Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  Before being cleared of all charges against him, my father had for years been a federal fugitive suspected of, among other things, murdering my mother. So hour upon hour of demolishing a stone wall with a pickaxe was his idea of a peaceful morning, as long as he didn't have to wear a set of leg irons while doing it.

  Ellie looked out the kitchen window, where a couple of newly appeared clouds on the horizon made the otherwise blue sky seem even bluer. “Going to blow a gale,” she remarked.

  On second thought, even I decided the clouds looked ominous, long and white like the fingers on a skeletal hand. But their presence hardly marred the unusual perfection of the autumn day, warm and humid as if a last bit of August had been saved over for us until now, when we would really appreciate it.

  “Ellie, why do you keep on insisting? It's like summer out there.” I leaned down to pat the two dogs who had romped back in from the parlor when my father came upstairs, and were now searching for him with canine determination.

  “No storm is coming and I don't see why you and Wade keep on saying there is,” I said.

  Monday butted her squarish head into the side of my leg. It was noon, which was when the gray-faced canine began anticipating an evening meal. Seeing that I was taken, Prill sniffed around for other sources of treats, fixing at last on Ellie.

  “Okay,” Ellie said, patting the big red dog's smooth flank and smiling at me. “Have it your way, Jacobia. The weather's terrific.”

  Green-eyed and even-tempered, Ellie was as fine-featured and delicate-appearing as an antique cameo, with small pale freckles like a dusting of gold flecks scattered across her nose.

  She was also as tough as a steak carved from one of those old deer haunches in the cellar. “But,” she finished as she got up to depart, “if you do go to the rental house, bring your umbrella.”

  With that she headed out to pick the baby up at the day-care place. Minutes later the phone rang and just as I'd expected it was our tenants again, calling for yet more help in the fix-it department.

  Only this time the repair they wanted was a doozy.

  Rain slashed the windshield as I squinted past the flapping wipers into the gathering darkness, driving out of town toward the Quoddy Village place about four hours later.

  Ellie had been right; the weather was deteriorating into a squall. Someone's trash can, propelled by the wind, tumbled from a driveway and bounced wildly through the gloom, directly across the rain-slick road in front of me.

  I hit the brakes, feeling the tires make that awful weave-and-a-bobble slither that means they are losing traction. Then the can rolled away into the darkness and the tires caught again, my heart pounding as the truck straightened.

  “Haunted,” I'd repeated disbelievingly into the phone when the tenants called. “You want me to come out there and make the house sound less . . .”

  Yep, that was it: a low, mournful woo noise alternating with a high, overexcited yow-wow! It had started a little while ago and could I please do something about it, they'd wanted to know. Because it was driving them crazy.

  Biting my tongue, I'd refrained from replying that in the week since they arrived I'd learned all about being driven crazy and as far as I was concerned, a woo noise was small potatoes.

  Instead I said I'd be over shortly. But after hanging up the phone I'd taken a moment to stow the Bisley away in its lockbox in the cellar, then stepped out to inhale some sanity-restoring breaths of fresh air while gazing at my own house.

  It was a massive 180-year-old white clapboard Federal with three full floors plus an attic, forty-eight old double-hung windows flanked by dark green wooden shutters, and a rotten front porch. In fact, that porch was so decrepit I feared that on Halloween night some trick-or-treater might crash through it under the added weight of even a single Snickers bar.

  So over the past few days I'd been demolishing it board by board with a crowbar and sledgehammer, preparatory to building a new one. And after glancing again at the sky I decided that before I left I'd better put the tools indoors, just in case the weather did decide to throw me a curve.

  But then the truck with the lumber for the new porch pulled up; I had forgotten it was coming. The lumber had to be stacked so it wouldn't warp and then covered with a tarp, and that meant a trip to the hardware store. Also the tarp needed to be weighted down with bricks, and I knew I had some, so I scavenged dutifully around the yard for . . . well, you get the idea.

  Thus it wasn't until four in the afternoon that I'd left a brief note on the kitchen table, got Wade's pickup truck started and muscled it out of the driveway, and headed for the rental house.

