by Sarah Graves
“She’s not scowling and shooing him around with a whisk broom anymore?”
Ellie shook her head. “First thing he did when he got here today was mix up some secret chemical for her, that takes the dirt off old windows. And since then she’s his number-one fan.”
Old etched-on dirt eats right into the panes, leaving a film no commercial cleaner can remove, and I could imagine the key to Bella’s heart being made of sparkling window glass. Dissolving her antagonism that way was typical of him, too. It takes an old warrior, my father had told me once, to understand peace.
I hoped he’d remember that when I finally managed to tell him who was coming to visit.
“Anyway,” I said, “I think Bill Imrie deserves some further attention. The way he keeps his folks’ old place up, that’s kind of weird, too. It’s like a shrine. And I don’t like his story about why he avoided me the other day, either.”
I finished my Moxie. “And now I’ve got to go try to track Maggie down and have that conversation,” I added, not looking forward to it one bit.
Because I still felt certain that Maggie couldn’t have killed Jim Diamond. But that didn’t mean I was going to let her look me in the face and lie.
Ellie started rinsing our plates. “Speaking of unwelcome, Victor was here while you were gone.” She drank the last of her own Moxie so she could wash the glass.
“Darn, what did he want?” My ex-husband regularly came up with requests that could’ve put two Quaker meetinghouses on the brink of a nuclear exchange.
“Invitation to dinner tonight. I told him he could come. I hope that was okay?” She poured us both some coffee and got two oatmeal lace cookies out of the jar.
“Is that all? Sure, I guess so. But how come he wants to?”
I didn’t mind that Ellie had gone ahead and given Victor the invitation. She knew it was easier to reject his more outrageous requests—such as for instance would I agree to having my head psychometrically modeled for a medical paper he was writing, a measuring process that would’ve meant first shaving off all my hair—if you’d already agreed to several simpler ones recently.
“Um, because he knew Sam asked Kris to come,” Ellie replied.
Which pricked my ears up. “And? I’m getting from your tone that there’s more to this story?”
In the maid’s room the baby woke from her nap and let out a stunning wail to inform us that she was ready now to rejoin the day’s activities, with emphasis on the word now.
“Well, actually, yes there is,” Ellie replied. “But listen to all of it before you react, Jake. It’s not a bad idea.”
Victor with an idea, in my experience, was a lot like Hitler having atomic weapons, a good way to deliver them, and a map of Washington, D.C.
“Victor wanted to know if he could bring Maggie with him,” Ellie told me. “And after I heard him out I told him that was all right, too.”
Bored, hungry, and probably needing a diaper change, Leonora the Magnificent emitted another howl that could have cleaned all those antique hot-water radiators out all by itself.
I wanted to howl, too. “Why in the world did you . . .”
“Jake, it’s about Kris. Victor has met her.”
He hadn’t, before. “Really,” I said, pausing to consider the possible implications.
Because Victor was a hound. On one of our early dates, one of the first things he asked me was whether or not I happened to own a G-string and tassels. Which I suppose should have raised my suspicions, but I’d thought it was a joke.
And it was on me.
“Victor hates her,” Ellie said. “He despises that girl.”
“But . . . why?” After all, Kris was female and had a pulse. And for all her flaws she had a spark of vitality, as well, one that to my mind only made her more dangerous.
“Well, apparently Sam and Kris ran into Victor downtown this morning, and Victor says the first thing Kris asked when she met him was what he did for a living.”
“Oh,” I breathed comprehendingly. So he wasn’t planning to put the moves on her. “And Victor told her . . .”
“Yes.” Ellie looked quietly pleased, the way she always does when she’s plotting something. “He said when she found out he’s a doctor, she was so happy she nearly swallowed her tongue.”
It was just the sort of unpleasant image Victor would come up with, but in this case I thought it was appropriate.
“Money,” I said. “Victor thinks Kris is only after Sam for Victor’s . . .”
