Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

But nobody in the world is so interested in money as a poor girl, and I’d pursued my fascination with a vengeance, first at night school, eventually via grants and graduate work. Soon I was managing large amounts of other people’s money along with my own, and I’d become skilled at life in Manhattan:

  I could get a cab in the rain, a good table at Four Seasons, or a bagel so fresh that just by eating it, you could learn whole phrases of vernacular Yiddish. In short, I’d grown up in the city, and I thought I might miss it. On the other hand, I was also miserable:

  Victor’s idea of an amicable divorce had turned out to be one in which the parties stopped short of using automatic assault weapons. No woman, no woman, had ever dumped him before, and my doing so had deeply affronted him; his idea of monogamy was serial monogamy—he was faithful to the girlfriends, anyway, although not to me—and the number in the series had climbed to the triple digits by the time I bailed out. But he still felt I was being unreasonable.

  Then there was Sam, whose new attitude toward me lay in the no-man’s land between carelessness and contempt. Since achieving puberty, a condition he apparently equated with immortality, he’d been running with a posse of computer-literate young outlaws with nicknames like Pillz, Wanker, and Doctor Destructo 357—

  —this latter nom I had seen painted artistically in bright, poisonous Day-Glo yellow on subway overpasses, up there with the wrist-thick high-tension cables, the sight of which did not reassure me in the slightest—

  —whose collective mission in life was, I gathered, to hack into a top-secret military database and start World War III.

  At anything else—anything lawful—they were hopeless, which was a part of what made them all so angry. Sam could barely read, a problem that at the time I attributed to his behavioral difficulties, and the others had ditched school entirely. But their illiteracy and general ineptitude overall was, to me, no particular comfort; at World War III I thought this bunch might succeed. For one thing, their personalities fitted their goals: dark. Suicidally apocalyptic and brilliant.

  Sam, I discovered during my bouts of shameless, terrified eavesdropping, was especially useful to the project, since while he could barely decipher the label on a cereal box, he could fix absolutely anything. Even while stoned on marijuana, which often he was without even bothering to hide it anymore, he was a real mechanical genius, unfortunately for civilization as we know it.

  As for the notion of discipline or a heart-to-heart talk: oh, please. For all that boy listened to me, I might as well have been speaking Urdu. I tried everything, including a psychologist who believed in back-to-the-womb regression. When she turned on the sloshing sound of the amniotic fluid and the lub-dub of what was supposed to be his mother’s heartbeat, Sam bolted from her office and didn’t come home for two days.

  Toward the end, I found myself standing before a Santeria shop window in a neighborhood up above 125th Street, desperately examining a display of magic candles and some vials of powdered sheep entrails, wondering if maybe …

  Well, I bought a candle—you can always use candles—and a week later I discovered Eastport and fell in love with it at once, in the same sudden, irreversible way that a person might be struck by lightening or run over by a bus.

  The town was on Moose Island, as far up the Maine coast as you can get, and reachable only by a narrow causeway. There was no reeking smog, no hostile gangs of drug-addled, dysfunctional little teenaged computer terrorists. Also, there was no Victor, and to get away from Victor at that point I’d have signed up for a colony on Mars.

  Still, even as I sold my Manhattan penthouse, complete with twenty-four-hour uniformed doorman, private elevator, and panoramic view of Central Park—

  —and even as I signed the papers that meant I owned the shambling, dilapidated but utterly charming antique house on Key Street, stepping into it afterward filled with the shimmering knowledge that something momentous had happened.

  Even then, I had no intention of giving up my status as a streetwise, dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. I would go back to the city often, I thought: on weekends, and during Sam’s school vacations.

  All of which strikes me as fairly hilarious now, because after a week in Eastport I forgot whether Park Avenue runs uptown or downtown, and didn’t care. Soon whole chunks of my past life began dropping away from me like pieces of a plaster body cast, leaving me feeling liberated and exposed, my skin unaccustomed to the air moving freely on it.

