by Sarah Graves
Bert always did have a nose for news. I wonder what set it sniffing? Brilliant, of course, and naturally talented. Trouble is, I’m never completely sure which side he’s on.
So—word to the wise, Horace. If Bert comes snooping you might want to give me a call. My love to Lang—is it too paranoid of me to suggest that you two take a little vacation somewhere together?
Cheers,
Dave D.
My beloved 1979 Fiat Sport Spyder convertible had rack-and-pinion steering, double overhead cams, five speeds forward, and a professionally applied apricot paint job on a jazzy little Pininfarina body, plus black leather bucket seats and a black cloth top.
It was a thing of beauty and a joy for about as long as it had taken the original owner to drive it from the showroom; after that it had started living up to its acronym, Fix It Again, Tony. But I still treasured it.
Too bad that a few hours after Ellie and I found the body in the barn, the car sat in a ditch where my son Sam had put it, on a side road near the tiny mainland town of Cooper, not far from Eastport.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sam said, for the fifth time. “But honestly, there was nothing I could do. The guy was crazy, he came right at me. For a minute there I thought he was trying to hit me.”
It was one A.M. and pitch dark; cold, too, with the kind of icy chill you can still get in Maine at night even in mid-May. I wrapped my sweatered arms around myself.
“Okay,” I told Sam through gritted teeth, trying to keep them from chattering. Since finding Cory’s corpse that afternoon, I’d been afflicted with a kind of free-floating anxiety that made me feel as if I were chewing on broken glass.
A car crept by, the driver’s face a pale featureless blur as he rubbernecked us. We’d set emergency flares a hundred yards down the road both ways, though, and we were lit up pretty well right around our vehicles, too.
“I understand,” I said. Working in the floodlight mounted on the rear of his truck cab, my husband, Wade, put a chain around the Fiat’s front axle, then hooked the other end to his tow bar.
But Sam wasn’t satisfied. He still thought I was angry. Or he was protesting too much as he sometimes did when he really was guilty of something.
“It was like the guy was trying to run me off the road on purpose,” he complained as Wade swung into the truck cab and put it in gear.
Sam looked sober. Sounded sober, too. And as far as I could tell out here in the chilly fresh air, he even smelled sober.
Unfortunately, in Sam none of that was any guarantee that he actually was sober. “Mom,” he said, reading my expression, “I haven’t had a drink in a week.”
That either. “Okay,” I replied as the truck pulled forward slowly and the front end of the Fiat emerged from the saplings and brush it was stuck among. From what I could see, the car was a little scraped up but essentially undamaged, and Sam said he hadn’t hit anything hard on the way off the pavement.
“You’re sure you’re not hurt?” In the harsh light from the flares his face looked ghastly.
“Yeah.” He’d been coming back from an AA meeting in Machias, or so he’d gone on insisting. It was why I’d lent him the car at all; he’d owned it for a while but when he couldn’t afford the maintenance he’d given it back to me.
“Little shaken up, I guess,” he added. Wade set the brake on the pickup and jumped down from the cab, got the chain off the Fiat, and stowed the tow bar in the truck bed, one efficient move after another.
“Scared me, was all,” Sam said. “You want me to…” He waved at the Fiat.
“Drive it home?” Somebody had to, assuming it would drive at all. I still didn’t know what kind of mess the trees and brush might’ve made of the car’s undercarriage. My first impulse was to let Sam ride with Wade and drive the vehicle home myself to check it out.
But if I said no, it would mean I really did think Sam was intoxicated, and that would start a whole big controversy.
“Sure. If you feel up to it.” Since his dad’s death Sam had fallen hard off the wagon a couple of times.
More than a couple. He got in the Fiat; it started fine. “You go on. We’ll follow,” I said. “Just in case.”
He grimaced, then realized I meant in case the car died on the way home, or wouldn’t steer. Not in case you really do turn out to be too sloshed to stay on your own side of the road.
Because this time at least I thought Sam really was sober. When he’d gone Wade and I collected the road flares in silence, not speaking until we were in the truck.
“Good thing you answered the phone,” Wade said mildly as he turned toward home.
“Yeah.” Because when it rings at midnight your average mom knows it’s probably not the Prize Patrol, calling to say she’s won three million dollars. After the crash Sam had walked to a nearby house and gotten the people there to summon me, then waited in the cold and dark.
But I didn’t want to talk about Sam; over the past months it seemed Sam was all Wade and I discussed. “Wade, are you really sure it’s okay for Jemmy to stay at the lake?”
Because maybe I’d acted hastily; the camp had originally belonged only to Wade, after all. He should say who got to use it, I thought, or at least have a vote. But he didn’t seem concerned about that.
“Oh, yeah,” he answered easily, slinging an arm around me. With a sigh so deep it felt as if it had come up from my shoes, I let myself relax against him.
“Hey, you’re my girl,” Wade said in the same deep, calm voice that had captured me back when I first met him. “And he’s pulled your irons out of the fire a few times, hasn’t he? Only fair, help him out in return.”
I nodded, feeling Wade’s muscular shoulder against my cheek. When I first met him I thought he was a man’s man, the kind who went hunting and fishing with his buddies, no girls allowed. He’d be the type who on Sunday afternoon watched endless football, getting up at halftime only to work on his truck, and who thought men’s jewelry was silly with the possible exception of the Timex.
And I’d been right; Wade was all that. In the dashboard’s pale glow his short blond hair gleamed, his eyes scanning the road ahead competently.
“’Bout a week, though, the mosquitoes are going to drive him out of there,” he reminded me. “Or suck him so dry he’ll need a blood transfusion. Blackflies, too.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” But it was true, man-eating tigers would be preferable to the insects at the lake once the weather got warmer, especially the blackflies; the biting swarms hadn’t been locally dubbed “defenders of the wilderness” for nothing.
I hoped Jemmy wouldn’t be there that long. We took the turn toward Eastport, Sam’s taillights glowing steadily ahead of us in the dark.
“Wade…”
He glanced down at me, a smile crinkling the skin around his eyes, and gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“Never mind,” I said at last.
I’d already told him about seeing the ghost of my ex-husband in the kitchen—if that had been what it was, and not some goofy imagining of mine—and about the reason why Jemmy had come here at all, and about the hanged kid.
Now I wanted to say I thought I might be in a mess, only I didn’t know what kind yet. But there was nothing anyone could do about any of it tonight, so instead we went home to bed. Wade, who’d been up for work at four the previous morning, was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
I lay awake beside him thinking about Cory Trow and Sam. They were nearly the same age; I only hoped they wouldn’t end up similarly, hanging being just a quicker way to get where Sam was headed if something substantial didn’t change soon.
Then I did sleep, tumbling into a nightmare: Sam, my father, Victor, and the hanged kid dancing on my roof, each with a noose end dangling in front of him like a loose necktie.
Until they all vanished through trap doors, each soft-shoe routine ending suddenly in a short, sharp drop, a terminal snap.
“Suicide, my ass,” Bella Diamond declared skeptically the
next morning.
Perched atop the washing machine, where I was tearing thick plastic sheets down from the windows—in winter my old kitchen was so cold that on some days the inside of that ancient refrigerator was warmer—I turned in surprise.
Ordinarily my housekeeper wouldn’t say a bad word if she had a mouth full of them. “Cory Trow no more killed himself than I’m the Queen of Sheba,” she insisted while scrubbing feverishly at the kitchen sink.
Bella was so emphatically not the Queen of Sheba that it was tragic. But I wanted that sink to retain at least a little of its remaining enamel.
And what she’d said was what I thought, too. So I climbed down from the washing machine, took away her scrub rag, sat her at the table, and put one of the blueberry muffins she’d just baked plus a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. “How can you be so sure?”
Morning sun glared in through the suddenly naked windows, covered all winter with those plastic sheets so heavy-duty they resembled waxed paper. I wasn’t even sure they kept the place any warmer, but at least they made me feel I was doing something to plug drafts.
“Don’t take no genius,” Bella said scornfully. Then she told me why, whereupon I very nearly choked on my own muffin.
“Married?” I repeated in disbelief. “And…a life insurance policy?”
She nodded. “Boy like that, who’d a thought he’d have a care for the end of his life? Or have a wife an’ child?”
But it seemed Cory Trow had. “Even his mom never knew he got married,” Bella told me. “His pals knew, though, an’ one o’ their moms called his mom last night, dropped the big bombshell on ’er in the middle of her grief.”
I gazed at the windows, wondering if next winter two layers of plastic might…but no. Beautifully old-house-atmospheric as they were, the antique windowpanes had the thermal efficiency of tissue paper. And one of these times when I climbed up on top of that washing machine, I was going to break my…
“But wait, there’s more,” Bella pronounced, polishing off the rest of the muffin. “That policy won’t pay if he killed himself, his mom says. Because it’s too soon after he bought it.”
Just then Ellie came in with her own child under one arm and a large ham under the other. Both were suitably wrapped, although from Ellie’s harried look I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a pair of toddler-sized coveralls pulled onto the pork and a sheet of aluminum foil fastened around Leonora.
But I wasn’t finished with Bella. “How does his mother know the insurance policy won’t…”
“Jake, you’ve got to help me,” Ellie exhaled.
I ignored her for the moment. “How’s she even know so fast that there is a policy? The friend wouldn’t have known it and it’s too soon for the insurance company to have—”
But my question was cut off. My father and the dogs came in behind Ellie, each canine competing with the other for who had the most sheer animal energy and which one could demonstrate it most disruptively. Dropping their leashes, my father made his escape, headed for the cellar and his tools while they bounded around, all gummy grins and clicking toenails, greeting us slobberily and demanding to have their breakfast.
“Coffee urn,” Ellie said a little desperately as I got up to feed them. “A sixty-cup coffee urn, a good-size sheet cake, fifty sandwiches, and paper plates. By,” she added in naked appeal, “eleven-thirty tomorrow morning.”
Lee chose that moment to open her mouth wide; at once, most of the unhappy sounds in the world began coming out of it.
“Cream,” Ellie recited, ignoring her daughter’s wails, “and sugar. And lemonade, I suppose, for the children. And…”
Loud sounds from Leonora. Simultaneously, a stream of water began leaking from beneath that vintage refrigerator.
“Ellie, what in the world…” I began. But then through the din—Ellie’s husband, George, said that in an emergency you could set Leonora up on the firehouse roof and use her for a siren—I realized: “Cory’s funeral?”
Ellie slid her daughter unceremoniously into the playpen we kept in the kitchen for her. As Leonora’s plump, padded bottom hit the playpen’s cushioned floor, her mouth fell shut with a nearly audible snap.
“Goo-goo,” she uttered happily; she adored the playpen.
“Yes,” Ellie replied. From atop the refrigerator Cat Dancing observed the baby, then leapt down into the playpen beside her.
“Well, not a funeral exactly,” Ellie amended. “A gathering to commemorate his life. Because you can’t very well have a real funeral without a body, and his body…”
Was by now on its way to the state medical examiner’s rooms in Augusta, where it would be autopsied as was usual in nearly all unattended deaths in Maine. “Prutt,” said the cross-eyed old feline as the child gripped her tail.
“That cat,” said Bella Diamond balefully, “will suck all the baby’s breath out of her.”
But the cat didn’t; soon Leonora turned to counting her own toes. “One, one, one, one, one,” she said accurately.
Next Bob Arnold came in, surveyed us, and spotted the platter of muffins; since Bella had begun baking them regularly, my kitchen had started resembling Grand Central Station in the morning.
Although not smelling like it. You could practically see the baked cinnamon-sugar aroma grasp Bob’s nose, leading him along irresistibly. “You ladies missed a trespassing charge by the skin of your teeth yesterday,” he informed us.
“Um. Yeah. Thanks for your help,” I said, meaning it.
