Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  Kris lunged for her but once again Sam caught her. “Hey,” he tried soothing the enraged girl, “don’t give them any more ammunition.”

  She struggled with him, then caught sight of us staring at her. With a pathetic attempt at regaining her dignity, she straightened and spoke.

  “You think I killed Jim? That’s what you think?” She laughed harshly, looking around at us in the firelight.

  “After what happened to him over those forged checks, you think I’d commit crimes? Oh, please, give me a little credit.”

  Sure. Two cents’ worth. And she’d already used it up.

  “It’s ridiculous anyone even suspecting my mom, much less me.” Then the beer hit her again and the laugh dissolved into a sob.

  “But you know, I’ll bet she really did it,” she contradicted herself, her words slurring. “I bet he scared her so bad she went to pieces and—”

  “Kris,” Sam said helplessly, “come on. Cut it out, you don’t have to—”

  “What?” she snapped at him. “I don’t have to what? Defend my own mother?”

  Which wasn’t exactly what she was doing. Instead, she’d been stating the obvious, that Bella had a very good reason to want Jim dead. I wondered suddenly if Kris was really as drunk as she looked. Sam drew her closer to him protectively as her shoulders sagged.

  If it was a drunk act, it was beautifully done. But of course she’d had practice at the real thing.

  “You’re right,” she mumbled. “I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to lie, either. I’m glad Jim’s dead. If Mom did it, more power to her. For once she stood up for herself.”

  She sniffled loudly. “But it’s not my fault they’re both born losers, is it?” she demanded of all of us. “It’s just not my fault, so can we talk about something else now? Please?”

  She sounded like a victimized little girl. And to some degree, she probably was. But just listening to her, my bullshit detectors zoomed into the red zone, and my suspicions didn’t diminish a bit as Sam led her out of the firelight toward his car.

  She was giggling again, holding the car keys teasingly away from him. I saw them glinting, got up, and started toward the pair to grab the keys.

  Sam got to them first. “No!” Kris objected petulantly as he snatched them. But she made no further protest as he got her into the car, then drove away without a further word to any of us.

  “That went well,” Ellie observed dryly into the silence when they were gone.

  “Girl’s a few buckets short of a barrelful,” George said.

  “I do not,” Victor repeated exasperatedly, “understand what Sam sees in her.”

  But Maggie, who had watched their taillights dwindle into the darkness, had a more insightful comment.

  “I do,” she told us. “I understand. Kris is fun. Or anyway she makes him think so.”

  Victor looked at her as if the word came from some obscure foreign language.

  “Fun,” she pronounced carefully for him again. “Laughs. The feeling you have when you’re doing something only for enjoyment?”

  Maggie shook her head, knowing a lost cause when she saw it, and appealed to the rest of us. “Like when they were on the beach throwing the Frisbee and she kept missing it, not being able to throw it straight to him?”

  I hadn’t seen it, but Maggie had been keeping a sharper eye. “So he would have to put his arms around her and show her how,” the girl went on, sarcasm creeping into her voice again.

  As she spoke the memory of Kris’s bare arms came back to me. As Victor had first noted, she did have those hard little arm muscles.

  “I’ve seen Kris throw a Frisbee before,” Maggie said. “With other people at the park. And believe me, she didn’t need anyone to show her. When she wants to, that girl could take your head off with a Frisbee.”

  Or with a big cast-iron skillet? The question rose unbidden to my mind.

  “She likes parties and music,” Maggie said bitterly. “Staying out all night, taking wild dares, going too fast in cars. And she really likes drinking.”

  Sam liked those things, too. It was how he’d gotten into so much trouble over the winter, letting himself think he could hang out with people who were doing them, just not doing them himself.

  “That’s why Sam likes her,” Maggie repeated. “Maybe tonight she was kind of a drag. But even her bad behavior . . . well.”

  She paused, deciding how to put it. “If you think you’re bad yourself, it’s nice to know there’s someone even worse.”

