Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  No arguing with that. “Hear anything about Wanda?” Bob asked.

  I repeated the story Greg Brand had told me. “But nothing else,” I added.

  No sense rattling on about the Rickerts either, not yet. Because any theory, notion, or wild supposition I might be entertaining always had a way of sounding silly when surrounded by Bob's gray file drawers, his sputtering police-band radio, and his sheaf of wanted posters in their hanging clipboard.

  But then he surprised me. “The state guys're looking for a local fella, name of Rickert. Druggie type, they think he might know something about the pills.”

  “That so?” I said evenly. “I've never met him. Interesting, though. And that reminds me: How come the state police haven't wanted to talk to me yet?”

  He hitched his belt up. “They will. You're on their list, you and Ellie. Just not very high on it. That all you wanted to tell me, then? What you found in the cellar?”

  The Greg Brand info hadn't impressed him much, or anyway not enough for him to speculate about it with me.

  “Yeah, that's it,” I agreed. “How's your fellow doing? The one with the kids?” My own problems, after all, weren't the only ones anyone had to worry about.

  He grimaced. “Okay so far. Long as I keep my nose clean, keep checkin' off the chores on my list.”

  From this I gathered that even though the state guys didn't want him directly involved in their investigation, they were still keeping him hopping with a variety of associated errands.

  And he didn't like it. “Not gettin' yourself in any trouble, are you?” he asked, glancing at me sternly. “Asked you to have a look for the girl, remember, not go off half-cocked, get yourself into something you don't have the policing skills to handle the situation.”

  I wasn't convinced. Bob knew Ellie and me, knew too that half-cocked was pretty much our standard operating procedure precisely because we lacked policing skills. Follow your nose was the advice we went by; it was the only method we knew.

  So he'd understood what he was getting. But he couldn't very well tell us to go out and court trouble, could he? Meanwhile just having that oxycontin out of my possession made me feel a lot better. In fact, it made me feel almost as if I weren't in any situation at all.

  “I'll get the pill to the state boys, tell 'em where you got it,” he added. “And I'll pass it along about Brand. He's comin' in?”

  I nodded.

  “But right now . . .” His voice trailed off as I went out the door with him and he locked it behind us.

  I got the picture; more scut work. His squad car was idling at the curb. “Take care,” I called as he got in, but he'd slammed the door already and I didn't think he'd heard me.

  After he pulled away I stood on the steps a moment taking in the wide blue expanse of the bay, the marine smells of salt and creosote, and the sound of a bell buoy clanging somewhere. Across the street the flower shop's windows were full of autumn-themed arrangements, strawflowers and pompon chrysanthemums.

  Then I began thinking once more about what I might say to Joey Rickert. But bribing and threatening were the only two strategies I could come up with, and anyway, as I passed the old brick storefronts on my way down Water Street, I kept getting distracted.

  Wadsworth's Hardware store had a set of fine wood chisels in its window; sharp at the business ends and featuring scrimshaw bone handles, they'd fit nicely in my toolbox and were just what I needed for those doors at the rental property. Unfortunately, as I was standing there admiring them I also caught sight of my own reflection in the glass: lean face, short dark hair, straight nose, regulation mouth.

  Nothing special, though I didn't break mirrors. On the other hand, my clothes all looked as if they'd come out of a trash bin: faded jeans, a too-big gray sweatshirt with paint smears on it, a navy cardigan. Pure ragamuffin, in other words.

  The old city directory had informed me that in 1823 a dressmaker named Annie Hadley had kept a millinery shop upstairs from Wadsworth's present spot, and as I spared a last yearning thought for the chisels, I could almost hear her begging me to come in for a fitting.

  On the other hand, I'd also learned from the directory that she'd specialized in the kind of black dresses meant for women in mourning, fastened up to the chin with tiny black jet buttons. . . .

  And now I really was procrastinating; the GhOulIE gUrl awaited. So I continued on down toward the harbor, pausing only to inspect the Moran Building's windows, where silk scarves hand-stenciled with the shapes of ginkgo leaves spread like treasures of some Arabian Nights– inspired seraglio.

