Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  Victor went on stirring his coffee with his fork. Apparently I hadn't gotten the sugar dissolved quite perfectly. He frowned briefly at the tiny crumb of piecrust floating on the surface of the coffee, picked it out with a fork tine.

  “What do you mean, spoiling him? He needed school clothes,” my ex-husband said innocently.

  Victor always tried innocence first. Next came shouting and sulking. But not this time, I thought determinedly. It was October and Sam had just recently started classes again, his time divided between the campus in Calais—the next town to our north, thirty miles distant on the mainland—and the boat school here in Eastport.

  I kept my voice even. “Yes, I appreciate your taking care of that for him. But he didn't need the four-hundred-dollar leather jacket, did he? Or the hand-sewn leather loafers.”

  If Sam ever starts loafing I will take him to the hospital for a battery of blood tests. By harnessing half the energy that boy generates on a slow day, you could light up the East Coast.

  Victor smiled a little, sitting there in my big barnlike kitchen with its high, bare windows, scuffed hardwood floor, and tall wooden wainscoting surrounding the old soapstone sink.

  “Or,” I went on, “those hundred-dollar-plus work boots from the Eddie Bauer catalog.”

  From her usual perch atop the refrigerator, Cat Dancing opened her crossed blue eyes and yawned expressively, then stood and stretched.

  “All Sam's friends . . .” I began.

  Mmrph, the Siamese uttered, leaping down onto the washing machine and across to the kitchen table. There she deliberately walked around Victor's plate three times, twitching her tail in his face while he tried swatting at her before she streaked from the room.

  “. . . dress out of the sale bins at Wal-Mart,” I finished; good old Cat Dancing. “He'll have to scuff up those boots with a wire brush just to seem normal.”

  Victor grimaced, brushing fastidiously at the area around his plate. He was a good-looking man in his forties with long-lashed green eyes, a lantern jaw, and lots of dark, curly hair just beginning to go a little gray at the temples.

  “. . . and as for that cowhide book bag you bought him . . .”

  Also, Victor was a cleanliness nut. Today he wore a spotless white V-neck cardigan over a white turtleneck, cream slacks, and a pair of ten-year-old driving moccasins that looked as if they'd just come out of the box.

  Irritably he plucked Cat hairs off the cardigan. “Hideous beast,” he muttered, and it was a good thing Cat Dancing didn't hear him; tail-twitching was the least of what that animal could accomplish when somebody riled her.

  I pretended I hadn't heard him either. “. . . it's ridiculous,” I persisted. “Donald Trump should be carrying that book bag. And Sam surely didn't need season tickets to the Boston Celtics.”

  We were getting to the heart of the matter now, the thing I objected to way more than any of the rest of the stuff Victor had been treating Sam to during the past few weeks.

  “It's six hours to drive there and he still has his weekend job, so during the school year—which may I remind you is mostly when professional basketball is played—he can't even get to the arena to see the games,” I said.

  No reply from Victor. Encouraged, I went on. “There's not a thing he can even do with those tickets except sell them, so . . .”

  But then I stopped, alerted by something even sneakier than usual in Victor's expression.

  “Oh, no. Tell me you didn't.”

  Victor put his cup down, spread his hands placatingly. “I know it's extravagant. But you're right, the tickets are useless if he can't get to the games. And since I'm planning to use one of those tickets myself—”

  “You're chartering down,” I said flatly. “To Boston, out of Quoddy Airfield and back.”

  When I first moved to Eastport I thought our little island airport, with its wooden sign, bright orange wind sock, and metal quonset hangars, was charmingly quaint. Then I learned that it is (a) big enough for a Learjet and (b) so well maintained that it is regarded as a safe haven by pilots for hundreds of miles in all directions.

  Also, you can get on a plane there in the afternoon and be in Boston by evening.

  “Victor, that's outrageous. It's out of the question. What do you think he is, a movie star?”

  “Jacobia, it's not—”

  “No,” I said flatly. “It's just way too out of line for his financial circumstances. I mean, I know you've got the money to do it, but . . .”

