The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  I looked at Bobby’s staging platform: three sets of two planks each, laid across the supports of the staging. The supports were attached to posts by a ratchet affair, which you operated with your foot while standing on the platform, clinging to the post to keep your weight off the platform if you were lowering it.

  Clinging to the post all the rest of the time, too, if you were me. But I was only going to get one crack at getting Ellie out of trouble, and when I went at it, I had to have my ducks in a row.

  And one of the ducks had been way up on that platform, while Threnody Mcllwaine had been getting murdered with an ice pick.

  I took another doughnut. What the hell, you only live once, and my cholesterol probably wouldn’t even have time to rise much before I was dead of fright.

  “So Bobby, what do you think of Nina?” Snooping into murder is really just indulging in gossip, but it is gossip with a point.

  He chuckled, wiping his fingers with a blue bandanna. “I think Nina’s about what she seems to be. Young, pretty, hungry. Saw the main chance and grabbed it. Hey, who can blame her?”

  Just what the world needed, I thought: another sucker for a pretty face. Still, his non-judgemental attitude was refreshing; Bobby was a good egg.

  He took a final swallow of coffee and screwed the cap back onto the thermos. “Jeez, a cigarette would go good about now.”

  Out on the water, the foghorns had begun a mournful hooting. “Sorry. I didn’t bring any.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t smoke. Anymore,” he added ruefully. “This clean-and-sober business is a pain in the tail, you take it halfway seriously.”

  He grinned, and I laughed with him, comfortably and easily. Bobby had been sober for as long as I had been in Eastport, but before that the story was that he could be seen on the waterfront any night of the week, clutching a paper-bag-wrapped bottle.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “Nina’s a tough nut. Gets what she wants one way or another. And with the situation out there now, I just had a crawful. Patty bitching, Gerry kowtowing, all those relatives of Nina’s everywhere you look. Not that they aren’t nice people. They all seem fine except for that one guy, the cousin.”

  He shook his head. “But jeez, it’s like a goddam Red Cross camp. And Janet’s all screwed up. I used to think her spending most of her time trying to finding her mother was a crock, just a waste of time. But it kept her busy, traveling—she took lots of trips all over the place—and on the phone and so on. She had a lead in New York she was excited about for a while, but I guess that didn’t pan out. Now, it’s like she’s lost her reason to live.”

  “Any idea why she gave it up?” The coincidence of that happening just when Mcllwaine died seemed too perfectly timed.

  “Nope. Unless it was just something she could do, butt heads with the old bastard. Drove her nuts, the way he made fun of her about it, but it was her way of standing up to him. Since he’s gone maybe she figures, why bother? She’s not talking about it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

  He strolled over to the staging apparatus, leaned against the posts at either end, and apparently found them satisfactory. “So I took a ride out to Meddybemps and went fishing, get away from it all. That’s where I was when you were looking for me.”

  “The situation makes you uncomfortable,” I offered.

  He looked at me. “Right. So I got out of it. And no, I don’t believe Ellie killed him any more than you do. As for the rest, I guess I want to keep it simple, like the saying goes. I don’t know who did it, or how, or why. And maybe I don’t want to.”

  He stuffed the bandanna into his jeans pocket. “Tell you one thing, though. I’m not going back there until those relatives are gone. Man, do those people drink.”

  It was another reason he’d wanted to get away. I’ve known a few recovering alcoholics, and most of them didn’t like hanging around people who were drinking, not because they were worried about slipping, themselves, but because it reminded them of the way they used to be—like looking at an old photograph of yourself and finding it’s someone you don’t even want to recognize.

  “So anyway,” he said, “you’ve been dancing around this staging for twenty minutes like it’s a roller coaster and you’re not sure whether to buy a ticket. You going up, or what?”

  He stepped onto the platform, and reached a hand down to me. I looked up at him: a tall, lean man whose craggy face showed the effects of a little time and a lot of abuse. As he waited to see what I would do, his eyes did not flinch in the slightest from my examining gaze.

