by Sarah Graves
“May I drive?” Maggie asked when we pulled to the gas pumps in Whiting. She looked pale and miserable, as if she needed a task to distract her from what had happened. And she had borrowed the car many times so she knew how to handle it.
The thought even crossed my mind that she’d been out in it the day before. But of course there was no connection; Maggie didn’t even know Jim Diamond, or Bella either.
Still . . . “Maggie, you weren’t in Lubec yesterday, were you?”
“Me?” She looked startled. “No, why?”
“Never mind.” I was really tempted to let her take the wheel. It would have been more comfortable for her than the backseat, and I felt tired. But at the moment I also needed to be in control.
“Sorry,” I told her, hooking the gas nozzle back up to the pump. “You can drive another time, okay?”
It seemed even smaller inside with the top up. Still, there was no hope of putting it down again on this trip. Moments later the skies opened abruptly, hammering the taut black canvas with a good old-fashioned summer downpour.
Also it was leaky black canvas, another unhappy surprise.
A drop of cold water hit the back of my neck, then two more. Ellie found the roll of adhesive tape I kept in the glove box, because it’s amazing what you can fix with enough adhesive tape.
But not black canvas convertible tops. She tore off a strip and pressed it to the wet spot over my head. Promptly it fell off and slid irretrievably down the back of my shirt.
“Never mind,” I said glumly. “But don’t lose the rest of the roll, please.”
Another cold drop hit my neck. “Something tells me I might be needing it to hold myself together before this is all over.”
I was hoping she’d contradict me. But Ellie only sighed and nodded agreement. “Me, too,” she said. She sounded worried.
Because maybe the sky wasn’t actually falling, but with the rain thundering down so hard that the drops were bouncing up off the pavement again, it was doing a pretty great imitation of it.
And to think, I ruminated as we sped through the cloudburst, that only a few days earlier I’d believed my worst problem—
—other than my son Sam, his girlfriend Maggie, and Bella Diamond, who even without a murdered ex-husband had turned out to be the housekeeper from hell—
—was a moose on the loose.
Chapter 2
The whole thing began on another bright morning a couple of days before we found Jim Diamond clobbered in his apartment. On that day I’d been feeling lighthearted even though an unpleasant chore lurked gremlinlike on my to-do list.
Which of course was a part of the problem. If I’d suspected in advance even a little bit of what I was in for, I’d have taken preventive measures.
Rocket launchers, say, or a moat full of alligators. Twelve-foot spikes, their tips smeared with exotic poison, backed by a razor-wire fence so sharp it could trim your toenails all the way up to your . . .
Well, you get the idea. But instead birds were singing and the dew-spangled lilacs were doing their perfume thing, richly intoxicating. A salt breeze off the bay blew in through the open kitchen window, sweet as a kiss.
The whole situation was so invigorating, in fact, that I’d gotten a start on two projects I’d been avoiding for months: I’d taken the screen off that open window so I could repair it. And I was painting the shutters I’d bought secondhand to replace the ones demolished in a gale the previous February.
I’d been up in my third-floor workroom where I had finished priming two pairs of the shutters, decided to come downstairs for a break, and was getting ready to clean my paintbrush at the sink in my one-hundred-and-eighty-one-year-old house in Eastport, Maine. Humming cheerfully in the big barnlike kitchen with its high tin ceiling, worn hardwood floor, and pine wainscoting, I had just turned on the faucet over the old soapstone basin when suddenly from that wide-open window behind me came a sound.
A loud sound, like . . .
Buh-wha-a-a-t!
Dropping the paintbrush in a splatter of paint, I whirled to confront a full-size moose head complete with a very respectable rack of moose antlers, attached to a full-size moose.
A live moose. The creature’s huge yellow teeth chomped down onto the last of six red Martha Washington geraniums I had planted in the kitchen window box only a few hours earlier, and began chewing.
“Muh-muh-moose,” I managed faintly. Nothing remained of the other five geraniums but short green stumps.
