Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  They hefted her in, then pulled away with sirens howling.

  “Did something trigger this?” I asked Jenna Durrell when we were back inside.

  She shook her head impatiently. “No. She was a walking time bomb, is all. You could practically see her blood pressure going up, she kept forgetting to take her medicines, and . . .”

  And I'd thought the last time I'd seen her that she wasn't well. We went out to the kitchen, where everything was spotless, only a single undried cup in the dish drainer indicating where Marge had been interrupted in her self-assigned chores.

  “Where were you when it happened?” Ellie asked Jenna.

  Meanwhile, in the living room, Hetty and Greg were arguing about whether or not they should go up to the hospital.

  “You don't even know the woman,” Greg insisted. “You just want to playact the role of the anxious friend in the waiting room,” he accused.

  “Out on the front steps,” Jenna told Ellie. “Just sitting there trying to keep my head on straight. Because between Marge's anxiety and the gruesome twosome in there, it's been . . .”

  She put her hands flat on the kitchen counter. “I could get a bus home to Massachusetts. Almost did it today. But then Marge would've been alone with them and I didn't quite have the heart for that,” she finished.

  Wade and Bob Arnold came in together, Bob wearing the “let's wrap it up” look his face took on when his duties were done but people still wanted to talk.

  “What're you all doing out here?” he wanted to know when he spotted me. I wanted to tell him, too. But now wasn't the time, not when all three remaining tenants were listening.

  “Just thought we'd come visit,” I said.

  Bob shot a funny glance at me and I could see him getting the notion that there was more, then deciding to let it go for now.

  “Right,” he said skeptically, not mentioning the message I'd left for him, either. Then he took off in the squad car, leaving Wade and Ellie to occupy the tenants while I had a peek around the house.

  A thorough peek.

  “At least we didn't have to explain to Marge why we'd left Wanda out there,” Ellie said as we drove home a little later.

  “Small comfort,” I said distractedly. My search of Marge's bedroom had yielded a surprising result. “Ellie, when you have to take pills, where do you keep them?”

  “Kitchen windowsill,” she replied promptly.

  Which was what I'd expected. Everyone I knew who took pills on a regular basis kept them somewhere like that, so they'd see them and remember. Only not Marge Cathcart.

  Jenna had said Marge forgot to take her medicines, and that meant Jenna and probably the others as well had known of her need for them. Yet when I examined her quarters . . .

  “I gave Marge's room a going-over.” I held up two small orange plastic bottles. “And these were inside the base of her bedside lamp.”

  Wade turned interestedly. “So she was . . .”

  “Yep. Hiding them.” I tucked the bottles back in my pocket; when we got home I'd give the hospital a call, let them know what medicines she'd been on.

  “Not at first, or Jenna wouldn't have known about them. But it looks like maybe once Marge got to know her housemates a little better . . .”

  Ellie took the long way home, to Dog Island through Bayside Cemetery. On clear nights you could see up the Western Passage to New Brunswick, but tonight the only view was of clouds pierced by the strobing beam of the Cherry Island light.

  “. . . she put them away,” I finished. “Maybe she was worried about them, that someone might steal them or tamper with them?”

  We drove between the deserted sidewalks and tall darkened storefront windows of Water Street, turned onto Key Street past the Happy Landings Café and Peavy Library, its big diamond-paned windows reflecting the yard lamps of the Motel East.

  “Only now we can't ask her,” I said. “I'm not even sure why I snooped around in the house in the first place, except . . .”

  Except that there was still something important I wasn't getting about all this; something missing.

  Like for instance an obvious villain. Because I'd had a good look at the way Mac Rickert behaved with Wanda on Tall Island. Their body language, at any rate: not predatory or threatening on his side, not frightened on hers.

  For which there had to be some reasonable explanation. But I couldn't imagine what it was, and as long as I didn't know, I still feared for her.

  Big-time. As I got out of the car at my house, the air seemed heavy with impending calamity and the fog drifting in the street didn't help; going inside, I wished I'd paid more attention to Marge when I'd had the chance.

  I couldn't have consoled her; nothing could do that except her daughter's safe return. But I could've listened to her. If I had, maybe I'd know more than I did right now.

  Because, I thought, feeling the pill bottles rattling in my pocket, maybe Marge hadn't been such a foolish woman after all.

  The railing assembly for an outdoor stairway consists of the posts, the balusters between the posts, and the handrails. I knew this because I'd read it in one of the many how-to-build-it books I'd collected.

  Reading them, unfortunately, was easier than following them. But the morning after we found Wanda on Tall Island, I needed a hands-on project.

  Thus, after making some coffee and drinking it as calmly as I could, then taking the dogs outside—pausing to savor the pure, deceptively clear island morning with the air like spring water and the sun just now rising over Campobello, on the other side of the bay—I hauled my tools outside to the front of the house.

  “Okay,” Bob Arnold had replied when I'd called him as soon as we got home the previous night. He'd picked up the phone right away, not asking how we'd found Wanda or why I hadn't mentioned it to him at the Quoddy Village house, either.

  Just: “I'll let the state boys know and they'll take care of it.” Click. Which told me that one of those state boys was in his office right that minute, ears pricked alertly.

  And that it was out of my hands.

  The lawn's crisp frostiness showed my indented footprints as I walked on it; winter was coming. A border of clouds lay like cotton batting on the horizon, the edge of the approaching storm having drifted sneakily toward us overnight. In the neighborhood nothing moved yet, shades still drawn in the silent windows of the old houses around mine.

  But loud nailing wasn't on the agenda today. Instead I opened the long red toolbox containing my ratchet kit, which was a set of tools for screwing or bolting things together.

  So all right, now: the posts. These held up the handrails, or would once I'd bolted the posts to the stringers. I'd bought precut four-by-fours about forty inches long so I'd have enough to cut them at the proper angle. And George had drilled half-inch holes for the hex bolts, so my second task was simply putting bolts through the holes and tightening them one after the other; easy-peasey.

  The first part was harder, though: holding the railing up at the angle I wanted it, then marking the sides of the posts to be cut so the rail could rest atop them. This did require noise, and a certain amount of terror as well, since the post cuts needed a circular saw: my personal old-house fix-up nemesis.

  But the way I felt, I could either run the circular saw or roar on out right this minute to Tall Island, guns a-blazin': not a good plan. So I took the posts back off the stringers and laid them across a pair of sawhorses, and fired that sucker up.

  Whang! There is nothing like the ferocious metallic sound of an operating circular saw, cutting either a four-by-four or the hand off your forearm, whichever it hits first. I cut the posts as fast as I could, before my bravery ran out and also before the neighbors started leaning out of their windows cursing a blue streak at me.

  When I bolted the four-by-fours on, for a wonder they fit into their places perfectly, and they were cut at the correct angle, too. This I thought might have been my ration of good luck for the day, but never mind; now all they needed were the
railings, which the book said to attach using galvanized nails.

  I looked at the nails, and at my claw hammer, then around at the houses inside which people were just getting back to sleep after the racket of the saw.

  On the other hand, at various ungodly hours I'd been woken by dogs barking, engines starting, and people summoning other people out late at night by leaning on their car horns.

  Recalling those times, I gathered the claw hammer, a handful of nails, and one of the railings. There was no possible upside to the idea of driving to Tall Island.

  None whatsoever, I told myself. Which was when Bob Arnold pulled up in his squad car and my luck ran out.

  “GhOulIE gUrl turned up this morning,” he reported. “Drifting. A lot of gear on her, camping stuff and so on. And a shotgun.”

  Uh-oh. “They found Joey Rickert's body floating a couple miles away,” he added.

  I put the hammer down. “What about Wanda?”

  “No sign of her. Mac either. Looks like Joey fell over the rail. Hit his head, maybe—he's got a big scalp wound. Drowned.”

  “So you think Mac spotted you,” my father said half an hour later at his place, a down-at-the-heels bungalow on Prince Street with a workshop out back.

  “Must've,” I said bitterly. The workshop was in what had once been a small concrete-floored garage, made over to include a woodstove, plenty of hanging tool storage, and a variety of old salvaged kitchen cabinets for the flotsam and jetsam guys with workshops always tend to collect.

  “Ellie heard him saying he wasn't leaving. Not yet. So why else would he change his mind and get out of there so fast?”

  Why, indeed. Because we'd spooked him, that's why. He just hadn't let us know we had.

  “He must've taken off as soon as we were gone and the coast was clear. Dad, how did I let all this get so screwed up? Now the cops think Mac killed Gene Dibble and Joey, and Wanda Cathcart's more missing than ever.”

  “Hmm,” he said, frowning down at the project he'd been working on when I arrived, under the set of hanging fluorescent lights installed over his workbench.

  With the help of some of the town men who'd been working on the water pipe at my house, he'd taken home the big section of old foundation with the wooden box still encased in it.

  “Things've got to get worse sometimes, 'fore they improve,” he offered.

  Old Maine license plates, glossies of classic cars, and cheesecake-calendar pictures of actresses from a bygone era were thumbtacked to the shop's interior walls, courtesy of the previous tenant.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “I've got half a mind to go down to Bob Arnold's office right this minute and tell the state cops the whole—”

  “Oh?” he interrupted coolly. “Tell 'em you met with Rickert and his brother, followed the brother around, now the guy turns up dead? You do that, I can tell you what tomorrow's headline'll read, Jacobia.”

  Right. I felt my shoulders slump. Drug House Owner Eyed in Pair of Suspicious Deaths . . .

  Not the news I wanted all my neighbors absorbing with their morning coffee. Also, once I started talking, it would come out why I'd been doing all that, and Bob Arnold's guy here in town would lose his kids.

  “Chief Arnold hasn't brought you into it already, though? Not a word about your involvement?” my father asked. He got out his rock tools from one of the kitchen cabinets: chisels, a bunch of miniature pickaxes in various sizes, plus a hammer.

  “No, he'd just have the same problem. Owning the rental house isn't enough reason to get Ellie and me snooping as hard as we've been doing, and with them being detectives and all, you know they'd tumble to the fact that we were doing it because he wasn't being allowed to,” I said.

  “So Bob said it was an anonymous tip?” my father concluded.

  “You got it,” I agreed. “That's exactly what he told them.” If you didn't already know it was a lie, I supposed it was reasonably believable. Or anyway, it was working so far, according to Bob.

  “At this point they think Joey was in on the drug deal with Mac and Gene Dibble, and Mac's been eliminating his partners,” I went on. “But if you knew those guys at all, that wouldn't make sense. Mac didn't murder his brother, I'm really pretty sure.”

  “And you know this because . . . ?” His tone was skeptical.

  “Wade says those two have been loyal to each other their whole lives,” I explained. “And I believe it. Heck, all I did was badmouth Joey one time, and Mac jumped all over me.”

  But then I paused; no sense going into detail about exactly which time that was. My dad was as sensitive about my safety—or the absence of it—as Wade.

  “Besides, Mac needed Joey's boat to get off Tall Island.”

  This notion seemed to interest my father. “Did he, then? Get off the island? Cops searched the whole place?”

  He had a point. “Well, no, they didn't. They found the campsite. No one was there. Then I guess Joey's body turned up out on the water and that diverted them.”

  To put it mildly. And since the tip about Mac's whereabouts had been anonymous, they'd decided not to canvass the entire island's difficult terrain on the basis of it, turning their attention instead to the evidence they did have: another dead man.

  “And Mac didn't actually need Joey to get off the island,” I amended. “Mac's own boat's big enough for around here. But to get clean out of the area, somewhere he wouldn't be recognized right off the bat, the GhOulIE gUrl was Mac's only option.”

  “And now it's gone.” My father eyed the big chunk of granite and mortar now occupying his workbench, raised his stone chisel consideringly, and brought it down with a metallic clink!

  A much bigger section of stone than I was expecting flew off it and whizzed across the room, tearing a paper chunk out of Rita Hayworth's left thigh before landing in the corner.

  “Right,” I said. Another chisel strike; a section of mortar cleaved off like an iceberg calving off a glacier. “You know, you really are pretty good at that.”

  He looked at me, amused. “I've had,” he said drily, “a fair amount of experience.”

  Stone masonry being a fine way to support yourself while you are on the run; plenty of work, few questions asked, and payment in cash at the end of the day if that's the way you want it.

  “Anyway,” he said, eyeing his task again, “what I think is that if I was Mac Rickert at the moment, I'd be doubling back.”

  It was why I'd come to see my dad in the first place: to get his read on what an experienced fugitive might do under similar circumstances.

  A successful fugitive. But now I just stared at him. “You mean you don't think Mac left Tall Island? That he's still . . . ?”

  “Yup.” He put down the chisel. “Because you said yourself his own boat isn't big enough to go far. And if I was a cop it's probably the last place I'd check again, at least for a while.”

  Where a tip hadn't panned out . . . it wasn't a great option but it was among the few available to Mac Rickert right now. So it made sense.

  And it was worth a try. But at the door I paused, struck by a question that popped into my mind out of nowhere.

  Along with the courage to ask. “Dad, do you think Mother would've forgiven you? I mean, if she'd known . . .”

  If she'd known in advance that his radical activities would result in her death, in the explosion of a house everyone thought he'd blown up, accidentally or deliberately. That was why the Feds had chased him for so long; they'd thought he was responsible.

  I'd thought so, too, until I learned different.

  “Your mother,” he said softly, “forgave me everything the first minute she laid eyes on me.”

  He hesitated, meanwhile testing the blade of his chisel with a callused finger. I guessed I wasn't the only one with memories too painful to scrutinize closely.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it's not other people forgiving us that's so difficult. Or us forgiving other people.”

  He examined my face. “When you get to be my age you
might even start thinking it hardly matters who did the bad deed in the first place,” he went on.

  “Hard part's forgiving ourselves for not being smarter or stronger or . . . whatever fault we think we had, or we're afraid we had, that let the bad thing happen at all,” he finished.

  He glanced up at the bare hanging bulb over his workbench. “In my case it was lack of imagination, I guess. When I was a young man I thought I was a bad guy, the worst there was.”

  But he'd been wrong. There were much worse.

  One of them had killed my mother, while trying to get at him. “You think about these things too much, they'll drive you crazy,” he said, picking up his chisel again.

  It was a long walk home past the old white clapboard houses of town, many with piles of autumn leaves already heaped against their foundations and plastic sheets stapled over their windows against the coming winter. But I was glad for it, thinking over what my father had said.

  Mac Rickert ought to have been miles away by now. If he had any sense he'd have left Wanda behind to make his escape. But instead he'd stubbornly stayed here with her right up until last night.

  If not longer. Which meant not just Wanda but something else about Tall Island was important to him.

  Only . . . what? His reasoning seemed as impenetrable to me as the old well George Valentine had fallen down, back when he was a boy and the talents of Wanda's water-witching ancestor, Horeb Cathcart, had been required to locate him.

  Too bad I couldn't call Horeb for help now. If the stories were true he might've sent a posse of animals to terrify Mac and escort the creature-loving Wanda to safety.

  Instead the escort would have to be me. And if what my dad had suggested was true, probably the rescue had to happen pretty much right this minute.

  “Mom?” Sam's voice came from the front parlor as I went in.

  “What're you doing here?” I asked. The dogs appeared, galumphing down the hall at me affectionately, and Cat Dancing yowled a welcome.

  “I needed to talk to you,” Sam said as I bent to greet the canines. He followed me into the kitchen, where I'd begun mentally listing the equipment I meant to take with me: a life jacket, an outboard engine—in the cellar was a little seven-and-a-half-horse Evinrude that I thought I could muscle into my car trunk—and a gun.