Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Now my head was clearing except for the odd noise I kept hearing. “I was only out a few seconds. You’d think I’d been in a coma for a month, for heaven’s sake.”

  Wade frowned down at me. “You’re sure it was just the smell of the polyurethane?”

  “Of course it was.” I looked away. “What about the hall?” I’d forgotten that, too. And I felt dizzy; fumes, I decided.

  “Mr. Ash and one of his guys are finishing it,” Wade replied as he ran me a glass of water. “Here, drink this.”

  I gulped it, heedless of the chlorine flavor, eager to do whatever he asked so as not to be sent to the clinic. Our recent run of medical emergencies had impressed Wade with the idea that Victor’s professional skill made up for his many personal sins.

  But the only time I wanted care from Victor was if I needed actual neurosurgery. Otherwise I’d prefer some wild-eyed quack who spoke in tongues and handled live rattlesnakes on Friday night.

  “I found Wyatt,” Ellie told me. “Or I think I have. Talked to Fran, again, and she told me where he said he was going. Jake, you look ghastly.”

  “Oh, thanks.” All that knocking I’d heard had been Ellie at the back door and Mr. Ash at the front; he’d finally gone around and entered from the yard, through the open Bilco door, and come up through the cellar.

  “What emergency?” I asked him now. We’d deal with Wyatt Evert later.

  Mr. Ash cleared his throat, readying himself to deliver bad news. “Old water main was behind a foundation stone. One of the fellows, he smacked that stone with a big hammer.”

  Suddenly I identified the sound I kept hearing: roaring, but not in my ears. “An empty old water main,” I said hopefully.

  “’Fraid not,” Mr. Ash said. Now came another sound: trucks. Big ones, the kind the city sends when a water main gets broken. A backhoe rumbled off a flatbed, thunderingly. Through the screen door I glimpsed its toothed yellow blade, ready to bite.

  “You deal with that,” Ellie told Wade decisively, gesturing toward the backhoe, “while we go up to the Calais emergency room and have Victor check on Jake. Just to be on the safe side,” she added, looking meaningfully at me, and I agreed at once.

  For one thing, if I didn’t, Wade was going to haul me there kicking and screaming. “I’ll be fine,” I assured him.

  And for another, Victor wasn’t in Calais, today. He had a regular schedule and this afternoon it put him at the Eastport clinic, no need for a car trip.

  And Ellie knew it.

  Five minutes later we were headed out of town. “So you know where Wyatt is right now?”

  “I do, indeed,” Ellie said. “If he went where Fran Hanson said.” We passed Bay City Mobil where the fellows had Joey Robley’s old Dodge on the lift, peering into it; Joey had 200,000 miles on the car and said he would drive it into the ground, after which he intended to go there, too. And Joey was ninety-six so the Bay City fellows took him seriously on this.

  Ellie pushed the accelerator. It was low tide, and on either side of the causeway acres of clam flats lay sparklingly exposed. Moments later we were on Route 1 heading north through the woods, Ellie as usual passing any car that didn’t match her exotic speed.

  “Well,” I demanded, “are you going to tell me?”

  “Wyatt’s up at the Moosehorn. He spotted us talking to Fran and had a fit about it, she said, and he knows she told us about the ledger. He said he was going up to collect some things he’d left at the ranger station.”

  She ripped past a lumbering dump truck; my heart only stuttered a little. “But he could be at the marsh double-checking, to be sure there’s no evidence to tie him to the boots incident,” she added. “And then he would skedaddle.”

  Suddenly, talking to Wyatt felt urgent again. “And if he leaves, experienced scam artist that he is, we’d never — oh god — find him again.”

  She swerved back into the right-hand lane a good millisecond before a highballing log truck barreled by on our left. “That’s what I thought. So I hope you’re telling me at least a little of the truth about your fainting episode back there.”

  That I’d passed out on account of the fumes, she meant. “I think I am. But Ellie, I can see a doctor later if need be. Right now—”

  She turned to me. “You promise to go to the hospital right afterward and get looked at. We told Wade we would, so…”

  “Ellie!” Doom roared at us in the shape of a driver whose notion of proper passing space was even smaller than Ellie’s.

  She yanked the wheel and put both right tires suddenly into the shoulder, soft sand inches lower than the pavement. The car did a buck-and-wing, fishtailing slipperily out of danger before Ellie jounced us expertly into the travel lane again.

  “…we’re going,” she finished, unfazed.

  Just at the moment I’d have agreed to go to Borneo if only I didn’t have to go there on this death trap of a road.

  “I do not see why,” I babbled anxiously, “when the southern Maine Turnpike is being widened to, I gather, about thirty lanes, at a cost of approximately a hundred million billion dollars, we cannot be given the measly few bucks it would cost to put a paved shoulder on Route 1. There are roads in Afghanistan, traveled by donkeys, better treated than…”

  “Okay, okay,” Ellie said. “I’ve been driving this road my whole life, you know.” Still, she slowed down and so did my heart rate, and for a while the trip proceeded in relative calm.

  But ten minutes later I was losing my breakfast into a ditch, in the middle of the Moosehorn Refuge.

  “I don’t get it,” I moaned, splashing my face with water from Ellie’s jug. A true Maine native, she kept her car stocked for everything short of nuclear winter. “Maybe it isn’t paint fumes.”

  “Hmm,” she said, eyeing me narrowly. “Well, we’re here so we might as well go on. But I’m telling you, the minute we’re finished with Wyatt…”

  “I know,” I grumped miserably. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Back in the car, I checked my eyes in the visor mirror. The green lenses were still in, by some miracle. But the world kept spinning gently unless I tipped my head back and then it lurched. Dizzily, I rode alongside Ellie, into the swamp.

  We found Wyatt Evert in his van, a big white Econoline with the words Evert Wild Natural Excursions emblazoned on the panels. Inside, the van was fitted with custom bucket seats featuring pockets for maps and binoculars, drinks holders, fold-down lap desks, and individual overhead reading lights. The upholstery, I noted, was luxurious enough to have had a ledger hidden in it.

  Also, that van had enough heating power to melt the polar ice caps, as I discovered when Wyatt opened the door and a burst of tropical air blew out at me. It wasn’t even a particularly cold day but he was sitting inside with the engine running so he could keep his surroundings toasty.

  Which was typical of Wyatt. He talked a good game but when it came to action, George had been right on the money about him: Wyatt was a whey-faced stinker with a politically correct line of crap, meant not to save the earth but to line his own personal pockets.

  “What do you want?” He hadn’t been retrieving any tourist-tripping snares or anything else odd that I could see in the van.

  “Couple questions. Beautiful here,” I said, waving at the flat water spreading away smoothly.

  I didn’t have the Bisley. Wade wouldn’t have swallowed the going-to-the-emergency-room story if I’d stopped to retrieve the gun. Now I noticed how empty the marsh was: beautiful and remote.

  Cattails thrust up between lily pads near the shore; water birds skimmed so near you could see them glance brassily at us, knowing we couldn’t shoot them. In the Moosehorn Refuge the birds were aware of their protected status; you could stand by the side of the road and watch eaglets emerging from their eggs.

  Wyatt scowled, seemingly unaware of the adult eagle descending now to a nesting platform fifty yards off. On the platform was a nest so huge, just seeing it convinced me that birds had indeed descen
ded from dinosaurs. I slapped at a bug biting my cheek, another on my neck. Apparently the blackflies were descended from carnivorous monsters, too.

  Correction: they were the carnivorous monsters. I slapped at another one. “So, the guy who drowned,” I said, feeling suddenly that I wanted to keep this conversation short; if I didn’t get out of here soon I’d be getting a blood transfusion at that hospital. Also, I remembered again how allergic to blackflies I was. “Did he have any idea what a lowlife crook you are?”

  Evert blinked, recovered swiftly, and opened his mouth to lie. Then he got a look at my face.

  It was wearing my patented lie-to-me-and-I’ll-disembowel-you expression. I’d found it useful, back in the city, when one of my money-management clients wanted to keep something a secret: say, a numbered bank account in the Bahamas, or a second set of books like the ones Fran Hanson swore Wyatt was keeping.

