by Sarah Graves
“Huh,” Ellie said. “Interesting. You know, especially if he believes in ghosts, you’d think the woo-woo stuff would’ve got rid of him in no time flat.”
The woo-woo stuff. It cheered me immensely, hearing her put it that way, making the unease I felt sound manageable, even trivial. Slender and pretty, with pale green eyes, red hair, and freckles like a sprinkling of gold dust, Ellie had been my friend since almost the moment I got to Eastport three years earlier.
“Drat, look at that,” she said. “I’ve lost the tiny hinge screw out of my glasses.” She took off the tortoiseshell pair she was wearing, frowned at the separation, and tucked the pieces into her sweater pocket. “Anyway, where is he now?”
“Walking around town. He had a glass of water while he was spinning me a few more moonbeams about himself, and then he went out.”
I took a deep breath. “It's Jared Hayes he's researching, Ellie. For his dissertation. Or he says that's what it's for, anyway.”
“Oh,” Ellie said. “Now I get it.”
When Jared Hayes, the Eastport musician and composer, looked out his bedroom window on an early nineteenth-century morning, he saw ships: great, many-sailed trading vessels gathered so thickly into port, the harbor seemed fairly bristling with their masts. The town swarmed with commerce: shipbuilders, chandlers, riggers and sailmakers, dealers in oakum, hemp, and galley provisions, not to mention the goods those ships brought in and out: rum and cotton, lumber and nails, peat from Canada, and of course the fish that swam so plentifully in the ocean.
There was work for everyone; recently released from the loathsome four-year occupation by the British army in the War of 1812—when the news came that the Treaty of Ghent was signed, local people dug out horns and fiddles and played “Yankee Doodle” up and down Water Street to pipe the hated redcoats on their way— Eastport boomed.
And when an economy booms, artists and musicians do well, too: parties and so on. People celebrating their comfortable circumstances. Only not usually quite as well as Jared Hayes had done.
Ellie gave the room a final look-over and dusted her hands together, indicating that we were finished. “But you think—”
“Of course I do,” I said, pulling the door shut. “What else would it be? He's searching for that damned violin.”
We went downstairs to the kitchen, where Ellie fixed coffee and I put out a plate of cupcakes I’d made earlier, in a burst of suspecting that I might be needing them: chocolate with bits of chopped sweet cherries in the batter and dark chocolate frosting.
“There's no violin,” she said as we applied ourselves to the cupcakes. They were pure wickedness, nearly as restorative as I’d hoped. I took another.
“No, there isn’t,” I replied, chewing. “We know that. Or,” I temporized, because after all you can’t prove a negative, “we’re pretty sure.”
A hefty dose of chocolate had smoothed down my hackles and settled my nerves. To balance the effect, I took another sip of the hot, strong coffee that Ellie produces like a magical elixir from ordinary Maxwell House; eat your heart out, Starbucks.
“How many people,” I asked, “do you suppose have been through the house searching for it?”
During the decades when the house had stood empty, I meant. Before I came to Eastport on a whim and spotted the huge white structure looming at the top of Key Street like a ghost from a distant era and got the people from the real estate office to let me in. I’d spent hours wandering the vacant rooms, filled with a shimmering sense of having been in them before; by the next day, the house had belonged to me.
Now, through the bright, bare windows of the big old barnlike kitchen, yellow sunlight fell in pale rectangles on the hardwood floor. Outside, a breeze shifted the branches of the cherry tree I had planted the previous summer, sending white petals swirling to the green grass like a shower of snow.
“Half the town,” Ellie replied dreamily. “Looking for Jared Hayes's famous lost Stradivarius. But they never found it. The only treasures ever found here were those dining room curtains, stuffed in a cubbyhole up in a corner of the attic, forgotten.”
They were champagne brocade and we’d run them through the washer and the dryer. They’d survived, and hung beautifully.
