Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

Nothing good, though. So I'd thrown myself into physical work, hoping it might help calm the emotional stuff down. But this plan turned out to have its drawbacks, too; when the hammer hit a porch board, the nails were meant to loosen and the board was supposed to rise up so I could pull it free with the end of the crowbar.

  Only the plan didn't account for two facts: (a) the hammer was very heavy, and (b) the nails were the solidest parts of the old porch. Thus each time the sledgehammer connected with a board, my feet came off the ground.

  It was a classic example of too much weight at one end (the whole porch) and not enough (me) at the other. I did manage to chip off a few more small rotten bits but they weren't enough to fill up that Dumpster.

  Not by a long shot. Soon I was standing there wondering if maybe I could just hire a construction crane from the marine terminal and get it to deposit the old porch into the receptacle whole, which was where I'd gotten in the project when my father drove up in his battered pickup truck.

  “Set yourself a task, I see,” he observed, sticking one big hand into an overall pocket and strolling over to me. His other hand held a heavy-duty drill; more foundation work, I realized. I'd dreaded even going down to look in the cellar.

  So I hadn't. “Yeah.” I swung the hammer again. The impact vibrated up my spine and made my eyeballs bobble around as if I were a cartoon character, while the board I'd hit moved upward about a sixteenth of an inch.

  “I don't know, though. This is taking forever. I might,” I admitted reluctantly, “have bitten off more than I can chew.”

  He eyed the project. “Maybe. But maybe not.”

  Inside the entryway lay the tools I'd gathered up at the end of my last work session. My father examined them, first picking his way up the ruins of the porch. It was safer with the rotten bits broken off; at least now you could see where your foot was going to go through.

  He came out carrying a pry bar. “Dad, you'll never be able to—”

  “Just watch.” With that, he smacked the top of the board with the sledgehammer. The board flattened back down onto the support it was nailed to.

  But the nailhead stayed up a little, because he hadn't hit the nail. He'd hit the board. So now there was about a sixteenth-of-an-inch gap there, between the nail and the wood.

  Not much. Just enough so he could slip the crowbar's claw tip under the nailhead.

  “Oh,” I breathed, beginning to get the idea.

  But not yet the whole idea. Next he inserted the sharply curved, pronged end of the pry bar under the nail. Then he leaned hard on it, using the bar's curve as a fulcrum so the pronged end pulled the nail upward.

  Creaking loudly, the old nail slid almost all the way out of the board, freeing the board from the porch structure.

  Whereupon he handed the pry bar to me. “There you are. Go thou and do likewise.”

  The whole project had been transformed. Now I only needed to hit each board twice; once from below, once on top. “Yes,” I said, eager to get to work on it again.

  But he wasn't finished with me. “You lookin' around for that little girl that's gone missing?”

  Wade had told him, I supposed. I got the feeling they talked me over more than I'd have liked knowing about, every so often.

  “Yes,” I said again, “but I'm not having very much luck with that either.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “Girl's about the age you were when you went,” he commented.

  When I took off from the aunts and uncles who were raising me, he meant; my mom's folks. At the time, I hadn't seen my dad in thirteen years.

  They'd told me that he was dead. I sat on what remained of the steps and after a moment he sat down beside me. “Different situation, though,” I said.

  He laughed a little bitterly. With his long gray ponytail and a red bandanna sticking out of his overalls pocket, he still resembled a nice old jeans-wearing, long-haired ex-hippie-type fellow left over from the sixties, not a care in the world.

  Which he wasn't. “You never know,” he said. “I mean, about situations. I guess you must've thought yours was the worst.”

  “Mmm.” That spurred my own bitter laughter but I kept it inside. He didn't know what the worst was; no one did, and even now that we were on comfortable terms I had no intention of telling him.

  Or maybe because we were. “That's all in the past,” I said, deliberately letting him off the hook again.

  All alone in Manhattan at age fifteen, I'd had ridiculously good luck: decent waitressing jobs, streetwise pals who hadn't hustled me or worse. Eventually I got into school, married Victor, had Sam, and started making some serious money as a financial professional.

