Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

Finally one day when I was trying to write another check to the fuel oil company, to run the furnace which was so inefficient I might as well have been burning bales of hundred-dollar bills, the ink froze in my pen. In response I threw the pen across the room, wrapped myself in all the clothing I owned that I was not already wearing, and staggered down to Wadsworth’s Hardware Store on Water Street to ask about buying a woodstove for the kitchen.

  I figured that if we had one, Sam and I could just move into the kitchen, which was where we were spending most of our time anyway because (a) the rest of the house was too cold, (b) if you ran the oven constantly you might just keep frost from forming on the surfaces of your clothes, and (c) we cooked a lot because it was taking so many calories to maintain our body heat.

  So I did ask. Whereupon the canny fellows at the hardware store sized me up in a glance, realized immediately that if they sold me a woodstove I would burn the house down with it, and decided to take pity on me.

  “Here,” one of them told me gently, “is what you need.”

  It was an absolutely gigantic roll of plastic sheeting, as thick as canvas, grayish colored, and so ugly you had to narrow your eyes just to look straight at it, and at first I thought the fellow meant I was supposed to wrap myself in it.

  By that point it was an idea I’d have gone along with, I was so cold. But I didn’t think I could get Sam to cooperate; for one thing, he had to go to school. And the task of sealing the dog up for the winter was beyond my capacity.

  So I waited, hoping for further enlightenment. On the store shelves were many other products for winter insulation, but I had no idea how to use any of them, either.

  While I stood there, a snowplow went by outside the big plate glass window. I could only see the operator’s head over the drift he had piled up. Customers came in, stomped the snow off their boots, uttered a few syllables in a Maine accent so broad I could barely understand it, and were sent via equally few syllables to the proper aisle of the store.

  The snowplow went by again. This time I could only see the top of the operator’s bright orange hat. But at last one of the hardware store fellows returned.

  “Havin’ a bit o’ trouble decidin’, are we?” he asked me with a smile. His name tag read “Tim” and he pronounced the end of his question the Maine way: ah we?

  “Yes,” I replied gratefully. I gestured at plastic sheeting that came in so many sizes besides the roll, the packets of items confusingly labeled furring strips although I didn’t see any fur, and tubes full of what appeared to be electrical cord, but why would you want ninety miles of it, and why was it so thin?

  “I don’t know what any of this stuff is, or what to do with the plastic,” I admitted.

  “You cover your windows with it,” he replied. “It stops drafts. Or anyway, it slows ’em down some.”

  “Oh,” I said, my heart sinking as I took in the truth:

  I would be cutting big pieces from the rolled material, a challenge in itself. Also the tops of my windows were eight feet off the floor, so mounting the pieces would have to be done while standing on stilts. But if I didn’t find some way to do it they’d be thawing me out with a hair dryer soon.

  Tim hadn’t been ignoring me, just giving me some space; for a newcomer to Maine it was sometimes a bit difficult to tell the difference.

  “Look,” he said finally. “How about I come over after work and show you how to do one of these? It’s kind of a pain but it’s not impossible once you get the hang of it.”

  Back in Manhattan any stranger who showed up at your door with a roll of plastic wanted to wrap your dead body in it. Later he would put you in the same landfill where he’d stashed the victims he’d murdered before you.

  But if anyone in Eastport wanted to kill me, all they had to do was not help me now. I began telling Tim where I lived.

  “I know,” he said as he rang up the plastic and the ninety-mile heat cord, which turned out to be for wrapping around water pipes. Mine, I gathered, had not yet frozen solid only because I was new here, and was experiencing a sort of beginner’s luck.

  It wasn’t, Tim suggested darkly, the kind of luck I could expect to last for long.

  “You’re the lady who bought the big old white house on Key Street,” he went on. “From New York. Got a boy? Dog, too. Seems I heard you were in some sort of money business, back in the city.”

