by Sarah Graves
I frowned inquiringly at him. Bill explained. “I know you found Jim’s body, and by now so does everyone else in Eastport. And a lot of them are bank customers.”
“And you think just from my being here they’d think you were involved? Isn’t that kind of a stretch?”
“Maybe. But maybe not.”
Interesting. “I’ll be leaving at noon,” he went on.
I indicated that lunchtime would work. “You know where my place is?” he asked. “Kendall’s Head Road, a mile out on the left?”
I knew, but I let him elaborate while I went on sizing him up: broad shoulders, evenly carved features, a crooked grin with just the right amount of boyish mischief in it.
That is, I’d noticed the grin on other occasions. He wasn’t wearing it now. And from the level of his discomfort it occurred to me that maybe Bill Imrie was about to offer some eye-opening revelation about the recently deceased Jim Diamond, perhaps something that violated the banker’s code of conversational prudence.
But instead it turned out to be about himself.
Kendall’s Head Road climbed precipitously from Route 190 onto the bluffs overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay. On the water side, summer places perched on stilts over the hillside, while older dwellings occupied the gentler-sloped side of the curving road.
A mile from the turnoff I pulled onto a paved drive leading down into a little valley. A neat white farmhouse with a long glassed-in porch and a row of sharply gabled windows sat at the end of the drive, which opened into a macadam parking area in front of a well-kept small red barn.
A pair of goats stood placidly cropping the grass in the fenced yard adjacent to the garage; as I got out of the car, Bill Imrie was filling their water trough with a garden hose.
“Hey,” he said resignedly at the sight of me. “I’ll be done in a minute. Go on inside if you want. Make yourself at home.”
In the bright glassed-in porch he’d started tomato plants in cardboard milk cartons and geranium cuttings in Styrofoam cups of rich black dirt, ready to be planted outdoors. Through the side windows I could see a strawberry bed with the straw mulch pulled back from it, and a row of raspberry canes.
Nice place. Taking his advice about making myself at home to heart, I went on into a neat, bright kitchen, opening the fridge to discover that Bill followed a healthy low-fat diet. Then I had a brief, moderately instructive tour of the rest of the house.
The two upstairs bedrooms were pleasant but unrevealing. In the bathroom, however, I found a short white terry bathrobe on a hook behind the door, and a few makeup items in the small wicker basket on the commode.
So Bill had a girlfriend. From the window I spotted him on his way in and hurried back downstairs. By the time I reached the porch again he was pulling rubber shoe-covers off his wing-tips and dusting his hands together.
“Bill,” I said sincerely, “this is all very lovely.”
I waved at the freshly mowed green lawn, apple trees whose pruning looked to be right out of an arborist’s textbook, and the garden plot, newly tilled and ready for those tomato plants.
“Do you do it all alone?” I asked.
“Yeah. This was my folks’ home. They passed away some time ago.” But not long enough ago for grief to have eased entirely, I saw from his pained expression.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said into an awkward silence.
He managed a smile. “It’s okay. I should probably sell the place. Just can’t seem to get my mind around doing it, though. So I guess I’ll wait for prices to go up, maybe get some out-of-town millionaire to take it off my hands someday.”
He tried for a laugh, missed by a mile. “Come on in, Jacobia.”
I followed him through another door into an old-fashioned farmhouse parlor. White curtains were tied back from sparkling windows, hooked rugs were spread on the wide-plank pine floors, and two maple rockers were pulled like a pair of old friends up to the enameled woodstove.
It was like a polished shrine to a bygone way of living, but with a startlingly luxurious element. The upstairs furniture had been ordinary stuff, but every piece here had been handbuilt out of what looked like rock maple, designed with an artist’s eye by some kind of furniture genius, and created by a real craftsman.
“Bill?” I said, looking around. “Did you do this?”
