by Sarah Graves
“Yeah. He told me again,” Sam recited, imitating Victor uncannily, “that it’s out of my hands, I had no choice, and if I beat myself up about it anymore, he’s going to kick my butt.”
It’s one of the very most annoying things about Victor, that once in a while he will blindside you with bighearted behavior. It would be so much easier just to hate him up one side and down the other.
“Don’t stay up late. Work tomorrow,” I reminded Sam, but he had the earphones back on already and couldn’t hear me.
In the hall I spotted a fluff of dog hair, like a shadow in the corner. But when I bent to reach for it, there was nothing. As I straightened, my glance fell onto the hall shelf.
The package Terence had shoved into my hands that afternoon was still there, wrapped in brown paper, marked PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL. It was addressed to a firm of attorneys in Bangor, Maine.
Hefting it, I discovered that it felt like spiral notebooks stacked one on top of another; you could feel the wire bindings along the side of the parcel. Half a dozen of them, maybe.
No stamps on it, though, and the string was starting to come undone. Tape, actually, would be better for it. I could rewrap it, and perhaps just glance at the contents as I did so.
“Guess I’ll go on up to bed,” Sam said. He snapped the radio off, interrupting a sputter of dot-and-dash. Then he paused, squinting at the Ouija board in puzzlement.
“Something funny about that thing,” he said.
I feel that falling out of the sky can be prevented by not going up into it. Ellie, however, does not share this opinion, as I was reminded very early the next morning when she showed up at a ghastly hour, full of what I regarded as a ghastly plan.
“Ellie, these notebooks,” I said, waving at them spread out on the kitchen table. “They’re …”
“We’ll be back by lunchtime,” she interrupted firmly in the tone her pirate ancestors might have used while persuading people to walk the plank. “Or probably before. Grand Manan’s only half an hour, as the crow flies.”
I did not point out that crows fly with wings that are attached by muscles and tendons, and that if God had meant me to do it too, He’d have attached some to me.
“But,” I protested uselessly, “the notebooks are …”
“I got a phone call while I was out last night. Message from George’s cousin, on the machine.”
Which didn’t help much. Half of downeast Maine consists of George Valentine’s cousins, the other half his aunts and uncles.
“So?”
“So Harriet Thorogood wants to talk to us.”
I stared. “Harriet … Boxy’s mother? I thought she was …”
“Dead, I know. But she isn’t. She’s in a nursing home.”
“Lovely. Why didn’t you mention this to me? Anyway, I’m very happy for her, that she’s alive. Still, I fail to see how flying over to see her there will advance our understanding of anything. In fact, after flying at all I will be in no shape to …”
But Ellie had already turned off the coffeemaker, filled up Monday’s water bowl, checked the stove knobs to make sure they were off, and scribbled a note.
“I’ll explain on the way,” she promised, hustling me out.
But she didn’t, or at least not immediately, because Ellie had been up and going strong since her usual rising time of five in the morning—in Maine, late sleeping is seen as a sure sign of deficient moral character—and had been to the Waco Diner with George for breakfast. So she had plenty of news:
Terence had indeed been transferred to Portland and Paddy Farrell had driven down there to be with him. Paddy would come back this evening, Ellie went on, to close up the studio; after that he would return to the medical center in Portland for the duration of Terence’s stay there.
“No word on Terence’s actual condition,” she added, “other than that he’s still unconscious and in intensive care.”
So he wouldn’t be letting on who had clobbered him anytime soon. I’d brought along the notebooks, which now lay in my lap. They were Terence’s diaries, and what they contained was still spinning in my head like the glass bits in a kaleidoscope.
“Ellie,” I began, picking up a notebook, “we need …”
Instead of listening, she set the parking brake on the Jeep in the visitor’s lot at the airfield and got out.
Set in a pasture overlooking blue water, the airstrip looked too short to land more than a helicopter but was actually long enough to accommodate a good-sized Gulfstream, a fact that was of little comfort to me since I didn’t want to go up in any of those either.