  Meanwhile Sam’s expression took on an odd listening quality, as if he were hearing music. I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop; when he got bored, I thought, he would start agitating to go back to New York.

  Instead he took up walking, from one end of the island to the other. He scoured the shore for periwinkles and beach glass, examined obsessively every boat he could wheedle his way aboard, and returned in the evenings with his face glowing pink from all the exercise and fresh air. When he was home he ate like a horse, slept like the dead, and said very little, but when he did speak, he spoke politely.

  And there was another thing, which he only confided to me later: in those first days, he really had been hearing music. The tune—he could hum it straight through, and a local Historical Society member eventually heard him, and identified it—was an old one, written by a man who had once lived in our house. Town legend hinted that he had died there, too, and under mysterious circumstances.

  But when I learned all this, I was busy and preoccupied; at the time, Victor had just begun threatening to move to Eastport. Probably the tune had survived in downeast Maine lore, I decided, and Sam had picked it up somewhere, possibly from one of the men on the boats.

  So I paid little attention to the old town legend.

  At the time.

  Early on the Saturday morning after our dinner at La Sardina, Ellie White and I found Reuben Tate with his throat slit, hanging upside down by a rope knotted hard around his ankles from one of the iron gates in Hillside Cemetery.

  His eyes were open, strafing the stones of the old graveyard with undimmed malice. A crow swooped down, attracted by the glint of his upturned boot cleats, and flapped off with a cheated caw. The puddle below the body, dully glistening in the pale sunshine, resembled fresh tar.

  “Reuben,” Ellie said softly, her face disbelieving.

  I said nothing. We’d started our walk as we always did, down Key Street to the bay which was just then brightening to silver. On Water Street, cars and pickups crowded around the Waco Diner, town men having their eggs and coffee before heading out to work.

  At the freight dock the Star Hoisin loomed massively, cargo bays open. Guys in coveralls and rubber boots went down the metal gangways to the finger piers and onto the fishing boats, the grumble of diesel engines mingling with the slopping of small waves against the breakwater and the cries of seagulls. A bell-buoy clanked as tinges of deep pink rose behind the Canadian islands, dark blue blotches against the lightening sky.

  As we walked, I’d been giving Ellie a few stock tips. It was advice I had lagged away from following for myself since I’d been in Eastport, but someone might as well get the good of it. Ellie had been half-listening as she always did, or so I’d thought.

  Now in the cemetery all thoughts of money flew from my mind; instead I was busy trying to hold on to my breakfast, breathing the way they’d told me to do while Sam was being born. It hadn’t worked very well then, either.

  Ellie reached out and touched a finger to Reuben’s leather jacket, as if to confirm what she was seeing. The whoop-whoop of a squad car sounded somewhere down on the waterfront.

  “Be careful,” Ellie murmured as if reminding herself, “what you wish for.”

  I sat down hard, leaning against one of the old gravestones with my head between my knees. The face was bad, shrouded in red, and his hair was no longer the pale whitish color of sun-bleached straw, but it was the hands that really got to me. Stiffened into caked, curved claws, they had obviously been at his throat.

 
“Nobody,” I managed, “wishes for that.”

  Ellie turned slowly, expressionless. “No. Not anymore.”

  Then the sirens started again. I got up and called Monday and snapped her onto her lead. The squad cars were coming fast. Somebody must have seen the body before we found it and gone to find Bob Arnold, Eastport’s police chief, to let him know.

  The thought troubled me; there wasn’t much traffic on the cemetery road at this hour of the morning. Moments later, Arnold’s squad car appeared, speeding between the maples and the larch trees that made a bright avenue of the road in autumn. But behind him were a couple of state squads, and that wasn’t right, either. All three cars pulled to the curb, cherry beacons whirling.

  Bob Arnold emerged from his squad and stalked over to us furiously. “Jesus H. Christ,” he grated. “One’s not enough?”

  “One what?” I asked puzzledly, and then I knew: the siren, and the state cops already in town. Another body.

  “He was alive when he went up there,” I said, gesturing at Reuben. “Somebody tied him and lifted him, hung him upside down.”

