Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  “Hello, Mr. Ash,” I said, making my way across the lawn to the helper I’d hired. “Don’t worry about that ladder, I’ll put it away.”

  He straightened, his pale-blue eyes softening as he saw that I wasn’t badly injured. But he frowned at the mess of my face.

  “Ice on the lip,” he suggested gravely, putting out a bony finger. Somehow his touch didn’t make me flinch the way Victor’s had. “Beefsteak on the eye,” he added.

  His work-roughened hand sketched the suggestion of a caress in the air alongside my head, drew back chastely. “Yeah,” I said, “but you should see the other guy.”

  At that he chuckled, a lean man in his late fifties, wearing blue coveralls, a faded red flannel shirt, and old leather boots. For a guy who worked on basements and crawl spaces he was very clean, smelling sweetly of concrete dust and something else I couldn’t identify, sharp as an old penny.

  “Going to put some crampons into these ladder feet for you,” he said, watching me climb the porch steps.

  Notched clamps, he meant, so the ladder wouldn’t slide. To hire Mr. Ash I’d put a note up on the bulletin board at the IGA, looking for a stonemason. And the very next morning Lian Ash’s ancient pickup truck was out in the driveway as if he’d been just waiting around for me to need something from him.

  “I guess you’ll be climbing this ladder again, will you?” he inquired mildly. “Not put off heights any worse’n you were?”

  I hate heights but I hate waiting even more for other people to brave them for me. “Yes, Mr. Ash.” His benevolent figure seemed to turn the tide on what had been, so far, a dreadful day. “I’ll go back up there again.”

  His face remained impassive but a small, protective smile twinkled in his eyes, under a shock of hair as fine and white as milkweed silk.

  “Well, then. Guess we’d better fix it.” He turned away.

  “Mr. Ash,” I called, really wanting to go inside now; the aspirin Ellie had given me earlier was wearing off big-time. “Was there something else you wanted? I mean, that you came for in the first place?”

  Probably by now the whole town knew Jake Tiptree had fallen off another ladder. But I hardly thought Lian Ash would hotfoot it over here just on account of that.

  “Nope,” he replied. “Lookin’ over the job. Need to talk about all o’ this work. Costs, materials. Make some decisions.”

  He got into the truck, a beat-up little vehicle with Bondo patches, mismatched tires, and a new heavy-duty bedliner that was probably holding the whole thing together.

  “But we can hash that over later,” he added. “After that, we start taking the old cellar wall apart an’ bracin’ ’er up.”

  I could have used some of the braces he’d be using, big cast-iron ones built to take the weight of houses. I gripped the porch rail as he slammed his truck door and backed out of the yard.

  “Come with me,” Ellie said firmly, taking my arm in a gentle grip that nevertheless managed to imply how much force might be exerted if I were foolish enough to resist. For this reason, and because the world had again begun spinning gently as if the rotation of the earth were being demonstrated especially for me, I followed Ellie meekly into the parlor and sank into the only piece of furniture not currently occupied by a household animal.

  “Wuff,” said Monday, thumping her black Labrador tail at me from her place on the sofa.

  “Mmmph,” uttered Prill, wagging her short, stubby one as she settled herself more comfortably in the easy chair.

  “Meeowrowyowowl,” Cat Dancing commented from the recliner, observing through crossed blue eyes the sad fact that I was still not dead.

  Kicking my shoes off, I lay down carefully on the settee and pulled up the comforter Ellie had crocheted for me the previous Christmas. And while she brought aspirin and ginger ale to take it with, and Sam and Wade returned, working together at hauling the downspouts bumpingly up the ladder, I picked up the latest issue of the Eastern Maine Examiner.

  Besides ads for truck parts and all-terrain vehicles and notices of births, weddings, and funerals, it printed news from all over the county, not skipping the juicy stuff. Bar fights, bad checks, boundary disputes, and arrests due to the possession of illegal substances were grist for the Examiner’s mill, along with house fires, vandalism, and the locally popular car-versus-moose encounters, with photos if the moose won.

