by Sarah Graves
Mike laughed bitterly. “He didn’t have to. He was toxic at a distance, like poison gas. He just threatened to touch me.”
Ellie pulled in beside Paddy Farrell’s building. “He liked little boys?”
Mike blew out an impatient breath. “Being a boy had nothing to do with it. It was power he was into; that’s a whole different thing. As to gender, Reuben was an equal-opportunity victimizer.”
He squinted up and down the street, saw no one. “He didn’t touch me. But he told me what he would do to me someday,” he went on. “And made me listen. Said if I told anyone he was coming into my room at night, he’d kill my parents.”
He turned to me. “Night after night. Can you imagine what that’s like for a child, not to want someday ever to come?”
He took a shaky breath. “He had no reason to be the way he was. He was just … broken. Someone should have drowned him at birth,” he said. “But nobody did so I cut his throat,” his voice grew chillingly ecstatic, “and let his blood run.”
There were lights on in the cannery building. “Reuben’s blood,” he finished wonderingly. “All of that blood.”
His tone grew efficient. “Let me out first.”
He kept the knife at Ellie’s throat, beckoning her from behind the wheel. On the sidewalk he kept the blade hidden by his side, aimed now at Ellie’s body.
“Walk with me,” he said. “We’re going in. You two wanted so badly to understand this. Now you’re going to help me finish it.”
“Finish … sending your message,” I said, because it was all coming clear now; too late.
“You didn’t tell your parents or the police what Reuben was doing,” I went on. “But you told someone: Reverend Sondergard. When it got to be too much, you must have gone to him and asked him to help you.”
It was Heywood’s only possible link to the whole thing. But it still didn’t explain the Weasel. “Why …?”
“Shut up.” We were approaching the narrow door at the end of the row of brick buildings, their front windows boarded against mischief so the place looked more like an abandoned tenement than a high-tech design studio.
Which was the way Paddy wanted it. He liked that stark urban contrast between gritty exterior and airy inside. From the street you couldn’t tell anything about what was going on in there.
“I begged him,” Mike said. “Reverend Sondergard. He told me that I should pray about it. He would pray too, he said. But I guess,” he finished as he urged us into Paddy’s building, “the old coward just didn’t pray hard enough.”
Inside, he locked the door behind us and lowered the bar that Paddy used for extra security. And then the thing I’d begun fearing back when he appeared in the cemetery came true:
All of them. The folding chairs that usually resided along Paddy’s long conference table were set out separately in the big workroom with the overheard lights glaring down:
Willow Prettymore. Marcus Sondergard. Wade Sorenson, looking furious but unable to do anything about it. And George Valentine, likewise incapacitated. Each had been tied, wrists behind, ankles bound to the legs of the chairs. Neat and complete.
On the table lay a canvas satchel. I didn’t like thinking about what might be in it; Mike’s penchant for careful planning and preparation made the possibilities unpleasant.
“How the hell did you do that?” I demanded, struck by the sheer unmanageability of it. And yet there they were.
Mike smiled, proud of his accomplishment. “Paddy was here when I arrived. He was easy. Willow got here next, and I hit her with a brick. Tied her.”
A runnel of blood on Willow’s terrified face confirmed this. Mike gazed around. “Then Marcus arrived.”
The enmity in George Valentine’s glance at Marcus, combined with the darkening bruise developing on George’s temple, told me what must have come next. Marcus had ambushed George, tied him up at Mike’s instruction. Otherwise, Mike had threatened, he would use the knife on Willow.
“Wade? Are you all right?” There was an enormous purple lump over his right eye.
He looked disgusted. “He called us separately, asked us to meet him here. Told each one of us he had something to say about the murders, couldn’t tell anyone else. Spaced the arrivals five minutes or so apart, give him time to do the necessary. And then Marcus ambushed us one at a time. He didn’t,” Wade added, “have any choice.”
But that still left … I peered around, puzzled.
“Told me he knew who killed Reuben,” Wade went on, “but he was afraid, needed my help. Fooled me but good,” he finished, angry with himself.
