Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  Surprised, Bob took a hasty half-step back. “Now, Ellie,” he began placatingly.

  “Don't ‘now, Ellie' me.” She advanced relentlessly on him. “Girl vanishes, cops are on the scene, but the mother wants us?”

  She put a hand on her hip. “So, Bob,” she persisted, “would you care to explain to us how that little eventuality happened to happen?”

  Here I should perhaps make clear that in the past Ellie and I had cleared up a number of fairly grisly Eastport crimes. Obsessed stalkers, murderous embezzlers, and in one truly horrid instance a corpse dangling upside down from a graveyard gate had helped form our unwanted reputation as . . .

  Well, as snoops. Emphasis on unwanted reputation; what we wanted was normal life. But if wishes were horses, one of my dogs would be winning the Kentucky Derby right this minute.

  Bob gave in at last. “Actually the reason Marge asked for you two is that I told her to.”

  “And that would be because . . . ?” Ellie appeared stern, which on her was quite a trick.

  He held out his hands. “First of all, the state cops've got a murder and felony drug weight to keep them occupied. I mean, you should've seen their eyes light up.”

  I could imagine it. “So all by itself, if it's just a simple teenaged runaway case . . .”

  Bob nodded briskly. “Yep. Oh, they'll do everything that's in the procedure book. Everything necessary,” he emphasized. “I'm not sayin' they'll sell it short. Put out the word, bulletins, the whole nine yards. But even after all that, in the end I figure there's two ways it could go.” He raised an index finger. “They'll decide maybe Wanda's got something to do with the felonies, and when they do find her, that'll be a mess.”

  Another finger. “Or . . . hey, kids run off. The girl didn't know Dibble. How could she? Only fifteen years old and a young fifteen, from what the mother told me.”

  I caught the drift. “So maybe Wanda won't show up and they won't find her. Because they didn't make a connection when maybe they should've.”

  A connection that might help find her, he meant. Because despite my impression of her, I supposed it wasn't impossible for Wanda to have known about the illicit pills. After all, Sam was a lot younger than fifteen when he first learned how to skin-pop cocaine using the TB syringes he'd stolen from his father's medical bag.

  And if such a link existed, recognizing it might be the key to finding her. But I could think of a third way things could go, too.

  A worse way. “Wanda Cathcart,” I said slowly, “couldn't fend for herself in a roomful of kittens. Drugs or no drugs, if she ran off on her own—or worse, if someone took her—she could be in a lot of trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Bob said. “There's that. Don't know why anyone would take her, though. She didn't see anything out there, did she?”

  “You mean like who dunnit? Bob, she's timid and she's speech-impaired but she seems perfectly normal intelligence-wise. Seeing a murder . . . I think she'd have been trying to tell us about it.”

  True, there had been her frightened expression. And even now that I'd dismissed them I supposed the sounds I'd heard last night could have been made by someone creeping stealthily to the door. But . . .

  “Anyway, if she had seen something, why wouldn't she have tried telling her mother?” I asked.

  I knew one thing for sure: When I opened that door on my way out of the little room, I'd found no one. And it was still none of my business. Stubbornly I hefted the sledgehammer.

  “Maybe what happened,” I suggested, “is that Wanda just got tired of the witches of Eastport.”

  I went on to describe the scene at the Quoddy Village house, a mixture of New Age mysticism, old-world superstition, and Gregory Brand's patronizing style, which he'd displayed both during and after the canned-goods dinner we'd all . . . well, “enjoyed” might not be exactly the right word for it.

  “Greg's like one of those how-to-empower-yourself gurus that used to be giving thousand-dollar seminars all over the place,” I said, “before people with money got tired of mingling with the great unwashed in seedy hotel banquet halls and started hiring individual life coaches instead.”

  I turned toward the remnants of the porch, readying the hammer. “And kids can spot a phony a mile away, you know that. Wanda might be trying to give her mother a scare, so when she does come back Marge will agree to take her home.”

  “Yeah?” Bob said, interested. “So you think the witch stuff is fake, do you?”

