by Sarah Graves
Another memory niggled at me; searching for it, I went to Kenty's kitchen. It was a big, old-fashioned room with a round-shouldered Frigidaire and a gas stove that had a wood-burning section on one side. A basket of newspaper spills stood by the soapstone sink.
I opened the cabinet doors. No baking supplies. “But she said she'd baked cookies, that she went to Faye Anne's house to borrow—”
I opened the refrigerator. Skim milk; no butter, no eggs. In the trash, no egg carton or butter wrapper.
Bob Arnold's car pulled up outside. “She lied about baking,” I told Ellie. “And she did it after she'd started seeming sane and in control, as if…”
As if it had been deliberate, even planned. Kenty had let me in as if she'd been waiting for me, or for someone she could talk to.
Someone she could tell. “Ellie, I think maybe the night of Merle's death Kenty could have seen something she wasn't supposed to see, and someone knew it.”
“But if that's true, it means she really was…”
Murdered, she would have finished. But she didn't want to. Instead, we went to meet Bob as he came in, and what with waiting for the ambulance so Kenty wouldn't have to get into it alone, and afterwards making sure the house was locked up and the furnace set high enough so the pipes wouldn't freeze, Ellie never did get a chance to make herself draw the conclusion aloud.
But she didn't need to because we both knew what we thought. Walking home with Monday, we kept our eyes peeled; inside, we locked up and checked every room in the house, like kids coming home from a scary movie. Because no matter what the medical examiner said—and he did, too, the very next day, calling it heart failure and explaining her facial expression as involuntary muscular contraction—Ellie and I were convinced another kind of death had been planned for Kenty. Her unstable heart had merely made the planned action unnecessary.
And that to us meant: (a) there'd been two killers running around Eastport this holiday season, which was about as likely as two meteors striking us simultaneously.
Or (b) there was one.
Still running around, I mean. Not in jail.
Ergo: not Faye Anne Carmody.
But when a lady of advanced years drops dead among her pill bottles and her African violets, a bathrobe belt and an unhappy expression are unlikely to be seen as convincing evidence of her murder.
So we knew, or thought we did.
But we were the only ones thinking about it that way.
Other, I mean, than the one who'd done it.
“None of your business,” Ben Devine told Ellie and me a little later that morning. We were sitting at a table at the rear of La Sardina, Eastport's sort-of Mexican restaurant.
Not much on the menu would be recognized as Mexican food, by a native; the meat in one taco would feed a Mexican family for a week, and the house specialty—fresh scallop tortilla, in season—was an especially downeast twist on the cuisine.
But what the place lacked in culinary authenticity, it made up in decor; twinkling lights, candle-jammed Kahlúa bottles, serape curtains, bright checked tablecloths, and oversized houseplants all combined somehow to give the impression that a large, colorful piñata had exploded somewhere nearby.
Ben had pulled up in a standard Eastport work vehicle: an aged Ford pickup, light blue, lots of Bondo. Now he glared at us across the table.
“Taught math. Quit. Came here. That's all you need to know.”
He took another drag of a cigarette, crushed it out. You can still smoke in a bar in Maine, if the bar owner pays a higher license fee and prohibits unaccompanied youngsters. Personally I’d rather eat dinner with a chain-smoker than a health-nazi; at least the smoker isn't pretending to be interested in my welfare, instead of in his own superior political correctness. But anyway:
“So, you're staying with Melinda?” Ellie inquired brightly. She thinks there aren't many barriers that can't be broken by a dose of her own pure, unadulterated friendliness, and usually she is right.
But not this time. “Yeah,” Ben Devine said. He was a big man, rawboned and fiftyish, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, his thick, greying hair tied back with a leather thong. One of his huge boots would've swallowed both my feet, with plenty of room to spare.
Then out of the blue the math thing rang a bell. “You wouldn't happen to be the B. J. Devine who wrote the Devine candlestick formula?” I blurted, not thinking it could be true.
