Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  Without warning a sob rose into my throat; I forced it back. “Wade, what if Mac Rickert's really got that girl somewhere right now and he's just gearing himself up to . . .”

  “Hey, hey,” Wade murmured, trying to comfort me.

  But it was no good. All the fears Wanda Cathcart's situation had reawakened in me were boiling to the surface.

  Including the ones I wouldn't reveal. In particular Hetty Bonham's words kept haunting me, triggering old memories. They find other creeps like themselves . . . his consolation prize . . .

  Wade hugged me hard, then pushed me away from him, seizing my shoulders so he could look into my eyes.

  “Jake,” he said helplessly.

  He didn't know what was wrong or how to fix it and that was terrible for him. I could see it in his face.

  Because he was always on my side, no matter what. “Jake, if you wanted me to, I'd go down and smack the living daylights out of Joey. In fact I've got half a mind to do it anyway,” he said.

  Monday shoved herself between us consolingly as I dragged in a wet sniffle, trying to get control of myself. Going to pieces never helped anything.

  Never had. “No, I don't want you to get your hands dirty. I'm not really hurt. And anyway, I started it. He could have me arrested for assaulting him, for heaven's sake. I just feel like an idiot, that's all.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “Yeah, well. I know how it is when your subconscious gets hold of a problem.”

  I felt myself go still in his arms. “Missing kid, right away you think of Sam, how he used to disappear for days at a time in the city. Makes you feel the same way as then, I guess,” Wade said.

  “You're right,” I agreed. “That must've been it.”

  I should have told him the truth right then, of course. But it is a character flaw of mine that I'd rather be burned alive than pitied, especially by someone I care about.

  Wade didn't seem to notice anything amiss. “Just don't put yourself in that position anymore,” he added.

  I couldn't believe he was taking this so well. “Okay. And the head feels much better, thank you.”

  He let go of me. “Smacking Joey wouldn't make him more talkative, anyhow. He's as loyal as a terrier to his big brother Mac, always has been.”

  Of course Wade knew Mac; Joey, too. Like Ellie and George, Wade had lived here in Eastport all his life.

  “Not that Joey's loyalty is worth much, but there's always the chance he will tell Mac what you said,” Wade continued as we went downstairs together.

  In the kitchen Bella ignored us, zipping busily from stove to refrigerator and out into the dining room. Peering in there, I saw the table set with the good china and silver, and the last of the autumn snapdragons from the garden arranged in a centerpiece.

  Fresh birch logs lay on the hearth, too, and new candles set into the chandelier promised the kind of light that always makes everyone lovely.

  “Oh,” I said, my aching head momentarily forgotten.

  “Yeah, huh?” said Wade, catching Bella's eye appreciatively as she hurried on to some fresh task.

  “So anyway, don't give up yet on maybe Joey helping you out on this thing,” he said when she had gone.

  Bella bustled back in, stopped in front of me, and wordlessly put a big glass of seltzer and ice with a slice of lime into my hand. She really was a very good housekeeper.

  “But,” Wade added when she'd gone, “from what you're telling me, you don't know the barrette belonged to Wanda and you also don't know that Dibble and Rickert were partners in drugs or any other scheme, either. Something else could be going on.”

  Something, his tone implied, that didn't necessarily merit my going off the deep end.

  It was what Ellie had tactfully implied the night before, too; that maybe I was getting too preoccupied by all this. And that she didn't understand why, which she liked even less.

  Wade took my glass and had a sip from it, then handed it back to me.

  “Something else entirely,” he said.

  There were still a couple of hours left before our guests arrived, so when I'd finished my seltzer I went out to bash at the porch some more. Every jolt of the hammer sent a throbbing surge of pain through my head, but I needed to hit something.

  And the porch didn't hit back, unlike some other obstacles I'd hurled myself at lately, though even with my dad's new method it still resisted very stubbornly my ongoing efforts to dismantle it. Hauling on yet another of the old boards, I reflected how shaky a structure could seem until you tried knocking it down.

