Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  Marcus looked thoughtful. “I didn’t see him. My father did. Reuben came here while I was out having the Winnebago serviced. Dad wouldn’t say what they talked about. I’m glad,” he went on, “you’re asking me these things and not him. Reuben upset him very badly. Dad stayed up half the night, praying over it.”

  Marcus rose, parted the Venetian blinds at one of the big vehicle’s windows, and looked out. “He’s a vigorous guy, but he is getting older. I wouldn’t want him,” Marcus finished meaningfully, “upset any further.”

  Those wagons circling again. I thought of asking Marcus what his dad had been praying about, then decided to cut to the chase, instead.

  “Did Reuben have anything to do with your mother’s death?”

  It was a guess based on nothing but a wild intuition. A funny kind of resonance had invaded the room just when they’d mentioned her, something unspoken between them. But at my query, Marcus’s frank gaze retracted as emphatically as a welcome mat being rolled up.

  “He didn’t murder my mother,” he said after a moment. “Not in the way that most people mean the term. But I’m sure that he was responsible for her death.”

  “In what way?”

  Marcus turned from the window. “He scared her to death. Oh, I know, it sounds melodramatic, but she was vulnerable to that. Her heart was bad; everyone knew it. But if you’re wondering if my dad would ever really act out that eye-for-an-eye stuff …”

  Or get his big, strong son to do it, I thought clearly, and Marcus read my thought.

  “Or get me to do it,” he finished, “all I can say is that Dad and I have hardly been out of each other’s sight since we arrived in Eastport.”

  Oh, terrific, another we-can-alibi-each-other scenario. A new thought struck me, and I had nothing else so I went with it:

  “Have you by any chance met my ex-husband around town,” I asked, “since you’ve arrived?”

  I followed Marcus out into the bright Sunday afternoon. He shut the door of the Winnebago, turned. “This is the one you’re trying to help out? Who’s been arrested?”

  “That’s the one.” I made my voice sound regretfully amused, as if Victor were a teenager who’d been picked up for some bit of harmless mischief.

  “I’m afraid he has rather a penchant for getting himself in trouble,” I went on, as we strolled into the garden. The tall white chrysanthemums bobbed in the breeze, flanked by the bright red masses of fruit on the thorned barberry bushes.

  “Dark curly hair, intense expression, abrupt manner,” I went on, describing Victor. “He’s a very clean sort of man. Fastidious to a fault, actually, enough so that you might remember him.”

  I picked a chrysanthemum. “You see, anyone who could help pinpoint his whereabouts in the few days before the murder might end up being of assistance.”

  Marcus nodded, enlightened. “Oh, sure. Now I remember him. Smells like soap?”

  That was Victor, all right: special antibacterial soap with hexachlorophene in it, which you could get only by prescription.

  “We met him in the Baywatch restaurant where we were having lunch, the day after we got in,” Marcus said. “He even gave us a little tour of his place. Lovely old Greek revival, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.” Victor’s friendliness to strangers was a new development, part of his program to be accepted in town.

  Meanwhile, Marcus couldn’t very well not mention this little meeting; anyone might have seen him and Heywood entering Victor’s house. “And Victor is such a hospitable fellow, it’s true.”

  When it suited him. “But our talk was very general,” Marcus said. “I wish I could think of something useful, but …”

  “That’s all right. I appreciate your telling me about this. And thank your dad for me, too.”

  “Will do.” He raised his big right hand unselfconsciously in a sort of salute as I went away down the sidewalk. When I glanced back he still stood there, watching me go, his face unreadable at that distance.

  “They’ve all three of them been in there,” I said to Wade an hour later. We were up in the front bedroom taking apart a whole window frame, at Wade’s insistence. “Mike Carpentier, Marcus Sondergard, and Heywood Sondergard, Marcus’s father,” I went on. “What’ll you bet that Terence and Paddy’ve also been in Victor’s place recently?”

