The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Arnold nodded. “You and Bobby Taylor had a little high-flying excitement, over to the Heddlepenny House earlier today, too.”

  “That’s right. There’s a lot more than meets the eye going on here, Arnold.”

  “Oh, it meets the eye,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  The fire, I thought, had put us on the same page at last, the message being that someone had matters arranged just the way they liked them, with Mcllwaine dead and Ellie in jail for the crime, and then I had stuck my nose in.

  “And there was the note,” I said. “The threatening note.”

  I got it from my bag and showed it to him. “Before this happened, I might have agreed it was just some prank. But this—”

  He looked at a heap of sodden plaster that had fallen from the hall ceiling, directly under the upstairs bathroom.

  “Right. This was no prank. None of it is. What a mess,” he said, and I knew he was longing for the days when he could jolly a couple of rowdy guys into the squad car and drive them home.

  “I’m sorry, Jacobia. I wish I could do more about all this. I’m not ignoring any of it, or sittin’ around on my hind end doing nothing, either. But—”

  He spread his hands. “Nothing that’s happened would make a rat’s ass worth of difference to that Clarissa Dow woman.”

  “But what about this?” I waved my arms, to indicate all the fire destruction. “This didn’t just happen by itself.”

  “I know. But if there was evidence of arson, it’s probably burnt now. And arson’s got to be proved—it’s not enough for you to have a suspicion, or me, either. On top of which, this state’s got one fire marshall, seven inspectors. For,” he added meaningfully, “the whole state.”

  I gripped Sam’s baby book. “So she’s not going to draw the obvious conclusion? That someone did this to discourage me from trying to clear Ellie?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Clarissa, trying to get her to see reason, but I tell you, she’s about as useless as a rubber clam hoe. Stuff that happened before this, your flat tires and so on, I get the impression she thinks you might have done ’em all yourself, shift suspicion away from Ellie. And this, she’ll say it was just some old wires, or something. Because for one thing, how are people getting into your house?”

  On Wade’s advice, I had begun locking my doors, and this question had troubled me, also. But the locks on my doors are as unreliable as most of the other fixtures. Lots of times, just rattling the knob will let you in.

  Now at my look of outrage, Arnold spread his hands. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Half the time, I feel like pushing old Clarissa off the end of the dock.”

  And the other half? I wanted to ask. Something in his voice sounded funny to me, as if Clarissa Dow were occupying more of his thoughts than he liked. But I understood what he meant.

  “I know, Arnold. It’s different here, that’s all,” I said. “You can’t even fault her for not seeing it, really. She’s used to the city.”

  “Yeah. Takes a while, I guess. I mean, to figure out that when something happens here, it actually means something, ’stead of just being background noise.”

  I felt a burst of affection for Arnold, for his being able to put it so clearly that way. In Eastport if someone shouts, odds are they are shouting at you, and wanting pretty urgently for you to do something about it. In more populous places, god forbid you should get involved, but in Eastport, you are already involved.

  “Anyway,” Arnold said, “couple of things. Alvin White asked me, could I try to find someone to stay in his house for a night or so. He says Hedda’s all bent out of shape about the fire, scared to hell their place is going to be next. She’s a handful, that Hedda. And since you’re kind of stuck for tonight…”

  And I had promised Ellie. Still, the thought made me quail.

  “Oh, Arnold. Can’t I just hire her a practical nurse? Or a lion tamer from a zoo somewhere?”

  Arnold chuckled. “Yeah, a whip and a chair is about the right equipment. But you know how Hedda is with strangers.”

  “She’s nicer to strangers than she is to people she knows,” I retorted, thinking of Janet Fox.

  “Alvin doesn’t want Janet, anymore.” Arnold dismissed my next suggestion before I could offer it. “Wouldn’t say why, but he was firm on that. Old boy needs a hand, though, Jacobia. He looks frazzled.”

  “Oh, all right,” I relented. After all, I’d had a house fire and nearly gotten my neck broken, and now that my evening would be occupied with Hedda, at least things couldn’t get any worse.

