by Sarah Graves
It was downeast Maine phrasing; as far as I knew, Tommy had never been farther from Eastport than Bangor, three hours away. He pulled his jacket on, remembered something in the pocket.
“Hey, my mom found this at the library, said I ought to give it to you.”
He pulled out a folder. I couldn’t think what Tommy’s mother might have found for me at the library; some recipes maybe, or curtain patterns. She was ferociously domestic. As he handed it to me, I noticed the red, inflamed mark on the back of his hand.
Seeing me blink at it, he shrugged embarrassedly. “Reached for the salt instead of asking to have it passed. Ma smacked me with a serving spoon.”
“I see,” I replied carefully. “You get smacked often?”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Tiptree. Don’t you go thinkin’ that. Jeez, that kind of story got around, Ma would kill me for sure.”
Tommy grinned earnestly at me as he said this, to show he was only joking. “Paddled my behind some when I was a kid. Guess I earned it. My uncle, he was a one, though.”
He winced, as if remembering. “Gave me this here.” Pointing to the dent over his eyebrow, shaped like a …
“He wore a big ring,” Tommy explained. “Hit me backhanded with it one time, I bothered him about something.”
The deep scar was shaped like a square-cut gemstone. “He’s changed, though. He’s okay now. Don’t worry about me, Mrs. Tiptree,” he finished solicitously.
“Okay, Tommy. Tell your mom I said thanks for the library stuff.” A foolproof biscuit method, I expected, or a new way of basting a turkey.
But when he was gone I found no recipes inside the folder. Instead it held copies of old newspaper articles about my house. Or rather, about one of its previous occupants: Jared Hayes.
The first clipping was an untorn copy of the same paper Wade and I had found stuffed into the woodwork, detailing facts about the local composer and fiddler and his latest tune: “The Pirate’s Revenge.” It had debuted to much enthusiasm in the ballroom of the Eastport Hotel, September 27, 1831.
All present had agreed that it was much the finest dance tune Hayes had produced, the Eastport Sentinel reported; they hoped he would supply many more as pleasant to the ear and as persuasive to all those who might otherwise be tempted to remain “wallflowers.”
But he didn’t. Carrying the folder into the dining room, I turned to the next photocopy, which reported that on the night of the dance, Jared Hayes had gone missing from his residence at 20 Key Street. The Sentinel ran his likeness, dark eyed, bearded, and intense, with a headline that read HAVE YOU SEEN HIM?
No one had. From the remaining articles in the folder, it seemed Jared Hayes was never seen or heard from again.
And then four whole days went by in which nothing happened, and I thought I would lose my mind.
Willow Prettymore refused to speak with me. It got so she hung up the telephone hard, banging it down, as soon as she heard my voice. When I wasn’t calling her, I talked to a lot of other people, but none of them had anything useful to say.
Meanwhile, Mike Carpentier and Molly stayed on the hilltop; Paddy Farrell, Terence Oscard, and the Sondergards were seen around town as usual. I weatherstripped twenty windows, leaving twenty-six remaining to do, and practiced until I got pretty good with that circular saw; I called the carpenters about the rot in the wall, and Monday’s nose healed. But nothing more, and in particular no more pranks.
Or attacks, depending on how you looked at them. Gradually the topic of Reuben Tate’s murder faded too, replaced by anxious questions about the weather: Would the rain drown out the Salmon Festival or hold off? A low over the Midwest was threatening to combine with another, more threatening one over the Carolinas and roar up the East Coast.
Finally, the wheels of justice turned with excruciating slowness; Victor’s bail was denied, as was a pretrial motion to dismiss, both hearings attended by an attorney Bennet had bullied Victor into accepting, and the case was transferred to superior court. Victor himself had begun calling me on the telephone, alternately worrying and complaining; Sam lost weight and took on more hours at the boatyard to distract himself.
“The hell of it is, I actually miss the damned fool,” George Valentine grumbled, meaning Victor. “How’s he doing?”