It was what I believed, too, even though it was absurd. Most of the time when I was married to him, we paid off Victor’s school loans. Then for a little while when we did have money, we spent it just as fast, having Sam and living in an Upper East Side building so expensive we might as well have built the place ourselves out of bricks of platinum.
“So Victor smells a gold digger,” I said. “Fascinating.”
After our divorce I moved to Eastport and put most of my money into my old house, and soon thereafter Victor moved here and put what remained of his earning power down the drain by trading a career as a brain surgeon for one as a small-town physician.
As a result the idea of anyone in our family being wealthy was hilarious. But like her mother, Kris had different standards of wealth. Also she wouldn’t understand that if you wanted to get rich nowadays, you didn’t go into medicine at all.
To her, Victor probably looked like King Midas and Sam like the heir apparent. And Victor had spotted it.
“So he wants us all to have dinner together. You know, just a kind of happy-family get-together with you, me, Wade, George, Sam, and Kris. And Maggie,” Ellie added, “because he thinks that way, by comparing us all together, Sam will be able to see Kris’s true colors and come to his own conclusions.”
Leonora’s yelling was getting louder, and so was the clanking from downstairs. But even through the din I could still parse out the malevolent brilliance of the plan. Because you had to give Victor one thing: In the evil-genius department, he was a star.
“Sam would never break up with Kris just because I say it’s what he should do,” I mused aloud.
“And you know Maggie, she wouldn’t make a face if she had a bad oyster in her mouth,” Ellie agreed.
“Not usually,” I said doubtfully as a picture of Maggie rose in my mind: unhappy, and laboring under the weight of a secret.
Ellie read my expression. “Listen, why don’t you take Maggie aside tonight, explain to her exactly what’s been going on, and then ask her again about the car being in Lubec?”
“Huh. It’s an idea. Because if I take her into my confidence, she might . . .”
“Precisely. She might return the favor. Heck, it’s worth a try, isn’t it? And for what it’s worth, next time I need a sitter I’m still going to hire her.”
The baby’s cries had subsided momentarily to whimpers, but a second onslaught was due any moment.
“I agree,” I said. “I mean, anyone can do anything if they get pushed hard enough, but I just don’t think . . .”
“Me either,” Ellie said. “Also, I don’t see how it could hurt to wait until after Victor’s plan has a chance of working, before you ask her about it all again.”
She had a point. Maggie was lovely and always so gracious and easy to be around, I knew that even in her current mood you could put her at a dinner table with Victor and not have to worry over what might happen.
Or at a table with Kris. “Next to her, Kris is going to look like something out of a fun-house mirror,” I admitted.
Of course Sam already knew the differences between the two girls. But actually seeing them together could be something else again. “Especially,” I added, “if I clue Maggie in to the plan.”
“Victor said he would,” Ellie replied. “Clue her in.”
“And he knows what to do?” I asked. “You don’t think he’ll forget himself and start charming Kris’s socks off just because she is young and female?”
Socks bei
ng the least of what Victor could charm off when he got going. “He knows,” Ellie assured me confidently.
Just then a funny sound came from the kitchen radiator. It had always been the most troublesome one. My father had mentioned he thought it had something stuck in its outflow tract.
Right, like maybe a grenade. Suddenly that radiator began rattling and trembling as if it were on a launch pad, waiting to take off.
Seeing this, a horrid premonition struck me. “Ellie, help me get these dogs out of here.”
Cat Dancing sank her claws into my forearms when I grabbed her; we made it into the maid’s room to snatch up the baby just as the radiator’s takeoff sounds modulated to something more like a volcanic eruption.
I shoved both the dogs outside; Ellie ran with Lee. “Shut it off!” my father shouted. “Turn the valve—”
Cat Dancing let go and scrambled away from me. Her tail had vanished hastily around the newel post of the hall stairs when . . .
“Off!” my father shouted again.
. . . the radiator exploded.
Chapter 9
Owing to the fact that my old house had been turned into a plumber’s paradise by the radiator explosion, we barbecued that night out on the beach.
