Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  But his answer was ordinary enough. “Oh, well.” He shrugged modestly. “That's not hard. Things are usually where you expect them to be, aren’t they? If you think about it.”

  He let out a heavy sigh. “Only not this time. And the trouble is, I can almost smell it. You have no idea the difference it would make to me, and it's here, but I don’t have the tools to get at it,” he finished, his voice hardening in frustration.

  Then he caught himself. “The information, I mean,” he added. “About Jared Hayes, to write my dissertation. Get the degree.”

  “Jonathan,” I began. Stop lying to me, I was about to say to him. Play straight with us and we might even be able to help you.

  But at his mention of Hayes, the lights dimmed suddenly once more and flared again. Up in the attic, something thumped loudly and threateningly three times.

  Monday whined. “It must be unnerving,” Raines said, angling his head sympathetically. “Having things so unsettled.”

  I could have told him how unnerving it was. But Raines hadn’t confided anything, so I didn’t, either, and that worked out in the end about as well as it always does.

  “Squirrels,” I said shortly. “They get into the attic and bump the wires and knock things over.” I was annoyed, so I didn’t feel like telling him anything but a few ground rules.

  “Listen,” I began sternly. “You’re welcome to stay here—”

  Back in the city, one of Raines's cousins had once saved my bacon. I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say that when Raines's relative finished chatting with the district attorney, my wealthy client no longer had a room reserved for him at a federal prison and I wasn’t being sued anymore.

  “—as long as you want,” I finished.

  Noting my tone, Raines eyed me contritely. And mad as I was at him, I still liked this strange creature with his gold shark's tooth necklace, his thick spectacles, and custom-tailored shirts.

  “However,” I went on briskly, noting with satisfaction that my sit-up-and-listen voice still worked, “there are some things you’re going to do, and not do, from here on out.”

  I pointed an index finger. “First, you will confine yourself to library research. Manuscripts, diaries, letters, and account books and so on, things Jared Hayes left behind in the house when he vanished.”

  Raines opened his mouth to object, but I got in ahead of him; two could play that game. “But when the rubber meets the road, my friend Ellie White and I will be in the driver's seat, not you.”

  I took a deep breath. “No more blundering around in Eastport demanding that people talk to you,” I went on. “If you need that sort of question answered, and I suspect that you will, ask it of us, and we will try to find the answer for you.”

  Ellie's eyebrows went up in the wow, good plan expression she saves for when I have really outdone myself, and I felt the small burst of pride I always experience on these rare occasions.

  Thank you, I telegraphed at her. “Also, I want you to watch out in general about who you talk to, where you go. Not just when you want to know something, but all the time. And don’t argue,” I added as he made as if to object again.

  “… tanks and regulators,” Sam said to Maggie on the porch. “And a few more dive flags.”

  I closed my ears to this; the idea of Sam being underwater at all was just one of the many notions I was having to learn to ignore—some more successfully than others—in the process of cutting the apron strings.

  “Guys like Wilbur Mapes, for example,” I went on to Raines. “He's no joke, Jonathan. You should stay away from him. People around town like his dog better, because the dog at least growls before it bites you. Wilbur just turns mean in a heartbeat.”

  Raines looked impressed. But I wasn’t finished. “Finally, I don’t believe for a minute your story about your Ph.D. dissertation. I think you’re really here to try to find a certain rare violin.”

  Once more he tried to interrupt; I waved a hand at him and he fell gratifyingly silent.

  “And you won’t. But if you insist on sticking with it,” I went on, “kindly at least refrain from flat-out rubbing our noses in your denials. We’re not stupid even if we don’t live in Boston and attend graduate school, which by the way I’ve already learned that part of your story isn’t true.”

  He examined his fingernails, looking like a kid who knows he deserves the scolding he is getting.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid,” he said. “I never thought that, honestly. And your plan sounds fine, except that there's one thing you haven’t thought of.”

  “Which is?” Ellie asked.