  This week’s riveting lead story had to do with a young man caught trying to evade the Canadian border patrol with a bag of illicit pharmaceuticals. But soon I drifted into a half-sleep watched over by the animals. Ellie delivered a cold cloth for my head; she’d have brought me a beefsteak, too, but I vetoed that.

  I already had the smell of blood in my nose: Harriet’s. Someone had gotten rid of the body but made a mistake, I mused drowsily, by losing her boot in that compost heap.

  Around me the parlor’s old gold-medallion wallpaper glowed dully, the sunshine through the antique, wavery-glassed windows slanting slowly to late afternoon. Then I did sleep, not waking until Ellie asked in the gloom of dusk if I felt like getting up for dinner or wanted it in my room.

  Dinner upstairs while the company laughs below isn’t as bad as being sent to bed with nothing at all, I feel, but it’s close. Voices were already mingling in the dining room as I struggled upstairs to change clothes and wash my face before hobbling down again.

  And all this — my tumble from the ladder, Victor’s clinic, the explosion, Harry Markle, the binoculars, the guests, and my growing certainty that Harriet Hollingsworth had been murdered—

  —was why it never occurred to me to wonder how Mr. Ash knew I disliked heights.

  An old wooden house on an island in Maine needs about as much regular scraping and painting as your average battleship. But over the years Harriet Hollingsworth’s house hadn’t gotten any at all.

  “Pressure hose?” Harry Markle tossed the suggestion out and looked around the table for comment. Ellie had kindly invited our new neighbor to dinner, and the conversation had turned to the repairs he meant to do around Harriet’s old place.

  “Uh-uh.” Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, shook his head at the notion of removing paint with a high-powered stream of water. “Soaks the wood.”

  George was a compactly built man in his thirties, with dark hair, the milky-white skin that runs in some old Maine families, and grease-stained knuckles. In Eastport, George was the man to call if your plumbing failed, your lights flickered, or your car began unexpectedly trailing a banner of blue smoke.

  Which reminded me: “George, can I borrow your circuit-alert tester? There’s a ceiling light fixture out upstairs.”

  He rubbed the bluish five o’clock shadow that was always on his jaw. “Dunno. You aren’t going to be climbin’ any ladders with it, are you?”

  He unclipped it from his belt: a dandy device that looked like a pen, but if you got it near a live wire it buzzed and flashed red warning lights at you.

  I tucked it in my sweater pocket, wishing again that the fuses in my old house correlated a bit less whimsically with its actual physical areas. Some wiring was new, some the old knob-and-tube variety, all installed piecemeal over the years after the waning of the gaslight era. The only way to be sure you’d shut off all power in a room was to shut down the whole fuse box, wreaking havoc on the activities of everyone else: Wade in his workshop, Sam at the computer, me with my power tools, and the animals in the TV room watching cartoons.

  But with George’s gadget you could test the wiring itself, avoiding the fuss, bother, and mess of accidental electrocution. “You pressure-hose an old house, you’ll never keep any paint on again,” George added to Harry Markle.

  George’s quick, sharp glance always seemed to be expressing some smoldering resentment, so that despite his diminutive size, George was a fearsome figure until you got to know him. He was getting along with Harry, though.

  “Better use a grinder,” he offered, taking a potato from the platter being sent around. The platter matched t
he plates and cups Ellie had bought at a yard sale the summer before; in blue and white they depicted stylized scenes of life in China, where a century ago the plates had been loaded on a schooner, ballast for the return voyage to Eastport.

  “Paint’ll crumble off,” George added, “you put friction on it with a paint grinder.”

  “Great,” Wyatt Evert commented sourly. “Put a little more of the old lead paint into the environment, too. Just what we need.”

  George speared himself a piece of baked salmon stuffed with bay leaves, lemon slices, onions, and peppercorns, served with new peas and buttered potatoes sprinkled with parsley. Ellie and Maggie had done themselves proud.

  Seated across from George, Wyatt was a fortyish, balding beanpole of a man with leathered skin, thin liver-colored lips, and a facial expression that suggested he had just bitten into one of those lemon slices. He was the leader of the other group currently visiting Eastport, nature buffs here to see the eagles nesting at the Moosehorn Refuge thirty miles to our north.