The moose rolled his eye at me, chewing pensively on a mouthful of Martha Washingtons. A single red blossom clung wetly to one of his enormous nostrils.
Bwha-a-t! he remarked again, spraying geranium cud all over my clean kitchen.
“Scram!” I quavered, glancing around for something large enough to discourage the creature.
Like maybe one of those rocket launchers. But none were in sight and when I looked back again, neither was the moose.
Hurrying to the window I skidded hard on moose cud, flailed wildly, and avoided a pratfall only by slamming into the refrigerator and wrapping my arms around it. This set the antique crystal lemonade pitcher I’d bought at a church sale and put up there for safekeeping teetering dangerously, as the cat perched next to it showed no interest whatsoever in saving it.
She just looked intensely bored, and when I’d rescued the pitcher and made it to the window to peer out, all I saw of the moose was his tail twitching casually as his big brown rear end vanished among the trees and bushes at the back of the yard.
Then he was gone, leaving my previously spotless kitchen heavily splattered with geranium cud. Oh, and by that paintbrush, too. In my confusion I’d apparently grabbed it again, waving it around rather wildly and indiscriminately.
As a result any surface not fire-hosed with moose cud was now heavily anointed with white latex paint. And the combination was not one your average home decorator would approve.
Even your average zookeeper couldn’t find much to approve about this mess, I thought as I gazed forlornly at it. And at the moment I couldn’t think of a good way of cleaning it up, either, except possibly with a blowtorch.
Mee-yow-row-wowl, the cat remarked. She was a cross-eyed Siamese named Cat Dancing who thought any troubles the humans got into were their own fault, and by the way, was it suppertime yet? Also she regarded herself as too refined to chase a mouse, much less a moose.
“Oh, hush up,” I told the cat irritably, thinking about cat prints tracked inevitably through a combination of moose cud and latex paint. “And you’d better stay up there if you know what’s good for you.”
Urmph, Cat replied, which in cat lingo I happened to know meant “Oh, stick a sock in it.”
Just then Ellie came in with the baby strapped to her back and my two dogs, Monday and Prill, straining at the ends of their leashes.
“Hi,” Ellie greeted me, not even breathing hard. “What’s new?”
She’d been out for her usual two-mile morning walk, which she took to maintain her already-lithe figure and believed was made even more healthfully effective by the addition of a twenty-pound baby and nearly two hundred pounds of rambunctious canine.
“Ellie, don’t—”
But it was too late. She’d dropped the leashes before she’d had a look at the kitchen. Instantly both dogs got the scent of the moose. They began bouncing off the walls like a couple of balls in a canine-themed pinball machine gone mad.
I slammed the hall door and the one to the ell of the house, then the one leading through the butler’s pantry to the dining room, and finally the kitchen window.
“Jake,” Ellie asked, peering around, “what on earth happened in here?”
Meanwhile Monday, the Labrador retriever, had snuffled up a snootful of moose-flavored geranium cud. She stood stock-still as an odd look came onto her doggy features. Then—ker-schnoof!—she sneezed it out again in a paint-infused aerosol that went absolutely everywhere instead of just nearly everywhere, the way it had been
before.
“And what,” Ellie added, her nose beginning to wrinkle, “is that smell?” Because morning moose breath, as it turns out, isn’t exactly minty-fresh.
Prill, the red Doberman, didn’t sniff at all, instead deciding instantly that whatever had been in here, she didn’t like it. She hit the floor running, heading for the window where the scent was apparently strongest, struck a patch of paint, and slid forward on all fours, barking furiously and spreading paint in a long thick smear all the way to the washing machine.
Hitting it with a thud didn’t discourage the big red dog one bit. Instead Prill scrambled back, took a running jump that carried her onto the top of the machine, and would have gone right on out through the window glass had I not remembered the magic words.
“Prill! Time to eat!”
The dog stopped short, realized where she was, and began to whimper. Jumping up was one thing, her sad look seemed to say.
Jumping down was something else again.
Yowrl, Cat Dancing commented from atop the refrigerator. In cat lingo, that meant ha ha ha.