Reluctantly, I got out of the Jeep. The air was crisp and washed clean by the storm of the night before, smelling of sea salt and evergreens, and the light had the fragile clarity of a Maine island in the early morning, unspoiled and full of bright innocent promise.
On the other hand, waiting on the tarmac was an aircraft that looked as if it had been glued together out of balsa wood and construction paper. Eyeing it, I opened my mouth to object.
But that was useless too. “We,” said Ellie, “are going. In that. Now.” She marched toward the plane.
The low metal Quonset building of Quoddy Air, Inc., looked like something that leather-helmeted cropdusters flew biplanes out of, back in the 1930s. The whole idea of my going up into the sky was ridiculous anyway, I thought wildly.
And then I was going up in it. Strapped in, shaking, and in imminent danger of supplying my breakfast for examination by my flying companions, I saw the end of the runway vanish under the nose of the toy plane. Another moment and Passamaquoddy Bay fell abruptly away beneath us; under the circumstances, I guessed it was better than seeing it rise abruptly toward us, but not much better.
The plane banked right. The pilot was cheerful. I took this as a good sign. Until he turned off the engine.
“You know,” I said faintly, in what I imagined was a nice, conversational tone, “I believe that when the airplane is actually in the air, hundreds and hundreds of feet off the ground or in this case, actually, the icecold water …”
“You don’t have to scream,” Ellie said. “I can hear you.”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the pilot asked. “Nothing but wind noise. Hey, look down there—it’s a whale.”
It was a big, dark shape moving along very slowly in the indigo bay, and I had no doubt that I would be getting much more closely acquainted with it in the immediate future.
“Better fire it up again,” Ellie suggested kindly. “Jake’s getting pale.”
With a grin, the pilot started the engine. Have I mentioned that he was approximately fourteen years old? Anyway, it only coughed two or three times before catching and running evenly, which meant only about ten seconds when I was so terrified that I had no discernible vital functions whatsoever, if you didn’t count all the ones I thought I might lose control of any minute.
The plane was a three-seater: me and the pilot up front, Ellie strapped in the rear. Her expression was glowingly radiant, the look of a little kid with an allday pass to the carnival.
Seeing her face, I realized suddenly that if the plane did crash, there was little that I could do about it. Possibly this thought was the result of all the neurochemicals pouring into my system, like the ones that supposedly make you feel cool as a cucumber while you’re about to be devoured by a tiger, although I don’t see how anyone could really know that.
Slowly my fists unclenched. The waves looked like crumpled aluminum foil. A boat bobbed, the size of my little fingernail. Far to the west, over Nova Scotia, the remnants of last night’s storm loomed darkly like an evil kingdom towering into the sky.
“So,” I said, “tell me again why we are going here. What’s she want to talk to us about?”
“I don’t know,” Ellie replied. “Harriet wouldn’t say. We’ll find out when we get there.”
Strapped in or not, I was about to pop her one, but then we were landing, a process whose details—especially the part about droppi
ng to earth way more rapidly than I thought could possibly be normal—captured me utterly until it was over.
Ten minutes later we were climbing the steps to Olde Bayview Nursing Home, a short walk from the airfield.
“So this is Boxy’s mother, who lives here, and she’s seventy years old,” I said, trying to get straight in my head what Ellie had been saying to me while the runway pavement was coming up at us so damned fast.
“Seventy isn’t old enough for a nursing home,” I added.
“It is for Harriet. She started failing when Boxy died. Not long after that,” Ellie went on, “she gave up her house and came here to live. Since then she’s been going downhill. Her mental functions. Sleeps most of the time, doesn’t speak at all, that sort of thing.”
She pressed the doorbell on the low, white-painted concrete block structure. What the place lacked in snazziness it more than made up for in regular maintenance: clipped hedges, a lawn like a putting green, riotous flower beds. A very old man with a very humped back was scattering bonemeal lovingly around the feet of some perfect rosebushes.