  “Thanks, Jacobia,” Arnold said, heading out. “Oh, and one other thing I meant to tell you.”

  He paused at the door. “There was a fellow downtown, a guy from away, asking about you. What with the fire and all, it kind of slipped my mind.”

  “Really? What kind of a guy?”

  Arnold shrugged. “Don’t know. Didn’t see him, myself. All I know is, he was looking for you. Pretty girl with him, and he was driving a yellow sports car.”

  I began to have an awful suspicion, which Arnold confirmed.

  “What I heard,” Arnold said over his shoulder as he went down the back steps, “this fellow, he says he’s your ex-husband.”

  41

  As I hurried into the Baywatch Cafe, I could already hear my ex-husband’s voice, loud and dripping with self-importance.

  “Of course, the people around her are almost all dirt-poor,” he said, “so you can’t expect much sophistication. Salt of the earth folks, though. Best place in the world to raise children.”

  Which was interesting to me, since I’d had to fight tooth and nail to get him to let me bring Sam here, and what he knew about raising children he could have fit into his martini olive.

  The part about their being poor and unsophisticated was also fascinating, I could tell, to the local people who were having a drink at the bar or enjoying an early supper.

  There was Watty Castleman, who had retired from a career as a special collections curator at an art museum in San Francisco, and Franklin Durang, until recently first oboe with the Boston Pops. Across the room I spotted a trio of performance artists who had rented a house on Harris Point for the winter, and the members of the musical group Border Crossing, fortifying themselves with broiled salmon and butternut ale before a sold-out concert tonight at the Eastport Arts Center.

  Of course, there were also tradesmen and fishermen, workers from the aquaculture outfit, a tableful of blue-haired ladies in subdued silk dresses, and a scattering of fellows whose employment I would classify as uncertain; several of them had helped put out my house fire.

  My ex-husband took another sip of his martini. He was a commanding-looking fellow with thick, black hair now gradually acquiring some salt-and-pepper, a strong, patrician profile, and the eyes of an experienced river-boat gambler, the kind who always knew the odds, and the cards, and what he intended to do about it.

  The girl sitting across from him was drinking, it looked to me, a cherry soda, but that may have been merely my perception of the drink appropriate for a child her age. I crossed the dining room to their table.

  “Jake!” my ex-husband exclaimed when he saw me. “This is great, we were just about to go back out looking for you. Where are the street signs in this town, anyway? Locals been using them to patch their roofs up, again?”

  People in Eastport used shingles like everyone else. The girl sat silently, waiting to be introduced.

  “Tiff,” my ex-husband said when he had finished being amused at his own joke, “this is my ex-wife; Jake Tiptree, this is Tiffany Emmerling. Tiffany teaches learning-disabled kids at the hospital clinic.”

  Tiffany smiled, and put her cool hand in mine. She was very beautiful: cornsilk hair, wide, blue eyes, and flawless skin.

  “How do you do,” she said. “It’s kind of you to have invited us.”

  “You know, Tiffany,” I told her, glancing at my ex-husband, “I think that if I were you, I
’d go order a real drink. A double, even.”

  The perfect little click of comprehension that occurred in her blue eyes, accompanied by a widening smile of such radiant gorgeousness that it nearly knocked me backward, told me that this time, my ex-husband had hooked a smart one.

  Although of course she had already spent eight hours in a car with him, so it wasn’t all my doing. “What a good idea,” Tiffany said. “I think I’ll go get it, now.” She rose with alacrity.

  “But Tiff, you don’t drink,” said my ex-husband.

  “You’ve known me one month. Don’t tell me what I do and don’t do, all right?” she requested sweetly, putting her hand on his shoulder briefly as she departed.

  “What was that all about?” my ex-husband demanded to know when Tiffany had left the table, and he had gotten his eyes popped back into his head. She wore a green cashmere sweater and beige tailored slacks, and watching her cross a room was an education in fluid dynamics.

  “She’s never argued with me before.” He frowned accusingly at me.

