Amateur Hour

Liam

Jimbo’s was a hole-in-the-wall place, that catered to locals. The place was known to all, and referred to simply as “the bar”. It was small, dim, and offered beer and straight shots. The most elegant mixed drink was anything that could be added to store-brand soda. There was wine, too, from chilled boxes.

Had Liam known it was so dreadful, he wouldn’t have chosen it, for a meeting place. It had only the advantages of being neutral, and public.

“Okay, what’s the gag, Liam?” Ted asked, as he pulled out a chair to join him. His face was amused, and perplexed, as well. “If you wanted beer, in an uncivilized place, we could have cracked open a couple, in my garage.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know it was an armpit.”

Ted chuckled. “More like a hairy wart, in an armpit. It’s okay. A beer’s a beer. We’ll have one, and go someplace else, maybe. I’m guessing Janice is better.”

“Much, thank you. She’s taking next week off work, but she can take care of herself, now. She just needs to go easy.”

“Glad to hear it. Nina will be, too. She’d like to drop in, some evening, when I can stay with Hannah.”

“Jan would love that. It brightens her day, when Nina calls her, to check in.”

A tired, bored waitress came, and took their order. She perked up a little, when Ted smiled at her, and wasted no time bringing their mugs to the table.

“Can’t blame her,” Liam remarked. “This place is dead. The tips have to be terrible. Do you know her?”

“Only by sight. She has another job, at the grocery store, in Sneads. We get our meat there, sometimes. They still have a real butcher.”

They each took a couple of sips. The ball appeared to be in Liam’s court.

“I figured out how you know about the shady shit the Eldridge family is into.”

“I guessed you might, eventually.” Ted’s face was chagrined, but he was calm, otherwise. “I don’t like to advertise that Evan Eldridge was my great-grandfather. I want no part of that family.”

“You’re hanging awfully close to the old family home, aren’t you?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Do you share them with anyone, Ted? Anyone, at all?”

“Nina knows everything about me, if that’s what worries you. Hannah, too, by now. I know I can trust you and Janice not to bandy it about.”

“You can, of course. But—“

“Do you mind if I ask how you found out?”

“Genealogical research.”

“I see,” Ted smiled. “May I ask another question?”

“Sure.”

“Why, Liam? What did I ever do, or say, that made you feel like you just had to dig?”

“I didn’t know who you were,” Liam replied, looking him squarely in the eye. “You see, I’ve been incautious – careless — with my loved ones, in the past, and they’ve gotten hurt.”

“Okay.” Ted nodded slowly. “I’ve heard worse reasons. But, believe me, when I tell you: those people are kin, to me, but they are not kindred. The only one who was, is gone, now — my Granny.”

“Evan’s daughter.”

“That’s right. She did her best, but my father is just like the old man. Tell me, Liam,” he smiled a slightly bitter smile. “Do you have a price?”

“What?” Liam was both startled and offended by the question.

“I’m in a position to pay you, to stop digging. Enough for you to leave New Canaan, buy a new home, write and research, full time. Janice would always be welcome, to visit Nina. I wouldn’t break that friendship up, for the world.”

“Fuck you, Ted!” he exclaimed, astonished into the kind of profanity he seldom used.

Liam began to push away from the table, but Ted’s hand came down upon his forearm, in a vice-like grip.

“Sit, and listen.” He hadn’t raised his voice one decibel. “I know how insulting that offer is, but it’s not meant to be. I inherited quite a lot of filthy money, from my Granny. Eldridge money. She barely touched it. I have, but only for clean purposes.”

“You consider bribery clean? Let go of my goddamned arm.”

Ted released it.

“It’s not bribery. It’s funding your escape.”

“Provided I stop digging.” Liam’s face wore a mocking grin.

“Dig all you want, in another sandbox. Otherwise, your stubbornness is apt to get you killed.”

“Is that a threat, Ted?”

“No, you mule-headed SOB. It’s an observation. You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with what happened to Janice! You can’t think Starkey is on my payroll. Wake the hell up!”

“Shut the hell up!” a boozy voice called, from the bar.

Ted subsided back into his chair, and sipped at his beer, while Liam glared at him, with loathing.

“You look at me, the way I used to look at my father,” Ted remarked.

“Is that why he sent you to New Canaan?” Liam asked.

To his surprise, Ted laughed, and shook his head.

“No. He sent me to New Canaan because I drove one of his cars into a swamp. For all I know, it’s still there. What really pissed him off about it was that I was stone cold sober, when I did it. It was revenge, for his not allowing me to go to live with my mother. I was thirteen.”

Liam leaned back in his own chair, and studied the other man. Anger battled with curiosity, in his mind.

“That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? Your father’s people sell the property, then, just a little less than a century later, you get sent to the very school that opened, on the site.”

