by Sarah Graves
“Nice theory,” I said. Also, my plan to distract her from her other problems was working, I thought. And then to Ellie, “Where do you guess she was yesterday morning, maybe here in town at the Senior Center lunch?”
When the earlier break-in happened, I meant. The lunches were a well-established social activity for the elderly here in Eastport, and Bella had been trying to get my dad to go to one since forever.
But he said that if he wanted to spend his noon hour hearing about a lot of other people’s aches and pains, he’d go to the doctor’s office and maybe get a flu shot while he was at it.
“If she was in town, though, all Devine would’ve had to do was catch sight of her here in Eastport . . .”
Which would’ve been likely; it’s a very small place.
“And he’d know that was his chance. To get out to her cottage yesterday morning, I mean, and do . . . whatever.”
I stopped, thinking about it. Then, “Maybe not to take something away or even destroy something, but . . .to leave something there?”
Ellie glanced over at me; I went on a little defensively. “Well, we need a new angle on all this, don’t we?”
But I had to admit I didn’t know what might’ve been left at the cottage. “Maybe something that should’ve been there all along,” I added, “and sooner or later somebody would notice if it was gone?”
“Hm. Maybe,” said Ellie, not sounding convinced.
Bella dumped the dry ingredients for the éclair pastry into the water and butter, by now simmering together, then removed the pan from the heat and began beating the mixture to cool it.
And yes, I do know that this couldn’t possibly work. Beating the dry ingredients into hot water and melted butter . . . how could it?
The whole thing always sounded to me like an unnecessarily complex recipe for flour paste. But somehow it did work; soon Bella had a dozen éclair shapes made of pastry dough on the cookie sheet.
“Right, into the oven with them,” said Ellie briskly, whisking the cookie sheet away from her and setting the timer once more.
Then Bella spoke. “All right, so maybe he’d asked her for the poison and she’d given it to him. Why, we don’t know.”
That’s for sure. Or anything else, basically, but that didn’t deter Bella.
“Then yesterday morning he went out there and put it back. Or most of it. To make it look as if it had never been gone.”
She began washing her hands, which for Bella is a project that proceeds fingernail by fingernail. “But then he realized . . .”
She stopped, frowning as she worked on her hands, then began wiping down counters and cabinet fronts. Next would come the refrigerator door and the little grooves in the gas stove’s knobs.
“Well, I don’t know what he might’ve realized,” she finished at last.
At least she wasn’t obsessing over my father; I scraped out the last cookie batter bowl and Ellie went back to making the éclair frosting: butter, powdered sugar, and melted semisweet.
That was when Bob Arnold walked in. “I thought you ladies would want to know that Miss Blaine went into surgery a few minutes ago,” he said unhappily.
“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “But the nurse told me . . .”
“Yeah, she took a turn for the worse. That head bump . . . they think they can fix it, but you know. Dicey until they do.”
“And she never said anything?” According to the nurse I’d talked to, Miss Blaine had regained consciousness but wasn’t yet fully awake.
Bob shook his head. “No, I’d been hoping she would. But things went the other way instead.”
And then it hit me, his expression. “Oh,” I said again, and Bob nodded, his pink plump face grim.
“Someone didn’t just get surprised by her, did they?” I asked. “I mean, she didn’t just happen upon someone breaking in.”
To take something. Or put something back. Or maybe just to rob the place; maybe we had this all wrong from the get-go.
“Nope.” Bob brushed a strand of his thinning blond hair straight back from his high pink forehead.
“Docs at the hospital say somebody hit her hard from behind with something heavy.”
He took a deep breath, his eyes lighting appreciatively on our wire racks full of cookies. But then his look turned serious again.
“Someone snuck up on her, it looks like,” he said. “Door was jimmied.”
Of course; that’s why it had swung open at Ellie’s touch.
“I’d told her to lock it when I was out there earlier for the burglary, and I think she did. She was shaken up by the break-in.”
