by Sarah Graves
“The police have already gone through Moran’s house,” said Ellie. “I saw them there bagging things and taking them away early this morning, when I was on my way here.”
Moran had a place in an old sea captain’s mansion that had been turned into apartments, down the street from where Ellie lived. “But when I passed by later, they were gone,” she added.
“Huh. So anyone else who took a look around wouldn’t be messing things up for the cops. In the evidence department, I mean,” I added.
Ellie frowned. “Let me just check that, though.” She got out her cell phone and pressed the speed dial button just as my own phone buzzed again.
Bella, of course. “Oh, brother,” I breathed in exasperation.
I typed on the tiny keyboard, pressed send. “It’s about my dad again,” I said. “He’s still not home and it’s driving her nuts. So I told her we’d have a look for him,” I added apologetically.
“Fine. Gives us a good reason not to rush right home, ourselves.”
Her daughter, Lee, was away at a school choir concert and the bus wouldn’t be back until late.
“She’s got a violin concert coming up soon, too, doesn’t she?” I asked. The kid had more events on her schedule than most adults around here.
“Oh, thanks for reminding me,” Ellie responded, checking the calendar on her phone, “you’re right, it’s the day after tomorrow.”
She tucked the device away. “But what’s this about your dad?”
“He’s behaving like a teenager,” I said, snatching my sweater off a hook as we went out.
“But you do think he’s okay?” she asked, waiting while I locked the door behind us.
Outside it was nearly evening, the shop’s OPEN banners all taken in and the parking spaces in front of them vacant. In a month we’d be so full of tourists that there’d barely be room to move, but right now the town felt as still as a held breath.
In the east, the first few stars began twinkling. I dropped the shop keys into my bag.
“Ellie, I don’t know that he is,” I answered. “Okay, I mean. But he’s an adult, and he’s made it clear he doesn’t want me checking up on him. So I’ll look around, but I’m not going on an all-out hunt for him.”
The phone vibrated again. I shut it off without looking at it.
“He’s not a child, and he’s not stupid,” I said as we set off on foot through the gathering evening; for this errand, we both knew the quieter our approach was, the better.
Besides, it was lovely out here, cool and fresh with a hint of soft, damp fog. “And he’s not an invalid anymore, either,” I added.
The little downtown business district thinned as we left the harbor area behind, striding uphill past the Coast Guard station, the marine store, and Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand.
“He’ll show up,” I said, “when he gets hungry.”
Or I hoped he would. As we walked, the big old houses looming on both sides of the street sent warm light from their curtained windows onto the lawns; dinner smells and the sound of TVs drifted from their front doors.
“You did call Bob Arnold?” I asked. She’d started to, but . . .
Ellie shook her head. “I changed my mind. Toby had a landlady, so we’ll just ask her to tell us for sure whether the state police have been through his room yet or not.”
It did seem like a better plan; no sense alerting Bob that we were on snoop patrol, since if he didn’t know, he couldn’t stop us.
Soon we reached Ellie’s house, a small, well-kept bungalow set back from the sidewalk and surrounded by a hedge of beach roses. The yard lamp lit the garden plot and the chicken coops; beyond, the other houses lay much farther apart and the sidewalk ended, leaving only the road’s gravel shoulder.
Still we continued, between fields and thickets of saplings; on the water to the north, the moon’s reflection lay silvery as mercury.
“Here we are,” Ellie whispered at last.
A shape loomed up suddenly in the moonlit darkness, a jumble of sharp angles and tall, peaked roofs, narrow windows, and treacherous-looking balconies.
It was an old sea-captain’s mansion with a widow’s walk and a cupola, the perfect place if you happened to like chains rattling and sheeted figures wafting around hauntingly.
“Yeesh,” I said. All it needed was bats flapping around it. The windows were dark, and there was no porch light.
“Who lived here besides Toby, the Addams Family?”
In the gloom I made out a yardful of weeds, ragged draperies sagging at the windows, and a house-number bracket dangling crookedly by one nail on the half-open front door.