  “You had your way,” George said to Wyatt, “folks’d live in mud huts. That is, the folks you decided were fit to go on living at all.”

  I glanced up curiously but Wyatt didn’t react to the odd comment. “People resent the inconvenience I cause,” he sniffed, “when I talk about their environmentally incorrect activities.”

  “Ayuh,” George agreed again. “There’s that, too.”

  This time Wyatt did open his mouth to retort, displaying the biscuit he was chewing. Beside him at the table sat his assistant Fran Hanson, a polished young woman wearing professional-looking makeup, her blond hair clipped short around her elfin features.

  Fran always looked as if she’d visited Elizabeth Arden about twenty minutes ago. But her manner didn’t match her aggressively stylish look; she wasn’t about to interrupt her boss.

  Roy McCall had no such hesitation, however. “A few guys on my video crew won’t have much to do for a few days,” my new houseguest told Harry. “You could hire them to start the scraping.”

  Roy was perhaps twenty-five, with curly black hair and the sweetly rounded face of a cathedral-ceiling cherub. Tonight he wore a green cashmere sweater, grey slacks, and Armani loafers. He drank some of the wine he had brought as his contribution to the dinner, a lovely California cabernet the color of rubies, and as expensive.

  “Just make sure they put down tarps,” Wyatt Evert instructed Harry sharply, wagging a finger at him. “To catch the paint chips.”

  George rolled his eyes. By all rights he should have hated Roy, who made the rough-hewn George look like a bumpkin. Despite his plain manner, George was sensitive to such things. But in the coming weeks Top Cat Productions would spend north of a million dollars in Eastport. So George was cutting Roy a lot of slack.

  “I’ll get the environment police on you if you don’t,” Wyatt went on meanly. “Get canvas tarps, not junk from around here.”

  “You can buy canvas tarps here if you want them,” I piped up. “In fact there’s an ad for them at Wadsworth’s right now, in this week’s Quoddy Tides.”

  Not listening, Wyatt guzzled Roy’s good wine without tasting it. Roy averted his gaze politely while the rest of us cringed, and when I got up to take plates to the kitchen, Roy joined me.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, once we were out of earshot. “He started talking to me downtown and just followed me home.”

  I rinsed a platter. Two glasses of the excellent cabernet he had brought were suiting me admirably. Victor would have plotzed, I supposed, but Victor — tra-la — wasn’t here.

  “Never mind,” I told Roy as I rinsed another platter. I felt much better. “It’s not the first time Wyatt’s cadged a meal off me, and brought his little helper, Fran.”

  Wyatt’s idea of good environmental protection was him being protected from picking up a restaurant check or cooking his own dinner. I’d have sent him packing but his crack about calling in the cops was no idle threat.

  “Don’t run afoul of him,” I warned McCall. “Wyatt informed the state once on a fellow who let some apprentice carpenter students tear down his old shed for practice. Turned out there was asbestos in the shingles. The guy came close to paying a ten-thousand-dollar fine on account of his good deed.”

  Roy looked impressed, and even more contrite than before. “I wish I had cold-shouldered him, then,” he declared.

  “No. It’s smarter to keep tabs on what Wyatt’s up to. But his social skills verge on the nonexistent at the best of times, and he’s worse than usual, lately.”

  Roy tipped his head in a question. “A member of one of his nature groups had an accident a few weeks ago,” I explained. “He drowned. I guess Wyatt’s still upset about it.”

  “Really? How’d that happen?”

  I turned off the faucet. Back in the dining room, Maggie and Sam had turned the table talk to a happier topic: Prill’s rescue from a diet of mackerel heads.

  “Nobody’s sure,” I told Roy, who had cleverly opened a third bottle. He poured us each a glass. “They were at Moosehorn Refuge with cameras and binoculars. Wyatt brings a group a few times a year to go on elaborate nature walks. Charges them a bundle, but from what I gather he gives good value. And it’s not as if they can’t afford it.”

  Roy sipped wine delicately, pausing to savor it. I’d tried not to sound too judgmental in my description, but he’d caught my drift. “And?”

  “Well, we get quite a few ecology buffs around here and most of them are pretty harmless. But Wyatt’s groups are… different.”

  “Yeah,” Sam put in, coming in with some plates. “And most of us think the wrong group-member got himself drowned.”

  “Sam,” I reproved him. “He can hear you.”

  “No, he can’t. He drank most of one of Roy’s bottles and now he’s got his head down on the table, snoring.”

  Sam grinned, returning to the dining room where Harry Markle had apparently fallen in love with Prill. “Good dog,” I heard him telling the animal delightedly.

  She was, too. But two dogs were too many for my household. A few moments later Maggie repaired to the parlor where she began tuning her banjo. Soon she and Sam were singing their own version of an old Gordon Lightfoot tune:

  “They took a big ship on a terrible trip, it was cold, it was dark, it was scary…”

  “Anyway,” I went on as Maggie’s voice lilted. “Wyatt’s folks are always dressed in brand-new clothes that cost the earth, and driving too fast in their gas-guzzling SUVs.”

  “Which,” Ellie put in, checking the coffeemaker, “I don’t get. You’d think fuel economy would be tops on his hit-list.”

  “…so I wrote down this song, it’s a million words long, and I used up the whole dic-tionary,” Sam chimed in with Maggie.

  “Meanwhile, they’re all always shooting off their mouths in the stores and restaurants, about how fishing and logging and so on are ruining the environment,” I explained.

  Roy nodded, getting it. Fishing and logging and so on were how people made their livings around here, and they didn’t like know-it-all strangers — people from away, the locals called them — coming around telling them they ought to quit. Or worse, that they should be made to quit.

  “Wyatt’s fat-cat clients could dump arsenic in the water supply and he wouldn’t say boo, as long as they kept paying him,” George said, coming in to fetch cups and dessert plates.

  We were having a berry pudding with fresh whipped cream and coffee with a blackberry brandy that George had distilled three autumns earlier, after Ellie and I had picked the blackberries.

  George made a face. “‘You mean I can’t get today’s New York Times today?’ ” he mimicked Wyatt’s nature-watching customers.

  “Wyatt arranges the whole thing for his clients,” I told Roy. “Books the rooms, has the drinks and meals catered, plans the nature-watching, and gives lectures. On eagles, for instance.”

  Roy got dessert spoons from the silverware drawer without being asked t
o. I already thought that as a houseguest he was the cat’s pajamas, so easy to get along with, you’d have thought he’d been living here forever. And just before dinner when he took me aside to pay for his room, he’d ignored the sum I asked for when we made the arrangement.

  Instead he’d estimated what the same room would cost in Los Angeles and added thirty percent. “For the inconvenience,” he’d said charmingly.

  “Water’s deep in that marsh right after the snowmelt,” I went on. “And from what got reported in the Tides, it seems like one of the group got separated from the rest.”

  Ellie took up the story. “By the time they thought to look for the poor man he’d been missing for a couple of hours.”

  Sam and Maggie harmonized, “…the water was deep and the waves they were steep; the captain and crew started drinking…”

  “They found him in the marsh?” Roy McCall’s face was still.

  I nodded, getting out the electric mixer. “They think maybe he slipped, stepped in a hole where the water was over his head. And at this time of year that water’s cold.”

  “…but booze on the lake is an awful mistake and especially when you are sinking!”

  “Brr.” McCall shivered. A moment of silence: sinking!

  “Hey, Mom?” Sam came in as I finished whipping the cream. “Maggie and I are going to skip dessert. She wants to take the boat out, see if she can navigate by the stars.” He cuffed her sturdy shoulder as she appeared in the doorway behind him.

  With wisps of dark hair escaping her thick braid and her costume as usual a medley of denim, flannel, and double-knit, Maggie seemed the opposite of the polished, blade-slim Fran Hanson. “Kid takes an astronomy course and all of a sudden she’s Bosco Diorama,” Sam added teasingly.

  Maggie cuffed him back. “That’s Vasco da Gama, you booby.” Sam had a disorder that had turned out to be different from and worse than dyslexia. He played it for laughs, mostly.