by Sarah Graves
The other girls had moved away, sniffling, herded by their mothers. I thought their first shock had been real; the doll was an awful sight. But once they’d gotten going, each shriek had made the next come more easily, till they were frightening one another even more than the doll had frightened them.
Terence had gone to sit with Paddy. From the looks on their faces, it seemed they were arguing, Paddy clenching his fist and slamming it onto the long table. Terence said something, got up, and strode back in my direction, passing the drinks table with the brown paper parcel still under his arm. Paddy followed, but stopped by the iced tea and lemonade glasses, grabbed one of the few remaining filled ones, and swallowed some of it angrily.
Marcus came down from the bandstand, grabbed a lemonade also, and ran back up again. Willow Prettymore appeared suddenly, took another from the two that were left; the pitcher was empty.
Gotcha, I thought, starting toward her. And I wanted to refill that lemonade pitcher, too; the latestayers were enjoying the music, and the cleanup crew was bound to be thirsty as well.
Heywood came down from the bandstand as Marcus went into a reprise of the “Biggest Whatever” song. Mike Carpentier passed the drinks table just as Willow did, still propelling Molly, who stopped to reach for a glass, looked imploring at her father, then moved along fretfully without a fresh drink.
On the lawn, the little girls looked up and began laughing, their fright forgotten at the funny song that Marcus was singing. Heywood laughed with the children, then continued across the lawn toward the drinks table, stopping to accept congratulations on the performance. Finally he picked up the last remaining glass of lemonade and took a swig from it.
The unpleasantness, it seemed, was over. But something still felt rotten in Denmark. For one thing, I did not at all like the expression that appeared suddenly on Heywood’s face.
Wincing, he looked down at his glass and frowned, putting his hand to his throat. From across the lawn I heard him cough, then try to say something. Willow put down her glass and took a step toward him, her face creasing abruptly with concern.
A rumble of thunder broke the sudden silence as Marcus cut off in the middle of a rousing second chorus and ran to his father. Suddenly it was pouring, the skies opening drenchingly, tent tops flapping and poles rattling as the squall hit us.
“What’s happening?” Ellie cried, rushing from the grill area where she had been wrapping salmon fillets and putting them into a cooler. George and Wade turned together from the desserts table.
Terence reached me, shoved the brown paper parcel at me, and ran to help. Marcus reached his father’s side at the same time. Bending convulsively, Heywood staggered and fell, his glass of lemonade flying from his hand in an arc of pale yellow.
Willow stopped, watching the liquid splash, and Marcus knelt helplessly by Heywood while Terence peered over his shoulder. “Get an ambulance, somebody!” Terence shouted.
Turning, Willow considered her own glass there on the drinks table. She hadn’t yet tasted it, apparently; now she picked it up again and sniffed cautiously at it.
The scream she let out then made the little girls sound like amateurs.
“Poisoned … My God, we’ve been poisoned!”
“We don’t know what was in the glasses,” Arnold said. “Let’s not be jumping to conclusions.”
His face, though, said otherwise. Reuben Tate’s death or even Weasel’s was one thing; spiking a preacher’s lemonade with a dose of poison at the town picnic was something else again.
“Bob, we should try to get Victor’s attorneys informed. If this is all part of a pattern, it’s obvious that Victor couldn’t have—”
“Nothing’s obvious,” he replied flatly. “Except maybe that getting lawyers to call back on a Sunday night is impossible. And even if you did, getting the state people to call them back, even later on a Sunday night, is about as likely as walking on water.”
“Well, I’m going to try. Who knows, maybe a miracle actually will happen and they’ll be in the office.”
But of course they weren’t. In the telephone alcove, I ran the gauntlet of the attorneys’ voice-mail while sheets of rain cascaded against the darkened dining-room windows. Finally I got a human being, the answering-service operator.
Five minutes later I hung up, having been (1) assured by her words that one of the partners would call me back very soon, and (2) informed by her tone that I shouldn’t hold my breath. Urgent calls from the ex-wives of imprisoned murder suspects, she seemed to feel, were not exactly tops on her list of items needing the full, focused attention of her employers right that very minute.
