The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  He sounded certain, and I had to admit it made sense. Sadie had probably been watching from somewhere nearby when the two-by-twelves fell. She was always around for disasters.

  He tossed the fallen cotter pin at me. “Here, you can keep it for a souvenir.”

  I caught the object with the sort of swift sure grab of which I am ordinarily incapable. Something about escaping annihilation, apparently, had sharpened my reflexes.

  And my eyes. At the hairpin end of the steel cotter pin, which was darkened with age and the beginnings of corrosion, were a set of tiny, thread-thin, bright parallel lines.

  Such as the lines that might be made on a metal object if you gripped it with a pair of pliers. And Sadie was a devil, all right, but I doubted that she carried tools.

  The marks could have been made any time, during maintenance, or repair. But as I stared at them, the grooves on the cotter pin seemed to smirk thinly at me, as if knowing something I didn’t.

  36

  “What,” Nina inquired, tipping her smooth brunette head with sweet, ingenue brightness, “means this thing, ’cotter pin’?”

  I’d had enough of sweet, ingenue brightness already, and I’d only been there about two minutes.

  “This,” I thrust the pin at her, “means cotter pin. It fell out of Bobby Taylor’s staging platform while we were on it.”

  The house at Mackerel Cove seemed outwardly unchanged: same landscaped plantings of oversized nursery shrubs, still in their burlap wrappings against the harsh Maine coast winter, same bullying sense of vulgar display trampling any potential for beauty.

  Inside, though, a new air of mad gaiety prevailed. Pop music pounded from the stereo set in the living room, remnants of breakfast littered the dining room table, clothes and magazines lay scattered where people had flung them.

  Nina’s eyes widened. “Is maybe bad accident.”

  “Yes, bad accident.” I gave the final word a harsh twist, saw her catch and understand it without any impediment.

  Somewhere upstairs, someone shouted: a sharp, angry bark, followed by a crash of furniture. On the mantel stood a half-empty bottle of vodka, a bag of Fritos, and a prescription bottle with the name of a Chicago pharmacy printed on the label.

  The stereo stopped blaring Metallica and began on nine inch nails. Altogether, the atmosphere in the house was the one I imagine must prevail in the asylum for the criminally insane, after the attendants have been murdered and buried on the grounds and the inmates have taken up management of the place.

  “You don’t think that I had to do with?” Nina asked.

  Which was an interesting leap of logic, considering that I had so far suggested nothing of the sort, or at least not in so many words.

  “Because,” Nina added with another of her language-mangling mannerisms, all of which separately and together were beginning to make me want to strangle her, “I was in bed, asleeping.”

  “Uh-huh. So Janet didn’t tell you I was going over there to meet Bobby Taylor. She didn’t say Bobby was going to show me that George Valentine couldn’t have killed your husband.”

  And that you could have, I thought but didn’t say aloud. She got it, though. Her eyes narrowed, her delicate nostrils flared, and for a moment I saw the hungry, street-wise refugee kid she had been, peering out at me with feral purpose.

  “Nina!” A young male voice barked abruptly from the stairs. Her eyes flickered calculatingly from me to its source, in the hallway behind her. “Nina, you must—”

  I turned. It was the fellow from the photograph, not unshaven and frowzy with sleep in the middle of the morning as I had been imagining, but sharp and alert as if he had been up since dawn.

  “Jacobia,” Nina said, “this is my cousin.” She said his name, but I could not have done so without some practice.

  He tipped his head in acknowledgment, sizing me up with his eyes as he put a hand on Nina’s shoulder, showing those white teeth that I remembered from the snapshot. In person, they were even more impressive: it was a carnivore’s grin.

  “I am guest in Nina’s home,” he said, glancing around at the luxurious rooms he now inhabited, the rich wood and expensive furnishings. His look had the proprietary air of a jungle animal surveying its newly enlarged territory.

  “Welcome,” I replied. “I hope you enjoy Eastport.”

  His nod, accompanied by a lazy lowering of his eyelids, said not only that he intended to do so, but that he hardly needed my good wishes; that he found them, in fact, rather impertinent.

