Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  “I’ll make myself scarce,” he assured me. “Don’t worry about that.”

  Wade had his own little house on Liberty Street, to which he repaired when he wanted to throw an all-male bash, bourbon and cigars. Or if he just wanted a stretch of solitude. Early on, I’d felt rejected when he did it, but then I noticed two facts: (a) his mail and his packages kept coming to my place, and (b) sooner or later, so did he. If—when—we got married, I would want him to keep the place on Liberty Street.

  And so would he. “Meanwhile,” I went on, “the power in the house is …”

  But then I stopped. We were cresting the hill on Key Street, under the big old maples looming massively along the sidewalk.

  “… out,” I finished. “Or it was.”

  Beaming through the branches, turning the new, transparent maple leaves a luminous gold-green, every window in the house blazed. All but the ones in Sam's room; he must have woken up and switched his off, not realizing that the rest were on, too.

  Monday woofed suspiciously once and fell silent as she caught our scent; when we got inside she did a doggy buck-and-wing in the hall to greet us, then settled back into her bed.

  Raines hadn’t returned. “Lucky for him,” I said grimly as Wade got a beer from the refrigerator and took it to the dining room to survey the damage. “When I get hold of him …”

  “Um, Jacobia?” Wade's voice sounded curious. “How big a hole did you say he made in here?”

  I’d been turning out lights, but at his tone I stopped and went into the room. And wished I hadn’t: half an hour earlier, the gap in the plaster had been about two feet square. But in my absence, the old-house domino effect had gone to work with a vengeance: with such a sizable section of old plaster missing—and therefore not available to hold the rest up against the forces of gravity—a whole section of wall between the door to the butler's pantry and the window pantry had collapsed.

  In other words, a two-foot square hole—not minor, but it had been manageable—had expanded to six-by-twelve: disastrous.

  “Oh,” I said inadequately.

  “Now, don’t panic,” Wade said, seeing my face.

  “I’m not panicking,” I said.

  Also, I wasn’t screaming. But I felt like it. Ragged ends of plaster chunks hung from the ceiling trim and dangled along the window, clinging only there by virtue of the strands of horsehair still embedded in them.

  “Inside the fortunately very solid containment vessel that is my body, I am exploding,” I said carefully.

  “Let's just go make ourselves a few scrambled eggs and an English muffin,” Wade said, putting his big hand on my shoulder. “And a couple of double whiskies. I can open the Lyman press in the morning.”

  And that, in a nutshell, is Wade. To him, disaster is green water over the helm and a fire in the engine room; little else signifies.

  “Right,” I said. There was nothing to be done about it now, anyway. So I went around turning off the rest of the lamps, glancing into Raines's room to make sure he hadn’t sneaked back in.

  He hadn’t, but his duffel still lay by his neatly made bed; that and his eyeglasses, still out on the dining room table, told me he would return to the scene of the crime sooner or later.

  And when he did, boy, was he ever going to be sorry.

  Wade and I had whiskey and eggs at the kitchen table, Monday delicately accepting the little bits of muffin and egg I fed her.

  “People giving you a hard time, huh?” Wade asked.

  Now that he was here, I felt the muscles in my shoulders and neck relaxing. The house had an entirely different feel about it when he was in it.

  I shrugged. “Not so bad.” Wade had warmed the whiskey very carefully in a saucepan, and I could sense it putting a fuzzy, artificial blur on my miseries. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of it left in the bottle.

  “This visitor guy. All the house repairs. And Jared Hayes.” Wade knew how caught up I’d gotten in that old story.

  “Still feeling spleeny about it, are you?”

  Spleeny: a downeast term for being jittery without cause. Most of the time Wade let me alone about it, for which I was grateful; if he had been solicitous on the topic I’d only have felt more foolish.

  “And Sam. Really it's him I’m most worried about,” I said.

  Wade eyed the second half of my muffin. I handed it to him. “I probably shouldn’t be so paranoid that Sam's going to turn out like his dad,” I said. “I mean, after they made Victor, I think they broke the petri dish they fished him out of.”