  And now I wished I hadn't. Wet leaves plastered themselves to the windshield like dark flattened hands and were swept aside; headlights glared smearily yellow through the rain, then vanished behind me.

  As I reached the Long Cove Road turnoff, a tractor-trailer came barreling out of the rain, its massive tires spinning silvery gouts that blinded me for a long moment while the pickup shuddered in the bigger vehicle's backwash.

  But I made it through the turn and a few grateful moments later pulled up in front of the rental property. The tenants' white van was in the driveway, so I backed the truck onto the lawn and dashed for the front steps.

  From behind me as I knocked and then struggled as usual with the sticky door knob, one of many in the house that needed repair—screwdriver, chisel, new can of 3-In-One oil, I recited mentally—waves crashed wildly onto the shore of what was ordinarily a quiet cove just across the road.

  Suddenly the door jerked inward, yanking me along with it.

  “Goodness!” exclaimed Marge Cathcart. She backed away hastily as I stumbled inside.

  It was the kind of remark Marge tended to make. At fifty or so, she was plump, plain, and motherly-appearing, with washed-out blue eyes, soft blurry features, and a habit of wearing a cotton housedress with a droopy cardigan and fuzzy blue slippers.

  In reply I made the kind of remarks I tended to make, none of them having to do with goodness. Marge supposedly had some old family connections in Eastport, and this ordinarily would've made me more careful about how I spoke in front of her; after all, who knew who her cousins might turn out to be?

  But at the moment I was soaking wet, worried about the drive home, and thoroughly annoyed, mostly at myself for coming out here at all in the middle of what was turning out to be a major weather event.

  And as if all that weren't bad enough, while I was standing there scandalizing Marge with the number of naughty words I knew, a huge crash sounded somewhere nearby and the lights went out.

  “Oh, dear,” Marge said into the darkness.

  Yeah, no kidding. Eastport has its own local generator for emergencies, but that crash had sounded irresistibly like a tree going over, probably taking down a power line along with it. Then while I stood there cursing and dripping, a pale greenish glow began brightening eerily in the living room, to the right of the entrance.

  As the hairs on my neck rose it occurred to me that I was (a) alone, (b) at the height of a raging storm, and (c) in a house occupied by a bunch of self-proclaimed witches, with no way to call for help because (d) by now the phones were almost certainly out, too.

  Then more greenish lights blazed up, revealing themselves to be the small propane lanterns Ellie and I had left here in case of emergency.

  Too bad they were all being operated by the other witches. On the other hand, at least I could see them as opposed to their flitting around me invisibly. . . .

  Oh, get a grip, I scolded myself, brandishing my toolbox. “So what actually is the problem here?” I demanded.

  And then I heard it.

  “Ow-owwow-ow-oooohhh!” came the sound.

  Ye gods.

  “Ow-wooooooh-wow-wow!” Holding his lamp at chest level so it lit his face from below, which I heartily recommend as a strategy for illuminating every single one of your nose hairs, a man stepped forward. It was Greg Brand, the leader of the group.

>   “Sorry to bring you out in such bad weather,” he said.

  “No problem,” I replied curtly. Dressed all in black—shirt and tie, slacks, black leather belt and wing-tips—Greg was tall, fortyish, and dark-haired with deep-set eyes and sharp features. His thin mouth tightened, probably registering my annoyance, but I wasn't about to make nice with him—or anyone—at that moment.

  “I'll just go find whatever's causing the noise and fix it,” I added, unwilling to trust myself to say more.

  Because the sound was ungodly, that was for sure, but it was also flat-out obvious what was making it: wind leaking in through some small crevice in a door or a window frame.

  Behind Greg Brand the other tenants gathered around the glass-doored woodstove which none of them had managed to light even though there was kindling and a big basket of firewood ready to hand.

  “How long do you think it'll take?” inquired Hetty Bonham in a snippy I-want-it-now tone that I felt was entirely uncalled for.

