Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  “Well, there you have it, then,” I said to Ellie. “That’s where Jimmy was, so I guess we’ll know what to tell Sally Crusoe next time she tries to say otherwise.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Ellie concurred. She was rising with an effort. “I guess we will. It’s a good preschool, then, is it?” she asked Maria disarmingly. “Because we are already looking around for one.”

  I happened to know that Ellie meant to keep her child out of school for as long as possible, having herself been packed off at the earliest legal moment. But there was no sense letting Maria know we didn’t believe her; thus the distracting small talk.

  She got up, picked a few dead leaves off a geranium. “Oh, yes. Porter loves it. Don’t you, honey?” The little boy wandered in sleepily to lean against her, clutching her skirt.

  “We trade goat’s milk and vegetables for his tuition, and firewood in the winter,” she went on. She cupped the dead leaves in her palm, probably for deposit in that compost keeper. Heaven forbid a shred of organic matter shouldn’t be recycled. But her hand closed tensely around the leaves and you could sense the relief coming off her in waves as she walked us to the door.

  Minutes later we were backing out the driveway, me feeling anxious to go home and waste a bread crust or something just to prove that I could.

  “I’ll bet she makes them eat their potato skins,” I grumbled as we reached Route 190 and I signaled to turn back toward Eastport.

  “Yup,” Ellie replied distantly. “Go the other way, okay?”

  It was nearly noon. “Ellie, don’t you think you should . . .”

  “Rest?” She snapped the word out. “No. Because it’s almost lunchtime. What do you think they serve for lunch in jail, Jake? Baloney and cheese? Stale chips, instant coffee?”

  At home George got a cooked lunch, say a hot turkey sandwich with stuffing and gravy. Piece of pie, maybe, and fresh coffee.

  A car pulled up behind me. It was the one I’d thought might be following us earlier, a beat-up old black muscle car with a big mismatched front grille and a crack in its tinted windshield, its plate too smeared with grime to read. I didn’t care for it. But when I turned left toward Route 1, it went the other way.

  Ginger Tolliver’s place lay beyond the Route 1 intersection, way up a side road at the far end of Boyden Lake. It was a long drive, deep into the countryside, and Ellie looked pale.

  I pulled over, meaning to take her home.

  “Please,” she said quietly, putting a hand on my arm.

  So I didn’t.

  Chapter 6

  How’d you know Maria was lying?” I asked Ellie as we drove up the winding two-lane that led toward Ginger’s place.

  “The gambling part, of course.” To our left a river bubbled merrily over gleaming rocks; to the right, boulder-studded fields spread uphill to a row of windbreak cedars.

  “I can go along with the woodstove and the icebox full of shorties,” she added. “As long as Jimmy didn’t bring any of the beer or a single stick of firewood.”

  “Yup. That’s what I thought. And unless they were playing for bottle caps Jimmy wasn’t gambling. Maria would as soon toss dollar bills out the window and you can safely assume he doesn’t have a dime that she doesn’t know about.”

  “And three fellows betting aren’t going to let a fourth in just for fun,” Ellie concurred.

  “How about the part about Maria dropping him off and picking him up, though?”

  “That she was at a craft fair meeting?” Ellie shrugged. “I don’t see any problem, there. Or with the fact that Jimmy could have borrowed one of the other guys’ cars. If I tell my friends I was supposed to be with them, I was. You know how it works.”

  “In other words same story as for Jimmy: I was with them. Just a different set of people backing it up for each of them.”

  The road made a snakelike set of wiggles through a sunlit stand of hardwood, the leafless branches gleaming pewter-colored.

  “The minute Sally started telling her latest story, you can be sure Jimmy and Maria’s pals closed ranks around them,” Ellie went on. “A wealthy lady from away implicating an Eastport boy?” She snorted softly. “Now that word’s starting to get out about when Hector died, Jimmy’s buddies and Maria’s, too, will swear on a stack of tide charts that Jimmy and Maria were with them Friday night. Make Sally look like as big an idiot as they can. Which,” she added, “shouldn’t be difficult.”

