Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  “Little while ago,” Wade answered tersely. Which could mean anything from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours; he was in no mood to talk about it. He went out again.

  In the summer the men had contests to see who could scramble into the survival suits fastest, and onto the life rafts. Always a lot of laughter and good-natured joshing, the idea of night and disaster the farthest thing from anyone's mind. Now we tried hard not to imagine them out there, doing it in earnest.

  Hard but unsuccessfully; at seven-thirty, Victor called to whine some more about his love life, and I felt so beaten and hopelessly hollowed out that I let him, although I made him call back on Wade's line so mine would be open.

  Victor hadn’t heard yet what was going on, and I didn’t tell him, in case he said something inappropriate about it and I would have to begin hating him. What he did say was, “Jacobia, I am at my wit's end.”

  This being, I thought, only a few millimeters from its beginning, but never mind; as I’d suspected, Willetta was still driving him crazy. The chip on his girlfriend's sister's shoulder was Vermont-sized, he complained, and she was always around. The way he told it, she had broken up with some local guy recently and was taking it out on Victor.

  From the karmic standpoint, I thought taking it out on

  Victor was fully justified. But I didn’t say so, just sat there listening to him, making a few noises now and then so he’d know that I was still on the line. Agreeing with him, which was all he wanted; eventually he got tired and we hung up.

  It was eight o’clock. A little later, Sam came downstairs and made sandwiches without being asked to. Nobody was hungry, but we all picked at them as the minutes ticked by. The women had stowed their children across the street at the church hall with the ladies from the Altar Guild, and bedtimes were imminent.

  But no one wanted to fetch them. It was as if we were all in suspended animation, or a nightmare from which we were collectively unable to wake. I got up to wash my hands again.

  “Mom.” Sam took me aside. He’d been with Tommy most of the day, working on the old car, then on the computer and doing errands for his Internet project. “There were messages for you when I got home.” Ellie had said so, too. But everything about the earlier part of the day now felt as if it had happened on the moon.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.” Outside, the helicopter from the air station at Cape Cod whapped heavily overhead. Each deep thud-thud cut into my heart like a dull blade.

  “I figured that,” he said. “But there was a weird one.”

  This was torture. All I kept remembering was that survival time in the water was about fifteen minutes, if they hadn’t got the gear on.

  I looked at Sam, trying to focus on him. “What do you mean, weird?” The girl who’d asked Wade the question earlier sat at my kitchen table now, crying.

  “Just… Here, I wrote it down.” He went to the phone alcove.

  “Stop that,” I heard Ellie tell the girl evenly, as Sam came back with the paper he’d written the message on.

  It must have seemed important to him or he wouldn’t have tried writing it at all; Sam is so dyslexic, he records classroom notes on a cassette player, and he pays other students to tape reading assignments.

  Now he frowned at the note, laboriously printed. “Whoever it was didn’t leave a name, and I didn’t recognize the voice.” He handed the slip of paper to me. “But they said…”

  I stared at it. The words were clear enough, but…

  The weeping grew louder. “It's only nine o’clock,” Ellie said over it, her own voice rising. “What’re you going to do, start praying the rosary and giving his clothes away?”

  But the girl was inconsolable, and no one dared say any of the words that would comfort her. No one but Ellie, cold rage lighting her face. “Listen to me. They. Will. Come. Back.”

  Sam closed his eyes a moment. Ellie was tempting fate.

  Defying it, even. Sam continued: “Whoever it was, Mom, they were whispering. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. And they said, ‘Check out Ben Devine, Melinda's brother.’ Then… click.”

  “What?” I crumpled the notepaper. It was as if I were listening—thinking, feeling—through a thick, sense-blocking layer of cotton batting.

  A protective layer. I dreaded the moment when it would be pulled away. The sound of the search helicopter faded out into the distance over the water.

  Ellie went on angrily: “They’ll come back and they’ll be fine. Do you hear me? Every single one of them will come…”

  She spoke with such certainty that I almost believed her: that the laws of cold water might really be suspended, just this one time.