Someone inside buzzed us in. “I knew she lived here,” Ellie went on, “but she’s been completely uncommunicative for so long, I never even thought of mentioning her to you. What I didn’t know was that she’s not out of it anymore. She’s woken up, George’s cousin says.”
In the foyer, a golden retriever got up and greeted us with wags and tongue lolling. From behind the reception desk, a woman smiled and offered the visitors’ book. The place smelled of soap and fresh floor wax. Ellie signed the book, and we were directed down a hardwood-floored hallway so shiny that I could see the soles of my shoes in it, yet somehow it wasn’t slippery.
I made a mental note to ask someone there how they managed the trick, since my floors could certainly use an application of the miracle substance. I knew of only two possible conditions for old wood floors: gritty or whoops!
“It should be one of these rooms,” Ellie murmured. The cleanliness here was stunning: windows glittering like diamonds, woodwork so unsmudged that it seemed to have been painted—glossy enamel, in a fresh, springlike shade of mint green—that very morning. A faint hint of something medicinally camphorated hung in the air, mingled with the smell of a cake baking.
“George’s cousin works here,” Ellie added, “did I mention that? The one,” she added, “who called last night. And Harriet’s doctor says her mental trouble started with a stroke.”
At which I finally got it: so that was how the cousin hooked into it. In Eastport, the maze of social, work, and family connections was mind-boggling, and it was mostly Greek to me.
Only not to Ellie. “But if you ask me,” she went on, “Harriet’s breakdown was on account of a broken heart.” We came to the door of a large common room: braided rugs, crocheted afghans, a large yellow cat ensconced in a sunny window.
“Then the other day someone told her Reuben was dead,” Ellie finished. “She’s been bright as a new penny, since.”
“I still don’t see, though,” I objected, “why she wants to talk to us.”
“I don’t,” said a shaky old voice at my elbow. “I want you to talk to me.”
Harriet Thorogood was a small, fragile woman with thin white hair, tiny bones, and the dark, sharp eyes of a bird. Wearing a flowered dress with a white lace collar, rolled stockings, and orthopedic shoes, she sat alertly in an upholstered armchair that seemed big enough to swallow her up.
“Someone said you found him after someone cut him, hung him to bleed. I want,” she demanded avidly, “to know how he looked.”
Ellie and I glanced at each other. Neither of us wanted to relive finding Reuben or to report the gory details. But she was Boxy’s mother.
So we sat down together and told her.
Rather, Ellie did. While she talked, I kept seeing Harriet Thorogood as she’d been twenty years earlier: not fragile, still vigorous, with a ten-year-old son.
I saw her come to the door with a cigarette in her hand. A drink, maybe, poured on the kitchen counter while she finished the dishes. There was a radio playing show tunes behind her, and when they told her what had happened I felt her eyes going wildly from one to another of their faces.
Searching for the one that would tell her it was not true.
But none of them had.
When Ellie had finished, Harriet sighed and looked away, satisfied.
“Mrs. Thorogood,” I said, “didn’t Boxy ever ask anyone for help about Reuben? You, or any adult? He was in the church group, for example. Didn’t he ask for help from Reverend Sondergard?”
Slowly she dragged her gaze back. Some of the brightness had already gone from her expression, as if now with this last thing finished, she had little reason for remaining alert.
“No,” she quavered regretfully. “He never. I wished he had of, I’d o’ skinned that Tate bastard”—bahstid—“alive. And he mustn’t have asked the reverend for any help, or the reverend would’ve helped him. Wouldn’t he?” she demanded.
Her cloudy eyes were full of a last appeal: surely her son hadn’t asked for help against Reuben Tate, only to be refused.
“Of course he would have,” I told her, with more confidence than I felt. “I’m sure he’d have done anything he could, if he had known.”
“Well, then,” she muttered. “There’s an end to it. I thank both you girls very kindly.” With this her head drooped, her tiny fingers plucking unaware at the cotton fabric of her dress.
