Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Instead via the Internet on Sam’s computer we had confirmed most of the details of Harry’s tale, the ones that were publicly available, anyway. Newspaper archives of The New York Times gave the NYPD’s version of the story Harry had told me the night before.

  Chillingly, the on-line articles delivered no photos of any police officers. They’d appeared in the print editions, a sidebar noted, but were later judged inappropriate for electronic versions in case a cop’s face caused him or her to be targeted by what one quoted officer termed colorfully, “a fruitcake from afar.”

  The phrase was funny but the message behind it wasn’t: that someone had spooked even the cops of the NYPD. Ordinarily the devil himself couldn’t scare one of them, I mused as I marched downtown with Monday frisking along beside me.

  I strode past the Top Cat truck, parked in front of the Peavey Library. Two production workers were eyeing the massive old Revolutionary War cannon on the lawn as if wondering how to fire it. I could have told them they’d have to get the log out of its throat, first. During the War of 1812 the cannon must have looked sufficient to the soldiers at Fort Sullivan on the hill over the harbor. That is, until they spotted the British flotilla sailing up the bay and knew they were outnumbered hundreds to one.

  Which went to prove something, I supposed, but I didn’t know what and at the moment, I didn’t care. Twenty-four hours earlier my only worry had been fixing a gutter.

  Now I had an injured son who might not have gotten that way by accident, a missing woman who surely hadn’t, and a new chapter in my own thoroughly lousy history, starring a father who instead of dying in a bomb blast might instead have callously abandoned me.

  On Water Street the shops gleamed with freshly washed plate glass, new paint, and tubs of red geraniums; sidewalks bustled as the shops’ proprietors readied for the coming tourist season. I passed the Quoddy Crafts store, its front window filled with the gorgeous stuff people around here kept busy making all winter: finely worked earrings of silver-wrapped beach glass, sweetgrass wreaths intricately braided with colored silks, white ash walking sticks incised with Native American glyphs, stained glass panels glowing with jewel colors.

  And much more, but I didn’t stop to admire it. Down on the dock, past the massive grey granite building that housed the Customs office and the Coast Guard, a wooden hut called Rosie’s sold hot dogs and onion rings. Near Rosie’s stood the pay phone from which a dock worker had called 911 after Sam’s crash. I ignored that, too, as I entered the wooden storefront that housed the Eastport Police Department.

  “Thanks,” I told Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, as Monday flopped down on the floor by Bob’s grey metal desk. I’d called him hours before, and he’d agreed to make some inquiries for me.

  “Early retirement,” Bob confirmed now. On his desk lay fresh copies of the Ellsworth Union-Leader, the Portland Gazette, and the Examiner, plus several more I wasn’t familiar with.

  You never saw him reading one, but by the end of the day Bob would have absorbed the contents of them all. According to Bob, there was nothing a crook liked better than a cop who hadn’t yet cottoned on to the capers the crook had been pulling elsewhere.

  “Under a cloud, like he said,” Bob went on, meaning Harry. “Union got him his pension, hadda fight for that. And they never caught the creep he’d been after, either. Once Harry Markle was out of the picture, this bad guy he’d been chasing stopped doing bad deeds like someone shut off a switch.”

  Bob was pink-cheeked and balding, with big blue eyes that looked innocent until you peered more deeply into them. “Like maybe it was what the guy’d had in mind in the first place, hurting Markle,” Bob observed thoughtfully.

  “An old enemy of Harry’s?” That hadn’t occurred to me. “But all those deaths, isn’t that an awful lot of…” I faltered.

  “Overkill,” Bob agreed dourly, gazing out the window. “That’s why I don’t buy the idea, myself.”

  Ellie and I could research a lot, but some questions you had to be a cop yourself to ask effectively. And I wanted them asked, never mind if some of the answers knocked me for a loop. I didn’t enjoy being blindsided by the past.

  Or anything else. “But it’s not just Harry’s facts that are accurate?” I pressed Bob. “His spin on it is true? Someone in the city really was victimizing cops, by killing their loved ones?”

