Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  “It didn’t come out in court?” I asked, surprised.

  She shook her head. “Took a plea, saved the county the cost of a trial. Said enough to clear the bank teller the cops thought was in on it with him. But that was all. His lip was zipped, and he went off to jail without clearing it up.”

  Ellie spoke up. “And the other mystery?”

  Azenath looked up as if the answer should be obvious. “Well, the money, of course. That’s the other thing he wouldn’t say.”

  She pushed herself up from behind her desk and crossed to the big windows. Out on the water a motor yacht idled, waiting for a signal from the harbormaster to come into the boat basin.

  A thought struck me. “Where’d you get all this information?”

  She turned. “I called the attorney the court had appointed to defend him at the time. I’d met this guy before, he knew I was on the up-and-up, and I told him I just wanted to be sure there was no lingering suspicion of Bella being in on it.”

  “But then he got chatting,” I guessed, “and . . . ?”

  She chuckled throatily. “Yes. Amazing what people will tell you, isn’t it? Not anything confidential or privileged, of course, but he did like the sound of his own voice.”

  From the other office I heard Dinah on the phone, telling someone they’d have to go on a waiting list.

  “At that point,” Azenath went on, “I could’ve asked for more details. But after he’d reassured me I didn’t have to worry about Bella, I didn’t need them.”

  Sure. Once her own concerns were handled, she wouldn’t have cared who Jim Diamond drove out of business. She returned to her desk, tented her plump fingers atop it.

  I took it as a signal that our time with her was nearly up. “So what’s your theory about the money?”

  She shrugged. “Once he’d deposited it, Diamond withdrew it in cash as soon as he could. I don’t even know how much it was.”

  Over thirty thousand, though; that’s what made it a felony. And if it drove the victims out of business, it could have been a lot more.

  Azenath raised her large arms gracefully, let them fall with a jingle of copper bracelets and a swish of loose silk sleeves.

  “It’s doubtful he spent it. No new car, anything like that.”

  Right, and a guy like Jim wouldn’t have had the forethought or know-how to stash it by some other method—in some offshore account, for instance. Also, the kind of weasel who swindled his employer generally went for flashy vehicles and department-store shopping sprees, anyway.

  “So,” Azenath inquired simply, “where is it now?”

  In the light from the big windows her long wavy hair had an auburn glint, and she looked beautiful in the caftan. She didn’t choose clothes to minimize her size, and I liked her for that, too.

  “What an interesting question,” I said, smiling.

  Thinking, Yes. Follow the money.

  “I thought you’d enjoy it,” she said. “Possibly someone else knows the answer, but not I. And now that you’ve picked my brain clean of every morsel it contains,” she added suggestively.

  “You have work to do. Of course.” Ellie and I got up.

  “So the business is going well,” I remarked to Azenath as she walked with us to the door.

  Against the backdrop of the windows she was a large, dark figure, almost menacing, and the patchouli oil was suddenly overpowering. Then she stepped toward me, her face came into the light, and the perfume unaccountably faded.

  “Yes. Dinah and I are pleased with the way things are going so far.”

  Which I thought must be an understatement. Dinah’s phone had rung with inquiries several times during our visit; it seemed to me these two women had come up with a license to print money.

  “Good luck on your inquiry,” she added pleasantly.

  “Thanks. And Azenath, if you could just . . .”

  Nodding, she made a lip-zipping gesture. “Confidential, of course. Who knows, Dinah or I could need your help some day.”

  She put out her hand to touch Leonora’s smooth cheek with a red-tipped finger. “Sweet little thing,” she murmured.

  Then the phone rang again and before Ellie and I had even gotten out of the office, I felt sure Azenath had forgotten us.

  “The nerve!” Ellie said indignantly when we had gotten down to the street. “She didn’t even ask Leonora’s name!”

  “I’m pretty sure Azenath calls all babies ‘it,’ ” I replied. “But don’t take it personally. She’s just all business, is all.”