  “… home,” she pronounced savagely.

  And then I did believe.

  “That's the whole message,” Sam said, but I wasn’t listening anymore. While Ellie was talking, the back door had opened and I turned to see who it was. The man who had entered the house now stood silently, witnessing her faith.

  Her furious faith.

  It was her husband, George Valentine.

  Later, upstairs with Wade in the dark: “How close was it?”

  “Pretty close. Lost engine. Battery, too, so no comms.”

  Radio, he meant. “The EPIRB had drifted,” he went on, “and they were taking on water.”

  Which was the mariner's way of saying the boat had been sinking. “Safety equipment was maintained, though, and the guys out of Jonesport found ’em quick, or it’d be a different story.”

  Different from this drained, almost disembodied sense of relief: the boat was history, but the men were all safe.

  I put my head on his shoulder. “It all happened so fast.” Or so it felt, now: as if the dark wings of disaster had brushed us, swooping past. Sparing us. Wade settled against me.

  “Yeah, well, one minute you’re the dog and the next minute you’re the fire hydrant, out there on the water.”

  Monday looked up from where she nested between us, hearing the word “dog.” She wouldn’t sleep downstairs, anymore; not by herself.

  “But you try not to take chances, and you trust people to help you,” Wade said. “That's all”—he yawned hugely—“anyone can do. When push comes to shove we are in each other's hands, is the long and short of it.”

  Then: “Jake, I didn't get the freighter repair job.”

  To fix equipment on the big boats on a regular basis. “Wade, I’m so sorry.”

  “ ’Sokay. Guy who got it, he's got some degrees and so on. All the qualifications. So they took him. I met him, he's an okay guy. And there's still plenty of harbor pilot work.”

  He sounded all right with it but I was still glad I hadn't said anything about diamonds.

  “Wade,” I began again after a while.

  I was thinking of Ellie, the message Sam took, and what Wade had said: in each other's hands.

  And about something else: that no matter how I washed them, my own hands still felt sticky and I kept smelling blood.

  But he was asleep.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning dawned blisteringly cold. The sun over the bay was like a lemon slice hovering over an iced drink. By then I’d decided not to say anything to anyone about how I was feeling; I decided it would pass.

  The anonymous call looked less significant in daylight, too: “The story's been in the papers and on TV. And even though you and I so far have managed to avoid being interviewed, by now everyone around here knows we found the body.”

  Ellie nodded silently. George's narrow escape was still hideously present to her.

  “Or it could have been Peter, I guess, but from the look of it he'd been out there with Melinda for a while.” Sam hadn't been sure, exactly, when the call came in.

  I was pressing rope caulk between a dining-room windowsill and its sash. The glass in the sash seemed to suck the warmth right out of my fingers.

  “Just a mischief-maker, then.” Ellie tried out the idea. “Not an
yone who's really involved at all.”

  “Calling us just to try stirring up trouble for Melinda,” I agreed.

  Well, it could happen. Eastport's not immune to that sort of idle mischief. And plenty of people didn't like Melinda: her unspoken assumption that she was much better than you, and that you should do what she wanted the instant she decided she wanted it, rubbed people the wrong way.

  And that business of her never wearing a coat. “I didn't see any evidence of the brother at her house, though, did you? Does she,” I asked, pressing in the last bit of rope caulk, “even have a brother? Someone named Ben?”

  As a person from away I was not expected to have the names, ages, and occupations of all the members of local families in my head. But Ellie did.

  “Oh, yes. Ben got drafted to Vietnam, and his and Melinda's parents went to Bangor for a few years, around that time. Their dad worked at the Air Force base, and their mom taught school. They came back after they'd retired, Melinda along with them, and they left her that house. But…”

  Give Ellie enough time and she could trace every family tree in Eastport right back to the original acorn.

