Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  Probably the one whose clerk I’d talked to. The store was open, Tommy went on helpfully, until eleven on Friday and Saturday nights. But the caviar hadn’t been bought there. In fact, the receipt I had didn’t even total enough. On it, someone had bought three of something that cost $12.95 each—not enough for all the purchases Will had suggested he’d made in Boston, either, now that I thought of it.

  So the question was… well, I didn’t know what the question was, and after a little while the whole confusing situation sent me fleeing up two flights of stairs to the third floor, to puzzle over it. Paint stripper had been simmering on the old door I was rehabilitating for many hours, now, and I needed to get my hands on it, because I needed to think and I wanted my hands busy while I was thinking, or I might start tearing my hair out.

  What I found up there made me glad I’d decided to check that door for any reason, since its grungy old paint had transformed itself into a bubbly mess. Sticking a scraper into it I brought up a thick, satisfying amount of sludgy material. This I wiped onto a paper towel, noticing with pleasure the tight, rock-hard grain of the old wood I was exposing.

  No hollow-core doors for those old craftsmen; this item was solid. Meanwhile, one thing was obvious, I thought as I scraped paint-and-stripper mixture off the door’s surface. George couldn’t have been out on his boat and in Boston, no matter what anyone said about the Witchcraft being on the water late that night. By the time I’d cleaned the paint from the screws holding the doorknob’s faceplate to the door, I’d come to another conclusion, too.

  Tommy was right. George might’ve lent the boat to someone but there was no way he’d allow anyone else to drive his rattletrap of a truck all the way to Boston. And it was too much of a stretch to think someone else with gourmet tastes had gone with George.

  It had to be Will. Maybe he’d stopped at two stores, and the receipt Tommy had found was only for his minor purchases. But what else had they been doing?

  I didn’t want to march up to Will and demand that he tell me, though, because as Tommy had said if it was so bad George wouldn’t even get himself out of a murder charge with it, maybe I ought to handle it with the equivalent of tongs, too.

  And that was as far as I’d gotten when I confronted the knob on that old door. It should have been taken off before the paint stripper went on but I couldn’t get a screwdriver into the screw slots until afterwards, a typical old-house Catch-22. Now I took the screws out of the faceplate, removed the spanner screws from the collar around the doorknob stem, and set them all aside.

  Then, after loosening the knob and removing it—the knob on the door’s other side had been missing for many moons—I slid the latch mechanism out. It was a block almost an inch thick and about four inches tall with a square hole in it for the doorknob stem to go through. Under a plate lay a spring mechanism that snapped the latch tongue out and also let it be pushed back in again; because of it, the door could be shut without turning the knob.

  Doorknobs today still work basically on that same principle, which just goes to show how brilliant an idea it was in the first place. But my admiration of it was diluted by thoughts of Therese Chamberlain.

  She might have told someone she meant to confide in me. If so, it would be great to find out whom she had told. But other than at a séance I didn’t see how I could find out. A pang struck me as I recalled her at the CPR class, determined to resuscitate that idiotic rubber doll.

  Scraping glumly at the old door, I imagined her before her addiction: young and vibrant if not actually pretty, possessing the hands-on practical kind of bravery a person had to have to be a member of her profession in the first place.

  And then it hit me who might be able to tell me more about her; maybe a lot more. Because not that long ago she had indeed been reasonably attractive.

  And she’d been a nurse.

  “Yes, I knew her,” my ex-husband admitted. “Not,” he added hastily, “in the biblical sense.”

  The biblical sense being the only way he ever knew them, in my experience. But never mind.

  “Drink?” he offered.

  I’d had to wait until he got home from the hospital so it was six in the evening when I knocked on the door of his wonderful old Greek Revival house, waiting while the strains of a Schubert Liebeslieder waltz wafted out among the enormous white porch pillars.

  “Sure,” I said. He’d come to the door at last with a martini in one hand and a copy of The New England Journal of Medicine in the other.