“He gave me a choice. The other option was the Florida School for Boys.”

“Good God!” Liam paled, at the mention of the latter.

“You see why I chose New Canaan,” Ted’s tone was dry. “It was a tough school, even then, but not the prison it is, now. We were allowed visits, from family. My father never showed his face, but Mom came, every month.

“I mostly stayed out of trouble, and got a decent education,” he shrugged. “When I graduated, I told my father to kiss my red ass, and went back home, to live with Mom. Took her name; took my place; never looked back.”

“Except that you are back,” Liam pressed.

“I saw things, when I was a student. You have to remember, this was the mid seventies. Even a disciplinary type school wasn’t exempt from the culture of the time. You could get pot, acid, all kinds of pills. And, there were always the runaways, and disappearances.”

“That doesn’t really explain why you’d return.”

“Maybe I’m like you. Could be, I have a curious mind. Or, maybe the school is a great, big, bull gator, that eats kids and the occasional adult. To hunt an animal, you need to study it.”

“Why do you think it hasn’t eaten you?” Liam challenged.

“Gators avoid spiny fish,” he grinned. “They hurt, going down.”

“You won’t take the whole thing down, on your own.”

“Might, once I find its vulnerable spot. I like you, Liam. You want to help, and I respect that. But, there’s nothing you can tell me about the school that I don’t already know. Tender your resignation. Move someplace safer.”

“Did you know that there’s someone else, investigating New Canaan?”

“Fact? Or, theory?” Ted frowned.

“Fact.” Liam rose, and dropped a twenty dollar tip, on the table. “Good evening, Ted.”

*******

Janice

Janice was kicked back on the sofa, with her feet up, when Liam returned. She was happy to see him. The research on the fishing industry of the Apalachicola region in the 1800’s wasn’t the stuff of best selling thrillers. She had been doing her part, to muddy the waters, on Liam’s computer, but it was tiresome.

“How’d it go?” she asked, after receiving his kiss, and moving her legs, so he could sit next to her.

“About like you’d expect. He didn’t deny anything, didn’t reveal anything pertinent, and advised us to quit our jobs, and move.” Liam kicked off his sneakers. “Oh, there was one twist — he tried to bribe me, to do it.”

Janice cringed. For such an intelligent man, Ted had few people skills, when it came to dealing with adults. Bribery would have the same effect on her husband as threats did —none, except to make him dig in his heels.

“I got the impression, from Nina, that he was alienated from his father’s family. Where did he think he’d get enough money, to ask you to even consider it?”

“Grandma’s money. She left him a bunch of it, it seems.”

Janice chewed on this, for a bit. “Honey, does it occur to you, that something isn’t adding up?”

“You don’t say. What doesn’t add up, for you?” He smiled at her, and patted his leg, inviting her to put her feet back up.

“I keep going back, to Nina. He knows who these people are, around here,” she said, reclining again. “He would never, ever, expose her to them. He’s lying about the swinger parties, or at least that part of it.”

“I never thought I’d see the day, when you’d accuse Ted of lying, even behind his back.” He began to gently massage her feet. “Seems like one hell of a coincidence, though, that her elderly aunt happens to live here, and needs her care. Otherwise, he’d have no reason even to bring her here.”

“Not if Hannah is actually her mother-in-law.”

“What?” He paused in his massage.

“You looked at the male line, in the genealogy. So did I — but we overlooked the woman Ted’s father married. See?” she opened a tab, and pulled up Toni’s email, with the .pdf that she’d sent, and raised herself, to pass the machine to her husband. “There was little about the wife; she wasn’t born in a hospital, and had no birth certificate.”

Liam peered at the screen. Sure enough, there was only a Seminole name, with an interpretation, and in parentheses, “BILLIE, Hannah”.

“It was right there!” he exclaimed, bending across her ankles, to put the laptop on the coffee table. He leaned back, and resumed his foot rub, frowning. “It’s not the picture I had, in my head. Somehow, I thought of Ted as having come from farther south. From a reservation, or a settlement. He said something about taking his mother’s name, and taking his place. I assumed that meant among his people.”

“Maybe he did. You could do a title search, to see who owned the house, before Hannah’s second husband, if there even was one. I’ll bet it was Grandma, if she was so sympathetic, to Ted, that he inherited money, from her.”

“It’s a nice house, but for someone who would have been used to wealth?”

“It’s not a given that she lived in it, but that doesn’t preclude her from having owned it.”

“True,” Liam nodded. He reached for the computer, again.

“Not that one — It still has the spyware, remember?”

“Right.”

Janice moved her feet, and sat up again. Liam got up, and he was at the doorway to the office, when he stopped, and turned back to her.

“What is it, Honey?” she asked.

