The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Son, you don’t understand. Those tests—I didn’t want you labeled your whole life as some kind of—”

  “Some kind of what, Dad?” Sam’s voice was almost cheerful. “A dummy? A retard? That’s what kids called me in the good school you paid so much to send me to, in New York. When they weren’t trying to score pot off me.”

  Victor, to his credit, looked appalled. “But—”

  “You know what, Dad? They don’t have classes in six foreign languages at the high school here, or field trips to Germany and Japan. Here, it’s pretty much just your basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. But the kids here don’t shoot up in the bathrooms. Most of ’em don’t even smoke dope. And they don’t call me names.”

  “He told me you’d had the tests,” I said helplessly.

  But I hadn’t seen the results. Victor kept promising to send them, and putting me off, while I had failed to press him because the less contact I had with him, the better I liked it.

  Sam’s face was full of love and pity; anger, too. “And you believed him. Mom, when are you going to learn? Where do we have to go, how far away, that you won’t listen to him anymore?”

  Which was when I understood: all Sam’s attempts to placate Victor, to do and be what his father wanted him to do and be—they weren’t to get his father’s approval for himself. They were to protect me.

  He went over and picked up the boat-school applications from the table where I had dropped them, pausing over the laser level, which I had also left there.

  “It’s broken,” I said.

  “I’ll get you another one,” said Victor hastily.

  “No,” said Sam, examining it more closely. “I can fix it.”

  “Sam, you can’t fix a thing like that,” Victor told him impatiently. “It’s not a lawn mower or a washing machine.” His face expressed what he thought of the ability to fix those. “It’s a very complex, high-technology device. You can’t just—”

  Sam put the laser level under his arm, raked his father and me with a glance that should have killed us both, and walked out.

  “Tell Sam,” said Tiffany as she departed with Victor a few minutes later, “he should call me if he wants. I’ve got some information on dyslexia that he might like to have.” She pressed her card into my hand.

  “I’ll call you,” said my ex-husband, trying and failing to get the old menace, the old you-haven’t-heard-the-last-of-this threat into his voice.

  But I thought I had, because I wasn’t listening to him, anymore. Instead I was listening to Sam, maybe for the first time.

  All Sam’s troubles in New York, truancy and lying and staying out late, and the drugs—they hadn’t been over his own problems at all, or that hadn’t been the root of them.

  They’d been over me. His mother had been crying all the time. And when I’d said I wouldn’t come to Eastport without him, Sam had believed me.

  Sam, who knew how to fix things.

  49

  After my ex-husband had gone, George Valentine came over, bringing with him an electrician, and they got the power turned on so I could make coffee and see the full extent of the fire’s destruction. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but it was going to require new plaster, new lath, and some subfloor and framing in the storeroom, which also needed a whole new roof.

  “Otherwise it’s just like putting Band-Aids on cancer,” said George. “You tear all this stuff out, though—”

  With a wave of his hand, he indicated an area that was larger than any apartment I’d ever lived in, before I came here.

  “Well, then,” he finished, “that’s all you’ll have to do for another couple hundred years.”

  Which was a line I’d heard before, but one that I had never developed any capacity to resist.

  “Fine,” I told George. “Just fix it. As quickly as possible, please.”

  After that I went around taking Polaroids, so I could show the insurance company the extent of the loss. I kept telling myself that I’d meant to replace the faded wallpaper and the cracked plaster anyway, and now a lot of it would just get done sooner than I’d expected. I told myself Sam would eventually come home, too. But that didn’t stop me from feeling stomach-punched about everything, and around noon Bob Arnold came by to lend further glumness to the proceedings.

  “I made a few calls,” he said, pulling out a kitchen chair, “to some buddies of mine, over to Customs and Immigration.”

  “And?” I poured him some coffee.

  “Turns out this cousin of Nina’s has got himself a history. And so,” he added, “does Nina. Well known, as they say in the big city, to law enforcement agencies.”

  “Yeah, Clarissa filled me in a little, last night.”