Another huge gust of wind rattled the window-panes, which now looked as if someone were out there hurling big buckets of water against them. That siding, I thought dismally, imagining the rain positively gushing in through the rotten clapboards.
“Whatever it was,” Arnold was saying when I got back to the kitchen, “it was in Willow’s glass, too.”
“Arnold,” I said, “you know what it was, just as well as I do. It smelled just exactly like the bait Howard Waldrop put out last summer when the rabid skunk showed up.”
It had been a real scare. Other than red ants, skunks were the most numerous pests on the island; bold and half-tame, they would saunter insolently right up to you before turning to spray you with dead-on accuracy. We’d had to keep our dogs and cats in, and children were supervised scrupulously, after a skunk staggered down Water Street snapping and foaming.
“Yeah,” Arnold admitted. “I know. Smelled like varmint bait. You can buy forty kinds of stuff smells like that, any hardware store. But I’m not saying it’s anything till after the tests.”
In the living room, Sam and Tommy were watching a ball game; George and Wade were still at the park, loading the tables into a truck and taking down the tents.
Arnold frowned. “I got all the names, who was there. Which doesn’t mean someone couldn’t have put it in the glasses earlier, then took off. Christ, what a mess.”
The coffeemaker finished burbling so I got out the cups and the cream and some sandwiches I’d put onto a plate. Outside, the storm battered and hammered.
“At least with all this rain, I doubt many people will be leaving the island tonight,” I said as we sat down. “You can talk to them while they’re still here, instead of having to find them at wherever they’ve gone home to.”
Bob nodded, biting into a chicken salad sandwich. One of the drawbacks to working at any Eastport food event is that you’re unlikely to get any of the food yourself.
“Unless some idiot tries driving over a flooded causeway,” he agreed darkly. “Which I have no doubt some idiot is going to do. But we’ve got barriers set up at our end, police at Pleasant Point’ve got barriers at theirs, flashing lights and so on. High tide, all this wind, decent storm surge—going over that causeway, next couple hours, you better have pontoons.”
A muffled pounding came from the back door; Monday leaped and began barking. A moment later, Marcus Sondergard came in, drenched to the skin.
“I … I’m sorry,” he managed, looking around wildly. “I have to …”
Monday stopped barking and started wagging; once an intruder is actually inside the house, she feels, the whole guard-dog act is pretty much beside the point. Marcus’s dark hair clung in sodden ringlets to his head, his white shirt plastered to his skin, and he was shivering hard.
“Come in here,” I ordered. “We’ll get you into some dry clothes and get some hot coffee into you, before you catch—”
Your death, I’d been about to say, noting that the rain had washed the makeup stuff off his hand. But I couldn’t see the mark on it without making too big a point of it. Just then Sam stuck his head in from the living room.
“Sam,” I said, “take Marcus upstairs and find him some of Wade’s dry clothes to get into, please. And a towel for his hair, and so on, all right?”
“C’mon,” Sam said agreeably, and Marcus allowed himse
lf to be led away. When he returned, his hair was not dripping, and he was wearing dry socks and a gray sweatsuit, and not shivering quite so violently. His hand was covered smoothly with surgical makeup again. So he carries the stuff with him, I thought.
But he still looked as if he had been run over by a truck. “It didn’t hit me,” he said, wrapping his hands gratefully around a mug of coffee, “until I was about to leave the hospital.”
He gazed around at us, his eyes huge and dark with emotion. “The fellow from the ambulance service told me he would drive me home. And I realized: Dad wasn’t with me.”
Marcus made a helpless little sound like a laugh, only it wasn’t. “Knowing it was coming for as long as I have, I wouldn’t have thought it’d hit me so hard. But …”
“Wait a minute. You knew this was going to happen?” Arnold looked astonished.