“Because”—I held up an index finger—“how would an isolated small-town fiddler and minor-league musical composer like Hayes ever get enough money to buy a Stradivarius in the first place?”
That was the old story, told and retold over the years until it had begun sounding like the truth: that Jared Hayes had bought one of the famous instruments and hidden it, and then he had vanished.
And that it was still here.
There had been a few hopefuls who had wanted me to let them look again—just before Raines phoned, a charming fellow with an Australian accent had called three times and very nearly managed to persuade me— but I had been able to turn them all down with one excuse or another. The idea of the thing appearing someday, however, just wouldn’t die.
And now out of the blue came a guy from Boston with a cock-and-bull story about a Ph.D. project.
Yeah, right. Ellie nibbled her cupcake delicately. “He had,” she pointed out, meaning Hayes, “enough money to buy this house.”
“If he bought it,” I came back. We’d been over all this before. “Some say he won the house gambling in a saloon.”
“And some say Hayes had enough money to buy the whole town,” Ellie countered, “if he wanted to. Surely he had cash enough for some pretty fancy furnishings. You’ve seen the receipts.”
Hayes's household account books still existed, and despite some irregularity in them—the way, for instance, the Grand Canyon forms an irregularity in Arizona—the expense sides of the ledger columns were clear enough for anyone to read. In the fine old copperplate hand of the classically educated man of his day, they listed furniture enough to outfit a castle, along with rugs from the far East, English china, and French crystal.
A harpsichord, originally crafted for the court of Frederick the Great, had been shipped here and reassembled in my dining room not far from where my attempt at a plaster job was crumbling right this minute. A Chinese lacquered cabinet so large and heavy no ship's captain would load it for the perilous journey around the Horn—at the time, of course, there was not yet any Panama Canal—had been hauled by a team of elephants over the Alps to Spain, where the shippers were more adventurous or perhaps only greedier; at any rate, it got here.
“Whether it was gambling money, though,” Ellie added, “is another question.”
“You can bet he wasn’t earning it by playing the fiddle,” I said. “Or not all of it, anyway. But…” I could already see which way her thoughts were headed. “But Ellie, we wanted a nice, quiet summer.”
My son had at last made firm college plans for the fall. My ex-husband, Victor, had moved here to Eastport but had also stopped devoting himself— full-time, anyway—to driving me nuts. And my main squeeze, Wade Sorenson, had proven as fine and durable a romantic choice as I had known he must be back when I fell in love with him at first sight. In fact we had decided—in theory, anyway; in practice we were both still shying at the gate—to get married.
This for me was like thinking I might stick my hand in the fire again, and Wade was of the “if it ain’t broke, let's not fix it” persuasion, constitutionally. Still, the idea kept recurring and gradually we were getting to feel easier with it, the way two people will when they are happy and comfortable with one another.
And Ellie knew all this, but now she brushed it impatiently aside.
“Nice, quiet summer,” she scoffed. “If you don’t get this place straightened out, you’ll be in a nice, quiet asylum soon.”
At which I nodded sadly because, as usual, she was correct. Lately I couldn’t even go to sleep in the house without worrying whether something was going to sneak up in the dark and pull the covers off me and I would wake up with double pneumonia. And I couldn’t help thinking that somehow it all had to do
with Jared Hayes:
With whatever had happened to him. And with what, since to me it seemed clear there was something, he wanted done about it.
“If Raines isn’t scared and he's already interested, that could be a good thing,” Ellie said persuasively. “It might be, he will come up with something that we haven’t.”
If Ellie and I were both mad scientists, she would be the one whose laboratory is always exploding. On the other hand, her blithe, no-disaster-can-possibly-befall-me attitude does tend to get results.
“Maybe,” I allowed. “And I do know those cousins. Probably they wouldn’t send me an axe-murderer, or anything like that.”
An understatement: all three of them were heavily involved in federal law enforcement. Any axe-murderers they came across would get sent somewhere, all right, but it wouldn’t be Eastport.
