Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  “And I want to know why we’d be targets,” I said. “All the other victims Harry thinks Sam’s crash is hooked to were close to cops, not just casual acquaintances.”

  “Also, ask him if his enemy ever used spiders before,” Ellie suggested. “Poisonous spiders.”

  I looked at her. She was serious. And the spiders had come from somewhere. “Okay. That’s simple enough.”

  But when we got there, it wasn’t. A few calls around town had told us where we should look for Harry; word was that his new girlfriend was in today’s video shoot. When we arrived, the big white house swarmed with activity.

  “Keep it steady!” a T-shirted young man yelled to two others who were operating a pump just outside one of the cellar windows. Water gushed from the pump through a length of PVC pipe, out to a gutter in the street.

  Across the yard I spotted Roy McCall in urgent conference with two women wearing headsets and holding clipboards. As they strode away, McCall caught sight of me and headed toward us.

  Ellie elbowed me. “There he is,” she said. Near the house Harry stood with a girl in full makeup, leotard, and leg warmers. They appeared to be arguing.

  “Hey,” Roy McCall panted, reaching us. “Listen, I’d love to let you two watch, but we’ve really got our hands full here…”

  Another efficient-looking young woman in a black satin Top Cat jacket rushed up to Roy. “Hey, we’ve got to do this ASAP. Power’s off in the basement and the batteries are charged.” She waved at a trailer pulled up alongside the house. From inside the trailer, the rumble of a diesel engine cut off abruptly.

  “Why’re they turning it off?” Roy demanded. “We need—”

  A thick, black power cable snaked to the house foundation. It was like the setup that ran electrical systems on boats.

  “I explained this before,” the woman interrupted steadily. “The diesel makes current, stores it in the battery banks. Lots,” she emphasized, “of battery storage. So we don’t trip circuits in the house,” she added, seeing the question on my face. “Our lights draw way more power than household appliances. And that way you don’t need the diesel to be running when—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Roy cut her off, “so it’s noise-free. Fine.”

  “But the batteries aren’t the problem,” she went on. “Water is the problem. The guys are having some trouble controlling the leak, and the cellar’s starting to fill up,” she finished.

  Frustration filled Roy’s face. “I told them, run it in slow. I want water in the background, on the floor, not over our heads. Is that so difficult to comprehend?”

  “Not to comprehend,” she replied matter-of-factly. “But you wanted a broken pipe in the background too, so they broke one and now the pressure is—” She waved her hands expressively.

  “Rupturing it,” I translated her gesture. “Making the leak worse. Leaks always make themselves worse. It’s a leak rule.”

  She smiled briefly at me. “Yeah. So shake it, Royster, we’ve gotta roll, or you’ll be filming an underwater disaster epic, not a music video.” She sprinted away.

  McCall’s cherub face pinched worriedly. I got the sense that all this was more than he’d bargained for.

  “Positions!” he shouted. More slim, leotard-wearing girls assembled, shedding leg warmers and trooping into the Danvers’ house.

  “We just want to talk to Harry,” I told Roy, then spotted a van across the street and touched Ellie’s arm. “Don’t turn around now but when you can, grab a peek at what the cat dragged in.”

  Wyatt Evert sat hunched behind the wheel of his van, wearing a wide-brimmed safari hat from beneath which he kept sneaking glances, as if he thought he could keep from being recognized by this thin subterfuge.

  “What’s he doing here?” I wondered aloud.

  “He was snooping around inside,” Roy said. “And making noise about how I’d better not let any diesel fuel soak into the ground. I told him to shove off. Guess he didn’t get the message.”

  “Roy! Let’s go or we’ll drown!” the efficient woman shouted.

  “Talk to anyone you want,” Roy called back as he hurried away across the lawn, “but not while we’re rolling. You ruin this shoot and I swear, I’ll be forced to shoot you.”

  He grinned to take the sting out of the threat, but I could see he wasn’t far from meaning it. Meanwhile the argument between Harry and the girl had grown heated.

  Fists clenched, she shouted something and spun away toward the house. I lost track of Harry for a few minutes in the crush around the door, caught up to him as he was going in.

