Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

But then she looked calculating. “No. That couldn’t be.”

  “Why not?” She was bewilderingly changeable; as if she weren’t sure, herself, what she might say or do in the next moment. But her answering words were certain, not at all confused.

  “Because I went over there that evening. I didn’t see him, but I heard him. He was alive. Be sure and say that, dear, will you?”

  My turn to be confused: say it to whom?

  Then: “Dear, would you like to see my new babies?”

  An inward sigh. Sure, Kenty; and after that let's just the two of us hop down the rabbit hole, pay a call on the Cheshire Cat. If we’re lucky we’ll find something to drink that will make us very small. Or large.

  I didn’t know Kenty very well; her social circle, such as it was, consisted of women and a few men who would have been my parents’ age. But this was so disappointing. She crossed the room in halting steps.

  “Come and see them. I’ve been nursing them along.”

  What I wanted to know was whether Kenty had seen anyone going in or out of the Carmody house, other than

  Merle or Faye Anne. But now I wasn’t sure if there was any point to asking her anything.

  She gestured impatiently at me, her expression eager; humoring her, I obeyed. She was a sweet person but the sad truth was that she’d gotten a little batty.

  In the next few minutes, however, my impression of her was turned upside down yet again. “Here they are,” she announced proudly. Under a fluorescent light fixture stood a tray of a dozen two-inch plastic pots. In each, a plant so small it looked embryonic put up leaves no bigger than the nail on my little finger. A plastic stick bore each plant's varietal name: Victorian Velvet. Rodeo Clown. Coral Sunset.

  “Oh,” I breathed, amazed. The tray was a collection of tiny miracles.

  “People say African violets don’t root well in water, but mine always do,” Kenty said. “I use little pimento jars to get them started in, and they do fine. Of course, it is quite a trick to manage to eat up all those pimentos.”

  Her chuckle sounded thoroughly sane, now; this was eerie, like a Jekyll-and-Hyde act. “But about the other night,” she recounted briskly. “I went over there to borrow some sugar for some cookies I was baking. Only it was a garden club night, so Faye Anne was out. The other garden club, I mean.”

  Everyone called it that, even its own members. All except Melinda, of course. Meanwhile as Kenty spoke, I began getting the uncomfortable feeling that she was telling me this for some reason.

  Other than to get it off her chest, I mean. But that was silly; especially given her general frailty, what reason could there be?

  “I don’t know why Melinda insisted on moving the meeting night to Sunday. She's a foolish girl anyway. Do you know she never wears a coat?”

  I did. I also thought I knew why she’d moved the day of the club meetings: Monday night was football night, and talk around town was that Melinda's brother, a guy no one knew well at all, had come to live with her a few months earlier.

  And Melinda was the kind of snob who didn’t want you to know she even owned a television, much less that football was ever displayed on it. More to the point, though, Melinda had said that Faye Anne wasn’t at the meeting. Or Peter Christie, either. “What happened then?” I asked Kenty.

  “I knocked, got no answer, walked in and called for Faye Anne,” she replied. In the bluish winter light from the parlor window you could see how lovely she had been, once: high forehead and swanlike throat that even now was only a little crepey, and her cheekbones were still to die for.

  She preened a little under my admiring glance. “Then I remembered where she must be,” she went on. “But I knew where the sugar was, so I got it, and called out once more. That time, he did answer me.”

  Kenty's lips tightened. “He sounded grumpy, as usual, and also a little drunk, of course. So I didn’t go out to the shop to say hello, as I might have otherwise.”

  I glanced questioningly at her; greeting Merle wasn’t the high point of anyone's day or evening. “I tried to keep on civil terms with him,” she explained. “For Faye Anne's sake.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him. Heard him, I mean. And you did not see Faye Anne at all.”

  Something else was wrong about all this, too, but at that moment I couldn’t quite figure out what.

  Kenty turned from fiddling with one of the plantlets. “Oh, no. I saw them both later that evening. After I’d done my baking I went back with the sugar and a plate of cookies. Faye Anne was home, by then, and everything seemed fine. Nothing amiss.”

