I walked them to the door.
“David?” I said. “Shoes?”
“Oh.” He looked down. “Yeah, I guess so.”
While he was racing back into the house for his socks and sneakers, I took Geof’s left arm and strolled outside with him. “Geof, when you said the word board, that made me think of my board of directors, and that made me think of my old board.” At the Port Frederick Civic Foundation, I meant. “Which made me think of Pete Falwell, which made me think of how he loves to look important by sitting on lots of boards. I think Pete must be a director of half the corporations in Massachusetts. And that made me think of the boards of directors of insurance companies.”
Geof stopped abruptly on our path, and I saw a dawning understanding and a hope in his eyes that mirrored my own feelings exactly.
“You think?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. But, Geof, that day Pete nearly killed me? I made some crack about insurance, and then I was afraid he’d nail me with a sarcastic comment, but he didn’t say a single word about it. I thought it was odd at the time. Pete always takes every chance to dig me. Why didn’t he do it then? And now I also wonder, why was his grandson out of school that morning? He and his grandfather were going somewhere together.”
“Boston?”
“Maybe. I’m so afraid to think … maybe. But, Geof, it’s really, really possible—”
“That Pete is on the board of directors of the insurance company that turned you down.”
“And that if that’s true, it is also really, really probable that he has secretly, personally sabotaged us.”
“You and the whole town, if it’s true. Would he do that?”
“Pete? Are you kidding?”
“Just to make you look bad, Jenny?”
Put that way, my theory did sound a shade solipsistic. Fear began once again to seep into all of the clean and empty spaces where calmness had resided for a short while in my soul.
“Somebody burned a witch on the common last night.” I told him about it. “She had on a blonde wing. Guess who?”
He folded me into a comforting embrace. “My witchy woman.”
David burst out of the kitchen, letting the screen door bang shut behind him. “Cut that out We’ve got felons to apprehend.”
By the time the Jeep had disappeared down our driveway, the clock showed dead-on eight o’clock. I decided to give Polly five more minutes to put down her purse, pour herself a cup of coffee, and get settled at her desk.
Then, I’d call.
I spent five of the tensest minutes of my life putting breakfast stuff away. But then I thought I’d better stop and compose myself for any eventuality. Yes, no. Pete was, he wasn’t. He did, he didn’t. The spider of fate was weaving a tight and intricate web around that man and me. Which of us would she trap? Which would she mercilessly devour?
Our October day was sunny, crisp, another harbinger of perfect festival weather, if only …
I didn’t know what the weather was in Portsmouth that morning.
I didn’t care.
At five minutes past eight, I placed the call.
“Good Morning. Evan Quilt Insurance Agency, representing business and homeowners statewide. This is Polly speaking, may I help you?”
“Hi, Polly, it’s Jenny Cain. Don’t say anything, Polly. I don’t want to get you in trouble. Just answer me one question: Do you recognize the name Peter Falwell?”
“No.”
Even that simple word sounded breathless, scared.
“Would you know—or be able to find out—if he is on the board of directors of the company that turned us down?”
“One moment, please.”
Her nervous singsong segued into telephone music. When I heard the selection, I had to laugh: “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” from My Fair Lady.
Oh, yes, it would be so loverly.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes, Polly?”
“The answer to your query is most certainly yes. Would you like to speak to one of our agents?”
“You’re sure, positive, absolutely certain?”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
“Oh, Polly, you have saved my life.”
“Really?” There was a happy little squeak to her voice. “I’m so happy I was able to assist you. Is there anything else we may help you with today?”
“Yes, may you live long and prosper, and all your children’s children after you. ’Bye, Polly. Come to our festival!”
“You’re kidding?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hooray! Ma’am.”
She hung up, before she could betray herself.
I hung up and danced.
I danced, danced, danced around the kitchen, looping out into the dining room, and then dancing up the stairs and into my closet, where I put on an electric blue silk suit, which was the very color of the heart of fire.
“Have you ever heard the old Bill Cosby routine about the football team in the locker room?”
Three hours later, I was at my office, leaving a message in Geof’s voice mailbox at the cop shop.
I continued: “It’s the one where it’s the big game day, and they’re all suited up in the locker room, and the coach is exhorting them to get out there and kill the other guys, and he gets them all worked up, and they’re so ravenous for the kill they’re practically drooling, and the coach finally releases them, and they rush the door like madmen, and—it’s locked. I laughed hysterically when Bill Cosby told that. Now I know how the coach felt.
“Geof, the answer to this morning’s questions is yes! Yes! But can I find the man to confront him with this information? The answer is no.” I closed my message with: “How’d it go with you and David?”
Pete Falwell wasn’t at the office, his secretary said, every time I called, never giving my name. He wasn’t at the office of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation. Or at Ardyth Kennedy’s campaign headquarters. Or at home, where they gave me his car phone number when I told them I was a reporter calling. Nor did he answer that traveling telephone.
“Maybe he’s dead,” I thought, but that idea, which ordinarily might have delighted me, failed to satisfy. “Don’t you dare die, Falwell, not before I get to you.”
