Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  A new thought hit me. “But how’d you get in? I locked up and the cellar door was hooked, just like today.”

  Like a magician he produced a thin strip of celluloid: the kind that still comes in the collars of new dress shirts. Keeping my face blank, I found the gun’s safety, thumbed it. I needed to shoot him where he stood, or try. Take a chance on the gun being loaded; my only chance.

  But even as I thought this, his own hand came out with a gun in it, too. I stared at it, hypnotized.

  He waved it, breaking the spell. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Getting this over with wasn’t on my to-do list. “You haven’t told me why, yet. What got you to Eastport? And why me, now?”

  He studied me as if this were the stupidest question he’d ever heard, waited for me to come up with the answer for myself. When I didn’t, he said:

  “You made a big impression on old Harry. Even while he and I were doing our little dance together, back in the city—”

  Where this bastard was killing people, murdering them just for spite, and Harry was desperately chasing him—

  “…he never gave up on the other thing. All those clippings in his room? Notes and a diary of his hunt for some old dead guy he had a bug about, didn’t believe the guy was really dead. And that guy’s daughter, that kid who Harry’d made such a big deal of saving.”

  The kid being me.

  “And afterwards, with Harry gone, hey, I had a lot of time on my hands.”

  That charming smile again, a little gesture as if appealing to my common sense, as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “So then I started looking for…”

  “For my father.” I finished his sentence crisply. The pieces fell together like glass in a kaleidoscope.

  “You picked up where Harry left off,” I said. “Did your homework, thought my father might be here because I’m here. That was why you came to Eastport, wasn’t it? But once you arrived…”

  Ellie’s words came back to me: He had a reason at first. But now… now he’s doing it because he likes it.

  So this was probably not a fruitful conversational angle. Meanwhile, the little gun felt like a cannon in my hand but it wasn’t. Even if it turned out to have bullets in it, I’d have no time to get it out of my pocket. And I’d thought Wade had exaggerated about needing a large caliber to put a guy down, in a situation.

  But looking at this guy now, I thought I could’ve parted his hair with a bullet and he wouldn’t’ve flinched. Slowly, he began mounting the stairs. No time… I took a wild guess:

  “As for Harriet, her problem was never what she wrote, all those letters to the Quoddy Tides. Her problem was what she read. Old newspapers… When you told her who you were, she knew better. Just like she’d known Wyatt. She’d seen the real Harry’s picture in the tabloids. She knew you weren’t him.”

  He stopped. “Very good,” he said in faintly mocking tones.

  “And the tourist… a shrink, Wyatt Evert told me. A retired psychiatrist from New York. Could he have been… Harry Markle’s psychiatrist? The tourist didn’t know you, but you knew him. And for you, that was enough.”

  Now that I knew so much, the rest was easier to figure. “The boots were just misdirection. Just something to confuse the whole picture, assuming anyone even paid attention to them. You never got into his room. You followed him to the marsh. You found him alone and you drowned him.”

  His face said that I was right again. But he couldn’t resist bragging a little more about it, letting me know how smart, how superior he was.

  “The damn boots were the only hard part. The switch for my own, which I’d messed up in advance so they’d look sabotaged. Same size, but I had to struggle in the marsh getting them on him. Him not being able to help me and all. Now, stop stalling and come down here.”

  Not on your tintype, buster. Stalling was the name of the game, at the moment.

  “How’d you kill Harriet? No wounds, no poison…”

  But just then Sam’s gauze sling on the newel post caught my eye again. At the sight a vivid mental picture rose up, of the night he’d gotten it.

  Of the ambulance technician punching Sam in the chest to get his heart started again. But it was a punch in the chest that had stopped it, too, from the broken steering column.

  “Your fist,” I said. “You punched her in the chest? You didn’t know it would kill her outright. But you were…”

  “Lucky,” he finished. “Yeah. I just wanted to put her down, shut her up until I could figure out a good way to do it. Turned out I didn’t have to.”

  “The blood on the porch?” It had been there, I realized; the gossip — about that much, anyway — had been right.