So: no new, revelatory information, nothing illuminating to add to another sad old story. Just an old woman who wanted some punctuation for the end of her tragedy.
And one other thing.
Back at the airfield, I climbed into the aircraft with no assistance, settling in the front cockpit seat and strapping the safety harness over my chest. Swinging around, we hurtled down the narrow runway and, it felt like, straight off a cliff.
Air punched up under the plane, lifting it, and we climbed suddenly, bouncing a little in the crossways air currents around the island. I didn’t care.
“You’re gung-ho all of a sudden,” Ellie said, watching me carefully. “I’m sorry nothing useful came of this.”
But it had. “I understand,” I said. My voice flew away on the engine noise. “The part of it that I hadn’t been getting.”
We banked hard right, arrowing toward Moose Island, on it the town of Eastport, the causeway ribboning east across more blue water, and finally the forested coastal plain, a vast swath of autumn reds, yellows, and evergreens rising to the mountains.
“What I didn’t get was the physical act,” I said. “Putting the blade to his throat and cutting it. Because … well, how? I mean, how could anyone do it? How could any human being actually do a thing like that?”
History, of course, suggested that lots of them could. Were, probably, right this very minute. And yet …
The nightmare memory of Reuben hanging in the graveyard still came to me at odd, awful moments. But this time, what I had imagined of Boxy’s mother came, also:
How she had felt. My mind tried to put Sam in Boxy’s place, but I wouldn’t let it. That far I couldn’t—wouldn’t—go.
And didn’t need to. Sunlight glinted suddenly on the plane’s front window, turning it into a mirror.
There was another crucial task to accomplish that morning, and by the time I got home it was the hour when normal people might actually be in their offices. So, although it was not what I wanted to be doing—
—Ellie was sitting at the table reading Terence’s diaries, and the faces she was making as she did so made me want to start hashing them over with her immediately—
—I began making phone calls.
When I was finished, it was several hours later, and I’d kept Victor’s trauma center from becoming a dead issue for one more day. Bankers, builders, real estate salespeople, medical regulators, prospective investors:
I promised them all that Victor’s arrest had been a terrible error,
the kind of thing that happened in your worst nightmares. I said that the wheels for releasing him were in the process of turning and he would be out tomorrow.
Well, it was the kind of thing that happened in my worst nightmares, anyway; that much was true. But it was the last time I would get away with saying any of the rest of it. The land-option payment was due in twenty-four hours. So if Victor stayed in jail for more than a day longer, it was all over.
“Have you,” Ellie asked quietly, “read these?”
I sat down and put my face in my hands. “Yes. Pretty low tactic, I guess, snooping in them when he’s not even around to object. But what Bob Arnold said about him really struck me.”
“That Terence might have done it himself. Hurt himself, I mean, by throwing himself down the stairs. The bottom step was messy, maybe from his landing there after someone hit him. But maybe just from his landing there … hard.”
“Yeah. He’d fallen once before, or so he said. His behavior on the ferry and at the festival was odd, too. It made me think he might be ill.”
The diaries, though, opened a whole new can of worms. They were dated on the covers; Ellie opened the most recent one again.
“Paddy owed Terence a lot of money. Apparently he’d lent it to him to put into the design studio. And they were breaking up.”
She looked at me, disbelieving. “But I can’t imagine them without each other. It would be like dividing Siamese twins.”
“Meanwhile, Terence was looking to get his money back,” I recited. “And Paddy couldn’t pay. So Terence was about to sue.”
Glumly, Ellie looked at the pages again. “Which is something else I absolutely can’t believe, under normal circumstances. And it looks as if, even if that never paid off, Terence would be okay financially. I never realized it, but I guess he’s wealthy. Or so it says here.”
“Right. Not the show-off type.” I examined once more the pages with their well-organized paragraphs and crisply set-off things-to-do lists, each task checked off as it was accomplished, interspersed with notes about his and Paddy’s imminent breakup.
