Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Starting a nonprofit is simpler, of course, if you do no paperwork at all, just tell people you’re benefiting something and take their money. By the time anyone figures it out, you’re out of town with a new name and new racket somewhere else.

  So maybe Tim Rutherford had been right. Maybe the tour operation was just a good way to identify the fattest pigeons.

  “You don’t handle the money or make solicitations yourself, though?” I quizzed Fran. “Or deposit checks into any account that has your name on it anywhere?”

  “No. I never even knew about any bigger money. All I see is my pay. And it’s not,” she added bitterly, “enough, if it turns out I go to jail. I was on the pier trying to figure out what to do when you two came along.”

  “You’re going to do nothing. You’re going to sit tight until we see how this all shakes out,” I told her, getting up. “Maybe if you’re telling us the truth, you can be gotten out of this.”

  A second set of account books: real numbers for a fake nonprofit, so Fran wouldn’t realize she was only getting crumbs from the table. If she was being honest about that it was possible she could be saved from the wreckage.

  But as Fran headed forlornly up Water Street toward Wilma’s, I was already less sure than I’d been. “Ellie, what if the guy who drowned found out somehow what Wyatt’s up to? Fran might’ve figured she had as much to lose as Wyatt. She is on probation. Wyatt could’ve held that over her. Threatened her, so she’d help him get into the guy’s room.”

  “So Fran gets her cousin the motel landscaper to steal a key, maybe. Wyatt wrecks the boots, makes sure the guy ends up in a deep part of the marsh,” Ellie mused. “But while Wyatt’s at it, Harriet sees something compromising from her window?”

  “…and being Harriet, she confronts Wyatt. That’s what the argument with Wyatt could’ve been about. And…”

  Across the street, Tim Rutherford headed for La Sardina, a red-stained handkerchief pressed to his nose and the desire for a good stiff orange soda clear on his face.

  He hadn’t seen me. But at the sight of him, mental lightning struck: newspaper reporters. And… newspapers.

  “Hang on a second,” Ellie said before I could tell her about my epiphany. She crossed the street, collared Timmy, and listened intently to him once she’d asked him a question.

  When she returned, I was still hot on the trail of my own insight. “Ellie, what if Harriet already knew who Harry was? All the old newspapers she kept stacked in her hall. She took clippings from them. So maybe she actually read them.”

  Ellie caught on nimbly. “So Harry walks up to the porch and introduces himself. The name rings a bell, Harriet digs out the old newspapers where she’s seen that name, to check? And she’s got them out, maybe right there in plain sight, when Wyatt shows up?”

  “Which Wyatt would do, if Harriet had called him to say she saw him up to mischief in that tourist’s room. Forrest said he’d seen them arguing at her house.”

  “Harry said he’d talked to Wyatt back when Harry first got to town. Wyatt would’ve recognized the name if he saw it again.”

  “Newspapers with Harry’s name, the whole ghastly story, and maybe even Harry’s picture. That gives Wyatt a brainstorm.”

  “Get rid of Harriet. But don’t just hide the body. Hide it with an old story about Harry. So if it is ever found…”

  “Wyatt couldn’t have been sure, then, that the tourist guy’s drowning wouldn’t be investigated as murder even without Harriet raising the alarm. And George had mentioned those boots to him, too. So he was in a panic, wanting to direct suspicion in some other direction in case someone else got snoopy.”

  “He couldn’t have known in advance that cellar wall would collapse,” Ellie said. “That would’ve been just good luck, for him. But he’d’ve intended all along that if the body was found…”

  “It wouldn’t just fail to suggest some connection with Wyatt Evert. It would point straight at Harry,” I finished.

  Oh, it was lovely, thoroughly wacko just like Wyatt Evert himself, and even the fact that it still had miles of loose ends — we did not, for instance, even know how Harriet had died — didn’t spoil it, at first.

  But there was one thing wrong with it. It wasn’t simple. And I’d already had one complex theory do the house-of-cards act on me that morning. As a result, I couldn’t get Bob Arnold’s words — Victor’s, too — out of my head: The simplest explanation is usually the truth.