  Wade chuckled. “Sooner or later any young guy gets wild over girls, Jake. Sam’ll get through it, just like he's gotten through everything else.”

  Everything else: like being dyslexic, getting addicted to a variety of drugs and kicking them, growing up in a household that had been perpetually at war. I could argue that Sam deserved a little irresponsibility, a little selfishness. As a child he’d had to be as sensitive as a cat's whisker just to survive.

  But it made me nervous. “Did you? Get wild about girls when you were his age?”

  Wade looked down at his plate. “Well, I was a little busy. Not too much time to raise hell. Of any kind.”

  Wade's own dad had been a hell-raiser there at the end of his life, only the hell he’d raised had been with his fists. He’d been beaten to death in a brawl in Derry; after that, with a mother and younger sister to support, Wade dropped out of school and went to work on a fishing boat.

  “I used to feel cheated, tell you the truth. Never dated any girls, figured I was missing out on something. But now I know.” He smiled quietly, poured the last half inch of spirits from the saucepan into his shot glass.

  “Know what?” Wade never talked about this stuff much.

  He looked up, still smiling. “That I was waiting for you.”

  And there it was; he would go along so silently, sometimes, that I would start wondering. Or he would go to Liberty Street for a week. Then he would blind-side me with something so simple and matter-of-fact, I wondered only how I’d gotten so lucky.

  Wade got up and stacked our plates and silverware in the sink. “Don’t let Victor give you too much guff,” he advised. “A lot of shipping coming into the harbor this week. I don’t have time to take off, find Victor, punch him in the nose.”

  That was another thing, the psychological place Wade located my ex-husband: in the margin where he belonged.

  “I’ll remember,” I promised, and he ruffled my hair easily.

  “Good.” He pointed at my glass. “Now finish that up.”

  Once the whiskey was gone, we went to bed, Wade wrapping his arms around me before falling almost instantly into the sleep of a man who has spent all day working hard outdoors.

  And so, much to my surprise, did I. And whether it was the whiskies or my relief at having Wade home off the ocean that made me sleep so hard, I’m not sure; all I know is that the next time I opened my eyes it was— egad!—eight in the morning.

  Wade had gone out already—the new shotgun-shell reloading press had been opened and hauled upstairs to the ell workshop, the carton it came in broken down and stowed with the rest of the recyclable stuff—and so had Sam. Raines's room remained empty, but his duffel was still here and so were his glasses.

  And the house felt very silent, as if the spirit world had gone on hiatus. All of which might have made for a day in which I could just possibly get the dining room repairs going, but in the kitchen, Eastport's police chief Bob Arnold sat waiting for me at the table: drinking coffee, eating a doughnut, looking unhappy.

  Very unhappy. Also, sooty and exhausted. “Another fire?” I asked, and he nodded glumly.

  “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a firebug in town. But what else is new?”

  Because it was summer, he meant; in Eastport it was the dark side of an old tradition. Burning fields of tinder-dry grass from the year before, heaping last autumn's leaves in bonfires, and on the mainland searing off acres and acres of old bluebe
rry shrub to make way for fresh growth: all of it remained common practice.

  Every year, too, a few houses went up in flames; unoccupied, mostly, but sometimes not, and tattling on a firebug was as good as putting up a placard: BURN MINE. Tradition wasn’t all church suppers and the Fourth of July in downeast Maine.

  It was why a grass fire had made George Valentine so angry. But that wasn’t what Bob Arnold wanted to talk to me about. “You had a guest? Jonathan Raines?”

  The past tense alerted me. “What's happened to him?”

  Drinking with Mapes, maybe, or poking his nose where someone decided it shouldn’t go. I thought about the possibilities for Raines's current whereabouts: the hospital or jail. Arnold eyed me, his round, pink face full of imminent bad news.

  “Seem all right to you when he left, this Raines fellow? In his right mind, and so on?”

  Uh-oh. “Bob, what is it?”

  He put his cup down. “Looks like last night, at midnight or so, he went off the end of the dock. Drowned.”

  A thump of disbelief hit me. “But… how do you know? I mean, are you sure it was him? You’ve found a body?”

