The Sense of Reckoning

by Matty Dalrymple

  Finally Garrick sat back in his chair. “So, tell me about what you’re experiencing.”

  Ann recapped the series of injuries to her hands and described the connection Joe had made to Biden Firth’s intentionally inflicted injuries.

  “Have you had any incidents since you left Pennsylvania?”

  Ann thought back over her uneventful trip up to Maine. “No, nothing.”

  “Have you sensed anything?”

  Ann shook her head.

  “Not at all? How about when you were in the hospital?”

  “There were spirits at the hospital, but I didn’t have a sense that any of them were especially interested in me. And I don’t recall hurting my hands while I was there.”

  Garrick nodded thoughtfully. “It’s possible, if it is Biden Firth, that it took him some time to rally his forces, or that he drew some strength from being in the location where he died once you returned home.”

  “But is it him?”

  “I told you, it’s not clear. For me, a spirit usually appears either much as he or she was in life or not at all. But this whatever-it-is surrounding you could be a weak spirit having difficulty manifesting itself or a strong spirit largely but not completely hiding itself from me. You met Mr. Firth—which would be your guess?”

  Ann considered. “Weak, I suppose. He seemed indecisive. Ineffectual. I understand from the detective who investigated the murder that it seems likely he killed his wife after his father chewed him out about an unsuccessful investment, and it may be that his wife also made some insulting comment that made him snap.”

  “Well, weak isn’t necessarily less dangerous than strong. A child playing with matches can burn down a house as quickly as a professional arsonist.”

  Ann shifted nervously in her chair, resisting the urge to glance over her shoulder. “What can I do about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a bit difficult to formulate a plan of attack if one is not even sure who the enemy is. Or what.” He gazed thoughtfully at her. “You could go back to the scene of his wife’s murder. See if you could leave him there. Like removing muck from one’s shoes on a boot scraper,” he said, clearly enjoying this rhetorical flourish.

  “Do you think that would work?”

  After a moment Garrick said, “No. How long are you staying in Maine?”

  “As long as I need to.”

  “I can’t imagine an extended stay will be required—within another day or two I should be able to tell you whether it’s possible to assist in this matter. However, it might be informative to see you at various times of the day. You killed him in the evening, correct?”

  “Jeez, Garrick.”

  “He died in the evening, correct?” he amended.

  “Yes.”

  “And I believe that he also killed his wife in the evening, yes?”

  “Yes, that seemed most likely.”

  “Very inconvenient, in view of my other engagement.”

  “Ah, the mysterious ‘other engagement.’”

  “It’s highly confidential.”

  “So you said.”

  Garrick raised an eyebrow at her crossly, then took a sip from a mug on his desk. “I can tell you that it involves a woman seeking information from her deceased brother. He appears for only a brief period around midnight and insists on discussing other topics, so it is taking some time to obtain the desired information. There is some urgency to obtaining the information, however, which is why I can’t reschedule the engagement.”

  “What is the information she’s looking for?” asked Ann.

  Garrick examined her speculatively for some time, then said, “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty—”

  “Of course.”

  Garrick tapped his fingers together. “This evening is not possible. Why don’t you come back tomorrow at, say, ten o’clock in the morning and we will see if this whatever-it-is around you has become more clear. If not, and depending on how my engagement goes tonight, perhaps tomorrow evening would be a possibility.”

  Ann, recognizing her dismissal, stood and retrieved her parka. Garrick followed her to the front door, opened it for her, and shut it behind her without a word.

  Ann pulled her cellphone from her knapsack and pushed the speed dial for Scott.

  “That was fast,” he answered.

  “Yes. He saw something but he can’t tell what. I’m supposed to come back tomorrow.”

  “Well, that sounds promising—at least he can see something.”

  “Yeah.” Ann felt unaccountably discouraged, although she realized she shouldn’t have expected instant results. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m just down the road at that cute building, want to meet me here? Then we could go for a walk, there are lots of hiking trails. I hope you’re wearing comfortable shoes.”

  “When have you known me to wear anything other than comfortable shoes?” said Ann. “I’ll see you in a minute.” She slipped the phone back in the knapsack, slung the knapsack onto her back, and descended the steps to the walk. She didn’t notice Garrick watching her from the window, his hands clasped behind his back, a worried look on his gaunt face.

  Chapter 12

  Mount Desert Island reminded her of home.

  The hulking masses of the mountains were gentler here on the Maine coast, and the hundreds of jewel-like ponds and lakes of the Adirondacks were replaced with quiet coves and the magnificent stretch of bays and ocean beyond, but the pine trees and boulders lining the well-worn roads, the mix of almost-hidden opulence and tourist kitsch and hard-scrabble living, that sense that the place had not changed much in a hundred years, gave her a pleasant feeling of familiarity with the surroundings.

  The warm weather in Pennsylvania had lulled her into a false sense of complacency about her travel wardrobe, and other than the parka that Scott had insisted she bring, she had no other cold-weather accessories. She and Scott drove into Bar Harbor to remedy the situation.