  So my happiness began collapsing swiftly, and what came next didn’t help. “What were you talking with Tim about?” I asked as we jaywalked past the art gallery and the dime store. The big windows previewed summer: in the art gallery, bright watercolors and whimsical sculpture, in the dime store, squirt guns and American flags.

  “Something I just wondered. Tim’s from here, too, and he’s about the right age. So I thought maybe he’d been in Fran’s high school class.”

  “So what if he was?”

  She’d learned something, I could tell, but she didn’t look any happier than I felt. “I thought when we were at her place that Wilma must be watching some of those kids for other people,” she said. “But not in day care, or foster care.”

  Eastport did have its own day care center, run by a pleasant, efficient woman who I thought must take atomic vitamins. Faces washed and noses wiped: when she brought those kids into the IGA they followed her up and down the aisles quietly and obediently, like well-behaved ducklings. None of them looked as if, behind their smiles, their teeth had been filed to sharp points.

  By contrast: “One glance at Wilma’s house and the state would be chartering a fleet of vans to take those kids away,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. The thing is, though, if you add a lot of kids to the fact that Fran comes back to Eastport often, even though she doesn’t like it, here. And sends money. Well, you wonder…”

  “Why.” Fran’s behavior was curious, and her feelings for her sister didn’t quite explain it.

  “And the answer is, they are all Bounce kids,” Ellie went on, “but they’re not all Wilma’s. Nieces, nephews, all kinds of relations. Tim says some of the parents are away working, haven’t got the wherewithal to take care of the kids. Or they’re in the military, or whatever. Wilma just takes ’em all, no questions, overnight or long-term.”

  Drat; there went the rest of my disdain for Wilma. “And Tim knows this because…”

  “Because he was going to do a story for the Tides about how great it was of Wilma to do that. Until she pointed out what you said, that the next thing you know she’d have inspectors on her doorstep. So Tim decided it’d be better to let Wilma go on flying under the radar, and he killed the story.”

  Good old Tim. BB guns or not he’d thought foster care wasn’t necessarily better for those kids than Wilma. And having been in the equivalent of foster care myself, I had to agree; I was well aware that there exist many dedicated, devoted foster parents.

  But I also knew every kid wasn’t guaranteed a foster family from heaven, and that you upset people’s applecarts — even the creaky, one-wheeled variety — at your peril.

  Tim Rutherford had apparently learned that somehow, too. My regard for him rose another notch. “And the bottom line is?”

  Ellie sighed. “One of those kids is Fran’s.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course. I mentally smacked my own forehead as Ellie went on. “Tim said Fran dropped out of their class as a junior, six months pregnant. No one knew the father. I doubt that matters now, who he was.”

  Suddenly getting Fran off the hook looked even less like a cakewalk, and more like a fire walk. “You know what this means, though. If Fran knew all along Wyatt Evert was a crook…”

  “And it’s one thing to support your sister but it’s a bigger ball game to support your own child. And stay out of jail, so you can keep seeing your kid.”

  “So if someone else, like maybe Harriet, found out about Wyatt’s scheme — if he had one — Fran had just as good a moti
ve as Wyatt to get rid of that person,” Ellie said. “Maybe better.”

  We headed uphill; me walking, Ellie striding. “Slow down, will you?” But she didn’t.

  “Probably most people here didn’t recognize Fran, and she changed her name to keep the Florida probation people off her trail.” Ellie was thinking aloud. “That’s why I didn’t tumble sooner to who she is. But there’s another thing bothering me.”

  Oh, terrific. “What?”

  “You told me you’d locked all the doors the other night.”

  “Yes.”

  “So let’s say Roy really was in Portland. If he was, he wouldn’t have wanted it, would he?” She turned to face me. “The key, I mean. Your house key, that you told me Roy had. He wouldn’t need it, wouldn’t even notice if it was gone probably. So who might’ve stolen it, used it, sneaked it back onto his key ring?”

  “Fran,” I said. “She implied she’d had a rendezvous with Roy since he got back from Portland. Today, maybe. It’s how she knew we’d asked him questions.”

