by Sarah Graves
Harold Horner was the county deputy medical examiner, the one who’d have referred the death to the state’s medical examiner. Bob held my gaze a moment longer. “Either of you think of anything else interesting, call me,” he ordered on his way out.
“Ellie,” I said when he’d gone. Bella had already washed his cup and was hovering impatiently for mine.
But she would have to wait a little longer. “Ellie, why do you suppose a kid like Cory Trow would buy life insurance, then kill himself before the suicide clause expired? And why didn’t Henderson’s alarms go off? Heck, a place like that, he might even have more high-tech stuff installed, maybe even outdoor motion detectors.”
“Well,” she theorized reasonably, “it was the middle of the day. People going in and out, the housekeeper doing errands and all, you wouldn’t want to be fooling with alarms all the time. Maybe he only turns the alarms on at—”
“Right. Okay, maybe he only turns them on at night. So if they were on, on Sunday night, how’d Cory Trow get in there? And how did he get past the dogs? Unless someone let him in…”
Our eyes met. “Jennifer,” we pronounced together.
Walter Henderson’s teenaged daughter, the one Cory had been headed to jail for stalking, might’ve turned off the alarms and penned the dogs up if she was expecting a nighttime visitor. And once the alarms were off, I supposed there was the barest chance they might not get turned on again until the next night, when it was likely that someone would’ve made a habit of checking them.
“Maybe she and her father didn’t agree on Cory’s undesirable status,” I speculated. “In fact, his being forbidden fruit might just have made him more desirable.”
“You think?” Bella inquired sarcastically, wiping furiously at a kitchen counter that was already so clean, a new white glove would’ve contaminated it. “From what I heard, that Jennifer girl was all over Cory like scales on a mackerel, right up until the minute he put his foot down.”
Henderson’s foot, she meant. Just then my own father came up from the cellar again and caught the end of the conversation. “Jen Henderson?” he said as he opened a work-roughened hand so I could see what it held.
Nails. Old ones, rusty and useless. “Out of the roof,” he explained as Ellie turned to him.
“You worked on the Henderson place for a while, didn’t you? Last summer when they were putting in that…”
“Barn foundation,” he agreed. Smiling, he crossed to the playpen and bent to offer Leonora a calloused finger. “Baby,” he crooned tenderly at her, and she babbled deliriously in reply.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. But there was plenty I didn’t know about my dad, including where else he worked and what he did when he wasn’t here at my house, laboring to keep the whole place from collapsing.
“That girl had Cory right around her little finger, his mom says,” Bella sputtered indignantly. “And all the time he had a wife and baby over in St. Stephen, Canada, not forty miles from here, that he was keeping a secret.”
“Sounds right,” my father said, straightening. “Part about the Henderson girl, I mean. Hate to say it but from what I saw, she’s what we used to call a man-eater.”
He dropped the old nails into the wastebasket by the sink and I didn’t protest. I used to save ruined parts of the house just out of sentiment, but as soon as I discovered how vastly they outnumbered the working parts, all the bloom went off that rose.
“Fellow with a blood pressure and a toolbox risked his life just walkin’ onto the property, seemed like to me,” he remarked, just as Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, came in and made a beeline for the now pathetically diminished pile of muffins.
“What’d you think of ’er?” my father asked him. “Henderson girl. You were out there too last summer, I seem to recall.”
George was a pale-skinned, compactly built fellow with a bluish five-o’clock shadow always darkening his stubborn chin. From the glint in his eye you could gather the strong notion that getting on his bad side might be unwise, and you would be correct.
But George’s sense of humor was even quicker than his temper, and longer lasting. “Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch,” he chuckled in reply. “I could get in a whole heap of trouble making remarks about that.”
But by the way he seized Ellie around the waist and hugged her, we all knew he couldn’t. “Hey, girl,” he said, gazing into her eyes.
“Get along with you, now,” she said, flustered, and pushed him away, blushing. She thought George walked on water, and for her he’d have given it a try. “Just answer the question.”
“Jen Henderson,” he repeated thoughtfully, tucking another muffin into his overall pocket for later. In Eastport, George was the man you called for sparks in the fuse box, bats in the attic, or trees that had once been vertical but now were horizontal on your front lawn.
“Let’s just say in a choice between her and a trap full o’ quicksand, I’ll take the quicksand,” he said.
Bending to kiss Lee, he shot Ellie a look full of romantic promise that made her blush even more deeply than before. “Later, babe,” he told her sweetly, and went back to work.
“Startin’ to look as if we might have to do something fairly radical to that roof of yours,” my father said when George had gone.
But I already knew. When nails got as bad as the ones he’d just shown me, the roof they’d been taken from was ready to blow off in the next stiff breeze.
Or fall down into the attic. “Just be careful,” I told him as he strode out to resume laboring on it, wrapping his stringy gray ponytail into its leather thong and whistling as he went.
“Anyway, if Jennifer let Cory in, it answers one question,” I said, finally relinquishing my cup to Bella, who bore it to the sink as if it carried plague germs. “But it raises some others.”
Such as, how’d a love scene turn into a death scene so fast? And meanwhile there was still the problem of Jemmy.
Seeming to catch my thought, Ellie looked up from the list she was making for Cory Trow’s memorial. “Jake, just stop trying to bamboozle me about that guy, will you?”
“Who?” I replied, trying to look innocent.
She made a face. “Oh, come on. For years you’ve been talking about Jemmy Wechsler as if he’s some cuddly old uncle.”
In the playpen Leonora sang softly; Bella had gone upstairs to make the beds. “Well, not an old uncle,” I objected, knowing I wouldn’t win this argument.
“So harmlessly entertaining,” Ellie went on, deliberately not hearing. “But I got a look at him. Listened to him, too.”
She hesitated. “Jake,” she said gently as if delivering bad news. “Jake, that man’s a sociopath.”
But that was no secret either. “Yeah,” I said, giving in. “You’re right, he doesn’t have as many personal feelings as other people do.”
Or any feelings, actually. “When he first latched onto me,” I said, “years ago, I thought he was working on me as a project. Rescue a kid off the street, you know, give himself some kind of personal merit badge for it.”
But later I realized I had it backwards. Jemmy was the project. He was trying to like someone, investigating different aspects of human emotion and figuring out how they might work.
“What made you catch on?” I asked Ellie. Because nowadays he had the human-being act nearly down pat.
“His voice,” she replied promptly. “With him in the truck behind me all I could think of was piano wire,” she said, shivering expressively.
Yep, that was Jemmy. “So let’s not pretend he’s harmless or I’ll get cranky,” Ellie said.
“All right,” I agreed as yet another swath of tar paper fell past the kitchen window. Then Bella hustled in with a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other; wordlessly she shoved the bucket under the hot-water tap and Lysol fumes billowed into the air, pungent as chlorine gas.
When she’d departed once more, Ellie said the other thing I was thinking. “If Henderson le
arned somehow that Cory really didn’t intend to go to jail after all, that instead he’d decided to run away, and then Walter found Cory…”
“And forced or lured him into that barn…but how?”
“Don’t know. But if it did happen that way, Henderson might have killed Cory and fixed it somehow to look like suicide.”
“So when we saw him talking to Bob Arnold on Water Street yesterday, he’d have already known Cory was dead.”
“Mm-hmm.” Ellie folded her list and tucked it into her pocket. “He could’ve turned those alarms off, too. And written the note.”
Suddenly I wished I could ask a lot of questions of a lot of different people, and then it hit me.
I mean that I was about to get the chance. “It’s why you did it, isn’t it?” I asked Ellie. “Set the memorial for tomorrow and volunteered the two of us to arrange the refreshments. So we could…”
“Get a look at them all,” she agreed. “Maybe learn something useful. Cory wasn’t exactly a pillar of the community, so I’m not sure who’ll come. But you never know.”
In the playpen the baby and Cat Dancing dozed peacefully together, Lee’s chubby arm around the animal’s neck. If anyone else had tried it, that cat would’ve performed major surgery on them.
