by Sarah Graves
Monday snuffled nearby, plunging her nose into the shrub and snurfing up berries like a piglet rooting for truffles. “To find what he was looking for,” Ellie finished.
“Right,” I said. “Maybe with her supposedly evil old uncle's help. He, by the way, is still around Eastport, too. Staying like a bad cold, Charmian says. And turning into the town celebrity.”
“So I’ve heard.” More berries went into the pail. “Hecky's nose is out of joint, George says, because Winston Cartwright is a better storyteller than Hecky, and he doesn’t get mad when you contradict him like Hecky does. And people haven’t already heard Cartwright's stories forty times, the way they have Hecky's.”
She ate a berry. “But Hecky's book is coming out any minute, so he’ll be the nine days’ wonder again soon enough.”
Cartwright had made a bed-and-breakfast on Washington Street his home base. Days he spent moseying around town; evenings he sat in La Sardina, at the bar with the other regulars. And like the public library, the bar at La Sardina was full of interesting information; Teddy didn’t talk, but everyone else in there did. You just had to keep your mouth shut and your ears open at the right times.
Which, it turned out, Winston Cartwright was also good at. “What are they up to?” I groused. “Charmian and Winston, whether separately or together?” But of course I got no answer.
“Any more luck with the invisible ink book?” Ellie asked.
“Nope. I copied the whole thing on the copy machine over at town hall—with Charmian at the library, I didn’t want to do it in there—and sent it to a friend of mine at St. Patrick's.”
The cathedral, I meant, in New York. Priests may still take vows of poverty, but the organization they work for most certainly does not, as I had learned back in my old money-management days. And the priest I’d dealt with back then had been a dab hand at reading Latin manuscripts.
Also, he was fast. “He called me back this morning.”
Ellie looked up. “How? You can’t mail overnight from here,” she objected.
“I know. I put it on Tim Prouty's fish truck.”
Laden with ocean delicacies, the truck made three round trips a week between here and some of the finest restaurants in Manhattan; I’d added the rest of those chocolate-cherry cupcakes for Tim, plus a thermos of coffee and a couple of live lobsters for my buddy over at St. Patrick's. The quarters were for tolls.
“So why didn’t you tell me about this before? And what does it say?” Ellie wanted to know.
I hadn’t told her because the result was so discouraging. I brushed an ant off my shoe.
“Not much. Or anyway, not much to help us. It's a record of Hayes's commercial dealings in the pirate loot he was selling for Josephus Whitelaw, as it turns out. So much for silver tankards, so much for Spanish gold.”
Down the hill from us, a few people moved among the granite headstones: tidying up the plots, placing flowers, or making small repairs to the graves and accessories: flags, Masonic insignia, war memorial markers. Every so often one of them stopped to slap madly at a sleeve or pants leg: those ants.
“The accounts pretty much substantiate the story Winston Cartwright told,” I went on. “That Hayes was crooked. And man, was he ever salting it away, all in gold. I mean a fortune. Guess that's why he was so secretive about it, with the Latin and the invisible ink.”
Ellie looked glum. “But why would he hide his own account book in the wall?”
“Beats me.” We resumed combing the bushes, but I soon thought Monday had eaten enough blueberries, snorting and snuffling along like a canine vacuum cleaner; if I didn’t stop her, she would go on until she fell over in a bloated heap.
“C’mere, you,” I told her, and spread a beach towel for her to lie down on in the grassy shade. Snarfing up a final mouthful of berries, she obeyed reluctantly.
“Was that all the book said?” Ellie asked. Her berry pail was half full.
“No.” I dropped another handful into mine. “It was pretty sad, actually. When he wasn’t keeping his accounts in the book, he wrote about Jane Whitelaw How much he loved her and how she wouldn’t marry him. He thought getting rich would help persuade her, just the way Cartwright said.”
“What about the map?” Ellie said hopefully.
“No luck there, either. For that, we would need to make the visible out of the invisible, and my friend at St. Patrick's only reads Latin. He doesn’t do magic tricks. There just wasn’t enough he said, for him to decipher anything useful from it.”
