Small Town

She was good company, but she didn’t have much to tell him about Peter Shevlin, just that he seemed to have gone missing and that her friend, Helen Mazarin, was up in arms about it. She’d been to the police, and once they’d established that she was no kin of Shevlin’s, that she was not even his lady friend (“though that’s not to say she wouldn’t like to be”), that a search of the apartment had shown no signs of foul play, or of Shevlin himself, and that he was not suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or any other form of senile dementia, they told her there was nothing they could do. It was a free country, they told her, and a man could pick up and go away for a while if he got the urge.

She went back a second time, explaining about his boat, the Nancy Dee, how sometimes it was there and sometimes it was not. It was a different policeman she talked to the second time, and he agreed to take a statement and file a missing persons report, but she had the feeling he just did it to get rid of her.

“You know about the boat? How it’s there one minute and gone the next?”

Like so many things, he thought, but he said yes, he’d heard about the boat.

“You should talk to her yourself. Helen Mazarin, she’s got a good heart, but I’m afraid she’s a bit more interested in Peter than he is in her, though I’d not be the one to tell her as much. She’s right here in the building, you know, and just two flights up, so you can take the stairs if you don’t feel like waiting for the elevator. Would you like me to call her and tell her you’re coming?”

Helen Mazarin was a strawberry blonde, though he had the feeling she hadn’t started out that way. Time had thickened her at the waist and widened her hips, but she remained an attractive woman for her years, and the way she sized him up confirmed that she had not lost interest in the game.

I’m too young for you, he thought. At the very least, you need a man old enough to grow pubic hair.

She took him into her kitchen, sat him down at a table with an enameled tin top not unlike the one in his own mother’s kitchen, and poured him a cup of coffee. “I’m glad they’re taking this seriously,” she said. “I got the impression the officer I spoke with was going to throw my report in the trash the minute I walked out of there, but here you are.”

He explained that he was a retired policeman, that this was an unofficial inquiry. “A friend of Mrs. Mabee’s thought I could help,” he said, and she nodded, impatient to begin, not really caring whose ear she had as long as she could pour her story into it.

There wasn’t much he hadn’t already heard. Peter Shevlin had disappeared, or perhaps more accurately he had ceased to appear. And it wasn’t like him to go off like that without a word to anyone, not that he was a man given to a great deal of conversation, but to walk off and not come back? It had been a couple of weeks now since she had seen him last, and she ordinarily saw him every few days.

And the boat, that was the great mystery. How he loved that boat! The Nancy Dee, that was its name, named for his wife, a lovely woman, Nancy Delia Shevlin, and what a cruel lingering death she’d had. She’d gone to the Boat Basin, thinking he might be there, and the boat was gone. And she’d gone another time, and it was back in its slip, and yes, she was quite certain it was his boat, for didn’t it have the name painted on it for anyone to see? The Nancy Dee, and it came and went, yet she never saw it actually coming in or going out. In fact the last several times she’d gone it had been there, with no signs of activity aboard, but she swore it had been gone on at least two occasions that she’d seen with her own eyes.

Maybe he’d left on an unannounced vacation, he suggested, and gave the use of the boat to a friend. But no, she was sure this wasn’t the case, and he’d realize as much if he knew Peter at all, because the man was very possessive about that boat. She’d hinted a time or two that she wouldn’t mind keeping him company on a cruise of the harbor, and one time she’d more than hinted, she’d outright asked, and he’d merely smiled and changed the subject. He’d made it quite clear that the Nancy Dee was for himself and himself alone, and if he wouldn’t even allow a friend aboard for an hour, how likely was it that he’d turn the boat over to a stranger to use in his absence?

He said, “The policeman you talked to, the one who took your statement and filed a report. Do you happen to remember his name?”

She’d written it down, she said, and went off to look for it. He was beginning to wonder why this had seemed like a good idea when he woke up this morning. Because it didn’t seem that remarkable to him that Shevlin (or anyone else) would just as soon not welcome Helen Mazarin at the dock and pipe her aboard. Nor did it seem out of the ordinary that the man, probably driven half mad by Mazarin on a daily basis, had slipped out of town without letting her know about it.