Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  “Mr. Brand, I have no idea what ‘this situation' even is,” I retorted. “All I know is, there's a dead guy in the house. Somebody shot him and I gather that you all are the only other ones who've been in the place recently.”

  Their eyes widened at the implication; only Wanda seemed unmoved, silently tending the fire with her back turned.

  “Oh, now wait just a damned minute,” Brand replied. “None of us is even from around here, we wouldn't have any possible motive to—”

  “That shed door doesn't lock right,” Hetty Bonham pointed out with a toss of her blonde mane. “You should've repaired it before you rented this place. Anyone could have gotten in,” she added accusingly.

  True; the door from the shed to the outside was so crooked in its frame that it was a struggle to get it to latch, though once you did, you couldn't get it to open again. Besides, as I'd told Jenna, Eugene Dibble was such a scuzz that he might as well have lived on another planet from any of these people.

  And finally, with the exception of Jenna herself—although considering the company she kept I was having my doubts about her, too—my tenants had pretty well proven they lacked the ability to change a lightbulb, much less kill a guy.

  “Okay,” I conceded grudgingly. “A lot of things could have happened. And you're right, it probably has nothing to do with any of you, so there's no need to get upset.”

  I pulled my wet jacket off. “The police will be able to get it all figured out. But,” I added cautioningly, “not tonight.”

  I explained about the truck on the causeway. “So we'll just have to wait until the authorities can clear the road,” I finished.

  “You mean,” Hetty asked, “the body has to stay here? With us?” She touched her long scarlet-tipped fingers to her crimson lips in a theatrical gesture.

  Greg narrowed his eyes at her. “He's not going to get up and pester anyone, Hetty. Your virtue is safe.”

  Her answering tone was bitter. “Yeah, Greg, with you around, everyone's is.”

  Jenna rolled her eyes; from her expression I gathered this kind of bickering went on between Hetty and Greg pretty much nonstop.

  Then she went to kneel by Wanda, putting a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder. But Wanda shrank from the gesture.

  “Oops, sorry,” Jenna said. “I forgot you don't like being touched by people.”

  Great, a neurotic teenager; just what we needed to give this witch's brew of an evening another stir. Meanwhile Hetty Bonham and Greg Brand were already healing their quarrel at the drinks cabinet.

  Watching them, it struck me suddenly that their interaction wasn't at all what I'd have expected from a teacher and a newly recruited student. Their arguing, for one thing; it sounded too personal. Then there was the way she seemed to know without asking what to put in his glass, and the easy gesture she used to hand it to him. . . .

  “Not that I expect it will be, but is the name Eugene Dibble familiar to anyone here?” I addressed the group.

  Because if Hetty and Greg did know each other, maybe I had other things wrong about them, too. Maybe one of them had known Eugene.

  Stranger things had happened. Like for instance his corpse out in that shed.

  “Not to me,” Jenna said; Marge nodded agreement, and though Wanda said nothing her blank face was answer enough.

  But at my question Brand's highball glass tilted abruptly, spilling some of its contents.

  “Jesus, Greg,” Hetty protested, brushing angrily at herself. “You clumsy—”

  “Shut up, Hetty,” he replied, crouching to retrieve fallen ice cubes.

  Only not so fast that I didn't get a chance to see the color draining out of his complexion. Even by candlelight the change was striking, and when he stood again the ice chattered in his glass.

  Oho, I thought as he gulped down the contents; the plot thickens. Because not much was clear about this horrible night, but one thing was. Greg Brand had heard Dibble's name before.

  “Will your family at home be awfully worried about you?” Marge Cathcart asked kindly a couple of hours later.

  The power was still out but she had put together a dinner of packaged things and canned goods heated on top of the woodstove, and Jenna had lent me some dry clothes.

  “I hope not,” I told her. “I left a note and my husband will know about the jackknifed truck. He'll figure out where I am pretty quickly, I think.”

  In fact Wade was probably out there now helping to clear the mess. But it could take hours for a big enough wrecker to arrive and make the road passable.

