by Sarah Graves
“Part of what he told us is true,” I said to Ellie when we got to the street. “They weren’t following Reuben. Heywood never even said so, not in plain words.”
In my mind, I went over the talk I’d had with the older man at the lake. “Heywood Sondergard just went along with whatever I said, let me draw conclusions.”
The Winnebago’s engine roared to life. “And now,” I went on, watching the big vehicle lumber up Washington Street toward the causeway, “Marcus is getting out of here like his hat is on fire and his pants are catching. What’s he in such a big hurry about?”
“But they still did,” Ellie recalled, meaning Reuben and the Sondergards, “end up in the same towns at the same time. It could hardly have been coincidence. So …”
“Right,” I said. “Tate was following them. Their concerts were booked well in advance, so it wouldn’t be difficult. And the reason he would go on doing that would be …”
“Money. One of them—Heywood or Marcus—was paying him.”
“Absolutely. My question is, for what?”
“Let’s,” Ellie said thoughtfully, “go see Mike Carpentier one more time.”
The house on the hill was as storybook pretty and remote as ever, the bay shining gloriously below it and the sky blue above. Mike was turning the compost heap behind his vegetable garden, his hands encased in leather gardening gloves.
“He was on it,” he confirmed. “The list Reuben had; Reverend Sondergard was one of the men I wrote letters to, when Reuben got out of jail.”
“And did he? Pay, that is?” Once again I was struck by the assertive neatness of the garden area, and in fact the whole service portion—firewood, food production, and trash burning, composting, or recycling—of the acre of paradise:
Paper went in a barrel, to be reduced to a smaller volume of ashes. The ashes apparently went in the compost heap, as did all vegetable waste. Bins held bottles and cans; a wooden box with a slat top received all meat scraps.
Only this last part of the arrangement seemed to need some tuning; animals had been at the scrap bin, and a couple of gnawed chicken bones lay scattered near it.
He saw me looking at it. “Damned vermin. Sometimes they’re smarter than people.”
“You could get a cat.” The tactless words were out of my mouth before I thought about them. He made a face of distaste.
“Don’t care for them. Speaking of vermin, though, yeah, I think Reuben got some money from Heywood. Don’t know for sure. I was on the giving end, the giving-trouble part. But not on the receiving end, where the money was. That part was all Reuben’s.”
He stuck his pitchfork into the compost as Molly’s face appeared at an upstairs cottage window, then vanished again.
“Is she all right?” I asked. “After what happened at the supper? It must have been awful for her, seeing all of that. And her doll …”
“I made her another one,” Mike said shortly. “She’s fine.”
“Willow says,” Ellie told Mike, “that you were at the fire. The night Deckie died.”
“Willow,” Mike replied, “is a lying fool. All she wants is to cover her own dirt, by making a big show of somebody else’s.”
Willow was also halfway to Boston by now, according to the proprietors of the Motel East. The police had been there first thing, done their interview, gotten her address and phone number. We wouldn’t be seeing her again, or her intriguing husband, either.
“You mean you weren’t there?” I said, glancing at the scrap box again. Something had gnawed through the side of it; something small, sharp toothed, and hungry. “Willow lied about that?”
“I said I wasn’t,” he replied flatly. “And I don’t see how you knew Heywood Sondergard was on that list, either. Reuben never told anyone, and he told me not to. And I didn’t.”
He glanced up sharply. “Molly! I said stay inside.”
A glimmer of blond hair vanished around the corner of the house, and the door slammed.
“After all,” he went on, plunging the pitchfork into the compost again, “there’s no sense blackmailing somebody whose dark secret is common knowledge, is there? So I shut up.”
He dug energetically, but stopped suddenly, his shoulders sagging. “It was all a long time ago,” he said in less combative tones. “Reuben was in the past.”
I looked out over the water. “Sometimes the past lives on. When people do more than hurt us. When the hurt does damage.”
I was thinking of Victor: how sometimes you just can’t get there from here. It changes you, finding that out. But if you’re like Mike you go on, build around it somehow. Or like Sam.
