Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  To me it suggested the skillet hadn’t been in the apartment when he began cooking, that instead someone had brought it to the scene and hit him with it. And that didn’t conjure up the picture of two guys, a couple of six-packs, and a sudden quarrel. It suggested premeditation, but a skillet was an odd weapon if you were planning mayhem.

  Speaking of which, there was another variety of it waiting for me downstairs, and even the loudest, most solitary fix-up project wouldn’t postpone it forever. Much as I dreaded the idea, I’d decided I was going to have to talk with Sam about Maggie and Kris Diamond.

  Not that he hadn’t had unsuitable girlfriends before; to my sorrow, he took very strongly after Victor in this department. It wasn’t the first time Maggie had suffered through one of Sam’s brief, high-intensity infatuations with some other female.

  And nobody thought it would be the last. But in the past he had always been open about them, praising to the skies the intellect of the marine biology student, the athleticism of the cross-country bicycle racer, or the beauty of the visiting landscape painter’s daughter.

  By contrast even now he wasn’t talking about Kris at all. Nor did he seem to understand that this time, Maggie was at the end of her rope. She kept busy; in summer her child-care talents were hugely and profitably in demand, and I knew she was working on a project for the Eastport Historical Society, too.

  But I was afraid that when Sam went to look for her as he always did eventually, she wouldn’t be there. And I wasn’t sure she should be; I thought his treatment of her was cruel. So when I went downstairs after cleaning the paint sprayer—

  —this turned out to be nearly as big a job as painting with it; I swear the torpedo tubes in a nuclear submarine couldn’t be as tricky to prepare for refiring—

  I was ready to lay it out for him. After all, I intended to say, his dad’s chronic Casanova act didn’t mean he could . . .

  “Hey, Mom, check this out,” Sam said as I reached the front hall. He sat at the dining room table with his books and papers; sketches mostly, because they helped compensate for his dyslexia.

  “Okay,” I said, leaning over to see what he was so enthused about. This was perfect; I could engage my son in conversation, show that what he was interested in was also important to me, and . . .

  “Pykrete,” Sam pronounced, waving happily at his notebook as if he personally had just discovered the stuff.

  Which was when I began having second thoughts. Opening up about the identity of his new girlfriend hadn’t made him any more talkative about her, but it sure had improved his mood.

  And lingering questions aside, by then I truly believed Jim Diamond’s death had nearly ended my snooping activities; all I’d wanted was to stop Bella’s hygiene hysteria and in that I’d succeeded.

  There were just a few final doubts I wished to have settled. And Ellie and I had a plan to deal with one of them tonight. So was I really prepared to do battle on another front so soon?

  Maybe. But . . . maybe not.

  “What,” I inquired with as much lively, I’m-your-mom-and-I-care-about-you interest as I could muster, “is pykrete?”

  I was humoring him, but if I had to develop genuine interest in everything Sam got excited about I would be bedridden from the exertion.

  “And what’s so good about it?” I added.

  “Pykrete is basically just ice, so it’s cheap,” he explained. “And it cuts easy. But it’s also partly wood dust, so it doesn’t melt. And it floats. Boy, oh boy, does it ever float.”

  “Wonderful,” I enthused, still not quite getting it. But I did know he was happy about it. “And in practical terms . . . ?”

  He nodded energetically. “That’s it,” he said. “Practically. Because I am working on my summer project, you know.”

  Yes, I did know. I just didn’t know what it was, because he hadn’t been talking to me very much lately. Also I was distracted by something I had not seen in a while: a smile on Sam’s face.

  “I’m re-creating a World War Two warship made entirely out of pykrete,” he declared proudly.

  In other words made out of ice laced with sawdust, a job he insisted on describing to me in all its fascinating (to him) and endless (to me) detail.

  But it was the first thing he seemed truly happy about in a very long time. “Lord Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations for Winston Churchill during the war,” he informed me brightly, “was the guy who introduced the stuff to Churchill.”