  “She’s road-weary,” I told him, sitting down across from him unasked. “You shouldn’t put so many miles on them, right off the bat. You were supposed to come,” I added, “next weekend.”

  “No, I wasn’t.” Bang; his reflexive denial was as reliable as a light switch. “You must have gotten it wrong.”

  Edna, the afternoon cocktail waitress at the Baywatch, put a glass of cold white wine in front of me. She was a motherly-looking woman with a thick shock of short, iron-grey hair, and the warm glance she gave me as she went away did me a world of good.

  My ex-husband frowned at the wine; how had that happened? He didn’t like things occurring without his understanding them. Then he decided how he could twist it.

  “Come here a lot, do you?” he smirked, meaning that I made a habit of hanging out in bars, leaving Sam to fend for himself, and so of course the bartenders would know what I drank.

  I didn’t tell him that if he came in here again next year, which I fervently hoped that he would not, Edna would bring him a martini with three olives in it without his having to ask.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” I went on, ignoring his nastiness, “who got it wrong, because I have nowhere to put you. I had a fire at my house today, and things are a mess.”

  “Well, how did you do that?” he wanted to know immediately. “Jacobia had a house fire,” he added in injured tones to Tiffany when she returned.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, putting her drink down. “Are you all right? Is your son all right?”

  “We’re fine. Thanks for asking. But I was just saying,” I went on, “that I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll have to stay at the motel, or at one of the little bed-and-breakfasts here in town.”

  I sipped my wine. “They’re really very charming, I think you would enjoy them,” I added, contemplating pleasantly the idea of my ex-husband trapped with his nubile honey in a room whose walls were about as soundproof as your average hanging bedsheet.

  “You could probably,” I said to Tiffany, ignoring his scowl, “still get a room at one of them for tonight.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be fun!” she said, turning to him eagerly. “Or maybe,” she added, catching sight of his expression, “not.”

  The look on her own face was one of amusement, I saw with what I identified after a moment as relief; I was getting to like Tiffany, and I didn’t want her to have a bad time.

  “The Motel East is comfortable,” I said, taking pity on him for her sake. “And there’s hardly anybody there this time of year. It’s quiet here, in winter.”

  She looked out at the water. At five in the afternoon it was getting on for dusk; Campobello Island showed sketchily through a hanging grey fog, in minimally connected black ink-strokes.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” she said, and I got up before my ex-husband could react to any more of her attention being stolen from him.

  “I don’t suppose Sam’s around.” He glowered at his martini. “Our plans have changed. We’re leaving tomorrow, for Prince Edward Island.”

  “Well, he was expecting you next week.” I tried to say this gently, but I could see that it roused his ire even more. Of course I did not add that next week would have been vastly more troublesome; on the order, in fact, of World War III. Nor did I bring up the notion that his sudden change of plan might inconvenience me; my ex-husband leaving earlier is always better than his leaving later.

  “But maybe you could see him tonight. He’s staying over with a friend on account of the fire, but you could take him out for dinner.”

  This more than anything had been my purpose for coming here. If Sam saw his father tonight, and if he didn’t spill the beans about the boat-school trip, we might yet get through this visit without any fireworks.

  “No,” said my ex-husband decisively, “that’s inconvenient. We have our own plans, tonight. But there’s something in the trunk of my car for him. Take it and tell him I’ll see him later if I can.”

  Tiffany appeared to be studying a painting on the wall of the Baywatch. It was one of Derek’s, and she seemed intrigued by the flat planes and unexpected splashes of color that somehow captured the essence of the town, without pretending to be photographic. She was, I calculated, about seven years older than Sam.

  I got up. “It was nice to meet you, Tiffany.”

  What in the world were you thinking, I wanted to ask her, but of course I knew; my ex-husband exudes killer charm when he wants to. It is only when he has you in his clutches—for instance, when you are stuck in a remote Maine village with only his little sports car to get you back home again, unless you are actually desperate enough to start reading bus schedules—that you begin remembering the old rhyme about the spider and the fly.

  “Tell Sam I’m sorry I missed him,” my ex-husband said.

