by Sarah Graves
But my new partner, a very skinny, dark-haired young woman with chapped lips and chewed fingernails, already knew real CPR and—this was the crucial part for me—could do it on the doll.
“Don’t worry,” Therese pronounced as we knelt on opposite sides of the floor mat. Called Resusci-Annie, the rubber model was anatomically designed so you could practice all the maneuvers of bringing a nearly dead person back to life without risking the opposite by practicing on a live one.
“I’ll walk you through it,” Therese told me. “It’s easy after you get the hang of it.”
Right, and tightrope walking was probably easy too when you’d been at it for a while. But if you put a foot wrong you’d only be killing yourself.
“You’ll probably never have to do it in real life anyway,” Therese added.
Famous last words. But it was after all only a rubber doll. “If you can do it, why are you here?” I asked her.
Therese shrugged, wincing at the hard concrete floor under her bony knees. If there was an extra half-ounce of flesh on this girl anywhere, I couldn’t see it.
“Renew my certification,” she replied, pushing on the doll’s forehead and pulling on its chin. Its neck arced sharply up into what seemed an uncomfortable and possibly even crippling angle. I mentioned this hesitantly.
“Pine box is uncomfortable too, and it’s where the victim’s going, you don’t get that airway open,” she replied.
Tough little nut. She pinched the doll’s nose and blew into its mouth. The rubber chest rose with a whooshing sound.
She swabbed the doll’s mouth with an alcohol pad. “Now you.”
She had sad pink-rimmed eyes and bad skin. “Mostly everyone here,” she informed me, amplifying her answer to my earlier question, “is a cop, EMT, or a nurse. Couple college students,” she added, gesturing at Sam and his partner. “You have to keep taking these courses to stay certified if you are on a health-care job.”
“Oh.” I assessed the doll. At least I wouldn’t be in danger of lacerating its liver.
“What’d the cops say when they brought Gosling in?” I asked, trying to sound casual and hoping she’d forget I hadn’t been part of her audience earlier.
“That they knew who did it.”
Around us other students were blowing into dolls’ rubber lips, compressing their rubber chests, and shouting the CPR formula’s question at them. “Annie, are you all right?”
The dolls didn’t reply. “How did they know that?” I asked Therese.
Steeling myself, I followed the other students’ example and tried to inflate our doll’s lungs. No good; it was like blowing against a brick wall.
“Here,” Therese said. “Like this.”
She pulled sort of up on the jaw and sort of out. I tried again without result. Apparently when I’d done it in real life I’d just had good luck. Unlike now, until finally:
“All right, Annie,” I snarled. “Do you want to die? Because if you don’t, you’d better cooperate.”
Then I pushed on the doll’s forehead and yanked on its jaw, meanwhile pinching on its nose and jamming my lips to its hard, inhuman-feeling mouth. Whereupon to my surprise my exhaled breath rushed easily into the doll’s rubber lungs.
“Hey, you did it,” Therese congratulated me. “Now press on the chest like this.”
She demonstrated, meanwhile going on with her reply. I got the feeling she didn’t often have anyone to talk to.
“The cops said everybody they’d questioned so far had named one guy, this George somebody? As the guy who wanted Gosling dead? But no one wanted to? Name him, I mean?”
Somewhere, Therese had picked up the tic of ending nearly every sentence with a question mark. And now that she’d strayed from a topic about which her profession made her feel confident, the tic was surfacing. Ellie called the question habit an insecure person’s way of making sure you agreed with whatever they were saying, before going on. I just found it annoying.
I didn’t like the information Therese was giving me either. If lots of people named George as the man with the motive, even reluctantly, there’d be a few who would do it in court, too. The whole fiasco was closing around him like a trap.
Correcting my cardiac massage position, Therese put the heel of my right hand on the lower third of the doll’s breastbone. “You want to squeeze the blood out into the vessels, not break a rib and push the sharp end into the victim’s heart,” she lectured me.
