by Sarah Graves
And because, I was beginning to suspect, a reputation for being a hothead environmental savior fattened his pocketbook.
Forrest turned to us. “Anyway, so happens I was here, night b’fore Harriet went missing. Guy owns this boat called me, would I come down, check ’er over.”
He blew a plume of smoke. “And you c’n spy the window of her house from here, y’know,” he added reluctantly. “Not always, but back then you could.”
Actually I hadn’t known that. The pleasure of shoving Wyatt Evert off the finger pier had apparently loosened Forrest’s lips: good luck for us.
“And,” I guessed, “Harriet wasn’t the only one with binoculars?” It was the only answer that fit, especially given Forrest’s clear embarrassment about what he was telling us.
He looked shamefaced. “Yeah, there was a pair on the boat. Took a peek through ’em. Just that once. I don’t make no habit of it like she did.”
“And saw… ?”
“Wyatt,” he confirmed. “And Harriet. Fussin’ at each other. That’s all. Put them spyglasses away, haven’t touched ’em again. Don’t want to get no reputation like she had.”
“But it’s not all,” Ellie put in excitedly to me. “Her window! If Forrest could see it from here, then she could see…”
I got it: not now, with leaves on the trees, as Forrest said. But the sky wasn’t the only thing that had changed since Harriet vanished; back then, the branches had been bare. “So Harriet,” I theorized, “could’ve seen all the way downtown.”
“Yup. She’d ’a seen a lot, too. Roy McCall was stayin’ at the Motel East,” Forrest said. “Scoutin’ out the territory ’fore he moved up t’your place so’s his crew could have them rooms. Evert was there,” he added as if mentally ticking on his fingers, “with that little girl he runs with, one who looks like Peter Pan with makeup.”
Fran Hanson. “And so was that drowned fella,” Forrest went on. “Such an outdoorsman, he accidentally inhaled half the water in the Moosehorn Refuge. Happened the very next day after I saw Evert with Harriet. Come to think about it…”
He turned his mild, impassive gaze slowly on me. “I saw that old mason o’ your’n that evening, too. What’s his name, again? Somethin’ like mine, seems to me. Let’s see, now; forest, tree…”
“Uh-oh.” Ellie looked stricken. “Jake, I’m so sorry. That reminds me. Lian Ash is up at the house waiting for you. Not working. I was so excited about what Forrest’s been saying that I forgot to tell you.”
I’d dropped Wade off but hadn’t gone inside; George had been out on the porch and said Ellie wasn’t there.
That she was here. “Not working at all?”
“No. He told me he needed to talk with you, first.”
“Let me guess, he found buried treasure in the cellar foundation.”
After all, it could be good news, couldn’t it?
Wrong.
I found Lian Ash in my kitchen with some notes in his hand. The foundation work was definitely halted.
“This here,” he pointed at a diagram of my cellar, “is the section I thought I’d have to bring down.”
He pointed to another spot on it. “But the break you found under the ell, when I got the stones out I found a second section ready to fall in, all along here.”
Of course he had. That’s another thing about old houses: each part is inextricably connected to the next part, which itself is only slightly less ready to collapse than the part you were working on in the first place. In my house, you can start out by changing a lightbulb and end up replacing the plumbing.
“Show me,” I told Ash, and when he did I wanted to weep: half of the old mortar in the old foundation was turning to sand. You could crumble it out with your fingernail, years of water damage from a time when the house didn’t even have any gutters. “It’s a wonder the kitchen isn’t in the cellar already,” I moaned.
“Well,” Mr. Ash said. “It’s not as bad as that. Not,” he added optimistically, “the whole kitchen.”
We went back upstairs. “Thing is,” he continued, “I was going to replace the old stones, original to the house, just like the craftsmen first built it.”
All that time ago: hauling them. Setting them. Even without water damage, most mortar won’t last more than a couple of centuries.
“Now,” he broke the news gently, “this much reconstruction, it’d be cheaper to use concrete block. More materials, but less in labor. Your choice.”
