Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  And after that I remembered once more the other thing that happened that same day:

  The guy who’d gone off the cliffs. As Sam had predicted, his body never had been recovered. And except for the moment when I’d seen where he went down, we’d all kind of forgotten about him.

  But now I realized: we shouldn’t have.

  “The tunnel had a cave-in,” Charmian was saying matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing a minor delay on the causeway to the island. “While I was in it, actually. Sand and centipedes, a few other critters.”

  I, by that point, would have been hysterical. “So I had to stop,” she finished.

  “Let me get this straight.” Bob Arnold had Thomas seated on his lap and was feeding him bits of salmon with his fingers while Clarissa looked on dotingly.

  “You got down there when the girl forced you. Why didn’t you come up the same way, over the cliffs where you went down?” Bob wanted to know.

  Charmian shrugged, swallowed some corn, which was fresh, hot, and dripping with butter. “The whole edge of it is sliding. But of course you all knew that. I’m surprised Jill got back up it, herself, and after she’d kicked all the rocks and whatnot loose, we certainly weren’t going to try it.”

  She glanced happily at Jonathan. “We like our cliff edges a little more solid, don’t we, dear?” she asked.

  “So that's what happened.” Ellie speared herself a baked potato, peeled back the foil. “Jane Whitelaw knew where the gold was, or thought she did, killed Hayes, then headed out there to collect it.”

  “But in her haste,” Winston Cartwright intoned, “Jane missed her footing and the soil crumbled away beneath her just as it nearly did beneath Jill Frey today. A sad end.”

  Clarissa took little Thomas from Bob, wiped his lips with a corner of her napkin, and cuddled him tenderly. “And wasn’t it said that she had a baby with her?” She pressed Thomas's forehead to her cheek and made motherly noises at him. “And that it was saved?”

  But Raines shook his head. “That must have been just part of the legend,” he said definitely. “I can tell you for sure no baby would ever survive what I saw down there today.”

  He smiled at Thomas, reached out to dandle the child's tiny finger, then looked indulgently over at Charmian, who blushed.

  “It was,” George Valentine said, “all a mishmash, some true and some not, like any old story as gets started around here. If any baby survived it's ’cause she left it home.”

  He said it the Maine way: stahted. “Rescued babies and old violins and witch's curses … and if the lady screamed, this Jane Whitelaw lady, likely she was a-screamin’ at her own bad luck.”

  Sam applied himself to his potatoes and salmon, his misery over Jill's betrayal assuaged somewhat by food and friends. From across the table, Maggie watched him eat with a look of pride in the fine meal she had accomplished and, I thought, the tiniest bit of feminine calculation, too.

  Sam brightened further when Maggie brought out the chocolate cake. “I didn’t know you could do this,” he said wonderingly as she set a slice in front of him. On the table now were a pitcher of milk and a pot of hot, fresh coffee; somehow she’d managed to whisk away the main course as unnoticeably as a magician.

  “You,” she said with a twinkly smile she aimed straight at him, “don’t know a lot of things.”

  Sam blinked, as with a glance around the table she made sure all was well; satisfied, she sat down to enjoy her own cake.

  Me, too, and as I did so the lingering sense of something unresolved nearly faded from my mind, pushed out by the pleasure of chocolate butter-cream frosting. But not completely.

  “So Jared Hayes marked an especially unstable area of those cliffs on his map?” Cartwright's tone was contemplative, his old eyes sharpened by the possible implications of this.

  “Seems so,” George agreed, forking up cake. Which was when it hit me, but Winston Cartwright had begun speaking again.

  “Hayes,” he said having come to a conclusion, “marked the bad part of the cliffs on purpose, on the map he gave Jane. She knew they were all unstable, of course; everyone did. But he realized that if she betrayed him, her greed would probably drive her to try it, anyway. So he got the last laugh in the end. Got it,” he finished rumblingly, “from the grave.”

  A little chill went over me. It was getting on for evening, the shadows lengthening over the green grass, and the breeze off the water had grown damp and tangy with the smell of sea salt.

  “So there was never any violin,” Wade said. “And no gold in the cave, either?”

  He turned to Jonathan. “Jill Frey told us you’d probably got it and vamoosed with it. But—”

  “Oh, yes.” Jonathan dug in his pocket. “There was gold.”

  Whereupon he produced the largest gold coin I had ever seen: as big around as a cookie cutter, flatter than a modern coin, and irregular at the edges, stamped with a sun pattern and engraved with some kind of legend in what appeared to be French.

  “It's just,” Raines finished in tones of faint sadness, “not there anymore.”

  He tossed the coin onto the table. “Jill told the truth on that. Until she got there, there was a great deal of old Hayes treasure in that cave, hidden under those bluffs. “This coin,” he added, “belongs to Wilbur. I think he's earned it.”

  George gazed fondly at the outboard motor. “Kinda makes me glad I went in and fixed that plaster for you, Miz Tiptree. In the dining room. I hung Elvis back up, though,” he added seriously. “I wasn’t sure but maybe you might want to keep ’im.”

  I looked at Ellie, and she looked at me. “The plaster,” we breathed together, and hurried into the house. I got the hammer, and she got the crowbar, and together we demolished George's new repair job in no time flat, while he watched astonishedly.

  “Jared Hayes cut a hole in this wall,” I said.

  “And he cut it,” Ellie said, “for a reason.”

  “Below the floor level,” I said, shining a flashlight down there. “That's why Howard Washburn's friend didn’t find anything. He wouldn’t have been able to sense anything with a stud-finder through the baseboards and flooring.”

  Excitedly they all crowded around behind me, waiting for me to find …

  Nothing. “You’d think he could at least have dropped one little bag of gold down there,” I complained.

  “Oh,” Charmian said disappointedly. “All he hid there was the book, after all. Oh, Jonathan, I’m so sorry.”

  But Jonathan's face was shining.

  “Never mind,” he said quietly. “That's not the treasure I was really looking for, was it?”

  He put his arm around her, drew her near, and spoke to us all. “I’ve found the only treasure I need, and from now on I’ll never forget it. Thank you, Charmian, for coming to find me. Please don’t let me get lost, ever again.”

  She looked up sweetly at him, and with a tart little edge in her voice that I thought boded well for both of them, replied:

  “You needn’t worry. You’re going to marry me without delay, and afterwards I’m not going to let you out of my sight.”

  She turned to her uncle. “This means I won’t be working for you anymore, you know. I’m welshing on that damned bet we made.”

  Jonathan squeezed her shoulders as Winston replied with a harrumph. “I told you I never meant to hold you to that wager.”

  She stepped forward and kissed him soundly. “Then you’ll give me away at the wedding?”

  Whereupon he blushed, and harrumphed some more, and tapped on the old floor with his ornately carved cane, finally allowing that if pressed he would do so.

  “With great,” he averred, nipping from his flask of cordial, “pleasure.”

  “So,” George said slowly, eyeing the destruction Ellie and I had wrought. “Guess that new plaster never needed to come down, then. I expect somebody had better get busy.”

  Which was when I realized that what we had, yet again, was a hole in the wall, and I doubted
that George would fix it for me a second time; the goodness of his heart is plentiful but it is not inexhaustible.

  Bucket, I thought; trowel, drop cloths, plaster mix. But somehow the list, and the thought of using all the items on it, didn’t lower my spirits. The opposite, actually.

  “Oh, Jacobia,” Charmian said, “we can fix the wall for you. Can’t we, Jonathan?” she added with a bright glance at him.

  To his credit, Jonathan didn’t agree immediately. The hole was rather large, and he eyed it with all the respect it was due.

  “Never mind,” I said, thinking about the old days when the house was built: when ships filled the harbor, Lewis and Clark's great adventure remained vivid in living memory, and a person who could put up a plaster wall, erect a brick chimney, or glaze in a window was a valued craftsperson.

  Now, the house depended on me. Maybe I could even find some horsehair to put into that plaster. “Somehow I think that this is a repair I want to make myself,” I said.

  “Good thing I hung onto that Elvis painting,” George commented. But he was smiling when he said it.

  Later, as the streetlights came on and the last birds of the evening began calling from yard to yard, Sam and Maggie started clearing the picnic table while I found Bob Arnold.

  Because, although Jonathan Raines had lost one treasure and recovered another, there was still a final bit of the tangled skein left to unravel. “Bob,” I said quietly, “where's Jill Frey, now?”

  Behind him, Clarissa jounced baby Thomas gently on her hip. Sam reached out a tentative hand and the baby grabbed it, crowing with infant delight.

  Bob shrugged. “Mapes wouldn’t press charges, and Charmian, either. No weapon found. So I had to release her.”

  “… in leather bags,” Jonathan Raines was saying as the rest came out to help Sam and Maggie. They were all talking about the treasure, again; the other treasure.

  The gold. “Inside an old wooden chest,” Jonathan went on. “For a while it was probably safe, but the tide's come up farther over time as the land erodes away.”

  He shook his head. “Bags and chest both been getting doused twice a day, every time the tide comes in, over a hundred years.”

  “She opened the chest,” George Valentine said, stacking the plates. “Jill Frey. She couldn’t resist.”

  Raines nodded. “And that was it. Next wave hit, that's all she wrote. I got one look at what was left, grabbed this …”

  He waved at the glittering gold object still lying on the table. Wilbur wasn’t ever going to be short of money again; he could fix up his old trailer.

  If he wanted to. “But by now those coins are all over the bottom of the bay,” Raines said, “some halfway to Nova Scotia, the rest on their way to Lubec. They’ll be getting found one at a time for a thousand years.”

  “To her mother?” I asked Bob. “Jill's back at her house?”

  “Uh-huh.” He paused on the porch, glancing at Clarissa and the baby framed against the gathering darkness, as Ellie came up behind us carrying the salad bowl.

  “I still don’t understand how Charmian and Jill got into the right cave, the one with the gold in it, when they had the wrong map. I mean, how did they know?” Ellie asked.

  Raines followed her, the charcoal bag in his hand. “Hayes annotated his maps, as you figured out, in Latin. And Charmian is,” he pronounced proudly, “a cool customer in tricky situations.”

  “Because,” Charmian added, appearing out of the gloom with the cake plate, “I didn’t know it was the wrong map, you see.”

  She stepped up beside Jonathan. “And I certainly wasn’t about to lead Jill to where that map said the entrance was.”

  “So?” I held the door open for them.

  “So I marked it myself with an X,” Charmian replied simply. “With my handy-dandy little jacknife pen when she wasn’t looking. Jill ignored the Latin she couldn’t read, followed the X-mark.”

  She set the cake plate on the sink. “I’d already decided if she asked, I’d say the ex on the map must stand for exit.”

  All this while being menaced by the gun Jill held; Charmian had confirmed this detail, as well.

  “Remarkable,” I said dryly, beginning to fill the sink. “So you just happened to pick the right cave.” I squirted dish soap into the steaming basin. “By luck?”

  “Um, not exactly. That wasn’t all of it.” Charmian examined the opal ring on her hand. “You see, by then I was thinking about how I would get out alive.”

  “And about time, too, I’d say,” Jonathan said sternly, but he couldn’t sustain it; you could see he thought she was the best idea since the invention of sliced bread.

  “Anyway,” Charmian continued, “by then I didn’t care about finding anything. I just looked at the map we did have, picked the cave that looked to be the highest above sea level, that's all. So I’d have a long time before it flooded. Time to escape.”

  “Which,” Jonathan concluded, “made it also the one Hayes had picked to hide his treasure. It was highest above sea level back then, too, and that made it the most accessible to him without the special equipment we’ve got nowadays. So it worked out.”

  “Jonathan,” I said, “there's one thing I still don’t quite see. What happened to the old violin you bought from Mapes? It's not by any chance—”

  “A Stradivarius, too?” He laughed comfortably. “Oh, would it were so. But no, I’m sorry to report I only took the violin to get the trunk Mapes had described on the phone to me, of moldy sheet music that stank of a house fire …”

  The things Howard Washburn had mentioned.

  “… and old books,” Raines finished.

  Which accounted for the whiff of smoke I’d smelled back in the library; not brimstone at all. Just the smell of my poor old house's chimneys, and the fire one of them had started long ago.

  “I’m afraid I fooled Wilbur a little on that one,” Raines said. “I didn’t want him to know what I thought he really had, so I let him think I wanted the violin. It's a perfectly playable instrument, though,” he added, “now it's cleaned up. I gave it to Maggie.”

  He and Charmian joined hands; clearly these two were going to make a formidable team, a fact Winston Cartwright seemed to realize with considerable pride as he gazed at them.

  “I had meant to return at once to Boston,” Cartwright said when some of the others had repaired to the parlor and Clarissa had taken the baby upstairs. “However, I have been inveigled.”

  From the parlor came the sound of Maggie's new fiddle tuning up; we were to have, I gathered, a musical evening.

  Or some of us were. Bob Arnold sat patiently at the kitchen table, waiting.

  Soon, I telegraphed to him, and he nodded, not happily.

  “Inveigled?” I wiped my hands on the dish towel.

  “Indeed.” Cartwright had put on the disreputable slouch hat and draped the vast folds of the huge trench coat around himself. Now he gripped his walking stick firmly in preparation for an evening stroll.

  Exercise, I thought; regular meals, congenial company: the town was good for him.

  “The ladies of the Eastport Reading Circle have asked me to speak at their annual summer picnic,” he announced.

  “How delightful. And have you accepted?”

  “I have,” he intoned gravely. “However, to do them justice I must move considerable of my research materials. Therefore I have engaged lodgings in town.”

  So he was staying. It happens; some urban person who thinks life begins and ends on the island of Manhattan or in Cambridge comes to our little island and is captured, and decides to stay. It had happened to me.

  “Jonathan,” I said, finding him a little while later in the butler's pantry; he was putting away unused paper plates. “Tell me the truth. I know you called, but did I really invite you?”

  He shook his head ruefully. “No. I knew of your sleuthing reputation from the cousins. Yours and Ellie's reputations, that is. But I couldn’t risk actually trying to wangle an
invitation. You might refuse, or talk to the cousins before I got here.”

  “Whereupon your scheme to actually stay here in the house so you could put the book in it, thus getting Ellie and me curious and involved, might fall apart.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. When I showed up, I needed you to have spoken to me before, so I’d be at least a little familiar, and I needed a connection you’d trust as a reference. But not one you’d actually go to the trouble of checking with care.”

  He looked a little shamefaced. “And,” he admitted, “I made sure I came when the cousins were tied up in projects that meant you wouldn’t be able to reach them, anyway. I didn’t expect you to check me out any further than that.”

  “Meanwhile, you didn’t tell me the truth about yourself and what you wanted in the first place because …”

  He nodded again; that much was obvious. Of course I would’ve said no. And he’d known that, too, not just suspected it, because …

  “That Australian guy,” I said. “Who called before you did. I told him no, although he was very persuasive, so you knew …”

  “Roight,” Jonathan replied, sounding for all the world as if he’d been throwing shrimps on the barbie all of his life. “Also, it was a last-minute check to make sure you’d be here, yourself.”

  Oh, boy. “Jonathan, with the kind of nerve you’ve got, it's a good thing you didn’t have evil intentions.”

  A shadow touched his face; the notion, apparently, was not a new one to him. “Yes,” he said quietly, pressing his fingertips together. “I suppose it is.”

  Then in the parlor fiddling began, along with a sound that meant George Valentine had found my old banjo and was remembering how to play it. Jonathan went to join them.

  “Five minutes,” I said to Bob Arnold. Nodding, he went to drive Clarissa and Thomas home before coming back for me, and I walked through the dining room to the front parlor, expecting to find a happy throng, Sam included.

  Instead I found Sam sitting alone at the dining room table with Jared Hayes's skull in front of him, staring disconsolately at it. “He died for love, didn’t he?” Sam said.