  I pictured a cartoon how-do-you-do scene: a block of dusty ice on one side, a large man with a cigar on the other.

  “Mountbatten marched in there with a chunk of pykrete and dropped it into Churchill’s bathtub,” Sam went on.

  I gathered it was a mark of Mountbatten’s great courage that Churchill was taking a bath in the tub at the time.

  “It’s strong,” Sam said, “and it doesn’t melt. You can carve it. Don’t you see, Mom? It’s . . .”

  He waved his hands at the complex drawing of a battleship in his notebook. “The war ended before they finished it up. But you could sail to China on this thing,” he insisted.

  “Uh, wait a minute. You mean you’re building a real boat?”

  He looked up, surprised. “Well, yeah. Not full-size, but . . . what’d you think I was doing, making another bathtub toy?”

  Which was when it came over me again that he wasn’t a kid anymore. If he decided to build an airplane, the next thing you knew he’d be doing a Lindbergh in it.

  So despite my doubts, on the spur of the moment I decided he could take a man-size question, too. “Sam. Don’t you think you’re being a little tough on Maggie?”

  His face instantly hardened. But if I’d backed off every time Sam’s face hardened in our twenty years together, he’d have been the world’s longest-living multiple-substance abuser by now.

  Or he’d have been dead. “Maggie’s a good friend, Sam,” I reminded him quietly. “And she’s stuck by you through a lot of things. Do you really think it’s fair to just drop her flat the way you have?”

  Considering the thin ice I’d just ventured out on, I could have used some pykrete myself. But as I waited for Sam’s answer, a conversation from earlier in the day flew into my head.

  “George says Sam asked him what it’s like to be married,” Ellie had told me. We’d stood in the yard raking up the piles of grass clippings that were left after Bella mowed it.

  “Oh, God. What did George say?” I asked, the sudden reek of fear in my nostrils blocking the perfume of freshly cut lawn. As it turned out, Bella had really known how to run the mower.

  “George told him that if you like working, worrying, and being tied down all the time,” Ellie had replied, “it’s as good a way to live as any.”

  Which was far from the way George really felt. “Tell him I owe him a strawberry-apricot pie,” I’d responded gratefully.

  And in fact I was baking it right now; I’d put it into the oven before I went up to the third floor.

  But the pie’s sweet fragrance contrasted with the sour look Sam now turned on me. “You’re sure eager to get me back with Maggie, aren’t you?” he accused. “Well, it’s not going to work, Mom.”

  “Sam, I’m not—”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” he cut in hotly. “I know what you think of Kris and me. That she’s not good enough for me because she’s not well educated and she hasn’t got any money.”

  “Sam, that’s not true!” I exclaimed, taken aback.

  But I couldn’t very well tell him the real reasons I opposed the match so strongly. For instance, that the girl was two-faced and greedy: Over the past few days I’d noticed that Kris was so polite she made your teeth ache if she knew you were watching, but she turned over plates and examined the silverware to see if it was worth anything, when she thought you weren’t.

  Also she was so self-involved, she wore a locket with a curl of her own hair in it. I knew because Bella had told me about it, Bella not being a big member of her daughte
r’s fan club, either.

  This to me was the most ominous fact of all. “Look, Sam,” I said. “It’s not like I expect veto power over your girlfriends.”

  Although at the moment I’d have welcomed it. “But you have plans for yourself. Finishing school and being a boatbuilder . . . they’re fine ambitions and you’re doing so well. And Kris . . . well, she just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere with her life.”

  His eyes flashed defiantly. “Yeah, because she’s been here at home, sticking by her mom just in case her stepfather got mean again. Being supportive.” He gave that final word an unpleasant twist. “She could have gone to college; she’s not dumb. She just didn’t want to leave. And since she can’t go, why spend a lot of time worrying about a career? To torture herself?”

  “Well, she can go now,” I pointed out angrily, stung by his implication that I hadn’t been so supportive, myself. If I’d been any more supportive to that boy, I’d have been a trampoline.

  “Jim’s dead,” I went on, “so Kris can resume her plans for getting a Ph.D. in astrophysics,” I finished.

  His face went blank. Oh, hell.

  “Sam,” I told him hastily. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, and I apologize to you and Kris both, very sincerely.”

  “Sure. Don’t mention it.” He stared down at his books.

  “I just think you owe Maggie a little loyalty, too, that’s all,” I persisted. After all, he was already going to despise me forever, so what did I have to lose?

  Also, I still had that big mouth. “Because even if things aren’t working out romantically for the two of you, she still wants to go on being your friend. Isn’t that worth something?”

  Too late, I realized that this was yet another blunder. The “Can’t we be friends” line was one Sam’s father had used on me, and Sam knew it. And he didn’t like it any better than I had.

  “Maggie doesn’t want to be friends,” he shot back. “She wants us back together and she’ll do anything to make it happen.”

  He slammed his notebook shut. “And you just like her because you think she’ll keep me out of trouble.”

  This was what I got, I supposed, for having had a kind, funny, congenial sixteen-year-old: the twenty-year-old from hell. But his assessment did give me pause, being as it was so right on target. That wasn’t the only reason I liked Maggie, but she was certainly the safe bet behavior-wise.

  “She wants to be friends?” Sam repeated. “Fine. You be her friend. The two of you can have a great time worrying about me.”

  He got up. “Just don’t rope me into it, because I’m telling you, Mom, Maggie and I are done. Whether,” he finished warningly, “you like it or not.”

  He swept up his books and papers, stalked toward the hall stairs, then paused uncertainly.

  Seeing this, I knew that deep down he was as sorry about our fight as I was. After I divorced his father we’d had a rough few years, my son and I, but since then—until about six months ago, anyway—we’d been pals. Two against the world, and all that. And I missed it.

  A lot. Probably he did, too, though you’d never have known it recently. Or I hoped he missed it.

  The truth was, I was afraid to ask.

  “By the way,” he said, relenting a bit. “Have you seen my baseball caps? They were in my closet, but . . .”

  Oh, brother. “No,” I said hastily, “I haven’t.”

  It was technically true. Wade had taken them to his house on Liberty Street to try repairing them where Sam wouldn’t catch him at it. “Are you sure that’s where you put them?” I asked.

  Because I thought if I told Sam what had really happened to those caps, all hell would break loose.

  “Maybe,” he said uncertainly as he went on upstairs.

  For a moment I stood pondering whether I ought to go up, too, and tell him the truth. Because how could I expect him to speak frankly to me if I wouldn’t be honest with him? Thinking this I put my hand on the banister to follow him up.

  But just then the timer went off on the pie.

  And then the phone rang.

  And after that, all hell really did break loose.

  About two hours after the argument with Sam, Ellie and I pulled up in the Fiat to the rough-looking little house on Rye Street where Bella Diamond lived with Kris.

  “You want to know, and I want to know. So let’s just do this and then we will know,” Ellie said persuasively.

  It was Friday night, a week since Bella had gotten her most recent note, and she’d said they always arrived on Fridays. So if another threat was going to show up, it could come tonight.

  “Anyway, what were you babbling about before?” Ellie asked. “Who’s coming for a visit?”

  I shut the Fiat’s ignition off. This was a crackpot plan but it was our only one, so we were going through with it despite the phone call whose implications I was still reeling under.

  “My dad’s relatives,” I said. “They’ve found out where he is and that he’s not on the FBI most-wanted list anymore. They think now it’s safe to come and get reacquainted with him.”

  My father ever being on the FBI list at all is a very long story whose major plot points include an explosion, my mother’s death in it, and his supposed culpability in the event.

  But when he’d showed up the previous autumn after an absence of about three decades, I’d learned—and eventually so did the Feds—that he’d never been the villain people believed he was.

  That I, especially, had believed he was.

  We got out of the car. Bella’s house was dark; in the wake of Diamond’s death—she’d taken the news stoically and there had been no services—she had gone to visit her aunt in mid-coast Maine.

