Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  This wasn't quite true. But if she felt confident that I didn't suspect her of anything, she might be likelier to confide, too.

  “Damn it, she doesn't know anything,” Peter repeated. “Why are you badgering her, when I told you…”

  Clearly, when Peter told you something, you were meant to listen up. That I hadn't was just frustrating the living hell out of him.

  And he was annoying the living hell out of me. “Don't raise your voice to me, you slick little son of a bitch.”

  At this, he actually tried puffing his chest out. “Oh, yeah. You and your nosy friend, here—”

  He waved what was meant to be a contemptuous hand at Ellie, but the lobster puff sort of blunted the effect.

  “—are just a couple of small-town busybodies, that's all.”

  Well, that put the frosting on it. While he was popping the lobster puff into his mouth, I gathered up my attitude-adjustment ammunition. He swallowed; I fired.

  “Tax audit,” I declared, and watched his throat move as the lobster puff went halfway down and stuck.

  “Self-employed, aren't you, Peter? Lots of opportunities for all kinds of fudging, especially if you get paid in cash. Did you know,” I added, “that for a couple of years I worked on contract for the IRS?”

  He gulped more wine, watching me carefully over the rim of the glass, now. I’d hit a nerve.

  “I’ve still got friends, there,” I went on. “Ones who could take every tax return you've ever filed apart so fast, you'd be hearing the cell door slam before you ever even knew what hit you.”

  I stepped nearer to him. “So unless you've always, always declared every cent of your income, and never padded a single one of your expenses by so much as a dime, you should shut up.”

  He gulped again, signaling his agreement with this suggestion. I turned, privately congratulating myself on my newfound skill as a liar; I’ve had a lot of jobs, but the IRS doesn't outsource snoop work.

  “Now, damn it,” I began to Melinda, “let's discuss the silly idea of your not knowing anything about anything that's gone on. And—”

  But there I stopped, as a new voice came from behind me.

  “She does.” A familiar voice; it sounded at least as fed up as I felt.

  Ben Devine stood there, tall, bearded, and blue-jeaned, with a gaze like a cutting torch. “She knows. But she's a good sister. And she promised not to tell.”

  His glance raked Peter Christie, who seemed to shrink farther into himself under Devine's scorn. More there, I thought, than a brother disapproving of his sister's romantic choice.

  If indeed that was what Peter was, and not something darker.

  Melinda spoke up quaveringly. “Ben, you don't have to—”

  His look instantly silenced her. It wasn't a harsh look, but a commanding one. I saw them suddenly as two sides of the same coin: Melinda shifting with every breeze of event or emotion, Ben unwavering. A man who would do a job and finish it, however unpleasant. A meat cutter, who knew how to take apart a moose or a deer. Or a man. The air was electric with invisible lines of force and emotion as Ben spoke again.

  Quietly: “Yes, I do have to tell, Melinda. These two aren't ever going to leave you alone, if I don't.”

  He turned to us. “I helped Mickey Jean vanish. She had no family to worry about her and her only choice, if she wanted to live, was to seem to have died.”

  “Because she was being stalked,” I said.

  Ben nodded, staring at Peter with a look of such contempt, you'd have thought Ben might put his foot out and crush Peter under the toe of his big boot.

  I gathered Ben hadn't known about Peter's hobby of watching women who'd scorned him: watching, and sometimes doing more. Not until Ellie and I brought the news to Melinda.

  Peter opened his mouth again. “Who'd stalk her?” he wanted to know. “She's just an overweight old—”

  Ben silenced him with a look that should have made him burst into flames. “You think only pretty young girls get stalked? You've led a sheltered life.” But it wouldn't be so sheltered, henceforth, his tone suggested.

  “Ex-student,” Ben Devine confirmed to me. “Bright but disturbed. Angry over a bad grade. After that it was a fast downhill spiral until Mickey Jean feared for her life. So when the police weren't able to help us, we made a plan.”