She went on: “Because I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me there are two possibilities to explain the discomfort you’ve been experiencing. One is that your house is haunted. Or two, and this is my clear choice, that your head is haunted.”
I just stared at her: trust Ellie to boil it all down for you that way. “Haunted,” she said, “by the idea of what happened to Hayes, by your questions and wondering about it.”
“But…”
“I know. You’ve experienced … phenomena.” She pronounced the word judiciously, like a physician mentioning an unpleasant side effect. “Only they’re never …”
Right; like I said. Never flat-out inexplicable.
“So in your view, it wouldn’t be so much that the house is haunted,” I said, “but that I am. By it.”
“Uh-huh.” She ate a cherry bit. “And if we’re going to do something about it, we need more information about Hayes. So we can find out the answers to your questions and put a stop to it.”
She got up, refilled our coffee cups. “And if this Raines person is here to look for Hayes's violin, maybe he can help. That is, if we help him.”
“Maybe,” I said, still not quite seeing how. “But Ellie, what if he only makes things in this house get more challenging?”
I didn’t quite see how that was going to happen, either. But lately, anything seemed possible. Out in the street a car started suddenly with the roar of a bad muffler; I jumped about a foot.
Ellie sighed. “Jacobia, don’t you see it doesn’t matter that things might get worse? For one thing, they might anyway, and for another, you’re already too unhappy. Whatever's going on around here is making you a nervous wreck.”
She took a deep breath, the kind people take when what they are about to say to you is painful but for your own good.
“I know you love it here,” she said. “But we’ve got to get this place fixed so you can live here comfortably again, and by that I don’t just mean your remodeling jobs. If we don’t, worst case, you won’t be able to …”
She stopped, allowing me to reach on my own a conclusion I’d been trying very hard to avoid. But at this point it was obvious.
“Worst case,” I said slowly, “I’m not going to be able to stay in this old house.”
“Meanwhile,” said Ellie, breaking the heavy silence that followed my pronouncement, “there's another thing that ought to start concerning you, if it hasn’t already. Isn’t the Eastport Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting in your dining room in”—she frowned in pretended thought—“just five days?”
“Oh, good heavens.” Like my unexpected house-guest, it was another thing I’d completely forgotten.
“With,” she went on, twinkling mischievously, “items like silver coffeepots and china teacups? Linen tablecloths, little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and so on?”
All that and more: tiny lobster-paste-filled puff pastries. Petit-fours hand-dipped and decorated with candied violets. Ellie is by no means a fan of little sandwiches with the crusts cut off, but I always find it charming that someone has gone to all the trouble of making them.
Only this time the trouble-taking someone would be me. After three years I had been accepted into the rarified society of town women who Got Dressed and Went Out every other Tuesday evening to Discuss Literature; now I was going to have to show I deserved my newly elevated status.
By, for instance, buying and wearing a pair of panty hose, an item of clothing I dimly remembered from my life in the city.
“I don’t guess folded paper towels for napkins will do, will they?” I asked nervously. Like Raines's visit, the Reading Circle meeting had seemed so far off when I’d agreed to host it.
And now here it was.
“No,” Ellie said. Her own great-aunt had been a founding member of the group, and Ellie while perfectly friendly to it in theory stayed away from it in practice.
But she knew the drill. “I think before I worried about the napkins, though, I’d do something about the wall,” she went on. “Having one in that dining room, I mean. With wallpaper on it and so on. And there's the matter of the facilities.”
Ye gods, the plaster and the flush. “Ellie, please, I’m on my knees, here.”
Not literally, but metaphorically I was down there bowing and scraping. Ellie made the loveliest puff pastries and petit-fours this side of Paris, and with the number of snow-white napkins and tablecloths her aunt had left her, she had enough linen to supply a hotel.
“All right,” she gave in immediately; she also has a solid gold heart. “I’ll be in charge of the catering and linen supply. But I’m not,” she warned, “going to be there.”
Ellie's aunt had not precisely been a sainted character, and the activities she had pursued still gave Ellie the hives just by association. “No how, no way …”
And that went double for Discussing Literature; my friend read voraciously, but as for displaying knowledge in public she would rather choke on her own spit.
“Fine,” I said, knowing when I was well off. “Now, about Raines …”
Ellie rinsed our cups and put the Tupperware lid back on the cupcakes. In the corner, Monday looked up from her dog bed.
“Well, he's out there,” I said reasonably. “Talking to people. So if someone's going to help him, I’d say now would be perfect timing, and I’ve got to …”
I waved at the hallway, where something that looked like a perfectly usable little guest bathroom lurked silently, waiting for the unwary. And considering the amount of coffee and tea that got consumed at your standard Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting …
“It is a sort of a beverage-intense gathering, isn’t it?” Ellie said thoughtfully.
Suffice it to say I believed that particular task had better go straight to the top of my to-do list. So I got out the tools: a big screwdriver, a pair of pliers, and the plumbing seal, like a doughnut made of wax, that I had bought at Wadsworth's Hardware Store months earlier when the job went on the list in the first place.
“You’re doing it yourself?”
“Why not?” The truth is, almost anyone can repair or replace any reasonably modern plumbing fixture. But this fact—that people do plumbing, you are a people, therefore et cetera—is a secret, because when plumbers do it, it costs $75 per hour, while when you do it, it's $0 per hour. And dividing $75 by $0 yields an infinite number of dollars, which is how many the plumbers will lose if the secret ever leaks out.
“Well, okay.” With a last doubtful look, Ellie went upstairs to wash her face and comb her hair before heading downtown. While she was gone, I got out the cleaning supplies and began my task by scrubbing the target area very thoroughly, this being another secret to successful plumbing:
Kill every germ within three miles before you start. That way you will possess a relaxed, confident attitude, and the body language to match.
Unfortunately my own body language was not as fully focused and confident as I might have wished, because the odd features in Jonathan Raines's personal presentation kept popping into my head like sour notes in an otherwise skillfully played piece of music.
He’d implied that he was an ivory-to
wer academic, and I was already fairly sure that story was hogwash. But none of the other occupations I could imagine for him would produce the muscles he had. Thinking this, I turned off the water in the little bathroom and pressed the flush handle, observing that the tank on the back of the bowl did not fill up again.
(Once I flushed first and then turned off the water, not noticing that the tank had refilled immediately, and when I took out the bolts that held the fixture to the floor … well, let's not proceed any further along with that little story.)
At any rate, I got rid of the water, thinking about the shirt Raines had been wearing when he arrived. An impoverished student, so short of money that he needed to stay with me: another obvious untruth. Back in my New York days when I was financial counselor to guys who kept London tailors’ fax numbers in their Rolodexes, I’d seen enough custom-made, long-stranded Egyptian cotton dress shirts to know one when I spotted one, even if it did have the collar open and the sleeves rolled up.
Musing over this, I disconnected the filler tube at the back of the tank—that's what the pliers were for—and pried the two little white plastic caps off the tops of the floor bolts. Next, I unscrewed the floor bolts; that's what the screwdriver was for.
Just then Ellie came back, thinking along the same lines as I’d been. “What do you suppose Raines really is?” she said.
“Maybe an art dealer or a scout from an auction house. Or even a private investigator specializing in valuable antiquities, on assignment from a buyer.”
Whatever he was, he’d picked up a rumor and decided to run it to its source, just in case. It was the only explanation that made sense.
“And since he is here, I guess it also makes sense to try to use him to find out what the heck this place wants,” I conceded.
Which for me was like saying that maybe the earth is really flat. Three years earlier, the idea of a place wanting anything would’ve made me hoot with scornful laughter.
Nowadays, I was more likely to hoot at the sensation of an ice-cold finger placed suddenly on the back of my neck. And when I turned, of course no one was ever there.