“He wouldn’t let me be,” Mike said suddenly. “I was afraid to tell anybody. He was always around. Even in my own room …”
“It must have been scary,” I said. If adults in East-port were frightened of Reuben Tate, what must it have been like for a child? “I’m surprised it really didn’t scar you for life. If,” I added gently, “you’re sure it didn’t?”
Because building around it really isn’t the best solution. If you have to, then you do it, allowing for the radiator that can’t be removed, the supporting wall that must remain where it is or the rest of the house will fall down.
But it can leave you in a wicked fix. He straightened. “You know, it might have scarred me. For a while I thought it had, he scared me so damn badly. But then we had Molly, and somehow after that I was okay again. You know how a kid can straighten out your priorities whether you like it or not?”
“I do,” I said, thinking of life after Sam. “All of a sudden you’re a sensible grown-up person, because you have to be. You do things you never dreamed of being able to do.”
He smiled at me. “When I first saw her, and I realized this helpless little creature was depending on me …”
“Right,” I laughed, remembering. “You thought oh my God, the poor thing, it’ll starve, or I’ll drop it, or something.”
“Yeah,” he agreed with a grin. “How old is yours?” he asked, leaning on the pitchfork.
“Seventeen. I didn’t,” I added, “drop him. And he eats as if he’s starving, nowadays, but I didn’t starve him back then. You and your ex worked it out okay, I guess, about raising Molly. I met Anne, by the way.”
Mike nodded. “Better this way for all of us. Anne’s a good person. She cares a hell of a lot. She’s just not cut out for what people think of as the normal wife and mother thing. That’s all.”
Which was what I had gathered from her, too. I gazed around the little homestead; Ellie had made herself scarce. There were hollyhocks in the dooryard, and the trellis up the side of the cottage was still full of roses, their perfume wafting lightly on a warm offshore breeze.
“You’ve done a great job here,” I said, meaning it. “The gardens, your ways of taking care of everything, and the trellis. I do love a trellis.”
His look sharpened for an instant, then relaxed. “Thank you. All the work is difficult sometimes, but it’s worth it. That was one thing the Reverend Sondergard said that was worth something: ’Mikey,’ he told me, ’if you want things to be a certain way, you have to make them that way.’”
Wade had said that, too, I remembered. That must have been where he’d gotten the phrase: from Heywood Sondergard. Out on the water a barge puttered steadily toward the salmon pens.
“It was bad for a while,” Mike said. “And the divorce itself was hard.” He gazed around the small homestead. “But we’re all right now, and we’re going to be even better.”
Hearing him say it made me wish I had some wood to knock for him. “Was there ever really a list?” I asked quietly, gazing out at the bright water. “Of gay men Reuben was blackmailing? Or did he just make that up, about getting hold of one in jail?”
He shook his head regretfully. “I don’t know. I’ve wondered about it myself. He had names, addresses. But—”
“But how would he have gotten them?” I finished for him.
Mike nodded. “I belie
ved him back then, but now I guess it’s more likely he just picked those guys out of a bunch of phone books. Yellow Pages listings of doctors, dentists—men he thought would have some money, or had a lot at stake. Maybe some would pay, Reuben would be thinking. And maybe some did.”
“What if one had called the cops on him, instead?”
He shrugged. “If they had, he’d just make himself scarce for a while. And none did that.”
A deep breath. Then: “You were right about the night at Deckie’s. I was there, Reuben made me go along with him. Later I said it was Willow; that was more likely, and it took the heat off me. I was scared my folks would find out I hung out with Reuben, and then he might hurt them. But I don’t really know what Sondergard paid him for, or if he paid. Reuben added something to the letter that I didn’t see,” he confessed. “A note of his own.”
Molly’s face reappeared at the upstairs window. “Is that her room?” I asked. “With the roses, and the view?”