  “Seems like this fellow has quite a collection of passports, none of ’em in his real name, on account of half the world wants to lock him up for gunrunning, and the other half wants to lock him up for drug smuggling, which is the revenue-producing part of his operation.”

  “He uses the drug money to buy the guns.” It figured. And when Mcllwaine found out about it, he took the information to his government buddies.

  “Uh-huh,” Arnold said. “And the guns find their way to the kind of people, they’re not supposed to have guns. The kind who think whole countries are their personal little kingdoms, they come in and butcher whole villages, if the poor people fight back.”

  All of which agreed with what Clarissa had said, and what I had thought of the guy, myself.

  Arnold shook his head. “Trouble is, cops over here’ve been told, leave him alone. I guess the Feds want to wait and see where the slime trail leads.”

  He got up. “I don’t know, Jacobia. Usually in this town, one way or another I’ve always been able to get things worked around, make ’em come out the way they ought to.”

  His eyes narrowed with frustration. “Guy goes out clamming, just tryin’ to feed his family, he gets busted for some small ones, I can see he doesn’t get hit too hard for it. Guy slugs his wife, I can get him locked up. But this …”

  I followed him to the door. “I know. Clarissa told me. It just doesn’t look too hopeful. We’ll have to wait, and try to get Ellie out on bail.”

  Arnold looked stricken. “Oh, hell. That’s the other thing I meant to tell you about.”

  We stepped outside together. Across the street, Alvin White was getting into a car driven by one of his cronies from the Breakfast Club; he waved wanly at me as the car pulled away.

  Hedda, I thought with grim pleasure, was probably too hung over to perform driving duties. Still, it seemed odd that Alvin would leave her alone in the house, and if I remembered correctly there wasn’t a Breakfast Club meeting today. Besides, it was too late in the morning for one.

  I turned back to Arnold, who had continued on out to the curb. “What? I’m sorry, Arnold, I was just watching Alvin for a minute. What was it you were saying?”

  “Bail,” he repeated, reaching for the door handle of the squad car. His face looked like seven days of rain. “Got a call from the state cops, courtesy thing, keep me informed.”

  “And?” Ten percent was what you needed in cash, and it wasn’t like attorney’s fees. With bail, you can get the money back out of the rat-hole again, so I might be able to do something helpful.

  Or so I thought, until I heard what Arnold said next.

  “Hearing was early this morning,” he said sorrowfully. “No bail. Not that it was likely, but … heinousness of the crime, the judge said, lot of other nonsense means somebody—probably those Federal guys—got the fix put in, hang onto her. She’s locked up for the duration.”

  50

  After Arnold left, I wandered around the house for a while, picking things up and putting them down uselessly. Glancing across the street, I spotted Janet Fox going into the Whites’ house, which meant that soon Hedda would be liquored up again, and the sink over there would be heaped high with more dishes. Alvin wouldn’t like it, and I knew I’d better go over there right away a
nd turn off the supply of alcohol.

  But I couldn’t face it. My house was a shambles, my son was estranged, and my friend was in a jail cell, and I couldn’t think of anything to do about any of it. Alvin was right, I reflected exhaustedly, to go out and forget about it for a few hours.

  Digging into my bag, I pulled out Sam’s baby book and rattle, to put them away, then spotted the little orange pharmacy bottle at the bottom. Cleaning up the Whites’ house the night before, I’d dropped this one in my bag, meaning to speak very firmly to Janet about it when I saw her.

  Then I’d moved all the other pill bottles I found to the top shelf of the medicine cabinet in Alvin’s bathroom, where Hedda couldn’t reach them.

  But Alvin could. Suddenly, I wondered again where he had been headed, and thought rather urgently—Janet and Hedda, I decided, could wait—that I had better find out.

  51

  I found Alvin’s old friend in the Happy Landings, having an early lunch of a haddock sandwich and coleslaw. It looked delicious, but the twinge of anxiety in my stomach kept me from feeling hungry.

