by Sarah Graves
“So you don’t think the notes are serious?” I persisted.
He took his thumbs from the utility belt that supported his sidearm, radio, handcuffs, baton, and pepper spray. Except for the radio, the only time he ever handled the items was to put them on and put them away after his shift. But he always carried them; Wade said that when Bob was a kid he’d had a collection of four-leaf clovers and rabbits’ feet.
“She’s been gettin’ em for weeks, and nothing’s happened,” he answered my question. “If they are threats. Like I said before, I still got my doubts about that.”
I unfolded the one she’d given me and studied it again. “I see your point. They’re not exactly messages, are they?”
“Somebody writes a threat, usually they say dear so-and-so, I’m gonna knock your block off,” Bob agreed a little impatiently.
Bob liked straightforward crimes, which were mostly what he got around here. Break-and-enter, DUI, disorderly conduct; these, along with the occasional domestic dispute or downtown vandalism, are Eastport’s idea of serious offenses.
“ ‘Mutilate, eviscerate, exsanguinate, decapitate,’ ” I read. “ ‘Amputate, mangle, chop.’ ”
I liked the plain finality of chop.
“Yeah,” Bob said sarcastically, hearing it, too. “Somebody’s a poet. Real what-you-call-it, a wordsmith.”
But I sure wouldn’t’ve liked it if I’d gotten the note, even if it was only a list of words with the threat merely implied.
By now the Sylvina Beal’s sails had diminished until the vessel was just a crimson dot on the dark blue water, beyond it the hills of New Brunswick rising in distant, hazy green mounds.
“Fourth of July in ten days,” Bob said a little sadly. By this he meant what we all knew, that after the holiday the brief, intense Maine summer would seem to last only a heartbeat longer.
“Enjoy it while we can,” he added, waving down the street toward the dock. There whole families gathered to cast lines into the water, hooking three or four mackerel at a time on their big mackerel jigs, parents helping kids drop their catch into buckets of water or throwing the fish back.
“Tell her we haven’t dropped her, though,” he told me. “Drive-by a couple times a shift; she calls, somebody’ll be there.”
But it was clear he didn’t believe Bella was in any danger. Instead, his thoughts were already occupied by the thousands of people who would arrive in Eastport for the Fourth. He ran crowd control for the parade, helped with security for the port and for visiting dignitaries, and would be handling any problems created by this year’s addition of a beer tent to the food kiosks.
Beer and crowds being, in his opinion, the two main obstacles to a small-town police chief’s ability to sleep at night. But the event organizers had been insistent.
“She does have an ex-husband,” Bob added as I started down the steps.
I turned back. “Bella? She does? Why didn’t she mention him, I wonder?”
“Dunno. He’s got a record, too.”
Down on the dock a big black muscle car arrived rumblingly, looking disconcertingly like a crow among harmless sparrows. The invasion of out-of-towners had apparently already begun.
“No violent crimes against persons, though.” Bob unhitched the radio and spoke into it. Near the dock a squad car extracted itself from a parking spot and began making its way casually out toward the fishing families.
“Bella’s okay, Jake. Kind of person, you feel pretty sorry for her. Just never got the kind of helping hand a woman’d need, or a man either. So she’s stayed sort of hardscrabble.”
I listened as Bob went on, still watching the squad car.
“But she’s got guts,” he added. “Always managed to put food on her table one way or another. Worked at the fish hatchery when there was work there, tied Christmas wreaths in the fall. For a while she had a job at the plastics factory till that went bust.”
It was a common story hereabouts, people piecing their lives together a step ahead of the bill collector. Sometimes a stroke of good luck or a kind deed made all the difference.
For Bella, it seemed neither of those things had happened. “You talk to him?” I asked Bob. “Her ex?”
“Ayuh. Took a ride, see him. He is not,” Bob said, “what you might call an intellectual. Gave me the usual big mouthful of how it must’ve been some other guy.”
