Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  “Starting right now,” I told him. “Or next spring, I’ll let you sort out your taxes all by yourself and go to Augusta to try defending the hash you’ve made of them.”

  I spoke to both of them; Terence was Paddy’s business partner as well as his domestic companion but even he wouldn’t go anywhere near Paddy’s IRS filings. So my threat carried weight.

  Paddy sighed irritably. “All right. I guess it can’t do any harm talking about Tate now.” His face still said different, though, and I couldn’t help wondering why.

  “But you’ll have to come along with me,” he went on. “I’m going over to Deer Island to get some more sketch work from one of my freelancers, and I’m picking up my car there.”

  He grabbed a portfolio case, a sweater, and his wallet. “And Terence is coming, too. Aren’t you, Terence?”

  A look of surprise crossed Terence’s jutting features, but he put away his papers and got up obediently. Publicly, Paddy was the up-front, bossy one of the pair, but I got the sense that in his quiet way, Terence was the strength of the duo.

  “Oh, do hurry up, Terence,” Paddy called as I went out onto Water Street. Glancing back, I stepped straight into the path of someone who obviously hadn’t seen me coming, either. The resulting full-body collision slammed me against the brick building; for an instant I saw stars.

  “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” The woman I’d run into reached out to steady me, concern on her face.

  “Fine.” I laughed, a little shakily. She was my size, with pale curly hair and wide violet eyes, wearing navy slacks, a knit shirt, and running shoes. But she’d been hitting the gym regularly, to judge by the punch she packed; there was a lot of muscle mass hidden in that petite-looking body.

  She assessed me closely as if to make sure she really hadn’t injured me, then flashed an apologetic grin and went on her way. By then, Paddy was on his way out the door, still frowning over his shoulder, and I wondered if maybe this trip to Deer Island with him was a mistake.

  But by the time we got to the ferry dock, his mood had lifted, buoyed as always by his unquenchable enthusiasm for Eastport. He was a New York refugee like me, veteran of SoHo and Greenwich Village, but unlike me he’d been born in Eastport, gone away to school and to get his career started, then had come back.

  “When I was a kid,” he recalled nostalgically as we strolled down the tree-lined lane to the dock where the ferry was just now approaching, “you could stand at the end of the pier there and catch your dinner of codfish. Or sell them. I had a little red wagon. I’d go around to the housewives. Of course,” he added, a bit less enthusiastically, “they’d want me to clean them, first.”

  “Nowadays,” Terence put in dryly, “Paddy likes his fish to be broiled with butter and garlic, preferably by someone else. Whatever happened to the little red wagon, though?” he asked Paddy affectionately, dropping his arm over the other man’s shoulder.

  “Never mind,” Paddy retorted, letting Terence’s arm linger a moment. But then he stepped away. “The boat’s coming in; let’s go.”

  Terence looked crestfallen, covered it smoothly, but not before I caught the look of deep hurt on his face. The ferry slid aground with a scrape of its metal ramp on the beach gravel. Then we were boarding, climbing the metal ramp while cars and sports utility vehicles—most with out-of-state license plates, filled with tourists—went alongside us onto the bargelike vessel.

  The grumble of diesel engines propelled the ferry back out onto the water, and we were away, the island town receding behind us and an onshore breeze gusting freshly.

  “Great day,” Terence called over the engine noise, putting his face into the wind. The tide was running hard, so the ferry pilot skirted the edge of Old Sow, the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere and a navigation hazard even to bigger boats. At the moment its turbulence was like water in a washing machine when the agitator is churning, the difference being that this was millions of gallons of water.

  Below us, it hammered like fists through narrow channels and slammed against granite ledges, assaulted the tall, precipitous cliffs of underwater islands and gouted up in unseen geysers, in a maelstrom that was mostly not visible from the swirling surface. If you happened to fall into it, though, it would suck you down in a frigid heartbeat and deposit your body miles away.

  “It might not,” Terence said startlingly, seeming to read my thought, “be a bad way to go. Quick. Decisive.”

