Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  I remember the moment clearly. Sam lay on the floor, rigid with the misery of not having been able to find any drugs in this new town. At his insistence I was ignoring him while also keeping the phone number of the local ambulance service close to hand, since if he went into clinical withdrawal I might have to rush him to the hospital.

  “I hate you,” he said as I fumbled with a hammer, a nail, and a pencil with which I was trying to make an X-marks-the-spot. The task was made particularly difficult by the fact that every time I touched the old plaster wall, more of it crumbled and fell to the hardwood floor.

  “You agreed to try Eastport,” I reminded him.

  “Uhh,” he replied.

  I held the nail to the X mark and tapped it tentatively with the hammer. The hammer knocked the nail sideways, bounced off the plaster, and clattered to the floor, barking me on the shin as it went by.

  “Ouch!” Next the hammer landed hard on my sneakered foot while the nail first nicked my finger, then fell inside the wall through the hole the hammer had opened.

  Whereupon as blood welled redly up from my finger I decided to tiptoe from the room, believing that if I went into hysterics in front of Sam it might be too much for him.

  Although by then I was feeling a little ragged myself. After our aforementioned swanky digs in Manhattan, equipped with a staff of concierges who would pick up your dry cleaning and overpriced Thai take-out right along with your theater tickets, this wasn't what either one of us was used to:

  Primitive bathing arrangements, windows that rattled like castanets in the slightest breeze, and a silence at night as endless-seeming as the dark sky stretching over our heads, full of unfamiliar stars.

  When I got back from the kitchen with a bandage for my finger, Sam had turned onto his stomach again with his face pushed into the crook of his arm so I couldn't see it.

  “Hey,” I said, but he didn't answer.

  I'd have nudged him with my foot but I felt too sorry for him. He was only here with me because I'd threatened to send him to a teenaged boot camp if he didn't agree to come—

  “Threaten” was a nice way of describing the coercion I had applied, complete with four-color brochures depicting hard labor, spartan meals, dormitory living, and a Cyclone fence topped with razor wire and electronic monitors.

  —and because his father wouldn't take him, another thing I felt bad about. But there wasn't anything useful I could think of to do for him, so after a moment I returned to the hammer, the nail, and the disintegrating plaster.

  Outside it was dusk, lights coming on in the big old houses around us and mist creeping softly uphill from the bay, smelling of sea salt. A car went by on the street. A dog barked, and a foghorn sounded.

  A door slammed, cutting off the sound of a radio playing the country hits. Then silence, as night fell and people went inside; people who laughed and gossiped together in the grocery store and at the gas station, places where I still drew studied politeness to my face and curious stares behind my back.

  Reaching up to reposition the new nail on the X mark, I had never felt so alone in my life.

  But one thing at a time, I instructed myself: nail, X mark, hammer. The problem, I realized as Sam tossed and turned on the bare wooden floor behind me, was that I had not hit the nail hard enough.

  Not by a long shot. So this time I steadied the nail with my left hand, then reared back with the hammer and gave that nail a no-holds-barred smack, missing the nail entirely and bringing the hammer head down full force onto my left thumbnail.

  What I said then really doesn't bear repeating.

  Sam turned over. “Mom?”

  I dropped the hammer, careless of whether or not it hit my foot. The pain in my thumb was blinding, exploding into my hand and paralyzing my whole left arm.

  Tears sprang to my eyes but I bit them back; the pain would subside.

  It would, damn it. It would.

  “Mom, are you okay?” Sam sounded frightened. He was used to me cursing, a bad habit I'd acquired in the financial district in Manhattan.

  But not like this. He sat up.

  “I'm okay,” I managed to whisper through gritted teeth.

  The hammer had indeed slammed down onto my foot again, then bounced off and hit the other one, but that was nothing compared to the booming anguish still coursing up from my thumbnail, which was already turning purple.