Wuff? Prill asked softly and a little embarrassedly, seeming all at once to feel very nearly as foolish as she looked, perched there atop a major household appliance.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, you big goof,” I said impatiently. “Ellie, give me a hand, here, will you please? And you,” I added to the dog now eyeing me imploringly, “don’t you move a goddamned inch.”
Then I remembered Leonora, who laughed happily from inside Ellie’s baby carrier. A cheerful little soul, Lee gazed around my kitchen with the goggle-eyed glee that pretty much symbolized her whole personality except when she was hungry.
“I mean a gosh-darned inch,” I amended. It had been twenty years since I’d had my own baby around the house.
“Don’t worry, she already says worse.” Ellie put her arms around Prill’s hind legs. “George took her down to the fish pier the other day to meet some of his buddies. Some of the mackerel they were pulling in, he says, were as big as the baby. Anyway, she came home cussing a blue streak.”
Knowing the daily habits of some of George’s buddies, I was surprised little Lee hadn’t come home demanding to drink beer and smoke cigars. Still . . .
“Ellie, are you sure that baby was cussing?” A small round spit bubble appeared, glistening on the infant’s rosebud lips.
For her walk that day Ellie wore a pale blue sundress with yellow sunflowers on it, a pink canvas sun hat whose floppy brim framed her delicately featured face, and a green cotton cardigan whose pockets were stuffed with all the baby items that didn’t fit in the baby backpack.
“Well,” Ellie admitted, “maybe not. At her age, I guess just about anything can sound like anything else.”
On Ellie’s feet were a pair of big brown Earth shoes that didn’t make her legs look fat, mostly because nothing could make Ellie’s legs look fat. With pale green eyes, red hair escaping in wisps from a purple hair ribbon, and freckles the color of gold dust sprinkled across her nose, my best friend was as fragile-appearing as a fairy princess out of a storybook, and as tough as shoe leather.
“At first George thought she was actually saying words,” she went on. “And wasn’t he some proud, though?”
Ellie’s husband George Valentine was the man you called when you had a bird’s nest in your chimney, raccoons in your attic, or foxes building a den behind your garden shed, from which shelter they were planning to feast all winter on neighborhood pets.
I wondered if I could get him to deal with a moose.
“But then he figured out what those babblings sounded like,” Ellie went on, “and hit the roof.”
“Maybe that’s what made it leak,” I replied.
George and my own husband, Wade Sorenson, were reshingling the roof of George and Ellie’s house when they weren’t both out working other jobs.
“Maybe.” Ellie laughed as we maneuvered a frightened Prill to the edge of the washing machine. “Anyway, he won’t let the guys cuss around Lee anymore, and he already wouldn’t let them breathe on her in case they had colds.”
All of which warmed my heart. After several childless years, Ellie and George had gotten used to being footloose and fancy-free, so I’d wondered how they would adjust to having a baby. But Leonora had instantly become their sun, moon, and stars; neither could bear to be away from her for long, and it was a contest as to which of them doted more upon her.
“Oof,” I said as we lifted the unhappy dog, me at the front of the frightened animal and Ellie at the other end.
Glrp, said Prill, stiffening anxiously as we raised her up off the washing machine.
“There,” Ellie exhaled, dusting her hands together as we finished setting the creature securely back down onto the floor.
Chagrined, Prill went to her water bowl and drank thirstily, as if to say this was all she’d meant to do in the first place, and how did she ever get up onto that awful contraption, anyway?
Murp, Cat pronounced disappointedly, and went back to sleep.
Whereupon I didn’t have the heart to scold Prill; after all, I hadn’t exactly distinguished myself with my own reaction to the moose, had I? Instead I put both dogs out in the ell where they couldn’t create more mayhem.
“A moose?” Ellie repeated in astonishment as I explained what had happened. “You’re sure it was a real, live moose?”
“Well, it wasn’t a stuffed one. Believe me, after seeing it I can definitely tell the difference. And after smelling it.”