  Paddy was busy paying our fares. “You don’t really mean that,” I told Terence. “It wouldn’t seem fast while you were doing it. Drowning, in that cold water.”

  He shrugged, glancing at me. “I suppose it depends on your alternatives.”

  Which was another very odd remark from the usually cheerful Terence; he suffered from hypochondria but in an interested way, not a glum one. Then Paddy approached and Terence’s warning glance made me change the subject.

  “What happened to your hand?” I gestured at the Ace bandage. “Looks like you gave your first-aid talents a real workout.”

  Terence frowned uncomfortably. “Took a fall. It’s nothing.”

  But the remark brought to mind again his unsteady episode in La Sardina. And the look on his face was guarded; an unhappy idea struck me. “Terence, are you all right?”

  “Never better,” he replied shortly, turning away.

  Clearly, he didn’t want to talk about it. His business; I decided to concentrate on Paddy.

  “Why were you so upset that Reuben had come back?” I asked. “I mean, I wouldn’t think you and he would have much to do with each other, in the normal course of things.”

  Paddy’s brow furrowed as he leaned on the ferry rail, gazing down into the now-serene water; we’d rounded the whirlpool margin and were on course for the little harbor at Deer Island.

  “First of all, there was nothing normal about him. See, that’s what most people don’t understand: Reuben was pathological, and he was smart. Too smart. If he wanted you, he found you. And…”

  He hesitated, considering. “Well, it’ll be common knowledge. In Eastport, everything is. Reuben came to see me the other night. Jittering around, hopped up on tequila. Said he wanted my help on something, offered me a deal he said was surefire.”

  Listening in silence, Terence chuckled bitterly as if the term were an unpleasant private joke, but said nothing.

  “What did Reuben mean?” I asked. “What kind of a deal?”

  Paddy shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is, I didn’t go for it. Told him to get out. When he left, he had that grin on his face, and he was laughing. You know the laugh?”

  The high, strangled whinny, like a cross between a cough and a man’s last breath; I knew.

  “Scared me pretty badly, I’ll admit,” Paddy went on. “That Reuben could freeze your heart up.”

  The impatience I’d been restraining since the night before overcame me. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. He was just one guy. I don’t care how bad he was—how’d he get a whole town so petrified?”

  Paddy turned slowly to me. “Right. That’s what anyone would think. Anyone who didn’t know him. But let me tell you a story.”

  He lifted his eyes, letting his gaze wander past the high promontory of Deer Island to the passage beyond: blue water all the way to Nova Scotia, which lay like a strip of autumn gold on the far horizon.

  “Reuben wasn’t just a bully,” Paddy said. “He was a criminal: burglaries, arson. If he wanted money, or he just wanted to hurt you, he would do something. And once he had done it, he would get away with it, too; Reuben always did.”

  “Which,” I came back at him, “is what I don’t understand. Why was he walking around? Seems to me Bob Arnold could put a guy like that in jail, double-quick.”

  “That,” Paddy replied, “is what I’m telling you about.”

  We were crossing the international boundary between the United States and Canada, an invisible line down the middle of Passamaquoddy Bay. To our left rose Deer
Island, sloping to pebble beaches and finally to sand. On our right lay the island of Campobello, long and low, its little towns toylike along the shoreline. The ferry adjusted course for the final approach to the Deer Island dock.

  “Once upon a time, a man from town complained—it’s not important about what. A charge was brought against Reuben, and the man promised to testify against him.”

  Paddy recited tonelessly. “A week later, the fellow who brought the charge was found in his cellar. Slipped and hit his head on a foundation stone, everybody said.”

  He looked at me. “But they all knew.” The ferry slid against the wooden dock pilings, her ramp scraping bottom.

  People and cars began moving toward the shore as the deck hand lowered the chain at the bow of the ferry, but I hung back. “They thought Reuben killed him, to stop him from testifying?”