  “All right, then,” Marge said. “You try to sleep.” Carrying a flashlight, she went away, closing the door and leaving me in the makeshift bed she and Jenna had helped me make on the floor of the upstairs spare room.

  Outside, the wind went on howling. Rain thrummed on the roof slanting a few feet from my head. A wave of homesickness swept over me as the rest of the house grew silent, the others gone to bed, too.

  But even as tired as I was, no way would I be able to sleep. Instead I lay there in the dark, eyes open and ears alert for the slightest sound.

  Tap, tap. I sat up suddenly. The sound came from the window.

  Rain dripping from the eaves, probably. I lay down again. Just a few more hours, I told myself. By morning the storm would surely pass and the wreckage of the truck would be hauled away.

  Tap, tap. I pulled the blankets over my head, then checked my watch once more. In the dark, the radium-green numbers said it was 12:31 A.M.

  Scuff-scuff.

  I popped out of the blankets. Something crept quietly just outside the door to the spare room. But before I could react . . .

  Tap! Another sound came at the window. A purposeful sound. But I was upstairs and so was that window, and I happened to know there were no ladders at the Quoddy Village house. So how . . . ?

  Grimly I scrambled across the room and shoved the window open, stuck my head out, and squinted into the streaming night.

  “Wade!” His rain-slick face grinned up from the darkness at me. “What're you doing here? And how'd you get here?”

  Not that I cared. I'd have ridden a flying carpet home by then if that's what it took.

  “Come on down,” he whispered back. “No sense waking the rest of them.” He dropped the handful of small stones he'd been tossing one by one at the window.

  “Got the ATV, you can ride behind me. Come on, Jake.”

  Moments later I'd flown down the stairs and out the door, barely pausing long enough to pull my shoes on, and was seated on Wade's oversize-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, affectionately known around our house as The Beast.

  “Hey,” he said, “don't I get a hello kiss?”

  Oh, did he ever. “How'd you know I was up there?”

  He shrugged. “Process of elimination. I knew which rooms the tenants had, didn't think you'd be bunking in with any of them.”

  Just the thought made me grimace. “That's for sure. But didn't they need you for . . . ?”

  “The wreck?” He shrugged. “Yeah, probably they did. But I did my share, and after a while I had a feeling maybe you needed me worse.”

  And that in a nutshell was Wade. “Thank you,” I said.

  Wade smiled back at me, a tall, broad-shouldered, craggy-faced knight in rain-soaked armor, riding a squat, four-wheeled steed that belonged in a heavy-artillery battle.

  Then he fired up The Beast with a roar loud enough to wake everyone in the Quoddy Village house, including possibly Eugene Dibble.

  “Hang on,” he yelled, his voice snatched away by the wind as we turned into it.

  The trip home was a wet, noisy, bruising assault on every muscle and bone in my body, The Beast howling as it powered through flooded gullies, swerved around huge uprooted trees, and muscled its way up steep embankments, only its small yellow headlamps glaring ahead of us until we'd bypassed the causeway.

  So it wasn't until the lights of town spread welcomingly before us that I thought again of the sound I'd he
ard coming from just outside the spare room, back at the tenants' house.

  The deliberate sound, soft but unmistakable, of footsteps oh-so-stealthily approaching my closed but unlocked door.

  Chapter

  4

  Ellie and I had a sort of game we played back and forth sometimes, called 1823. In it we took turns coming up with facts related to the year in which my old house was built.

  For example, “In 1823,” Ellie said early the next morning after the fiasco out at the rental property, “Edgar Allan Poe was fourteen years old.”

  We were on my front lawn contemplating the porch wreckage; I'd already brought her up-to-date on all that had gone on at the tenants' place.

  “Nice,” I said of her game contribution. We'd used up the easy ones: the Monroe Doctrine, the invention of Santa Claus, and the patenting of roller skates, for instance.

  So we'd gotten a little loose on the rules for what made an acceptable entry; later I would learn that 1823 was the death-year of Edward Jenner, developer of the smallpox vaccine.

  But I didn't know it yet. So when Ellie made a challenging little “your turn” gesture at me, I was about to offer the start of construction on the British Museum in London.

  Just then, though, Eastport police chief Bob Arnold's squad car pulled up to the curb across the street.

  I'd talked to him already, too, and I wasn't particularly eager to do it again; the whole episode was like a nightmare I just wanted to shake free of as soon as possible.

  But now here he was. “Morning, ladies,” he said, getting out of the car.

  A stout, round-faced fellow with a ruddy complexion, pale thinning hair, and small rosebud lips that didn't look as if they belonged on a police officer, Bob wore a gray cop-uniform shirt, blue serge slacks, and black utility shoes.

  His belt was loaded with many items of professional policing gear: sidearm, baton, radio, pair of handcuffs, and so on. “Got yourself quite a project,” he added to me with a glance at the front steps.

  Which was an understatement. Then he said what he'd come to say and I just stood there wondering if I'd heard him right.

  “Oh, you've got to be kidding,” Ellie said finally, but Bob just shook his head.

  The storm had blown through with the speed of a freight train, leaving behind a washed-clean morning sky bright with sunshine and crisp with the threat of early snow.

  “You're saying Wanda Cathcart is missing?” Ellie demanded.

  “Ayuh,” Bob allowed unhappily. “'Fraid so.”

  The trees in the yard were stripped, their branches turned skeletal overnight and the lawn beneath them an autumn patchwork of orange and red. For a moment I thought about raking up a pile of the leaves, then just burrowing under it and staying there.

  Instead I dragged my attention unwillingly back to Bob, who pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and spoke around it.

  “Girl's mother called in a panic about an hour ago, said the kid's gone,” he said.

  I put down my sledgehammer. Around me lay more wreckage of the old porch, broken planks and rusty remnants of the cast-iron railings. A few yards distant, out of the way of possible flying debris, Ellie's baby daughter Leonora slept in her stroller.

  “Wanda wouldn't just happen to be around here by any chance, would she?” Bob asked, chewing on the toothpick.

  “Huh?” I replied intelligently.

  With the coming of day the stealthy sounds of the night before had simplified in memory, the mystery draining out of them until they were no more than a bit of loose wallpaper rustling in the drafty hall.

  “Around here?” I repeated, still not getting it, and Ellie looked puzzledly at him, too.

  Down the street a big orange town truck moved slowly along in front of the other old houses, its grinder roaring as the men alongside it shoved fallen tree limbs and other storm debris into its hopper. From its rear spewed a thick gout of yellowish wood chips, which the workers shoveled into enormous piles for later collection.

  “So I guess she's not here, then?” Bob yelled over the sound of the truck.

  “No,” I shouted, my voice too loud as the racket faded all at once. “Why would you even think that?” I added in more normal tones.

  “Her mom said she must've gone sometime during the night,” he replied. “And since you also went missing from those very same premises, at about the same time . . .”

  “Oh, for Pete's sake,” I said when I finally understood, or believed I did. “Marge thinks I took Wanda?”

  I'd called Bob when I got home and found the phones were working here. So he knew all about Wade coming to get me.

  “I can see why Marge Cathcart might jump to conclusions if she's worried,” I added, “but . . .”

  Bob shook his head. “No, she doesn't think you took the girl. I was just hoping for a nice, simple coincidence, that's all. Like maybe Wanda knows where you live and showed up here.”

  But his face said there was more to it than that. Sighing, he gazed down Key Street toward the old redbrick Peavy Library building on the corner, and Passamaquoddy Bay beyond.

  In 1823 Eastport's harbor was so busy, people said you could walk across the bay on the decks of ships waiting to come in. Now a single scallop-dragger motored on it toward the Canadian shore.

  Bob turned to me again. “Crews cleared the jackknifed truck about two this morning, I met the state cops in Quoddy Village 'bout an hour later.”

  He went on, chewing the toothpick. “They got photographs, asked the tenants some questions, transported Dibble's body out of there, and took a walk through the house,” he finished.

  “Was Wanda there then?” Ellie asked reasonably.

  Bob scratched his head. “It isn't real clear. I guess this kid's a little, um . . . unusual?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I told him, and went on to describe shy, speechless Wanda.

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” he said when I'd finished. “She wasn't in the house but Marge told the state police she probably got scared, decided to hide when she saw all the flashing lights show up in the middle of the night. Wind had gone down a lot by that time and the rain had quit,” he added.

  I already knew when the storm had passed. “So?” I demanded, beginning to be impatient. “Then what?”

  I was sorry about Wanda but it was none of my business and anyway, I wanted to get the porch torn down and the wreckage cleared while the sun was still shining.

  “So the staties figured they'd talk to Wanda when she showed up,” Bob went on, “which Marge kept insisting she would do sooner or later. That's when they took their walk-through.”

  Bob removed the toothpick and tucked it back into his shirt pocket. “That,” he added, “is when they found a paper bag full of pills. Oxycontins, big stash in a bag in the utility shed.”

  Oh, brother. Oxycontins, or “oxies” as they were called by illicit users, were the latest and most horrendously addictive drug of choice in two areas of the United States: rural poverty-stricken Appalachia, and here.

  “They're sure?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Pharmaceutical stuff,” he confirmed. “But you didn't see anything like that?”

  I shook my head. “No, but it was dark, and . . .”

  And anyway, why would I? I'd had the little matter of a dead guy distracting me.

  Leonora had slept through the din of the town truck but now she woke and began bouncing energetically in her stroller, her small arms and legs waving as if being pulled up and down on strings.

  “I put a word in for you two, by the way,” Bob added, “so no DEA guy'll start thinking maybe one of you hid 'em there.”

  “Thanks,” I said sincerely. Paunchy and faintly comical-appearing draped in all that cop paraphernalia, Bob didn't resemble a fellow who could vouch for you with anyone much higher than dogcatcher.

  But over the years, he'd been quietly involved in some law enforcement matters whose reach extended far beyond Eastport, Maine. So his cha
racter reference was golden; right away I felt a little better about the situation.

  “I'll bet the body and the pills are connected,” Ellie said, crossing the lawn to retrieve one of Leonora's kicked-off pink booties.

  That was a reasonable idea, too; Eugene Dibble was just the kind of loser to whom a stash of oxies would look like a winning hand.

  “I still don't get what that's got to do with Wanda Cathcart being missing, though,” she went on, replacing the bootie.

  The baby grinned, showing nubbins of new front teeth, then let out a squall they must've heard across the bay. Ellie picked her up and began walking around with her, as Bob went on to me.

  “Maybe nothing,” he said, pushing some wet leaves around with the toe of his own boot. “Trouble is that when the cops left, Wanda didn't come back. Marge is pretty scared, which is why she decided to confide in me at all, I guess.”

  That was the plus side of Bob Arnold's unthreatening looks: people talked to him. Once they did they often found out mild appearances aren't everything, but that's another story.

  “And,” I thought aloud, “she's also afraid if Wanda doesn't show up soon they'll think maybe she is involved somehow with the drugs?”

  “Yeah. Or even the murder. Or both. Hey, they don't know the girl,” he said as Ellie returned with the baby, “so why shouldn't they think that? Anyway, the long and short of it is, Marge asked me to ask you two to help try finding her daughter,” he finished.

  “Preferably before the state boys come around again wanting to complete their interviews?” I suggested.

  “Wouldn't hurt,” he agreed amiably. “They're all over this thing like fleas on a yard dog. They find out the girl's gone, they're going to draw some conclusions.”

  Just the thought of the state cops trying to make heads or tails out of Wanda Cathcart made me feel like taking that sledgehammer to my own head. But so did what Bob Arnold was asking Ellie and me to do.

  “Criminy,” I said helplessly. “How did Marge even find out we might be any good at it, anyway?”

  “Yeah, Bob,” Ellie said, stepping forward with the baby in her arms. “How did she?”