Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  Sam looked uncomfortable. I sent a thought-question at him but he avoided my gaze.

  “And another one,” Tommy went on, “with an actual alien eyeball he found in the desert, from Roswell.”

  Sam nudged Tommy hard. “Um,” Tommy said, his ears reddening, “but we aren't actually buying any of those things. Nothing to worry about, that's for sure. Nope, we sure aren't.”

  Sam looked crucified, as Wade and Victor both glanced queryingly at him. But then George spoke up. “What's Ben Devine's connection to all this, anyway?”

  Wade and Sam got up to clear the table, as Ellie replied with a summary of what we'd learned about Devine. “I wish we could find out more about the fellow who disappeared at his college,” she finished. “Just because he wasn't charged doesn't mean—”

  “Wasn't a fellow,” Bob Arnold spoke up. “It was a woman. I don't know the details either, but I heard she was a model. Or had something to do with modeling. Some fool thing.”

  “And she had money,” Joy Abrams put in unexpectedly. “The college was Bates. I lived in Lewiston when all that happened.”

  Victor frowned, reminded, I supposed, of what else had gone on in Lewiston: the snake act. Though the Abrams sisters had moved back to Eastport only the previous summer, he much preferred pretending his ladies didn't have pasts, or anyway not ones they bothered recalling after they met him.

  “So what was the deal?” George asked, turning to Joy.

  “Well.” She glanced around the table. “She disappeared. Ben was supposed to be a friend of hers. A close friend.”

  She paused, looking at Bob Arnold. “I’m not sure about that part about the modeling, though.”

  “I thought I heard something about her being connected to the school,” Clarissa agreed.

  Bob shrugged. “Could be. We got a flyer when it happened. But like I say, I didn't follow it close. Out of my territory. Papers in Portland and so on, they covered the story.”

  “So then what?” Ellie wanted to know.

  “So, of course the police investigated, like Bob says,” Joy said. On anyone else her perfect makeup would have been way too much, but she was good at it.

  “And”she added significantly, “her money had vanished. The woman who disappeared. A lot of money.”

  “So the plot thickens,” I put in. “They checked to see if Ben had any of it?”

  Joy nodded. “Uh-huh. But he didn't. Or if he did, he hid it somewhere that no one could find it. And they couldn't find any way to hook him up with her disappearance, either. So in the end, they had to drop it.”

  “If people behaved better they wouldn't get into trouble.” Willetta's bitter tone produced an uncomfortable silence.

  “She's sensitive right now,” Joy apologized for her sister. “She's just had a bad time with somebody, herself.”

  “Oh, a bad time, is that what you call it?” Willetta shot a dark look at Victor, then got up, flung her napkin angrily onto the table, and left the room. Victor gazed after her and I could see in his eyes the desire to follow her, preferably while gripping a sturdy length of piano wire in both hands. And for once I didn't blame him; Willetta, I decided, was a pill.

  In the parlor, the dog had come out from under the coffee table and was seated gravely across from little Thomas, offering her paw. I was so glad to see her acting normally, I didn't even mind seeing the bits of stuffing the baby had apparently pulled from the upholstered chair. Maybe, I thought hopefully, there really had only been one skunk.

  But the evening was over; George said he was sorry but he didn't want any cake. He thought he'd go home and take one of the pain pills he'd gotten at the health center—which to me meant that sore thumb of his felt like it was being sawed off—and he and Ellie left soon thereafter.

  Victor came up to me, carrying coats, while in the parlor Joy bent cooing over the Arnolds’ baby. “I’m going to kill her,” he fumed.

  Willetta, he meant; she'd already gone out to the car. I made sympathetic noises while thinking about the poetic justice of him having somebody around all the time, driving him bonkers. In the old days, Victor could make me so crazy I feared I might swallow my tongue.

  “You're so nice to him,” Clarissa observed when Victor and Joy had departed.

  Sam and Tommy had vanished back upstairs, Bob was out warming the car up, and the dog was under the coffee table, again. Thomas had offered her one of the stuffing bits from the chair and she'd reeled back in doggy horror.

  I shrugged. “Path of least resistance,” I said.

