Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Maybe Lian Ash had done much the same. But if so, why? He hadn’t just let me assume something, either; he had flat out said he’d come to Eastport from Portland, not from Machias. And — how had he known anything about me?

  Tim downshifted smoothly into the speed zone at Pleasant Point, keeping the speedometer carefully under thirty-five until the houses thinned to trees and fields again.

  “So, do you want to unburden yourself in return?” he asked. “Put me in the picture a little? Or am I supposed to put the cab fare on your tab, too?”

  I gave myself a hard mental shake. That beer had been a bad idea. “Okay, the thing is this. I don’t know what’s going on, and if I tell you all I don’t understand, it’ll take a year.”

  He waited as an eighteen-wheeler highballed past us at the intersection of Route 1, then turned left onto the highway.

  “So I’ll fill you in later, when I do. Meanwhile, why don’t you tell me: What do you know about Lian Ash?”

  “Okay.” Tim passed the eighteen-wheeler expertly on the last straightaway before the road narrowed and curved into the trees, leaving the big rig’s headlights fading into the darkness behind us. “Like I said, I lived in the same house as him.”

  He drove the little car fast and well, accelerating out of the curves but with no flashy, dangerous-feeling fanfare. “I said good morning to him a few times, that was about the extent of it. Year or so ago, I moved up to Eastport. Not long after that, he did, too,” Tim added.

  “But not because you moved here, surely.” A truck blew by us in a rush of wind and a billow of road dust.

  “Oh, no. Guys get on their feet, they go out on their own,” Tim replied. “Get their own place in Machias or come to Eastport or Calais. You stay in the area, there’s not many other choices.”

  True. After Machias, the next biggish place was Ellsworth, another sixty miles south. “So it was like graduating. From the rooming house, I mean.”

  He nodded. “I started seeing him in La Sardina. Not often. He shows up, has a coffee or soda, pays and leaves. He isn’t,” Tim added dryly, “a big socializer.”

  So I’d gathered. “He told me he moved here just last winter.” Which was a few months ago, not a year: another small discrepancy.

  Tim shrugged. “Yeah, well, I’m just reporting what I know. Although since we’re talking about him now I guess maybe you know more. Or think you do, you’re all anxious to check it out.” He glanced at me. “Or are you luring me somewhere for immoral purposes?”

  From anyone else the comment might’ve made me nervous. I was not used to driving around at night with men other than Wade. But Tim’s Jimmy Olson grin took the worry out of being close.

  “I realize this sounds nuts,” I answered. “But with all that’s happened… it’s small stuff, probably meaningless. Still, I want to check out the rooming house and talk to the landlady.”

  Tim made Twilight Zone theme-song noises. He was a sarcastic little bugger, another reason I liked him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I conceded. “Bush-league snooping. And I really hope I don’t find out anything bad about him. He seems so decent.”

  “But you asked him the equivalent of a straight question and he gave you a crooked answer and that makes you think maybe there’s more to the story, so you want to go after it.”

  He braked smoothly. Deer stood in the road, unfazed by our appearance, a female and two fawns, mild-eyed.

  “Come on, Mom, get ’em off the freeway,” Tim said. And when they’d moseyed calmly into the brush:

  “People lie for all kinds of reasons, Jake. Doesn’t mean they’re bad, just that they think what they’re being asked is nobody else’s business.”

  “Yeah. That’s possible, too. But in the context…” My ears were ringing hard from the too-fast beer and suddenly I realized just how ridiculous this idea was.

  “Or maybe I’m just drunk,” I finished.

  Tim didn’t comment, taking the turns south of Whiting as if we were on a track on the NASCAR circuit. Chilly darkness whizzed past, broken by glittering tidal inlets, pointed outlines of firs pasted on them as if cut from black paper with sharp scissors.

  Then, just as I thought he’d decided he was humoring me but nothing more, he spoke again.

  “The context being that Sam crashed the car, Wade nearly got his head blown off, that dancer’s dead, and a well-known missing Eastport crackpot has just been found walled up in a cellar.”

  I let a breath out gratefully. Coming out of the hills, the road curved sharply across the long, low bridge leading into the county seat of Machias.

  “Yeah,” I told Tim. “Thanks. That’s exactly it. And it’s making me nervous.”

  Tim just nodded. His career rise had been meteoric, his fall just as fast, so the story went. Nowadays it seemed he wasn’t in a hurry about much of anything but this road. But he was quick on the uptake, and the fact that he wasn’t laughing at an eighty-mile round-trip spurred on by little more than a beer-fueled impulse made me feel a little better.

  “So you’ll tell me about this once you’ve got it all worked out?” he asked.

  He slowed over the causeway that spanned the Machias River, took the right-hand fork in the road past Helen’s Restaurant in Machias. Visions of Helen’s famous pie danced in my head but I was on a mission.

  “If I get it all worked out,” I promised. We climbed a hill, shot past the county courthouse and the lockup adjacent. Lights glowed behind the barred windows. The hapless drug smuggler I’d read about in the Examiner was in there somewhere. “You’re sure it’s not too late?”

  Maine people, especially the older ones, were early risers. Eight in the evening to them was like midnight to me.

  “Yup. And I’ve kept in touch with the landlady.” Tim grinned briefly sideways at me. “Wait till you meet her, she’s a sketch.” We turned onto a side street. “Almost there.”

  “I hope she’s still up.” Now that we were here, I was even less certain than before that this was a good idea.

  Tim barked a laugh. “Oh, she’s up, all right.”

  We pulled over. “Listen, if you’re not ready to talk about your thing, maybe you can help me on something else,” he said as we got out of the car. “Wyatt Evert.”

  The street was silent, dead-ending a block away. Beyond lay two hundred or so dark miles of fields, trees, and rivers before any other street began; in Maine, when you’re on the edge of town you are also on the edge of real wilderness.

  “What about him?” We were going up a narrow walk leading to the steps of a glassed-in porch. The house was smaller than I had expected, with a grassy little rut of a side driveway and a one-car garage.

  “I asked him what else he does besides the tour groups,” Tim replied as we mounted the steps. “For a feature we might run on the different jobs people do to string a living together around here.” He knocked and after a moment the porch light went on.

  “Crooked answer?” I said as a face appeared at a window.

  “Says he runs a nonprofit, it benefits endangered species,” Tim said as the inside door opened. A woman in slippers and fuzzy robe, her hair in a towel and cream all over her face, came onto the porch.

  “Just a sec!” she called fretfully through the glass.

  Tim’s absence of scorn aside, I was even sorrier that I had given in to what was obviously a truly dumb notion.

  “Thing is,” Tim went on as the woman fussed, muttering, with the balky door lock, “I looked up the organization Evert mentioned, in the lists of nonprofits registered in any of the fifty states or with the federal folks, the IRS.”

  The lock popped. A greasy face peered out doubtfully at us.

  “No such outfit,” I guessed. You register nonprofits to get tax-exempt status, among other things. I’d done lots of them.

  “Bingo,” he confirmed. Then: “Mrs. Sprague? It’s me.”

  The woman frowned, still squinting. Just as I’d feared, she’d been getting ready for bed. And we hadn
’t even called first; I wanted to sink through the sidewalk and disappear.

  “Tim, let’s just go—” I began.

  But then a huge grin, its toothlessness rendered irrelevant by its happiness, broke through the face cream.

  “Thimmy!” the woman shouted joyfully, and ushered us in.

  Chapter 5

  Mr. Ash was a lovely man,” Sheila Sprague told us fifteen minutes later. She’d put her dentures in, abolishing her lisp without diminishing her cracked, radiant charm.

  “He was working for the road crew where they were blasting for the new bridge, down at Cherryfield.” Still wearing the face cream, she’d brought us into the parlor where she served us iced root beer and Ritz crackers with slices of processed cheese.

  To my surprise, I was thirsty and starving. Mrs. Sprague beamed approval as I devoured crackers and slugged down the root beer, meanwhile taking in my surroundings.

