by Sarah Graves
“All right,” she agreed reluctantly, sounding as glum as I felt. “This is getting to be—”
“A crowd scene,” I finished for her. “Mike Carpentier’s been in Victor’s place with Molly. Willow and the goon-guy have been there with their kids. Marcus has been there, for heaven’s sake, touring the place. And I suppose any minute now I’ll find out Terence and Paddy were regular visitors. Tea and crumpets, or something, with Weasel serving all of them as the butler.”
We drove slowly past Wadsworth’s Hardware, its sign dangling by one chain length, the other snapped off. Lines of raindrops drummed across the street, sheets of water flinging themselves at the storefronts.
“Drat,” Ellie muttered. “I’m pulling over. I could drive off the fish pier in this and not know it till we hit bottom.”
Cautiously she turned into the tiny parking lot above the boat basin. The dock lights had gone off, so the gleams of white paint on the boats tossing and lurching against their mooring lines were barely visible. Corralled up inside the dock pilings, they made me think of a lot of horses panicking in a barn. To our right loomed Paddy Farrell’s building, also pitch dark.
“Next thing you know,” I said, “we’ll find out Reuben had been in Victor’s office, getting treated for an ingrown toenail. Maybe Reuben took the scalpel and slit his own throat with it.”
The sheltered spot by Paddy’s building kept the wind and rain from battering us so badly. I settled down to wait for the power to come back on or the storm to back off, preferably both.
“Just wait,” I fumed in exasperation. “They’ll all turn out to be suicides. Weasel will turn out to have stuffed the tie down his own throat. We’ll find a note from Heywood, too: sayonara.”
“Suicide,” Ellie objected distractedly, “is a sin.” Then: “What’s that up there?”
“Molly’s doll,” I ranted on—the heater in the Jeep was not powerful and I hate wet feet—“will turn out to be possessed by a horror-movie demon, self-animated and self-destructive.”
“I don’t think so. Jake, will you look a minute?”
The rain let up a little as if gathering itself for another deluge. “What is that? And do you hear something?”
I peered where she was pointing: glimmers of light moving intermittently behind Paddy’s windows. “It looks like they turned on flashlights. Or lit some candles.”
“I don’t think Paddy would use candles up there,” Ellie said. “He’s paranoid about fire in that old building. Even with all the fire extinguishers he has, I don’t think he would …”
Light shone once more at the loft windows, then careened away. The wind screamed again; it was nuts of us even to be out there. “I don’t hear anything except a gale blowing,” I said.
But then I did. Light bounced off the inside of the window again: not a candle. A flashlight or battery lantern, swinging. And the sound I heard was not the wind, although very like it.
Somebody screaming.
The power went back on as we reached the stairs inside the old building, tracklights and torchières blazing on blindingly to reveal the shape of Terence Oscard crumpled by the bottom step.
“Jesus, oh Jesus,” Paddy moaned, clutching his head. He’d stopped shouting at the sight of us, but he was still frantic.
“Sit,” Ellie told him. “I’ll call the ambulance. Jake, look at him, will you? See if there’s anything …”
To be done for him, she meant, and at first I didn’t think there was. The back of his head was a pulpy-looking mess, and he wasn’t breathing until I turned him.
“Don’t move him, you’ll paralyze him!” Paddy shouted. “Oh, my God … Terence always said you never move somebody, you could damage their spinal cord.”
“Paddy, if he’s not breathing, it won’t do him much good to have an intact spinal cord, will it?”
That much first aid even I knew, but suddenly I wished I’d taken Terence up on the loan of that Red Cross book. Still, once he was shifted so that his jaw wasn’t blocking his windpipe, he took a shuddery breath, then another. “We really, really need a medical person here right now,” I called to Ellie.
“They’re coming,” she reported, returning from the phone. “Paddy, what happened?”
“I … I don’t know.” Paddy looked dazed. “I thought he was down here reading, but when the lights went out and he didn’t say anything I went looking for him with the flashlight. And I found him here … like this.”