He smiled. “Yes. At night she can see the stars. She loves her room. She feels so safe there. I know people think I’m too strict with her,” he added, walking with me toward the house. “But I want her to have a real childhood, not be smearing on makeup and wearing sexy clothes at eleven or twelve years old. There’s plenty of time for her to be a grown-up later.”
The little girl emerged cautiously onto the back step of the cottage. “Dad? Can I go play with Barney?” At the sound of his name, the pony in the railed enclosure looked up hopefully.
“All right,” Mike allowed. “But stay away from those feed sacks. Something’s got into them again; I’m going to have to clean them up. And don’t get too dirty, please. We need to go to town, and we don’t want to look like little ragamuffins.”
Molly scrambled happily down the porch steps and ran to her pet, an apple for his snack clutched in her small fist. Ellie looked up from where she had perched on a rock overlooking the bay, came to say goodbye.
“Mike, did Reuben say anything else the last time you saw him? Anything at all that might help me?”
He shook his head. “Only that we were all going to remember him. That he was going to make a big splash.”
Well, he’d gotten that much right, although not, I guessed, in the way that he intended or could have foreseen. As we were leaving I noticed again the pretty well-house, its stone cistern and peaked roof surrounding a red-painted hand pump.
“It must be a project in winter,” I remarked. “Doesn’t it freeze up?”
Mike laughed. “Oh, you can keep it running okay if you know how,” he replied. “No one had running water in the old days, and they didn’t die of thirst.”
Yes, but what’s past is past, I was about to tease him, then decided not to. Mike Carpentier had taken what he wanted from the past and made a paradise of it.
The rest he’d put firmly behind him, with an effort of will and an amount of hard labor that I could only imagine. It didn’t seem right to make fun of it.
So I didn’t. Making my way downhill behind Ellie to where the Jeep was parked, I thought that if grit and a willingness to work could be bottled and sold, Mike would be a millionaire by now, except of course that money wasn’t what he wanted.
“Peace of mind,” I said, breathing in the fresh, salt air at the foot of the path. “If more people went after it, they might find out that things aren’t important. Even,” I added, glancing back up, “running water and electricity.”
“Personally, I like my peace of mind to be equipped with modern plumbing,” Ellie retorted, “and central heating. It’s lots easier to give up things when you know you can have them back anytime you want them. Like,” she added, “Mike Carpentier can.”
I glanced in surprise at her as she swung the vehicle around and gunned it toward town. “Molly’s mom,” she reminded me, “is in the merchant marine, after all. They make good money.”
Which put a faint new gloss on things: that Mike had income would have been common knowledge to people in Eastport. Maybe including Reuben, who might have wanted a piece of it. That could have been why he had bothered hotfooting it up that hill. But I believed Mike, that he hadn’t felt threatened by Reuben anymore.
Still, I felt a little disappointed. “So he’s not exactly subsistence-farming that acre,” I said. Somehow it tarnished the fantasy. On the other hand, the fantasy had been unrealistic; making a living for yourself and a child off a Maine acre would take more than a hard worker.
More like a miracle worker. Meanwhile, I’d thought we were heading home, but at Route 190 and Washington Street Ellie didn’t turn left as I’d expected. Instead she shot straight forward.
I peered at Ellie’s gas gauge; she likes to let the Jeep run on fumes periodically, and after my empty-tank episode of a couple of days earlier, I was still gun shy.
“It’ll get to Perry and back,” she said, and glanced in the rearview. “Huh. Didn’t Mike say they were going to Eastport?”
“That’s what I thought. Why?”
“He’s behind us. Molly with him.”
“So he changed his mind. Going to Calais, maybe.”
“I guess.” She drove in silence awhile.
“So why are we going to Perry?” I asked finally. “Is there someone we should talk to there, too?”
Spruce trees, cedar posts, fields, glints of water went by. “No,” Ellie said, pulling up to the corner at the end of 190.
She glanced left, scooted onto Route 1, avoiding a big old Chrysler making a signal-free left turn into the Farmer’s Union Market and after that a green panel truck backing out of the Perry Post Office. Then she turned into the gravel parking lot of the New Friendly Restaurant.