  Then, as the pain faded gradually from excruciating to only agonizing, I caught my breath. It was going to be all right; I'd made the right decision. We weren't really alone among strangers, miles from anywhere and without anyone to help us.

  It just felt that way. Sniffing, I managed a smile for Sam's sake. “See?” I held out my thumb. “It's only . . .”

  And then it happened: that foghorn again. Low, mournful, and even more sorrowful at night and from a distance, as if all the peril and uncertainty of the ocean were somehow distilled in it.

  And the loneliness; oh, that most of all. I felt my lower lip quivering, warm salty tears brimming and running down my face uncontrollably.

  “Oh, Sam,” I said, sitting down on the floor beside him. I just sat there and bawled my head off. After a moment Sam leaned over and wrapped his arms around me, sobbing too, neither one of us really knowing exactly what we were crying about.

  Pretty soon we'd cried so hard, we had to get up and go back out to the kitchen and find some tissues, we were both so snotty and messy. And it was while we were standing there sniffling and blowing our noses that a huge piece of the kitchen ceiling let go without warning, crashing down onto the kitchen table and missing Sam by an inch.

  After a moment of shocked silence and seeing that he was apparently not meant to die, or at any rate not that evening, Sam began laughing. And once he got started I did, too, hysterically, weeping with hilarity, staggering with mirth.

  “Nearly . . . killed me!” Sam guffawed, small grayish-white bits of plaster littering his hair and shoulders.

  “Only . . . not quite!” I agreed, gasping and wiping my eyes.

  Later, when we had both calmed down again: “Listen, what do you say we go out for an ice cream?” I asked.

  We hadn't had any dinner. “Yeah, okay,” Sam said, shrugging. “Why not? I mean, seeing as we're both not,” he exaggerated the final word theatrically, “dead.”

  Now, I won't pretend that the events of that evening cured matters between Sam and me, or anyway they didn't completely. But we did go out, and it was good ice cream, too, made even better by the knowledge that we were—by some grace neither one of us yet wanted to explore too carefully—still walking around able to eat it.

  And that's how I've approached life in Eastport ever since, even while enmeshed in situations much less pleasant than confronting a kitchen ceiling that's decided to find out whether or not it can commit murder.

  Such as for instance coming upon the body of someone who's really been murdered.

  Recently.

  “Do you know him?”

  I jumped about a foot. In my shock over finding the dead guy in the shed at the tenants' place, I'd forgotten Jenna Durrell was even there.

  “No. You?” I moved my flashlight a little so she could see him better.

  She shook her head, her dark hair moving softly against the strong lines of her face. “How'd he get in here?”

  “No idea,” I said. “But when he fell he must've jostled one of those old windows out of its frame.”

  I moved the flashlight again. “See that gap? It's where the wind is coming in, and . . .”

  Stepping past me, Jenna seized the corpse by its shoulders, shifting it away from the wall. As she did so she brushed against the knocked-askew window, which fell back into place with a thud.

  The howling stopped. “Oh,” I said doubtfully. “Jenna, are you really sure you should . . . ?”

  Move the body, I'd been about to say. But the absence of the awful noise was such a relief, I didn't bother finishing.

  “I guess we'd better c
all the police,” I said instead.

  Jenna laughed without humor. “Good luck. Phone's out. Guess the storm must have knocked a line down.”

  As I'd feared. “Cell phone?” I suggested.

  “Already tried. When the weather started getting wild I was going to call, tell you not to come. But all I'm getting is a ‘no signal' icon.”

  Have I mentioned that Eastport is three hours from Bangor and light-years, or so it often seems, from everywhere else? Cell-phone coverage around here could be spotty at the best of times.

  “Maybe it'll clear up later,” I said, but not with a lot of hope. Then I looked down at the body again. The blood from his head wound was like a mask over his lumpy features, disgruntled even in death, and the clothes could've been anyone's: old jeans, gray long-sleeved undershirt, and over that a flannel shirt so faded it was impossible to tell what color it had been.