  Like Greg Brand, Hetty was forty or so, dressed too young for her age in white pedal pushers and a tight, low-cut pink sweater that put her considerable cleavage on display. She brushed back her long blonde hair impatiently. “Because it's quite annoying, you know,” she added.

  “It'll take as long as it takes,” I replied, counting to ten in my head. Along with rings, bracelets, and huge hoop earrings, Hetty wore an eye-catching silver pentacle pendant on a silver chain positioned on her chest like a flashing road sign: This way to my two best features!

  “Anyone want to come and help me?” I asked. I didn't expect an answer. The tenants had already proven they weren't big on do-it-yourself projects.

  But to my surprise, the woman standing next to Hetty Bonham spoke up. “I will,” Jenna Durrell said agreeably.

  A slender brunette in her mid-thirties, she wore slim blue jeans and a crimson turtleneck with a pale blue sweatshirt. “It's coming from somewhere in the back of the house,” she added.

  According to the real estate agent who had referred this group to Ellie and me, Jenna was an ex-cop. But as she stepped forward I noticed the collection of items spread out on the coffee table behind her. The array included a deck of Tarot cards, incense cones, and what appeared to be a real, no-kidding crystal ball mounted on a black base.

  You'd think somebody accustomed to dealing with physical evidence would make the connection between the blowing wind and an eerie howling sound. On the other hand, the coffee-table items reminded me again that Jenna was here as a member of a witches' group. Maybe logic wasn't her strong point.

  I was about to turn away when I noticed Marge Cathcart's daughter Wanda peeping shyly from behind the others. She looked to be about fifteen, wearing baggy khaki cargo pants and a gray sweatshirt with a pocket on the right sleeve. Her long dark hair was pulled messily back with green plastic barrettes, and she stared at me with a frightened expression in her eyes.

  “Wanda doesn't speak,” Marge cautioned before I could try to say anything to the girl. “Not at all.”

  I'd known this; the real estate agent had told me. And to me it was just another strange fact about a strange group. But then I spotted something moving inside the gently curved fingers of Wanda's hand. Something alive, small and furry, like . . . a mouse?

  No. It was a bat. A small, brown, wickedly bright-eyed little bat with its wings folded up tight, so it resembled at first an ordinary household rodent.

  “Um, Wanda?”

  Bats carried rabies. “Honey, aren't you worried that bat's going to get startled or something, and bite you?”

  Wanda's face lit up. Silly woman, her look said, but not in an unpleasant way. It won't hurt me. Tenderly she tucked the tiny creature into the pocket on her sleeve, from which refuge its eyes went on staring unblinkingly, shiny black and expressionless.

  I broke from its gaze at last, unsure why the girl and her unusual pet had captured me so thoroughly. “Come on, Jenna. I can't fix electrical things until the power goes back on, and the pump's on the power, so I guess that means I can't do much with the leaky faucet either.”

  Ellie and I had left flashlights here, and once Jenna had produced them we went together toward the back of the house, where the howling seemed loudest.

  “But I'll get rid of the noise, if I can,” I said. Probably the broken window or whatever it was just needed a rag stuffed in it to stop the sound.

  “Ow-wow-wow!” Howling when the wind blew and fading when it subsided, the noise seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. But at last we followed the flashlight beams out to the small attached utility shed, where we hit pay dirt. The volume jumped as soon as I opened the door.

  Jenna waved her flash around. Its beam reflected off the windows and picked out the shapes of a lot of useless, unrelated junk. The area had become a catchall for the things Ellie and I had found too heavy to remove by ourselves, or that we couldn't find other places for: an old wringer-style washing machine; big rusty pieces of weight-lifting equipment; an ancient, massive automobile engine nailed into a wooden crate.

  The air was sharp with the smell of old potting soil spilled on the brick floor, mingled with the faint sweet scent of motor oil. In a corner lay a heap of ice-fishing equipment including an ice strainer and an auger, which was the tool you used to drill down through the ice to where the fish were.

  If you liked going ice fishing at all; I'd been meaning to take that bit of gear home for Wade, who actually did. But now as the autumn storm hurled itself darkly against the windows, I figured I had time; with luck, it wouldn't be ice-fishing season for another few weeks.

