Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  “Mac likes animals,” she said irrelevantly, glancing at the tank. “Only thing ever softens him up. Or used to. I haven't seen him lately.”

  I pushed my chair back. A dead neon tetra was snagged in one of the green plastic aquarium plants, but she hadn't seen it yet.

  “Yeah, we're done. But Luanne, if you ever need any help . . .”

  Her expression hardened; she'd heard it before, and she knew I didn't mean assistance with home repairs.

  “. . . with the fish,” I finished as her eyes narrowed. “I mean sometimes people want to go away,” I improvised. “On vacation, or if they have to leave town for a little while for some reason . . .”

  Like to a rehab facility, I thought. But Sam had warned me. And anyway it wouldn't have done any good.

  “. . . and leave their pets,” I added. “I'm just saying I could come over and feed them for you, is all.”

  She wasn't deceived and she didn't intend to take me up on my offer. But as she listened her mood softened grudgingly.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said. Then, “So Sam's doing good, huh?”

  “Yes, he is. Well,” I amended, not wanting to shame her, “he has his ups and downs. Like everyone.”

  “Uh-huh.” She thought about that. “Um, listen, say hi to him for me. And . . . thanks for the money.”

  “Sure, Luanne. Take care,” I said, leaving her there in the kitchen with the aquarium bubbling and the faucet fixed.

  Right; everything hunky-dory, including a pocketful of extra money. She already had a date for tonight, too.

  Or at any rate that's what Luanne was still calling it to herself, probably. And as I went out into the cold fresh air I knew the eighty bucks I'd given her wouldn't make tomorrow night any different.

  Still, like everyone else who knocked on the door of her spotless little trick pad and asked or demanded to be let in, I'd gotten what I wanted.

  And like most people who left, I supposed, I was satisfied but not particularly proud of the transaction.

  Or of myself.

  Chapter

  5

  As I drove away from Luanne Moretti's house, the gnawing of anxiety in my stomach sharpened. I'd wanted to rule out a bad notion, that Eugene Dibble could have had not only a partner in crime but one who'd killed Dibble, then maybe got nervous about a possible witness.

  Or perhaps even worse, a partner who simply saw Wanda, liked the look of her, and came back later to grab what he'd taken such a fancy to earlier in the day.

  But instead of eliminating this suspicion, Luanne had supplied me with a candidate. So next on my to-do list was a chat with the tenants, to find out if any of them had noticed anyone hanging around.

  And to check on my boat. When I arrived at the rental property, though, no one was around, and in my annoyance at this I forgot all about the rowboat until I was halfway back to town.

  Next time, I resolved, and continued on home, where I found my housekeeper, Bella Diamond, already busy at the stove though dinner was still hours away.

  “Mmm,” I said, sniffing appreciatively. “That smells like shrimp casserole.”

  She'd already made the quince jam, the jars glowing jewel-like on the kitchen windowsill and the jelly pan clean and upside down on the dish rack. Now she turned from stirring the fragrant sauce of sautéed scallions, mushrooms, and garlic.

  “That's right. Better'n a restaurant dinner, for sure.” She spoke with deserved pride.

  Several generations of bad childhood nutrition showed in the bone structure of Bella's face, and she'd apparently decided to try making up for all of it by cooking for us. “I'm sure,” I told her inadequately, “it will be lovely.”

  From the ingredients ranged out on the counter, I gathered that clam juice, chicken broth, oregano, and cream also featured in today's creation. The shrimp she'd peeled were in a bowl and the angel-hair spaghetti was out, ready to be dropped into the olive-oil-tinctured boiling water.

  “With green salad and garlic bread,” Bella agreed. “Just the thing for a chilly fall day. And this nice dry raspberry wine to go with it.”

  All of which spelled Bella's special brand of dinner-table heaven, as usual. I'd never meant to have a housekeeper but I'd won a week's worth of Bella's services at a church raffle, and after I helped clear her of the charge of bonking her ex-husband to death with a cast-iron skillet, her devotion to me became complete.

  “Here, you strike me as if you could use cheering up,” she said, and poured me a glass.