  The glass he handed me was cold, and one sip told me that a vermouth bottle had been waved delicately over the gin.

  “Thanks,” I said, and followed him past the antler-rack coat tree and the elephant-foot umbrella stand in the hall. The inside of his house hadn’t had a thing done to it since the 40s, and Victor had kept all the safari memorabilia of the previous owner.

  “I was about to phone Ellie,” he told me. “George is showing a bit of improvement. Nothing too dramatic,” he added cautioningly. “But I think we can be pleased with his progress.”

  “I’ll let you tell her.” The pleasure of reporting decent progress was rare in his world; I thought he ought to have it. “But there’s something else I need to ask you.” I told him about my day, with emphasis on the finding-yet-another-dead-body part of the program.

  “So what I want to know is who Therese might have talked to about her plan to confide in me,” I said.

  Victor frowned in disapproval. “Jacobia, I’ve mentioned to you how unwise it is, you getting involved in all sorts of . . .”

  I noted that he was blathering, which in the old days always meant he was hiding something. “Victor,” I said when he stopped, “are you sure you weren’t sleeping with her?”

  I hadn’t really thought he was up to his old tricks, chasing after women as if they were goldfish and he was a shark. I’d just thought he would know about her: a shark on a diet.

  “No, I wasn’t,” he snapped, applying a gulp of his drink to whatever was paining him. “It wasn’t that at all.”

  “What, then?”

  Another swallow. “I tried to help her. You saw how well that worked out. Some doctor I am.” His tone was self-lacerating.

  “I knew something was going on with her,” he went on. “Everyone did. She was calling in sick more, appearance deteriorating. They put her on nights when she couldn’t get along with anyone. And one more unauthorized absence, she’d be fired.”

  “Would a nursing convention count as unauthorized absence?”

  “You bet. In fact she’d asked about attending one. I heard her with the nursing supervisor, they were arguing about it. Therese knew her performance reviews were going downhill. I guess she thought attending a convention would help.”

  Sure, and the CPR class too. “Wouldn’t it?”

  He made a face. “Yes, but showing up for work would help a lot more. And being on nights, the shift is short-staffed already so they couldn’t spare her. But,” he finished unhappily, “maybe her head was too screwed up by then to realize that.”

  So she’d gone anyway, which gave her a reason not to speak up for George right off the bat. She’d have to say she’d called in sick to take the Boston trip, and she might get fired for it. But after George was attacked she’d tried telling me, maybe hoping I could give information for her, keep her out of trouble.

  “And you knew it was drugs causing her deterioration?” I probed.

  “Not for sure. I really didn’t know much about her, who her friends were, what kind of support she had. I asked, but she was too suspicious of me to say. She wouldn’t open up at all.”

  He swallowed more of his drink. “No one else could get close to her, either. And pretty soon they didn’t want to. She’d make really inept, off-putting remarks and then wonder out loud, sort of sullenly, why people avoided her.”

  I recalled the baffled way she’d tried to socialize with the other nurses at the CPR class.

  “But a few days ago the nursing s
upervisor asked me to talk to her again,” he went on, “so I tried one last time. I took her aside and gave her a lecture. Handed her a bunch of literature from a rehab clinic in Bangor, told her to shape up or ship out.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Well, she’s shipped out now, hasn’t she? Just the way I told her to. Very therapeutic, my advice.”

  “Oh, Victor.” As usual, he was turning it around so he was the important one; what he’d done. But at the same time he really did feel bad.

  “So you don’t know of anyone she might confide in? A family member, even?”

  He shook his head. “The way I heard it, she came from a bad situation. One of those kids who really did pull herself up by her bootstraps, school on a scholarship, all that.”

  And look how she’d ended. Victor frowned at his hands. “She reminded me of Sam. I was about as helpful to her, too.”