Candlesticking is one of the trickier methods of charting stock market activity; the graphing patterns, with colorful names like Three White Soldiers, Advancing Blocks, and Bearish Counterattack, are used to predict what a stock may do in the future—i.e., go up or down—based on what the patterns have presaged in the past.
Devine's eyes flickered briefly with interest. “Yeah. That was me.” But his tone suggested that this had been in some other life, no longer relevant.
In my own money career, I’d gone straight for fundamentals: How much cash? How much debt? What's the burn rate? Do people want the product? And—the most important question, perhaps—is the CEO a solid, smart person or a power-mad looney-tune? A lot of people swore by can-dlesticking, though, and by the variation on it that B. J. Devine had invented, after I’d left the business.
“But”—he mashed another cigarette—“that's history. You want to know about Merle Carmody.”
Interesting segue: two things that were history. “Right. Somebody called me,” I said. “Someone who seemed to think you might know something about Merle's death. D’you have any idea who might want to implicate you in it?”
Because while Ellie and I were going around my house making sure no one lurked in it—Monday following us approvingly as if to say it was about time someone did an actual search, for heaven's sake—something occurred to us. If the call about Ben was not mischief, might it have been meant as misdirection?
Devine drank black coffee with his cigarettes, and from the harsh sound of his laugh it was a habit he'd been pursuing for years. “Unfortunate. That's a good one. Like wiping out smallpox. Maybe someone thinks I’d be good to implicate ’cause I’m so glad he's dead.”
“Your frankness is refreshing.” Also a little worrisome, I thought. “May I ask why you disliked Merle Carmody so intensely?”
“Nope. But I’ll tell you how you know I didn't kill him.”
He leaned across the table at me, his eyes locking onto mine. “Because I’m a knife man, see? A meticulous knife man. And if I’d cut that son of a bitch up there wouldn't have been a head in one of those packages.”
Word of that had gotten out, of course. Ben Devine smiled down at his nicotine-stained fingers. “If I’d done it, I’d have started with his tongue. Skinned it, trimmed it, boiled it with an onion. I’d be at home now, having it in a sandwich.”
The knife on Devine's belt was a big Randall in a hand-sewn leather scabbard. Not the kind of item you would use to dress out a deer. This was a Vietnam infantry knife; Wade had one, up in his workshop. A killing knife.
“But I didn't,” Ben said. “I just mind my own business. And I expect other people to mind theirs. Any more questions?”
Not waiting for an answer he slapped money on the bar and went out; the blue pickup roared to life, its carburetor banging out a couple of smoky backfires like parting shots.
“Well,” Ellie said into the silence afterwards. Ben had blitzed in, laid his rap on us, and blitzed out, all in about ten minutes. “Another happy member of Merle Carmody's fan club. Not.”
Ted Armstrong, La Sardina's daytime bar man, came over with fresh coffee and we drank it gratefully to get the bitter taste of Ben's remarks from our mouths. “What did he mean, Ted? Do you know why Ben hated Merle so much?”
Ted nodded, running a towel on the bar trim, straightening the backgammon and cribbage boards and the boxed chess set, all stacked at the end of the polished surface.
“Ayuh. Don't see Ben a whole lot. Not that I particularly want to. He is way too intense for me.”
He
was that, all right. You ran into guys like Ben now and then in Eastport: with oversized personalities that had not fit comfortably into whatever mold they'd burst out of. They lived on the mainland, mostly, sometimes in desperately ramshackle little off-road cabins without electricity, plumbing, or central heat, and came to town a few times a year for medicine and supplies.
Mostly, they were perfectly fine people. But a few of them weren't: if you wanted it to be, Eastport was the perfect spot for vanishing right off the face of the earth, out of sight of any pursuing authorities. Even a murder only got the city news crews here for two days.
“I heard where he was some kind of math wizard back at the school he was at,” Teddy said, pouring pretzels into a bowl.
“Right. And Michael Jordan was a basketball player.”
“Uh-huh. The real deal, huh? But anyway, when he got to Eastport last summer he wasn't like that. Started doing odd jobs. And one of ’em was, when hunting season got here, he cut up deer for people.”
