Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

  Which many mornings there was. “I’ll get a fire started,” said Ellie, taking my newspaper and gathering sticks of kindling from the wicker basket under the stairs.

  Her voice sounded odd, as if something unpleasant had occurred to her. I waited for more but she merely crouched by the stove with her back turned, crumpling up news stories.

  Jemmy stepped out onto the deck, a rustic affair of graying lumber bolted together atop concrete footings. Silently he gazed at the nearby lake’s edge. A look of puzzlement spread on his face.

  “Didn’t there used to be a pier right down there?” he asked. I’d brought him here once. “And is it just me, or is the water a little…?”

  “Higher, yes,” I replied, stepping out to stand on the deck beside him. After the spring melt of the record snow we’d endured over the previous winter, the lake was a good deal higher even than it had been last fall.

  “Three feet since you saw it last, as a matter of fact,” I told him. “We’ve had a lot of rain.”

  Better than drought, which had turned last summer’s grass yellow-crisp and dried up people’s wells. But in autumn the skies had opened, and they’d stayed that way right on through February. The rocks that had once lined the water’s edge, serving us as diving platforms and sunbathing perches, were now completely submerged.

  “It’s why Ellie and I are here, to build a new dock. Because the other one floated away.”

  As I spoke I watched him carefully. He never did tell me everything right off the bat, preferring to ease into things. But it was clear already that he meant to confront Walter Henderson somehow.

  “How come he’s still after you?” I asked.

  Jemmy blinked, as if the thought of the pickle he was in was the furthest thing from his mind. “You mean when all the rest have quit?”

  Yep, that’s the part I meant. Ordinarily those guys were so single-minded, you practically had to drive a stake through their hearts. But when one stopped they all did, usually.

  He smiled, crinkling the smooth, taut skin on his new face. “Because Henderson’s the best. And the best gets paid up front, see? The whole enchilada. So even though there’s no one else still around to care anymore…”

  The real old-guard Mob fellows, I knew, had almost all died by now, either murdered or from natural causes. If you thought breathing your last behind the walls of a maximum-security prison counted as natural, that is.

  I didn’t. “Got his money, means to finish the job,” Jemmy concluded. “Matter of pride, that kind of thing. So I’ve got to do something about him.”

  He turned earnestly to me. “Because, Jake, he’s not gonna quit. Those subcontractors of his won’t come after me here—this’s his own private territory, you see, and nobody fools with him. He doesn’t want any big dogs but him runnin’ around in it.”

  I understood; if you don’t want a fight, don’t mix with critters who’re inclined to. And don’t let them come around where they might be tempted to start one with you.

  “He’s got no organization behind him anymore; nowadays he flies solo,” Jemmy continued. “That just makes him worse, you see, ’cause he takes it all so personally. Thing is, he’s not a have-gun-will-travel kind of guy anymore either.”

  Oh, I don’t know. I’d thought Walter Henderson looked like he could still move pretty fast when he wanted to. And my guess was that he probably still did want to; just glancing at him this morning as we passed him on the street, I’d gotten the impression of a snake striking.

  Potentially striking. Jemmy went on, “So it’s just him and me. And I can’t go on this way,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Sure,” I said. I understood that, too; spending all his time staying one step ahead of a hired killer couldn’t be much of a life. And Jemmy was no spring chicken anymore, not for that kind of thing.

  But being that it was him—brilliant, feckless, given to wild schemes that might or might not work out as he hoped—what he was saying now didn’t only spell trouble, as Ellie had already intuited.

  Instead it could spell disaster, like a few other situations that were already fairly high on my bad-stuff list. A ghost in the kitchen, a leaky roof, a son with a booze problem, Bella’s cleaning binge, and now…

  Jemmy, arrived to confront an old enemy and resolve an old conflict for good. That most of all made me want to shoo everyone else away and stay here alone at the lake myself.

  Still, Jemmy was my oldest friend and long ago he’d saved my life. I mean literally saved it: off the street, into a job and then into school…

  “You can bunk here for a while,” I said. “For as long as you need to.”

