Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  Finally, she confided how much money she’d made, and it was a good thing I didn’t happen to be wearing full dentures when she told me, or I’d have been searching the floor for them.

  “I put in everything my folks left me when they passed on,” she continued briskly. “And anything else I could salt away when the opportunity arose. So,” she concluded, “when Sam needs school money or whatever, you send him to me.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “Shut up,” she explained. “You’re not leaving. It’s a stupid idea. I swear, Jake, you’re smart all right, but sometimes your big-city brains don’t have enough powder to blow your own bottom out of a bathtub, common-sense-wise.”

  “Oh,” I heard myself say faintly. “But you …”

  Of course she had. In this whole wide world there is nothing more practical—or closemouthed about it, especially when it comes to money—than a downeast Mainer.

  “I will charge you,” she said, “enough interest to keep you from feeling too guilty. Assuming you end up really needing it.”

  The girl on the Greyhound hadn’t had a hope of any help. She’d forgotten, even, how to ask for it. Ellie waited to see if I understood how to accept it.

  Then it suddenly occurred to me that if you need a big cushion, you must be expecting a hard landing. And I wasn’t; not anymore. My friends would help me.

  Whatever happened. A weight like a ballast stone lifted off my shoulders. “I’ll come to you if I need to,” I said gratefully.

  “Well, of course you will,” Ellie replied. “You’re not that foolish. As for Victor …”

  She was about to tell me again that it was too early to quit. But it wasn’t. We had pieces of the pattern, but they just kept on whirling and they might go on doing it forever.

  So I braced for Ellie’s argument and prepared to resist it, an old Wall Street adage echoing in my head: Don’t chase your losses.

  It was excellent advice. But I did not get the chance to insist that I was going to take it.

  She glanced past me, her face changing. “Don’t look now, but it appears to me that someone didn’t quite manage to make it out through the departure gate.”

  I let my glance stray casually to the mirror behind the lunch counter, just as the man in the doorway looked into it, meeting my gaze:

  Marcus Sondergard.

  “The Winnebago was giving him trouble,” I said, repeating Marcus’s grudging explanation for his presence, as we pulled out of the restaurant parking lot. “So what?”

  “He must have been nearly to Ellsworth when he noticed it,” Ellie retorted. “He’s been gone a couple of hours.”

  She took the left onto Route 190, back toward Eastport. “So why didn’t he have it fixed there? He’s got engine trouble, that means it’s not running well. Why drive it all the way back here?”

  “Ellie,” I said, seeing where all this was going. “I said I was finished.”

  She stared stubbornly ahead as I went on: “I’ve got a roll of weatherstripping the size of a wagon wheel in my house. And if I don’t get the carpenters over for the back wall soon, the phrase winter kitchen is going to be a literal description. And …”

  And besides getting my house ready for cold weather—a task that even without carpentry was as lengthy and detailed as the one the NASA people undertook, getting the space shuttle set for lift off—there was now Victor’s place to get ready for the winter, too.

  Two mints in one, if by that you meant what it was going to cost me: window caulking and insulation rolls do not come cheap, and neither does a tankful of heating oil every other half-hour.

  “Furthermore, I still have a money situation to confront,” I said. “Your help is a safety net for me but it is not a windfall. And all Sam’s school arrangements, paperwork and so on; Victor would have done all of that, but now of course he can’t.”

  In short, compared to all I had to accomplish in the coming weeks, the Augean stables needed only a little light vacuuming and dusting, and I hadn’t even thought about the difficulties posed by Victor himself, locked up in the Washington County Jail.

  I doubted his noble attitude was going to last long. For Sam’s sake, there would have to be a visiting schedule. Care and upkeep: fresh fruit, toiletry items, psychiatry for me so I could tolerate it. That sort of thing.

  “So I mean it,” I said, then chanced to look out the Jeep window. While I’d been stewing, Ellie had been driving: over the causeway, into town, and …

  “Ellie, would you mind telling me where we are?”

