Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  “Okay,” Wade grunted through the gouts of water spurting from the pipe into his face. “See if you can break the . . .”

  Whang! While Wade held the wrench in place my father hit its handle with the hammer, and I don't even want to think about what the impact must have felt like rattling up through their arms.

  But the water slowed a little as the rusty old valve turned a fraction. The waterfall sound diminished, first to a trickling and then to a steady plink-plink as they got control of the pipe. Eventually the bottom cellar step became visible, then the second one from the bottom.

  And so did an item I'd failed to notice earlier, owing to the fact that most of the water in the universe had been flowing into my house. “Just managed to muscle it out and move it before that thing went—”

  Kablooie, my father's gesture communicated with perfect clarity when we had all gone back upstairs.

  It was a chunk of the foundation, about two feet square and a foot deep. He and Wade had gotten it up the cellar steps; now it sat on the kitchen table; Bella, I thought, would have a fit.

  “That old water pipe,” he went on, “all that was holding it together anymore was the foundation structure. I took enough of that away, and—”

  It seemed that at some time in the distant past new pipes had been put into Key Street and the old ones shut off. But they had clearly not been drained of the water they'd contained.

  Until now. “The good news is . . .” my father began after a restorative gulp of coffee.

  I looked around; the kitchen was in chaos, tools everywhere and the dogs prowling around and getting underfoot excitedly. Also a missing fifteen-year-old girl was on the island somewhere, in who knew what sort of ghastly difficulty. And I had a badly collapsed cellar wall, flood damage, and a hunk of the old house shedding mortar chunks onto the kitchen table.

  But there was good news. I waited hopefully.

  “. . . whatever's in that box didn't get wet,” my father said, sounding pleased.

  At the moment, unless there was a plane ticket to a resort on the French Riviera in the box, I didn't care about it.

  “Wonderful,” I replied. It was five in the morning and Wade was already in the shower; so much for a night's sleep. “Um, but listen, Dad, when you've finished your coffee maybe you could . . .”

  “Scram” was the only possible final word to that sentence, and he got it.

  “Y'know,” he began, rinsing his cup before placing it in the sink—considering the condition of that kitchen it was a little like bailing on the Titanic but I thought it was a nice gesture—“I think I'll have another go with the sump pumps in case they're not as wrecked as I think they are. And then get to work chipping some more of the foundation off that box.”

  So he did, and a few minutes later Wade came downstairs and helped him wrestle the chunk of foundation into the ell, to the big workshop table there.

  Hauling out the mop, I heard the mortar drill start up and figured that he was safely occupied for a while, or anyway long enough for me to get the kitchen cleaned up before Bella arrived. But shortly he returned.

  “Miscalculated,” he reported, holding the drill up to show me a few bits of stuff clinging to the end of the drill bit. “Box is bigger'n I thought.”

  He pointed. “See that there? Dark stuff's old leather, and the lighter, feathery stuff . . .”

  It was obvious what it was. “Paper,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Back when this house was bein' built, somebody saw a chance to hide something. Bury it in the foundation, make that part of it super strong, there was a good chance it'd never see the light of day again.”

  I touched the end of the drill bit lightly. Ash-light shreds of yellowed old paper floated to the floor. Cat Dancing followed their progress with interest.

  “Or anyway,” he added, “that's what I'm startin' to think.”

  But the shreds weren't so small that you couldn't make out the ink on them, faded flecks in smooth, cursive little fishhook shapes that to me indicated handwriting.

  And the leather meant . . .

  “A book,” I said, and my father nodded seriously.

  “Someone buried it down there,” he agreed. “Buried it there because they didn't want anyone ever to find it.”

  The question being . . . why?

  Chapter

  6

  Later that morning I grabbed my toolbox and drove back out to Quoddy Village, leaving my father in charge of handling the cellar debacle. Through the open car window the air was fruity with the tang of rose hips, like the taste of a vitamin C drop.

