Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  Or something.

  Ellie's plan turned out to include more hot coffee, which by the time we got downtown I’d have preferred having pumped into my veins. A wind like a knife's edge was rising off the water as daylight faded. The moon was higher now so that each wave-top shone, laced with a silvery glitter.

  Inside the Waco Diner, I stamped my feet which felt leaden with cold and sent Monday to lie down by a radiator, which she did happily, the weather outside being too frigid even for a Labrador retriever. Then we settled ourselves: me shivering, Ellie pulling layers off, as in her native-Eastporter opinion the day was a little nippy but nothing to exclaim over.

  “Sorry, my aunt Fanny!” Dimity Wilson replied to Ellie's report of my running into Melinda that morning. I didn’t know why Ellie wanted to start that way, but it was her party.

  Dimity smacked two coffee mugs down in front of us. A tall, raw-boned woman with glossy black hair and a big, square jaw, she wore yellow stretch pants and an oversized red sweatshirt with the slogan I Eastportin white letters on it.

  “Melinda Devine's never been sorry about anything in her whole life,” Dimity pronounced, “other than the fibs she's been caught out in, and the mean tricks she's pulled, like on that poor woman at the library.”

  We were in the old section of the Waco: worn yellow linoleum between the long Formica counter's red leather stools and a battered row of comfortable booths, a chalkboard listing the day's specials. In summer, Dimity opened the new back room where sliding glass doors looked out onto the deck's Cinzano umbrellas.

  Now snowdrifts pressed against the glass. “Damn fool woman, walking around in shirtsleeves in the middle of December. And so superior about it, as if being a freak of nature was something to brag about, too. If Melinda called Faye Anne the night of that club meeting, and I have no doubt she did, it would be exactly like her, it was to tip Merle off on purpose and nothing else,” Dimity said.

  “Why would she do that?” Ellie sipped the ferocious coffee brewed for men who worked outdoors in cold weather: on the snowplows, at the cargo docks where the big ships loaded, or at the aquaculture plants.

  “Two reasons.” Dimity slapped a plate of eggs in front of one of the salmon-pen workers beside us at the counter, and pancakes before another. They’d been out since five A.M., their faces chapped and hands reddened despite the enormous amount of clothing they’d shed as they came in.

  “Same reasons why Melinda does everything,” Dimity answered. “Jealousy and spite. I went to a few of those new club meetings,” she went on. “Thought I’d see what it was all about. And I saw, all right.”

  The fellows down the counter ate their meals with the grim purposefulness of men shoveling coal into a furnace. Dimity set a full pot of coffee and a bowl of sugar packets between them, and they nodded without speaking.

  “First,” Dimity ticked off on her blunt fingers, “she was jealous about Faye Anne and Peter Christie. It just about killed Melinda, handsome fellow like that payin’ his main court to Faye Anne, 'stead of to her.”

  That jibed with what I had seen earlier; Melinda didn’t seem to have wasted any time filling the vacancy created by Faye Anne's arrest.

  Dimity plunged used coffee mugs into a plastic tub of hot, soapy water, swishing them around. Clean, I thought longingly. And everywhere I went, it seemed, had that coppery smell to it, now, like the taste of an old penny.

  “Saw Melinda going by a little while ago, matter o’ fact,” Dimity said, “no coat as usual, and with that foolish string shopping bag she carries so everyone can see all the fine stuff she buys. Endive,” she snorted. “Wild rice and cooking sherry, and probably sirloin tips.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I joked, but Dimity wasn’t having any humor on the subject of Melinda.

  “For fixing Peter Christie what she calls one of those ‘delicious little suppers’ of hers, probably,” Dimity snorted.

  “Way she was all fluttery around him at one o’ those foolish meetings I went to, that won’t be all she's feedin’ him, ’fore long.”

  Some men from the road crew stomped in: orange jackets, high boots, and thick wool sweaters. They nodded familiarly at Ellie whom they’d all known since she was in kindergarten, a little less so at me, and ordered pie and coffee.