  Tumbledown vacant wooden bungalows, tiny yards overgrown and trash-blown, the fences not much more than heaps of kindling. I’d walked all over Eastport but I’d never been on this dismal, dead-end alley before; somehow I’d missed knowing it even existed.

  Which was not, from the looks of it, any great loss: broken windows, toppling chimneys, falling gutters. The house at the end of the short row of broken-roofed structures was so covered with old vines that it was hard to tell there was even a building under there at all.

  Ellie pulled over to what had once been a neat, straight sidewalk but was now a broken jumble of concrete scrap. “This is the street Paddy Farrell, Willow Prettymore, and Mike Carpentier all lived on,” she said, “back when we were kids.”

  Old wooden screen doors with hand-turned ornamental corner brackets sagged brokenly onto the remnants of wide front porches. Tall, graceful windows were capped by lintels like bushy eyebrows, now rotted and sagging; cracked front walks where the girls had played hopscotch and boys bounced balls now sprouted with weeds.

  “The end one that’s falling in under all that rose vine was Mike’s house, the middle one was Willow’s, and Paddy lived in this one,” Ellie said, pointing at the nearest wreckage. “Beyond the field,” she waved generally, “was Deckie Cobb’s shack.”

  The whole street looked abandoned. Junk cars lurked under shredded remnants of tarps. Here and there a hopeless little hand-scrawled For Sale By Owner sign peeked from behind a broken window-pane; otherwise, these places had been forgotten.

  “Oh,” I said faintly. It was really heartbreaking; if you squinted, you could see how lovely it all once had been. And it was as good a demonstration of how lost in history the motive for Reuben’s murder might be as anything I could think of, bolstering my decision to quit searching for something I would never find.

  Ellie seemed to be getting the idea, finally, too; she gazed a moment longer, her forehead furrowing briefly, at the sprawl of rose cane burying Mike Carpentier’s old homestead.

  “I just wanted to see it once more,” she said. “I thought maybe … But I guess not.”

  We headed back to inhabited territory, riding in silence until we reached Water Street, where I thought I saw a familiar blond glint. “Isn’t that …?”

  Couldn’t be. But Ellie saw it too and pulled over in front of Peavy Library: old red brick, dark and glowering, against an interior of yellow light crosshatched by the leaded panes of the arched windows.

  Then I saw clearly the pale gold hair, sleek and shining as she got out of a rental car in the parking lot of the Motel East: Willow Prettymore. She took a key from her bag and entered one of the motel rooms, closing the door behind her.

  Ellie made a U-turn and headed down Water Street in the other direction. “Ride with me a little longer?”

  I nodded resignedly, feeling the quicksand of another wild-goose chase gathering around my feet: Willow had come back for a pair of earrings she’d forgotten and was searching the room for them. Or some similarly silly and intensely irritating reason. But the room Willow entered wasn’t the one they had been in, I realized. Then, parked in front of La Sardina, I saw Paddy Farrell’s Peugeot. “But he’s in Portland. Unless …”

  A bad thought hit me. “You don’t suppose Terence died, and Paddy heard about it so he didn’t go back?”

  “No. Wouldn’t you go? If nothing else, there would be some arrangements to make. Besides …”
/>   At her gesture, I peered out the Jeep’s rear window. Paddy was just coming out of La Sardina, pausing to speak with someone on the doorstep just out of sight.

  Paddy looked reasonably normal. Grave-faced but not a basket case, as he would be if Terence had passed away.

  “Someone called them,” Ellie said quietly, “I’ll bet. It’s just too much of a coincidence otherwise. Willow was in Boston, or nearly. Something must have seemed awfully urgent to get her to face down that thug of a husband, rent a car or whatever, and drive back. Marcus Sondergard has a telephone in that Winnebago?”

  “Yes. And the whole town knew Paddy was in Portland, at the medical center. They’d all be reachable if you tried hard enough. Still …”

  It’s an awful leap to assume that, I was about to say, only Ellie wasn’t having any.

  “But which one of them was the caller and which other ones were the recipients?” she pondered aloud.

  Then she swung left onto Clark Street, uphill between small wooden bungalows with shining yellow windows and lace curtains, and left again into Hillside Cemetery. From here it was only a few blocks to Key Street, home sweet home.