  “Left him off over to Hillside Cemetery,” the old man said. “He said he wanted a quiet place, to think. Jeez, it’s too bad about Ellie. She’s such a pretty girl, and I don’t know what old Alvin is going to do without her.”

  “Right,” I said, and raced out of there.

  Hillside was peaceful and deserted, with the bare trees towering over silent stone monuments under a pale blue sky. I parked by the side of the road and got out, hearing the screams of herring gulls and the putter of a fishing boat out on the bay.

  I found him in the far northeast corner, the oldest part of the graveyard, where small, bright British flags mark the places of soldiers who died of smallpox or consumption while policing the town’s nineteenth-century occupation. Alvin glanced up from his seat on one of the stones.

  “Jacobia,” he said mildly.

  “Alvin.” I sat beside him.

  “Children,” Alvin mused. “If they’re bad they’ll break your heart. But if they’re good …”

  “They break it worse,” I finished for him, thinking of Sam. “You think you’ve done what you should for them. When you find out you didn’t, by then sometimes it’s too late.”

  “Uh-huh.” He gazed out over the gravestones. “That’s about the size of it.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. Under his flannel shirt he felt fragile and vulnerable, like a shell made of papier-mâché. “Alvin, did you take the pills yet?”

  He shook his head ruefully. “Nope. Thought I would, I felt so damned low, but when I got here, I decided not to. Don’t know why. Too much of a coward, maybe.”

  He reached into his pants pocket and handed the small bottles to me: enough, all together, to kill a horse. I thought about the way he’d taken care of Ellie all those years, and the way he now cared for Hedda.

  “No, Alvin. You’re not a coward. I think maybe you made some mistakes, but we all do that.”

  We sat in silence for a while. “Alvin, why were you able to blackmail Threnody Mcllwaine? What could you do, or not do, that he couldn’t take care of, himself?”

  Alvin’s brow furrowed in surprise. “You know. You must have figured it out by now. The papers you found, up in the attic. You left ’em on the kitchen table, so I would see ’em. Them, and that picture. You did it so I’d know you know: I’m as guilty as if I’d stuck him with that ice pick, myself.”

  Startled, I shook my head. “I know part of it, I guess, but I still don’t understand why it matters so much to you, now. Or what it has to do with his murder. I know you didn’t kill him. Explain it to me, Alvin. Please.”

  Alvin sighed, but seemed relieved at the chance to talk about it. “I hardly know how. The thing is, you never knew Hedda back when she was young. She was so different, not like now. Prettiest thing. I loved her the minute I saw her.”

  “But she didn’t want to get married. She went to New York.” It didn’t seem to have any connection to my questions, but I let him go on the way he wanted, to get to it in his own way.

  He nodded again. “Just about killed me, when she left. Like Thren Mcllwaine, though, she wanted to make her way in the world, or at least give it a try before she settled down.”

  A distant look came into his eyes. “He and I were awful good friends, as boys. We went around and did everything together. But he was always different, we all knew it. Right from the start, everybody in Eastport knew that Thren Mcllwaine was going to make something of himself.”

  “And she was like that, too.”

  He made a sound of assent. “Thren’s folks gave him their blessing and a hundred dollars, to go to New York. And when she heard about it, Hedda run off, too, ’thout saying a word to anyone. She was hell-bent.”

  And still was. I said nothing, turning the pieces over in my mind but not getting anywhere with them.

  “Somehow,” he went on, “she found Thren, and for a while they were both there, him already making money in business, getting to meet the people who could do him good, her dancing on stage. He kept an eye on her, and now an’ again he’d report back to me, and for a while everything was all right.”

  Alvin managed a smile for his own youthful innocence. “I missed her, but I figured she’d be back again once the novelty wore off.” His face changed.

  “And then?” I prompted him; clearly he didn’t like recalling this part.

  “Well,” he went on reluctantly, “then she got wild. Spent her time with shady fellows, ran around and got herself in trouble.”

  Light dawned. “The birth certificate,” I said.

