by Sarah Graves
“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking for it,” Sam said.
Absently, he opened the Ouija board box, slid the planchette dejectedly over the varnished surface of the board. It was elaborately painted in crisp, glossy black, the standard numerals and letters spread out across it. The words Yes and No were displayed in the upper left-and-right-hand corners.
“I was wishing Dad would call me over,” he said, fiddling with the planchette. “But he didn’t, and then I was past him. I never looked at the gate.”
The planchette slipped off the edge of the table and fell to the floor; Monday came over and sniffed suspiciously at it.
Sam picked it up again. “It felt lousy, you know? Not being able to help him. But he never does. Let me help him, I mean. And now if I have to say where he was when I saw him last night…”
“No one has asked you,” Ellie said. “And I hope you’re not thinking of volunteering any information before it’s requested.”
We sat in glum silence until the oven timer’s brrring! interrupted my musing: Victor had bathed that morning, so thoroughly that to anyone who didn’t know him it would look as if he’d been trying to wash something off.
Even more, I mean, than usual. Ellie took the cream scones from the oven. “So the next time you knew where your father was, he was here? This morning?”
But Sam shook his head again. “After I went to bed, I heard him. It was getting light out, so it must have been around five. I heard the shower run, and after that he did a load of laundry.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Most of the time, Victor’s idea of doing laundry was bundling it up for the maid to take. He’d hired a cleaning person from town three days a week, and a high-school kid to do his yard work, the minute he’d arrived in Eastport.
And now suddenly he was Holly Homemaker.
“What about the jacket he was wearing, and the slacks he had on?” Ellie inquired acutely. “Have you seen those?”
“Uh-uh,” Sam replied. “But…”
His face fell further. “But he took the trash out. I saw a fresh bag in the bin this morning. He’d put the top back on the bin but he hadn’t tied it down, which was why I noticed.”
A grin lit his face briefly. “Dad still thinks skunks won’t eat his trash if he just disapproves of them hard enough.”
Then the seriousness of the situation overtook him again.
“Anyway, I had to shove the bag farther down in the bin, so I could get the top shut. And it was soft,” he finished in a tone of terminal glumness. “Like maybe there were clothes inside it.”
He thought for a minute. “I could call Charlie Martin. Ask him to pick up the trash now instead of waiting for our regular day.”
Ellie split a scone, buttered it, and put it in front of him.
“He will, you know,” Sam finished earnestly to me. “He will, if I call and ask him.”
But as Sam said this, a rumbling sound came from the street. I knew it well: it was the sound I heard each Thursday morning, when once again I had forgotten to put out my own trash and had to scramble to get the cans lugged out to the sidewalk, and the wastebaskets emptied too, if I was lucky.
Opening the back door, I watched the garbage truck roll by: red cab, big bull moose painted in green on the white compactor.
And today wasn’t Thursday. “Looks like some helpful person already has. Called him, I mean.”
Charlie swung out and started up the driveway to the trash bin, a low, lean-to structure built onto the shed out back of Victor’s house. He was halfway there when the Maine State Police squad car rolled to the curb. Two officers got out and waved him over.
I saw Charlie glance at my house as he listened to the officers. Then I closed the door so I wouldn’t have to see any more.
“Look,” I told Sam. “Whatever trouble your dad’s in, the way to help him is not by lying or trying to cover anything up.”
He listened disconsolately. Meanwhile in my head an awful refrain was repeating itself: motive, method, opportunity. I was pretty sure the state cops knew that old song, too.
And from what I could tell, Victor had just spent the night putting together a new arrangement for it.
“So,” I told Sam, “you say nothing unless you’re questioned by somebody who has the authority to do it. And even then, say you have to ask your mother before you can answer. Got it so far?”
Sam nodded gratefully. Ordinarily, he doesn’t like asking my permission to do anything, regarding it as an outworn, childhood habit that ought to be put behind him, like a snake’s skin. But this time he looked relieved.