It hadn’t been bought anywhere around here, of that I was certain. You couldn’t buy things like this at all, in fact, or even dream about them, unless you happened to be that millionaire Bill had been talking about.
He looked genuinely pleased for the first time. “No. My dad. He drove a truck for the town, plowed snow in the winter, fixed roads. All that kind of thing. But in his off time . . .”
He waved simply at the astonishing items of furniture. Owls’ heads were carved into the knobs of the rockers’ arms, feather by feather. Tables stood on legs made to look like fresh birch bark, down to the tiniest knothole.
“He liked working with wood,” Bill said, setting two cups of coffee on a tray before us.
Uh-huh. And the Wright brothers had liked tinkering around with airplanes.
“I’ll show you the sawmill later if you want,” he went on. “I still use it pretty much the way my dad did, cutting hardwood for furniture makers, instrument builders, and so on.”
He swallowed some coffee. “Hobby of mine. But now I think we’d better get down to business.” He raised the subject as if it were medicine and he knew he had to take it.
“All right, look,” I said, “I’m not trying to jam you up in any way. I just thought you might know what Jim did, that got him sent to jail for check forgery. I mean, exactly what he did.”
Bill laughed, not happily. “And you came to me because . . . ?”
On a hunch, because you avoided me, I thought.
But I didn’t want to say that. Let him go on thinking maybe I knew more than I did. That way he might be less likely to lie.
“Well, the phony checks had to get cashed somehow,” I evaded, “and no bank would do that if they knew the checks were forged.”
A little breeze stirred the curtains, fresh with the smell of newly tilled earth. “Which means,” I added, “that Jim figured out a way to fool the bank.”
The coffee was excellent. “So I thought it might be a sort of case history,” I continued. “Something bank employees get taught now, I mean, to keep it from ever happening again.”
A lock of blond hair fell onto Bill’s forehead as he stared down at his hands. Except for his sadder-but-wiser expression, he didn’t look much older than Sam.
“Which was why,” I finished, “I thought you might remember, even though at the time I know you were only a . . .”
And that was when it hit me. From the look now on Imrie’s face he might as well have been a hundred; despite his youth, I was looking at a man who had eaten the fruit of knowledge and found it bitter.
Very bitter. I took a wild guess. “It was you, wasn’t it? Ellie said you were a young bank teller back then. So you’d have been perfect. Diamond ran some sort of a scam on you, didn’t he?”
Imrie nodded miserably. “Give the little lady a great big hand. Yeah, it was me.”
No wonder he’d reacted as if I’d tossed him a hot potato. But it still didn’t explain why he’d avoided me so determinedly on the street the other day.
“Not that it was so hard for you to figure out,” he went on. “Cops didn’t have any trouble either, at the time. Looked around for the biggest dope in the world, and came up with me.”
“But you were never charged with anything?”
He shook his head, looking almost relieved now that the cat was out of the moneybag. “No. Diamond finally came clean. Told the cops I didn’t know anything, I was just the patsy he used to get checks deposited into his account. Because they were good checks on the face of it, and I didn’t question anything else.”
“What kind were they?” A car went by on the road outside, its engine sound dwindling as
it rounded the curve. Then there was only the bright summer silence again.
“Diamond had a job at a combination lumberyard and building supply outfit in Machias,” Imrie said. “He was using the lumberyard’s checks, forging the signatures, and fiddling the accounts somehow to cover the amounts of the stolen ones.”
Just as I’d thought. Bill’s mouth twisted sourly as if tasting the memory. “Later I was too busy trying to clear my name to care much just what he’d been doing to the accounts. I just know that he fixed it so he could write checks to himself and deposit them.”
Which would mean that Diamond had access to the lumberyard’s computers. I wondered how he’d gotten it.
But for now, I wanted the rest of Imrie’s side of the story. “You were always the teller. He waited, I mean, until he saw you at one of the windows. Figured out your schedule, probably?”
Imrie nodded. “Sure. And what did I know? Maybe people who knew him better would’ve questioned the situation.”
