by Sarah Graves
"Anyone asks, Campbell gave it to Jake," Bob had said. Bob already had what he called a quiet word with the fellow who was supposed to have been guarding Anthony Colapietro in the hospital, and who instead had been chatting up one of the nurses.
Although Jake suspected it had actually been more than one word, and that quite a number of them had been profane. Just because Colapietro had appeared to be unconscious…well, Jake didn't envy the guard.
Now Billie Whitson went on apologizing profusely: "If I'd had any idea who he was, I'd never have—"
"It's okay, Billie. You couldn't have known."
Instantly the real estate maven brightened, glancing around greedily; she'd been wanting to get in here for ages. "You know, this room would photograph beautifully as a ‘before’ picture…"
Bella, who had put down her bucket and pulled a broom from the closet, yanked Billie's chair out hard with Billie still in it. Shoving the broom under the table she found Billie's sandal-clad toes while energetically pursuing nonexistent crumbs. Yelping, Billie took the hint and fled, after which Bella went back to preparing her mop bucket.
"Now, that there's a woman who'd sell her dead grandmother right out of her coffin if she thought she could make a buck on it," Bella remarked. "Coffin, too. She'd tell folks it was a studio apartment."
Apahtment—the. Maine way of saying it. And although Jake couldn't responsibly endorse Bella's methods for getting rid of pestiferous persons, she had to admit the result made her feel as if some henna-haired, bony-faced, super-hygienic cross between a housekeeper and a fairy godmother had granted her dearest wish.
Stepmother, she realized, gazing with gratitude at the dour, ropy-armed woman in the cotton housedress, a bib-style red apron trimmed up with black rickrack tied around her skinny waist and her hair skinned harshly back into a fraying elastic.
Bella's rawboned hand cranked off the hot water faucet. The sudden act rattled every pipe and radiator in the house.
"Anyway, she's the end of all the company for today," Bella declared, which was a notion Jake absolutely could get behind, as Sam would've put it. She felt hollowed out with exhaustion, like a radiator that had just had all the water drained out of it.
And not just by Billie; already this morning there'd been half a dozen kinds of cops needing to do interviews so they could finish their paperwork. Reporters had found the house, too; it hadn't been as easy as Bob Arnold thought, heading them off. But now that they were gone and Anthony Colapietro had been sent to a jail hospital in New Jersey, Jake hoped to begin feeling normal again soon.
Bella hustled out to the porch just as Jake's dad came in, looking troubled. "Hoped I'd find you here," he said. "Couple of things I wanted to say to you."
"It's okay, Dad," she began, but he sat anyway.
"You did fine, you know," he said, resting his hands on the table. "And… well. It's time for you to have these."
He opened his right hand. Two earrings lay in it. "Sometimes we all need something to hold onto. And Bella's been awfully good about me wearing one, but…"
She let him drop them into her palm, closed her fingers on them. "Thank you," she said. It wasn't all Jacob had come for, however.
"Ozzie could be a fine fellow when he wanted to be," he said. "But he had another side to him, one that I should've paid more attention to."
"Dad. None of it was your fault. I don't—"
"He always had a way of figuring out what to say or do to hurt you," her father went on. "I know because he was my friend, once, and I knew him very well. Just not…"
Not well enough. "Anyway, I thought maybe he might've said something ugly to you about your mother and me. It would've been just like him."
Tears filled Jake's throat; she blurted the truth. "He said I made her stay with you, that if it weren't for me she'd have-Dad, was I the reason? Was she in love with him, is that why…?"
"Why he thought she might leave me?" He shook his head. "We both loved her, yes. There wasn't a man alive who wouldn't. But not like…we'd laughed about it, the three of us together. How devoted he was, how at her service."
He paused, remembering. "Sir Galahad, we'd started calling him. Foolish, I guess. But it's hard to explain, now, how happy we were. Like nothing could ever go wrong. We were young, that's all. We just didn't know."
They sat in silence for a moment. "I wanted to straighten it out with him but she said no, she'd talk to him herself. And she did, she sat him down and told him, the day before…"
His voice trailed off; he got control of it again. "She told him that what he wanted would never happen, there wasn't a chance and that even if there were, that she'd never leave you. Or take you from me," he added.
His eyes glistened. "Afterward, she said that he seemed to understand, that she thought it would be okay. But…"
"But he came back," Jake whispered.
He nodded. "The very next day. I was busy in the kitchen. He must've slipped in past me. Other people saw him come in."
The explosion had blown both her father and his visitor out the door, leveled a city block. Later he'd found the earring in the rubble. "I stuck around," he went on, "and kept out of sight until I was sure you were both…"
Dead. In the pandemonium he'd managed to escape notice. Jake recalled being dug from beneath a warped piece of sheet metal in the yard, hours after the event; recalled the astonished face of the young cop who'd found her.
Recalled being lifted, carried away. "She was so beautiful," Jake said.
"Yes, she was." He got up and crossed to the window.
In the yard both dogs rested in the shade of a pointed fir tree, happy to be back home where the only thing either one of them ever had to retrieve was a Frisbee. "Your ma would've put the screws to Ozzie just the way you did," he said. "That woman had more guts'n anyone I ever knew."
He turned and met Jake's gaze. "Except maybe her daughter. So, is there anything else you want to ask me?"
"No. I know all I need to now."
He regarded her. "All right. Any questions, though…" He tapped his chest with an index finger. "You know where I'll be."
With that he went out to oversee the backhoe work for the broken sidewalk. After a while Bella came in and went upstairs to turn on the vacuum cleaner, just as another chunk of old gutter crashed past the hall window.
"Big doings out there," Wade observed, descending from his shop. He was cleaning the .22 Marky Larson had hurled into the water off Jiminy Point; that morning at slack tide, Sam had gotten up very early, put on a drysuit, and gone down there and found it.
"Mmm," Jake replied, fingering the earrings once more before closing her hand around them. Wade leaned over and kissed her.
"Life goes on, then, huh?" he murmured before heading back upstairs to work a little longer.
Yes, she thought. If you were lucky and you remembered what people who loved you had taught you, sometimes it did.
She placed the silver stem of one of the earrings into her ear just as another, louder crash sounded from the front of the house, followed by laughter.
Getting up, she paused at the hall mirror to put in the other earring, feeling the pair of them as a sweet, solid weight, the color of heart's blood. Then she turned from her reflection and hurried outside to see what all the commotion was.
About the Author
SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels are set. She is currently working on her thirteenth Home Repair Is Homicide novel.
A FACE AT THE WINDOW
A Bantam Book / January 2009
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All r
ights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Graves
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the
colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graves, Sarah.
A face at the window / Sarah Graves.
p. cm. — (A home repair is homicide mystery)
eISBN: 978-0-553-90608-0
1. Tiptree, Jacobia (Fictitious character)-Fiction. 2. White, Ellie (Fictitious
character)—Fiction. 3. Women detectives—Maine—Eastport—Fiction.
4. Historic buildings—Conservation and restoration—Fiction.
5. Female friendship—Fiction. 6. Eastport (Me.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3557R2897F33 2009
813'.54—dc22
2008030284
www.bantamdell.com
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