“Tell the truth,” I continued. “But no more than you’ve been asked.”
He nodded some more, so woebegone I almost wished for a hint of the bad old days: teenaged anger and open defiance.
But not quite. “Got it?” I emphasized.
“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “I know,” he went on earnestly, “about Dad’s trouble with Tate. Dad didn’t want Tate telling that he’d gotten sued in New York. He told me he knew people here would find out eventually. But he wanted them to know him better, kind of get used to him, you know. Before they heard about it. He was real worried about it.”
His shoulders slumped. “I won’t say that to anyone but you two, though. Unless,” he added sorrowfully, “the police ask.”
Typical Victor: knee-jerk secretiveness, bunker mentality. He’d have kept his New York troubles under wraps forever if he could, and never mind what he’d told Sam he was going to do about it; worrying about looking bad was one of Victor’s main ways of not worrying about being bad.
Typical Reuben Tate, too, from what I’d been hearing: playing into Victor’s psychology that way. Sam got up, closed the Ouija box, and took it and the blue-covered Morse code book with him.
“Mom, how could they have arrested him? He’s not guilty. He couldn’t have done it. He’s not…”
Sam paused, swallowed hard. “He’s not violent. Anymore.”
“Right,” I said, knowing that we were remembering the same incident. But that was from the really bad old days, and it was over. I put my hand on his arm, made my voice sound confident.
“His talk about threatening Reuben, even if he did say that stuff, it was just talk. Don’t worry about it too much. Things are going to be a little rough for a while, but I’m certain that this will all get straightened out just fine.”
Sam met my gaze, comforted for a moment. But then his face changed, as he realized that I was lying.
That Victor was innocent of Tate’s murder I was certain; I knew Victor too well. It was the getting things straightened out part I wasn’t sure of, because what I couldn’t come up with was the answer to one simple question:
Neither Ellie nor I had said anything about Reuben Tate when we’d arrived home from the cemetery to find Victor sitting in my kitchen.
Arnold hadn’t mentioned Tate either when he’d called Victor earlier, because at that point he hadn’t heard.
So how had Victor known that Reuben was dead?
The question of hauntedness was a recurring one in our old house: cold spots on the stairs, strange noises in the attic, doors that opened or closed with odd, mischievous regularity. Once I came down in the morning to find a set of steak knives, their blades all bent and twisted, inside the washing machine.
So having a Ouija board around the place just seemed to me like begging for trouble, but Sam was enthralled with the thing. He took it into the dining room and sat brooding over it, as if it might reveal some hidden secret to him.
“Sam,” I said. “It’s supposed to take at least two people to get any action out it.”
Live people, I meant, and not that I wanted any action; the reverse, in fact, unless the dratted thing decided to levitate itself into the trash. The astral plane had been pretty quiet on our part of Key Street in recent months, and I wished it would stay that way.
“I know,” he replied. “I’m just playing around with it.”
He’d
finished stripping the radiator, put a coat of primer on it, and cleaned up, then spent some time on the phone and afterward just picked at his lunch. Behind him, early-afternoon sunlight slanted brilliantly through the dining-room windows.
“Are you worried about your dad?”
Sam frowned, moving the planchette a fraction toward the Yes corner of the board. “Daigle says lots of people wanted to kill Reuben Tate. He says there are, like, other possible suspects.”
Which wouldn’t stop a prosecutor from doing his best to pin the deed on Victor. And until recently I’d have been happy to see Victor impaled on a pin the size of a railroad spike. But now that he was in trouble I had to admit that, over the months since he’d moved here, Victor had done the one thing I’d never expected of him: he had behaved.
Oh, he was still about as easy to have around as a sprained ankle, and all the emotional baggage I had with him could have filled a boxcar. Still, he hadn’t engaged in any scandalous dalliances with Eastport girls, or gotten into feuds with any of the town’s leading citizens. He hadn’t, as I had been so much fearing, made a public spectacle of himself.