  Also, without the Bisley, my hard-nosed expression was the only weapon I had. I only hoped Wyatt wasn’t as savvy as the birds.

  “No,” he said evenly. “He didn’t. I’d never met him until he came on one of my excursions. And he wasn’t a plainclothes cop or anything like that, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  I had been. Somebody already on Wyatt’s crooked trail posing as an ordinary tourist… it was a possibility. Trouble was, there were so many possibilities.

  “He was a retired shrink from New York. Check all you want, you’ll find out I had no motive to kill him. Or anyone else.”

  “You didn’t sabotage his boots, and send him out here alone to drown?”

  A small smile twitched his thin lips. “Let’s see, and then I killed Harriet Hollingsworth because she saw me sneaking into the guy’s motel room.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Got hold of that newspaper page, too. And then maybe I killed the dancer Harry Markle was hot about, to make it look even more like Harriet’s death was part of some other situation?”

  Scam guys were always quick on the uptake, so I wasn’t surprised he understood so much. Knowing how other people think is a big part of the scam guy’s bag of tricks. They never look or sound guilty, either; just the opposite, if they’re good.

  Wyatt was good. A dozen or so blackflies landed on my neck and bit. “Damn,” I uttered, recalling the last time I’d been bitten by a few of them: fever, swollen glands.

  I tipped my head back carefully to meet Evert’s snakelike expression, but a wave of dizziness still made my gut turn over.

  “What was your argument with Harriet about?” I asked him. “And before you answer, Wyatt, let me just tell you I know a fair amount about your past. So don’t waste time trying a snow job on me, okay?”

  He didn’t. Instead, he surprised me utterly. “Harriet knew it, too. All those newspapers she collected in that shambles she was living in?” A disgusted expression crossed his face. “The old bat read them all and she recognized me from a picture in one of them, a story about a little action I had going back in the city. A fund-raising effort.”

  He smiled reminiscently. “God, it was sweet.”

  “Until you got caught?”

  The smile vanished. “Yeah. Tabloids made a big deal of it, ran a mug shot. So this Harriet woman sees me just walking by her house, gives me a look like she’s shooting me through the heart, and the next thing I know my phone’s ringing in my room at the motel.” He shook his head. “You can plan for everything but that, you know? A stupid coincidence that screws you royally. Someone who knows you.”

  “You went to Harriet’s house. You argued with her.”

  He nodded. “Absolutely. I’ve got a good thing going here, I didn’t want her messing it up. I offered to pay her. She played it tough: hit the road, Jack, or she’s calling the cops.”

  I glanced at Ellie, who was listening with keen interest. The blackflies were making a bloody picnic out of me but this was too good to cut short. “And?”

  “And I believed her. I was going to leave the clients here, just disappear into the sunset. Hell with ’em.”

  “But you didn’t,” Ellie said. “Why not?”

  “Because first that damned idiot in the rotten boots went and drowned himself in the marsh, and I couldn’t cut out on that or people would think maybe I’d had something to do with it,” he said impatiently. “You think I’m stupid?”

  He had a point. If he’d gone just when George and Bob Arnold were feeling suspicious about those boots, Bob would’ve put the alarms out for him instantly. Wyatt’s past would have been exposed, and his scams crossed state lines so the FBI would have gotten involved.

  “Then the old woman just vanished. Poof, like my wish was granted,” he said. “So what the hell? Nothing to do with me. I forgot about it and went on with life.”

  He looked momentarily pleased. But then he remembered that we could still queer his pitch. Or Fran could.

  I was remembering something, too: that you didn’t get to be a career scam artist by being a bad liar. But so far, I thought I believed him.

  “So,” Evert asked, “you going to mess me up? Me,” he added, “and Eastport’s sourest little sweetheart, Fran Hanson?”

  “That depends,” I countered as more flies bit hard. “Are you going to mess her up?”

  Maybe Wyatt was lying through his yellowish teeth and he was a murderer with or without Fran Hanson’s help. But if neither of them had done anything deadly, I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to upset their applecart. Fran’s, especially.

  “Does Fran still have a job?” I asked pointedly.