  “Right. She got pregnant, but Threnody took care of that, paid for everything, made all Hedda’s arrangements for her, kept her name out of it. Said he’d talk her into comin’ home, soon as the … well. Afterwards.”

  “But she didn’t come home.” The mugging had occurred a whole year after the baby’s birth.

  “No.” He frowned. “She didn’t. Soon’s the baby got there, and he took care of finding a place for it, Hedda went back to her old ways. Once upon a time, she’d said I was all she ever wanted, but now it seemed like she’d forgot me. And I started in thinking …”

  A tear leaked down his face. “I started thinking she wouldn’t come home at all. I couldn’t stand it. And so…”

  Finally, I saw the connection: Mcllwaine, meeting people who could help him—later, probably, they would become his henchmen, but at the time they would have been just minor wiseguys—and a mugging in which two young women were injured, one fatally.

  “By then they weren’t on such good terms anymore. So he sent along two fellows he knew,” Alvin said. “To persuade her, to make her give it up and come home.”

  “But something went wrong.”

  Even today, Mcllwaine’s employees—the ones who are working off the books—are known to enjoy their labors, or so say widows and orphans of the union organizers they have labored on.

  Alvin nodded. “The other girl died. And Hedda came home, but she was never the same after that. That pretty, happy girl I knew—that girl was gone. And what was left…”

  He sighed deeply. “Still, I loved her. I do even now. It would kill me, I think, to lose her. I think Ellie knows that—it’s why she has been so good to her mother, all these years. On my account. Because she promised me she would be. She was always such a good girl, Ellie.”

  Right; so good that now she was sitting in jail. I brushed off a surge of anger; that, and the sudden wish that Ellie had turned out to be more like Hedda: selfish and hard.

  “But Alvin, how did you know? Why in the world did Mcllwaine tell you what he’d done, give you something you could hold over him that way?”

  Alvin’s face twisted. “But he didn’t tell me, don’t you see? I told him. I told him to do it, to do something to her, to make her come home. And he did, on account of our friendship. And to show me, I expect, that he could do it. That he was a big man in the big city. A real up
-and-comer.”

  The dismayed surprise I felt must have showed on my face; he winced in misery away from it.

  “Nothing else would convince her,” he said quietly. “Unless Thren made it so she had to come home, that there was nothing left for her there.”

  His face was as hard and pitiless as a granite ledge, unforgiving of himself. “After it happened, he wrote me in a panic, trying to ease his mind. He never meant for anybody to die.”

  Alvin looked up, and saw my disbelief. “Thren wasn’t so tough in those days,” he explained, “as he pretended. He didn’t know, back then, how things can get out of hand.”

  Proof. Mcllwaine had written it in a letter. And wouldn’t someone love to get a thing like that on Threnody Mcllwaine: the union organizers, for one, would have a field day with it. He’d have done anything to keep it quiet. But with something on paper, getting rid of Alvin wouldn’t have been enough.

  “Back then,” Alvin went on, “for all his plans and his fancy ways, like he was already a big shot, Thren was just a scared kid.”

  “You burned the letter, of course.” God forbid Hedda should ever find it.

  “Uh-huh. But he didn’t know that, did he? He figured I’d keep it to hold over him. Because, you know, that’s what he would have done.”

  Alvin’s sigh seemed to come up from his feet, his whole body awash in regret. “So he always made sure I was happy, helped me on those stock deals. I never asked him for the money, he just did it on his own hook, but I knew why. We both did, but we never talked about it. Until that last deal went wrong, and then the other day when he threw it all up in my face.”

  “What did he say?” Out on the water, a little boat was puttering in the sunshine, moving toward Lubec. For an instant I thought it looked familiar, then turned back to what Alvin was telling me.

  “Reminded me how it was my idea to get Hedda crippled,” Alvin said, “that I was as much a killer as he was when it came down to it, because of the girl who died. Said he was calling my bluff—even though I’d never threatened him, nor even asked him for money until now—and that I was a foolish old man. I’d ruined myself, he said, and he was finished paying for it.”