  Or how solid, until you stepped in the wrong place and your foot went right through.

  Like me. I swung the hammer viciously in full view of the street, not caring who saw me making a fool of myself. And as it turned out, that was just what the job needed; soon only the side supports remained, so soft they broke off when I pulled on them.

  Then they were gone, too. I was muscling the last one up over the side of the half-filled Dumpster when Ellie came out with an aluminum lawn chair in one hand and the baby in her other arm.

  “Hi,” she said, and sat down on the chair with the baby in her lap.

  The baby wore a red long-sleeved tee, a navy jumper with an American flag embroidered on the bodice, and tiny little sneakers in blue denim over red socks with red-white-and-blue cuff trim.

  “Hi, yourself,” I replied, wiping hastily at my face with my sleeve.

  Ellie gave no sign of having seen that I'd been weeping as I worked. But after a minute she pulled some tissues from her smock pocket and held them out to me.

  “Blow,” she commanded.

  I obeyed. “Thanks.”

  She didn't ask what was the matter, either; Ellie rarely did. As a result people told her things they'd never dreamed of telling.

  But not this time. She just sat silently again as I finished cleaning up the remnants of porch.

  There wasn't much left; a few wood scraps, some brick chips from an earlier time when the porch had apparently been held up by masonry, and a heap of newly exposed leaf mold, thick and darkly ancient.

  “Okay,” I said finally, dusting my hands together. But just then the baby laughed, waved her arms around, and began wiggling as if trying to escape.

  “Leonora,” Ellie admonished the infant smilingly, “what are you going on about?”

  Which was when I too spied the tiny yellow gleam that had attracted the baby's attention, shining from between the layers of leaf mold. I picked it up as Ellie came over to peer at it with me.

  “Wah!” Leonora said, reaching out. It was an old gold coin, just one edge of it eye-catchingly bright. Rubbing grime from it, I exposed the number 1823.

  The year the house was built. “Oh my gosh,” Ellie breathed when I showed it to her. “That's weird.”

  “Yeah. Someone dropped it here. Or put it here.”

  A long time ago. “What's that?” Ellie pointed at the coin's back. The front showed a man's head: George IV, probably, the king of England at the time.

  “I'm not sure. A man and a sea monster?”

  Then the answer popped into my head; I'd had a client once who collected old coins. “Saint George and the dragon,” I said.

  Across the lawn, late-afternoon sunlight caught in droplets from the storm still clinging to the grass blades, creating tiny mirrors. Ellie hoisted the baby over onto her other hip.

  “How'd it get here?” she wondered. “Maybe a worker dropped it or something when they were building the house?”

  “I don't know,” I said doubtfully. “This was a lot of money back then.”

  The coin-collecting client had known a lot, and even then I'd had what's called in the money business a head for the stuff. So facts about cash stuck with me.

  “Maybe about ten dollars,” I said. “And that was at a time when a good dinner cost about a nickel, a night in an inn maybe a dime. Two thousand or so in today's money.”

  “Wow. That's a lot to lose.” The baby put her head back and yod
eled cheerfully, singing to the sky.

  “If it was lost. If it wasn't put there on purpose,” I said. “Sometimes the old builders did that sometimes, left something of value inside a wall or under a floor. Like a kind of good-luck charm for the house.”

  Or an X-marks-the-spot. I didn't know why the idea occurred to me so strongly, but it did.

  “I guess it means that even long-gone things can be found again,” said Ellie.

  “People, maybe, too,” I agreed.

  Or so I hoped. I dropped the thing into my pocket, felt it weighing there, and wondered whether the old piece of gold might also help restore my peace of mind.

  But I didn't expect this. With few exceptions I'd given up on magic a long time ago, or it had given up on me.

  Same difference.

  Chapter

  8

  Old Horeb Cathcart,” Ellie's husband George Valentine said that night at the dinner table, “was a water witch.”

  He'd learned while being introduced to Marge Cathcart that she had family connections in the area. Now he was enlarging upon the topic while she and the other Quoddy Village tenants met rappie pie.