“Oh.” Ellie fell disappointedly silent, thinking this over. Monday dozed, waking only to snap at a honeybee buzzing too near her nose. Out on the water, a little red and black boat puttered up the bay toward New Brunswick.
We picked steadily for another half hour; they were big berry pails, and we wanted enough fruit for making jelly and for the freezer. Then:
“Something's not right about all of this,” Ellie said. “If Mapes was working with Raines—or if someone else was—it would be to that person's benefit to have Raines alive to help in looking for the violin. Unless …”
Right. “Unless Raines had already found it, or was about to. Then Raines's partner might want to get rid of Raines and keep the thing for himself.”
“Scamper off to Boston or New York and sell it. But then Charmian and Winston arrived, so he's got to wait until the uproar dies down?”
“Assuming,” I said, “it's a he, and that he's got the violin at all. But if it's Mapes we’re talking about, then he hasn’t got it yet, or I doubt he’d still be around.”
“So maybe Raines knew, but he didn’t know that he knew.”
I stood up, feeling my knees creak. The mosquito repellent was wearing off; a couple of scout ants were clambering up the cuffs of my pants. I brushed them away as Monday got to her feet and yawned. Our buckets were full to the brim.
“Okay, so what could Raines know? He didn’t see what's in the invisible-ink book, the words or what might be a map if the lines were all there. Because the words weren’t there, and lines of the map still aren’t there, so …”
We looked at each other. “Or did he?” Ellie said. “Did he see something we haven’t seen?”
I let out a big breath. “What if there was something else in it that he took with him? Something he could read? And then, in a hurry but hoping to hide the book again, he dropped it back into the wall. In his hurry, he also dropped that fiber-optic-looking instrument he—”
“He wouldn’t be careless with that,” Ellie objected. “He didn’t need it anymore, that's all, so he left it. He knew what he needed to know. And maybe—Jake, could he have made a phone call?”
I opened the car trunk and set the buckets inside, let the dog into the backseat. “I don’t know that he didn’t call someone, and it would make sense. ‘Wilbur, I found something. Meet me,’ he might’ve said.”
“On the dock, and Wilbur did. Put Raines off an hour to give himself time, maybe?”
“He’d have had to,” I agreed. “It's a five-minute walk from my house to the dock, but Mapes would have needed longer than that to get ready.”
I turned to Ellie as we got into the car. “What gave him the idea to do it at all, do you suppose? Mapes doesn’t strike me as a quick thinker.”
She frowned. “Maybe because that other fellow went off the cliffs at North End that same morning?”
“Right. It would not only give Mapes the idea, it would make it seem like the kind of accident that could happen.”
I started the car. “So he put Raines off with some excuse, drove to town, took a rowboat, slammed that platform up there, tied up under the dock, climbed up, waited for Raines to arrive. Because he understood something from what Raines told him. And he wanted to be the one to benefit from it. Him alone.”
I’d already told her about my watery expedition with Wade. “And he had the dive gear, for urchin diving. It could have been him last night, back to retrieve the evidence of what happened.”
She sighed. “But even that's no help, because the evidence is gone now. So not a bit of this can we prove,” she finished. “It's all speculation.”
Drat, why did she have to be so right all the time?
“So what do we do?” I asked as we passed the high school and the remnants of Fort Sullivan, where seventy American soldiers first got a look at the British ships, their guns bristling, as they hove into the bay one ghastly morning in 1816.
Being outnumbered a hundred to one and also no fools, they lay down their arms. The British took Eastport without a shot and held it until the end of the war, which end was itself delayed by the occupation. That gave Andrew Jackson time to win at the Battle of New Orleans, made him a national hero, and eventually made him president.
Funny how one thing leads to another, and how you can’t tell that it will. Jackson was probably mighty unhappy when he heard about those Eastport soldiers putting down their weapons. Later, of course, he felt differently about it.
“We look at the manuscript again,” Ellie said. “And keep talking to people.”
