Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  I blinked, jolted from my musings. “Serious about what?”

  We were in Whiting already, passing between the general store and the white two-room schoolhouse that served this area to grade eight. Tim lifted one finger in a minuscule wave to the state cop idling in a squad car in the darkened lot beside the store.

  “About each other,” he replied mildly, turning uphill into the last long stretch of wilderness before the turnoff to Eastport.

  I glanced at him in surprise. “Maggie just joined the Quoddy Choristers,” he explained. “Singing group. Nice alto she’s got. I belong, too. I just wondered, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask her.” The notion of Maggie taking up with someone else gave me a pang. But it would happen sooner or later if Sam turned out to be foolish enough to let it.

  Maggie was no beauty queen, any more than Mrs. Sprague; you had to look hard to notice loveliness that didn’t come out of a cosmetics ad. I sensed Tim had that kind of vision, though, that he’d tried the other kind of beauty and found it wanting.

  But if not Tim, then someone else would come along to steal Maggie away from word pairs that sounded the same and Scrabble contests that went on for hours. After another long silence I said:

  “About Wyatt Evert. You think he’s got some racket going?”

  Tim frowned, taking the turn off Route 1 onto 190. It was the last leg of our journey. “Dunno. I think there’s more to his story, though. All that ecology crap he spouts, I think that’s a smoke screen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the environment.”

  “Right,” I replied evenly. “And I’m not against banks. Just against bank robbery.”

  He laughed, taking my point. The first thing any con artist working a charity racket said was, “How can you be against… ?”

  Starving children, vanishing forests, the ozone layer. Fill in the blank: there was a racket to exploit it.

  “Anyway,” Tim said as we crossed the causeway. Across the bay the lights of the Canadian cargo terminal shone whitely like airport beacons in the surrounding blackness of maritimes night. “I’m in no hurry. Want to be sure I’ve done my homework before I confront him.”

  “You’re getting ready for a move,” I guessed. Tim’s usual beat included Eastport shipping news, school personnel changes, navigation-chart corrections, and minutes of the marine terminal business meetings.

  “Thinking about girls, thinking about big stories. In spring a young man’s fancy turns?” To love and money, I meant.

  And wider horizons, jobs he could keep now that he was sober again. That would explain why he wasn’t hopping on to the Harriet story with both feet. A body in a basement was major news around here; elsewhere, it would barely be a blip on the radar.

  “Maybe. Gotta get back on that big horse someday, or Mrs. Sprague’ll be disappointed in me.” We came into town, past the Bay City Mobil. “She thinks I’m gonna be another Sinclair Lewis someday.”

  He laughed to show he didn’t take this ambition seriously. “But it’s a biggish story if Wyatt’s what I think he might be. I could take it down to the Boston Herald…”

  Maggie loved Boston, the bookstores and music clubs where she sat in on jam sessions with her banjo or fiddle whenever she could. It wasn’t often; instead she hung around where Sam was, waiting.

  “Listen, about Sam’s accident,” Tim ventured. “I mean, was he…”

  When Sam was a young teenager he’d had a substance abuse problem. Now Tim and Sam attended the same AA meeting when Sam was home. “No, he wasn’t drinking. He hasn’t done that or anything else for a long time. They think the accident was mechanical failure.”

  He nodded, looking relieved as we came into town. Sam had told me someone else’s slip always scared him, too, made him see how easy it was. “Good,” Tim replied. “I like Sam. I don’t want to mess him up, especially if he and Maggie are…”

  We pulled up in front of my house. “An item? Like I told you, I don’t think I’m your source on that story.” I gathered Mr. Ash’s books. “And as far as tonight’s adventure goes…” The porch light went on as I opened the car door. “We have had a lot of trouble all at once. First Sam, then Wade. And now with Harriet’s body, and the dancer, Samantha…” I took a deep breath. “Well, it was like you said at first. Me feeling nervous, wanting to cover all my bases, that’s all.”

  Bob Arnold hadn’t told Tim about the newspaper in Harriet’s hand, or Tim would’ve mentioned it. So I didn’t, either.