  “It wasn't as if they had a choice,” Melinda put in with a loyal glance at her brother. “They'd moved, unlisted their phone number. But a college teacher is a pretty visible person. Their apartment had been trashed, there were fires. Pets were killed.”

  I looked at Ben with new understanding. It sounded bad enough, but experiencing it would have been horrific. And attacks like that… well, you didn't have to be a math genius to figure out what the next step would be. Someone had been escalating the violence.

  “Wasn't the stalker suspected when Mickey Jean vanished?” Ellie wanted to know.

  Ben shook his head. For all his previous ferocity, he was gentle in telling his story, as if in shedding secrecy he was dropping other protective armor, too.

  “We made sure our tormentor had an alibi. The idea was to escape, start over, not destroy someone else in the process.”

  Which they could have, probably, if they'd wanted to. A few drops of Mickey Jean's blood, hairs from the stalker's hairbrush—with a history of harassment and the unexplained absence of the stalking victim, a little would have gone a long way.

  But they hadn't. I wondered if under the same circumstances I would be so merciful. “What about the money?” I asked. “I can see constructing a new identity, but how did you manage her not having any identity?”

  He chuckled grimly, then confirmed my earlier theory: “But I had an identity. And we never changed that. We banked on the idea that the fixation was on Mickey, not me. And so far, that's been true. But you're right, the money was the hardest part.”

  “But you wouldn't want to leave it behind if you could help it. So what did she buy?”

  Appreciation flashed in his eyes, that I’d gotten it so quickly. But it was easy, really. Money leaves footprints but objects don't, or they don't have to. Valuable objects like precious metals, say. Or gems.

  And Ben had been in Africa and Belgium. “Diamonds!” I exclaimed, answering my own question. “You have… interesting friends?”

  He nodded again. It would work fine, especially if your “friends” had agreed to buy the diamonds back from you, whenever necessary. Bingo: a source of cash.

  Ellie spoke up, getting us back to the question before us, again: “How'd Merle find out?”

  Because it wouldn't be enough just to catch a glimpse of Mickey Jean in a bar; not without knowing something in advance, or suspecting.

  Ben answered: “I’m not sure how Merle caught on originally. But he was the kind of guy always had a handle on people's secrets. Just like he found out about that land with the tree on it.”

  Melinda's lips tightened resentfully. “And if Merle thought he had something on you, he'd keep after it until he was sure of it. Then try to use it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Ben agreed. “So first I had that dust-up with him over the meat. Butchering it for people, the weekend warrior-type hunters who can't do their own. But I never meant to cut in on his turf.”

  He didn't seem to intend the pun, or even notice it. “But right off, I was on his you-know-what list, on account of that. He was just watching for me to put a foot wrong.”

  A new thought, still too uncertain for me to articulate clearly even to myself, was forming.

  “And then we made the mistake, just that once, of Mickey Jean and me going into that bar, Duddy's, and he spotted her,” Ben was saying.

  “And he must've put it together,” Peter interjected importantly, apparently believing that with a villain like Merle Carmody to talk about, his own bad deeds might fade conveniently.

  “How would you like a nice fat lip to go with that fat head of yours?” Ben asked.

  Peter scowled, but quie
ted. I’d been trying to think of what his motive for killing Merle might be; that he'd been protecting Faye Anne was nonsense, of course. But now it was obvious: when a woman broke up with him, Peter made trouble for her.

  And if the ongoing fear of those women in California was any clue, he was clever at it. And it could be a lot of trouble.

  “Anyway, once he was mad at me, Merle had made himself a project of finding out all about me,” Ben continued. “That I’d been a suspect in Lewiston wasn't hard for him to learn. Then he caught just that one sight of Mickey Jean in the bar, put it together. The next day he was out there at her place, demanding money.”

  That was Merle, all right: not real smart, but a master of low cunning when there was a chance it might pay off.

  Which was bad enough. But if Merle knew their secret, they could not be sure it wouldn't get around to everyone in Eastport, sooner or later. Then their troubles would begin all over again.

  “I didn't kill him,” Ben said baldly.

