by Sarah Graves
Past the post office I dropped my cup and cruller wrapper in a trash bin, then went into the beauty salon called the Ship’s Snipper and begged the hairdresser there for twenty minutes of her time. If she couldn’t help me, I told her, I intended to buy a razor.
“Oh, my,” she replied, horrified. The way I looked, she probably thought I meant to cut my own throat. “I’m sure we can do better!”
I sat obediently in the swivel chair by the shampoo sink, letting her wash carefully and then comb out my remaining tresses with hands gentle as an angel’s. “There,” she said when she’d finished. “It looks,” she added hesitantly, turning me so I could see, “…streamlined.”
Um, sure. Like a bullet is streamlined, especially if the bullet has been sewn together haphazardly and has an orange stripe painted down the middle; she’d managed to avoid getting the stitches wet, so the Betadine cleanser remained.
What I resembled most was a refugee from a punk rock band, minus any possible musical talent. Stepping back outside, I felt the breeze touching portions of my neck that hadn’t seen daylight in twenty years; she’d buzz-cut it up the back and snipped the bangs off into tiny wisps. It was a boy’s haircut, really, and it made me feel unrecognizable.
But I still recognized myself. I wondered if, after what I planned to do and say tonight, anyone else would. Thinking this, I turned my steps toward Bert Merkle’s place in South End; maybe the old crackpot would be able to remember something more about Fred Mudge’s kidnapping, I thought.
Besides, I needed to fill the afternoon somehow. Ellie had taken Lee to her own pediatrician for a follow-up visit, and as for starting on any more home repairs, I’d as soon have taken a hammer to my head.
The rotting brown stubs of wharf pilings stuck up through the green water of the inlet at half-tide, below the foliage of early lupines massing along its banks. The fresh air helped my headache for a while; climbing the final hill between big new houses rich with custom windows and terraced gardens, I felt almost normal.
But the throbbing in my skull roared back with an awful vengeance as I knocked and waited for Bert Merkle to come to the door of his little trailer. It sat on a flat quarter-acre of land in a warren of narrow streets, surrounded by so much junk—cars, barrels, crates, and unidentifiable stuff—the place looked like a hazardous-waste facility; his neighbors, I decided, must be about ready to commit murder themselves.
“Who’s there?” his rough voice demanded from inside. The door creaked open and Bert peered narrowly out at me, the watery blue eyes in his craggy old face suspicious.
He was wearing a tinfoil hat. From behind him on a table piled high with booklets and newsletters, a shortwave radio let out a series of squeals and crackles.
He observed my wounded head without surprise. “Got to you, did they? I keep sayin’ that. Sneak right up on you, burrow right in. Split yer skull wide open sure as if they were usin’ an axe.”
At the moment, that was just what it felt like. “Can I come in?”
He backed away from the door. “Sure, sure. Always glad to help out a fellow sufferer. You shoulda had one o’ these.” With a nicotine-stained index finger, he indicated the foil headgear. “Siddown, take a load off. Want a beer?” Without waiting for an answer he opened the trailer’s tiny refrigerator.
“No, thanks. Really, I shouldn’t…well, all right.” It was a root beer. I pressed the icy-cold bottle to my temple, sighing, before draining half of it while Bert looked on with satisfaction.
“Hits the spot, doesn’t it?” He sat across from me, twiddled a dial on the shortwave. The squeals faded. “Now, what’s up?”
The booklets and flyers were all about government plots to hide The Others Among Us, plus related topics.
“I was wondering about that guy you saw getting shoved into a car on Water Street,” I began.
Now that I was here, asking Bert about it seemed…well, let’s just say that in person he appeared even less reliable as a witness. But I didn’t have much else to talk about with a man whose reading material included a book called Our Alien Visitors and a paperback entitled Ray-Proofing Your Own Home: A New and Improved Guide to Keeping Them Out of Your House and Head.
Thus, I supposed, the hat. Bert got up and rummaged in the refrigerator again, turning his back on me. Besides the tinfoil beanie, I noticed wires from a metal box the size of a cigarette pack in his shirt pocket leading to tiny earplugs in his ears.
Turning back, he saw me looking at them. “Don’t ask,” he said resignedly, and I decided not to. Keeping Them Out of Your Head, apparently, required equipment.
“The fellow,” I reminded him, “with the mustache.”
“Right, right.” He sat again. There was barely enough room at the table for two, especially because the walls of the tiny trailer were covered with bookshelves. Scanning them, I expected more crackpot material.
But the books were mathematics texts. “Saw him coming down the street, saw the car pull up. Fellow got out, grabbed the one with the mustache, shoved him in. Drove away.” He shook his head, frowning. “Not sure what else might’ve happened. Not certain-sure, anyway. Tires spun, I remember that. Not much else, though,” he added in apology.
“Really,” I replied evenly. “Do you remember anything else about the fellow? The one with the mustache. Tall, short? Blond hair? Or dark?”
Bert Merkle made as if to scratch his head thoughtfully but when his fingers encountered tinfoil he let his hand drop again. “Nope. Can’t say I do. Blond, maybe. Tall fella. Real tall, and he was wearin’ a puffy jacket. Pale blue. My memory isn’t what it used to be, though.”
“I see.” I regarded him silently. In return he offered a big smile and another root beer.
“No, thanks.” I got up. “I won’t take any more of your time. I can see you’ve got a lot of reading to do.”
At this his smile grew knowing. And forgiving, as if I were the one lying through my teeth. The thought hadn’t occurred to me before that maybe the story about Mudge getting grabbed on Water Street really was just as unreliable as the rest of Merkle’s tall tales, that it might be a crock like Merkle himself.
But now it did. Except for the table full of literature, the trailer was neat and clean though obviously impoverished. Bert’s clothes, threadbare and patched, didn’t quite fit him, the frayed thrift-shop sweater too large and his shoes worn at the heel. One trailer window was broken, the hole filled with bloopy orange goo of the kind usually used to stop water leaks.
I looked at the bookshelves again. Several of the texts bore the author’s name on the spine. The titles were in English but were as incomprehensible to me as ancient Greek, and one of them actually had Greek letters in it, or something like them.
Bert smiled, ducking his head briefly as if I’d caught him at something. “In my old life,” he explained, waving at the shelf. It was his name on the textbooks; he’d written them. “I was a mathematics professor once,” he added. The one good chair in the place was a Harvard chair, black with the school’s emblem in gold on the backrest. It barely fit in the fake-wood-paneled corner by the junky lamp he’d set up next to it.
A flat footstool held a chessboard. An old pair of reading glasses lay on the board, whose chess pieces were set up in the middle of a game, awaiting the next move.
They were my father’s spare reading glasses. I recognized them from the strip of blue painter’s tape he’d used to repair them. At the sight of them, suddenly everything about Bert Merkle seemed to mean something different than it had a moment earlier; for one thing, my father suffered fools so ungladly you’d think there was a bounty on them.
I moved to pick up the glasses, to bring them home. But Merkle shook his head. “He’ll be back,” he said, meaning my dad. “He’s two moves from checkmate. So he thinks,” he added.
I stared at him. “So,” I managed, “what’s with the act?”
The whole nutcase-with-the-tinfoil-hat business, I meant, because it was obviously false. Bert chuck
led sadly.
“Maybe I just like the flying-saucer nut character better than the one about the math genius gone awry,” he replied with a shrug. “Tragically driven mad by the wild, theoretical reaches of his own abstruse research because…some things Man wasn’t meant to know,” he intoned.
His eyebrows arched sardonically. “In other words, it’s better to be ignorant.”
“I see,” I stammered, though I didn’t. All I really understood was that there was more to Bert Merkle than met the eye, a story behind him that I would probably never hear all of.
But I was figuring out now how somebody else might’ve made use of it. “So if a new person in Eastport were to ask a local who the craziest guy in town is—” I began.
He made an ironic little bow. “Yours truly.”
