Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  “That’s very nice to hear. And what was the other thing?”

  “The other thing is, you don’t have to do it. I mean”—Sam’s face wrinkled with unaccustomed emotion—“you don’t have to do it for me.”

  He sipped from his cold cup, grimaced, and flung the rest of the liquid onto the grass. “Because the thing is this. I know you think …”

  He broke off, began again. “I know you think you were a not-so-good mother. Back then.”

  She waited. It was exactly what she thought. But she hadn’t realized he knew it.

  “You probably think it’s why I started using and drinking,” he continued. “Like, when I was so young. Because of things you did. Or didn’t do. You and Dad, but mostly you, probably.”

  No kidding, she thought. “Sam,” she said, “if I’d had your life back then, I’d have tried to find some kind of painkiller for it, too.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “Yeah, well, you could also say I had three squares and a pretty fancy roof over my head.”

  His look now was startlingly adult. “Which I get is not your point. I mean, especially the whole Dad thing and all,” Sam added.

  The whole Dad thing … She had to laugh. He did, too; they had reconciled, both of them, with Sam’s dad before he died.

  “He was a piece of work, though, wasn’t he?” she said.

  Sam nodded emphatically. “Hey, maybe it’s his fault I turned into a drunk.”

  He went on, “But see, the thing is, nobody knows. What they might have done if some things were different and which things it would have to be.”

  He took a breath. “So don’t feel bad about it, is what I’m trying to say here.”

  A tear escaped; she brushed hastily at it. “Yeah, well. If you’re okay now, then I’m happy.”

  “But I still think this thing tonight is crazy,” Sam emphasized. “Unless …”

  She seized on the word. “Unless what?”

  “I want to be in on it.” She’d already said no way, that his role tonight was to stay with Bella and handle the phone, in case calls that were crucial came in from her or anyone else.

  She’d also told him what an important job it was, being the information manager on such a dicey project. That staying up-to-the-moment and keeping everyone else that way, too, could be the make-or-break on the whole thing.

  But he wasn’t buying it. “I’m coming along, I’m sticking by your side,” he declared now. “And—”

  Here it came. He knew about the gun box in the cellar, had known for a long time. So no real surprise that he would want …

  “I want a gun,” Sam said. “With me, loaded and ready. Or I’m not going, and if I’m not, you’re not, either.”

  She waited for him to say something more that she could spin some other direction so she wouldn’t have to refuse him.

  But he didn’t. “Sam, you downtown in a crowd with a—”

  Concealed weapon. Yeah, Bob Arnold would really be able to get behind that, she thought sarcastically. The only thing he’d want more was maybe everybody carrying plague-germ vials.

  “I can get one,” Sam said quietly, “on my own.”

  Of course he could. He had plenty of young male friends in Eastport, and plenty of them had weapons. For hunting, mostly.

  “Look,” Jake backpedaled, “maybe we’re going just a little overboard on all this.”

  Although Sam with a weapon might not actually be such a bad idea. Thinking about the face in the stocking mask, she thought rocket launchers in the windows would be about right, too.

  Plus maybe a moat. With piranhas in it. And alligators, to supplement the man-eating fish.

  “I mean,” she went on, “we don’t really know for sure.…”

  That Garner has actually killed anyone, she was about to finish. Just then, though, Bob Arnold drove up in the squad car and knocked that idea into a cocked hat.

  “IT’S WORTH MY JOB IF THIS GETS OUT,” BOB EXPLAINED. He’d asked her to ride with him around the island in the squad car instead of him going inside to talk with everyone.

  “The Fourth’s a big deal,” he added, as if she didn’t know. He pulled the car away from the curb outside her house. “And what I’ve got could ruin it. But it’s not official, so mum’s the word.”

  He drove out Key Street past the Dead River oil company, the ball field, and the old train yard, now a vacant, grassy expanse behind the IGA parking lot.

  “I don’t understand. Has one of the boys from yesterday said something?”

  The ones who’d been stabbed at the parade, she meant. Bob turned left onto County Road, past the wood-frame youth center building with its paved lot and basketball hoop.

  “Nope. Guy who turned himself in last night won’t say boo, either.”

  They drove past the abandoned schoolhouse with the two huge maples nearly blocking its twin front doors—one for boys, one for girls—and then the low concrete bunker-like buildings of the water-treatment plant.

  “A cop at the jail in Machias knew him, though, from when he used to work in Bangor. That’s how his act fell apart so quick.”

  Jake grimaced. “So let me get this straight. The fellow last night identified himself as Garner. And showed ID to prove it.”

  Bob nodded. In the fields around them, vast green swathes of cinnamon fern spread between mountain ash trees, their clusters of berries just now turning orange, and wine-red clumps of sumac.

  “And he’s not saying why he pretended to be someone else?” she asked.

  At the southernmost tip of the island, they crossed the long, freshly paved road leading out to the freighter terminal. “Nope. But you’ve got to figure, Garner must’ve paid him to do it.”

  Jake nodded bleakly. “Yup. You don’t steal ID and then use it to turn yourself in with, usually.”

  From here, the view down the bay was unobstructed: first the blue, glittering water, next a scattering of green, rocky mounds with names like Burial Island and Treat’s Folly, and finally the bridge linking the town of Lubec with its tall white steeples to the Canadian island of Campobello.

  “So I’d think Garner was out of the picture,” Jake said.

  Bob nodded again, grimly. “We all did. So Wade went to work, your dad and Bella were off playing tourist—”

  “And Garner could visit me.” She turned suddenly from the spectacular expanse of water and the sailboats tacking prettily in it. “But … why did you show up?”

  They drove slowly uphill past four massive old elm skeletons whose dead gray trunks were as big around as Volkswagens; the trees had died long ago of Dutch elm disease but had never been cut down.

  So now here they still stood, slowly decaying, occasionally dropping wood chunks the size of chest freezers into what once had been a house and was now just a cellar hole.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Bob. He steered around the sharp curve onto High Street, and back toward town. “See, I told the state cops what you said about that dead girl down on Sea Street.”

  “Really.” She felt like shaking him. But she couldn’t, since for one thing he was driving, and for another he would get to it, whatever he meant to say, when he was ready.

  He always did. “About how she knew the local geography, and how a girl from here, even drunk, wouldn’t likely fall.”

  She began feeling alarmed. What was it that was so bad, he didn’t want to tell her?

  “So to make a long story short …”

  Thank God. “Hey, Bob? I’m getting old, here.”

  He nodded reluctantly. “I know. I just … well.”

  He took the turn onto Pleasant Street, past the community gardens with their high, mulched rows and their electric fences strung up against the deer that herded on the island in summer.

  “Girl’s purse was there,” he said. “State guys took it, turned out there were prints on it. Not hers.”

  “That was fast,” she observed, and didn’t add unlike your storytelling style.


  “Yeah. It was fast, because the thing is, see, there was a regional alert already up for the Garner fellow.”

  The New England region, he meant, and the different state police departments communicating with one another in it.

  “Garner did something else before he got here,” Bob added. “Back in New York. So they were already all geared up; they had fingerprints on him, sent out with the bulletin.”

  So if someone picked up a suspect, they’d be able to tell in short order whether or not it was Garner.…

  “And the ones on the purse matched?” She put it all together finally. “They were his prints?”

  Bob sighed. “Yeah. So, long story short, a whole bunch of New York cops are on their way up here right now, to find him and grab him. They’ll be here by late tonight.”

  “So you’re not supposed to let word get out ’cause they don’t want you to spook him.”

  “Got it in one. I guess the safety of a whole townful of people, not to mention all the visitors we have this weekend, doesn’t signify compared to—”

  In Maine, the only town cops who investigated murders were the Portland and Bangor departments. Otherwise, it was the state police all the way—or the out-of-staters with warrants—and the townies were supposed to keep right out of it.

  She sank back in the car seat. “Just tell me, Bob, okay? Why the New York cops are so hot to capture some little mutt from the Bronx, or wherever.”

  “Staten Island,” he said, still stalling. But then he gave in all of a sudden.

  “Okay, look. He’s been living with his mom all his life, but last week a neighbor went in, made a complaint to the cops there. Says the place isn’t kept up anymore, no one coming or going, the lights go on and off but it’s like they’re on a timer.”

  Jake didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “And?”

  Across the bay, Campobello Island lay like a long green bar between the blue water and blue sky. “And the neighbor wanted the house checked,” Bob said. “So they did. And inside …”

  A cat streaked across the road; Bob braked hard, hurling her against the seat belt.

  “What about inside, Bob?” Jake asked as the Crown Vic’s big engine died, mustering the last tattered shreds of her patience to keep herself from shrieking.

  Bob looked at his hands on the steering wheel. “Inside, they found his mom. Air-conditioning on high, place was like a freezer in there, they said.”

  He turned the key; nothing. “Inside, there’s a lady wrapped up in a blanket with only her face showing, sitting in a chair.”

  “And what did she say about it?”

  The air-conditioning wasn’t unusual; after all, it was the middle of summer. And that Steven Garner’s mother might be just as much of a nut job as he was came as no great surprise, either.

  He’d had to get it from somewhere. She looked inquiringly at Bob.

  “Nothing. She didn’t say anything.”

  Uh-oh. “Because she was deceased,” he continued as the Vic’s engine finally caught. “And according to the cops down there, it looked like she’d had a little help getting to be deceased.”

  “Oh,” she breathed, feeling suddenly funny all over.

  Not ha-ha funny, either, because six hours ago Steven Garner had had his hands on her, hands he’d apparently also used to—

  His own mother. “Pull over.”

  Bob obeyed. She opened the car door, sat sucking in gulps of salty air. A hundred yards distant, white seagulls rose and fell as if bobbed up and down by invisible filaments in the breeze.

  She wished the air could scour her clean, starting on the inside and working its way out. “So Garner killed the Sea Street girl.”

  “Probably he did. I don’t know how else his fingerprints would’ve gotten onto her purse.”

  Bob waited. When she was sure she wasn’t about to lose her breakfast, she swung her legs back into the car.

  She slammed the door; he drove on.

  On Battery Street, looking across the cove to Sea Street and the place at the foot of the cliff where the girl’s body had been found, Bob turned right, up Middle Street toward home. “As for the stabbed kid, the other boys who were there when that happened still aren’t talking about it.” Bob sighed. “State guys are on that now, too, of course.”

  Now that someone besides me says Garner’s in on it all, she thought with a burst of bitterness. But Bob knew that, too.

  He glanced at her. “Look, Jake, I couldn’t just—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Forget it, I know you did what you could.”

  After all, if it hadn’t been for him pressuring the state cops to fingerprint the purse, the New York cops wouldn’t be riding to the rescue right this minute, would they?

  Not that she had any great confidence that they’d be any help. “If he did stab the Wadman kid, too,” Bob said.

  “Oh, of course he did! Who else would? You think we’ve got two killers running around Eastport this Fourth of July?”

  “Jeez, I hope not.” He pulled the car over to the curb in front of her house, the big, old white structure with its fat red-brick chimneys and oversized porches looking solid as a fort to her.

  Or it had until last night. “But if he did it, I just don’t know why the other boys won’t say so,” Bob finished.

  She bit her lip, remembering her terror in Wade’s workshop. “I do.”

  That face, those eyes … “He scared them,” she said. “He may look like a twerp, but believe me, he’s capable of it.”

  And of a lot of other things; the unpleasant mental picture of the dead woman sitting in a chair with the air conditioner on high rose in her mind unbidden.

  “And if those New York cops are right about what Garner did to his mom, the boys are right to be scared of him,” she added.