And then there was Sam, whose personal transformation over the past couple of years had been nearly miraculous. Now all he wanted was some semblance of a normal home life, or at any rate one that didn’t feature a father confined to prison.
What we needed, I decided, was one of those other suspects Tommy Daigle talked about, preferably one who was (a) not in any sense a member of my family, and (b) the real perpetrator.
“How come you’re not down at the boatyard?” I asked Sam.
He shrugged. “Day off. I got twenty hours in, Harpwell says that’s enough for this week.”
And Sam did, too, his expression telegraphed with perfect clarity. Work on the local guys’ boats was all right, as far as it went. Sam enjoyed it, but it didn’t offer him much variety.
“Well, it won’t be forever. You’ll be at school next year.”
I hoped. He’d been accepted at Yale, into a special program, then had discovered Yale wasn’t among the top training grounds for marine architects, which was what he planned on being. In the end he’d turned them down, deciding to put off college altogether for a year, which I personally thought was a fine idea.
But now … “I don’t know, Mom. I’m just not sure that stuff is for me.”
I stifled impatience. Dan Harpwell, owner of East-port Boat Yard, was holding out a promise of a partnership for Sam: better money, more interesting work. Without advanced schooling, though, in computer-aided design, modern methods and materials, even some business accounting, Sam’s future at the boat establishment—and in his chosen career—was limited.
“Did you hear,” he asked wryly, “about the dyslexic devil worshiper who sold his soul to Santa?”
Well, at least he could joke about it. We’d found out about his dyslexia a few years earlier; it had turned out to be an odd, refractory form of the disability. He’d gotten through high school by dint of taped texts, special therapy, and tutoring. But now with a year off from school he was getting a taste of not having to struggle so hard all the time, and was—temporarily, I hoped—shying at the gate of any further education at all.
“Sam,” I began gently, but his shoulders stiffened. Time for a change of subject.
“I think,” I offered carefully, for Sam could be touchy if you tried cheering him up too blatantly, “George Valentine knows Morse code. He’s a ham-radio enthusiast.”
He brightened a little. “Yeah? Hey, maybe I’ll ask him about it. You think spirits could learn to send messages in Morse?”
“I don’t know,” I said, again feeling obscurely troubled. On the other hand, none of the odd events we’d experienced in the house had been malicious. And just at that moment I’d have rented a room to the headless horseman, if it made Sam feel better.
“I think,” he said in a wan attempt to make a little joke, “it would depend on whether a spirit knew any Morse code before.”
He took his hands off the Ouija board and looked up sideways at me, his grin the pale ghost of the one he usually wore.
Whereupon I swear that dratted planchette twitched.
That afternoon, Arnold drove Victor to the courthouse in Machias, thirty miles to our south. The prisoner’s behavior was calm and cooperative, Arnold reported; Victor allowed himself to be fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a cell; he was given a phone call, which, as promised, he had made to an attorney in Manhattan.
“And that,” Arnold finished, “is that.” Victor would remain in jail to await arraignment, hearings, and trial.
I gripped the telephone, not yet quite able to believe that it was all so cut-and-dried, or in fact that any of it was real. But of course it was.
“State guys’ll be around,” Arnold went on, “talk to you and Ellie about finding the body. About what you saw and heard at La Sardina, too. And,” he added reluctantly, “they’ll want to have a word with Sam.”
Which was the part that I was most emphatically not looking forward to. But it was coming; the state’s mobile crime lab was in town and the bodies were on their way to the police forensic unit in Augusta; the physical-evidence-gathering part of the program, Arnold felt, would be completed by nightfall.
“Cops’re saving your interviews until last,” he said. “They know none of you are going anywhere. That’ll wrap it up.”
“But,” I protested, “won’t there be further investigation? Isn’t there anyone who thinks someone besides Victor is guilty?”