“The mother, the wife, the girlfriend, and his other pals,” Ellie recited. “It’s easier if you get them all together in one place. Assuming we can,” she added. “But if we don’t do the food, even we don’t have a reason to be there.”
She lifted Leonora from the playpen, settled the sleeping child on her shoulder. Meanwhile the leak from the refrigerator widened inexorably into a puddle; all the newly exposed kitchen windows rattled.
Pretty soon I would need to haul roof-repair shingles for my dad, too; lots of them. Up the ladder and down the ladder; repeat until your legs fall off.
Or you do. And at the lake there was a dock to finish. “Um, remind me again why we’re doing this at all?”
Ellie pointed upstairs where my housekeeper ran the vacuum cleaner furiously over the hall carpet. Next she might pull apart the plumbing to be sure all the pipe interiors were spotless; the last time Bella’s engines got revved she’d decided the insides of our ears were a serious source of filth and spent a day chasing after Wade and me with a whirring device like a miniature Roto-Rooter.
“Then,” Ellie went on, “there’s Jemmy.” And when I looked blank: “Well, if Walt Henderson murdered Cory Trow and we could prove it…”
“Oh!” I said, understanding suddenly. “He might go to jail. And behind bars, Henderson couldn’t try to kill Jemmy anymore, could he?”
Because as Jemmy had said, Henderson flew solo; there was no one on the outside to do his bidding. His subcontractors wouldn’t return to the job either, since he wouldn’t be around to pay them. And as Jemmy had also pointed out, no one else cared.
“But we don’t know for sure what happened and we’re a long way from finding out,” Ellie concluded. “And right now it’s time for me to take Lee over to preschool.”
Leonora’s eyes popped open. “Kids!” she screeched gleefully. Ellie’s answering smile was beatific despite the painful eardrum injury she’d undoubtedly just suffered.
“Jake,” she told me, “why don’t you start by clearing all your other chores up today so you’ll be free for tomorrow?”
She eyed the refrigerator leak meaningfully. I could have called a repair person but for what that would cost I could also have bought Greenland, kept all our frozen food up there, and had it flown in by private jet.
And it wasn’t the first time that refrigerator had sprung a leak. In fact I already had the necessary replacement part; all I needed was to install it.
The breeze rattled the antique window harder and the pool on the floor enlarged. Then the phone rang and it wasn’t the Prize Patrol calling any more than it had been the night before.
“Mom?” said Sam. Ellie waved and went out.
“Hey, Mom?” An ice cube rattled in his glass. It was ten o’clock in the morning.
“What is it, Sam?” I asked, feeling my throat close with the old, familiar sorrow. Upon reflection, I was still fairly sure he hadn’t been driving drunk last night. But today…
“Listen,” he slurred into the phone. “I got news.”
Today he was fully loaded.
Sam wanted a visit from me at his house on Liberty Street, for reasons he seemed unable to articulate on the phone. But given a choice between confronting a drunken Sam and stepping in front of a high-balling locomotive, I’ll take the train.
So after he hung up I dragged the refrigerator away from the wall. The trouble was with the drip pan that sits atop the rear compressor collecting humidity drainage. Meanwhile the compressor itself gets warm, evaporating the water.
Until the drip pan gets a hole in it, which in my experience happens only a few moments after the refrigerator is delivered. Replacing the pan requires a pair of pliers, a tubeful of gooey stuff called thermal mastic, and every single swear word you know plus several you will undoubtedly invent on the spot.
“Um, what are you doing?” Wade inquired thirty minutes later when he came down from his workshop in the ell of our old house. There when he was not being Eastport’s premier harbor pilot, he repaired old firearms, reloaded shotgun shells, and performed other tasks closely related to the exploding of gunpowder in confined spaces.
At the moment I felt a lot like that gunpowder. Gritting my teeth, I used the pliers to give the nut on the bolt holding the drip pan down another half turn. It was all there was room for in the tiny space between the compressor and the refrigerator’s myriad other internal parts.