  “But Melinda hates Faye Anne anyway,” Dimity went on as she cut big wedges of lemon meringue. “Faye Anne grows better roses, her compost heats up without her having to put chemicals into it, and she's friends with Kenty Dalrymple, who won’t give Melinda the time of day. And that's not all,” she added, going away with the pie and coffee.

  “What's not all?” I asked Ellie, under my breath. “She's already told us everything but Melinda's blood type and Social Security number. What more could there be?”

  “Everyone comes in here,” Ellie answered. “And they talk. That's why we’re here. I guess Dimity's heard something.”

  “The girls from Town Hall were in the other day,” Dimity confirmed when she returned. By which she meant the clerks and secretaries who actually did the day-to-day town business.

  “And you know,” she went on, “they’re careful about not hashing over anything confidential when they’re out in public. Who has a tax lien, who's not paying their sewer bill, so on and so forth.”

  We waited as she started a new pot of coffee. “But what they did say was, Merle Carmody and Melinda had a great big shouting match the other day in the town office.”

  She turned, hands flat on the counter. “You know that strip of property there at the edge of Melinda's side yard?”

  Melinda lived in one of the last houses on Water Street, at the north end of the island looking out toward New

  Brunswick; between her house and the next was a half-acre strip of brush and trees, with one enormous old maple at the center of it.

  “Well,” Dimity declared importantly. “A couple of months ago, that next house went to auction on a foreclosure. No one paid much attention; some people from away owned it, and talk was they’d worked a deal with the bank to buy it back at the last minute, 'stead of the bank getting stuck with it. But the talk was wrong, and do you know who wound up getting that property?”

  She paused for effect. “Merle Carmody is who. All on the quiet-like. Bid on it at auction, walked away with it clean as a whistle.”

  Ellie looked taken aback. This, apparently, was news even to her. “Where’d Merle get the money?”

  Which was my first question, too. Merle didn’t do much more than butcher a few deer carcasses for people, maybe a moose now and then, order in the holiday meats, and sell a few lamb chops. And Faye Anne didn’t earn any money that anyone knew of.

  “All I know,” Dimity answered, “it included a bit o’ land that Melinda always thought was hers. But Merle spied out that it wasn’t, after the property survey was printed in the foreclosure ad. And I guess he took advantage of the fact, quick as he could.”

  “You know,” Ellie said slowly, “a few months ago he bought all new storm windows, too. And he had his driveway paved.”

  In Eastport, having your driveway paved is like announcing you’ve won the Irish Sweepstakes. After all, once all the frost is out of the ground—say, by the end of June or so—that mud will probably dry up by itself.

  “Yes,” Dimity agreed. She began filling the paper napkin holders with practiced motions: flip-snap. “He did start in to spending, didn’t he? Anyway, that land deal got Melinda all het up. Worst thing, though, was what Merle wanted to do next, what the shouting was about. What the girls from Town Hall said, he was planning to cut that tree.”7

  “Ayuh,” put in one of the men from down the counter. “He said it was bird's-eye, sure as shootin’. Fortune in hardwood just a-sittin’ on that propitty, a-goin’ to waste.”

  The other man spoke up. “Bird's-eye maple's big business, I hear. Up around Princeton last year a couple of poachers got into a sugar maple stand, ’bout wrecked the whole place. They’ll cut into the trees one after t’other, look
ing for the bird's-eye marks in the wood,” he explained.

  Turning to Ellie and me: “But ol’ Merle said he could tell about this here tree ’thout cuttin’ it,” the man finished.

  “I don’t think he gave a damn about the land or house,” Dimity said. “He just saw a way to make a quick buck, sell off that wood. It was funny, though, how he came up with the money for that land so promptlike.”

  There was a time in my life when if I could get hold of your IRS filings, and a few other items of information like your date of birth, your mother's maiden name, and your Social Security number, I could get any other information about you that I wanted.

  But not anymore. Or not on my own, anyway. And with my move out of New York, the list of people I could pull favors from had shrunk pretty dramatically, too. What have you done for me lately is the big question, back in the city, and as time went by I had fewer answers to it.

  “I don’t know where he got the cash, either,” one of the town crew said as he finished his coffee and got up. “Far as I know, nobody does. Tell you one thing, though.” He pulled his jacket on. “Merle Carmody kickin’ the bucket's about the best thing could’ve happened to that poor little Faye Anne. Even if she goes to jail, she's not gonna be beat half to death.”