  “I need to talk to you about last night,” I said, putting a hand on the sleeve of his leather jacket.

  “Not now.” He shook me off.

  “Let’s go, ladies and gentlemen!” Roy McCall’s voice, taut with controlled tension, came from within the house.

  I followed Harry inside. The house smelled of fresh paint and featured new wallpaper, the original wide-board floors newly finished with high-gloss poly, and pressed-tin ceilings. Also it featured a sound I knew well: a gushing leak in the cellar.

  “I’m not leaving Samantha alone here,” Harry said when, turning, he spotted me again. Samantha was the dancer Harry had been arguing with, I realized, remembering what Bob Arnold had told me about Harry having a girlfriend. “This is dangerous,” Harry went on. “But she won’t listen.”

  It didn’t look dangerous. Most of the year the house stood vacant with sheeted furniture and lowered shades. Its owners used it as a vacation home, rented it or let it stand empty the rest of the time, and wouldn’t even be here until August. It struck me again that Harry’s mental train might be missing a few boxcars; the man seemed to see peril everywhere.

  “Quiet, everyone!” McCall’s voice came from the cellar amid a confusion of other voices both upstairs and down.

  Harry descended the cellar steps, stationing himself on the bottom one; in his greying crew cut and battered leather jacket, his jaw thrust out and his hands clamped on his blue-jeaned hips, he resembled some 1950s-style avenging angel.

  I peered past him. Now this looked dangerous. In the cellar, the dancers perched like bizarre living statues on the washer and dryer, on sawhorses and stepladders, and on every other raised surface, limbs frozen expectantly in exotic-looking positions.

  But it wasn’t their collection of precarious poses that gave me such pause. “We’ll go straight through it,” McCall told them.

  A trapeze-seat slung by lines from a ceiling beam supported a camera operator. Lights blazed white; unnervingly so. With the water pouring down the old stone-and-mortar wall by the fuse box, having the power turned on down here would’ve been like licking a finger and sticking it into an electrical outlet.

  But a battery wasn’t really safer. It was one of the things Wade always hammered into new tugboat deckhands: You don’t have to plug into a wall outlet to get electricity. A diesel and an alternator could turn deckhands into crispy critters in the blink of a careless eye. And here was juice enough to run all these big lights.

  Thinking this, I noted distractedly a new, freshly mortared section of foundation, now getting soaked by water gushing down the wall. At the foot of it a few stones had already come out and some larger ones above were loosening, falling together of their own weight.

  Seeing them I remembered again how very young Roy was and wondered anew if he was in over his head here, not only with the leak. The whole project was a lot to keep under control.

  “First we’ll roll cameras,” he announced. “Count of four and the click starts.” He glanced at a woman in a jumpsuit, holding what I guessed must be a metronome. Pushing a button on it, she demonstrated that it did click, a hollow-sounding pop-pop-pop.

  “On the count of eight,” Roy waved at the rafters, “the wire comes down. Samantha, you take it, just like we rehearsed. Don’t worry,” he added with a smile. “That wire’s not really connected to any power.”

  “Oh, sure,” Harry muttered amidst n
ervous laughter from the assembled company. “Trust your life to Mr. Fancy Pants, there.”

  “You all know the drill. We just need the action on film, that’s all. You do your stunt, Samantha. The rest of you follow with each of yours, and… we’ll cut. Got it?”

  Nods from the dancers. “Let’s do it,” Roy commanded.

  Samantha was pretty in a peas-in-a-pod way: gelled hair, big eyes, tiny nub of nose, small mouth. Generic-looking, like a successful, interchangeable product of a dance-school cloning experiment.

  “Ready,” the metronome woman announced. The cellar smelled of makeup, hot lights, and wet concrete. The water had now risen to the stairway footings. Somewhere outside a siren sounded distantly.

  “What’s going to happen?” I whispered.

  Harry whispered back: “They dance. No sound — the music gets put in later. If you want to call it music,” he added scathingly.