  By now I’d lost something like a quarter of my blood volume to the swarms of vampire insects inhabiting the Moosehorn Refuge. It was time to clear out whether I intended to let Wyatt off the hook or not.

  He nodded resignedly. “Guess I don’t have much choice, do I? If I fire her, she’ll be testifying before the dust clears.”

  “And mail fraud is an annoying charge,” I agreed. “It could turn into all sorts of complications.”

  Money laundering, interstate commerce fraud, racketeering; for a minute, I was happy for Fran. Assuming, I mean, she didn’t turn out to be a bloody murderer, herself.

  But then I noticed that blackflies had gotten into my hair and were feasting on my scalp. “Ouch. Ellie,” I said, “grab the hairbrush out of the car, will you please? I’ve got to… agghh.”

  “Better get some bug dope,” Wyatt observed, “before they eat you alive.” Behind him another eagle lifted from a nesting platform, its shaggy white legs hanging beneath it like dinosaur drumsticks.

  Or maybe it was another blackfly. All I wanted was to go home, take a shower, and slather on a gallon of calamine lotion. “Forget the hospital,” I said, back in the car. But it came out, “fgh hshpshtl.” My tongue felt thick.

  “Ellie,” I began in alarm. It came out “Eglegl.” She looked at me, said a word I’d never heard from her before, and hit the gas. Five minutes later, Victor said the very same word as he saw me in the ER entrance of the Calais Hospital.

  Drat, what was he doing here? “Hglgl,” I said, trying for nonchalance and failing. It seemed that nonchalance, along with any hope of coherent speech, had become unavailable to me.

  But I didn’t have much time to resent this; the next thing I knew, the ceiling was whirling and I was being wheeled down a tiled corridor. No one was paying any attention to my objections. Instead, they were cutting my clothes off: never a good omen.

  Somebody slapped a plastic mask onto my face and a needle into my arm. Victor was speaking tersely in what I knew from the bad old days as his get-the-crash-cart-now voice, so penetrating it could liquefy bone marrow. Also, that’s what he was saying:

  “Get the crash cart. Now!” Chills wracked me as hives rose on my body like some fast-forwarding nature film documenting a hideous biological process.

  Which this was. Even in my seriously befogged mental state I recognized it: anaphylactic shock. I’d known I was allergic to blackflies, but I’d never been bitten by so many of them before.
r />   Distantly, a creaking sound penetrated my consciousness; after a moment I realized it was me, wheezing. My lungs were closing, swollen by the allergic reaction.

  “Victor,” I mouthed, looking up into his eyes.

  But I could make no sound and he wasn’t listening, anyway, his eyes darting from cardiac and blood pressure monitors above my head to the plastic IV bags hanging above my right arm.

  “…Benadryl,” he said. I shut my eyes, the sense of purposeful activity around me fading fast.

  Fading and gone.

  Victor glared at me. “Nausea. Ringing in your ears. And this dizziness… what is it like, and when does it occur?”

  “When I look up. Like this…”

  I tipped my head back and was rewarded by a wave of vertigo so intense I had to grab the gurney rails.

  “Mm-hm,” Victor said, looking unimpressed. “Let me guess. It also happens when you turn over in bed at night.”

  Maybe he wasn’t impressed, but I was. “How’d you know that?”

  “Never mind. It’s my job to know that.”

  I was in an observation room off the main area of the ER. No more IV, no more cardiac monitor. The clock on the wall said I’d been here an hour, although it felt like a year; no clock in the world moves slower than the one in a hospital emergency room.

  “What’re you doing here, anyway?” I asked Victor.

  He scribbled in my chart. “Car-moose collision,” he replied distractedly. “Cracked his skull. The driver, not the moose.”

  Ellie was outside, rummaging in her car trunk for a set of clothes in which interesting slashes had not been cut by hospital scissors. Also she had the green contact lenses in her purse; in the last act I could remember clearly, I had popped them out when my eyes started itching, back at the marsh.

  Victor held up three fingers. It was the gesture he once used when my coffee failed to meet his standards. One, filter the water. Two, grind fresh beans…

  Three, dump the pot over his head. On the other hand, he had just saved my life. It was getting to be another of his annoying habits, short-circuiting my disasters.