The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Wade nodded. “Sound and fury.”

  “But nothing behind. You don’t think she did it, either.”

  He paused, adjusting the slide on his string tie. The first time I met him, he told me sincerely that if you touch the two metal ends of a string tie together, they will make a spark.

  “Ellie and George were engaged to be married, once. Neither of ’em ’ll talk much about it now,” he said, “but they were. Story around town was, Ellie’s mother put the brakes on it.”

  The revelation didn’t surprise me as much as it might have. I’d always thought Ellie’s disparagement of George as a romantic prospect was a case of protesting too much—although I wouldn’t have told Ellie so. She could be prickly about her privacy.

  Wade sat down and bent to tie the black leather, rubber-soled utility shoes that he wore for work. “Ellie,” he said, “should have got shut of that old woman a long time ago.”

  Wishing Ellie’s mother would take a sudden notion to walk east until her hat floated was not a new idea to me, either, or to anyone who knew Ellie. I looked at the door, which had opened again a fascinating quarter-inch. “You think Ellie is protecting George?”

  The idea of George as a killer was almost as bad as the idea of Ellie as one, and more plausible from the upper-body-strength point of view. George performed hard physical work all day, and never mind that he didn’t have any motive, since as far as I was concerned, Ellie didn’t, either, despite what she’d said about a swindle. I made a mental note to find out more about this, if only to discount it, since the notion of Ellie killing over money was, to me, outlandish.

  “No,” Wade said, “I don’t. But it might be I just don’t want to. Because if Ellie didn’t do it, and she’s confessing, it stands to reason she’s protecting someone, doesn’t it?”

  Over on my dresser, Mcllwaine’s tie pin glittered spitefully. Bob Arnold had given it to me for safekeeping the evening before, asking me to return it to Mcllwaine’s widow, Nina, when I could, as he imagined that he would be on the job all night and who knew where he or it might get to by morning. As if to prove this, the radio on his belt had begun sputtering, so I’d taken the thing reluctantly, Mcllwaine’s body itself having at last been removed to Flagg’s Funeral Home at my absolute insistence.

  “Paintbrush,” Wade said. “Silicone caulk.”

  The bedroom door sneaked open another inch.

  8

  “I’m not going,” Sam insisted a couple of hours later, his face set into the hard-jawed, mulish expression that reminded me so much of his father. “I’m not, and you can’t make me.”

  I dropped two bagel halves into the toaster and poured myself a glass of V8. Sam made a face; he regards vegetables as garnish, mere obstacles between himself and the meat and potatoes.

  “Dad said I shouldn’t go.” Sam sank into a kitchen chair. “He says boat building is for losers. He says I’m getting to be a local yokel, all I want is a dog, a shotgun, and a pickup truck.”

  At the word “dog,” Monday got up and put her head in his lap, and gazed up at him adoringly. He smoothed her ears.

  “Dad says,” Sam went on, “I’m wasting my life. He says you’re making me waste my life, up here.”

  I did not look at Sam, just kept buttering the toasted bagel halves, while in my head the coffeepot smashed against the wall and the knives all flew out of the kitchen drawers, gnashing their blades together and impaling themselves in the countertops.

  “Is Wade wasting his life here? Or George?” I asked. “Or,” I went on, my voice rising despite my resolve, “the men who go out on fishing boats, and risk their lives trying to support their families? Do you think,” I demanded, “those two guys who drowned trying to bring the scallop dragger over from Lubec in the storm, that those guys were yokels?”

  The bad news had come in a call for Wade, just before he left for the Federated Marine office. The previous evening in Lubec, the next town down the coast from Eastport, four men had set out in a sixteen-foot wooden skiff, trying to reach a dragger that one of them had left moored offshore. Their plan was to get the big boat into the boat basin, where it would be safer from the weather.

  Instead, a wave swamped the skiff. Two of the men had clung to mooring balls, and two drowned, their bodies swept out by the tide. Wade was part of the recovery team.

  Sam looked momentarily shamefaced, but where his father’s advice was concerned he was like an alcoholic: knowing it was bad for him, hoping this time it would come out differently.

  “I know I’m not doing so good in school, but I’m going to get a tutor, and work harder,” he insisted. “Dad says if I do, he can still get me into Yale.” He frowned at his clenched fists.

  “And I know what you think,” he went on. “That I’ll fail. But you want me to fail, you want me not to be anything like Dad.”

  His tone was growing frantic; this, in a nutshell, was the trouble with calls from Sam’s father. His vindictive, grandiose notions seeped through the phone lines like poison gas.

  “Look,” I said, mustering a smile that felt nailed on, “it’s no big deal. I’ll just call the school and have them take you off the tour list.”

  Twelve hours earlier, Sam had been enthused about a plan that I thought was just perfect for him. But in only a few minutes his father had convinced him that learning to build ships, a skill that would make Sam employable anywhere in the world, was about as worthwhile as learning to carve tugboats out of bathtub soap.

  “Okay,” Sam relented. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want me to fail, and I don’t think those guys are yokels. It’s just…”

  He spread his hands helplessly. “Why can’t I be smart, like you and Dad?”

  I looked at my son, with whom I had always tried to be honest. “Because,” I said, “you have to be smart like yourself.”

  “Yeah,” he snorted dismissively, “me and Bozo the Clown.”

  Which was when I decided that what Sam needed was lies: the sort of low trickery and shameless, silver-tongued deceit that only a seasoned financial professional can properly deliver.

  “You know,” I ventured, “in a way, your father is right. If you visited the boat school, you’d probably find out you didn’t like it, anyway. So in that sense, it would be a waste of time.”

  Sam looked up, his expression doubtful. But he was listening, and all I’d ever needed was to keep them listening.

  “Still,” I said slowly, as if just now thinking it through, “I’ll bet they could hook you up with a good tutor. Some of their students must want extra help, too, wouldn’t you think?”

  Sam brightened. “Yeah, I bet they could,” he allowed.

  “And,” I said, moving in to close the sale, “it would be too bad to make Tommy Daigle go alone, when he’s been counting on you all this time.”

  Sam looked vexed as he remembered his commitment to his friend. “Daigle,” he moaned, clapping his hand to his forehead. “Oh, man, he’ll kill me if I wimp out on him.”

  “Besides,” I continued smoothly, “I’ve heard that some of the students over at the school have some pretty cool tattoos. Not,” I added, “that I am going to allow you to get any such thing.”

  The tattoo question had been bouncing around the house for weeks, with Wade saying I ought to just let Sam do it, and me quailing at the idea of some coarse Hell’s Angel type sticking a dirty needle into my baby boy.

  Sam eyed me speculatively. He really wanted to go on the boat school tour. “A tattoo would make Dad bonkers.”

  “Indeed,” I agreed, “it would. If you had one, which you won’t, and if he saw it, which he wouldn’t. Would he?”

  “No, of course not.” He got up. “You know, Mom, maybe you’d better hold off canceling me out. Just, you know, let me think it over a little while longer.”

  My throat opened, allowing a morsel of bagel to pass through. “Good. That’s all I want you to do. Think it over, maybe talk it over with Wade.”

  After the first night
Wade had stayed with me, Sam met him coming out of my bedroom in the morning. The two men eyed one another cautiously, then went on about their business: Sam to eat breakfast and head on off to school, and Wade to go down to the Federated Marine office on Water Street.

  Later that day, though, I spotted them together on the fish pier, Sam with a Coke in his hands and Wade with a bottle of Narragansett. Neither of them ever told me what they talked about that day, and I have never asked. But I had noticed Sam beginning to ask Wade for bits of advice, and Wade thinking carefully before providing any.

  “I don’t suppose we even need to worry your dad about it, at this stage. Do we?”

  Sam paused, and I thought I might have gone too far.

  “No,” he said at last. “We don’t. At this stage.”

  And with that it was, as they say, a done deal.

  Or so I thought. Moments later Sam was gone in a whirl of books and athletic gear. So many high school teachers lived on the island, and so many high school students had serious summer jobs, that a snow day was out of the question even though it continued snowing hard, with the forecast of a foot or more still to come.

  What I ought to do, I knew, was call Sam’s father, but what I wanted to do was kill Sam’s father, and this desire would surely lend an unhelpful note to the tenor of our conversation. So in the end I settled for cursing Sam’s father, fervently and colorfully, while doing up the dishes that always got heaped in the sink somehow between midnight and seven A.M. And gradually, under the influence of a sinkful of hot soapsuds and the hushed, marooned feeling of a major snowstorm, I grew more cheerful.

  I had lost the tattoo battle, but this was a concession I would willingly make in order to save Sam from a type of schooling that I thought was about as suitable for him as an ax-murderers’ academy. And even Elite’s problems, I felt, could be resolved; surely no one would believe she killed Mcllwaine, or that George had. There was another explanation and it would be revealed, I assured myself confidently.

  Thinking this, I hung up the dish towel—smiling at the polka music oompah-ing out of the Canadian radio station, enjoying my solitude in the big old house—and contemplated taking a bath.

  Which was of course when the telephone should have rung, but instead the back door opened without warning and Can Man strolled into my freshly neatened kitchen as if he owned the place.

  “Keep your chin up,” he advised cheerfully, shedding snow down onto my newly mopped floor and dropping his burlap bag full of bottles and soda cans onto my clean kitchen table. “Look on the bright side. Don’t,” he counseled, “take any wooden nickels.”

  Can Man was in his forties, tall and slender, with thinning blond hair and long, spidery fingers that were always in motion, plucking up the returnable aluminum and glass beverage containers he found on his tramps all over the island.

  “You should knock,” I said, but I couldn’t be angry. Can Man’s pale face was so simply, guilelessly sweet and his manner so harmlessly friendly that even though I had asked him not to a dozen times and he still kept walking right on in anyway, I kept saving all our bottles and cans for him; everyone did.

  “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” he observed. “Could I have a glass of milk?”

  “Of course. Wash your hands,” I added. “Do you think that if I gave you a pair of gloves, you would remember to wear them?”

  His answering smile was beatific. “Uh-huh.” Then without washing his hands or accepting the gloves I offered him, he drank his glass of milk standing up.

  He wasn’t ever going to remember to knock, either. What Can Man remembered was every old proverb ever minted, every bright color he had ever seen, and three other unchanging facts: where he lived (with his mother, in a house on High Street), what he did (pick up bottles and cans), and where to take returnables for the deposit (Sawtelle’s Redemption, which when I first came to Maine I thought had something to do with born-again Christians).

  “When interest rates rise, liquidity dries,” I said, taking the emptied milk glass from him, and he looked at me, delighted.

  “If the currency’s weak, inflation will peak,” he replied, stunning me in return; it was one I’d told him months earlier.

  “How do you find cans when it snows?” I asked, handing over the clanking sack of containers I had saved for him. “Don’t they all get covered up?”

  Can Man emptied my paper bag into his burlap one. “It’s not easy,” he replied. “It’s not easy at all.”

  He slung the burlap bag over his shoulder. “But,” he added with another of his purely happy smiles, “hope springs eternal.”

  A thought struck me. “You didn’t happen to be out yesterday, I suppose?”

  He nodded. “Oh, sure. Work,” he confided seriously, “expands to fill the time allowed.”

  “But not here on Key Street? Seeing,” I added, “since you’re here today. Yesterday, you probably went somewhere else.”

  “I was here.” He gestured at his bag. “First come, first serve. The early bird gets the worm.”

  Something occurred to him, and he looked alarmed. “Fish and visitors. Two days. Yesterday, today.” He counted on his fingers. “Two days.”

  “No,” I assured him. “That’s all right. You can come here as often as you like. I just wondered if maybe you saw anyone at the Whites’ house, yesterday.”

  Because if Ellie didn’t do it, and George didn’t do it, who did? But Can Man wouldn’t remember. He never remembered anything outside of his categories.

  “Red,” he blurted, startling me. “I saw George’s red truck. I saw Ellie’s green shoes. I saw a gold thing, like a bottle cap, on a man’s front.” He pointed to his chest. “Right here.”

  Mcllwaine, I realized, and his tie pin.

  “And … blue!” Can Man exulted.

  Mcllwaine drove a blue Lincoln, I remembered, but it hadn’t been anywhere around when his body turned up. And when he was on the island, he didn’t have a chauffeur. I wondered if maybe Nina had driven him in from Mackerel Cove, and dropped him off.

  “Blue,” Can Man murmured, and looked frightened. Then he seemed to give himself a brisk mental shake, like a dog coming out of the water.

  “I have to go now. My mother says don’t stay unless you’re invited. She says, never ask for anything but bottles and cans.”

  He looked strickenly at the milk glass on the table. “White,” he whispered.

  “Tell your mother I said it’s fine. About the milk. Tell her I said don’t worry.”

  His face cleared; he hoisted the burlap bag. “Have a nice day,” he said, heading for the door, and at that point I still believed I might.

  Can Man stepped out onto the porch, where his footprints and Sam’s had already filled completely with new snow. Just then Mcllwaine’s big blue Lincoln went by, toiling in the wake of the orange town snowplow.

  “Blue!” Can Man said, and it seemed to me that the Lincoln slowed slightly, as if the driver had spotted him, then drove on.

  “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” Can Man advised as he went away down the sidewalk, his face lifted bravely into the whirling snow, and I should have listened to him.

  Instead I wiped the burlap shreds off the table and washed out Can Man’s milk glass. Through the kitchen window I spotted a dozen bobolinks, each appearing to wear a black-and-white tuxedo scarved with butter-yellow, sheltering in the raspberry thicket at the rear of the lawn and eating (I hoped) plenty of weed seeds.

  The radio stopped playing polkas and began playing show tunes. Monday sighed and stretched, smiling in her sleep. The coffeemaker burbled and fell silent, and I poured myself a cup.

  That bath, I thought hopefully.

  Which of course was when the telephone did ring.

  9

  “Girl! Where’s my tea?” Hedda White thumped her cane on the Oriental rug, in the Whites’ back parlor.

  “It’s not ready yet, Mother,” Ellie called patiently from the kitchen. “You
know you don’t like it too weak.”

  Hedda rolled her eyes, which were heavily outlined in black, fringed with thick, dark mascara; her wig, elaborately arranged in a coiffure that would have been appropriate for a costume ball, was the metallic color of a new penny. Apparently she hadn’t cared for the rinse put into her own hair at the beauty shop the day before, but then not much ever pleased Hedda.

  “Oh, come off it,” she bellowed back at Ellie. “Too strong, too weak, who cares? I’m a helpless old lady, nobody worries about what I like anymore.”

  Au contraire, I thought, determinedly saying nothing. Hedda was as helpless as a scorpion, and nearly as pleasant, her moods ranging from manipulatively charming through irascible to the one she had chosen to inhabit today: hell on wheels. For her morning at home, she wore a gold brocade dressing gown belted with a gold tasseled cord, along with more jewelry than she should have been able to lift, given the severity of her arthritis.

  “Just hurry it up,” she ordered, banging the cane again, “and never mind your excuses.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Ellie called from the kitchen, exhibiting more forbearance than I could have summoned to save my life.

  Hedda let out a heavy sigh of impatience. Ranged around her in the Whites’ large, overfurnished parlor, perched on the mantel and massed against the gold-patterned wallpaper, were photographs of her in her heyday, the thought of which I found terrifying: Hedda with even more malignant energy than she possessed now.

  “Everyone cared what I liked back then,” she said, seeing me examining the photos. With Hedda, I never knew where else to look; if I stared straight at her I wouldn’t be able to keep my opinion of her out of my face, and that would spell disaster.

  At any rate, there she was, out nightclubbing with the fast set she’d been part of in New York, thirty years ago: politicians, movie stars, rock idols, gangsters, and their retinues. Other photos showed her on stage in a spangled leotard, fishnet tights, and the sort of precipitously high-heeled pumps that showed just how immortal she must have felt back then. Like Mcllwaine, she had left East-port in her dust when she was young, and like him she had returned.