  “I am so sorry to interrupt, but we must go soon,” he told Nina. His fingers moved briefly on her shoulder with uncousinlike intimacy.

  “Goodbye, Jacobia,” she murmured in the polite, practiced tones of a woman who would just as soon slit your throat. “I will give Janet your greeting.”

  What I wanted Janet to be given was a smack upside the head. Had she really run, like a good little sycophant, to let Nina know what I was up to?

  If she had, this fellow could have tampered with the staging platform before Bobby got there. The morning would not yet have been full light, so he could have done it unnoticed, and the task might have taken only a moment.

  Finally, there were the tool marks on the cotter pin, fresh and bright. At the door I turned again to the cousin, whose hands, hanging loosely but powerfully at his sides, appeared capable of wielding a pair of pliers without difficulty.

  “So pleased to meet you,” I lied, as I had countless other times to countless other bloody-minded thugs in good clothing, in countless other huge, tasteless houses full of knick-knacks chosen by trendy decorators. “What did you say you did in your country, again?”

  He hadn’t said, of course. Moving protectively in front of Nina, he smiled at me.

  “I head government project in villages. Recording populations, various ethnic groups.”

  Yeah, recording them. And reducing them, if the prayer books abandoned in the glass-strewn, bomb-pocked churches didn’t happen to be printed in the right language. Oh, this guy was slick.

  I looked at Nina. “Congratulations,” I said, “on finding him so fast.” Then I winked.

  Her pretty face wrinkled into a look of such fury, I thought she was going to spit at me, but I got out of there in a hurry before she could, wondering all the way to the car whether in the next instant the cousin was going to grab me, yank my throat back, and draw a knife blade across my throat.

  I may not always know who is capable of an amateur, spur-of-the-moment homicide, but I do know a stone killer when I see one. After all, I used to work with them all the time.

  37

  Heading into town, I drove down Washington Street toward the Coast Guard building and the customs office. Not much happened in Eastport to vary the customs officials’ routine of trooping aboard container vessels and clearing the crews en masse for the couple of days the boat would be in harbor. Checking out the so-called cousin’s travel papers might, I thought, make a nice diversion for them. Who knew what would happen once he felt his well-feathered nest getting jostled by a lot of nosy immigration officials?

  But as I was about to turn into the lot behind the customs building, I spotted the blue Lincoln in my rearview mirror, and there was really no sense in telegraphing my punches. So I continued to the next lot, alongside the fish pier, and went into the Eastport Gallery, where Derek Hart had already opened up for the day.

  Inside, I was greeted by the aroma of fresh coffee mingled with the perfumes of paint and turpentine, the fine madness of a Beethoven string quartet exulting from the good speakers Derek had installed, and cascades of natural light pouring in through the gallery’s big second-floor back windows, facing the water.

  I paused on the top step. The gallery’s old exposed rafters and beams had been washed in thinned white paint, as had the walls and trim. The floor was glossily coated in dark red, and the room divided into oblique cubicles by panels at eye level, on enameled support frames.

  The effect, especially with th
e windows open and the tang of salt from the harbor breezing in, was of a large, wonderfully airy atelier with a work area in the brightest corner.

  “Why didn’t I become a painter?” I asked into the space and lightness.

  “Because,” Derek Hart said long-sufferingly in answer to my question, and without turning from the canvas he was engaged upon, “a quick martyrdom is so much more efficient. Burning at the stake or being shot through with arrows. Or eaten up by a lion.”

  He sighed, putting down his brush. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be finished off by a lion right this minute.”

  But when he turned, he was cheerful, a ruddy-faced, jovially grinning man of fifty or so, wearing a blue-striped shirt with the collar open, the sleeves rolled up, and a tie stuffed in the pocket. Navy slacks and a belt with red sailboats embroidered on it completed his outfit, along with a pair of deck shoes.

  “Good morning, Jacobia. What can I do for you today?” He waved at the works on the dividing panels, the product of a dozen industrious gallery members’ busy winters.

  “Something in pastel? Pen-and-ink? Possibly you’re partial to oil. Or a woodcut.”