  I blew out a skeptical breath. “Bob, if they were real witches, why not just cast a spell to bring Wanda back? Anyway,” I added, “tell Marge the answer's no. They paid for rent, not human bloodhounds, which Ellie and I are out of the business of being, anyway.”

  Saying this, I waited for Ellie to jump in and back me up. But she didn't; instead she gazed thoughtfully down at the baby and as she contemplated her offspring I could practically hear her thinking: What if it were Lee?

  “Girl's a diabetic,” Bob said suddenly.

  I hadn't known that. “Not the shots kind,” he added. “Pills. Kinda holds off the diabetes from settling in, from what I could gather. She's okay as long as she takes 'em. But if she doesn't, she could get real sick, real fast.”

  He looked straight at me. “Marge says Wanda's got the idea she can think the diabetes away, by the force of her mind or some such foolishness. If she can just get off those pills long enough to try, that is. Course Marge wouldn't allow it,” Bob added.

  “But the pills are still at the house?” I asked.

  Bob nodded. “Little orange bottle. None missing.”

  Which could either mean that Wanda didn't want the pills, or that someone else didn't know that the girl needed them. Or just didn't care. . . .

  Stop that, I instructed myself sternly. “Bob, I really don't want to get involved in this. And you'll be looking for her anyway, so why—?”

  “No I won't,” he interrupted. “State guy in charge of the investigation, he made that real clear right from the get-go. I'm to keep right out of the whole situation, Wanda included. His turf, y'know.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. It isn't like that kind of thing's ever stopped me before, is it?” he replied.

  “But I got this guy,” he explained, “young fellow here in town with two little kids, the state's trying to decide whether or not to take those children away from him. Which,” he added, “I know they absolutely should not. Take them away, that is.”

  “Where's their mother?” Ellie asked, embracing Lee.

  “Ran off,” he answered, “with some other guy, she thought he was a better bet. Now she's in the women's prison, check forging and assault with a deadly.”

  Weapon, he meant. “Which is how your state guy found out about the whole situation?” I guessed. “He was involved in her arrest?”

  Bob nodded unhappy agreement. “Yeah, and he's already busting my shoes about it. Knows the story, and he's the kind of guy if he's got something he can use on you, then right away he's got to use it. He can't just wait and see how you're going to behave.”

  Bob made a face, commenting on what he thought of that kind of tactic. “Anyway, I screw up and my detective pal starts taking an interest, communicating with social services and so on, bottom line is that right or wrong my boy is gonna lose those kids. Which're doing just fine where they are, besides bein' all that's keeping him on the straight an' narrow himself.”

  He took a deep breath. “So I'm out. I don't want to be, but from now on I'm local support as requested and not a thing more. Only if you could just ask around,” he added persuasively, “maybe see if Sam's friends have heard anything, it'd mean a whole lot to Marge Cathcart.”

  And to him, he didn't add. But he had two young kids of his own and I knew the tough family cases always bothered him most.

  Still I said nothing, staring at the thick, dark mat of leaf mold that had accumulated under the front porch over the decades.

  “It won't take lon
g for the news about all this to spread,” he added warningly. By then the silence had lengthened enough for him to know I wasn't just going to cave right in on this, despite his feelings.

  On the other hand, if you spilled red wine on a tablecloth at one end of the island, ten minutes later people were arguing the relative merits of bleach versus lemon juice at the other end, and by the way had anyone else noticed that you were drinking a lot lately?

  And it was my house the drugs were found in. Well, Ellie's too, but Ellie was so well liked around Eastport that no one would accuse her if she were selling the stuff from a pushcart.

  So I'd be getting the blame, and never mind that the story would be far-fetched in the extreme; on the Eastport grapevine an ounce of colorful beat a pound of believable.

  “You've made a few enemies in town lately even on top of that,” Bob observed. “Bad-mouthing Gene Dibble, for example.”

  “Yeah,” I said sourly. “Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.”

  Because despite the way I'd soft-pedaled my opinion of him after finding him at the rental house, in my opinion Dibble had been a troublemaking son of a bitch.

