Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  I’d have said anything, at the moment, to get out of Mickey Jean's line of fire. But Ellie kept moving forward, even when two dogs as big as wild boars and nearly as friendly looking burst out of the brush and came barreling toward us, snarling and slavering.

  “Skip! Rascal!” Mickey Jean Bunting bellowed. “Okay!”

  At her command the dogs halted, lowering their hackles. The blood lust went out of their eyes as if a switch had been flipped; moments later they were just a pair of let-out house dogs, delighted to see us but mostly interested in a romp in the snow.

  The house itself, concealed by a cedar windbreak, was a low log structure with a wide front porch and several outbuildings in the rear, one topped by a satellite dish. An old Honda sedan of indeterminate light color was parked by one of the sheds.

  Mickey Jean, still gripping the rifle in businesslike fashion, ushered us into the cabin and slammed the door brusquely behind us. We just stood there as she wiped the rifle, racked it, and stoked the woodstove before speaking again.

  “Coffee in the pot. Whiskey there, too. Suit yourself.” She waved at a shelf where a bottle and glasses were ranged neatly.

  Ellie took coffee but as far as I’m concerned, when a rifle shot misses me by two feet, cocktail hour has arrived. I poured, meanwhile examining Mickey Jean Bunting and her extraordinary living quarters.

  Wearing a red plaid flannel shirt, bib overalls, and leather work boots, she looked like a female version of Paul Bunyan. Cropped greying hair, a hatchet face, and a grimly set jaw completed the picture. By contrast, the cabin interior was a woodsy version of House Beautiful:

  Thick braided rugs, Mission-style furniture, hunter-green draperies, and fat pottery lamps with huge pleated shades. A pair of bentwood rockers with dark red cushions faced the enameled woodstove; two wicker baskets held split kindling and newspaper spills.

  “Yeah, I messed with Merle some,” Mickey Jean admitted in answer to my second question.

  The first one was how come she'd shot at us, to which she'd had a ready answer: that a woman alone out here in the woods couldn't be too careful. Personally I felt firing a rifle in the direction of persons unknown wasn't particularly careful at all, and the “alone” part didn't strike me right, either. But by then I’d decided that if she wanted to shoot a hole clean through me instead of merely in my vicinity, she'd have done that. So I let it go.

  For now. Meanwhile she'd realized what I meant, and backtracked. “Oh, hey, not messin’ around that way. That whiskery little runt?” Her laugh was a harsh bark. “Lent the son of a bitch some money, is what I did. You think he kept that pretty little wife of his in a rose-covered cottage, on what he made from a butcher shop hardly ever did any business?”

  Waving for emphasis, she brushed against a low table; on it, a blueberry-colored iMac computer popped out of the sleep mode when she bumped it, long enough for me to scan what she'd been doing on it when we had arrived.

  “How did you meet him in the first place?” I asked.

  Stock charts vanished from the computer screen as she touched the keyboard. And the newspaper spills in the stove basket were of Barron's and The Wall Street Journal: Fascinating.

  Something else interested me, too; a business card, its corner tucked under the edge of the computer's keyboard. It read, “Peter Christie, Computer Repair,” with a phone number and his address in Eastport, on Prince Street. Criminy, the guy was like a bad penny.

  “At a bar,” Mickey Jean replied. “Duddy's in Meddy-bemps. You know it?”

  Another place where bad pennies turned up.

  “Yeah, well, it's not a regular hangout of mine,” she said, as if she'd heard my thought. “Went in with a friend once just to satisfy my curiosity.” She shook her head. “Never again. But Merle was there.”

  I wondered what he could possibly have said to her, to engage her in conversation. Because Mickey Jean was rough around the edges but she had a strong, penetrating intelligence; you could feel it in the energy of her speech, sense it merely by being in the room with her: physical vigor, lively brain.

  “That's rich,” she went on. “You thinking I wanted old Merle for his body. Faye Anne thought so, too? Hah. When all along it's me who was funding that lovely little garden of hers.”

  She poured a neat whiskey twice the size of mine, knocked it back in a gulp. “Nope, I wanted a return on my money.”