“It just occurred to me. We opened that email, on contaminated machines.”

Janice’s eyes widened. “Do you think it could access our email?”

“If we opened it, yeah. Maybe even if we didn’t.”

He came back to the couch, and dropped next to her, again. “Should we call him?”

“Absolutely,” she said, reaching for her phone.

“Wait. No.” Liam plucked the phone from her had, then, to her astonishment, walked out the front door with it, still in his stocking feet. After a moment, she followed.

She found Liam leaning against the tailgate of the Suburban, idly scrolling through his social media feed. It looked too bizarre for words, until she saw two neighbors walk by, with their Yorkie, on a retractable leash. They waved, and passed without pausing.

By the time Janice was at his side, Liam was dialing. Ted picked up on the third ring.

“Hey, Janice,” he answered.

“Not quite. Sorry.”

“Liam.” Ted was less than enthused.

“Jan and I really need to see you.”

“Have you reconsidered my offer?”

“Not for a nanosecond.”

“Liam,” Janice warned. “Ted, it’s really important that we speak to you,” she added. “Please.”

“If you say so, Janice, of course. Come on over.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Liam said. “Could we meet, somewhere? Just for a few minutes. Anywhere.”

“Okay… The convenience store, just down the road?”

“Perfect.”

***

Ted arrived, moments after Janice and Liam did, and found them, where they had parked, and gotten out of the Hulk, away from the main flow of the parking lot’s traffic.

“What’s with the cloak and dagger?” he asked, by way of greeting, as he leaned against the car.

“I don’t know whether or not my walls have ears, or your walls, either.” Liam went on to explain about the spyware app, the possibility of compromised email, and the fact that the wrong people could now know about Ted’s identity. “I’m sorry,” he finished. “I only found out about the spyware, yesterday.”

“Not your fault. It’s a mandatory app, but I never put it on my desktop computer. Any email I check at work is just business. I have a separate email account for personal correspondence.”

“Still, I take it that you don’t want some people at the school to know too much about your identity, and we may have screwed that up, for you.”

“You didn’t mean to, and you told me, right away. Thank you, for that. We weren’t exactly happy with each other, earlier, this evening.”

“You really take me for a passive aggressive asshat, don’t you?” Liam scowled.

“Liam, stop it,” Janice said.

“I don’t, actually,” Ted replied. “I take you for a stubborn asshat, but I don’t think you’d deliberately stand by, and let someone get hurt. I’m thanking you for not waiting until you’d cooled off, or until you thought I had. You’ve got integrity. I wish we could get past our impatience, with each other.”

“You’d have to accept that I’m not going anywhere. You’re not the only one who cares about these kids, Ted. And, you’re not the only one with skin, in the game.”

“I know that. I even know that it’s not all your skin. It’s Janice’s—“

“Stop, right there,” Janice snapped. “No one gambles my skin, but me.”

“I believe it,” Ted smiled. “But, did your sister sign up for this, Liam? Her husband?”

“As a matter of fact, they did. Indigenous people don’t own the concept of clans and kin, Ted!”

Ted considered this. “No, you’re right. They don’t. I apologize, if I made it sound that way. I’m not criticizing. Just acknowledging that you are invested. Maybe more heavily than I am.”

“How did you know?” Janice hoped she didn’t look as unsettled as she felt.

“No worries, Janice.” Ted sighed, then continued. “My sources belong to me; not to the school, and not to the cops. The information was given to me in a report. Unless I miss my guess, you know who the investigators are. I don’t. I really don’t want to know, and risk putting them in danger, or making them ineffective. I believe you and Liam are being intimidated solely because of his investigation of the school’s history.”

“Do you think we can control the damage?” Liam asked. “I’ll delete the email, of course.”

“We can hope,” Ted shrugged. “Maybe they’ve been so concerned with your research and notes, they haven’t thought to be interested in your email.”

“I’ll get rid of it.”

“Spyware, huh? I never even considered that. It’s not lost on me, that I’d never have known, if you weren’t such loose cannons.” Ted crossed his arms, and leaned against the side of The Hulk, eyeing them both. They were all quiet, for a moment.

“Okay,” he said, at last. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“No,” Liam replied.

“Is it asking too much, for you to keep your heads down, then?”

“We have every intention of it,” Janice said. “Liam has a clean computer, and I’m going to lead them down the garden path, on his old one, with fake research. Make it look like he’s losing interest, gradually.”

“Smart. As for walls, with ears, you can buy a bug detector— that’s what I plan to do. If they’ll stoop to nosing around on your computer, I wouldn’t put house bugging past them. I don’t know about you two, but I’m too old for this spy shit. I should get back, before Nina starts to worry.”

“We should get back, too. Good night, Ted.”

“’Night.”