Nail Biter
Page 26
I reached out. “What is it?” His fingers closed around mine.
“Jake,” he murmured. “Do you forgive me?”
And for once I knew just what to say to him. “Oh, Victor,” I replied, letting a little impatience into my voice so he would be sure to believe me.
“Victor, you know I forgave you everything the first minute I laid eyes on you.”
When the recurring dream ended I lurched up in bed. Wade slept beside me, sitting up with his reading glasses slipped to the end of his nose and his book splayed open under his hand.
Outside a blizzard howled massively, gusts of wind shaking the old house. When I drew back an edge of curtain to look out, I found the windows thickly plastered over with snow.
Tiptoeing to Wade's side of the bed, I eased his glasses off and plucked the book from his fingers, then snapped the light out and crept from the room. As I went I heard him slide down under the covers and turn over in his sleep.
Passing the open guest room door I looked in, unable to stop myself. But of course it was empty, the hospital bed dismantled and taken away weeks earlier. Downstairs the dogs followed me to the dining room, where I flipped the light switch without result.
The storm had taken the power out, and I supposed the snow made it difficult for the town men to get to the generator. So I lit candles and placed them around the room; then, wrapping my robe around myself against the chill, I sat down with the book my father had dug from the cellar.
The cover felt soft, smooth as skin. Hesitantly I opened it, fear and wonder stirring together in my heart. Inside was line after line of writing in a fine antique hand, each consisting of a single name.
Ship's captain James Waldron, for instance, was the very first inhabitant of my house; his was also the first name in the book, which had been hidden—there'd been no evidence, according to my father, of any more recent tampering with that section of the foundation—for nearly two hundred years.
I drew my finger down a page, one of forty or so bound by hand into the volume. A tiny hole pierced them—the injury done by that drill bit of my father's wasn't fixable on the inside, as it turned out—but they were all still perfectly readable.
Following the old sea captain's came more names, line after line of them. The ink and the penmanship never changed, though; all the entries in the book had been made by the same person.
Turning the last page I paused, once more unable to believe my eyes. In a volume written and hidden long ago by an unknown person, for reasons as mysterious to me as the dark side of the moon, the final entry was as familiar to me as my own two hands.
Or my face in a mirror. A dreamlike feeling seized me but this was no dream. I put out my finger and traced the old lines of antique ink; so odd, so utterly impossible.
But the book was real, lying open before me.
And my own name was in it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, in the 1823 Federal-style house that helped inspire her books. She is currently at work on her next Home Repair Is Homicide mystery, which Bantam will publish in hardcover in 2007.
ALSO BY SARAH GRAVES
Triple Witch
The Dead Cat Bounce
Wicked Fix
Repair to Her Grave
Wreck the Halls
Unhinged
Mallets Aforethought
Tool & Die
NAIL BITER
A HOME REPAIR IS HOMICIDE MYSTERY
A Bantam Book / January 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Sarah Graves
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graves, Sarah.
Nail biter / Sarah Graves.
p. cm. — (A home repair is homicide mystery)
1. Tiptree, Jacobia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. White, Ellie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Women detectives—Maine—Eastport—Fiction. 4. Dwellings—Maintenance and repair—Fiction. 5. Eastport (Me.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.R2897N35 2006
813'.6—dc22
2005050368
Published simultaneously in Canada
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90223-5
v3.0