Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  I’d been thinking more that Faye Anne didn’t remember. But:

  “Never, ever,” Ellie finished, soaping a coffee cup. “So what did you think of Joy Abrams? To look at her now, you’d never know she was the same girl who left Eastport. Her hair is so fancy, you can’t even see where it's connected to her head.”

  “I thought,” I began, meaning to say that this time Victor's reach might possibly have exceeded his greedy little grasp. But I never got the chance to finish:

  Outside, holiday carolers were fa-la-la-ing from the back of a pickup truck, up and down Eastport streets. The season was in high gear, though by the sound of it the pickup was struggling mightily to get out of low. A series of loud backfires exploded in the night like a string of cherry bombs.

  “Mom.” Sam put his head around the corner. “Sorry about my big mouth in the dining room.”

  “That's okay,” I said. Outside, the truck backfired again. “No harm, no foul.” But then I focused on him; back in the city he’d been in a little trouble, but now he was healthy. Clear-eyed and energetic.

  And he had good friends, here. Tommy was upstairs waiting for him; I gathered they were going to be a team on the Internet project. “Hey. I’m glad you’re home.”

  “Me, too. Anything in the fridge?” Without waiting for an answer he bounded past me to forage for nutrition; it had, after all, been half an hour since we’d finished dinner.

  Then: “Mom, do you think Tommy should have his ears fixed?”

  I turned in surprise. “Is he thinking about it?”

  Sam shrugged. “Sort of. He says they’re freaky looking, and there's a clinic in Bangor that sent out some sort of bulk-mail brochure, gave him the idea.”

  I’d seen the brochure, too, tossed it out without reading it. “I think Tommy's ears are fine,” I said, only crossing my fingers a little bit. Tommy worked the fish pens for an hourly wage and few benefits, and was helping to support his mother. “I’m sure your father would be happy to talk to him about it, if he wanted. But that surgery is expensive.”

  Sam grinned. “Yeah. I hope he doesn’t do it. I told him they make him lots easier to find in a crowd.”

  Which I wasn’t sure was quite the variety of reassurance Tommy had wanted, but before I could say so Sam had taken his supplies—sodas, a box of cookies, apples, and a bag of potato chips—back upstairs to share with his friend.

  When he was gone, Ellie got out two of Wade's bottles of ale and sank into a kitchen chair. “I let her down, Jake. I should never have let Faye Anne stay with Merle. I should have gotten her out of there.”

  “So should we all have. But it's too late to do anything about it, now.”

  Ellie is ordinarily a sweet, kind person, but every so often she gives me a look that would etch glass. “No, it's not.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, backpedaling. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe if we spend all our free time on it, we can work up some kind of convincing argument for extenuating circumstances, enough to make even what's happened seem like-well, not so much what it is. But Ellie…” I tried a last time to escape doom. “I’ve got a son home from college, a house that needs attention, a dog acting spooky, a new husband…”

  After marrying Victor, I spent most of what was supposed to have been our honeymoon in the waiting room of the neurosurgery suite at NYU Medical Center. Our nuptials were apparently the signal for every fool who thought he could drive a Harley to find out otherwise, with predictable results.

  “… and besides, it's nearly Christmas. I wanted to get the tree, buy presents and wrap them, do some baking, and…”

  Ellie just fixed me with that penetrating gaze of hers, so unfoolable that you could set her up at the CIA and use her to detect spies.

  I gave in to her scrutiny. “And I need time to figure out how I can get a wedding ring and an engagement ring,” I finished. “Diamonds, in platinum settings.”

  Ellie looked at me as if I’d admitted that I wanted one inserted through my nose. “Jacobia, I had no idea you were such a traditionalist.”

  Charitably, she didn’t snicker. Usually, I’m more the type who would want a new tool belt. “Yeah, well. Make fun if you want to, but I notice you’re wearing one.”

  She glanced at the plain gold circlet on her left hand. “But this is different. It was George's grandmother's, and his mother wore it, too, so it has…”

  Then she looked at me, her gaze softening behind her thick glasses. “History,” she finished. “Oh, I see.”

