Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Harry scowled. “You mean you’re not going to call him now?”

  “No,” I retorted in exasperation. “What’s Bob going to do, drive around in this pea soup looking for somebody when we don’t even have a description?” I opened a plastic bag, sliding the bag’s edge under the knife before lifting it and sealing it. If Harry had tried to give instructions, I’d probably have smacked him.

  But he didn’t. I put the bag in the vegetable crisper next to a white carton marked in Wade’s handwriting: Fishing Worms! Do Not Open!!! Then I slammed the refrigerator door, to give feeble emphasis to the notion that I was the one giving the instructions tonight.

  “Right now,” I went on, “you should go to bed.” I pointed to Sam, who, for a wonder, turned away obediently.

  “And you should go home before some other nervous housewife really does blow your head off,” I told Harry.

  Tomorrow when it was light, we would talk all this over with Bob. But at present I was battening down the hatches; don’t let the aft one hit you in the backside on your way out.

  “All right,” Harry said, with unconcealed reluctance. “But I’m going to look around some more. Maybe it is a waste of time, but maybe it’s not.”

  He looked so troubled that I relented: “Okay. Thanks, Harry. We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  “Yeah.” Brief, sad grin. Outside, his shape blurred, vanished into the streaming darkness.

  After that there was silence, way too much of it after Sam had gone to bed; when the animals followed me upstairs I was glad for their company. As Ellie always says, It’s not the ghosts in the house that’ll get you, it’s the ghosts in your head. And that night my head was full of apparitions shaped like question marks.

  I laid the Bisley on the bedside table by the phone with the caller ID box perched atop it. The box had originally been Wade’s idea; he liked to know who was calling, especially at night when it might be somebody from down at the freighter terminal. He said it helped him work on a fast answer if he knew in advance who was going to be at the other end, asking the question.

  Now I closed my eyes to the ready-light on the box. I needed sleep. My face ached and my ears rang in the silence. But with the light off I kept seeing Jemmy’s message, and the note:

  HA HA. Which was probably why, lying there in the dark, I remembered one of the first things Jemmy ever taught me, back in the days when I still thought Jemmy pretty much walked on water.

  He’d been teaching me to play poker, the kind with big-money stakes that other people conspire at, ganging up on an unwary new player to raise their own haul. The victim in that game, or in any con, actually, is called the pigeon. And what Jemmy said was that if you’re sitting at a poker table wondering who the pigeon is, the pigeon is you.

  Ordinarily I wouldn’t have found this realization the least bit pleasant. But it helped me keep my head a little later, when the phone rang and a voice told me that Wade Sorenson had just died unexpectedly in Calais Hospital.

  The numerals on the caller ID were glowing redly at me and I was still thinking of what Jemmy had said: Don’t be a pigeon. Which was how it came to me so fast, that the dialing exchange on the ID box didn’t belong to Calais Hospital at all.

  In fact I happened to know, having had a teenaged son for what felt like all of my own life plus several other similarly eventful lives, that the number belonged to the pay phone on the breakwater across from Rosie’s hot dog stand. Sam used to call me from there if he wanted to stay out later than we’d agreed.

  Now, if the fog weren’t socked in so thickly I could look out the window and almost see…

  “Who is this?” I demanded.

  But the merry prankster had hung up.

  Some of the things Wade does for me are obvious, like those gutters. And others aren’t. For instance:

  Immediately after the prank call, I phoned Calais Hospital to make sure Wade really was okay, and he was. But that wasn’t enough; I wanted him home. So the next morning, I hotfooted it out to Wade’s truck as soon as Mr. Ash had arrived, and headed for the hospital. On Route 1 the fog had begun clearing as the wind shifted, branches overhanging the road shaking droplets onto the windshield.

  George, who despite Wade’s impatience had returned to guard duty, looked up from his coffee and Bangor Daily News as I hurried down the hospital corridor toward him.

  “Ayuh,” he agreed when I told him I needed him at home, and that Wade and I would be there soon. In his room, Wade took one look at my face and swung his legs out of bed. Gangway, his own look said.