“Oh,” Ellie said, enlightenment spreading over her face. That was one of the things Merle Carmody had done for money, too. Professional woodsmen did their own butchering but if you only went out once a year, got your deer and that was the end of it, it wasn't the kind of thing you got much practice at.
“And Merle didn't like it,” said Teddy, “that someone from away was cuttin’ into his customer base. Get it? Cuttin’ in? And Merle, he started talkin’ about Ben.” He smiled at his own joke. “Tales out of school, you might say,” he added, chuckling again.
“So Merle started some nasty rumor about Ben?” Could that explain the tongue references?
“Ayuh. Said Ben left bone chips in the meat. And other icky stuff I won't go into.” Teddy made a face. “Ended up that nobody wanted Ben Devine handling their edibles anymore.”
He wiped his hands on the bar towel, tossed it in the dirty linen hamper. “And Carmody started doing more business after that but it wasn't enough for him. He kept after Ben in the flappin’-his-yap department. Just kept talkin’.” He began flicking at the bottles behind the bar with a feather duster. “Hear Merle tell it, Ben was the real killer that O. J. Simpson's been lookin’ for.”
He flicked a bottle of Galliano, squinted at it, and flicked it again. The Harvey Wallbanger, I gathered, had been out of favor for a while. “Merle kept bad-mouthin’ Ben any way he could, and Ben didn't like it.”
All of which presented another motive neat as a butcher's package. So far by my count we had love for Peter Christie, money for Melinda, vengeance for Ben, and self-preservation for Faye Anne, herself; if there'd been an Olympic event for racking up mortal enemies, Merle would've won the gold.
“Why did Ben leave the college?” Ellie wanted to know. “Have you heard anything about that?”
“Well,” Teddy replied uncertainly, “what I heard was, folks there thought he killed a fellow. But I don't know how much truth there really is in that.”
Ellie and I looked at each other. “Is that so?” she said mildly, waiting for more.
“Uh-huh. Some guy at the school he was at was s'posed to've disappeared. But they never found a body, was what I heard, and he never got charged with anything, Ben didn't. Only suspected hard, the story goes.”
“I’m surprised we've never heard about that,” I said.
Teddy shrugged. “You know how it is. Thing gets to be old news.” He waved at the street beyond La Sardina's front window. “And Ben keeps his head down pretty good. Guy's not around much, that's not the guy people're going to be gabbin’ about. ’Cept for Merle. And he's not going to anymore, either.”
Ted began rinsing the glasses: more hot water, then onto the rack for drying. I wanted to plunge my hands into the steaming soapy basin.
“Not,” he added, “that anyone was too hot on hearin’ Merle gab. And toward the end, there, I didn't have to, ’cause he was hangin’ out more at Duddy's. Glad to lose that business.” He picked up the rack of glasses, moved it toward a pad of towels he'd prepared for it. “Ben's an okay guy in the bar, here, though, the few times he's come in. Quiet drinker, not a smart-ass, and in my business I like that.”
He set the rack down. “Only thing is,” he added, “you don't want to bad-mouth that sister of his, Melinda. You know her, lives up to North End? That damn-fool woman, all skin and bones, never wears a jacket?”
We indicated that we did.
“Fella made the mistake once of mentioning her name wrong when Ben was in, I had to order a new bar mirror and a dozen beer glasses.”
“That's what I heard from George, too,” Ellie said to me, sotto voce.
Ted peeked at himself in the replacement mirror, patting a dark hairpiece so perfectly made and well-arranged you'd never have known he had it, but for the betraying gesture. “I guess Ben'd do about anything for that Melinda,” he said.
Or unless you'd known him before he got it; three months earlier when he'd first put it on, it had been the talk of the town. “Met her a few times, too, in here, and I didn't notice much pleasant about the woman, myself. But,” he let his hand drop self-consciously as he caught my eye in the mirror, “I guess that's true about blood bein’ thicker'n water.”
“Right,” Ellie agreed thoughtfully. “I guess it is, at that. Does he talk about anything when he's here? Ben, I mean?”