  Out on the water a little black-and-red scallop dragger was puttering into the harbor. But most of the town’s boats were in the boat basin getting extra bumpers thrown on for what locals predicted would be a gullywhumper.

  “Yeah. Nobody in the series not connected to the job.”

  The string of deaths Harry had been investigating had begun about five years earlier. They were bad ones, the killings ritualistic. The papers hadn’t printed the gory details but you didn’t have to work too hard to imagine them. “A real mess,” Bob added unnecessarily.

  To distract myself from the mental images I fixed my eyes on the horizon. The storm was in the mid-Atlantic states now, raising hell all over the place; state of emergency on the Jersey shoreline.

  “Thing like that, you ask yourself,” Bob said, “what’s the point? But in this case, you look at the big picture, seems like knocking off a whole lot of people was the point.”

  I turned back to him. “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head sorrowfully. “The cop connection made it special, and maybe there was some grudge-type reason somewhere in the past. Somebody targets cops, it’s ’cause they don’t like cops. But when people keep killing people, bottom line it’s usually ’cause they like killing.”

  Brr. He peered at me. “Looks like someone had a poke at you, too, Jake. Or are you working on your house again?”

  “House,” I confirmed tersely. No need to add to my already stellar reputation by detailing exactly what had happened.

  Bob got up, gazing across the street at the concrete barrier that I gathered Sam had crashed into; the night before, it was on Bob’s orders that I’d been kept from the scene until Sam was revived. The barrier bore dark blue car paint and white scars from the impact, its orange reflectors smashed, shining bits of them littering the street.

  “Kid’s lucky,” Bob commented, hitching up his belt which was burdened with baton, sidearm, and cuffs. Bob was the kind of guy who expected the best but always prepared for the worst. “He’s going to be okay? And Maggie?”

  “Uh-huh.” Just thinking about it again made my heart do a buck-and-wing. “We went back to the hospital before breakfast. Sam said all he thought of when the brakes went was making it around the corner.”

  Or they’d have ended up in the water. The howling I’d heard was Sam desperately trying to slow the car with the transmission. But the Key Street hill was too steep for engine braking, and the attempt had failed.

  “They’re agitating to get out today,” I said. “Sam might but Maggie probably not. She took a harder hit.”

  He’d been chipper, no more cardiac monitor, requiring only codeine to be comfortable. Maggie looked pale and in pain despite stronger pills, but she’d had her game face on, working to get up and into a wheelchair and already suggesting word games she and Sam could play while they remained in the hospital.

  “They’ll be fine,” I said again, mostly to reassure myself. I’d wanted to stay but Sam was clearly mortified at the thought of being watched over by his mother. When I’d left, Maggie had been urging him to concentrate on homonyms: “quail” and “quail,” et cetera.

  “Victor’s there with them, and so is George.”

  “Good. Listen, Jacobia,” Bob said uncomfortably as a breeze through the open door riffled his sparse hair.

  With his slow, face-saving way of handling trouble, people joked Bob ought to have his motto, “All in good time,” stenciled on the cop car. Bob gave a guy room to consider his options, have an apology ready when the moment of truth finally arrived and Bob stood toe-to-toe with him, radiating moral authority. “This story Ha
rry Markle is telling now, about this guy following him,” Bob went on doubtfully.

  We went outside. At one end of Water Street the Top Cat crew was loading big equipment onto a pickup truck: lights, cameras, I don’t know what all else, only that there was a lot of it.

  At the other, in front of the Motel East, people in safari garb climbed into Wyatt Evert’s van. They carried cameras, backpacks, all the gear they would need for a day out observing nature, plus lunches Wyatt had had packed for them.

  “Hope they’ve got plenty of bug dope,” Bob observed.

  Wyatt, looking rocky after his evening of appreciating fine wine at my house, got behind the van’s wheel and peered into its oversized rearview mirror. His assistant Fran Hanson was in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.

  “Blackflies out at the Moosehorn are so big right now, they could stand flat-footed and look right over the barn at you,” Bob added wryly, watching the van pull out.