  “Okay,” I interrupted. The fire was nearly out, and George was loading the cookout stuff in his truck bed. “I get the idea.”

  None of it sounded like fun to me. But Victor wasn’t done with the subject. “How’d you find that out?” he wanted to know.

  Wade was loading the dogs into the sturdy wire cages he had bolted into his truck bed for them. But even he stopped to listen to Maggie’s reply.

  “He told me,” she said simply. “I finally went and asked him what the big attraction was, and that’s what he said. That Kris was a lot of fun, and I . . .”

  Her face crumpled. “And that I wasn’t.”

  Her words hung in the silence by the dark moving water, with the moon staring pitilessly down like a cold, unblinking eye.

  “Maggie, I’m so sorry,” I said finally, moving to put my arm around her. But she wasn’t having any.

  “No!” she said, stepping away from me. “Just don’t, okay?” She managed a smile. “I’m fine. I came here tonight because Dr. Tiptree wanted me to, but I knew it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “What did you say to Sam?” I asked. “I mean after he . . .”

  Thinking, the selfish little son of a bitch.

  She shook her head ruefully. “I told him I was done being his emotional punching bag, and I didn’t want to know any more of his secrets,” she replied. “Or hers, either.”

  “Come on,” Victor told her. “I’ll drive you home.”

  Maggie nodded and let herself be guided to his car. To me it was just one more familiar, not-to-be-trusted thing about Victor, that he could seem so strongly to be the person you should turn to when you needed someone.

  But at the moment I was profoundly grateful for it.

  Victor’s car rumbled into my driveway a little later as I was helping Wade get the dogs in, moving in tired silence to lift Monday down off the tailgate while Prill allowed Wade to assist her, his arms gathering her long legs as if they were a bouquet.

  “Hey,” Victor said, his car door slamming.

  “I’ll get ’em,” Wade said, taking Monday’s leash from me.

  I went to meet Victor. “What is it? I thought you were going home after you dropped Maggie off.”

  “I was. But Maggie told me something on the way back and I thought you ought to know. The fight Kris and Sam had the other night in front of the house? Maggie told me what it was about.”

  “And?” I was staggering with fatigue.

  “They were at a party. She was drinking, he wasn’t.”

  I’d known that much.

  “Kris started teasing Sam. Saying he was a Goody Two-shoes, tied to his mother’s apron strings, that kind of stuff.”

  That was also little beyond what I’d already suspected. Kris was a disaster waiting to happen, and the fact that Sam’s eyes had not been opened to her tonight discouraged me immensely.

  “Maggie knew this?”

  Victor nodded. “Sam told her. It’s what she meant about not wanting to hear any more of his secrets.”

  “So what’s the punch line?”

  “At the party he stuck to Coca-Cola,” Victor said. “But Kris was pretty loaded. And she grabbed Sam and kissed him.”

  I frowned, puzzled. “I don’t see what’s so bad about—”

  “Right, but she had a mouthful of bourbon at the time. And when she kissed him, she spit it into his mouth.”

  I just stared at him, my heart thudding suddenly. “What did Sam do?”
/>
  “Spit it out again. That’s what the whole fight was about, her trying to sabotage his sobriety. Although of course she claimed it was a joke, she didn’t mean anything by it, et cetera.”

  Sure. All the things you tell someone you’re trying to hurt, when you don’t want them to know just how vicious you are.

  Or you haven’t figured it out yet, yourself.

  “I gather it wasn’t the first time it’s happened,” Victor went on. “Maggie says Kris has done it before.”

  “She’s known that, too?” I felt outraged. “Why didn’t she tell one of us sooner?”

  Victor shrugged. “You know how it is. She probably felt that if she told on him, he’d hate her for it. Which he would.”

  Frustration seized me, that this was all so difficult and it didn’t seem I could do anything about it.

  “Victor, what’s this all about? Sam was doing so well. Even after his slip last winter, he was upset for a while. But he just got right back on the horse, and—”

  “Maybe he’s still upset. Maybe it’s just hitting him, Jake, that he’s going to be riding that horse his whole life.”