  A cup of coffee, I thought longingly, and silence; my own thoughts. Later, Ellie and I would make dinner together and the boys would help eat it, then take over doing up the dishes. But for now I needed—

  Without warning, Ellie pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

  “Ellie,” I began, “I understand you’re not ready to quit, and I sympathize. Really I do. But I hardly think a graveyard is any place to pull over and have a conversation about it. Which,” I went on, “I am prepared to have at some point in the future, seeing as we now have this new, curious information about …”

  Well, I didn’t know what it was about, when you came right down to it. But they were all back in town for something, that much was obvious.

  I gazed out the Jeep window. The storm had torn down some of the old wild grapevines that grew on the cemetery gate where Reuben’s body had been hanging. They reminded me of the rope he’d hung from.

  “… about whatever it is,” I finished uneasily. “So start the Jeep, please. We can think much better in my kitchen than we can in …” A cold, dark graveyard, I was about to say.

  But Ellie didn’t let me.

  “I can’t,” she confessed. “We’re out of gas.”

  “There’s a gas can in my cellar,” I said, summoning patience I’d never known I had. “We’ll just walk home, and …” Ellie wasn’t listening. She rolled down her window, looking at the cemetery gate. The night air was damp, fragrant with cedar and the tannic smell of the wet leaves lying thickly everywhere after the rain.

  “Ellie,” I began. She turned and gazed at me, then back at the grape foliage now dangling haphazardly.

  “All those vines,” she said simply, and then it hit me:

  Such a small thing, unremarkable. So innocent.

  Until you knew. “The trellis,” I said numbly.

  Ellie nodded. “Willow said Reuben used to climb a trellis to Mike Carpentier’s room. Like the trellis on Mike’s cottage now.”

  “Mike’s daughter, Molly,” I said slowly, “is the age Mike was back then.”

  “And he’s fighting vermin at the cottage. He’d have rat poison, and traps.”

  “The trouble he was in,” I said thoughtfully. Everyone in Eastport would know what it was; they always did. But not me, because I was from away.

  “Drugs,” Ellie replied. “Marijuana, some heavier stuff. You can bet he’s not doing it with Molly around, but it might be he’s still got connections.”

  Right; Mike had mentioned that he didn’t get stoned anymore. And I’d already come to the conclusion that the tranquilizer in Reuben’s system didn’t have to be what Victor had prescribed. Now I tried imagining it.

  “So what if Mike’s going along as peacefully as always, but then the ex-wife comes home, finds out Reuben’s been at the cottage. That he was pestering Molly, that he invaded her room. Hears from Mike, maybe, about the scalpels at Victor’s place.”

  “And she doesn’t react the way Mike did,” Ellie picked up the theory. “For her it’s not enough just to send Reuben packing because, for one thing, she’s got to go back out to sea on the merchant vessel, won’t be here to help protect Molly.”

  “Maybe she wants to be certain Reuben won’t try anything like that again,” I agreed. Battle to the death, Anne had said. Take care of things; pick up the pieces later. Maybe I should have taken her words a bit more literally. “And Mike could have known that Reuben was blackmailing Victor from Reuben himself, when he was up there.”

  “She hatches a plan that includes duping Reuben,” Ellie said. “Later throws a few curveballs in your direction, thinks maybe she can get you scared.”

  “Stopped by the side of the road that day to check me out,” I agreed, “see if I had any inkling about her, which of course I didn’t. And now the boat’s back out to sea, which is why we haven’t thought of her; she’s not around. And why there haven’t been any more mean tricks. But …” Before Heywood died and Terence was attacked.

  I stopped: big problem. “Only she’s not around, is she?” I finished. “Anne went back out to sea before …” Before Heywood died and Terence was attacked.

  A hand thrust in through the open window, seizing Ellie’s hair. A knife gleamed.

  “That’s right. But you two have figured out way too much. Why couldn’t you let it go? If you had, I wouldn’t have to do this.”

