by Sarah Graves
I bent to inspect the photographs. Nina had her father’s high cheekbones, her mother’s wide smile. They all looked ragged and vitamin deficient: gaunt necks, bony wrists. All had Nina’s dark hair and dark, thick-lashed eyes.
“And then there’s this guy,” Patty went on, picking up the smallest of the frames. It contained a shot of a grinning young man with intelligent eyes, curly hair, and a wolfish expression. “He’s the real interesting one of the bunch, don’t you think?”
She thrust the photograph at me. Unlike the other frames, this one was made of some cheap metal, dinged and scratched as if from being carried for a long time at the bottom of a handbag.
I set the photo back where it had been on the table. The battered item looked out of place amidst the silver and platinum frames, yet had been given the place of honor: center stage, up front. The pallor of the rest of Nina’s people contrasted sharply with the healthy complexion of this handsome fellow.
Patty seemed to read my thought. “Cousin,” she snorted. “She just put that picture out this morning. Until my father died, we only had to put up with looking at the rest of the motley clan.”
“Patty?” Gerry Porter’s voice rose from the service part of the house. “Where … oh, there you are.”
He looked discomfited at finding his wife with me. “Honey, I hope you haven’t been saying anything too awful to Mrs. Tiptree. I know you’re feeling blue, but you gotta believe things are going to look better, tomorrow.”
Patty blinked at her husband in boozy wonder. “You think,” she pronounced carefully, “it will be better tomorrow. My father’s dead and that Transylvanian bimbo is going to get everything, but I should look on the bright side?”
Her voice rose hysterically as she turned to me, her 90-proof breath gusting sickeningly into my face. “Is that what you think? I should look on the goddamn bright side?”
“Now, honey,” Gerry began placatingly, but it was no use.
“What should I do now, Gerry, huh? I thought I’d be able to get out of here, that once he was dead I’d finally have some real money of my own, but now it looks like there isn’t going to be any money. Should I hang out at the gas station, listen to the goddamn police scanner all day long?”
“Patty …” Gerry tried again, but she was unstoppable by now. In a minute she would be passed out.
“You know, my father was pretty smart about some things. But in other things, Gerry? He was almost as dumb as you.”
She snatched up the cheap frame, grimaced at it, and flung it down. Its machined metal corner dug a gash in the gleaming surface of the table.
“Cousin,” she pronounced, “my ass.”
14
Other than the prospect of being hanged, nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully well as a session of scraping paint.
When I got home I set up the stepladder in the bathroom, fitting its legs between the pedestal sink and the clawfooted tub. I had already pried the crown moldings away from the ceiling; under the moldings lurked layer upon layer of antique wallpaper, and finally the original horsehair plaster.
The ceiling was a textbook project: some of the sagging plaster could be screwed back up again, using dry-wall screws and pierced washers called plaster buttons. With an electric drill you run screws into the lath, predrilling the holes and using a plow bit to sink circular depressions for the plaster buttons. Once they are in, you float the whole surface with a coat of patching material mixed to the texture of oatmeal.
The result, especially if you practice on holes in the attic until you have got your plastering chops together, is a pristine surface that looks even better by contrast with the rest of the house, which of course is still crumbling around you.
Repairing almost anything in an old house, however, involves scraping paint as a sort of soul-testing prologue. Each swipe of the scraper should have brought down an avalanche of paint chips, but this was lead paint, the most infuriatingly adherent material ever invented. Perched atop the ladder with a dust mask strapped to my face—I’d have used a respirator, but these were big chips—I concentrated on removing the stuff, one too-loose-to-leave, too-tight-to-fall-off bit at a time.
Item: Nina Mcllwaine had called all over town that morning looking for me, supposedly to retrieve her late husband’s tie pin. But when she did get it back, she barely glanced at it.
Theory: What Nina really wanted was for me to put a story around town, the theme of which was to be how devastated she was by her husband’s death.
Item: Patty Porter, supposedly weeping her heart out over her late father, apparently knew enough about the terms of his will to be enraged by them, so much so as to make a drunken scene in front of me. But something about her performance felt false, as if what she really wanted was to get some information across.
Theory: The real point of Patty’s outburst was the fellow in the photograph. Patty had arrived in the foyer when she knew I was there, and had deliberately drawn my attention to him.
Conclusion: Like the rock-hard little refugee survivor she was, Nina had taken my measure and decided to try enlisting my sympathy by seeming to speak frankly with me. But the appearance of grief she wanted me to help maintain had nothing to do with keeping her reputation. Instead, she wanted a smoke screen for an ongoing relationship with the supposed, and supposedly lost, cousin. Patty, on the other hand, wanted me to comprehend the truth about Nina’s ruse … why?
Simple mischief, perhaps, and anger over a lost inheritance; there was clearly enough malice there to float a barge. I even found myself sympathizing with Patty and Janet. Having a father who married young girls, divorced them, and went on to marry new ones had likely made their family life feel about as secure as something built out of Tinkertoys.
The money questions, though, were what really interested me. How, for instance, had Mcllwaine gotten that much money into Alvin White’s hands without setting off IRS alarm bells? Alvin had paid capital gains taxes when he took profits, which should have raised questions about the money he used to buy the stocks, since it was more than he could account for with declared income.
