by Sarah Graves
Her lips tightened. “But facing jail,” I persisted, “he decided to use what you told him. So you were forced to tell your dad that if Cory served any time on the stalking charge, he meant to spread some news.”
Jen’s eyes blazed but still she said nothing.
“And having that info get around would have screwed up something important for your father,” I finished, “isn’t that right?”
Wordlessly she shook her head, lunged forward. “Shut up!” She shoved me blindly. “Get out of here!”
The dogs stayed put; the gate at the end of the drive opened automatically to let us out. “Poor kid,” Ellie murmured.
“I guess.” Henderson could’ve used one of the scarves as part of a scheme to trick Cory into the loft somehow, I mused as we left the estate. And in the final struggle—although not much of a struggle, or there would have been more marks on Cory’s body than a single small bruise—the victim grabbed a piece of it.
Unless it really was just a scrap of his mother’s sewing project. “Ellie? The drawer you looked into…what was inside?”
She cleared her throat. “Um, well…let’s see, now. How do I put this? She had some personal items.”
I glanced at her, surprised. Ellie wasn’t the shy type and there wasn’t a lot in life that we couldn’t talk about. Just for example, owing to a small scheduling problem, she’d had her baby in the middle of my kitchen floor.
We drove past open fields, boggy glens full of pussy willow, and the tumbled remnants of old house foundations, the latter like dire warnings of what could happen to mine if that roof didn’t get fixed soon. “Well?” I demanded.
Her cheeks grew pink with embarrassment. “Oh, Jake. There was a pair of pink plastic handcuffs. Some bottles of stuff like hand cream, only it wasn’t. And a…device. A sort of a battery-operated…device.”
I personally wasn’t a big fan of purchased sex toys, since in my opinion the human body already comes fairly well equipped with them. But as Wade would’ve said, whatever floats your boat.
“So Jen’s a little kinky,” I mused aloud.
Ellie giggled. “Cory must’ve thought he’d gone to heaven.”
Yeah, even before he did. “No wonder he didn’t want to give her up without a fight,” I agreed. The silk scarves, I thought. Were they an element of the fun and games, too? Could that be why one of them had been used to help lure him to his death?
We turned past the ball field and the defunct railroad yard. What was left of the old roundhouse still showed through the newly green grass, although the rails and ties had long been torn up and discarded.
Three blocks later my house came into view, complete with an enormous blue plastic tarp spread over half the roof. My father had needed to buy it, I thought guiltily; his request had slipped my mind again. I didn’t think the mountain of newly delivered lumber and roof sheathing was a good sign, either.
“Hey,” said my father, striding out from behind the house. “There’ve been developments.” What he’d torn out of the roof now lay on the lawn, and from the look of it there was enough scrap there to build another whole dwelling.
Or there would have been if it hadn’t all been wormholed and rotten. Although…were they wormholes? I bent to peer at a chunk of old beam.
From the outside it appeared undamaged but what remained of its interior was a lacework of membranous wood, reducing the beam’s strength to nearly nothing. Dry, powdery dust dribbled from within, but the beam itself was wet.
“Carpenter ants,” I diagnosed sorrowfully. “And it looks like they’ve been here awhile.”
“Yup.” My dad looked sympathetic. “Leak around the chimney got the wood wet, and that’s what those ants love. Looks as if half the beams are infested. Treat it all for insects, sister ’em up, we can probably save the rest.”
Splice in new pieces, he meant, at a cost of approximately a gazillion dollars. And besides the materials, it would take real, professional carpenters and exterminators; this was no job for an old-house amateur, even one as good as my father.
I sighed. “I guess there’s no other help for it, and it looks like you’ve got it under control.”
If you could call all the brand-new roofing material plus the attentions of an ant killer who billed by the nanosecond “under control,” that is. The phone rang inside and Ellie went in to answer.
“I’ll just nail my checkbook to the kitchen counter where everyone can get at it conveniently,” I told my father.