“It’ll look,” Ellie remarked tartly from the hall where she was hand-sanding some remaining varnish off the floor, “like a little old lady with tin wheels where house slippers should be.”
Mr. Ash nodded. “Unless you put a foundation planting in front of it. Nice little row of bushes? Maybe box hedge?”
Box hedge is beautiful when it’s a hundred years old. Newly planted, it resembles a row of Chia Pets.
“Right,” I retorted, “and I’ll put up aluminum siding so the clapboards can rot faster, plastic shutters in place of wood, and hey, how about a satellite dish on a corner pillar? Make it look like I’m tracking flying objects for NORAD.”
I swallowed coffee grumpily. The choice was between new and hideously unauthentic concrete blocks, versus a zillion bucks for the original stones that had been there in the first place.
“I can work with you on the labor cost,” he said, “but it’ll still be more expensive. Practical choice is concrete block, but it all depends on how much you want to stay hooked to the past. For that you pay a price. For cost efficiency, you gotta let the old stuff go.”
He paused, then added the kicker. “Don’t try stayin’ betwixt an’ between, though,” he warned. “That won’t work.”
Exactly what I’d been innocently contemplating; original stones now, in the parts that were desperately crumbling. More work later on a gradual schedule, maybe? But Mr. Ash put paid to that thought.
“Halfway measures won’t take the weight,” he admonished. He sounded like Moses delivering the Eleventh Commandment.
Just once, I’d like to hear about a job that costs more to do wrong than right, I thought as he returned to the cellar.
“You want to maintain the house’s character, keep it looking hooked to its history. But doing it that way feels so extravagant,” Ellie summed up.
“Uh-huh.” I knelt beside her. The old wood coming out from under her sandpaper was white maple, grain tight as granite and as beautifully figured as the long-ago day when it was milled.
Ellie kept sanding; it was time for the machine sanding but she wanted to see more of the wood. Fragile-looking as a sprig of lavender, that woman had the stubborn stamina of your average pack mule.
“Maybe we should’ve only taken half this varnish off,” she said. “The top half.”
“Ellie, what in the world are you — oh.”
I knew what she meant: halfway measures didn’t work. She sat up and folded her arms. “Jake, how long have we known each other? Almost five years,” she answered herself, “so I know you.”
My fingers worried a scrap of sandpaper. Ellie never pried but she was awesomely effective at winkling the secrets out of a dour downeast native like Forrest Pryne.
Or out of me. “Dancing around the past, the damage that was done. It’s not your fault but you’re still stuck with it, aren’t you? And you don’t want to face it for fear of what it might cost. But it isn’t going to cost less later, is it? And sure, concrete block will work.”
Right. If you kept your eyes closed. “The question is,” she persisted, “what do you really want holding things up? Something you can’t stand to look at, or the right stuff? And if I know you, I know the answer,” she finished.
I got up. A patch of the old hardwood was nearly clean now. And it was beautiful. “Mr. Ash,” I called down the cellar steps.
His face, clean-shaven with his blue eyes shining alertly in it, appeared in the gloom.
“Don’t order any concrete block for the foundation, please,” I
said. “I want you to rebuild it with the old, original stones.”
Ellie was smiling up at me. I said, “Because around here…”
I paused. How would I ever pay for the work? My old house wasn’t a money pit; it was a crevasse. “Around here,” I repeated firmly, “we hang on to all the past we can stand.”
Mr. Ash nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, looking pleased; more so when Sam appeared in the hall asking if he could help.
“You come on down here, young feller,” Mr. Ash said, “but no heavy lifting. Even your young bones don’t heal that quick.”
He waved at a crate. “Set yourself here,” he instructed Sam. “We’ll list you on the work roster as supervisor. That,” he added with a wink at me, “means all you exercise is your gift of gab.”
“They get along well,” Ellie observed as we cleared out the hall to ready it for the sanding machine.
“Mmm,” I replied distantly. I was thinking about Wyatt Evert, the drowned eco-tourist, Harry Markle, and Roy McCall all being in Eastport when Harriet Hollingsworth vanished. About Harriet seeing so much from her window, and about the newspaper page in her dead hand.