  Like I say: you only live once.

  35

  “Steady,” Bobby Taylor said to me from the other end of the platform.

  I unclenched my teeth just long enough to smile at him, meanwhile thinking how pretty the rooftops were and wondering if I had remembered to send in my life-insurance policy premium.

  Bobby cranked his end of the platform up with a foot ratchet. This of course made my end of the platform slant down. But Bobby had lent me leather gloves, which turned out to be handy for clinging to wooden support poles, and of course he would not crank his end up very much.

  Bobby kept cranking. Apparently responding to nerve signals emanating from my brain stem, which I understand is the portion of the brain responsible for basic survival matters, my arms wrapped themselves more firmly around the support pole.

  Little rootlets, I felt sure, would soon emerge from my arms, responding to some even more primitive brain segment that traced its heritage back to the vegetable kingdom, fastening me to the pole so securely that I would have to be excised from it by a tree surgeon.

  “Okay,” Bobby Taylor called. “Now it’s your turn. Put your foot on the foot pad and press down.”

  “You,” I muttered, “are out of your mind.”

  “I could come down there and do it,” he called genially. “But then you’d have to get out of my way, so I could get at it.”

  Far off in the distance, I could see the windshields of cars glinting on their way across the Lubec Bridge. Turning slowly, I saw my very own rooftop, with the flashing on one of the chimneys peeling away like tinfoil and a patch of the shingles flapping, looking for all the world like someone riffling a wad of hundred-dollar bills, which was roughly what the roof work represented.

  “You,” Bobby Taylor clarified, patiently and kindly, “would have to let go.”

  “In that case …” I looked at my feet, remembering that under no circumstances did I wish to look past them to the ground below.

  Near my right foot was the metal foot pad, which of course would not just unclamp and let go. Bobby Taylor had firmly assured me no foot pad would unclamp on its own and send the staging platform plunging to earth. To lower the staging you had to unbrake the pad, then turn a reluctant crank. He’d assured me that it was not at all an impromptu operation.

  I put my foot in the foot pad and tentatively pressed down.

  “Harder,” Bobby called. “Put your weight on it.”

  Then, seeing that I was having difficulty, he made his way down the platform to stand behind me. Reaching his arms around me and out on either side, he braced his hands atop my gloved ones.

  “Now, go ahead and put your foot on it.”

  I did as he instructed and was rewarded by the feeling of the platform rising beneath me until the two-by-twelves paralleled the earth. And with that, except for the Congregational Church steeple and Heddlepenny House itself, we were the highest thing in Eastport.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, all at once very glad I had come.

  “Yeah. You don’t miss much from up here. Look.” He extended one finger without taking his hand from mine.

  Down at the harbor, a couple of fellows in orange life jackets set out for Deer Island in an aluminum boat. Sitting amidships, a little boy clutched the rail with one hand and rummaged in a basket with the other. A napkin flew away from him and he grabbed at it, then clutched his handhold as the bow hit a wave, bouncing, t
he napkin flittering into the boat’s wake, disappearing.

  “And over there’s the Whites’ house,” Bobby said. “See that orange stuff below the roofline? That’s the Rustoleum George was spraying on his pipe fix.”

  Now that so many of the reporters had gone away, Key Street looked curiously vacant. “So you could see him.” Relief hit me; part of the trick of getting Ellie off the hook was indeed making sure that George was off, too, or she wouldn’t recant. It just wasn’t the whole trick.

  Meanwhile, it wasn’t enough for me to hear Bobby Taylor say he’d seen George from up here that morning. I had to know for sure that it was possible. Otherwise, the way my luck was running, the dreadful Clarissa Dow would climb up here herself and prove that it couldn’t be. Clarissa, I felt rather certain, was not afraid of staging platforms or of anything else.

  “Of course I could see him.” Bobby laughed. “Why would I lie about a thing like that?”

  “I don’t know, Bobby. I mean, I didn’t mean to imply that you would. I’m just so glad, that’s all, because you can see the church clock from here, and you saw George from here when you did, and that means that Ellie doesn’t have to lie, anymore.”

