Crawlspace

by Sarah Graves

  And in her annoyance over all these things, she had forgotten about the compressor. “Dumb, dumb …”

  “What?” asked Ellie, but Jake was too vexed to answer. Even from this high above it, she could see that the machine the men had delivered featured a large metal intake hopper on one side and seventy-five feet of wide-bore, black corrugated plastic hose on the other.

  A hose with a plastic nozzle on it, just as required. The trouble was, the compressor was way down there, but the insulation bales that needed to go into the hopper were all up here.

  “Hmm,” she commented thoughtfully, which made Ellie look cautious.

  “Jake,” said the pretty redhead in a warning tone born of experience.

  Jake wasn’t listening. The hose was plenty long enough to reach up here; she could still stick its nozzled business end into the third-floor walls to fill them with heat-saving material just as she’d planned, no problem at all.

  But she was pretty sure she couldn’t throw a bale out the window and hit the hopper with it, even if she could figure a way to get the plastic to come off the bale as it descended.

  She could throw one out the window and not hit the hopper, though, and a bale of what was basically shredded paper couldn’t do too much more than bounce at the bottom, could it?

  Surely not. And then while she ran the hose, Ellie could just go down there and put the dropped insulation bale where it belonged, into the compressor’s maw.

  “Jake,” Ellie said even more warningly, but Jake just waved her off, experimentally hefting a bale.

  It was a foot square, three feet long, and surprisingly heavy. Solid as a brick, too, in its blue plastic wrapper, almost pressurized-feeling, as if the contents were trying hard to burst out at her.

  Downstairs, the phone began ringing. Jake ignored it as, with the bale in her arms, she staggered over to the window and raised the sash with her elbow, and gave the bale a shove.

  “Wow,” said Ellie as the bale toppled out.

  They watched it fall. As Jake had expected, it missed the hopper, dropping straight down to hit the ground just a foot or so away from the compressor.

  But it didn’t bounce. Instead, with a short, sharp pop that sounded like big trouble—and was—the insulation bale exploded.

  Gray stuff spewed up from the burst blue plastic wrapper as if shot out of a cannon. An aerosol of pale gray insulation flew up past the third-floor window and just kept on going.

  Jake felt her mouth drop open in awe as the stuff spread out over the neighbors’ lawns, wherever it wasn’t blocked by treetops. Where it was blocked, it snagged in the high branches and began fluttering in the breeze.

  Fortunately, none of it landed on the rosebushes next door, because they were already burlap-wrapped. And that, as far as Jake could tell, was the only fortunate thing about the entire event.

  “You know,” Ellie said thoughtfully, “maybe that wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Right,” Jake said, as below, a familiar shape came around the corner of the house.

  Thickly covered with a truly enormous amount of fluffy gray stuff, the shape strongly resembled the Abominable Snowman. Then, slowly, it looked up and saw them.

  Jake recognized the figure. Under all the abominableness, it was her father, and despite his usual unflappable good nature, he did not look happy.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “No kidding,” said Ellie.

  But then that phone started ringing again.

  JAKE HAD A HUSBAND, A FATHER, A GROWN SON, AND A stepmother who was also her housekeeper living with her in the big old house on Key Street.

  But, as often happened, when she wanted one of them, nobody was around.

  Racing down the two flights of stairs from the third floor, she noticed in passing that her son Sam’s bedroom door was wide open and that his bed was neatly made. Like the dogs’ anxiety to go out earlier and their not having been fed, this was unusual.

  Sam, who was doing this year’s autumn college semester here at home, was ordinarily very responsible about his animal chores and casual about his bed-making ones. But in her hurry she didn’t pause to wonder about it.

  That phone …

  She took the last few steps at a leap, sprinted into the telephone alcove between the dining room and the kitchen, and glanced at the caller ID. Undisclosed.

  Answering, she spoke fiercely. “Stop calling me. Do you hear me? You stop calling here, I mean it, or I’m going to … What? Say that again, please?”