  I sank into a chair at the table. “Thanks. So what have you been doing besides working your fingers to the bone as usual?”

  With skinned-back dyed red hair, big buck teeth, and pale green bulging eyes that reminded me of a pair of peeled grapes, Bella also kept Wade and me in pristine surroundings five days a week.

  “Oh, not a lot,” she said, gesturing at the kitchen, which was so clean, Victor could have done brain transplants in it. She'd have come to work the other two days, too, if I'd let her, and now that I'd trained her to let Wade finish his beer before grabbing the bottle out of his hands to rinse it, she was working out just fine.

  Also, Bella was a reliable Eastport information resource; in other words, a gossip.

  “Have you ever heard of a local guy named Mac Rickert?” I asked as she returned to tinkering with the shrimp sauce.

  Her eyebrows went up as she stirred. “Um, yeah. Kind of like I've heard of the boogeyman, though.”

  The wine was cold and delicious. I let it roll around my tongue for a while before swallowing and taking another sip, then pressed the cold glass to the side of my forehead.

  Only then did what she'd said sink in. “Wait a minute, the boogeyman? You mean he's not real?”

  A pang of irritation hit me. Had Luanne taken my cash and told me a fairy tale just to get rid of me?

  Bella dumped the bowl of cleaned shrimp into the sauce. “No. It's just that no one much sees him,” she replied.

  Cat Dancing watched from the top of the refrigerator as the morsels disappeared, then pronounced a disappointed cat-syllable and went back to sleep.

  “Mac's an outdoors type,” Bella went on. “Lives in the woods, knows how to catch wild game to eat, make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Build a shelter, keep you from freezing to death in the winter, just out of pine boughs and such.”

  “I see.” But guys like that weren't really rare around here, so I still didn't understand the boogeyman reference.

  She poured another dollop of olive oil into the boiling water, then opened the spaghetti. “Funny thing about that, though. The hunting part, I mean. Few years ago when Mac still lived in town, he was the animal control officer.”

  Extracting the spaghetti, she broke it all in half and began feeding it into the water. “And he was death on people who were mean to their pets, Mac was. He caught you tyin' 'em in the yard out in the cold, he'd take 'em right away from you.”

  She tossed the spaghetti box out. “Take 'em home himself, he would, and if you complained he'd threaten to tie you out in the snow. Which people believed he would do, too. He's an imposing man, Mac Rickert is,” she added. “Mountain-man type of fellow.”

  It was the second time that day that I'd heard of Rickert's supposed fondness for animals, or at any rate for ones that were under human protection.

  “But if you shot 'em clean—game animals I mean, not folks' pets—well, I guess Mac thought that was different.”

  The sweet perfume of olive oil wafted into the room. “Later on he had a business guiding hunting trips. Only the deal was, he would take you into the real backwoods, teach survival skills while you were bagging your moose. Or deer or bear, or whatever.”

  “Uh-huh.” The wine had unlocked a kink in the back of my neck. I finished the glass and set it aside, touched the tender bump rising on my head where I'd banged it coming out from under Luanne Moretti's kitchen sink.

  “But I gather Rickert's in another business now?” I asked, then related what L
uanne had told me about him.

  Bella dumped the cooked spaghetti into a colander, stepping back from the cloud of steam. “Drugs? That I didn't know about. Interesting, though,” she said, putting the drained spaghetti back into the pot along with a lump of butter half the size of my clenched fist.

  “What is?” Oh, what the hell, one more glass of wine wasn't going to kill me any more than that butter would, or anyway not immediately. So I poured it.

  “Well, it probably doesn't mean anything,” Bella answered. “But Jenny Dibble mentioned Mac Rickert this morning when I stopped in at her house on my way here to work.”

  I sat up straight. Jenny Dibble was Eugene Dibble's recently bereaved wife. “Really. Why did you visit her?”

  Bella sniffed as if the answer to this question ought to be obvious. “Girl's a grievin' widow, ain't she? Christian thing to do, stop by an' see if she might need anything.”