His Maine accent, I noticed, had faded steadily as our conversation progressed. Now he was a fellow who’d pahked his cah in Hahvard yahd, even though quite a while ago.
Then I noticed something else. Everything in the trailer was worn and shabby. But the shortwave radio looked brand-new. As if someone had given Bert Merkle some money lately, and he’d bought the radio with it.
Money for something. Like perhaps telling a story about Fred Mudge being grabbed up and shoved into a car on Water Street? Suddenly I felt certain Merkle had never seen Mudge at all, grabbed or otherwise. The episode had never happened.
Only I had been expected to believe it because it jibed with what I thought was going on. Only I had been meant to hear the tale and…
But what had I been meant to do, and by whom?
“Who paid you to tell that story?” I asked Merkle, suddenly furious. “Who’s jerking me around?”
He shook his head regretfully at me. Someone had paid him enough to buy not only the radio, but his loyalty. And to me he owed nothing. “You should take care of that injury,” he advised, eyeing my scalp.
A cabinet door in his tiny galley kitchen stood open a small crack, enough for me to glimpse cans of cat food stacked inside. Off-brand cat food. And he didn’t have a cat.
On the counter by contrast stood a bag of groceries, some unpacked and ready to be put away. Cheese, oranges. Coffee, and a sirloin steak.
And that root beer. It took money to buy groceries. Suddenly I felt dizzy, and not only because of the headache. He offered me one of the booklets from the kitchen table strewn with them.
What THEY Want was the title.
Good question. Angrily, I went out.
When I got home I grabbed a bottle of aspirin and swallowed three tablets, brain bleed be damned. Then I got my car keys, fired up the Fiat, and took off out of there; luckily my father was on the roof again and Ellie was still at the pediatrician’s, or they’d probably have tried to stop me.
And the result wouldn’t have been pretty, because Jemmy had lied to me. He hadn’t trusted me to get him out of his jam; he’d thought I might decide to hang up on him, old-friendship-wise. It would’ve been the smart thing to do; if he weren’t around, all my troubles were over in the tale-telling-to-prosecutors department.
Permanently not around, that is, because dead men don’t tell any. I could’ve let Henderson kill Jemmy and presto, instant crime-free history for yours truly.
Thinking this, I slammed the Fiat into fifth gear and stepped on it, slowing only for the speed trap just beyond the end of the causeway and hitting the gas again once I got to Route 1.
You little bastard, I cursed him mentally as I swung hard through the S-turns in Robbinston. You little…
On the straight stretch toward Calais, I really let it rip. The Fiat leapt gratefully forward, seeming to elongate as its engine snarled, doing what it liked best. Soon enough the timing belt would break again, or the head gasket would blow, sending the car on yet another flatbed journey to a repair shop in Bangor or beyond. But for now…vroom.
By contrast the bumpy two-mile dirt road to the cottage was a treacherous tiptoe through the equivalent of a minefield; the Fiat’s undercarriage was so low, it would take little more than a pebble to rip the muffler off. While I negotiated it I thought again about Jemmy, and cursed him even more forcefully.
Because now I knew he’d done it all: following me and Ellie, faking attacks, two on me and one on Sam. Faking the kidnapping of Fred Mudge, even, and of Trish and the baby, too.
All to make sure I’d keep trying to put Henderson behind bars. Until Jemmy pushed it all too far and things started happening much faster than he expected. He got Trish, Mudge, and the baby hidden away somewhere, pretending they’d been snatched.
But then Henderson snatched him. And Henderson would’ve wasted no time learning the location where Jemmy had stashed the others. So he now had all of them—Jemmy, plus everyone who might believably have repeated whatever it was that Cory Trow had known about Henderson—and I was fresh out of miracles.
Finally reaching the lake, I pulled the Fiat under a canopy of spruce trees and shut off the engine. In the silence the cooling engine’s tick-tick-tick was the only sound. Unlocking the cottage I paused, reluctant to go in.
But at last I stepped inside. Sunlight lay in bright squares on the red-checked tablecloth. In a glass jar, a bouquet of forsythia twigs from the bushes I’d planted up here two summers ago was just opening.
