Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  The floor slanted sharply in one corner. “Of course I did,” I finished. “Big family reunion, all their hearts set on it?”

  The back door was bolted and all the windows were locked. “All that time my dad was on the run,” I told Ellie, “he couldn’t visit them. The police were watching in case they got in touch with him, or vice versa. And according to Eunice they all knew that.”

  The rest of the house smelled of carpet shampoo, Windex, and lemon furniture polish. “But that’s not the only reason,” Ellie observed. “I mean, why you agreed to the visit.”

  “No,” I admitted. “It’s the idea of having relatives at all. People related to me by blood. It’s blown me away a little.”

  “Well,” Ellie said, “at least you know that.” Ellie believed firmly that I had a rich, full interior life, most of which went unexplored by anyone and especially not by me.

  Probably she was right. We went into the bedrooms, peering into the closets and opening dresser drawers.

  “But let’s not get mushy about the whole long-lost portion of the program, all right?” I added a little irritably. “It holds bad memories for me.”

  After the blast that killed my mother when I was a toddler and—so I’d believed—orphaned me, I’d been sent to her folks in remote southeast hill country, where it was an item of faith that my father was the devil himself.

  And that I was his spawn. I’d been a young teenager when I fled those hard faces, climbed on a Greyhound headed for New York, and never looked back. But now here was a whole other set of kinfolk I’d never heard anything about; all I really knew was that I’d be damned if I was going to turn them away.

  Dear heaven, though, a dozen of them, and over the Fourth!

  “Let’s get this search done with,” I said. “I want to be out in the front parlor sitting quietly if anyone shows up.”

  I entered Kris’s room with its bottles of dime-store makeup and hair products. The only thing faintly suggesting any serious interests was a letter from an admissions counselor at a beauty school in Portland, suggesting she come in for an interview.

  This I thought was a good sign; a person could make a living as a beautician, even start a business and get something going.

  A career, a life. But the letter was weeks old, stuffed under a bunch of teen fashion zines and a copy of Rolling Stone, and I saw nothing to make me think she’d done anything about it.

  I glanced through more items: a set of fake fingernails, two miniature bottles of rum. Sam would have killed me for this. But Sam wasn’t going to know.

  And bottom line, I noted nothing strange anywhere in Bella’s shabby-but-spotless house.

  Just . . . something missing.

  “So anyway, they’re coming next week,” I told Ellie when we met again in the cramped living room. There was a woodstove plugged into the fireplace flue and the night was chilly as they often are in Maine, even in summer.

  I didn’t want to leave live embers in the stove when we went out, though. I don’t trust old chimneys even if Bella thought this one was safe enough. So we just sat there shivering.

  “The whole dozen of them,” I said, “and they’re staying for ten days.” We’d turned the lights back off, readying the house for the next stage of our mission.

  Which consisted of waiting for someone who might not even show up. The darkness was claustrophobic, and my fingers itched for the matches and kindling by the woodstove. But I resisted.

  “So listen, just to make sure we’re both still on the same page,” Ellie began, changing the subject. “Our theory is that if Kris isn’t writing the notes, and Jim wasn’t, either . . .”

  “Then someone else was. Right.”

  “And if that person doesn’t know Jim is dead, or doesn’t care . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed. “Then whoever it is might just show up to drop off another communication tonight.”

  A sound from outside interrupted me. But when I peeked out the curtains (which smelled strongly of air freshener) I saw only a racoon shuffling away across the lawn.

  “Anyway, Bella says she’s quite sure Kris isn’t leaving the messages. And from all those big words in them, I have to agree.”

  The raccoon knocked over a metal trash can somewhere down the street. “That girl,” I finished unhappily, “is no Einstein.”

  By now it was nearly eleven. “Ellie, did you get the feeling that something was missing out in the kitchen?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her voice came out of the darkness at me. “I know what it was, too. Or I think I do.”

  “What . . . ?” A shadow moved on the curtains, startling me. But it was only a branch, sharply silhouetted by the streetlight.

  Simultaneously the answer to my question came clear in my mind. What wasn’t there . . . “A frying pan,” I said.

  I got up and moved with the aid of the flashlight back out to Bella’s antiseptically clean kitchen. Over the stove was a row of hooks, and from the hooks hung a set of skillets.

  Three of them, from smallest to large, all cast iron. Only the fourth, the very biggest one, was missing. I returned to the living room.

  “Bella has a car,” I said. A crossword puzzle book fell off the arm of the chair to the floor. “She could’ve gone to Lubec.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ellie agreed. “And if Jim was threatening her, but she couldn’t get the police to take the idea seriously . . .”

  “. . . she could have killed him,” I finished Ellie’s sentence. “I mean, if she was really afraid of him. But Bob Arnold said Jim didn’t have any record of crimes against persons.”

  “It could be that was only because she never complained about him,” Ellie countered. “He could have beaten her up every day of the week and twice on Sundays when they were married, but without a complaint the cops wouldn’t even have known about it.”

  A thought out of left field struck me. “Sam says Jim Diamond was Kris’s stepfather.”

  Unlike me, Ellie had grown up in Eastport. She was generally well supplied not only with the latest gossip, but also with the equivalent of its back issues.

  “Yes. Bella and Jim got married before you moved here. Kris was eleven or so,” she said. “I don’t think she ever knew her real father. Bella changed Kris’s last name.”

  “So if Jim did abuse Bella, Kris would have witnessed it. And she strikes me as the type who might do something about it if she thought something like that was starting to happen again.”

  “I suppose so,” Ellie said doubtfully. “If she thought he was sending Bella the notes . . .”

  “Then she could’ve flown off the handle and bonked him. But why would he?” I puzzled frustratedly. “Threaten Bella at all, I mean. He just got out of jail, we know harassment is a crime, and probably he did, too. So my question is, what motive could he have had for . . .”

  “Especially if she was already giving him money,” Ellie agreed. I’d already mentioned this point to her on the way over here, that Jim was getting money from somewhere if only to pay for that apartment.

  “Because why would he threaten a person who was helping him financially?” Ellie went on rhetorically.

  Another shadow moved on the curtains. “Yep. But we’re not sure she was.”

  In fact at that point we weren’t sure of anything; we were just tossing ideas around and both of us knew it. “What’d he go to jail for, anyway?” I asked.

  “Check forging,” Ellie replied promptly. “A lot of it.”

  “Huh. Do you know if he was working at the time?”

  But I was willing to bet he was, even before Ellie confirmed it. Because back when I was a hotshot money professional instead of a struggling old-house fixer-upper, I’d turned a few scam artists upside down to shake the secrets out of them. And what I’d learned was that to be a successful check forger you don’t just steal checks, sign your name to them, then go out and cash them.

  That way spelled ruination. To run the scam correctly you needed business checks, plus a way to mani
pulate the business’s accounts-payable operations. I explained it to Ellie.

  “You mock up phony invoices to the business you work for, pretend to pay them, but write the checks to yourself instead.”

  Ideally you’ve also established an account with a bank where people don’t know you well, so you can deposit the checks in your own name without a lot of pesky questions. Whereupon you’re good to go until someone tumbles to your scheme.

  And that could take a while. “But we already said Jim Diamond wasn’t very smart,” Ellie objected.

  “You don’t have to be smart, just nervy enough to do it.” Because if you were smart, you’d realize your scam couldn’t work forever. But check forgers never do.

  Realize it, I mean. “Also, you need a cold heart. Someone’s got to trust you, and you’ve got to betray that trust.”

  And speaking of banks . . . in a delayed reaction, the sight of that blood-drive literature on Bella’s kitchen table popped a sudden memory of bank manager Bill Imrie into my head, doing an about-face in the middle of Water Street a week earlier.

  At that point we hadn’t even known that Jim Diamond was dead yet, but the fact that his ex-wife Bella was connected to my household must already have been pretty much common knowledge around town.

  Hey, everything else about me was. At the time I’d figured maybe Bill just hated needles as much as I did. But . . .

  “Ellie, was Bill Imrie in town back when Jim went on trial? And was Bill working at a bank?”

  “Uh-huh. He’d been away in college, but by then he was back. He was a part-time teller at . . .”

  She named a local financial institution.

  “Fascinating,” I commented, wondering if maybe it wasn’t the Red Cross blood-drive lady Bill Imrie had been trying to avoid.

  If instead maybe it was me.

  Meanwhile Ellie was following another train of thought. “Bob Arnold could’ve been wrong about Jim,” she said. “He might’ve had someone else write the notes, even deliver them for him.”

  She sat up straight. “Who knows, maybe Jim was the kind of guy who could come up with an accomplice if he needed one.”

  “Right, or . . .” But the rest of the thought eluded me, and by then I was only half listening anyway. I was watching that curtain again.

  Another shadow shifted stealthily on it. This time the shadow wasn’t branch-shaped. It was human-shaped, and as I gazed at it, it moved toward the front door.

  Putting a finger to my lips I got up, crossed to the entry, and waited until I heard footsteps on the front porch.

  Then I yanked the door open. “All right, now, dammit . . .”

  A figure stood there, hands drawn up in startlement. “Stop right there!” I ordered.

  Then I realized who it was. “Maggie?”

  “Jake, what are you doing here?” The girl peered past me as Ellie switched a lamp on.

  “I saw your car,” Maggie managed breathlessly, still getting over the surprise of being confronted so suddenly. “I was driving by, and then I saw lights in here go on and off, so I—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I snapped, exasperated. “We were just waiting to see if someone . . .”

  But then I stopped, because we’d been waiting here in case someone showed up at Bella’s house, someone with no good reason to be here.

  And someone had.

  Maggie.

  “I haven’t been sleeping well,” Maggie confessed a short while later. “So I’ve been going out and driving around.”

  Because of the recent breakup with Sam, she meant. Because her heart was broken.

  I’d taken a few moments at Bella’s to do some things around the house, on the steps, and under the windows. Then we’d gone to Ellie’s place with Maggie following in her own car.

  “Just driving and thinking,” she went on now. “It’s the only way I can calm myself down. Sometimes if I go far enough, I can even sleep afterward.”

  She sat in the rocker by the woodstove in Ellie’s cozy, low-ceilinged kitchen while Ellie put the kettle on. It was just past midnight and George was already upstairs, asleep.

  “You poor thing,” I said, hearing the false note in my own voice. But Maggie was too upset to notice it.

  “I’m sorry if I messed up whatever you were doing.” She put a hand to her forehead. “Oh, I’m just making a fool of myself!”

  Right, but was that all? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

  “I’m going to check the baby,” Ellie said, with a transparent glance at me.

  When she was gone I leaned toward Maggie. An air of safety seemed to envelop us, with the kettle beginning to simmer and a lamp burning low on a shelf in the corner of the room, its bright rag rugs and gingham curtains creating a familiar haven.

  “Maggie, are you sure that’s all you were doing? Just out driving?”

  She hesitated, drawing her sweater around herself, seeming to take comfort in her surroundings.

  Me, too. Bella’s place was cleaner, I supposed. Since the baby arrived, Ellie’s house had a slapdash air as if cared for by the cheerful warden of an unusually pleasant insane asylum.

  But an operating room was clean also, and that didn’t make it cozy. Ellie had a way of taking a tag-sale table, plunking a square of gingham and a green glass jug of wildflowers on it, and making it look like House Beautiful.

  “Maggie,” I persisted, “is there anything you need to . . . ?”

  Tell me, I’d meant to finish. Such as that maybe Maggie was persecuting Kris Diamond, trying to get at her through Bella in some way I didn’t yet understand.

  That maybe that’s what the threatening notes were all about, and it was Maggie we’d been waiting for in Bella’s house.

  But I didn’t complete my question; her furious glance said she had already caught my drift and wasn’t happy about it.