  “… but Ben was out of the service, through college, and was teaching, too, by then.” She tipped her head in thought. “At some private school. He is—or was, I guess—a math professor. And then I thought I heard he was sick. But maybe that part was wrong because I never heard any more about it. And I think George said something about him being around here again.”

  The phone rang and I got up grudgingly, thinking it might be another reporter, though the volume of those calls had dropped. I felt lucky to have escaped them all and fortunate, too, that no one in town would tell a stranger where I lived, or where Ellie did. Eastporters know how to circle the wagons around their own.

  It was Bob Arnold. “I just got a call from our friend Melinda Devine,” he said.

  Speak of the devil yet again; my eyebrows went up. Why call Bob? Ellie and I hadn't sung songs of holiday cheer at Melinda's. But I didn't think we'd done anything illegal, either.

  “His boots,” Ellie said thoughtfully to herself.

  “She says she's been trying to get hold of Kenty Dalrymple,” Bob went on. “Something about a garden club meeting?”

  Melinda was always trying to lure Kenty into her club. “Only Kenty's not answering her phone,” Bob said.

  “Yes,” I replied slowly, still not understanding what that might have to do with me.

  “… and I’m tied down here with some state cops trying to help get a plan together, set up surveillance on a bar in—” He stopped short, probably not having meant to say that much.

  “I understand, Bob.” Duddy's, I supposed. It had been only a matter of time before its reputation reached Augusta.

  “So I can't go,” he finished, and waited.

  Which was when I got it. This would be another of Melinda's maneuvers to ingratiate herself with Kenty: fake concern for the older woman's welfare.

  A neighborly gesture, but without, of course, Melinda having to do anything, herself. “Okay,” I said resignedly. “Ellie and I can take a run over there, make sure Kenty's okay.”

  “Hey, thanks, Jacobia.” Bob sounded relieved. “Probably Kenty just turned off her phone. Strangers've been calling her, those newspeople and all, I guess ’cause she lives right there next to the Carmodys. But if she's fallen and can't get up, you know I’ll never hear the end of it from Melinda.”

  “Right.” I hung up. Ellie already was pulling her coat on, having caught the drift, and Monday brightened at the prospect of going out again; I’d practically had to drag her indoors after her walk that morning.

  A few minutes later we were making our way up snowy

  Key Street past the Episcopal church hall; through the hall windows we could see the Altar Guild ladies, unfazed by their vigil labors of the night before, making evergreen garlands for the chapel.

  “Maybe Kenty's gone out,” Ellie said as we knocked and waited.

  No sound from within. “We should try to make sure, though,” I said, trying the door.

  It swung open with a faint creak. Inside, the house was icy cold. Monday sniffed at the still air and didn't want to go any farther.

  Me either, suddenly. “I don't like this,” I said. “Maybe we should…”

  “Kenty?” Ellie called, stepping inside. “You around, dear?”

  Dee-yah. In the parlor, the three pill bottles stood on the table where I’d seen them before. The fluorescent bulbs set up over her collection of tiny plants glowed bluish in the otherwise darkened room, the draperies drawn.

  No fire burned in the parlor stove. Monday trotted to the foot of the hall stairs and whined, pawing the bottom step.

  I went up: smells of camphor, age, and loneliness.

  “Kenty?” I called.

  But she didn't answer and she wasn't going to.

  Kenty Dalrymple lay fully clothed in the narrow upstairs hall that led from the bathroom to the bedroom. A fist pressed to her chest, no mark of violence on her; not unless you counted the expression on her face.

  I did. “Ellie,” I said quietly, and she came up.

  “Stand here, please, and look in the direction she'd have been looking as she came out of the bedroom.”

  Ellie silently obeyed. Kenty was wearing the same print housedress I’d seen her in the day before. Maybe she'd gone into the bedroom after I’d left her, for a nap.

  But then she'd come out again. “The hall closet,” Ellie said, looking at its partially open door. “And…”

  She pointed at the soft chenille belt of a bathrobe on the floor. “But she isn't wearing any bathrobe,” Ellie added in the tone of mild interest she uses when her mind is busily putting things together.