  “I guess,” Ellie grumbled, then pounced on the thing Azenath had suggested without ever quite saying it.

  “An accomplice. Not Bella, but Azenath still thinks there must have been someone else in on Jim’s fraud scheme,” she declared.

  “Right. Someone who helped Jim and who might still have some of the money.” It would have been a very good reason for Diamond not to want to talk about it: to preserve the stash.

  And more recently, it could provide a motive for murder. “What we need now is someone who was there at the time. Someone with an idea of who Jim’s accomplice might have been.”

  Ellie frowned. “At the business he defrauded? But how are we going to find someone like that? From the sound of it, the place has been gone since he went to jail. We’d need a time machine to go back and . . .”

  Brilliant as usual. “A time machine,” I repeated. “Yes, it’s just what we need.”

  And fortunately, I was pretty sure we had one.

  It was only a short walk back up Key Street to my house, but during it I thought we might as well have been in a time machine already. Men from the VFW were painting the outside of the band shell on the library lawn; in it, high school students practiced for the Fourth of July concert, tootling out “Yankee Doodle.”

  “. . . needles in haystacks,” Ellie fretted.

  Meanwhile the ladies from the Historical Society draped the lawn’s picket fence in patriotic tricolored bunting, chatting about the strawberry shortcake social scheduled for the holiday.

  “. . . moved away, or gone to work on freighters, or up to the woods to work for the lumber companies,” Ellie went on.

  She meant the ex-employees of the lumber-and-building-supply company Jim Diamond had driven out of business.

  But I was only half listening. All the summer scene needed was about twelve thousand happy visitors here to witness the parade and band concert, cheer the traditional Eastport Fourth of July competitions—

  —the greasy-pole walk (out over the cold salt water), the codfish relay race (with the codfish gripped in your teeth), and the blueberry pie-eating contest (nice change from the codfish) were my personal favorites—

  —and finally to see fireworks being shot from a barge out in Passamaquoddy Bay, on the last evening.

  And from the number of RVs, camper trucks, and other tourist vehicles streaming into town already, it seemed we would have at least twelve thousand visitors before the festivities even began.

  Bang! A cherry bomb went off behind the Motel East, and then what sounded like an M-80. A smoke puff floated up as a bunch of middle-school-age boys ran laughing from the scene.

  “Bob Arnold,” Ellie observed, “will have his hands full.”

  “Good,” I said. “All the easier for us to snoop without him noticing.” Or anyone else either, I hoped.

  “But I still don’t see . . .”

  Then I revealed my plan. “Oh,” she breathed comprehendingly. “You’re right, Jake, that’ll work.”

  At my house we greeted the dogs, put the baby down for her nap, and then rooted through the phone alcove until we found the time machine I’d been talking about: an area telephone book from when I’d first moved here, seven years earlier.

  “Don’t you ever throw these away?” Ellie asked.

  There were seven of them stacked in the alcove, including the current one. “I try.”

  I shuffled through to find the earliest one. “But I feel so guilty puttin
g them in the trash and I can’t seem to get them to the collection place. So they pile up.”

  Fortunately, phone books stack neatly; otherwise Bella would have made short work of them on her first day here. I opened the old and the new one to the same yellow pages listings.

  There were only a few lumber-and-supply outfits in Washington County, so identifying the one that had vanished from the listings was easy. Let’s see, Pinkham’s was still there; so were EBS and Guptill’s. But wait, here was one that hadn’t survived . . . “Duckworth’s Building and Hardware,” I read. “Machias.”

  “Really.” She peered over my shoulder. “In that case . . .”

  “What?” I demanded impatiently.

  “I remember Duckworth’s. My dad used to take me there. It was on a side street,” she recalled. “There were barns, a lumber warehouse, a couple of equipment sheds, the main store, and . . .”

  A mental light went on as I imagined it. “A house,” I said. “Is that it? Did the owners live there?”

  She nodded slowly. “Right on the premises. And maybe—”

  Maybe they still did.