“I told old Walt you were just a harmless pair of town do-gooders, putting together a survey on local library usage,” our police chief said. “Got past the two dogs onto his porch by dumb luck, I told him, and then had to run for it.”
Which was close enough to the truth to make me wince; the dumb part, anyway. Not that Henderson had believed it; his look as he’d greeted me still made me feel as if a set of crosshairs was centered on me.
“Don’t like the cut of that guy’s jib, never did since he moved here,” Bob said, looking sour. “Henderson’s got more pull than a team o’ Clydesdales when he wants something, I don’t know why.”
He finished his first muffin, washed it down with coffee. “Look at the way he got that big house o’ his built there. Land was s’posed to be in a nature trust, all of a sudden he’s gotten himself a mansion on it,” he said, taking another.
“I heard he also had something to do with the Trow boy being convicted on stalking,” Bella said. “Payoffs or something.”
Or maybe just the right lawyers. Either way…“Henderson’s shaping up to be quite the steamroller, isn’t he?” I asked. “Where his interests are concerned.”
I didn’t like what I thought that meant for Jemmy. I’d driven up to check on him that morning, watching all the way to be sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone, but I hadn’t been and Jemmy was okay.
So far. “What did Henderson want yesterday morning?” I asked Bob. “When he was talking to you on Water Street? He looked upset about something.”
Bob nodded. “His lawyers’d already called him to say Cory Trow hadn’t showed up at his sentencing hearing in Machias. So of course Walter came charging downtown to find me and let me know in no uncertain terms that I’d better do something about it toot sweet.”
His face conveyed what he thought about that, the rosebud lips twisting as if instead of sweet blueberries he’d encountered a lemon slice. “He asked about you,” Bob added.
“Walter Henderson did? But I thought you told him we were just…”
“Not at the barn,” Bob clarified. “Before, when I was with him on the street and you both were driving by with that guy in the backseat of Wade’s truck.”
It was a useful trick of Bob’s and one of the traits that made him such an effective day-to-day police officer in Eastport, his ability to seem fully engrossed in one thing while at the same time observing every single pertinent detail of another.
But I had the feeling Walter Henderson knew the
trick, too, and five would get you ten it wasn’t me or Ellie who’d drawn his attention as we drove by.
It was Jemmy, even hidden behind his new face. Bob finished the muffin. “So do you want to let me in on what you were really doing out there?”
Yeeks. Rushing in where angels fear to tread, was the honest answer. In this case honesty probably wasn’t the best policy, though, because Bob was another reason Ellie and I had exited the snooping business.
The last time we’d done anything in that regard, Bob had been quietly in favor, but by the time it was over, Ellie and I had nearly gotten killed. So afterwards he’d reversed his policy.
Bella spoke up. “They were trying to find Cory. His mom asked me to ask ’em. So they did,” she defended us stoutly. “And as for this suicide nonsense…”
“Bella,” I intervened quietly as Bob got up. She looked at me and fastened her trap.
“All right,” Bob conceded. “Kid bein’ such a damn pest with runnin’ after the Henderson girl, guess maybe it was reasonable thinkin’ he might be there.”
This of course hadn’t been our only errand. But there was no sense telling Bob about Jemmy, either. He turned to Bella. “But the boy did hang himself, you know. They’ll probably find booze or marijuana in the blood test, too, maybe even some pills.”
Heading for the door, he threw over his shoulder: “Guess I might want a ration of chemical courage myself if I decided to do what Cory Trow did. Anyway, autopsy’ll cover all the bases.”
Guilt needled me. I remembered that there was another base, one Bob didn’t know about. I thought of revealing to him what had happened to the shred of cloth on the boy’s fingernail, decided again not to. After all, what possible good would it have done?
Besides getting me in a heap of trouble. Something in my silence must’ve alerted him, however. “I’m going to have a word with the workers at Henderson’s place,” he said, turning and eyeing me curiously. “See if they saw anything. Even though Horner says the kid likely died Sunday night when none of ’em were around.”