Marcus nodded, staring at his mug, not realizing what Arnold meant. “Five years I’ve known. We both did. Doctors told him he could live a long time or go any second. A stretched place in a big artery like a weak spot in a tire, was how they explained it to me. If they operated on it he probably wouldn’t survive, they said. So they didn’t.”
He glanced up, caught Arnold’s expression. “Oh, you thought I meant … No. Not that someone would try to hurt him. I meant my being prepared for his going … naturally. Not this way. Who would want to hurt Dad?”
That was my big question, too. Marcus hadn’t had time to do a perfect job with the cosmetic; the edges of the mark showed long and slender, with some oddshaped crescents at the center of it, like the edges of petals. “What are your plans now?”
I put it generally, but the answer I wanted was specific: Had he known about the life insurance?
Because if he had, I couldn’t help thinking that a grown man with an impatient woman waiting in the wings might tend to get a little impatient himself, waiting for dear old Dad to pop off as he was predicted to. Add to that a big life-insurance payoff, so his son didn’t have to worry about money, and …
Well, the comfort of a clear conscience can compete very effectively with the lure of cold cash, in my experience.
“I’m going to move to Portland, sell the Winnebago, and open a music store,” he said, “with the proceeds of Dad’s insurance.”
So much for the idea that he might not have known about his coming windfall, or that his thought processes might be unhinged by grief. Still, he looked stung by my narrow-eyed glance at him.
“I’ve known for a long time that Dad wouldn’t live forever. And he told me he’d taken out a policy for me. Is it so terrible that I tried to think about the rest of my life?”
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t. I apologized to Marcus, and if he knew I still had mental reservations, he didn’t show it.
“Anyway, I just felt … well, lost, when I got back home. All his things … it didn’t seem real that he was gone. So I went out. I didn’t realize how bad it was, the storm. But once I was out, I got disoriented, and when I saw your lights … Well. I’m grateful for the dry things, and the coffee. I’ll be okay now.”
“You’re sure?” I followed him to the door. Arnold was on his way out too and offered Marcus a ride back to Heddlepenny House.
“Yep.” He nodded decisively. Like his father, he was either for real or one of the more accomplished liars I’d ever met.
“Come on, Sondergard,” Arnold growled, tugging on his yellow slicker and pulling his black sou’wester onto his head.
When they were gone I shoved the door shut against a rain-filled gust of wind. In the darkness the branches of the trees in the side yard lashed wildly, yellow leaves showering from them.
“What do you make of that?” Ellie asked.
“Not sure. But if I were going to knock somebody off, I’d do it when a couple of other people had already been knocked off, wouldn’t you?”
“You think Marcus might have poisoned his dad? But they were so close.”
“Right. Peas in a pod. Maybe,” I said as I took my rain slicker off the hook, “it got a little snug in there. Maybe …”
On the hall shelf lay the package Terence Oscard had shoved into my hands as he rushed to help Heywood.
“Maybe helping Heywood along with a swig of poison was just hastening the inevitable, in Marcus’s mind. Ending,” I finished, “the suspense.” Leaving Terence’s package where it was, I grabbed a pair of flashlights and my car keys.
“Meanwhile,” I said, “when Marcus left the bandstand this afternoon, there were three glasses of lemonade on that table. I know because I was looking at them, thinking about putting out some more.”
I dropped the car keys into my slicker pocket. “When he got back onto the bandstand, there were only two.” I pulled a pair of rubber boots onto my feet.
“One of them Willow picked up,” Ellie said, following my thought. I’d described this to her. “And the other one, Heywood got.” She pulled her own rain gear on and took an umbrella from one of the other hooks.
“Marcus had a one-in-three chance of choosing the one that was harmless. So,” she concluded, “maybe Marcus was just lucky or something.”
“Right,” I said, pulling on my rain hat. “Or something.”
Tomorrow morning, the weekend would be over. Ordinarily, the town’s visitors might stay longer, but lousy weather combined with the news that Eastport harbored a murderer would make the causeway look like the Long Island Expressway.
