by Sarah Graves
drunk enough to consent to do it, and
sober enough to be able to.
Also, the person had to know how to perform roof work. And although that combination is not as rare as you may think—
—men in Eastport climb cheerfully up steeples, ship masts, and shaky, slapdashedly assembled scaffoldings, and walk along roof lines to reflash chimneys and install lightning rods without even dropping the pint bottles of fiery brown liquid with which they are, in order to go up there at all, necessarily equipped—
—there is a final requirement: When it comes time for the job, you also have to find a place in your house where you cannot see out any windows, in case the person you have sent up there should fall past one suddenly, waving that pint bottle.
So it’s a big project even aside from what it costs. Slowly, I replaced the cap on the caulking gun, turning to see where the dog might have wandered off to. But she was still in the yard; as I spotted her she readied herself to pounce, and plunged her nose curiously into another pile of dry leaves.
And let out a shriek.
“The dog is fine,” Ellie kept saying two hours later as she drove us home from the animal clinic on the mainland. Even though it was Sunday evening, the vet had agreed to meet us there when I told her what had happened.
Crazed with sudden pain, Monday had run without knowing it straight into my arms, or I might never have caught her. I’d grabbed the rat trap she was trying to shake off and muscled it open, praying for only a bruise. But the horrid thing—like a mouse trap only bigger, much bigger—had cut a gash on the side of her nose.
Now she was stitched up, medicated for pain and infection, and sedated, her glossy black head cradled quietly in my lap. The vet hadn’t said anything about owner’s tears being therapeutic.
But I shed them anyway. “Sam raked those leaves three days ago,” I managed. “That thing must’ve been put out there since then. If I’d stuck my hand in it, it could have broken my wrist. We’re lucky it didn’t fracture Monday’s nose.”
Ellie nodded grimly, saying nothing. The look on her face as she glanced in the rearview said it all. Monday sighed, grieved and puzzled by the whole ordeal, and burrowed her head tighter against me, wincing when her nose brushed my sweater.
“Has this happened to anyone else around town lately? Mean pranks, meant to hurt someone?”
“Not that I’ve heard.” Ellie hesitated. “This is the kind of thing that Reuben would do, not a normal person. And I’m not sure it was a prank.”
I’d filled her in on the Sondergards’ travels, the way they had mirrored the drifting of Reuben Tate from town to town.
“I don’t mean to upset you any more than you are, but you’ve been asking a lot of questions about him,” she went on. “Word’s spread.”
She was right. Pranks in Eastport were pretty exclusively of the ring-your-doorbell-and-run variety, not the snap-your-hand-off kind. And by now almost everybody in town knew that Victor was in trouble and I was trying to get him out of it.
“I called Willow Prettymore,” Ellie added. “Explained your situation. And never mind what Mike Carpentier might think, I didn’t get a feeling that Willow’s exactly dying to talk to us.”
The woman Mike had been so sure would blab to us about him and Reuben.
“Too bad for Willow,” I retorted angrily. “She’s going to.”
Then the import of Ellie’s first comment sank in; I wondered abruptly what other surprises someone might have prepared for me.
Ellie met my gaze in the rearview again. “That trap might have sat there until spring, you know, without you or anyone else finding it.”
So if the rat trap had been intended to discourage me from asking any more questions, she meant, then there might be other things intended to accomplish that goal, too: attacks that didn’t depend as much on blind chance, but were equally anonymous—
—assuming, of course, that Ellie and I weren’t jumping to conclusions.
“If somebody told me to stop digging into this,” I began. “Threatened me right up front …”
“Then it would be obvious there was something to dig into,” she agreed. “And Victor would stop looking so guilty, maybe even to the police.”
“But this way …”
I let the rest go unspoken. This way, someone could go on being subtle about suggesting that I mind my own damned business, without raising anyone else’s suspicions about the status quo.
Subtle for now. The thought made me angrier. “You’ve set it up with her?” I asked. “With Willow, to meet with us?”
“Uh-uh. She hung up on me. Willow’s a tough one.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said as I smoothed Monday’s ears. The vet said it was lucky that the thing had caught her sideways, not full on. “We’ll just see.”
We were nearly at my house. “At this point,” I went on as Ellie turned into the drive—I averted my eyes from the storm windows—“I’m so mad that to get rid of me, Willow Prettymore’s probably going to have to break my jaw.”
Ellie stopped the Jeep, her eyes meeting mine again. “Yes, but be a little careful, too, will you, Jacobia? Whoever’s doing this …”
“I know.” The awful scarecrow sight of him rose again, as if Reuben himself were behind today’s mean deed. Which of course in a way he was…
That night we all pampered the dog to a fare-thee-well, and I explained to Wade and Sam about the rat trap: that my chronic nosiness might just possibly have annoyed someone.
Wade raised his eyebrows, saying nothing but meaning plenty, and I knew we were going to have a very interesting discussion later. Sam nodded gravely, filing the information away to think over in private before he commented on it.
Then he went back to nursing Monday: sitting by her dog bed on his sleeping bag, where he meant to spend the night, speaking very quietly to her without ever stopping—I listened once: he was telling her knock-knock jokes—and rinsing her nose with warm water at frequent, regular intervals.