  He studied me. “That it wasn’t just a kid thing, something he’d grow out of. Something he could control. Maybe what’s really bothering Sam is that he knows last winter could happen again.”

  And that’s Victor. He can go along for months as brainlessly as one of those department-store mannequins, then come up with an insight as brilliant as a meteor streaking on the night sky.

  Exhaustion hit me, making me sway. I’d been up for thirty-six hours. “Victor, I have to go lie down now.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He walked back to his car, turned as if to say something else. But I was too tired to hear it.

  Inside our house, Wade took one look at me and knew enough to leave me alone. Bella had gone home by then; my father, too. And Sam was still out.

  Ignoring the wreckage of radiator repair work littering the kitchen, I went upstairs where I took a shower, collapsed into the bed whose covers Wade had already turned down, and slept like the dead.

  Not until early morning did I wake again, sitting up with a start, my heart hammering as if I were still out in the moonlit driveway listening to Victor. But it wasn’t my ex-husband I was hearing in my head.

  It was Maggie, taunting Kris with her supposed career plans. Sam could have told Maggie about the beauty school idea. But there was another way she could have learned about it, too. She could’ve seen the letter Kris got from the school, some time when she was alone in Bella’s house.

  Thinking this I got up quietly so as not to wake Wade, and looked into Sam’s room. He was there, snoring softly, one tanned arm hanging down over the side of his bed.

  Hating myself for it, I sniffed the air for stale alcohol and detected none. Finally I checked my robe pocket for the magic wand that would make everything okay for him.

  I’d have given anything for that magic wand. But I’d lost it around the time his father and I began fighting like a couple of wildcats, and I’d never found it again.

  Down in the kitchen I put coffee on, then took the dogs out and fed them, picking my way between pipe wrenches, hacksaws, crowbars, and the other heavy tools the plumbers had used to get the remnants of exploded radiator apart from the rest of the system.

  By the time the coffee was finished I’d pulled a warm sweat suit from a hook in the hall closet and put it on, along with a pair of thick socks from the backpack I kept stocked in there.

  I gathered a collection of items from the tool shelf and slipped my feet into the insulated sneakers Wade had given me on my last birthday, because even though it was June and the sun was rising, the thermometer said it was only 52 outside.

  Out in the yard, I found Ellie already at the picnic table with her own coffee. It was George’s morning to have the baby, a privilege he guarded jealously, so she was alone.

  “Hi,” I said, not surprised. If the sky was light, Ellie was up. I sat across from her.

  With me I’d brought latex gloves, wire brushes, a scouring pad, and a coffee can full of paint stripper in which I had been soaking the old hinges that belonged to the shutters.

  Because if you’re going to go to the trouble of drilling all new holes for them, they might as well look good. Spreading the things on the table, I repeated Victor’s revelations of the night before, and what I’d been thinking since then.

  “Oof.” Ellie blew a breath out. “So Kris and Maggie both had reasons to get rid of Jim; Kris because if he were gone she could leave—she wouldn’t have to stick around to try to keep an eye on Bella’s safety—and Maggie because if he were gone Kris really might.”

  She thought a moment. “And Maggie thinks Kris is actually a danger to Sam, not just Maggie’s rival.”

  “Correct,” I said unhappily, fishing the first shutter hinge out of the coffee can with gloved fingers. The paint stripper had taken off the first few paint layers and softened the rest to the consistency of thick clay.

  I applied the copper scouring pad to the hinge. It took most of the paint sludge off with a couple of swipes.

  But not all of it. “And I can believe that Kris would stay, too, to support Bella, even though she’s such a little . . .”

  Numerous vulgar terms came to mind, but I didn’t pronounce any of them. “Sam got between me and Victor a couple of times,” I added quietly.

  Ellie gazed sympathetically at me over the rim of her coffee mug. “Oh,” she said softly, “that must have been . . .”