  “Not thought,” Paddy corrected. “Knew. Reuben would kill your house pets or poison your well. He would terrify your wife and menace your children. He would terrify anyone. Which is why,” he finished, “nobody ever told on Reuben. As for testifying against him, well, that was a joke. You might as well kill yourself.”

  We got off the ferry. Uphill stood a small log-cabin snack bar and souvenir shop, a drinking fountain, and some rough frame buildings containing sanitary facilities. Paddy’s old green Peugeot was parked beside the snack bar where his mechanic—the only Peugeot man in five hundred miles—had apparently left it for him.

  “But not you,” I said as we drove down the narrow, paved two-lane leading out from the dock area. It curved immediately into scrubby, second-growth evergreen forest dotted here and there with modest homesteads: cottages and trailers. A mountain of sand loomed beside a public-works barn, ready for winter.

  “Not me,” Paddy agreed grimly. “I stood up to him. Me and a few others. That was the key to it, see. Standing up to him. Then he’d back off.”

  We passed through a crossroads: church, general store with a post office, a diner, and a cluster of dwellings. At a low wharf a battered dragger was tied, its deck piled with lobster traps. Then we were in the country again, finally at the entrance to a warren of lanes lined with cottages.

  “So, what was the surefire deal?” I asked again.

  He turned right, left, at last down an unmarked rut. “Bottom line was, Reuben said he going to reenact history. You know the big Eastport fire in the late 1800s, took down most of Water Street? He said he could make it all happen again, starting with my place.”

  The thought made me cringe. His big old building with its antique brick exterior, so gorgeously refurbished inside and with its glorious view, wasn’t only a showpiece of old-time Eastport architecture. It was Paddy’s baby, so precious to him I sometimes thought the design business was only an excuse for using it in a legitimately tax-deductible way.

  Meanwhile, I’d seen pictures of the Eastport fire. They looked as if a bomb had gone off in the middle of Water Street. It had burned right up one side and down the other, leaving only blocks of charred devastation.

  “Unless, of course, I wanted to help him with his big plan,” Paddy added grimly.

  “Help him what?” At the end of the lane he pulled to a halt and we got out. Across a short stretch of pasture the water lay flat and motionless, at slack tide.

  The silence was stunning. We walked on a grassy path between evergreens smelling of pine sap. A dalmation romped out of the trees at us, grinning, its pink tongue lolling. Terence bent and fondled its ears.

  “I was supposed to help blackmail your ex-husband. Scare him into thinking I knew whatever it was that Reuben had on him—not that Reuben would really tell me, you understand, he was too smart to give away his game—and warn him that he ought to pay.”

  Overhead, a bald eagle circled lazily, just riding the thermals and sailing so low I could see his white helmet, shaggy-feathered white legs, and thick, curving talons: hunting.

  “Not that I would have,” Paddy added. “It just goes to show how nuts Reuben was, that he would ask me.”

  We were approaching a house with a rail-fenced garden and some mulched rose beds. “He’d tried that, tried to bully you, back in the old days? When you were growing up together in Eastport?”

  Paddy nodded, as the dalmation loped over to me, a frisky creature with coltlike legs. No leash, only a fabric collar from which hung a stamped metal ID tag. Talk about a dog’s life.

  “What did you tell him?” I asked. “When he came to see you the other night?”

  I was still trying to imagine Reuben with his black leather jacket, pegged pants, and cleated boots, in that pristine studio of Paddy’s: clicking on the tiles, making demands, and breathing tequila fumes.

  Paddy would have hated it. It would have made him angry.

  Very angry. And only a few nights later, Reuben was dead.

  “I told him go to hell,” Paddy replied. “He wasn’t going to burn my building. Because he knew if he did I would find him. And then,” Paddy finished flatly, “I would kill him.”

  I was about to ask him if he knew the other victim, the one found suffocated on Water Street. Reuben, it seemed more and more to me, was a such a larger-than-life kind of a person, his death pushed the other one to the background. And no one had yet said anything about any connection between the victims. But I couldn’t believe there had been two unrelated murders in Eastport on a single night.