  Before following me here to Maine in order to drive me crazy and incidentally also (he maintained) so that he could be nearer to Sam, Victor was the kind of brain surgeon you would go to when the other surgeons had all washed their hands of you because your neurological situation was so ghastly, it terrified even them.

  And Victor's take-no-prisoners brand of scalpel-wielding chutzpah—not to mention his win-loss record on the operating table, which wasn't half shabby, either—hadn't come cheap.

  So he could afford this stuff. But I couldn't, and neither could Sam. “Victor, I just don't want him thinking he can—”

  “What?” he demanded. “Have something that not everyone else can, once in a blue moon? Something special?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Or is it only a big problem for you when the something special happens to be supplied by me?” His tone had turned waspish.

  I opened my mouth to explain very specifically and in detail why he was wrong, which would have turned the conversation into a verbal slugfest. But I was saved from this by the arrival of my friend Ellie White.

  “Hey, everybody,” she called out cheerfully as she swept in lugging two brown paper bags in one arm while leading my two huge dogs on their leashes with her other hand.

  Although “leading” was a gentle term for what those dogs were like, clipped to the ends of leashes. “Are you ready for the big storm?” she asked, not even out of breath.

  Ellie was tall, redheaded, and so slender that she could wear green sweatpants, a big yellow sweatshirt, and a turquoise fleece top without impersonating something that has been inflated with a bicycle pump. Also, for today's three-mile midmorning dog-jog she wore white sneakers with thick pink socks puffing up over her pants cuffs.

  “Going to be a humdinger,” she added; Ellie liked what she called big weather.

  “Because,” Victor continued, glowering at me and ignoring her, “I notice that when Wade takes Sam hunting, they charter a seaplane right into the hunting camp up in the Allagash. But that's fine.”

  Wade Sorenson, my current husband, was a gun-repair expert, prizewinning target shooter—he'd taught me the basics and given me the Bisley .45 as a wedding gift—and devoted outdoorsman when he wasn't too busy being Eastport's harbor pilot, guiding huge freighters in and out of our deep-water port.

  “The Allagash is different,” I said. “It's nature, it's . . .”

  I waved my hands inadequately. In fact Wade had intended to go deer hunting today, at his camp on Balsam Lake with a few buddies. But instead he was on a tugboat headed out to a big vessel diverted here for repairs.

  “. . . character building,” I declared, and Victor grimaced.

  The freighter's diversion was bad news for Wade, but not for local truckers, since the repairs required offloading the cargo with cranes and land-hauling it elsewhere: good money for all the stevedores and drivers.

  “That's just great,” Victor fumed. “Whatever Wade does . . .”

  The dogs snuffled eagerly at his pants legs, causing him to pull his feet sharply up like a man whose toes are about to be nibbled by alligators. Prill the red Doberman turned away at this gesture of unwillingness to socialize, but Monday the old black Labrador went on nuzzling him; she figured he was just playing hard to get.

  “. . . outdoors with a gun,” he groused . . .

  Down in the cellar my father went on hacking away at another part of the massive old stone foundation, which he was replacing section by section. The rhythmic chunk! chunk! of
his mason's axe rang metallically as it ate its way through the antique mortar.

  “. . . is always just ducky,” Victor concluded in disgust, and made another attempt to shove Monday's head out of his lap.

  Ellie hauled the bags full of quinces she carried across the kitchen and deposited them on the counter where they promptly fell over. The quince bushes grew in her yard and we'd been waiting for them to ripen enough to pick.

  “You know, you just wouldn't believe what they put on kids' TV ads,” she announced, speaking over the sound of Victor's voice.

  We were used to speaking over the sound of his voice. “The sheer mind-bending audacity of them,” Ellie went on indignantly.

  Her own daughter, Leonora, was now nearly a year old. “I mean, it's almost as bad as all those dreadful political ads I've been seeing lately.”

  It was an election year and the candidates were busy trying to convince us they were saints, while their opponents had horns and forked tails. “Look, Victor,” Ellie said. “Quinces.”