  I must have stared. In response his eyes twinkled. “Not a lot going on around here in the winter,” he observed. “So we tend to get all the good out of any amusement that arrives.”

  The amusement being me. Humbly I took my change, and later Tim delivered my purchases and plowed my driveway. I stood by the window watching his Jeep’s headlights move to and fro, feeling for the first time as if I were not completely alone here.

  When he came in he accepted coffee and ten dollars; I got the idea that by offering the money I’d passed a small test. The plow blade was attached to the Jeep to generate cash, and knowing this without having to be told drew a nod of approval from him.

  “I brought along a few other things I thought you needed,” he told me, spreading them out on the kitchen table: a clawhammer, a pair of pliers, two screwdrivers—one Phillips head, one flat—a small pipe wrench, and a roll of silicone tape.

  “With these, you’re set for any emergency you can handle. Anything more, you’ll need an electrician or a plumber. Later,” he added, eyeing me closely, “I have an idea that might change.”

  And while I filled the hall shelves with the new tools this kindhearted semistranger had collected for me, he finally revealed the most important thing about putting plastic on your windows.

  Which is don’t cut it first. This will be your impulse, to cut a piece of plastic that seems to be of a size you can handle instead of having to maneuver the whole heavy awkward roll while simultaneously keeping your balance on a stepladder.

  But put the plastic up first, pressing it to the sticky surface of the double-sided tape you have already affixed to the window trim and letting the roll fall to the floor. Spread the sheeting out at the top of the window, then at the sides, and finally at the bottom, smoothing it as you go.

  Only when the plastic is fastened all the way around should you cut it, using a straight edge butted against the window trim for a guide. And presto, one whole window is covered with draft-busting plastic so hideous that the decorating police will come to your house and arrest you if they ever get word of it.

  “Thank you,” I told Tim sincerely when he was done with his demonstration, still not understanding quite why he had come over at all. Though he’d taken the plow money, he’d refused to be paid for his window-covering instruction.

  “ ’S all right,” he replied. His hat had big furry ear flaps, accessories I had so far resisted. But as he pulled them over his ears I realized my notion of fashion was going to take a beating over the winter, too.

  “Stuff some thick insulating material into all the fireplace and stovepipe openings,” he instructed me as he departed. “In this old house, half your heat is probably goin’ up them flues.”

  There was a wedding ring on his finger or I might’ve thrown him to the floor and ravished him right then and there.

  “Stop up all the electrical outlets you’re not using, the keyholes, mail slot and so on. I can’t sell you a woodstove until you get somebody in to inspect your chimneys,” he concluded kindly.

  Later I learned that he belonged to the volunteer fire department, so I suppose there was self-interest in the woodstove advice Tim offered. And it didn’t hurt that he’d sold me a lot of hardware products, the first but far from the last I would buy; soon whenever he saw me coming he would slide the cash drawer open and closed a few times just to make sure it was working smoothly.

  But fire prevention wasn’t the main reason for his visit, or planned profit, either. And although I didn’t get it then, eventually I began to comprehend why he’d helped me on that frigid winter night.

  He’d done i
t because he could. Because what goes around comes around. And in Eastport it can come with the devastating accuracy of a heat-seeking missile.

  We grease the wheels of human kindness when we can, here; otherwise they might seize up on us some time when we can least afford it.

  All of which brings me back to the unhappy woman sitting at my kitchen table that bright June morning a couple of days before we found Jim Diamond on the brink of death.

  I wasn’t sure helping Bella would turn the avenging angel of household hygiene back into an ordinary cleaning woman.

  Also she was in possession of something I’ve always found to be a serious pain: that is, a series of apparent death threats.

  None of which made me want to keep her in my employ, and I still wasn’t sure I would. But something told me clearly that if I abandoned her now without even trying to find out a little more about her problem, the heat-seeking missile of “What goes around, comes around” might wind up targeting me.

  Which in the end it turned out to anyway, and so did the frighteningly intelligent attentions of a bloody murderer.