  “Scalp wound, when she fell.” He shook his head impatiently. “Got people talking before I noticed it myself and got it cleaned up. That, and that damned boot she was wearing.”

  Harriet’s boot, the one that had been found in the compost heap. “Dragging her through backyards in the middle of the night,” he went on. “Freakin’ thing fell off, I couldn’t find it in the dark. Although” — he brightened hideously for an instant — “it was exciting.”

  Yeah, the risk of getting caught with the corpse of a harmless old woman you’d just murdered must’ve been a thrill. I felt a strong urge to punch this guy, myself, right in the nose.

  “Why’d you put that paper in her hand? And… where the hell did you get the mortar to put her in the wall?”

  He shrugged carelessly. “Men painting the Danvers’ house left a window open to air it out. I just spotted it, climbed in. I dragged her in the cellar door and closed it behind me.” He was enjoying this. “The mortar was a stroke of luck, it was down there already, couple bags. I didn’t know she’d be found so soon, but that turned out to work pretty well, too, didn’t it?”

  Uh-huh. Just ducky. He came up another step. At this range he could put a hole the size of a Pontiac in my chest, and if I turned to run it would be all over instantly.

  And I still didn’t know if my gun was loaded.

  “As for the newspaper, well, I’m always the funny man. I just couldn’t resist the joke.”

  Hilarious. So while we’d been working up one theory after another, he’d been winging it, improvising day by day, trusting in his wits and a benevolent universe to pave his path.

  “It was fun while it lasted,” he went on expansively, “but now… happier hunting grounds, that’s what I need. There’s plenty of small towns where I’d fit right in, don’t you think?” His eyes were fixed on mine. “Move in, do my thing, and — poof!”

  He smiled brilliantly. “Here today. Gone tomorrow. After I finish up here in Eastport, of course. Your son, his girl, your husband. And that friend of yours, that Ellie.”

  His voice lingered on their names, touched their images in my mind with a filth-dipped brush. He was getting disorganized, unraveling at the edges; it showed in the way his face changed so fast, in his jittery energy. And in the way he kept slapping new names onto his victim list: somebody likes it.

  Not that it was going to help me any, that his emotions were running haywire.

  Somehow I had to look down long enough to make sure something more than a dry-fire would come out of that damned gun if I shot him through my sweater pocket. And I had to do it without him figuring out that I had the thing.

  There was also the interesting little matter of shooting a person at all. Now that push had come to shove, I saw the difference between me and this guy. He was hardwired for killing people; I wasn’t.

  On the other hand, Sam would be home soon, with Maggie. Wade too, maybe with Ellie and George.

  None of them knowing what I knew. They’d all walk right into the house. Into my death scene, and then into their own.

  Unsuspecting. I breathed in quietly, centered myself.

  Focused down, as I had on the shooting range. Praying that the damned thing was loaded; begging heaven, because it was my only way out of this.

 
“Yeah, good old Harry,” my opponent reminisced. “Kept a diary, Harry did. And you were on every page. It was all he wanted in life, to find your old man. He wanted to tell you the truth about what happened back then, and how it all turned out. ’Cause he figured you deserved to know.” He gave the words a sour twist. “Damned old fool.”

  The thought kept nearly dropping me: the notion, previously unimagined, of a life lived in service to the child I had been. But while he’d been talking, the monster before me had also been climbing the stairs, and now he was nearly on me.

  I could almost hear his heart beating, feel his short, hot exhalations on my face. Then the cellar door opened, metal latch clicking; not hooked anymore, I realized. Because this guy had already come through, slipped the hook with his handy-dandy strip of celluloid.

  At the click he turned alertly, scuttled back downstairs, the gun in his hand. “Make a peep and I’ll shoot whoever it is in the face,” he grated, and moved out of sight across that newly finished floor.

  Without thinking I rushed down the steps after him, in time to see him backing toward me again, hands raised, the gun now dangling from one of them. Coming toward him was Lian Ash, the weapon in his hand the twin to the one in my own. I left something for you…

  But Lian had kept something too; good for him.

  Suddenly his meeting with Wade took on a new meaning. Lian had bought the guns from Wade. Suspecting… or had he known? “Get out of the way, Jacobia,” Mr. Ash told me. “Quick, now.”

  But not quick enough. A second later my personal nightmare had an arm around my throat; his other hand pressed what felt like the end of a cannon barrel to my forehead. Worse, when he turned, he slammed me against the wall hard before he dragged me partway up the stairs again.

  And that was bad, but much worse was the whole world tilting abruptly, whirling and spinning, so that without warning, six images of Lian Ash turned like a nightmare Ferris wheel at the foot of the stairs.

  “Hi,” I gasped, trying and failing to make the images one.

  “Hi,” said the turning wheel of faces. So dizzy…

  Still halfway up the stairs and in the madman’s grip, I felt myself being held at arm’s length like a rag doll and shaken. “Shut up! Get up here, old man, or I’ll—”

  My captor shoved me against the wall, my head smacking it so hard I heard plaster crack, then flung me away. By then I had such vertigo I could barely tell up from down.

  “I said come here!” he shouted at Mr. Ash. He was losing it.

  But I wasn’t; losing it, I mean. Even then, to my own immense surprise, I was still in the game. Hill country, tenements, waitressing, numbers running, getting Sam out of the city, even Victor: sometimes all you can do in this world is hang on. Just… hang on.

  I’d gotten into the habit. And I hadn’t taken all that target practice for nothing. The question still was, was the damn gun loaded?

  Screw it. If it went off when I fired it, we would know. Six whirling faces and pairs of eyes saw the gun in my hand, widened startledly, narrowed in scornful amusement.

  “Okay, hand it over.” As I’d thought, it was a .32 semiauto, nothing special but plenty for my purposes. Only I couldn’t…

  Six hands reached out, the whole world whirling.

  “No.” I couldn’t get the damned thing level, couldn’t even figure out which direction was level.

  “Go on, now,” I gasped, “don’t make me—”

  But he wasn’t having any. To him, I must’ve looked ridiculous. “I’ll have the last laugh, you know,” he smirked. “It’s too late, now.”

  Somehow he was above me on the stairs; I must have fallen when he flung me away from himself. He took a step down toward me, and another. In my dizzy vision his shoe was huge, as if it might crush me. I could see through the spinning balusters to the other faces, too, tumbling below.

  “You look like your mom,” said the voice at the foot of the stairs. Ash, I remembered. Lian Ash.

  The inside of my head whirled anew, words forming out of the sound of the voice and from some memory I couldn’t quite catch. And then I could, the recollection crystalizing in a burst of all the word games I’d been hearing Sam and Maggie play for so long.

  Scrabble, anagrams, synonyms and homonyms. Words spinning. Falling together, mingling with that voice in a dizzy rush.

  Lian… lean. Tip. Ash… tree. Tiptree.

  Six guns materialized, inches from me. “Bitch,” someone said. No soul in that voice. “Little bitch.”

  “No,” Jacob Tiptree said. I’d found him at last.

  “You,” I whispered.

  Alive… But I’d found him, I knew with a rush of drowning sorrow, in the moment before my death.

  Soundlessly the world exploded.

  Hot. Wet. Red.

  The sound I didn’t hear blew into my head like a cleansing wind, scouring away nausea, dizziness, everything, leaving in its place a huge emptiness that hung there for a moment, sharp and pure.

  Then the world rushed in: the man who had said he was Harry Markle crumpled onto me, bleeding. I pushed him away hard and he rolled off. His right eye was gone, and that is all I am going to say about that.

  But I’d never fired at him. Someone else had. A voice came from below; gratefully I focused on it. “Just like your mother,” the voice said, as footsteps mounted the stairs. “You have her eyes.”

  A long, ghastly sharp straight razor slid from the sleeve of the crumpled man who had called himself Harry Markle. An NYPD gold shield lay on the stair by the body. Number 1905. Lian Ash picked it up as he shoved the body aside, stepped over it toward me.

  The weapon in Ash’s other hand matched the one in my own. He had fired the shot, I realized belatedly, not me.

  The razor’s glint disappeared back up the sleeve as the body on the stairs lurched once, convulsively, and tumbled. The sound was like a sack of something heavy and wet thumping end-over-end. Turning from it as Mr. Ash helped me down step by step, I flashed back: Lifting me…

  But that was then and this was now, as we reached the foot of the stairs and the man standing in front of me realized: I knew who he was. “I saw you through the kitchen window,” he told me, “when I was out in the yard. You were putting that big gun away in the mantel.”

  Releasing me, he stepped back to look at me assessingly. “Unwise, I thought.”

  “Yes.” There was an understatement. He was good, I realized, at understatement. I let a breath out. “I guess it was dumb, huh?”

  Which was when it hit me that I’d had it all, as Sam would have said, bass-ackwards. “Did you,” I asked slowly, “ever send me any cards? Or a hundred dollars in an envelope, once?”

  He looked strangely at me. “No. I didn’t. Never anything at all.”

  “I see. No, don’t apologize. I just needed to know.” So it was true, the idea of a life lived in service to that child. And to the woman I was now. The man called Lian Ash wasn’t the last surviving important person in Harry Markle’s sad life. I was. The monster had been hunting me.

  “You knew the real Harry was dead?”

  He shook his head. “I knew he wasn’t active, not why. We old fugitives tend to keep abreast of these things.”

  Yeah, I’ll bet. Like Jemmy Wechsler, who kept his ear to the ground so obsessively, it was a wonder it didn’t sprout roots.

  “Once Harry was out of the picture, I figured it was safe to get a little closer to you.” He winked at me. Then he grew serious again. “Till then he was probably watching out for guys like me who might show up in Eastport, try to make contact. From what I heard he’d made quite a hobby out of me. So I stayed in Machias, laid low.”

  “And you knew this guy wasn’t Harry Markle?”

  “I didn’t at first. Scared the heck out of me when I heard somebody by that name was around. I thought he must’ve found out I was here, after all. Didn’t want him to see me, of course.”

  “Then why’d you buy those guns from Wade, if you weren’t sus
picious?”

  He shrugged. “One for me, and one for my old landlady, Mrs. Sprague. Always figured she needed one around. Opportunity came up so I took it.”

  His eyes met mine. Blue, like mine. “Later I made a point of getting a look at him. Then I knew it wasn’t Markle, but if I said so I’d have to say how I knew. Besides, the only thing I could think of, he was another cop, and it was some kind of trap for that other fellow Markle had been chasing.”

  He glanced toward the motionless man in my hallway. “I thought he was one of the good guys, whoever he really was. And I was wrong.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” Boy, was I. “When were you planning to tell me the truth about yourself? Or did you ever intend to?”

  “That’s what I came back to do,” he replied quietly. “I’d been afraid to, you see, for so long.”

  That I might reject him? Or turn him in to the authorities, maybe. “And you weren’t anymore?”

  A short laugh. “Oh, yes. I was afraid. But driving away this afternoon, it occurred to me, I’d just put a gun in my daughter’s hand in case she needed it.” His tone darkened. “I left my little girl alone to fend for herself. And I ran. Just like before.”

  “So you came back.” A silence between us. Then: “Give me the other weapon, please,” I said. “Please—”

  What should I call him — Dad? I didn’t think so. “Jacob, give me that gun. We need to go out to the kitchen and put this—”

  The second weapon, the one I hadn’t fired. “…away.”

  My mental processes were kicking in with a vengeance, maybe because my body was getting used to shocks: mental, physical, and emotional. I took the gun from his hands, wiped it and gripped it as if I were firing it.

  An excess of caution, probably. No one would question the story I was planning to tell. But I wasn’t taking chances, now. Stepping over the motionless man, I made it almost to the kitchen door before a sound made me turn again. The man on the floor rose with nightmare smoothness. In his bloody hand, a razor…

  And that face. Half the brain behind it is gone, probably. A layman’s diagnosis, not the way Victor would’ve phrased it at all. But accurate phrasing was the smallest of my worries as I stood staring, momentarily paralyzed with fright.