Wait a minute, the half-open front door? “Ellie, is anyone else living here?” I whispered. A landlady wouldn’t leave a door open.
Just looking at the place made the hairs stand up on my arms. And it didn’t help that right now someone else was looking at it, too, only they were doing it from the inside.
“I told you,” Ellie whispered. “The landlady lives here. But—”
The flashlight’s beam flared again behind one of the upstairs windows.
“Her name’s Mrs. Starne,” whispered Ellie. The flashlight up there flickered some more. “Oh, I hope she’s all right.”
She marched away from me, up the weed-choked gravel path leading to the house. Tripping over tangles of bittersweet vines and shoving through clumps of birch saplings carelessly sprouting in the path, I managed to keep her in sight.
“Ellie, wait!”
She stopped, and I saw the set of her shoulders in the moonlight, her head high and her fists clenched combatively. “There’s somebody in there, and I want to know who,” she said, staring at the house.
The flashlight glimmered upstairs yet again. She stomped up the front steps and shoved the heavy oaken door the rest of the way open.
“Hello? Mrs. Starne, are you in here? Are you okay?”
She stepped into the dark front hallway. In the yellowish glow of a single bare hanging lightbulb I glimpsed an ornate staircase, strips of peeling wallpaper, and what appeared to be a moth-eaten stuffed owl perched on a chair back.
Then: “Help!” quavered a frightened old voice from somewhere deep in the house. “Help, somebody!”
Ellie found a light switch. A weak glow showed threadbare rugs, antique furniture, and a hanging planter with a dead philodendron leaf dangling from it. We rushed past all of it toward where the voice had come from, into a dim-lit kitchen.
“Oh!” gasped an elderly lady from the straight chair she’d been tied to. Around her, the kitchen was like an old, sepia-toned photo from the 1890s: wood-burning cookstove, a half-barrel full of kindling, and an age-battered, cast-iron sink standing next to the gas-fired hot water heater.
“Foolish girls, get me out of here!” Mrs. Starne spat. Tiny and white-haired, wearing a shapeless housedress, she was so goggle-eyed with fury that I thought she might be about to have a stroke.
“Hurry!” she demanded, glaring at me while I hastened to comply. I yanked at the clothesline binding her to the chair, then found a knife in a drawer and sliced away the rope.
She sprang up, grabbing at the glass of water Ellie brought to her. “Oh,” the landlady fumed inarticulately. “Oh, that rotten . . .”
“Who, Mrs. Starne, who did this to you?” Good heavens, but I was irked; the very idea, tying up a helpless old woman—
“Are they still in the house?” I asked, but just then a shout came from the front hall, where Ellie had gone.
“Jake, come quick, they’re getting . . .”
Away. Of course, I realized, whoever had been up there was now deciding to vamoose. Footsteps thudded down the stairs as I hurried back out to the hall, but before I got there Ellie cried out again.
“Oh, no, you don’t, you—” Then the front door slammed hard and shoes thumped across the porch.
“Ellie, are you okay?” I found her peering out into the darkness, where faint crunching sounds on the gravel path moved hurriedly aw
ay.
“We’ll call Bob Arnold,” I said, pulling my phone out.
“No.” Mrs. Starne’s voice came harshly from behind me. Turning, I found her in the hall wearing a pair of rolled-down white stockings, that blue flowered housedress, and fuzzy slippers.
She had a little gunmetal-gray pistol in her hand. “Don’t call anyone,” she snapped. “I don’t want the police.”
Her eyes were as pale and shiny as silver bullets, her lips pressed tightly together like thin slices of liver. “If that bastard shows up here again, I’ll save them the trouble.”
It struck me that having her out here shooting people might not be Bob’s idea of preventing trouble. But never mind.
“Did you see who it was?” I asked.
“No,” Mrs. Starne retorted. “He grabbed me from behind, tied me before I could blink.”