If I had tried this she would have run up three flights of stairs, to the back of a closet in the attic, and stayed there until I gave up. But Sam is a repairing type of boy; not only did she tolerate his method of canine wound care, but it worked:
The next morning, Monday ate the soft food I prepared for her and drank some water. The gash looked clean, if still very swollen; her eyes were clear, her mood subdued but cheerful. She even frisked a little when I put down her breakfast—Sam, after a careful inspection of her condition, had consented to go to work—and she licked my hand as I got her settled back onto her dog bed, preparatory to my leaving the house.
The .25 semiauto was in my sweater pocket. Setting out into a morning of thin clouds and watery sun, I could feel it there: a lump of misery like the one in my heart.
Despite what I’d told Sam and Wade, because of course I’d had to warn them, all night I’d gone on resisting the idea that the rat trap really had been put there on purpose. There were, I kept insisting to myself, other possible explanations.
Only none held much water and at last I’d given in: Someone wasn’t kidding.
“Listen,” I’d said to Wade, who was just then waking up as he always did at the crack of dawn, “there’s another thing. All this is about Victor. And I can’t help thinking that you must be feeling …”
Annoyed. Even a little jealous. Something.
He’d clicked on the lamp. “Maybe if I’d done what I ought to all those years ago, this might not be happening.”
He sat up. “So I’ll tell you what. Until I say so, why don’t you assume I’m okay about whatever you need to do, all right?”
Which was typical of him. “Yes,” I agreed, wondering who I’d been in a past life to deserve him: St. Teresa of Avila, apparently.
“And,” he continued, “if Victor bugs me, I’ll be the one to take care of it. We all square on this?”
“Perfectly,” I’d agreed, “square.”
“Okay. C’mere,”
he’d said sleepily, and held his arms out.
I slid into them. Like I say, Wade is not a particularly verbal guy.
But when he wants to, he gets his message across.
No one answered the door of Heddlepenny House, but I found Marcus out in the Winnebago, on the exercise bicycle.
“Your father,” I said, “was on that list.”
His eyes narrowed. “What list? I don’t know about any list.”
But it was the only thing that made sense.
“The list of gay men Reuben Tate got hold of, somehow. He tried to blackmail them. And that sort of story would have ruined your dad in this town, back then.”
He started to reply, but I got in ahead of him. “You made it sound as if you left right away, but you two stayed in town for years after your mother died. A long time, if your motive for leaving was grief over her death. But then Reuben went to jail for six months, and when he came back …”
He was staring at me. “When Reuben came back,” I finished, “he did something that drove your father out of Eastport.”
The flywheel on the exercise bicycle spun down with a low whine. “You’re wrong. Without her, my dad couldn’t stand it here. He tried for a long time, but everything reminded him; he had to get away finally.”
“What did your father and Reuben talk about the other night?”
He picked up a small freeweight from the rack of them near the exercise apparatus and began hefting it up and down nervously.
“I told you, I don’t know. Dad took him into the study, in the house. Half an hour later, I heard the door close. When I went in, Reuben was gone.”
“Your father didn’t say what they’d discussed?”
Marcus shook his head. “Said it was pastoral. He’s serious about the confidentiality of that. It was one reason the kids all went to him with their problems, back in the old days. Although I can’t imagine what Reuben could talk about that would have to do with solving any of his problems. Or about religion.”
“Maybe they talked about how you two and Reuben kept ending up in the same towns, time after time. So which was it, Marcus—was he following you, or were you following him?”
He went to the refrigerator in the galley kitchen, came back with a bottle of water, and drank nervously from it. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he repeated.
I felt like punching him. Maybe he was a good musician, maybe not. But he was a lousy liar. “You know, Marcus, I used to be a money manager, back in the city. Investing, tax counseling. That sort of thing.”
“How,” he remarked uninterestedly, “interesting.”
“Some of my clients were crooks,” I went on.
He looked sharply at me.
“And liars. Skilled ones, not like you. Sometimes they even lied to me. And since I didn’t want my name on anything that could be proven fraudulent—since it was my job to make sure it couldn’t be, in fact—I would ask them questions. Know what I found out?”
“What?” he replied resentfully, picking up a towel, wiping it across his face. He was starting to look even more uncomfortable.
“Nobody ever says they don’t know what you’re talking about when you ask them about what somebody else did. They say it when you ask about what they did. Or they don’t say it at all.”
Marcus frowned thwartedly. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. All you want to do is stir up trouble.”
“It’s already stirred up. Two men are dead. Where is your dad, anyway? Maybe he can manage to give me a straight answer.”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “You’re not a police officer. You can’t just barge in here and ask me questions like this.”
“Sure I can. And you can refuse to answer. Of course, if you do, I’ll just go ask somebody else.”
I got up, looked between the slats of the Venetian blinds. “Do I look like a quitter to you, Marcus?” I asked, and waited.
He sighed defeatedly. “Dad’s at the lake. We had a camp out there. Sold now, but he still likes to fool around on the water.”