  Brown shag carpet covered the floor. The heavy furniture’s thick, sturdy upholstery was a hideous orange plaid, above it on the walls a collection of heavily framed paint-by-numbers scenes. Reader’s Digest condensed books lined up on a low shelf; a black china planter in the shape of a crouching panther, a philodendron straggling gamely from its back, stood on the TV below a wooden cuckoo clock whose strike of each quarter hour was prefaced by a cataclysmic whirring of internal machinery.

  In short, it was crowded, crammed full of bric-a-brac, and so utterly, undemandingly comfortable I wanted to move right in. And I gathered I wasn’t the only one; a half dozen empty chairs crowded in a semicircle in front of the TV.

  “All six of my gentlemen go to bed early,” Sheila explained to me. She was a sketch, all right.

  A sharp sketch. If Ellie’s eyes were X-ray, this lady had CAT-scanners installed in her forehead. “They’re all working men, and need their rest. So I have the evenings to myself. For,” she touched a fingertip to her face while batting her skimpy lashes self-parodyingly at me, “my beauty routine.”

  The house didn’t seem big enough to accept one tenant, much less six. “Mrs. Sprague keeps the rent down by boarding two to a room,” Tim told me. “Fellows here, mostly just getting going again.”

  “Like you,” she agreed, beaming through the face cream. Her affectionate regard for him was obvious. “And just as I predicted, haven’t you done lovely for yourself? I knew that you would.”

  She jumped up, her slippers padding away swiftly. “If you’d like to see Mr. Ash’s room, you’re welcome to. It’s just now come vacant again. Though I don’t know what you could find. He didn’t leave much, and it was quite a long time ago.”

  Tim followed me as I followed her to a back stair. The kitchen smelled of Ajax, the floor’s linoleum covered with brightly woven rag rugs, the appliances quaint relics from five decades ago. A round-shouldered Frigidaire wheezed beside a Formica table, its six red leatherette-and-chrome chairs neatly pulled up to it.

  Upstairs, she put a finger to her lips. The carpeted hall was dark except for the glow of the night-light in the bathroom, whose door stood ajar. “Let’s be mice, now,” she cautioned sweetly, opening a hallway door. “Everyone’s asleep.”

  The cell she showed us was barely large enough to walk into. It featured a narrow bed, a dresser, and a tiny closet containing a few wire hangers. Another braided rug lay on the floor. She pulled a string to switch the bedside lamp on.

  “This is a single room,” she said unnecessarily as I blinked at its small size. If she’d turned all her spare rooms into rentals, this one must’ve been the linen closet.

  “I’ve rented it several times since Mr. Ash was in it,” she whispered. “But it’s just the same as when he left. He took all his things with him, of course, not that he had much. Not a man for a lot of possessions, Mr. Ash.”

  She gestured at a shelf under the bedside table. “Except a few books. They’re still here. That was one funny thing. He asked me when he left if anyone ever came looking for him, to give them his books.”

  I knelt to peer at them: Kessel’s Handbook of Explosives, a biography of Frederick the Great, and a grammar text: Synonyms, Homonyms, and Antonyms.

  “I thought it was odd,” she added. “But harmless. Why don’t you take them along with you, dear?” she whispered.

  I gathered them up. The handbook and the biography had the soft, handled feeling of books well read; the grammar felt crisp; the smell of a new, unopened binding rose poignantly from it.

  Back downstairs, she had little more to tell us about Lian Ash. Quiet, hardworking. A gentleman; it was the term I’d have used about him, too. As for his past:

  Mrs. Sprague put a gentle hand on my arm. “I don’t ask any of my tenants about that, dear,” she said. “For so many of them the past is what they’re trying to get over. You understand.”

  She’d taken in the damage to my face without comment as if to demonstrate the wisdom of this policy. She was not, perhaps, as simple a woman as her decorating style suggested; the opposite, possibly. The moment passed; she was disappointed we couldn’t stay longer. She planned a snack of tomato soup and crackers, and wouldn’t Tim and I like to join her in it?

  The soup sounded good, safe and normal like the rest of her kitsch-filled but oddly appealing little refuge. Still, I wanted to get home, call the hospital to check on Wade, and see Sam, who was probably home, too, by now. Ellie would be with him and both of them were certainly wondering where in the world I’d gotten to.

