by Sarah Graves
“All right, Jacobia,” Bob said. “Let's have a look.”
“They were right over here somewhere… .”
We picked our way between rusty bedsprings, wringer-style washing machines, rot-bottomed coal scuttles. The sheer volume of junk was overwhelming; where had I been when I saw the boots?
“You’re sure, now? The boots you saw were the same ones… .”
“I’m sure,” I said. But I was getting a sinking feeling.
I’d snagged Bob Arnold just as he was getting to his office and persuaded him to come out here with me, luring him with a bag of pastries from the IGA and a thermos of coffee.
On the ride we’d been silent, me because what could I tell him? That (a) the poltergeist or whatever it was in my old house was gone—or anyway, it had quit bothering me—but now (b) an old curse had got linked up somehow with Eastport's busiest junk collector, and the result killed Jonathan Raines?
I didn’t say anything about keeping Charmian in residence with me, either. It probably wasn’t the most sensible course of action on my part. But I knew how it felt to be a young woman in love and in difficulties, with no one to turn to; if I forgot, I had my memories of my years with Victor to fall back on. Maybe she was a pain in the neck, but I felt sorry for her, and with each passing day I was also feeling more stiff-necked stubborn about it, like the ladies of the Reading Circle who just hung in there come hell or (more often, in downeast Maine) high water.
Bottom line, I wasn’t going to dump her, but I didn’t think I needed to invite any arguments from Bob Arnold by saying so; at this point, he was so exasperated by her insistence that the search for Raines's body be continued, he was about ready to send her off the end of the dock, too.
Meanwhile, he was bone-tired after another night of trying—and failing—to catch the firebug. Happy just not to be driving, he’d ridden along contentedly enough, eating pastries and sipping coffee in a blur of fatigue. But now in the pale grey morning behind Wilbur Mapes's trailer, he wasn’t happy anymore.
Me either. No yellow boots. Mapes slammed out again, thumped down the steps. “You want to say what you's are lookin’ for, I might be able to set you on the track,” he allowed sullenly.
“Pair of boots,” Bob said. “Yellow, expensive ones. You got anything like that around here, Wilbur?”
The grassy path I’d noticed the day before led from the shed back into the fields, old pasture land bounded in the distance by windbreak cedars. Wilbur's face didn’t change.
“Nuh-uh. Pair o’ galoshes, you want them.” He eased between a car engine and a row of bald truck tires, pulled the galoshes down.
Bob looked at me. “No,” I said, wondering if the confusion of worthless things gathered here was really random, as it seemed to me, or if it mimicked some bizarre pattern in Mapes's head.
“We go in?” Bob asked, and Mapes nodded grudgingly.
“Suit yourself. Watch the dog.”
Inside, the dog was doing enough watching for all of us as we made our way through the clutter. I saw again the many valuable items, several that hadn’t been here the day before, among the hunting trophies: a Queen Anne wing chair, a pewter tankard, two long-stemmed clay tobacco pipes.
“You know the fellow?” Bob asked Mapes. “One supposed to’ve fallen off the fish pier the other night?” He didn’t mention the guns lying around; in Maine, if Mapes wasn’t carrying a weapon concealed, he didn’t need a permit.
“Ayuh,” Mapes replied, startling me. “I sold him some stuff now an’ again. Old stuff, like he ’us always lookin’ for.”
Bob ignored my urgent glance; so there was a connection. “Sold him anything lately?”
“Nuh-uh. I’d call him, I got anything I thought he wanted. Old music stuff a while back. Ain’t had nothin’ like that lately. Damn fool.”
My impatience got the better of me. “If you haven’t sold him anything lately, how is it that you’re the one who gave him the ride into town and took him up to Calais to get that replacement light fixture he’d broken? And how did you get his boots?”
Mapes turned, his eyes without expression. “Saw him on the road. Gave him a ride. Ain’t no law against it.” And you can’t prove otherwise, his empty look added mockingly.
“Don’t know about boots,” he finished. “I’m a junk man.”