  “You realize,” Victor intoned lugubriously as a nurse gave instructions on how to care for Wade’s surgical dressing, “that this is against my advice.”

  But he’d already had the “one more night” he’d insisted on. Besides, if I’d spent my life worrying about Victor’s advice, I would be a rich, bitter New York fashionista by now, wielding my smile like a straight razor across a table at the Russian Tea Room, drinking vodka stingers and commiserating with the other ex-wives on the affront of having been replaced by a trophy wife.

  Fortunately I’d tumbled early on to the fact that Victor’s ideal trophy wife is, among other things, inflatable.

  “Shut up, Victor,” I said pleasantly. “We’re leaving.”

  The next time somebody called to say Wade was dead, I wanted to look confidently over at the next pillow, not check with a crew of nurses. In my previous life, I’d had enough of finding my husband by calling nurses.

  “Oh, all right,” Victor gave in petulantly. He’d been up all night himself with another patient, but his hair was combed, his jaw was shaven, and his long white coat seemed to have about a pound of laundry starch in it; Victor always looks as if he just popped out of a box marked: “Contents: One Surgeon.”

  “But don’t blame me if the stitches let go and he bleeds out all over you,” Victor fussed impotently.

  I rounded on him. “Oh, yeah? Well get this, buddy: I’m going to blame you if he gets so much as a ragged hangnail. You just better hope those stitches you put in him are made of titanium.” I zipped the duffel. “I blame you for everything, Victor. You know that. You made that bed and now you’re sleeping in it.”

  Wade just buckled his anchor belt. Any other man would have cringed at the sound of his wife and her ex-husband still feuding like the Hatfields and the McCoys. But Wade goes through life so serenely you would think his nervous system was made of titanium, too.

  “Do not,” Victor snarled, “let him get the incision wet. And he should come in next week, get the stitches removed.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir.” I salaamed backwards away from him down the corridor. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  Yeah, it was childish. So sue me. But then I stopped, took a deep breath, and went back. “Victor.”

  He was at the nurses’ station reading a chart. “I apologize,” I said. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for Wade.”

  He put the chart down before replying. “You’re welcome, Jacobia.” Then, to my astonishment: “There’s a job on that new medical boat. They want a trauma guy with general medical experience like mine.”

  “Really?” Victor on a big vessel was like me on a ladder but worse. “It sounds… exciting.”

  Actually, it sounded lethal. He liked small, fast boats, the kind that skim thrillingly over the wave tops but you can’t tell that you’re really on the water. The only other boat Victor ever went on was the Circle Line around Manhattan, and on that he got so seasick they had to rehydrate him with IVs.

  “Now that the Eastport clinic’s up and running,” he said, “they can get another doctor for it easily. And I need a change.”

  Right. Replacing all his DNA might do it, I thought meanly, then caught myself. “Well, they’d be lucky to get you. Let me know what you decide. Wade’s outside.” Waiting for me, I meant.

  Victor nodded, looking as usual as distant and unreachable as the stars, and went back to the chart.
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  “So how’s it going otherwise?” Wade asked a little later.

  I laughed, but only to cover my renewed fury. He had already taken the dressing off and the wound was scary looking.

  I wanted to put my hands on the throat of whoever had done this to him and squeeze. “The blood on the knife and the note was fake,” I reported instead. I’d already told him about the prank call that had informed me of his death.

  “That was obvious as soon as I examined them more closely,” I went on tightly. After I’d called Calais Hospital, I’d called Bob Arnold, and he had been at my house minutes later.

  I’d given Bob the note and knife, too, and he’d promised to hand them over to the state cops. But he didn’t hold out much hope of them turning out to be useful. Or even of the staties believing they were linked to the murders at all. I’d only summoned Bob because I was so unnerved, not because I’d thought he could actually do anything.

  “The note, the knife, and the call were only on the level of pranks,” I added. “Mean ones, but not like what happened to you and Sam.” Pranks, but they’d frightened me, as Wade could tell by the quaver in my voice. So I shut up and we rode along silently a while.