  “Yeah. Not so good.” I scrubbed the hinge with a wire brush. The screw holes were the worst part. “Sam didn’t much like me back then, but he’d have fought tigers for me anyway, because I was his mother.”

  Three crows flapped into the yard to perch on the power line near my house, and began belting out a raucous early-morning concert.

  Only a few more hinges to go. I dipped into the stripper and came up with another one. The crows cawed vigorously, as if each big black bird were trying to outdo the next.

  “That still doesn’t mean Kris did anything to Jim. Or that Maggie did either,” Ellie mused thoughtfully.

  Out in the street a garbage truck rumbled by. The crows all flapped off, leaving the power wire bouncing.

  “And it certainly doesn’t make sense that Maggie would have planned to do anything to him,” Ellie went on reasonably. “For one thing, if that had been her intention, why go there in your very recognizable car when her own is so nondescript?”

  “Maggie could have started out just going for a drive. Once she was on the road she could’ve made a spur-of-the-moment decision to talk to Jim, maybe to see if he could be persuaded into doing something about Kris.”

  “How would she know where he lived?” Ellie objected.

  “I don’t know. But she seemed to, when we were there. Don’t you remember, she pointed up at the sign in the window? And then backtracked about it right afterward as if she didn’t want us to know she knew.”

  “If she did it on the spur of the moment,” Ellie said, “what about the notes?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” The last bit of paint came off the final hinge. I put the wire brush down.

  “The notes don’t make sense, and neither does the skillet. I mean, if you meant to do something serious to someone, would you arm yourself with a frying pan?”

  “Nope.” Ellie screwed the cup back onto her thermos while I pulled off the latex gloves. Inside the house, both dogs danced welcomingly as if we’d been away for hours.

  Ellie stopped in the hall, surveying the radiator wreckage. “Meanwhile, has Wade said what he’s going to do to get the guest rooms ready in time for your relatives yet?”

  “No. For all I know he’s planning to line up Porta Potties on the sidewalk. But right now I can’t worry about it.”

  Actually I could. It was running constantly in the back of my mind like an annoying tune you can’t get out of your head. But I hadn’t been able to think what I cou
ld do about that, either.

  Ellie got ready to take the dogs out. I always had to chase them around to get them leashed up, but she had been walking them semiregularly, lately, so now she just jingled their collars together and they sat before her like furry angels.

  “Look,” I said when she’d gotten Monday neatly lined up on one side of her, and Prill on the other. “Don’t say anything to Maggie about any of this, all right? Or to anyone else.”

  The dogs looked like a couple of bookends. If I’d tried to make them sit still that way, they’d have been doing somersaults.

  “As it is now,” I went on, “we feel like we’re not getting anywhere. We probably don’t look like we’re doing very much, either, assuming anyone’s paying attention.”

  Ellie nodded thoughtfully. “But that could be a good thing if it’s making whoever’s behind all this feel safe.”

  The dogs gazed adoringly at her. “If we keep a low profile, somebody might get careless, drop a little hint?” she added.

  I looked out past her through the screen door. Long shafts of early-morning sunlight sparkled in the grass, and the air had a fresh, nothing-has-gone-wrong-yet smell, sweetly invigorating.

  “And maybe it will be just the bit of information we need,” I agreed with Ellie, not really believing it.

  But I wasn’t ready to give up. “So when you get back, how about if we keep trying to find out more about Jim Diamond?”

  “Sure,” she said enthusiastically. “After all, he’s the dead guy, so maybe we should figure his death had something to do with him.”

  She stepped outside, the dogs gamboling around her. “But we will be tactful, Ellie,” I warned. “And careful. Because whoever we’re after is on the far side already.”

  Of the line, I meant, between most of the population and the tiny, unpredictable fraction of it that has committed murder.

  Chapter 10

  The rest of the morning went reasonably well at first. Freighters can dock on Sunday as well as any other day so Wade headed off to work, and Sam left for a meet-and-greet with some marine engineers at the boat school—