  Two plates and cups on the wiped-clean drainboard, two cast-iron reading lamps, one by each of the bentwood rockers. “Merle was supposed to pay me back when he cut his bird's-eye,” Mickey Jean declared.

  The iMac had a phone line connection. “But now that he's dead, I guess I’ll never get the money,” she added.

  That caught my attention. “How often did it happen? Your loans to Merle Carmody, I mean. One lump sum, or—”

  A bitter laugh. “I wish. No, he got into me pretty regular. Once a week or so, there at the end.”

  And there was my answer about his house improvements. “If he signed a promissory note,” I began, but her laugh cut me off again.

  “No note. No nothing. I didn't want my name on anything with that rascal's name on it, too. Handshake deal.”

  “I see. So you have no record of these loans.”

  She shrugged, daring me to disbelieve her. “Wouldn't tell you but if I don't that other story'll keep goin’ around, the romance version.” She shuddered. “Not an idea that I want floatin’ in people's heads. Just the mental picture gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  Funny, that's exactly what her story was giving me. For one thing, no one in town knew Mickey Jean, so why would she care? “Kept a record of it in my head,” she went on, “and he knew I’d come collecting if he didn't pay it eventually, and with interest.”

  She nodded at the rifle in the gun case. A matching one stood in the slot next to it. Two of everything.

  But only one person in evidence. “When that land deal of his was straightened out an’ the wood sold, Merle Carmody owed me big-time.”

  She moved toward the door, opened it. Skip and Rascal barged in exuberantly, two big bundles of doggy energy shedding snow, and headed for their water bowls. “Guess that wraps up the other thing you wanted to ask me, too,” Mickey Jean said.

  She pulled a towel from a hook by the door and bent to the first dog, lifting his paws to clean ice crystals from between his pads: an oddly humane gesture from a woman who was otherwise taking pains to show us how rough-and-tough she was. “I mean, whether maybe I cut him up. But how would I ever get my money back, if I did that? Which now I won't.”

  She released the dog. “Yeah, I’d like to find the person killed Merle. Give whoever a real special downeast Maine thanks.” She angled her head at the gun case, to indicate the kind of gratitude she wished to express.

  Beside the gun case stood a table with a potted living tree on it: a Norfolk island pine, its evergreen fronds decorated with carved wooden Christmas ornaments: angels and stars, candy canes, and little drummer boys. A foil star shone at the top.

  It was charming, and again not part of the character she was trying so hard to project to us. Ellie spoke: “You seem comfortable with the rifle.”

  Mickey Jean released the second dog, who followed the first to a plaid L.L. Bean dog cushion in the corner. Even the animals used classy furniture, around here.

  “No sense keeping a gun, you don't know how to use it if you need to,” she said.

  “Maybe, but you could use a refresher in weapons safety,” I retorted. I was still pretty steamed about getting shot at, even though it was obvious now that she'd meant it as a gesture. I gathered she'd brought us inside just to get a good look at us, to size us up in case we actually were some sort of threat.

  From where I stood I could see into a pantry area, shelves loaded with supplies: bottled water, economy-sized sacks and boxes of provisions: flour, salt, coffee. Kerosene, too; lamp oil, and batteries. There'd been a feeder line over our heads on the way in for electricity, but out her
e, I figured, you hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.

  “So,” I said, trying for a change in the atmosphere, “do you do any shooting at the target range in Charlotte?”

  And there you had it, straight out of the Miss Marple Society's official handbook: try to establish a common interest or activity before moving on to the damning questions. Such as: what's your real connection to the dead guy whose noggin I found sitting in a meat counter?

  Mickey Jean just shook her head impatiently. “You see any holes in you?” she demanded. “No. But if I wanted there to be any, you can bet there would be. So you go on, both of you. Get back to town where you belong.” At her tone, Skip and Rascal lifted their heads. Skip bared his teeth in a big white grin.

  Rascal merely opened one blue eye. But the look in it said that if his mistress should happen to call upon him or his pal, we were dog chow.

  We went. So much for asking any questions, damning or not. It would have been like trying to push thumbtacks through bullet-proof glass. Not that I wanted to contemplate bullets or anything else at all related to them, just at the moment.

  In the car: “So what do you think?”

  The drive out wasn't as thrillingly perilous as the trip in. Ellie knew the way, now, and gunned it through the treacherously snow-choked parts as before. But I only bit my tongue twice.

  “She says she lives alone, but she's got two of everything people use,” Ellie replied, swerving to avoid a tree stump that would have creamed us if she hadn't spotted it in time.

  “And she's got the reading material and computer connections you'd expect of a serious money hobbyist,” I mused. “But no record of a loan to Merle Carmody.”

  “Think she made it up?”

  I considered this, partly in order to avoid considering the massive snowbank hurtling toward us. I’d forgotten to bring my cell phone; back in the city the thing had been practically grafted to my hip.

  But not anymore. “Nope.”

  Ellie swung the wheel, the car fishtailed, and the front tires caught on about an inch-wide strip of bare, sanded pavement. We shot out onto the road.

  “No, I think that part probably was the truth,” I told Ellie. “That he had money of hers. And she didn't like it.”

  The look on Mickey Jean's face when she'd said it convinced me: she was kicking herself hard for some kind of a money deal that involved Merle.

  “But why lend money to him at all?” I went on. “She said that she wanted a return. From what I saw, though, she knows other ways of getting that.”

  We crossed Route 1, headed back to Eastport. It was two in the afternoon, the sun already more than halfway through its short winter arc; in the east a band of frigid darker blue was beginning to fill the sky. Wind buffeted us across the causeway.

  “Maybe she's worried that he kept a record,” Ellie suggested, glancing in the rearview mirror again. “If she thinks she'll have to explain the loans to him, she might be worried that she could come under suspicion.”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. Ellie slowed for a pickup loaded with evergreen tips bound for the seasonal factory on Sea Street. This time of year some people worked twenty hours a day, tying Christmas wreaths or harvesting the makings out of the woods. The labor was brutal but it put something under the tree for their own kids, come the big day.

  We turned in at my house. “I went to Kenty's funeral,” Ellie said suddenly.

  The church service, she meant; no burying would happen until the spring, when the earth lost its granitelike winter hardness. “How was it?” With a guilty pang I realized I’d forgotten the service entirely.

  “Sad.” She shook her head. “Not many there. Kenty basically didn't have any life of her own, anymore, so she gossiped about other people to keep from feeling so alone, I guess.”

  Then: “Someone was following us back there,” Ellie added.

  “Really.” Her daredevil driving took on a new meaning to me. “Could you see who it was?”

  She shook her head. “I noticed them just before we got to Route 1. They fell back whenever I slowed down. Little light-colored car, I didn't see much else about it. So I decided, if I couldn't find out about them, they weren't going to find out about us, either. Where we were headed, I mean. And I guess they didn't. Whoever it was, they weren't waiting when we got back to the main road.”

  “Nice going,” I said lightly, slamming the car door. Snow squeaked frozenly under my feet.

  Ellie put the car in reverse. “Just one thing, though.”

  “What?” As I spoke, a shadow darted from the granite foundation of the house and scuttled across the snowy back lawn. Peering into the gloom where it came from, I saw that a pane in a cellar window was broken. And on the edge of it hung a tuft of long black hair.

  Coarse, musky smelling: skunk hair. “Like you said, there aren't lots of people living out there,” Ellie said. “Not in winter.” With that she backed the car out, drove away.

  I stood holding the tuft of hair, feeling like a scientist who has just found a dandy little nest of plague germs, because one skunk exiting did not mean no more were inside. Skunks enjoy cuddling up together in a warm place, such as for instance behind the mop bucket or under the paint tarps in my cellar.

  Grimly, I went over my indoor-skunk-equipment list: live trap, blanket to put over it, gloves, and a long stick with which to urge a skunk firmly out again, once I’d gotten it far away. Also if possible a gas mask; skunks do not tend to be in good moods while they are being evicted. Maybe once I’d evicted this one, Monday would return to her usual calm self.

  All the while, though, I kept thinking about what Ellie had said: that considering how few places we could reasonably have been going on South Meadow Road in winter, maybe whoever was behind us hadn't needed to follow all the way to Mickey Jean's, to learn our destination.

  Just far enough to think suspicions confirmed.

  “Whoever else is or isn't involved,” Clarissa Arnold pointed out that evening, “the question remains: how would anyone cause Faye Anne's claimed amnesia for the event?”

  We were having corned beef hash, which follows New England boiled dinner as night follows day, and the company was a near-reprise of the one we'd assembled two evenings before, minus the government guys but plus Bob Arnold, his wife, Clarissa, and their toddler son, Thomas.

  “That's the trouble,” I agreed. “Unless she's lying about it. Remembers, and just won't say, the same way she won't admit that Merle was the hitting type.”

  In the parlor young Thomas was coaxing Monday from under the coffee table by offering her a teething biscuit. Ordinarily I do not encourage the dog to eat anything except dog food. But she'd been so glum and skittish, I’d have sat her up at the table and fed her corned beef hash if I’d thought it would help.

  “Checked out the cellar for that varmint,” George Valentine said. I’d piled the skunk equipment in the hall and from it he'd drawn the correct conclusion. “No live ones that I could spot, but there's a little heap of shavings and such in the corner. A start of a nest, seems like. I set the trap just in case.”

  It was his birthday so we had a cake with candles waiting for him in the kitchen, and Sam had taken all our pictures with his digital camera. But the mood wasn't very celebratory: For one thing, George's injured thumb had turned out to be broken and he was wearing a splint on it. For another, at the end of the table sat Victor, Joy Abrams, and Joy's sister Willetta; suffice it to say they were not a gleesome threesome.

  “What reason would Faye Anne have not to say what happened?” Willetta asked sourly. “Going to jail instead of somebody else? It just doesn't make sense.”

  Victor said Willetta had decided she didn't like staying alone at night, so she'd moved in with Joy. This continued to crimp the progress of his hoped-for romance; what Willetta needed, he had opined to me out in the kitchen—meanwhile depositing a stack of old paperbacks, a broken hammer, and a cracked cream pitcher on the kitchen table—was a new boyfriend, and
couldn't I please find someone for her?

  But looking at Willetta, whose pallid little face reminded me of a glass of buttermilk—splotched with yellowish freckles and made even less delightful by a peevish expression—I thought hooking her up was going to require more matchmaking horsepower than I possessed.

  “She makes a point of running into me whenever I’m there at the hospital,” Victor had complained. “Like she's got radar. Then she drenches me in her hatred.”

  “The amnesia doesn't make sense,” Ellie said quietly to Willetta. “Unless she's frightened of someone. If she thinks telling the truth about what happened could make something else happen. To her.”

  “What could be worse than getting blamed for something that's not your fault?” Willetta snapped now, but no one answered.

  Meanwhile Wade sat calmly eating his corned beef hash. I’d told him all that had happened, including Mickey Jean Bunting's unorthodox way of greeting visitors and Ellie's belief that we'd been followed. In response, Wade had gone thoughtfully up to his workroom and opened the lockbox.

  Now there was a.38 special police revolver in his bedside table, and another in the kitchen drawer. “Emergency equipment,” he'd said. I didn't know if he was carrying any firearm on his person, but if I’d found out he was, I wouldn't have tried talking him out of it. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when I’d have been carrying one, myself: a wonderful old Bisley.45 caliber revolver Wade had given me and taught me to use, a no-kidding weapon with a punch like a prizefighter and a kick like a Kentucky mule.

  It did the job, all right. But none of the gun-related incidents of that time had turned out quite the way I’d planned. So in the end I’d decided to leave weapon power to the experts and concentrate instead on brainpower. I shot at clay pigeons and paper targets at the range on the mainland in Charlotte with Wade, who kept his certifications up religiously, but that was all. Instead of a handgun I carried a cell phone—if I remembered to—and so far, that had worked out just fine.

  “There's a guy selling real vampire blood on the Internet,” Tommy Pockets announced cheerfully, digging into his hash.