Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  “Ale?” he inquired, sounding horrified. “Ale is loaded with deleterious yeast organisms. And what’s this—buttermilk? Blue cheese, and … wine? Good heavens.”

  He held up a bottle of Riesling, light and harmless as spring water. “This stuff,” he breathed fervently, “is bad.”

  I felt Wade sigh.

  9 “Hargood,” I said urgently into the phone. “Don’t sell the gold stocks. Hang on, and someday they’ll be worth something.”

  Right, and someday I would go ice skating in hell. On the other hand, even in hell there was the chance of a cold snap, and if my old friend Hargood Biddeford sold his precious-metals stock now, he would miss out on it.

  Besides, at the moment those stocks were about as valuable as wallpaper. “Hargood. Don’t do it. We’ll think of something else.”

  Six hundred miles and an entire, it seemed, universe away, Hargood Biddeford sat in the study of his New York apartment on Fifth Avenue and sighed heavily. “But Jacobia, they’re so low.”

  “So low that if they get any lower, people won’t pay to take them off your hands anymore. Which is why it makes sense to hang onto them, doesn’t it? You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  From out in the dining room came the clink of silverware on plates. George and Ellie were there, and Wade, and Sam, and of course there was also Victor, who would ordinarily have spoiled my appetite. But after my boat ride I was starving, so that just the thought of those salmon fillets made me feel faint.

  I waved my hand out of the phone alcove, and Sam came and put my glass of Riesling into it, and gave me a pitying look.

  “Harry,” I said, “you’ve got that telephone.” AT&T, I meant. “Why not dump a little of that?”

  “But,” he responded predictably, “it’s so high.”

  Hargood’s grasp of investment theory is tenuous. Getting him to take actual profits, for example, as opposed to bailing out of things at the worst possible moment, is a formidable project.

  But Hargood also has eight children, whom I adore and whose voices I could now hear piping sweetly in the background. And what with them all having to eat and wear shoes and so on, I could not quite bring myself to abandon Hargood.

  I did a series of quick calculations in my head. “Sell,” I instructed him, “half your telephone stock.”

  He gasped. “But Jacobia, that’s—”

  “Enough,” I overrode him, “to run your household and pay all the kids’ tuitions for the rest of the year.”

  Not coincidentally, it was also what he’d lost on the gold stocks, which he had bought without my advice. If as I expected they were still tanked at the end of the quarter, we would sell them and offset his telephone profits.

  “Meanwhile, take your income and start buying …” I named the stock. “And Harry, don’t have any more children. I can only finagle your money a finite number of ways.”

  There was an ominous silence; Harry’s wife is so fertile, I believe she actually goes by the name of Bunny.

  “Righto, then,” he said quickly, hanging up before I could question him further on the topic of yet another bouncing little Form 1040 deduction.

  Back at the table, I took my plate off the warming tray and ate a bite of salmon, pausing while my taste buds swooned. “So,” I asked Ellie, “what happened with Tim Mumford?”

  Timothy had changed his mind about staying in Eastport, Ellie had reported after taking him to see Bob Arnold, so she had run him and his belongings back out to Crow Island.

  “Well,” she replied, “he does think he knows who killed Ken.”

  Victor looked up with interest. Bullets on the kitchen table and murder at dinner, I could hear him thinking.

  “Because when Kenny was in jail this last time—”

  She turned to Victor. “Kenny is an old friend of mine,” she explained, “or he was until today when we found him on the beach. He’d been shot to death.”

  Wade merely tipped his head; Sam had filled him in on all this while I was steaming the new potatoes. But Victor looked as if he might have a heart attack, the way he did the day I told him I was leaving him and that, by the way, the apartment and his office and the charge cards were all in his name, not just in his possession, so he could start making the payments on them.

  “And,” Ellie went on, “the last time Kenny was in jail for D and D—”

  “That’s drunk and disorderly,” I explained sotto voce to Victor, whose hand seemed to be trembling. Ellie took pity on him and put some wine in his glass, and he drank it without noticing.

  “—he met this other guy, a real bad guy,” Ellie said.