  This place too had been transformed since the 1800s, its upper floors once home to a tariff collector on one side and the mahogany-paneled, Belgian-carpeted consulting chambers of a local surgeon on the other.

  Everything in Eastport had been something else, it seemed, a long time ago. Ellie said there'd been not one but two secret societies in the room over the old drugstore, then a bookbinder's shop. The most recent had been part of a post–Civil War plot for an invasion of Canada, ten thousand men strong at its height in Eastport and surrounding areas alone.

  But the earlier group was even more curious. Its members were rumored to have odd symbols branded into their palms, to greet one another with strange foreign-sounding syllables, and to practice a ritual of peering into a looking glass in order to predict the future.

  As far as I knew, no record existed of what they might have seen, but as I passed the fish pier, where seagulls made perches of the wooden pilings and the tugboats resembled a pair of massive bathtub toys, I decided that if it really was the future they saw then it mustn't have made them happy.

  Because after shipbuilding went downhill, Eastport hit hard times. No longer could you buy a cigar, a grand piano, or French wallpaper in the shops on Water Street. Nor, I supposed, did the mysterious handshakes survive, though Ellie said the old men in town spoke of the secret society as recently as her father's era.

  Meanwhile the closer I got to the boat basin, the more the GhOulIE gUrl visit felt about as alluring as one of those dark visions glimpsed in the secret society's mirror. But the store windows up and down the street also featured computer-scanned photographs of Wanda Cathcart, on paper flyers stuck to the insides of the glass with cellophane tape.

  MISSING, the flyers trumpeted in big black capital letters. So I strode on past the small white cottage housing Eastport's biweekly newspaper, the Quoddy Tides. At the moment, the office overlooking the harbor was busy getting out the new issue, people inside visible through the windows squaring up freshly printed stacks.

  Next came Rosie's Hot Dog Stand and the cobbled launch ramp leading down to the water, and finally the brand-new Coast Guard building: big, white, and red-roofed except where the seagulls had already begun their job of anointing it.

  After which there was nowhere to go but down the metal gang to the floating docks; egad.

  The gang was steeply angled, the docks swaying to the subtle movements of the tide and waves. Which at the moment weren't so subtle at all, especially not when the Coast Guard's big orange Zodiac boat zipped swiftly into her mooring, sending a surge of fresh instability in my direction.

  It wasn't the first time I'd ventured onto the metal ramp, its surface dimpled with bumps that were supposed to make keeping your footing easier. Ellie's big, broad-beamed open boat bobbed only a couple of docks distant; she'd coaxed me onto it regularly over the previous summer, trying to get me comfortable.

  But it hadn't worked. Making my way down the ramp in baby steps, both hands on the cables that substituted inadequately for railings on either side, I envied again my friend's easy skill at all things watery. Wade said Ellie was the best amateur boater he'd seen, safe as houses and with the kind of deep, bred-in-the-bone instinct for sea and weather that turned a good mariner into an excellent one.

  Unlike myself. “Yeesh!” I said, stepping off the ramp, and grabbed onto a dock piling.

  It turned out to be a good move, since standing t
here with my arms wrapped around it gave me a chance to size up the GhOulIE gUrl at close range, while the Zodiac's wake subsided.

  As the turbulence calmed I inhaled the mingled aromas of boat exhaust, salt water, and fish, all floating on a breeze so freshly sweet you could've bottled and sold it.

  By contrast, the stench emanating from the GhOulIE gUrl was of trash and unrinsed beer bottles. Even the sea breeze didn't really dissipate it, just churned it around a little.

  “Hello?” I called. “Is anyone down there?”

  A face appeared in the hatchway. Eyes squinted at me painfully in the afternoon brilliance. “Yeah. Whadeya want?”

  Unshaven, shaggy hair uncombed, little scrim of dried spit in the corner of his mouth. I'd woken him up.

  “My name is Jacobia Tiptree, I want information, and if you're Joey Rickert I'm willing to pay for it,” I said before he could vanish belowdecks again.

  Bingo. “I'm Joey,” he allowed grudgingly. “Jesus, what time is it?”