  All of which led me in a roundabout way to Eastport. Then, just when I'd decided my father really must be dead, he'd showed up again, no longer a fugitive but still on the run in his heart.

  “I don't know, though,” I said. “I mean whether or not we—Ellie and I, that is—can possibly find Wanda Cathcart.”

  Changing the subject. He caught it, shot me a look. You couldn't put too much over on a guy who'd survived thirty years on the wrong side of a wanted poster. “You don't think she's maybe with some of the town kids?”

  “Sam's been asking them. Checking in their places, too, this morning.” He'd phoned just as I got home to tell me so: no luck.

  “But you know kids,” I went on, repeating the rest of what Sam had told me. “They might hide one of their own. But not somebody none of them has any loyalty to. And especially not an odd duck like Wanda.”

  He nodded, picking apart a scrap of rotten porch board with his work-hardened fingers. “Sure. Give her up in a heartbeat. Do a favor for the cops, then maybe get off easier sometime when one of them gets in a little bit of trouble.”

  “Exactly. If they had her, they'd have told on her by now.”

  As I'd been thinking pretty much from the get-go, but never mind. Across the yard, bluejays called echoingly to one another in the treetops.

  “And I doubt I'll get to talk to this Mac Rickert guy who might be involved in the drugs they found in the house, either. He's supposed to be pretty elusive.” Assuming he even had anything to do with Wanda's disappearance.

  My dad got up stiffly. On autumn days like this one you could tell his old bones were starting to creak.

  “So,” I sighed, “maybe it's all a waste of time. Maybe I should quit. Because if Sam can't find Wanda and the ladies putting up posters can't find her and the cops can't find her, I don't see how we are going to . . .”

  I stopped. He was smiling again but the look in his eyes was sad. Sometimes I thought he actually knew my whole story without needing to be told.

  Knew too that no matter what I said now, I wasn't quitting on Wanda. The way he—or so I'd believed for years—had quit on me. He took up the pry bar again.

  “Thing is,” he said, “you haven't got the weight to knock that porch board off with the sledgehammer.”

  His turn to change the subject. I watched while he banged another board up, smacked it down again, and pulled the nail out.

  Again the board came free easily. “That's what tools are all about,” he said. “Add mechanical advantage to your brute force, get the right angle on a thing, multiply the weight you do have.”

  It occurred to me that by being here so often and working on my old house, my father was getting the right angle on me. Adding, as he would have put it, some mechanical advantage.

  Which he must have felt he needed. And the truth was, now that the novelty of having him around had passed, I still wasn't so sure he didn't.

  “It's all physics,” he concluded. “Which is just a fancy way of talking about how the world works. Figure that out, it'll lead you, when you're stuck, to maybe a better tool.”

  How the world works. My mouth felt dry suddenly; despite my chat with Marge I didn't have the faintest idea how Wanda's world worked.

  Maybe I should find out. “So,” I said, my mind already percolating with the possibilities of this
notion, “what're you going to do about the old box from the foundation, and the book you think is inside it?”

  His smile grew wolfish. You could still see in his blue eyes and in the contours of his age-lined face the amused confidence that must've been one of the first things to attract my mother.

  “Why, I'm going to get the book out of the box, of course.”

  He winked. “Physics,” he repeated, and with that he hefted the drill and strode off jauntily toward the back door, the one leading to the kitchen. It was the entrance he always used to carry his tools inside.

  I wondered if just possibly it could be because Bella was there. “Thanks,” I called after him. And then, “Hey, Dad?”

  I don't know what I wanted to say to him. I love you, maybe. Or possibly just Be careful. Don't hurt yourself with that drill.

  But as it turned out I didn't say anything because he didn't pause, only waved without turning back, having used up I supposed his supply of family intimacy for one morning.

  Such as it was. But that was okay; I was under no illusions about it. I mean about the fact—regrettable but still perfectly obvious to both of us—that I'd used mine up, too.

  Soon after Bella Diamond came to work for us I noticed there were places in my old house she wouldn't go.