  After she died, my mother's wedding ring went to her family in Kentucky, where one of my uncles traded it for a winter's worth of firewood and kerosene. Well, they’d needed to keep warm; I’d put it out of my mind.

  Mostly. “Anyway, I want them and I’ve been trying to figure where Wade and I can get the money for them. Because buying your own rings all by yourself isn’t a bit traditional, is it?”

  Also, much of the money I’d had when I got to Eastport was spoken for now: Sam's college fund, an investment in Victor's trauma clinic, an emergency fund for the house, all untouchable. With what was left I could just about rub two nickels together. “Besides, Wade wouldn’t hear of it. So I wanted to think about rings, not about murder.”

  “I do believe,” Ellie said thoughtfully, “that to make Wade feel less manly you’d have to hit him pretty strategically with one of those whole trees, over at the debarking machine.”

  True. “You know he’d still want to be in on it, though. And I’d want that, too. But even if shipping stays strong so there's plenty of harbor piloting, and navigation repairs start bringing in more cash…”

  In Eastport, the phrase spare money is an oxymoron for almost everyone, Wade included. Besides harbor piloting and equipment fixing, he also had a gun-repair shop in the ell of the house. But even the three jobs together just about kept him solvent.

  “I thought I’d have time to come up with a plan,” I finished inadequately.

  Ellie nodded and was probably about to say something useful, as a knock came at the back door. Those carolers, I thought, looking around for something to offer them, because when people are out riding in the bed of a pickup truck, freezing their posteriors off to spread a little holiday cheer, I figure they deserve substantial refreshment.

  But when I opened the door, I found no carolers standing there. In fact, it wasn’t anyone spreading any sort of cheer at all, Christmas or otherwise.

  It was Peter Christie.

  Chapter 4

  If you don’t get a warm spell you can’t keep the streets clear in Eastport, if by “clear” you mean a dry snow-free surface of the kind people in other cities are accustomed to enjoying. Because frozen condensed humidity (augmented by sleet, freezing rain, freezing fog, freezing drizzle, and the many other Maine meteorological delights whose common denominator is “freezing”) tends to accumulate.

  Thus what you get here soon after the plows pass is a smooth, deceptively sand-streaked surface that offers about as much traction as a toboggan slide. But minutes after Peter Christie showed up on my porch I was careening along those icy surfaces in his old Ford Falcon, hanging on for dear life while remembering what George had once said about Peter and women: that the man had more spares than a bowling alley.

  More balls, too, from the way he was driving. “What's your hurry?” I groused, slamming both feet onto the imaginary brakes as he sped to a stop sign and tromped his own brake pedal at the very last instant.

  “Sorry,” he said, and took off more sedately, spinning his wheels no more than we all did when snow had been recent.

  “Now that you’ve got us out here, maybe you’d like to tell us a little more about what we’re doing,” Ellie suggested.

  Peter was slim, dark-haired, personable, and equipped with the loveliest confidential smile you ever saw in your life: in its glow, one felt both adored and adorable. The trouble was, the smile had more miles on it than the Ford, and everyone in Eastport knew it.

  “To get Faye Anne's diary
,” he told us. “At her house.”

  Oh, great. All he would tell us at my place was that it was “an emergency,” something to do with Faye Anne's “predicament.”

  So I’d been against coming out with him, but Ellie had been bound and determined. And I couldn’t very well let her do it alone. If I needed help, Ellie might not quite walk on water, but she would try.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before, but I didn’t know who all was still at your house and I certainly didn’t want anyone else overhearing,” Peter said. “It’d be disastrous for her if anyone found out about it.”

  “What makes you so sure it won’t be disastrous if we do?”

  Now that he’d saved himself by throwing Faye Anne to the wolves, I didn’t have much faith in his opinion of what might help her. But at least he’d slowed down, so the holiday decorations on the elaborate old houses we passed were more than colored smears:

  Eight plywood reindeer pulling a sleigh up the steeply pitched roof of a carpenter Gothic. Ribbons circling the pillars of an old Greek Revival. A Queen Anne mansion with stars on its far-flung gables, looking vast as an ocean liner in the darkness. In its heyday, Eastport's well-to-do citizens had built whatever sort of dwellings they might fancy, and bigger was better.