  “That I’ve made such a hash of it already,” Raines replied. “I thought this was just going to be another small town. You know, with people dying to talk. Flattered, thrilled to be asked.”

  He shook his head. “But Eastport… well, I was too eager and people didn’t like it. And now”—he sighed heavily—“if you ask questions on my behalf, they’ll know it's for me, and they won’t answer you, either. If only there were a way to …”

  He hesitated, then seemed to gather his courage. “And there is another thing. I hadn’t wanted to tell you. It sounds so … so melodramatic. But there's someone who wants to stop me.”

  Great: now we had a villain, opposing the lovesick hero in his brave, solitary search for… Oh, for heaven's sake.

  “Jonathan, it doesn’t only sound melodramatic. It sounds absurd.” For one thing, why would a villain want to stop someone from writing a Ph.D. dissertation? “You can’t even keep your …”

  Stories straight, I was about to say. But, “Look, let's just cut to the chase, shall we? First of all, I want to know where you heard that tune you were whistling. Earlier”—I looked hard at him—“when you first got here.”

  Maggie and Sam had finished with the drysuits and were now in the back parlor powering up the computer. “While we’re on-line we can upload pictures of the jug,” Maggie said. “I borrowed my Dad's digital camera while he was up here.”

  Maggie's dad was a salesman in Bangor; he and her mom were on decent terms and he visited often. “See,” she said, “they’re on this disk. Sure wish he’d left the camera, too,” she sighed.

  I heard the computer's disk drive whirr as it accepted the pictures, which was a process I no more understood than I caught the drift of quantum physics, but it worked.

  “Great,” Sam said. “Um, you’ll write the captions?”

  “Uh-huh.” Maggie finished whatever arcane maneuvers it took to get snapshots of a two-hundred-year-old seltzer jug onto the World Wide Web, and snapped the floppy from the drive. “That's the bargain, right? I do the words, you do the numbers.”

  “You got it.” Sam was dyslexic, a handicap that made reading and writing laborious, but he drove a hard bargain; Maggie, smoothly literate, tended to low-ball. So they made a good team for the Internet auctions where they sold their finds.

  And in other ways, I thought. But I reminded myself that it was none of my business, as Raines looked puzzled.

  “Tune? I don’t know. Guess I heard it somewhere.” He tipped his head, thinking.

  Or acting as if he were trying to think, while knowing where he’d heard it.

  “Not in Boston,” he mused aloud. “I think I’d recall. Hmm, that is a riddle—maybe from you? Did you happen to be whistling it yourself when I came in? Because I’m sure I heard it when I—”

  “No, Jonathan.” My patience was wearing thin. “We all know the tune.”

  It was a dervish of a virtuoso fiddle number; local players had tried it, and although they could reproduce the melody, the tempo was demonic and in the end they all confessed that it had beaten them.

  “But I can’t whistle,” I went on, “and Sam wasn’t here, and when Monday tries to whistle all she does is spit out little dry bits of dog biscuit. So tell me the truth, for once.”

  What I wanted was the rest of the story: not just how he’d known the music or why he was here, but why
he was so sure a country fiddler named Jared Hayes had really had a Stradivarius.

  And why he thought it was still in Eastport. That was what I wanted that night, safe and sound at the kitchen table.

  Instead, as he whistled the tune again, the old music books in the library seemed to rise in my mind's eye: thickly quill-penned with eighth- and sixteenth-notes, the heavy old vellum foxed and faded but still thrillingly legible, even to me.

  The pieces, mostly dance tunes with titles like “Jo's Jig” and “Mandalay Reel,” painted a portrait of Hayes as a man with energy and style. When they were played at musical evenings put on by the Eastport Historical Society, you could almost hear him laughing merrily in the background.

  But there were darker pieces, also, as presto yet filled with minor-key flourishes and throbbingly sad melodies, hinting at an awful yearning. Like …

  “ ‘Pirate's Revenge.’ ” Raines snapped his fingers, smiling with the happy surprise of a man who has answered a difficult game-show question. “But for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how I know,” he said.

  Whereupon all the lights went out.

  And stayed out. We lit candles, which didn’t do much for our activity level; really, there are few things anybody wants to do nowadays by candlelight, with the notable exception of one thing. But Wade had not gotten back, yet.

  We called the power company to no avail as the blackout time lengthened to an hour and then another. And we played a few games, trying to tell Go To Jail from Park Place in the gloom. But we were a dull company, and finally when George stopped back to get Ellie and Maggie had gone home, we went to bed. George had promised to fix whatever had gone wrong—it wasn’t the fuse box, and no one else in town had lost power—in the morning.

  Lonesomely, I got under the covers. Of course, the house was well stocked with emergency storm supplies; after all, this was downeast Maine, where a three-day blow is referred to by the natives as “a little weather.” But candles in the bedrooms were forbidden as fire hazards and reading by oil lamp has never been a habit of mine, since the lamp wicks must be trimmed with near-microscopic precison or they stink.

  And since Raines was tired, he said, from traveling, and Sam was planning to go out early the next morning, by ten o’clock I thought everybody in the house was asleep.

  Except for me. I just lay there with my eyes open, half of me cursing Jonathan Raines for disrupting my summer and the other half still wondering curiously what the heck he was up to. Even with Monday taking up most of it, the big bed felt empty, as it always did with Wade still out on the water. I wished he would get home early, but I knew he was still several hours from shore, on a boat in the dark.

  Somewhere out there a man's body was floating, too: a man whose whole story I felt certain we hadn’t heard yet. The Coast Guard search for the fallen stranger would start again in the morning, but as Sam said, strong tides and currents could have taken the body anywhere, as they took everything that floated, sooner or later.

  Around midnight the phone rang shrilly and I jumped, but it was only Ellie. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You?”

  “Okay. Working on the quilt. The stitching is in two colors, red and blue, so you can’t see the pattern until all the quilting is finished. But it's going to be great when it's done.”

  I waited, imagining her with the quilting frame in her lap, her hands moving patiently.

  “George went out again,” she said.

  “That fire at Pirate's Cove?”

  “Uh-huh. It was arson. He just didn’t want to say so at the table.”

  “Oh,” I said, understanding immediately. Not too many topics could make George Valentine lose his temper. Arson, though …

  “So the guys are taking turns on night patrol in Eastport, and over on the mainland, too,” she said resignedly. “They are carrying,” she added, “guns.”

  Which anywhere else might have seemed like an over-reaction, but on the rural mainland, especially, night patrol could be scary duty. The midnights there were unbroken by streetlights, so dark and deep that even familiar places felt like another country. And many of the inhabited structures were miles off-road, so it was essential not to let an arsonist's habit get established.

  “George says the gun rack in his truck's not a decoration,” Ellie said, and I could see it: George's face wearing the closed, purposeful look Eastport men's faces get when they mean business.

  “He’ll be all right,” I said, thinking of Wade. When he was home he had a small business appraising and repairing firearms out of a workshop in the ell of my house.

  “I know,” she replied quickly. George was nearly as handy with a shotgun or rifle as Wade was. “It's silly, isn’t it? How we worry about them.”

  I agreed that was true, and after a while we hung up, knowing it wasn’t. Because out there in the dark, on the back roads or on the water, anything could happen.

  Anything at all: a few months earlier, three men had gone out fishing like they always did. Solid, experienced men, and the boat was fine, too. But without any warning an aft compartment filled with water: gone fishing. That time, one of the men came back and two didn’t.

  So one way and another I didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. Still, I must have dozed, because several hours later when I came downstairs, flashlight in hand, to go down to the breakwater and meet Wade when he arrived home on the tugboat, I found that the hole in the dining room wall had been vastly enlarged.

