Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Eastpawt. Edna’s hair this week was a particularly vivid electric blue-white, her bracelets jangling, her eyes ringed with mascara, and her lipstick vivid.

  “Nah,” one of the men at the counter contradicted her. “Wind out of the south, gonna swing around. You wait, that sucker hits outta the northeast? Man, she’s gonna blow.”

  “We’ll see,” Edna muttered darkly. After thirty years at the Waco she still believed she might be discovered and wafted off to her rightful place in Hollywood, in the pantheon of the stars.

  But not today. “Video’s done for,” she announced gloomily. “Boys over to the boat school heard McCall’s lost his financing,” she added, and went back behind the counter.

  “There goes my paying guest,” I moaned to Ellie. Roy McCall’s presence had taken some of the sting out of the need for the new clapboards. But Ellie wasn’t listening.

  “That’s why,” she murmured.

  “That’s why what?” I swallowed hot coffee. Fog off the water applies itself from the outside but chills from within.

  “Why we can’t let Harry Markle leave.”

  “Ellie, what are you talking about?”

  Edna glanced over curiously at me.

  “Look,” I went on more quietly, “I do owe Harry and I am going to try to help him, or I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror. The thing is…”

  Behind the counter, Edna raised her hand casually to one of the tight, blue-white curls just above her left ear, which I knew was the location of her hearing aid.

  I hastily dropped my voice to a whisper. “I’m convinced, okay? Harry is the reason Sam got hurt. Wade, too, and probably Samantha. I don’t understand how, but I do know one thing. If Harry changed his mind again and decided to leave town, all this — whatever this is — would be over just as quick as it started. And things would go back to normal. Safe. End of story.”

  There, I’d said it. But Ellie was shaking her head. “No, Jake. That’s not what would happen at all. Remember what Mr. Ash said?”

  “What’s he got to do with anything?” She always did this: picked up some little detail, then drew out a string of reasoning as if she were pulling a loose thread.

  Even more annoying was the fact that, usually, she was right. “Okay, it’s been a year now since Harry left New York,” she said.

  “Correct. He moved around the Northeast a little, made one brief visit back to the city, ended up here.” Our Internet research confirmed it via his credit cards; I may not be a hot-shot money person anymore but I can still get in the back doors of some nifty databases.

  “And as far as we know, nothing’s happened since then,” she persisted. “Since he left New York the first time. Until now, here in Eastport.”

  Right again. “But maybe Harry didn’t stay anywhere long enough to get it all going again until now.”

  “But he hasn’t stayed very long here, either, has he?”

  Like I said; annoying. And persistent:

  “What I think is, Harry was right. Someone knew he’d stay in town. After all, if Harriet’s involved, the trouble began weeks ago,” Ellie said.

  “And she is involved. Otherwise why that newspaper in her hand, with the story about Harry? But how would someone know… ?”

  “That Harry was staying? Maybe because if you buy a house in a place, it’s a pretty good bet you’re planning to stick around?” Ellie replied.

  Another thought hit her. “Jake, we don’t even know for sure the nature guy isn’t part of it, too. The one who drowned, from Wyatt Evert’s group.”

  “Oh, Ellie, that’s really…”

  Pushing it, I’d been about to say. But then George Valentine came in and spotted us, and came over to our booth.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, alarmed. “I thought you were with Sam and Maggie, at the hospital. And who’s watching out for Wade?”

  George put a hand on my shoulder, slapped a copy of the Bargain News against his leg with the other. He was always on the prowl for old engine parts and tools. “Took Sam home, Maggie over to her house. Set a fan up in the hall, paint thinner stink’s nearly out. And Wade gets really mean when he’s in pain, did you know that?”

  Wade wouldn’t get mean if his leg was in a bear trap. “Just kidding,” George added. “But he said he’s coming home, don’t need a baby-sitter, and did I want my nose punched? So I took off.”

  I gathered Wade was getting his gumption back. “And I didn’t walk in your varnish-stripping project or let the animals in, and Mr. Ash is with Sam,” George finished.

  He bent to kiss the top of Ellie’s head. “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.” She preened unconsciously; Ellie in love was like roses in bloom, or Paris in springtime. She’d resisted George’s courtship for longer than was good for either of them but now his mere presence made everything hunky-dory for her.

  “I was just about to tell Jake about the nature guy’s boots. Is it okay?” she asked.

  Over behind the counter Edna Barclay fiddled madly with the hearing aid, not even bothering to hide it. The guys eating their pie were listening, too, their talk of boats, the forecast storm, and the fishing regulations newly publicized in the Maine Record ominously silenced.

  And by the look on George’s face, Ellie’s question had hit a nerve. “Funny you should mention that,” he said. “Come on.”

  We followed him out past Edna’s thwarted scowl into the fog. In the few minutes we’d been inside, the weather boom had lowered. You couldn’t even see the end of the fishing pier except for the dim glow of the beacons on the tugboats lurking massively in the gloom, headlights on passing cars blurry smears in the murk and foghorns bow-whonk!ing lustily.

  “I’ve been thinking about that all night,” George began as soon as we’d lost our audience. “Because at the time we didn’t want to get stories started. And Bob Arnold agreed there was nothing solid, nothing to follow up on. But…”

  “George,” I demanded, “what are you talking about?”

  “That tourist’s boots,” Ellie replied. “George happened to see them, thought there was something funny about them, back when it happened. After the man drowned.”

  “The tourist from Wyatt’s group?”

  “Ayuh. But Arnold said if he tried getting the state cops in on it, they’d just laugh,” George continued.

  “So you talked to Wyatt?” Of course he had. George would hop over and have a word with Satan, if he felt the situation called for it. And by the look he wore now, the conversation with Wyatt had come out just about the same way.

  “I told him, Wyatt, those boots that guy was wearing looked kind of fiddled with. And Wyatt, he near to had a stroke. He said if I ever said anything like that to anybody else, it’d hurt his tourist business and he would sue me, make me pay big-time.”

  “To which I said, so what if he sues?” Ellie put in stoutly.

  “But Ellie,” he reminded her, “we talked about it. I don’t know what’s true. And if it came to a lawsuit over it, you got to defend against those things, y’know, or the other guy wins.”

  “He does if it’s not a frivolous lawsuit,” I agreed, “and it could cost thousands to defend. And you could lose, especially if Bob had to testify that there wasn’t evidence enough for him to pursue it. If Wyatt could prove he had real material losses, you might have to pay. But…”

  Wyatt Evert’s tourist-herding business had never made much sense to me; he didn’t like people enough to be around them so much. But if it was a way to line rich suckers up for donations to some phony nonprofit, as Tim Rutherford had begun suggesting the night before, it made more sense.

  In that case he certainly wouldn’t want a client’s death investigated as a murder. But his business records wouldn’t take the examination that bringing a lawsuit would require, either. So…

  “He was probably just blowing smoke,” I concluded. “Worst case, you’d end up settling out of court.”

  George nodded miserably. “We’d be r
uined before it even got that far. So we thought, nothing we can do about it, we’ll keep our mouths shut. Not tell anyone. Three of us,” he said, glancing at Ellie. “Us and Bob Arnold. Just go on like nothing happened.”

  Which maybe nothing had, though Ellie’s face said it had about half-killed her not to try finding out. But she was like the grave with secrets, and keeping shut of a Wyatt Evert lawsuit was a motive I could definitely get on board with.

  It didn’t surprise me, either, that George and Ellie had decided to tell me about it at practically the same moment. Some couples seem to be joined at the hip; with these two, it was more like the frontal lobe.

  “So what was it about the boots that looked strange to you?” I asked as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past, headed for the quonsets at the freight dock.

  “They were all chewed. Shredded like some chemical had been eating at the bottoms,” George answered when the noise had faded.

  “Corrosive chemicals? Like paint stripper, or…”

  “Ayuh.” He nodded seriously. “What made me think of it was, my old man had a shoe repair shop. Back in that alley,” he aimed a finger up Water Street, “behind the furniture store.”

  A fading arrow painted on the red bricks still pointed up the alley. “Last few years the old man’d lost his concentration,” George said. “Still tried to work, but he mixed up things.”

  He put an arm around Ellie’s shoulders. “Story about the Moosehorn accident was, guy just had a lousy pair of boots. The public story. But Wyatt’s nature folks don’t buy lousy gear.”

  He frowned some more. “Only other time I ever saw boots half as wrecked, my old man tried resoling a pair, used triple-strong solvent, ’stead o’ glue.”

  “You mean maybe somebody could’ve sabotaged the boots?”

  It was a fairly uncertain method. Unlike, say, rigging a hot wire to be touched by a person standing in water. But if you were to time it right, I supposed it could be effective.

  “Yep. Deep marsh, loss of footing, boots filling up with water. It would be easy to drown,” George replied. “Bob Arnold said so, too. But where the hell is any motive?”

  We crossed the street together. “That’s what we decided to think at the time, anyway,” George went on. “And they were old boots. Good an’ broken in, the kind a guy likes to wear. Even a quality pair, sooner or later they will come apart, you wear ’em long enough.”

  “Sure.” Like George’s truck; the wheel hadn’t just come off. It had rolled off, despite his regular maintenance, while he was driving the thing. He could have been killed.

  And if pulled on an inexperienced person, the boot trick could be deadly, too. The thought came again: The simplest answer is usually correct. But at the moment no explanations I could think of for any of this were simple.

  We started home, past the old clapboard houses like white faces peering at us through the fog. “Where are the boots now?”

  George shook his head regretfully. “Tossed out, I guess. No reason to keep them. Like I say, nothing else suspicious. Far as I know, the guy didn’t even know any other group members, ’fore he arrived. Or Wyatt, either. From New York, the guy was.”

  And of course it was unlikely that a casual tourist had made a mortal enemy, in town or among the other members of his group, in only a few days. “So the state sent an investigator…”

  They always did, for an unexplained death. “Stayed an hour. Wrote it up as an accident just like Bob said he would,” George replied.

  “Wouldn’t the guy notice when he put them on? The boots?”

  He shook his head. “They went out before dawn. You put your shoes on in the dark, do you stop to check the undersides?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Prob’ly didn’t really come apart till the water hit them,” George said. Ahead an old truck materialized from the mist in my driveway, reminding me of another thing.

  “Ellie, what were you saying about Mr. Ash?”

  “That he said he liked it here,” she replied slowly.

  “So?” My house came into view: green shutters, red chimneys. A pane in one of the dining room windows needed replacing.

  “So when he said it, I was wondering why all Harry’s trouble is starting again just now,” Ellie continued. “After so long.”

  “Maybe it took a year for someone to find him?”

  But Ellie rejected that idea, too. From the cellar came the regular clang-thud of stones being pried out with a crowbar.

  “Jake, you’re not the only one who can follow a credit card trail. Harry shouldn’t have been that hard to find. I think it’s more like what Mr. Ash told us. Maybe some real motive got it all started in the first place. But now something’s changed.”

  Inside, the chemical smell was just a faint acrid presence, not the throat-closing poison cloud it had been earlier. George’s fan whirred efficiently in the open front door. “Sam?” I called, and his reply came promptly from the parlor.

  By contrast, the silence from Wade’s workshop was deafening. I closed my ears to it, telling myself it was no worse than if he were out on a boat. Through the kitchen windows I spotted Monday outside with George, Mr. Ash joining them after a moment.

  “Harry’s leaving wouldn’t stop it,” Ellie went on. “Mr. Ash made me see it; what he said about enjoying his work. And—”

  She turned to me. “Somebody likes all this, Jake.”

  Harriet, Samantha, and now the nature tourist, maybe. All dead, Sam and Wade lucky not to be. I was lucky, too.

  So far.

  “The fear, the confusion.”

  Her tone sent a renewed chill through me.

  “And,” she finished somberly, “somebody likes it here.”