  “Never mind that,” I said, stepping aboard without bothering to ask permission. He eyed me in annoyance. But he didn't push me overboard. Instead, he shielded his eyes with one hand to scan the dock area cautiously.

  I gathered there might be people Joey Rickert didn't want to run into, ones who might be waiting for him to stick his head recklessly up into the light of day.

  Something, anyway, was making him behave so carefully. He waved toward the fetid little hole in the water that he lived in. “Awright,” he conceded reluctantly. “You c'n come on down.”

  The cabin area was as filthy and unpleasant as I'd expected: pizza boxes in the galley, girly magazines on the floor, a pile of clothing heaped in a doorless storage locker.

  “You need to use the head, it's over there,” he offered in an oddly courteous gesture, flicking his wrist at a tiny wooden door with a crescent moon painted on it.

  Not on your life. “Thanks. But all I came for is to find out whether you've—”

  He stuck out his hand. “The money,” he said flatly.

  Yeah, I'd figured him right. I pulled out a twenty and his fingers clamped onto it so hard, I nearly lost my own.

  “Heard from your brother lately?”

  Joey squinted past me as if he feared I'd brought someone with me. But seeing no one in the bright square of hatchway light, he answered succinctly.

  “No. And if that's all you want, that's the easiest twenty I ever made.” He grinned, revealing teeth like smashed piano keys.

  Not much time for dental appointments in Joey's busy life. But the grin was short-lived as, spying something on the floor half hidden by a pair of grayish underpants, I kicked the garment aside and plucked it up.

  It was a pink plastic barrette. “Hey, Joey. What's this?”

  His lower lip pooched out sullenly. “Gimme that.”

  I stuffed it into my jeans pocket, praying that Joey was as ineffective at injuring others as he obviously was in the rest of his existence.

  But there was no sense pushing my luck, so I switched to a more conciliatory approach, even though the barrette made me feel like just clobbering him and getting it over with.

  “Joey, your brother is in trouble and I think I can get him out of it. But we've got to move fast.”

  Jeez, I sounded like a TV cop show. But how else could I instill a sense of urgency in him?

  Maybe a cattle prod would do it. Joey slumped down on the shaky metal step stool that was the cabin's only seating, other than the berth he used for a bed. “Mac's not in trouble,” he said.

  Oh, for Pete's sake. “Yeah, and you're not an idiot.”

  I'm not proud of what happened next; there's no excuse for it. But with that damned pink barrette burning in my pocket like a hot coal, I kicked the stool out from under him, then stood over him waving another twenty right in his beer-bloated kisser.

  “Hey, what'd you do that for?” he whined injuredly.

  I was two-for-two in the character-assessment department so far; the little jerk still didn't have the gumption to get mad at me.

  “To get your attention,” I told him. “Do what I say, you can have this and four more and Mac can pay off whoever it is he owes for the drug stash the cops confiscated after they found Dibble's body out at my rental house.”

  All pure improvisation; between paying Luanne and Joey Rickert, I was draining a lot of twenties from my cash stash. It would be worth it, though, if it got Mac Rickert into a position where someone could drop a net over him.

  Because maybe he had Wanda. But at my words Joey's whiskery face creased with the same animal cunning that a rat's does, after it smells cheese.

  “What about Dibble?” he demanded.

  “If Mac shot him, he's on his own about that. But at least he won't also be on the run from whoever fronted them the pills in the first place. All I want . . .”

  I pulled the barrette from my pocket, waved it at him. “All I want is the girl.”

  My working theory now being that Mac shot Dibble, Wanda witnessed the murder, and Rickert saw her witnessing it. And he couldn't have that, so later he came back and took her, using the storm for cover. Kept her here on Joey's boat, maybe, till the weather cleared.

  In which theory there were many holes, such as how did Mac know Wanda hadn't already revealed what she'd seen? And—since in fact she hadn't—why hadn't she?

  Furthermore I'd never seen Wanda actually wearing the hair clip, just one sort of like it, but it bolstered my suspicion that she—or some other young girl, and how likely was that?—had been aboard the GhOulIE gUrl recently.