A few feet away from him, Paddy sat glowering, tied like Marcus. “You should,” Paddy said, “have been praying for brains, you tone-deaf little Jesus freak.”
Paddy had never been a great fan of organized religion, but I thought this was no time for them to be sorting out their theological differences. Especially since, if someone didn’t come up with a way out of this pretty efficiently, it looked as if we were going to be getting answers to an entire spectrum of deep, important questions about the afterlife, real soon now.
“Sit.” Mike waved at the two remaining chairs.
We didn’t have a choice, any more than Marcus had had. Ellie looked pale but composed, seating herself. I sat too, readying myself to rocket back up again the very instant Mike took that knife away from Ellie’s neck, which he would have to do in order to begin tying one of us.
But then I realized: If Marcus had tied the others to keep Mike from cutting Willow’s throat, who’d tied Marcus? Not Mike; he was busy doing his knife-handling act.
Then a small voice came from the shadows under the circular staircase. “Dad?” Molly Carpentier quavered. “Dad, can we go home now?”
“Get over there and do what I told you,” Mike snapped, his eyes glittering dangerously.
Reluctantly the child came out. In her hands she held a ball of thick brown twine, the kind all those hanging planters at the cottage were made of. And if it could hold up a heavy earth-filled planter without breaking, it could probably hold us.
Which it did. Molly wrapped the stuff repeatedly around Ellie’s wrists and ankles, then around mine. “I’ll try not to cut off your circulation,” she said, tying the final knot. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that pretty soon I wouldn’t have any.
“Mike,” I said. “I know you want Molly to get the message you never got. That she’s not alone, that you will help her if someone gives her trouble. But is this what you want her to know? That the answer is violence?”
Suddenly Willow Prettymore broke her silence. “That’s a lot of bull. There’s no message. Things didn’t go little Mikey’s way and now he wants revenge, that’s all….”
Mike was at her side in an instant; Willow broke off and uttered a thin, breathy little scream as the knife moved fast. A line of bright red ran suddenly down Willow’s pale throat, into the collar of her white blouse.
“Shut up,” Mike whispered. “Or next time I’ll really cut you.” Willow stared, whimpering.
“Your time to talk,” Mike grated out at her, “was when you saw him going in my window at night. But you never told anyone. You were older, I was just a little kid, I needed help.”
Mike looked around contemptuously. “But if Reuben was after me, then he wasn’t after any of you. Isn’t that right? You could forget him for a while. So you did. All of you … you just did.”
“Why didn’t you stand up to him?” Ellie asked sadly.
He spun on her. “Sure. And be another Boxy Thorogood, go down hard. It was different for you guys. You were Reuben’s own age. Me and Boxy were eleven years old.”
“Dad,” Molly began faintly.
“Quiet,” The little girl shrank back, frightened.
“But why hurt Terence?” Paddy asked sadly. “He didn’t have anything to do with any of this. He wasn’t even here.”
“He really did fall, that first time,” I said to Paddy. “And hurt his hand. And turned tho
se gas burners on, himself.”
“Yes.” He eyed me helplessly. “But the thread he said he’d tripped on … it wasn’t there. That was his mind,” Paddy mourned heavily, “telling him something bad was about to happen, he was so intuitive, Terence was, and then Mike really attacked him….”
“Shut up.” Mike whirled on him, spitting a reply. “I mistook him for you in the dark, you artsy little fake. Always talking about facing Reuben down, always ready to get into a big argument. But he killed your own father and you still didn’t do anything because you were afraid. You know it’s true, don’t you?”
Paddy’s face hardened. “What should I have done, Mike? Drop to his level? Sneak around killing people?” Like you, his look added clearly, but Mike didn’t see it.
“And when he came back,” Mike went on, “threatened to burn down your building, what did you do?”
He grimaced mockingly. “You whined about it. ’Oh, big, bad Reuben’s back, somebody save me.’ I could have told you how well that works,” he finished scornfully.