  “I don’t get it,” said Sam. “I thought Ken was a bad guy.”

  My ex-husband nodded approvingly at Sam, forgetting what a bad guy he was, himself.

  While the others listened to Ellie, Wade glanced meaningfully at me. The look in his eyes expressed an invitation requiring no clothes whatsoever, and I must say I have rarely felt so fabulous while discussing bloody murder.

  “Kenny,” agreed Ellie, “was kind of a loser. But this guy, his name is Ike Forepaugh, beats people up and robs them, and he sticks up gas stations with a gun. According to Tim, when Ken was in jail, he met Forepaugh and borrowed money from him, and also told him that he—Ken, I mean—had some kind of a surefire moneymaking operation planned, for when he got back to Eastport.”

  The deal Tim had mentioned, I recalled; the way Ken Mumford had found to make money.

  “How’d Tim know?” George asked, helping himself to seconds. “How would Tim know who Ken met in jail, or what Ken said there?”

  “Ken loved talking about big plans,” Ellie replied. “And mostly it was just talk. But this time, Tim says, was different. He says he thinks Ken was running drug packages over the border from Canada, in his boat.”

  At this, Wade and I looked at each other again, George sat back sharply in his chair, and even Sam appeared impressed.

  “Whoa,” he said, while his father’s lips pressed together in a tight, puritanical line.

  “Tim didn’t like it, but he says he thinks that’s how Ken was making money. Tim’s theory is that Ike tried to horn in,” Ellie went on, “then killed Ken when Ken didn’t let him. Ken wouldn’t have known how to handle a guy like that.”

  “Ken,” George objected, “wasn’t spending any money.” Which Ken would have if he could have, George meant.

  “Maybe he wasn’t spending it in an obvious way. There are methods of doing things,” I said, looking straight at Sam, “that don’t raise an uproar.”

  Sam got the message; I didn’t object to his telling his dad about his plans. We’d have to, sooner or later; that was the point of the visit. But I wanted him to be diplomatic.

  Meanwhile my ex-husband had drawn himself up into a sour little pickle of self-righteousness. “This,” he pronounced, “is not a very uplifting conversation.”

  George peered up from his meal. “Hey, Victor,” he said, gesturing at Victor’s wineglass, “pour yourself a real drink, why don’t you? Might cheer you up.”

  He took a gulp of his own wine. “I don’t think,” he added in tones of genuine kindness, “that anybody’s going to call you back to the city, make you do any complicated brain surgery, tonight.”

  Victor looked at his glass, and realized what had been in it. There was a brief silence, the kind that I imagine occurs between the click of the pin being pulled from the grenade, and the moment when it explodes.

  “So go on ahead,” George said. “Relax. Loosen up.”

  Whereupon, and to everyone’s astonishment, Victor did.

  10 No one except George would have dared say that to Victor. But George is so good-hearted and plainly without guile, he can get away with almost anything; nor is he afraid of bullies, which is also handy when dealing with Victor.

  George’s directness, though, can be a problem when it comes to things like that leaky radiator, as I was reminded later in the evening when Sam had gone out, Wade was in his worksho
p fixing a shotgun, and George was on his knees on the kitchen floor.

  “This radiator,” he observed, “has bought the farm.”

  Once upon a time, those words would have paralyzed my heart. But now I only suffered a brief arrhythmia, after which I returned to the problem that arose whenever I hired George for anything: keeping him from turning my old house into the sort of domestic showplace that the Stepford wives would feel right at home in.

  “Don’t,” I said, “even mention baseboard heaters to me. The day I put baseboard heaters into this house, I will put in fake paneling, acoustical ceiling tiles, and wall-to-wall shag carpet, and I will install fake gas logs in the fireplaces, too.”

  “All right,” he groused. “I get the picture. You split enough firewood, though, you’ll get to like those gas logs.”

  Pict-chah. “I don’t see why people from away want to cling to all these old, inconvenient household trappings.”