It was the Saturday night before the Salmon Festival, and we were eating boiled lobsters at a picnic table by Wilson’s dock.
“Victor’s okay,” I told George. “As well as you can expect.”
I hadn’t felt like cooking, and we couldn’t get into any of the other restaurants, the town was so jammed with visitors. Past more tables crowded with folks who’d gotten the same idea we had, Campobello Island shone in the sunset like a long bar of gold.
“Says hello,” I added. “Says he wants you to keep holding a good thought for him.”
The truth was, Victor wasn’t doing well at all. His bravado was determined but behind it I detected the truth—he was scared. But Sam was listening, so I spoke carefully.
“Sam can visit him,” I said, “next week. Unless he’s out.”
Which was unlikely. A wisp of smoke from the outdoor brick fireplace where they boiled the lobsters tinged the salt air, making it smell like autumn.
“Huh,” Wade said. “Sam, do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Sam will be fine,” I put in firmly; Wade caught on and bent to his dinner. Actually, I thought it was a terrible idea. But at my objections Sam had turned so stonily mutinous that I gave in.
“Sorry I’ve been scarce,” Ellie said, changing the subject as best she could.
“That’s okay.” I poured wine, spilling some, sopping it with a napkin. “I know you’ve been busy with the festival.”
I’d hoped the outing might lift my mood; instead I seemed to be infecting everyone else with my glumness. It was awful, like the supper after a funeral for someone that no one had liked. Sam picked listlessly at his food, excused himself, and wandered off; the men finished and got up too, to chat with Tim Poole, the fishmarket owner.
Tim at least looked cheery at the sight of all the customers eating his lobsters. People had brought candles, silverware, and tablecloths, even tape players; it was becoming a party.
“I guess you think I’ve left you in the lurch,” Ellie said.
The thought had occurred to me. Every time I finished the weatherstripping on another storm window, I got a different view of the town. And Ellie always seemed to be in it: hanging bright streamers, stringing paper lanterns, or finishing the bandstand paint job.
“Maybe a little,” I admitted. “But it’s not as if anything’s been going on. I’m stonewalled.”
A payment was due on the option-to-buy for Victor’s medical-building property, a great big whacking payment. If I didn’t ante up, the option would expire.
“Nothing more about the house?”
The old clippings, she meant. In the evenings to busy myself I’d been poking around the library. But the dusty tomes in the historical collection gave no clue as to what had happened to my old house’s tenant. Nor did the microfilms of antique newspapers supply any hint; brief follow-ups said he continued missing, but nothing more. And then there was nothing at all, as if the violinist and composer Jared Hayes had vanished not only from Eastport but from the face of the earth.
“Nothing about anything. I swear, Ellie, this week has been one long fizzle from beginning to end.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Ellie said. “It might seem like I’ve bailed out on you, but I’ve been working behind the scenes. You know what we do while we’re foil-wrapping a thousand potatoes for baking or mixing up another thousand blueberry biscuits?”
“Talk,” I said, feeling a sudden dart of hope pierce me. She sounded confident. “About …?”
“Willow Prettymore, for one. That’s her over there, by the way.”
I turned sharply. “Where? You mean that … that bombshell?”
It was the only word for the woman at the nearby picni
c table: tall, blond, built like a swimsuit model only more so.
A lot more so. Willow Prettymore was encased in a sheath of some shimmery white material, dripping in gold jewelry, and shod in the kind of spiky-heeled pumps that make your legs look like stilettos, an honest-to-gosh mink stole draped over her arm.
“She’s staying up there,” Ellie said, pointing to one of the Motel East’s balconies overlooking the water. “The best room, of course.” Trust Ellie to know.
“Wow,” I said inadequately.
She was having an argument with a man who looked like an ape dressed in a suit: long, thick arms and bunchy-muscled shoulders, hunched posture, and dark, glowering eyes set too close together under a low forehead.