  She drew back from the plants. “Nothing was wrong, for once. And that was the last I saw them.”

  “What about Peter Christie? Ever see him hanging around when he shouldn’t be? Faye Anne mentioned she had the feeling someone was watching her. And he said he was keeping an eye on her, because he was worried about her. So I’m assuming it was him, but…”

  Her gaze darkened. The glasses made her eyes huge, as if they were the eyes of some other kind of creature entirely: strange and intensely vulnerable.

  “If it was him, he was doing more than watching,” she said. “Faye Anne told me she was getting phone calls. Somebody just waited until she answered, then hung up. She even asked the phone company to put some sort of a tracer on the calls, but it turned out they couldn’t.”

  Out in the parlor, Monday sighed contentedly. I hated to make her go, but Kenty was moving me expertly toward the hall, having accomplished, apparently, whatever she had intended. “Because it seems…” she began.

  By now she sounded fully in command of her wits, her emotions, and anything else that could possibly have needed commanding; it was as if a magic wand had somehow been waved over Kenty Dalrymple. Witnessing this transformation, I found myself wondering if maybe something out of that third pill bottle had kicked in, suddenly and beneficially.

  “… it seems,” she concluded, serene and in control, “that it's still very difficult, even nowadays, to trace a cell-phone call.”

  On the way home I thought over the rest of what Kenty said, as she’d ushered me out: that to her knowledge no one else had entered the Carmody house the whole day and evening before Merle was found dead in it. She’d sounded certain, not a bit quavery.

  Or batty. “But would she have seen them?” Ellie wanted to know when I found her back at my house, working in the kitchen.

  Monday started shivering as we went up the porch steps. I had to lure her in with a biscuit, after which she wormed her way under the kitchen table and curled up with the chair legs.

  Ellie was cutting candied fruit. A dozen empty coffee cans stood on the drainboard with a bottle of brandy, a roll of waxed paper, baking ingredients, and a mixing bowl big enough to mix a load of concrete in.

  “Kenty says she would have. What she wanted me to know, though, was that she didn’t. And she seemed particularly intent on making sure that I would tell other people so, too.”

  Once upon a time this kitchen had held a woodstove, an icebox, and a soapstone sink, and it was not much more modern now. But the preheating oven, the board-and-batten wainscoting, and Ellie's calm competence made it feel cozier, if a bit less convenient, than any up-to-date kitchen I’d ever been in, much less owned.

  I peered at the things Ellie had assembled.

  “Fruitcake,” I said. “Oh, good.” I think fruitcake makes an excellent doorstop. “But isn’t it a little late to be baking them? I thought you had to leave them in the brandy a long time. Months, even. To mummify, or whatever they do.”

  Ellie turned from cutting an orchard's worth of candied cherries. Pouring me a mug of hot coffee, she opened the brandy bottle and added a generous dollop. “Here. It’ll make you feel better.”

  Just breathing the fumes made me feel better. I swallowed some. That made me feel better, too.

  A lot better. “You know what? Something's rotten in Denmark.” On the kitchen table with more coffee cans and

  Ellie'
s handbag lay an old photo album; she must have brought it.

  “These cakes are for next year,” she said, returning to her work.

  “Did you hear what I said?” I opened the album.

  “Rotten. Yes. I agree.” In another bowl she’d already beaten what looked like a dozen eggs. The microwave beeped; she removed the butter she’d been softening and added white and brown sugar. Next came the eggs, flour, and a tree-load of chopped walnuts, plus raisins and the candied fruit: pineapple, citron, cherries, and some green things that I didn’t know what they were, exactly, only that they were the color of something left over from St. Patrick's Day.

  Looking down, I glanced at the album photos, then gazed at them. Some were of Faye Anne Carmody, only not the Faye Anne I’d known. In one photograph—a class picnic, I thought, or a party—she wore a long skirt, slim knit shirt, and strappy sandals, her long hair flying behind her as Ellie pushed her high on a swing. They were both about seventeen, then, it looked to me, laughing and long-limbed.