  With, I thought, varying degrees of pleasure. “Though I've noticed it ain't takin' no magical mumbo jumbo to get some of 'em to eat it,” Bella Diamond observed from her post in the kitchen, on the other side of the butler's pantry pass-through.

  “Now, Bella,” I said, trying not to smile, “keep your voice down.” I handed her some plates. “Seconds on these, please?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “I'll bring 'em in. Need to fill up Dr. Tiptree's glass, anyway. You want another bottle out?”

  “Yes,” I said, momentarily worried. Victor's appetite, ordinarily so dependable, was picky again tonight. But unlike the last time he'd been here, he was drinking more than usual.

  “Horeb could find water by holding a branch out, seeing how it felt to him in his hands. When the branch bent down, he would say ‘Dig here,'” George continued as I sat down again.

  “Oh, come on,” Greg Brand reacted skeptically. “That's just old wives' tales.”

  Bella's glance at him was deceptively mild as she put filled plates in front of Wade and Jenna Durrell and placed a new bottle of wine on the table. Chicken and potatoes baked with gravy in a pie pastry, green beans, and rolls plus spiced cranberry sauce and a relish dish had hit the spot with those two, anyway.

  But Victor poured another glass of wine immediately, having pushed his plate away. I looked a question at him but he only smiled dismissively, then reached to pat Monday, who blinked up at him in surprise at the gesture.

  “Wives' tales or no, people would find water,” George said. He ate some chicken and potato. “And water wasn't all Horeb Cathcart found, either. Back when I was a little boy he went out to try to find a missing child. For hours people'd searched all over the island till at last someone thought to ask Horeb.”

  “And?” Marge Cathcart asked breathlessly. The story of a lost child must have flown like an arrow to her heart; I was surprised she had been willing to sit down at a table with Greg Brand at all.

  “He cut a willow switch,” George said, and drank some wine. “Put his hands on it, followed that twitching tip out to the edge of the kid's parents' yard, into the brush and trees.”

  Noticing that Victor had begun petting Monday, Prill leaned in on his other side. I braced for the explosion of fuss-budgetry to erupt from Victor.

  It didn't. “Then what happened?” Ellie wanted to know.

  George picked his cap up from where he'd set it by his plate and turned it thoughtfully in his hands. “Horeb followed that switch through the underbrush till it led him to an old well they'd all forgotten about. And when he looked down—”

  “Oh, come on,” Greg Brand interrupted. “You're just trying to put one over on—”

  “When he looked down,” George repeated, “there was a little boy clinging onto a tree root, bawling his head off, only nobody had heard him. You couldn't have heard him, 'less you stuck your head over the edge, leaned way down in there.”

  At this, even Wade paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. It seemed he hadn't heard this story before either.

  “And the way I know it's true,” George said into the silence at the table, “is that the little boy was me.”

  “George,” Ellie said. “You never told me that.”

  He shrugged. “Quoddy Tides has an old photo of me hangin' on that root while the men lowered a line. Had a time gettin' me to grab it. But when I got more hungry than I was scairt, I did.”

  Victor got up, taking care not to step on any dogs. “Quite a story,” he remarked, patting George on the shoulder genially. “Glad you made it out of the well.” Then, offering his apologies all around, he excused himself.

  I went to the door with him. “Are you all right?”

  He hadn't even wanted any of the quince jam, though I'd offered him some. Now his eyes were bright; with wine, I thought. And one of them was bloodshot.

  “Got something in it,” he explained the redness. “I'm going to go home, wash it out. I've got an early morning tomorrow, too, so I should call it a night.”

  His words weren't exactly slurred but they weren't crisply enunciated, either. “You're not driving, are you?” I asked.

  I stepped onto the back porch with him as Sam pulled up in the street out front in Victor's car, tapped the horn gently.

  “He's taking me,” Victor said. “Thanks for dinner.” Pulling me nearer he planted a swift, chaste kiss on my forehead.