He knelt by Terence’s body, reaching out to touch the unconscious man’s face. His palm cradled Terence’s rough cheek.
“Terry, please don’t die. Please, Terry—” He looked up desperately. “Are they coming? Did they say they were coming?”
“Yeah, they’re coming,” I told him. A siren approached. “Go out and wave them down so they know where we are.”
He gathered himself and went. “Here, over here!” I heard him shout, out in the street.
Ellie came back from the rear of the work area where Paddy kept cardboard, bags of fabric scraps, anything he was going to put out in the bin as trash. Being Paddy, he’d installed a small, very visible red-lit Exit sign back there.
“Go look at that door,” she suggested mildly, and when I did I found the wooden frame around it splintered, the broken wood fresh and gleaming under the chipped-out white paint. The area around the heavy lock set and deadbolt were especially chewed up. Someone had jimmied it, using a pry bar or something like one.
Even that wouldn’t have worked, though, I saw as I examined it more closely, except for one thing. The pry-bar attack had been done energetically, but the lock was designed precisely for that sort of criminal assault. Paddy was no slouch at any security; he didn’t confine himself only to fire precautions.
His locks would have held. I didn’t touch them but I didn’t need to. The door stood ajar, so the bolts of both the cylinder lock and the deadbolt were clearly visible.
Unless someone had unlocked it after it was jimmied, the door hadn’t been locked in the first place.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bob Arnold exhaled angrily. “Is there some kind of drug has gotten the water around here? Making people crazy?”
It was late, but Teddy kept the bar at La Sardina open for us; we were all too wired up to go home. The tail end of the storm had snapped around with a last vicious twist, splattering the windows with bursts of rain; huge swells rolled into the boat basin, the small craft bobbing and straining uneasily at their mooring lines.
“Did Paddy have anything to say?” Ellie asked.
Bob shrugged. “Thinks maybe Terence heard someone breaking in, went to the stairs, yelled to Paddy, someone caught him there.”
“Weapon?” I inquired.
“Nah. Run outside, toss it over the seawall, end of story. Time anyone finds it, it’s all washed off. If anyone does.”
“Good trick, readin’ with the lights out,” George Valentine observed neutrally. He’d heard the ambulance siren and come down to see what might be the matter.
“Yeah,” Bob Arnold agreed. “Asked Paddy. Changed his story a little. Now he says the two of ’em’d had a set-to, earlier. When that happened, sometimes Terence’d just sleep downstairs.”
He sighed, ate a pretzel from the bowl of them on the shiny wooden bar surface. “But then he started feelin’ bad about it. Paddy did, I mean. Called downstairs, no answer, got a flashlight and went down lookin’ for his buddy.”
Wade’s big arm rested on my shoulder and I was glad to have it there; even with all that had happened recently, the sight of Terence lying there helpless had really thrown me.
“It could have been,” Ellie said, “that someone mistook him for Paddy, in the dark.”
Wade and George glanced at each other. “Paddy,” George said, and Wade nodded at him.
“What?” Bob Arnold demanded.
“We were all in what was left of Heywood Sondergard’s youth group,” Wade said uncomfortably, “at the end of it, just before Marcus and Heywood lef
t town. Mike, Willow, Paddy, and us.” His hand took in George and Ellie. “Little Boxy Thorogood hung around too, for a while. Junior member. Till,” Wade added, “Boxy died.”
“Yeah, so what?” Arnold said. “I know that.” He spied a pot of hours-old coffee on the hot plate, got up, and poured a mug of it. He held the pot out to us, noted our refusals, sampled some, and shuddered.
“You trying to tell me someone’s knockin’ off old members of a church club? What, maybe they didn’t like any of the hymns you guys sang?”
He hoisted himself back onto the barstool. “Besides, what about the other members? Why single you out? For that matter, it ain’t even all of you—unless you three have been suffering from problems you haven’t reported.”
They shook their heads. “And,” he finished, taking another handful of pretzels, “why now?”
George examined his fingernails. “Point is, Terence wasn’t part of it. He wasn’t hooked up to Reuben in any way.”