  The sun climbed to our left over the hills of New Brunswick. The slopes were a hazy, ethereal greenish-gold. I accelerated up the curve by the St. Croix River, past the scenic turnout with its ornate sign directing attention to the island where in 1604, the French settlers tried spending the winter. There, they thought they’d be safe from attack by Native Americans, whom they dreaded.

  They were safe, too, but not for the reason they believed: the Native Americans must have thought those French people hardly worth attacking, since very soon they would perish on their own. No one wintered on St. Croix Island.

  By the following spring all the settlers were dead or dying, having underestimated the awful bitterness of Maine winters. A few remaining stragglers had staggered ashore and departed as fast as they could, the luckiest missing only their toes.

  “Hey,” Wade said suddenly, breaking my grim reverie. Twenty miles to go: fields, old farmhouses, vast stretches of woodlot, bluffs, and steep drops on the left overlooking the river where it widened into the bay. All I wanted was to get back home and lock all the doors again. But Wade didn’t.

  “I feel too good to go home,” he answered my look of query.

  He was taking nearly having his head blown off very calmly. But then, Wade was boarding an oil freighter once when the ship had nearly its whole superstructure blown off; something about an embargo, some contraband arms shipments (that being why he’d been getting onto the freighter; it was during the Gulf War), and a missile that had (or perhaps had not) missed its intended target.

  By all reports he’d been calm then, too. Now he gazed happily across the bay at the red-tiled roof of the hotel at St. Andrews, over in New Brunswick. Nearer by, the net-draped tall sticks of a herring weir stuck up from a cove, its reflection like a mirage on the placid water.

  Next came hairpin turns flanked by big old gnarly spruces in Red Beach. Wade’s look of appeal as we passed between them was as loud as a shout, and impractical. On the other hand, he had just escaped death by inches.

  “Oh, all right,” I gave in, and he grinned at me.

  I checked the rearview, slowed for the turn: a few hundred yards of frost-heaved pavement, then a dirt surface so bumpy, you could use it to test how fast vital parts might be made to fall off cars. Luckily I was driving the truck, so all we tested was how fast the vital parts could fall off me; despite the frequent jolting, Wade seemed not to mind the rough ride in the slightest.

  The lane narrowed, its washboard gravel devolving to a rough bulldozed track edged with rucked-up stones. About a mile in we descended a hill, then crossed a culvert where the track bisected a beaver pond. “Look at that,” he marveled.

  Across the marsh a heron lifted from the cattails, its body the same bluish-white as the clouds above. “Wade, we’re just visiting, right? I mean, I know you feel pretty well, now.”

  But later he might be miserable. And being in serious pain at the wrong end of five miles of rough road is bad strategy.

  Also, much as I hated to admit it, (a) no, Victor wouldn’t approve, and (b) yes, I cared. The fact that in his private life my ex-husband is a sociopathic doofus doesn’t keep him from being a more-than-adequate clinician, whose advice I trust. Or anyway I trust it when he is not trying to apply it to me.

  “You look a little tired,” Wade said mildly, not answering my question.

  What I looked like was hell. “Yeah, I’m losing it,” I admitted. “The way I went off on Victor in there… my nerves are shot.”

  “Sure,” he said sympathetically. “It’s no wonder.”

  We bumped slowly on. The trees were a canopy of pale green freckled by crab-apple blossoms. Quail ran herky-jerky into the huckleberry shrub where snow lay in lingering triangular patches at the bases of boulders and in the north shade of evergreens. The perfume pouring through the truck window was of pine sap and clean, cold water.

  “Beautiful day,” Wade said casually, glorying in it. Which was when I realized he knew how close a call he’d had. It could have been fatal and as usual he was making little of it. Except:

  “The sun’s shining, birds are singing, and the ice is out of the lake,” he exulted as we jounced, jolted, and juddered down the primitive old road. He turned to me.

  “Honey, we’re going to camp.”