  Besides, their saying who’d stabbed them wasn’t going to help find Garner now, was it? Or maybe there was another reason they’d decided not to cross him.…

  But then a new thought hit her. “Why’d you tell me all this if I’m not supposed to let anyone else know?”

  “Because I know you, Jake. You’ve got some kind of a plan to do something about him already, and—”

  “Plan? Me have a plan?” She tried lightening her tone, but just then Sam appeared on the front porch. Even from here, she could see the pistol grip sticking out of his jeans pocket.

  He must’ve heard the car drive up, maybe thought it was some friend of his own, not realizing that instead it was her and Bob.

  And now it was too late; Sam had qualified at the shooting range, even had a carry permit for a weapon. But that didn’t keep a look of deep disapproval off Bob’s face.

  “Yes,” he pronounced drily, his gaze following Sam. “A plan. Like you always do.”

  He leaned intently toward her, raising a pudgy index finger that looked to her as if it could do damage, should he decide to start poking with it.

  “Jake, you tell that kid that if I find him with a weapon on him tonight …”

  “Okay, okay.” But there was something else in Bob’s face, too, something he hadn’t said yet.

  “Bob,” she said, “let’s just pretend I’m a grown-up for a minute, okay? What is it you’re not telling me?”

  He looked even more reluctant.

  “It’s about him, isn’t it? Or … about the mother,” she guessed, and saw Bob’s expression change.

  “That’s it,” she said. “All right, lay it on me, or I’ll go right out this minute and tell everyone I run into about the New York cops who are coming here, and why.”

  Which she wouldn’t in a million years, and he knew it. But he’d been getting ready to tell her the rest of it anyway; he’d just been nerving himself up to do it, she realized. And after what she’d heard so far, what could be so bad that …?

  “Okay,” he gave in. “First, the situation they were in. From what the city cops said, it was, um, unconventional.”

  But that couldn’t be all. She flexed her fin
gers in a “give it” gesture. Grudgingly he complied.

  “The house was … sterile. Everything with plastic covers on it. Furniture, lampshades. And the place stank of bleach. There were ultraviolet lights installed in the bathroom and over the kitchen sink, an ozone machine in the bedroom he was using. All anti-germ stuff. And there was a lot of merchandise, all home-shopping products stored everywhere. Still in packaging, mostly.”

  “And?” That Steven Garner and his mom weren’t great examples of perfect sanity wasn’t a surprise.

  It wasn’t enough to put that look of disgust on Bob’s plump features, either. Eastport in summer was like paradise, but he’d seen plenty here, in all four seasons.

  “And the other thing is … well. Like I said, they found her sitting in a chair. Clear plastic sheeting over her, of course. But what I didn’t say was, she’d been dead for a while.”

  He straightened in the driver’s seat, frowning out through the squad car’s front windshield as if the sparkling view could take this next part out of his mind.

  “And he’d been living in there with her. With her sitting there. For months.”

  “Oh,” she breathed, understanding now why Bob hadn’t wanted to talk about it, or even think about it.

  She didn’t want to, either. But he wasn’t finished. “That’s not the worst of it, though. The cops said she’d been there so long, and the air was so cold and dry from the air-conditioning, that she’d turned into … well, a mummy, sort of.”

  He took a deep breath, spat out the rest. “And I don’t want you fooling around with this guy, Jacobia,” he finished. “Because the body in that house, the one that used to be our pal’s mom?”

  He turned to her. “It had a meat cleaver in its forehead.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  RUB-A-DUB-DUB. NO TUB, BUT HE WAS USED TO THAT. BACK home, a real bath or a shower was something he got only at the YMCA’s locker room, anyway; the facilities at his own house were still full of his mother’s collectibles.

  Stuffed animals, commemorative coins, Ginsu knives, salad spinners … For a while there, while the phone was still hooked up and the TV worked, she’d spent all day watching the shopping channels, clutching the remote with one hand and the phone with the other.