It was low tide at Gleason’s Cove, the air sweetly briny after the long warm day, and the dogs galloped happily away across the expanse of stony beach, play-fighting over sticks of driftwood and crunching up tasty sea-urchin shells when they found them.
Soon after we got there Kris Diamond arrived in fine form, wearing a tiny pair of shorts, heeled sandals that positively begged for a broken ankle, and a halter top she’d apparently made out of a couple of shiny black Band-Aids.
“Nice,” Victor commented sourly, noticing that Sam couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. “See the hard little muscles in her arms? Later she’ll turn him upside down, shake the cash out of his pockets.”
My father had stayed home to supervise the plumbers, who said they thought they could create something that wouldn’t spew water everywhere by midnight or so. And Bella, whom I’d at first thought of inviting to come along, had insisted on staying there, too, in case there were messes to be cleaned up.
“When she gets done with that boy,” Victor went on bitterly, “there’ll be nothing left but a pile of fingernail clippings and a few bone fragments.”
For once Victor and I were in complete accord. I pulled a bottle of Sea Dog ale out of the cooler for him, then opened one for myself. “May I have one of those fruit sodas?” Maggie asked, coming up behind us.
I handed her one. With her dark, wavy hair loose, dressed in a white scoop-necked T-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and a little red kerchief tied at her throat, she looked scrumptious.
But not scrumptious enough. Sam slung his arm playfully over Kris’s bare shoulders, pulling her off balance.
“Sam!” she shrieked in mock protest. The sandals weren’t all that made her sway; it seemed to me she’d already had a few beers before she got here.
“Sa—am!” Victor mimicked her under his breath.
“Don’t,” I warned him quietly. “If you make her into your victim, Sam is only going to want to defend her.”
“I’d like to make her a victim, all right,” he retorted darkly. “What the hell’s the matter with that boy?”
He was trying to help, so I decided now wasn’t the time to remind him of the womanizing example he’d so helpfully provided over the years. In the war between men and women, his strategy for most of his life had been the equivalent of taking scalps.
Meanwhile, Wade and George had just about finished cooking the steaks. “. . . guy’s got a real nice old Harper’s Ferry rifle he wants restored,” Wade was saying as I approached the grill. “He lives right near Limestone, so he took me over and showed it to me the last time we were up there. Lots of work, thing’s been in someone’s basement . . .”
George said something I couldn’t quite hear, ending in the word “. . . expensive?”
“Nah,” Wade replied. “We worked out a deal.”
Wade didn’t talk very much about the gunsmithing bargains he arranged with people, but I had no doubt the deal he’d made was in the other guy’s favor. For one thing, he never missed a chance to put a little something into the system just in case.
Or anyway that’s what I thought the whole Harper’s Ferry rifle thing was about. “Hey,” I said as he and George looked up at me, their barbecue tools in hand. “You guys just about ready?”
They were. With the steaks we had steamed corn on the cob, baked potatoes with sour cream and freshly minced chives from Ellie’s garden, and strawberry shortcake on her miracle biscuits, so high that you have to break them into morsels before spooning the berries onto them.
With fresh whipped cream, naturally. And by the time we got to the dessert the evening was getting chilly, a thin fog creeping in at us from across the water, so hot coffee from the thermoses was welcome, too, as we pulled our chairs nearer to the driftwood bonfire Ellie and I had built.
Out on the bay the red and green running lights of fishing boats glowed in the dusk, the vessels’ black silhouettes on the invisibly turning tide. A foghorn sounded, followed by the lonesome clanking of a channel bell, as the stars came out.
I moved to the chair next to where Maggie sat, and felt her stiffen at my approach.
“Don’t,” she warned tonelessly before I could say anything. On the beach, Sam and Kris were tossing a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, the dogs racing between them.
In the firelight Maggie’s face was as smooth and uncommunicative as one of those pottery masks down at the Art Center.