Outside it was full dark, and beyond Paddy’s studio windows the water was calm, each little fishing vessel in the boat basin seeming to perch upon a mirror image of itself. From Campobello, the lights of shops and houses reflected in straight, bright lines to the water, like bar codes drawn in Day-Glo markers.
“You didn’t jimmy those locks to get into the studio,” I said, understanding it now. “Terence hadn’t even locked them—he wasn’t thinking right, so he’d left them open.”
I looked at Mike. “You thought you were equipped to break in. You weren’t, but then it turned out you didn’t need to. You still broke the door frame, though, because …”
Cold comprehension washed over me. “Because if things had gone entirely your way, Paddy would be dead by now. And Terence might or might not be here to let you in. Once you saw how big those locks were, you decided to give yourself a head start on getting through that door next time.”
Breaking the frame, weakening the structure … people think about the locks they install. Too often they don’t worry so much about what that expensive hardware is set into: solid wood, or a splintered door frame slammed back together with a couple of good-looking but easily-pulled nails?
On the other hand, it had turned out not to matter, anyway, because once again, dumb luck had favored the prepared mind. Too bad that in Mike’s case, the prepared mind had lost a few marbles in the Thou Shalt Not Kill department.
“You’ve been planning this a long time, haven’t you, Mike? Planning on finishing things, tying up loose ends, and doing it here, like this. But I still don’t see how you got Victor’s tie, or why you had to kill Weasel.”
His face showed exasperation; apparently I didn’t appreciate his cleverness fully enough to satisfy him. “I watched, and I waited, and I took advantage of every little thing that happened, that’s how. I was outside La Sardina, saw Reuben and your ex and the rest of you through the window.”
The thoroughness of it was terrifying. “Once you’d decided that night was the night, you hurried to his house, waited until Sam left, took the scalpel, and went back downtown,” I said. “But what if things went wrong, and it turned out you couldn’t use the scalpel after all?”
His face flattened stubbornly. “Then I’d find another way. But mostly, they didn’t go wrong. Later the tie was on the street where your ex dropped it. Reuben picked it up, had it with him.”
“And then,” the last piece dropped into place, “Weasel saw you with Reuben. Weasel was on the seawall that night, wasn’t he?”
Memo to self: When you’re looking for connections, remember that the absence of a connection might also be meaningful….
“Weasel saw you,” I went on, “but you didn’t notice it until it was too late. You couldn’t afford anyone remembering you were with Reuben on the night Reuben died. So you had to go back and kill Weasel Bodine, and what better way to confuse things than to use the method everyone in town thought Reuben had used, long ago?”
He nodded smugly. “Now you’re getting it.”
It had been yet another improvisation; he was good at them and had used them skillfully. Because it wasn’t enough to have a careful plan; to make a thing like this work, you had to use every happenstance, too, seize it and turn it to your advantage.
Which he had. “You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that much,” I said, still hoping to put a new spin on things. “The poison …”
“Rat killer,” he confirmed. “I tried not to use too much. It wasn’t supposed to work so fast.”
At this, Ellie got into the act, trying to keep him talking. “That doesn’t sound like you, Mike, always ready for anything. I mean, you didn’t check on the dose?”
He looked impatient. “You can’t just call someone and ask that kind of question. Besides, if it didn’t work the first time, I’d get to kill him twice, wouldn’t I?”
Keep him talking … I thought hard. “Reuben was drunk, and he was probably drugged, too. You invited him to take a ride. In the cemetery you lured him from the car….”
He took over the story eagerly, this being, after all, the last time he would ever be able to tell it. “I was ready to drug him myself. Reached out to one of my old buddies, got something to use on him.”
Hideously, he produced a syringe. “I didn’t need it, though.”
Because Reuben had probably already taken what Victor had prescribed, on top of alcohol. “And once you had the rope around his ankles, he was helpless. You didn’t have to lift him. You tossed the end of the rope over the gate and hauled him, using the pulley action for,” Sam’s words came back to me, “mechanical advantage.”