I took a deep breath. “I mean, Arnold, if Victor ever wanted to kill somebody, he’d come up with some goofy plan full of clever, unworkable details. Full,” I went on, “of self-glorifying intellectual flourishes and literary-thriller stuff he’d read somewhere and wanted to imitate. A victim,” I was practically pleading now, “would die of natural causes, before Victor ever even got around to doing the actual murder.”
Arnold harrumphed unhappily. “Well, if you say so. But Jacobia, that’s beside the point. State guys heard what they heard, they got orders of their own, and the orders said go get Victor. I had to twist some arms, even to talk them into letting me do it.”
His tone softened. “And listen, Victor threatened the guy. A lot of people heard him. Now it turns out Reuben was threatening Victor, he had information that Victor didn’t want getting around.”
A vehicle pulled into the driveway; Monday got up and padded to the hall vigilantly, in case it contained any burglars she could lick or nuzzle to death.
“Later,” Arnold went on, “the guy gets found with his throat cut and the weapon is Victor’s. And Victor’s got no alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the crime. And you’ve got to admit he’s done some guilty-looking activities: washing up, getting rid of clothes, and so on. So I ask you,” Arnold finished reasonably, “what’s left, besides a confession?”
It did look awful. “But what about all the others who wanted Reuben out of their hair? Sounds to me like he had a grab bag full of mortal enemies.”
“Yeah, but Reuben, he wasn’t blackmailing them.”
In the back hall, Monday’s wag-o-meter shot up to redline as Wade came in, home from the harbor. But his face didn’t look right to me; it was even more troubled than I’d expected.
Also, he wasn’t carrying his soft canvas gun bag. When he is not on a boat, Wade restores and repairs firearms in a workshop he has built into the storeroom ell of my house. Thus, in addition to a fragrance of camellias that tends to appear for no reason like a calling card from a time gone by, the house often smells of gun oil, hot soldering compound, and the bright, sharp reek of metal being machined to produce close tolerances in the working parts of deadly weapons.
But this time no weapons were in evidence. Puzzled, I turned back to the phone. “Thanks, Arnold, for keeping me posted. How’s Clarissa?”
In answer, I heard the latest details of Arnold’s impending fatherhood. Arnold’s wife, a criminal attorney wh
o would have been defending Victor if she hadn’t been about to deliver a baby practically that minute, was enormous, elated, and, according to Arnold, so impatient to get it all over with that he “dassn’t even look cross-eyed at her.”
Which reminded me that somewhere in the world, someone was happy, an assurance I sorely needed. I told Arnold to give her all our love and he promised to, and we hung up.
Out in the kitchen, Wade sat at the table looking thoughtful, a bottle of Sea Dog ale in front of him. He’d gotten the news on our crime wave, I could see from his expression, from the guys at dockside. I sat down with him and told him the rest of it, still wondering what else was eating at him.
“That’s a lot of money,” he said mildly when I had explained what could happen if Victor remained in custody.
He’d known of my investment in the trauma-center project; just not how much.
“You know that whatever you do about money, it’s all right with me. Don’t you?” Wade added.
“Yes.” It was part of our ongoing success in being together, that neither of us meddled in the other’s finances. We just knew we’d have given each other the world, no strings attached.
“Still,” he went on, “I’ll bet it galls you. Having it a lot more at risk than you planned.”
“Right. And that’s an understatement.”
Wade understood that I was a little crazy about my financial security. Well, maybe a lot crazy: even aside from Sam’s feelings and Victor’s innocence, if there was anything I could do to avoid losing that money, I was going to.
“And the only way for me not to lose it,” I said, “is for Victor to get back to his project. Otherwise the whole idea goes off the rails and my investment goes with it, because without a surgeon a trauma center is pretty pointless, wouldn’t you say?”
Wade took another meditative sip of his ale. “You can’t just find another surgeon, maybe advertise in the city papers? Hire on someone else to fill in for Victor?”