Great. Not only was George in even hotter water than I’d realized, it was starting to look as if any dying person I might encounter would be better off taking his chances with St. Peter.
“Didn’t anyone mention anyone else who might have wanted to kill Hector Gosling?” I asked. Because it was still a case of the more reasonable doubt the better.
“Like I said, no one wanted to mention anyone at all, from what I heard,” Therese replied. “But when the cops asked a direct question? Who wanted Gosling dead the most?”
She put her own hands on the doll’s chest and pushed. “It was this guy George whoever whose name kept coming up.”
I wanted to ask more but the class was nearly over, Victor strolling around to observe how the students were doing.
“I hope you’re not planning on meeting a nearly dead person, Jacobia,” was all he said when he got to us.
Me, too.
But as was true of almost everything that overlapped my life with Victor’s: drat the luck.
“He kept blathering on about how crucial everything was, how dumb it would be to do it wrong, and he kept adding unappetizing details,” I reported indignantly to Ellie later when we met in the parlor of Harlequin House.
I opened a fresh trash bag. If we wanted to hear gossip we couldn’t just grab my tools and go; we had to hang around.
Meanwhile I was dying to tell her about Jan Jesperson, but I couldn’t. Clarissa Arnold was a friend, but she was also a tiger when her instructions weren’t followed.
I turned my mind from the topic. “Such as,” I went on, “the fact that you’re not only giving the person air, with rescue breathing. When you blow into their lungs you’re also removing excess acid from the body by way of what he called waste gases.”
I swept up yet another dustpanful of sawdust and dumped it into the bag, along with some wood splinters. “Which is just the person’s exhaled breath,” I added.
Put that way it didn’t sound so bad, but Victor’s commentary had not made doing actual cardio-pulmonary resuscitation seem attractive in the slightest. Which I supposed it wouldn’t be; the details of my own last try had faded mercifully in my memory.
“Apparently if the victim’s blood stays too acid you can’t resuscitate them at all,” I continued. “As if their heart seizing up like an old engine isn’t enough of a problem.”
I dumped more sawdust into the bag. “Not that you can do anything about that, either. The acid, I mean.”
Ellie listened patiently as I vented the nervous energy I’d absorbed in the firehouse. Most of the professional medical folks and paramedics had been weirdly cheerful, as if eager for a shot at a real tragedy; between that and my newly acquired merit badge in housebreaking over at Jan’s place, I was jazzed.
“In the hospital they give a medical version of bicarbonate of soda to treat the extra acid.” I scraped up another dustpanful of scraps. “But who except ambulance drivers goes around with any of that?”
The bag was full; I twisted the top. “I think he just told us so we’d know how futile our efforts are likely to be.”
Ellie made a noise of assent. “Anyway,” I continued, “mostly what I learned is, the doll’s lips taste like rubber and rubbing alcohol. Bleaggh.”
The taste wouldn’t go away and neither would the disaster we’d made of the Harlequin House parlor. It was early afternoon, we’d torn out everything that had to go, and sunshine streaming in lit up every chunk of plaster, rag of torn-off wallpaper, and scraped, sanded, or otherwise paint-denuded patch of woodwo
rk.
“What a mess,” said Ellie as she contemplated it.
Or I think it’s what she said. To keep her little passenger safe from toxic materials she wore a yellow paper jumpsuit that covered her from neck to ankles, rubber gloves, and a green-and-black respirator that made her look like a bug from outer space. Paper boots and a hair-covering paper cap completed her outfit.
But even through all that I could tell she had her game face on. If anyone here knew anything at all about Gosling’s murder, she meant to discover it.
And so did everyone else. The police were finished with the scene examination, the smoke smell from the near-disastrous fire of the day before had been aired out, and the house was full of volunteers with rumor on their tongues and fresh scandal on their agenda. Many of them came shamelessly up to Ellie, angling for new info, and I’m sure I couldn’t have been as patient with them as she was.
“You poor thing,” crooned Siss Moore, her eyes glittering. “Have they really charged him? And what happens next?”
From the hall where a lunch was being set up came an alert silence. Enquiring minds wanted to know. Ellie stopped shoveling plaster bits into a trash bag and pulled off her respirator.
“Well,” she began slowly.
There were a dozen tasks in progress in the rest of the house: floor sanding and woodwork stripping, doorknob replacement and tin-ceiling (in the kitchen) patching, replacement of sections of the wainscoting in the library, and even repairs to the dumbwaiter from the butler’s pantry up to the second floor.
But it all stopped dead as everyone within earshot waited to hear how Ellie would answer.
She paused another moment. Then, “I’m not sure,” she confessed.
A little exhalation of disappointment went through the old house, an oh! of gratification denied.
“A lot of court hearings,” she added. She was a genius at answering politely while revealing nothing. “It’s all very confusing.”
No kidding. Speaking of rumors, I hadn’t passed on to Ellie what Therese Chamberlain had said, either. It was just more gossip, this time filtered through hospital shoptalk. And I had already decided not to pass on bad news unless it was news we could do something about.
Meanwhile Clarissa had spoken to Ellie that morning, too, to let her know George’s bail request had been denied. It was what I’d expected; it’s rare for someone to get bail on an actual murder charge. But then Clarissa had added something else, that I hadn’t expected. George had instructed that no one be allowed to visit him, not even Ellie.
I supposed it was understandable; who wants his pregnant wife hanging around a jail? But it put an awful crimp in Ellie’s effort to stay upbeat, one she was attempting to get over now by pursuing her snooping plan with even more determination.
And that meant listening to everyone. “If the police want to arrest somebody for poisoning Hector Gosling, they should try that housekeeper of his, Ginger Tolliver,” Siss Moore sniffed.
A recently retired high school teacher, Siss was a black-haired woman with big teeth and an authoritative manner. “I knew her in school, she was a man-chaser then,” Siss went on. “And I wouldn’t put it a bit past her.”
Dumping an armload of peeled-off wallpaper into my trash bag, I turned to Siss. “You don’t mean she was after Hector?”
Siss made a face. “No. Of course not. It was some fellow Hector found out about, started coming by the house. Sweet on Ginger, or so he said. Until Hector noticed it and put a stop to it. Some sailor off a ship,” she sniffed disapprovingly.
“How’d he do that?” I asked. “Stop it, I mean. And why?”
But Siss didn’t know. Evidently if Ginger wanted something, that was more than enough reason why it should have a stop put to it, in Siss’s opinion.
“That girl never had any use for the advice of her elders,” Siss finished, “and look what she’s come to.”
I didn’t know what she’d come to and was about to ask. But Siss went on talking. “At any rate, Ellie, I’m sorry for your trouble, but I must tell you, you belong home in bed. In my day, women didn’t go out in your condition.”
In your day they didn’t vote or own property either, I was on the verge of retorting. But before I could, Siss bustled off to position her rain cloud over somebody else.
A few minutes later, though, she was back, and this time she cornered me. “How is my young friend Tommy Pockets?” she wanted to know.
“The same,” I told her. “Working, trying to make money.”
Siss looked regretful. “I’m afraid I pushed him too hard in school. When I go by the gas station Tommy’s never the one who pumps. I think,” she confessed, “he’s trying to avoid me.”
According to Sam, that was the situation with half the students in Eastport. “Tommy has responsibilities, you know.” Something about the urgency of her interest made me want to defend him.
“That’s a cop-out,” Siss replied tartly. “A reason not to try.” But then her face softened. “Although not in Tommy’s case, perhaps. Well, tell him I said hello.”
Her gentle tone reminded me: nobody’s all bad. But then as if deliberately to dilute the effect, Siss added a postscript.
“Don’t forget,” she snapped, “what I’ve told you about that Tolliver girl.”
“So, was I right?” Ellie murmured a little later as we stood six newly removed window sashes against the wall. From there they would be worked on by whoever was in charge of reglazing them; not, thank goodness, moi.
But Harry Leonard, a local WWII veteran who lived on the mainland in a brand-new manufactured home that required no maintenance at all, wasn’t burned out on window glazing. He bustled in, spied the windows, and whipped out his cordless putty-removing tool, and if I had one I wouldn’t be so burned out, either, I thought.
He set the tip of the tool along one pane, pushed a button, and whirr! A whole strip of old putty turned to powder and fell out onto the floor.
Bzzt! Another strip went. Harry was like a kid with a new toy. A great new toy; in less than a minute he’d removed one pane and was starting on the next.
I resolved to purchase one of these gadgets for myself, as I took Ellie aside.
“One suspect, coming up,” I replied cheerfully to her question. Because I had to admit she was right; the Ginger Tolliver story was worth pursuing. Maybe it wasn’t as good as what I’d discovered about Jan Jesperson, but there was no such thing as too many other people with good motives.
I propped up the final window and after that we wiped down all the parlor’s other surfaces with a dust mop and a second time with a tack cloth, dumped the rags and cloths into the trash bags, and tied the bags’ tops.
“Okay,” I said, pleased in spite of myself. “Now we’re ready to make an even bigger mess.”
Because much as I didn’t enjoy being in Harlequin House, now—the little room where we’d found the bodies yawned darkly at me, its repaired door ajar—I do like the part of a job when the prep work is done and the debris all cleared. The labor of priming and finishing is still to come, with its trials and missteps. I once painted an entire wall before I realized I was doing it out of the wrong paint bucket; to this day that bedroom has three satin-finish surfaces and a glossy one. But for a glorious instant the old Harlequin House parlor seemed cleansed of its past.
“Jake, look.” Ellie’s voice came from the little chamber I’d begun calling, in my own mind, the dead room.
“Ellie, what the heck are you doing in… Oh.”
She’d shoved the old red rug aside and lifted the trapdoor that Trooper Colgate had told me about. I could just glimpse the top rung of a ladder leading down. She put a foot on it.
“Ellie, don’t you dare! We don’t know what’s down there. Or if,” I added, eyeing her shape, “you can get back up again.”
She’d taken off the goggles and respirator again. “All right.” She stood back a little. “You go.”
Sheesh. If there’s anything any higher on my hit
parade of hideousness than an old wooden ladder, it’s one leading down into an area I know nothing about, other than that it’s very dark.
“Ellie, there’s a door to that cellar in the back hall. With nice safe steps leading down. And a handrail.”
“I know that. But there’s also a dozen people out there. I’m sure they’d all like to follow us down, mill around and ask lots of questions, maybe mess up items of interest we might discover.”
I sighed, tried again. That ladder looked awfully rickety. “The cops must’ve looked at the cellar already.”
She made a face. “Sure, and all we have to do is say please, they’ll tell us everything we want to know about it, is that it? I,” she pronounced caustically, “don’t think so.”
The ladder vanished into the velvety blackness about three rungs down. Furthermore, unless you happen to be an agile person it’s not easy stepping onto a ladder from above.
I am not an agile person. But I felt very guilty not telling Ellie about Jan or Therese. And I was curious.
“Oh, all right. Just give me your hand.” I positioned myself beside the ladder and stepped down sideways onto it.
Nervously at first, and then a little more confidently; old it might have been, but that ladder felt solid enough. Also the cops had likely used it too, and it hadn’t collapsed under them.
Turning my mind from the possibility that they’d weakened it just enough to set me up for the big fall, I continued down.
“Maybe this was an escape route for the criminals when Uncle Chester was here,” Ellie theorized from above.
“Or even earlier,” I said. Because another human cargo that got transported through this part of the world, years before some genius realized that the way to make money on booze was to forbid it, had been slaves.
Escaped slaves headed for the freedom of Canada. “Hand me a flashlight, will you?”
Gripping it, I aimed it first at a dirt floor and a granite foundation like the one in my house. Hand-adzed beams, massive old cistern, lots of unpainted shelves along the walls, and . . .