“Ellie, Harriet knew something. Or saw something.”
“Uh-huh. And she was first.”
“That, too. Almost the same time as Wyatt’s tourist.”
I was thinking about the fish I’d seen hiding in plain sight and about the look on Wyatt’s face as he’d sat in his van outside the Danvers’ house: angry, expectant.
All that, and the sound of his van speeding away, like the sound I’d heard years ago: of someone going when almost anyone’s impulse would’ve been stay. It was a pretty good bet Wyatt wasn’t going to explain it, especially after his recent saltwater swim.
But the more I thought about his rudeness, drunkenness, and general ill-temper, the misery it must be having to work for him, the more I thought somebody else might explain Wyatt Evert to me.
His assistant, Fran Hanson.
“Odd,” Ellie said in surprise, putting down the phone a few minutes later. “I can’t find her.”
Fran wasn’t at any of the bed-and-breakfasts; she wasn’t in a cabin at Sunrise Camp Grounds, or at the Motel East. A pang of unease struck me. “You don’t suppose he makes her sleep in the van, do you?”
Ellie shook her head. “I doubt even she’d put up with that. I’m going downtown to ask around. Maybe I’ll get lucky and I can ask Wyatt himself.”
She leashed Monday; when they’d gone I checked the e-mail on Sam’s computer and found the follow-up I’d been waiting for from Jemmy Wechsler. As before, no personal remarks were in Jemmy’s message, only info-bits.
“Samantha Greer, born Yonkers, NY 1976, hired by Roy McCall personally for Shake It Till You Break It, her first professional appearance and McCall’s first project for music video company Top Cat Productions.”
He went on about the dancer: blah blah. Jemmy’s own survival depended on his knowing many odd details, so not surprisingly his write-up was full of them. But the final part was fascinating.
“She will be replaced in the production by Tonya Hemming, rumored associate of…”
Here Jemmy named a guy so terrifying, I’m not even going to identify him. Suffice it to say that when anybody big vanishes west of the Mississippi, this guy did it.
Or had it done. If he was hiring for Top Cat Productions, it was a revelation that put an entirely new spin on Roy McCall’s situation. Next paragraph, new subject:
“Wyatt Evert aka Walter Evers, wants and warrants numerous, scam specialty charitable nonprofits, travels w/ female Frances Marie Hargreave aka Fran Hilyard, Fran Hannaford, probation state of Florida rsp, no other record.”
And aka Fran Hanson, I was willing to bet. Fran was turning up like a bad penny all of a sudden; rsp was short for “receiving stolen property.”
Jemmy’s scam info was always superb; before he got into the money game he’d been a scam guy himself, moving VIN numbers off totaled wrecks and onto stolen cars of the same model and year. Last on his list was a single line.
“HM: Bronx H.S. > NYPD > detective 1st grade > retired.”
Harry Markle; the brevity of the entry meant nothing notable between high school graduation and retirement from the cop shop.
Finally, two comments: “Longer a guy’s memory, more he will have a sense of humor, my experience.”
And: “Look at McCall. Show business: no such thing as bad buzz.”
Jemmy was noting the prank aspect. As grisly as they’d been, there was a ghoulish humor about the deaths. Drowning because your boots leak, being walled up, even grabbing a live wire were things that could have happened in an animated cartoon.
And with the memory comment he was suggesting a possible Mob connection. No one knew better than Jemmy Wechsler how long those guys’ memories were.
I closed the e-mail program and shut down the computer as footsteps came up the back porch. Wade had gone down to the fish pier to see if any freighters were scheduled imminently; if so, he’d said he would get the other harbor pilot to work them.
Which meant that despite the reassurances he’d given me, he was worried, too. Wade went to work with a bad case of flu, once, ate sleet for a week when a nor’easter blew up unexpectedly and came home with double pneumonia. But he’d had his paycheck, and forgoing one now was a storm signal clearer than the red pennant flying down at the Coast Guard Station.