Wesley Bodine wasn’t, either, I thought, but Paddy was. I kept quiet, though, so George would talk more.
“And I’ve been thinking,” he went on. “We all gab about how if you stood up to him, Reuben would back off. Even Paddy, though he really didn’t. But that wasn’t the whole story, only half.”
He looked up. “The other half was, if you showed you were scared of him, he would never quit. And even after you stood up to him once, he would try again. Just one more time.”
“That’s right,” Ellie recalled. “He cornered me in the back of Leighton’s store after I’d beat him up.”
George frowned. “You never told me that. What did you do?”
Her smile was beatific. “I kneed him in the groin just as hard as ever I could. Then I paid for my Popsicle, stood outside eating it until he came out limping. He didn’t even look at me.”
“Great,” Arnold said flatly. “I’m impressed. You three faced him down, he don’t bother you anymore. But Reuben, you might just want to remember, is dead. He is not running around bothering anybody, anymore, so what’s going on now, this ain’t Reuben’s one more time. Even though,” he conceded reluctantly, “it sure as hell does feel as if it is, doesn’t it?”
He drank more terrible coffee, grimaced. “Just like the bad old days.”
It was an unpleasant echo of what Paddy Farrell had said in La Sardina. “Who else was in the group?” I asked. “In that last year, when all the worst things happened? Paddy’s dad, Boxy Thorogood and Deckie Cobb, Mrs. Sondergard …”
Silence. I waited for them to remember. But after a moment I realized: the silence was my answer.
“No one,” Ellie said finally. “The other kids just kind of dropped away. We would have too, eventually. And then Marcus and Heywood left town, of course. But even before that, it wasn’t fun anymore.”
She looked into the mirror behind the bar. “In a way, Reuben killed that, too. And there wasn’t even anything to bury.”
George got up decisively. “Come on, kiddo. Long day. I want to be shut of it.”
Wade left some money on the bar, called to Ted in the kitchen as we went out, to let him know he could lock up. “Paddy going to be all right, up in Calais?” he asked Bob Arnold.
At the hospital, he meant. Paddy had gone in the ambulance with Terence.
“Yeah,” Arnold said, heading across the street to where his squad car was parked. The rain had stopped, and puddles stood gleamingly under the yellow streetlights. A few stars had shown up, poking tentatively between the streaming clouds.
Bob straightened tiredly. “They didn’t know, Terence, if he is going to make it or not. I think they’re going to LifeStar him out of there. Said they’d keep me posted. Paddy wouldn’t leave.”
A thump of regret hit me: If Victor’s trauma center were operating now, they wouldn’t have to LifeStar Terence anywhere. Whoever was doing all this wasn’t only killing people right this minute; next year some little kid would fall off a skateboard, or a logger would get creamed by a shifting load, or the boom would swing suddenly on a sailboat.
And instead of prompt surgery within the first hour—the golden hour, as Victor always called it—the victim would get a helicopter ride to Portland or wherever. Better than nothing, of course.
But a long way from ideal. That was the gap my goofball ex-husband had wanted to close. And crazy as he was in every other way but that one, he could have done it.
George and Ellie got into the Jeep together; I rode home in the pickup with Wade. “Arnold asks good questions,” I said as he downshifted for the Key Street hill.
“Yeah. How come others from the group, and not the three of us. And why now? Although the answer to that last one’s pretty clear,” he added, turning into the driveway. “It’s someone from away who’s doing it, someone who’s in town for the festival.”
“Or,” I suggested, “someone who wants it to look that way.”
His shoulders slumped. “Huh. Yeah, that too, maybe.”
Half a block away, Victor’s house looked dark and forlorn. A branch had blown down onto the porch roof, crumpling a section of gutter, and wet leaves were plastered to the pristine white siding like dirty handprints.
“And that door was open,” I said. “It couldn’t have been broken in, those locks were good ones, and there was no need for it to be. Unless someone already inside wanted it to look that way too.”