“Why? People, I mean. If we think that whatever Raines knew, he found it out from the manuscript…”
I pulled the car into my driveway. Monday dashed for the porch, where a pile of diving gear lay outside the door. Gone to Boston. Maybe your friend can use this stuff, the note pinned to the door read.
It was from Maggie Altvater. “Oh, damn. That son of mine's got his brains in his … I told Victor he should talk to Sam, but you know Victor.”
Inside, we washed and froze some berries quickly, put some more into containers for Ellie to take home and make jam, and ate the rest on ice cream; unlike the watery blue objects you can buy in the grocery store, wild blueberries have to be used quickly or they will turn into blue goo.
“You know, though,” Ellie said thoughtfully, “if it was Wilbur Mapes that Raines was teamed up with … Well. Then even if Wilbur didn’t want to share the violin's proceeds with Raines, he still could not have gotten rid of it all by himself.”
“Huh. That's true. Wilbur's claim to fame is getting hold of stuff around here, not selling it in New York.”
“So Wilbur might try to team up with some other partner, one who would take less of a commission.”
I ate some ice cream. “True again. So keeping in mind that Wilbur's been in trouble, before …”
“With Hecky Wilmot,” Ellie agreed. “But he's probably still too riled up to talk to us.”
“Right. So who else's cage could we rattle in case something useful falls out?”
But she was already nodding. “That's easy. Howard Washburn,” she said.
Howard Washburn's barn full of auction items stood on a side road, west off Route 1, up in the hilly land where the comforts of town quickly began seeming like a distant memory. Small wooden signs by the roadside, each a mile from the last, directed us to the AUCTION SUNDAY!
I peered at yet another of the signs; unfortunately, they gave no clue as to how many more of them we had to read and pass before arriving at Washburn's place.
“Howard buys from everyone,” Ellie said from the passenger seat. “Stores stuff up, then in summer all the tourists go out to his auctions. But the rest of the time …”
“A nine-month break in his business activity?” I negotiated a tricky S-turn. When these roads were built, fifty miles an hour was regarded as suicidal; that they had pavement on them at all was the height of modern convenience.
“Yep.” Ellie gazed out the car window. “Look, an eagle's nest.”
I glanced at the mass of sticks at the top of a wooden power pole, branches as big around as a man's forearm poking out every which way. It looked more like a beaver dam than a bird's nest and imagining the size of the eggs made you believe the theory that our feathered friends had descended from dinosaurs.
“So he's got some other way to make money.” In the backseat Monday rode happily, tongue lolling, de- lighted to be in the car. “Moving illegal items, maybe? I thought Bob Arnold put a stop to that.”
Ellie nodded. “He did. It's gambling now.”
I shot her a look of surprise. Around here the football pool at the convenience store was big-time: maybe a hundred bucks.
“Howard has lots of friends,” Ellie explained, “from when he worked at the Portsmouth shipyard. And when he was in prison.”
Bigger surprise. Jail's one thing, prison another. “For what?” Thick forest fell away suddenly on both sides of the road and was replaced by spreading marshland, cattails massing thick at the edges of the blue, pearlescent pools.
“Something to do with some men getting together to hire a hit man,” Ellie replied.
Coming out of Ellie's mouth, the phrase hit man sounded ridiculous. But her tone remained serious, and the authorities must have thought it was, too, if Washburn had gone away for it.
I glanced at her again, shocked. “So he was a bad guy, for what, conspiracy to commit murder? And now he's become a bookie, with the kind of old pals who could get bad things done here, too. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
She looked at me. “Jacobia, it was a long time ago. And lots of people have been in one kind of trouble or another. You can’t assume anything from it.”
True; George Valentine himself had had his little run-ins with the law in his younger days. “And the gambling can’t be much because if local guys were losing much, we’d have heard of it.”
“Good point. But you can’t blame me for getting my hopes up, can you?”
“No. But just keep an open mind, that's all. I don’t think Howard's going to be quite the kind of major crime figure you’re expecting.”