  But he hadn’t answered my question. “What makes you so sure,” I persisted as he pulled into the alley behind the Carmodys’ house and shut off the engine, “that we’ll keep it a secret?”

  He turned the ignition key enough to put the dashboard lights back on. In their glow, his features were as classically modeled as the old architecture all around us. But his eyes were shadowy pools as he paused to compose his unhelpful reply and I thought again of what Joy Abrams had said of him: that he was a liar.

  “Look, Faye Anne's in trouble. And I think I’ve helped put her there.”

  Wow, as Sam would have said; brilliant deduction. But before I could reply aloud Peter picked up on my mental skewering of him.

  “They were going to come and ask me, you know.” The state guys, he meant. “It's not like they were going to ignore me, or not find out about me. Hell, in this town you can’t even go for coffee with a woman without people talking.”

  He frowned. “Especially a married one. Just because I was seeing her, it got so I couldn’t walk down the street without people looking at me. Going to the post office was an ordeal, even before this. And now it's going to be worse,” he complained.

  Right. And it was all about him, wasn’t it? Inconvenience he had to suffer, embarrassment he might be required to endure. Never mind that he wasn’t in a jail cell, right before Christmas.

  I controlled my impatience. “But there was more than coffee? The talk was accurate—you two were an item?”

  He looked sulkily at his hands: long, tapering fingers and neatly clipped nails. “Yes. I’d never felt that way about anyone before.”

  Mm-hmm. I glanced back at Ellie. Word was, Peter always had at least two women on the string, so when he got done with one there was another all lined up, ready for action. But he was speaking again:

  “It wasn’t any of their business, people who talked about us.” He slammed his fists onto the steering wheel, in the sort of spoiled, ladies’-man frustration I recognized from living with Victor. “It wasn’t fair.”

  Sam used to say that a lot, too. But I understood. When you first come to Eastport, it's easy to believe that its active gossip mill is an amusing but ultimately inconsequential feature of local life. After a while, though, some of the gossip inevitably starts being about you.

  And that, as they say around here, is what separates the culls from the keepers. “So, what's in this diary?”

  We were still sitting in the car because for one thing, this was a dumb idea; I’d come this far but I’d already decided that I wasn’t getting out. For another, I could see Kenty Dalrymple's windows from where the car was parked, which meant Faye Anne's neighbor could also look out one of them and see us. “Back the car up about fifteen feet,” I told Peter.

  “What?” He frowned, but did as I asked.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, you tell me what's in the diary that you’re so worried about, or I’m going to reach over there and lean on the horn until the cops come or your ears start bleeding, whichever happens first.”

  He flinched, and I noticed with pleasure that my “do it” voice still worked. But he still didn’t answer directly.

  “Anything seem funny to you about the method?” he mused. “I mean, cutting him up like that?”

  “Poetic justice,” I snapped. Something about Peter Christie had really begun getting on my nerves. Maybe it was the “I’m such a sweet guy” crap he was exuding from every pore.

  Or the way he kept evading my questions. Also the dash-lights were still on but the heater wasn’t.

  “Hey, buddy. My feet are cold. Get on with your story and make it a concise one, please. Or take us home.”

  Ellie still sat in the backseat: no comment. But I knew she was listening. This wasn’t the first time we’d found ourselves in, shall we say, unusual circumstances.

  By which I mean murder. People do it, here, and try to get away with it, too, just like anywhere else. And in the snooping department, Ellie and I had our division-oflabor routine pretty well written up and initialed. Maybe Peter believed we wouldn’t be blabbermouths because, in all the strange stuff Ellie and I had been involved in, we were always so far on the side of the underdog that we practically had fleas.

  Still, what Faye Anne really needed was a lawyer, not a pair of sympathetic but officially powerless Eastport women, teamed up with the dubiously motivated town Lothario, on a goofy mission. It all made me almost decide to insist on going home immediately.

  Almost; instead, I glanced down at my ringless left hand, illuminated in the dashboard glow.

  “I don’t want to say anything. I want you to look at it, and tell me what you think,” Peter said stubbornly. “I want your opinion.”

  I want, I want. Now he sounded like Victor. “Well, isn’t that special?” I began sarcastically, but just then a blue-and-white Eastport squad car went by in the street behind us, tires squeaking on snow.

  It gave no sign that its driver had seen us, though, not slowing. And with any luck, Kenty Dalrymple hadn’t noticed that we’d backed up, but hadn’t driven away.

  That she might not have seen us at all was way too much to hope for; Kenty was famed as a combination surveillance-and-public-address system.

  The squad car didn’t come back.

  “And you have to see it here,” Peter went on, ignoring my remark. “We certainly can’t take it with us.”

  But we could break into the house and rifle through the diary's contents, maybe muck up evidence… “Yeah,” I retorted, “let's not do that. It would be wrong.” Oh, this guy was a hoot.

  Still, I was curious about that diary. And Ellie was sitting there, waiting patiently for me to decide. But neither of those things were what really turned the trick for me in the end. It was Faye Anne, herself. Alone and in trouble she reminded me of someone I barely remembered, someone I hadn’t been able to help.

  Because when that help had been needed, I’d been only three years old.

  “And let's not get too comfortable with the first person plural, either,” I told Peter irritably, getting out. “We are not a team.”

  He slammed his car door. In the snow-covered neighborhood it sounded like a bomb going off. “Oh, for criminy's sake,” I protested.

  “Sorry, sorry. I forgot. I’m not used to this kind of thing.”

  “Sure, everything else in your life is so well ordered,” I shot back.

  “Ssh,” Ellie interjected quietly. A porch light had gone on two houses away. We stood rooted. The only sound was the breeze clickety-clicking in the frozen branches of the mountain ash tree in Faye Anne's yard.

  When the light went out we hurried to the butcher shop door. The key was still under the mat where I’d replaced it; the s
tate guys hadn’t found it. I let us in and closed the door hurriedly behind us. If the door to the kitchen was still hooked, this errand was over.

  The door opened, the three of us tiptoeing in like cartoon burglars. “Okay, where is it?” Of course we couldn’t switch on any lights, but the streetlight shone in enough to show the shapes of the furniture, so we wouldn’t break our necks.

  The stove fire had gone out and the central heating had been left on only enough to keep the pipes from freezing; it was cold as a tomb in here, the air faintly metallic smelling.

  Rank, actually; like meat that has begun spoiling, then gone into a cooler too late to keep it from being ruined. Suddenly I wished I were home where I could wash; my hands felt sticky again and my stomach did a slow, warning roll.

  “I don’t know,” Peter confessed. “Somewhere in the house. She's showed it to me, I’ve even read parts, but I don’t know where she keeps it.”

  “Oh, terrific. Anybody ever tell you you’re not one of the great minds of the century, Peter?” The sticky feeling faded. Right about then if I’d had a cleaver I’d have put him in that cooler.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he said huffily, “but I thought you could help find it. You two are supposed to be good at that kind of thing. And if you don’t want to, why did you agree to come?”

  “Never mind,” I told him. My motives were none of his business. Simultaneously it occurred to me that Faye Anne hadn’t been the only one with a reason to kill Merle. If Peter really loved Faye Anne, or thought he did, he had one, too.

  “I didn’t know it was going to be a goose chase,” I said. In the windows, the dark outlines of leaves on Faye Anne's houseplants stretched like small groping hands. White frost traceries unfurled on the panes behind them. Ellie had gone to the front of the house where the streetlight was brighter.

  “Anyway, what were you saying about the method being funny?” I started opening cabinet drawers at random, looking for one that maybe Merle wouldn’t have gone into, so it would be safe for Faye Anne to tuck a diary in it.

  The room hadn’t been cleaned, but the carnage had occurred at the other end, mostly. And as my eyes adjusted to the gloom the large shapes and smaller items around me began clarifying, like a black-and-white photo negative coming up in developing solution. In the drawers: silverware, napkins, larger utensils. One held flashlights; I lingered over these but rejected the temptation. Someone going by outside would be bound to glimpse a light.