  Throughout my whole history with Victor I might as well have expected a thank-you from one of those dogs. I wanted to ask what was going on, but he hustled down the steps and out to the car.

  “You're welcome,” I said into the night as it disappeared around the corner.

  When I returned to the table Jenna Durrell was telling Wade about her adventures in boat rental; it seemed her struggles with rowboat navigation had been nothing compared to the hard time she was having learning to run even a small outboard engine.

  But she was cheerful enough about it. Meanwhile Greg Brand gave the rest of the table the benefit of his knowledge regarding, it seemed, just about everything; at the moment he was pontificating about food.

  “. . . peasant cookery,” he pronounced condescendingly, a lofty wave of his left hand indicating the rappie pie.

  He took another greedy bite of it, continuing as he chewed. “It's a bowdlerized version of the higher-class form of the dish, altered to include whatever game meat happens to be available to the working folk.”

  “Bowdler,” George pronounced appreciatively. “That's some kind of a hat, isn't it?”

  His own was an old black gimme-cap with the words Guptill's Excavating embroidered on it in orange script.

  Greg didn't answer, rolling his eyes—I guessed that at the high-class meals he was used to, this constituted good manners—while beside him Jenna went on working on her second helping.

  “Go on,” she told Hetty Bonham. “Your diet won't fail on one night of decent food.”

  But Hetty remained hesitant. With her blonde hair teased in glamor-queen style and her nails polished tomato red, she wore so much eye makeup along with her fake lashes it was a wonder she could even see her food, much less notice its likely calorie content.

  “I suppose,” she allowed doubtfully, forking up a green bean and eating it, then favoring the rest of us with a big smile as if this were a photo op.

  “I remember rappie pie,” Marge Cathcart remarked sadly. She wasn't eating much, either.

  “My great-aunt used to make it for Sunday dinner when we visited her. She was from New Brunswick, just over the Canadian border from here,” she explained.

  George finished his buttered roll and looked for another; I handed him the basket of them. After a day out fixing whatever had gotten broken in the storm—a fallen gutter, a split tree, or a strip of shingles peeled from the slant of an old roof—he was hungry enough t
o eat the gold off the rim of his plate.

  “So you must have heard the stories about Horeb,” he said.

  “He was my husband's grandfather,” Marge agreed. “I never met him but the family said he did even more than find water and lost kids. He was,” she said, scorching Greg Brand with a look that dared him to disagree, “a talker to animals.”

  “I did hear one time that he had a tame fox,” Ellie put in. “But I don't know if it was true. I was little when he died.”

  “Brought him rabbits.” George nodded. “I know it for a fact. Fox hunted for him, he was so old an' poor by then he couldn't get meat no other way.”

  George cast a sideways eye-flicker at Greg, whom he had not forgiven for the comment about low-class food. “He used to give my folks some of the rabbits when he had more'n he could use. But like I say, he was an old man by then.”

  He ate part of his roll. “Last time I saw Horeb he was out at Ship's Point, sittin' way out there on the high rock, all by himself.”

  He took a final sip of his wine. “Anyway he was alone if you don't count the lynx by his side, and what I was pretty sure was an osprey perched on his arm like one o' them trained birds, what do you call 'em?”

  “Falcons,” Wade supplied quietly. There was a long moment of silence around the table as a sudden vivid picture popped into my head, not of old Horeb Cathcart the talker-to-animals, but of his great-granddaughter Wanda.

  With that bat. Somehow the memory gave me hope, and when I looked across the table at Marge I could tell she was thinking something similar: Wanda was a strange child, and maybe in some way none of us could imagine, her strangeness would help her.

  But then Greg was talking again. “Sorry, but I can't swallow that nonsense,” he said. “Turning some old codger into a myth is all you're doing, and—”

  George interrupted him smartly. “Come on, Greg, aren't you a magic teacher? Got these here folks to pay up for your expensive seminar, teach 'em to harness their powers and so on?”

  He gave the word “powers” just enough of a twist so we all knew what he thought of Greg and his seminar. Then, without waiting for an answer: