Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  Manslaughter, say, instead of murder. And although Merle Carmody had been a brute who couldn’t find a civilized thought with both hands and a road map, from there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the fact that Faye Anne had married him, hadn’t she, so what did that make her?

  Someone who could be made to look bad in front of a jury, that's what. A person who had, as Victor would probably say, bad judgment. It was the first dark color a prosecutor could use to start painting a damning portrait.

  Of, as Victor would say, a murderess.

  “That doesn’t mean he deserved it,” said Cold Fish Number Two. “Getting”—he cut a chunk of corned beef— “dismembered.”

  I take it back about those wives and children: spawners, definitely. This one was the primary investigator's assistant and compared to his boss he was Fish On Ice: dark, wavy hair, pitted skin, and very dark eyes without any discernable pupil, like a shark's.

  I poured more wine, tried gathering my thoughts before replying. But before I could complete this ambitious-some say hopeless—task, a voice from the end of the table spoke up:

  “Truth is, anybody here would’ve been right tickled to wrap old Merle Carmody's head up in butcher paper. Difference is, we’d of stuck it on a pike, first, set it outside of Town Hall for a week or three, let the seagulls fight over it.”

  It was this sort of pronouncement—swift, accurate, and bloody-minded in the good-old-fashioned, scram-if-you-don’t-like-it downeast Maine way—that made me proud to have married the man who was sitting there making it. Wade had proposed six months earlier, but we’d gotten around to tying the knot (or, as he so nautically put it, lowering the boom) only the previous week.

  Still, it wasn’t the way I wanted the table-talk heading. “This old house,” I began, trying to change the subject, “was built in 1823, the very same year that the poem ‘T was the Night Before Christmas’ first appeared in a small-town newspaper in upstate New York.”

  “Isn’t that fascinating?” Ellie commented brightly, catching my drift.

  But too late: George had interrupted his stolid chewing to agree with Wade. “Fella was bad business. Faye Anne used to come down where I was working, back when we were putting the furnace in the medical clinic. Beg me to steal them butterfly bandages from the storeroom down cellar. The ones they use to close cuts, instead of stitches.”

  “Because she couldn’t afford to get medical care?” This, I could see, fit right in with the DA man's idea of local household economics: all those snowmobiles.

  George had dark hair and the pale, milky complexion that runs in some downeast Maine families, and a bluish five o’clock shadow on his small, stubborn jaw. His knuckles were permanently grease-stained; in Eastport, George was the man you called if you couldn’t get hold of that duct tape fast enough.

  Now he looked patiently at his questioner. “No. She was ashamed. Old man hit her, she didn’t want folks to know about it. So I got the bandages for her.”

  Then he returned to eating his dinner, while the DA's fellows pondered what they’d heard. “So somebody might say she was justified? Even that it was self-defense, or could have been?” the assistant asked.

  “Absolutely,” I began enthusiastically, trying again to get the conversation back on track. But this time, Sam interrupted.

  “That's not what she's saying. She's saying she didn’t do it. Or doesn’t remember it. Anyway, what happened to presumed innocent?”

  I shot him a glance. We wanted them to feel sorry for Faye Anne, not angry at what they might perceive as deceptiveness, or defiance; not only the facts but the tone these guys presented them in would be important. But the damage was done:

  “She is, isn’t she?” Cold Fish Number One said complacently. “First statement was that she couldn’t imagine where all the blood had come from.”

  “And she did have a boyfriend,” Gill-Boy Number Two put in. “This guy she was seeing,” he added with a glance at his colleague, “Peter Christie.”

  He spoke as if women possessing boyfriends also had the number “666” tattooed in hidden places on their bodies. Or at least that juries could be brought around to believing that they did. Peter Christie was just about the last person I’d have wanted these two to run into.

  But: “Wait a minute,” Sam protested. “Peter isn’t a boyfriend. Not what you mean by a boyfriend. Besides, Faye Anne is—”

  Married, he’d been about to say, stopping only when he realized that was the point in the first place: marrying a bum like Merle was blameworthy enough, in some eyes. But cheating on a bum…

  Well, that was a hanging offense, or it could be if you presented it to that jury properly. Because when you came right down to it, this was all about perceptions. And about winning and losing.

  Mostly the latter. “Peter Christie is a computer repair guy,” Sam said, trying to end what he’d started and becoming indignant in the process. “He's not hooking up with any married women. Why should he? He's from California” Which to my son was like being the Dalai Lama, but with sun! And fun!

  “Sam,” I said, and at my tone the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. A boyfriend was bad; a promiscuous one could be even more damaging. But as they explained over coffee and baked apples with maple syrup and cream, our guests already knew all about Peter Christie.

  A recent Silicon Valley transplant who’d moved here to Eastport and set up, just as Sam had said, in computer repair—as a sideline he also fixed copiers, fax machines, and mobile phones—Peter hadn’t waited for the DA's men to find him and ask their questions. Instead I gathered that he’d sought them out and insisted on spilling his guts, incriminating Faye Anne more than ever, so as to clear himself of any possible suspicion.

  Not, of course, that Peter had put it quite that way. But due to his forthcomingness the DA's men now knew things we might have preferred that Peter had kept under his hat.

  Such as, for instance, that Faye Anne didn’t believe in divorce. And that despite Sam's opinion, Peter had been in love with her, or so he’d maintained; that he had begged her to leave Merle and marry him. But she’d refused, and in the end he’d told her that they would have to stop seeing each other. With Merle in the picture, Peter said he’d told Faye Anne, further contact between them would only go on hurting them both.

  “So,” Ellie summed up unhappily. “The way Peter tells it, the only way she could be with him would be if Merle were to leave. Or die.”

  Sam shot a contrite glance at me. But, I realized now, it didn’t matter; the government guys had known all that Sam or any of the rest of us might’ve clued them to, and more. Not that picking up personal facts was all they had accomplished:

  They’d already taken photographs, bagged up the apron and gloves Faye Anne had been wearing, and sent Merle's remains down to the medical examiner in Augusta. They’d talked to the neighbors and taken all the cutting tools out of Merle's shop, too, they indicated, and they would go over Faye Anne's house one last time in the morning.

  And that would be that. “Wrapping it up” was a perfect phrase for their day's activity; not information, but confirmation, was all these two wanted.

  Of the obvious: that she had done it. “What a guy,” George said, meaning Peter Christie. “Real bail-out artist.”

  My thought exactly. What I didn’t know was how come these fellows were telling us all this? It didn’t seem usual, so I asked them about it.

  “It's not, I suppose. But it's no big secret, either. Christie's not bound to keep quiet about anything he told us. And if’ it came to trial, the defense attorneys get it all anyway. We have to tell what we’ve got,” the DA's primary investigator said.

  “But you think there won’t be a trial because of…”

  He gestured with his dessert spoon. “The battered-woman aspect. Juries don’t like chronic abusers, and everyone in the county knew the victim was one, just from what we’ve heard already. So she's probably going to get offered some kind of a deal.”

&n
bsp; “She’ll plead to a lesser charge and accept a sentence, no matter what she says now,” his second-in-command declared, scraping up the last morsel of baked apple.

  But Ellie was shaking her head: no, she won’t. And these two guys worked well together, but to my ears that last comment had sounded rehearsed; I decided we were being played.

  Then Joy Abrams spoke up unexpectedly. “Peter Christie might not exactly be the right one to believe, where Faye Anne Carmody is concerned.”

  “Joy,” Victor said, “are you sure you want to discuss this? It's really not the sort of thing…”

  Victor liked his women to confine their conversation to suitable topics: cooking, sewing, flower arranging. The evening wasn’t going as he’d planned, either, although the government men had given no sign of recognizing his name—contrary to his belief, people the world over didn’t spend all their time thinking about him—so he’d relaxed a little.

  Joy touched his hand lightly, silencing him. Under other circumstances this alone would have been worth the whole evening; silencing Victor ordinarily requires a brickbat.

  “Peter's a stone liar,” she said. “And a flatterer, sort of a… a serial romancer, but with a twist. He likes women, all right. Just not in a nice way.”

  She swallowed some wine. “Don’t ask me how I know. I’m not going to tell you. It was told to me in confidence. But I will say, if Faye Anne turned Peter down she's smarter than I thought. He's trouble. You be careful of what he says, is all.” Then, to me:

  “Dear…” Dee-yah: the downeast Maine pronunciation.

  “I just can’t thank you enough for the truly wonderful dinner.” Dinnah.

  Victor's little pinch-purse mouth kept opening and closing as Joy went on: “I keep telling him he was a fool to lose you, Jacobia.” She laid the accent firmly and properly on the second syllable; I do so enjoy people who know the difference between a woman's name and the seventeenth-century English historical period.

  Although strictly speaking it is a man's: James, in Latin, though my mother wouldn’t have realized. She spent her girlhood in a Kentucky hill town, never learned much history except maybe for Russian history. But that was later and another story.

  Joy looked around at the dining room's tiled hearth-apron behind which glowed a fire of cedar logs, at the red candles nested in balsam in the table's center piece, at the old brocade curtains gleaming richly before the windows. Mistletoe hung on the door to the butler's pantry, and she smiled a little at that.

  “Everything's lovely. I just adore boiled dinner and nobody makes it, anymore. Baked apples, too. And real cream, wasn’t it? You whipped it for us from scratch?”

  By then I’d have told her that the moon was made of green cheese, if she’d wanted me to. Because the thing about Joy, I was starting to think, was that she was real. Not faking anything; genuinely herself. It was that more than anything else that made her so beautiful, I thought.

  Willetta got up as if linked to Joy by an invisible cord. “Thank you,” she said colorlessly, and followed her sister.

  Accompanying them to the hall, I glanced into the front parlor where Monday was circling the best chair nervously, her ears flat and the hairs on her neck-ruff prickling defensively. Seeing me emboldened her to put a paw up onto it-Monday is allowed on any furniture that will hold her, except for the guest beds—but at the last minute she lost courage again and turned tail, whining.

  “Oh, Monday,” I said sadly, and she skulked out to the kitchen as if embarrassed by her own cowardice.

  Meanwhile George had retreated to the back parlor for football on TV, carrying a cup of ice to soak his sore thumb in. Tomorrow he would get plenty of cold on it; scalloping season had opened and with the church pipes thawed, the generator repaired, and the materials for his own house repairs undelivered, he was going out on one of the boats.

  George worked, Ellie said, the way other people breathed; now the rest of the men got up to join him, hungry for scores.

  “Joy,” I began slowly while Victor was in the hall retrieving their coats; it was none of my business. But I already liked her a great deal.

  “Don’t,” I heard Victor say distinctly to Willetta from down the hall, “be such a baby.”

  “Victor has a way of making you feel…” I hesitated.

  “Special,” she finished my sentence accurately. Her cologne was L’Air du Temps. “Like you’re the one, after all the others, that he's been looking for.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And I don’t want to be the one who…”

  “Puts a hitch in his git-along?” Her laugh made me like her more.

  “Yes,” I admitted, “exactly that.”

  She patted my arm. “Don’t worry, dear. I’ve been paddling my own canoe for a good while, now.”

  I’d been right about her age, I saw; much younger than her hair and elaborate makeup made her appear. But her eyes were intelligent and there was a kind of seasoned hardness in them, so I believed her when she went on:

  “It's going to take lots more than Victor Tiptree to capsize me.” She glanced down the hall. “Listen, about those state guys—”

  “What about them?”

  Joy looked uncomfortable. “A friend of mine was having a few drinks in Duddy's Bar out on Route 214 last night. You know the place halfway to Meddybemps?”

  I knew. Duddy's was a dive; thick smoke, loud music, a pool table full of cigarette burns in the back room. A place for people who were banned from other bars; bikers, hookers, and drug dealers: oxycontin, methamphetamines.

  Thinking of it reminded me that my view of downeast Maine was a privileged one: that of a person safe inside a warm house after a good dinner. But not everyone around here was so lucky and the unluckiest salved their wounds with booze or pills.

  I also knew that Victor had been tied up in surgery the night before, working on a logger who’d been hit with a whole tree over at the lumber mill's debarking machine, on the mainland.

  So Joy had been on her own. “Your, um, friend,” I prodded gently. “What's she got to do with those state guys?”

  “She saw them there. Both of them. Stuck out like sore thumbs, even though they weren’t wearing suits at the time.”

  I could imagine. The dress code at Duddy's ran to jeans so greasy you couldn’t see what color they were, boots that looked as if they’d been used to stomp rival gang members, and T-shirts bearing slogans so foul, you wouldn’t clean the bathroom with them. People said it wasn’t a matter of if Duddy's would get raided, but when.

  “I don’t think,” Joy added carefully, “they saw her.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ellie said, coming up behind us. “We didn’t find Merle till this morning. And it's six hours to get here from Augusta. I did think they made it pretty fast. But what were those two doing around here last night?”

  “Who?” Victor wanted to know, appearing with the coats. Willetta came along with him, sulkily. I had a flash of just what a burr under his saddle she must be, grumpy and seemingly ever-present.

  “No one you know, dear,” Joy told him sweetly. “Why don’t you go out and get the car started, warm it up a little?”

  “All right,” he agreed, and went.

  “What kind of drugs are you feeding him?” I asked. “The change is miraculous.”

  “We’ll see,” Joy responded, which was when I knew she understood what I’d been saying earlier: that Victor in the first, fine flush of infatuation was one thing. Long term, though, he was something else.

  “Anyway, they’re sure not telling you everything,” she finished, meaning the state guys. “Better watch out for them.”

  Which I’d already figured out, too. Still: last night?

  “… incredible stuff people are selling,” Sam was saying to Tommy. “You can buy the right to perform a hit song in public, or a snow globe with Charles Manson's face glowing inside, or cancer drugs.”

  On the Internet, he meant, from which I gathered that his semester-break independent stud
y project was moving along okay. Entitled “Weird or Wired? E-commerce in the 21st Century,” it was an examination of exactly what he was saying to Tommy: the stuff people bought and sold on-line. Only secondarily and perhaps subconsciously was it a joke on his own dyslexia. I wasn’t even sure he’d noticed the anagram—yet.

  Then in a final flurry of thanks and farewells, Joy and Victor were gone, along with Willetta. The investigators left soon after, proffering chilly handshakes. So I was free for postdinner analysis in the kitchen with Ellie.

  “How can they be done already?” she complained. “Aren’t they going to dust for fingerprints, or look for hair samples, or…”

  “Why should they? It's not like on TV, where every crime scene gets gone over with tweezers and a microscope. They’ve already got a suspect, so it's a matter of resources. And of confidence, which they’ve got, too.”

  “I guess so,” she conceded reluctantly. “But…”

  “And ‘no trial,’ my aunt Fanny,” I said, drying a relish dish. “Expert testimony gets bought and paid for like anything else, along with the expenses of the expert: travel, lodging, and anything else they can think of, to fatten the expense sheet. You get it if you can pay for it, and you don’t if you can’t. And Faye Anne isn’t going to be able to afford anything remotely like that, and I’m sure they know it.”

  And nothing else, I felt sure, would induce the offer of a deal. “They just thought if they told us a lot of stuff that didn’t matter,” I said, “or that probably wasn’t so; like that business of her maybe pleading to lesser charges, we might say something that did matter. Make her look worse, and make their lives even easier than they already are.”

  “It's true. I don’t think they start out by offering deals to people who chop people up and put the pieces in a butcher shop counter,” Ellie agreed disconsolately. “Besides, I know her. She’ll never say she did it if she didn’t.”