  I was babbling. “And then …”

  “I get the picture, Jacobia.” Arnold pronounced it the Maine way: pictchah.

  By now it was full morning and a pickup truck was pulling in behind the squad cars. George Valentine got out and walked over to Ellie, while Arnold and the state guys conferred by the gate.

  “The guy Victor sewed up last night,” George said. “In the bar? They found him down on the seawall a couple hours ago, cold as a flounder.”

  A town truck with a bunch of orange traffic cones in its bed parked behind George’s vehicle, and some fellows from the highway department began using the cones to block off the road where it entered Hillside Cemetery.

  “Couldn’t figure what happened,” George went on. “Bruises on him. And something blue sticking out of his mouth.”

  “Blood all over his shirt,” Arnold added, approaching. “But that was from the events of earlier, in the bar.”

  He looked at me. “No mystery there. We’ve got a complete and fully detailed report of that. Fully,” he emphasized, “detailed.”

  Uh-oh. Suddenly one those details came back to me: blue. But of course what I was thinking wasn’t possible.

  Behind Arnold, the state men began marking off a perimeter, using yellow tape weighed down with small stones to form a circle about twenty feet in diameter.

  “Tell me it wasn’t,” I said to George, who had been at the restaurant with us. Who had seen …

  Victor, tossing back that final martini. And afterwards …

  George nodded, looking unhappy. “Pried open the guy’s mouth, see what was in there, that’s when we found it.”

  One of the state officers went back to his car and got on the radio, while the other began marking off a second perimeter a few yards out from the first. At the center of it all, Reuben hung there like some ghastly flag.

  “And to judge by how far down his windpipe it was,” Arnold went on, “I doubt that fellow just happened to mistake it for a cheeseburger. I don’t care,” he finished, “how rip-roaring drunk he’d got, couple-three hours earlier.”

  My mind’s eye showed Victor readying himself for impromptu surgery, in the course of which there might be blood. So that Victor, always a poster boy for the compulsively fastidious …

  “Mistook what?” Ellie demanded.

  Monday stopped nosing around and sat down beside me, wanting to go home. Me, too.

  “Victor’s tie,” George said. “What the guy strangled on.”

  He must have taken it off. Tucked it into his shirt-front, first, but that hadn’t been enough for him; it might get dirty. So he’d taken it off.

  “Part in his mouth, and the rest,” Arnold supplied, “damned near down into his lung. Have to wait for the medical examiner, of course. And the way his dance card’s filling up already today, it could take a while. But I’d agree the guy suffocated on it.”

  Somebody touched my shoulder and I jumped: Sam.

  “Mom? I think you better come. Dad’s at the house, and he’s pretty upset.” Sam kept his eyes averted from Reuben.

  “Oh, brother. He knows about the tie?” I asked Arnold.

  “Yeah. Teddy Armstrong remembered who he’d seen wearing it. I talked to your ex-husband about it a little while ago. Told him I’d see him at your house, and I was on my way over there. But then,” he gestured in disgust at Reuben, “I got diverted.”

  I got up. To Victor, everything was always about him. But this was going to put the frosting on it.

  “Did Reuben have relatives?” Bob Arnold asked, squinting at the body. Thinking, I supposed, about a funeral.

  Ellie shook her head. “His parents were from away. Both gone now. Buried away, too, I’ve forgotten quite where. They both had,” she added, “that same white-blond hair. And those white eyelashes—to look at them, you’d think they must be brother and sister. But,” she came back to the practical present, “he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, himself.”

  Trust her to know; Ellie’s memory contained a veritable orchard of Eastport family trees. “Come on, kiddo,” I told Sam. “Let’s go settle your father down. I guess he must have left that tie in the bar last night. He’d forget his head, you know, you feed him enough martinis.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sam agreed, not sounding convinced, but I just laid it to general upset. When Victor gets going, he can generate emotional shock waves that would shatter the Rock of Gibraltar.