Mike Carpentier’s Ford Escort went on up Route 1 in the direction of Calais, which didn’t surprise me; even someone as back-to-basics as Mike needed the Rite-Aid or the Wal-Mart once in a while, not to mention McDonald’s or Taco Bell.
The New Friendly was the opposite of all those: a low, red wooden structure with big white-framed windows and no hint of mass-produced anything, backed up against a salt marsh. Cattails waved their chocolate heads over the tide-filled inlets, small waves making zigzags of their reflections on the water.
Inside, the eatery was crowded with groups of men in denims and gimme caps, families ranging from babies to grandmothers. The special, the board behind the counter said, was clam pie.
Ellie slid in across from me at the only vacant booth and opened her menu. “I have to admit it looks a little bleak,” she said. “We’ve talked to everyone who might have anything useful to say to us. We’ve snooped, and pried, and read diaries that didn’t belong to us. You’ve gone up in an airplane, for heaven’s sake.”
The waitress came, took our orders, went away again. Ellie resumed: “And now everybody’s leaving town except Mike. And his life, never mind what Reuben did twenty years ago, is just ducky.”
We sat in discouraged silence until the waitress returned; Ellie bit into her haddock sandwich. My coleslaw was crisp and peppery.
“It’s over, Ellie. Somebody’s gotten away with it, at least for now.”
She nodded without quite agreeing. “And what about your own problems? The money you’re losing, I mean.”
Misery over the topic made me sigh. “Well, I’m going to take a major hit over the trauma-center project,” I admitted. “Seed money, pretty much by definition, is money you don’t get back if things go wrong.”
“And since you can’t get Victor out, it’s going to.”
“Right. We gave it a last shot, but we’ve done all we can.”
My hands made helpless sawing motions over the table. “I’ve got to face it, all the practical stuff that needs doing. Instead of running around chasing Reuben Tate’s old, evil moonbeams.”
“What are you going to do about the money?”
I didn’t want to tell her. But I would have to, sooner or later. “Well. It might take a little while, but I think I can get things back on track.”
P
recisely how I would have to do that, though—that was the hard part. “The big project is to get Sam’s living and tuition money together, now that he’s decided to go to school, if not for that, I guess I could build a portfolio from here, from Eastport, just on my own investing. But …”
But that wasn’t all of it. What I didn’t say was that aside from money for expenses I needed a big cash cushion just to feel decent. Otherwise, I was a poor girl again.
“I can get a cash flow going if I move back to New York, set up in practice again. Investment counseling, financial plans, tax structuring … all the stuff I used to do when I lived there.”
No more early-morning walks with Monday on the breakwater, in the salt-fresh dawn. No coffee frappes at Bay Books, with the new best-sellers and the latest gossip. No more knowing and being known by everyone in town; in Manhattan, life had been fast-paced and exciting, and I’d been one of a million busy strangers.
No Wade. Not for a while, anyway. “I can come back here,” I managed weakly, “often.”
She was looking at me as if I’d just arrived from the planet Mars. “Can I ask you a question?” she inquired seriously.
Without waiting, she went on. “What do you think I’ve been doing with all the investing tips you’ve been handing me for two years, wallpapering the bathroom?”
Actually, that was what I had thought, or something like it. She’d never said any more about them. “All those ideas you kept on giving me? You think I wasted them?”
She eyed me incredulously. “Is that what you think I think of your ideas, Jacobia? All the knowledge and experience that you worked so hard to get, even though you don’t brag on it now?”
She sounded quite affronted, so it took a moment before the import of her words hit me. “Beg pardon? You mean you’ve been …”
Crisply, she reeled off the names of a dozen publicly traded companies, all of which had appreciated smartly over the previous two years, just as I had predicted they would. Then, knocking my socks off, she told me exactly how much each had appreciated, as well as where it had closed at the end of trading on the preceding Friday.
