Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  I waited. For dinner we’d had two of those trout on the gas grill. With it: wine, new potatoes, a salad of fiddlehead ferns and baby dandelions in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. George had brought us some of Ellie’s double chocolate cake for dessert.

  “Straight for shore,” Wade said. “Waves’ll hit you broadside, swamp you, then you’re really in trouble.”

  He sipped his wine, took a reflective puff of the Dunhill Cabinetta ’86 that arrived in a box of fifty, no return address, soon after I’d let Jemmy know Wade and I were married.

  “And this,” he said, “whatever it ends up being, it’s the same kind of bad. Like a storm. Starts out slow and sneaky, fools you. Gets worse, maybe.” Which was what I was so afraid of.

  “But when the waves’re coming one way,” he went on, “rain’s coming another, and the wind’s right out straight from hell—”

  Like now: Harriet, Sam’s car, Wade, my father, prank calls, Samantha, the intruder… but all one storm, Wade was saying, and if you stuck to the facts instead of going on your feelings, kept your wits about you and didn’t panic, you wouldn’t be swamped.

  Wouldn’t drown. I’d known that. Really, I had.

  But it still helped to hear it. He curved his arm around me. “Not quite summer yet,” he observed.

  Stars glittered like tiny ice chips over the lake. I pulled a wool blanket onto our laps, propped my feet on the deck rail.

  But Wade wasn’t finished. “So, what if you find out your dad is still alive? I’ll tell you what,” he answered himself firmly. “First, it’s a real long shot. The best were looking, no luck, probably he’s dead.”

  That word again: probably. “But even if it happened, and you found him, and… Jake, nothing would change. We would handle it, you and me. I’d still be here, and so would Sam. Our house, the life you’ve made here, your friends.”

  Monday shoved her head under my hand as if sensing all my worry, gazed up adoringly. And me. I’d be here.

  “It’s the sneakiest damn trick,” Wade said, “when the bad-old-days baggage tries making you think it still owns you.” His arm tightened around me. “But it doesn’t. You’re allowed, Jake.”

  “Allowed?” I was thinking of the cold: that there must have been a time on St. Croix when the settlers knew they should give up, try something else while there was still time.

  But they didn’t until it was too late; even if they’d made it to the mainland there was no way out of a Maine winter. They had set their hearts for so long on St. Croix that in the end, it had little choice but to claim them.

  “You are allowed,” Wade repeated, “to put the old baggage down.”

  “Wade, could you have—”

  His grim chuckle cut me off. “Used the wrong primer? Or too much wadding? Cranked down the reloader handle too fast? Mistaken a can of black powder for a can of Pyrodex? What do you think?”

  “Yeah.” In other words: No. His workshop explosion had not been an accident. None of it was, however much I kept wishing it would be. “That’s what I thought.”

  He finished his wine. Across the lake the smoke from another cabin’s chimney twisted in the moonlight. Nothing else moved.

  “Sometimes the old baggage takes off by itself. Then again,” Wade allowed, “could be it’ll need a shove.” Which meant, he didn’t believe my carrying the Bisley around with me was nuts.

  “Do you have all the shooting stuff in the truck?” I asked. In Wade’s lockbox, I meant, bolted to the truck bed: ammunition, targets, gun-cleaning supplies. The Bisley was in my own bag, of course.

  “Uh-huh. I surely do.” A pause. Then:

  “Jake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you have done it? Pulled the trigger, if it hadn’t been Harry Markle in our kitchen?”

  “I don’t know. I knew so fast that I wasn’t going to, I didn’t have time to ask the question.”

  Soon after that we went inside, turned the lights down, and climbed into the big bed up in the sleeping loft.

  “Ouch,” Wade said, not very convincingly.

  Then: “Ouch?” Not convincingly at all.

  “Like this,” I said. He shifted carefully, whereupon I took advantage of my situation.

  “Oh,” he murmured. And later:

  “Huh,” he said dazedly. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  I hadn’t known I could do that, either. Pulling the quilts up around us, I relaxed against him, felt his breathing slow. But later still when the silence was total, Wade sleeping quietly and the darkness in the loft around us complete…

  …even then I could still hear that loon laughing out on the lake.