  The third floor, for instance, where in a tiny room that I imagined had once belonged to a live-in servant the unmistakable fragrance of perfume had a habit of materializing. Nor would she visit the cellar in which a shallow pit showed the spot where a coal furnace had once stood, behind that the low unframed door to the coal bin yawning dark as a tunnel entrance.

  Once I thought I glimpsed a pale green light glowing deep in that coal bin. At the sight of it I'd abandoned my errand and hurried back up to the kitchen, not venturing to the cellar again until days later when the orbital sander I was using tripped a circuit breaker and I had to creep down to reset it.

  And then there was the cold spot lurking unnervingly on the front stairs, second step from the top. I wouldn't have minded so much except that every time I reached it—on my way downstairs, never going up—the same thought always popped unbidden into my head: Here's where he pushed her.

  And I was reminded of all that when I went in later and found Bella and Ellie in the kitchen with an enormous kettle, one I knew Bella must have sent Ellie to the cellar to get.

  “Rappie pie,” Ellie said by way of explaining the kettle.

  I'd pried most of the porch boards off and loaded them into the Dumpster. My shoulders ached and my fingers were stiff from gripping the pry bar, but the job was moving along again.

  “Beg pardon?” I paused in the act of pouring coffee.

  Rappie pie was an old traditional downeast Maine recipe, as delicious as it was laborious. Just for starters, the first line of the recipe read: Boil two chickens and a peck of potatoes, then squeeze the water out of the potatoes with a cheesecloth.

  “You mean buy some, right?” I asked, looking back and forth between Ellie and Bella Diamond. “Someone's made a lot of it for a fund-raiser or something?”

  Bella stood at the stove. With her henna hair skinned back into its usual ponytail, shirtsleeves pushed up, and her green eyes bugging in a combination of thyroid trouble, determination, and way more energy than your average highballing freight locomotive, she was boiling potatoes in the kettle.

  Lots of potatoes. “Have a doughnut,” Ellie said, distracting me with the bag of them she'd brought with her. But not so much that I couldn't see what she was doing: writing a grocery list.

  “Ellie, please don't tell me you're going to . . .”

  Good simple food, carefully created and consumed with great pleasure, was one of the things I'd learned to love most since moving here to Maine; farewell, nouvelle cuisine.

  But rappie pie was an exception in the “simple” department. If you put it on a TV cooking show, its preparation would take up all the episodes in a season. I looked over Ellie's shoulder.

  Chickens, the list read. Fresh green beans, mushrooms, lard.

  “For the piecrust,” she explained when my eyebrows went up at this last item. “Rappie pie needs a homemade piecrust.”

  I bit into a doughnut. Ellie got up before dawn to make them for George and his pals to eat in the truck while they were on their way to work.

  This to me sounded a lot like getting up and digging to China with my bare hands, but Ellie enjoyed it. Also, the minute I tasted the moist, buttermilk-and-molasses-flavored inside of this delicious morsel, I felt its energy flood my brain.

  Just as she'd intended. While I chewed, Bella put a lid on the potatoes, transferred a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer, and refreshed the dogs' water bowl.

  “Get 'em here, get 'em all eating and drinking, and get 'em talking,” she advised, wiping down all the cabinet fronts, the kitchen counter, and the inside of the oven in what Sam would have called one swell foop if he were here.

  Which he wasn't; I wondered if he was with Victor again. But then what Bella had said sank in.

  “Get who eating and drinking?” I demanded, taking another doughnut; the things were addictive.

  “Because I'll tell you this much,” Bella added, “there's a lot more to them people than meets the eye.”

  Then I got it; she meant the tenants. She and Ellie had been having a little discussion about them, apparently.

  I closed the doughnut bag resolutely. “Huh, that's a thought.” It went with my idea of trying to find out more about Wanda, too; I'd been wondering how I might manage that. “But d'you think they'd even come?”

  Ellie finished her list. “Are you kidding? After what you told me they fed you the other night?”

  I'd described the meal to her, with dismayed emphasis on the freeze-dried-potatoes part of the menu.

  “You could be right,” I said. “Once I tell them the kind of dinner we're having . . .”