  “Look, no one’s going to hold your feelings against you,” I said. “Whatever they are. But I need to know what’s going on.”

  Maggie didn’t like that, either. “Against me? That’s a hot one.”

  She sat up straight, brushing her thick, dark braid back over her shoulder. “You know what kind of girl Kris is. I don’t understand why you don’t do something about her.”

  Ellie came back with a sleepy-looking Leonora in her arms, and began fixing a bottle as Maggie got to her feet.

  “I told you why I was there. I saw your car, I saw lights, I thought you might be in trouble so I came to find out. And that’s all there was to it.”

  She sounded truthful. It was one of the things I loved about Maggie, that she was as transparent as a glass of springwater.

  And as unlikely to be harmful. But now, as I listened to her, a whole host of unwelcome thoughts washed through my mind.

  It would have been easy for her to learn that Bella and Kris were out of town, especially if this wasn’t the first time she’d been watching their home. As for motive, if Bella were frightened enough to move away, Kris would probably go, too, since as far as I knew the girl had no other means of support.

  So could that have been what the whole anonymous-threat deal was about? To scare Bella and Kris out of Eastport?

  And then there was the matter of a car just like mine being spotted in Lubec. . . . But one thing at a time:

  “Maggie,” I asked her straight out, “was it you who sent Bella Diamond those threats?”

  No one had told Maggie anything about them, that I knew of. But if she was behind them, then of course she would know what I meant. Waiting for her answer I watched her face for tiny changes that might mean she was composing a lie.

  But she just gazed at me, her lips sorrowful and her usually ruddy cheeks pale with distress.

  And didn’t reply. “I’m sorry,” she said instead. “I know I’m not taking things well. It’s just that I know what she’ll do to him, I know what she is, and—”

  “What?” I broke in, unable to help myself. Because one thing I did believe was that this girl truly loved my s
on, even if love was screwing her up in a way I hated seeing.

  Once again, she didn’t give me a straight answer. “I’m not going to talk about it anymore,” she said with sudden resolve. “What’s the point? You’ll just think I’m bad-mouthing Kris to get Sam back.” She sighed ruefully. “And maybe I am. Maybe she’ll be great for him, and I’m the one who needs her head examined.”

  The kettle shrieked, startling us all. Ellie got up, handing the baby to me as Maggie snatched her car keys from the table.

  “Maggie, don’t go. Have some tea with us. We’ll talk it over and . . .”

  I wanted to ask her about the notes again, and about my car, too. But she didn’t let me.

  “No. I’ve embarrassed myself enough.” She shot a half-wary, half-apologetic look my way.

  It was the wary part I didn’t like, plus my sudden certainty that it had been my car in Lubec that day.

  Not a tourist’s car. Mine, because Maggie had driven it there the day Jim Diamond was murdered with a cast-iron skillet, a weapon that had almost certainly been taken from Bella’s house.

  “Anyway, I’m glad you two are all right,” Maggie finished in subdued tones, and went out.

  In the silence she left behind, Leonora stretched and settled herself in my arms, waving her tiny fists, her lips turned upward in a dreamy smile.

  “So,” I said after a moment.

  “So,” Ellie repeated vexedly. “And on top of everything else we don’t know if someone showed up after we left. Someone who could be putting another note in that house right this minute and we might never find out.”

  “Oh, we’ll find out,” I said. “Bella will tell us. And unless I’m wrong we can find out how they got in, too.”

  I let Ellie take the baby, fished my own car keys out of my pocket. For our sleuthing errand Ellie had put on a navy jumper with a big pink rose embroidered on the bodice. Under it she wore a navy turtleneck, leggings, and moccasins with tassels, each tassel with a row of pink beads threaded onto it.

  “Jake,” she asked with a little smile, “what did you do?”

  “Just took the ashes out of that woodstove of Bella’s and spread some under each window,” I replied innocently, “and on the front and back steps. If anyone did go in after we left, Bella’s going to have a mess to clean up when she gets home. Maybe I’ll even get to Bella before she cleans up, so I can tell her to preserve a footprint.”