Foursome Read Online Free

coverage, but apparently The Foursome did everything together.”
    Another pause. Everything?
    I couldn’t stop the smile. “You know how slow I am about that sort of thing, Beth.”
    And here I always thought you were a child of the sixties, John.
    “I was a college student in the sixties. That makes me a child of the fifties. Hell, it was 1983 before I realized that Eleanor Rigby was waiting for Father McKenzie.”
    Good line. Pity to waste it on me.
    “I’ve wasted a lot of things in life, kid. None of them ever on you.”
    I looked down at the edge of the water, the sun just high enough to make it look opaquely gray. Two seagulls were trying to take off into the east wind by flapping their wings and running in a slow-motion, flat-footed, “sproing-sproing” way along the rocks, like old kinescopes of pre-Kitty Hawk flyers and their contraptions.
    John?
    “Yes?”
    You may be a child of the fifties, but don’t forget you’re also a man of the city.
    “Meaning?”
    Meaning be careful up in Maine. They may do things differently there.
    I thought about the crossbow that every news update, however short, managed to work into the voiced-over videotape, sandwiched between the more familiar urban clips of drug drive-bys and serial killers. “Different, Beth, but ever the same.”
    She didn’t need to ask what I meant.

2
    I DROVE BACK TO the condo in Back Bay I was renting from a doctor doing a two-year residency in Chicago. Parking the Prelude in its slot behind the brownstone building, I went upstairs and used the number on Nancy’s message slip to reach Gil Lacouture’s office in Augusta. In clipped but friendly syllables, his secretary told me that her name was Judy, that it was “a real shiny day up here today,” and that her boss would be available by the time I got there. She gave me simple directions from the Maine Turnpike, saying it would probably take about three hours if I did the speed limit.
    I changed into a suit, then pulled a Samsonite from the closet in my bedroom and packed what I thought I’d need for a couple of days. The last of the deli meat in the refrigerator went into a quasi-brunch that I figured would hold me until dinner.
    Back in the Honda, I took Fairfield Street across Beacon between the buildings that back onto the river. I turned right into the alley that’s an extension of Bay State Road and parallels Storrow Drive through most of my neighborhood. At Berkeley Street, I got on Storrow eastbound and began to inch my way toward Leverett Circle.
    Over the last fifteen years, the major roads around Boston have become as clogged as the cart paths we laughingly call our city streets. The Registry of Motor Vehicles says the main reason for this is the forty percent increase in passenger cars in the metro region, vastly inflating something called the “congestion severity index.” There are plans on the drawing boards for widening some of the arteries and building a third harbor tunnel to the airport. I figured the recession would reduce traffic a little, but the opposite seems to have happened, the rush hour now extending virtually from seven A.M. to seven P.M.
    I finally made my way onto the ramp for Route 1 north. After ten miles of car dealers, strip malls, and pancake houses comes Interstate 95. The traffic stayed with me but spaced out. I kept the Prelude at fifty-five and didn’t pass anybody for thirty miles.
    Skirting Newburyport and Salisbury, the Interstate crosses the Merrimack River and then goes through about fourteen miles of New Hampshire, for which privilege you get to pay the Granite State a dollar at an inconvenient tollbooth. Shortly thereafter, I climbed onto the curving bridge over the Piscataqua River and halfway across the span saw a little sign telling me I was entering Maine. Just after the bridge in Kittery is a bigger sign, a small billboard really. In white letters on a royal blue background, it says WELCOME TO MAINE—THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE.
    I hadn’t