  Ellie continued: “And I've been thinking a little more about your theory, too, and I've come up with a possible way to get in touch with Mac Rickert. Because maybe we don't know where he is, but he's got a brother. One we do know how to find.”

  “He does?” I said stupidly. And then, “We do?”

  So far today I'd rattled my own skeleton with an enormous sledgehammer, nearly drowned in a rowboat, and been the unwilling recipient of an old water main's suddenly released contents.

  Not to mention that spider, and I hadn't even had lunch yet unless you counted the doughnuts. “An accessible brother? But why didn't . . . why isn't someone already . . . ?” I'm not sure but at this point there's a good chance I began waving my arms ineffectually. “. . . out talking to him?”

  “Because nobody's searching for Wanda but us anymore,” Ellie replied simply.

  Hearing this, I thought yearningly of the cold water under that rowboat. Probably it was quiet down there, too.

  “Bob Arnold called a little while ago while you were out front working on the porch,” Ellie went on. “Based on their talk this morning with Marge, the state cops have decided that Wanda is a runaway, not a crime victim.”

  Oh, phooey. “Because she took stuff with her. A sleeping bag, her backpack . . .”

  The decision would lower the intensity of the hunt for the girl. And now when Marge went to them with the story about Wanda possibly being there during the shooting, the police would think it was just to get them fired up about looking for her again.

  Ellie nodded, her eyes on the kitchen clock. It was time to pick up Leonora from day care.

  “Sooner or later I'm sure the state boys will visit Joey—that's his name, Joey Rickert—and talk to him about where his brother Mac might be, just on the strength of those drugs,” Ellie said. “Combined, I mean, with Mac's reputation.”

  Which they probably knew about, even though I hadn't. But sooner or later might not be soon enough for Wanda.

  Ellie moved toward the door. “I've got to go now, but I'll do the shopping and call the tenants to invite them fo
r tonight. If,” she added, “it's okay with you.”

  “Fine,” I said tiredly; after all, I had to eat sometime. I could call Sam and have him bring Victor, as well. That way maybe I'd get a little advance warning if Victor decided to buy Sam an airplane instead of only chartering one.

  “So where's this Joey guy live?” I asked. Might as well get that over with, too.

  “In the boat basin,” Ellie replied; she'd known I would jump on the idea. “You know the boat, it's an old cabin cruiser with a rocking chair on the foredeck and the Jolly Roger draped over the side?”

  At this I felt my heart sink abruptly, which was what just about everyone in Eastport hoped would happen to the boat in question.

  “You're kidding,” I said, knowing she wasn't.

  “Nope. I'd go but I'm already late for . . .”

  She waved her satchel, stuffed full of baby equipment and clothes. I hadn't even had a chance to tell her yet about the oxycontin tablet. “So congratulations, Jacobia,” she said, “you're about to make your maiden visit to . . .”

  Uh-huh. To the ugliest, most notorious little bucket of rust in the harbor. I didn't know her owner personally but I knew of him, and everyone in town knew the boat's name. It was scrawled on her stern in a whimsical mix of capitals and lowercase black letters: GhOulIE gUrl.

  And I just hoped she wasn't going to take me on the voyage of the damned.

  Twenty minutes later I faced Bob Arnold across his desk. “Yeah, it's an oxie, all right,” he confirmed, dropping the pill I'd found into a plastic bag and then into a desk drawer. We were in his office in the old Frontier Bank building, just one door down from the Peavy Library.

  On my way I'd stopped in there to grab up another fact for the 1823 game, and come up with a nice one from an old Eastport City Directory they turned out to have on microfilm.

  Now I finished explaining to Bob how I'd found the pill, and where. “Which could mean one of the tenants brought the drugs, hid them in the crawl space, and maybe dropped one when . . .”

  But I didn't know when. “Whenever,” I finished inadequately.

  “Or whoever else hid 'em in the house, if that's where they were hidden, could've dropped it,” he answered at once. “Dibble, for instance, could've gone down there, retrieved 'em, then got shot on his way out.”