  The next morning Balsam Lake was a bowl of dawn-tinged mist, pierced by the distant honking of Canada geese headed north for the summer. I stoked the woodstove and fired up the percolator; when it was done I took my coffee to the end of the dock and sat with Monday beside me, watching a water snake cutting a speedy S-curve on the lake’s silvery surface.

  Wade was up and about too, and as I’d predicted his neck was as sore as a boil. I set him up in an armchair with the coffee thermos and a bottle of brandy, by the stove which I’d encouraged to a proper blaze.

  He grinned wanly at me. “I’m fine,” he insisted. He was still refusing to take pills.

  “Right. And I’m Howdy Doody. You’re sure about this?”

  “Do it. If your nervous system could hold on to those skills forever there wouldn’t be any such thing as firing ranges. No one would need ’em.”

  What with the varnish-stripping, the cellar foundation, and the ell floor, not to mention those dratted downspouts and the fallen siding, I hadn’t been on the firing range for weeks. And if it turned out that some sort of unpleasant baggage did need a shove, it would be nice to know that I still had the marksmanship chops to give it one.

  Also, there was a twin to the Bisley under a floorboard in the cottage where Wade could get at it, if required. So I left him, maneuvering the truck over the ruts to the Charlotte Road.

  The hard blue sky of winter had softened to pastel; dark clouds mounded ominously on the horizon. Along the road, maples linked by plastic tubing flowed with sap; in the Moosehorn Refuge, acres of flat water lay prickly with cattails and studded with nesting boxes. A bald eagle soared overhead, its huge wings flapping flexibly in slow motion.

  Ten minutes later I arrived at the firing range and pulled up the drive to the low, red-painted wooden hut. Under the sign posting the safety rules I opened the lockbox in the bed of the truck, took out a pad of bull’s-eye-printed paper targets.

  I carried a dozen of these and a small soft-cardboard box of ammunition to the firing table. There was no one around when I pressed the first target onto the notches of the firing backdrop.

  But then I heard it: something — or someone — moving in the brush at the end of the range. At first I put it down to nerves. But then I heard it again and the Bisley didn’t seem big enough.

  What I wanted was a Hannibal rifle loaded with one of the cartridges Wade had gotten into his shop the winter before. The Tyrannosaur was named for its muzzle energy: 13,700 joules, three times that of a standard .308 high-powered rifle cartridge.

  According to Wade, the cartridge had a kick like the animal it was named for. I’d never fired one; a broken shoulder hadn’t been on my list of must-haves. But I’d have risked that fracture and a dozen more as I stood frozen on the firing range, wondering who was out there.

  The ten-point buck that stepped out of the sumac sixty seconds later answered my question. His liquid eyes held mine, his great yellowish antlers a thicket of sharp tips: not Bambi. Then the frightened breath I let out in a rush sent him crashing back into the safety of cover with a harsh bleat of alarm.

  All of which reminded me of how exposed I was at the moment. So in the end I disobeyed rule #7 on the safety poster. I didn’t put on the hearing protectors that were a standard element of target-shooting costume. If someone came up behind me here — or a
nywhere — I wanted to know about it.

  After that for a while it was load, post, and shoot: six paper targets and six groups of six shots, all but one series placed tight. By the second series I’d gone ahead and put on the earmuffs, by the fourth, my arms ached. On the final round, I started missing the center circle.

  But if you don’t start missing until the thirtieth shot, it’s a decent bet you’ve already hit whatever you were shooting at. So I felt okay; back in the city I’d thought guns were for hard guys or in an emergency for guys like Jemmy: in other words, for guys. Now I put the Bisley away and got out the little .32 semiauto I like to finish up with.

  The .32’s kick is less jarring and its crack! less deafening than the Bisley’s. You don’t feel it in your chest, a short sharp thump from inside, your heart bumping against your breastbone as if a good-sized fish were jumping in there.

  Soon, though, I’d used up my second wind and my ears were ringing with the insult I’d given them before I put the earmuffs on. I cleaned shell casings off the table, policed for strays, and wadded used targets, leaving the area tidy for the next shooter. Driving back to camp with the truck windows down and the radio on I felt my mind clearing as if a fog bank had moved out to sea.