  “And Fran’s clever,” Ellie said thoughtfully.

  “Yes. She’s had to be, to survive.”

  The question was, how clever? As if in answer, a detailed picture of a motel-room dresser top rose in my mind. Loose change from the pockets; wallet, cell phone, too, probably. And…

  And a ring of keys.

  Chapter 9

  Back at my house, all was peaceful except for the racket of the men beavering away at the cellar project. But I regard noises made by other people working on my house as music, so that didn’t bother me.

  “I’ll be back,” Ellie said. She wanted to find out where Wyatt Evert had gotten to after his poke at Tim, maybe try to float some story whereby Wyatt would agree to talk to us. I had a date with Wade that I didn’t want to break, so I let her go.

  At the door she peered at me. “You sure you’re all right?”

  “Fine,” I said firmly. The bruise on my face had faded to an exotic greeny-lavender color, and my shoulder only clicked a little bit when I moved it. The swimmy feeling in my head was a constant, mildly annoying backdrop, but it wasn’t getting worse. When she’d gone I took ibuprofen instead of the aspirin I would otherwise have chosen; if the wooziness I felt meant my brain was getting ready to hemorrhage, I didn’t want to encourage it.

  Then I returned to the hall, where the old floor lay sanded to the bare wood. I’d run the vacuum over it since otherwise the dust would’ve smothered us all; now I ran it again.

  Or rather, I started running it, using the soft dust-brush attachment to clean carefully in the spaces between the flooring pieces and in the corners formed by the baseboard trim. Halfway through, though, I realized: the machine’s roar obliterated other sounds, such as for instance the back door opening.

  The thought made my heart lurch. Switching off the machine I stood there with my head pounding and my ears ringing, feeling the presence of someone standing in the hall behind me.

  Slowly, I turned to face…

  No one. No one at all. Cat Dancing sat watching me with a smirky look on her furry features. “Scat,” I told her and she got up disdainfully and stalked away, uttering some feline oath.

  And then, unable to help myself, I went around locking doors and windows again; Wade showed up before our appointed time and caught me latching the door from the ell to the yard. He raised his eyebrows, followed me inside, and closed the door behind us.

  “Feeling a little vulnerable, are we?” he commented.

  “Yep,” I replied shortly. “Not like before, but…”

  After some thought, earlier that morning I’d waited until I saw Mr. Ash through the kitchen window in the yard with the dog. Then I’d put the Bisley into a secret hiding place in the kitchen mantel; not even Sam knew the sliding door was there, installed when the house was built 200 years ago.

  Carrying the gun made me feel even more anxious and paranoid, as if it were a magnet for trouble instead of a tool to fend it off. I would carry a weapon, I’d decided, when I was alone in the house. The rest of the time I could get to it in a heartbeat if need be.

  “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” I went on. “You know that feeling?” I handed Wade a tack cloth. “Anyway, thanks for helping me with this.” We knelt side by side, began wiping.

  The first pass of my cloth brought up a thick coat of dust from the vacuumed surface. A paintbrush loaded with polyurethane would bring up even more, then deposit it again in hard, finish-coated beads to give the floor a cobbled appearance.

  “Wilma Bounce didn’t pan out?” Wade said. “Or Fran?”

  “I don’t know yet about Fran,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure about Wilma.”

  I turned the tack cloth over; the first side was already clogged with wood dust. “That she didn’t, I mean. I suppose if you wanted to, you could still make the case against her.”

  We moved forward in tandem, me wiping the left side of the floor and Wade the right. “But now it turns out her cat wouldn’t have wandered as far as Harriet’s house, and Wilma knew it.”

  I summed up my visit with Ellie to Wilma’s and our chat with Fran Hanson. “She’s not quite the unredeemed character I thought, either. Wilma, that is.”

  I added the kid-care details. Wade wadded the tack cloth and pushed it under the old cast-iron radiator.

  “How about a case against Wyatt? Or Wyatt and Fran together?” he suggested, dragging out heaps of dust the vacuum hadn’t been able to reach.