  Derek’s tone skewered his dual role of artist and promoter. Once the owner of a small, wildly successful Manhattan ad shop, he was the gentlest of men and a canny, energetic marketer, with an eye for quality that set the gallery’s offerings a sharp cut above the blurry daubs often seen in tourist destinations.

  “Nothing today, Derek, sorry. I really just came in to use the phone.”

  His face fell comically. “Help yourself,” he sighed. “Coffee, too, if you want. All I am here is a public convenience.”

  The phone was downstairs with the larger paintings and the sculptures. I pressed in Bob Arnold’s number—a request for an immigration check might be taken more seriously, I decided on second thought, if it came from him—but his personal line was busy and I didn’t think this was an emergency. So I waited, sniffing at a little whiff of woodsmoke drifting in from the street while gazing at Derek’s latest finished painting: three men in a boat, on a tossing sea, in trouble, and a fantastic fourth figure.

  In the painting, one man reached for the outstretched hand of a drowning mermaid. Another rowed energetically, while the third man pointed in alarm at something outside the picture frame, on the horizon.

  Or risen from the sea. The maiden’s hand reaches imploringly, with what is either her final, dying bit of strength or a fine imitation of it. No one seems to notice the pointing man’s wide-eyed alarm, nor the fact that a great slosh of water is slopping up over the gunwale of the little boat, the wave’s curved shape a watery reverse of the woman’s hand; no one sees the trap.

  A mermaid’s heart, they say, is very cold. The tang of woodsmoke was getting stronger.

  “Jacobia.”

  It was Derek, looking concerned. I started out of my moment’s reverie and smiled at him, ready to debate yet again what was causing that strange wave; he loved to talk about his paintings.

  “Jacobia, I think you’d better go home right away.”

  The smoke smell became a stink; I could see it now in the air outside the gallery, a faint, bluish haze acrid with the smell of old varnish.

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  Derek looked stricken, his pale hands unhappily clenched; he hated being the bearer of bad news. But like the men in the painting I still didn’t get it.

  “Jacobia,” Derek said, “your house is on fire.”

  38

  Through the smoke, the sun was a strange, pale disk hanging in the sky like a malignant omen. From the windows of the storeroom where I had found Mcllwaine’s body, orange bursts punched out like fists. Gouts of water poured from hoses around the spot where George Valentine was chopping a hole in the roof with an axe, while two other firemen advanced on the storeroom’s back door, trying to muscle in close enough to battle the erupting flames.

  “Sam,” I managed, slamming my car to a halt and half-falling out of it in my fright. “Sam?”

  The yard was a muddy battle zone filled with grim-faced men in yellow coats and boots, their sooty faces streaming with the choking smoke. “Sam!”

  Bob Arnold heard me, turned, and jerked his arm toward Victor Sawtelle’s palisade fence, now wetly plastered with charred bits of the antique newspapers I had salvaged from behind the plaster I had torn down out there, before it became obvious that the storeroom would have to be rebuilt entirely.

  Then I saw Sam by the fence, his denim jacket around his defeated shoulders, a few of the neighbors trying ineffectively to comfort him.

  He was alive, and for a moment that was all I needed. But then I saw how devastated he was: crying, his eyes wild with shock and misery when his brought his fists down from them.

  “Mom!” At the sight of me, the last of the fight went out of him and he sobbed.

  George broke through the roof and a glut of fire exploded from it, sending him scrambling. I wrapped my arm around Sam’s shoulders and hugged him to me, hard.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Whatever happens, we will deal with it. We will get through it, and we will be fine.”

  He pulled away. “Monday’s still in there. The fire guys were here when I got here, they wouldn’t let me in. I could hear her.”

  George crawled back up to the hole in the roof, aiming a fire hose through it.

  “She’s in there,” Sam insisted. “She was whining, scratching at something. I think she might be stuck in the basement.”

  Another boom of flame, and even though the fire had not yet broken through to the main house, smoke was beginning to drift out the back door. Pretty soon it would be a choking hell inside, and then it would all go at once in an incinerating rush.