A few words reached us as the conversation grew agitated. Willow wanted the man in the suit to locate a waitress, pronto. But Poole’s was self-serve; you went inside to choose a victim, waited for it to be boiled over the fire before dismantling it with your own lobster equipment, and cleaned up after yourself.
I got up. “I’ve been trying to corner her for days. Now I’m going over there and …”
“Wait.” Willow and her companion figured out the routine, began moving toward the Quonset to peruse the big lobster tanks.
“I already asked her,” Ellie said, “and it’s no go. Willow isn’t going to say a word to us about the murders, at least not without a good reason to get involved. And right now she hasn’t got one.”
“What are you talking about? She can’t just …”
“Actually, she can. Free country and all that. But,” Ellie raised an index finger wisely, “I have a plan.”
She gazed out over the water. “Willow,” she said, “used to look a lot different from the way she does now. Her teeth were all rotten, and if that’s her natural hair color I will eat this lobster shell. Also, Willow’s reputation was as dirty as ditchwater—rude, crude, and if it wore pants she would sleep with it. But she had a kind of natural cunning, I’ll say that for her. And eventually she decided she wanted more.”
“So she got out of town,” I guessed. “Slicked up, found that guy, maybe he’s the source of all that glitz she’s dolled up in. Married him, now she’s reinvented herself and come back to …”
“Right. Show the home folks how well she’s done for herself, maybe even rub their noses in it a little. Which Willow has and wants to go on doing for a few more days.”
They stood by the lobster pots, Willow drawing the mink closely around her in the harbor breeze. The loutish fellow hulked beside her, hands dangling at his sides. You could see he didn’t know what to do with them when he wasn’t making fists.
“What I hear in town,” Ellie went on, “he’s some sort of behind-the-scenes mover and shaker in Portland, maybe not such a nice guy.”
Of course there would be talk about him, plenty of it right on the money, too.
“But no matter what he is, the last thing she wants is to mess up her shiny new image with an ugly old story, dredge it all up again,” Ellie finished.
“What old story?” I tried to go on sounding interested, but when I heard this last part, my heart sank discouragedly. All I’d been doing was listening to tales of the old days, and none of them had helped.
“The story,” Ellie said, “about the night Reuben Tate burned down Uncle Deckie Cobb’s shack.”
She turned to me, her green eyes luminous in the last fading glow of an autumn evening thickening steadily to night.
“With,” she added, “Uncle Deckie still in it.”
I felt my jaw drop.
“Willow was there,” Ellie said. “But she doesn’t want the memory refreshed around town. Bad for her new identity as a woman of means and importance. She cares about that a lot.”
I was still busy absorbing Ellie’s earlier statement. “So Reuben was a firebug, too.”
Her forehead furrowed. “Yes. You couldn’t tell what he might do.” She got up and began clearing the table.
“Anyway, the word is Willow’s going to be around a few more days. Make sure she sees everybody, and more to the point, that everyone sees her. So tomorrow at the salmon supper maybe you can corner her and explain a couple of things.”
“Such as, she talks to me or I talk to everyone else? Spruce up their memories of her old, unimproved situation? Sounds like a plan.”
Just then Tommy Daigle’s jalopy appeared around the corner, horn blaring and headlights flashing, the big raccoon tails Tommy thought so much of flying like banners. The jalopy pulled over, Sam got in, and the cherry-red glow of the taillights moved away up Water Street.
Ellie and I gathered our paper trash and put it in one of the barrels Tim Poole had stationed around the area, wrapped up our lobster tools and butter and so on to take home. In the near darkness, the fire in the brick stove under the lobster pots leaped orange and yellow.
“So tomorrow you confront her and question her,” Ellie said, meaning Willow.
“Right,” I said doubtfully. “But I still can’t say I’m confident it’s going to do any real good. I’ve been chasing her because I don’t have much else. But what can she tell me that I don’t already know?”
Ellie turned, her hair like flowing copper under the yard lights Tim Poole was turning on. The dock he’d built shone yellow with new, raw wood, looming over the glinting wave tops and scenting the damp breeze with the pine-sap smell of fresh logs.
