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“That was the weather, not me. I did the best I could.” Fly
Fly
He had arrived home with his cold around three. He’d called in sick, then gone to bed and slept for several hours. When he woke, Junie had made the chicken soup and began preparing the pan of hot water for his feet while he told her about his journey through the snowstorm and what he had found at Bishop’s Hill.
“I never seen snow like that.” Fly
“So why didn’t you come home yesterday? Coughlin said you were supposed to work.” Junie took her coat from the back of a chair. Her club met punctually at eight and it was now past seven-thirty.
“I wanted to talk to this guy Hawthorne. Dr. Hawthorne, they call him. He told me about LaBrecque or LeBrun—I can’t keep the names straight. Like I had part of the story and I wanted the rest. I thought he’d be glad that LaBrecque was dead. But he was more upset about LaBrecque than about those two teachers that got killed. Hawthorne couldn’t stop talking about him. It made me suspicious, but this copper up there said Hawthorne was all right. A little eccentric, that’s all. They call this copper a police chief but he’s only got one guy under him. We had a couple of meals together. I like him. We might even go up there this summer. They got a lake.”
Junie looked skeptical. “I like to take our vacations on the Cape.” She began putting on her coat—dark brown with black buttons and a mink collar. “So everything’s over and done with?”
“As far as Massachusetts is concerned, but New Hampshire’s not off the hook. There’ll be a grand jury investigation and they’ll bring charges against three or four people—a couple of them lawyers. That’ll drag on for a while. Statutory rape, sexual abuse—the whole business. But then a lot of white-collar crime. That Hawthorne’s got his work cut out for him, I can tell you. Give me a good old working-class murder any day of the week. Nothing subtle or too complex. I mean, LaBrecque was a bad guy but he’d been a bad guy from the start. These teachers and lawyers, it’s like they chose to be bad. Like they could pick one or the other and they decided they wanted to be crooks.”
“They all sound the same to me.” Junie tied her scarf around her neck. “I’ll be back by eleven at the latest. Remember—no cigarettes, no beer, be in bed by nine, and keep the cat off the table.” She crossed the kitchen to kiss his cheek. Fly
“You look nice,” he said.
Junie pursed her lips disapprovingly, then smiled. A moment later she was shutting the front door. Fly
Fly
How strange, he thought, still brooding about Bishop’s Hill. If going to prison or getting killed was how you ended up, why would a person choose to be bad?
He thought of LaBrecque’s death again and how upset Hawthorne had been. Why hadn’t he been relieved, getting rid of a guy like that? Hawthorne hadn’t wanted to let LaBrecque stay on the fence till the ambulance came. They had to move the body—first Moulton and himself and Hawthorne, trying to push LaBrecque off the spikes where he was wedged tight, pushing until Fly
But there was Hawthorne, standing over the guy looking somber, practically in tears. He was mourning, for Pete’s sake. Who the hell was this LaBrecque to make such a fuss over? Like he had told Junie, LaBrecque had been a bad guy from the start. It was as if LaBrecque had become the person in charge, as if the dead man lying there in the snow was making the rules. But Leo Fly
About the Author
Stephen Dobyns is the author of over thirty novels and poetry collections, including The Church of Dead Girls, Cold Dog Soup, Cemetery Nights, and The Burn Palace. Among his many honors and awards are a Melville Cane Award, Pushcart Prizes, National Poetry Series prize, and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His novels have been translated into twenty languages, and his poetry has appeared in the Best American Poems anthology. Dobyns teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College and has taught at the University of Iowa, Sarah Lawrence College, and Syracuse University.
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