  I studied him, surprised. Victor hadn’t wanted to admit there was anything wrong with Sam, back in the bad old days. He’d simply said Sam’s troubles were all my fault and that I should deal with them.

  Now he made a sad, helpless gesture with his glass. “She deserved better,” he said, and his eyes said more. It was one of those rare shining moments of Victor as he could’ve been, honest and kind.

  But the moments never lasted and they didn’t now, either. “Anyway, that’s all I know about her.” His tone turned pettish as if I’d interrupted him during major surgery. “She didn’t confide in anyone that I know of. It was a big part of her trouble. So was there something else? Because . . .”

  He waved at the stack of medical journals on a table by his chair. “Because I have some catching up to do.”

  I suspected the martini glass would get more of a workout than his reading glasses tonight. But that wasn’t my business anymore. “Don’t give yourself a headache,” I said.

  He eyed me defensively but softened when he saw I meant it. “Anyway, Ellie can go up tonight and visit,” he told me. “I believe George might even recognize her.”

  My heart lifted again. “Oh, that’s great. You’ll call her?”

  He hesitated. “Do me a favor? I was going to, but… you tell her. She can call me if she has questions, but . . .” He glanced over at the martini shaker. “But to tell you the truth, I don’t feel much like having a conversation right now.”

  Poor Victor, he was such a strange ranger. I watched as he poured the rest of the liquid from the martini shaker. No one to talk to, indeed; I wondered if he ever looked in a mirror.

  “Sure, Victor. I’ll do it,” I said, and let myself out.

  By the time Wade drove us up to the hospital an hour later, Ellie’s eyes were so bright Wade’s truck hardly needed its headlights.

  “I told you,” she kept saying. “I told you he’d get better. And he is. He’ll tell us where he was, now. He’ll tell, and all of this will be over.”

  She sat beside Wade; I hunched on the half seat behind them in the extended cab. “Victor said that George was improving,” I reminded her. “Not that he was all better. Don’t expect a whole lot from him right off the bat.”

  But she didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t even bother to say the other thing I was thinking: that if George got too much better they’d send him back to jail. Because Tommy had been right about that, too; the county paid for every day an inmate spent in the hospital. They’d have him back in a prisoner-orange jumpsuit the instant he was up to it.

  “Thanks, Jake,” Ellie said. “For all you’ve done. From both of us. I mean, all three of us.”

  Wade’s eyes met mine in the rearview; she’s going to be disappointed, his look said, and I feared so too.

  But at first everything was fine. As we crossed the parking lot to the hospital’s glass doors, I could see into the warmly lit lobby with groupings of tables and chairs, the information desk, and the nursing desk beyond. Inside, we found George sitting up, looking a little dazed but in possession of all his faculties.

  He hugged Ellie, patted her belly fondly, and tried to make light of the injury he’d suffered. “Hard head.” He grinned.

  His tubes and wires were gone and they’d transferred him to a room in a less critical area of the nursing ward. “How’d it happen, anyway?” he asked. “Did I have an accident working?”

  Ellie glanced at me, alarmed. “George, you were in jail and another inmate… Do you mean to say you don’t remember?”

  “Nope.” He shrugged happily. “And I can’t say I mind much. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, right?”

  He appeared much better than I had expected, freshly shaven and with nothing left of his hospital dinner but the tray on his bedside table. Out by the nursing desk, the guard the county had posted stood listening, no doubt noting also how healthy-looking the prisoner was.

  I felt like telling George to fake a seizure or something. At this rate the county would wise up so fast he’d be behind bars again by tomorrow morning.

  “But I’d like to know,” he went on. “What’d I do, fall off a ladder or something? And what’s all this about jail?”

  “George.” Ellie sat down on his bed, took his hands in hers. “George, I want you to try very hard to remember. What’s the last thing you recall before you woke up here? Think hard, now.”

  He squinted, thinking. “Um, painting the baby’s room. Yellow paint.”