  Ellie didn’t care for Sally either, since what she’d done to Jimmy she could as easily have done to George. It was a class thing, that the peasants shouldn’t eat so much as an apple from a tree without getting the landowner’s permission.

  “They’ll make Sally look foolish for implying that Jimmy could’ve killed Hector,” I agreed. “But it also screws us up.”

  A woodcock ran out from the underbrush and paused at the gravel edge of the road, eyeing us brightly. With a ridiculously long bill and plump body atop long, sticklike legs, it looked more like a carved bird than like something that lived in nature.

  “Because they did have a motive,” I added. “If they don’t buy that woodlot and Jimmy doesn’t start managing it quick—”

  Cutting on it, I meant, and selling contracts, too, for wood to be cut from it later—

  “—they’ll lose their house,” I said. “And my problem with the whole thing is that Sally’s b.s. comes in so handy for them.”

  “Because we don’t know if their story might be to cover their tracks on Hector or just a hit-back at Sally’s gossip,” Ellie agreed. Then she frowned suddenly.

  “What’s the matter?” I pulled over, startling a wild turkey into emitting a loud gobble! and strutting into the sumac bushes.

  “Nothing.” Tiny beads of sweat glistened on her forehead.

  “You swear, Ellie?” I peered closely at her. “Because I’m telling you, if you have this baby out here in the woods I’ll . . .”

  Well, I didn’t know what I would do so I didn’t finish the threat. She mustered a weak smile.

  “Swear. I said it’ll be a while. I’m just uncomfortable.”

  “Yeah.” I pulled the car back onto the road. “When I was in your boat I started asking Victor for spinal anesthesia at about thirty-six weeks.”

  Actually by that point he’d been threatening to inject the stuff into my brain. There’s a chance the nubile X-ray technician he was dating at the time might’ve added to my distress, too.

  “I hope this kid doesn’t turn out like Victor,” Ellie murmured. “I mean precocious like him.”

  “Awful thought.” Victor had finished college at thirteen and medical school three years later. He’d been the youngest first-year resident his hospital ever had; if anyone complained, they were going to make him get a Ph.D. first, then return to hands-on medical practice.

  But no one did complain. Even back then, Victor could charm the birds out of the trees.

  When he wanted to. “Don’t worry, though,” I told Ellie. “There’s not much chance it’ll turn out like Victor. Mutations like him only happen every billion or so years.”

  She managed another smile. Then: “Jake? How much does it hurt? To have the baby, I mean. Tell the truth.”

  I thought a minute. “Pain’s not what you’ll remember.”

  She glanced at me, scenting evasion. But I saw no point in scaring her since after all there’s no bail-out option. If there were I’d have taken it seconds after I reached the delivery room. I’d have taken heroin too, if any had been on offer.

  On the other hand, it’s evasion that scares me. And Ellie could smell it a mile away.

  “Look,” I relented. “It hurts like a son of a bitch, okay? It really does. But the instant it’s over you won’t care. Trust me on this, you won’t.”

  I was about to go on. But as we reached the road leading into the woods I thought maybe she didn’t want to know about the heroin-desiring portion of the program after all.

  Because all she said was, “Turn here.”

 
Hector Gosling’s ex-housekeeper Ginger Tolliver turned out to be a tall Nordic beauty with masses of braided yellow hair pinned in complicated fashion atop her head. In a red-and-green reindeer sweater and green stretch pants, her appearance suggested skiing and other strenuous winter activities.

  Or it would have except that her left arm ended in a hand so unusual that it was impossible not to look at it.

  “Car accident,” she explained when we’d pulled up into her drive and gotten out. Her place was a trailer on a woodsy cleared spot, with a lake visible through the trees behind it.

  Ginger’s hand was a sort of claw fashioned out of the thumb joint, working pincerlike with what remained of the scarred palm.

  “It’s okay,” she added, seeing my embarrassment when she caught me staring. “Everyone always wants to know.”

  She wore a built-up shoe, too, that didn’t entirely correct her spine’s curvature. Her ice-blue eyes had tight lines at the corners and her mouth betrayed a burden of chronic pain.

