Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

  Keep a brush handy to brush out any paint drips and continue until your shoulder seizes up from fatigue or all the rust spots are covered. I worked until I’d done two more rows of clapboards all the way around the house, then went in and helped Bella wipe off our cold food items before placing them into the new refrigerator.

  Funny how a repair date takes days or even weeks to arrange, but a replacement appliance can show up in about twenty minutes; luckily Prill the Doberman had met the delivery guy before, so she didn’t delay matters by threatening to snack on him. “Lovely,” Bella pronounced it when we were finished, though by tomorrow she would be wiping out the vegetable bins with Windex.

  Next came dinner, dishes, animal care, and a sad examination of my checkbook balance after the refrigerator debacle. Thus by eleven-thirty that night after a discouraging roof-repair update from my father—

  Those rafters had enough rot in them to sink a schooner, and did I by any chance have any heavy-duty tarps to cover up all the holes he was making up there? Because as we all knew, sooner or later a major roof repair would trigger torrential rain….

  —I should’ve been out cold. But instead my eyes were as wide open as if they’d been propped that way on toothpicks.

  Finally I went to bed. I thought Wade was asleep already but his hand slipped over to cover mine sympathetically.

  “Sorry,” I murmured. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t. Bad day, huh?”

  “Not all of it. Just…”

  “Yeah.” I’d told him about Sam calling up drunk.

  “Sometimes I think I spend half my time denying to myself what I know about Sam, that he’s in real trouble. The other half I spend believing it. But I haven’t the faintest idea what to do about it.”

  “Mmm. We could try another intervention.”

  If you ever want to re-create authentic medieval torture, try an intervention. “I guess.”

  Three months earlier, with the aid of a counselor from the health center, we’d gotten together to confront Sam. He raged, wept, apologized, and swore to us that he would try the rehab place we’d arranged for him. Then he’d eluded us all at the airport and gone on a bender that lasted weeks.

  “Wade?” I said again a while later. But by then he really was asleep; I slid out of bed.

  Monday and Prill danced happily at the foot of the stairs. “Come on, dogs,” I said, pulling on a heavy sweater and leashing the pair of them. “Let’s go out.”

  The night was silent, not a car or a footstep breaking the hush. Mist crept in the glow under the streetlights and the chilly air carried the perfume of buds fattening on the maple branches, sticky green sap-bombs getting ready to burst open.

  The dogs romped ahead, snuffling at each stray scent as we climbed the Sullivan Street hill between the Quoddy Marine store and the weed-tangled ruins of what once had been a row of nineteenth-century houses, now reduced to concrete foundations half hidden among weeds.

  Partway up the hill I paused to look back over the town, the gleaming black front windows of the shops on Water Street and the empty, sodium-lit expanse of the breakwater half surrounding the boat basin. At this hour I could almost believe Victor wasn’t the only ghost wandering Eastport; in the dark with the long-gone dwellings looming invisibly around me, it felt more like we all were.

  As I continued uphill, real, physically present dwellings rose from the fenced yards. A few lights here and there in the shaded windows suggested that I wasn’t the only sleepless one tonight, either. Finally I stopped before a bungalow with a low sloping roof, enclosed front porch, and leaded-glass ornamentation in the windows. A small yard showed evidence of gardening: mulched beds and raised boxes heaped with new loam.

  A light was on here, too, and a figure moved behind one of the shades. It was Henny Trow’s house. Without pausing—I didn’t want time to second-guess myself, for this was where without letting myself know it I’d been headed all along—I went up to the door and knocked.

  The woman who answered was tall and slender, with frizzy dark hair cut short around a narrow, full-lipped face. Her dark brows arched questioningly when she saw me but her red eyes, puffy with weeping, showed no surprise.

  “You’re Jake Tiptree. Bella Diamond pointed you out to me, one time. She thinks a lot of you, you know.” Henny stepped aside to let me in.

  “The dogs—” I began apologetically, still not knowing quite what I’d intended. Prill eyed the woman doubtfully until I said it was okay, then relaxed.