  “And could have seen that instrument collection,” Wade said. “I don’t know, though, how much that’s going to help you. It’s a pretty big net you’re casting.” “Right,” I agreed glumly. “Because who knows who else was in the house? At this rate, it could’ve been half the town. Did Marcus have any birthmark or a scar on his right hand, back when you knew him?” Mike Carpentier, I recalled, had a burn on his.

  “Not one I remember. But not that I necessarily would recall something like that, either.”

  Wade had brought a six-foot piece of one-by-eight pine board along with his circular saw, two sawhorses, the clawhammer, and a bag of nails, plus the electric drill. I’d brought a tape measure and a detailed, exploded-view diagram of a modern window frame, which if it couldn’t be jury-rigged to work in an antique house I was in deep trouble.

  Wade’s eyebrows went up as he got a good look at the window I had been working on earlier. “Exactly how did you manage to destroy this, again?”

  Embarrassment swept over me. “Nailed the weatherstripping in backwards,” I confessed. “Which,” I added, “anyone could make that mistake, and I was preoccupied. Then of course I had to pull it out again. Which was when the old framing piece split.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wade looked at me hard, then relented. “At least you’re trying. This old house hasn’t had so many repairs going on inside it since it was built, I’ll bet.”

  He eyed the frame again, then hefted the pry bar and tore what I thought was a hideously large and important piece off of it. Plaster bits clattered to the floor. “Hey, look at this.”

  He fished around with his fingers in the crevice between the inner and outer walls. “I stand corrected. Someone has worked on this window before.”

  He drew out some tightly folded, yellowing newspaper, mostly intact. “Somebody packed this in here, trying to block a draft,” he said, tossing aside the paper.

  I picked it up. It was torn down the center, obliterating the date. But the quaint typography put it in its era: fresh news, 150 years ago. Others much like it had been in the walls of the downstairs ell, stuffed in there apparently as makeshift insulation.

  The brittle pages were filled with ads for patent remedies, notices of public meetings, and reports of local events from a time when ladies wore elaborate hats with ostrich feathers in them, men raced horses hell-for-leather along the Shore Road, and they all gathered formally to attend….

  Concerts, including one at the Eastport Hotel on the Friday night previous to the newspaper’s ancient issue. The fragile old sheet detailed a fine performance, well attended and marvelously entertaining, by a local musician: one Jared Hayes, resident of 20 Key Street.

  As I read, a faint thread of the old music Sam had hummed to me played in my head: a goblin tune, haunting and sweet.

  Wade looked up puzzledly. “Did you hear something?”

  “No.” I put aside the newspaper. “No, I don’t think so.” My mouth felt dry. The house seemed filled with an expectant silence.

  And then nothing, as if a mist off the water had gathered up suddenly and evaporated.

  “Kids all liked Sondergard,” Wade said, turning back to the window. “Ones of us who were in his church youth group. Pastor Sondergard, that is. What we called him then.”

  “You didn’t like Marcus?” I tried to recapture the sense I’d had a moment ago, as of someone about to whisper urgently to me.

  But it was gone. Wade held up the tape measure. “Oh, he was kind of a geek. Filled out some, I’ll say that much for him.”

  He laid the one-by-eight across the sawhorses, marked it, and picked up the circular saw. Since his unburdening of the night befor
e, he seemed easier in his skin: talkative, not so worried. After he cut the board, he marked it once more and cut it again.

  Had I been doing it, I’d have used a handsaw and taken half an hour. “Can I see that?”

  The circular saw was heavy. “Like this?” I laid a piece of waste board on the sawhorses.

  Wade nodded, steadied the wood. “Press the trigger and cut.”

  Brrr-anngg! It was done. Two pieces clattered to the floor.

  “Good,” he said, and picked up the clawhammer again.

  Cheered—I have never been much good with power tools, but when you are trying to do things swiftly there is nothing like an electric motor—I resolved to get some scrap boards and practice with that circular saw again, sometime. This was, however, the only cheery thing about the task at hand, because it turned out there was a lot more wrong with the window frame than the damage I had done to it.

  “Rot back here,” Wade muttered, pulling crumbling wood out of the crevice. “Can’t leave that.”