  Then he turned back to me. “Thing is, Jacobia, Markle seems okay. Got his work cut out for him with Harriet’s house.”

  I hadn’t said anything about what I thought really happened to Harriet. An abandoned pair of binoculars, however convincing to me, wasn’t going to cut much ice with Bob; I needed more. So I just listened as the breeze blew in, smelling of sea salt and the storm that was out there, past where we could see.

  “But back in New York, Markle’s got a reputation as a loose cannon,” Bob said, getting down to brass tacks.

  “Fellow I talked to,” he went on, “said Markle was the kind of guy, wouldn’t let go. Thing’d go cold, Harry wouldn’t give up on it. He would work on his own time and put other people in danger, plus himself.”

  “That’s not good.” But it fit, actually; going up on that roof before a backup team was in position, trying to be a hero. “Thinking it was personal, all about him. He still thinks so.”

  Bob looked at me, and I got the message: don’t make the same mistake. But at the moment, it felt personal.

  A big old blue work truck, its muffler belching and its bed piled high with lobster traps, trundled past on its way to the boat basin. The men liked to be on their boats, even just tied up at the piers, puttering and trading gossip. And there was work to do before the boats got blown, as George would have put it, nine ways from Sunday.

  “Did your friend say anything more about the last case Harry was on, specifically?” The ghastly one: targeting cops.

  “Ayuh.” Bob eyed me unhappily. “Says before Markle finally took his retirement he already had the idea the bad guy was stalking him, had it so he couldn’t think about anything else. He got counseling but that didn’t help him.”

  The psychiatrist Harry had mentioned. “And there was some other thing he was working on, some old case he couldn’t seem to accept a closing to, that it was over and done with,” Bob said.

  I had an idea maybe I knew what that one was. But it wasn’t important now. “So, Bob, you think Sam’s accident really was an accident?”

  Bob eyed the length of the street again, taking it all in with practiced casualness. He could spot a guy with a baggie full of illegal pills so fast, the guy would be off the breakwater and into the lockup before the first startled flurry of denials and excuses finished escaping his lips.

  And to that kind of guy Bob gave no leeway for apologies. “I don’t want to swear to it. But Sam’s car was a clunker. Rust gets started over the winters, salt and so on. Year after year. Eats through.”

  “Can’t someone tell for sure if it was rust?”

  I hadn’t examined the car; I’m no mechanic and I didn’t want to look at it, anyway. Seeing the scraped and broken barrier was bad enough.

  Bob shook his head, following my gaze. “That’s not what Sam hit, Jacobia. The barrier’s just what he scraped by, going fast.”

  He pointed. “That’s what he hit.”

  “Dear god.” There wasn’t very much damage to it, so I hadn’t noticed. But about forty yards past the barrier, a granite boulder marked the far corner of the Neptune Fish Company parking lot. A big boulder.

  “Whole front end of that car’s a shambles, no one’s ever going to know what happened for sure, there was just too much damage from the impact,” Bob said.

  He turned to me. “Mechanical problem’s the simplest answer, though. And in my experience, simplest is correct.”

  Which had been Victor’s comment, too, in another context. “I am just saying,” Bob went on, “you want to look at what Markle says from all angles, ’fore you go acceptin’ it as gospel. People who know him say his imagination’s his whadyacallit.”

  “His Achilles’ heel.” The Top Cat Productions truck rumbled toward us.

  “On the other hand,” Bob cautioned, “if Harry Markle did have an old enemy following him—”

  “Not someone whose radar you want to be on,” I agreed. But with Bob not seeming to give the notion much credence, it seemed more remote to me, too; comfortingly so.

  Too bad I couldn’t dismiss the rest of what Harry had said. “What else did you find out about him, anything?”

  “Just that he’s got a girlfriend already. One of the dancers in that video they’re making, name of Samantha Greer. Not local,” he added.

  People from away could behave like a hutch full of bunnies for all Bob cared; he didn’t have to attend town meetings with their parents. “Jake. About the binoculars.”