Wade was quietly working to pull his hands free; I wanted to keep the conversation going, so he could. “The only thing that really went wrong was Weasel biting you while you killed him. So you covered it by burning yourself on your woodstove. Then …”
“And then,” Mike said dreamily, “I put him in a fix that made the one he’d put me in look like a fairy tale. Now I’m going to wipe out all memory of what he did to me, and show Molly that I can stop it from ever happening to her,” he finished.
“How,” Marcus ventured, his baritone voice uncertain, “are you going to do that?”
“You know,” I began brightly, because this was exactly the part I didn’t want Mike getting to anytime in the immediate future, “now that you’ve taught us all a good lesson, this would be a fine opportunity to follow up on it, by—”
Letting us all go, I was about to say. But he didn’t seem to be listening.
“This building,” he uttered in a dead voice, “should have burned down years ago.”
I could see Marcus’s hand now: the mark on it. Once he’d left town, he must have washed off the makeup. He saw me looking at it, flushed angrily.
“That was it, wasn’t it?” I asked him. “What you tried so hard to protect your dad from: his own actions.”
Tommy Daigle’s cheerful face rose in front of me, with the scar on it. “That’s the mark of his silver rose-of-Sharon belt buckle,” I said, “on the back of your hand. And Reuben knew it.”
He added a note, Mike had said about the blackmail letter. Reuben always knew how to hurt you.
And if word had got out that one of the Bible Belters used to belt the other one—suddenly I wondered how they’d chosen that name; deliberately or unconsciously?—well, then neither of them would have had a career in musical soul-saving ever again.
Or so they had feared. So they had paid. “Your mother was formidable in public. But in private, your father …”
“But he’d changed,” Marcus insisted, struggling against his bonds. “He didn’t deserve to—”
“Yes, he did,” Mike said flatly. “What he got, and more.”
“Wise up,” George said scathingly. “Everyone’s going to know we were here. And they’ll figure out that you did it.”
“Oh, really?” Mike turned in mock interest to him. “And
how are they going to know that? Especially since it’s Ellie’s car parked outside, not mine. Mine’s blocks away, and I was careful to speak to each of you personally. And I’ll be far away,” he finished smugly, “before the fire even starts.”
That reminded me: “You called Victor to tell him Reuben was dead, called Bob Arnold, even called the garbage truck to take Victor’s trash. How? You don’t have …”
But of course he did. Always prepared: he would have a car phone, of course. For emergencies. Still, how had he gotten …
“The phone numbers to reach Willow and Marcus were in the Old Timers’ book,” Ellie said bleakly. “From the Salmon Festival.”
“That’s right,” Mike said. “As for Victor, I kept watching him all that night, after Reuben was finished off. That was the tricky part, what Victor did afterwards. Working with it all and making sure it fit what I wanted to have happen. And now …”
Proudly, he opened his satchel: wax cubes like the kind on all those canning jars in the cottage’s pantry. Sparklers, from the same bunch of leftovers, I supposed, as the children had been playing with at the Salmon Festival.
And finally—seeing this, I began at last to feel really afraid, because it would work; what Mike had in mind was going to work beautifully—a large can of liquid charcoal starter. Opening it, he began squirting it around with the happy air of a person releasing air freshener into a musty room.
“You know,” said George, “I always knew you were nutty as a fruitcake. But this really caps it. You know what, now? I’m glad I never lifted a finger for you.”
Ellie shot an admonishing look at him, but he wouldn’t stop. “He did stuff to all of us, Mike. He was a bad guy. But you—I think you’re worse. ’Cause you can stop yourself. And Reuben—he couldn’t. Reuben just couldn’t.”
In answer, Mike squirted charcoal lighter under George’s chair. “Talk all you want. Yakity-yakity. But better make it snappy. You’d better say all,” he emphasized, “that you have got to say. Because pretty soon—”
He took one of the sparklers, stuck the wire end into one of the blocks of wax. “Pretty soon, your little vocal cords are going to be busy, screaming your lungs out.”