  Chapter 4

  Death threats,” I repeated unhappily to Bella, peering at the note. “There are more like this?”

  She nodded. “Started a month or so ago. I find ’em in my house, which is scary enough, ’cause how do they get in there? I keep it locked when I’m out. My daughter Kris lives there, too, but I don’t think she wants to kill me.”

  Tears welled in her big eyes. “Besides, if she did want to I don’t see why she’d bother to say so first. And why waste energy on notes? That’d be her attitude.”

  “She sounds charming,” I said.

  Bella glanced wryly at me. “Kris’s got a temper just as much as her dad had. But she’s all right.”

  “Are you bothering anyone? Quarreling with a neighbor, your dog barking, are you trying to get money from someone? That is,” I added at her insulted look, “money someone owes you?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t like fighting, I’ve got no dog, and nobody owes me money. I just go along trying to live.”

  “And you do think the notes are serious?” I asked.

  She frowned in reply, pointing at the yellow notepaper.

  “Lookit the way the letters are pressed in, like someone was grittin’ their teeth,” she said. “And the hateful words.”

  I looked the note over again. “You know, I have to agree.”

  It was written in blue ballpoint, the letters gouged into the cheap paper. Interestingly, it included no misspellings and featured big words, including a favorite of mine: exsanguinate.

  Right away I wondered why the term had been chosen instead of the simpler bleed to death. Was it to intimidate Bella with the sender’s intelligence? Or did the sender use large words as a habit, not realizing how they would stand out?

  “It does look unpleasant,” I agreed, trying to think of all the big-word specialists I knew around here. But the only one I could come up with was my ex-husband Victor, and he wouldn’t be threatening Bella. Victor is such a snob, he barely believes in the existence of people like Bella.

  That is, unless they happen to be his patients, in which case he monitors them every waking minute and even talks about them in his sleep. He is, as I may have indicated elsewhere, a complicated guy.

  “Have you told the police?” I asked Bella.

  She nodded. “The chief came to my house.” Eastport’s Chief of Police Bob Arnold, she meant. “He set officers to watch, and the notes stopped. But when they quit watching, the threats just started right up again.”

  I came to a decision. “Bella, I’d like to talk to Bob Arnold myself about this. May I keep this note a while?”

  “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “But please don’t tell anyone else. It’s already getting around town that I’m losing my marbles. And . . .” Her voice thickened with tears. “And they can’t think that. I have to work. Somehow I have to have a job, and if people start thinking I’m off my rocker . . .”

  “I’ll keep it as confidential as I can,” I promised. “But right now you have a job, and there’s plenty to do. The kitchen floor, for instance.”

  She brightened instantly. “It’s bad,” she opined. “Very bad.”

  It was worse than that. But before I could give her specific instructions on how she might even begin repairing the damage—for once I thought her cleanliness mania might have met its match—someone knocked on the back door.

  It turned out to be a pleasant-looking lady in her late sixties, wearing a light straw hat, a flowered dress, and white low-heeled shoes. Her short steel-gray hair curved neatly from beneath the hat in a becoming pageboy style.

  “Yes?” I asked a little puzzledly through the screen door.

  “The local Red Cross is having a blood drive,” she informed me with a smile. “This is to tell you when and where it will be held, and to encourage you to give blood.”

  Thanking her, I took the pamphlet and donor card she offered and she went away.

  “Hmph,” Bella said when I came back into the kitchen. “Guess they don’t bother canvassing the poor side of town. But I ain’t so hard up I can’t spare a pint of blood for a sick person. You never know, I might need one someday myself.”

  And there it was again, the “Do unto others” ethic, as if the universe thought I needed more reminding. I hurried out to try catching the lady to get another set of donor literature. But when I reached the sidewalk and looked both ways, she had vanished.