Another sign advised AUCTION AHEAD! How far ahead, was my big question. We were high on a hill with what looked like all of Maine spread below us: the mill at Woodland puffing white smoke, a lake's irregular borders cut into the solid evergreen of a pine forest. Patches of pasture lay like quilt squares spread out on the hillsides.
Suddenly the biggest sign of all was upon us: YOU’RE HERE! A crushed stone drive cut through brushy undergrowth, bordered by a rail fence upon which bittersweet climbed with riotous vigor. At the top was a parking lot the size of a football field.
Well, half a football field, but it was big, and so was the barn: gambrel-roofed, four stories high, bright yellow. A big bay door stood open at the near end, the shadowy interior pitch-black by contrast with the brilliant day. Shafts of sunlight slanted down from hayloft windows onto a plank floor.
A beater of an old Ford Escort was pulled up alongside a shed. Other Fords, each one missing some vital component of its equipment—one had wheels but no tires, another four bald tires piled on its hood but no wheels—lined up by the Escort.
A man in a blue coverall slid from beneath the vehicle at our approach, a wrench in his greasy hand. Hopping up, he grinned eagerly, showing a set of false teeth that didn’t fit and making me wonder uneasily where they had come from originally.
“Howard Washburn, good t'see ya, how ya doin’? Wonderful day, ain’t it? How can I help you two young ladies? Got some fine bargains out there in the barn, new stuff every day.”
The teeth clicked loudly with every syllable. “Got a new washing machine, poor lady died before she could use it.” The knuckles on his right hand were bleeding through a coat of black grease.
“Mr. Washburn, we’re not here to buy anything.”
The teeth snapped shut. Sharp suspicion replaced the bright, false welcome in his eyes. “You cops?”
“No.” I looked around curiously: no house. But a teardrop trailer was parked at the end of the row of Fords, a card table and two lawn chairs set up just outside it.
“Mr. Washburn, we need to ask you about Jonathan Raines.”
I saw him jump before he could hide it. Prison, I suppose, can do that to a fellow. So he knew the name.
“Say, I know you,” he said cheerfully to Ellie. “You’re the one who came out here to … Oh. Now I remember.” His eyes, brig
htening at the sight of her, narrowed with sudden caution again.
“Right,” Ellie said gently to him. “I came out here one time to tell you that so-called colonial furniture you were selling still had the Sears tags on it.”
She turned to me, her expression indulgent. “Howard found a way to distress furniture so it would look antique. But he kind of forgot about the undersides, didn’t you, Howard? If you want to fake stuff, you’ve got to do the whole thing, take it apart to get at all of it. Howard just did the tops.”
Clearly Howard wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. But he was a good sport about it. He grinned embarrassedly, looking down at his grease-stained hands. “I don’t do none o’ that stuff no more, anyway. All on the up-and-up now.”
“Right, Howard,” Ellie said. “Sure you are. Now, my friend here wants to know how you’ve heard of Jonathan Raines.”
Howard Washburn made a show of trying to remember. “Wilbur Mapes said this Raines fella was from away and o’ course I didn’t like that, right off the bat.”
He peered at me through the automobile grease that smeared his face. “They come here, think the home folks is idiots. Try to buy the fambly treasures for peanuts and a song.”
And if anyone was going to do that, it should be Howard, he clearly felt. “Ain’t right,” he pronounced stoutly. “Ain’t fair.”
“Uh-huh. Did Wilbur mention an old violin?”
Washburn's look turned sly. “Might have. Might not. I wasn’t payin’ a whole lot of attention, tell you the truth.”
There was a concept: Howard Washburn telling the truth. I’d already decided he couldn’t have found it with both hands and a road map. I lowered the boom.
“Or maybe Wilbur had been in touch with you earlier about it? That Raines, I mean, was looking for one?”
Washburn looked from one to the other of us, cottoning on to what we knew already.
“Why,” he wanted to know, “am I talking to you? Is there some benefit to me standing here shootin’ the breeze?”
“Maybe it's because I’ve still got one of those ‘colonial’ tables you sold to the lady from Connecticut,” Ellie said mildly.
