by Sarah Graves
“What’s wrong, Bella? Come on, now. Out with it,” I said.
Because Victor was bad enough, but if I didn’t get to the bottom of this Bella difficulty I might come home later to find the whole inside of the house washed and waxed, including the pets. Looking around the kitchen for the possible source of the difficulty, I saw only Bella’s puzzle books—she was a demon for anagrams, acrostics, and crosswords—still in a canvas satchel.
Ordinarily by this time of day she’d have finished off two or three of them, with the devilishly difficult Bangor Daily News Sudoku thrown in as an afterthought. These she did in her head, glancing first at the grid with its few numerical clues, then filling in the rest as she went by with a scrub brush, a mop, or the sharp hooked dental tool she used to clean out the grooves in the stove knobs every morning and evening.
So whatever her worry was, it was already throwing her off her routine, I realized uneasily. Just then the dogs—Monday the Labrador retriever, and Prill, our big red Doberman, waltzed in from the parlor. Ellie got up to find biscuits for them; she was a sucker for animals.
Luckily the Doberman had a soft spot for her in return, as well as for any other human beings to whom she’d been properly introduced. But strangers Prill didn’t like so much; we’d saved her from life on the street where her trust had been eroded by the hardness of stray-dog experience, we guessed.
And she was getting worse. Not biting, nor any suggestion of it. But the more familiar and confident she became with us, the worse her barking and growling with visitors got.
“Bella,” I said. From behind me Victor’s gaze seemed to linger wistfully, but that was surely just my imagination.
I hoped. “No kidding,” I said to the housekeeper. “I mean it, now. What’s going on?”
She turned reluctantly. “Miz Tiptree,” she began, her tone implying that whatever the story turned out to be, I was dragging it from her.
I wasn’t. Bella had engineered this moment and we both knew it. She didn’t like asking me for favors, so she worked it around until I made her do it.
“Jake,” I corrected. Getting her to call me by my first name was an ongoing battle, too. But I kept trying, knowing that if I ever gave in she would be disappointed in me.
“I’ll put the rest of these things in the truck,” Ellie said diplomatically, gathering the screwdriver and its power pack from the counter and placing them in their carrying case.
For our project today she wore frayed denim coveralls, yellow boots, and a yellow turtleneck shirt under a red hooded sweatshirt. Her red hair was tied back with a purple scrunchy, her boot laces were red-and-green plaid, and dangling from her ears were a pair of lime green ceramic M&Ms.
“You,” I told her, “look fabulous.”
She shot me a smile that could’ve lit up a football stadium, standing there with her arms full of tools and the excitement of a coming adventure on her face.
We just didn’t realize yet how much adventure. If we had, we’d have probably put the tools away and gone back to bed.
“Thanks,” she said, and when she’d gone out I faced Bella again. “All right, what’s this about?” I demanded a final time.
Cat Dancing had already returned to the refrigerator top and gone back to sleep, and having devoured all their biscuits the dogs had departed as well, to take up once more their usual places in the best chairs in the parlor.
If they’d had thumbs they’d have turned on the television. And Victor was still gone, which was perhaps the best omen of all, though I already feared not a permanent one.
“Friendship,” Bella uttered sorrowfully. She stripped off her rubber gloves in a despairing gesture and tossed them on the dish drainer. “And Miz Tiptree, I’ll tell you I’m right torn up over it.”
My heart sank further. When Bella got right torn up it was a cinch we were in for a decontaminating extravaganza. Soon she’d be grabbing the toothbrushes from our hands, peering suspiciously at them before dipping them into an exotic brew of antimicrobial fluid before the toothpaste even got scrubbed off our teeth.
“Okay, lay it on me,” I said, wishing someone else were here to help absorb her aggrieved outpourings. My current husband, Wade Sorenson, was out on the water at the helm of one of the enormous freighters he regularly guided into our port—the deepest natural anchorage in the nation, second only to Valdez, Alaska—for a living.