  Supervising Bella, repairing that window screen, watching for the moose, and figuring out and fixing something to eat for dinner took up the rest of my day. But the following morning I set out to investigate Bella’s problem a little further.

  The Eastport Police Department was located in the old bank building on Water Street, one door down from the public library and one door up from La Sardina, our only Mexican bar and restaurant. Bob Arnold joked that it was the perfect spot for a cop shop; guys could get ideas for new crimes in the library, then soak up the courage to carry them out right nearby in the bar.

  Not that Eastport’s few active lowlifes spent much time in the library. And anyway Bob usually grabbed them and took their car keys right after last call, when they’d drunk enough to get reckless but before they could get into serious trouble. Because Bob knew his regulars and the felonious schemes they tended to come up with, and his First Commandment of law enforcement was Thou Shalt Prevent It.

  “Pleasant day,” Bob commented now, standing on the steps of the bank building with his thumbs hooked in his utility belt.

  I climbed the concrete steps to stand with him, beside the old bank vault alarm still installed in the building’s brickwork. His squad car was angle-parked a few feet away, radio sputtering intermittently. Between its eruptions of static I reported on my conversation with Bella.

  Bob’s round pink face creased in a grin. “Ayuh. Heard about you winnin’ her at the church fair. Ladies at the sewing circle are takin’ bets, I understand, on how long she’ll last.”

  Working for me, he meant. “She’s a strange one, that Bella,” he added.

  Which was one of the lines of speculation I wanted a stop put to. If I ended up needing to fire Bella, I at least wanted her to be able to go to work for someone else.

  “If her behavior’s unusual, it’s only because someone’s been threatening her life,” I retorted. Bob wasn’t taking the threat notes very seriously, it seemed to me.

  I pulled out the one Bella had given me, but Bob had already begun shaking his head.

  “Jake, first of all, these aren’t threats. They’re more like lists, wouldn’t you say? Even so,” he went on, “I set two men on her house at night, sat ’em there whenever they weren’t out on a call, kept ’em there two whole weeks.”

  He made a face that communicated perfectly how useless this had been. “And I told ’em, keep their traps shut.”

  So word didn’t spread that Bella’s house was bein
g watched, he meant; so the supposed perpetrator wouldn’t get tipped to it and take a break from his activities.

  Which apparently he had anyway. According to Bella, the notes had stopped while the officers were there.

  “Nothing at all?” I asked. “No prowlers, no . . .”

  “If a worm turned in the earth around that house, my guys had orders to tell me about it. But it didn’t.”

  Down in the boat basin, the schooner Sylvina Beal nosed away from the breakwater, making her way between the dock and the mooring dolphin at the entrance to the basin. Her vast scarlet sails filled, billowing like the lungs of some great animal inhaling.

  And then she soared, her long prow arrowing into the waves. Moments later she broke free of the current, headed east toward the open water.

  “Nice sight,” Bob remarked. Wade said that if Bob ever saw an angel descending from heaven on a pearl-pink cloud, he would remark, “Nice sight.”

  “She try her sob story on you, then, I guess?” he inquired, “when she finished getting a rise out of me?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, wondering if after all I’d sized Bella up incorrectly. “But Bob, she really does seem—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted. “She’s real convincing. She had those deputies crying in their coffee, her story was so sad.”

  He turned to me. “But Jake, there’s nothing to it. She has no enemies. She has no money that anyone could be trying to get out of her. And as for that house she lives in, the only ones’d be trying to get her out of that are the mice an’ squirrels. Oh, it’s clean, all right,” he added. “Spic an’ span.”

  He’d heard, then, about the particular form Bella’s distress was taking.

  “But in every other way it’s hardly fit to live in,” he went on, “because it needs so much structural work. No view, either,” he added before I could ask, “that anyone’d even want to get hold of just as a teardown, build something new.”

  It was a practice that had been going around like a virus here in the past few years, buying an old house with a great view of the water, then tearing it down and building a modern trophy-palace in its place.