Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,40

the great John Bonham, would be dead from drink six years later. The temperature was in the nineties by now and I was beginning to perspire. By the time I hummed my way through the song once, I knew I didn’t want to walk.

I stuck my thumb out and two cars passed me, a Volvo station wagon and a Ford Pinto. Wouldn’t it be just my luck, I reflected, if Margaret and her brother drove past? Was she kidding when she told me he had been in jail for beating up her old boyfriend? I still couldn’t figure that one out. Sometimes people said things just to play with your head. And what if Bob and his sister happened by? It wasn’t like I could run. A red Malibu with mag wheels pulled to a stop. I approached and looked in through the rolled-down passenger window at Officer O’Rourke. This was a stroke of luck. It’s not often the possibility of redemption presents itself in so convenient a way.

“I’m really sorry about last night,” I said. “I acted like an idiot.”

“Where you headed?” His face was neutral, but cops are like that. I said I was going to West Dennis and he told me he could take me most of the way. I got in the front seat. O’Rourke was dressed in civilian clothes: painter’s pants and a gray T-shirt that said, Eddie’s Seafood Shack, Since 1972. That was a joke, since it was 1974. Eddie obviously had a good sense of humor, which was more than I could say for O’Rourke. There was a snub-nosed revolver on his hip. We rode in silence for a minute. This made me uncomfortable. I like small talk.

“How long you been a cop?” I asked, leaving out the word have in an attempt to be familiar.

“Five years.”

I nodded. It was clear O’Rourke wasn’t interested in talking. I settled into the seat. At my feet there were a pile of eight track tapes: Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple, Bachman Turner Overdrive. Utter crap. I hated all of it but wanted to be friendly.

“Okay if we listen to some music?”

“Sure,” he said, as he picked up the BTO tape and slid it into the player. “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” filled the car. I closed my eyes and sighed. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous, I thought, if this shit was the last thing I ever heard?

SPECTACLE POND

BY LIZZIE SKURNICK

Wellfleet

Albert was going to clean out the house. This had been decided weeks ago by his aging aunt June, although if you asked Albert, which it was unlikely anyone would, the circumstances that sent him—not his older brother Mark, or even Mark’s nineteen-year-old only daughter Ludi, whereabouts undetermined—from Queens to Cape Cod had been set in motion decades before, perhaps by his and Mark’s dead parents, or even, Albert suspected, when Aunt June’s husband Travis first bought the house as an investment property, then decamped immediately for parts unknown.

As June rattlingly related to Albert from Horizon Wind, her active seniors community in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the last three years his older brother had joined an actor’s collective in the Appalachians—although on more precise details she was spotty. In the wake of his wife Susan’s tragic death, Albert had made a habit of calling June every two weeks. When she moved to Horizon Wind, he drove down to Charlotte to help carry the few treasured possessions—June was not one to treasure—from her ten-room Larchmont Georgian. Then June rebuffed his offer of one last nice dinner out. Surrounded by new social possibilities, like a gawky teenager in a college dorm, his seventy-three-year-old aunt was vaguely mortified, he realized, by his presence.

Ludi’s coordinates were less certain. After the accident that killed Albert’s wife, she returned to her mother; how often Mark had visited the girl during this period Albert did not know. He himself descended into a stinking waste of bourbon for a few years, abetted by a job that required little more effort than showing up. No one was riding a telemarketing firm’s accountant. Yet it was partly his money that, years later, allowed Ludi to debark from her small liberal arts school in New Hampshire to communicate, Albert understood from June, primarily with her father only by the occasional phone call or e-mail from abroad. June too claimed she was the recipient of a stray postcard from Barcelona or Kharkov, although Albert was dubious. But despite the improbability of the situation, despite the fact that the girl throughout