Ellie handed him a snickerdoodle and he bit into it. “No sign of a struggle,” he went on. “Nothing missing that I could tell. Someone surprised her, knocked her out, dragged her down to the water.”
He swallowed. Then, “There’s drag marks on that path to the dock. Someone tried kicking ’em away, but you look close and they’re there.”
“You were out there already this morning?” Ellie asked.
He nodded. “Waiting for it to get light. The shoulder wound was from a sharp nail in the dock. I think it was meant to look as if she fell in, hit her head on a rock, and drowned.”
“So is everybody else done out there now, too?” Bella inquired. She was scrubbing the already-spotless kitchen sink so hard with Ajax, it was a wonder the porcelain didn’t peel off.
“Because,” she went on with a glance at me, “Jake and I were thinking of going to get her a few things. Her hair and tooth brushes, her own hand cream, maybe her robe and a pair of slippers—”
I glanced back. “Yes, to take up to the hospital for Miss Blaine. For when she wakes up,” I agreed.
Bob nodded. “County boys were there late last night, going over the inside of the house. Now that it’s getting to be daylight it won’t take them long to finish up outside.”
He thought a moment. “So, yeah, those guys’ll probably be gone,” he added to Bella, “and if they’re not, you just wait for them to go and afterward you won’t be stepping on their toes any.”
“Great,” I said, keeping my tone light. “We’ll go as soon as we’re done here.”
Meanwhile, Bob didn’t seem to know anything about the cyanide Miss Blaine might have had, and I saw no reason to enlighten him. Or at any rate not yet.
* * *
Outside Ellie’s house I slung my arm around Bella’s shoulder and squeezed, and she leaned against me for a moment.
“Good thinking on the toiletry items,” I said.
She nodded minutely. But now that we weren’t busy with baking, her mind was on something else.
“Why can’t he just talk about it?” she wondered plaintively. “About what’s going on with him, I mean?”
She’d been married once before, to a guy who was approximately as communicative as a fence post. My father, on the other hand, had never had any problem letting people know how he felt, whether they liked it or not.
Until now. “I don’t know,” I said when we’d gotten into my car.
The pale early light made the dew in the grass sparkle, and the air smelled like the fountain of youth as we left Ellie’s driveway.
“But I think maybe it’s got something to do with being old, and feeling like he dodged a bullet with that heart attack,” I said.
Downtown on Water Street the shopkeepers were sweeping sidewalks, setting out sale tables, and hanging banners, while in the boat basin a dozen new Coasties were hustling onto their training vessel.
I spotted Andy Devine with them, shepherding them to their assigned places on the boat. I gathered his superiors weren’t taking his legal troubles very seriously.
Yet. “I’ll make him dodge something, all right,” Bella grumbled, “if he keeps on behaving like such a . . . a butthead.”
“Mmm,” I replied, trying not to burst out laughing. Bella’s idea of profanity was about as scandalous as a glass of warm milk. But her problem remained serious, and I still had no id
ea what to do about it.
Driving out Route 190 from Eastport, we were silent, me with my eyes on my driving and her with her henna-frizzed head leaning back on the head rest.
“Pretty,” she murmured, gazing out the side window, and it was, too.
The sun was well up now, shedding its champagne-colored light on the rocky shores of Carrying Place Cove. Then came old apple orchards bursting with pink-white blossoms, and salt marshes where deep-purple water lily blooms lay thickly on the water.
“I suppose you want to know why I’m not home with your father right this minute,” Bella said conversationally.
Long-legged shore birds skittered across the sand alongside the causeway. “Because he’s driving you nuts?” I replied.
In Pleasant Point, Native American kids whose ancestors had been living in this spot when Leif Eriksson was only a bud jogged to school, lugging Power Rangers lunch boxes and Batman backpacks.
Bella glared balefully at the dashboard, ignoring them. “Because he’s going to get himself killed, and I refuse to watch,” she said.