  His face said he knew how weak that sounded under the circumstances. Even Melinda must have worried that maybe he had; thus the unsuccessful alibi she'd concocted for him.

  And for herself. “You know,” I said, “I think I will have a glass of that wine.”

  Playing for time; the inside of my head felt as if a tornado was whirling around in there. So many people had good reasons for wishing Merle dead. Even Melinda: she wanted the old maple tree standing, while Merle wanted it cut. Now with Peter hovering over her like some knight in tarnished armor, she sniffed quietly to make sure we all understood how deeply upsetting this was to a sensitive person like herself.

  “We'll have a picnic,” Peter was murmuring to her. “A winter picnic, to take your mind off all this. It'll cheer you up.”

  Melinda flinched at his touch, didn't reply at once. But then: “Well, all right. We could go to the beach by the old factory. It's sheltered and there are some flat rocks to sit on. And…”

  She mustered a little burst of the old, drama-queen blither. “It's atmospheric,” she finished, fluttering her hands. “I don't care if it's cold, I nevermind that. I just adore it.”

  Yeah, right. She would probably do it, though, just to keep the jerk happy. I got the sense she'd tumbled to the fact that keeping Peter happy might be important to her peace of mind, and possibly to her health and welfare.

  “Or,” I said when Ellie and I got back outside again, “she's such a ding-a-ling, she could just be going along with it because it sounds romantic. After all, she just adores the cold,” I cooed sarcastically.

  Wind gusts buffeted the car, fishing boats in the harbor straining at their lines as we made our way through town. “But maybe Melinda's not the one we should be thinking about,” Ellie suggested.

  “What do you mean?” A burst of wet snow hit the windshield.

  “I mean Mickey Jean's the one who is in trouble.”

  I stopped the car in front of the swinging wooden sign over the door of Wadsworth's hardware store. From the window, a miniature glass lighthouse strobed the sidewalk.

  “You're right. She's still the one with the most to lose, besides Faye Anne. But why would she be at Melinda's and attack Bob Arnold, there?”

  “I’m not saying she was. Or that she did.” Ellie watched a couple of seagulls battle the wind in the arc lights over the pier. “I’m saying, who's been protecting her? Who cares enough to give up his career, even, and go into hiding with her?”

  Ben Devine, of course. Ben, who had attacked another man merely over a remark about Melinda.

  “Ben's acting open and honest right now,” Ellie went on, “but the fact is, we have no idea who's really telling the truth and who isn't.”

  “And he would tell as much of it as he could,” I agreed, “so if we found it out later we wouldn't wonder why he hadn't.”

  She nodded energetically. “And even though Peter's a louse…”

  “And I trust Melinda about as far as I can throw her one-handed…” I put in.

  “If it is Ben you know what they'll do, don't you?” Ellie finished. “Him and Mickey Jean, maybe even any minute?”

  “Same as before,” I agreed. A huge wave slammed the dock as I made the U-turn to head back out of town. “They'll run.”

  Chapter 10

  An eighteen-wheeler blew by us, spewing a slurry of slush mixed with road sand onto the windshield. I hit the wipers and let my breath out as the glass cleared, peered through the darkness that seemed to be coagulating around us: fog, mist, spatters of wet sleet, and every so often yet another huge, highballing behemoth.

  “We aren't going to confront them out there, are we? Or her?” Ellie asked.

  She seemed a little taken aback by my sudden eagerness. But if it was Ben, and he and Mickey Jean split before we knew it for sure, Faye Anne was done for.

  “Of course not. We're going to get the plate number of that car of hers. His, too, if he shows up. And we'll see if she's making any preparations to head out, if we can—packing up the dog gear, closing up the cabin—and find out anything else that we're able to, without being seen.” I squinted ahead. “Then we'll come right back. Forty-five minutes, tops, because…”

  Another wave of sandy slush hit the windshield. “I don't care where that storm veered to,” I finished, “it's not fit out here for man nor beast.”