This, I thought clearly, is why the repair people get paid the big bucks. “Fixing,” I answered Wade, “this darned…Ouch!”
The pliers slipped off the nut suddenly, sending my hand yet again into the sharp metal corner of the drip pan.
“Oh,” he said. And then, accurately sensing my mood, “Would you like help, or should I just go muck myself?”
Only he didn’t say “muck.” A rueful laugh burst from me just as the nut finally revolved off the top of the bolt.
“Thanks, but now that I’ve got it off I don’t think I will need…Oof,” I said, wiggling the loosened drip pan and frowning.
The bolt, permanently soldered onto the compressor, stuck up through the pan’s middle. To remove the pan you simply lifted it off the bolt. Or you would if there’d been any clearance between the pan and the bolt’s end.
Which there wasn’t. I turned and tilted the pan first one direction and then another, yanking at it with increasing force. At one point I braced both feet on the refrigerator; this didn’t seem likely to work but I was desperate.
Wisely, by now Wade had gone back up into his workshop where I heard him whistling, trying, I suppose, to drown out what was now becoming a really creative bout of snarling and cursing.
But finally Bella came downstairs and found me struggling with the appliance. “Missus,” she said, taking in the futility of what I was doing.
The drip pan sat askew on the compressor top; I couldn’t get it off, and now I couldn’t get it back on again, either. “Jake,” I corrected automatically, giving the pan a final yank.
“What is it, Bella?” If I couldn’t get the darn thing off and I couldn’t replace it properly, then…
“It’s…the doctor’s room,” she replied hesitantly. That was what she called the small guest room we’d turned into a sickroom for Victor, the room that he had died in.
I sat up abruptly, bonking my head hard on the windowsill behind me. “What about it?” I demanded, rubbing the bumped spot with the hand I’d wounded on the sharp part of the refrigerator.
I hadn’t seen Victor since the previous morning, and Wade had pretty well convinced me that that had been a hallucination, just as I’d been trying to tell myself.
“He ain’t passed,” Bella said, peering at the ravaged guts of the old appliance; I’d
been working on it for over an hour. “Hand me a rag,” she added, and I obeyed. Not that I thought she could do much about the situation, but it was dusty back there so I figured she just wanted to clean up.
“What do you mean, ‘passed’?” I asked.
She merely spared me a glance of disdain while wiping grime off the compressor and the screw mounts holding its support frame tightly to the back of the appliance. “Screwdriver,” she commanded.
Six minutes later she had the frame loosened and lowered far enough to get the old drip pan off and the new one on, all because she’d bothered to wipe the work area clean so she could see what she was doing.
And let that be a lesson to me, I thought. “Finished,” she pronounced.
But when I plugged the refrigerator back in, awful sounds came from it, like something inside yammering to get out. Next I noticed that the spots I’d braced my feet against now resembled the impact craters of bombs. And that the big dents had what smelled like ammonia hissing out of them.
Only it wasn’t ammonia; it was freon gas.
Poisonous freon gas. And then what with summoning the fire department and getting Wade, Bella, the dogs, the cat, and myself all outside before we could be gassed to death by my unfortunate repair attempt, Bella didn’t get a chance until later—while we watched the firemen rush in wearing hazardous-materials masks—to finish telling me what she’d seen upstairs in what she called the doctor’s room.
The doctor himself.
I spent the rest of the day resisting the strong temptation to drive back up to the lake and check on Jemmy again.
After all, I told myself firmly, unless I sat there guarding him myself with one of Wade’s shotguns, there wasn’t much I could do about him. And if I did go, Henderson might follow me and find out where Jemmy was.
If he didn’t already know. So when I got done telephoning the helpful fellow at the appliance store, I turned to the job of rust abatement on the outside of the house. Like this:
Sand the rust off the nail head, tap the nail in with a nail set—like hitting a nail with another nail—put some paintable caulking compound into the resulting dimple, smooth it, and apply a burst of rust-inhibiting paint from a spray can.
