Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  “I see.” I didn’t, but if I let her talk she might explain it to me. A car went by outside, its lights casting the shapes of leaves onto the darkened dining room windows.

  “They said he wasn’t involved,” Mrs. Duckworth murmured as if to herself. But she was slurring a bit, and it occurred to me that the pleasant Red Cross volunteer lady had been tippling.

  Not a lot. Just enough to loosen her tongue. “Who did they say wasn’t involved?” I pressed.

  A pause. Ice clinked in a glass. Then, “Bill Imrie. That bank teller. They said they looked into him, and there was no reason to believe it happened any way other than the way he said. He was so young and terribly inexperienced. He didn’t realize Jim Diamond shouldn’t have been depositing those checks.”

  “But you think otherwise?” From upstairs I heard the faint thump of a dog jumping off a bed, and then another. Moments later, the two canines padded downstairs into the phone alcove to check on what I was up to.

  “It’s not what I think, it’s what I know,” Lydia Duckworth said with the slightly excessive vehemence of the vaguely inebriated. “It was hushed up at the time, you see. People liked the father so much, they put a lid on it when it came to the son.”

  That was what Ellie had said, too, that Pops Imrie’s great popularity had benefited his son, Bill. Satisfied, the dogs went out to the kitchen and lay down together in their dog bed.

  “A lid,” I asked Lydia patiently, “on what?”

  “Why, on his gambling,” she replied. “I wouldn’t even know, but my grandson went to college with Bill Imrie and he told me. Said the Imrie boy played cards and kept a . . . a game book?”

  “A sports book,” I corrected her gently.

  “That’s right. A sports book. Only the bets he took kept winning, and his own bets kept losing. So he ended up owing a lot of money. Students’ parents finally complained to the school.”

  “Oh, dear. That must have been inconvenient for him.”

  “Well, I should say. My grandson said Bill Imrie’s father paid them all off, the debts, I mean, and the school didn’t want any bad publicity. So it was all kept very quiet.”

  “So the gambling was before Bill came home and went to work at the bank. Did you mention this to the police?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed, sounding more sozzled now. “It was before he started work at the bank. The gambling, that is. But I didn’t tell the police about it. I only learned of it after the investigation. By then of course they’d questioned Imrie themselves.”

  “So you assumed they already knew his history.”

  “I don’t know what I assumed,” she replied impatiently. “I understood they’d questioned him, that’s all. And Diamond himself had said Imrie didn’t have anything to do with it. So I guess I thought, well, if there was something there, the police would surely have found out about it.”

  There was a long pause; more ice clinked. Finally she came back to the phone. “And by then I felt sorry for him myself. For Bill Imrie, I mean. The story around here was that the police had given him a bad time.”

  “But now?” I asked, trying not to feel excited.

  This might not mean anything. She’d gotten a little tipsy and decided she wanted to talk on the phone, that’s all.

  “Now,” Lydia Duckworth replied sadly, “I guess I just wonder if maybe they should’ve investigated him more.”

  There was a last small tinkle of ice, after which she began apologizing for bothering me. I assured her it was no trouble, thanked her for calling, and was about to hang up.

  At the last minute, though, something stopped me. Maybe it was the thought of her sitting there alone, then calling someone else on impulse the way she’d called me.

  I’d known a few drunk dialers back when I lived in the city; they were always the loneliest kids in town and they never seemed to realize how obvious it was that they were loaded.

  “Lydia,” I said, “put the bottle away and go to bed.”

  I heard her short, surprised intake of breath. “Yes,” she replied in a small voice. “I think I’ll do that. Good night, Jacobia.”

  After she hung up I sat there listening to the dogs snoring peacefully together out in the kitchen. By now it was past three in the morning, so I changed my mind about calling Ellie.

  Instead I cleared up the few tools I had been using, then slid my sock-clad foot over the floorboard I’d nailed down to be sure the nail heads didn’t snag.

  Finally I went back upstairs. In the hall window the sky to the east showed the faintest hint of gray, the roofs of town just a collection of cutout triangles against it.

  I paused at Sam’s doorway, hearing nothing from within, and then outside the partly open door of the guest room where I had put Maggie.

  Nothing from in there, either. Nothing at all.

  Not even breathing. “Maggie?” I whispered.

  No reply. I tiptoed into the guest room. “Maggie?”

  Silence. Moving slowly in the dark, I approached the narrow twin bed. From behind me in the doorway came Sam’s voice, quietly but with some impatience.

  He hadn’t been asleep after all. “Mom? What are you doing?”

  Ignoring him, I snapped the bedside light on. The last thing I needed was him questioning me about my activities. Then . . .

  “Oh, hell,” I said distinctly into the lamp’s sudden glare.

  The bed had been slept in, the pillow dented and the covers rumpled. But Maggie wasn’t there.

  Or anywhere else in the house, either.

  Maggie was gone.

  I went to her place first, thinking maybe she’d just walked home from my house. But she wasn’t there, and neither was her car, an old blue Honda Civic. Alone in the little Fiat I scoured the island looking for Maggie. Her car wasn’t outside the Waco Diner where the pickups of tradesmen and fishermen already clustered, the air scented with bacon and coffee. It wasn’t outside her apartment when I went back a second time, either, or at her mother’s, or anywhere I thought she might go to think.

  And if she was already off-island I had no idea where she might be. But finally as the charcoal sky lightened to pale gray I returned to her place a third time, spotted the car, and found her there, sitting at the end of the deck looking out over the glimmering water.