  The other men nodded grimly, getting their gear on, also.

  But Dimity slammed the coffeepot back onto the warmer and said, “Maybe so. But it seems to me Melinda's who gets the brass ring. Merle gone, Peter Christie up for grabs, and Faye Anne gets the blame. Couldn’t have worked out any better for Melinda if she’d planned it.”

  Outside the Waco, long blue shadows stretched across the sidewalks and the few cars moving in the streets had already turned their headlights on. The two tugboats regularly berthed at the fish pier chuffed diesel smoke, their engines grumbling and their yellow deck lamps illuminating the bulky figures of the men casting off lines, readying to depart.

  Wade was on one of the tugboats right now, preparing to be ferried out to whatever vessel was arriving. Once on board, he would oversee the piloting of the large craft into the harbor as regulations required, since in these fast-changing waters it wasn’t enough to go by the charts; you had to know the territory.

  It must be a freighter, I decided as I peered through the murk, hoping to see Wade; otherwise Federated Marine wouldn’t be sending both tugs. And this was good news: more work for the truckers and stevedores.

  “So,” Ellie said. “What do you think now?”

  Far up the bay on Deer Island, a Christmas tree winked on like a special lighthouse set up for Santa Claus. From the way the wind felt now, though, he wouldn’t need it; if the plummeting temperature was any indication, the North Pole was just out of sight, over the horizon.

  Wade, I guessed, was already belowdecks on the tug. “It's no big news that so many people hated Merle,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed, “but…”

  Suddenly all the downtown Eastport Christmas lights came on, twinkling red and green. In the storefronts, holiday scenes were set up: a toy train ran in circles in the dime store. At the art gallery, a star made of hundreds of pieces of colored beach-glass shone softly. The pizza parlor had hung a wreath of green peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, purple onions, and heads of garlic.

  “No,” Ellie conceded. “Not news.” She sighed.

  In the window of Wadsworth's hardware store every possible kind of nail, screw, nut, bolt, pin, washer, tack, or heavy-duty staple had been fastened to a background of red-foil-covered plywood, in a holiday mosaic. It spelled out “Noel” at its center; around it, dozens of brightly colored pushpins formed the words “Happy Hanukkah” and “Happy Kwanza.”

  “And I don’t suppose Melinda really did plan the murder.”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. Monday sniffed along the sidewalk in case the pizza-parlor wreath had shed any treats. “For one thing, I doubt she would know how to cut a person up. Her specialty is the cutting remark.”

  Ellie nodded. “Melinda is the dirtiest fighter in town. But I don’t see how she could have made Faye Anne forget committing a bloody murder, either.”

  Or how anyone could have done it but Faye Anne, herself, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  We headed up Water Street past the big old granite-block Customs building. To our right lay the vast L-shaped concrete dock, stretching out to form the boat basin. In the dusk the running lights of the scallop boats were approaching, their engines a faint hum at first, deepening as they came in.

  “There are messages on your phone machine,” Ellie said.

  Oh, great. So many newspeople had left their cell-phone or pager numbers on my machine, I’d stopped listening to the messages. Monday snorted, smelling raw shellfish. “Reporters?” As Ellie nodded, I told her about the TV van that had been outside Kenty's. There’d been a few others cruising, too.

  Not, I suspected, very productively. No one in town would want much publicity for a thing like this. “Funny

  Kenty wanted to avoid them, though,” I added. “You’d think she’d be eager for the spotlight again, even if no one else is.”

  “Uh-huh. Maybe.” Her eyes searched the incoming boats just as mine had scanned the tugboats. “I didn’t think you wanted to talk, either, so I didn’t pick up the phone.”

  “Good.” Reliving what we’d seen at Faye Anne's was the last thing I felt like doing. All I wanted was this cold fresh air, salt-tasting and clean.

  Although actually I could have used it a little warmer. “Is George down there yet?”

  In the basin on the boats that had already come in, bright white work lights illuminated gangs of orange-suited men, six or eight of them to a boat. Crowded around work tables on the decks they were shucking the scallops, shoveling shells overboard into nets and tossing the meats into buckets.