  “Lots,” I added despairingly, “of relatives.”

  That was when I noticed the small plaster statue of a fisherman by the door on Bella’s front porch. Like all such supposed clever hiding places, it practically screamed there’s a key underneath me! So at least one thing was going well; this might be easier than I’d thought.

  No one else was on the street as we approached the house. It had brown shingle-type asphalt siding, shutters at the small off-kilter windows, and a cracked front walk.

  “Four sisters, three brothers, three nieces, and an elderly aunt,” I told Ellie. “It was one of the sisters who called to say they were all coming for the Fourth.”

  We climbed the front steps, even shakier and more rotten than mine. The rusty cast-iron banister’s bolts flopped loosely in their holes.

  “Eunice,” I said, still dazed by the implications of it all. “My aunt. I never even knew my father had brothers and sisters.”

  “You’re sure Kris isn’t home?” Ellie asked.

  As we’d expected, the door was locked. It was a big solid Block lock, too, the kind you couldn’t pop with a plastic strip, set into a newly reinforced door and frame. But that wasn’t going to be a problem.

  “Yup,” I replied. “Kris told Sam her mom’s aunt always gives her money when she visits.”

  I’d have given Kris money to stay there. “So now the house is empty,” I concluded, “just the way we want it.”

  The question being, would it stay empty? Because there was still a chance it hadn’t been Jim sending those nasty notes to Bella.

  And I wanted to know for sure. An owl hooted in one of the trees dividing Bella’s yard from the next one. I jumped about a foot.

  “Guess I’ve gotten out of the housebreaking habit,” I said.

  Ellie’s look at me in the darkness was unreadable. We had both decided to give up snooping when Leonora was born, agreeing that it was irresponsible now that Ellie was a mother. But it wasn’t Jim’s murder we were poking into now, just the notes.

  Or so I hoped. “Here goes nothing,” Ellie said, lifting the statue. And just as I’d thought, there was the door key. I swear all these key-hiding gadgets are created for the convenience of burglars; you have to be honest to be fooled by them. Moments later, we were inside, catching our
breath and closing the door hastily behind us.

  “Shine the flash around,” I told Ellie, “but not at the windows.”

  It was just after ten, and from the lights in nearby houses I knew some of the neighbors were still up and liable to see us if we weren’t careful. The flashlight’s beam revealed a worn carpet, shabby pieces of furniture, a small TV. Everything was spotless. I examined a few library books on the floor by a chair.

  Mystery novels, some romances, and a shiny new book about Princess Diana, this one by her butler’s uncle’s sister’s greengrocer. There were a lot of crossword puzzle books, too, of the type you can buy on the newsstand, and a TV Guide.

  “A dozen people? Are they nuts? Do they know what it’s like here on the Fourth?” Ellie asked, returning to the subject of my father and his relatives.

  And to the fact that in Eastport the Fourth of July is a weeklong, round-the-clock lollapalooza. Every lodging place in the county is booked solid for months in advance.

  Which meant I couldn’t send my newly discovered kin to a motel. I found my way to the kitchen. “Yes, yes, and they don’t have a clue,” I said.

  The kitchen smelled powerfully of Ajax, fresh floor wax, and laundry detergent. “But to hear her talk about seeing my dad, you’d think it was a private audience with the Pope.”

  I still couldn’t see much with just the flashlight. “And they can’t come another time. I asked, but they’ve already bought nonrefundable plane tickets.”

  Oh, what the hell. I found a light switch and flipped it on. If the neighbors came, I’d tell them we were Bella’s housekeepers.

  Or something. “So what could I say?” I finished helplessly.

  Ellie followed me into the kitchen, glanced around. Lying on the table was a Red Cross blood-drive brochure. Either Bella had found the Red Cross lady, or the lady had found her.

  “So you told them they could come,” Ellie said.

  “Yep.” I examined the kitchen some more. Something big was missing here, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what.

  “Well, it was more like Eunice told me,” I added. “But in the end . . .”