Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

  I was, too; that cool-as-a-cucumber stuff Bob Arnold had mentioned was really just well-bred manners. Maybe the girl was as steel-spined and capable as her actions seemed to indicate; getting from Boston to Eastport as she had, for instance, showed some fairly machinelike efficiency.

  But she was obviously heartbroken. Despite her high color and good grooming, her violet eyes were tragic and her squared shoulders suggested a soldier marching to doom; if she let her guard down even the slightest bit, I sensed, she might lose all her desperate control.

  She bit her lip hard. “I’m sorry,” she began, but couldn’t go on; a sob escaped her. Producing a handkerchief, she dabbed her eyes with it, then gathered an inner strength I’d already begun suspecting might be considerable and straightened bravely.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” she began again, her voice shaking faintly. “But he hasn’t any family to make arrangements, you see. So I came as soon … as soon as …”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Ellie said, coming in and assessing the situation immediately. “George went down,” she went on to me, “last night when the call came. I didn’t know then who it was, or I’d have called you. They’re out again now, looking.”

  Charmian gazed brokenly at us. “You mean he hasn’t… Jon's body hasn’t been …”

  “No. The tides are strong, and there's a current around that pier. And it seems he was wearing a pair of boots?”

  Ellie looked questioningly at me. She had on her spare eyeglasses, the ones with the pink frames that made her look like an absent-minded librarian, especially with her red hair twisted into a French knot from which a few curly strands escaped.

  “Those Wellingtons,” I agreed sadly, understanding what she meant. They’d have filled with water and carried him down where the currents ran like cold submarine rivers, to sweep him away.

  “So I can’t take him—” Charmian's voice broke on the word home.

  “No. I’m so sorry to have to tell you,” Ellie pronounced kindly, but firmly, too. I remembered suddenly that as George's wife—the wife of Eastport's fire chief, that is—Ellie spoke to many people who had suffered misfortunes.

  And it would be no kindness to raise false hopes. “They may find him, and certainly they’re going to make every effort to do so. But you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that you may never be able to take his body home.”

  At this, I fully expected a sudden torrent of tears. But Charmian Cartwright received the bad news with grave dignity. Only a tiny stiffening of her shoulders betrayed how hard it hit her.

  “I see. Thank you for telling me. Would it be too much trouble to … that is, exactly what's supposed to have happened to him? Was he doing something foolish and dangerous, as usual?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that.” I decided not to mention the violin we believed he’d been looking for; it wasn’t pertinent anymore, I thought.

  “He didn’t seem careless to us,” I went on. “He was just a very nice, mild fellow, said he was researching his Ph.D. A bit absentminded-professorish, maybe,” I added as another pang of affectionate regret struck me.

  “Drat,” Ellie said. “Can you believe it?” She frowned down at the stem of her glasses in one hand, a tiny screw in the other. “Twice in two days.”

  “Give them to me, please,” Charmian said softly but in tones of command, like a schoolteacher so accustomed to obedience that it is given unquestioningly.

  Ellie looked surprised but handed them over.

  “And of course you know he was a little … well. Clumsy,” I went on. But even as I said this, I felt my memories of Raines clashing confusedly:

  Muscles, a lithe appearance, but those thick glasses, and he’d dropped that cut-glass ceiling fixture as if his fingers had been buttered. Short of money, too, yet dressed by a London shirtmaker and out of the Orvis catalog.

  “He said himself,” I went on puzzledly, “that he wasn’t the deftest person in the world. …”

  But Charmian apparently was. From a soft leather bag that looked too tiny to hold much more than a lipstick, she produced a small ornate penknife. Opened, the implement revealed a multitude of attachments, including a miniature screwdriver.

  With it, she reattached the stem of Ellie's glasses, then handed them back to her. The whole operation took approximately thirty seconds.

  “Why, thank you,” Ellie managed.

  “Go on, please,” Charmian said, closing the penknife.

  “Well. That's what they think happened. That he missed his footing in the dark or lost his balance at the edge of the pier.”

  It sounded reasonable as I said it, but Charmian stared as if I’d suddenly begun speaking gibberish. “They think he fell?”

  She turned to Ellie. “You can’t be serious. There must be some other explanation.”

  Ellie looked regretful. “Well, yes, actually. He could have jumped. I must say I don’t think that's very likely, but…”

  “But,” I put in gently, “he did mention being short of money, as well as extremely late on his dissertation. And”—I hesitated—“he’d touched briefly on his breakup with you, too.”

  “Oh, that.” She waved a manicured hand dismis-sively. “That wouldn’t have lasted. It was … I mean, surely he knew …”

  Her voice wavered; she pressed a knuckle to her perfectly even, porcelain-white front teeth.

  “We’d have reconciled in time no matter how we quarreled,” she managed. “But now … oh, Jon,” she finished brokenly, “what in the world have you done?”

  Something she’d said struck home suddenly. “You mentioned his not having any family? What about his cousins in New York?”

  The ones whose assurances, even secondhand, I’d accepted so blithely. Whose implied vouching for Raines, without my having ever even spoken to them directly about him, I’d swallowed whole, taking them as a guarantee that he would at least be harmless, if not the most forthcoming person in the world.

  “You mean he wasn’t related to them at all ?” So that if I had called them …

  Charmian looked confused; all at once I understood just how thoroughly I’d been flim-flammed. Talk about chutzpah …

  “I’ll be damned,” I said, and Ellie nodded compre-hendingly.

  “Probably he had some more moonbeams ready to spin for you,” she said, “if he got caught.”

  “But that's not important now,” Charmian insisted. “What's important is that…” She fought tears, mustered control.

  “Jon was cheerful and clever,” she declared, “and not a bit clumsy. I can’t imagine where you got that idea. He couldn’t have jumped—or fallen. Do you know what he took up last summer for a joke, just to show that he could do it?”

  Her violet eyes challenged me. “Tightrope-walking. He had already mastered rock-climbing, bungee-jumping, and parachuting.”

  She dug in the little handbag again, pulled out a snapshot. “Look,” she demanded.

  It was a shot of Raines at the edge of a snowy canyon, with what looked like half the earth and all the sky spread gloriously out behind him. He was wearing canvas shorts, thick socks, hiking boots, and a white T-shirt; the backpack he bore towered over his head, a pair of cross-country skis strapped to the pack.

  “That's Jonathan,” Charmian stated flatly.

  It made me feel a little better, that I’d gotten that much right about him: athletic. But probably nothing else. The yuppie garb he’d been wearing had been a good disguise.

  I’m an idiot, I thought at Ellie, and she shrugged minutely.

  Hey, you can’t win ’em all, she telegraphed back.

  “As for money, that's the silliest… I have enough for both of us even if we lived forever, and Jon knew that perfectly well. And as for a dissertation …”

  The girl gave the word an odd, scathing twist, then stopped troubledly, as if she’d been about to speak ill of the dead.

  Or tell a secret: that, for instance, h
e wasn’t writing any dissertation.

  “Well,” she went on, “let's just say there was no urgency about it. Furthermore,” she added with quiet emphasis, “his death was no accident. Or suicide.”

  A stab of unease pierced me. He had said someone was trying to stop him. But I’d brushed it off. “So what you’re telling us is …”

  Ellie looked significantly at me, her eyebrows raised.

  The thought had occurred to me, too, when I tried picturing the scene on that pier in the dark; that there had to be something more.

  But even now I didn’t really believe it. I still thought Jonathan Raines had fallen off the dock in a mishap, or maybe—this was a long shot, but possible—on purpose.

  And despite my own questions about either of those scenarios I thought Charmian's memory of him was obscured by grief and by her own guilt on account of their broken affair.

  Still, I wanted to know if she would come right out and say it, the word we were all thinking.

  She did.

  “Murder,” Ellie repeated as if testing the idea. “But Jake, you don’t really think …”

  “She does.” I angled my head at the ceiling.

  Charmian was upstairs in Jonathan's room; we’d decided she should stay here instead of going to a motel, so I had another guest, which I wanted about as much as typhoid fever. But I just couldn’t bear the thought of sending her to stay alone.

  Now Ellie and I were in the dining room, cleaning up chunks of plaster. Rag ends of wallpaper clung to the plaster pieces and broken sticks of lath. “What a mess,” I mourned.

  Raines's eyeglasses still lay out on the table. “He meant to come back,” Ellie said, picking them up.

  “If he was going to jump, he wouldn’t be needing them,” I countered. Experimentally, Ellie took off her own and put his on.

  “Criminy,” she said, peering through them.

  I thought she was talking about the glasses being so strong, about how if he’d been wearing them, as perhaps he ought to have been, he wouldn’t have fallen.

  “Take a look,” Ellie said, handing them to me.

  But when I put them to my eyes, I saw … nothing. Or nothing different, anyway. “Plain glass.” I got more distortion looking out through the old panes of the dining room window.

  “These are fakes,” Ellie said. “No prescription at all. But for what? So he would look more intellectual?” She peered through them again. “Or to make it look as if he needed them. Like a disguise?”

  “I don’t know, Ellie. And what difference does it make now, anyway?”

  I dropped the last chunk of plaster into a trash bag and swept up the dust, already making a mental list for the hardware store: more plaster, and new filters for the respirator I’d be wearing when the plaster dried, so I could sand it all down again without having to get in line for a lung transplant.

  And that sanding needed to be complete inside of four days, since last time I looked, the untimely death of a mysterious visitor that no one knew anything about was not grounds to cancel a Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting.

  I tied the trash bag with a wire twist—wondering if maybe I could just crawl inside the bag and stay there— and set it in the butler's pantry, which was turning into ground zero for the repair project.

  Tools, tarps, a bucket, and a jumbo packet of sandpaper like a harbinger of the dark days to come stood where the good china and crystal had resided, in the golden days before I moved here. Once upon a time, this house had been home to people of quality: vigorous businessmen and ladies whose housekeeping outranked mine by several orders of magnitude.

  Sadly I regarded the pantry shelves, where now the only eating or drinking implements were a set of plastic cutlery, paper plates, and a thermos for when we went on picnics.

  And then I spotted it, glittering in the corner beneath the low shelf: some kind of high-tech gadget. Battery-pack handle; it was obvious that it twisted, to turn the device on… .

  At the other end, the glassy, rounded tip of a long, stalky appendage glowed suddenly. Ellie peered over my shoulder to get a closer look at the thing. “Is that an eyepiece?”

  She pointed at a roundish, eye-sized aperture in the body of the thing. “May I see it?”

  She grasped the black stalklike part in one hand to keep it from waving around, held the cylindrical body of the object with the other hand, and peered into it.

  “Oh! Jacobia, it's a …”

  I’d figured it out: a fiber-optic viewing device. Victor, my ex-husband the philandering brain surgeon, had brought this sort of thing home sometimes to show to Sam, in case Sam might like to follow in his father's footsteps.

  The thought made me shudder, especially since right now Sam was with his father and, probably, one of his father's young lady friends. Victor found them even here in downeast Maine, and when he couldn’t find them, he imported them. And of course Jill Frey was with them, too.

  I frowned at the high-tech gadget. “What the heck's it doing here?”

  “Raines must have had it,” Ellie concluded. “No one else in the house would have one, would they? Sam wouldn’t, for diving?”

  “I don’t think so. He’d have been showing it to us at dinner last night if he had.” Perhaps due to his father's influence, Sam adored fancy gadgetry, could fix just about any of it, and vastly enjoyed demonstrating it for other people.

  Ellie frowned. “But what would Raines want with … Oh.”

  Her face intent, she approached what was left of the wall: a two-foot-high section of intact plaster extending upward from the floor trim. Carefully she placed the stalk's long end behind the plaster, twisted the device to make the light go on, and …

  “There's something down there.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. It's a …”

  My mind was racing. “I’ll bet Raines meant to take that wall down all along.”

  Or take some wall down, anyway, to peek behind it, in case a Stradivarius happened to be hidden there. I’d inadvertently focused his attention on this wall by removing the wallpaper, so he saw the old plaster patch centered behind my new one.

  Then he’d done just what we’d been hoping he would do: he’d seen with fresh eyes. The old patch was square, with clean, straight edges; it hadn’t been put in to fix something broken. It had been done to fill a hole that was deliberately cut.

  And he had realized this. “Oof,” Ellie said, craning her arm down. “I think there's something … What have you got in the house with a hook on the end? Maybe we can fish it out.”

  “Nuts.” I’d had enough. “Take that gadget out and stand back.” With the claw hammer I gave the remaining plaster a smack.

  Naturally, however, when you are trying to break plaster it becomes durable. So it was ten minutes and a lot of claw hammering before we got at it: a thick packet of papers bound in leather.

  An old manuscript: eagerly, we opened the cover.

  The pages were blank.

  “Well, darn,” Ellie said indignantly as Monday nosed in to find out what we were excited about: hidden dog biscuits?

  “No, Monday, there's nothing here.” I flipped through the empty pages in disgust. “Well, that's par for the course lately. Raines tore down the wall for nothing.”

  But Ellie looked dubious. “Why would anyone hide a book of blank pages?”

  I snapped the book shut, dust clouds from it billowing into the air. The soft antique-leather binding seemed to mock me with its aged look of importance, its sense of having been hidden away for some secret reason.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t care. What I do know is that the Reading Circle meeting is getting closer by the minute, and if I don’t want those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off to be full of plaster dust, I need to get busy.”

  Because it was obvious now that there was no percentage in further effort. Raines was a stranger, he’d showed up here, and now he was gone: end of story.

  Blank pages, indeed;
I yanked sharply at the last scraps of wallpaper. “And Charmian?” Ellie asked.

  “Waiting for the body to be found, that's all. And talking to Bob Arnold this afternoon. I hope he convinces her that she shouldn’t wait around forever.”

  I picked up the hammer and pulled out the rest of the broken plaster. Plaster mix, I said stubbornly to myself. Lath pieces, nails, wallpaper paste. Tools and materials for reconstructing what was broken. Doggedly, I swept up the plaster bits.

  But Ellie wasn’t ready to quit. “Fake glasses. A high-tech snooping device. And a book without words,” she said. “There's something connected about those ideas. But what's the link?”

  “They’re all part of an annoying and ultimately meaningless puzzle,” I said. “One that at the moment resembles my life.”

  I emptied the dustpan into the trash bag with an impatient shake. “Why couldn’t Jonathan Raines have picked some other house to demolish? Darn it, I wish I’d never heard of Hayes. I’ve got half a mind to burn the place down and see how he likes that.”

  Then I waited: for all the alarm clocks to go off, or the smoke detectors to begin shrieking, or the windows to slam open and closed by themselves.

  But nothing happened at all, and it struck me suddenly that my haunted old house (or my haunted old head, if you subscribed to Ellie's theory) had been eerily inactive since the power came back on.

  Or since Jonathan Raines had disappeared.

  “Why would he leave it there?” Charmian asked.

  I didn’t know how long she’d been standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs. She came into the room.

  “If he had the eyepiece and had torn down the plaster, why would he leave before he looked? He’d done all that work, so why stop at the critical moment? And if he did look, why go out just as he might have discovered something important?”

  Good questions, but I didn’t have answers to them, either. “Did you know what he was searching for?” I demanded.

  She flushed slightly, biting her lip. “Yes. An extremely valuable violin. A Stradivarius. Everyone else says there’ll be no more ever found. But Jonathan … well.”