“In that case, why not lock it after you broke it?” Wade inquired reasonably.
I put my hands to my head. “I don’t know.”
“My question doesn’t have anything to do with any of that, though,” Wade went on, shutting off the engine. Sometime during the day, he’d found time to haul in all those storm windows.
“What I want to know,” he demanded of the dripping darkness, “is why? What Reuben started should have died with him. But it’s not.” We got out, crossed the sodden grass to the back porch. In the hallway, Monday’s toenails clicked welcomingly.
“Because,” Wade went on, “whoever did for Reuben, that’s one thing. I’m not condoning it, but I understand it.”
He unlocked the back door, and I realized with a sad little thump of startlement that he must have locked it, even though Sam was home: another evidence of Reuben’s legacy of fear.
“So?” In the kitchen, a wave of tiredness washed over me and I sank into a chair.
“So you’d think if someone wanted to go on doing bad deeds, they’d do them to other bad guys like Reuben. If,” he added, “you could find any. Instead, someone’s targeting his victims. Almost as if they are finishing the business he can’t finish himself.”
I looked at him. “You’re brilliant.”
“But not brilliant enough.” He peered into the refrigerator, closed it again. “What’s the good of that?”
I got up. “It’s the link. What they all have in common—not only that they were in Sondergard’s group. They were victims in the group—even Heywood, if you think being blackmailed and having your wife murdered makes you a victim, which I do. Maybe even Weasel, if he’s connected to the group in some way we just haven’t figured out yet. And you know, I’ll bet someone thinks that also makes them villains.”
He thought about that. “Like if a woman goes to a bar, she ends up having to fight off some drunk, people say she shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
“Right. Or a guy ends up living in his car and eating out of a soup kitchen. Nobody ever says, Hey, that could be me. They say the guy’s a loser, he should try harder. He gets blamed, and so does she. The victim gets turned into the villain ’cause it makes somebody feel, Hey, that couldn’t be me. Or something,” I trailed off unhappily.
“Huh.” I could see him turning it over in his head. But then he frowned.
“Close, but no cigar. For one thing, you’d have to kill off the whole darn town. Everybody got victimized by Reuben, or almost everybody, at one time or another. And,” he put the nail in the coffin of my theory, “it still doesn’t a
ccount for Weasel. If he had been hooked up to our group in any way, Jacobia, I’d remember it.”
“Oh.” The energy went out of me again. He was right.
“Sorry.” He shrugged helplessly.
“That’s okay.” But it was something about being a victim, I was sure, combined with some threat or actual behavior of Reuben’s that had gotten it all going again.
And something more, a third thing I kept almost realizing. But every time I tried to get my mind around it, it fluttered away, as wispy and elusive as gossamer.
The lights were on in the dining room but there wasn’t a sound from in there. I got up to look, found Sam hunched over the dratted Ouija board.
I wished he weren’t. I’d managed to rationalize my creepy experience with it; just my subconscious, I’d decided, spitting out the gist of my current preoccupation again and again.
But I couldn’t get over my uneasiness about it. Around me, the old house was as silent as a held breath. A pair of earphones were on Sam’s head; he glanced up and saw me.
“Hey,” he said, pulling the earphones off.
“Hi. What are you doing?”
He shrugged. “Just fooling with this. The radio gets shortwave. If I listen enough, maybe I’ll be able to translate Morse in my head. You know, like if you live in France pretty soon you can speak French?”
From the earphones came the distant, tinny sound of dots and dashes. Something about Morse code had always sounded urgent to me, even when it probably wasn’t.
“Dad called earlier, kind of upset,” Sam went on. “He says the diet in jail is not nutritionally balanced, it’s a violation of his rights. Also the reading material is inadequate.”
I could imagine. “You settle him down?”
“Yeah.” Sam managed a grin: his game face. I was glad to see it, didn’t like thinking about how long he might have to wear it.
Now I needed my own. “Did he ask about the interview? With the DA, I mean?”
On the table, the Ouija board lay silent and motionless, its black letters and numerals sharp against its polished surface.