The squad car pulled alongside the black muscle car, paused, then headed back toward the hot-dog stand at the entrance to the pier. Moments later the muscle car’s driver seemed to decide that he had urgent business elsewhere, and departed the scene.
“But I checked on him,” Bob said, “pretty well ruled him out. Big guy, never known him to be in a good mood. He doesn’t even live here in Eastport anymore. Not since he got out of jail. Got himself a place down in Lubec.”
Which is the next town along the coast to our south, at the mouth of the bay. It takes just ten minutes to get there by boat but nearly an hour by car.
“So he’d have to go to a lot of trouble to bother Bella. I mean, unless he’s got a vessel,” I said.
“Or if he hired one.” Bob tucked his radio back on his belt, satisfied the squad car had prevented the muscle car’s next likely tricks: a howl of engine, the shriek of spinning tires, and the smell of burning rubber as people scattered, the car accelerating between the peaceful fishing groups just to show that it could.
Because when it came to harassing ordinary citizens, Bob’s Second Commandment was Thou Shalt Not Even Dream of It.
“Name’s Jim,” Bob said. “And from what I know of him he couldn’t spell any of those words in the note. I also doubt he knows what many of ’em mean. He’s not a verbal type of guy, either.”
“Uh-huh.” The muscle car came up the street toward us. Bob made a point of eyeballing it as it went by.
“So,” he finished, “my sense is he’s no poison pen artist. I think she’d have liked it, I found a way to lock him up again. But I didn’t.”
“Okay, then, thanks,” I said, heading back down the concrete steps. But when I reached the sidewalk, Bob spoke once more.
“Jake. You found out who Sam’s new girlfriend is, yet?”
A needle of worry jabbed my heart. My son Sam had been keeping the details of his romantic interest very close to the vest lately. “No, why?”
Bob shrugged, looking out over the water. The big fishing boat, Quoddy Dam, was loading up a party of tourists for a ride out to where the porpoises cavorted.
Thinking of Sam, I wished I were out there with them. The porpoises, I mean, diving down into the green, cold silence.
At last Bob replied. “You know how it is, in summer the kids have outdoor parties at night. Up in the woods behind the high school, or on the beach at Deep Cove if it’s low tide.”
He looked down the steps at me. “The next morning you find a cold bonfire and a lot of beer cans, and lately I’ve been hearing that a bunch of the kids are underage.”
“I know,” I said cautiously. “About the parties, I mean. It happens every year. But what’s that got to do with Sam?”
Though I already feared I knew. Back in the bad old days, my son had supplemented an enormous drug habit with an equally sizable liquor intake. But when we moved here to Eastport he’d sworn off everything, suddenly and with little apparent difficulty.
That is, until the Christmas school break last winter when he drove home in a blizzard, coming in late when Wade and I were already asleep. The next morning Sam wasn’t even out of bed yet when Bob arrived wanting to know why Sam’s car was in a ditch over on Prince Street, half buried by a passing snowplow.
And Sam, horrifyingly, didn’t remember.
After that it was AA meetings every day; counseling, too, for a while. Sam worked hard, I’ll give him that much. But something had changed, and six months later he was still angry and oddly secretive.
Bob must have seen the fear in my face. “What do you want me to do, Jake?” he asked gently.
“Do you know something for sure?” I asked him. “Or who she is, even? The new girl?”
Bob shook his head. “Whoever she is, there’s rumors the two of ’em have been at those parties. But I’d tell you if I had any actual facts.”
A rush of relief went through me. Rumors weren’t necessarily worth the paper Bella’s threatening note had been written on.
“Okay,” I said. “But if anything does come up for sure I’d appreciate it if you could tell me before you do anything about it.”
“Yeah.” He nodded, this being what he’d hoped to hear; that if there was bad news I wanted to know, that I wasn’t just going to stick my head in the sand.
Or go down with the porpoises. Buried or drowned; the way it was between me and Sam lately I could choose from a whole range of colorful metaphors, each ending up with me not being able to breathe.