  “There,” uttered Jenna, aiming her flashlight at the base of the wall where a puddle reflected the beam.

  Drat, it meant water was coming in somewhere above. But that was odd. Ellie and I had worked in the house through a couple of August storms, removing what old stuff we could. And although the shed was ramshackle we hadn't discovered any sizable leaks then.

  Maybe one of the tenants had shifted some of the junk out here, I thought as I stepped carefully between the washer and the auto engine. The window frames were warped, and if you bumped one of them its sash might move enough to . . .

  I reached down, touching the wet spot, then yanked my hand back with a visceral little shudder. Uh-oh.

  “What?” Jenna asked. “You okay?”

  “I'm fine. Go back with the others, all right?”

  But something in my tone alerted her; at once she was right beside me.

  “What is it? You don't sound so good . . . Oh.”

  Because the puddle wasn't water. It was blood, its surface sticky and darkly gelatinous.

  Ow-ooh! the wind howled unhappily.

  Also there was a pair of leather boots lying near the puddle, and unless I was mistaken the boots were being worn by someone.

  A dead someone.

  Chapter

  3

  My name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first came to Maine I thought “old paint” was a nickname for somebody's favorite horse. But then I bought a massive old rambling fixer-upper of a house with a lot of old rooms, a lot of old woodwork, and a lot of old windows, each equipped with a pair of emphatically antique wooden shutters.

  In other words, a lot of old paint. Which was why soon after I moved into the house I came to realize that I might have preferred horses. At least when you clean up after animals, you don't risk poisoning yourself to death.

  Not that paint-stripper fumes are the only dangerous part of old-dwelling repair. Death by falling (from a ladder, off a roof, or most annoyingly through a collapsing floor) ranks high on the hazard list, too, right up there with electrocution (bad wiring), blunt trauma (those floors again), and the sort of silly mishap in which you mistake your own arm for a two-by-four, then shorten it swiftly and, alas, irrevocably with a power saw.

  But your biggest risk of all will be in getting out of bed in the morning, since that's when you'll choose between (a) facing yet another endless day of home repai
r, or (b) climbing the damned ladder and hanging yourself from one of the rafters just to get it over with.

  That last option was one I'd already rejected when I bought my old house, however. If I'd wanted to die I could have stayed in Manhattan, where the way things were going I had six months, tops, before I took a header off the roof of my building.

  Because look: I had a crazy ex-husband who hated me because I'd gotten the divorce, a drug-abusing son who hated me because it took me so long to go after the divorce, and a long roster of clients who'd made pretty much all the money in the world by the simple method of following my financial advice.

  For which they paid fifteen percent. And fifteen percent of all the money in the world is a lot, but there was nothing that I wanted to buy with it. Sure, I had clothes, jewelry, furniture, and an address so swanky that you practically needed to have your retinas scanned to get past the guards in the lobby.

  But I didn't care. All I wanted was to go into Sam's room each morning—I'd given up trying to stay awake until the wee hours when he usually came home, and anyway if I was still up he would only swear at me or threaten me—and not find him dead.

  Victor, meanwhile, contributed the helpful information that our son's problems were all my fault, a mantra he recited at me by phone or e-mail when he wasn't busy boffing the latest in a line of pretty nurses, and sometimes I suspected even when he was.

  So one way and another that rooftop had begun looking fairly attractive. But then I visited Eastport, a tiny village on the downeast Maine coast, and noticed that many of its houses were in even worse shape than I was, a comparison I found heartening.

  One in particular caught my eye: vast, paint-peeling, and neglected, with shimmeringly empty rooms, three tall red chimneys whose bricks were in the process of toppling onto the lawn, roof leaks galore, and plenty of windows, several of which still even had intact panes of glass in them.

  Two weeks later I'd sold my apartment; by that time I already owned an almost-two-hundred-year-old house in Eastport plus a cheap pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a claw hammer with which I immediately removed my left thumbnail while trying to hang a picture.