Chapter 18
THE AGAWAM HAD put him in a bad place, set his mind in motion. Unanswered questions. Antagonistic people. But now Denny was faced with further questions. Who was Sticks, really? And where did his loyalties lie?
When Anna was sad or confused or out of sorts, she had disappeared—he knew this, though she thought he didn’t—to the museums. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum did not have any Gerhard Richter, her favorite.
But he knew she liked to drive into the city to see the Sargents, or to walk through the Gothic Room, or to spend time in the courtyard, especially in December and January, when the indoor garden was transformed into a holiday forest, populated by flowering jade, green aloe, and amaryllis.
She was, he felt, communing with old friends.
The car made a crunch. The Nissan began to honk furiously. More brake lights, this time from all of the surrounding cars, too. An angry driver popped out of the car.
“This car is brand new!” the driver shouted at him. He looked like he was in his mid-thirties and wore a button-down linen shirt that was open to mid-chest. “You have got to be kidding!”
“Let me take a look,” Denny said, getting out and surveying the damage. He had experience with cars. Both vehicles would be fine; the traffic had saved them. The truest definition of a fender-bender.
“I’m not letting you look!” the man said, suddenly shouting. “Let me see your phone! Who were you texting?”
“Calm down, man, let’s just . . .”
“Oh no, no way. I’m calling the police. We can wait here and file a police report. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay,” Denny said. Despite a slightly cracked front bumper on his end, which insurance would no doubt cover, both cars appeared operational. Well, there was, he now realized, the issue of the brakes, a true problem.
It was terrible luck. A year earlier, Anna had been in a hit-and-run and the car had been out of commission for nearly a month while it was under an insurance repair contract in Beverly.
When Denny had gone to retrieve it, the Volkswagen had been fine—fully repaired, the mechanic assured him—but it had made a strange ticking noise that Denny had attributed to one of the rotors.
Now Denny wondered if the brakes or the rotors were to blame, scarring from an old accident, another ghost from his wife’s past come back to haunt him.
By the time the police arrived, traffic was backed up for at least a half mile.
A tow truck came and towed Denny’s car to a repair shop in Malden, which was closer and cheaper than taking it all the way to Hamilton.
He’d take an Uber home and deal with the rest of it tomorrow.
The Nissan driver left in a hurry once the details were exchanged, but not without offering Denny one last piece of his mind. “Expect to hear from me,” he said.
“Some people don’t know how to drive,” Denny said, under his breath, but he never did hear from the driver again after that.
It wasn’t until Denny arrived back at home—not until he had stopped to pick up a pizza, and not until he had spent forty-five minutes listening to Ben and Louisa debate a fight one of them had witnessed in school regarding Magna-Tiles—that he stopped to think more fully about the car.
It couldn’t have been the rotors, Denny realized, and it couldn’t have been the brakes, either.
Just a few weeks earlier he had taken the Volkswagen over to Burnett’s Garage, in Wenham, for its annual inspection.
There were no emissions issues. The car had four great tires.
And, to hear the guys tell it, there were no issues with the brakes.
The mechanic in a one-piece denim blue jumpsuit and a red baseball cap had slapped the car on the side like it was a thoroughbred.
In fact, that pesky ticking had even gone away of late. He hadn’t noticed it in months.
“She’s ready to go,” the mechanic told Denny.
So Denny paid the thirty-five dollars for the inspection, got the new Massachusetts sticker, with the little hole punched in the corner that said August, another end-of-summer task accomplished.
One more thing he wouldn’t have to worry about until next August. He had driven back—he remembered this clearly—in the gray, pulsing rain, a day so hot and thick that nature had released itself in the only way it knew how.
Had the inspection missed some crucial detail? Denny knew a thing or two about cars, and brake pads squeaked when they needed to be replaced. He had heard no such noise when he pushed all the way to the floorboards. Just an excruciating silence. No brakes. No resistance.
What, then? Could someone have, what, tampered with the brakes? Or, more likely, caused the brake fluid to leak slowly so that he was more prone to find himself in a situation where the brakes suddenly stopped working? Unlikely. But possible. Kids? Neighbors? Denny was no longer so confident.
Once the kids were settled, Denny busied himself with a martini. Then he headed to the garage, into the bay where the Volks-wagen usually lived. The flickering overhead light could not mask the pool of yellow-tinted fluid on the ground.
Brake fluid.
Was it a leak? That was possible, Denny thought. It was possible that the two-year-old Volkswagen Atlas was leaking brake fluid, and that it had lost so much of it that the brakes had simply given out on Storrow Drive, causing him to collide with the car in front of him.
Or maybe—and this was something darker—someone had caused the brake fluid to leak.
It was, if he was honest, a possibility he didn’t want to entertain, the possibility of his own mortality, and the suspicion that the brakes were another instance of the threatening forces surrounding him, and, of course, Anna.
To entertain that possibility was to confront the reality that he was fighting a war that might never be won.
That he was battling an enemy. And that he was losing.
Do you have a sec? he texted Di. He had come to rely upon her too heavily, he knew, but she could—and would—tell him if he was being unreasonable. Anyway, he was starting to wonder whom he could and could not trust. His phone rang almost immediately.
“Everything okay?” Her voice sounded a little unsteady, borne, he knew, from concern.
Denny looked at the spot on the floor of the garage again.
“Paranoia getting the best of me, I think,” he said.
“Had a little fender-bender today on Storrow. My brakes went out. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe someone did something to my car.
I know it sounds nuts,” Denny said. He considered Sticks’s warning at the Agawam and the encounter at the Block Party.
Right now what he needed was the comfort of a friend.
“That sounds very scary,” Di said.
“Yeah,” Denny said. “I guess it was.”
“I don’t mean for this to come out the wrong way,” she said. “But do you think maybe there’s another explanation?”
“Under ordinary circumstances? It sure does sound insane,” Denny admitted. “But I’ve gotten used to insane. Also, the car was just inspected.”
“I guess I just feel . . .” She coughed lightly, interrupting herself. “I just feel that maybe it’s best not to jump to conclusions.”
“You mean that maybe assuming that someone breaking into my house and draining the brake fluid from my car is a wild and unlikely thing to happen, and that there is probably a much more logical explanation for what happened today,” Denny said.
“Bingo,” Di said.
“Thanks,” Denny said. “I really did need to be brought back down to earth.”
Louisa called from upstairs, even though she was supposed to be asleep.
He took one last look at the stain. If you looked at it for long enough, he told himself, you could be convinced that it was just old oil, or water, or something that had been there a long time, the kind of stain that had been on that floor long before a Volks-wagen Atlas had ever parked in its spot.
“I’ll be right there,” he called in response. “I’ll be up in a minute.” Then, to Di: “I gotta go. Louisa’s calling for me. Thanks for talking me off the cliff.”
Turning the lights off, he closed the door.
There was no use in trying to solve a mystery like that, he told himself.