She was waving her little gun around in a way I found nervous-making in the extreme. “But if he comes back here again—”
“He won’t have to.” Ellie sounded discouraged. “Whoever it was had a bundle in his arms when he went by. Jake, I think he’s beaten us to the . . .”
“Right, but for what?” This being to me the big question, right up there with whether or not Mrs. Starne was going to accidentally put a bullet in my head.
“Have the state cops been here?” I asked the landlady. If I hadn’t been sure before that I wanted to see Moran’s room, I was now.
“Because if they have, we’d like to go up there and take a peek, ourselves,” I added.
Besides, I was eager to put distance—not to mention a ceiling and some sturdy floorboards—between me and that weapon.
The landlady’s glare was so cold, you could’ve used it to freeze fish. But she told us the room had already been examined, and that she’d been told she could go ahead and clean it.
“Going to need a fire hose for the job,” she grumbled.
Then she followed us up the massive old staircase with the gun still gripped in her hand; not what I’d been hoping for. Still, we got to the landing and the hall beyond it without suffering any gunshot wounds, and found Moran’s door.
It had been kicked open. Inside, a rumpled bed and a dresser with its drawers yanked out stood opposite an antique washstand with a razor and a can of Barbasol perched on it.
Magazines lay scattered across the floor amidst a clutter of dirty socks. A closet’s narrow door gaped open; all the hangers had been yanked down. A shelf above was similarly swept clean.
Ellie was examining something on the small, flimsy-looking desk by the window. “Jake, look at these.”
A laptop cord lay on the desk, but no laptop; I guessed that the police investigators had taken it. Stepping aside, she revealed a big manila envelope whose contents she’d already removed.
“Good heavens,” I breathed. From the envelope, Ellie had pulled a bunch of photographs, either the same ones that Moran had sent around to embarrass Sharon Sweetwater or ones very like them.
And they were worse than Sharon had said. “Oh, dear,” Ellie murmured. “That’s quite a costume he’s got her wearing.”
“Yeah. Expensive, too, I’ll bet. Probably the black boots and the little whip with the tassels on it cost extra.”
I turned the photos facedown on the desk. Also in the envelope was a list of local names and addresses, written in a whimsical mix of capital and lowercase letters and including e-mail addresses.
The names were of Sharon’s student’s parents, I guessed; I tucked the whole mess back into the envelope.
“Well, at least now we know what Andy was so mad about. I mean, specifically what he—”
“Right. And these aren’t going to make him seem any less guilty, are they? Even though, I mean, look at them, Jake, they’re obviously Photoshopped.”
I shoved the envelope into my pocket. Ellie was right; it didn’t matter that the photos were faked, that by the miracle of modern computers Sharon’s head appeared to have been clumsily glued onto each model’s body by a kid wielding a pair of blunt scissors and a bottle of Elmer’s.
What mattered was that their mere existence might be enough to make a boyfriend blow a gasket, and that Moran had not only made them—or had someone make them for him, maybe—he’d tried hurting Sharon by mailing them to her students’ parents.
I said as much to Ellie. “Moran doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d know how to alter digital photographs, though.”
The magazines scattered about his room were of two types: the kind that were about hunting or fishing, and the kind that were about cars. Nothing in the room suggested any other interests or skills.
“What I’m wondering,” I went on, “is why the cops didn’t take them.”
We looked at each other. Then, “Because the pictures weren’t here when the cops were,” we said, both of us speaking at the same time.
Ellie looked thoughtful. “Someone printed them out and put them here for the police to find, but too late? The cops had already. . .”
“Uh-huh. To help build the case against Andy, maybe.”
Something twined around my ankle; my heart leapt into my throat. But it was only a gray cat, agitating to be picked up.
“Scat,” I told it, unpersuaded by its ratty-looking fur and notched ear. Then I noticed the dead mouse in its mouth.
“Eek,” I added as the cat dropped the mouse’s stiffening corpse on my foot. I kicked it away with a shudder and it landed at the back of the room’s tiny closet, whereupon the cat leapt after it, grabbed it again, and vanished.