But this wasn’t a problem I could solve by my usual method of crashing into it headfirst. So I left Bob surveying the town from his vantage point in front of the police station, put Sam back into the mental folder headed “Still Worried,” and began wondering what else to do about something that maybe I could fix.
If I went home while Bella was still in a cleaning fit I was afraid she might pounce on me and scour the enamel off my teeth; her frenzy had diminished somewhat, but it had certainly not abated. And now that I had some dope on Jim Diamond, I figured I might as well match it with any I could get on Bella herself.
On Water Street, town workers were stringing red-white-and-blue banners from light poles while shopkeepers hung flags over freshly green-painted sidewalk benches and half-barrel planters of geraniums. Boys on skateboards whizzed around the big statue of the fisherman overlooking the tugboat mooring, amidst gulls swooping to squabble over fallen ice creams dropped by youngsters racing in and out of the soda fountain.
At the Eastport Art Center I paused to gaze at new offerings in the front window, oil paintings whose skewed perspectives and madcap hues captured the carnival feeling of Eastport in summer. But as if to say nothing was ever really that simple, the oils were flanked by large pottery masks whose smooth closed eyelids and enigmatic smiles implied they knew something I didn’t.
As I stood there a voice came from behind me. “Hi, Jacobia.”
It was Dinah Sanborne, dressed in black pedal-pushers, a big white linen shirt, and heeled sandals. She looked like a million bucks, and like exactly the piece of luck I’d been hoping for.
“Hi, Dinah. You’re just the person I wanted to talk to.”
In her mid-twenties, Dinah was part of the new, young crowd that had discovered Eastport over the past few years. Ambition, creativity, and more energy than a nuclear power plant were the characteristics the newcomers seemed to have in common.
“I wanted to ask you a little about Bella,” I went on.
Dinah was the cofounder, with her partner Azenath Jones, of the home-help agency they’d called Gopher Baroque.
“Really?” she said, not sounding happy about the prospect. It was Gopher Baroque that had sent me Bella, as my prize from the church raffle.
“Come on,” I said. “Walk with me a little.”
Dinah’s short, spiky dark hair had the New York look the bright young crowd here strove for: not too clean, not too dirty, not too deliberate. Effortless cool, as if you’d fallen out of bed quoting lines from Kerouac.
“Is there a problem?” she asked.
I stifled impatience. Of course there’s a problem, I wanted to reply. You sent me a head case for a housekeeper. Why wouldn’t there be a problem, you dimwit?
But Dinah wasn’t a dimwit. Quite the opposite; she and Azenath were ferociously smart. They’d both seen that although in the winter Eastport had little market for housekeepers, in summer it did. Folks came to the island, many of them wealthy or what passed for it here, bringing parents, children, pets, and various hangers-on. Also, they entertained.
Which, I guessed, was why Gopher Baroque had sent Bella to me—not maliciously or carelessly, but as a last resort. They didn’t want to fire her, knowing she needed the job and that they’d look like villains if they got rid of her, but on the flip side they also wouldn’t inflict her on their more lucrative clients.
So I bit my tongue long enough to think of a mild reply, then delivered it. “She is,” I told Dinah, “somewhat unusual.”
Dinah absorbed this. A raffle prize that blew up like a stink bomb wouldn’t be good Gopher Baroque publicity, either.
“That’s partly why I want some background on her,” I added.
She considered briefly. With her studiedly careless clothes and minimalist hairstyle, she looked as if she ought to be doing performance art in a chicly underfurnished but vastly overpriced warehouse space in the SoHo district of Manhattan.
There were lots of her there and only one of her here, however, another reason she and Azenath had chosen Eastport as their base of operations. Here the pair stood out. Especially Azenath, but that was another story.
“Let’s get coffee,” Dinah said finally.
But as we turned toward the Blue Moon coffee shop just down the street, a yellow convertible swung past the big granite post office building on the corner and pulled to the curb beside me.
A man leaned over the passenger seat, automatically giving Dinah the once-over before looking at me. He had curly dark hair, green eyes, a determined jaw, and a master-of-the-universe manner that most women found extremely attractive.
