Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

There were notes about his finances, too: CDs, money market accounts, a portfolio of blue chips. Like the kind I should have had, except that in the past couple of years I’d let that aspect of my financial life slip, handing Ellie all my juicy stock tips instead of following them myself.

  Terence’s personal finances were news to me but not a huge surprise. I’d done Paddy’s taxes, but knew Terence’s situation only as it related to his partnership in Paddy’s business. He had done his personal taxes himself, and from the look of these notes he’d done them as well as I could have.

  Now I thought about his good, casual clothes, his easy, self-effacing way of approaching most situations. It all spelled money, but so quietly you never would notice it unless you were looking for it.

  As Terence—a quiet, civilized man—had intended. “I’ll bet he had his other affairs in order too,” I said. “Terence is a neat freak.” Only at the end of the final book had the diaries’ careful system of organization begun deteriorating.

  “So I’ll bet Terence has a will tucked into a safe-deposit box somewhere,” I said, “and a copy in his desk.”

  “Right,” Ellie said. “But why would he—”

  “Your next guess, I suppose, is that I am the beneficiary,” Paddy Farrell said, appearing suddenly in the hall behind us.

  A thump of guilty embarrassment hit me. We hadn’t heard him come in, and it was pretty clear what we were doing.

  “Paddy, I hope your being back this early doesn’t mean—”

  “That he’s died?” Paddy’s expression was haunted. “No, he’s hanging on. For now.”

  He stared at the diaries. “Sorry to startle you. I knocked but you were apparently engrossed in your reading. I came to ask about his package. But I see you’ve already dealt with it. In,” he added bitterly, “your great wisdom.” He turned to go.

  “Paddy, this isn’t the way it looks.”

  “Oh, I think it is. It’ll make great dinner conversation all over town, Terence’s poor delusions, like his crazy idea of suing me. Have fun, chewing over our relationship. You’re right about his will, by the way; I’d get everything if Terence passed. As if,” he finished bitterly, “I would want it, then.”

  He opened the door; I got up and stopped him. “Okay. As long as you’re here, I’ll ask: What about it, Paddy? What’s all this about Terence wanting to leave, wanting his money and your not wanting to pay it back to him?”

  His eyes were hard and glittery. “Oh, it’s not enough to read his diary? Pry into his private secrets? You want details?”

  I shook my head impatiently. “I want to know if you hit him, Paddy. Maybe you had an argument over his leaving, and over the money. You lost your temper, the way you do sometimes. And then set it up to look like an intruder. That’s what I’m asking you.”

  All the fight went out of him; he sagged against the door.

  “No,” he whispered, aghast. “We argued, but not over money. It’s true I don’t have it to give him, but that’s not the point. The trouble was that he was talking about leaving again, and he couldn’t leave….”

  “Why not?” Ellie asked.

  He looked at her as if the answer must be obvious. “Because he’s ill. He can’t be alone. Surely you’ve noticed.”

  He turned to me, distraught. “Jacobia, I thought you at least understood, since the other day on the ferry. He stumbles, he talks strangely—that’s when this whole idea of his going away began, when he started behaving … irrationally. And it was getting worse all the time.” He began pacing the kitchen. “It’s why I took him to see your ex-husband—once he’d have jumped at the chance of another medical examination, but he’d gotten so strange … and now your ex was the only doctor Terence would agree to be examined by.”

  His face clouded with guilt. “But I still didn’t believe he was really sick. He was always saying he was, you know. I tried acting cold to him, to let him see how it would be if we really did part.”

  A huge sigh escaped him. “But,” he finished miserably, “I was wrong. I guess I just didn’t want to believe it. When he got so ill on the ferry, that’s when I started really thinking—”

  “So you’ve been in Victor’s office too,” I interrupted.

  “Yes.” Paddy looked taken aback. “Why shouldn’t we have? He scheduled Terence for tests, referred him to a man in Portland, much to Terence’s dismay. But now, of course, all that is pretty much beside the point. We know what the trouble is.”