  The noonish brilliance of a Maine summer afternoon gives you the idea that you have more time than you really do. But as Ellie and I passed the turnoff to Lubec with the sun still high, I felt something like evening closing in even though the sky remained bright.

  “Want me to drop you off somewhere?” I asked casually. “The park, or maybe the library?”

  Fed, changed, and played with until she began nodding again, Leonora slept peacefully, strapped into the car seat behind us.

  Ellie thought about my offer. “I guess not,” she said. “If I change my mind, though . . .”

  Her hesitation meant she too felt gun-shy about this visit. Unfortunately, there is a one-to-one relationship between you getting closer to a killer, and the killer getting closer to you. So possibly some precautions were in order.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “First we have to find out if anyone from the family even still lives there. After that only one of us has to get in. Probably the other one should wait, and set a—”

  “Time limit,” Ellie finished my thought. “Wait outside for a set period, then—”

  “Knock on the door, try to find out what’s cooking. Use your judgment, but if things don’t seem right to you—”

  “Right. Go to plan B.”

  Which could be anything from calling the cops to driving the car through the door, depending on the situation. Zipping through the wilderness stretch between Whiting and Machias, I relaxed a hairsbreadth behind the wheel.

  We had to make allowances for Leonora: her presence with us today, and the fact of her existence generally. And since having Ellie stay outside the Duckworth house might also help ensure my continued existence, I thought our plan would work out well for everyone concerned.

  Because after all, neither of us could tell yet what I might find there; last time, it had been a corpse.

  “Turn here,” Ellie said after we had crossed the Machias River twice: once on the causeway where the old railroad station stood like a wooden ghost, again at the bridge over Bad Little Falls with the water rushing and tumbling beneath us.

  I followed her direction onto a narrow, curving side street that climbed along the riverbank. Here, sea captains’ mansions with turrets topped by ornate cast-iron widows’ walks hulked as if peering down on us, their fanlighted front doors flanked by rows of mailboxes for the apartments the houses had been cut into.

  After that came smaller homes, their exteriors covered with aluminum siding. Finally the street narrowed, pavement dissolving to gravel as a set of farm buildings loomed ahead.

  DUCKWORTH’S, read the faded black lettering on the red barn. Behind a chain-link fence stood sheds, utility buildings, stacks of wooden pallets, and an old forklift parked by a loading dock.

  I shut off the car. The whole place was as still as a held breath. Leonora stirred, smiling and waving her arms as Ellie leaned back to unbuckle her and bring her up front.

  Then Ellie turned to me. “Go get ’em,” she said.

  So I did, although still a little doubtfully. The house at least looked harmless enough, a pleasant two-story Victorian with white siding, black shutters, and a wide, sunny front porch with a pair of wicker rockers on it.

  Pink geraniums bloomed between white eyelet curtains at the windows, and an old Irish setter scrambled up to meet me as I climbed the iron-railed front steps.

  “Hey, boy,” I said, leaning down to smooth his silky ears with one hand, pressing the doorbell with the other.

  Not until I heard footsteps did I realize I hadn’t planned what to say. “Hi, you don’t know me but I’m here to root around in your painful past” didn’t seem quite appropriate.

  And the alternative—that I was an Eastport busybody looking to find out who really bonked Jim Diamond with a skillet—wasn’t what Emily Post would have recommended, either.

  But my lack of preparation turned out not to matter, since when the door opened and I saw who lived here, the unexpectedness of it forced every other thought from my head.

  “Why, hello,” said the gray-haired, beautifully groomed lady who greeted me. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  It was the Red Cross volunteer who’d been in Eastport asking for blood. “I’m Lydia Duckworth,” she said kindly, stepping aside to let me in.

  “Do excuse the mess, I’m working at home today. Would you like a cup of tea? And your friend,” she added, peering through the front window, “perhaps she’d like to come in, too?”

  The mess consisted of a neat stack of papers on the rug by an armchair, a fountain pen atop the stack, and a lamp angled to illuminate the wheeled writing table pushed away from the chair.

  “Thanks, but she wanted to walk a bit. To settle the baby,” I improvised, hoping Ellie’s next actions would confirm me in this.

  They did. From between the drawn curtains I saw her get out of the car with Leonora in her arms, strolling under the trees away from the house to where the road became a grassy track.

  Distantly, a kettle whistled. “As you like,” Mrs. Duckworth replied cheerfully. “Now, I’ll just be a moment.”

  While she was gone I looked around the immaculate parlor with its groupings of African violets blooming moistly on doilies near the windows. Hummel figurines in a display hutch faced gold-framed photos, several of which were of Lydia Duckworth and a man of about her own age, early sixties or so.

  In each successive photograph the man had lost weight, his face in the final one gauntly knowing and his eyes huge and dark. The owner was ill, Azenath Jones had said.

  “Now, what can I do for you?” Lydia Duckworth inquired when she had returned to pour the tea.

  Crunch time; what should I say? Over in the corner the Irish setter sank into his bed, smiled gamely at us, then snored.

  “Come, come, don’t be shy,” Lydia Duckworth urged quietly. “I gather you haven’t come all this way just to sign up to give blood.” She poured for both of us. “And whatever it is, you needn’t worry about shocking my feelings. I assume that it must be something about Jim Diamond’s having been murdered?”

  She glanced at the shelf full of photographs, her pale gaze lingering on the ones of her husband before returning to me.

  “I know your reputation, you see,” she added gently. “And that of your friend. When you first moved to Maine you might have counted on anonymity for your inquiries.”

  She smiled a little mischievously. “But not anymore.”

  I sipped tea to cover my confusion; so much for a low profile. “Why don’t you tell me what it is you want to ask, and I will answer if I can,” Mrs. Duckworth suggested.

  Her eyes had gone steely behind the gold-rimmed half-glasses as she looked at her husband’s picture.

  “I’d like to know, too,” she said. Her tone was no longer quite so gentle. “Who Jim’s helper was back then, I mean. Although I can’t say I’m sorry he’s dead, even if
it means he can’t tell us.”

  She looked up. “Forgive me if I’m jumping to conclusions. But surely it makes sense that his accomplice might’ve had a hand in his murder.”

  She was a quick study. But then, she’d had a lot of time to think about it.

  Still, I wasn’t ready to confide in her yet. I waved at the papers she’d been working on, the Red Cross logo visible on them.

  “It’s a long drive from Machias to volunteer in Eastport,” I remarked.

  “It is,” she agreed immediately. “But my husband had so many blood transfusions during his illness, and they had no spots open for volunteers any nearer by. I keep busy with my charity work,” she added. “I find it keeps me from becoming bitter.”

  Because what you put out there comes back to you, or so she probably hoped. A clock ticked hollowly somewhere in the house.

  I thought about how quiet it would be in my own house if Wade and Sam were not living in it, and decided suddenly to tell her what I’d come here to learn instead of angling for it.

  “It’s about my housekeeper,” I said. “I think you know her?”

  She nodded, listening carefully without interrupting until I finished. What she said then surprised me.

  But like I said, she was a quick study. “When I first became a Red Cross volunteer they told us that when you go into people’s houses, you go at your peril.”

  She glanced out to where Ellie sat with Leonora on the grass under a maple tree across from the barn.

  “Bring along a friend, have the friend wait outside for you, they said,” Mrs. Duckworth went on, turning from the window. “So that if you don’t come out again in a reasonable amount of time, your friend can help you.”

  She took the glasses off, rubbed a finger wearily over one eyelid. The vulnerable moment underlined her resolute look.

  “And do you follow that advice?” I’d seen no one with her in Eastport.

  She shrugged minutely, a what-does-it-matter shrug. “No.”

  It was my move, and I was pretty certain she hadn’t poisoned my tea. “Why don’t I call her in now?” I suggested. “Ellie would probably want to hear what you have to say, also.”