  Besides the radiators, he meant tin ceilings, pressed with acorn-and-oak wreath patterns; stovepipe thimbles decorated with illustrations snipped from turn-of-the-century magazines; plaster walls and double-hung windows paned with wavery old glass. To him there was little wrong with my house that couldn’t be fixed with Sheetrock and new Thermopane replacement windows, which he wanted to supply at once.

  “George,” said Victor, sitting with his elbows propped on the kitchen table. “You’re a good man, George.”

  “Ayuh,” George said kindly, and went to get his toolbox.

  “Do you think he’ll be all right?” Ellie asked, meaning Victor, who had opened another bottle of Riesling and was drinking it, studiously and determinedly, out of a jelly glass.

  “He’ll be okay,” Wade said from the doorway; periodically he likes to come down from his workshop and wash the gun oil off his hands. “I’ll stay and keep him company, while you two do your errand.”

  Ellie and I were going out to Ken Mumford’s trailer, to pick up a few things for Timothy; Bob Arnold and the state police had already been through it, finding nothing of interest.

  “Company,” Victor agreed owlishly. “That’s what I need.”

  “You might want to stop at the drugstore,” Wade added, “get some aspirin. In the morning, he’s going to be one sick pup.”

  “I,” Victor pronounced in slurry sorrow, “am a sick pup now.”

  11 “What was that all about?” Ellie asked as she drove her old Land Rover with gear-grinding vigor, gunning it down the dirt road that led to the neighborhood known as Quoddy Village. Here, small frame houses dating from the forties perched on tiny lots laid out in the style of a subdivision.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” I said, steeling myself against the bone-jarring bounce of the vehicle’s suspension.

  “Victor’s usual drink,” I added, “is a double martini. Or it was, before he turned into a health-food freak. And I doubt that the murder of someone he hadn’t even met would have upset him. Maybe he just didn’t know how hard that wine would hit him.”

  “He drank,” Ellie pointed out, “a whole bottle. He’s got to have realized that would have some impact.”

  The road narrowed and began slanting downhill. “Victor’s been pretty mellow for a while, at least since Sam was in New York with him,” I said. “He’s had things the way he wanted them. But if his intuition tells him that’s about to change—”

  “Victor has the intuition of a cinder block.”

  Which was comforting in its intent but not quite true. Victor had plenty of intuition. The trouble was, the things he intuited were always things that you did not want him knowing about.

  “I’ve got,” Ellie said, “a bad feeling about him.” She found the landmark she’d been looking for. “Hey, this is it.”

  Ken Mumford’s trailer was located at the back of an acre of uncleared land at the end of Toll Bridge Road, nearly to where the bridge once stood. Now the bridge—and before it, the flat barge-like ferry—were memories, the bright water moving swiftly where carts and carriages once rumbled for a penny.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said as we started bush-whacking in.

  “What do you mean?” I plucked raspberry bramble from my sleeve.

  “My understanding from Tim is that Kenny had a dog. A big,” Ellie said, “dog. It’s why he wanted us to come out here.”

  “Oh,” I said doubtfully. From what I had gathered on Crow Island, Tim’s idea of a big dog was the size of a brontosaurus.

  “That’s what Tim is mainly worried about,” Ellie went on. “Who’s going to take care of the animal.”

  Just then the animal in question hurtled from the forest at us: not big as a brontosaurus. No bigger, really, than a Buick.

  A Buick with sharp white teeth, two blazing coals for eyes, and a bark like the one you might hear on a nature program whose film has had to be retrieved from amongst the scattered bones of the cameraman, to whose memory the production is dedicated.

  I had a second to notice the width of its shoulders, the blocky head atop the thick neck. It was a German shepherd and as it hurled itself I did the only thing I could think of: I ducked.

  The dog sailed over me with a snap of his massive jaws, hit the brush in a skid, and whirled for another rush at me; then from somewhere up ahead came a whistle and a girl’s anxious call.

  “Cosmo, heel!”

  The only heel this monster wanted was mine, and with my leg attached. I couldn’t see Ellie, but I hadn’t heard screaming; it was the only good thing I could think of about the situation.