  They parked near the village green and strolled down Main Street. The season was winding down, with a few shops already closed. In one that was still doing a brisk business, Ann bought a knit cap and gloves, while Scott found a pair of red flannel pajamas decorated with a pattern of small black moose for Mike.

  “From a distance you can’t even tell it’s moose,” said Scott. “I think it’s pretty classy, as moose-themed clothing goes.” He also insisted on getting Ann a moose-decorated nightshirt, and Ann retaliated by getting him moose-decorated boxer shorts.

  After their clothing needs were met, they continued down Main Street toward the water. The old wooden buildings, their second stories painted a jaunty mixture of creams and blues and raspberries, stepped down toward the channel that separated Bar Harbor from Bar Island. Couples and families wandered the sidewalks, gazing in store windows or huddling on the sidewalk benches licking ice cream cones. Cars waited with varying degrees of patience for pedestrians in the crosswalks. At the end of the street, another small park—Agamont Park, according to Scott’s map—offered a view of the pleasingly named Sheep Porcupine Island. On the point stood the Bar Harbor Inn, its glass-enclosed dining room jutting prow-like toward the water, its white trim sparkling against the silver of the shingle siding. They stopped at the seawall to take in the view, watching a cruise ship make its way through the narrows assisted by a barge boat, dwarfing the sailboats and lobster boats that dotted the water.

  “I wonder if cruise ships are ever haunted,” said Ann.

  “Not if no one died on it, right?” said Scott.

  “Right. I wonder what a cruise line would think if I called up and asked them if anyone had died on a particular ship.”

  Scott became aware that a couple standing next to them at the seaway had glanced over. He smiled at them and wiggled his fingers at the little boy with them. He turned back to Ann. “Are you thinking of going on a cruise?”

  Ann shrugged. “Maybe. Not on one of those giant ships, but maybe one of the small ones.”

  “Mi
ke and I took that cruise to Bermuda in a smallish one. It was nice. Good food.”

  “With my luck I’d book a cruise on a clean ship and then someone would die during the cruise.”

  The couple turned and moved away, herding the little boy ahead of them. Scott sighed and turned back to Ann. “Well, a cruise sounds nice. If you wanted company, maybe Mike could go along.”

  “What about you?”

  “I think I’ve used up my vacation time for this year.”

  Ann looked back out at the ship, which was now disappearing behind one of the islands. “Because you’re babysitting me.”

  “Don’t be silly, this is fun. What next? Look, there’s a place that does whale-watching tours.” And Scott and Ann headed down to the pier to see what Bar Harbor had to offer two people with a free afternoon.

  Chapter 13

  That evening at the hotel, Loring arrived later than usual. He appeared to be slightly inebriated, although Garrick couldn’t recall ever encountering a drunk spirit before. Garrick thought back to the young man he had first met at Lynam’s Point so many years ago—doggedly working to keep the hotel afloat, old beyond his years with responsibility. But during the off-seasons when the hotel was closed and his only responsibility was to keep it from falling down over the winter, Loring Lynam had had a reputation as a hard drinker. And in the last few years of his life, it wasn’t only during off-season that he had overindulged. When they had found his body, there had been an empty bottle of bourbon in the room.

  It appeared that Loring was once again in a storytelling mood.

  “So now you know how much Dad loved his mother.”

  “Yes,” said Garrick cautiously.

  “What did he say?” asked Ellen.

  “Ellen, please don’t be a distraction,” Garrick said to her and turned back to Loring.

  “It’s probably helpful for you to know how Dad felt about his father.”

  “Helpful to whom?” glowered Garrick.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up some gems of wisdom from the story,” said Loring. He stood, with that slight over-carefulness of the drunk, and walked to the window overlooking the lawn. “I never had the pleasure of meeting my grandfather—he had a heart attack on a dock in Bernard where he had gone to buy lobsters back when the dining room was open. Forty-nine years old. Forty-nine’s a bad age for the Lynam men. Or maybe I should say fifty’s a bad age for the Lynam men, since we never get to see it. Anyhow, from some of the stories Dad told—and Dad did love to tell stories—it sounds like Granddad was no treat to live with ...”

  Chapter 14

  1936

  Chip lay in bed, thinking over the day, savoring his triumph with the tea tray. That the hotel would be his someday—he had never thought about that before. It had always been his playground, the hotel itself with its odd nooks and crannies to hide in, the grounds with the pine woods to explore, Lynam Narrows with its trove of interesting pebbles. But if he had to take care of it himself—it might be possible, with his mother’s help.

  He tossed restlessly as a new thought struck him. If the hotel was his, that would mean it would no longer be his father’s. Chip turned that thought over in his mind.

  He could just barely remember a time—before all his parents’ talk was about where they would find the money to pay for this or that—when his father would laugh and smile. He could remember days when his father would take him—Chip had been just a baby then—down to the water to watch the boats, or throw him in the air so that he would shriek with delight.