  I didn’t get to ask Paddy anything, though, because he pushed aside the evergreen branches abruptly, striding away from us down the sun-dappled path toward the house, leaving his final words hanging in the silence.

  “Not that he did, of course,” Terence said mildly. He drew aside the pine boughs, inviting me to go first.

  “Kill Reuben, I mean,” he added, following behind.

  Paddy’s sketch artist lived in a small, ranch-style cottage a hundred feet from an inlet studded with dozens of tiny islands, granite boulders thrusting up through the water’s surface.

  I wandered to the water’s edge. The dog came, too, picking his way delicately on the small stones. The small waves reflected the sunshine glassily, as if lit from below. A scuffling splash, followed by the swoop of the eagle back up into his own bright element, signaled the doom of some poor fish struggling at the ends of those sharp talons.

  “Quiet,” Terence said suddenly, startling me.

  He tossed a pebble into the water. “Not like back in town. All the people, visiting from away.”

  Another pebble. “Paddy won’t talk to me about Reuben.”

  That troubled me. Just looking at those two, you knew they talked about everything under the sun. Or they had, but something had changed; not for the better.

  “The murder … he won’t discuss it at all,” Terence said. “I’m surprised he is with you. Taxes,” he twinkled briefly, “or no taxes.”

  There was the Terence I remembered, funny and kind. Almost at once, though, some deep worry returned to his features.

  “So I haven’t said this to him, but…”

  He gestured out at the marine setting. It seemed to go on forever, and for all practical purposes it did. “All that water. So deep and cold. A cove somewhere, weigh a body down with enough stones, or just let the current take it. And bingo, it’s gone.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that, too. No one ever needed to know Tate was dead,” I agreed. “But instead someone took a lot of trouble displaying him. Like,” I added, “an art object.”

  The tide turned and larger waves began slapping on the beach pebbles. Terence’s face was thinner than I remembered seeing it over the summer.

  “Cemetery fences are supposed to keep spirits in,” I added. “You don’t suppose that was it?” Wanting to keep him talking, I tried for a tone of casual lightness. “Maybe someone thought Tate was demon enough that his spirit needed to be kept imprisoned.”

  “Someone should have tried it when he was alive,” Terence blurted angrily. But in the next moment he was composed again.

&n
bsp; “Anyway, he was tied to the outside of the gate. People with family buried inside are glad of that much. That’s what I’ve heard. So if confining him was what someone wanted they got it wrong. He’s no more confined in the spirit world than he was here on earth.”

  Terence picked up a stick of driftwood and threw it; the dog raced after it, flinging himself into the water and racing back, shaking off bright droplets.

  “Why do you think he was hung there, Terence?” I asked.

  He threw the stick again. “Messages,” he said cryptically.

  But I got it; it was what I’d been thinking also, although until that moment I hadn’t known it.

  “Hanging him up there, showing him off…”

  Terence nodded. The dog trotted away, tired of the game or perhaps just having had enough of the icy water.

  “I don’t know why Reuben Tate was killed,” Terence went on, dropping the stick on the beach stones. “Although,” he added, “I am still not convinced that you believe it.”

  The eyes in his homely face were insightful, intelligent, and wary. “But,” he said, “it occurs to me that having all the Salmon Festival visitors in town enlarges the suspect pool. Some of them grew up alongside Reuben, too.”

  “And might have had a grudge against him,” I agreed. “An old score to settle, something to do with the past.”

  “If someone was here in Eastport for only a week,” he added reasonably, “and managed to escape suspicion that long, once they went home the odds would go up that they would never be caught.”

  His tone was mild, his expression serene, the view of water and islands so idyllic it seemed that nothing could go amiss in it. But when I turned to reply, I saw that he’d begun putting small, wet beach stones into his mouth, stuffing them in one after another.

  Alarm pierced me. There was something really wrong with him. “Terence,” I said sharply, and my tone seemed to bring him back to himself.

  But not all the way. He spat the stones out slowly, looking at me as if he could not quite remember what he’d been doing.