I didn’t want to kill him.
I didn’t want to flog him in public, gratifying though that might have felt.
I only wanted to make him sell his soul to the devil, the small corner of it that remained from all that he’d already traded away, that is, and the devil I wanted him to sell it to was the one with the blue dress on.
We had a history, Peter Falwell and I. There was a time when he and my dad ran in the same golf-playing circle of Port Frederick tycoons. They had a lot in common: Both of them were Port Frederick natives, both of them were the heads of family-owned seafood canning businesses that went back generations. For Jimmy Cain, it was Cain Clams, which was once the largest employer in the area. For Pete, it was the “friendly” competition, Port Frederick Fisheries. Of the two men, Pete was the better businessman, by far.
He was smart and ruthless.
In an earlier chapter in my family’s life, he had connived, through the use of industrial sabotage, to lure my dad into commencing a building spree that doomed our company. Then, when Cain Clams was bankrupt and under court-appointed management, Pete stepped in to purchase it at rock-bottom prices.
I’d proved it happened that way.
I knew how he did it, even who he did it with, and I could have helped a team of attorneys make a case out of it.
But the rest of my family turned their faces away from that prospect. My dad? He didn’t even believe me; he wouldn’t hear my evidence against his old “friend.” My mother was dead, having been emotionally eviscerated by that and other disasters. My sister said she’d already had enough infamy to last her a lifetime, and she refused to let her life be turned into a public courtroom drama. They didn’t need the money; our company failure didn’t pinch the family
’s personal assets.
I was the only one who wanted to go after Pete, but I was a pit bull straining against my family’s short leash.
He knew—Pete did—that I knew.
And he knew that in spite of my knowledge, he’d gotten clean away with it.
Maybe my family was right to just move silently past it.
The statute of limitations made it all moot by now, anyway.
But the statute hadn’t run out on my loathing for the man. Oh, yes, we had a history. He had won every single battle up to this point, but this time I had a fighting chance to alter the course of that juggernaut.
20
IT WAS HARD, AT WORK, TO ANSWER THE ONE QUESTION EVERYBODY asked: “Jenny, is it true?” There wasn’t, in fact, much time for any other activity than answering the phone, and every caller wanted to know the same thing.
“Jenny, should I even bother coming over to work on the festival today?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely, please come.”
“But is it true, about the insurance?”
“We are having a festival.”
“It’s not over?”
“Not on your life.”
“You mean we did get the insurance?”
“Could we hold a festival without it?”
“Oh! But where’d the TV station ever get the idea that—”
“They were probably misinformed.”
That’s what I told the television producer, Susan Bergalis, when she called, and said, “But Jenny, I talked to a vice president of the insurance company, and she said you didn’t get it.”
“I haven’t heard any such thing from them, Susan.”
That was true, but only because I had not listened to the messages on our office answering machine.
“But Jenny, our source said that you definitely didn’t—”
“Ardyth? Come to the town council meeting tonight, Susan. Bring a crew. You’ll get your ‘definitely’ then.”
“You swear?”
“On the lives of my children.”
She must have forgotten I’m childless, because she hung up sounding satisfied with my promise. It was an incredible strain, trying to be truthful without being candid, and I was obviously beginning to fail at it. It was proving so difficult, in fact, that I finally just gave up and fled from Judy’s House.
Right into the arms of the law.
“I want you to come with me, Jenny. Can they spare you from the festival for a little while?”
Geof was just getting out of his Jeep when I left Judy’s House by the back door.
“Perfect,” I replied, without saying why. “What happened with you guys this morning? Where’s the poltergeist?” Suddenly that didn’t sound right anymore. “David.”
“They were already gone when we got there. I dropped Dave off at his bike, and he was going on from there to his job. He’s going to have a time of it, pumping gas and washing windows with that bum shoulder.”
“He didn’t complain this morning.”
“He doesn’t, you know?”
“Doesn’t complain?” I asked incredulously.
“Not about real stuff, haven’t you noticed that, Jenny? He makes an initial fuss, then he bears up under it, whatever it is.”
I smiled a little. “You’re not suggesting he has character?”
He smiled, too. “You will agree that he is a character.”
“I will stipulate to that. Did you get my message? I still haven’t located Pete. It’s very difficult to beard a lion when you can’t catch him in any of his dens.” I cocked my head. “What do you want with me, my dearest?”
He waggled his eyebrows.
I laughed. “Besides that?”
“We’ll take my car,” was his only answer. “Hop in.”
Ten minutes later we were parked in front of a crab shack, which was literally a shack of a tiny take-out restaurant that sold simple seafood fare to go. Fried clam baskets. Boiled whole lobsters. Crab salad. Potato chips, slaw, soda pop, and coffee. The entire menu fit on a board above the window, and all the cooking was done on the premises. These little shacks had some of the best food around, and the owners could make a small subsidiary living out of them—hardly ever enough to support a family, but enough to buy VCRs and second cars, and maybe even college educations, over time.