  Yeah, he’d been bonked with a crowbar or something. “Paddy, what the hell are you talking about?”

  He pulled a chair out, sank into it, his face bleak. “I’m saying,” he uttered, “that even before what happened last night, Terry was dying.”

  The words hung there. “I don’t understand,” I managed after a shocked moment. “Terence is always so …”

  “Healthy,” Paddy finished for me. “So healthy it was a joke. But aside from everything else, he was—well. It’s a dangerous world, Jacobia.”

  Suddenly I knew what was coming. Eastport’s not perfect; we probably have as many knuckleheads as anywhere else. But much of the time, we tolerate one another’s differences pretty well. And when you’ve gone without overt hatefulness over your neighbors’—and your own—differences for a while, you can start thinking maybe the rest of the planet’s ills won’t come around to afflict you either.

  So I hadn’t considered it. But:

  “He’s been HIV-positive for nearly thirteen years,” Paddy said quietly. “Or technically he has been—there’s been no detectable virus for a long time, but they never call you cured.”

  “So his being a hypochondriac, studying first aid, all the herbal remedies, working out and jogging, and so on,” I began.

  “Were his ways of coping,” Paddy agreed. “Along with his real medications, of course. He’d been one of the lucky ones, always responding well to treatment, even in the early times when the medicines weren’t as good as they are now. We thought that might go on forever. It never occurred to me that something else might go wrong.”

  He took a deep breath. “But before he was in treatment, just around the time I met him a dozen years ago, he’d had some headaches. The doctors said then that they were probably from some kind of an infection that had left a scar in his brain. And now, just because he’s getting older, or whatever, the scar had begun changing and starting to press on something important.”

  “But … can’t it be removed?”

  “No.” He sounded heartbroken. “If it weren’t for this injury, we wouldn’t even know about it yet. And now with the skull fracture and all the damage beneath it, Terence would have only about a ten percent likelihood of surviving the surgery, the doctors told me.”

  “And his mental status? How’d they say the tissue would have affected it? Before the injury?”

  “Paranoia, delusions, emotional outbursts, unsteady gait, a slur when he talked. More to come. Any of that sound familiar?”

  He straightened with an effort. “He was sending his diaries to his attorney in Bangor for safekeeping. Another of his crazy ideas. But I’ll do it for him now, if you’ll let me have them.”

  Ellie gathered them up and gave them to him unhesitatingly. “Sure, Paddy. We’ll be keeping a good thought for him. And you.”

  “Right,” he said, accepting the volumes.

  He nodded wanly at Tommy and Sam as they came in, Monday galloping happily behind them, and went away down the street, his step so slow it made me think of a man walking to the gallows.

  “You don’t suppose he’s lying,” Ellie said as the boys began raiding the refrigerator. “I know that sounds awful, but …”

  “You can’t fake an actual lesion. If it’s on the scans they took at the hospital, it’s there. And it fits his behavior.”

  The boys came back in from the dining room, where they had set up their snack. “Hey, Mom,” Sam said, “Tommy got this great idea. We’ve set up battery lanterns in our windows, so now we can signal in M
orse code at night. Secret messages.”

  “And everyone,” Tommy put in, “will be mystified when they see these lamps flashing. Because the thing is, with Morse code you can tell right away that it means something.”

  “From,” Sam enthused, “the pattern. But you don’t know what, so it seems, like, even more secret than it is.”

  Patterns; there were patterns all over the place, and they were driving me crazy, but …

  “Sam,” Tommy called back from the dining room, where he had gone with a jar of pickled herring, some cheese, a few leftover deviled eggs, a box of Ritz crackers, and a liter of Coca-Cola. “Let’s ask the board about those girls at the park yesterday.”

  “Come on, what’s the spirit world know about girls?” Sam retorted, grabbing a bottle of milk. “Dead girls, maybe, but we want live girls.”

  Maniacal boyish laughter greeted this impeccable teenaged logic, as Sam snagged the Oreos bag. “Tommy,” he confided to me as he went out, “is just so not with it about girls.”