  Next photo: Faye Anne perched on a high rock overlooking the water, one graceful foot outstretched as if daring gravity to take her. Not believing, though, that it ever could. Her blithe confidence, wide grin, and upturned face, nearly arrogant in its happiness, were all new to me; the Faye Anne I’d known was a cautious, hunched creature, scuttling and shy, with an anxious giggle in place of a laugh and shoulders habitually tensed as if readied for the inevitable next blow.

  In the final shot of her, Merle stood beside her, she gazing up at him as if he’d just recently descended from heaven, he in the act of crushing a beer can in one fist, the other ropy, muscular arm looped possessively around her and his grin leering, already smeary with drink.

  She didn’t see that part, though. Not yet; to her, Merle Carmody would have seemed merely a walk on the wild side, one she could return from without lasting harm whenever she liked. In her wide, innocent eyes I could read all that Faye Anne had hoped for, all she’d expected on that sunny, long-ago day.

  But it wasn’t what she’d gotten and if no one did anything about it, it never would be; nothing would be salvaged of that smile or that bright hope, nothing at all. Even chopped in pieces and wrapped up in butcher paper, Merle would’ve won.

  Forever. I closed the album, not commenting on it. Ellie, either; we both knew why she’d brought it.

  By the time I’d poured more coffee—without brandy, this time; I wanted to be relaxed, not comatose—Ellie was funneling batter into the coffee cans lined with buttered waxed paper. She’d already checked the oven temperature as carefully as if it were a vital science experiment.

  “There,” she said finally, dusting her hands together.

  The aroma of fruit, nuts, and spices in a batter rich with butter and brown sugar filled the room, covering the faintly rank smell I had noticed when I first walked in. I got up and washed my hands.

  “Now you can tell me all about it,” she added. So I did, omitting the smell I kept smelling and a few other things, such as the way my hands still felt: sticky. As if they couldn’t get clean of something.

  “I’m getting the feeling that maybe Peter and Faye Anne's breakup was one-sided,” Ellie said. “But not one-sided the way Peter told it. It sounds more to me as if she broke up with him, but…”

  “Right. Peter didn’t accept it. Following her. Hang-up calls, too, according to Kenty. And who knows what else?”

  “Melinda said neither of them were at the meeting?”

  “Uh-huh.” A mental picture of her popped up. “Criminy, Ellie, you should have seen her, dressed in just a sweater. Melinda must have antifreeze in her veins. But anyway, that's right: Kenty says Faye Anne wasn’t home. But Melinda made a big thing of how she called in case Faye Anne needed a ride. Zinged Peter about being absent, too.”

  “Which means they were together,” Ellie concluded, as I had. “Peter and Faye Anne. And she’d told Merle she was going to the meeting. That's how she got out of the house. But if Melinda talked to Merle, then…”

  That part, I hadn’t thought of. “Until Melinda called Merle, he must’ve thought Faye Anne was at the club. Melinda spilled the beans, that Faye Anne wasn’t where she’d said she was going.”

  Just then Sam came in the back door and began rummaging in the hall closet, but he didn’t sound as if he needed my help creating even more chaos than was already in there, so I left him to it.

  “Kenty said she went over there,” I went on, “to give them some of the cookies she’d baked, after Faye Anne got home. Everything was hunky-dory at the Carmody house at… what, maybe eleven or so?”

  Ellie nodded. “That's another thing Melinda didn’t like about the original garden club, you know. Too much business, not enough partying. With this group you’ve got to fight off the dry martinis. And the meetings go so late, I can’t get up at a decent hour the next morning.”

  By which she meant five-thirty or so, at the latest; in Eastport, early rising is a moral imperative. “It's why I don’t attend a lot of them,” she finished.

  “… gloves?” Sam muttered. His work gloves, he meant. Tommy had decided to save up for ear surgery, after all, so they were working on Tommy's car instead of paying someone to try getting the backfire out of it.

  “Here they are,” I heard Sam say, then rummage some more.

  “Kenty was strange,” I mused. “One minute sort of… loosey-goosey and emotional. Couldn’t stick to a subject.

  Then suddenly as clear as could be, very focused. You couldn’t believe she’d been an author and a TV personality, until she… switched herself on, or something.”