  “Some choreographer’s brilliant idea of drama, what’s coming now,” he went on, as the technicians took their places. “It’s an electrocution scene. That’s what the whole fake live-wire thing is about.” His voice dripped disgust.

  Roy McCall’s, by contrast, was rich with manufactured confidence; he had a lot riding on this. And at first it was okay: metronome clicking slowly, but the dancers performing moves that if I hadn’t seen, I wouldn’t have believed could be done so fast.

  A sort of peace began spreading on McCall’s face: This was gonna work. But on the metronome’s fifth click, I noticed Harry’s gaze was locked on the rafter from which the fake live wire was set to fall.

  I spotted the dangling end of it, fastened I imagined by a nail in the darkness where I couldn’t see. The lights, clamped to cross beams, had been positioned well away from any possible contact with the water.

  But Harry’s eyes widened as the metronome clicked on. Six, seven: he turned in slow motion, his mouth opening.

  Eight: Samantha’s hand reaching gracefully, wire pulled by a technician yanking a length of invisible filament tied to it, the wire swinging down on cue.

  “No!” Bellowing, Harry launched himself as Samantha’s head jerked back, her body convulsing. McCall got there first, slammed into her, carrying her away with her hand still hard on the wire. There was a snap! and the hot sizzling smell of a short circuit.

  From outside: the sound of an engine starting, roaring away as Samantha toppled. She landed with a splash and the sort of sick thump I knew meant she hadn’t tried to break her fall, Roy on top of her. The metronome kept clicking.

  “Turn it off!” Roy shouted, shoving Harry aside. They were struggling, almost as if to gain possession of her, amidst cries for an ambulance and for someone who knew CPR, shoving, and shouts to make sure all the power was disconnected, damn it!

  The lights were off but the water was still rising; when I saw none of the people in it were being electrocuted, I waded in, too, found the main valve on the cellar wall, and cranked it shut. I’d done it at home enough times to know how; the gush of rushing water slowed to a trickle, stopped. Then I peered up at the place where the wire had been fastened, looking for a nail or hook.

  I found it, too, screwed into a cross beam. But no wire hung from it. Instead a tiny, fresh-looking hole pierced the old wooden ceiling. It was unnoticeable unless you looked hard. Then I followed Ellie upstairs.

  Outside, the dancers were all crying. The metronome woman had her arms around some of them, murmuring and scolding. Harry and Roy had Samantha out, too, depositing her on the lawn. She was breathing, her thin little bird-ribs moving jerkily under the leotard top. “Where’s the ambulance?” McCall implored.

  My heart sank. The siren we’d heard earlier meant that the nearest ambulance was out on another emergency. Backup would kick in and the second would get here in a couple of minutes, cold comfort if you were the one waiting. But this wasn’t the big city with safety nets under you twenty-four-seven. Here, it was what we had.

  I wanted to head back in and find where that hole led to in the cellar ceiling. But just then Bob Arnold pulled up in the squad car, grim-faced. “Jake,” he said, “you and Ellie better go home to your house. I’ll be there soon. There’s been an accident.”

  “No accident. It was—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “Listen to me, Jake. I mean at your house.”

  “But Bob, no one’s home except…”

  That siren.

  “…Wade.”

  “What the hell have you gotten stirred up?” Victor demanded. Tearing off his surgical gloves and tossing them, he stomped down the hospital corridor straight at me, full of sound and fury.

  At the house I’d found only the frightened animals and the reek, unmistakable, of burnt gunpowder.

  “You always do this.” Tearing off his surgical gown, ripping the paper OR shoes from his feet.

  “You stick your nose in, you can’t let things alone, like it’s any of your business…”

  He’d heard already about our presence at the Danvers’ house, of course. Victor was good at hearing of anything that had to do with me, in case he could use it against me.

  He turned, pulling his white coat from a hook. His name was embroidered in red script across the breast pocket, like a swirl of bright blood.

  “You always…” he repeated, and then I was on him, spinning him, pinning him to the wall.

  “Damn it, Victor, you tell me right now if Wade is okay.”

  “Jesus,” he gasped. “Of course he is.” He shook himself from my grasp, his face creased with distaste for my loss of control.