  Victor eyed the round greenish fruits spilling out of the bags. “Oh,” he said, sounding pleased. “That means quince jam.”

  The thought of which was enough to sweeten even his prickly nature for the moment. Then he apparently heard the rest of what Ellie had said and switched into lecture mode; this was one of his favorite subjects.

  “Ellie, TV advertisers can't sell goodness, you know that. No one would buy. TV sells fun, toys, things that taste sweet and so on.”

  He took a breath, warming to his topic. “So the politicians, knowing people feel guilty about glutting themselves and their kids on what the TV ads sell, offer to let people off the hook in their own ads.”

  He waved an expressive hand. “That way you can buy, say, an expensive gas-guzzler or bucket of chicken wings, and just vote for a good energy policy, healthy food, or whatever.”

  Enjoying himself, he went on. “By which I mean, and I'm sorry to have to tell you this . . .”

  He wasn't. “. . . but it's worse than you think. They're all in it together.”

  I'd come to Maine after a career of managing money for Wall Street honchos so corrupt that the Devil probably sold his soul to them. Thus I shared Victor's opinion, but you can't go around saying it or people will start thinking you're nuts.

  Which we already knew Victor was; this time, though, his words resonated strongly with Ellie, fresh from watching her baby daughter's eyes widen at the sight of an ad for a toy makeup kit in a glittery pink plastic pouch.

  “Jake,” she said, angling her head at Victor, “sometimes I actually understand why you married this man.”

  He smiled self-importantly, missing the dig. “And when I pick Leonora up in a little while, I'm going to tell the day-care lady to keep her away from the TV from now on,” Ellie added.

  Leonora saw no television at home but went to the day-care place for four hours each morning without fail. If she didn't she got cranky, refusing to take her naps and howling inconsolably to communicate her craving for infant society.

  Pleased with her decision not to let the baby become a TV addict, Ellie shoved the quinces back into the bags, then set the bags upright again.

  “Have our tenants called yet?” She peeked into the cabinet under the sink to see if I had enough jelly jars, tops, and jar rings for about a dozen pints.

  “Twice,” I said, sighing while mentally counting the jars myself. Owing to Wade's habit of appropriating them for use in storing small gun-parts, we were probably a few short. “Once for an electrical problem, once for a leaky faucet,” I added.

  Victor pushed his chair back and got up, since if we weren't going to make the quince jam right that minute and he had already eaten the pie, he saw no reason to stick around.

  “I thought I'd wait for the third call,” I went on to Ellie when he had gone. The dogs returned from following him to the door. “It'll probably be coming any minute now and I thought I'd go out there after lunch and get all the chores done up at once.”

  Two months earlier Ellie and I had bought a small house on the waterfront in Quoddy Village, which was the nearest thing to a suburb that the tiny island city of Eastport had. We'd planned to fix the place up and rent it long-term or maybe even sell it.

  But while we were still working on it, a set of temporary tenants had descended, referred by a local real estate agency. And an actual income from the beat-up little bungalow had been the height of good luck.

  Or so we'd thought at the time. Income, it turned out, was only a small part of the overall landlady experience. “Better go soon,” Ellie said with a glance out the window.

  The day's early fog and mist had cleared to reveal a bright blue sky. “Storm tonight,” she repeated.

  Wade had said so, too, although I didn't believe it, nor did the weather report. So I paid no heed to Ellie's warning, sitting down instead with my own cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

  Ellie had already poured some for herself. “You know, it's not that I'm sorry the place is rented,” she began.

  Me either. We'd picked it up for pennies, mostly because it hadn't had any real maintenance in decades. The foundation under my house was as solid as the Rock of Ages when compared to the slurry of shifted earth, rotted sills, and gritty powder that we'd discovered under the Quoddy Village property.

  “And they seem like okay people, even if they are a little weird,” Ellie went on.

  “Weird,” I agreed, but the term did not cover the unusual nature of our tenants. It's not every day you rent a house to a coven of witches, five of them if you counted the teenaged girl who I guessed must probably still have training wheels on her broomstick. And especially with Halloween coming so soon, news of their unorthodox religious views was causing enough local comment to raise the dead.

  Or anyway I supposed you could call it a religion. They'd been here only a week and responding to their repair requests had kept me so busy, I hadn't had time to bone up on the subject.

  “Deke Meekins from down at the boatyard stopped me on my walk this morning,” Ellie went on. “He particularly wanted to know if they wear black pointy hats and sacrifice small animals at midnight.”

  “Oh, dear. Did you set him straight, I hope?”

  The part about the animals I knew for sure wasn't occurring, since even before I found out about the witch portion of the program, I'd put my foot down: no pets.

  “Yes,” Ellie replied, “but I'm not sure he believed me.”

  Gregory Brand, leader of the coven and the one who signed the rental agreement and wrote the deposit check, had looked at me as if I were the one with the funny hat on when I warned him against noisy, bad-smelling, or otherwise objectionable occult nonsense. But he'd made no comment, merely assuring me that his group fully intended to be clean, quiet, and responsible.

  “And yesterday at the IGA, Esther Deedy was complaining that her neighborhood has been invaded by black cats. Two or three dozen of them, and she was staring right at me when she said it,” Ellie continued.

  I happened to know that if Esther Deedy spotted a pair of grasshoppers in her backyard, she reported a plague of locusts.

  “Ellie,” I said helplessly, “their check cleared. We asked top dollar and they're paying. And other than repair calls, there hasn't been a peep out of them. No complaints from the neighbors about loud parties . . .”

  Which if they'd had any you could be sure someone would be calling the police to say it was a Black Mass. “And considering the shape it's in . . .”

  Wade and my father had gone underneath the house and set up a dozen pump jacks to level it enough so the drains would run. Until then, the result of toilet-flushing had been unfortunate.

  “. . . we're lucky to be renting it at all,” I finished. “And anyway they're only going to be here another week. We can handle the gossip until then. And the repairs,” I added resignedly.

  Ellie brightened a bit. In the beginning she'd been the one who was most gung-ho about renting the place.
But Ellie was born and had lived all her life in Eastport. She was more sensitive to local talk.

  “I guess,” she conceded. “Just because they call themselves witches doesn't mean they really are. Or that Greg Brand is, at any rate, because for one thing I don't think any real witches sell their powers, or whatever it is they have. Do you?”

  According to Brand, the little group was paying him for a seminar he was giving. “No idea,” I told Ellie. But it sounded right.

  “And in a way they're doing us a favor, too, by finding all the things that need fixing,” Ellie remarked.

  “Hmm,” I said, finishing my coffee. “Maybe.”

  Before they'd moved in we'd made certain that the house was both safe and sanitary, all nuts-and-bolts plumbing and wiring situations up to code. But the number of problems the tenants had discovered, at the rate of two or three a day for the past seven days, had begun to make me feel I was being nibbled to death by ducks.

  Just then my father came upstairs, covered in concrete dust. He was a tall, wiry old fellow with a graying ponytail tied back in a leather thong, wearing coveralls, a flannel work shirt, and battered boots.

  “Phew,” he sighed, crossing to the sink for a drink of water. “I don't know what somebody thought he was doing, building that northeast corner of the foundation over by the cold room.”

  The cold room, back in the early 1800s when my old house had been built, was where they stored meat: sides of beef and slaughtered half-pigs, whole deer and turkeys, bacon and hams, hung from big iron hooks fastened into the massive beams of the cellar ceiling.

  Great chunks of ice cut from lakes on the mainland a dozen miles distant had been packed into sawdust and brought here on barges and trundled into the cellar for refrigeration in summer; in the winter, the northeast corner of the house was plenty cold enough all by itself.

  “That one whole area's built like a brick sh—” my father began.

  But then he caught himself, washing his throat clean of concrete dust with a gulp of water. “It is,” he amended judiciously as he went back downstairs to hack at it some more, “a very strong corner.”