  Chapter 6

  When Ellie and George had gone I found Sam in the parlor. His chest was sore, his arm in a sling to keep his collarbone from moving, but he was cheerful.

  Almost too cheerful: “Mom,” he enthused from in front of the TV. “Mr. Ash is cool. He knows about dynamite!”

  Right. I already knew that. “Great,” I replied, but my lack of enthusiasm had little to do with Mr. Ash.

  Now that Sam was home, I would have to start trying not to think about the seminar he had lined up for that weekend, the one on the theory and practice of safe, effective underwater demolition.

  “Because sometimes you need to get rid of something in the water,” he’d explained. “A wreck, a ruined wharf. So… bang!”

  Wonderful. I’d never told him much past the bare facts about my own personal history in the bang! department. I hadn’t wanted him to develop phobias. And now look what I’d done:

  “Mr. Ash says if you know how to do it, you can blow one bad brick out of a chimney and replace it without having to take the whole chimney down,” Sam reported.

  “Terrific,” I responded.

  The seminar was four days off; clearly, Sam would be well enough to go. Ruffling his hair, I walked away from him; he hated being fussed over and at the moment, his weekend plans were even less cheering to me than they’d been.

  Besides, I had a chore to perform: reluctantly, I hoped even foolishly. But after checking that Mr. Ash was still out with the dog, I left Sam flipping the TV remote and went to the cellar.

  The steps, steep and narrow, curved down to a dirt-floored chamber. Large and low-ceilinged, with massive adze-marked beams crisscrossing overhead, it stretched away to cobwebby corners, shadowy stone niches, and rooms full of shelves loaded with old canning jars, their glass gone bluish over the years.

  Piles of rubble marked where Mr. Ash had been working, floor jacks set up to stand in for the missing foundation section. Big stones lay on the floor, chunks of ancient mortar still clinging to them; in the earth where they had been, thick white tree roots coiled forlornly like the fingers of a long-buried corpse.

  Chill damp air blew in through the hole in the stone wall under the ell, another long section removed there since I’d found the break in it. Mr. Ash hadn’t wasted
any time opening it up, I thought distractedly. And the hole was huge; any bigger and the mason could drive his truck down here, to haul the old stones out. But that wasn’t my problem right now:

  In a rafter at the opposite end of the cellar hung the lockbox where I kept a handgun and the ammunition for it. The Bisley .45 was a six-shot revolver, an Italian-made reproduction of the weapon the lawmen used to bring order to the Old West. Unlocking the box, I removed the ammunition box and the weapon itself; in a pinch I could use it to establish some order around here, too.

  Soon after I met Wade, he taught me to put six shots in a six-inch target circle, so I had little fear and no ignorance of the handgun’s power. What I did fear was what I was admitting by getting the gun out at all. There in the quiet cellar it was easy to believe that my growing sense of the other shoe getting ready to drop was an illusion.

  But Ellie’s comment had spooked me more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. In the next instant a new sound from upstairs made me claw open the ammunition box, pop the cylinder, drop the projectiles into the slots with cold, unnaturally steady hands.

  “Jake? You down there?” The cellar door creaked open. I fingered the trigger.

  It was Bob Arnold. Breath rushed out past my pounding heart. “You scared the wits out of me.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Come on up here, will you?”

  I locked the rest of the ammunition up, mounted the stairs.

  “I saw no reason to pass this on earlier,” Bob began. “But with what happened to Wade, and finding Harriet with that paper…” He sighed. “Well, it’s made me think again.”

  “About?” The Bisley’s weight felt reassuring. When your pocket contains enough stopping power to drop an elk it eases your mind somewhat about the possibility of the elk showing up.

  “What happened in New York City,” Bob said. “When the guy killed Harry Markle’s wife and girlfriend. You knew about that?”

  The girlfriend part, he meant. “I knew.”

  He swallowed some coffee he’d poured for himself, set the cup on the old red-checked tablecloth. Out the window past him I saw Monday duck into a play posture, then sprint to chase something that Mr. Ash had thrown for her.