Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  “Anyway,” Wade said, “it has to simmer for a while.”

  “How long?” I looked around at the house I lived in now: high ceilings, generous rooms, and everywhere that sense of balance and proportion like an elegantly solved equation. Then I glanced into the telephone alcove. The machine was blinking.

  “Oh, about fifteen hours,” Wade answered, meaning the fish. “You change the water three times,” he added matter-of-factly. “To get the salt out and make it nice and tender.” He rinsed the jar the onions had come in, and tossed out the fish wrappings.

  “Really.” I turned my back on the dratted phone, cautiously approaching a bit of salt fish that hadn't made it into the pot. Picking it up, I touched my tongue to it very briefly, whereupon every single cell in my body absorbed approximately twelve times the lethal amount of sodium.

  “Gack,” I said, grabbing a glass from the cabinet. Also, that salt fish was so hard you could have ground it up and spread it on the roads; it would have given traction while dissolving the ice.

  And the pavement beneath. “It will be a lot better,” Wade said gently, “after it's cooked.”

  “I hope so,” I gasped between big, salt-diluting gulps of water. The machine was still blinking at me. “Where's Sam? And doesn't anyone answer the phone in this house except me?”

  “Down at the post office waiting for a package. Him and Tommy, all excited about something they ordered on-line for Sam's school project, supposed to come yesterday but now they think it's coming today. And I’d have answered it but I wasn't here, and no one ever calls me on that line, anyway, do they?”

  He forked the bacon strips out of the pan, blotted them on a pad of paper towels and wrapped them in foil, finally put the drained onions back in the jar and capped it, and put it away. When Wade cooks, it's like someone preparing for a rocket launch.

  Which I sincerely hoped our salt fish dinner experience was not going to resemble. “Wouldn't you rather know what you're ignoring?” he added, angling his head at the telephone alcove.

  I could've asked him the same. The answer was similar, too: no. But that little red light would keep on winking slyly at me until I found out. So I pressed the play button and the first call was Victor, of course, moaning yet again about his romantic trouble, the subject of which I found as interesting as the smell of that fish.

  The second call was from Melinda Devine, who was becoming as unwelcome and seemingly ever-present to me, lately, as Willetta Abrams was to my long-suffering—and long-winded—ex-husband.

  The third call was from Faye Anne Carmody's court-appointed lawyer, Geofrey Claiborn.

  Having a defense lawyer who believes you is in my opinion highly overrated. The idea, when it comes to lawyers, is to have one who can get other people to believe you. And in that department, as in so many others, lately, Faye Anne Carmody was apparently out of luck.

  “Three hundred thousand,” said Claiborn when I called him back. He sounded about fourteen years old. “A chunk in cash, the rest against real property.”

  As he was speaking it came over me again suddenly, the thing I’d been missing until I’d seen Ellie's photograph album: that Faye Anne was as real, as physically real and in trouble as the men who had been on that doomed boat last night.

  “I argued for less,” Geofrey Claiborn said.

  Well, of course he had. I sat down in the phone alcove. Faye Anne was sitting somewhere, now, too; the wings of disaster had not merely brushed her. They enfolded her, holding her in their dark embrace.

  “… lucky to get any bail at all,” Geofrey was saying. “But they'll probably revoke it altogether, you know, when the DA gets his ducks in a row, ups the charge, and gets himself a grand jury indictment.”

  There's no bail, in Maine, for capital murder: the flip side, I guess, to there being no capital punishment, either. But in Eastport, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar bail judgment is equivalent to requiring the accused to put up a lung and a kidney. Any dim thought I might've had about getting Faye Anne out of custody for the duration went right out the window.

  “But the part about cutting the guy into pieces hit hard,” the young attorney went on. “The judge says it was heinous.”

  “Yeah, well, no arguing with that.”

  I sat there struck with the unwanted realization that had come over me. In each other's hands. “So what's next?”

  “Well, there'll be a bunch more hearings. What that'll be, the judge will send the case along to Superior Court. See, in Maine we have a two-tiered system where…”

  I knew about the two-tiered system: little crimes, local court. Serious crimes, Superior Court. Maine has a pool of judges who travel around on a regular schedule to the district courts, mostly for the formality of hearing people plead out to nonviolent crimes: DUI, hunting and fishing violations, minor auto stuff, and the ubiquitous “theft by unauthorized taking,” which covered all kinds of sticky-fingered activities.

  But this was the big time. “Then there'll be the trial, of course. It'll probably take a couple of days, unless she decides to plead guilty. Then…”

  “Wait a minute.” I gathered myself together. “A couple of days? I mean, I know she can't afford all the expensive bells and whistles.”

  If she could have, the first thing she'd have done would've been to hire an attorney, or Ellie would have gone out and hired one for her, not have waited until the court appointed one.

  “What kind of defense are you planning, Geofrey, one built of Tinkertoys?”

  There was a brief silence while he digested this, decided not to respond. “We're going to say he beat her up, even though she won't admit it,” he said finally. “But that's common, I’m given to understand, among battered women. Being,” he added, “ashamed.”

  “You mean she's still not saying Merle hit her? Does she know how serious this is, the situation she's in?”

  “Yeah. She's getting there, anyway. But it's a hard thing to get your mind around, you know. For anyone. That something like this has happened to you. Couldhappen. And as I say, Faye Anne's getting there. But what she's absolutely not saying, says didn't happen, though, is that he hit her that night.”

  Which would be the best thing: flat-out self-defense. What happened afterwards wouldn't help her argument, but…

  “And you're right, we're not going to get the top expert people,” he went on. “But we'll bring in X rays that'll probably show old fractures, and I’ve talked to a woman from the battered women's shelter, who'll testify on our side for free—”

  Impatience overcame me. “Still, we're talking about a murder charge, aren't we? Not clamming without a license or driving a snowmobile on a public way. What about other medical testimony?”

  “I didn't get her case until twenty hours after the arrest,” he responded. “She'd had a cursory medical checkup at that point but no lab stuff. And by then, once I was up to speed on the whole thing, any blood work I might've asked for would have been worthless.”

  A blood alcohol test and screening for other drugs could have assisted in her defense, had they been done immediately. If they showed that she was likely to have been heavily under the influence at the time of Merle's death, Geofrey could argue it hadn't been a calculated crime.

  But now it was too late. “As for the bail, I actually had some hope when I heard she had a house. But it turns out there's already so many mortgages on the place you couldn't raise a dime against it. And the cash, that's out of the question, too.”

  “Yeah.” Not surprising about the mortgages. Eastport had a little bump in real estate values fifteen years ago, when the eighties were in full swing and city people thought they had money to burn. Now the second mortgages folks had taken back then were millstones around their necks.

  Whatever Merle had spent on his windows and driveway work would've been nothing, by comparison. Probably he and Faye Anne had barely been making their monthly payments, nothing left over. A common situation in a part of the world where—despite a good eco
nomy a few hundred miles south of us—people thought little of working three jobs just to get by; it was why Clarissa Arnold had assumed Faye Anne would need court-appointed representation in the first place.

  And yet there hadbeen the newly surfaced driveway, and the windows… I put it aside to consider, later. “You don't suppose they're open to some kind of deal on the charge? The prosecutors, because of the battering thing?”

  When the DA's men from Augusta had mentioned this notion I’d mentally pooh-poohed it; now, however, it seemed one of the few straws left to grasp at.

  But Geofrey didn't think so. “No. I understand your thinking but the so-called battered woman defense is very difficult and complex. It's not just ‘he slugged her, so she's innocent,’ the way most people think. It's a syndrome that has to be proven with evidence; specific, technical evidence. We don't have a great shot at it without expert testimony, I’m sorry to say. Or even with it; it's controversial. And they know it, the other side does, so they're not about to deal on a slim-to-none chance that we might win with it.”

  “Okay.” No surprise there, either: that the tag team from Augusta had not exactly been open and forthcoming. Or that we had a chance in some kind of legal David-and-Goliath match. It was what I had thought in the first place: dismal all the way around.

  “So I guess all that's left is, when can we visit her?”

  But this time, Geofrey did surprise me. Unpleasantly:

  “Not anytime soon. She's been hospitalized in Bangor, over at the mental health institute.”

  “What? What's she doing there?” My dismay was genuine; for one thing, it was a couple of hours’ drive each way for Geofrey, which by itself wasn't good. The law says you have to be provided with an attorney but it doesn't say the arrangement has to be convenient for anyone involved, if it's not so inconvenient as to make the conviction reversable on appeal; I’d discovered this to my sorrow back in the city, when a RICOH-indicted client of mine got the bright idea to start faking a mental disability.

  “After the hearing, I guess it came over her, all that's happened,” Geofrey said. “She started talking about hurting herself and she sounds like she means it.”

  You think visiting in a jail is difficult, just try the locked forensic ward of a mental health facility. By the time my city client's attorneys managed to confer with him again, the other patients had convinced him he was Frederick the Great.

  “What's the matter?” I asked; by now, I was truly unhappy. “Couldn't the fellows down at the jail figure out how to get the shoelaces out of her shoes?”

  But Geofrey wasn't having any more snottiness out of me. He didn't sound fourteen anymore, either, suddenly.

  “Look, it wasn't their call. I got the order issued after I met her. She's depressed, angry… she's much better off in the hospital. And I,” he added in tones that said he'd had enough of me, too, “am going to sleep better with her there, okay?”

  “Oh. Okay.” It was what I’d been waiting for, actually: some sense that he had a spinal cord. My assessment of Geofrey went up a notch.

  “So could her temporary commitment do any good in an—”

  “Insanity defense? Dream on.” He, I realized, was unhappy, too. “That damned diary deep-sixed that idea. Clear as springwater. How she would do it, how to hide it… if they decide she did it, she's never going to persuade anybody she didn't know what she was doing, or didn't know that it was wrong. She has no psychiatric history, her speech and writing are lucid and well organized, and nothing suggests she was hearing voices or feeling compelled, or anything like that.”

  Wonderful; maybe Faye Anne could write a book in prison. The silence on the phone lengthened. Then: “So what do you know about the divorce she says she wanted?” he asked, out of the blue.

  Worser and worser, as Sam used to say. “Divorce? She's never said anything about a divorce. In fact, she's opposed to—”

  “Her story, as far as you could even call it a story,”

  Geofrey interrupted, “is that she'd changed her mind about that, and she didn't kill him but why would she kill him when she was already planning to divorce him?”

  Well, maybe she had changed her mind; certainly plenty of people had urged her to. But it wasn't a great argument now, because: “But that's not the way a prosecutor would look at it, is it? From that angle, it would be that they fought over the divorce, and she killed him during the fight.”

  “Yup,” Geofrey agreed. “And over the infidelity she planned charging him with. So she says.”

  Oh, brother. I could just hear the prosecutor describing Faye Anne's outrage over Merle's cheating on her. Her murderous fury…

  Never mind that Faye Anne was just about as murderous as a sand flea. “And you're telling me because she's already talking about this. Not just to you. Volunteered it, while she was being questioned? Waived her right to an…”

  Geofrey confirmed this bad news. “They couldn't shut her up. She also says that although they were cash-poor he owned property besides the house. Know anything about that?”

  Ye gods. “The property, yes, some land here in town. That's the rumor, anyway.” With that tree on it, next to Melinda's. “Infidelity being a circumstance she thought she could bring up in a settlement argument?”

  But not being beaten. Pride's a funny thing. At the moment I wasn't laughing.

  “Sure. But it didn't sound to me as if she had any good proof. She said he was seeing a woman but she had no photographs, no letters, no tapes. Not that they'd necessarily have held water either; infidelity isn't the bugaboo it used to be, in divorce court. For getting property, or anything else.”

  I liked him for the word: bugaboo. “Faye Anne,” he went on, “is a sweet-seeming woman, but she's also kind of…”

  “Clueless,” I supplied when he hesitated.

  It wasn't fair: she'd known enough to do exactly the right thing about those daisies for Ellie's mother's funeral. But that didn't mean she knew how to handle herself in the world beyond Eastport.

  Or at a murder trial. “She say who it was?”

  “Well, yes,” Geofrey Claiborn said. “When I pressed her for the name of the woman, she didn't want to say. But finally—”

  “Who?” I demanded impatiently. What the hell, might as well pile up all the bombshells in one place.

  “Mickey Jean Bunting,” he said. The name wasn't familiar to me. “Anyway, I’ll do what I can,” he went on. This conversation was ending. “But you know…”

  I knew: lousy situation. Before hanging up, Geofrey promised to keep me posted on further developments. But we both knew that if Faye Anne didn't change her story— and at this point, maybe even if she did—all that remained was for a jury to pronounce what everyone in Washington County probably already believed: that she was guilty.

  Which to me meant that somebody would be enjoying an extra-special holiday gift this year: getting away with murder. Because I’d been thinking about it ever since we'd found Kenty, and I’d come to the conclusion that if Faye Anne Carmody had killed her husband Merle, I would personally shoot Rudolph and serve him for Christmas dinner.

  Unfortunately, my certainty wasn't going to cut much ice with a grand jury. If something didn't happen soon to prevent it, by the end of the week Faye Anne would be indicted for just what Eastport Police Chief Bob Arnold had predicted: capital murder.

  And after that, the blithe, laughing girl in the photo album would likely be in prison for the rest of her life. Thinking this, I glanced out the dining-room window to where the pale blues of afternoon were darkening to indigo and aquamarine. Against lead-colored clouds mounding high over the Moosehorn Refuge to the west, the white clapboard houses, red-studded barberry bushes, and blackish-green fir trees of town stood etched on the snow, coldly elegant.

  Upstairs, music thumped on as Sam and Tommy set to opening the package they had come in with while I was on the phone. A whine from the parlor told me Monday was still afflicted by some private terror. The bandsaw went on
in Wade's workshop where he was rejiggering a gun stock for somebody; with boat repair down the tubes, he was depending on harbor piloting and gun work, for the foreseeable future.

  At last I returned to the kitchen, hoping to interest myself in some project I could actually finish, noting mournfully how the thick, opaque plastic at the windows blurred the view. I was wondering what Faye Anne could see from her locked hospital ward, and if two layers of clear plastic might be better—even if more expensive—than the milky-looking stuff, when it happened:

  A face appeared. Only for an instant, obscured by the plastic to dark eyes, the blob of a briefly pressing nose, and a mouth that stretched to a crescent grin.

  Or grimace. Then it was gone. And although I raced out, I saw no one in the yard or on the street. Footprints dotted the snow, too many to distinguish which were new ones.

  A truck passed, its tire-chains jingling, and then a second one, backfiring copiously. A purple finch hopped from one bare, thorny rose cane to another. Then nothing moved but blue shadows lengthening on the snow, gathering up what remained of the thin, desolate winter light.

  Wade went to a Federated Marine meeting that evening, came in around eleven, and watched the sports wrap-up on TV before coming up to bed.

  “Hey,” he said comfortably, seeing I was still awake.

  I hadn't been, but then I’d had an awful dream. In it I was standing on a hillside looking out over blue water: sun on my arms, the smell of flowers, the whisper of dry grass. But when I turned to gaze down into the valley behind me, everything in it was glittering with a thick, deadly coating of white frost.

  “Hey, yourself.” I slid over against him. No matter how cold the weather or how long he'd been out, Wade was always warm.

  He curved his arm around me. “Bad night?”

  “Yeah.” I ran the nuts and bolts of it for him quickly.

  “I started out just wanting to help Ellie. Faye Anne's her friend. We wanted extenuating circumstances, or something. But now I’m sure she didn't do it.” I told him why: all the small, wrong things about it, and Kenty. And the face at the window.