  “Great. I’ll help you with the dock,” he offered cheerfully. “Least I can do, lend a hand.”

  The only nails he knew anything about were at the ends of his fingers: clean, manicured. As for running any power tools…

  “No,” I told him. “After lunch you’re going to Calais, to the stores there. Buy yourself some supplies. Boots and warmer clothes, for instance, sweaters and a hat and a down jacket.”

  “I imagine it still gets plenty cold at night out here,” he agreed.

  I eyed his thin shirt and slacks. “Yes, it certainly does.”

  He had no idea. “Get ready to keep that woodstove stoked,” I advised. “Also you’ll need food, drinks, reading material, and so on. Assuming you like reading by lamplight. Or flashlight.”

  The summer before, Wade had decided the primitive conditions here weren’t as charming as he’d originally thought. So he’d set up a solar generating system for the cottage: collecting panels, a charge controller, a deep-cycle marine battery, and an inverter to transform the direct current to AC. He’d spent a weekend just figuring out the schematics, then putting it all together.

  And it had worked like a charm. Eureka! I’d thought, turning on an electric light after dinner instead of stinking the place up with lamp oil smoke. But now after the long winter the storage battery was uncharged and the solar panels were safely wrapped up in the toolshed, waiting to be remounted on the roof.

  Another thought hit me. “You have any money?” I asked Jemmy. One way and another what he’d stolen hadn’t lasted long. “Because if you need some, I…”

  His smile of appreciation cut me off. Even through all the face work he’d had done, you could still see the old Jemmy shining through; amused, calm even in the face of catastrophe.

  Which this wasn’t; not yet. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he told me.

  He pulled a cigarette out and lit it without offering me one. He remembered how I took my coffee, too, I was willing to bet, and that I liked yellow mustard better than gray, loved the smell of new Cray-olas, and couldn’t abide anchovies or most horror films but loved Blair Witch.

  He changed the subject suddenly. “Remember that day in the diner right after I first met you? We pretended we were boyfriend and girlfriend? You were a skinny, tough-talking little thing and you were wearing a plaid skirt. You looked like you were about eleven.”

  “Yeah.” Despite my misgivings about his presence here, I had to laugh; we’d had fun. “All the mushy stuff we faked, and the waitress glaring at us until we ended up having to get out of there before she called the cops.”

  I’d never been his real girlfriend, though. Not even close; yet another reason I’d trusted him. And still did, sort of.

  His tone turned apologetic. “I know it’s a surprise, me showing up here. And I’ll understand if you—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I cut him off swiftly, and went back inside, where by now Ellie had gotten the woodstove radiating, its waves of warmth nearly visible in the room, and was unwrapping the ham salad sandwiches at the kitchen counter.

  Luckily she always made extra. “Why don’t you unload our stuff from the truck?” I told Jemmy as he followed me in. “There isn’t much, just the cordless drill and a few other gadgets.”

  Ellie looked up, her eyes still full of whatever it was she wanted to say to me
. But for the moment I ignored her.

  “We’ll eat,” I told him as she poured steaming coffee from the thermos into thick white china mugs, “and figure out what you need. Then while we work on the dock, you can supply yourself for remote lakeside housekeeping.”

  And that’s what happened: first the unloading of our tools—Jemmy had plenty of energy, even if it was only nervous energy—then lunch. Ellie’s ham salad was as smooth and mellow as pâté, her fresh baby lettuce leaves ruffling out over the edges of the homemade bread. She’d made fresh lemonade, too, and run it through a seltzer bottle to give it fizz.

  Later, with input from me, Jemmy made a list of items required for his survival in a no-plumbing, no-electricity wilderness environment. And when I finally handed the keys over, he started Wade’s old truck and muscled it into gear competently. Maybe this will turn out all right, I thought, watching him go.

  But Ellie threw a look of undiminished dislike at him as he bumped away down the road, disappearing among the spring-green trees.