“Wade,” I began, “how about some…”
But when the door opened it wasn’t Wade. It was Roy McCall, looking every inch the successful music-video producer: manicured hair, black Top Cat Productions T-shirt, jacket and slacks.
Jemmy’s e-mail revelations washed over me like an icy wave. Roy might be charming but his production company was hooked up with crooks. Bad ones.
“…coffee,” I finished flatly.
Roy glanced warily at me, headed for the stairs up to his room. “Oh, no, you don’t. Right this way.” I steered him back to the kitchen.
“Sit,” I said as Ellie came back in, too.
“No sign of Fran,” she reported. “Or Wyatt. But I did learn a very interesting new—”
Then she saw Roy, and her tone chilled noticeably to match the atmosphere in the room. “Oh, hello.” She hadn’t liked Roy’s grandstanding on MTV. Dancing on a grave, she’d called it.
“What’s going on?” Roy wanted to know, so I told him that I knew his financial angel was a devil so dark even I wouldn’t have had him as a client, not that the guy hired people like me.
He killed people like me, and anyone else who got in his way or had anything he wanted.
Like Samantha. “I didn’t have a choice,” Roy protested half an hour later. It had taken that long to get him to admit Jemmy’s report on him was true.
Then he caved, telling us more. “I was coming off a flop. It wasn’t my fault. It was that misbegotten girl group whose leader suddenly came out with news that she’s really a boy. Can you imagine how that would’ve played in Paducah?”
Nope. And I didn’t much care, either. But as Roy went on it hit me that Jemmy was right: publicity. For his maiden effort, Roy McCall desperately needed all the prerelease ink he could get, even if — maybe even especially if — the ink was mixed with blood.
“Okay, so my backers aren’t Boy Scouts. But they wouldn’t kill the talent just to get rid of it,” Roy went on. “Or to get rid of me. We’ll be back in production again, soon. What you are thinking is ridiculous,” he finished indignantly.
Actually, it wasn’t. Not that Roy would necessarily be to blame, personally; he might not even have known about it until it happened. But his buffed, sunshiny pizzazz wasn’t so charming anymore. I noticed he hadn’t once called Samantha by her name. She was dead, but this was all about him.
“Anyway, it’s not like you go there, Los Angeles, everyone wants to hire you,” he said sulkily. “It’s not about talent.”
Some guys hit a little adversity, they go from be
ing the cat’s pajamas to the cat’s litter box in no time flat.
“You need connections,” he said, trying to explain. “And you can’t do it all your own way, either. There’s no such thing as creative freedom, and no one cares about your artistic vision.”
In L.A., he meant, as if it might be different anywhere else. Personally I’ve always liked coloring inside the lines. You watch who you sign up with but when someone hires you, you do what they want or you walk away from it, end of story.
But it sounded as if it had come as a bad surprise to Roy that the world wasn’t a fairy tale, that it was run by guys who would slit your throat as soon as look at you. Or someone else’s throat, as a demonstration of what might happen to yours if you crossed them again.
“So you hired Samantha even though your backers wanted Tonya Hemming, their own talent. Who’s a known associate of someone you knew didn’t like being contradicted. What’re you, stupid?”
Across from him Ellie sat listening silently, connecting the dots. She connects dots the way a herring weir collects herring, gobs at a time.
McCall’s shoulders sagged. “I’d done everything else they asked. I hired their musicians, their hair and makeup people.”
“But you liked Samantha. You thought she was good. So you went ahead and hired her. Figuring maybe they wouldn’t notice.”
“Or wouldn’t care. Tonya’s one of their girls, she works all the time.”
He looked up at me, hurt confusion in his eyes. “What’s she need me for? I don’t get it. They’re taking her off a toothpaste commercial, reshoot the whole thing with other talent so they can send Tonya here? Why?”
I knew, even if Roy was telling the truth and he didn’t. But I didn’t have the heart to enlighten him. He needed to learn a lesson about the guys he’d partnered with. When they say jump you don’t tell them you want artistic vision, or creative freedom. You say how high, sir?