Teddy nodded. “His travels, after he got out of the service. ’Specially Africa and Belgium. When he does talk, it's about how he liked those places. But not,” Teddy added, “what he did there.”
“Africa and Belgium,” Ellie repeated. “Where diamonds come from, and where they get bought and sold.”
I stared at her in surprise. “You said you wanted some. So I went on-line and read up on them,” she told me, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
Which for her it was; she may be only an Eastport girl—a designation in which she takes justifiable pride—but she is the perfect living example of acting locally, thinking globally. If I wanted a little jar of pure radium, it's a good bet Ellie could find out how to get one for me.
“Yeah, well, he's not flashing a Diamond-Jim-sized bankroll around, that's for sure,” Teddy commented. “Two beers, max. Not the fancy stuff, either. Just whatever's on tap.” He dumped Ben's ashtray in a metal container he kept for the purpose, as we gathered our things to go.
“Not very productive,” Ellie commented as we stepped out the door into the icy wind rushing off the harbor, and she was right:
For all Ben's apparent willingness to meet with us—we'd called Melinda's, and he'd surprised us by being there and coming down to the bar on very short notice—all he'd really given us was a silent warning: that he wanted to be left alone.
And that we'd better, if we knew what was good for us. Other than that, we went out into the cold, bright day no wiser than before.
Which was very unwise indeed.
Ellie and I parted outside La Sardina; she had a load of nails and tar paper coming for her kitchen roof work, and George was out scalloping, again.
Different boat, of course. “He says after a close call like that, if you don't go back out right away, you never will,” Ellie said. “He says you'll walk around drowned on dry land, the rest of your life.”
Which I thought was better than the alternative, but never mind; George, we both knew, would work till he dropped or until someone poleaxed him. And at least he wasn't feeding whole trees into the debarking machine over on the mainland, which Victor always said was a job so dangerous that any man who worked at it should bank his own blood, as a precaution.
So she went home to take delivery of rebuilding materials and I went back to my own house, which in my absence had begun smelling like a cat-food factory in the middle of July.
Well, it was better than the blood smell.
Still… a lot like a cat-food factory.
“Hi,” Wade said cheerfully as I came in, dropping a bay leaf into an enormous steaming kettle on the stove and replacing the lid. His fac
e was like a six-year-old's on Christmas morning.
“Mmm,” I said, sniffing. “Smells… interesting.”
It was one word for it. I put my arms around him, reminded again of one of those whole trees; Wade is the sort of man whose muscles don't show on the outside, particularly.
“Salt fish dinner,” he said, peeking into the pot once more. A wave of ferociously potent aroma steamed up into my face; I reeled back.
“In the old days, people around here used to live on salt fish all winter.” He started peeling another potato. On the counter already were a whole quartered cabbage, a jar of pearl onions, and a pound of bacon.
“They used to survive crossing the Rocky Mountains by eating their shoes, too,” I commented. “And sometimes by eating each other.”
He only grinned. “You'll see,” he said, draining the onions and separating the slices of bacon, laying them in the cast-iron skillet. The smell of frying began partly obliterating the aroma of fish.
But only partly. “My uncle,” he confided enthusiastically, “used to make this all the time.”
Uh-oh. If you want to get me really doubtful about a food item, tell me your uncle used to cook it. “My uncle used to cook things, too,” I said, washing my hands at the sink. “Usually they were things that he'd hit with a load of buckshot that could've blown a hole right through the side of the barn.”
Also, the things were usually squirrels, these being the only live creatures in the county without the sense to hide when my uncle got out the shotgun. Mothers kept their children indoors when they heard him blasting away with it, cursing when he missed and rebel-yelling on the few occasions when he didn't.
Back then, I’d hated squirrel. I saw it as a symbol of all that I’d lost, along with my parents: eating stuff that I had to pick the buckshot out of before I could chew it. But when I moved back up North and saw the fat, half-tame ones gamboling in the parks, I’ll admit I felt comforted, knowing that if worse came to worst at least I would never lack protein.