  But there was something about those lips, so thick and blubbery looking . . . then I had it. “I do know this guy,” I said.

  “Yeah, great,” Jenna said carelessly. “I'm going back in the house.”

  “But . . . hey, wait. What're we going to do now?” I thought that as an ex-cop she might at least have a clue about a standard operating procedure for a corpse plus no phone.

  And she did, but it wasn't one I liked. “Watch our backs, for one thing,” she replied. “Unless you'd like to try driving in this. I wouldn't.”

  She waved at the windows, still deluged by rain. Outside them raged a storm so nasty that all the animals on the island were probably lining up two by two, waiting for the ark.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Why should we have to be worried?”

  But she didn't answer, instead returning to inspect the body again. “Who is he, anyway?”

  “Eugene Dibble. Kind of a jerk,” I told her, though there was more to him than that. Among other things, he'd been a bully and a self-styled preacher of fire and brimstone.

  These latter materials always being aimed at others, of course. But there was no sense speaking ill of the dead in front of Jenna, who hadn't even known him. “Sad story,” I added.

  No real church would go near him but he had a small, ragged following of hard-luck cases. The point of his sermons—often delivered on street corners with firepower provided by beer—usually being that all their troubles were the fault of someone else.

  “Poor dope,” I said, remembering how angry Eugene's hate-spewing mouth had made me. But it was his hands that interested me now, and the area around them.

  Because speaking of things being somebody else's fault . . . “Help me a minute, here, will you?” I bent over the body again.

  My first thought had been that he'd come in here thinking the house was unoccupied, and shot himself. From what I'd heard he'd had plenty of reasons: chronic pain from an old work injury, no money, and a wife who treated him like something she'd like to have scraped off her shoe, for starters.

  But if he'd done that, there should have been a gun. And as Jenna had seen—and already understood, I now realized—there wasn't one.

  “It's not going to be here,” she said as we lifted Eugene's shoulders.

  My earlier qualms about disturbing a fresh crime scene had vanished; hey, we'd already moved him once. And at the moment I was a lot less worried about the cops being mad at me than I was about how Eugene's body had gotten into the shed in the first place.

  Specifically I wanted to be reassured that Eugene really had put it there himself. Versus for instance someone else having done it, as Jenna had implied; someone who might still be around.

  After all, if Eugene had found his way in here, anyone could do the same . . .

  “People who shoot themselves don't fall on the weapon very often. For one thing they usually sit down first,” Jenna remarked as we hauled on him.

  Criminy, he was heavy. But we got him rolled over and as she predicted no gun was underneath him. I aimed the flash all around just to be sure.

  “Nope. No sign of it.”

  So: someone else. I said the next thing that came into my head. “Where was everyone before I got here? Earlier today, I mean.”

  She thought about it. “Well, we were all here first thing in the morning, of course. The others were going out before lunch, I think. But I left before they did, for a bike ride when it first started to look as if the sun might come out.”

  She paused thoughtfully. “Then I came back here, had my own lunch, and took the boat out. I was on the water, saw the clouds come up again, and got in just as things were getting rough.”

  My boat, she meant. When Ellie and I bought the house, Sam bought a wooden dory last year's boat school students had built and brought it out here for me as a surprise. I kept it across the road, pulled up on the beach in the cove.

  “You tied it up after you used it?” If not, by now the dory would be halfway to Greenland.

  “Oh, sure. Everyone else was back when I got in. Hetty was complaining about the noise,” she added wryly. “I think Marge had already called you, in fact.”

  It sounded right, timing-wise. “Anybody come out here? Of the other tenants, that is, after you got in from the water and before I arrived?”

  She shook her head. “Don't think so. I didn't, I know that much. But I wasn't really paying attention to what everyone was doing.”

  Sure, why should she? I had the sense Jenna didn't find the other tenants in the house particularly congenial, and I wondered again why she'd come here with them.