  Of course. And to pick up any interesting facts that might be floating around while she was there, too.

  “Which, by the way, she's already moving out of.” Bella tasted the sauce with a spoon. “The house, that is.”

  “That didn't take long.” From down in the cellar came a low grinding sound, like a dentist's drill being run on slow speed.

  “Nope. Getting her clothes together, leaving the furniture and so on. All junk, Eugene was an awful slob. I don't think that place holds many happy memories for Jenny,” Bella remarked.

  She took a second taste, larger and more thoughtful than the first. “Married him on the rebound from her first husband, had a daughter already then. Girl's out of the house now, though, has been for a while. I don't know her at all.”

  She shook salt into the sauce. “Anyway, there was a brace of partridges in the kitchen, all ready for the oven, along with the casseroles and other things people had been bringing on account of Eugene, and when I asked her where they came from she said she thought them partridges was from Mac Rickert.”

  She pronounced it the Maine way: pah-triches. “Really,” I said, and then because she'd been so informative so far, I decided to tell her the rest of what I'd been up to for the last twenty-four hours.

  “So does all that plus a bag of pills smell like partnership to you?” I asked when I had finished. “Because it does to me.”

  Bella turned, spoon in hand. “Well, I wouldn't know for sure. But I can tell you this much—Mac Rickert wouldn't be caught dead within a mile of that goofball Eugene Dibble unless he had some reason.”

  At my questioning look she explained, “When Mac was out an' about more he only hung around with the hunting guys, loggers, some of the commercial fishermen. 'S all you'd ever see him with, not fools like Eugene.”

  Cat Dancing stood up, peered around for possible stray shrimp, and settled herself once more with a soft thump. “And now he's not around at all?”

  Bella shrugged expressively. “That's the other thing. He's around, all right. Once in a while you'll hear a boat, no running lights on a foggy night, or some hunter'll catch a glimpse of somebody a long ways from the road, slippin' 'mongst the trees.”

  She paused, thinking. “Or a car will go missing out of some driveway, stay gone for a day or so, then show up again like it was never gone in the first place, 'cept the gas tank's empty.”

  “So not a bad boogeyman, exactly?” Unless he'd taken Wanda. “Because from what you're saying, shooting people and kidnapping girls doesn't sound like Rickert's M.O.,” I added.

  Bella nodded agreement. “Mac's more the type to go out and shoot a turkey, dress it all out, and leave it on somebody's back doorstep. Like them partridges.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Somebody who can't afford to buy a bird for Thanksgiving,” she explained. “That's the rumor, when it happens people say it was Mac.”

  “A Robin Hood boogeyman, then.” Only in Eastport, folks.

  “Jenny Dibble said one other strange thing,” Bella continued. “She said Gene'd been real cheerful lately. Which I imagine was unusual. As if something was going right for him, she said.”

  Which was pretty unusual, too, I supposed. Picking up the garlic press, Bella broke half a dozen cloves from the garlic head, removed the peelings, then put them through the press into a bowl that already held another stick of butter.

  So maybe our arteries would harden but at least we wouldn't have to worry about vampires. “I'd like to talk to this Rickert,” I told her.

  She tipped her head doubtfully as she mashed the garlic into the butter with a fork. But before she could answer, my dad stomped up the cellar stairs, a string of profanities issuing from his mouth.

  Stopping when he saw us. “Oh. Sorry about that,” he said. He crossed to the sink and drew himself a glass of water, guzzling it down without pause, then let out a sigh.

  “But I've just discovered there's a box hidden in that wall,” he added. “Or at any rate I think there is. And I don't mind telling you two it's driving me plumb nuts.”

  He ran more water. “A big box. At least two feet long and a foot wide from what I can tell.” He held his hands out to indicate the item's dimensions.

  They were big, work-gnarled hands, knuckles grimy and joints knobby with early arthritis. “A wooden box. But—”

  In every old-house task there is always a “but.” You can depend on it.

  “. . . I can't get the box out without taking apart a lot more wall,” he went on. “And I don't know what they used for mortar, but here we are almost two hundred years later and it's still harder than the stone.”