  I felt giddy with happiness, and height.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “He was up there a long time. In my sight all the while, as a matter of fact. He hauls a lot of stuff up to the job with him, so he doesn’t have to run up and down.”

  A thought struck me. “Did you see Nina? Can Man said there was a blue car, and I was just wondering …”

  “Oh, sure. She pulled in, went around the side. I remember thinking that was funny.”

  He shot me a knowing look. “Nina’s kind of sworn off the back doors of places, you know.”

  His voice grew sardonic. “Now that she’s not a refugee in a war zone anymore, filling up on roots and berries while the bombs explode. She likes front doors, and she likes ’em best if there’s a bunch of snooty butlers and footmen standing behind ’em, wearing their uniforms as she sashays in.”

  A squawk from below distracted me. Moments later, Martha Dodd rushed out the side door of her house—the one right next to Heddlepenny—into the garden, where each spring she put in more labor than the yearly output of your average chain gang.

  “Oh, dahling,” Bobby imitated with bull’s-eye accuracy, waving his hand in a careless, Nina-like way that nearly made my heart stop, considering how high off the ground we were; but I couldn’t help laughing.

  George hadn’t gone in, but maybe Nina had.

  “Anyway, I didn’t see Nina for a while, maybe five minutes, and then I did, going around to the front of the house.”

  Janet had said she heard a knock on the door, and that Alvin had answered.

  “Couple minutes later, she drove away,” Bobby added.

  Nina, I exulted silently, had been out of the car and out of Bobby’s sight for maybe five minutes: long enough to swing that ice pick.

  Another shout from below interrupted my thoughts. “Get out of there!” Martha Dodd urged, swinging a broom before her as if driving a flock of chickens. A wicked little burbling laugh came from somewhere in the yard.

  “Scat, you little pest!” Martha cried, as Sadie Peltier crawled out from the concealment of a burlap windbreak, her curls a mess of straw and compost.

  Sadie beat feet for the garden gate, swung on it once very hard as she was forbidden to do, and pelted off down the street, pausing to turn and grimace defiantly at Martha, waggling her hips and wiggling her fingers in her ears before making good on her escape.

  “Oh!” Martha mourned, crouching to inspect her rhubarb bed, then rising to wring her apron vexedly at the fleeing child.

  “Sadie,” I observed, “is an absolute menace.”

  “She’s a caution,” Bobby agreed. “Stout line might hold her down, but not much short of that.”

  He craned his neck around the post to watch Bill Blatchley’s little blue scallop dragger Sally nip around stern-first in the dark green waters of the boat basin, and settle into her slip just as neatly as a hen settling onto her nest.

  “You know, some people around here appreciate what you’re doing for Ellie. Trying to help her, and all.”

  “Oh.” A little bolt of happiness pierced me. “I thought maybe people would just think I was meddling.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. In fact I was telling Janet this morning, she could do worse than find a friend like you. Instead of aping after Nina all the time, trying to get her approval. Or sucking up to that old witch Hedda White.”

  I looked out again over the pointed rooftops, like sharp-edged cutouts snipped against the pale sky. “You spoke to Janet,” I said, wanting not to have heard him correctly.

  “Yeah, I went over early, after I called you. I figured I’d better. Takin’ off the way I did. I’m not mad at her or anything, I just needed thinking room.”

  “You told her what I wanted,” I said, hoping it wasn’t true.

  A tiny little ping came from the support mechanism under my feet, but I didn’t pay attention. I was busy thinking about Janet telling Nina that Bobby could see what went on over at the Whites’ house that morning, and Nina deciding to do something about it.

  “Don’t,” said Bobby Taylor in tones of unnatural calm, “move an inch.”

  “What? What’s wrong?” I turned my head slightly. Under the year-round tan he’d acquired by working outside all the time, his face was waxily pale.

  “See that bolt down there?”