  Headlights in the rearview said we weren't the only idiots driving in it; still, what with the big trucks roaring toward the loading docks at the port, I had a vision of myself lying dead in an icy ditch, the mark of the bulldog hood ornament stamped into my chest. Not until we made it across Route 1 and onto South Meadow Road did I realize that the car behind us was actually following us.

  “Ellie.” I couldn't see anything about the car except that it was still there.

  “I know. Take the right fork coming up, and put your foot on it.” The road she directed us to was unmarked, narrow, and curving; I’d never been on it before. But Ellie knew every lane and alley in Washington County, so I obeyed.

  The visibility here on the mainland was no better than on the island: closing in on zero. We passed small houses, widely spaced; then nothing but trees and thick, tangled brush growing close to the road. The other car stayed behind us, headlights sullen yellow in the murk.

  “What's ahead?” I asked, pushing the gas as hard as I dared.

  “Straightaway,” Ellie replied. “Couple of miles of it. If he doesn't know that, we could lose him; he won't want to go as fast. And I know a place to turn that he'll never spot, if we can get far enough ahead.”

  So I did it: hands on the wheel, heart in my throat, foot on the floorboard, and God bless whatever road crew had been out that night, spreading sand. “Whoa…”

  She'd said it was straight. She hadn't said it was hilly. We flew up over a rise and for an instant went totally airborne.

  Thump. “Here,” she said. “Turn hard, and cut the engine.”

  The interesting sensation of flying through the air was followed by the even more fascinating feeling of hitting the brakes and noticing that the car didn't slow in the slightest.

  “Turn,” Ellie suggested quietly again, “the goddamn steering wheel, Jake.”

  The other car's headlights were just now showing again in the rearview, like pale eyes intent on finding us in the thick, freezing fog. Something about them made me feel cold in the pit of my stomach; the fact, for instance, that they were there at all. People don't follow you, in Eastport. They don't menace you.

  They just don't. But now on a night so lousy that only the truck drivers were out doing anything whatsoever, somebody was. And that opened a worm-can full of unpleasant possibilities, including the notion that we had made somebody really, really mad.

  Someone who had already killed two people and tried very hard to kill a third. All these thoughts went by in an instant as the car's rear end skewed wildly sideways on the icy pavement, until we were turned ninety degrees, aiming— miraculously—in the direction Ellie
pointed.

  Which meant that for the moment whoever was behind us probably couldn't see us. I tromped the gas pedal as hard as I could one more despairing time, knowing it was probably going to land us smack in a frozen snowbank. But if I didn't, the chase car wouldn't have to chase us much farther; crossways in the road as we were, in another few seconds it was going to come upon us and broadside us.

  We shot forward, spewing sand, which was bad enough, but then the muffler scraped horrendously over something much higher and harder than I should have been trying to clear at that speed.

  Or any speed, but it was too late. We left the muffler and, it felt like, half the transmission as the car continued barreling between half-visible trees. I braced myself for the halt we were inevitably going to come to: tree stump, old fence post, or chunk of granite. The possibilities for what we could hit were seemingly endless, and as far as I could tell, also endlessly unpleasant.

  But we didn't come to any halt at all until Ellie reached out and shut off the ignition. Then everything went off all at once, including the power brakes and steering, and there was a silence.

  Into which, slowly like a being materializing malevolently out of the fog, a car appeared in the rearview mirror on the road we had departed.

  The beams of its headlights were solid yellow bars in the mist. A spark of radium-green from the dashboard of the vehicle flashed briefly as it passed. Then it was gone.

  “Could you tell who it was?” Ellie whispered.

  I shook my head. “Too dark and thick out there.”

  Then we just sat for what seemed like forever, while the cold seeped through the floorboards and our breaths fogged the windows. Fat clots of snow fell from the trees onto the car roof with soft wet sounds like the tentative patting of cold, searching hands.

  “What is this, anyway?” I asked Ellie. “Someone's long driveway, or a firebreak, or what?”

  She shook her head. “Camp road. Summer places on the lake, half a mile or so that way.” She wiped condensation from the window with her sleeve. “I hope he didn't see our tire marks.”