  For his part, all he wanted at this point was to get rid of me. I wasn’t going to give him a bed, cook him a meal, or provide any of the other domestic services he’d been expecting, so my presence was superfluous, and as for Sam, well, Sam would have to take what he could get.

  “Tell him,” my ex-husband said, “I’ll catch him next time.”

  “Right. If it’s convenient.”

  He ignored this, waving for another drink, looking around in annoyance to try signaling Edna with one of the brisk, imperious gestures that worked so well for him in the operating room. Soon he would start snapping his fingers, and then he wouldn’t be able to get so much as a glass of water in this place except possibly by lighting himself on fire.

  I got out of there.

  42

  The walk home was chilly and depressing, through a thin, salt-tasting rain that haloed the streetlights and made my bones feel creaky and old. Seeing my house, forlorn and miserable-looking in the sodium glow, didn’t help any, and knowing that I wouldn’t be able to stay there was the worst thing of all. Promise or no, the idea of spending a night under the same roof as Hedda White made me feel like Daniel, contemplating the lions’ den.

  Under my arm was the package from my ex-husband’s car trunk. The box said that it was a laser-beam level, a carpentry tool for which Sam had no use whatsoever. When I got into the sooty, grimy, smoke-smelling house, I opened and examined the thing.

  The directions printed on the box said that when you pressed a button, the device emitted a pulse of ruby light that could be spotted over long distances, so that if you were laying out the floor of a hockey rink or putting the sewers in a new subdivision, you could get the grading exactly right.

  On a boat, it would be a waste of toolbox space, and this was so like my ex-husband that I nearly threw the thing away. He had seen it, and enjoyed the idea of it—technology!—and having no use for it himself, had bought it for Sam as a sort of sop, to show how tuned-in he was to what he imagined were Sam’s interests.

  On top of which, the laser level was broken. I scanned the instructions again, noting the large-print warning that on no account shou
ld the beam be directed into someone’s eyes; serious injury or even blindness might result.

  Oh, good, I thought; a carpentry tool that can also be used as a dangerous weapon. Just the thing for a teen-aged boy. But no pressing of buttons produced any light, injurious or otherwise, nor did putting in a fresh battery correct the problem.

  Still, it was up to Sam to decide the gadget’s fate, so I left it there on the counter, where Sam would see it when he got home. Monday, who had been all agog when I came in, caught my mood and sank onto her sleeping-bag bed—like almost everything else in the house, I realized with a wave of deep fatigue, it needed a thorough laundering—and curled her paws over her eyes.

  I wanted to curl my paws over my own eyes, too. I had gotten precisely nowhere with all my running around: Mcllwaine still dead, Ellie still in custody, Nina still cavorting with her so-called cousin out at Mackerel Cove, while my own place stood in shambles. Even the mysterious portrait on the mantel seemed to mock me, the unknown woman still wearing her soft, inscrutable—and at the moment infuriating—smile. For an instant, I wanted to rip her to shreds.

  And then sanity kicked in: this, I told myself, would not do. There was still some hot coffee in the thermos I had taken along that morning to Heddlepenny House, and two doughnuts in the bottom of the bag. As a precaution, George had switched off the power to the house until it could be checked, but I had the battery radio, which was playing old Dave Brubeck numbers, and a flashlight, so I could read the Quoddy Tides.

  The Eastport Clam Board, the newspaper said, had decided to open half of Carryingplace Cove to clamming instead of only a quarter as originally planned, after the clammers had gathered to picket in protest of the tighter restrictions, outside the IGA.

  The Passamaquoddy Water District announced that the pump at the treatment plant had broken down, but the fire department had lent them their old diesel pumper, so no interruption in service was expected; repairs would be complete in about a week.

  Finally, the Eastport police log for the previous fourteen days—not including the murder; the Tides is biweekly, and went to press before that—listed seven minors possessing tobacco, two complaints of loud music, one unregistered motor vehicle, and a fistfight. In the latter, the combatants were lectured by Eastport Police Chief Bob Arnold and afterwards required to shake hands, and no arrests were deemed necessary.