“You don’t think,” I pressed her gently as we rolled up to the Route 1 intersection, “that maybe he can take care of himself?”
He’d done all right until now, after all, even reuniting with me here in Eastport after a long mutual misunderstanding. And he’d had sense enough to marry Bella. But she was convinced that he was heading for trouble.
“He will get his neck broken in another accident or drive off the end of a pier at night,” she predicted darkly. “That dratted truck’s on the road to ruin and him with it.”
She turned exasperatedly to me. “And you of all people, I thought you had better sense. But all you do is encourage him more.”
I turned left onto the lake road. In bright daylight the old farm fields rolled away uphill, newly sprouted with pale-green hay and bordered by rock walls that were slowly falling into lichen-encrusted heaps.
“You think he listens to me?” We passed the old railroad trestle that once had brought everyone and everything to Eastport. Now it hung lonesomely in the air, its connection to the remaining railbed lopped off at both ends so that it resembled a chunk of ancient Roman ruins.
“They had the right idea,” stated Bella, pointing to this piece of unceremoniously amputated infrastructure. “If you don’t want people doing something, you just take away the ability to do it.”
Trespassing on the trestle, she meant, by daredevils leaping the gaps at either end on their ATVs and dirt bikes. Which made me wonder . . .
“What happened here, anyway?” We drove down a winding lane between a double row of willow trees, their new spring leaves silvery in the sunlight. “To make them cut off the trestle ends, I mean?”
Because there must’ve been an incident of some kind. In downeast Maine, where we can barely keep the schools open and the roads paved even in good times, the money wouldn’t have been available otherwise.
“Kid flew off it, broke his neck,” Bella said flatly.
Which didn’t do much for my argument about Bella maybe taking it easier on my dad, or for her mood, either. But only a few minutes later we turned in at the road to Miss Blaine’s cottage, and there her attitude softened.
“We used to come out here to swim,” she said softly as the blue lake water appeared glittering between the leaves.
I slowed the car, partly on account of the road’s rough surface, but more for her sake.
“My cousins had a cottage; we’d come out here in the summer and stay,” she said. “But I haven’t been back here in, oh, years.”
We passed the place where the mystery cyclist had roared past us in the dark the night before; moments later, we were in the turnaround where I’d left the car, and where somebody had disabled it.
Wade had come out with a compressor and re-inflated the tires, and put the wires back so I could drive home. Now I parked and we got out; no county officers were around, and no squad cars, either.
So we were alone. “Oh,” breathed Bella, her big grape-green eyes widened wonderingly as she gazed around.
Light slanting through the leaves fell on lady’s slippers and trilliums, hyacinth and vermillion bloodroot growing from the rich black leaf mold at the bases of the big old trees.
“Oh, I remember the way it smells,” she said, breathing in the cool, damp aroma of lake water mingled with pine sap.
“Come on,” I said, not liking that I had to rush her.
But neither of us would enjoy getting discovered here by anyone but Bob Arnold; his tacit permission notwithstanding, I thought the county cops whose jurisdiction this was might not share his casual approval of our visit, especially if they knew the whole story.
And if I found what I was beginning to suspect I might inside Miss Blaine’s lakeside cottage, they’d like it even less. But first we had to get inside, which was a project.
Bob had nailed the jimmied door shut to stop vandals getting in, and I’d neglected to ask him about a key to the other one. The windows were all too high to try climbing in through, and the cellar bulkhead door was secured by a sturdy, gleaming padlock.
So I was stymied until Bella spoke up. “Ladder,” she said.
“Huh?” I’d been gazing around dumbly, trying to figure out what to do.
“Ladder,” Bella uttered again. “On the shed.”
I looked where she pointed, found the aging but solid-appearing wooden ladder hung on the tool shed’s shingled side, and hauled it down from its cast-iron angle brackets it was mounted on.
Then Bella and I hauled the ladder to the house and propped it, and I clambered up. Soon I had a window open, and after that it was simply a matter of shoving myself through it headfirst, losing my precarious grip on the frame at a most inopportune moment, and landing on the floor at an awkward angle that didn’t quite break my neck.