  At the cabin, Monday danced to meet me. Wade sat on the deck. “Time to head home?” He looked better, too, shaved and all packed up, ready to go.

  Inside, the dishes were washed, the canoe paddles and life rings stowed, and the floorboard with the Bisley beneath it was undisturbed. Humming, I walked down to the dock for a last gaze at the lake.

  The water was high, nearly up to the planking nailed to the tree trunks that formed the dock’s underpinnings. I lay flat and peered down into it, at first seeing nothing.

  But then the flicker of a translucent gill caught my eye and held it. Instantly a big fish whose mottled stillness had hidden it materialized in the water.

  With a fin-flick it was gone; I blinked, seeing it again for a vivid, illusory moment against my retina.

  And knew, suddenly, what I’d been missing.

  Chapter 7

  The Eastport breakwater is an L-shaped concrete structure perched massively atop forty-foot pilings. Metal gangways lead to the wooden finger piers of the boat basin; on one of them I found Ellie deep in conversation with Eastport native Forrest Pryne.

  “…last to see Harriet alive?” I heard Ellie ask as I made my way down the metal gang.

  Until that moment I’d been feeling pretty proud of myself. But her question made me wonder why I was always last to get the brainstorm: that when Harriet died, Harry’s plan to stay here in Eastport hadn’t been known to anyone, maybe not even Harry.

  While I was gone Ellie had wised up to the obvious just as I had: that somehow Harriet Hollingsworth was the start of all this.

  It had been there in front of my nose all along. Harriet was a part of it somehow, and so was Harry; he’d bought her house, and the newspaper page clutched in her dead hand pointed even more certainly to some link with him. But her disappearance hadn’t harmed Harry at all, nor could it have been expected to.

  So had there been another reason? Had Harry’s arrival been a convenient distraction used by someone who knew or learned of his past? Were later deeds meant to further the notion of his involvement?

  And to hide the real motive, perhaps unconnected to him or to anyone he’d ever pursued… ?

  But that way led into a thicket of speculation. And unlike the youngsters of The Blair Witch Project, I had no confidence in my ability to find my way out again.

  Just the facts, ma’am, I told myself firmly. For now.

  “If you saw anything or heard anything, Forrest, I’d like to know,” Ellie was saying as I joined them on the pier. Her red hair was pulled back in a purple scrunchy, her heavy sweater was a riot of primary colors, and the daisy shoes were bright on her feet.

  Forrest’s big hand dwarfed a rag full of metal polish. He was a heavyset man, moon-faced with high shiny forehead, wearing a denim coverall, red long-underwear shirt, and yellow rubber boots.

  “Whoever killed her, I guess,” he replied at last, the hand with the rag in it moving on the brightwork of a 36-foot cruiser.

  Whoevah. Ellie shot an exasperated glance at me. “I mean who before that?”

  Forrest went on polishing imperturbably. Around him bobbed Eastport’s working fleet: draggers, lobster boats, small utility vessels freelancing for salmon farmers, hauling feed and so on to the offshore underwater pens where the fish were raised.

  But Forrest’s job was with summer people soon to arrive in town, wanting their pleasure boats ready and waiting for them when they got here. And from his vantage point Forrest could see all the goings-on downtown while he dipped regularly from his tin of Bright-All.

  Which vantage point I gathered was what had brought Ellie to question him, me wagging behind like the tail on a friendly but slow-witted dog. “Before,” he repeated. “Hmm.”

  Forrest’s laconic nature was one reason he was popular with the summer folk; things he might find while cleaning up after a party cruise, for instance, he kept mum about.

  But Forrest saw all. He put down the rag. “Guess that’d be me. Saw Harriet with Wyatt Evert, evening ’fore she went AWOL. And no one has said they saw her, any time later’n that.”

  Ellie stared. “Forrest, did you tell the police?”

  Forrest plucked a crumpled pack of smokes from his coverall pocket, cupped his hand to light one.

  “Nope. They didn’t ask me.”

  Of course not. And getting him to volunteer information was like trying to pry a clamshell open with your thumbnail.

  “Speak of the devil,” Ellie murmured as Wyatt Evert himself appeared suddenly on the breakwater above us, glaring down.