  “Never mind. Bring them along.” Cory Trow’s grieving mother walked away from me into a room furnished with threadbare rugs, messily heaped bookshelves, and chairs and lamps well arranged for reading. A big round oak table was covered with notebooks and papers.

  I followed, the dogs panting and yanking in all directions in this new place. “Let them off the leash, why don’t you?” Henny said without looking back. “It doesn’t matter, there’s nothing in here they can hurt.”

  She wore a black cowel-neck sweater, slim black jeans, and black leather slippers with little fake jewels on the uppers. A plain gold band gleamed on her wedding finger as she took a cut-crystal decanter from the sideboard and poured two drinks.

  “I’m so sorry about your son,” I said as she handed me one. Freed of their restraints, the dogs hustled around the room in an orgy of sniffing and wagging.

  “Thank you. Please sit down.” The upholstered armchair was as shabby as the rest of the furniture, but comfortable. And the drink was a good old single-malt Scotch; sipping it, I couldn’t repress a small sigh of appreciation.

  “I’m sorry to barge in on you. I was out walking, I saw your light, and…”

  And ever since we found him, I wanted to say, the sight of your hanged son has been with me, dangling from a mental rafter as if the only real haunted place is inside my head. But I didn’t say it; this wasn’t about my feelings.

  She drank from her own glass and set it down with a look of resolve as if she’d have preferred emptying the bottle.

  “Yes,” she said. “You saw that I was up, probably imagined me walking the floor in my awful grief, alone.”

  Close enough. But before I could say something to blunt the sharp edges of the image her words summoned, she went on. “Well, I’m alone, all right. Cory took care of that. But unfortunately there’s a small problem with the rest of your scenario.”

  She took another swallow. “The problem is that my son was a thoroughgoing little shit.”

  The dogs settled by the hearth where a sulky wood fire was emitting more smoke than heat. To cover my surprise I got up and rearranged the logs without asking permission.

  She wasn’t fooled. “Don’t pretend you’re not shocked. What a thing to say about your dead son, right? That he made your life a misery from the moment he was born. Ruined it, really.”

  I sat again. “Drove off anyone who tried to care about you. Did his best to break your heart,” she added. “And now this.”

  A sob threatened her; she washed it down with the rest of her drink. “Now this,” she repeated.

  Time to cut to the chase. I didn’t know how much the bottle had held when she started, but it was half empty now. “So you’re satisfied that he killed himself?”

  She didn’t even pause at the suggestion that it might not have been suicide. “Oh, of course he did. Cory made everyone wish he’d never lived. And when he got done doing that, he decided to make me wish I never had, either.”

  I sipped cautiously at my drink, thinking one of us ought to stay sober and it wasn’t going to be her. “But there must’ve been a more immediate reason…”

  If Cory Trow had killed himself, there was no point pursuing it further. In reply, her strong features said the answer to my question was obvious. “He didn’t want to go to jail, is all. And he was going to, he’d pushed that Henderson man to the limit.” She met my gaze. “Cory was never much for realizing the long-term consequences of his actions.”

&nb
sp; I tipped my head questioningly. “Henderson’s team of legal attack dogs made sure he was convicted,” she explained. “Now it was time to finish him off. And running would only make it worse, of course, but Cory wouldn’t have thought about that.”

  “And you asked Bella to ask us to find him because…?”

  Her dark eyes staring into the revived fire, she bit her lip before answering. “He was my son,” she said at last. “He needed help and it was still my duty to help him if I could.”

  Her strong-boned face would’ve been ugly if it hadn’t held a lively intelligence and the kind of emotional honesty that always trumps mere looks. Right now the raw anguish in it was as painful to me as if I’d stuck my hand in the fire.

  I changed the subject. “How’d you know Bella, anyway?”

  A smile curved her lips. “Oh, I’d hired her a few times. As you can see, I’m not much for housework. She took a liking to me, I can’t imagine why.”

  I could. Bella had a soft spot for odd ducks, me included.

  “I couldn’t afford to keep her. But when Cory didn’t come home I didn’t know who else to call,” Henny said bleakly. “Those horrible buddies he’d been running with were certainly no help.”

  “I thought you’d have someone here with you now, though,” I ventured. “Relatives or…”

  She laughed bitterly. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But I don’t have any. Parents gone, no siblings. My husband went off to the Persian Gulf six weeks after we got married and never came back. Jeep accident.”

  Thus the wedding ring. “But you were pregnant?” She nodded, then got up to refill her own glass, waving the decanter at me.

  What the heck, it wasn’t as if I had to drive.

  “And,” she went on as she poured, “he was the baby from hell. Then he became the kid from hell, and then the teenager from…oh, God.”

  Her hands shook; she regained control of them with a swallow of liquor. “Killing himself would’ve been another angry impulse, that’s all. He had so many of them…but I tried. I really did.”

  I believed her. And once again I knew just how she felt.

  “What about the life insurance?” I probed. “And this story I heard of him having a wife and baby…”

  She sat up straight, nodding agreement. “In Canada. One of his friends’ mothers called to pry, wanted to know if I knew I had a grandchild. Which I didn’t, but she was thrilled to fill me in, of course.” Her lips tightened. “The upshot is that what she told me is apparently true. Too much detail in the story for it not to be. But that’s all I know. I haven’t heard from the girl. I’m not sure if she even knows yet that he’s…”

  Her face crumpled. I cut in swiftly. “And the insurance? I’m not sure I understand why a boy like your son would…”

  Would care if anyone benefited by his death. The unfinished sentence hung cruelly in the air between us.

  But she took no offense. Harsh reality offered more reliable comfort than illusion, as we both understood all too well.

  “It was part of a crazy plan he had to fake his death somehow and make a lot of money off it,” she answered bluntly.

  “May I see the policy?”

  In response, she left the room; while she was gone I examined a small collection of Native American baskets she kept on a shelf, local artefacts made of sweetgrass and pounded poplar decorated with porcupine quills. At last she returned with a folded sheaf of boilerplate pages.

  “He’d told me about it,” she said as I scanned the thing. It looked correct—the no-pay-for-suicide clause was near the end, among the other perfectly proper exceptions—but now I had a new question.

  Where’d he gotten the money for the premium payment? And who’d sold it to him?

  “I don’t know,” his mother said. “I refused to participate and Cory stopped talking about it. That’s what he always did when he knew I disapproved of anything.”

  She shook her head sadly. “But he must’ve bought the policy anyway. On the Internet, maybe? I found it when I was looking through his dresser, after the police…”

  This time she did sob, pressing her fists to her breastbone. When the spasm passed, she continued. “With Cory it was always something. And this marriage…”

  She looked up helplessly at me. “Maybe his wife paid for the insurance. Maybe that’s why he married her, she has money. But as I said, I don’t really know anything about it. Only what I’ve been told.”

  She reflected a moment. “The marriage, too…besides cash, he might’ve thought it was a legal way for him to get into Canada if he ever was in real trouble. With a wife and child there, the immigration people might…”

  “Let him become a citizen? Well, maybe,” I said doubtfully. I didn’t know what the law said about that.

  But maybe Cory hadn’t known either. And maybe it didn’t matter. If he’d killed himself before the suicide clause on his insurance policy expired, it suggested to me that he was big on schemes, not so much on the research required to make them pan out.

  I gestured at the multitude of papers on the table in the dining area. There was a laptop computer there, too, and a pair of reading glasses. “Your work?”

  Double doors from the dining area led to another room, smaller; a generous closet or possibly a sewing room. “I write newsletters and edit them,” she said. “Freelance, mostly, for ad agencies, public relations firms, and so on. I started out in Boston when Cory was small, but once you’ve got clients you can do it long-distance if you’re good at keeping in touch with them. And when he got older I thought…”

  “A change of environment?” I could have told her it didn’t work; not permanently. The geographic cure just put a brief gloss of novelty on everything.

  But she knew that now, too.

  Seeing me rise, the dogs scrambled to their feet.

  “Thanks for coming in,” Henny Trow said. “I didn’t think I wanted company, but…”

  “No problem. Call me if you feel like talking. But listen, if you don’t mind one more question now…”

  Her frizzy head tipped inquiringly. “Why there?” I asked. “Why d’you suppose he picked the barn on Henderson’s property, of all places, to take his own life?”

  And why that method? I might have added. There were easier ways. But she only shrugged. “To punish Mr. Henderson, I guess. To make it his problem. Cory was like that, he’d find your weak spot and exploit it if he could. But if that didn’t work he got vindictive. And,” she added, “it’s where he’d been meeting the Henderson girl. It came out in his trial, that it was where they’d…get together.”

  A low light burned in the adjoining room, over a sewing machine with some fabric on it. She saw me looking at it.

  “There’s a woman here who designs clothing,” she explained. “Special things, hand-dyed on silks. I do the sewing for her.”

  Eastport was full of hidden geniuses. “So you’re a woman of many talents.”

  Henny shrugged. “An old hobby. I’ve always sewed in my spare time. My own clothes, and Cory’s when he was little.” Her eyes narrowed in pain again at the memory. “And writing’s not exactly a big-money occupation, so I can use the extra cash.”

  She stepped back from the door. It was my cue to go. “Thanks for the drink.”

  The fabric was blue. I bent to leash the dogs as the door closed behind me and the light in the living room went out. But she was probably still in there, sitting in the dark, not going upstairs to bed on this first night after her son’s death.

  She’d be trying to make it last, this brief time when only a day still separated them. Breathing air he’d breathed, touching the things he’d touched, before it all whirled away into memory.

  Before he was really gone. But there was nothing I could do about that. In the darkness the world tilted a bit under my feet: that Scotch. The night air cleared my head, though; by the time I finished climbing the rest of the Sullivan Street hill, I was awake and glad to be out of Henny Trow’s too-warm livin
g room.

  And still thinking about that blue cloth. Which was why as a car sped uphill from behind me I didn’t notice at first just how fast it was coming.

  Its headlights brightened ominously as I reached the narrow part of the street, without sidewalks and bounded by granite outcroppings, hemming me in so there was nowhere to escape.

  I drew the dogs nearer to give the car plenty of room. As if on signal it veered and roared straight at me, its headlights swelling to blinding disks.

  “Hey!” Fright made me shout as I flattened myself against the granite. “Prill! Monday!” I yelled, yanking the dogs in tight as the car’s lights dazzled me.

  Pressing the animals to my legs, I leaned desperately into a niche in the granite, sucking in my breath as the vehicle sped by with mere inches to spare. Exhaust fumes billowed into my face and gravel flew, stinging as it hit me.

  Then after what seemed like minutes but was really only a couple of seconds, the car roared away. A hundred yards distant it stopped briefly, brake lights brightening, and I knew it would come back.

  Instead, with a shriek of tires it took the turn past the water tower and into Hillside Cemetery, engine howling as it sped toward Clark Street and the fastest way out of town.

  Tightening both dogs’ leashes I hurried us all to where the sidewalk resumed, then paused to listen. Nothing. Slowly I began walking home, the animals trotting ahead unfazed as if to say a little accidental unpleasantness was a small price to pay for the pleasure of an extra walk.

  But I didn’t think it was accidental. And given Sam’s near miss of the night before, I doubted that it was coincidence.

  From: hlrb@mainetel.net

  To: ddimaio@miskatonic.edu

  Subj: Eastport book

  Dave

  Thanks for the news on the old book. Now that it’s happened I’m uncertain whether to be elated or terrified time will tell, I suppose. I’ll keep a weather eye out for Merkle but doubt he’ll come around. I agree he’s a weird duck, not to be trusted.