Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  Whereupon all at once the whole job suddenly seemed possible again. As did everything else: the centuries-old house, the remaking of her whole life.

  This, she thought, watching the white-paint expanse widen. This is why I do it. Before she knew it, she’d covered a few more decking planks, then more still, and a whole rail-and-post unit.

  By the time the sun rose high enough to flood the streets with golden light, joggers and dog walkers were out. Even a few bicyclists pedaled by, their faces bright with the pleasure of the sweet, fresh air and the absence of car traffic.

  None of them paid her any attention or looked the least bit familiar, and soon she stopped bothering to look up each time she heard a derailleur’s whir. When the creak in her back and a cramp in her brush hand—as well as the need for more coffee—got her off her knees, to her own surprise she had nearly emptied the paint can, and a fresh coat of white primer covered the whole porch.

  And the second coat couldn’t go on until the first dried, so it was break time. After finding and brushing smooth the drips of excess paint on the vertical surfaces of the job, she scraped the brush on the rim of the open can.

  Next she wrapped the brush in layers of plastic wrap to preserve it for the few hours it would take the primer to dry. Finally she tapped the paint can’s top back on with little raps of the brush handle and set the can on some sheets of newspaper.

  Inside, she expected to find the coffee stewed to black syrup and the house still hushed. But instead Bella was up, already busy damp-mopping the floors.

  The smell of kitchen cleanser floated in the air along with the aroma of fresh coffee. The windows stood open wide, the white lace curtains fluttering in puffs of cool, salt-freshened air.

  “Is Sam up, too?” Jake asked. The coffee was delicious, much better than the dregs she’d left cooking in the pot. Across the back lawn an army of robins marched, cocking their bright eyes skyward while breakfasting on worms.

  “Up and gone,” said Bella. The muscles in her long, ropy arms flexed visibly as she rubbed the mop over a stubborn patch of imaginary dirt.

  “Wade, too, and your father. Slipped out the back way; they didn’t want to interrupt you while you had a good head of steam up.”

  All three men were on the fireworks committee, charged with handling everything but the explosives themselves. Later that day a professional team from the suppliers would board a barge and get towed out onto the water, where they—the fireworks, not the men—would be detonated in about—Jake checked the kitchen clock—twelve hours from now.

  “And Ellie stopped by,” said Bella.

  The dogs danced around; Jake gave each one a biscuit. Prill wolfed hers and looked up eagerly for another; Monday nibbled delicately but finished it.

  “Good pup,” Jake told the old Labrador, whose clouded eyes seemed to brighten minutely at the sound.

  “She says do you want to meet her for breakfast?” said Bella as she ran hot water over her mop. “Ellie, I mean.”

  Jake watched Monday walk slowly to her bed and sink into it. “Oh?” she said distractedly. “She say why?”

  All the restaurants downtown would be jammed, what with the crowds in town. And anyway, Ellie would have already eaten her breakfast with George, hours earlier.

  Wringing the mop out, Bella shook her head, her big green eyes scanning the kitchen alertly for further grit, grime, or corruption. “Just said she had news.”

  Jake would’ve tried to keep Bella from spending her every waking minute housecleaning, but attacking dirt banished whatever demons the stiff-necked, ungainly woman needed to keep at bay.

  Or it seemed that way, anyway, so Jake had shut up about it, and since then they had gotten along just fine. “News? But we saw her just last night.”

  Still sipping her coffee, she wandered into the dining room and powered up her laptop in case Ellie had sent an email about it. Outside the wavery, antique panes of the old windows, shafts of sunlight drew gauzy puffs of evaporation from the damp grass.

  No reply from Bella. Probably she was already on to a new task: scalding out the wastebaskets with boiling water, maybe, or sterilizing the stove knobs.

  Jake clicked on “Mail,” then waited as what appeared to be a rather large file began downloading into her mailbox.

  Just for you! read the item’s header. Impatiently she waited with her finger poised over the delete button; emails with titles like that were usually spam.

  By the time it occurred to her that it might be another nasty message like yesterday’s, a photograph had begun appearing scroll-wise on the screen, unreeling from top to bottom.

  A color photograph …

  At the halfway point, she pulled a chair out from the dining table. When it finished, she sat down hard in it.

  The photograph was of someone sitting in a chair, too, taken from behind. But the person in the picture was tied to the chair with what appeared to be clothesline.

  Harsh flash illumination whitened some parts of the scene and blackened other parts. The figure’s head slumped forward, so that at first glance it seemed not to be there at all.

  But it was. Sort of. “Bella,” she whispered to her stepmother but got no answer. Monday came stiffly into the dining room, shoved her grizzled old head into Jake’s lap, and whined.

  “It’s okay, girl,” said Jake, smoothing the dog’s ears as the last section of the photograph appeared on the screen.

  The last, worst part. “Everything’s fine,” she murmured, and felt the sweet old animal relax against her.

  But it wasn’t fine, was it? She stared at the photograph.

  Not at all. Not even a little bit. Because she recognized it.

  Remembered it, rather. From the bad old days …

  Closing the laptop so Bella wouldn’t come in and get a glimpse of the screen accidentally, she pressed the print button on the computer, checked the wireless icon to make sure the file was transmitting to the printer in Wade’s office, and went upstairs to get dressed.

  Correction: ran up the stairs. As if the hounds of hell were behind her.

  Which, in a way, they were.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, JAKE MET ELLIE WHITE DOWNTOWN at a table in the Blue Iris, a small combination café and gift shop overlooking the water.

  On the table between them, a manila folder shielded the printed-out photo from casual eyes. If anyone else in the restaurant had spied it, it would’ve ruined their breakfasts and their sleep that night, too.

  Probably for many nights.

  “Good heavens,” Ellie said faintly as she peered at it, then gestured at Jake to close the folder. “And you’re telling me you know who this is?”

  Jake nodded grimly. “A long time ago, a fellow I knew very slightly got in gambling-debt trouble, big-time. This—”

  She gestured at the folder. “This was the result. The photo got sent around; not to me, but somebody I knew got one.”

  Because after all, what good was making an example of Steven Garner if no one knew about it? She shuddered, remembering.

  “But why …?” Ellie began.

  “I’m not sure,” Jake replied, although she was, now. And she knew who the bike guy must be, too.

  She just didn’t want to confront it yet, or at any rate not out loud.

  “And your news is?” she asked Ellie, not expecting it to be good.

  Because things like this didn’t happen all by themselves, did they? They came in groups, like invading armies or the clouds of germs Bella always thought were descending on everything.

  The restaurant’s window table overlooked the half-submerged old pilings of what had long ago been a steamboat wharf. From it, travelers had embarked upon journeys that might end in Boston or the West Indies, or even the Far East.

  Now waves sparkled between the pilings. “The news is, they found a body this morning,” Ellie answered. “Some tourists taking an early stroll found it.”

  Her red hair glinted in the sun. “Down there on Sea Street.”
She gestured past the rotted wood pilings to where an unpaved track curved along the steep bank of a tidal inlet.

  “I didn’t tell Bella because I didn’t want to upset her,” Ellie added.

  With a sheer drop to the water on one side and a granite cliff rising on the other, Sea Street was a busy, scenic walking path in the daytime. But only locals traveled the dark, out-of-the-way route at night.

  “Do they know who?” Jake asked. “Or how? And how’d you find out about it, anyway?”

  “George got beeped.” Which made sense; besides being on call to repair nearly anything municipal that got broken—a valve at the sewer plant, a leak at the city buildings, a fuel pump on a squad car—George was also a volunteer emergency medical technician.

  “He didn’t want to talk about it,” Ellie added. “But I heard him and Bob Arnold down in the kitchen, afterwards.”

  In the past, the Fourth had always passed without fatalities despite the raucousness of the celebration. But not this year, apparently. “I guess someone must’ve fallen,” Ellie said softly.

  The cliff over the path was forty feet high, with nothing to grab on to on the way down. “Landed on solid rock, got a broken neck. And bounced a few times, I gather, from what I overheard.”

  Ellie shivered a little, then turned once more to the folder on the table between them. “The message said what, again?”

  “That it was just for me,” Jake replied as their breakfasts came: a bowl of oatmeal for Ellie, an omelet for Jake. But neither had much appetite.

  “So you’re thinking …”

  “Yes. I’m pretty sure the guy on the bike sent it.”

  Jake ate a bite of egg she didn’t want. She had no specific reason to think that the body on Sea Street was part of it all, too.

  But she couldn’t shake the notion, and five minutes later, leaving their breakfasts unfinished, they crossed the street to Bob Arnold’s office in the Frontier Bank building.

  A red-brick and granite confection from the early 1800s, the bank with its ornate moldings and widow’s walk resembled a wedding cake. But inside, everything was clean and utilitarian feeling; the bulletin boards where interest rates and Christmas club info had once been tacked were now plastered with public-service placards and wanted posters.

  Bob Arnold sat at a gray metal desk behind what had been the bank’s customer service counter. “I don’t care,” he said flatly into the phone, and listened for a moment.

  Then, “I don’t care,” he said again, and stood up.

  “You just get me five deputies. I’ve got thousands of people here, more tonight, and we’ve had a fatality already. You send them, or I’ll deputize my own, whether I’m empowered to or not.”

  He put a wry twist on the word empowered. Way out here in Eastport, Bob’s law-enforcement mandate was to keep things from going to hell in a handbasket; how was his own lookout.

  “We’re going to have a bigger police presence here,” he finished, “and if you want those extra officers answering to you instead of me, you’ll send them.”

  He slammed the phone down and glared at Jake and Ellie. “Now, what do you two want?”

  In the small offices at the back, Eastport’s pair of part-time cops were on their phones, also.

  “No,” said Joe Dahm, a tall, salt-and-pepper-haired black man whose voice carried a Jamaican lilt. “I don’t know any more. No, we don’t have a confirmed …”

  “… identity,” Wad Hardesty said into the other phone. “We were hoping to maybe show you some personal items that you might be able to …”

  Jake tossed the manila folder with the photograph in it over the counter, onto Bob’s desk. Scowling, he opened it, and then a change came over his face.

  Not a pleasant change. “Jesus H. Key-rist,” he breathed, and opened the gateway to the area behind the counter.

  “Siddown, both of you.” He pointed at the straight chairs facing his desk.

  They sat. Outside, another day of holiday activities had begun; just now the pet parade was passing, with much barking and meowing plus a few ba-a-as, oinks, and whinnies.

  There was even a moo; Jake and Ellie looked startledly at each other. But Bob wasn’t interested in the menagerie being led past his office. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  The photograph, he meant. Behind him, one of the officers was trying to calm someone who’d just caught on to the reason for his call.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “We’re not sure she … It’s just there are some items to …”

  Bob sighed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Items like a driver’s license, a movie-rental ID card, a Social Security card …”

  “It came by email this morning,” answered Jake, gesturing at the horrid photo.

  “I think I know who sent it,” she went on, and Ellie glanced at her in surprise. Swiftly, Jake summarized her history with the doomed gambling debtor, Steven Garner Sr.

  Ancient history. But …

  “But there was a guy hanging around my house yesterday, and I got some bad emails.”

  Bob frowned. “So you think he sent ’em? The guy’s son?”

  She nodded, reluctantly. Bob was an old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts, don’t-waste-my-time kind of a small-town police chief, and right now he was busy as hell.

  Holiday weekend, a town full of people, an accidental death—or she still hoped it was, anyway. And now this …

  “He has,” she told Bob, “an identifying feature.” Feeling obscurely foolish, she described Steven Garner Jr.’s protruding ears.

  “The guy from yesterday has them, too,” she said. “I’d have probably recognized him just from that, if—”

  If she’d had even the slightest idea that anything from the old days would come back to bite her this long afterwards.

  “Okay,” Bob exhaled when she’d finished. The cops in the rear offices had put down their phones and were leaning back, drained. “Leave this with me. Anything else happens, you call.”

  He hoisted his body from the chair. “One thing’s for sure, whoever sent you that picture went to some trouble to do it.”

  She looked quizzically at him. “You ever try to track down somebody’s email address, you don’t know it already?” he asked.

  “Oh. Right.”

  But someone had learned hers. “Do you want me to bring the laptop down here?” she asked.

  He stared out the old bank building’s big glass front door. On the heels of the menagerie, the Little Miss Eastport pageant had begun, frilly-dressed four- and five-year-olds scurrying by.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This place is going to be crazy soon. Even crazier than it is now. Crime lab van, state major crimes guys, who knows who all.”

  To investigate the death on Sea Street, he meant, because it probably had been an accident. But it wasn’t officially one until the medical examiner said it was one.

  “Guess I’ll have to close my plant room,” he added. The bank vault was what he used for an evidence lockup. But in Eastport there was so little call for secure evidence storage that nowadays he had a grow light in there, with African violets blooming under it.

  “Portland’s got a fancy new division for computer crime; we can ask them for help.”

  The little girls outside wore white nylon anklets with lacy ruffles, and shiny patent leather shoes. She wondered suddenly whether the Sea Street victim had been in the pageant, once.

  “What was her name?” She looked up at Bob’s grim face. “On the paperwork, I mean, that the Sea Street victim had.”

  “I don’t want to say yet, Jake.” News like that, he didn’t want the next of kin finding it out from someone else.

  Not that hearing it out of a cop’s mouth made it any better. “But I can tell you this much. We’re not going to confirm an ID by asking the relatives to view the body.”

  Brr, Jake thought, understanding what he must have meant. “And I don’t want anyone seeing her who doesn’t have to,” he added.

  Ellie turned.
“Why not? Isn’t that usually the way they—”

  He shook his head. “Not this time. They’ll know her clothes and personal items, probably. Some jewelry, pretty much makes the case for who she is, seems to me.”

  He sighed sorrowfully. “But that forty-foot drop broke every bone in her face and a whole lot of them in the rest of her body, too.”

  He gazed out at the bright day. “If she hadn’t left a purse and a half-drunk bottle of beer at the top of the cliff, I wouldn’t be thinking now that she either fell or jumped off it.”

  Outside, some kids chased one another with cans of Silly String. A red, white, and blue Model T juddered by, lurching and backfiring.

  “Bashed up the way she was,” Bob finished somberly, “I’d be thinking someone must’ve beaten her to death.”

  • • •

  BELLA WAS AT THE DINING ROOM TABLE WITH THE LAPTOP open when Jake and Ellie returned from seeing Bob Arnold. The awful picture was on the screen; she turned haggardly to them.

  “Oh,” Jake said, realizing in horror what must’ve happened. “Bella, I’m so sorry, I should have warned you not to—”

  Although it was Jake’s machine, as she’d been reminded only the night before, everyone in the house used it.

  “I was hunting up a fish chowder recipe,” Bella whispered. “A while ago, I’d deleted the email that it came in, and—”

  And when she’d opened the mail program to look in the trash folder for it, the photograph appeared. Jake put her arms around the older woman’s bony shoulders.

  “You poor thing, to have that pop up at you.”

  Bella was rugged, but no one was tough enough to see that without being affected. “Come on,” Jake said. “We’ll go out to the kitchen and I’ll make you a nice cup of—”

  Tea, she was about to finish, but before she could, Prill the Doberman came flying out from where she’d been lying half asleep under the dining room table. With a volley of ferocious barking, the big dog charged to the back hall.

  By the time Jake caught up to her, with Ellie right behind, the back door was closing. A blur sped away from the back porch.