Ellie came back out looking troubled. “What now?” I asked. “Furnace exploded? Pipes backed up? Electrical wiring spitting sparks out onto the oh-so-flammable parlor carpets?”
Because when one big thing goes wrong in an old house, the other major systems all get the same idea, like grade-school kids acting out because one of their classmates did.
“That was Fred Mudge. He got your number off a card you gave Trish.” I followed Ellie inside where I noted that no floors had collapsed and the panes weren’t falling out of the windows.
“What’s he want?” I opened the refrigerator. Cheese, baked beans, half a loaf of Bella’s spectacularly good brown bread, and a couple of bottles of root beer…at least we had lunch.
But in the next instant my appetite dwindled to nothing. “Trish and the baby are gone,” reported Ellie. “Since last night, Fred Mudge says, and she didn’t take anything with her, not even baby stuff.”
When Sam was that little I’d practically needed pack animals to lug around his gear. “Did he call the police?”
“Yes. He says they came and got a report, but his impression was that they thought Trish probably left on her own.”
“Darn.” I hurried to the phone to call Fred back.
But he didn’t answer.
“Ellie says Mudge told her he still hadn’t gotten around to pawning any of Trish’s jewelry,” I reported to Jemmy an hour later. “So she didn’t have much money. And anyway I’m sure that she wouldn’t go far without anything to take care of the baby with.”
Of course Mudge hadn’t pawned the valuables. That would’ve given Trish the means to leave him. The ring and bracelets were still there but she was gone, so what the heck had happened?
“You believed her?” Jemmy asked. That the items were real, he meant, that they belonged to her, and that she hadn’t told anyone but Fred Mudge about them.
“Uh-huh.” Once I got the news that she was missing, I’d put the dogs in the truck and gone up to the lake to run it by Jemmy, see if he could come up with any useful insights.
And to check on him yet again. I was increasingly uneasy that one of these times I’d find him dead, shot in the head with a weapon that no one would ever find.
Or something. “I saw the jewelry myself and I’m pretty sure it was real. And for a girl who’s possibly not the sharpest hook in the tackle box, Trish is pretty smart about self-preservation,” I told him.
In other words, I wasn’t going for Jemmy’s first theory about Trish Bogan’s sudden absence: that maybe she’d gabbed unwisely about the baubles she’d inherited from her mom and somebody had snatched her, trying to get them.
We sat at the big table in the cabin, thin sunlight slanting onto the red-checked tablecloth. “And you figure she didn’t kill this Cory, just to get him out of her life, to hell with the insurance money?”
Jemmy plucked one of the miniature muffins he’d baked from the cast-iron muffin tin I’d always believed was in the cottage merely for decoration, popped it into his mouth. He went on with his second theory.
“Now you and Ellie’re poking around, making them feel uncomfortable, they’re on the run? Maybe they’re in on the whole thing together, her and this Mudge guy?”
The cabin smelled sweetly of the muffins, and of the soap and water he’d used to wipe down every surface. The floor shone, the firewood box was full, the carpet was swept, and he’d made fresh coffee in the blue enamelware percolator on the stove.
I drank some, shook my head. “Nope.
First of all, Trish is the one missing, not Fred Mudge. He’s probably just out looking for her.” I reached for one of the muffins. “Also, she was falling-down in love with that little dope Cory Trow. Don’t ask me why,” I added, recalling the girl’s face when she talked about him.
Jemmy just looked at me. “Oh, shut up,” I snapped.
Because he was right, it was exactly like me and Victor; something about Cory just rang Trish’s bells. And she wasn’t experienced enough to know the tune they were playing: the shark music from Jaws.
“The suicide clause in the kid’s life insurance policy did come as a surprise to her, I’m sure. But I doubt that means anything. If she’d wanted money she could get it out of Mudge.”
I bit into the muffin, realized by its taste that it wasn’t one and that I should’ve known. Jemmy would no more bake a muffin than he would whip up a loaf of healthy, grittily nutritious whole-grain bread.
It was a cupcake from the kind of mix that needs only an egg and a cup of water, thickly topped with chocolate frosting out of a can. I licked my fingers, took another.
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Jemmy agreed. “Why kill for money when you could just ask for it? And even if she did want to kill him, she’d have had to get to Eastport, get him out to the barn at Henderson’s and up into the loft…”
“Yes. While carrying the baby around,” I pointed out. “Or she’d have needed to let someone else take care of that child for a while, which as far as we know she never did, not even Fred.”
He nodded thoughtfully again. “So if we’re wondering about villains other than Henderson, maybe we can leave out Trish and the puppeteer?”
I finished the second cupcake. “Yes. And we’re not wondering about them. We can leave them all out, Jemmy. Henderson did it.”
“You sound pretty sure of that.” He got up to stoke the fire in the woodstove.
“I am.” I explained about Jennifer and what I thought might have happened. “She likes to drink, and she’s got a stash her father doesn’t know about. So she’s up in the loft partying with Cory, she gets a little loose, and presto, she’s blabbed the big family secret, no taking it back.”
I thought a moment. “Or she tells Cory deliberately, as a way of getting rid of him. Either way, Cory tries using it against her to try to get leverage with her dad, and…”
“Jen makes an end run around Cory, tells dear old dad what’s up. After that, Daddy steps in, settles the matter permanently,” Jemmy finished, closing the woodstove door. He sat across from me again. “You’re right, this’d be a bad time to have the spotlight of public interest focused on Walter Henderson and his doings.”
Especially since in Eastport the spotlight was more like a laser beam. “But you said Mudge hated Cory. And maybe he’s not much on brute strength, but from what you’ve told me about him he might be able to figure something out that would work as well as muscles. He’s got it bad for the Trish girl, huh?”
“Enough so he’ll take another fellow’s child to raise if it means he can have her.” I recalled the furtive-appearing little man with the weird mustache.
“But even if Henderson weren’t the obvious culprit, there are still those dogs of his, and the alarms. I can’t see Mudge doing anything effective against that kind of double jeopardy. On the other hand, if in a careless moment Jen did tell Cory about her dad’s occupation, that answers why Trish is in trouble now. Because Cory might’ve told her.”
“A loose end Henderson would want to tie up,” Jemmy agreed. He was coming around to my way of thinking. “But now Jen wants to be sure she never has to testify to anything. So she says she was asleep.” He got up, poured us more coffee.
“Let Jen worry awhile,” he advised after a slow sip. “She might still get nervous enough to tell you the real story.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so. She’s tougher than I thought she’d be. You think I should warn Cory’s buddies? He could’ve talked to them about Henderson, too.”
He gave me a scathing look. “You warn flies before they get swatted?” He’d never had a soft spot for street punks.
Other than me. But then he relented. “Nah. Henderson can’t just start mowing down the population. Cory might have told his pals, but Henderson’s gotta stick to the ones other people could take seriously. What I’m wondering is why he didn’t dispose of the body. You’d think with all his on-the-job experience…”
But I’d already figured that out. “First, he wants it to look like suicide. And second, he doesn’t know how to dispose of bodies around here. It takes,” I finished, “a degree of familiarity.”
“With the territory, right.” Jemmy nodded. “Better to have somebody else discover the body, too. Because…”
Because in real life he who found it is generally he who done it, to borrow a notion from Bella’s box of used books.
“Good point,” I agreed. “Anyway, I’ve got to go.” And as an afterthought, “You’ve worked wonders here,” I told Jemmy.
The stovepipe had been taken apart, polished, and put back together with new rivets. Minus their usual scrim of cobwebs, the windows glittered, and the broken-down settee in the corner had been replaced by a new daybed. Its crisp cover and pillows gave the whole place a clean, cheerfully cosmopolitan flair.
“Thanks.” He waved at a desk he’d built out of some planks and cinder blocks he must’ve salvaged from behind the shed. “Got my little command central over there,” he pointed out.
He’d set up a laptop computer and a lamp. There was even a wireless Internet connector complete with blinking lights. “How did you manage that?” I asked, surprised.
I’d never tried, just assumed we were out of range back here in the woods. “Figured I’d give it a go,” he replied, waving at a new cell phone in a charging stand on a windowsill. “Turns out there’s a new tower across the lake, wireless access as good as a phone line.”
I’d never noticed the tower, either; it must’ve gone up over the winter. But it meant I could call Jemmy, a big improvement over driving all the way up here to check on him.
“Excellent,” I said, writing his cell number on a napkin. Then another thought struck me. “How’re you getting back and forth to town, anyway?”
“Necessity’s a mother.” He stuck his thumb in the air while taking a few steps in place to pantomime walking and hitching.
Which I thought sounded risky but he just waved me off when I tried to object to it. Together we went outside, where the dogs had finished investigating every deer-scat pile, rabbit warren, and porcupine trail on the path leading into the forest. Now they lounged under the hemlocks near the cottage.
“How’s the kid?” Jemmy asked.
Sam, he meant. “About the same, I guess. All I really know is that I don’t know what to do. He’s headed down a hard road and I can’t seem to stop him. We all want to help him but if we do something like not drinking around him, it just makes him angry.”
Jemmy grimaced. “Well, sure it does. I mean come on, let’s say you get diabetes so I start prickin’ my finger six times a day, how’d that make you feel? Or hey, how about this, you need a transplant so I go get a new kidney put in, start actin’ like now all your troubles are over. Would you like that?”
“No. Of course I wouldn’t. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
We stood there a minute in the spring sunshine, soaking it in. “You try that auxiliary group they got?” he asked. “Al-Anon? Bunch of whiners, I heard.”
They weren’t. But they’d been at it so much longer than I had, most of them, that it scared me to listen to them: what they’d been through, what I still had to look forward to.
“I knew a guy once,” Jemmy said, “real rummy, you know the type. Sorry,” he added at my expression. “Anyway, he quit drinking, just one day up and checked himself into a place. And you want to know what he said afterwards?”
“Yes.” Despite the sting of the word “rummy,” I still wanted to hear. Such stories to me
were like grainy old news film of men walking on the moon: people had done it.
People could. “He said it was like giving up,” Jemmy went on. “Like just puttin’ up the white flag and takin’ whatever came next ’cause at least you don’t have to do that anymore. What you been doing.”
His voice took on an echo of the rhythms I remembered from the street and made me feel briefly homesick for those times, the good old days before everything happened. But that thought led me back to his current predicament.
“So everything’s still okay here?” Seeing me begin heading for the truck, Monday the Labrador scrambled to her feet.
“So far,” said Jemmy. Prill the red Doberman stayed where she was in a nest of evergreen boughs. A blue jay let out its harsh call from somewhere in the woods.
“Maybe Henderson’s lying low,” he added. “Letting the Cory Trow thing settle awhile, you know?”
Maybe. Or maybe not. Jemmy went on, “Anyway, thanks again for letting me stay here. I know it’s kind of awkward for you and I’m sorry about that.”
Discovering his corpse would be awkward, too. “If you’re really sorry you can prove it by lying low for a while yourself.” I came to a decision, took a deep breath. “Just…somewhere else. Take off and let me try to do something about Henderson for you. Maybe I can still…”
Get Walter Henderson sent to jail, I meant to finish. Nail him with an accusation I wouldn’t have to back up with a history lesson, one that reflected just as badly on me as it did on him.
Put him where he can’t hurt you, I added to Jemmy mentally. Fix this for both of us.
Because some secrets are better kept. I turned from watching the jay’s flight. “I’m just trying to help…Jemmy?”
Trees, water, sky. The jay cried distantly again. I rushed inside but of course he wasn’t there, then back to where the path led into the trees, calling for him.
No answer. In the silence I turned helplessly, knowing now that his peril had been even more real than I’d understood.