  “You’re making a big mistake,” Ellie said as soon as Jemmy was gone. “Why did he have to bring all his troubles around here, anyway?”

  Scowling, she grabbed up her canvas carpenter’s apron and wrapped it around her waist. “It’s like he’s got his own personal bull’s-eye painted on him,” she added, “and now you’re going to have one, too.”

  I tightened a leather tool belt around my own middle. In its many loops and pockets hung everything I needed: hammer, tape measure, socket wrench, and the heavy-duty fasteners we’d bought for putting the first section of the dock together.

  “You know I can’t refuse,” I replied. She’d heard all about my runaway youth.

  Almost all. “Besides,” I went on, “Jemmy’s not planning anything that’ll cause me any problems. He’ll probably just try to set up some kind of a meeting with Walt Henderson. Pay him off or something. Buy out the contract so he’s not wearing a bull’s-eye anymore.”

  Well, a girl could hope. “I mean guys who kill other guys for money, they’ve got no loyalty,” I told Ellie. “They always switch sides and go to the highest bidder.”

  I couldn’t believe I was discussing such things way out here in the Maine woods. “Or Jemmy might stay for a while and take off again without anything happening. He has before.”

  Well, except for that boat explosion. “And either way it’s not like I’m involved. Not if I don’t want to be,” I added resolutely.

  Ellie shook her head. “If you think that, maybe you don’t understand the situation,” she pronounced as we got to work.

  We’d prepared the concrete mix in big plastic basins a week earlier, moistening the powdery stuff with lake water we hauled up in buckets. Stirring it thoroughly with hoes and trowels, we’d poured it into two square wooden forms made out of scrap lumber to create the base blocks for the dock pilings.

  While the mixture was still wet we’d also set a big bolt head-down into each of the blocks’ centers so that the bolts’ threaded ends stuck up straight. Now Ellie used a clawhammer to knock the wooden forms off the blocks, each eighteen inches square and a foot tall, while I centered six-inch-square metal brackets on the bolts and wrenched nuts onto them, securing the brackets.

  “Remember Bella’s friend? The one with the missing kid?” she asked as she hammered away.

  “Mm-hmm.” I began ratcheting the nuts tighter onto the bolts until they would turn no farther. When I was done, each concrete block had a metal frame bolted to the top of it.

  “But what’s she got to do with anything?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure yet.” Ellie hauled six-inch-square pine posts over to our work area. We’d already cut them to nearly the right length using the chain saw; later we would need to perfect our measurements to make the dock’s surface level.

  But we couldn’t do that until after we got them into the water, and found out how far they stuck up out of it. “I know who Bella’s friends are, though,” Ellie went on.

  I didn’t. Like Walt Henderson, I too was a Person From Away, and regularly missed whole layers of Eastport nuance as a result. By contrast, Ellie had known the area’s whole complex family and social network by heart before she could even talk.

  “—and one of those women has an eighteen-year-old son,” she concluded grimly.

  “Well, then, Bella’s friend has even more of my sympathy,” I replied, tightening down the final bolt with a last twist of the ratchet tool. Because if you think a toddler can fray your lone surviving nerve, try listening to the old ‘Mom, I’m not a kid anymore’ routine two million times.

  Then try it when the kid is staggering drunk. “But I fail to see…” I added as Ellie positioned the first post carefully atop a concrete block, forcing it tightly into the bolted-on metal frame.

  We’d had to shave the post ends a little to make them fit. “I know,” she replied. “You don’t see, Jacobia. And you don’t know the rest of the story.”

  She stuck a galvanized nail through one of the holes in the metal frame’s sides, banged it in, then did the rest bing-bang-boom, two nails per side for a total of eight. That fastened the wooden post to the concrete block. And we were using galvanized nails—that is, rust-proof ones—because the block would be underwater soon, if everything went right.

  “So, since you’re obviously not up on the background info, I’ll give you the high points,” she said. “First, based on who Bella’s friends are, if the runaway kid she’s so worried about is the one I think it is—”

  It was. Ellie was never wrong about things like this.