It was the price for tying a cargo vessel up in our harbor that you needed local help to do it. In the wild currents, strong tides, and harshly unforgiving granite channels of Passamaquoddy Bay, getting in at all was like guiding a rodeo bull through a needle’s eye. But Wade had been Eastport’s harbor pilot for years, and I had it on good authority that he made the freighters perform as obediently as lambs.
Sam wasn’t here, either. He had his own place now, a small frame house that had once been Wade’s down on Liberty Street overlooking the water. And having managed by the skin of his teeth to finish up his winter semester of community college, I guessed that today he was either (a) lining up a summer job at the boatyard out on Deep Cove Road, or (b) sitting with his pals in front of one of their computers here in town, playing Grand Theft Auto while getting drunk, stoned, wired, or some even more toxic combination of all three.
The boatyard job, I felt sure, wasn’t even on Sam’s radar this morning. And the only other person capable of managing Bella Diamond was my father, but he was already occupied on the roof of my old house trying to find all the places that needed patching, after a winter of so many leaks that living in it had been like camping in a melting igloo.
If I listened hard I could hear his boots scraping around up there, which was at least some comfort since it meant I probably wouldn’t see him sail down past the kitchen window anytime soon. So for now it was just me and Bella, who still stood by the sink wringing her hands.
Sighing, I poured another cup of coffee and prepared to hear her out; fifteen minutes later, she’d unloaded the whole story on me. And at first I was pleased because hey, I was trying to avoid a housecleaning apocalypse here. But it wasn’t long afterward that I began wishing with all my heart that I’d left well enough alone.
Hauntings in Eastport’s antique houses were so common that hardly anyone even talked about them. Only occasionally would an Eastport newcomer who’d recently bought one of the old places appear pale and shaken in the library or grocery store, mentioning with embarrassment—are they going to think I’m crazy?—what had happened in the attic, the pantry, or the half-bath newly installed under the stairs.
Or in the cellar, where my own house’s early disturbances originated. The strange manifestations that began as soon as Sam and I moved in—an icy spot on the stairway, a scuttling in the hall, other things at once less obvious and more deeply unnerving—had dissipated once the cellar’s foundation got excavated and a strange book was removed from it.
Leather-bound and inside a wooden box, the odd volume had apparently been hidden when the house was built, as the granite stones of the cellar walls were being hauled in by oxcart and piled atop one another. Changes and repairs had nearly uncovered it a few times; most notably a water main put in when the house first got plumbing pierced the foundation inches from the thing.
Then when a pipe burst the box resurfaced, rescued from the flood by my father, a stonemason whose nosiness was equaled only by his stubbornness. Whereupon a really weird thing about the old book was revealed: my name was in it. Handwritten in ink in an elegant cursive full of old-fashioned flourishes, it appeared at the end of a list: all the occupants of my house from its very first tenant in 1823 right up to—and including—me.
Which if you think about it was pretty inexplicable right there. Next, the haunting stopped; not all at once but gradually, like an infection subsiding. It was as if with the discovery and removal of the old book, the house had the equivalent of a bad tooth pulled and the rest of its system could settle.
That is, until Victor showed up. Now I wondered une
asily if just possibly the earlier disorders had left a vacancy, a place he could move into the way the missing-tooth spot may breed new unpleasantness if you’re not careful.
So after I’d finished hearing Bella Diamond’s tale of woe that morning, I dashed off a follow-up letter to some fellows in Orono that Ellie had recommended, specialists in dealing with old Maine manuscripts and their forgotten authors. The two men had worked for her father, Ellie told me, and I could trust them, so after some introductory correspondence and a few phone chats, I’d sent them the strange book itself about three weeks earlier.
Now I felt impatient, unnerved by Victor’s appearance and wishing at least to have one mystery solved. My last name, after all, is so unusual I can only think someone in my past must have made it up to cover his (or her) own past misdeeds. And the question of how it could be accurately listed in a book hidden nearly two centuries earlier was, you will admit, a curious one.
Some of this I mentioned again in my letter to the Orono fellows, but mostly I just gave them a little nudge. Could they update me, please, on anything their examination of the volume might so far have uncovered? As I didn’t mean to rush them but I was of course very interested in what they had to say.
Sincerely, et cetera. I put my return address and a stamp on the envelope and dropped it in the mailbox on the back porch for the carrier to pick up.
After which, given what turned out to be the eventfulness of the next few days, I forgot all about it.
Soon after I mailed the letter, Ellie and I were in Wade’s pickup truck, ready to go. Or anyway I hoped we were ready:
Tools, check. Sandwiches and coffee, check. Work clothes, hip boots, unbridled optimism entirely out of proportion to our experience with the task at hand…
Yeah, we were down with that, as Sam would’ve put it. Never mind that building a lakeside dock was about a gazillion percent more challenging than anything I’d tried before in the planning-and-construction department. Until now I’d stuck with the small-scale fixes on the Key Street house; bashing out any walls was beyond my ken, for instance, and probably always would be.
Not that I hadn’t tried. But that’s an important thing an old house teaches you if you let it: don’t bite off more than you can chew, and especially not out of a structural beam. Everything looks easy on those do-it-yourself TV shows, wood floors gleaming under fresh polyurethane while a glib home-repair guru squares up new bathroom tiles with mathematical exactitude.
My efforts were more like some old slapstick comedy film: teetering atop a ladder, paint pail upended and brush swinging wildly. On the other hand, probably no one expected much out of the Brooklyn Bridge either while it was still on paper.
Speaking of which: “Right here,” I replied when Ellie asked if I’d remembered to bring along the drawings we’d made of our planned dock. I pulled the notebook out of my satchel and she pulled the truck out of the driveway. She was driving, because when I did it she claimed I turned into a wimp—this was true, but only because other Maine drivers so emphatically weren’t—whereas when she got behind the wheel she mysteriously began channeling Evel Knievel.
“I hope we can make some headway on the dock,” I said as we headed down Key Street toward the water. “First barbecue of the season in a couple of days, you know. Wade’s excited.”
Glancing back, I spotted my father sashaying along the roof ridge of my house, proceeding with all the verve, casual vigor, and general foolhardiness of a man half his age.
“Mmm,” Ellie said. “We’ll see. About the dock, I mean, not the barbecue. That I’m totally up for.”
On the roof, my father stuck out a crowbar and pulled back a wide swath of old shingles, exposing equally ancient tar paper. Also it was shredded tar paper, so even from a distance I could see the rotted wooden sheathing lurking beneath.
Presto, instant leak-source discovery. I’d sent a pair of roof professionals up there a couple of years earlier, but what I’d had done to it then turned out to be whistling in the dark.
In fact what I’d had done then did whistle, every time the wind blew hard. Now my father stood frowning at it, snapping the red suspenders he wore over a blue work shirt, blue jeans, and boots. With his stringy gray hair tied back into a leather thong and a tool belt around his waist, he wore no safety harness and was not hanging on to anything.
“What was Bella so upset about?” Ellie asked, partly to divert me from the sight of my father playing Walking Wallenda.
“Missing person,” I answered distractedly. “Friend of hers has a kid gone AWOL. Big kid, though, nearly Sam’s age. Took off on his own, probably, on account of some trouble he’s in, she didn’t say what. Not an abduction or anything like that.”
My house was an 1823 white Federal clapboard with three full floors, three redbrick chimneys, forty-eight double-hung windows each with a pair of forest-green shutters, and a drop from the roof beam to the ground of about seventy-five feet.
“He’ll be fine,” Ellie said reassuringly, meaning my father. And probably she was right. Being on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for so many years after my mom was murdered had given him a knack for surviving an astonishing variety of precarious situations.
He hadn’t, by the way, killed her. But after she died and he went on the lam, I’d grown up thinking he had; only recently had he been cleared of the whole unfortunate business.
“What did Bella want you to do?” Ellie asked. On either side of the street more old white houses gleamed freshly in the spring sunshine. New green bumps of bulb foliage pushed up through dark bark mulch in tulip beds; painted picket fences glistened with moisture that the day’s weak warmth couldn’t dispel.
Springtime, I thought distractedly, wishing that this year the sense of sap rising didn’t somehow remind me so strongly of strangling vines, creeping vegetation gone wild.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Missing kid’s mother is worried and she asked Bella to angle around about it with me, maybe see if we could be persuaded to get involved. But,” I added firmly, “we can’t.” Which I’d told Bella before she’d even had a chance to fill me in on any more of the details; no sense giving her false hope.
Ellie stopped at the end of Key Street overlooking the bay. Out on the waves a small green fishing boat puttered, gulls circling its wake. Beyond, the Coast Guard’s orange Zodiac vessel sped in circles, throwing up gouts of white spray as a new class of fledgling Coasties practiced handling her.
“No, of course we can’t,” Ellie agreed placidly. She turned left onto Water Street and drove past the flower shop and the redbrick library with its tall arched entry, leaded-glass windows, and a War of 1812 cannon bolted to a slab on the lawn out front.
“For one thing, we’re not hooked into the teen scene anymore, are we?” Ellie added. A few years earlier we could have gotten Sam to find out things for us, ask around among his buddies and learn where a local teenaged runaway might be headed. But now…
A pang of sorrow hit me as I thought about Sam now. “Yes,” I replied. “And besides…”
Besides, we weren’t in the snooping business anymore either. When I’d arrived in Maine, just about the first thing Ellie and I had done together was solve a nasty murder; her local knowledge and my damn-fool stubbornness had turned out to form a surprisingly effective investigative team.
“We’ve given all that up,” I concluded as Ellie guided the pickup toward the harbor past the Happy Landings Café. Its awnings, tables, and umbrellas were stacked out on its deck awaiting warmer weather. Next came the police station, located in the old brick-Italianate Frontier Bank Building, and after that the Mexican restaurant, La Sardina, with gigantic geraniums and jade plants thriving in the big plate-glass front windows.
“Yes,” Ellie said firmly as we drove by Wadsworth’s Hardware store. Decades ago the store had been located on a wharf across the street, but the great storm of 1976 had blown it into the bay and the wharf right along with it.
“We have given it up,” Elli
e repeated as if convincing herself. Her daughter Leonora was a year and a half old now, and needed more of Ellie’s focused time when she wasn’t in day care. Not that Ellie begrudged it—the time or the focus. Lee wouldn’t have gone to the day-care place at all if she hadn’t refused to eat or sleep when deprived of her posse of baby buddies.
“Hey, who’s that?” Ellie wondered aloud suddenly. We were passing the fish pier with the two big tugboats, the Pleon and the Ahoskie, snugged up against the pier’s black rubber bumpers. Under the pier loomed the forty-foot wooden pilings, thickly draped in seaweed and encrusted with generations of barnacles, that kept the pier’s deck dry at the highest of tides.
Today at the pier’s far end a man stood, staring out at the water and, to judge by the movement of his lips, saying something to it. I recognized him as Bert Merkle, a crusty old character who regularly reported seeing UFOs among the junk cars, rotting boat carcasses, empty metal barrels, and bundled newspapers that formed a vast wasteland in his backyard.
But that wasn’t who Ellie meant. On one of the green park benches across from the pier sat another fellow; not a local guy, and it was still a little too early in the season for tourists.
“Don’t know,” I told her as we drew nearer. But I’d been eyeing him too, because…
No, it couldn’t be. The guy had thinning hair, dark horn-rims, a white shirt with an open collar and the sleeves rolled up, and a nice pair of flannel slacks.
His oxblood loafers had tassels on them. “Oh my God,” I said softly, feeling my heart pound. He took the horn-rims off and his profile without them was the giveaway.
“That’s Jemmy Wechsler.”
Ellie knew the name; I’d talked about him enough over the years. But she stayed cool, not doing anything until she knew what I wanted.
“Turn around,” I said at last, so she made a neat three-point reversal against the curb in front of the Moose Island General Store’s corner doorway and we went back.