I bit my lip. I’d come here hoping for comfort, a moment of peace in the midst of grief, frustration, and fear. But all I got was Jemmy again; his industrious, adaptable nature, his ingenious way of making things workable in almost any setting.
His liking for flowers. I wanted to cry but it would’ve made my head hurt worse, so I swallowed down my tears and instead went outside, unable to stop remembering the last time I’d seen him. Leaving the cottage, talking about Sam, walking to the car and arguing with Jemmy about how maybe the safest thing would be for him to leave.
Leave and let me help him; the memory made me cringe. Fat chance; Jemmy must have been worried I might tell Walt Henderson where he was, after which there would be no more worries about him talking to Witness Protection Program people.
About me or anyone else. A few chunks of birch lay on the driveway, one of them the one that hit me; I could tell by the blood still on it. Picking it up, I hurled the club-shaped chunk as far as I could into the woods.
Finally I walked down to the lake. A hundred yards out still floated the buoy hooked to the dock footing Ellie and I had lost, a red-and-white-striped wooden lozenge bobbing gaily like a flag from a happier time. Watching it, I wondered if Jemmy had ruined the place, if I would ever be able to come here without thinking of him.
And I wondered if after tonight I would still be welcome. Returning to the car, I paused once more to gaze at the clearing where only a day earlier I’d stood so innocently, bickering with Jemmy and watching the dogs as they…
Then I stopped short, remembering. Monday had gotten up and wandered down to the water. But Prill the Doberman had remained in her nest of pine boughs, pleasantly relaxed.
Prill, whose suspicious nature made her leap to her feet if a new mailman climbed our back porch. Whose worried snarl could be triggered by a strange voice on the answering machine or an unfamiliar truck driver delivering a package.
Who under no circumstances would’ve stayed in her bed had anyone besides Jemmy and me been here in the clearing with her. Because she was the perfect alarm system, one I was beginning to understand.
She wasn’t vicious, not in the least. It was just that the shock of being a neglected stray was wearing off now, so she was remembering her earlier training.
Guard dog training. She’d have gotten up and threatened a stranger. And…no wind had been blowing. I remembered that much very clearly. And no wind blowing meant no branch blown down.
It was Jemmy who’d hit me.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subj: New info
Dear Dave,
Interesting find here, and I thought I’d be
tter let you know right away. In the course of his local genealogical work, Lang’s come up with a cache of letters. First glance says they’re from a servant girl in Eastport to her sister in Halifax and here’s the bombshell—she seems to have worked in the Key Street house.
At the right time, no less. Amazing, I know, and I suppose it’ll evaporate upon closer examination, as these too-good-to-be-true coincidences always do.
Still, Lang’s copying them now and I’ll send them along ASAP for you to look at when you have a moment. He’s terribly excited about being able to contribute, but if we’re going to have to let him down, as I fear we will, sooner’s better.
On a personal note, we’ll both be awfully glad to see you when you come to meet the Tiptree woman in Eastport. You’ll stay with us? We’ve a guest room all ready—plush as the Ritz, Lang likes to say and we’ll feast together like kings.
Really, Dave, you’d like it a lot here. These Maine Yankees don’t miss a trick, and yet they’re immensely kind to a pair of confirmed old bachelors—that’s what they call us!—like Lang and me. It’s so quiet here, too, peaceful and safe as houses even when walking alone at night.
Which I’m about to do, a couple of miles through the silent streets. Nightly constitutional, must take care of my health, so commandeth the other old bachelor.
Watch for the letters by overnight express. You should have them day after tomorrow, latest. Best from Lang as usual.
Horace
At eight o’clock that night, I wished I were anywhere else, even atop a stepladder. But instead we’d all gathered in Walter Henderson’s barn, just as I’d arranged.
The drywall enclosure of the office space Cory Trow’s body had fallen into had been removed, the two-by-four framing bashed apart and taken away. Scraps from the demolition work littered the floor in that area. Otherwise the barn looked the same as it had when Ellie and I were here last.