  Ellie came too, looking grimly gratified now that the first surprise of our discovery had worn off. She is ordinarily the mildest of souls but her gentleness conceals some icy attitudes, partly I think because her ancestors were cold-water pirates, men who cut their eyeteeth on barbecues of long pig and rum until a hurricane blew them out of the Caribbean, eventually to downeast Maine, back in the 1700s.

  Since then her family had flourished in Eastport and the surrounding towns, as tenacious as barnacles and when necessary as coldly pragmatic. I got the impression she felt some rough justice had been served there in the cemetery.

  George stayed behind with Arnold, calling on Arnold’s radio for sawhorses to hold more perimeter tape and for a second body bag from the small stock of them kept over at the medical clinic.

  Which made two more body bags than our little town tended to use in a year. When we have bodies in Eastport they are generally the result of elderly people—and by that I mean very elderly; in Maine, if you should pass before the age of one hundred, your obituary will call it unexpected—signing off more or less on schedule.

  So I still felt reasonably sure that the sudden run on body bags was a statistical anomaly, not the beginning of a trend.

  Wrong.

  Before Wade went out on the water that morning, he’d brought all forty-eight of my old wooden storm windows up out of the cellar and lined them against the picnic table in the side yard. I’d bet him I could remove the upstairs window sashes and weatherstrip them before snow fell, and he’d said that if I did he would repair and hang the storm windows for me.

  But when Victor is in trouble, he thinks he is a swallow and my house is Capistrano, so I wasn’t going to get to the weatherstripping anytime soon.

  “Sam,” I said as we approached the back porch. “Why don’t you go on over and hang out with Tommy Daigle awhile? Let your dad and me have a conversation.”

  “You sure? He’s pretty, um … you know.” Sam waved his hands in a pantomime of something flying to pieces.

  “I’m sure,” I replied as reassuringly as I could, and to my relief he headed off. Tommy Daigle was a sensible, good-hearted boy, and his company would be an antidote to Sam’s distress.

  Now all I needed was an antidote to my own, but I wasn’t going to get that, either. Mounting the back steps with Ellie, I could hear Victor in there muttering to himself.

  “Well, it took you long enough,” he snapped as he saw us.

  Scrubbed and freshly
shaved as usual, he looked pink as a shrimp. But his eyes were narrowly anxious. I looked at the coffeepot, nearly full when I’d left—Sam had made the coffee, and since he believed it should compete with battery acid, I’d hardly drunk any—and empty now.

  Then Ellie and I swung into action: I filled the coffeepot and started it again while she got cups and saucers and sliced bread for toast. I cracked eggs into a bowl, adding milk and waiting for the butter in the pan to sizzle before I dumped them in; she washed the bowl, dried it, and put it away before the eggs had time to need stirring.

  Victor looked helpless and puzzled, as he always does when anything useful is happening that does not involve surgery.

  “Doesn’t anybody want to know why I’m so upset?” he finally demanded.

  Ellie put a glass of orange juice on the oilcloth-covered table in front of him. She had not wanted him to move to Eastport any more than I had, but there hadn’t been much she could do about it, either. When he wants something, he is as relentless as the hurricane that had resettled her ancestors.

  “Maybe you’re upset because you have high blood pressure?” she inquired. “That always puts you in a bad mood. Drink your juice. Here’s some aspirin to go with it.”

  She dropped tablets onto the table. “I don’t suppose you’ve thought to take any, yet.” Now that he was here, she’d adopted my standard procedure for dealing with him:

  First, get him out of his immediate physical discomfort. We would have skipped this, except that it so much simplified stage two: getting him out of my house and back into his own as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

  Which was the hard part. I could have just banished him as a general rule, I suppose, but that would have been hard on Sam. And this morning, something serious was up; how serious, I didn’t know yet.

  “Well, no,” he admitted about the aspirin and swallowed them grudgingly. He ate the eggs and toast we fixed for him, too, and drank more coffee.

  Ellie glanced meaningfully at me: Now he can vamoose.

  Not so fast, I signaled back at her, because I was watching Victor carefully and something about him was different: