by Sarah Graves
A familiar blur … “After him!” shouted Bella, and dashed out herself, across the back porch and down the steps into the street before Jake could do anything about it.
“Bella!” She grabbed at Prill’s stubby tail as the dog shot out, too, missed it, and watched the animal gallop after Bella and their unwelcome visitor, speeding away on his bike.
“Stop! Bella! Prill!” Jake shouted, but neither of them heard her. Bella was making way too much noise herself, squawking out a series of threats in language that Jake had never before heard from the bony old woman.
Meanwhile, Prill’s angry barking covered Bella’s use of curse words—loud, varied, and surprisingly creative—in a way that Bella would probably find pretty convenient later, in the you-must’ve-misheard-me, I-never-said-that department.
The bike rider reached the corner and vanished around it, the bell still brring!-ing tauntingly. Prill and Bella followed, but moments later they returned, winded.
“Oh, if I could’ve got my hands on him,” Bella panted out, her big, work-reddened hands making wringing motions that for once had nothing to do with dishcloths.
Whining, the big red Doberman scrambled up the back porch and wriggled into Jake’s arms. “Okay, girl,” Jake whispered with her face buried in the dog’s smooth neck. She was so glad to see them both back unharmed, she had no energy for scolding.
Because if they’d caught him, she didn’t know what he might do. And nothing would be worth losing either one of them.…
“Everything’s okay now.” But it wasn’t, for just inside the back door lay a small box.
A cracker box, taped shut … Lifting it cautiously, Jake felt a small, soft weight shift inside.
I’ll bet that’s not anything good, she thought clearly.
It wasn’t.
LONG AGO IN MANHATTAN, JAKE HAD LEARNED A FEW THINGS from her crooked clients, including what message a package with a dead rat in it was meant to convey: that you were a rat, too.
And that you were as good as dead.
“Okay, let me get this straight,” said Wade. “First, some strange guy rides by the house on a bike, saying hostile things to you.”
He and the other men had finished prepping the barge and the support boats for the professional team that would be detonating the fireworks tonight. Now he was driving her around town in his pickup truck, trying to calm her down.
“Yes, but Wade, they weren’t just any hostile things.”
On the sidewalk, little kids waved flags. Ahead, a flatbed truck sported a dozen folding chairs and a sign reading WELCOME CLASS OF 1972!!!
“He was saying I’d done something, that murder will out. And now I know what that means.”
Wade waited for the flatbed to pull through the intersection onto Washington Street. As it began its sharp uphill course past the post office building, all the chairs fell over.
“Okay. So who is he?” Wade asked as they passed the white clapboard Baptist church building, now home to the Arts Center. Along the sidewalk on both sides of the street, people already had set blankets and lawn chairs out for the parade later.
“Someone from back in Manhattan,” she admitted reluctantly. “Because … listen, you know I was no angel back then, right?”
Wade steered the truck along Deep Cove Road. “Jake, whatever happened, the important thing is that it was back then. And this is now. And,” he added reassuringly, “I do know the difference.”
Relief flooded her. “And try to relax, will you?” he went on. “Because right now, at least, I’d say you’re fairly safe.”
For emphasis, he angled his head at the shotgun racked in the rear window. The ammo boxed under the seat was only birdshot, but an assailant would find it persuasive enough.
Wade himself, squarely built and with the kind of blocky fists that could double as wrecking balls, was pretty persuasive-looking, too. She let her head rest against his shoulder.
“Thanks.” Swiftly she summarized Steven Garner Jr.’s grievance against her, that he believed she was responsible for the death of his father.
There was, she decided, no need to go into the gory details. Or that she was convinced the dead girl down on Sea Street was somehow involved.
Because that really was just speculation.… “What I don’t get, though, is why he’s decided to come after me now, after all this time. And … how’d he find me?” she asked Wade. “How did he get my email address?”
The truck sailed down a long hill and through an S curve. “That’s easy,” he replied. “The new town address book.”
“Oh,” she breathed. The Eastport Improvement Society had made a project out of collecting the email addresses of everyone in town.
“Of course. That must be it.” A town email directory would improve interpersonal networking, the Society group had said. But the net they had created was likely the one she’d been caught in.
Out Deep Cove Road, the water spread sapphire-blue and sparkling. A heron stalked the shallows, deliberately lifting first one long, sticklike leg and then the other.
Wade turned the truck into Shackford Head State Park. In the lot overlooking the cove, they got out into a silence broken only by the breeze in the old trees.
Wade slung his arm around her. “Come on, let’s stretch our legs. No one can find you out here, I guarantee it.”
They climbed a narrow path, crossed a plank boardwalk over a shallow bog teeming with life, and emerged into a forest where massive tree trunks held up an arching roof of evergreen boughs.
Shafts of sunlight slanted down, as solid appearing as gold bars. “So the big ears are the identifying feature,” Wade said.
She understood: he was talking about how to recognize Steven Garner Jr., so he could do something to him.
Nothing too terrible. Just enough to make him cut it out, which ordinarily Jake could’ve endorsed, no problem. But she had a bad feeling that this time Wade’s approach might backfire.