  So he knew that Harriet hadn’t taken them with her. Around here, if a sparrow fell Bob knew it before the feathers quit fluttering.

  Knew, and did something about it, too, if necessary.

  All in good time.

  I hoped.

  My old house stands on a granite foundation each block of which was quarried miles away on the mainland, dragged to the water, barged over the channel, and hauled by oxcart to the site where it was mortared in by someone who knew how. The house’s first owner, Captain Jeremiah Loundsworth, survived a long career of dangerous, extremely lucrative commercial voyages only to perish by shipwreck in a storm while carrying soldiers to the Civil War.

  Sometimes in the house late at night I could almost hear the weeping when the word came: that the captain was lost. Or possibly it was cheering at the news that the old tyrant had finally drowned.

  I’ll never know; the walls cannot speak. But they can fall down, and they were doing it very convincingly when I returned home.

  “Sorry,” Wade said, throwing an arm around my shoulder as I gazed at the clapboards lying where they had fallen onto the back lawn. A row of them had smashed the pretty trellis Ellie and I had built the previous summer to support the Concord grapevines.

  “Guess we bumped them too hard with that ladder,” Wade added ruefully. “Gutters and downspouts are all on straight, though.”

  I managed a chuckle. The rotted clapboards were bad enough. But the real disaster was why they’d fallen; the framing beneath them was rotten, too. And that meant…

  “Leak,” I diagnosed grimly. “Bad flashing, snow and ice on top, water ran inside.” I should have let the Shingle Belles do the whole roof, not just the actively leaking portion on the ell, as they had advised.

  But it was too late now. The hole where the clapboards fell resembled a spreading patch of leprosy. And it would act like one if it didn’t get repaired, as Sam would’ve put it, soot tweet.

  “I’ll order the materials today, by Friday I can have new clapboards painted,” I said, adding and subtracting in my head.

  Mostly subtracting. The job would take hundreds of dollars’ worth of clapboards, as hideously expensive as skin grafts. And it would need oil-based paint, which is the very devil to work with. But here on the island in the damp salt air, latex exterior paint is about as durable as a dusting of powdered sugar.

  “Turpentine,” I recited. “Sprayer nozzle—”

  The way to paint clapboards is before you nail them up: two coats of primer, two of paint. I was certainly not going to paint them with a brush, and the
paint-sprayer nozzle had a clog in it.

  This being yet another do-it-yourself home-fix-up rule: The paint-sprayer nozzle always has a clog in it.

  “The storm will be past by then. And,” I went on recklessly, gazing at the bare spot which was a good ten feet higher than I’d ever climbed before, “maybe I can put the clapboards up myself. I could rent scaffolding, or borrow a longer extension ladder.”

  Wade’s head moved against my hair in a way that I had learned meant he was trying hard to keep from laughing outright. “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “You.” He wrapped me in a bear hug. We hadn’t yet discussed the previous night’s revelations about my father. Now I leaned on him, feeling the tight metal clamp around my heart ease momentarily.

  “A longer ladder,” he marveled at last. His hands smelled like gun oil; when not piloting big cargo ships in and out of Eastport’s shipping dock, he was a well-known gunsmith with a workshop upstairs in the ell of the old house. “Don’t you think you should give that face of yours a break from slamming it into stuff?” he added, eyeing my bruises.

  “Maybe you’ve got a point.” Wondering what else could go wrong, I followed him inside with Monday trotting behind me. The day’s only bright spot was that I’d been able to put the contact lenses in again that morning, adding yet another unnatural color to the ghastly panorama that was my face.

  “I called the hospital,” Wade went on, pouring me a cup of coffee. “Talked to Victor. Sam’s coming home after another set of X rays.”

  The coffee was fresh. Maybe Victor would set up a catheter so I could infuse some into my brain. “How’d he sound?”

  Wade grinned. “Like Victor. Trying to figure out some way it could be your fault, but he couldn’t because it isn’t.”

  A clatter hammered up from the cellar but I was so tired I barely flinched, just raised a querying eyebrow at Wade. “What’s going on?”