“Is it lunchtime already?” I asked, in amazement. “And if it isn’t, who cares? Let’s go. This is a great idea, Lieutenant, honey.”
But he held me back, literally, by placing one large hand on my arm. “Sorry, we’re not eating, just looking.”
“What?”
“Take a good look at the cook, Jen.”
I peered out the open window of the Jeep and squinted through the sunlight at the dark figure moving inside the shack. A man, it appeared. Big—tall and beefy. Wearing a white baseball cap turned backward and a white uniform.
“Who is he?” I asked. “I can’t see his face.”
“Wait until you can.”
That didn’t take long, not with a carload of dock workers pulling up and getting out But those guys were all so burly, themselves, that it was still hard to get a decent glimpse of the cook’s face, behind them.
Then the customers shifted. At the same moment, the cook stuck his head out of the window of the shack and yelled to a man who had just walked off, “Hey! You want chips with that?”
I got an excellent view of him and quickly pulled myself back into the car. “It’s him!” I said, feeling completely and unpleasantly taken by surprise by my husband. “The Holy Ghost That guy, Tyler, who threw me to the ground! Geof, what are you doing? How did you find him? You know I said I don’t want anything to do with him!”
“He was easy to find,” Geof said calmly. “How many big guys named Tyler would have been working at the common last Saturday? I figured he’d be memorable, considering what he did there. People might know him, or at least who he is. Turns out Tyler is his last name. Meryl Tyler. Only had to ask three people. The third one said, ‘Oh, you mean that stupid son of a bitch, Meryl Tyler,’”
I started to speak, but he held up his hand.
“What if I were to tell you that Meryl Tyler has hammer and nails and an empty can of gasoline in the bed of that pickup truck back of the shack?”
I stared at him.
“Our boy Meryl is into burning witches, Jenny, especially pretty blonde ones who stand up to him.”
I blinked and stared back at the shack, suddenly feeling considerably different about the man inside of it.
“Jenny?”
I turned back, to find an extremely sober police lieutenant staring at me. “Where would a man get a witch costume, do you suppose?”
I brought my hand to my mouth and whispered through my fingers, “Oh, my God, the Dime Store.”
“Our boy Meryl was in the store Saturday night before it burned. A sales clerk remembers a man of Meryl’s description buying a wig and a witch’s costume. She remembers him because he was rude to her.” Geof glanced over my shoulder and smiled coldly. “Our boy Meryl is not very bright.”
“Geof? Why did you think of him?”
He reached over to stroke my hair—the very tresses that had gone up in figurative smoke. “You were clearly the witch being burned. The list of people who hate you is very short, maybe even nonexistent, but I knew you did have one very recent, very public enemy.”
“Thank goodness you made me tell you his name.”
I sighed, as we pulled away from the curb. “I guess this means fried clams are out?”
That afternoon, the Port Frederick police arrested Meryl Tyler on suspicion of torching the Dime Store, and on the considerably lesser charge (to them) of burning “me.” He confessed to the lesser charge—they had him on everything from an eye witness I.D. by the clerk from whom he bought the costume, to bits of black lint and yellow wig hair in his truck. But he wouldn’t cop to the far more serious charges of arson and homicide. On the other hand, nobody expected him to, because
such situations are what defense lawyers are for.
As for Lew Riss and his merry band of ecoterrorists?
Definitely flown from their campsite and nowhere to be found. As Geof said so accurately of his morning: win some, lose some.
Afternoon found me still avoiding the office, while continuing my search (and destroy) mission for Peter Falwell.
I spotted Cleo in her truck and waved her down, stopping her on her route long enough to enlist her assistance.
“You said you’re good at finding people, Cleo?”
Her affirmative answer and her smile were reminders of the odd but pleasant hour we’d spent the day before on my kitchen floor.
“Well,” I said, “remember the man who hit me, and his car, the Jag?”
“I could forget?”
“I really need to find him.”
“But then how will I find you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “You’ve got me stumped there, Cleo.”
She laughed down at me from where she sat perched behind a steering wheel that looked a size too large for her. “Leave it to me, Jen.”
“Oh, and Cleo? Don’t say anything to anybody about the festival insurance, okay? Things have changed since last we met.”
“Told you,” she said. “Didn’t the pendulum say you’d get it, and the runes say you’d be safe?”
“Well, I won’t count my tourists until the gate opens on Saturday morning.” I waved her off. “Thank you!”
Sometimes it seems as if when fate finally opens the door, it lets in a big wind that blows everything your way for a while. Cleo did find Pete, and she did find me, and the amazing thing was that both events happened at the same time.
I was chowing down on a bowl of lobster bisque at the diner about half an hour after seeing her, when I heard a heavy honking outside. Looking up, I saw her Post Haste truck right on the tail of a Jaguar convertible. Cleo was honking like mad to get my attention.
“How’d she know I was here … ?” I said aloud.
The Miata. She’d seen it parked in front.
Twilight Page 23