“Huh?” I said, then realized there must be a hole of some sort back there.
“Ugh,” I muttered, crawling through a clutter of old socks, dust clumps, and fallen plaster bits. Also, there was a book lying back there as if tossed when someone was finished with it: Photo Editing for Dummies.
Well, they had the right audience, all right. And it answered my earlier question, too, about Moran’s minimal picture-faking abilities; even he, I imagined, might be able to follow simple instructions.
“Hand me the flashlight.”
Ellie reached cautiously back to where I crouched. I shone the light at the rear floorboards of the closet, finding one dislodged just enough to make a hole that a cat could slither through.
Also, once the board was lifted away entirely, that you could slide a shoe box into. I pulled the top off and stared at what was inside.
It was a gun. Small, ugly, and obviously very cheap, the weapon was a .22 pistol with a black plastic grip.
“Here’s the gun he used to wave around,” I said. I’d been wondering about it. I plucked it from the shoebox and slid back out of the closet, then dropped it into my bag.
“We’ll give it to Bob Arnold along with the pictures,” I said as Ellie and I went back downstairs, where we found Mrs. Starne bustling irritably around the cavernous old kitchen.
A bottle of vodka and a glass stood on the kitchen table. No sign of the weapon she’d been brandishing, though—probably she kept it in her apron pocket along with her brass knuckles, I thought uncharitably—and when we called good night she didn’t answer.
“I can see why there aren’t any other tenants,” said Ellie as we made our way down the path outside. By now it was full dark, with the silvery moon shrunk to dime size in the blue-black sky.
“It’s like the rooming house from hell,” I agreed, glancing back.
Mrs. Starne’s ramshackle old dwelling stood sharply against the night sky like a silhouette jaggedly cut from construction paper, its peaked roofs and gables jutting ominously this way and that.
“Brr,” said Ellie, shivering as she followed my gaze; the place had all the vintage charm of a mausoleum. A breeze sprang up, setting the half-fledged birch leaves whispering stealthily in the darkness.
Suddenly it occurred to me that whoever had tied up Mrs. Starne might not have gone far away; that, in fact, he could be out here with us right now.
As we made our way out to the street, a
shadow moved back there among the birches. But it was only a deer, its eyes reflecting yellow.
I quickened my step. A few blocks away in town, the houses were closer together and there were people around. But way out here at the north end of the island we might as well have been on the surface of that silvery moon instead of hurrying along beneath it.
We walked on silently for a while. Then, “You know,” I began, meaning to bring up the murder method. Because let’s face it, how would you get a cup of insecticide-laced poison into a victim?
Smelly insecticide . . . so maybe it wasn’t. Maybe what killed Moran was something else instead, I theorized to myself, and the intensely smelly stuff was only to cover the real method. But before I could suggest this, headlights appeared. Bright ones, bouncing up and down as the vehicle approached; winter had long gone by, but the frost heaves it left behind on our little island’s roads hadn’t.
“Oh,” Ellie said as the truck went by. A recognizable truck: bright red paint, shiny new hubcaps, still with the temporary license plate in its holder on the rear bumper.
My dad’s truck . . . Its brake lights flashed on, cherry red in the darkness. I thought he must’ve seen us and was stopping for us.
Bella would be glad, I had time to think before the brake lights flashed once more.
Then suddenly the red truck swerved wildly across the roadway, its headlights illuminating a particularly dense stand of those birch saplings just before the truck crashed into them.
Four
“Cyanide,” said Wade, “would do the kind of thing you’re talking about.” He pulled off one of his work boots while he began answering the question I’d just asked him.
Because the trouble was, I still couldn’t think of why Toby Moran would swallow a milkshake that reeked of insect poison. Even if you were drunk, you’d have to notice it, it was so powerfully aromatic.
So maybe it was something else that had killed him: something deadly, fast-acting, and not quite as stinky as insecticide? Maybe the bug-killer was just a cover-up, added after the fact?