  Pictures of Wanda had been all over the TV news when I turned it on to check the weather report. Dibble's murder gave the story a sensational angle that I thought meant CNN coverage might not be far off, if she didn't show up soon.

  And I didn't even want to think about the media circus that would be. So far I hadn't even been questioned by the state cops; Bob Arnold's vouching, I realized gratefully, had been effective.

  But it was only a matter of time before they got around to me. And my being the daughter of an ex-fugitive they'd all heard of always put a certain speculative gleam in their eye, whether or not I deserved it.

  So I wasn't looking forward to it, nor was I happy about the figure I'd seen lurking in the fog, on the street outside my place.

  Or . . . hadn't seen. Because maybe Ellie was right. Maybe I was taking this whole thing too personally. Maybe my imagination had been revved, and I'd really seen nothing at all.

  When I rounded the curve on Route 190, a woman came out of one of the houses by the road and set a jack-o'-lantern on the step. The thing had jagged teeth, triangle eyes, and a slit nose, all carved no doubt with an ordinary kitchen knife.

  Harmless; amusing, even. But just like the shape I'd thought I'd glimpsed the night before, in the dark that pumpkin would be a frightener.

  Thinking this, I pulled up in front of the Quoddy Village house. The small red bungalow appeared even more shabby and forlorn than the last time I'd visited, a couple of the shutters dangling and a clutter of small storm-tossed branches and other debris littering the front walk.

  Also, it looked empty. Damn, the white van was gone again, even though I'd called in advance; these people were as hard to get face time with as the inhabitants of a space colony.

  Then I looked for the boat, glancing across the road to the short, grass-covered bank bisected by a path leading to the stony beach. Now paved with dark mud, the path ran alongside a cluster of old pilings where the little craft should've been tied up.

  And wasn't. Cursing a mental blue streak, I scrambled down to the rocky expanse, stretching fifty yards or so out into the cove at this hour of turning tide. Incoming waves were already transforming the exposed sand flats into a body of water again.

  While I scanned for the boat, I pictured the cove in the recent storm, tons of water surging out toward the bay and the even more powerful currents racing there. Today the waves appeared innocent but their cheerful glitter was a malicious ruse; behind their smiles they were ready at a moment's notice to rush the ignorant or careless mariner into a wet grave.

  No rowboat. Turning, I slipped on a slick rock and landed on my bottom in the chilly mud.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  It was Greg Brand, coming down the grassy bank with his hand held out.

  “Yeah,” I grumped, struggling up to brush myself off.

  His dark hair glinting in the sun, he wore a denim jacket over a white cable-knit sweater, navy corduroys, and new-looking white sneakers.

  “Here, let me help you,” he offered, but I ignored his hand, wiping at the cold grime and seaweed I was smeared with.

  “Boat's gone,” I groused. “Is Jenna out rowing again by any chance?”

  An odd look passed across his angular features. “No, why?”

  I got the impression that my mention of Jenna Durrell made him uncomfortable. Good, I thought, remembering his rudeness to me the night of
the storm; whatever I could do to make him even more unhappy was fine with me at the moment.

  He seemed to remember his behavior, too; apology replacing the unease on his face. “I'm sorry about the other evening, Jacobia. I was . . . upset. And I'm sorry about your boat, too, of course.”

  He gestured at the length of line dangling uselessly from an old pier's wooden support, all that remained of a wharf that was active here a hundred years before. “Was that where . . . ?”

  I nodded unhappily. The knot had been tied well enough when I'd fastened it onto the cleat on the boat's prow, under Sam's expert supervision.

  “I guess maybe I should've come out the other night to check it myself,” Greg added. “But with all that was going on . . .”

  I shrugged, relenting; this wasn't his problem. “Not your job,” I told him. “Probably it was already gone by then anyway. Jenna might not have known how to tie it.”

  Or that you were supposed to untie it from the tree, not the prow, I added with a final mental grump.