“Are you all right?” Bella called from outside.
The cottage was cold, the fire in the woodstove having gone out and the still air smelling of ashes.
“I’m just ducky,” I called back to her grumpily, and once I had gotten myself up off the floor I let her in.
“Good,” she said, brushing past me and stopping. “Oh, this is lovely, nothing like the old camp house that we used to—”
“Yeah, never mind that.” From the windows overlooking the deck I could see straight out onto the lake.
Across the water, one of the cottages that had been dark the night before was now abuzz with activity: kids swimming around a dock, dogs romping and barking happily at them, a woman spreading a yellow tablecloth out onto a picnic table.
Also, there was a boat leaving the dock. A small boat, with a little outboard engine on it . . . two guys in the boat, it looked like.
Coming toward us. As they got nearer I could see them looking up at the cottage. “Go,” I told Bella, and she didn’t hesitate.
“I’ll take the upstairs,” she said, “and you stay down here.” Her quick step hurried up the staircase to the second floor, where Ellie had gone the night before.
I yanked open drawers and cabinets: in the kitchen, where a hand pump over the sink provided water, and in the living area, where the cottage’s solar power was augmented by glass-globed gas lamps mounted at intervals on the ceiling beams.
From down on the lake, the distant mutter of an outboard engine grew to a nearby snarl, then shut down entirely.
I pulled the lids of the window seats open: board games, extra pillows and blankets, gas lantern parts—globes, mantles, the little metal inside mechanisms that regulate the gas—and in the final bin, a plastic tackle box with a lot of rubber bands wrapped around it.
I rolled the rubber bands off. Down on the water, a boat’s metal side thunked the dock; then footsteps thumped the dock planks.
The box had compartments for lures, hooks, and the other doodads needed for freshwater fishing. No doodads, however, were in the box. Instead there was another, smaller box made of clear hard plastic.
&
nbsp; The box had a printed label on it: POISON! CAUTION! NOT FOR USE NEAR PETS, CHILDREN, OR DOMESTIC ANIMALS!
And other warnings along those lines. You were not, I gathered, meant to eat any of this stuff. Or feed it to anyone, which, of course, was the question for today: had someone?
Or administered it some other way, perhaps. I opened the box. Inside were four shiny white plastic cartridges along with a leaflet of instructions. The trap itself came packaged separately, maybe.
“Bella,” I called, but she didn’t answer. Outside, the men from across the lake climbed toward the cottage, their shoes crunching on the graveled path. I could hear them talking to one another, just not what they were saying.
But they didn’t sound happy. And the little gun I’d had was at home in my dresser drawer, now. I’d meant to turn it over to Bob last night after Miss Blaine got loaded into the ambulance, but then Wade had arrived and I got distracted again.
Now the two guys climbed the deck steps. Probably they weren’t bad guys, but I didn’t feel like taking chances. Urgently, I scanned the cottage’s open living area, hoping to spot a weapon.
An iron poker leaned against the woodstove, but no way was I a fighter. Me trying to use that thing as a weapon might be hilarious to watch, but forget about it being dangerous to anyone but me.
Because, unfortunately, if I can bonk myself with an object, I will. Talking, though, I can do, sort of.
“Hey, guys!” I greeted the two men who appeared on the deck. “Something I can help you with?”
Brightly, cheerfully . . . because when people who are up to no good sense that you know something is wrong, they move faster. And I didn’t want that, even though I didn’t know quite yet who these guys were.
Up to, I mean, if anything. “I’m here getting a few things for Miss Blaine,” I said, keeping my tone genial. “I don’t know if you heard, but she’s in the hospital. She took a bad fall last night.”
The men were in their thirties, shaggy-haired, stubble-chinned, in jeans and sweatshirts with battered sneakers; one had on a gimme cap with a local trucking outfit’s name embroidered on it.