At first. His fingers tapped the steering wheel impatiently. “Jake,” he announced in bossy tones, “we need to talk about Sam.”
It was my ex-husband Victor, and what had just happened was a pretty good summary of our history together. If another woman was present and she had the equipment he looked for in a possible conquest—that is, if she was younger and had a measurable blood pressure—Victor always gave her the eye first.
Also, as far as I was concerned we’d needed to talk for about six months now and we hadn’t. I doubted there was any big urgency about it right this minute.
“Right,” I said. “Lunch at my house in an hour.”
Victor didn’t take well to my not dropping what I was doing to get in the car. Instead he shot a look of strained patience at me and what he must have thought was a seductive one at Dinah. She deflected it as coolly as if she were made of porcelain.
“ ’Bye, Victor,” I told him sweetly, just as if I were not enjoying the hell out of the sight of him and his yellow sports car getting blown off.
Then to the musical sound of twin carburetors rumbling away grumpily, Dinah and I went into the coffee shop.
The Blue Moon was a haven of city sophistication plunked into an old redbrick storefront on the edge of Passamaquoddy Bay. Going in, I always felt I should be wearing a black leotard, carrying a book of poetry I’d written myself, and within shouting distance of my nineteenth birthday.
None of which I would ever be again, but never mind; the Blue Moon was still a lot of fun. Inside, cool jazz floated from the speakers mounted between old Village Vanguard posters on the exposed brick walls. Copies of the Times, the New York Observer, and Publishers Weekly littered the tables, many occupied at this hour by twenty- and thirty-somethings who looked as if they belonged in the East Village or San Francisco.
Dinah and I made our way past the counter stacked with thick white pottery mugs and baskets heaped with fresh pastry, then down the aisle between the red leatherette booths to the back of the room.
“Here okay?” she asked at a vacant window table, and I nodded assent. The air was a heady brew of warm aromas: chocolate, fresh-ground coffee beans, and smoke from imported cigarettes. Exotic liqueur bottles lined a mirrored shelf, but no one was drinking. The Blue Moon’s owner had a liquor license only so people could smoke—at the time the state hadn’t yet enacted a comprehensive
no-smoking law—and the espresso machine hissed from five in the morning till after midnight.
“So,” Dinah said when we’d settled and given our orders: a Fatal Chocolate Brownie and double mocha espresso for me—I doubted I’d get much eating done during lunch with Victor—and a French mineral water for Dinah.
She pulled a little gold case from her tiny black shoulder bag, and lit a Sobranie. “Oh, I’m sorry, do you mind?” she asked, after a drag on it.
I shook my head, mentally parsing the strategy of cigarettes but no chocolate, and coming up with skinny.
But I’d already ordered the brownie, and being me if I ever started smoking I’d be at three packs a day in no time. Mentally I scheduled a ten-mile walk to make up for half of the calories I was about to ingest, and returned to business.
“Bella,” I said. “The housekeeper you sent. Due to my having won her like a heifer at a Four-H fair, I mean.”
Dinah pursed her lips. There was a tiny white scar above her right nostril, just in the crevice; she’d been pierced, once.
“She’s not working out?” she asked innocently.
I ate some brownie, sipped espresso. Together they went to my brain and detonated like an accident at the fireworks factory.
“Oh, of course she’s not working out, for heaven’s sake. Two other people already fired her on account of they think she’s a whack job, she told me. So what did you think was going to happen this time—the miracle at Lourdes?”
Dinah’s slender shoulders moved minutely, accepting this. “I’m so sorry, Jake. To tell you the truth, because it was you we hoped it would work out. Of course we knew there were risks to the idea, and we talked about whether or not we should try it.”
I wasn’t appeased. “You mean you both thought I might not notice a little more craziness, or that I might just not care?”
She hesitated, taking a tiny sip of mineral water. Then, “We sent Bella to you as her last chance,” she confirmed.
Oh, great. “We’d heard you and Ellie White were quite good at sorting things out,” she added. “Problems, that is.”