And somehow I had no doubt that one of the first cars onto the mainland would contain a tall, statuesque blonde, heading for the hills.
“Let’s,” I said grimly, “go find Willow Prettymore.”
The Motel East was a low, well-kept structure of dark wood with a blacktopped parking lot and manicured landscaping. The lot was full of cars, most with out-of-state plates, the blacktop awash and the shrubberies bent in the driving wind. We made our way among them and headed for Willow’s door, which was around back facing the water.
The wind howled as we struggled to keep on our feet; the tide was so high that the bay itself surged nearly onto Sea Street, below the granite ledge the motel was built on.
Then the door opened, and whatever Ellie said got us in.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Willow began, “but I am very upset, and I wish you’d just—”
“Shut up,” I gasped, still busy catching my breath after the maelstrom outside. Her jaw dropped, and she fell silent.
The room was huge, equipped with two queen-sized beds, three armchairs, bureaus, and a big TV. A kitchenette held a small sink, a microwave, and a coffeemaker. Pulled up in front of the television were the two young blond kids I’d seen earlier, now in thrall to the screen.
A bottle of Cutty Sark and an ice bucket stood on the sink. “You can’t …” Willow tried again. Ellie walked over to the sink, poured a stiff slug of Cutty, and handed it to Willow.
“This is my friend Jacobia. You’re going to talk to her, or tomorrow we’re going to start reminding people why your nickname used to be ’Willow the Pillow.’ I believe it had something to do with lying down,” she finished sweetly. “Isn’t that right?”
Willow took a slow, furious swallow of her Cutty Sark. “You always were a holier-than-thou little bitch,” she grated in low tones. “I knew I shouldn’t have come back here.”
So much for the image. I glanced at the kids but they were watching a wrestling match with the sound turned up loud. No husband was in evidence. “Have the police been here?” I asked.
“Just Bob Arnold,” Willow replied resentfully. “He thinks we’ll have to stay an extra day, for the state police. I told him it was inconvenient and he got extremely huffy with me.”
She took another gulp. “As if it’s any concern of mine what goes on among the locals.”
She gave the final word a scornful twist, and suddenly I realized how hard it would be, trying to figure out who might’ve wanted to poison Willow Prettymore. I, for instance, had only known her about t
hree minutes, and I wanted to put a couple of cyanide-laced ice cubes in her Cutty, just for the fun of it.
“Be that as it may,” I began. She was wearing Joy perfume, full makeup, and enough gold jewelry to sink a battleship.
“I’d still like to know what puts you in the same category as Heywood Sondergard, Weasel Bodine, Mike Carpentier, and Reuben Tate. I mean, in the sense that I think someone wants to kill you all, and so far has succeeded three times out of four.”
That widened her eyes, all right. If she wasn’t acting. I was lying a little bit myself. But only a little bit. I went on:
“Someone dosed the last two glasses of lemonade very fast, as they were passing by the drinks table. And as you and Heywood were already nearly in the act of reaching for the glasses.”
I’d been thinking hard on the way down to the motel. “To be sure,” I finished, “that the right people got them.”
“But … how?” She stared at me in shock.
“Have you any idea how little rat poison it takes to kill a person?”
Or whatever it was, and I didn’t know how much it took, either; all I knew was that it smelled like the stuff. But maybe Willow did know; she’d been standing by that drinks table, too.
“Palm two doses,” I theorized, “preferably folded in slips of paper so it doesn’t get on your skin. Then … just walk along, dropping the stuff in. Toss the paper slips in the trash.”
I sat down at the Formica-topped table in the kitchen area. “The killer would have come prepared, hoping for a good moment. Maybe even mutilated Molly Carpentier’s doll, to get attention focused elsewhere. The timing didn’t quite work out, maybe, but it worked well enough. And when the moment arrived, bingo.”
I smiled at her. “Neat, sweet, and complete. Only you didn’t happen to drink from your glass. How,” I finished, “convenient.”
“Oh, now wait a minute! You don’t think I had anything to do with—”