  I moved to the hall window. From it you could see into the Carmody house; Faye Anne's white lace panels covered only the lower sashes. You could see the garden, its raised beds covered now by a foot of snow, the compost heap in the corner a white, rounded lump, the picket fence broken by a pair of gates: one for the driveway and one for the front walk.

  And you could see the street, and the front door. A row of low cedars, neatly trimmed long ago to form a dark-green privacy fence, blocked all other aspects. So that was all you could see from Kenty Dalrymple's windows.

  But it had been enough.

  “If someone came in while she napped…” Ellie said.

  I nodded. “And hid in that closet.”

  “Waiting. With that belt, to strangle her when she came out into the hall. She was so frail, it wouldn't have taken much. And the belt is chenille, soft enough so it might not leave a mark if someone was lucky and quick.”

  “But they didn't have to be, maybe.” I peered into the closet, pulled the string that switched on a bulb.

  Its harsh yellow glow showed where items on hangers had been pushed aside. A shelf at the back of the closet had served as a low bench. A few sweaters on it were shoved over untidily. The small enclosure held a mingled fragrance of lavender and scented talc.

  “Wouldn't have to be quick, I mean.” Visualizing it all in my mind's eye made me back hastily out of the closet. “The shock of seeing someone bursting out here at her unexpectedly…”

  Ellie looked down at the dead woman, nodding. “Her heart could've just stopped.”

  We got a bedspread from one of the spare rooms—white sheer curtains, dressers with doilies, neat narrow twin beds no guest had slept in for many years—and put it over her, and I called Bob Arnold, not mentioning what we thought might have happened. To look at her, you would think she had simply suffered a heart attack.

  Except for her face, the expression of horror etched deeply into the soft, white flesh, and I already knew what would likely be said about that. Down in the parlor while we waited for Bob, I examined the pill bottles again without touching them.

  One was nitroglycerin: “for chest pain.” The second vial held tablets of a digitalis compound. Ellie peered at the third one, frowned a
t the blue-printed pharmacy label.

  “ ‘Methylphenidate,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Take BID.’ That's not very enlightening.”

  But it was enlightening to me. Once upon a time I’d been a veritable human Physician s Desk Reference when it came to the pharmaceutical substances that might be used to assist learning-disabled kids.

  “Methylphenidate is the generic name for Ritalin. So Sam was right.” I went to the bookshelf, and sure enough, there were two volumes on ADD, attention deficit disorder, both fairly new hardcovers with gold stickers from Bay Books affixed to their bright jackets, slid in among the garden encyclopedias and the how-to plant books.

  Ellie looked perplexed. “I don't get how this stuff works, though. If you're already too flighty, too agitated or whatever, and you take a drug like this, sort of an amphetamine-type thing, doesn't it just speed you up more?”

  “It speeds you up only if you don't have the disorder it's prescribed for,” I replied, shivering. It was so cold in the house. But there was no sense turning any heat on.

  Not anymore. “But look at it this way, Ellie: what if you're too active, too impulsive, because you don't have the brain chemical you need to turn off the impulses. That's the deficit they mean when they talk about attention deficit, see? So the impulses you have just stay in control, and you have no choice but to go along with them, whatever they are. You can't control your self. Like some hyperactive kids.”

  I remembered Kenty's inability to stick to any topic, her seemingly random veering from one emotional state to another. And then, as if a magic switch had been flipped in her mind, she'd been able to focus.

  Because her medication had kicked in. “This,” I pointed at the small orange vial, “is the chemical. If you think of the act of quelling an impulse as an act, not as the absence of one, you'll get the picture.”

  Or anyway that was how it had been explained to me, back in the days when I’d have dosed Sam with eye of newt and toe of frog if only it could have helped him. But Sam hadn't had ADD or any other chemical disorder. In addition to his dyslexia, which had not been vulnerable to drug therapy, he'd just been messed up royally, principally by me and his father.