  “Which I have,” I added. “Covered them.” But not with glory; in the clear night air my earlier suspicions seemed trivial, even paranoid.

  A few little white lies didn’t put Lian Ash on the FBI’s most wanted list. And if Ash had been a bad dude in the past, he wasn’t anymore or Mrs. Sprague wouldn’t have had him in her house.

  As for his books, whatever that was all about it had nothing to do with me. I hadn’t known Mr. Ash until recently, wouldn’t’ve known him now if I hadn’t put an ad up looking for a stonemason.

  “So thanks a lot,” I told Tim. “If I find out anything new about Wyatt Evert, I’ll let you know. Wade and Sam’s accidents, too,” I added, “if anything interesting comes up about them.”

  He drove off with a good-humored but skeptical wave. News guys heard similar promises ten times a day, the gesture told me.

  And I felt a little guilty about it; I already knew plenty that Tim would’ve found interesting. But it all seemed connected to Harry Markle one way or another. And when it came to promises, in my book it was still first come, first served:

  Ellie and I had told Harry we’d help him, not broadcast his troubles to the media. And I didn’t want Tim’s interest piqued by my off-the-record comments, either. It was one thing that do-it-yourself home repair and homicide-snooping had in common:

  If anyone was going to upset any applecarts, I wanted first crack at them.

  So when I went in I felt at peace with my decision, which boiled down to doing what I’d said I would do, the way I’d said I would do it. But by the next morning I was having second thoughts about my home-repair and homicide-snooping philosophies.

  Third thoughts, too.

  “We shouldn’t have told Harry that,” I groused to Ellie. “We let him set the terms as if we were working for him.” I was in a foul mood. My field trip of the evening before felt even more like a humiliatingly silly stunt.

  And me like a harebrain who needed better impulse control. “Riding around with a beer buzz on, with a guy from my son’s AA group, of all things,” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “Yes, well, they don’t cancel your membership in the human race for that. Just,” she added tartly, “the opposite.”

  “Meaning I like life to be at least a little under control?” Shoving aside the tins of varnish remover in the hall, I yanked two respirator masks from the utility closet.

  “Under control. That’s putting it mildly, Jake. You’re allowed to do something unusual now and then, is all I’m saying.” If I were an axe-murderer, my pal Ellie would put the kindest possible face on it.

  “Unusual,” I repeated scathingly. “It was nuts.”

  “You were upset. You needed to do something useful about the situation, but there wasn’t anything, so you tried to do something about something else. Big deal. Quit beating yourself up.”

  But I wasn’t ready to let myself off the hook just yet. “Why should I?”

  “Because the ability to do something stupid,” she replied serenely, “is a necessary component of the ability to do anything at all.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case.” Trust Ellie to boil it down for you.

  “And,” she added, “since when is finding out that there’s really nothing to find out a useless errand? Nothing you need to worry about, I mean.”

  She was right. Mrs. Sprague was an excellent litmus test; with her recommendation I’d probably be safe in trusting the old mason with my checkbook, never mind just the stones in my ce
llar. “You have a way of making the most annoyingly correct points, Ellie, did you know that?”

  “My, we are in a great mood.” She grimaced at me. “Anyway, Harry wouldn’t have stayed otherwise. Unless we agreed to doing it all his way.”

  “No big tragedy, either,” I retorted, hauling on my canvas apron. Another thing that I’d decided overnight: my better angel was a fool, too. “And his way means acting like vigilantes.”

  Meanwhile I mentally marked off a section of the front hall floor, presently coated with a dozen or so layers of old varnish. Eight feet by eight was ambitious without being reckless.

  Unlike our bargain with Harry. “Jake,” Ellie said, “we only agreed that he gets to deal with whoever’s behind all the mayhem if he catches someone.”

  Not, she meant, if someone else did, like maybe Bob Arnold. Or if the culprit didn’t get caught at all. It was an idea that did not provide me with any further cheer whatsoever.

  “I guess,” I grumbled. Ellie’s mind, obviously, was already made up. “And at least it’s quiet here, now.”

  Too quiet, actually; to my surprise and initial alarm, Sam hadn’t been home when I got there. He’d stayed at the hospital, refusing to leave while Maggie was still there even though she refused to abandon the homonym list, so Victor had finagled another night for him.

  George had stayed too since if Sam wasn’t going he wasn’t; George would carve Sam’s enemies up with a plastic knife from the hospital cafeteria, if he had to. And Wade, though improved, was still doped up; Ellie said George had set a chair in view of all three patients’ rooms and was eagle-eyed when she spoke with him.

  Finally, Roy McCall was in Portland, his music video on hold while he talked to state cops and his insurance people, arranged for Samantha’s body to be transported home, and — this had been on late-night TV when I got home — was interviewed about the tragedy for the E! Entertainment Network and MTV, who were all over the story.

  “Which,” Ellie said briskly, “doesn’t guarantee that we are going to. Do it Harry’s way, I mean.”

  “Uh-huh.” A foghorn hooted distantly. My windows were opaque in a fog as thick as, Sam would’ve said, sea poop. From the closet I pulled some yellow crime-scene tape I’d gotten from Bob Arnold, so no one would walk into the mess that we were about to make.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather let George put the sanding machine on this when he gets home?” Ellie asked.

  “Absolutely. If we don’t get the top layers off first, you won’t like the result.” Stripping an old floor with only a sander is like trying to get gum out of a kid’s hair by heating the gum.

  I opened the front door: salt air, tinctured with woodsmoke. “It turns the varnish to warm goo,” I continued as I got out two long-handled sponge mops, and put them with the rest of the items by which we would avoid (I hoped) asphyxiating or otherwise injuring ourselves.

  These included safety glasses, the chemical respirators, and surgical caps for our hair. Two pairs of thick, blue rubber gauntlet-length gloves completed our outfits. Once we were suited — the animals having been locked in the ell away from the fumes that would rise — I opened the first tin of chemical stripper.

  Outside, Mr. Ash’s truck rumbled in with a rattletrap roar. A note on the door let him know to use the cellar entrance. I’d taken the three books from Mrs. Sprague’s house up to my own room, and left them there.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” I said, my voice muffled by the rubber mask of the respirator, and began to pour stripper onto the thick, dark varnish.

  “Mmphglbmphgl,” Ellie said through her respirator. Stripper blooped from the can in orangey globs.

  “Darn right,” I said; it came out “dmrphgl.” We took up the sponge mops for the spreading portion of the operation. But then:

  “Glmph.” That the mops would absorb some of the stripper on the floor instead of spreading it had not occurred to me. But it was happening and as a result the varnished surface of the floor was being transformed into the La Brea tar pits.

  “Hglrhyh!” Ellie said.

  Hurry. I grabbed two more cans of stripper and walked into the gooey mess the floor was becoming, hoping I could get the new cans opened before the contents of the old ones had dissolved my shoes. Working fast we spread stripper goo with the sodden mops, now also beginning to dissolve.

  Finally at the edge of the coated section I stepped out of my shoes onto the clean floor, which I’d covered with old issues of National Fisherman and Gun Times from Wade’s used newspaper stack.

  Then I picked up my shoes. Or rather, I tried picking them up. “Hrph,” Ellie said, watching. “Mphlucnsrphmph?”

  Maybe you can scrape them off. I took the paint scraper she offered me, pried at the edge of a sneaker. Its sole seemed to be flowing, bubbling as it dissolved.

  “There.” The sneakers popped up from the clean floor with a wet, sucking sound, leaving distinct outlines like the footprints of an Arthur Murray dance lesson from hell.

  “Hey! What the Sam Hill’re you two doin’ up there?” It was Mr. Ash’s voice. I tore off the respirator; fumes hit me. Those footprints were smoking, little wisps rising up from them.

  “Mr. Ash, go out the cellar door, don’t come up here!” The fumes were intense; the skin on my face began stinging.

  “Sheesh.” I hotfooted it onto the porch and leaned against it gasping while Ellie hurried to let the animals out of the ell. Monday gamboled on the grass as Cat Dancing turned her crossed eyes balefully toward the bird feeder.