  His face grew serious. “You know,” he added, “I think I probably will go to college after all. Bridget”—the girl from the salmon supper—“thinks it’s probably a good idea.”

  Great. Maybe Bridget would be able to come up with some way to pay for it, too, now that I was going to be penniless in about ten minutes.

  Then he was gone and I sat down with Ellie, who was looking miserable. “Rotten of us to snoop in those diaries,” she said.

  “Maybe. But if we hadn’t, Paddy wouldn’t have told us all he did.”

  “I guess. It’s what he didn’t say that’s bothering me now.”

  “Yeah. Somebody bonks your buddy over the head, there in the darkness. Under the circumstances you would be thinking: Maybe that was a mistake; maybe there was a murderous intruder. But he hit the wrong guy—maybe the intended victim was me. And I just don’t get it, about that unlocked door. It doesn’t fit anything.”

  “Maybe Paddy’s too heartbroken over Terence to worry about it,” Ellie said. “Somebody coming back for a second try, I mean.”

  “Sure. Or—” I hated to say it, “maybe he knows they won’t.”

  Because Paddy’s story was neat, but everyone’s was. That was the whole trouble. Some truth, lots of poetry; hard to sort out.

  The phone rang, and I told the boys to let the machine take it: it was the zoning commissioner wanting to know if Victor would appear at the appeals board meeting, at which the variance for the zoning on the trauma-center property would be considered.

  It rang again: it was the loan officer from the bank where Victor needed to borrow a zillion dollars, to buy all the medical equipment he needed just to get started. I’d forgotten those two when I’d been making my calls; there were so many of them.

  “Maybe,” I offered, “we should ask the dratted Ouija board who killed Reuben.”

  “No!” She looked shocked. “I don’t want that thing getting a whiff of Reuben. It wouldn’t,” she added frowningly, “be prudent.”

  My thought exactly. “Only kidding,” I assured her. So far, everything had been going just as Reuben would have dreamed: from bad to worse. I didn’t want him getting an actual hand in matters even if the hand was only made of ectoplasm, or whatever moves a planchette around a Ouija board.

  If it does. “Anyway, the situation is this,” Ellie summed up. “Everyone’s got a motive, and a story, and everybody—”

  “Could be lying,” I finished, “about some of it even if they aren’t lying about all of it.”

  The whole truth about the end of the trauma center was just then hitting me: finis. Game over.

  “Ellie, I’ve got to start getting past all this.”

  She ignored me. “So what do you say we just go and talk to everyone again. Just … talk to them once more, the ones that we can find, anyway. See if anything they say doesn’t fit or isn’t what they said the first time.”

  In the dining room, the boys guffawed at some spirit-world witticism. “And if we don’t? Learn something new, I mean. What then? Because we’ve already talked to …”

  The phone rang. Determinedly, I closed my ears to it. After a few rings, the machine picked up again.

  “Ellie. I mean it, I’ve got to start thinking hard about my options here. I’ve got to think about …”

  “Giving up.” She watched me carefully as she said it.

  “I know,” I went on quickly, “you don’t like the idea. But I didn’t get Victor into this pickle. And it’s starting to look as if I might not be able to get him out. This time.”

  As opposed, I meant, to all the other times: the palimony-demanding girlfriends, the scamsters who regarded Victor as the perfect flimflam target, the obsession he’d had over a famous television attorney, who had responded to his many unappreciated overtures by having him served with two restraining orders, one in New York State and one that barred him from coming within 250 miles of Atlanta, Georgia …

  Well, suffice it to say that if I had all the hot water I had gotten Victor out of over the years, I wouldn’t have had to worry about that weatherstripping; I could have run the radiators for centuries with the windows wide open and stay plenty warm.

  Which reminded me: If I didn’t get back to work on the house very soon, I’d be running the radiators outdoors, because they would be the only thing left standing when the rest fell down. The weatherstripping itself wasn’t completed yet either, and the rain of the night before had left a stain shaped like Africa on the kitchen ceiling, courtesy of those rotten clapboards.

