Free No Way Home by Andrew Coburn Page A

Eunice Rayball, perhaps distraught, left her home in the night, traversed uncertain ground, tripped and fell, and died by accidental drowning.
    Morgan never forgot the look of her when he raised her from the water, and he never forgot the weight of her hair when it slopped over his sleeve. Nor did he forget how he and Eugene Avery, after averting their heads, argued over who would stay with the body while the other radioed the station.
    “Why does anyone have to stay?” Eugene asked.
    “She’s been alone here enough,” Morgan replied.
    Eugene, whose seniority was greater by a month, left him standing there. He remembered how the sun shot rays through the sharp angles of a swamp maple and irradiated Eunice Ray ball’s remains.
    Later, when Chief Carr was battling cancer and planning to retire, he said to Morgan, “It’s not your triumphs you remember, Jimmy, but your failures. Not the rights you did, but the wrongs. That’s the way it goes for most of us. Life’s final injustice.”
    “I don’t know any wrongs you did, Chief.”
    “I did a big wrong, Jimmy. I let Rayball walk.”
    “You didn’t have a choice.”
    “If I was a different kind of fella, I’d have taken him into the woods and beaten the truth out of him.”
    • • •
    Arlene Bowman lay supine on the padded table, and the masseur, a huge, unsmiling bald man with remarkable hands, took the stress from her shoulders but not the edge from her mood. Her dark eyes half shut, she said, “Take the towel off, Pierre, and tell me what you think of my ass.”
    “I’ve seen it before, Mrs. Bowman. It’s OK.”
    “Don’t you want to see it again?”
    “I see posteriors all day, especially ones that aren’t OK.”
    “Mostly women’s?”
    “Half and half,” he said, his sure fingers working the cords in the back of her slender neck.
    “Do you know the Pooles?”
    “I do Mr. Poole at the club. I’ve never met Mrs. Poole.”
    “She could use you. Though of course you know, Pierre, it’s illegal in this state for a masseur to do a woman.”
    “We won’t tell, will we, Mrs. Bowman?”
    “Probably not, but I should warn you that I’m a terribly vengeful sort. My husband is even worse.”
    His fingers rode up her nape, into her black hair where the curl began. “Your husband has complete trust in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?” With knowing thumbs he kneaded the bone behind each ear.
    “Christ, that’s good,” she murmured. “Do other women confide in you, reveal their fantasies, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty in bed with them at the same time?”
    “Usually they just relax and enjoy. You don’t ever relax, Mrs. Bowman.”
    “That’s because I don’t want my juices ever to ebb, my skin to sag. I don’t want ever to die.”
    “You can delay practically anything, Mrs. Bowman, but death has the edge. It has time on its side.” With outstretched fingers, his hands swept down on her shapely back and found the right muscles to move. “How’s this?”
    “Wonderful,” she whispered, luxuriating under his care. Then she lifted her head and glanced over the curve of her shoulder. “Impossible to tell your age, you don’t have a line in your face. How old are you?”
    “Sixty-four.”
    “And what’s your real name? It can’t be Pierre.”
    “Dennis,” he said. He removed the towel from her and stepped back.
    “Well?”
    “You’re in perfect shape, Mrs. Bowman.”
    • • •
    Ignoring the perfume of skunk, Chief Morgan reached furtively out of the car window and opened the mailbox. Among a few flyers was a thick ordinary envelope addressed to Papa Rayball, with an extra stamp to carry the weight. The envelope looked as if it had been worn in someone’s back pocket before being mailed. No return address was given, but the postmark, partially blurred, read Florida, which told Morgan who the sender was.
    He drove around the corpse of the skunk and turned sharply. The car clawed its way over ruts in the gravel