  Sam paused in the doorway with the gloves in his hands. “Sounds like some of the guys in my class who take Ritalin,” he said. “You want to talk about before-and-after. It's like a magic wand, that stuff.”

  “I thought only little children had to take that,” Ellie objected.

  “Nuh-uh. Anyone can.” He’d been tested, back when we were trying to find out why he had such a hard time in school, for just about every learning disorder human beings could have.

  A light went on in my head. “You know, I remember thinking when I was there with her that it was as if a drug of some kind had just kicked in. One of her medicines, maybe.”

  With a wave Sam went out again, as Ellie checked the oven. “You know, these cakes have to bake for hours. Which gives us time.”

  Uh-oh. But she was already pulling on her coat, a silvery quilted one that would’ve made anyone else look as big as the Goodyear blimp.

  She looked smashing in it. “After last night, don’t you think we had better keep hands off?” I asked. “We’re in enough trouble with the law-enforcement establishment already. And besides…”

  There's an old sailor's phrase, rude but accurate, about doing something into the wind. I quoted it to her.

  Ellie sighed patiently. “Jacobia. Remember the story I started to tell you? About my mother's funeral?”

  “I do. So what?”

  Stubbornly, I remained seated at the table. The brandy bottle was looking good to me, again. And the smell was back, coppery sweet.

  “And do you remember the Shasta daisies, enormous vases of them, along the altar that day?”

  Resignedly, I got up. “I remember them, too. But what does that have to do with…” And then I got it. “Faye Anne. From her garden.”

  “Correct.” She pulled her boots on, short brown furry ones that should have thickened her ankles and made her calves appear clumpy.

  They didn’t. “Shasta daisies look simple to grow: those big white flowers with yellow centers. Nothing to it, right?”

  Wrong. It's the little white chamomile daisies that are simple. Those big, luscious Shastas are the devil to winter over; right then, a dozen new plants were in my garden border, bedded down so carefully and lovingly that you’d have thought they were newborn infants.

  Probably they were already dead. Ellie went on: “After Mom passed away, Faye Anne didn’t say anything to
me about those flowers. She just went out the morning of the service with a pair of garden shears, and cut down her whole border of them.”

  “Oh,” I said inadequately, wiping my hands dry.

  “When I saw them in the chapel, I started to cry,” Ellie said, “and it was the only time I was ever able to do that about my mother.”

  She paused. “Funny, isn’t it? Not being able to, I mean.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ellie knew all about my own mother; all I knew, anyway.

  Sam stuck his head back in, looking puzzled. “Hey.”

  “What?” I snapped at him, looking for the hand cream. Between the cold weather and all this washing, I was getting raw.

  “Did I hear you two say Kenty Dalrymple was over at the Carmodys’ delivering cookies at eleven o’clock at night?”

  A little silence fell. “Well, yes,” I began doubtfully as my son went out again. The unlikeliness of that part of Kenty's tale hadn’t occurred to me. But now it did.

  “So anyway, don’t tell me we aren’t helping Faye Anne.” Ellie's tone rose heatedly again as she pulled on a wool knit hat. The purple yarn tassels poking out of the top were particularly fetching. With a sigh I began hauling my own boots back on.

  “Because I’m not having it. Stay here if you want, but darn it, I’m not giving up yet, and…”

  Jacket, mittens, scarf. “Fine,” I said, grabbing Monday's leash.

  All around me, urgent household tasks loomed: painting steps, renewing radiators, caulking more windows, insulating attic rooms. But even higher now loomed a fascinating question: why had Kenty Dalrymple looked me in the face and lied?

  And then there was Ellie. “What?” she said, blinking back tears of angry determination as we got outside. To the east in the already-waning winter daylight, a huge, peach-colored moon peeked over the watery horizon.

  “I said, fine.” My eyelashes prickled with the brutal cold and the hairs in my nose froze instantly. “You’ve got a plan. I don’t know what it is, but I’m out here, aren’t I? So let's go do it.”

  “Oh.” Her answering smile was beatific, as if she’d caught sight of that moon floating up into the sky.