  “…his name’s Cory Trow. He had a court date this morning, supposed to show up at the courthouse in Machias. Whole town knew about it.”

  Except me. Between Sam’s drunken antics and a roof so leaky you could strain spaghetti through it, I’d had my hands full. So I hadn’t heard about all this.

  “And,” she continued briskly, “the court date he had was for a sentencing hearing.” Never a good thing. But I had a feeling worse was to come, and I was right.

  “Because he got convicted on a stalking charge. And the complainant…wait for it…was Walter Henderson’s daughter,” she finished.

  Ye gods. “So you think he took off. Blew off his sentencing hearing, which means he’ll get a…”

  “A prison term, yes. If and when he ever does show up again. Alive,” she added darkly.

  Which was when I caught on. “But that’s not his big problem, is it?” I said slowly. “His problem is—”

  “Walter Henderson the hit man,” Ellie finished for me. “Bingo. Who is here in Eastport at all, I gather, because your pal Jemmy has a habit of coming up for air in your vicinity.”

  She gestured for me to help her hold the second post, then hammered the nails in just as she’d done with the first. Now we had two concrete cubes, each with a six-by-six wooden post sticking up from it about four feet.

  Too bad that at the moment the cubes were also sitting fifty yards from the water’s edge. And since docks are most usefully positioned in the water, not fifty yards from it…

  “And what do you want to bet our buddy Mr. Henderson’s going to feel like doing some recreational killing,” Ellie said, “when he finds out that the town boy who’s been bothering his daughter isn’t in court where he belongs?”

  She took a deep breath. “That instead Cory Trow’s on the run, maybe even planning to bother Mr. H’s precious little girl again?”

  The memory of Henderson conversing earlier that morning with police chief Bob Arnold popped into my mind. “Probably he already knows,” I said.

  It was what Henderson had been chewing Bob’s ear about, I was willing to bet. “How little is she, anyway?” I asked. “The daughter?”

  To move the huge concrete blocks, we’d invented a transport vehicle consisting of a wooden pallet, some styrofoam blocks I’d managed to beg from the guys out at the boat school, and the wheels from Ellie’s baby daughter Leonora’s stroller.

>   It was a lovely little item with blue trim and white padding inside, and Ellie had adored it when Wade and I showed up with it as a gift for Lee’s first birthday. But Leonora hated it. She’d bawled when she was placed in it.

  So Ellie and I had cannibalized it. To keep it from rolling downhill uncontrollably, we’d tied a rope handle to the rear end and bolted a wagon handle to the front. The completed cart resembled one the Little Rascals would build, and we hadn’t had a test run.

  But our choice was between trying it or toppling the blocks end over end down to the water, a process we thought might bode ill for the eventual integrity of the whole dock structure.

  And for our own. So together with much grunting and groaning we hefted one of the concrete blocks onto the cart. The stroller wheels bulged with its weight but didn’t collapse.

  “Jen Henderson’s a teenager,” Ellie said, eyeing our cart doubtfully. “The tall, blonde, athletic type. I’ve seen her, and so has every male human being in Eastport over the age of two.”

  We centered the block by rocking it back and forth; once we got rolling, any instability could lead to an upset.

  “Jen takes the whole golden-girl thing to extremes, though,” Ellie elaborated as together we gave the block a last centering wiggle.

  “She looks…oof!…like a Barbie doll on steroids. Not that I think she uses them. At her age she doesn’t need them, to look the way she does. Protein shakes, maybe.”

  By that time I was gasping. Ellie wasn’t even breathing hard but we still looked at each other with trepidation, wishing we’d brought along someone who regularly ingested both steroids and protein shakes. Loaded, that cart was heavy.

  But there was nothing left for it but to tie the block to the platform, start the whole thing rolling and hope for the best. “So the bottom line is, you think this kid took off to avoid being sent to jail for girl trouble,” I said.