  A hammer lay on the hardwood floor beneath it. Another flashlight lay there, too, still switched on, its battery dying and its bulb emitting a weak yellow glow. Pried chunks of plaster littered the floor around it, and on the table, as if he had only taken them off for a moment, lay Jonathan Raines's pair of thick-lensed, wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Raines himself, though, was nowhere to be found; luckily for him, since if he had been there I’d have throttled him.

  But I looked everywhere, Monday padding along behind me in the silent rooms.

  And he was gone.

  3

  Furiously I pulled a sweater on and strode downtown, past the old mansard-roofed Bainbridge mansion at the corner of Key Street. Of late a sad relic with boarded-up windows and rotting trim, in its heyday a ballroom had occupied the mansion's third floor; now whenever I glimpsed it I thought of the music played there all those years ago, and of the people gorgeously dressed in ball gowns and tuxedos. Lately I found myself wondering, too, if they were all still up there somehow, dancing in the dark.

  I shook off a chill, though the night was not very cold. Funny, Raines had said when he arrived, how an item can seem to be one thing and turn out to be another.

  Yeah, I thought at him; the way you seemed at first to be a minor annoyance, and instead you’re a major pain in the tail.

  I headed downhill on Key Street toward the bay; next came a row of clapboard cottages from the 1800s, gleaming by moonlight, their window boxes brimming with flowers. At Water Street I passed the red-brick Peavey Library, its front-lawn cannon aimed at the waterfront as if to ward off any redcoats who might be returning. Across the street, the Happy Landings Café stood dark and silent, its deck umbrellas folded like the wings of sleeping birds.

  At the breakwater, Wade's boat had already arrived. Under the dock lamps, the men on the Ahoski worked to make her fast to the massive dock pilings, with lines as thick as their arms tied around the cleats on the tugboat's rail. Beyond, the moonlight sketched the wave tops with thin lines of silver; below, the dark water heaved sluggishly with the tide, reminding me again of the fellow floating somewhere out there, drowned and alone.

  The dampness made me shiver again. But then Wade appeared, ascending the old ladder up the dock's side as easily as climbing a flight of stairs. His wiry hair gleaming in the lights and his grin visible even at a distance, he hurried across the breakwater and caught me in a bear hug.

  “Hey.” Smelling of lime shaving soap and cold salt water, he pressed his ch
eek to my hair.

  “Hey, yourself.” I put my face into his down vest. “Trip go okay?”

  “Piece of cake.” He glanced back at the tubby old vessel, waved to the guy still at the helm behind the big wheel, shutting down the electricals. The bridge lights went out, the radium glow of the navigation and communications equipment on the consoles like sparks of green fire in the sudden darkness.

  “Everything good at home?” Wade slung an arm and we started back uphill. “Sam okay? And did I get a package?”

  “You got a package. I brought it in.” A new Lyman shotgun-shell reloading press, I happened to know, and it weighed a ton.

  “And Sam's fine. Well, not perfectly fine; he's got a huge crush on an unsuitable girl. I’m hoping it will fade. But…”

  I told him about the day. “So when I see him again I’m going to kill him,” I said, meaning Raines, “and that will be that.”

  I didn’t really mean it. Probably cutting his thumbs off and feeding them to the seagulls would be punishment enough.

  “But the way things are going around here, I’m going to have to host the Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting in a tent out in the backyard.”

  Wade laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that made me feel much better. “Do them good,” he said. “Fresh air.”

  By which he meant he thought Reading Circle meetings were excessively refined. “Tell you the truth, I’m a little surprised at you,” he said.

  I’d wondered about it, myself; china teacups tend to make my little finger rise in parody, and just thinking about the elastic waistband on a pair of panty hose can give me a cramp. But when winter returned and it started getting dark at two-thirty in the afternoon, and I had been wearing ice cleats on my boots for what seemed forever, the ladylike refinement portion of the program would start looking pretty good to me.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re not going to have to attend. In fact—”

  Men sometimes hovered around the edges of Reading Circle meetings, or were present as invited guests. As a rule, though, it was a girl thing.