  Victor would’ve had a team of specialists lined up in about ten seconds. “Can’t they do some kind of… ?”

  “Surgery?” A brief, bitter laugh. “I’ve had enough surgery. Besides, I don’t have any way to pay for more.”

  She limped ahead of us into a screened porch. “The surgery that might help,” she told us, “is experimental, according to my benefits administrator. And when Medicaid pays, Medicaid calls the tune.”

  We followed her onto the porch. “Sit,” she said brusquely, waving at a pair of plastic lawn chairs alongside hers. “I was out here relaxing. But soon I have to go to a job interview.”

  My surprise must have shown on my face. She gave me a “d’oh” look. “Well, what do you think? Hector’s dead, isn’t he? So I need a new job. I’m not going to retire on a pension, that’s for sure.”

  “Actually that’s what we wanted to ask you about,” Ellie put in. “Hector Gosling being dead.”

  Another look, this time a little less friendly. A yellow cat jumped onto Ginger’s lap and settled there.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think you two were selling Avon,” she said. And especially not you, her look added to me.

  Hey, not everyone can resemble a Viking goddess. It was cold on the porch so my lips were probably pale blue against my ghost-white skin. Any tan I get during the summer fades promptly, any makeup I try stands out like paint on the side of a barn, and my hair probably looked as if it had been styled with an egg beater.

  “Poor kitty,” Ginger told the cat. “But you’re staying out while I’m gone or you’ll claw the furniture.”

  The cat meowed as if in grudging acceptance of this dictum.

  “Anyway,” Ellie said, “we heard Hector wasn’t very nice to you.”

  From the screened porch you could look downhill fifty feet through the birches and some huckleberry shrubbery to the water. A pebble path led to a rickety dock.

  “No. He wasn’t,” Ginger agreed placidly.

  The place was so backwoods-beautiful, it wasn’t obvious at first how desperately poor it was. There was a burn-barrel for the trash, a fraying clothesline with a few rusty pins clipped to it for laundry. Thick sheets of plastic had been affixed with nails and cardboard furring strips to the trailer windows to save on heat.

  “Hector broke up a romance?” I probed. “Because that’s what we heard. It’s what people are saying. Siss Moore, for one.”

  Ginger turned to me, her astonishing blue eyes suddenly full of angry tears. “Well then, it must be true.”

  She got up. A cane leaned by her chair but she either didn’t see it or wouldn’t use it in front of us. “When I was in school Mrs. Moore wanted to take me under her wing. She picks someone every year, a deserving candidate.”

  She gave the last words a bitter twist. “Starts sticking her nose in their business. ‘You’re smart, you should do so-and-so.’ ”

  Staring at the water lapping the dock pilings, she went on. “But if you didn’t take her advice she turned on you. I’ve heard that later she wised up, figured out why some kids avoided her.”

  The way Tommy was avoiding Siss Moore now, I remembered. “Anyway,” Ginger added, “she got it right about what Mr. Gosling did to me. As if he hadn’t done enough.”

  I wanted to ask about the “enough” part. Enough what? But she hurried on. “His name was Mark Timberlake. We were going to be married. He’s in the merchant marine.”

  Head high, voice steady. Ginger wasn’t the type who enjoyed letting you in on her private troubles. On the table beside her chair were a stack of chess books and a little chess computer, a wooden flute and a leaflet that promised it could teach you to play, and a big tapestry knitting bag.

  It was the gear of a self-sufficient and intensely private person. “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “And then Mr. Gosling got to him. He said Mark wasn’t good enough for me, kept at me to change my mind, do what he said and end the engagement. All he really wanted was to keep me working for him. He could tell Mark didn’t like him, wouldn’t have wanted me to stay in the job.”

  “But you wouldn’t break the engagement. And you didn’t quit before you got married because . . .”

  Another laugh, harsher this time. “Because what if it ended up turning out I didn’t get married? Jobs don’t grow on trees around here, in case you haven’t noticed it. And for me it’s always twice as hard because people don’t think I can work.”

  She waved the ruined hand. “Or if it’s a company they can’t afford me on their insurance. It’s not what they say, of course. They’re not allowed to discriminate against me. But they do it anyway. They just tell me some other reason. Everyone does what they have to do to survive, right?”

  Interesting comment. “Including you?”

  Sam was considering a stint in the merchant marine. For the right type of person, working aboard the big freighters offered a solid career and a harsh but not impossible existence. You could climb the promotion and pay scale, and the job offered excellent benefits. The downside was that you were away most of the time, your loved ones just snapshots in your wallet. For newlyweds in love it would be terribly difficult.

  But Ginger hadn’t said she loved him, had she?

  She hadn’t said that. “How did Hector ‘get to him’?” I asked.

  She frowned down at her shoes: one ordinary sneaker, one big complicated piece of machinery. “I don’t know. I got a call from Mark, all worried. First he wanted me to marry him right away and when I wouldn’t do that he did a sudden turnaround, said maybe we’d better call it all off. I hung up on him before he could say anything even worse. Like maybe he never really wanted to. Or at least not enough.”

  Ellie had been silent. She spoke up now. “What makes you think that Hector had anything to do with it? Couldn’t it be that this guy just… chickened out?” Her shoulders moved helplessly as Ginger and I looked at her. “Hey, it happens,” she said.

  But Ginger’s face denied this. “You’d have to know Mark. He wasn’t . . .”

  She turned back to me. “I know what you were thinking. I saw it in your face. You think I didn’t love him. But it’s not true. I did. I just wasn’t brave enough to give up the job in advance, because I couldn’t believe it.”

  Her inability to credit such good fortune remained in her eyes; that and the new pain of realizing she’d been correct to proceed with caution. “I mean, I couldn’t believe he loved me. And,” she finished briskly, “it turns out he didn’t. He caved in to Hector, and if he would do that he’s no good to me.”

  A car pulled in. The driver, a woman, remained behind the wheel. “That’s my ride,” Ginger told us as it arrived. “To the new job interview. I have to go.”

  She pulled on a battered old sheepskin jacket. I’d seen it in the thrift shop in Eastport a few weeks earlier.

  “The jacket looks great on you.” It did, too; some people redeem their clothes, and Ginger was one of them. The messed-up hand and leg were just things s
he carried around; in every other way she seemed one of the healthier and more resilient women I’d ever met.

  And among the best at facing hard truths. She beamed briefly at the compliment. “Yeah, huh? And it’s warm. Okay, I’m coming,” she called toward the waiting car when its horn tooted gently in summons.

  “How exactly did Hector scare your boyfriend off?” I asked as she moved away from us. Because I thought she did know. Two young lovers, telling one another everything as lovers tended to do… it didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t.

  Her gait, the kick-forward-and-lock stride of the practiced prosthetic-wearer, was painful to see. Not for esthetic reasons; the woman was too damned gorgeous for her looks to be spoiled by that. But it hurt. You could see it in her face: every step shot a zing of anguish through her.

  “What’d Hector have on him?” I persisted.

  She stopped, her back still turned to me. Her torso shifted under the reindeer sweater, to ease itself in the brace I suddenly realized she must be wearing.

  “I don’t know,” she repeated stubbornly. “I just know it was something. And Mr. Gosling must have known that it would work, because the day after Mark broke off our engagement Mr. Gosling didn’t try to make me break it off anymore. He just didn’t talk about it, so I knew he knew already. And… he had the look on his face.”

  She didn’t have to explain. I’d heard somebody say once that Hector Gosling’s gotcha look was like the face of an evil tomcat after it had just finished eating up all the canaries. He looked especially satisfied, the person had gone on to say, if they were your favorite canaries.

  The person being George. “Anyway, I have to go,” Ginger said. She made her way to the passenger side of the car, a white sedan with the name of a local health agency on the door.

  “How’d Siss Moore know about it?” I asked.

  “Mr. Gosling probably bragged about it,” Ginger replied at once.

  Bingo; that was Hector, all right. “Mark hasn’t been back? You haven’t seen him or heard from him since the phone call?”