Then there were the SEC questions. One lucky pick on the order that Alvin had made was plenty to set the hounds howling; two was indictment time, and three was when you got the tailor working on your wardrobe of prison stripes.
And these, at least, were questions to which I could find answers. Between modern banking regulations and electronic methods of tracking any fund transfer short of handing over a wad of bills, there are only a few good places left to hide money nowadays. And while I couldn’t poke into each of them, I had friends who could: tax attorneys, IRS investigators, even guys skilled in tracing cash to its former, unsavory associations—girls, guns, gambling, and so on, right down to the last load of substandard concrete. These were guys who, as they themselves put it, could find a penny in a privy-hole, and one of them just happened to live right here in Eastport. I made a mental note to call my old buddy, Jemmy Wechsler, as soon as I got down off the ladder.
As for why Mcllwaine would give money to White at all, the answer felt tantalizingly at my fingertips.
Item: Over a period of thirty years, White receives money and stock tips from Mcllwaine, amassing a fortune. Over the same time, he’s led to expect big benefits in the event of Mcllwaine’s death.
But then an about-face: Mcllwaine puts his old friend, whom he’s known since childhood, into a stock that takes a cataclysmic dive, wiping out not only Mcllwaine’s contributions and the profits on them, but everything White owns.
I slipped the scraper under a paint chip and flipped the chip off the ceiling. Mcllwaine hadn’t become a world-class financial power by committing many foolish errors, and certainly not ones of that magnitude. In his fifty years of financial swashbuckling, in fact, he had hardly made any missteps, financial or otherwise; at least, not any that anyone could prove.
Except maybe his old friend Alvin.
Theory: Mcllwaine had engineered Alvin’s disa
ster on purpose. The money he’d paid over the years to Alvin was blackmail, and the crash was Mcllwaine’s revenge.
15
He lied, he cheated, he threatened me with mayhem, but if you want a really straight answer, go ask a neurosurgeon. They are accustomed to telling the most awful truths, as long as the truths are not about themselves.
“Arterial spasm?” my ex-husband mused over the telephone. “Maybe an intracranial bleed? How far in did you say that weapon was? And where?”
Of course the police would also be pursuing all of this. But their agenda was entirely different from mine: they thought Ellie was guilty. Meanwhile, my ex-husband knew all about the connections inside people’s heads. It was his job to reconnect them, or if that was not possible, then to core them out like a rotten spot at the center of a piece of fruit.
Outside, helicopters were arriving in town thick and fast, whap-whapping over my house toward the airport, and the vans with radio and TV stations’ logos had multiplied in the couple of hours since Wade and I had seen the Bangor station’s Econoline, out at the Route 1 intersection. Key Street was lined on both sides with recreational vehicles fitted out with rooftop transmitters; crews of goosedown-jacketed broadcast technicians swarmed importantly on the sidewalks; and smart-suited, sleekly-coiffed reporters of both sexes jostled for good camera angles, their expressions under their full on-air makeup grimly avid.
It was turning into a no-holds-barred feeding frenzy, with everyone from the Calais Advertiser to the National Enquirer represented: the major U.S. networks, Maine Public Radio, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company out of Halifax were there, someone had set up a coffee wagon on the church lawn, and at the corner of Key and Middle streets a flatbed was unloading Port-a-Potties.
“Jacobia?” my ex-husband demanded. “Are you there?”
“Yes,” I replied distractedly, wishing I weren’t. Across the street, the Whites’ house had taken on the appearance of a building under siege, and it occurred to me that I had better get over there to check on Ellie and her parents, before the milling crowds of story-hungry reporters started throwing flaming torches and actually tearing people limb from limb.
“What I’m trying to do,” I told my ex-husband, “is figure out exactly what could have happened.”
I described the wound Mcllwaine had suffered. “They’ll be taking him to Bangor for the autopsy, I think, but I don’t know which hospital.” My ex-husband hadn’t asked about Sam and I prayed he wouldn’t; I wanted this conversation to remain friendly.
“Probably a bleed,” he theorized. “Slowly diminishing function, irreversible when the intracranial pressure rises too high. Enough blood leaks into the skull,” he translated for me, “it squeezes the brain to death.”
That might account for the single set of footprints out in my yard. With his awareness level dropping, Mcllwaine could have made it into my shed and collapsed there. My train of thought, though, kept traveling straight back to the money: why, specifically, had Mcllwaine been paying Alvin, and why had he suddenly stopped?
“We had a guy last year, got shot through the skull with a crossbow,” my ex-husband went on. “Same kind of injury as the one you’re describing, but through and through. The guy looked like he was wearing one of those trick hats with the fake arrow through it, only this one wasn’t a trick.”
Just then Same came home, slamming the back door and dropping his books in the hall, thundering in to find me.
“Hey, Mom—” He looked agitated.
I shushed him violently with my hand. If his father knew he was here, he would insist on talking with Sam, and the first thing he would want to know was about the boat school tour. Had Sam stuck with his decision not to go? Or had Sam’s mother undone all his father’s good work?
Which of course Sam’s mother had.
“But Mow…”
Not many years ago, in New York, I got a call from a trader friend of mine in Hong Kong. In a badly concealed panic, he said he needed to sell off a certain position; could I help him out?
Translated, this meant my friend’s account was being audited, and the auditors were going to come up with a row of zeros where a pile of glowingly reported profits were supposed to be. Nothing else could account for such a naked appeal for help.
I said I was sorry, but I was fully bought up; if only he had called a day earlier I’d have been in all cash.
Right, he’d replied, undeceived, and later I watched him being marched through an airport on the evening news, on his way to a Belgian jail. But even then I didn’t regret my decision; he’d bought that trip.
And that was how I felt about Sam and my program of defusing his father’s influence over him: sorry and cold.
Sam was hopping with urgency; I waved him off, giving him my worst I’ll-kill-you-if-you-don’t-stop-it look, at which he rolled his eyes in the time-honored way that smart teenagers have been inflicting on their hopelessly stupid parents for generations, and stalked out.
“So what happened?” I asked my ex-husband, keeping my voice light and unconcerned, as if I had not just deprived him of another chance to run his son’s life off the rails. “Did the guy die?”
“Oh, no,” my ex-husband said. “Once we got the shaft out of his skull and cleaned up the damage, he healed up fine. Well,” he amended with a little laugh, “he’s sure not going to be a nuclear physicist. But he’s alive.”
And that, in a nutshell, was my ex-husband: the little laugh while the guy with the arrow through his skull tries to pick up the shattered pieces, tries to fit them into the pattern that once was his life.
“So why,” I said, “did he live and the guy up here died?”
“Two things,” my ex-husband responded swiftly, like the gold-star, head-of-the-class student he was. “First, it could’ve been a freak thing, kind of thing no one’s ever going to be able to say for sure, even after the autopsy.”
He was enjoying this. “But you said the guy was older. What was he, mid-seventies?”
I allowed as how that sounded right. Even in death, Mcllwaine had looked well taken care of, plump and glossy as a prize pig, but if he was a contemporary of Alvin White, he’d been older than he looked.
“So maybe he was on some kind of a blood-thinning drug, like Coumadin,” said Sam’s father. “They stop clots when you don’t want them, after coronary artery bypass, for instance, or if you’re on an anti-stroke regimen. But they also stop them when you do.”
When, for example, you have an ice pick in your head. I asked my ex-husband to find out if Mcllwaine had been taking Coumadin or any other blood thinner. I asked him also to learn what he could about the autopsy results—this, for a New York neurosurgeon who is well known both here and abroad, is not as difficult as you might think—and let me know.
This exhausted the number of favors I would request from him, since I knew he would use them as an excuse to call me. That I had asked at all he would regard as a major breakthrough; it is amazing how desirable I have become, now that I reside in a separate state and would prefer, actually, a separate planet.
Once again I assured him that Sam was not home, that I really had no idea when Sam would be home, and that when Sam did get home I would be certain to have him call his father.
Then I hung up and went to Sam’s room, meaning to tell him that he could stay the night at Tommy Daigle’s house after all, and watch the prize fights there on Tommy’s satellite TV. Sam has no skills at lying or disguising his voice, so I thought it might be better if he didn’t answer the telephone at all for a while.
But when I knocked and went in I found him kneeling on his bed, peeking out through the edge of the window shade.
“What’s going on?” I moved up alongside him. Reporters were clustering excitedly in the street below; something was happening.
“That’s what I tried to tell you. Man, look at those people. They practically attacked me when I got home.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“Yeah, I
blabbed my head off. Not.” He pressed his face to the crack between shade and sill. “Uh-oh. Here she comes.”
“Who?” I squeezed in beside him, noticing that among the mobile news vans was a blue-and-white from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department.
Then I saw Ellie, her coppery hair swinging against her face, shielding it, shoulders hunched tightly against the forest of microphones thrust at her, flanked by two sheriff’s deputies who were guiding her toward the squad car.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Mom,” Sam said. “The reporters were all saying it. Any minute now, they were saying.”
The deputies helped Ellie into the back seat and shut the door, and made their way through the reporters to the front seats. The long black microphones bristled like a mass of waving insect legs as the squad car moved from the curb, the reporters breaking ranks to let it pass, the cameras swinging around to record its progress down Key Street.
Under a brightening sky, the bay was the color of tarnished nickels lightly scratched with silver. Ellie would be looking at it, memorizing it. On account of the blizzard it had taken them about twenty hours after Ellie’s confession to get out here and get themselves organized.
But now they were taking her away.
As soon as Ellie had gone, I hurried across the street to see about Alvin and Hedda, shouldering my way through a gang of journalists whose rudeness would have shocked all their mothers permanently speechless. One of them shoved himself in front of me, his face thrust vehemently up into mine, and poked his microphone roughly at me.
“Do you know her?” he demanded excitedly. “What was she like? Was she ever violent? And how do you feel about a brutal stabbing right here in your neighborhood? What can you tell our viewers?”
“That they should mind their own damned business,” I snarled, and pushed him aside to hammer on the Whites’ door.