So I skipped the part about confiding in her; it wasn’t going to work. “Maggie, I know you took my car to Lubec. You parked right across from Jim Diamond’s place, the cop said so, the day before we found Jim. And I want to know why.”
She turned to me in the fire’s orange glow. “Are they asking you about it? The police?”
“No. But Maggie . . .”
“Then let it go.” She sounded close to tears. “I didn’t have anything to do with it, Jacobia. You believe that, don’t you?”
The fire’s reflection on the incoming tide crept nearer. “I believe you, Maggie. But I still need to know what happened.”
“No, you don’t.” She stared straight ahead to where Kris and Sam played. “I was out for a ride. I went to get an ice cream at that place with the umbrellas over the tables, remember it?”
I remembered. And it could have been true. But she was too upset for that to be all there was to the story.
Besides, the first time around she’d denied being there at all. And she still sounded guilty and miserable.
“Maggie—” I began again.
“Look, either you trust me or you don’t. I don’t know any more about what happened to that man than you do,” she declared. She got to her feet. “And if you don’t trust me, then tell the police I was there. Let them ask me about it.”
So there it was: Put up or shut up.
“No,” I said, after a moment. “I’m not going to do that. But Maggie—”
You can trust me, too, I was about to say. Whatever’s wrong, I’ll try to help you. But before I could, she walked away from me, and Wade came and took her place.
The moon began rising, a huge fiery orange orb from behind the distant hills of New Brunswick.
“Nice picnic,” he observed serenely after a while.
“Mmm,” I agreed. “I guess. But Sam was supposed to see the obvious difference between Maggie and Kris at this little affair. And instead I don’t think he even noticed that Maggie is here.”
I glanced back toward the picnic table. Near it, George was giving Leonora a bottle while Ellie put items back in the hamper and Victor stood by supervising.
Just then Sam and Kris came back from the darkness on the beach. “Give me a break, it’s not like I’m driving,” I heard Kris say as she reached into the cooler for another beer.
&n
bsp; Sam mumbled something in reply. Maggie was there, too, and said something I didn’t hear.
But Kris did, and she didn’t like it, flying off the handle at once. “What do you mean, where was I?” she demanded. “You think I had something to do with what happened to my stepfather?”
“I didn’t say that. I just asked where you were that day, is all.” Maggie spoke clearly, putting a little steel in her tone. This only fueled Kris’s anger further.
“You know,” Kris said shrilly, “you’re pathetic, the way you keep hanging around like anyone wants you anymore.”
She’d been drinking all evening, waving it obviously under Sam’s nose in a way that made me furious, though he hadn’t seemed bothered by it, sticking to sodas.
“Kris,” he began uncomfortably. “Forget it.”
She turned on him. “Oh, sure! Big help you are. Your big fat friend here can just about accuse me of murder and that’s okay.”
Maggie wasn’t fat. But she wasn’t thin, and of course Kris would attack her at a vulnerable spot.
“All right, now,” Victor stepped in, seeing Maggie flinch. “That’s enough of—”
Whirling, stumbling until Sam caught her, Kris laughed in his face. “Shut up. I’ve seen you watching me, you old letch.”
Of course he’d been watching her; we all had, Victor perhaps a little more than the rest, but hey, she’d bought that trip. Hadn’t she been putting herself on display all evening?
“If you must know, I was with Sam all that day,” she snarled. “He’s my alibi.” She put a nasty twist on the word. “I could tell you what we were doing, too,” she added even more unpleasantly in my direction, “but you wouldn’t like it.”
Yeah, I’ll bet I wouldn’t. Wade tightened his arm around my shoulder, sensing with perfect accuracy my strong desire to slap the taste right out of the girl’s mouth.
“But you wanted him gone,” Maggie said evenly. “He was the reason why you’re still living with your mother, instead of pursuing a career in . . .”
She paused in pretended thought. “Let’s see, now, what was it? Nursing? Social work? No, wait, it was hair. Yeah, that’s it, the deep science of beauty technology.”