  “I guess it’s possible. But that would be awfully detailed, too, wouldn’t it? Making it work right so they didn’t get caught at any of it, and making sure it stayed linked to Harry Markle.”

  “Complicated things do happen sometimes,” he pointed out.

  “Sure. It would also hinge on the tourist’s having found out about Wyatt’s racket, though, and threatening to expose it, which I have no way to confirm, either. And after that…”

  After that a whole string of things would have had to line up; improbable things like Wyatt happening to see Harriet’s newspaper and pay attention to it while he was upset about something else.

  “Ellie and I still plan to talk to Wyatt. But I don’t have high hopes. As for Fran, that theory’s got other problems.”

  Such as how could she be sure she would get my key back to Roy before he noticed it was missing? “I hope she’s not involved. Just being hooked up with Wyatt, that girl’s in way over her head.” A sigh escaped me. “Maybe Harry Markle’s got the right idea after all, and it is all about him. Now, that would be simple.”

  Like puppets on the same pair of strings Wade and I turned, opened new cloths, and started back. “Harry’s still working on that?” Wade asked.

  “Uh-huh. I guess. But he hasn’t said much about it and I’ve got to believe that means he’s not getting anywhere, either, any more than we are.”

  “Paint after this?” Polyurethane, he meant.

  I nodded, sighing again. “Wade, I’m starting to think the only way anyone will get to the bottom of this is if some culprit walks up and confesses to killing Harriet. And to the rest of it, too.”

  Meanwhile when you already have a headache the best thing to do is open a can of polyurethane floor finish. That way, at least you’ve got an excuse. “Is it hot in here?”

  I pulled off my sweater and hung it on the radiator. Wade reached out and laid a hand across my forehead.

  “No. But you look sort of pale. Maybe you should let me put the first coat on.”

  I’d already opened the can of poly and was stirring it with a paint stick. The sludge at the bottom was fudgey-thick, and you can’t have it shaken at the paint store; it puts bubbles in it.

  “Uh-uh. The first coat dries too fast, so you won’t be able to keep a wet edge if you’re working by yourself. Gad, it stinks.” The fumes rose up medicinally.

  Wade went to open the door, feeling that the last thing I needed was chemical brain damage, and in fact when you are finishing a floor i
t’s a good idea to do it outside. But like so many aspects of do-it-yourself home repair, this is impossible.

  Finally the polyurethane was stirred. Also we’d taken the brushes outdoors and gotten the loose bristles out of them (me taking breaths of fresh air, trying not to let on how nauseated I felt) which meant there were only about a zillion loose bristles still left in the brushes.

  And we’d locked Monday and Cat Dancing in Wade’s shop where Monday could sleep and Cat could amuse herself by, I imagined, learning to load, aim, and fire a variety of deadly weapons. At last we knelt at the end of the hall, the polyurethane can open between us and brushes in hand, like runners on their marks.

  “Ready?” Wade asked. Finishing a floor is a sprint; it takes only a few minutes but while you’re doing it, you can’t stop.

  “Ready,” I replied. I loaded my brush with the watery stuff and applied it to the raw wood in long, even strokes as Wade did likewise. The dull, pinkish-white surface glistened and came alive; the old wood glowed richly, pale radiant gold.

  Which naturally was when urgent knocks sounded first on our front door, and then on the back. Both phone lines began ringing and a ping! came from Sam’s computer, signaling e-mail.

  Also, Mr. Ash chose that moment to climb the cellar steps. “Ahem,” he said, or something ominously like it. “We have a small emergency in the cellar.”

  “Oh,” I said clearly, watching the light-shards sparkle in the scimitar-shaped panes of the fanlight over the front door. I was thinking how interesting they were, really interesting.

  And then I passed out.

  “I’m fine. Utterly fine. I’ll shoot anybody who tries saying otherwise.”

  Focusing on Ellie, I attempted a grin, meanwhile realizing that for a moment I’d forgotten I didn’t still have the Bisley bulking in my sweater pocket. Or the sweater, either.

  Not a good sign. The yes or no question is the crucial one about gun possession, I feel, including any that are in my own possession. But never mind; they thought I’d meant it as a joke.