  If they had, it could’ve been the other one, I was already thinking. The one who’d gone off the bluff at North End. Hoping, because Raines was so troublesome that by then I’d have done anything to get rid of him; his boyish charm was a point in his favor, but even I drew the line at torn-down walls.

  The thought of his face, though, blue and motionless … and his Ph.D. work. Now, I thought irrationally, it would never be finished.

  “Oh, Bob.” Suddenly I was heartbroken. “Are you sure?”

  “ ’Fraid so. Wore a vest, did he? Fancy one, a lot of small pockets in it, like for fly-fishing?”

  “You mean he isn’t even recognizable?”

  I don’t know why that felt as if it made things worse. Maybe because I could see Jonathan's face so clearly in my mind's eye: handsome, and with a quiet kind of competence half hidden behind the youthful features. A face with a future … but not anymore. Monday came up and pushed her cold nose anxiously into my hand, sensing my distress.

  “I mean,” Bob said gently, “so far the vest is all we’ve got. Couple of fellows working on a dragger in the boat basin saw him; they were up late, hoping to get out fishing today.”

  So by the time I went down to meet Wade, it had all been over. What search there would have been in the darkness would’ve halted, to start again in daylight: recovery, not rescue, because as Sam said, the cold water would finish a person off fast.

  “Put in an emergency call as soon as they saw him fall,” Bob went on. “They said he had just pitched off the end like maybe he lost his balance.”

  Which made sense timing-wise, if he’d gone out while I was asleep. “Anyone else see him?”

  “Ayuh. Teddy at La Sardina”—the Mexican place on Water Street across from the dock—“he said Raines came in eleven-thirty or so, had a drink at the bar.”

  “Just one?” I asked, but Bob didn’t know. “Teddy won’t talk about his customers, you know, ’less you ask a direct question. Even to me. He's too good a barkeep for that.” Discretion being the key to success in the bar business in Eastport, just as it was anywhere else. “He did say Raines wasn’t loaded enough to mistake the dock for a stretch of sidewalk.”

  Which happened now and again, in town. But if Raines was not drunk, there went that explanation.

  “Fell off the end of the dock,” I repeated musingly, trying to picture it. “Well, I guess it could happen.”

  In the dark, the end of that pier was a wild place, with wind gusts that could knock you off your feet and the half-glimpsed, half-felt movement of the rolling waves to upset your equilibrium, especially if you weren’t used to it. Wade handled it fine, but I kept well back from the edge myself.

  “Time we got there, there was already no sign of him. Early this morning, found the fishing vest hung up on a snag in one of the pilings. And that's all she wrote,” Bob finished in tones of regret. “Who was he, anyway? Friend of yours?”

  I shook my head. “Hardly knew him. Friend of a friend, you know how that goes.”

  He nodded wisely. “Summer complaint.”

  It was the term Maine natives used when describing summer visitors, especially ones who lingered, offering no certain date of departure.

  “Talk in town already,” he said, swallowing some coffee. “He have any problems that you know of?”

  “Talk? You mean about problems that might have made him jump off the dock?” I had to laugh at the idea; Jonathan Raines had been about as darkly brooding as your average ball-chasing pup.

  “I doubt it,” I told Bob. “He wasn’t the type.” “Which I was sure had been said of many unexpected suicides, but this time I thought it was true. “I’m sure it must’ve been an accident.”

  Another possibility was beginning to niggle at me, though. It was true that there was no guardrail on that dock. And it was a dicey spot if you lost your balance easily.

  Still, plenty of people did stand there, even at night.

  “Least his wallet was in the vest,” Bob said, “not like the other guy. Startin’ to look as if we might never find out who he was.”

  A lot people seemed to be falling into the water around here suddenly, I thought, my suspicion index rising.

  “I notified,” Bob added, “the woman on his emergency card. She's the girlfriend.”

  Oh, boy; I’d forgotten about her. She dumped me, Raines had said. “You talked to her?” I asked. “Was she …” I waved my hands to indicate emotional upset.

  Bob shook his head. “Cool as a cucumber. I doubt you’ll even hear from her,” he replied.

  “Excuse me,” said a woman from the back hall, peering into the kitchen at us.

  I hadn’t heard her at the door and neither had Monday, who blinked in affronted surprise: Where’d you come from?

  Which was my question, also. She was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, with hair dark and glossy as a raven's wing. She wore no makeup—on her, it would have been gilding the lily—but her red lips, pink cheeks, and violet eyes framed in dark fringelike eyelashes made her face as richly colorful as an oil painting.

  “I’m Charmian Cartwright,” she said, holding out her hand.

  I took it; it was cool and trembling perceptibly, her voice shaky with the effort it was costing her to keep it controlled.

  “The lady I mentioned to you,” Bob Arnold said, getting up.

  Lady was right; it wasn’t so much her costume— beige silk slacks, a tunic top in yellow with silk frog closures, sandals that looked like—and probably had cost—a million bucks.

  It was the way she wore them: perfectly. Carelessly, and yet with a great deal of quiet care. Nary a chip in her pink-beige nail polish, and if that black hair didn’t get a hundred strokes every night, I was willing to eat my hat.

  “You’re Jonathan's …” I paused, looking for the right word.

  “That's right,” she agreed, not supplying it. “I flew up as soon as I heard.” Her eyes, the same dark purple-blue as the tiny flower their color was named for, glistened with emotion.

  “Miss Cartwright, I wonder if I could have a few words with you later,” Bob Arnold said.

  She glanced sharply at him. “I’d like a few words with you, too,” she retorted, at which point any thoughts I might have been having about purely decorative value went out the window. Getting a charter to Eastport on sudden notice was no mean feat, either.

  “Please sit down,” I offered a little tardily, as Bob went out, no doubt to recover from the effects of having just met this elegant young creature.

  She did so, accepting a cup of coffee and, after a moment of hesitation, a piece of toast. “Thank you,” she murmured as I set it in front of her.

  I liked the way she ate: manners aplenty but businesslike, putting fuel in the machine. On her left ring finger she wore a gold ring with an opal in it, the stone glowing with blue fire; it was h
er only jewelery.

  Just then Sam came in with a clunk and clatter of dive gear, talking animatedly; I expected to see Maggie behind him, but it was Jill Frey. I hadn’t heard her car pull up, but it must have; oh, this was just terrific.

  “Anyone here?” Sam began, then saw Charmian and dropped a diving weight onto his foot. “Ow.”

  Behind him, Jill's ice-blue eyes narrowed for a competitive instant.

  “Where's Maggie?” I asked, feeling mean and not bothering to squelch the emotion, especially since Sam had apparently stiffed Maggie on the plans he’d made with her for this morning.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Jill said carelessly, flipping back a wisp of white-blond hair while still eyeing the stranger. “Off lifting barbells or something. God forbid she shouldn’t be able to keep up with the men, since she obviously can’t compete with the girls.” Her laugh was a brittle, dismissive sound.

  Sam had already raced upstairs; Jill wouldn’t have said that about Maggie if he’d been listening, I thought.

  Hoped. “Hurry up, Sam,” she added with irritation.

  “Coming,” he called, and when he came down his hair had been slicked back and his T-shirt exchanged for a clean polo shirt.

  “See you later, Mom,” he said, peering curiously at the woman at the table as Jill put her hand possessively on his arm.

  I could tell he was torn between wanting to know who the visitor was and anxiety to get Jill Frey out of here; he was well aware of my opinion of her.

  “Got to stop at Dad's, he owes me ten bucks,” Sam said. Then: “Jill's joined the dive class,” he added, wanting to push something positive about her. “Isn’t that great? We’re going out on Dad's boat with him to practice with the gear.”

  He smiled at Jill, who simpered at him in return, and of course I did not poke my finger down my throat right there at the kitchen table.

  “Great,” I said flatly. “Don’t let her stay underwater too long.”

  Sam ignored the clear meaning in my remark, but he heard it, and so did Jill, whose icy eyes flashed at me in sweet triumph as she tugged my son's arm. “Come on, Sam.”

  Then they were gone, and I was left with a collapsed wall, a dead houseguest, and a grief-stricken fair maiden.