  Clarissa pursed her lips. “Oh, not really. You know Victor's weak spots. I think you could get rid of him anytime you wanted and I think you know it. Just… destroy him, psychologically. But you don't.”

  “Too chicken, maybe?” I said it lightly as Bob came in, stomped snow off his boots, and joined Wade in the kitchen.

  Clarissa removed Thomas's grasping fist from her dark hair. He was already bundled into his red snowsuit, bright as a Christmas elf. “I doubt it,” she said. “I think it's that you'd have to remember doing it. Like the live trap—you won't kill something helpless when you don't have to.”

  She wasn't only talking about Victor, I realized. Or the skunk.

  “Kenty Dalrymple was a fragile old woman,” Clarissa went on. “I can go with the verdict of heart attack. Bob, too.”

  “But?” Neither Ellie nor I had mentioned anything about our suspicions over Kenty's death. A stray bathrobe belt and a bad feeling just weren't enough to get folks all het up over, as George would've put it.

  But Clarissa didn't need anyone to mention it; she had seen more of life than the view from her Water Street office afforded. “But if by some chance it wasn't what it looked like…”

  “Then,” I answered slowly, “maybe she saw something that she shouldn't have. Or someone was worried that she had.”

  Clarissa nodded. “That's what I thought you thought.”

  By now Thomas was asleep on her shoulder. She hefted him to a more comfortable position. “I’m not convinced,” she said. “Faye Anne might have killed Merle, and Kenty might've dropped dead of her own accord. But if that isn't what happened, then someone's out there.”

  Hearing her say what I’d been thinking sent a chill over me. “And if you're expecting that person to feel any guilt, or have any mercy, or to care at all…” Clarissa added.

  “I get it.” Nervousness made me laugh. “Murderers aren't like you and me.”

  But she didn't smile. She was—it was easy to forget this, with Thomas around—an experienced criminal attorney. “But that's just it, Jacobia. That's the problem. Murderers are like us. On the outside.”

  The baby awoke and whimpered; Bob came and took him from her, his eyes meeting hers in the sort of glance that always made me glad these two had found one another. “Don't suppose any friends of yours will be hangin’ out, out to Meddybemps, tonight,” he said.

  At Duddy's; the bar with the pool table and rough clientele. “No,” I answered. “Not that I know of. Why would you think that?”

  “No reason.” His eyes met mine and I remembered his comment: that the state police had surveillance on a place.

  So I guessed they were doing something there this evening and Bob was in on it. “Not a good time for girls’ night out?” I hazarded. It happened sometimes, a carful of young town women looking for a harmless thrill, a few drinks and some loud music. Something to break the monotony of husbands and kids, make the winter seem not so long.

  Bob nodded, laying his cheek against the baby's soft hair while Clarissa pulled her coat on.

  “It's the inside,” she said, “you need to worry about.”

  Of killers, she meant. She stepped onto the porch. Overhead a disk of full moon shed light without heat, making the street into a black-and-white photograph.

  “Like,” she said, “the dark side of the moon.”

  “That was pretty sobering. What Clarissa said.” Wade nodded, crouching by the wire contraption George h
ad set up in the cellar to trap our skunk. He'd pushed insulation material into the broken window frame, too, and puttied in a new glass pane. It was too cold to do the job right without preparation, since putty and cold weather aren't exactly bosom buddies. Still, it would do for now.

  Nothing in the trap, yet. The bait—a peanut-butter-and-cheese lump smeared with grape jelly—didn't look attractive to me. But then I wasn't a skunk intent on setting up housekeeping.

  Wade straightened. “S’pose you could put a sign in your car window. I mean, seeing as you think somebody's watching.”

  I took his point and laughed, but it was weak-sounding even to me. “Yeah. ‘No Snooping—Closed for Repairs.’ ” “Trouble is,” he added ruefully, “it wouldn't work.” I put my cheek against his shoulder. “No. Probably not.” All Kenty'd done was see something accidentally. Ellie and I had actually gone out looking for trouble.

  “Sam and Tommy are pretty involved in his project,” I commented.

  “Uh-huh. I lent Sam a few bucks so they could buy some stuff for this display he's planning.”

