Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  He let his voice trail off suggestively; she finished his sentence for him.

  “Garner didn’t do anything illegal, or not anything you can arrest him for right this minute. Also there’s been an accidental death you’ve had to take care of, and it’s the holiday, so you’re right out straight, even without my troubles.”

  “Key-rect,” he responded briskly. “Absolutely correct on all counts. Which is not to say I haven’t been trying,” he added. “I told all my guys about your stalker or whatever he is, made sure they know to pick him up, they have the slightest reason.”

  “I know.” Of course he was trying. But Garner was like the fog, here one minute and dissolving away the next.

  “Why couldn’t you just hunker down and wait while we get the computer crime division involved, people who can help?” Bob sucked in a breath. “But no, right away you’ve got to go all proactive about it. You talk to Wade, and his next move—”

  She cut Bob off briskly. “Wade did not assault anyone. Or ask anyone to.”

  The second coat of primer was on the porch already, as if by magic; she couldn’t have done it any faster with a spray painter.

  Anger, the other home-repair tool, she thought. “You want to ask him about that,” she continued, getting up, “he’s upstairs in his workshop.”

  She dragged the brush bristles hard against the paint can’s rim. “And even if he did tell somebody what’s been going on—” she began, because she hadn’t specifically asked him not to, had she?

  Bob rolled his eyes. “Oh, here we go now,” he groaned.

  She tapped the lid onto the paint can with a tack hammer. “If he did,” she insisted, “it’s because he’s trying to help me.”

  Once they’d left the chapel, it hadn’t taken her and Ellie long to check the remaining vacant Eastport houses on their list. But they’d come up empty, as had the other searchers. Afterwards she’d thrown herself into the painting project again, just so she wouldn’t feel later that she’d wasted the whole day.

  Bob’s squad car idled at the curb. The paint-stirring stick lay on the grass. She plucked it up, wiped both sides of it with a bit of rag, and laid it on the paint can.

  “Just some poor guy, a case of mistaken identity,” said Bob, “he gets hassled because of your—”

  “Hey, I said I was sorry.” She was, too, about the mistaken identity part.

  “Listen, though,” she added, relenting. “Would it help if I went over to where this guy’s staying and apologized? Because it is …”

  My fault. She’d told Bob so. “I mean there’s really no getting around it that if it weren’t for me …”

  Bob took off his uniform hat, gazed downhill at the water as he slicked his few sweat-damp strands of blond hair back, put the hat back on. “Nah,” he said finally. “Let’s just leave well enough alone for now. Guy calms down, no reason to chance riling him up again.”

  Which made sense; Jake nodded in agreement, closing the subject. So now the way was cleared for what she really wanted to talk to him about.

  “Hey, Bob,” she said mildly. “Look over there on that lawn chair, will you? Under the brick.”

  Sighing impatiently, he plucked the photo from the chair and squinted at it. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a snapshot of Sam, taken by Steven Garner. He left it in the meetinghouse for me and Ellie to find earlier today after he lured us there by making me think he was spying on me from an upstairs window.”

  She took a breath. “Which he also was doing.”

  Bob looked up from the photo. “You sure about this? I mean, you can …”

  “Prove it? No, of course not. No more than I can prove any of the rest of it.”

  “Still think he was involved with the thing on Sea Street?”

  The girl’s death, he meant. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  From downtown, random blats and bleats of the high school band’s instruments sounded at irregular intervals. A firecracker went off, and then another.

  Jake regarded the porch she’d just painted. “And Bob, here’s the other thing I think about it.”

  Paint dripped off one of the risers. She swiped at it with the brush and made it worse, then smacked the brush down hard.

  “He believes I killed his dad. Or that I was responsible for him getting murdered, anyway. And he’s been thinking about that and mulling it and obsessing over it since he was ten years old, and now he’s here to do something about it.”

  “You don’t know that,” Bob protested, spreading his hands. But this time she wasn’t having any.

  “I may not be able to prove it. But I do know.”

  Inside, Bella was running the vacuum cleaner. Wade was up in his workshop, as she’d said; together with Jake’s dad he was busy sharpening all the small tools he used on gun-stock repairs.

  And Sam was in his room trying to trace the scary emails she’d gotten, still without success. “Tell me, Bob, does the idea of a dry run sound reasonable to you?” She took the photograph from him. “Or do you really think a local girl got a few beers too many in her and proceeded to walk off a thirty-foot cliff that she’s known about all her life?”

  Bob looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, well …”

  He really did mean well. And he was a friend. She sat down on the lawn chair.

  “Bob, that picture was a message to let me know it’s not just me he’s after. He’d hurt Sam to get at me, I’m certain of it.”

  “You think maybe he killed the girl for practice. And … he’s making you feel guilty a little, too?” Bob asked perceptively. He was a very good cop.

  “Yeah.” She looked up at him. Creating order from disorder by way of the old house wasn’t having the desired effect lately—not on her conscience or on the rest of her life, either.

  And it certainly wasn’t helping put the past in perspective where Steven Garner Sr. was concerned. “I mean, I’m still pretty sure that if I’d given his dad what he wanted, the exact same thing would’ve happened. Only first he’d have gambled it all away, and then they’d’ve killed him.”

  But not absolutely sure. And almost as much as anything else, it was still the notion that she could’ve prevented all this that was driving her nuts.

  Regret for the past is a waste of spirit, they told Sam at his AA meetings. What they didn’t say, though, was how to stop regretting it.

  “Anyway,” she said. “We did look in all the empty houses we could think of, in case he was in one. But no dice.”

  A static burst from his radio distracted Bob; he went over to the squad car to listen. When he returned:

  “I gotta go now,” he told her. “But, Jake, I wish you’d talk to Wade, before he …”

  Gets anyone else beat up. Bob didn’t finish. But it was what he meant. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?” she asked mildly.

  Bob gave her a look. “Because if I do, he’ll say something and then I’ll say something. And you know how that might end up.”

  She did.

  “But you could. If anyone can,” he added.

  Without answering, she put the paint can and bag of wadded-up papers against the house, on the lee side where a breeze wouldn’t scatter them; the sky was gray now, with little gusts rustling.

  “Because bottom line, it’s called conspiracy to commit a felony,” Bob continued. “Now, I’m not threatening,” he added hastily as she turned, outraged.

  “Bob, if a man can’t try to defend his wife, I don’t know what—”

  He held his hands up, palms out. “I’m not saying he can’t, Jake, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just pointing out the possible downside if it happens again. Already I’ve got to track down that first bunch and give them a talking-to.”

  The ones who’d menaced the unfortunate Canadian, he meant. “But hey, do whatever you think is right. I’ve got to go.”

  He strode toward the squad car; she followed, knees creaky from the hard porch steps. “What’s going on?” Hope pierced her suddenly. “
They haven’t picked my guy up, have they? That’s not what the call was?”

  Littering, jaywalking … anything to get him off the street. But of course that would have been too easy; Bob got behind the wheel.

  “No. It was from the hospital up in Calais. Some local boys got their butts kicked a little while ago on Washington Street.”

  While they’d been talking, the squad car’s engine had died; the chief made a face at the key hanging in the ignition. “You prob’ly know ’em, that bunch that’s been running wild downtown the last few months.”

  In Eastport, knuckleheads were as common as anywhere else, but hardened delinquency was rare. Hanging out and drinking beer, maybe a little pot smoking in the wildest cases …

  Mostly that was as bad as it ever got. But the bunch that Bob meant was an exception. “With the black jackets?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, settling uncomfortably in the squad car’s buttsprung driver’s seat while waiting for the engine to quit racing. At 110,000 miles, the only part of the vehicle still in decent condition was the sunrise stencil on the door panel.

  “Same ones I caught trying to blow up the hot dog stand on the breakwater a few weeks ago,” Bob said.

  With, of all things, wired-together bundles of M-80s plus remote triggering devices that they’d found on the Internet and ordered with their parents’ credit cards. It seemed that even the dumbest clucks—and in the most remote places, too, like Eastport—could get hold of sophisticated stuff to do mischief with now.

  “Funny thing, though,” Bob said as the car stalled. With a sigh, he started it again. “Well, not ha-ha funny,” he amended as the Crown Vic’s big engine roared to life. “That call I got?” He touched the accelerator cautiously to steady the idle. “Call was to say one of ’em just died. Weird part is, all of ’em got stabbed by someone at the parade, and they won’t say who. Like they’re scared of whoever it was.”

  “No kidding.” The ghost of a chill went through her.

  But that was ridiculous. Garner’s gripe was with her alone, so why would he pick a street fight?

  Unless maybe they’d picked one with him.… “Stabbed with what?” she asked distractedly.

  The police chief shrugged. “Something long and thin, the docs said, from the tiny holes it made. Like a shish kebab skewer, maybe, or …”

  But even as he spoke, a mental picture rose in her head, of a woman on Key Street a few hours earlier.

  She was an older woman, gray-haired and wearing a purple dress and hat … an old-fashioned hat, the kind women once secured to their hair with a—

  “Hat pin,” she said. “I’ll just bet that it was a—”

  But just then the old Vic’s engine settled at last and he drove off without hearing her.

  SHUDDERING, STEVEN PULLED THE SOFT GRAY WIG FROM HIS head and stuffed it into his bag, his nose wrinkling with distaste at the damp, perfumed smell coming from it.

  He stripped off the clothes he’d been wearing, the dress and stockings and the hideous undergarments. Naked in the gloom of the ramshackle old kitchen, he pulled wet towelettes from a fresh packet and wiped his face with them, wrinkling his nose at their sharp reek.

  As he did so, a vivid mental snapshot rose up, of his mother at her dressing table, fussing with her face. Dabbing and patting at it while he watched from her doorway, enthralled.

  She’d been beautiful before all the bad things began happening. Fun, too, sometimes, spending all afternoon working on puzzles with him, or watching old monster movies, the two of them shrieking together as the big, fake-looking lizard rose up out of the waves to stomp Japan.

  Even then, though, she’d shown signs of what was to come. Rages, weeping, cursing his father and sometimes Steven, too.

  Afterwards she was sorry, begging them to forgive her, buying Steven special treats and demanding to know he still loved her.

  Now he drew a fresh towelette over his eyelids, then drew his mascara-caked lashes through it as he’d seen her do, so long ago. After that, with his own clothes pulled on again, it was time to return the room to its previous state, as well.

  First, the windows: he stood on the chair he’d found to pull the tacked-on trash bags from the holes he’d stuffed them into, in the broken plaster above the window frames.

  The plastic tarp on the floor and the items he’d spread out on it had been harder to hide. Luckily, though, he’d had the wit to make sure the tarp had grommets, metal-reinforced holes at the tarp’s edges, through which a rope could be run.

  So he’d done that, turning the tarp into a huge blue plastic bag with a drawstring made of clothesline around the top. All his stuff in the tarp, drawstring pulled tight, and presto, the bag went down the stairway hole with the things inside.

  He’d tied the line’s loose ends in a knot he’d learned long ago, when he’d been in Cub Scouts. That is, before his mother had decided that Cub Scouts was too dangerous an activity for her son.

  Once out of her frantic sight, he might be snatched by a filthy pervert, catch a ghastly disease from a bus seat, or eat and be fatally sickened by the refreshments at the scout meeting. Once his dad was gone, there seemed no end to the dangers a boy might fall prey to; by the end, even talking on the phone with a school classmate was … but never mind.

  That was all over now. A sad smile curved his lips as he hauled the blue tarp bag up out of the cellar by way of the old door, which now opened onto a pitch-dark drop. Beyond it the stairs had been and, like his mother, were no more.

  Next: the hook that had once held broom and dustpan was invisible unless you looked for it. Lifting the clothesline from it, he slid the line from the grommets and coiled it neatly, for he intended to use it again soon.

  Finally, with the room once more sunk in gloom and his equipment ready at hand, he allowed himself to recall the rest of what he’d accomplished.

  The look in that guy’s eyes when he realized what had just happened …

  Anger, of course. But mostly fear. And … respect. As Steven moved away from the ginger-haired fellow still prostrate on the ground, he’d heard sirens approaching, seen the guy already calculating what to say to the cops about his injury, and those of his friends.

  The ferret-faced boy, lying there near death …

  Or so Steven hoped. Don’t mess with me, he’d telegraphed with his brief final glance at Mr. Ginger Hair. And in response, the guy had looked away in surrender.

  Because he knew Steven had something on him, something big, that he didn’t want Steven to tell anyone about. So now Steven was safe from Mr. Ginger Hair and his pals. He could concentrate on readying the ruined kitchen for the next part of his mission, the capture and confinement of Jacobia Tiptree.

  On gathering and arranging all the needed equipment, for instance: the clothesline, of course, and the chair, both placed now at the tarp’s center.

  Next he carefully removed gold-framed photographs of his mother and father from his pack and placed them on the wrecked kitchen counter. The photographs were both studio portraits, his mother against a stock matte-brown backdrop, wearing a green suit with a mink collar, smiling with blood-red lips and already, in Steven’s opinion, a little wild-eyed.

  Though at the time, she’d probably been thought of as merely vivacious. Steven’s father, dark-haired and with his own enormous ears sticking out like the handles on an urn, gazed gravely from his photo, which he’d sat for only at his wife’s insistence.

  Steven recalled the quarrel: What if something happens to you? And me without even a picture of you?

  She’d ranted about it for weeks, until Steven’s dad gave in. Now his eyes seemed to watch Steven, but without any opinion or expression in them that Steven could discern.

  It made Steven uneasy; both pictures did. But he wasn’t here for his own comfort, was he? “Good,” he whispered into the room’s silence. Now for his preparations to be complete, there were just two more tasks left to do, the trickiest of all. But tasks involving other people always wer
e, he knew, so he was already resigned to this.

  Also, it would be expensive; he pulled his wallet from his pocket and checked it. As he’d expected—

  —but you can never be too careful, his mother’s voice intruded briefly until he banished it—

  —the ten crisp, new hundred-dollar bills he’d placed in it before leaving home were still there. He hadn’t even known back then exactly what he’d end up spending them on, only that a good amount of cash on hand never hurt anything.

  Outside, the parade had gone by long ago. The curbs and sidewalks were empty. As late afternoon came on, the action had shifted downtown, where the food tents, trinket tables, and other holiday venues were in full swing.

  Later, when darkness fell, there would be the fireworks. Absently, Steven put a few broken crackers in his mouth and washed them down with a swig of juice, noticing as he did that his supplies were running low.

  But no matter. By tonight, food would be the last of his concerns. He’d have found the ginger-haired guy again and given him his task, and explained carefully to him why he’d be wise to complete it properly.

  And he’d have one thing more; that’s where the cash came in. Something besides food to occupy him, something to do in a place where no one expected him to be.

  Something better.

  THE IDEA SPRANG UP FULL-BLOWN, AND THE MINUTE IT occurred to her she knew she was going to have to try it. The trouble was, it would take some cooperation from the rest of them.

  And getting that would be the real challenge; determinedly, Jake climbed the stairs to Wade’s gun-repair workshop.

  “He’s going to try to get me, you know. Or Sam. I don’t care what Bob Arnold says, if we don’t stop Garner, he’s going to—”

  The workshop smelled sweetly of black powder, turpentine, a variety of stains and varnishes, sawdust, and a whiff of gun oil. To Jake, the mingled scents meant normalcy and security.

  Only not right now. Unhappily, she crossed the rough plank floor to where Wade stood under the hanging work-lamps.

  Ordinarily she loved this space. But now the brightly lit shop with its familiar long tables, drawers full of gun parts, and shelves packed with reference books, its specialized tools neatly hung on hooks and pegboards, all seemed to exist beyond a pane of invisible glass, one she couldn’t break through.