Sorrow clouded his expression. “Someone with more experience might have wondered why he was getting paid so well. But I was just a kid; I’d come home that year from college to take care of my dad. Mom was gone by then.”
Something odd there. But Imrie was on a conversational roll and I didn’t want to say anything to stop it. “So Diamond cleared you. Didn’t he have to admit his own guilt, in order to do that?”
“Yeah. It surprised me, too. I don’t know, maybe they made some kind of a deal with him.” Puzzlement wrinkled his forehead. “Not that it helped much. They’d already started investigating me. Word got around.”
Pain replaced the confusion. He wasn’t used to talking about this and now that he had, old feelings were surfacing.
“Like I said, in his younger days my dad had been kind of an unofficial big shot in town,” Bill told me. “Fixture down at the firehouse, big on the town council and all. You know.”
I did. Wade was like that now, and so was George. And once you had that kind of standing in Eastport, it would be a crushing blow to lose it.
If for instance your golden-boy son was accused of being a thief. “Was your father,” I inquired gently, “very ill at the time?”
A nod. “I still think that’s what finished him off, having it going around that I was a crook. You don’t get that kind of dirt clean with a single washing, if you know what I mean.”
“You seem to have come out of it okay now,” I offered. But his answering glance was sharp.
“Sure. Unless I tried to get bank work anywhere else. Know how seriously anyone would take me outside of Washington County?”
I did. Here at least there was hope of being given another chance. Anywhere else, though, he’d get an impersonal background check. After that, he might as well be wearing a burglar’s mask and carrying a swag bag.
It was time to go. “Listen, Bill, I didn’t know about this. I mean, I didn’t pick you to ask thinking I’d be able to get some information just by rubbing your nose in . . .”
Oops, not a nice way to put it. But he merely waved it off. “That’s okay. Tell you the truth, when I heard Diamond was dead I wanted to talk to someone about it all anyway. I just didn’t know it was going to be you.”
He shook his head ruefully. “Brought it all back up for me, if you know what I mean.”
Sure, like a recurring sore. I still felt sorry for him. Just not enough to believe him, or anyway not completely.
“But if you could just not spread it around, the whole sad story I’ve had to live down once already . . .” he added.
Walking out, he gave me that smile again, too old and far too world-weary. “It’s taken me a while to earn back people’s confidence, I mean with their money and all.”
“I can imagine.” In Maine, the trust people tended to have in institutions—even federally insured ones—would’ve left room in your average thimble.
We got to my car. “Given the choice between you and stuffing their cash in a mattress . . .”
“Yeah. For a while, most picked the mattress.” His laugh this time sounded sincere. Hearing it, the goats trotted to the fence, nudging each other and uttering goat greetings.
“But they’ve gotten over it and maybe someday,” Bill added, “I will, too.”
His voice hardened. “I’m not going to talk about this again, though. Say what you want, to whoever you want, but I’ve told you what I know, now, and far as I’m concerned the whole subject is closed.”
I opened the car door. “I understand. But Bill, there’s one other thing. On Water Street the other day? You were about to cross but you changed your mind. How come?”
He turned slowly. “What? I don’t . . . oh.”
He made a pretense of thinking. Then his face cleared elaborately. “Now I remember. I’d left my wallet in the office, in my desk drawer.”
He mimed patting his pocket, finding the wallet missing. “So I had to go back and get it,” he finished glibly.
“I see. Well, that explains it, then,” I said, getting into the car.
Sure it did. As I drove away, the bright blond-headed young banker was reaching in through the fence, scratching one of those pleasant-looking billy goats on its bony forehead.
They at least appeared to have perfect confidence in him.
Too bad I still didn’t.
“Why didn’t I ever hear about Bill Imrie and the checks?” I asked Ellie half an hour later.
When I got back to my house, she’d returned from her walk and the Red Cross lady was just leaving. To Ellie, her spiel covered the amount of blood needed to make one unit of plasma, used for burn victim treatment.
“So you can see why we want every possible local donor,” she added with a meaningful sideways look at me.
I had not yet signed my donor card. “But I am considering it carefully,” I assured her as I closed the door.
“That woman,” I told Ellie afterward, “is relentless.”
“I guess you have to be,” Ellie agreed. “Especially because some people are such chickens about it.”
She of course had signed her card immediately. Now she was making our lunch: cream cheese, black olive, and pepper sprout sandwiches on seven-grain bagels. Pouring us each a glass of iced Moxie she sat down across from me.
“Probably the reason you never heard about Bill’s troubles is that whoever did know about them kept their mouths shut out of respect for his father,” she said.
She bit into her sandwich. “I didn’t even know, myself.”
Which was saying something; Ellie’s nerve endings seemed to pluck local information out of the air.
“But Bill thinks . . .”
“Sure he does. That everyone knows. Because he’s so sensitive about it. But Pops Imrie was part of the old guard in Eastport. Family went way back. Bill was the town’s fair-haired boy. Literally,” she added, “not just because of that blond head.”
She drank some Moxie. “Smart, great athlete, went to college and did real well there. He could do no wrong.”
I bit into my sandwich, all parts of which were designed to flood well-being back into my physiology, the olives especially. And some of the Moxie herbs do seem to have medicinal properties.
“So when he came back . . . ?” I prompted.
She nodded, chewing. “Like I said before, staying home to take care of the old folks is something a girl might be expected to do without a second thought. But when a son does it . . .”
She swallowed, sipped. “Well, you’d have thought Bill Imrie had redeemed us all of original sin or something, the way people praised him.”
“So even an imaginary blot on his reputation would have hurt him in his own eyes. And he’s right that in the bank industry anywhere else, it might still hurt him for real.”
I thought a moment. “So Bill probably wasn’t happy with Jim Diamond,” I said. “But he didn’t express any anger toward him. It was more like he was mad at himself.”
Despite olives and Moxie, fatigue w
as still trying to shut my brain down; I wanted to put my head on the table and snore.
Ellie looked at me, then started a pot of coffee. “Bill finished a degree at the community college and the bank kept him on, obviously. And whatever guilt-by-association there really was has faded, too. So maybe he figures least said, soonest mended.”
“Maybe. Or it could be he likes another old saying better. I mean the one about revenge being a dish best served cold.”
“Hmm. And served silently? Being as from his point of view, Jim Diamond wrecked his life?”
“Correct. Get Bella all worked up over threatening notes she thinks came from Jim, then kill Jim, and bingo, Bella looks good for it while Bill stays conveniently out of the picture.”
Monday padded over and asked politely for an olive, accepted it delicately, and chewed it with many strange wrinklings of her furry black Labrador face.
“I don’t trust him,” I told Ellie. “There’s still something he wasn’t saying to me.”
Noticing that Monday had gotten a treat, Prill the Doberman eyed me hopefully, so then of course I had to give her one, too, even though she didn’t like olives and spat hers out swiftly.
I picked it up, fed it to Monday. “Where is Bella, anyway?”
“She finished upstairs, then went down to the cellar to help your father get ready to flush the radiators,” Ellie replied.
“Oh.” I’d seen his truck in the driveway, but figured the sounds down there were just the normal clanking and thunking of the plumbing, complaining about the indignity of actually having water running through it.
“I think she’d be happier if he let her clean them out with a brush, but in the end she accepted his argument that the brush would have to be about ten miles long,” Ellie added.
Radiator maintenance was a task my father had taken on, and I had to admit the old cast-iron behemoths gave more heat after a century’s worth of sediment had been forced from their clean-out valves. But the job had to be done in summer: if one of them should explode under an onslaught of pressurized water during the winter, it would sit atop an iceberg until spring.