  “After her soup she’ll make bag lunches for the boarders to take to work tomorrow,” Tim told me as we drove back down toward the center of Machias.

  He’d hugged her warmly, heedless of the face cream. It was late, everything hushed and surreal-looking in the lights from gas station and convenience store lots, mostly empty.

  “She helped you a lot, didn’t she? Mrs. Sprague.”

  “Saved my life,” he agreed bluntly. “She started taking boarders after her husband died, get enough income so she wouldn’t lose the house. But now I think taking care of guys who forgot how to take care of themselves, guys on the skids, is what keeps her going.”

  “Do they all turn out to be gentlemen, like she said?”

  “Yep. Mrs. Sprague’s a sweetie, but she’s shrewd, knows how to pick ’em. In fact it was Lian Ash who said something to her once about getting her a gun, just in case. But nothing ever came of it.”

  “Was Mr. Ash on the skids?”

  He shook his head. “Worked all the overtime he could get and never spent a dime he didn’t have to. But it seemed he had what he needed.”

  “So that’s how.”

  Tim glanced a sideways question.

  “The house he bought on the shore road,” I explained. “He was saving up for it, probably.”

  “Oh. The down payment. Yeah.” A silence. Then:

  “Doesn’t it bother you, Tim? Sitting in a bar every night?”

  “No,” he replied easily. “I was never much of a bar drinker. I only drink alone. Drank,” he corrected himself, “alone.”

  But then he changed the subject. “So was it a goose chase?”

  “This trip? I don’t know. Probably it was.” There was another reason Tim had been willing to make it, I realized. A way not to be alone. “I didn’t get any questions answered, but I didn’t find out anything bad, either. Probably there’s a perfectly simple reason for what Lian Ash told me. And if Mrs. Sprague thinks he’s okay…”

  “Yeah. She’s a good judge of character.” I hope, his tone added wistfully, on his own behalf.

  He slowed for the S-curves just outside East Machias, then accelerated for the long run up the coast. We drove in silence a while longer, Tim lost in his thoughts and me in mine.

  It was a Frederick the Great story that Mr. Ash had told me when I asked about his past. The Kessel handbook was an annual, a new one published every year; Sam had one for the demolition seminar he was going to, and a blasting handbook made perfectly good sense for a man with a job on a road crew, handl
ing explosives.

  The grammar book didn’t fit. But I’d spent half an hour in his presence, tops; not nearly enough, surely, to explain all his choices in reading material. “Some people aren’t good at recalling how long ago things happened,” I said.

  “Sure,” Tim agreed. “And maybe he thought mentioning a stay in a boardinghouse that caters to recovering drunks wouldn’t boost your confidence in him.”

  “That, too. But he asked me if falling off the ladder meant I would dislike heights even more than before. I just wish I knew how he knew that.”

  Tim glanced over incredulously. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  “Well, mostly, I guess. Because the rest I can rationalize, but…”

  “Hey, Jake? Seen yourself in a mirror lately? Anyone asked you how it happened?” Tim sounded amused.

  “Well, no. Not around Eastport. Because…”

  Because they already knew. The whole town knew. Bob Arnold hadn’t given it a second thought; Purlie Wadsworth hadn’t even commented. As Sam would’ve said: Doink.

  “Oh,” I said embarrassedly. “So I guess that explains it.”

  “Yeah. Believe me, no one who falls off as much as you…”

  “…enjoys going up,” I completed Tim’s sentence. And of course it was well known; in Eastport, what wasn’t? “So let’s say he walks into Wadsworth’s, mentions who he’s working for…”

  “Purlie fills him in,” Tim agreed. “‘Geez, don’t let her go up any ladders.’ That, or he figured it out for himself. It’s not,” Tim finished, “exactly a stretch that if you’re not vastly skilled at something, maybe you don’t enjoy it.”

  “Right. I guess not, huh? Okay, then,” I said unhappily.

  I felt like an idiot; another simple explanation, and likely the truth. This trip had been a fool’s errand and while I was gone, anything could have happened. Suddenly I wanted to be home even more than before.

  “Are Sam and Maggie serious?”