  “Hey!” he yelled, gesturing curtly. “I want to talk to you.”

  Ditto; in light of what Forrest had just told us, and Tim Rutherford’s suspicions, I was even more curious about Wyatt’s presence outside the Danvers’ house just before the deadly live-wire incident.

  But Wyatt had other ideas. “You’ve got pull around here,” he said as soon as I reached him.

  “I want you to tell that fool he’s got to print my article,” he went on, stabbing a finger at the office of the Quoddy Tides a few hundred feet distant.

  The office, a tiny blue-and-white wooden structure with its entry on Water Street, perched on the rocks over the boat basin as if readying itself to leap. By “that fool,” I assumed Wyatt meant the Tides’ editor, whose only connection to fools was his ability to see one coming; thus Wyatt’s inability to get anywhere with him.

  “I don’t have any pull,” I retorted, “with—”

  “Don’t give me that,” Wyatt snapped. “I’m not stupid, I see how things work around here.”

  He jerked his head to where Forrest was confiding something to Ellie. “You and her,” Wyatt sneered. “Nothing but a couple of busybodies, but people here listen to you. So I want you to tell that idiot…”

  Apparently he thought bad temper would help get his message across. “Jake,” Ellie said urgently, coming up the gangway.

  “…my article explaining why all this area ought to be set aside,” Wyatt declaimed angrily, waving his arms to include Water Street, the boat basin, and apparently the whole known world.

  Or all of Maine, anyway. “It’s a precious environment, you people are ruining it with logging and lumber mills and scallop dragging and fish farms,” he fulminated. “It’s got to be stopped.”

  Men getting out of their pickup trucks on the breakwater had turned to look at him. They carried toolboxes, boat parts, lunch bags, and plenty of warm clothing for the work which would go on all day and into the evening.

  “Hey!” Wyatt yelled, but they only stared at him, eyes haggard. Men getting to the pier this late in the day always looked exhausted, but around here they were regarded as lucky: besides their boats, they also had work somewhere else.

  “It belongs t
o everyone!” Wyatt yelled. Funny, you could have fooled the families who’d lived here for decades, getting along on salt fish and potatoes to stake their claim. Or the native tribes before that.

  “It should all be a national park,” Wyatt shouted. He was on a roll now. “This whole town, it should be for the people…”

  What did he think these guys on the dock were, hand puppets? But he was getting to that.

  “It can’t all just be left to all you…”

  Forrest Pryne mounted the gang behind Ellie, his pale hair sticking out from beneath a ragged watch cap he’d pulled on.

  “…rednecks!” A pearl of spittle formed at the corner of Wyatt Evert’s angrily flapping lip.

  Wordlessly Forrest grabbed Wyatt by the shoulders, marched him down the ramp and out the finger pier.

  “Listen to me!” Wyatt expostulated as they reached the end of it.

  “Sure,” Forrest replied mildly, and pushed him off.

  Wyatt Evert’s thin arms pinwheeled. Then came a splash, his shouts muffled by cheers from the men on the breakwater.

  “Yikes,” Ellie said. “We’d better go get him, Jake. I don’t think Wyatt’s love of nature extends quite that far.”

  No one’s did; in that icy water, he’d be lucky if his heart didn’t seize like an old engine, his blood turned to instant sludge.

  But one of the men working on a lobster boat was ahead of us, tossing Wyatt an orange life ring. Shrieking and sputtering, Wyatt flailed for the boat hook the guy extended to him.

  “Freakin’ idjut,” was Forrest’s comment as he came back up the gang. “Nature’s our daily bread too, not just his.” He pulled out another cigarette. Wyatt was now safely aboard the lobster boat.

  “Guy shows up here,” Forrest said, “from the city where they use all the paper, build stuff with the wood, eat the fish. Spend more money in a month than most a’ those guys see in a year. But Wyatt looks at the way some guys are livin’ here, barely gettin’ along, doin’ their best. And you know what he thinks? I’ll tell you what he thinks. He thinks it ain’t photo-genic.” He gave the word a sardonic twist. “Some of ’em got their hearts in the right place, I know that. Want to save things, that’s fine. But not Wyatt. He’s just mad ’cause it ain’t all been set aside for him.”