  But now wasn't the time to get into it. Eugene's eyes gazed sightlessly up at the shed's low ceiling, rain still beating hollowly on it.

  “Come on,” I told Jenna. “We'd better tell the others what we've found.”

  “I guess.” Then, “Listen—you don't think one of us did it, do you? Because when I said watch our backs, I didn't mean . . .”

  “I can't imagine why any of you would,” I replied as we went back into the darkened house.

  “Plenty of locals probably wouldn't have minded putting his lights out,” I added, shining the flash ahead so we could find our way through the kitchen. “Overall, he was what my son calls a crude dude. But I doubt anyone in your group ever met him.”

  And at that stage I hardly cared if anyone had. I just wanted two things, the first being to get back home as soon as possible.

  In the living room the others had finally gotten a fire going in the stove and were gathered around it as if attempting to soak up its feeble cheer.

  “You tell them,” I said to Jenna. “I'm going out to try the phone in the truck, just in case.”

  Because the other thing I wanted was the cops notified, and as swiftly and efficiently as possible, too, since it seemed now that an evil deed might have been committed and not just a sad or foolish one.

  Pushing my way out the front door I met a battering ram of rain and wind-driven debris, sticks and leaves whipping into my face and getting tangled in my clothing and hair.

  Gasping, I hauled the pickup's door open, barely catching it before it could fly back in the wind and spring the hinges, then scrambled up onto the seat. I sat there catching my breath while turning the headlights on.

  As I'd feared, the dark hulking shape of a fallen tree lay a few hundred feet away, downed power lines gleaming in the truck's high beams. But the tree didn't seem to be blocking the road.

  Hallelujah, I thought, shutting the lights off; no sense wasting the battery. Sudden darkness closed in, broken by distant gleams from the eighteen-wheelers moving over the causeway on the far side of the cove, headed for the freighter in port.

  Next I tried the phone wired into the dash. No signal, the blinking icon reported. But I'd expected that, too, and I could just call the police from home; Jenna's doubts notwithstanding, I'd been out in far worse, and the phones might be working there. Driving back would be a hellish chore, I thought resignedly, but not an impossible one.

  But then over on the causeway a row of orange running lights
came around ninety degrees from behind one of the moving truck cabs, dimly visible in the others' headlamps. From where I sat it appeared that the truck's lights were swerving in slow motion.

  To the driver, though, what happened next must've felt nearly instantaneous. The cab itself moved oddly, its headlights shining upward, creating bright nearly-vertical bars in the night sky. . . .

  The cab lights vanished. I felt my fingernails biting into my palms as I imagined the trailer slammed by a wind gust on the rain-slick road, pulling the cab out of control until it and the trailer toppled over together.

  Blocking the one road to town . . . oh, fiddlesticks, I thought, still hoping against hope.

  But already more headlights were lining up on the causeway, nothing moving in either direction. So even if the cell phone had been working it was useless to me now.

  No one could get here past the crippled rig. Worse, until it was cleared, I couldn't get home. Instead, I was stuck with a dead guy, five witches, and—

  I checked around the dark interior of the truck. A hunting jacket of Wade's, a pair of his old boots, two sticks of Black Jack chewing gum, and a paperback price guide to American rifles, its pages dog-eared to mark the most important and/or valuable of the weapons.

  But—drat, no magic wand.

  Inside, the tenants had found the utility candles Ellie and I had left in one of the kitchen drawers, and lit them in the kitchen and living room. All the flickering flames made the place seem ready for an impromptu funeral, which considering the body out in the shed I supposed was appropriate.

  But Greg Brand's reaction to my return from the great outdoors wasn't. “What's the idea?” he demanded. “What's going on, and what if anything are you doing to take care of this situation?”

  It was the “if anything” part that got me. I was soaked to the skin, not to mention a little shaky from discovering the late Eugene Dibble, and Brand's attitude wasn't improving my state of mind.