  In Maine, your camp is your summer place: anything from a patch of rented land and a ten-dollar tent to a palace of cedar and glass. Wade’s was a shingled, gambrel-roofed cottage with a sleeping loft and an airtight woodstove, surrounded by birches, firs, and pin oaks, on the edge of Balsam Lake.

  “So,” he said as we sat on the deck overlooking the water at the end of that day. The sun had set and the surface of the lake was mirror-calm; an evening chill crept out of its depths as the light faded. “What’s really up? What’re you not telling me?”

  Because he knew, of course, that there was something. I’d told him about the trip to Machias and he’d teased me about it. “Riding in cars with boys,” he’d commented, shaking his head. But he was fully aware how out of character it was.

  How unhinged. No blackflies here yet, I noticed with relief. To most people the insects were only an annoyance but to me, their bite spelled a week of misery. Behind us in the cabin, gas lamps glowed yellow — no electricity here, either, and no phones — and the fire behind the woodstove window flickered orange.

  Appealed to via the cell phone in Wade’s truck, George had showed up with supplies and the dog. Still damp from swimming, Monday now sprawled by the stove, exhausted and happy.

  A loon laughed, out on the lake. I took a breath, said the words I’d been working hard not even to think. But I had to, now; think it, and say it.

  “I’m very worried about what Harry told me the other night. I’m afraid my dad really is still alive, even after all this time. Alive, and out there somewhere.”

  The words hung in the air like the wisps of mist rising over the water. “I see,” Wade replied gravely.

  Not: Don’t be silly, or That’s ridiculous. If it worried me, Wade never thought it was silly. Fifty feet away the weathered dock was the color of a bar of pewter in the fading light.

  “What would that mean?” he asked. “If it’s true?”

  “It would mean I could find him. Find out if the worst thing of all is true, too,” I said softly.

  “Someone drove off that day after the explosion,” I continued. “I can hear it as clearly in my head as I can hear you now.” The sound, after a blast so powerful it demolished a house, of someone starting a car out in the Greenwich Village street, and roaring away.

  And who — who? — would be driving away after such an event?

  Wade changed the subject. He will do this: give me a little breathing room. “You okay having Sam alone in town?”

  Wade hadn’t taken any more o
f the pain pills Victor gave him. When I asked, he said it hurt but it was a good hurt.

  “As long as George and Ellie are there,” I said, “Sam’s fine.” If I knew George, he’d be out on the porch with a shotgun in his lap all night.

  More silence. Then: “Jake, if the worst is true.”

  If my father killed my mother on purpose and tried to kill me: was it that far-fetched? A radical whose ways had included armed bank robbery, he would set a timed charge for diversion, then pick off a bank that he knew had just gotten a big cash delivery. He was little more than a kid himself at the time, but he was a criminal, my old man, and he knew his bombs. And his body had never been found.

  The underbrush rustled. Deer, probably. Or a moose. “Harry hunted for him for over thirty years, first on the task force, then on his own time. Those cops who pursued him for so long didn’t believe he was dead.”

  We’d spent most of the day doing nothing, on the lake in the canoe. Now that I’d learned a decent J-stroke I could paddle and steer too, so Wade had just sat soaking it in: water and sky, the liquid plop! of a trout leaping openmouthed into the air, through the clouds of hovering hatchflies.

  “Sure. But that was then, and this is now. Look,” he said into the darkness, now complete. “One thing’s fairly certain: somebody’s got it in for Harry but now that he’s here it’s spreading onto us. An old grudge, or whatever it is. Probably that’s it.” He was smoking a cigar; its end moved like a red eye. “You don’t know why, so your feelings are supplying you with all kinds of reasons, making all kinds of connections. Some may be valid ones,” he added. “But if I know you it’s not the facts that’re bothering you, not even the facts you don’t know yet. It’s your feelings that are blowing your doors off.”

  Right. Carrying a gun around, racing to Machias to check on a little fib, embarrassing Wade by needlessly losing my temper with Victor; it was nuts, all of it.

  Or most of it. “Say you’re out in a boat in a storm,” Wade went on. “What you feel like is heading for shore.”