  He drained his glass again. “So what I need is to find out the true size of the thing,” he said, his frustration easing somewhat as he aired it out by talking to us. “Just start outwards and work in till I get to its edges, so I don't have to take down more old mortar and stone than I need to.”

  “And you'll find out the true size,” I asked, “by . . . ?”

  “Drilling,” he replied firmly. “Drill some test holes with a mortar bit, I don't hit wood, then I haven't hit the box.”

  Frowning, he went on. “I already nicked it once, wood chips came out on the pick edge. Mahogany, it appears, which is why I think it's a box and not just a structural part of the house.”

  Indeed, I thought; let's not damage any of those. The place already had an alarming tendency to fall down at one end faster than I could prop it up at the other.

  “I want to preserve the thing whole, if I can,” he said.

  I wanted it, too. A mysterious box dating from when the house was built . . .

  “But it's not going to be easy.” He wiped his forehead with his bandanna. “There's an old pipe of some kind in the wall. I'd rather not hurt that. And like I said, some old-time builder put that box in there to stay.”

  He eyed the counter where Bella stood spreading thick slices of a French loaf with the garlic butter. “Course,” he added, “some other old-timer might just manage to get the jump on the situation, he's well fueled enough.”

  Bella sniffed. “Go on with you, shedding grit an' grime all over my clean kitchen. Supper ain't for hours, yet.”

  But then her face softened, which on Bella was really saying something. She was no oil painting but when she looked at my dad she was almost pretty.

  “Here,” she added, reaching into the cookie jar and coming up with a couple of homemade date bars. “Wouldn't want it to be said I turned my back on a starving man.”

  She thrust them gruffly at him and when he'd departed with them she turned back to me. “Missus,” she began; one thing I hadn't been able to train her to do was call me by my first name.

  “Missus, here's what I think. Eugene Dibble's brains had about enough powder to blow him to hell, which I'm guessing is what happened one way or another. And from what I've heard, Mac Rickert is exactly the man Eugene would've needed if he was all involved in some kind of drug deal and it was too big to handle by himself.”

  “But would Dibble be smart enough to realize that?” I a
sked. “I mean that he needed someone else, with experience in this kind of thing, badly enough to consider sharing the profit?”

  Which he'd have had to do and from what I knew of Dibble myself, I felt confident it would've half killed him. Bella shook her head, sliding the casserole into the oven.

  “No, I wouldn't expect so. But you never can tell, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And what if for once he did something the proper way for a change?

  “That is,” she amended darkly, straightening, “if there is a proper way to do a thing like that.”

  “Huh,” I said, thinking over what she'd told me as footsteps thudded up the back porch. Moments later Wade came in, kissed me on the ear, and went upstairs to change his clothes.

  Behind him came Sam with the two dogs, Monday white-faced and arthritic beside Prill, a youngster by comparison. But at the moment they were both so invigorated from their walk, their names might as well have been Romp and Stomp.

  “Sam, put them out in the ell until they calm down, please,” I said, and he was quick to comply. Though we'd finished the chartering-a-plane talk, he knew I wasn't at all happy about it, and he wanted to appease me.

  Last came Victor, uninvited and unexpected. But that man could smell shrimp casserole a mile away. “Hello,” he said pleasantly, putting an extra bottle of wine on the table, then went on into the living room without offering even one critical remark.

  Bella watched him go. “Is he mellowing?” she asked me. “Or is it my imagination?”

  “Yeah, right,” I scoffed, “and after that, Hannibal Lecter's going to become a vegetarian.”

  I'd have gone on but Sam called out from the hall closet to say he'd just broken the light switch in there and did I have any more of them so he could replace it?

  That keep-Mom-in-a-good-mood program could operate to my advantage, I realized, if I figured out how to work it right. The trouble was, Sam didn't know how to fix a light switch.

  Also, I didn't have any. So I ran down to the hardware store again and when I got back I had to turn off all the power in the house because I couldn't remember which circuit ran the closet wiring, and we did replace the thing.