  “Key-riminy,” Mr. Ash expostulated, emerging from the Bilco door of the cellar into the backyard, “what’re you women up to, mustard gas production? A fella could have his lungs burned out in that house.”

  Apologetically I explained the mishap. “We ended up needing to use much more of the stuff than we planned,” I finished. “I’m so sorry. Did you breathe much of it in? Are you all right?”

  “I b’lieve I’ll survive. Substance got the better of you, did it? I c’n understand that. Why, I remember one time I…”

  Suddenly he stopped, seeming to think better of telling this story. “Anyway. Everything all right inside? Don’t have any birds in cages going to suffercate, no burners left on, or any pilot lights?”

  “I don’t think so.” A school bus rumbled up Key Street. A sweeper truck motored the other direction, its brushes whisking up the last tan swathes of sand that had been spread when the streets were icy-slick, during the previous winter. A boy on a bike blithely hurled rolled newspapers, pedaling dreamily.

  Mr. Ash raised a bushy white eyebrow. “Could’a been worse, then. You could’ve decided to skip the stripper and use blowtorches.”

  I decided not to tell him that had been my fallback plan. A few birds twittered sleepily in the bushes edging the lawn, mist drifting among them like smoke. In the fog they couldn’t even find the bird feeder; tail twitching, Cat Dancing stalked up the steps with a mutter of bird-deprived frustration.

  “Fumes from that stuff sinks, y’know. Flows downhill. But it’ll clear quick,” Mr. Ash told me. “I turned off the furnace and yanked the cellar windows before I vamoosed. Kill any varmints’re down there, for sure.”

  Including any spiders Wade might have missed capturing. Good, I thought, but it was the only good thing I could think of.

  “Do you want to take the rest of the morning off?” I asked. “I won’t mind if you do, after we nearly gassed you to death.”

  Now that he was here, the night before felt even goofier. I wondered again what that grammar textbook was about. But all he’d really done was say he’d come from Portland instead of Machias, and that he’d arrived a little more recently than he really had.

  Was he embarrassed about needing a boardinghouse room, and Mrs. Sprague’s help to get on his feet again? Maybe the jail time was more recent than he’d let on, or he’d had a booze slip he was ashamed of. There could be lots of reasons, all harmless. And as Tim had gently suggested, none of them were even
a little bit any of my business.

  “You two go on down to the diner for coffee or some such while you wait for the house to air out,” he instructed us.

  He looked around. “I’ll stay, keep an eye on the critters.” As if to second this motion Monday pranced up; he leaned to pat her glossy head. “Shake, girl.”

  Monday gazed at Mr. Ash for a long moment, then lifted her paw and deposited it in his hand as I stared in astonishment. She was a wonderful dog but she could no more do tricks, even simple ones, than I could jump off a building and fly.

  Until now. Abruptly, I came to my final decision: not to confront Lian Ash about the books or anything else. He was working on my cellar, not marrying into my family; whatever questions his past might’ve held, the answers could remain there, too.

  “We’ll stay,” Mr. Ash amended as Ellie came up behind us. “Me and the critters’ll hold down the fort.” I had the odd feeling that if he’d known about my snooping he might not have minded, that he’d have understood my reason and sympathized.

  Still, I hoped he wouldn’t find out. “Got work to do,” Lian Ash said peaceably. “I like work. Always have.”

  He looked at Ellie and me, his mild, utterly benevolent gaze as unreadable as the drifting fog.

  “And,” he added, “I like it here.”

  Five minutes later Ellie and I slid into a booth at the Waco Diner: smells of coffee, hash, bacon, and eggs, amplified by heat from the energetically hissing radiators. Red leather stools at the counter were occupied by burly men in coveralls, sweatshirts, and rubber boots, devouring their morning meals.

  Chilled by the fog, I shivered gratefully in the warmth of the booth. Ellie looked refreshed, her eyes glowing with renewed energy. But Ellie grew up here, where people wear T-shirts on the first day of spring no matter how hard it is snowing.

  And there was a bad thought: What if the storm didn’t come as rain? What if it came as…

  “Snow,” Edna Barclay predicted dourly, setting mugs in front of us. “I’ve seen snow in Eastport in every month but August.”