  Well, I could have, but he couldn’t. Half an hour later, the bedroom wall looked as if a small missile had blasted through it.

  “Sometime soon, better find out where the leak is,” he said, dampening—no pun intended—my spirits further. If there was rot, there was water coming in somewhere, and I dreaded finding out more about it.

  The repairs, though, went pretty swiftly: measuring, fitting, and nailing. And this time I set the weather-stripping pieces in their places the right way, so the sashes slid snugly and easily on them.

  “Marcus’s mother was a great big formidable woman,” Wade said after a while. “She had some heart trouble, but you sure couldn’t tell it by looking at her. Hilda, I think her name was.”

  “Marcus said she was vulnerable to fright.”

  Wade nodded, fit a sash back into its channel. “Yep. Marcus played piano back then. Fancied himself a little prodigy.”

  He set a molding strip back on, gave the gimlet a twist, put a nail in. “And anybody who thought they were good at anything, naturally that attracted old Reuben’s attention. So what happened, one day Hilda caught Reuben trying to break Marcus’s ring finger, get his allowance money out of him.”

  “Uh-oh.” I was starting to see what was coming.

  “Yeah. And heart condition or not, she wasn’t the type to take a lot of backchat out of a kid, even Reuben. She grabbed him, dragged him into Washington Street, and shook him till he got away and ran home, her shouting after him, waving a big stick.”

  “Yikes. But she didn’t catch him? Sounds like Reuben got off easy.”

  Wade tipped his head ambivalently. “Depends. No, she didn’t catch him, but a week later they found Hilda Sondergard out in her garden. She’d had a heart attack. No one noticed for a couple of hours. Gone.”

  I slid the sash up and down, enjoying its new, draft-free condition and the absence of sticking or wobbling. Only forty-six more to go … “But what’d Reuben have to do with that? How would anyone know he’d done anything to her? If he did.”

  “Like I say, everyone knew she had heart trouble.” Wade put the nails in the bag, unplugged the circular saw. “The theory is, Reuben hid out there. Jumped out at her. Scared her to death.”

  “I don’t see,” I began, “how you could prove—”

  “You couldn’t,” Wade said flatly. “But when they rolled her over, they found money beneath her. Nickels and dimes. The exact amount of Marcus’s allowance.”

  I took the sawhorses apart, put the pieces under my arms, and started downstairs with them, Wade following with the other tools.

  “It was the big story in town for a while,” he said. “Then Reuben took off, turned into a drifter. Ran different scams here and there. Came back sometimes, left again. Mostly he moved from town to town. Kept his forwarding address current with the post office here, though, to get those checks from that trust his mom had set up for him.”

  He reached past me to open the cellar door. “Then the two Sondergards left. And I’ve often wondered,” he added, flipping the light switch in the cellar landing, “if it was coincidence.”

  “If what was?” I set the sawhorse parts on the floor.

  “That every time Reuben moved on to greener pastures,” Wade replied, putting the circular saw on its shelf in the corner, “a certain pair of itinerant musical ministers showed up there too?”

  I turned to face him. “Come on. How would you know that?”

  He spread his hands. “Jacobia. I couldn’t forget him. Boxy. Or Reuben either. It’s always preyed on me, just kind of eaten at me. So,” he confessed, “I kept track of him. Where he showed up. Kind of hoping, you know.”

  “That you would hear about something else? Hear about it—”

  “And be able to stop it.” He frowned. “And then there’s that flyer the Sondergards put out, about their musical dates.”

  I’d seen one in the parlor of Heddlepenny House. “They’ve been sending it for years, and I’m on their mailing list because I was in the youth group, I guess,” Waded added.

  “So you knew where they were, too.”

  “Yeah. And like I say, I suppose it could be a coincidence,” Wade said, coming out of the cellar stairwell behind me.

  Tommy and Sam were at the kitchen table, drilling each other in Morse code and high-fiving each other when they translated the patterns correctly.