  “Stay here,” I told Sam, gripping him. “I mean it.”

  He stared, nodding openmouthed as I strode away from him through the little groups of shocked, silent neighbors. One of them was little Sadie, of course, her moppet face with its halo of dark ringlets gazing up at the fire with an expression of awe and malicious glee.

  Disgusted, I turned away from her toward the house, but a hand on my shoulder stopped me.

  “Oh, but you mustn’t going there,” said a familiar voice dripping with sly feline charm. “It is too much dangerous.”

  It was Nina, looking on as my life burned down to the ground. A hundred feet away, the cousin lounged against the blue Lincoln, his face composed into a look of languid disinterest but with eyes alert.

  Sighting me, he deliberately took a pack of Gauloises from his pocket and lit one, and tucked a gold lighter back into his shirt.

  And suddenly, I’d had it with Nina and her selfish schemes, her perfect willingness to ruin lives—and even end them—in order to get her way. I put my hand in the middle of her yellow cashmere sweater and shoved, hard. She took two startled backward steps and sat down in the mud.

  The cousin moved forward, seeming to uncoil from where he lounged against the car, a frown beginning to spoil his pretty-boy appearance. But I moved in front of him, leaning down over Nina to speak to her.

  “Get away from here,” I gritted out through clenched teeth at her. “Get away and stay away from my house, or getting dropped in a mud puddle is going to be the least of your worries. Understand?”

  I yanked her up by her shoulders, spun her, and shoved her again, propelling her in the direction of the looming cousin.

  “I don’t have time for you, now,” I called after her. “But I know what you did. I can’t prove it yet, but I will.”

  Tottering, Nina put her muddy hands out toward the cousin’s champagne suede jacket, so new it might as well have had tags hanging from it. A look of dismay crossed his face as she staggered at him, dripping with filth. Suddenly her foot hit a slick patch and she pitched forward off-balance, uttering a mewing cry of alarm.

  I didn’t wait to see if he caught her.

  “Jacobia,” Bob Arnold said as I shoved through the knot of men clustered around the porch, a
nd he made as if to step in front of me, to block my way. “We tried for the dog, but they couldn’t find her. They went all through the house, and now it’s not…”

  Not safe, he was about to say. I just looked at him, and something in my expression must have told him that if he really meant to stop me, he would have to shoot my kneecaps off.

  “Wait a minute, I’ll go,” Wade said, coming out of nowhere.

  I hadn’t seen him arrive, but now after a hasty conference with Sam he was bulling his way toward me, the men separating to let him pass.

  “I am going after Monday,” I told Arnold. “Step aside.”

  “Hey,” Wade said, putting his big hand on my shoulder. “Let me do it. Fire’s not in the main house, yet. I’ll look for the dog again.”

  “We’ll do it,” I insisted, and he looked at me, two separate impulses warring in his eyes: gallantry, or equal partners? If it was the former, I would have to stop making those sardine sandwiches; after all, one cannot have one’s nurturing instincts mistaken for a political position.

  “Okay.” Wade gave in with a chuckle of resignation. “We’ll do it together. Anybody ever tell you you’re a tough little broad?”

  Actually they had, and not in such polite terms, either, but I don’t think it had ever pleased me so much. Wade cuffed me gently on the shoulder, his gloved fist lingering and his eyes bright with what I suddenly understood was love.

  It felt like a cross between a shower of gold dust and a smack with a two-by-four. “Oh,” I said softly, feeling floored for a dizzying instant.

  And then we went in.

  It wasn’t like a fire scene in New York where the firemen and policemen will physically stop you from doing something stupid. In Eastport, plenty of people have made crazy decisions based on pure damn bull-headedness, and they will put on a slam-bang funeral for you, too, if yours goes wrong. Reluctantly, Arnold let us pass.

  The smoke inside was so thick we were swimming in it, holding our breath and squinting against the burning in our eyes. Wade went first down the hallway ahead of me, feeling for the light switch and putting his hands on the basement door, checking for heat. At least we could breathe better, back here; the smoke was seeping from beneath the door to the spare room, so it was worse at that end of the house.