  Relief ambushed me; I sank into one of the chairs lining the corridor outside the surgical area.

  Nurses stared. “Jake,” Victor grated. “You’re making a scene.”

  Inside my ex somewhere I suppose there’s some vestige of human beingness. But it’s so well defended you practically have to hold a gun to his head to get a glimpse of it. Or if you have a tumor as big as a rutabaga, he’ll be kind to you.

  Otherwise he won’t. “Wade’s in recovery. He’ll wake up soon. He had a close call but he’s okay. And Sam’s fine,” he added thinly, letting me know how derelict it was of me not to have asked. Then he stalked away.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ellie comforted me when he was gone. “It’s just his way of blowing off steam.”

  Right. But even after years of being divorced he still only blew it off at me, partly I guessed because mine were the buttons he knew how to push. Ellie sat beside me, handed me a tissue.

  “Watch out for the contact lenses,” she said automatically.

  “Thanks. Did you get to talk to Harry?”

  On an end table the day’s issue of the Bangor paper lay open to the Downeast section. A photo of Sam’s demolished car featured prominently.

  “No,” Ellie said. “Harry went in the ambulance with Samantha straight to Bangor. From there, they’re airlifting her down to Portland. We can talk to Harry later.”

  “Okay.” I blew my nose hard. “Ellie. I’m not crazy, right? This really isn’t just a string of…”

  “Coincidences?” she finished for me. “I don’t think so.”

  The hall smelled of new paint, not quite covering the odors of fear and pain that no amount of disinfectant could ever eradicate. Victor dealt well with fear and pain as long as they belonged to other people, and as long as they were generated by a discernable physical cause that he could do something about.

  It was the emotional stuff he had such trouble with. For approximately the millionth time, I put Victor away in the mental compartment I reserve for his psychopathology.

  “This,” Ellie said, “goes beyond coincidence. And we should start assuming Sam’s car was tampered with, too.”

  A nurse appeared. “You can see him now.”

  In the recovery room Wade raised a hand weakly, let it fall. “How’re you doing?” he asked me.

  Tears spilled through my lashes although I tried not to let them; partly for his sake, partly on account of t
he darn lenses.

  “No crying in baseball,” he admonished me mock severely. He was half-drunk with anesthetic; a burn reddened his jaw.

  The bad part, though, was the bandage on his neck. Clearly, something had just missed some very important anatomy. And Ellie was right: this all went way beyond coincidence.

  “Wade, what happened?”

  The good humor left his eyes, which were blessedly unharmed. “Shell. I brought the lever down—”

  To compress the powder inside one of the shotgun shells he’d been reloading. “Ka-boom,” he finished simply.

  The nurse came back in, suggested it was time for us to let him rest. “Wait. What’s going on?” Wade demanded.

  He’d seen our expressions even through a haze of painkiller: Ellie’s especially, her gaze so penetrating they could have substituted it for one of the X-ray machines.

  But now he was nodding, sandbagged by the drugs they’d given him. “Whoever did it,” he muttered blurrily. “Rigged a reloading press. Righ’ un’er my nose.”

  So he thought so, too: that this was no accident. His eyes drifted shut. “Guy’s a real cowboy,” he murmured.

  Then he was asleep. Ellie led me back out to the corridor. “A cowboy,” she repeated, her green eyes glinting. “Cowboys are daring, determined, imaginative—”

  These were not qualities I wanted to find in my opponents. But Ellie seemed to relish the notion.

  “Whoever this cowboy is,” she declared… Whoevah.

  “…he just messed with the wrong Indians.”

  We spent part of the afternoon in the hospital with Sam and Maggie, who at her insistence were improving his time with the crossword puzzle from the Quoddy Tides. As the day waned we checked a sleeping Wade once more before going home, leaving George again in charge of guard duty; later, after feeding the animals and walking Monday, we confronted Harry Markle at his house.

  Or we tried. But Harry had other ideas. He was packing, throwing clothes into a duffel bag and toiletries into a kit. “I’ll have to give the dog back, Jake. I don’t know where I’m going. You should take her tonight.”