  “Reuben and the Sondergards,” Wade said, getting himself a beer out of the refrigerator. “Same towns, same time, so often. It could be,” he finished, “meaningless.”

  But I could tell from his voice that he didn’t think so.

  Me, either.

  Later that afternoon, Wade went down to the dock to check on his freighter-piloting schedule for the coming week, and I went out into the yard and dragged out the aluminum extension ladder. Encouraged by my triumph with the electric saw, and reminded of leaks in general by the rot Wade had found behind the plaster, I thought I might fix a small leak that I had already located over the kitchen window.

  About this leak, I thought, there was no mystery whatsoever: Every time it rained, water poured into the space between the sash and the aluminum storm window with which—for what reason, I had no idea—that one window had at some time been fitted.

  This, by the way, is a constant feature of old-house fix-up: wondering why someone has done something idiotic that you have to undo, redo, or otherwise somehow finagle. Probably someday, a thoroughly annoyed person will wonder the same thing about many of my amateur repairs; in an old house, necessity is often the mother of some pretty funny-looking inventions.

  Fortunately, however, this particular fix looked relatively straightforward. So I took Monday, the ladder, and the caulking gun filled with polyurethane caulking material—

  —silicone caulk is indeed indestructible, as advertised, but it has a bad habit of letting go of porous old wood, which is of course what my old house was mostly made of—

  —and prepared to do minor battle.

  While I worked, I thought about Reuben Tate following the Sondergards, or vice versa. Surely the state police investigators would be interested in that idea.

  The trouble was, in order to tell them about it I would have to get Wade involved, and I didn’t want to. The less interest the better if it was focused on my family, I decided, at least for now. And since Ellie was still busy stitching children’s costumes for the festival, I decided to wait before trying to interview Willow Prettymore, too; I’d been lucky with the Sondergards, but history suggested that a familiar face like Ellie’s might ease my way considerably, in the snoopy-questions department.

  In the backyard, I put up the ladder, cursing mildly as I struggled to find a level place for it. Meanwhile, Monday ran circles around herself, rejoicing in the fresh air and in the fact that she was not on a leash; Sam had actually managed to teach her to stay in the yard, which for a Labrador retriever is like teaching it to do algebra.

  But finally I got up there, and as I�
��d suspected, a strip of old wood on the framing above the window was loose. My plan was to nail it, slather it with caulk, and pray that my fix stopped water from pouring through it: handy-dandy, I thought, reaching confidently for the strip of window trim.

  Which came away in my hand a good deal more swiftly than I had anticipated. Flailing, I did manage not to fall off that blasted ladder. But obviously the wood around the window had been exposed to water longer than I’d thought. Instead of being solid with one loose place in the middle, the whole strip was the consistency of damp papier-mâché, from one side of the window top to the other.

  And down both sides, I realized with dawning horror as I tapped the wood experimentally. The siding gave off the punky, hollow-log sound that meant it was holding together mostly via some dim, vegetable memory of being solid, at some time in the distant past such as for instance when it used to be a tree.

  While I frowned at it, Monday plunged into a pile of fallen leaves and rolled joyously, then began snuffling along the edge of the perennial garden, where I’d heaped more leaves in hopes of discouraging my best crop: weeds.

  Cautiously, I tugged on a piece of siding. It came away as if I were tearing off wet newspaper; underneath, a colony of dark beetles swarmed in the sudden sunlight.

  All thoughts of handy-dandy, one-afternoon home fix-it work flew out of my head; this wasn’t a job I could do myself. This would take carpentry of the kind done by people who ordered their lumber and nails by the hideously expensive truckload.

  Probably it explained the rot Wade had found upstairs, too; this water wasn’t only coming in around the aluminum window. It was from above, as I could tell by pulling on siding higher than the window frame. A sick sensation started somewhere in the pit of my stomach; possibly the leak was in the roof.

  The idea made me think I might break out in hives, because the roof of my old house is three full stories above the ground, not counting the peak above the attic. Working on it myself was out of the question, and hiring somebody to climb up there meant finding someone who was: