The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Which, it seemed, George was actually going to fix, and maybe even soon. “Here,” he said, indicating a hole as deep as I was tall, “is where the dry well goes. The boys’ll be bringing in the rest of the gravel this afternoon—”

  The gravel, he meant, in the burlap bags at the end of my driveway; there was already another stack of bags down here.

  “—so leave the Bilco doors unlocked for ’em if you think of it.”

  “I will,” I promised, “think of it.” The hole was as wide across as four large oil drums, which he had already brought down and stood on end in the corner where the coal bin used to be.

  “But what’s the lime for?” Besides the oil drums and the sacks of gravel that he meant to use for filling the hole once the drums were set in, several bags of lime like the ones in Ellie’s garden shed were also stacked in the corner.

  “Oh. Well,” he explained, “the thing is that even after I cut the channels in the concrete—”

  He was planning to route all the water that seeped in through the foundation into channels he had cut in the ancient concrete at the foot of the cellar walls.

  “—Even after the water gets into the channels, and runs down into the dry well, the hole will be damp. And where there’s damp, there’s a smell. Lime, see, it helps keep the earth sweet.”

  “I see.” That seemed a sensible answer.

  “Then, after I route the water to the barrels that are full of gravel, fill around with gravel and put the lime on top, I cover it over with concrete, or more gravel if you want.”

  “Gravel would be better,” I told George. Given the checkered repair history of my old house, I thought paving over the dry well might be unrealistically optimistic.

  He nodded. “Okay, then. Guess I’ll get to work.” He reached for the first of the oil drums, turning his back as if I might just leave him to it.

  “Not so fast. You told me you were going to talk while you worked.”

  He shrugged, looking caught, and peered around at the dim, ramshackle cellar as if one of the holes in the foundation might be about to let him out. “Well,” he began reluctantly when he realized none would, “the thing is, I cornered Ellie at a church supper about a month ago, and told her how I felt.”

  Sighing, he let his breath out hard. “I told her it was a sin to let that old witch Hedda spoil our lives, that Ellie’s promise to Alvin didn’t mean she had to be a martyr. I said I loved her and I was always going to, and I knew she felt the same way, and wasn’t that worth something, too?”

  “She promised what, exactly? Not to hurt Hedda? And marrying you would do that?”

  He nodded despairingly. “Hedda smacked Ellie hard, once, when Ellie was fifteen, and Ellie raised a hand to her. Alvin got in the middle of it, got them quieted down, and when Ellie had cooled off he made her promise never to do anything to hurt Hedda. Not in any way at all.”

  His shoulders sagged under his blue poplin work jacket. “And I can understand that. But Ellie, she takes it too far.”

  Then he smiled a little, thinking of her again. “I swear, Miz Tiptree, mostly I’m a pretty reasonable guy, but I’d walk on water all the way to Campobello for that woman.”

  “Right,” I said. “I know the feeling. So then what happened?”

  He stared at his hands. “Well, Ellie talked to Alvin about us, on the quiet. That’s when he told her about the money, how his deal had gone bad but he thought he could get Mcllwaine to make good on it, and also that Mcllwaine was leaving him some. He said he was going to hire live-in help, either that or move into that brand-new retirement community down in Blue Hill, the fancy one where they do just about everything for you.”

  George looked up. “Either way, Ellie wouldn’t have to take care of Hedda anymore. Which everyone knows she shouldn’t have had to anyway, but she felt she did. Because of Alvin, you know.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?” I knew, but I wanted to hear it from George, get his slant on it.

  “Well, because he raised her,” George said.

  He set the last big oil drum in the bottom of the dry-well hole. “Let that lumberyard of his run itself down into the ground, spent all his time on Ellie. Taught her how to throw a fastball, take your head right off,” George added admiringly.

  Then the knowledge of her present situation overcame him again. “I don’t guess Alvin meant to make Ellie feel duty-bound, but she does. She won’t leave Alvin alone with Hedda, and she won’t marry me and take care of Hedda at the same time. Says it wouldn’t be fair to me or Hedda. Ellie,” he repeated, “made a promise. And you know Ellie,” he finished glumly, “when she’s set on something.”

  “Yes, I do. Although,” I added, “it was Ellie’s reputation for keeping those promises of hers that kept them from trying to haul her out of here on a helicopter the other night, so I guess that’s good for something, too.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I guess. But right now I sure don’t know what.”

  I caught him as he turned away again. “So George, what is it you’re not saying? Oh, come on,” I added at his denying look. “It might as well be embroidered on your cap, there’s something else you’re not telling me.”

  George looked unhappily at the dry-well hole. “Still got to wait for the rest of the gravel,” he said. “The bigger stuff, that goes inside the drums. Maybe I’ll just run over and ask the boys when they—”

  “Oh, no you don’t. Come with me.” I herded him back up the cellar steps; now that I had him, I wasn’t letting go until I got it all out of him.

  In the kitchen, I began slapping sardines onto slices of bread and slathering them with Raye’s mustard, which is made right here in Eastport and is a blend, as far as I can tell (and I mean this figuratively, of course), of dynamite and cocaine: delicious, energizing, and an excellent sinus remedy to boot.

  As for the other ingredient in the sandwiches, it seemed to me that sardines were small, whole fish, and I felt as likely to eat them as I was to swallow a few goldfish straight out of the bowl. But Wade said sardines were brain food and Sam preferred them to peanut butter, and when Ellie disguised them with fresh herbs and garlic in spaghetti sauce, even I devoured them.

  “So what’s the rest of it?” I asked. “Come on, George, you might as well tell it all.”

  George reached out and plucked a sardine from the tin, and put it in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully on it. “Those are good sardines,” he said.

  “Don’t stall me.” I wrapped the sandwiches in waxed paper, which Wade says keeps the damp out better than plastic wrap, and put them in his lunch pail with a thermos, two brownies, and an apple, sliced into quarters and cored.

  I know; it was awfully old-world domestic, wasn’t it, my fixing Wade’s lunch. But when people go out on the water, all you can send along with them is food; that, and a vigilant turning-away from your own fear. I would go up on the widow’s walk, I suppose, but the house doesn’t have one and Wade wouldn’t stand for it, anyway. That there’s little to earn and many to keep is a fact of downeast life, but the other line of that old sea-chanty—that men must work and women must weep—is not a part of Wade’s repertoire.

  “You were working over there the day before yesterday in the morning, weren’t you?” I asked.

  George’s throat tightened; I saw the sardine he was chewing go down in a lump.

  “Because Ellie says she killed Mcllwaine,” I went on, “but I don’t believe her, and I don’t think you do, either. What I think is that she’s protecting somebody. Jemmy Wechsler overheard you two in the Baywatch,” I added.

  George stared at me, his milky-pale skin gone even whiter. “We were talking about the money, about how if Alvin got Mcllwaine to replace it, we could get married. That’s all.”

  “And,” I asked, “about what Alvin might get if Mcllwaine died? That would replace the money pretty efficiently, too, wouldn’t it?”

  George shook his head. “That’s crazy. Counting on an inheritance—why, you might as well
bet on the weather. I don’t believe old Mcllwaine did anything of the sort, leave Alvin White any money. And I was there, but even if we’d done what you’re thinking—planned it together, I mean—it’s a stupid way to do it. The guy,” he added, “shouldn’t even have have died, in my opinion.”

  I closed the lunchbox. “Why not?”

  “Well, you saw it. Ice pick in the head.” George’s voice was full of disgust. “Buddy of mine down in Portland is a bouncer in a bar, he got shot in the head. Week later, he’s up walking around. I don’t know what’s inside a person’s head, I mean, where the big connections are and so on.”

  He picked up his cup and swallowed the last of his cold coffee. “But I’ve seen a lot of things, car wrecks, logging accidents and so on, and I’m telling you, that one shouldn’t have been a fatal head wound. Back of the neck, maybe, but not front of the head. I’ve been wondering about it.”

  He’d lost all his uncertainty, and I had to admit what he said made some sense. My ex-husband, for instance, dug around inside people’s skulls all the time, admittedly with more planning and awareness than your standard ice-pick wielder, but still. And even he had mentioned similar wounds that weren’t fatal.

  The sound of a helicopter interrupted us. From the window, I could see the craft’s shape through the fog—which was dispersing slightly—and the big red M emblazoned on the side of the fuselage, as the ’copter headed for Quoddy Airfield.

  “They’re taking Mcllwaine’s body,” I guessed. “Take it over to Bangor, I suppose, for the autopsy.” To me it seemed like forever since he’d died, but it was really only two days.

  “No way.” George stood beside me, watching the helicopter dissolve into the low clouds toward the west side of the island. “Arnold says someone pulled strings, got the body released to somewhere in New York.”

  He sniffed. “Guess Maine Medical Center isn’t good enough for him, even when he’s dead.” He picked up his hat with the air of someone about to make an escape.

  “Listen,” he went on, “I’ve got to go talk to Bob Arnold. If the weather’s clearing enough for that helicopter to get in here, we’re going to have even more people in town pretty soon.”

  He was right: the influx of yesterday, intense as it had been, represented the bravest reporters, hot to file a story on the Bastard of Wall Street and how he died. Today, the second wave would be coming in: stringers, freelancers, and smaller publications. It would be good business for restaurants and the Motel East, and a mixture of comedy and annoyance for the rest of us who lived here. After a year or so without twenty-four-hour Thai takeout, while-you-wait photo processing, shopping malls complete with international food courts and thirty-screen, Dolbyized surround-sound cineplexes, you tend not to miss these things very much or very often. But the media were about to go cold turkey on the whole latter half of the twentieth century, and the shock was going to make them irritable.

  George’s mouth curved into a small, anticipatory smile; he was thinking the same thing I was.

  “I saw a guy once,” George said, “in Leighton’s Variety, up there by the counter between the newspapers and the Megabucks tickets. He’s got his silver Beemer sitting idling outside, and he’s so mad, he’s pounding the counter so the little boxes of nail clippers and Red Hots jump. And he’s saying, ‘What do you mean, I can’t see a real-time stock market ticker up here? What do you people do with your lives in this damned burg?’ ”

  George’s imitation was more than passable: chest puffed and expression terminally affronted, as if he’d been told that the drinking water in Eastport contained cholera germs, and that the local people sort of liked it that way.

  “You can get real-time here, now,” I said distractedly. “Buy the service, dial it up. On the Internet.”

  Not, of course, that it is going to do you any good. With a real-time ticker, all you get is the benefit of knowing fifteen minutes sooner what the real players on the Street knew yesterday, or last week.

  “Yeah,” George said thoughtfully. “You can get anything you want in Eastport, really. It’s just you’re not having it forced on you all the time. ’S why I came back. One of the reasons. Thanks for the breakfast.”

  “George.”

  He stopped at the door, smiling as if I might ask him to pick me up some drywall screws at Wadsworth’s, or another giant economy size box of rope caulk.

  Wild oats, I remembered, asking myself what he would hate most to have revealed, and why in the worst of all possible worlds he would let Ellie confess to a crime instead of confessing to it himself. Then I took, you should excuse the expression, a stab at it.

  “George, have you ever had a felony conviction?”

  What little color there was in his face drained away. He pulled out his inhaler and sucked on it unhappily, short of breath at being confronted with a question he’d hoped no one would ask.

  Damn, I thought: there was Ellie’s reason.

  20

  Ellie’s trip from her front door to the squad car had made breaking-news headlines on all the networks. The papers were full of it, and tonight, Larry King would be making hay on it, on account of Mcllwaine being so famously who he was.

  “I wish,” I said heatedly to Bob Arnold, “the cops hadn’t taken her right past all the cameras. In fact, I wish they hadn’t taken her at all. You know as well as I do that confession can’t be true.”

  The Eastport Police Department operated out of an old frame storefront on the west side of Water Street. Two plate-glass front windows furnished a view of passing cars and pedestrians, and of the hand-carved Atlantic shorebirds Rollie Bach was displaying in the window of the Eastport Gallery.

  Now Arnold put his big hands together on the top of his desk, in full view of the reporters shivering hopefully outside. He had banished them from his office, as firmly and completely as if he were quarantining against plague, but he couldn’t order them off the sidewalk. “I can’t help the way it worked out,” he said. “What was I supposed to say, she confessed but we all just like her too much to let you guys do anything about it?”

  He sighed heavily. “I’m sorry, Jacobia. Truth is, we stalled as long as we could, but if there was an arrangement between the cops and the newspeople, I wasn’t in on it. What I wish is, she’d kept her mouth shut, let us figure it all out if we were able to and not if we weren’t.”

  In the gallery window, a pair of plump puffins with black-and-white feathers, huge webbed feet, and bulbous beaks as bright as orange slices waddled atop a chunk of salvaged dock piling.

  “And why did it have to be somebody like Mcllwaine? People from away,” he said, “just come here and screw things up.” Then he caught himself, mortified.

  “I mean, not you, Jacobia. Not ordinary people. Aw, hell,” he gave up, “you know what I mean.”

  “That’s okay,” I relented, because I did know. Exotic as they looked, the puffins belonged here, and I at least had transplanted myself fairly credibly. But Mcllwaine hadn’t; he’d grown up here, but only returned to make a display of his success, showing in the end how much he really didn’t belong.

  “I’m sorry I got all hot at you,” I told Arnold, and he accepted this.

  “Ellie says she killed him out in that pantry of theirs, on account of some money deal. You know anything about that?” Arnold asked.

  “A little,” I admitted, and told him about the stock flop Alvin had gotten caught under. It would all come out now, anyway.

  Arnold nodded. “Alvin’s a sweet old guy, but imagine him thinking he could change Mcllwaine’s mind.”

  I was still thinking about the pantry. “So she just left him lying there afterwards? Is that what she says?”

  “Well, no.” Arnold looked unhappy. “Once she’d lost her temper and done it, she got in a panic about it. Tiptoed into the hall, she says, to make sure Alvin was still in the front room. Janet Fox and Hedda were upstairs. Seeing if the coast was clear, while she tried to figure out what to do. And when she came back �
�”

  “He was gone.” I could picture it: Mcllwaine struggling up, stunned but not yet unconscious, maybe confused. Key Street is quiet in the morning, with people already all off to work or to school; he could have crossed it unnoticed, looking for help.

  But the part before that didn’t sound right to me: Ellie in a panic, or losing her temper. Ellie wouldn’t panic if you set a bomb off under her, and while she was fully capable of skewering you verbally, I couldn’t imagine her becoming physically violent.

  “Did George come and talk to you?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Arnold said, glowering at me again. “Gave me his badge and his weapon. How’d you know about the felony thing?”

  “I didn’t. I thought about what might make Ellie protect him, and him let her. It would go harder on him than on her if he had a prior. They’d end up being together sooner.”

  Arnold looked thunderous. “Now wait just a damned minute.”

  “Well, that’s what the state cops will think, if they ever stop fixating on Ellie. Which they probably won’t, but Arnold, George was there. Hedda’s not physically capable, Janet was with Hedda, and Alvin wouldn’t let Ellie go to jail for him, you know that. Believe me, I hate it as much as you do, but tell me: who’s left?”

  Other, I meant, than Nina Mcllwaine. She felt so right, I could practically taste the triumph of seeing her led off in handcuffs. But so far there wasn’t any point mentioning her to Arnold; I had no real evidence she was even near the house when the killing occurred, much less inside. Nina was cold, calculating, shrewd, and—I was willing to bet—as mean as a snake, but that wouldn’t cut it in the arrest-and-prosecution department. Meanwhile, though: (a) Ellie had confessed, (b) I was sure she hadn’t done those things, herself, and (c) George—now that he and Ellie were together again—was a fabulous candidate for Person Most Worth Protecting, from Ellie’s viewpoint.

  Which suggested that he actually had done it, or she thought he had. I didn’t much like those ideas, either, especially the first one, and I hoped that there was (d) some other alternative. But good alternatives, ones I liked contemplating at all and could put forward convincingly, were getting as scarce as bargain-priced blue chips, lately.