  Joey got up off the floor. “You're crazy. I got girls here all the time, one must've dropped that hair thing.”

  Yes, I was sure the young ladies were lining up to be his guests on this floating garbage pail. Also, as he got to his feet Joey was thinking so hard, his eyes were practically crossed; he didn't like it that I'd found the barrette, and why would that be?

  “Joey, I'm sorry about what I did just now. I lost my temper. And from all I know, Mac's not even a bad guy.”

  Well, except for the part about the hole in Dibble's head.

  “Probably he doesn't even want the girl,” I said.

  Or anyway I sure hoped that he didn't. Hetty Bonham's idea that maybe Dibble's partner in the drug deal was a child molester still weighed heavily on me, too.

  But it wasn't a notion I was about to float for Mac's brother. That would probably get me tossed overboard.

  No, let's just keep it a clean, cash-on-the-barrelhead swap. “So I'll trade. The girl for whatever he owes on the drugs.”

  Which was when Joey Rickert dropped the mild-mannered scum-bucket act and sprang at me. “Yeah?” His hot, sour breath gusted into my face. “What if I've got a better idea?”

  For a boozy little lowlife he was surprisingly strong, and he hadn't forgiven me for kicking him off that stool. His hand fastened around mine, pried my fingers open as he slammed me hard backwards into the bulkhead.

  My head smacked a locker and it fell open, showering canned goods down onto my skull, as his grimy fingers closed around the barrette. Then he shoved me toward the hatchway.

  “G'wan, get outta here! You don't know nothin' an' you ain't got nothin,' so why'ntcha just get lost, huh? I don't need your aggravation and my brother don't need it, neither. Ya got that?”

  I stumbled out into the fresh air and daylight still holding the other twenty-dollar bill, until a hand stretched past me and plucked it away.

  I turned, indignant. His face confronted me defiantly.

  “Price of admission,” he snarled. “You come back here, I'll take it outta your hide.”

  To which there was really not much that I could say. My head felt as if someone had been dropping canned goods onto it and I was pretty sure my thumb had been sprained.

  I did manage a parting shot, though. “Tell Mac I was here,” I said once I'd gotten safely back up onto the dock. “Maybe he's got more brains than you. Like I said, I'm wil
ling to give him the money he needs in return for the girl, unharmed. No cops, no questions.”

  Joey snorted derisively, forty bucks ahead and with his sad, hungover notion of pride intact.

  “Sure,” he sniggered, bouncing unsteadily on the balls of his feet like some punch-drunk prizefighter, goofy with triumph. “How 'bout instead I tell him an' everyone else you paid me forty just to let you come down here with me?” he taunted.

  Yeah, how about that? I thought tiredly. Not many people in Eastport would be willing to believe it; Joey was just too awful.

  Still, there were some. And on top of the story about drugs in the Quoddy Village house—not to mention a dead body—as grist for the gossip mill I'd just raised my own standing another couple of notches.

  “Tell him, Joey,” I urged, turning away.

  But as I made my bruised, unsteady way back up the gangway I had little hope that he would.

  “Because I was stupid, that's why,” I told Wade soon after I got home.

  He frowned down at my cut forehead, gently dabbed some more antiseptic onto it as Monday watched alertly, whining a little; Prill the Doberman, that supposedly ferocious breed, had already left the room and hustled downstairs, unable to stand the sight.

  “Ouch!” I winced, tears springing to my eyes. But they were more from embarrassment than pain.

  I'd managed to slink past Bella Diamond and my father in the kitchen, then crept upstairs to the bathroom to try cleaning up the mess Joey Rickert had made of me. But Wade had been in the bedroom getting a clean shirt, and when he saw me the jig was up.

  “I should never have gone there alone, and I shouldn't have antagonized him, should've known a jerk like him can't stand—”

  “—a woman getting over on him,” Wade said soothingly, his fingers kind as he applied a square of gauze and adhesive tape.

  I examined his face in the bathroom mirror. “You don't sound very angry,” I ventured.

  At me, I meant. Because it had been dumb. Joey could've had a knife and the bottled-up rage to use it.