  Bella Diamond peered in, her grape-green eyes inquisitive. Tall and rawboned with henna-dyed hair skinned back tightly into a rubber band, she smoothed her hands over the front of her white bib apron, then returned to her morning’s task of cleaning the kitchen even though it was already so spotless that in a pinch, organ transplant surgery could have been done in it. Bella was the teensiest bit devoted to household hygiene, if by that one meant obsessed.

  “Sorry,” Jake said distractedly into the phone, “but I was expecting …”

  A death-threat caller.

  “You are … Who did you say?” she asked, still perplexed. “And who did you say you wanted to—”

  The caller pronounced his name again; the light dawned. “Oh, Chip Hahn! Of course I—”

  Outside the dining room window, the Abominable Snowman had lost most of his fluffiness. He looked like Jake’s father again, a lean, clean old man in faded overalls and a red flannel shirt, his stringy gray ponytail fastened back with a leather thong. But he still didn’t look happy.

  “Of course I remember you, Chip,” said Jake. “But you’re where? The police station? Here?”

  She listened some more. Not much that came out of the phone sounded sensible, though. Mostly she understood that someone had gone missing; the rest was panicked babbling.

  “Chip? Listen, you just stay there and I’ll come and … No. No, I’m not hanging up on you, I’m just … Stop. No. Chip, listen to me, now, I—”

  She took a deep breath. “Chipper—Will. You. Shut. Up?”

  So he did. And then she did hang up.

  BELLA DIAMOND WATCHED JAKE AND ELLIE HURRY OUT OF the house, then lifted a large wooden box down from a pantry shelf. Her own feelings of pleasure at the younger women’s liveliness mingled with regret that she could no longer share in it.

  Or so it seemed. She had celebrated her sixtieth birthday a few months earlier, not that sixty was old, especially nowadays. But with age and experience had come caution, and now she worried that caution might be hardening into timidity.

  Lately she feared heights, spiders, snakes, even the pilot light on the gas stove. And darkness—especially that. Going down into the cellar after nightfall had become a trial, because the string used to pull the light on was located several paces from the foot of the cellar stairs.

  Paces that had to be taken blind, with no idea what horror might be reaching stealthily out of the darkness at her …

  Bella shuddered just thinking about it, at the same time as she made scornful fun of the thought. She was turning into a scaredy-cat, an idea she would have pooh-poohed vigorously only a few years ago.

  Still, right now there was work to be done. Turning to it with relief, she peered into the box, where a whole pollock, split and cleaned, lay in a bed of rock salt. Its preparation, at which Bella was an expert, was a legacy from early Eastport, at a time when refrigeration was unknown and ice a luxury.

  Once the large white-fleshed fish had absorbed all the salt it could—Bella knew just by looking at it when it was right—it would be hung out on the clothesline with two clothespins, to dry until it had a texture somewhere between leather and cardboard, at which point it could be stored for the winter.

  Later it would be used to make dried-fish dinner, with boiled potatoes and fried pork scraps. Bella smiled, anticipating this; her new husband, Jacob Tiptree, liked hearty fare, plain cooking, and plenty of it.

  She hadn’t yet tried serving him what the old guar
d in Eastport still called huff-and-puff—potatoes and turnips mashed together with bacon fat—but sooner or later she was going to get her nerve up, she resolved, and do it. But that notion brought her thoughts around to her own cowardice, and to Jacobia again.

  She closed the lid on the fish box and returned it to the pantry, wondering why she had always felt so comfortable with Jacobia before, but not anymore. Something about being a stepmother had thrown her off, Bella decided.

  Of the two jobs, being a housekeeper was easier. And being a mother-in-law and a stepmother … well.

  She just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. Returning to the big old-fashioned kitchen with its high, bare windows, pine wainscoting, and scuffed hardwood floor, she reflexively touched one of the small gold hoop earrings she wore.

  Anne Dodd had given them to her as a birthday present, long ago. And Anne, who had been Bella’s oldest friend in the world, would know what to do.

  How to reach out to Jacobia, to signal a willingness to try—what? Anne would know.

  But Anne Dodd was dead now and would not be offering any more opinions on anything. Fingering the earring sadly, Bella reminded herself to get safety catches for these, her most treasured possessions.

  Well, aside from her wedding ring, of course. She’d been wearing the earrings for six weeks, ever since Anne’s body was found, and they hadn’t fallen out or gotten lost yet.

  That didn’t mean they couldn’t, though. In fact, Bella had her hand on the phone to call the jewelry store in Bangor and ask about safety guards for the earrings, whether she could just go in and pick a pair or if there were other considerations.

  But just then Jacob came inside with a few lingering fluffs of insulation material still clinging to him, and in her haste to remedy that situation she put the telephone down and forgot about it.

  Although not about her own decision, that in the personal courage area—especially as it had to do with her new stepdaughter, Jacobia—she was going to have to try to do better.

  JAKE TIPTREE’S BIG OLD EASTPORT HOUSE WAS A WHITE clapboard 1823 Federal with three full floors plus a two-story ell, forty-eight antique double-hung windows, each with its own pair of dark green shutters, and three tall red-brick chimneys.

  The bricks needed pointing, the flashing around the chimneys needed tar, and as she backed the car out of the driveway she saw that the whole house needed painting again, too.

  None of which came as a surprise. Moose Island, where Eastport, Maine, had been located for two-hundred-plus years, was a large granite rock sticking out of cold salt water. On it, an old wooden building was as tricky and difficult to maintain as a wooden boat.

  The only difference was that if the house got a hole in it, the people inside wouldn’t drown. Or anyway not immediately.

  “Who’s Chip Hahn?” Ellie asked as they pulled away down Key Street.

  Jake sighed, eyeing the old green shutters in the rearview mirror. They looked as if they had a disgusting disease. Paint, putty, scrapers, she thought.

  Plus someone to go up on a ladder and get the shutters and stack them in the workroom. But not until after the insulation material got used up. Until then, there wouldn’t be space up there to put shutters or anything else.

  “He was Sam’s friend in Manhattan,” she answered. “He lived with his family in our building.”

  It had been an Upper East Side penthouse with a doorman, a concierge, a private elevator, and a view, all so exclusive you practically had to show a pedigree to get in. That or a brokerage statement plus the deed to your place in the Hamptons.

  “But I didn’t know much about them, and anyway, that was what, a dozen years ago?”

  In those days, she’d been a freelance financial manager to the filthy rich, many of whom turned out to be so crooked, they made the Soprano family look like the Brady Bunch. At that time she was the only money professional in the city with not one but two well-connected, high-octane criminal defense attorneys’ home phone numbers on her speed dial.

  Her neighbors in the exclusive building would no doubt have been horrified had they known. Or perhaps not.

  Anyway, the kind of clients she’d had then plus long workdays, way more money than she could spend, and a brilliant neurosurgeon husband so chronically unfaithful that his nickname around the hospital where he worked was Vlad the Impaler hadn’t done much for her neighborly instincts.

  Or for her son’s well-being. “Chip spent a lot of his time at our place,” she added, “hanging out with Sam. Which turned out to be a blessing.”

  By age ten, Sam had quite naturally been spoiled, scared, and furious, a perfect candidate for membership in a gang of preadolescent boys even angrier and more disaffected than he was.

  Also, he’d had not-yet-diagnosed dyslexia. If you want to make the child of a couple of high-IQ parents feel worthless, try that one. “Still, I’m a little surprised Chip even remembers us,” Jake went on.

  One day back then, Sam had gone missing, and when he finally came home, she learned that he and his pals had been riding the tops of subway cars for eighteen hours, in a contest to see who could stay on the longest. Sam had won, but in the process he lost six pounds and had to be hospitalized for severe exhaustion, dehydration, and an electrical burn that just missed being fatal.

  Slowing at the foot of Key Street, Jake glanced to her right at the Motel East, a long, low wooden building perched over the bay’s edge. A new, sleek black Volvo sedan with New York plates sat in the parking lot.

  It was the only car there, since what there was of the tourist season in Eastport having ended a month earlier. “I’ll bet that’s his.”

  At the stop sign she turned left, then left again into one of the angled parking spots fronting the Eastport police station, across Water Street from the Happy Crab Bar and Grille. On the Crab’s sign, a cheerful crustacean teetered gaily on the rim of a boiling kettle.

  “But what’s Chip doing way up here at this time of year?” she wondered aloud.

  Once the Frontier Bank building, the Eastport police station resembled a red-brick wedding cake with its tall, arched windows on granite-slab lintels, gobs of ornately carved stone trim, and massive stone steps leading up to the front door. The bank’s old alarm box, helpfully labeled Bank Alarm in large white letters, still hung beneath a front window.

  “Anyway, I don’t know Chip’s whole story,” Jake went on as she and Ellie got out of the car. “He was five or six years older than Sam. A real nerd, I thought back then. But he was very good to Sam.”

  And good for him, she added mentally, recalling Chip Hahn’s pear-shaped body, thick glasses, and earnest expression.

  “If you needed to sum Chip up in a word, it was ‘podgy,’ ” she said. “And you wouldn’t think a kid like that would be good at sports, but he was, and that’s how he took Sam under his wing. Played catch with him, took him to ball games and so on.”

  They climbed the police station’s half-dozen granite front steps.

  “Chip taught Sam to ice-skate down at Rockefeller Center one Christmas Eve, and after that he took him out for dinner at the Russian Tea Room. It was,” Jake added with a half-wondering pang of nostalgia, “before it closed.”

  When his father and I were too busy working, she thought but did not add.

  “Chip’s family had a big resort cabin on a lake somewhere in upstate New York, too. One summer Sam learned to sail there, and water-ski.”

  At the police station’s big glass front door they paused. “That’s how he found out he liked boats.”

  Which for Sam had turned out to be a lifesaver; nowadays he was in school for an engineering degree and was already licensed by the Coast Guard to pilot any number of heavy work vessels. He wanted someday to own a tugboat fleet, which as an alternative to drinking himself to death, Jake thought was a fine plan.

  “You know …” Ellie began as they entered the police station’s cramped vestibule.

  “Yes,” said Jake, knowing Ellie’s concer
n without having to be told. “Don’t worry.”

  About what they might be getting into, she meant. Over the past few years, together she and Ellie had enjoyed quite a career looking unofficially into local bad deeds, even clearing up a few when no one else could.

  But a recent episode involving a kidnapping, a very bad guy, and a final, frightening twist that neither of them could quite manage to forget had spoiled their appetite for other people’s business.

  For a while, anyway. “No more snooping,” Jake said as they passed through the vestibule and then a second set of glass doors. Finally: “There he is.”

  Inside, Chip Hahn sat nervously on a wooden bench, across from the high marble counter where once thrifty Eastport ladies had waited to deposit their savings into the Christmas club. The counter now held a display box of neighborhood-watch brochures.

  Chip looked up when he heard the door. He wore a thin polished-cotton jacket over a tired-looking white shirt, no tie, and dark brown slacks. A pair of black wing tips were on his feet.

  He’d lost some of his baby fat since the last time Jake had seen him, but his hands still made the anxious, automatic washing motions she remembered from a dozen years ago, and his round face looked guilty as hell about something.

  Uh-oh, Jake thought as she spotted this. Chip jumped up when he saw her, his expression changing swiftly to one of relief.

  “Hi. Thanks for coming,” he began, sticking his hand out as he smiled uncertainly, looking from Jake to Ellie and back again. But Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, interrupted this greeting impatiently.

  “Is everyone taking stupid pills around here today, or what?” Bob demanded from behind his desk.

  He was pink, plump, and balding, with pale blue eyes, a few thin strands of blond hair combed over his shining forehead, and small rosebud lips that did not look at all as if they belonged on a police officer.

  A child beauty-pageant contestant, maybe. “Because first I got a guy,” he went on abrasively, “who said his car was stolen, and I drove around half last night looking for it.”

  He eyed Chip suspiciously, as if the young man now standing across from him might be responsible for the missing vehicle. “But then a couple hours later he calls again, he says the car’s right back where he left it.”