  “Could be,” he agreed. “And listen, not to be a tattletale but she's no genius with a pair of oars, either. I was watching her out there one day last week, it's a wonder she even got back without drowning.”

  “Landlubber, is she?” We climbed the grassy bank together, me still rubbing my muddy hands ineffectively on my pants legs.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Way out of her element. You might want to mention to her what a life vest's for, if you do get the boat back. Not that I don't think you will, but . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I told him as we reached the road between the beach and the house. At least the mud hadn't soaked right through my pants.

  “Say,” he said suddenly, “is that it way over there?”

  I followed his gesture without optimism but sure enough it was, aground on the embankment below the causeway about a mile distant.

  “Fabulous,” I exhaled with glum sarcasm. “Now I'll have to drive out in Wade's truck and grab it, haul it up into the truck bed somehow,” I said, and started away from him.

  But he had another idea. “Why don't we just walk over there and row it back, the two of us? It's solidly aground, looks like, so it might take some muscle, but I can help you get it down to the water,” he offered.

  It was a decent suggestion and I might've accepted even if I didn't have the sense he was making it only because he wanted to talk to me. Maybe put over his own version of all that was going on, I suspected uncharitably, but not here at the house where one or more of the other tenants might show up any minute.

  “Okay,” I said, causing him to look confident and me to feel strongly that if I had anything to do with it, Gregory Brand was about to get more conversation than he'd bargained for.

  Starting now. “So what's with the witch stuff?” I asked when we had set off. At least it was a good day for a walk, sunny and breezy with the water still twinkling under the clear sky. “I mean,” I went on, “I wouldn't have figured you for a trainer in the occult arts. Or if you were, you'd have gone for a little higher level of student.”

  That got a laugh. See, when I wanted to I could behave well, too. “Long story,” he said.

  Yeah, no doubt. He had an even stride, faster than my usual but still easy to keep up with; once I'd gotten accustomed to it I just matched his steps and used him for a pace car.

  “I'm actually here under a little bit of pretense,” he went on. “As I guess maybe you've already figured.”

  Oh, no kidding, I thought, saying nothing. Leaving a great big silence for other people to fill works wonderfully well, I've found.

  And this time was no exception. But what Greg Brand said next nearly made me trip over my own feet.

  “I've known Gene Dibble for years,” he admitted. “I saw you noticing my reaction when you mentioned his name. It was a shock.”

  Uh-huh. More silence on my part.

  “Truth is, the two of us were crooks together back in Massachusetts,” he went on. “Scam artists, I guess you'd have to call us. But I swear I didn't know he was coming to the house, or about the drugs,” he added urgently. “And I didn't kill him.”

  “Oh,” I said mildly. One foot in front of the other. “So that's what this is, the whole private seminar thing? A scam, you pretend to teach people how to . . . ?”

  As if I hadn't already figured that out, too. “Access their inner earth-goddess,” he confirmed, his voice mingling matter-of-fact honesty with contempt for his victims.

  “A little Wicca, a pinch of mythology, New Age crystals, massage oils, and aromatherapy,” he recited, “plus a whole lot of candles . . . Did you know there's a special candle you can burn if you want somebody dead?”

  I did, actually. Back in the city there'd been a Santeria shop whose dusty windows, displaying a range of potions, powders, and magical charms, I'd stared into regularly for a time. Sam was almost two then and Victor was dating a cardiology nurse, coming home only to change his shirts and criticize my mothering skills.

  “Kind of a big coincidence, though, you have to admit,” I told Greg. “I mean Eugene Dibble being here, and now you being . . .”

  He laughed once more, but without mirth. “Gene had mentioned the place a few times, talked about growing up here, in the old days when we were doing our thing together. I had no idea he'd come back here to live again, though,” he insisted.

  “So what, you just threw a dart at a map?” At least I knew now why Brand had decided to come clean to me.

  If he was. But as things stood, no cop in the world was going to believe he hadn't killed Gene Dibble, his old partner in crime, and never mind that supposedly Greg had been in the van with the others when Dibble died.

  Alibis, an old cop buddy of mine once told me, are made to be broken. To have even a hope of being thought truthful, Brand needed people on his side.

  People like me. He shook his head dismally. “Like I said, I remembered Gene mentioning it. And I needed some really out-of-the-way place where we could . . .”

  I stopped. “We? You mean somebody else is working this with you? Who?”

  We'd reached Toll Bridge Road, a long curving lane with salt marsh on both sides. Here the incoming tide surged under the roadway through a series of large culverts, foaming as it came.

  He frowned. “Hetty Bonham,” he said reluctantly at last.

  We started walking again. “She's hit hard times, I thought if I kept her around maybe I could—”

  I made a rude noise. “'Scuse me, Greg, but you don't strike me as exactly the philanthropist type. And Hetty . . .”

  Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but Hetty was an over-the-hill, bleached-blonde harridan with grandiose delusions of youth.

  “What's in it for you?” I demanded.

  His pace didn't slow as we headed uphill toward the Quoddy Village parade grounds. Remnants of broken sidewalk showed where the Navy once mustered in full dress, row on row flanking the bright water that at the time might have hidden enemy periscopes.

  “Hetty's my stepsister,” Brand said reluctantly. “My dad married her mother.”

  Now the Navy was long gone—they'd had a hospital, stores, office and classroom facilities, the whole nine yards in addition to the housing, which was never meant to be permanent—but the area still attracted a blip of military interest now and then.

  Just ahead on the left loomed the old factory building that had until recently made woolen blankets, for example, but was now an assembly site for chemical protection suits contracted for by the U.S. Army. “And my father was, shall we say, not opposed to having a young girl in the house,” Greg said.

  Putting a light, ironic gloss on it, but at his words I felt myself growing more alert on several levels. Did he know he was beginning to trespass on one of my personal danger zones?

  Not consciously. I'd never revealed much to anyone about my childhood-from-hell, and if I had confided in someone it wouldn't have been Mr. Smoothie here. But a good scammer's instincts, I knew,
were as sensitive as an insect's feelers.

  “Dad thought I didn't understand, but I did. Even before it happened I knew he married Hetty's mom to get at Hetty,” he said.

  We reached Route 190. Across Passamaquoddy Bay the rolling hills of New Brunswick loomed greenish-brown in the foreground, fading to heather cloudlike shapes in the distance.

  “Hell, I was a fourteen-year-old boy,” he went on. “If there was anything like that going on within a mile, you bet I knew it was happening.”

  “And about this you did . . . ?”

  “Nothing,” he replied quietly. “Dad sent me off to an elite boarding school the minute he twigged to the idea that I knew.”

  Having had an adolescent boy around the house myself, I thought Greg's account of his teenaged awareness of sexual matters sounded authentic. Not that I believed it, necessarily, because another thing my money days had taught me was that guys like Greg could make up plausible stories at a moment's notice, never mind with as much time as he'd had to think about it.

  “But later,” he went on, “when we were grown up, I hooked up with her again and tried to watch out for her a little. As much as I could. Hetty doesn't,” he added with a wry smile, “always make it easy.”

  “So Hetty's just playing along, pretending to be one of your students of the occult?” I asked, and he nodded.

  “Makes people relax a little more if they think they're not the only ones drinking the Kool-Aid,” he agreed, and of course I didn't deck him right there on the gravel shoulder of Route 190.

  But I wanted to. Then as we made our way along the side of the road the cab of an eighteen-wheeler blew by, spinning dust and sand; I blinked grit from my eyes.

  Another truck roared past. “Let's get away from the road,” I said, leading him down a trail between stands of long grass, whippy chokecherry saplings, and elderberry bushes. Here the road noise faded and the remaining few leaves were dusty crimson and purple, lending a pinkish glow to the light filtering in through silvery branches. Chickadees called sharply, fluttering from twig to twig in the underbrush, always just out of sight.