  But Ellie was still watching me. “Okay,” I gave in. “Once more. We’ll make a few visits. And if that doesn’t work …”

  The words tasted like poison in my mouth, but I just didn’t see much choice. The phone rang again: it was one of the main prospective outside investors in Victor’s project; he’d read the papers, seen Victor in them, and wanted an update.

  The machine thweeped, recording the guy’s message.

  “Then,” I finished as the phone rang again and I ignored it, “it’s endgame.”

  Marcus was vehement. “I have no idea why my father told you that.”

  He was packing to leave. They were all leaving, tourists and visitors, getting out of town in a steady stream up Washington Street like ants departing a rained-out picnic.

  “Following Reuben Tate,” he said scathingly. “Why, that’s ridiculous. Our engagements were booked months in advance. We’d have had no idea where Reuben might be. It was impossible.”

  He flung shirts into a suitcase, in one of the Victorian bedrooms in Heddlepenny House. The oval mirror above the ornate carved dresser reflected his irritation.

  “Not to mention pointless,” he added. “What reason could we have had?”

  “Your father suggested he wanted to convert Reuben,” I said. “I got the sense that saving such a doomed, damned soul would’ve been a feather in his cap. Spiritually speaking.”

  Marcus made a sound of disgust; his hand was again covered with dermatological makeup. “My father had no idea how bad Tate really was. And didn’t take spiritual trophies in the foolish sense that you’re implying. Why he said we were pursuing Tate,” he repeated, “I simply cannot imagine.”

  Heywood’s funeral was scheduled for Friday, in a tiny town in Florida where, it turned out, he had been born. His body, now at the medical examiner’s, would be shipped there; if it did not make it in time, they would have the services anyway and bury him later.

  “How could your father not know about death threats, arson, and murder? About the terrors Reuben inflicted on the members of the children’s group your father was in charge of? And it’s well known that Reuben was supposed to have frightened your own mother to death, after she punished Reuben.”

  “That’s nonsense, too,” Marcus retorted swiftly. “My mother had a heart condition; she could have died of it at any time. But that part was forgotten because it wasn’t suitable fodder for the gossip mill, that’s all. Not sensational eno
ugh.”

  “But you said yourself you thought …”

  “I admit I said it,” he retorted, snapping his case shut. “But I was a victim of the hysteria the town has about Tate.”

  What about the coins under her body? I wanted to ask, but I wanted more for him to go on talking.

  “And the notion that Dad ignored his young parishioners’ problems is really a slur on his name. That really,” he faced me, “is going too far.”

  I noticed, however, that Marcus did not precisely deny it.

  “Are you sure it’s not exactly what Reuben threatened to say about your father? The last time he saw him?”

  Willow had said that Reuben did his homework, knew how he could hurt you. So why wouldn’t he have updated his arsenal against Heywood, dropped the story about being gay in favor of one that might work better now that times had changed?

  Especially if there was a grain of truth in it.

  “As I told you,” Marcus declared, “I don’t know what he said to my father, but I can guess: that he’d keep coming back until one of us gave him money. Anything else is pure fantasy on your part. And for Dad’s sake, I’d appreciate your not repeating it.”

  He swung his case off the white tufted chenille spread that covered the four-poster. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long way to go, and since I’ll have to do all the driving myself, I want to get a head start.”

  It was two in the afternoon, too late to get a head start on anything. He was getting out, was what he was doing. But I let him leave. I couldn’t stop him.

  Besides, he’d already given me what I wanted.

  At the door, he turned to me. “Look, I hated Reuben. But I didn’t kill him. And I certainly didn’t kill my father, your foolish suspicions notwithstanding.”

  He sounded so sincere. Everyone did. “Marcus,” I asked quietly, “what’s on your hand?”

  I’d promised Bob Arnold, but I couldn’t help it, and since Marcus was leaving, he wouldn’t be telling anyone I’d asked.

  I hoped. “The spot,” I added, “that you always keep covered up with the makeup?”

  At this he whitened suddenly, his face tightening as if painfully wounded. Then he turned and stalked out.