  And I'd said so recently, out loud and in public. “Bob, he was outside the fish fry at the Congregational Church last Friday night. Up on his soapbox, loaded to the gills and spouting his nonsense.”

  The gist of it had been that the Quoddy Village tenants were summoning up the Devil. “So what was I supposed to do, just stand there and keep my mouth shut?”

  As I was saying this, my son Sam drove up and went into the house with a laundry bag over his shoulder. Ellie looked at me; What if it were Sam? her expression said.

  “No, no,” Bob replied placatingly, “I know what a royal pain he was, Jake. Thing is, though, a lot of other people heard you. His people, who go—went—to those street-corner Sunday sermons of his.”

  “Sermons,” Ellie spat. “That's a laugh. Gene Dibble made a hobby of getting people riled up about anybody who was different. And you know it,” she added to Bob.

  “Yes, I do know it,” he responded evenly. “Eugene approved of white, Protestant, and male, and he had the tar and feathers out for everybody else.”

  He hitched up the utility belt. Bob rarely used any of the items on it, but he said the one time he ended up needing any of them, he wanted them handy.

  Even more, he wanted Eastport's few bad guys to know they were handy. “But that's neither here nor there,” he went on. “The thing is, his pals include some pretty vindictive personalities.”

  “And they talk,” Ellie conceded quietly, having sussed Bob's point, too. Drugs in my house plus Dibble being found dead in it, and now a missing girl . . .

  If you wanted, you could base a fairly effective character-assassination program on all that. Which Eugene's pals would want; in short, in the let's-make-a-meal-of-her department it was a pretty good bet that I was about to be served up hot.

  Suddenly that porch wreckage looked like a lot more fun than it had half an hour earlier. For one thing, there were no killers in it, and for another I doubted any missing girls were hiding among the rotted planks, busted support posts, and rusty railings strewn gaily over my front lawn.

  But in Bob's mind Ellie and I were the town busybodies, and I supposed he figured that for once he might as well get some use out of us. I sighed.

  “Okay,” I said. “I'll poke around a little, see what I can find out about where Wanda might have gone.”

  Bob looked satisfied. “Good. She's pretty sure to be here on the island. State guys put a checkpoint on the causeway to try to pick up any known drug dealers, soon as they found the bag and got the truck wreck cleared. So even if she tried hitchhiking, no one could've taken her off in a vehicle.”

  I thought a minute about Wanda hitchhiking, then put the idea immediately into the category of when pigs fly. That along with the checkpoint at least narrowed things down a bit. And the island was only seven miles long by two miles wide.

  “And I guess we could put a few feelers out, ask around. But that's all,” I cautioned Bob Arnold.

  With any luck Eugene Dibble's killer would be identified and arrested quickly, along with his partner in the drug deal—for that surely had to be why Dibble had ended up dead—and the murder part of this fiasco would be over, along with any rumor of my own participation in it.

  “We can ask Sam to let us know if he hears anything. Check some of the places the kids hang out here on the island, too,” I finished reluctantly.

  Woodsy secluded areas, private little coves, reachable only if you clambered down steep, loose-shale cliffs . . . these had been the places Sam and his friends spent time in as young teens.

  “Me too,” Ellie put in loyally. Because she was right; if Lee were ever missing we'd want someone to help us.

  But there was another reason that I was agreeing to look for Wanda Cathcart, and Ellie probably sensed it. Personal and complicated, it boiled down to the number of people who really do need assistance in this world versus the number who ever get any.

  Young female people, especially. I wasn't up for facing that thought directly, though; not yet. Firmly I shoved away the clammy feelings memory summoned up at the idea of Wanda somewhere alone right now.

  Or worse, not alone. “So okay,” I told Bob again. “But as for Dibble and the drugs, and whatever else people might decide to say I'm involved in—”

  Gossip fodder or no, it was Wanda who interested me, not some mouth-breathing slime toad whose drug deal, predictably and I thought deservedly, had gone south—

  “The rest of this whole mess,” I finished to Bob, “is up to the Maine State Police.”

  Even as I spoke I think I sensed the emptiness of my remark, the foolishness of insisting to myself that in this instance, as in no other, bad things might not lead irresistibly to other bad things.

  Or to worse ones. But at the time I thought I could limit my own involvement. Curtail, as they say, the collateral damage. Because the real reason I'd agreed to Bob's request had nothing to do with my vulnerability to local rumor, Bob's problem, or my feelings for Ellie's daughter Leonora, who might someday need assistance herself.

  The reason was in me, and in the still-fresh, incineratingly shameful memory of my own narrow escape from the kind of trouble I hoped Wanda wasn't in, right this very minute.

  That is, if you could actually call what happened to me an escape.

  I could.

  Mostly.

  After Bob Arnold left and Ellie took Lee to day care, I went inside, where Sam wanted to explain to me why plane chartering was Really No Big Deal Whatsoever.

  “Mom, I'd like to hang out with him more, okay? He's my dad, I want to spend time with him, and he picked this. So is that so strange?”

  “Of course not,” I replied. “I just don't see why you can't do it here in Eastport. I mean he moved here to be near you, so you wouldn't have to spend zillions of dollars just to—”

  Sam frowned briefly into the washing machine, so heavily loaded it might as well have been trying to mix concrete, then closed the lid and turned to me.

  “Mom,” he said patiently. “I knew you wouldn't approve. But it's all arranged, so try to be cool about it, all right?”

  Outlined against the tall, bright windows of my old kitchen, Sam was tall, dark-haired, and muscular, graceful in the way men are who are comfortable on boats. Today he was wearing dungarees, old deck shoes, and a white T-shirt that said “I'll try to be nicer if you'll try to be smarter” in black letters on the front.

  “How can I be cool about you and your dad turning into a pair of jet-setters?” I demanded.

  It wasn't a jet. From what I'd heard it was a small twin-engine turboprop, and I wasn't all that comfortable about Sam getting onto one of those, either. But the real point was that Victor seemed to be buying Sam's affection, and by doing so getting Sam used to things he couldn't afford and would yearn for later, when he should be thinking about practical matters.

 
Achievable goals like finishing school, getting a job, and staying off substances. Or anyway I hoped they were achievable.

  “What's up with all the spend-time-with-Dad stuff anyway, all of a sudden?” I asked.

  Sam opened the washer again, stuffed a few more socks into it, tipped his head consideringly at the result, and added some T-shirts. The way he overloaded the thing, you'd think I charged him a quarter for using it instead of only threatening to.

  Closing the lid, he replied, his face troubled, “It's just . . . I don't know, Mom, but I'm kind of worried about him lately. The way he talks to me, the way he acts . . .”

  The washer began rumbling loudly as it labored; for Sam's laundry anyway maybe we'd have been better off with a cement mixer. Over the sound, he finished, “I think he doesn't feel very good, or something.”

  A snort of unkind laughter escaped me. “Victor? Are you kidding? Sam, the only time he doesn't feel good is when girls half his age turn him down for dates. The rest of the time he's a man of steel, you know that.”

  And especially when it came to his heart, I added silently. Victor was older now and his conquests were fewer, but just as when I was married to him they lasted about as long as the bloom on a fresh-cut rose.

  After that, whammo. But I'd long ago decided not to subject Sam to any more of that kind of information. For one thing, Sam still thought the swath his father cut through the world of women was remarkable, even somehow admirable.

  It was a further reason I thought Sam should spend less time with Victor, rather than more.

  “Probably he ate a bad clam,” I said. “And you'd better look out, he gets even sicker on bouncy little airplanes.”

  But I could see I was getting nowhere. Sam's face closed the way it always did when his mind was made up.

  “Hey,” he said quietly, taking a banana from the fruit bowl. “Mom. I've thought about it, and I'm doing this. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but—”

  Right, message understood. Where chartering a plane down to the Celtics games was concerned, I could stand at the end of the runway and wave as they took off.

  But otherwise I should keep out of it. Maybe, I thought in a final little burst of last-ditch optimism, something else will keep them from going.