Just then George himself arrived. He was a small, dark-haired man with a five o’clock shadow already shading his stubborn jaw and the creases in his knuckles permanently stained by the many varieties of hard, dirty work he did in Eastport year-round. Today he wore an old white T-shirt, faded jeans, and battered leather boots.
He bent to embrace Ellie and kiss the baby, then sniffed the air. “Phew, what’s that?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, instead heading to the cellar where Wade had stashed a carton of roofing nails; when George was on a mission you got in front of him at your peril. But his question made me even more aware of the green, richly weedy aroma in the room, mingled with something I can’t fully describe without being indelicate. Suffice it to say the atmosphere in my kitchen was as rank as a cow barn that for some reason has been situated in the middle of a swamp.
“So yes,” I told Ellie, “I’m sure that it was a moose.”
Once George had retrieved the nails and departed, Ellie and I met again to confer at the kitchen table. We’d put Leonora down for a nap in the crib I kept ready for her in what had been the downstairs maid’s room, back in the time when my house was lived in by people who actually had maids.
In those days, when water came from hand pumps and heat came from woodstoves that had to be tended in a filthy, never-ending round of back-breaking work, all the backs that got broken around here belonged to servants.
Nowadays, the back belonged to me. Or it had until recently; fear touched my heart as I remembered that I wasn’t alone in the household-help department at the moment. Also, the prospect of the unpleasant chore looming over me had just gotten worse.
“A big,” I emphasized, “moose.” I leaned down to wipe at yet another stubborn paint splotch.
It didn’t come off. The finish on the nineteenth-century kitchen floor was so thin—and let’s face it, in places so nonexistent—that the paint had quickly sunk in. Somehow the smears had also reached the cabinets, the stove and countertops, and the ceiling that Monday had apparently managed to hit with her explosive sneeze.
In short, you couldn’t have spread that paint around better if you’d shot it from a shotgun at about a hundred yards, which was how far I wanted to be from the situation, minimum.
Because given enough elbow grease and the same determination as that famous old Greek guy used to sanitize the Augean stable, I could’ve cleaned the kitchen up myself. Trouble was, I wouldn’t be doing it myself because for the first
time since I’d moved to Maine seven years earlier, I had household help.
Actual paid-by-the-hour help, I mean, not the kind Ellie always gave so cheerfully and willingly. And the help was due to arrive in . . .
Good heavens, only about thirty minutes. As if to emphasize this fact, the hall clock chimed the half hour. Ellie looked up, catching my thought. “Uh-oh.”
“Yep. Bella’s coming,” I said hopelessly. “Soon. And when she gets a look at this place, she’ll go absolutely bananas.”
“Right,” Ellie agreed, instantly reaching out to scrub at the front of a kitchen cabinet.
But a mixture of moose cud and latex is apparently the stuff they should use to glue ceramic tiles onto the walls in bathtub enclosures. In ten minutes it had dried to the durability of epoxy; now the only way it was coming off was with a hammer and chisel.
Assuming I didn’t really go out and rent a blowtorch, a plan that was starting to look more tempting by the minute. Even the most determined domestic helper wouldn’t be able to clean a house if it was actually on fire.
I hoped.
“So it’s true,” Ellie said, changing the subject. “There is really a moose running around town.”
I just stared at her. “You mean you knew?”
Here I should explain that Eastport is located on an island, which funnily enough is actually called Moose Island, seven miles off the coast of Maine and so far downeast that it is almost in Canada. Two miles wide, seven miles long, three hours from Bangor and light-years from anywhere else, Eastport is reachable by car over a causeway, although at low tide you could probably just wade across the clam flats.
Which it seemed our moose must have done, wandering from the thousands of acres of wild, wooded mainland on the other side of the channel. Something about Eastport had attracted it, possibly, or maybe it just got lost.
And now at least according to Ellie it seemed other people had seen it, too.
“Deke Meekins from the marine store said he nearly walked right into it this morning, putting kayaks in the water for some tourists,” she reported, glancing nervously at the back door.