  Then things had gotten bad—Chip knew from listening to his parents talk when they thought he wasn’t around. They talked about the Crash of ’29—it was after that that the rooms started to go empty, even in high season. (Chip wondered what could have crashed that would have kept people away from his parents’ hotel—maybe a train crash that frightened people traveling from faraway places like New York City and Philadelphia? He figured if it had involved a boat, it would have been called the Wreck of ’29.) At first, a few locals had occasionally stopped by to eat in the practically empty dining room, but then his parents had had to close the dining room when they couldn’t afford to pay the cook. One season they hadn’t opened at all—Chip had been too little to remember it himself, but he had once or twice heard his father refer to it in the same strained tones he used to discuss “bank balance” or “room occupancy.”

  Just the year before, Chip had more than once woken up in the middle of the night in his bedroom on the top floor of the hotel and, unable to go back to sleep, had gone to his parents’ room across the hall to find it empty. He knew that if he went looking for them he would find them, as he had one night, huddled over the ledger books at the big worktable in the hotel’s kitchen. The first time he had gone looking for them and peeked through the swinging kitchen door, his father had had his head in his hands and his mother had been distractedly smoking a cigarette, something she never did during the day. He had snuck back to his room hoping they hadn’t known he was there—there was something embarrassing about having observed his parents so unguarded and demoralized. A few days later, a truck had come and his father had helped a man load the piano from the now-empty dining room into the back; a few days after that the same happened with the old grandfather clock that his father had taken such pride in winding each Sunday.

  But this year business was better. The people his parents referred to as “the regulars”—some from so long ago he hadn’t even been born yet—were back. His father’s shoulders weren’t quite so stooped these days, and he moved with more purpose, although with an underlying wariness that reminded Chip of a squirrel eating at the bird feeder while keeping an eye out for the neighborhood cat. Even now, with his mother saying things were looking up, it was as if his father believed that only frantic activity would keep bad luck at bay. His only leisure was working in the wood shop in a shed behind the hotel, but even then his projects were almost always for the hotel: repairing a dining room chair or mending balusters broken by guests as they hauled their luggage up the steps to the guest rooms on the second and third floors.

  In fact, the only event that had elicited some enthusiasm from his father was the installation of the new elevator—he liked to brag that not even some of the fancy hotels in Portland had elevators yet. Chip longed to operate the sliding door and metal grate, to move the handle that sent the elevator up or down, but his father had made it very clear that the elevator was not a toy and implied that there would be dire consequences if he found Chip using it as such.

  His father had said “toy” with such disdain that Chip had begun to fear for his actual toys, and he had fashioned a hiding place for them—a wooden box he kept under his bed. It was possible to see under his bed from the hallway, so he had gotten a board from the workshop of the same color as the floorboards and had propped it up in front of the box. It wouldn’t withstand close scrutiny, but it provided effective camouflage from a casual glance.

  He would feel better if he had his bear, Timothy—he could put him away before his father came to wake him up in the morning. He climbed out of bed, slid aside the board, pulled out the toy box, and removed Timothy.

  But even holding Timothy didn’t soothe him. His brain flickered from thought to thought, he couldn’t get his legs in a comfortable position, a seam of his pajama bottoms was digging into his hip. He looked at the clock on his bedside table—the big hand was on the two. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted to one hundred several times then opened them again—the big hand was still on the two.

  He decided to go downstairs and get a glass of milk. His mother sometimes warmed milk for him when he couldn’t sleep, but she wouldn’t be up anymore and, since he couldn’t use the stove, he hoped cold milk would work just as well as warm.

  Even though it was highly unlikely that he would encounter any guests, he pulled on his robe and slipped his feet into his slippers as his father had instructed him to do if he had to leave the top floor at ni
ght. He made his way as quietly as he could down the stairs to the first floor and through the hallway that led to the kitchen.

  He was just about to push the door open when he heard voices inside, low but strained. It was his mother, his father, and ...Uncle Edward? It sounded like they were arguing and Chip, who avoided arguments whenever possible, had turned to go when he heard his father’s angry whisper.

  “You whore!”

  Chip froze. He heard a murmur from his mother and then the third person—he was pretty sure it was Uncle Edward—and then his father cutting through both their voices.

  “Don’t you defend her. I can’t believe you’re even still standing in my kitchen. You traitor.” His father’s voice was getting louder, violating his own rule that any personal conversations must be whispered so as not to disturb the guests.

  Now he could hear Uncle Edward’s words as well. “Listen here, Lorry—”

  “Don’t you call me by my first name—you are the help, you will call me Mr. Lynam,” his father hissed.

  Then he heard his mother: “Stay out of this, Edward, this is between me and him.”

  “Ha!” spat his father. “That’s rich—if it was between you and me, and he had stayed out of it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

  “Perhaps not this exact conversation,” said his mother, her voice cold. “But it’s high time we had some kind of conversation, although I wish it wasn’t in these circumstances.” There was a pause, and when she spoke again Chip could tell she had moved closer to his father. “Perhaps I should call you Mr. Lynam as well? Am I the help too? Because that’s how I feel sometimes. Like the hired girl.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Am I? I remember the look in your eyes when you courted me, like I was something special and precious. You won me with that look. But once we were married, you know what I realized? That I was only as special and precious as your elevator or your ridiculous croquet court.”