  The girl’s voice, again; this time the dog paid attention. With its regal head lofty, bones as big as sledgehammers, and a coat as heavily underfluffed as fox fur, the dog was—now that it wasn’t trying to kill me—magnificent.

  “Jacobia, I’m so sorry,” Ellie managed shakily, rising from where she’d been crouched. “I didn’t know it was a wild dog.”

  “It’s not.” I watched it depart. “It’s a Schutzhund dog.”

  “I don’t care what it is. Bob Arnold can just come out here and take it to the shelter, before it hurts someone.”

  “Wait.” I caught up with Ellie. “Whoever called it, the dog obeys her. Sort of,” I added.

  Ellie looked doubtful. “What if she tells it to attack us?”

  “Well, then probably we’re dead. But she won’t, or why would she have called it off in the first place?”

  The girl hadn’t called heel, I realized. She’d given the dog a command in German, the language in which the dogs were trained.

  “Ellie, those dogs are amazing. The training costs a mint, but when they’re done, you’ve got the best bodyguard and the best companion dog in the world.”

  Ellie eyed me. “I thought you were scared of strange dogs.” But she was pushing with me through the bramble again.

  “Not of strange dogs. Just mean dogs. And I like to get it clear which kind I’m dealing with. But this dog …”

  The path broke through to a clearing. At the back of it stood an old Airstream trailer, the round-shouldered, silver-skinned kind. Somebody had built a deck for it, with steps leading up to the door. Through a stand of trees at the back of the lot, blue water sparkled like sequins on a fancy cocktail dress.

  “Dogs like that,” I said, “won’t hurt you unless they’re told to. They won’t even eat their own food until you tell them to.” It’s to keep them from being poisoned; trained for tracking, obedience, and protection, the animals make excellent guards for big estates.

  “So why’d he charge us?” Ellie wanted to know.

  “Handler error,” I guessed. “That’s mostly why a guard dog’s an insurance liability. And the girl didn’t sound very confident.”

  Lying on the deck, the dog raised its head but didn’t move. “We can go,” I told Ellie, “right to the foot of the steps.” After that, I wouldn’t give a pin for our chances. Someone, probably the girl, had told the dog where the line was now.

  “You,” Ellie said, “seem to know an awful lot
about this.”

  “I worked for a while with a fellow who had them,” I said, scanning the trailer again.

  There was something wrong with the windows: they were clean, hung with curtains of eyelet lace.

  “And,” I went on, frowning at this incongruity, “this fellow asked me to keep one for a while. When I was in New York.”

  Actually, the fellow hadn’t asked me to keep the dog. He’d ordered me to do so, emphasizing that the arrangement was for my own safety. My client, it seemed, had made some interesting enemies, and so by association had I.

  Clamped to Ken’s trailer near the deck was a pulley like the one old Tim used to operate his shed windows, only smaller. Looped through it was a length of clothesline with towels hanging from it. A pang of unease struck me: what had bothered me about Tim’s pulley? But the thought faded in light of a new insight about Ken.

  “He had a girlfriend. That’s Ken’s girlfriend, in there.”

  Ellie looked dismayed. “Oh, I hope someone’s called her. I don’t want to have to tell her that he’s—”

  The trailer’s door opened suddenly and the girl appeared.

  “Get out of here. I’ll sic Cosmo on you, if you don’t.”

  She was a small, slender person in her late teens, with a cap of short, white-blonde hair, wearing cutoffs and a halter top. A large, silver-glinting medallion hung from a chain around her frail neck.

  “Do you know,” I called, “what will happen if you do? The dog will tear us apart, and it will end up being shot.”

  I took a step. The dog got calmly to its feet. “Look, we only want a few of Ken’s personal things for his dad.”

  The girl glared, but spoke to the dog, who lay down again.

  “We’re not here to bother you. Although,” I added, unable to help myself, she looked so woebegone, “if you want to come back with us, maybe talk about it …”

  “No. I know who sent you. My father. I’m not going back.”

  Ellie stepped quickly in front of me. “Hallie, we only want things that mean something to Timothy, to remember Ken by.”