  The baby’s room had been painted weeks earlier. I gestured at Wade, who was in the corridor by the nursing desk talking to the guard on duty. Maybe Wade could jog George’s memory more effectively.

  But my hand stopped in midair as, looking past Wade, I saw something odd happening out by the main entrance. The glass doors were opening by themselves.

  Or they seemed to. The dark glittering panes swung inward to reveal a woman and two children materializing out of nowhere as they stepped into the lighted lobby. They stopped at the desk, then went off in another direction, as the glass doors swung open yet again to admit another group of visitors.

  “Excuse me,” I told George and Ellie. In the lobby I passed between the waiting area and the information desk. Noting that I still wasn’t able to see out through them, I approached the double doors. Then, as they swung open at my touch, I exited to the front-entrance drop-off area marked with No Parking signs.

  A pair of wheelchairs stood empty on the sidewalk. Near them were an honor box for the Bangor Daily News, a large concrete urn filled with sand and cigarette butts, and a mailbox.

  A dark blue mailbox. Ellie and Will had been standing near it a few evenings earlier. I’d seen them there very briefly while I was speaking with Therese Chamberlain.

  And they could have seen us, I realized. From her furtive look and anxious behavior it must have been obvious that Therese was imparting something confidential, something she didn’t want anyone else to know she was saying.

  But someone had, without either of us realizing it, because at night you couldn’t see into the parking lot from the interior of the hospital. From there, those doors were glittering black. From out here, though, the nursing desk was clearly visible.

  Which was how I discovered that no one had overheard Therese talking to me. She hadn’t told anyone about her plan to confide further in me, either. Someone had seen her, first in Boston and then here at the hospital as she was telling me something she didn’t want anyone else to know.

  Not to mention a final time, of course, on the morning when she was murdered.

  “He doesn’t remember anything,” Ellie agonized as we drove home. “Not since weeks ago. He won’t be able to tell us where he was when—”

  “He won’t have to.” Crammed into the truck’s tiny backseat, I felt so full of knowledge that I feared I might explode. One bright burst of understanding had illuminated everything.

  Someone had seen Therese talking to me and known the threat she represented, known that she could ruin everything by giving George an alibi for the night Hector Gosling was murdered. For she’d been in the garage in Boston w
hen George was there, and had seen him.

  “He won’t have to remember anything,” I said again. “We’re going to clear him.” I put my hand on Ellie’s shoulder.

  I could feel the tension in her neck muscles as she fought for composure. “But Jake, if they send him back to that jail . . .”

  Wade interrupted. “The guard told me Perry Daigle’s been sent to Thomaston. George won’t have trouble with him again.”

  Thomaston, the state prison. “I think old Perry’s going to have his world view adjusted real sharply,” Wade continued. “He’s tough when everyone else is smaller or more civilized.” Small chuckle from Wade. “But down there, he’s going to find out what it’s like to be at the low end of the food chain.”

  Ellie laid her cheek on my hand. “Thanks, you guys. That does make me feel a little better, knowing that at least he won’t be at Perry’s mercy. But Jake, how will we clear George?”

  I didn’t want to burden her with more uncertainty by telling her I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t even say what I suspected, not to Ellie or to anyone else, in case someone’s body language or face communicated something sooner than I wanted.

  Botox, where are you when I need you? All I could give her was a heartfelt promise.

  “Trust me, Ellie. We’re going to do it.”

  Or I am, I added silently. Because whether she liked it or not, in the snooping department she was out of action. No matter what she said, I knew the baby could show up any time. I couldn’t risk her going into labor at an inconvenient, possibly even a dangerous moment.

  Such as for instance during the unmasking of a killer.

  Chapter 10

  Just as I’d expected, George was sent back to the county jail in Machias first thing the next morning.

  “Neanderthals,” Victor fumed as Sam and I arrived for the CPR class at the firehouse. “You’d think they all had traumatic brain injury.”