Boyden Lake was a few miles west on the mainland. It was big, and there were quite a few camps on it. “Want to give me a hint? Or should I just go down to Bay Books, ask around, maybe mention why I want to find him, to ask him about that list and what he did to get on it? I’ll bet people would be fascinated.”
He slammed down the water bottle. “Look, my father is a good man. He did a lot of good for this town, kids especially. He gave them somewhere to go, something to do, he helped them with their problems. And a lot of them, if they care about anything today—if they go to church, or like music, or try to help people—it’s because of what they learned from him. And the example he gave.”
I could think of at least one kid whose problems Reverend Sondergard hadn’t helped with at all. “He doesn’t deserve to have his name blackened now,” Marcus went on furiously. “To have you digging up old dirt.”
Boxy Thorogood would have raced down Washington Street right outside the Sondergards’ house, the night Reuben ambushed him. And according to Wade, he’d been a member of that youth group: the youngest member, more helpless than most against a guy like Reuben. But I didn’t say this, or anything. I just let Marcus rant, noticing that the mark on his right hand was again covered skillfully with makeup.
And when he had finished, and saw that I still hadn’t given up, he scribbled me a little map.
Traffic along rural Route 190 was busy, lots of motor homes and vans piling into town for the festival. At the airfield small planes crowded the usually quiet tarmac, and the tourist cabins at Harris Point sported barbecue grills, bicycles leaning against the porch rails, and badminton nets strung up in the side yards.
It all looked like someone’s happy dream of an island autumn in Maine, and I can’t tell you how uneasy it all made me feel, as if the other shoe were just hanging there waiting to drop. Marcus Sondergard was hiding something, and I had little confidence that his father would tell me what it was.
But I had to try, because something very bad was happening in Eastport and it wasn’t over: as if Reuben, for all the sick, purposeful display someone had made of him, wasn’t quite dead.
The unusual number of vehicles didn’t slow me much, since they were all heading into town; outbound, the only obstacle was a slow eighteen-wheeler, just ahead of me, hauling a massive crane and apparently having some kind of engine trouble. Its WIDE LOAD sign barely described adequately the size of the vehicle, but finally it found a bit of shoulder and pulled to the side.
And then it was smooth sailing. After the causeway came a short jog onto the Golding Road: rolling pastures, dark granite outcroppings, crosshatchings of orchard trees studded with red and yellow apples. Scrub pine closed in on the roadside until a dirt cut opened to the left.
I put the car on the shoulder, its tires in the sand that had accumulated over years of icy winters, and hiked into the brush. Hundred-year-old spruce trees, originally planted as windbreaks, towered in rows. I passed an old well hole, its cover rotted in and its throat choked with stones. There was a cellar hole, too, now a shallow depression edged with arm-thick rose canes. A barn foundation humped under mats of thick grass behind the collapse of a rail fence. A hundred yards ahead, water glittered in a gap between two small structures: the camps.
In Maine your camp is your summer place, whether primitive or elaborate. These were little old clapboard houses, each situated pleasantly on its ledge in the sunshine overlooking the water. A dirt path between them led down to a short dock.
“Hello?” Marcus Sondergard was sliding a dark-green kayak into the shallows. Two paddles lay on the dock.
“I’d hoped someone might be out here,” he said cheerfully, “to take a ride with me. But no such luck.”
Until you showed up, his expression communicated hopefully. The kayak was a two-seater. Heywood wore dark canvas slacks with the same leather belt I’d seen before, the cross-and-rose buckle glittering in the sun, plus a gray sweatshirt
and old sneakers. His hair, as thick and youthfully luxuriant as his son Marcus’s, shone nearly as silver as the belt buckle. “Care for a spin?”
The problem with a kayak, as I understood it, is that it could roll upside down, so your head would poke straight down into the water like the stick on a popsicle. But I did want to talk to him. And the water there was quite shallow. Maybe I would only break my neck on the lake bottom, instead of drowning.
“This isn’t a social visit,” I temporized.
“I know,” Heywood said calmly, his blue eyes perceptive. “I know exactly why you’re here. And”—his eyes twinkled—“two-person kayaks don’t roll. Come on, we’ll talk on the water.”
Ten minutes later, with his help I’d maneuvered myself into the kayak’s aft cockpit, and I wasn’t even completely drenched. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll do all the work. If we do tip, just cross your arms and tuck.” He demonstrated.
Sure, I thought; in my dreams. But I took a paddle, held it as he instructed, and did nothing with it, also as Heywood instructed.
And then we skimmed.
The water’s surface was bright as a pearl and seemed to offer no resistance; under Heywood’s power we shot from the dock, then turned, parallel to the shore. His energy struck me as I watched him work the paddle, turning his face into the sunshine and basking in it, moving the craft without any visible effort.
“Now,” he invited. “The reason that you are here is …”
“Was he blackmailing you? Reuben?”
Heywood kept paddling. “Yes. The accusation was false. But I was frightened. I wish I hadn’t been. Still, I was.”
“Marcus didn’t want to tell me. He seemed quite frantic.”
“Marcus is very protective of me.”
I could see both of Heywood’s hands from where I sat. There was no mark on either of them.
