Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  “Melinda stepped in,” Mickey Jean said. “She found out what he needed, and over his protests she gave Ben a kidney.”

  Which, in a funny backwards way, sounded just like Melinda. The big, dramatic gesture from the drama queen. But then I caught myself; it was more than that, way more. The one thing she really could have bragged about, only she hadn't; suddenly I had another picture of the drama queen, entirely.

  Frivolous, maybe; even foolish. On the surface. Underneath was someone who delivered when push came to shove. And kept quiet about it.

  Discouragement washed over me. So many possibilities weaving together in interlocking patterns of deceit. And in the center of them something missing, something I kept looking for, not knowing anything except that when I saw it, I would know it.

  But by then it might be too late. “She's not here now,” I began, turning to head back up the slope toward the car. Ben and Peter went on shouting. “I guess we'd better go somewhere, call Tim after all.”

  And see Wade, let him know I wasn't dead in a ditch. It was time to go home and face the music.

  “Come on, Ellie,” I said. The men were pushing one another again, Willetta taking verbal potshots from the darkness on the slope above—her voice barely audible in the noise of wind and waves—Mickey Jean down on the beach, still trying to separate them without success.

  Peter took a roundhouse swing at Ben Devine, who replied with a clip to the side of Peter's head that sent him staggering, ankle-deep in the frigid water; if there'd been any beer bottles handy they'd have been breaking them over each other's heads. Shouting and cursing…

  “What a mess.” I trudged upward, the sand dragging at my feet. “I don't think we've done a darned bit of good, tonight.”

  God, but I was tired. Mostly, though, I was thinking about going home and facing Wade. All the energy seemed to be leaking out of me; a slick stone made me stumble.

  “Wait.” Ellie's voice pierced the shouting and the sound of the waves.

  “What?” I turned, peering to where she aimed a finger.

  She'd taken off her glasses, and without them my face was no more than a pinkish blur to her, her own hands rounded blobs. But at a distance…

  “There,” she said. “At the end of the wharf, on the water. See it? Something…”

  Once she'd pointed it out, I did see it: floating. A bit of driftwood or a gleaming rag of rockweed; even a dead harbor seal could look that way in the moving water. But it wasn't any of those, because none of them had—the thing turned sluggishly in the waves—fringes.

  “It's a scarf,” Ellie said. “Drifting.”

  I was already running. It was a scarf, all right, but it wasn't drifting. Tide going out, currents swirling, but now I could see that it hung by a piling, snagged, its fringes turning like the rag-ends of seaweed anchored to the rocks.

  As if it, like the waving rockweed, were firmly attached.

  Tied there. I plunged into the water, my legs hammered by mallets of cold. Ben saw me, uttered an oath, dove in behind me.

  “I’m calling for help!” Mickey yelled down from where her car was parked, as Ben surfaced, bellowing, and dove again.

  Peter was in the water, too, cringing at it but striding on. Ben came up a third time, the Randall knife unsheathed, its blade a glinting horror in the murk under the wharf pilings.

  Down again. Gasping with the cold, I watched the water where he had gone under, Peter still struggling toward the spot, but Ben didn't reappear. In the distance a siren began wailing, coming closer.

  I couldn't feel my legs; as they started to go from under me Ellie grabbed me and pulled me in. “You can't do anything,” she said. “You don't swim well enough to go under the—”

  “Hey!” The Eastport squad car slid to a halt above us, Tim Rutherford at a run almost before the car's wheels had stopped turning. The headlights lit up the whole beach, the wharf's underside, and the water with Peter Christie slogging out of it.

  No Ben. No anyone. “Tim,” I said, my teeth chattering, “we think maybe Melinda's down there…”

  Ben surfaced, something in his arms. “Ambulance!” he shouted at us, nearly falling, struggling onto the shore.

  Another vehicle pulled in: Wade's truck, George Valentine in the passenger seat. The two of them sprinted down, faces anxious.

  “Ellie?” George shouted. Then he spotted her, his shoulders sagging with relief. “Tim called us, said you were here…”

  Wade grabbed me, peered into my face. “Damn you, don't you ever do this to me again.”

  I fell against him and as his arms went around me I could feel the anger go out of him; not that I wasn't going to get a brisk talking-to, later. But now all I could think about was that he had found me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I whispered. “So sorry, you must have been so worried.”

  “Christ.” His arms tightened. “I swear, Jacobia.” Then both of us realized what it was that Ben had been carrying over the rocks. Melinda…

  Motionless. Peter and Ben began working over her while Tim ran for the squad car and the radio in it. Willetta ran with him.

  Peter knelt on the rocks beside the body; Ben, too. Around its sodden middle was her scarf and a length of nylon rope. And the tide had fallen enough now so I could see where it had been tied before Ben's knife cut it.

  In my mind's eye, I saw how it had happened: Melinda lying unconscious on the beach. The rope tied halfway up the piling. As the tide came in, she would drown. Or if she woke…

  The hideous cleverness of it made me gasp. If she woke, she would have to climb the piling, using the spikes, to reach the rope and try to free herself. But by that time she wouldn't be able to undo the knots, because her fingers would be numb with the devastating cold. So she would cling up there until the water reached her or until she lost consciousness, and fell.

  Knowing that she was dying. Screaming, probably, for as long as her voice lasted. No one to hear her.

  “Dear God,” Ellie murmured. “It was a torture-killing.”

  “She was under a long time?” George asked quietly.

  “We don't know. Last we saw her was a couple of hours ago,” I said.

  “But that nylon line is long.” Ellie pointed at the pilings. “If you climbed, you could stay above water a while. And the way the wharf's built, there are air pockets up under there.”

  Her hope infected me: those birds’ nests, and the feral cats… “She's right. And as the water rose, maybe you could push your face up into…”

  Wade's voice broke in flatly. “It would work till you passed out from the cold, and fell in anyway.”

  Ben and Peter kept on: chest compressions and respirations. “You getting a pulse with that?” Ben managed.

  With the chest compressions, he meant; he knew what he was doing. I did, too. So I knew neither one could have faked the effort without the other noticing. Peter had looked legitimately frantic when he arrived, and Melinda was Ben's sister; he owed his life to her. Yet one of them, I thought, must have been lying.

  Lying to us all along. “Yeah,” Peter replied, pausing to place his fingers on Melinda's neck. They resumed.

  But with no result, and as I watched I remembered also what Victor had said about CPR administered outside of a hospital: how few people survive it.

  The ambulance screamed up. “Bring a tank,” Wade called to the two fellows getting out. Of oxygen, he meant, and they did, scrambling down with a small green cylinder and a mask to go with it.

  Wade and George went to get the stretcher for them, for the transport to the hospital. But I had a bad feeling. “It's been too long.” My eyes prickled with tears. The whole long night, all the frights and surprises, all come to this:

  A motionless woman, cold on the beach, with a half-dozen people now working urgently—and, I believed, uselessly—to save her life.

  “He did it,” Willetta repeated bitterly, coming up to me. “He drugged her. That's how he got her there in the first place.”

/>   “One… two… three,” the ambulance fellows said, lifting Melinda onto the stretcher.

  “You wait,” Willetta went on. “There'll be drugs in her system, and if they search his house—let's see if he lets them do that—I bet they'll find them there, too. I know they will. You just wait.”

  I was still wearing wet clothes and my legs felt as if tiny teeth were biting into them. The guys with the stretcher had gotten nearly to the ambulance doors.

  “I’ve got to get dry stuff on,” I began, and then it happened: from the stretcher came a banshee shriek as Melinda's body jerked half-upright.

  The motion surprised the paramedics, throwing them off-balance; the wheeled gurney teetered and bounced back down to the rocky beach, miraculously not overturning. But that wasn't the real miracle.

  Melinda's eyes opened. “You!” she wailed, her arm moving unsteadily as she tried to point. But she was shaking too hard from the cold and all that she had been through.

  “You,” she repeated, her voice gargly with inhaled water and with the effects of who knew what else: a botched drug overdose?

  Well, Melinda knew, actually, and for a moment it seemed she would say. Her finger aimed uncertainly at one and then another of us, frozen on the beach.

  Meanwhile the frazzled ambulance guys were trying to untangle and refasten the stretcher's fallen chest strap. To do so, they were having to cut the half-frozen sweater off Melinda's body and suddenly they succeeded, exposing what lay beneath the sodden fabric.

  Whereupon one mystery, at least, was solved:

  The mystery of how Melinda had survived, not just now but all this winter, prancing around as if it were the middle of May. From beneath the sweater shone a slick, bright-orange skin with a glinting metal zip front.

  No one had known her secret; not us, and certainly not her attempted killer. But now…

  It was an orange neoprene bodysuit.

  Her voice trilled in memory: I just adore the cold…

  “You!” Melinda cried, pointing around wildly. “You… you ruined my scarf!”

  Chapter 11

  We looked at each other. Which one of us was she accusing?

  “Melinda,” I began. But it was too late.

  Her hands clenched convulsively; her eyes rolled up.

  “Go!” Ben snarled at the ambulance fellows.

  They went.

  “Fine,” Peter Christie said tightly half an hour later.

  It was not what I, had I been an attorney would have advised. But Willetta kept nagging at him, accusing him, and finally he turned to Timmy Rutherford.

  “Go look right now. I give you permission. Here's the key.”

  To his own house, he meant. Ben and Mickey Jean had gone home to get Ben some dry clothes, and then to the hospital; the rest of us were in my kitchen: drinking hot coffee and trying to get ourselves back to normal.

  Which under the circumstances wasn't going to happen soon, but hope springs eternal. I swallowed more of the warming liquid, waiting for it to penetrate the cold, hard lump at the center of my chest.

  But it wouldn't.

  “What are you waiting for?” Willetta demanded. “I told you what happened. He drugged her and tried to kill her.”

  Maybe so, but he wasn't acting as if he had. I wished desperately that Willetta would go home.

  She wasn't going to, though: not until she got what she wanted. “So go look” she insisted. “You'll see.”

  “You have my permission. I want this talk stopped,” Peter told Tim Rutherford for the third time. “Please do it now.”

  Tim was tall, dark haired, and well over twenty years old, a good boy but hardly experienced at police work. Wearing his blue officer's uniform with cuffs, radio, and sidearm clipped to his utility belt, he looked like a kid who'd gotten the whole kit and kaboodle as an early Christmas present.

  “Tim…” I began as he touched a fresh bruise on his cheek. Bob Arnold wouldn't like this, and I was sure Clarissa would disapprove even more strongly. “Tim, you should get advice. And a search warrant, just to keep it all on the up-and-up.” A young officer, verbal permission, emotional circumstances… “If only to cover yourself,” I finished, not adding the other part: anything wrong with a search could screw up evidence it uncovered.

  “No!” Willetta objected. “That'll give him time to get rid of it, waiting for all that.”

  “Come on.” Peter headed for the door. “Tim, you come with me. I’m going to stand there—doing nothing, saying nothing,” he added with a hard look at Willetta, “while you come and find all these deadly drugs I’m supposed to be hiding.”

  Tim was in over his head and he knew it. This kind of thing was not his department when Bob was around.

  But Bob wasn't around. He was on a respirator, fighting for his life. No one was yet saying aloud that it was over, but…

  Tim sighed. “Okay, I’m going to go and check out his place. For all I know,” he added disgustedly, “somebody's hidin’ over there, waitin’ for him.”

  At this, Peter looked vindicated.

  “Then I’ve got a whole slew of paperwork to do,” Tim went on. “A lot of people to talk to—state cops, district attorney, I don't know what-all. But I guess I will find out what-all, and I am going to do it, whatever it is, and when I am finished I expect all of you to be available, if I have any questions. Understand?”

  We all nodded solemnly.

  “All right, then,” Tim said: over his head, indeed, but he was swimming capably, and he would reach dry land if he had anything to do with it.

  “So that's it,” Ellie said when Tim and Peter had gone. George poured another cup of coffee; Wade ate some fruitcake, wincing as he bit into a piece of candied citron. “All this, and still we don't know any more than we did when we started.”

  On Monday's dog bed, the dog and cat lay curled together, asleep. But at some sound I couldn't hear Monday sat up suddenly and gazed around the kitchen suspiciously before settling again.

  The cat didn't budge. So much for its mousing abilities. Being Victor's animal, it probably hired other cats to catch mice for it.

  “And,” I added to Willetta, “I wouldn't get my hopes up for the results of this house-searching expedition Tim Rutherford has gone on. Guys holding contraband don't usually invite cops inside to search for it, in my admittedly limited experience.”

  “You'll see,” Willetta repeated stubbornly. “It'll be there.”

  Then we all just sort of stewed in our misery for a while. I called Portland to see how Bob was doing now, and he was still critical. Then I called the Calais hospital about Melinda, and she was critical, too.

  One bout of consciousness, apparently, did not a recovery make. It would be touch and go for Melinda, the nurse in the ICU informed me gently, for at least a few hours, maybe more.

  Which did not cheer me, or Ellie, either. All our choices, which had seemed so reasonable at the time, had gotten us here.

  Maybe, I thought with a sinking heart, I should just go down in the basement with the mouse. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Ellie told me reluctantly, joining George in the hall.

  But as I opened the door and switched on the porch light Tim Rutherford was getting out of his car. He came to the steps and looked up at us, framed in the light.

  Holding a plastic bag. In it: small glass vials, glassine packets. A half-dozen syringes with needles capped in pastel plastic. Some bottles of capsules. Peering through the darkness I spotted Peter in the squad car's backseat. He was in custody.

  “I told you so,” Willetta breathed, gratified. “Didn't I? Didn't I tell you?”

  “Shut up, Willetta,” Wade said. “Tim, what's the story?”

  Tim shrugged. “Well, he let me in. I looked around. Didn't find anything. ’Course I couldn't do a real search, every nook and cranny.”

  Yet here the stuff was…. “So I asked myself where would I hide something,” Tim went on, “not particularly thinking anyone was going to look? But still wanting it out
of sight?” He lifted the bag. “In the freezer. Down at the bottom of a bowl of ice cubes.” In the squad car, Peter Christie gazed straight ahead. “Miss Abrams,” Tim told us, “was right.”

  “Did you find any photographs of me?” Willetta demanded.

  The ones she claimed Peter had taken of her, drugged. “No, ma'am,” Tim replied. “Nothing like that.”

  The photographs hadn't been among the things Peter's cleaning lady had turned over to us, either. Maybe he hid his current activities better than evidence of his historical ones. Willetta seemed to think so:

  “You will,” she predicted grimly. “And I’d better not hear about anyone else seeing them, you got that?”

  “Yes, ma'am,” he gulped startledly.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. “Hell, it's nearly time for the night shift. I’ve got to get to work or I’ll be out of a job on top of everything else.” She stalked to her own car, got in, and roared away, the little vehicle backfiring down the street.

  I took Tim aside as her taillights vanished around the corner. “Listen, did the Duddy's raid ever happen? And if it did… why now, particularly? Any reason?”

  He looked surprised. “Oh, yeah. Some woman phoned in an anonymous tip on the state hotline. How'd you think I got this?” He touched his cheek. “I got there late on account of what happened to Bob, but they saved some for me. Gave us a battle, some of those guys. Should've seen the stuff they had there. But it happened, all right. And now him,” Tim added in disgust, glancing back at his squad car. “Never rains but it pours.”

  “That's that, then,” George said when Tim had gone. Victim saved, culprit nabbed, back to our regular programming. But:

  “I don't think so,” Ellie said. She took George's arm, went down the steps with him. “Real peace might be a ways off, yet.”

  “Not for me,” I retorted. “I’m going to sleep. And I plan to stay that way for at least twelve hours.”

  Which was a lovely plan, and worked out about as well as all such plans do.

  • • •

  “All right, now,” I began very soon after I finally got upstairs. I was going over my mental list. My other mental list.