“Jacobia. When I say Willow cares what people think, I mean she really cares. And who do you suppose she despised finding out had gotten here ahead of her when she got back to Eastport? Who could wreck her reputation just by existing?”
“Reuben Tate,” I replied slowly. “Her partner in teenaged crime.” Suddenly I got what Ellie was implying. “But, Ellie, that doesn’t mean she could or would …”
Kill him, I was about to say. Because how would she get the weapon, or know about Victor, or …
“Just meet her,” Ellie interrupted. “Then come and tell me what you think Willow might or might not do. Because the image is impressive, and it probably cost a mint,” she finished with a glance at the glamorous woman seated a few tables from us. “But it’s fake, and what it’s covering … well, Willow would do almost anything to keep people from remembering it.”
Later that evening, sitting up in bed with Wade:
“I’m not going to lose the house. I might have to go back to work. But if I do, big deal. People in Eastport work harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, and think nothing of it.”
I put my chin on my clasped hands. “It’s not,” I finished, “the end of the world. Tell you what, though, I sure wish I had been paying more attention to my own investing instead of giving all those stock tips to Ellie. If I had, I’d be sitting on a big fortune by now.” Aside, I meant, from the one I was losing.
He chuckled. “Don’t know she hasn’t, do you? Done something about them herself, I mean. Ellie’s pure Maine, you know, keeps money matters pretty close to the vest.”
“Be that as it may.” I turned to him. “I’m not kidding, Wade, I’ve got to do something about this.”
“Will you,” he asked soberly, “be able to stay on here? To work, or would you have to go away?”
Trust him to find the crux of the matter. I’d been avoiding thinking about it too hard, but push was coming to shove. Very soon I would have to decide about that land-option payment. And from that, everything else would fall like a row of dominoes.
The operative word being fall. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “The kind of thing I’m good at, individual client work, takes face time. I probably could come home on weekends.”
I’d gotten past the stage where I’d had to be at clients’ beck and call, back in the city. But they all still needed to be sweet-talked, scolded, or simply educated. They had to be protected from a variety of scams, flimflams, and rackets. And they’d all needed heavy-duty advice before doing deeds more complicated than brushing their teeth. In the rarefied world of rich people, structur
e is everything; they plan their activities with an eye to the tax implications, down to the penny.
In other words, they hire somebody like me: cool head and keen eye. Or so I’d thought.
“I’m sorry, Wade. I’ve told people a million times not to let their emotions affect sensible financial decisions. And now look how awful my own decision has turned out.”
“Oh, hey, wait a minute. First of all, it hasn’t turned out any way, yet. And second, it wasn’t your emotions that got you to this point.”
He looked at me, shrugged in concession. “Okay, so it wasn’t all your emotions, anyway. But the area needs the trauma center, Victor’s a good fit for it, and having this thing happen was like getting hit by lightning. You couldn’t have seen it coming.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel better.” I settled against him. “Once, it was all I wanted to do, you know. Wheeling and dealing was exciting. But I’m not sure I have the energy for the money business anymore. Part of why I’d just talk about it to Ellie, I guess. Instead of acting on stocks I heard about, or read about.”
“I haven’t noticed any lack of energy. And I still think you are exciting, even if you’re flat broke.”
I smiled against his shoulder. “That’s because you’re not one of those boring nitwits who think money’s an aphrodisiac.”
Which clearly he didn’t. At the moment, for instance, I didn’t have a dime on me. Or anything else, which was turning out to be awfully convenient.
“Aw. You mean it’s not? Another myth bites the dust.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him, shifting slightly. “There are plenty of soft, pliable young girls out there, ready and willing to keep that particular myth propped up. As it were.”
“Oh.” He paused. Monday woke up, looked around, and jumped off the bed.
“You know,” he said in a different voice, “you’d better stop doing that or I might start mistaking you for one of those girls. The soft, pliable ones.”