  “Not the Roswell eyeball, I hope.”

  His weathered face crinkled in amusement. “Make a hell of an item for the show-and-tell portion of the program.”

  “You don't think he's run into any trouble? At the table, he and Tommy seemed kind of… secretive.”

  Wade looked unworried. “I doubt they can get into real difficulty just buying a couple of things on eBay. Tomorrow, they'll have figured out how to solve whatever it is, you'll see.”

  I wasn't so sure. Sam had seemed antsy, the way he had after he broke a deck window in the Coast Guard boat with a baseball he had hit on a dare off the fish pier.

  “Mmm. Well, I guess it's all right if he pays you the money back. Or gives you the eyeball.”

  Wade pulled an IOU from his pocket. “Got it covered.” Then: “Jacobia. I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

  Of course not. He never did. “But?”

  “But Ben Devine's a loose cannon. He keeps his head down and you don't see him drunk in the bars, any of that sort of nonsense.”

  Teddy Armstrong had said so, too. “But on the docks, and out on the water,” Wade went on, “all the guys know about him. If you say the wrong thing to him…”

  “He'll go off on you?” Teddy had said that, as well.

  “Ayuh. Couple of months ago he put Lonny Altvater in the hospital. Lon told me it was like trying to fight off a wild animal. All he'd said was, Melinda looked hot in her Fourth of July outfit.”

  “Oh, gosh.” The outfit in question had been a red-white-and-blue jumpsuit, cut up to here and down two inches past there, with strategically placed stars. They'd let her ride in it on the parade float but she'd had to sit behind a flag made of geraniums when the float passed the nursing home, for fear of the effect the patriotic costume might have on residents’ health.

  Wade finished tinkering with the live trap, kissed me hard, and followed me up to the hall where he handed me my jacket, and grabbed a leash.

  “You have more questions for Ben?” he asked.

  He knew I did. I wasn't sure which piqued my curiosity more, Joy Abrams’ dinner-table report about the woman who'd vanished from Ben's life or Melinda's lies about his whereabouts the night of Merle's murder.

  “I think maybe he's got some answers, too,” I replied. “But as for getting him to tell them,” I added, “after the day I’ve had, I’d rather face the skunk.”

  Wade grabbed his own coat. As he'd said, he wouldn't dream of telling me what to do. But he's not above adding himself to the mix, when it's appropriate. “Let's go try to find Ben, see if we can talk to him one more time about all this. You think?”

  Let's see, now: with or without backup?

  “Gangway,” I said.

  Monday hurled herself ahead of us out the storm door to get away from whatever was still bugging her in the house, and we set off in Wade's pickup with the dog perched on the bench seat between us.

  Minutes later we pulled up quietly on the empty road at the north end of the island, not far from Melinda's. Against the moon-bright sky the enormous maple tree stood sentry, its branches stretched up as if to ward off an onslaught of stars.

  “Wade, why are you doing this?”

  He set the brake. “Don't know. You haven't told me why you are, yet.”

  I looked down at my hands. “Yes, I did. To help Ellie.” And Faye Anne. And because nobody helped my mother.

  A silly reason, that last one. Or not; it depended on how you looked at it.

  “And,” Wade added, unfooled, “you don't have to tell me. Not now, not ever. If it's important to you, it's good enough for me, Jacobia.”

  Back in the city, nobody ever just took me on faith. I felt selfish, suddenly, for even thinking about diamonds. We got out, Wade handing me a flashlight from the truck's glove box and taking one, himself.

  No lights burned ahead as we made our way in on the shrub-lined avenue toward Melinda's, snow crunching under our boots. Monday romped happily.

  “She's okay away from the house,” I said. The dog, I meant.

  “Uh-huh.” Wade peered into the gloom.

  No light blue pickup truck in the driveway, or any other vehicles. We went around back where the drapes at the windows were open: no movement within. A propane tank was neatly hidden by a screen of wooden lattice; no mess of a wood fire for Melinda when she could have almost the same thing by pushing a button.

  In the garden, straw mulch on perennial beds resembled huge nests blanketed in snow; I flashed momentarily on that bit of chair stuffing at home in the parlor. Then I moved on, admiring Melinda's handiwork in spite of myself.

  Big stone urns stood at either side of a flagstone path; in a nice touch, Melinda had filled the urns with evergreens and rose canes, the red rose hips like blood-colored Bing cherries frozen to the foliage. Touches of snow frosted the greens and the urn rims artfully.

  “Here,” Wade called quietly as Monday nosed beside me.

  The footprints Ellie had seen earlier were obliterated now by back-and-forth tracks: Melinda, no doubt, doing little outdoor chores. As Ellie said, the woman could work like a horse when she wanted to.

  The dog vanished ahead of us. I switched my flashlight on, followed its beam past a snow-topped grape arbor to the door of a low shed. A scattering of what looked like cigarette ash lay in the snow by the corner of the shed, whose wooden door stood open an inch.

  I pushed the shed door wide, aimed the flash at the threshold to keep from tripping over it. Scents of cedar mulch, top-soil, and fertilizer came from within. The light picked out a patch of something dark glistening on the floor.

  Blood. “What the hell?” a voice muttered thickly.

  I swung the flashlight.

  Wincing at the glare, Bob Arnold sat up unsteadily among a heap of broken clay pots. Some bags of potting soil, vermiculite, and peat moss had fallen around him. He put his hand to his head; it came away red.

  “Wade!” The overhead lights snapped on, dazzling me. But I could still see the big purple split in Bob's scalp.

  A car started smoothly, far down the road. The sound of the engine faded as I just stood there, struggling to understand.

  But then I got it. “Sit there,” I told Bob. “Just sit there, and we'll get you some help.”

  “Don't need…” He tried to get up, sat down hard again. “Jesus.”

  “Hey.” Wade appeared, crouched briefly. A small hand axe of the type used to split kindling lay by Bob's feet, its sharp edge bloody.

  A car pulled up out front; an instant later Melinda appeared, dressed to the nines: black pants suit, sequined bag, impractical shoes. No coat, of course. “What is going on?” she demanded, flinging her scarf back. “I come home, find you tramping around my…”

  Then she saw Bob. “I’ll call an ambulance,” she said.

  “Thought I’d drive around once more,” Bob muttered, touching his head again. Blood slicked his finge
rs. “Give it a last once-over for the night, before I…”

  That was Bob: his town, his duty. “Saw a light back here, moving around. Parked down the road a ways, not to spook someone, burglar or something.”

  He shook his head to try to clear it. Then he coughed, a thickly bubbling sound that should have alerted me. Melinda came back. “They're coming. I told them to get Victor, too.”

  Bob coughed again, working at it. Which didn't make sense. The head wound looked ugly, but—

  “I’ll go wave them in,” Wade said. “Hang in there, buddy.”

  Bob's face was ashen and he couldn't keep still. “Just wait, okay?” I told him. “You need to get checked out before you…”

  An anxious expression appeared in his eyes as he tried struggling up again. A sudden gout of red appeared on his jacket front. His look went gently thoughtful, as if something interesting had occurred to him and he needed to ponder it.

  I ripped his jacket open. The head wound wasn't the problem. Bunching my gloves into a ball I pressed them to the slit pulsing steadily beside his breastbone.

  The gloves soaked through. His eyelids fluttered. “How's it going?”

  “Fine. It's going fine,” I lied. “You're going to be okay, Bob.”

  But he wasn't fooled. Me either, really. This was the bad thing, right here and now, and it was going so fast.

  He was going so fast.

  “Bob, listen to me. Do you remember when I first came here? And you all thought I would last about six months?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up. “Summer complaint…”

  It's what downeast Mainers call people who stick around only in fine weather. I spoke hurriedly, as if the rush of my words could do what pressure to the wound had not. “But I made it a lot longer, and that's what you'll do, too.”

  He regarded me mildly. “You're a good egg,” he whispered.

  Then his lips moved with no sound at all: “Take care of them.”

  “Bob?” I pressed harder on his chest. “Oh, please.”

  A small red bubble appeared in his left nostril. Another.

  Terror seized me. “Bob, don't. Please, you have to…”

  Live, I was going to say. Be with us.