But his treasures said he was more. The plain wooden table in the corner, for instance, had never been refinished; on closer inspection, it showed the rare mottling of old bird's-eye maple.
He saw me looking at it. “Folks want to get rid of stuff, they’re gettin’ new. Take it off their hands, couple of bucks.”
Right, and because Mapes was just a junk man, no one thought about the stuff maybe being worth larger sums, the way they might if a city boy like Raines came around trying to buy it from them.
“You’re a front man, aren’t you?” I asked sharply. “A rep for the antique buyers. To the local people around here, you’re the guy.”
It was a good arrangement, profitable for Mapes and for his buyer in the city. And it could be how Mapes and Raines had come into contact in the first place. But I couldn’t help thinking about the people whose houses that good stuff in Mapes's trailer had come out of: houses that needed reroofing, new furnaces, and insulation. People, mostly elderly, could badly use the cash the old stuff would bring at the Sotheby's auction.
Mapes just shrugged. “Wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, if I was, it wouldn’t do me no good to get rid of Raines. Ain’t that what you’re sniffin’ around about? Think you saw them boot's o’ his’n an’ I had somethin’ to do with what happened to ’im?
“Anyway,” he went on, turning away, “you done? Morning's wastin’, I got things to work at, man's got to make a living.”
“Yeah, we’re done, Wilbur,” Bob said. “You hear anything in your travels, might shed some light on a certain subject, I want to know that I am going to hear from you.”
“Ayuh,” Mapes replied dully and unconvincingly. “Get on with you, now, I got to let the dog out.”
We went, backing down the rutted drive past the big sign in red letters, whose message despite all Wilbur's guns I now found somewhat less convincing: NOTHING HERE IS WORTH YOUR LIFE.
Maybe so, but back in the city many of my wealthier clients had been collectors of old things, and while none would exactly have given their lives for that pewter tankard, I knew some who would have used the idea as a starting point in the bargaining process.
I gripped the wheel while the washboard road beat hell out of the car's suspension. “Bob, those boots were there. And Mapes is not precisely the most upright local citizen. For Pete's sake, he goes around tricking people into selling him valuable things, probably not giving them anywhere near what they must be—”
“Wrong.” He said it mildly but definitely.
“What?” I glanced at him, then jerked my eyes back to the road as something white flashed across it: the flaglike tail of a twelve-point buck, bounding over the roadway and into the brush on the other side. “Did you see that deer?”
“Uh-huh. Big old fella, wasn’t he? Blackflies start drivin’ ’em out toward the roads this time o’ year.”
He watched it until it blended into the undergrowth. “Wilbur pays value. Him and his sister, only ones do, in my opinion.”
We reached the paved road. “Used to be a dope grower,” Bob went on. “Out on all that good land, the back of beyond.”
Those fields behind his house, I realized as Bob added:
“I broke him of that. Stove in his boat bottom three or four times before he got the idea maybe someone was trying to save him a whole lot worse trouble. Him and his pals.”
“Pals?”
“Ayuh. Hecky Wilmot and a guy named Howard Washburn, lives even farther out in the sticks than Wilbur.”
My eyebrows went up. “Hecky a dope smuggler? But he's …”
Way too old, I was going to say, forgetting that the youth culture had not yet arrived
in downeast Maine; in Eastport no man is too old for much of anything until he is permanently horizontal.
“Oh, ayuh,” Bob said. “Hecky was a hell-raiser till he got the literary bug. Still got a streak of it, you ask me. Eye for the main chance, what's good for Hecky, and hell with the rest.”
We passed the grange hall, got to Route 1. “But Wilbur's been pretty straight with me since that one little interlude we had,” Bob went on. “Maybe I’m too soft, but I don’t like to think he's involved with any really bad business.”
In front of the police station he turned to me. “I believe you about those boots, you know. But he could’ve found ’em on the beach.”
“Then why is he lying about them? Because he is, Bob, and that means he's involved somehow.”
A carful of kids went by, the driver snapping a lighter. Bob didn’t let his eyes follow them, but he noticed.
“I said that I didn’t like to think it, not that he couldn’t be. But I’ll tell you one thing, those boots aren’t on his place now. Mapes has some bad qualities, but bein’ a damn fool was never among ’em, that I’ve noticed.”
In other words, even if Bob got officially involved— beyond, I mean, looking for the body of an accidental drowning victim or possibly a suicide—at this point it wouldn’t do any good.
“Those boots,” he said, “are long gone.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks for riding with me.”
“Thanks for the doughnuts.” He got out, straightened his shoulders against the effects of a sleepless night, and strode toward the little storefront building that was Eastport's police department headquarters. Then I remembered.
“Hey, Bob. The other one you said pays right for people's things, Mapes's sister?” The idea of his having sprung from a human family at all seemed unlikely, but I guessed he must have.
Bob turned, a pen and a notebook already in his hand: noting the plate number of the car with the lighter-flicking kid in it.
“Oh, yeah. Lives up on Hart Road? Big old California-lookin’ house, used to be a lot of old back-to-the-land hippies there?”
The other shoe dropped. “Clamshell Cove.” I knew the place.
“Mapes's sister,” Bob said, tucking away his notebook, “she only dabbles in antiques, though. Mainly, she builds musical instruments. From around Boston, originally. Name's … Tarnation. What the heck is it, again?”
I knew that, too, drat the luck. Charmian had mentioned it.
That wasn’t why I recalled it so clearly, though. It’d been on my mind in another context entirely.
But I let Bob have the satisfaction of snapping his fingers, anyway. “Got it,” he said. “Lillian Frey.”
“Funny how his clothes keep showing up, but not him,” said Wade Sorenson. He was disassembling a Remington shotgun in his workshop in the upstairs ell. It was the only modern place in the house and I came here sometimes when I needed to see what a shipshape building looked like: square corners, level floors.
“Yeah.” I sat on a milk crate by the steps leading up to the storage area. Wade had installed overhead lighting, benches for the big tools that did the metal-grinding and stock-cutting procedures, and the new Lyman shotgun-shell reloading press.
“But the thing is this,” I said. “Bob Arnold hasn’t got a clue how cutthroat the antiques business can be. And he's got a soft spot, for some reason, for that pack rat Wilbur Mapes.”
“Who you think is involved?” Wade wound bubble-wrap around the shotgun parts, in preparation for shipping the weapon back to its owner.
“Well, how could he not be?” I asked impatiently. “Bob would think so, too, if he knew how much money might be at stake. That is, he does know. But that kind of money just isn’t real to him. He feels fat and happy on thirty-four grand a year, plus the money Clarissa earns.”
Bob's wife is a defense attorney. But around here, that job's no ticket to the higher tax brackets, either, since for big-time white-collar criminal cases that produce big attorney's fees, first of all you need some white collars.
Wade sealed the box up, slapped the label on it. “He's no slouch in the character assessment department, you know. Tends to pick out bad apples.”
“I know. Another reason I’m so confused.”
“Well. You could just let it all go by.” His tone, and the amused crinkles around his eyes, expressed just how likely he thought that was.
He put the box in the bin with the others he’d readied for FedEx. “What strikes me, though, is what people from away know that you don’t.”
He pulled up another milk crate, sat beside me. Being up in the workshop with Wade always made me feel I’d been invited into his tree house.
“Because, look: Mapes and Raines already had something going. And obviously Charmian Cartwright knew about it, too. Enough, I mean, to know where he lives, and that she should talk to him.”
“Uh-huh.” Outside the high windows the clouds faded abruptly from rose-red to lavender as the sun dropped below the horizon, and fog moved in.
“But she didn’t tell you,” he went on. “Which means she was in on what was going on all along, or—”
“Or whatever it was, maybe she wants in on it now.”
Wade nodded. “Or maybe she just doesn’t know who to trust. The problem is, you don’t know how much of any of their stories is true. You don’t know she's on the outs with the old uncle. For all you know, they could be in on it together, and Mapes could just be a fall guy. Maybe she stuck those boots out there herself.”
Brr. That was a bad thought. And she was an awfully capable young woman. “Mapes saw them afterwards, got scared, got rid of them,” I tried it out aloud.
Wade stood up. “It could happen. The other thing, though, is still the whole idea that Raines was murdered at all.”
I’d told Wade my theory of how it could be done: someone under the dock, waiting. Cast up a big hook, pull Raines off, cut the line.
“Well, maybe that's not so far-fetched, either.” He was pulling his jacket on. “And I can see that it's eating at you. So why don’t we just get it settled? What say we go down there and have ourselves a look?”
I smacked a hand to the side of my head. “Why didn’t I—”
“Think of that?” he finished for me, giving me a hand up. “Because climbing out under that dock is slippery and scary, not to mention legitimately dangerous. Your mind didn’t want to raise the possibility because then you would have to do it. Right?”
“Um, right.” I followed him down the stairs. That's the thing about Wade: when his mind raises the possibility of doing something legitimately dangerous, his body is generally already full speed ahead.
Twenty minutes later, we both were. “It's not going to prove anything on the positive side, mind you,” he said, pulling the rope on the little outboard. “But it could rule out something.”
It was dead calm and about an hour away from high tide, just about as it had been when Jonathan Raines went off the dock; the rowboat putted smoothly out of the boat basin, around the stern of the tugboat tied at the fish pier.
Wade tossed a line, snugged it, and cut the engine. We were floating alongside the treelike pilings of the dock, dark and dripping with watery vegetation.
“Seaweed's been there a long time,” he said, pointing to the long, leathery-looking fronds of it. “Anyone climbing in there, they’ll have knocked down chunks of it with their boots, maybe marred the soft wood with a rope. And they’d have to be up high, ’cause the tide's the same as it was then.”
He grinned at me in the darkness. He was wearing leather boots and work gloves, carrying a coil of line. “Sit tight.”
“Wade …”
Maybe we should rethink this, I added mentally. But he was gone, swinging over the side into the dark looming structure of pilings and timbers. And then silence except for the creaking of the dock under the pressure of millions of gallons of cold salt water.
The neon lights of La Sardina on Water Street gleamed through the thi
ck grey fog a hundred yards away; it could have been miles. A bat whuffed by, brushing my cheek, and a fish jumped with a watery smack.
“Wade?” No answer. A foghorn sounded distantly, and the ocean smell was briny, so sharp it was almost acidic.
The dock lamps didn’t reach out here, and at first it was so dark, it was like sitting in a puddle of ink. But as my eyes adjusted I began to see into the forest of dock pilings. No Wade.
A splash, and a muffled oath. “Wade?” Damn, I was going to be made a widow before I’d even managed to get remarried.
I grabbed a float cushion, untied the boat, and was just about to give that motor cord a pull when a white face appeared out of the dripping gloom.
Wade. “Hey. Where you going?”
“Oh, criminy.” I tossed him the line. “I was getting ready to come in under there and rescue you.”
He chuckled. “Why, thank you, ma’am. That's right neighborly of you.” He stepped from a dock timber to the boat's rail, from there into the boat, so deftly that the boat barely bobbled.
“The annoying thing is, you make that look so easy,” I said, starting the outboard. I aimed us back out around the end of the dock.
“You wouldn’t have thought so, you’d seen me a minute ago.”
“Why, what happened?”
He motioned me amidships, sat in the stern, angled the boat back in toward the pilings and then between them, idling down.
“Look up there.” He aimed his flashlight up so the beam lit the green-shrouded works of the old dock structure. “See it?”
Suddenly we were surrounded on all sides by the massive old pilings, hemmed in by the support works of the timbers and rising steadily upward with the movement of the tide.
“Wade? I think …”
We should get out of there, was what I thought. Another few minutes of rising tide and there wouldn’t be enough clearance to sit upright.
“Just look,” Wade said calmly. So I did, and there it was: a plywood platform.
“Like a hunting blind,” he said quietly. “Nobody scrambled out here. I was wrong about that, it's too slippery.”