  Ellie squinted. “Not yet.”

  A welder's arc flared, throwing pink sparks. A half-dozen small refrigerated trucks, engines idling to run the cooler compressors, clustered along the dock's edge. Out on the water, boat lights bobbed, white hulls ghostly in the moonlight.

  We walked on in silence, leaving the harbor area to pass old wooden-framed houses, trimmed Christmas trees twinkling nostalgically from their front parlor windows. At the ferry landing, snow heaped the ramp, blue-shadowed runner marks showing where the town kids had been sledding down the steep incline.

  Now they had all gone home for supper. “Faye Anne,” I said, “could be lying.”

  From the top of the hill you could see all the way up the bay to Canada. The freighter the tugboats were readying for sat out there waiting for the tide to rise and the tugs to arrive, its lights making it look like a small city adrift in the night.

  “I mean,” I said, “she could be lying, but still not guilty….”

  Ellie looked sharply at me as I explained the suspicion I’d had the evening before: that Peter and Faye Anne could’ve planned the whole thing together.

  “Maybe Peter was the one who did the… you know. And maybe he didn’t tell Faye Anne until afterwards what the plan was.”7

  It was still hard to imagine, even though I’d seen the awful result of it myself. But somebody had done it. And that meant someone could do such things; maybe someone still among us.

  “But she wouldn’t have let Peter—”

  I stopped her. “Ellie. What I mean is, what if Peter killed Merle and then told Faye Anne what she had to do, to keep him from being caught for it. And we didn’t live in that place with Merle. We don’t know what-all went on there, how desperate she was or what she’d have agreed to do to escape.”

  Headlights gleamed briefly from behind us; Ellie glanced back as a car slowed, then took the plowed turnaround on the bluffs above the old gas-plant ruins. We’d reached North End. Here the bustle of town drained away to land, sea, and sky: long fields blanketed in snow, clumps of fir trees, a few houses widely spaced with sumac and raspberry bramble making wildernesses between them.

  “If the ide
a really was for Peter to get Faye Anne out of trouble after he got her into it,” Ellie declared, “he's doing a darned poor job of it.”

  “Right. The thing is, what if that was the original plan, only now…”

  Just ahead, Melinda's house was a shingled cottage set back from the road and half hidden by landscaped shrubbery. A pair of old spruce trees loomed like dark sentries at either side of her drive, huge and forbidding.

  It was where we’d been heading all the while, I realized. But I didn’t know why. “Only now,” Ellie said slowly, “what if Peter has changed his mind?”

  “Got scared, maybe,” I agreed. “The planning was okay, but the reality part of the program turned out to be more than he’d bargained for? And… speak of the devil.”

  His car was by the gate. Beyond it, at the end of a long, dark driveway, a lamp gleamed ochre yellow.

  A terrace walled by a row of fruit trees, their branches resembling spider legs clambering a wire trellis, divided the drive from the front of Melinda Devine's house. We walked in silently from the road, turning once when a car slowed at the end of the driveway but then moved on. Then Ellie spoke again.

  “How did those fellows from Augusta know to come a day before anything happened?” She answered herself. “Because someone told them, that's how. Someone wanted Faye Anne to be found the way she was. Only we happened to walk in on her, first.”

  Well, that was one theory. But: “What could you say to get them here a day early?” Hi, I’m planning a murder for tomorrow. Want to come?

  Another theory, more likely, was still that Joy Abrams had gotten it wrong, had seen some other two men out at Duddy's Bar in Meddybemps. “Also,” Ellie said, “Peter said he loved Faye Anne. But now…”

  She gestured back at his car which had been sitting out there long enough for a thick frost to form on the windshield. “Maybe Melinda needed more computer advice than he expected,” I said.

  Ellie rolled her eyes. From where we stood you could just glimpse the top of the big tree Merle Carmody had meant to cut down, its bare branches towering vastly over a low roofline dimly visible beyond: the house Dimity Wilson had mentioned, that had gone to a foreclosure auction. “Or maybe it's been Peter Christie and Melinda all along,” Ellie mused aloud.