He did not recognize the number. He squinted at it, swiped, and said, “Hello?”
“Bob? Is this Bob Burgess?” It was a woman’s voice.
“It is.”
There was a pause, and then the woman said, “Bob, this is Diana Beach. We went to school together a million years ago.”
Bob closed his eyes briefly. He had read the newspaper article that morning. “Hello, Diana,” he said.
The woman said, “Bob, I’m in town, and my brother needs a lawyer. Now.”
—
He walked back and forth, hoping that the wind would get the smoke off him, but he doubted it would, and so he leaned against his car and called the number that Diana had texted him.
It rang and rang and rang and Bob finally hung up.
*
An hour later Bob was walking up the steps to Mrs. Hasselbeck’s house when his phone rang again, and so he put the groceries down and saw that the number was the one he had called earlier. “Hello?” He saw Mrs. Hasselbeck at the window, ready to open the door, her face filled with gladness. He held up a finger to indicate just one minute, and he heard a man’s voice say, “Is this Bob Burgess?”
“It is,” Bob said.
“It’s Matt Beach, and thank you, Mr. Burgess, I was outside with my dog when you called,” said the man. “Thank you so much for taking my case. Thank you, Mr. Burgess.”
And then Bob understood: He would take the case.
“I’ll call you back in half an hour,” Bob said, and Matt Beach said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
—
Mrs. Hasselbeck was beaming at him: “Hello, Robert!” And Bob said “Hello,” and then he was inside, unpacking her groceries once again, and he said that he was sorry but he could not stay long, and he saw the disappointment on her face and he said, “But I’ll stay for a little while.”
She told him at great length the funny things her cats had done that week, the apparent dispute they had with each other, and Bob could not stand stories about cats, but he sat there and said, “What a thing.”
She had apparently not remembered the time—weeks ago—that she had asked him to write the letter B on the back of her underpants, and he did not remind her that she had one more pair—the pair she had been wearing—which needed the B; he did not want to embarrass her. But as he finally stood to leave, she said, “Robert, my oldest boy called me last night! He lives in Oregon, and he’s heard of that psychiatrist, what’s his name, you know—the Beach man—Thomas Beach, the older brother of the guy who killed his mother here in Shirley Falls. My son read about the case.”
Bob turned and said, “It’s in the Oregon press?” And she said, “No, my son read it online because a friend here told him about it. And Greg, my son, wanted to know if I knew of the case. And I said, Only what I know from the papers.” She beamed up at him with her shiny large brown eyes. “He told me that the guy, Thomas Beach, the psychiatrist, has a wonderful reputation.”
*
As Bob was driving to Shirley Falls to see Matt Beach later that morning, his sister, Susan, was sitting on the front porch of Gerry O’Hare’s house and they were talking about Bitch Ball. Gerry was wearing sweatpants with his white socks and flattened-in-the-back moccasins, and also his blue cap. Susan was saying, “I don’t understand the mechanics of it. I mean, how does an old woman end up in a car in a quarry? I mean literally, how does that happen?” A huge stack of old newspapers sat in the corner of the porch, and by the corner near the door were various boots of Gerry’s, rubber boots and work boots. Above them along the wall were cobwebs weaving a light lace.
Gerry said, “Well, whoever did it probably put her body in the passenger seat and drove the car to the edge of the quarry, and then—most likely—the person took a big stick and stuck it through the front door onto the gas pedal.” Gerry was wearing a fleece vest this morning, unzipped. He stuck one hand into a pocket and took a sip from his coffee with the other hand.
“Really,” Susan said slowly, shaking her head in quiet amazement. But then Susan said, “Remember that woman who did that to two of her kids, I can’t remember where it was, but somewhere in the country, huge national news, drove her two kids into a lake.”
“Oh yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about.”
“Wait! That woman blamed it on a Black man, do you remember that?”
Gerry tilted his head. “She did? Oh, you’re right, she did. Jesus, that was foul stuff.”
Gerry had been planning on asking Susan if she wanted to have dinner with him some night, but—oddly—the words would not come from his mouth. He pondered this. And then it came to him: Susan had an innocence that somehow protected her. She did not understand that a man might want to have dinner with her. But he did.
Susan said, “You know what I was thinking the other day? I was thinking about when Zach got into so much trouble.” Zach was Susan’s son. “Those were horrible days.” She sipped from her coffee mug. “Just horrible,” she said.
Gerry remembered those days well from back when he was the police chief in Shirley Falls. Zach had thrown a pig’s head through a storefront Somali mosque in town. A really screwed-up strange guy, Zach had been back then. It had been a truly awful thing for the Somali community, and Gerry had felt very sorry for them, but also for Susan throughout the whole ordeal; her ex-husband was the one who had been filling Zach with that kind of hate. “But he’s all straightened out now,” Gerry said.
Susan nodded. “Yeah. Yup. I think he might marry his girlfriend, Kelly.” She stood then and swiped with one hand at the cobwebs above his head. Then she flicked her hand trying to get the cobwebs off and sat back down again. “Whoa, that mother who drowned her kids, trying to blame it on a Black man. It was in the South, I think I remember now.”
Gerry was about to say, It could have been right here in Shirley Falls, but he did not say that because of what Zach had done fifteen years earlier to the Somali community. So he only said, “Well, you like Kelly, so that would be good.”
And then they spoke of Gerry’s kids: One was a state trooper in New Hampshire, the other had moved to Massachusetts and was working as an investigator of insurance fraud.
Again, Gerry opened his mouth to ask Susan if she wanted to have dinner with him—it had touched him, her removing the cobwebs; there was an intimacy, he felt, to the gesture—but Susan had just remembered something about state troopers and was telling Gerry how her brother Jim—the famous one, years back—had put a state trooper on the stand one time and just blown him up. “So to speak,” Susan said.
And Gerry remained quiet. But he took his cap off and placed it on the small table beside him.
2
Matthew Beach’s house, to remind, was on the outer edge of Shirley Falls, two miles down on the end of a narrow road where the family had always lived. Diana Beach was not staying there with her brother; she was staying at the hotel in town by the river. She had wanted to accompany Bob on his visit to see Matt, but Bob had said no.
As Bob drove along the road his heart was heavy. He was not sure why he had agreed to represent the man, but—again, only partly consciously—it seemed to have something to do with the fact that Bob had for most of his life thought he had killed his father, and this man had perhaps killed his mother. Bob steered the car carefully along the narrow road; it was potholed and muddy, and you would not think that anyone lived at the end of it. Evergreens and bare trees leaned above his car as he drove. But then there was the house: a medium-size white house, three stories high, whose paint had long ago been waiting for a new coat, and the shrubs in front of the windows had not been clipped for years. A straggly forsythia bush wagged in the wind, its branches skinny and bare, close to where Bob parked his car.
—
From behind the house came a big black dog, and the dog barked with a kind of hysteria as Bob stepped from the car. After a moment, Matt Beach emerged from his house through the side door and tried—with no effectiveness—to call the dog off.