“If he gets beaten up, he might get madder at me.”
Wade himself wouldn’t even have to do the deed. A longtime downeast Maine native, her husband had friends and relatives all over the county, many of them as solidly put together and battle ready as he was, at least in the fisticuffs department. All Wade would have to do was pass the word, and Steven Jr. was toast. But:
“Jake, you know me. I won’t hurt the guy.”
Ha, she thought, because she did know him. And what he meant was he wouldn’t hurt him much.
“But,” he went on reasonably, “it’s going to take a while to get any action out of the Portland police, don’t you think?”
Of course it would. Meanwhile, Garner was here now.
“And,” he added, “this business has captured my attention.”
Which was what he always said when he was provoked past all reason but didn’t want to alarm her. Because in Eastport, it was very well known that if you captured Wade Sorenson’s attention, he might react by capturing you.
And then your attention would get captured. “But, Wade,” she began again.
“All right, all right,” he gave in easily. “No clobbering. Word of honor. But don’t worry, we’ll figure a way to fix this.”
They emerged from among the evergreens onto a trail leading slantwise across a steep granite slope. Patches of scrubby grass and pale, greenish-gray lichens grew in the thin soil.
High over the water, the trail’s end was like the prow of a great ship. Jake stretched, letting the wind blow through her.
Wade stood beside her. “I won’t do anything,” he told her again, which reassured her so much that she forgot to make him promise also not to tell anyone else about Garner’s antics.
Such as, for instance, those friends and relatives all over the county.
CHAPTER
5
THE EARLY ROMANS USED TO MAKE CONCRETE, DID YOU know that?” said Ellie later that morning. They were out in the backyard of Jake’s house on Key Street, mixing concrete.
Jake attached the hose to the outdoor spigot. They could have used premixed concrete and saved themselves some trouble.
But she had some bags of sand to get rid of, left over from other projects, and opportunities to use fifty-pound bags of sand didn’t just happen along every day. Thank goodness.
“Nope,” she said. The morning had bloomed into a day of sparkling sunshine. The warmed air was fruity with the perfume of blooming beach roses.
But a fog bank hung on the horizon. “I wish the early Romans were doing it right now, though, instead of me,” she added.
While Ellie gathered more tools and equipment, Jake slammed the last nail into the last of the four plywood boxes she was building.
Forms, they were called. Sam wanted some anchors for a few rowboats he’d fixed up and was planning to sell, out at the Boat School, and there were still enough tacky patches on the porch primer to keep her from working any more on that project today.
So, since she wasn’t too busy with that to do this, and she did know how to put a batch of concrete together … Besides, she couldn’t refuse Sam such a simple favor when he’d worked so hard refurbishing those rowboats.
Or it would’ve been simple if the Romans had been doing it, she decided as Ellie hauled the garden cart across the lawn.
“Limestone, calcium, iron, aluminum,” Ellie recited. “Those are concrete’s main ingredients.” She was just brimming with interesting facts this morning.
“Did you know that?” The boxes to pour the concrete into now stood ready and waiting.
“No,” Jake replied, glancing nervously at the forsythia and bay-berry bushes edging the yard. No strange faces peeped through the shrubbery at her.
But she still felt … observed, somehow. “No, I didn’t know that, either.” Watched, as if …
With an effort she turned back to Ellie, who was trying hard to cheer her up. “But then the recipe got lost,” Ellie said.
Which got Jake’s attention, finally. “Really? For concrete? Do you mean they just …”
“Uh-huh.” Ellie nodded emphatically, which caused even more of her pale red hair to fall from the loose chignon she’d pinned it into.
“Yep. Just forgot how to make it,” she went on. “I guess what with their empire shrinking and so many of their far-flung colonies rebelling against them and all, they got preoccupied.”
“Huh,” Jake said, distracted again as she dug in the pocket of her canvas work apron. She laid a level on two corners of a wooden form, then set a carpenter’s square into one corner to ensure the final product would be rectangular and not some other, more exotic geometrical shape, as Ellie continued:
“And can you imagine what a drag that must have been? Last year, you could build a terrace or a bunch of massive foundation blocks or a spillway for your canal.…”
“No kidding.” Jake paused in the act of shifting a forty-pound sack of cement to the other side of the lawn cart.
“But this year …”
It was a law of nature, apparently, that forty-pound sacks were always on the wrong side of the lawn cart.
“… this year, it’s back to mud, sticks, and stones,” Ellie finished.
And that by the time you discovered that the forty-pound bag was on the wrong side, the cart’s wheels were always stuck.
“But how did it get lost? The recipe, I mean.”
Because that was the difference between concrete and cement: what you added, and the proportions you added it in. Sand, stone, and water; how much of each you used was the key to the result.
“Rome fell. Attila the Hun and so on,” Ellie explained. “So I guess with barbarians sacking and vandalizing from the outside, and then all the plotting and poisoning that was going on on the inside, well, a lot of things must’ve gotten misplaced.”
With the tip of a penknife, Jake tried loosening the string that tied the top of the cement bag shut. As usual, the bag tore before the string loosened; yet another of the laws of nature.
Concrete-mixing nature, anyway; a small gray cloud of cement dust puffed out of the bag.
“And nobody found it again until the sixteenth century,” said Ellie, meanwhile filling big plastic buckets with the hose. They’d also set a wheelbarrow full of construction sand nearby.
Or rather, Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, had set it there for them; filled with sand, that wheelbarrow was heavy, and he was the helpful type.
“Which is when a British guy finally figured it out again,” Ellie went on with the story.
Jake looked around at the sand, the cement, the forms, and the buckets of water. Also at the concrete-mixing tray, made of heavy-duty black plastic and the size of a child’s wading pool.
In fact, until they pressed it into service for this job, it had been used as a wading pool. But little Lee was with her dad for the afternoon, and they planned to have it cleaned up by the time she got home.
So: water, forms, ingredients, tools … “You know what?” Jake remarked in surprise. “I think we’re ready.”
To mix, she meant. She stood up straight, her back creaking warningly at the movement even without having hauled any sand.
Simple or not, the job was not for the faint of spine. But around her on the grass lay the four plywood forms, shimmed beneath with shingle scraps so their tops were level. Near them lay four galvanized eyebolts with brackets.
Concrete blocks, after all, made lousy anchors unless you could tie something to them. She turned to the cement bag.
But just then from the open kitchen window wafted the aroma of frying linguica, a kind of Portuguese pork sausage with onions, garlic, and paprika mixed in. With it Bella was making kale soup, the fragrance an invisible ribbon of tantalizing promise.
The ribbon seized Jake’s nose. Her stomach made sympathetic growling sounds. And mixing and pouring the concrete would surely take another hour at least, whereas if they stopped now …
“Tools,” Ellie said helpfully; she’d smelled the linguica, too. And somehow, Ellie always required huge amounts of nutrition to maintain her sylphlike form.
“We should go in and make a list, to be sure we’ve got the right ones,” she added.
This, of course, was merely an excuse for going in; the required tools—trowels, shovels, smaller buckets for doling out water from the bigger ones—were already there with the rest of the equipment.
But once they got inside, Bella would urge lunch on them, which was Ellie’s real plan; not only was she hungry herself, but she took her friend-care responsibilities seriously.
Jake smiled. “Okay,” she agreed, putting down her shovel. But just then Wade drove into the driveway.
He didn’t look happy. A needle of alarm pierced her. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously.
“Nothing.” He crossed the yard and put an arm around her. “I heard from a few people, that’s all.”
She followed him to the back porch. “Wade, you told, didn’t you? You put the word out about Steven Garner, and—”
“Hey, it never hurts to have your folks know you might need them to watch your back.”
“So? Did somebody find out something …?”
Bad, her mind finished, grimly. Wade paused at the door. “No. Well, not exactly. But I called a few guys and they called a few guys.”
When Wade called his buddies, it was like casting a fishnet. It always caught something.
Not always something good. “Gave them a description of your pal.”
Jake nodded eagerly. “And?”
“And nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him. Well,” he amended, “downtown last night, one guy said he might’ve seen somebody like that nearly getting pounded by a few hooligans. But he didn’t see him up close, and Bob Arnold broke it up before it could turn into anything. And after that—nothing.”
He held the door open for her. Inside, the kale soup aroma was warmly comforting. “The state cops are here, by the way,” he added. “They still think the girl on Sea Street was accidental.”
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A sound from the street cut him off, one bright, sharp brring! A bike bell … the too-familiar sound revived her earlier feeling of being watched; turning to the door, she scanned up and down the sunlight-flooded street.
On it, though, there was no sign of any bike or rider; if it had been him, Steven Garner Jr. was gone.
But in her heart, she knew now that he would be back.
SHE DIDN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. BUT SHE HAD NO CHOICE. A blast from the past was here, and she could either warn them about it or not.
“Listen up, everyone,” she said when she had gotten them all gathered around the dining room table.
Bella served the soup, accompanied by hot, crusty sourdough rolls and glasses of sparkling apple juice made from the windfalls she and Jake had collected the previous autumn. Then she sat, too.
“What’s happened?” she asked, clasping her large, bony hands anxiously together.
“I’ll tell you,” said Jake reluctantly. “Right now I’m going to tell you all about it.”
Wade knew her history, of course, and her dad did, too. But the others didn’t; she’d never wanted them to.
“Eat some of your soup first,” Ellie said kindly. So she did, hoping it would give her strength. Then she began:
“Back in the city, I was a complete jerk.”
Bella’s bony face took on a rebellious look. “No,” Jake told her stepmother, “let me finish.”
She looked around at the others. Sam, especially, was not going to like this.
“See, I was a money manager. Freelance. An advisor to the rich and loathsome,” she added with a crooked smile.
She’d also been (1) married to a brain surgeon who thought that fidelity was only the name of a large investment firm, and (2) the mother of a boy who at age twelve was so worldly-wise, he already had his very own stash box, stocked with his own marijuana and rolling papers.
But never mind that now. “Sam and his father and I lived in a coop building so exclusive, even the pets had trust funds.”
She paused, took another spoonful of soup. Her neighbors in the city had regarded the smell of cash as aromatherapy, and she’d been no different.