  It was Mike Carpentier, eyes alight with purposeful malice. So much for my thinking that I could tell when people were lying to me. Now I saw Ellie’s throat move as she swallowed hard, and an ooze of blood showed at the knife edge.

  “The three of us are going to drive downtown,” Mike said.

  “We can’t,” I said quickly. “We’re out of gas.”

  Mike sighed in a way that suggested tolerance strained to the breaking point.

  “Out,” he ordered me, and although I have never been much good at taking orders, I followed that one. At his instruction, I took the gas can from the trunk of his Escort where it sat with some sandbags, a coil of rope, flares, a blanket, the standard set of tire-changing equipment, and a big water jug; as usual, he was prepared for anything.

  I emptied the gas can into the Jeep. “I should think,” Mike said as I replaced the filler cap, “you’d have learned to be ready for emergency situations like this one. Running,” he finished scornfully, “out of gas twice. Hand me that rope.”

  “Yeah, silly me,” I said, thinking about the revolver locked safely in the box down in my cellar as I obeyed.

  Mike waited, still ready to skewer Ellie, as I got back into the Jeep. Then he ordered Ellie out, slipknotted the rope around her neck, and climbed into the Jeep’s rear cargo area very quickly before yanking her back into the driver’s seat.

  “Now,” he said, removing the rope. “Drive, and no tricks.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ellie whispered. The knife was aimed at the back of her neck.

  “You’ve been following us?” I managed as we pulled away from the curb.

  “Yes. I knew when you came to the cottage earlier today that you must’ve put at least part of it together, or why would you come back? And then when you drove by my old house and sat there looking at it … then I was sure.”

  We hadn’t been, of course, at the time. But he hadn’t known that. He gave us a lot more credit than we deserved.

  Unfortunately.

  His conversational tone was more chilling than a shriek. “I never meant to hurt you, Jacobia. I’m sorry it’s turned out this way.”

  Terrific. So maybe he would tranquilize me, too, before he cut my throat.

  “I only wanted to distract you, get you busy with something else,” he went on. “Send you off in another direction.”

  “Right,” I snapped back as a burst of anger washed over me. “Somewhere like the hospital. That rat trap could’
ve broken my wrist, you know. Instead it got my dog. Someone’s pet cat could have walked right into—”

  I stopped, remembering the poor creature Molly had been burying. “It’s what he used,” I understood aloud. “Reuben brought her that pet to win her over. The way he brought all those animals to you—to try softening you up, I suppose—he brought the cat to Molly.”

  All at once I figured out how he had kept those long-ago puppies and birds from his parents’ notice. Ellie’s voice told me in memory: Somebody wrung its neck.

  “He wanted to repeat history,” Mike agreed grimly. “With my daughter.” He frowned suddenly. “Turn at the next corner.”

  But just then the familiar rumble of Tommy Daigle’s jalopy came up behind us. Its horn erupted in the loud ooh-ooh-gah that Tommy loved so dearly, and that he sounded at the slightest excuse.

  “It’s the boys,” I said. “Just let them go by, Mike. They aren’t involved. Put the knife down so they don’t see it. Ellie won’t do anything, will you, Ellie?”

  The jalopy’s headlights glared in Ellie’s rearview, flashed high and low. The horn ooh-ooh-gahed raucously again.

  “Right. Especially since I’m aiming it at the back of the driver’s seat,” Mike said, “and it’s long enough to go all the way through.”

  As we neared the corner, Ellie touched the brakes, touched them again to slow for the turn. The jalopy kept coming behind us and she tapped the brakes once more.

  “I want them to stay back,” she explained, but instead they followed us onto Sullivan Street. Ellie kept touching the brakes all the way down the steep hill, finally signaling for a right turn at the bottom. The boys went the other direction.

  The knife returned to Ellie’s throat. “When you get to the lot by Paddy Farrell’s studio building, pull in and park.”

  Wade’s pickup sat by the Quonset warehouse out on the dock. Beside it was George Valentine’s red panel truck. Hope rose in my heart as I spotted the vehicles. But the men were nowhere in sight.

  “Reuben victimized you,” I said. “Did he hurt you? Touch you?”