  I followed his gaze. In a way whose specifics I did not fully understand, the staging mechanism worked on friction; everything had to be tight. And now I could see that the bolt Bobby Taylor was indicating had a small, round hole machined through it, a hole intended for a cotter pin.

  No cotter pin. That ping, I realized coldly. The platform descended about a quarter-inch.

  “Just shut up,” Bobby Taylor said fiercely into my ear, and seized me hard by the scruff of my collar with his left hand, and by the muscle of my upper arm with his right hand. Turning me, he wrenched my own hands from the support post and propelled me into, it seemed, empty space.

  “Forward,” he grated out. “Believe me, you want to do this. Go for the next support post, the next set of boards.”

  The platform jolted down six inches. I had a sudden, dizzying sense of the sky tilting and the earth rushing up to meet me, a zooming, wah-wah distortion of perspective that seemed to be sucking me sideways off the narrow platform. Bobby stayed behind me, motoring me forward, but I couldn’t feel my feet and I didn’t dare to look down; it was as if fear had dematerialized my body.

  There was a moment, halfway between support posts, climbing, it seemed, a slope that got steeper by the second. In that instant there was nothing to stop my falling, and the two-by-twelves were sliding faster. It was like the dream where you are running, and the awful dreaming knowledge overcomes you that you are not going to make it.

  Bobby hit me from behind with the force of a linebacker, and I lurched forward, slamming onto the next set of two-by-twelves. I felt his arms wrap tight around me, and around the support post.

  A splinter stabbed my cheek. The post smelled of pine. I could feel my heart thudding, see stars against my eyelids. Blood oozed from my lip, tasting rusty like a mouthful of old nails.

  Bobby’s breath gusted urgently into my ear. “Is it there?”

  “What?” I was trying to talk, but no sound came out.

  “Look down,” he insisted, “is the pin there?”

  And then it hit me that cotter pins do not simply fall out. You may be able to remove one with your fingers, but often you cannot. The whole point of a cotter pin is that once you put it in, it stays in, unless of course somebody hammers the hairpin portion of the pin and breaks it, whereupon the straight section will slide through and fall out easily.

  If this pin were missing, there would be no next set of two-by-twelves.

  I squinted down. The cotter pin protruded in friendl
y fashion through the bolt holding the support mechanism to the post.

  Only, not all the way through. The straight part of the pin was pushed almost into the hole, as if someone had tried to force it, deforming the end and giving up when the pin stuck.

  “It’s there,” I told Bobby. “Now what?”

  I felt him sigh. “Now I’m going to lower us down,” he said. “You just stay here and hang on.”

  “What if the cotter pin over there turns out to be missing?” I pointed at the final support post.

  “It got us up here,” he replied grimly, already setting out across the two-by-twelves.

  Which was not a particularly comforting thought, seeing as the other one had gotten us up there, too, before falling, but the final pin was present and intact, and Bobby lowered us without further incident.

  “Sadie,” he said when he got his breath back.

  “Martha Dodd yelled at her yesterday, over at my house,” I agreed.

  He sank down, and I sat beside him, heedless of cold and damp. I’d have sat on a nuclear waste dump if it was at ground level. “Outside my house, after Can Man got hit.”

  I remembered my premonition that someone would suffer the consequences of scolding Sadie, who did not take even the mildest correction lightly.

  “Probably,” Bobby said, grimly picking up the fallen cotter pin, “Sadie came over here to get her revenge, then. Give Martha the what-for.”

  The two-by-twelves had landed smack on a couple of Martha Dodd’s rhododendrons, flattening them. The faint crack of their branches had been the only sound, and no cars had happened to be passing on Washington Street, so no one had even noticed us.

  “Could she reach them?” I objected. “And do it?”

  He nodded. “I lower ’em way down when I leave at night, so no kids will climb up on ’em. She could hit the pin with a rock.”

  He looked at the remaining two-by-twelves. “You know what I like about not drinking? I like it that when something bad happens, it could’ve happened to anyone. But somebody’s got to talk to that kid’s parents, before she kills someone.”