  “Maggie! You scared the living hell out of—”

  Then I stopped. She wasn’t weeping and she didn’t look as if she had been, recently. She just looked . . . emptied out.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  Gulls cried in the early-morning silence, the first rays of sunlight turning their wings pale pink. I angled my head toward her apartment. “Are you going to be able to sleep?”

  “No.” She shrugged, looked across the water where the Fundy Clipper was beginning its first ferry journey across the channel. “But I didn’t want to be at your place.”

  With Sam. Of course she didn’t. “I’m sorry, Maggie. Last night was my fault. It was a really bad idea bringing you to—”

  “No. You were trying to be nice. I thought I could slip out and not bother you. I should’ve left you a note, though.”

  “Where’d you go? I’ve been looking all over the—”

  “Just driving around,” she replied, gravel crunching beneath our feet as she followed me back to the parking area. Her tone was flat with sorrow, with guilt over the Jim Diamond fiasco, and with misery over Sam, I supposed.

  And maybe if I hadn’t seen so much of my own younger self in Maggie—and so worrisomely much of Victor in Sam—I’d have just left her on her own to deal with it somehow.

  Hey, people do. I had. But suddenly I didn’t see why Maggie should have to. Because standing there by the water with the seagulls crying and the sun hauling itself redly up from behind the hills of New Brunswick, it occurred to me that maybe what doesn’t go around has to come around sometimes, too.

  That maybe the help you didn’t get is the kind you know best how to supply
, and it’s your job to start putting it out there.

  Since obviously, there’s some kind of a shortage. “Come on,” I told Maggie. “You’re coming with me.”

  Starting the Fiat, I lifted myself over the center console into the passenger seat. “Get in,” I said, gesturing her behind the wheel.

  Her face brightening cautiously, she looked at me to make sure I meant it, then snapped her seat belt on and put the little vehicle in gear expertly. “Where to?”

  “Ellie’s.” The sky was full light now and in the distance I could already hear the concussive rap!-rap!-rap! of nail guns.

  Wade and George hoped to finish the roof work today. “I’ve got an idea, and you’re going to help,” I said as the house came into view.

  Wade stood on a scaffolding a couple of shingle-rows down from the roof beam, gripping a clawhammer. With his shirt already off and the hammer raised purposefully, he looked like a handsome weather vane.

  Too bad looking hunky wasn’t getting our guest rooms done. The thought of the relatives arriving very soon shifted ominously in my head, like one of the brain aneurysms Victor was so good at repairing.

  But that situation couldn’t top my agenda now; for one thing, I wasn’t about to go up that ladder to nag Wade about it.

  “Whatever you want, you just tell me and I’ll do it,” Maggie said earnestly as we pulled into the drive.

  That’s the spirit, I thought, gratified. She needed what I always needed when I was in a funk, and couldn’t see my way out of it: something to do.

  And someone to do it with. I felt better, too, since at the time what I meant to propose really seemed like a good idea.

  At the time.

  Chapter 13

  Bob Arnold’s squad car was parked outside the Country Corner restaurant on Route 1 when we all arrived there twenty minutes later. We knew it was Bob’s because the perp screen bore a little cartoon sticker of Yosemite Sam, waving his shootin’ irons.

  Maggie saw the vehicle, too, and looked alarmed. “Don’t worry, I haven’t dragged you out here to be grilled,” I reassured her as Ellie lifted the baby from the car seat and we approached the green wood-frame building.

  Behind the restaurant a tidal salt marsh spread serenely to where the river turned under an old railroad overpass. Beneath that a couple of mallards paddled, circling their nest protectively.

  “Maggie, I haven’t told anyone what you said last night—besides us, only Victor and Wade know about it—and I’m not going to.”

  I hope, I added silently as we passed the restaurant’s big front windows. We’d have to see how this all turned out. But I was sure of one thing: Maggie’s distress over her encounter with Jim Diamond was genuine, and her story about it rang true.

  “I’m glad to see Bob’s car, though,” I added. “I’ve got some questions for him this morning.”

  We took a table in the back room and gave our orders. Then I briefed Maggie on all that had happened so far—Bella’s threatening notes, Diamond’s crimes and punishment, everything but what I wanted Maggie to do.

  I hadn’t brought Ellie up to speed on that part yet, or on Lydia Duckworth’s late-night call, either. But I did so while Maggie went to the ladies’ room to splash water on her face; even at nineteen, a night of weeping and no sleep had taken its toll.

  “Why, that little weasel,” Ellie said indignantly when I was finished. “Just imagine Bill Imrie letting his father pay off his gambling debts. So much for being the golden boy.”

  “Yeah, funny how that works out sometimes, isn’t it?” Back in the city if somebody was a golden boy you counted your fingers right after you shook hands, in case he’d stolen a few.

  “But the thing is, Imrie’s not going to talk to me again, or to you, either,” I said. “He made it clear last time I saw him.”

  Around us in the comfortable little diner the breakfast rush was in full swing, with a trio of waitresses serving booths and tables so fast they appeared to be on roller skates.

  “I don’t get why anyone has to talk to him,” Ellie said as our coffees arrived. “We know now, so what’s the point of asking him about it?”

  Leonora, looking lovely in a polka-dot playsuit and gingham bonnet, seized a teaspoon and waved it happily. “That’s not what we’d ask,” I told her mother.

  The coffee was fresh and I needed it badly. After I’d drunk half a cup I felt brain cells opening for business. “Because the thing is, coincidences happen and maybe this is one of them.”

  I drank the rest of it. “But has it occurred to you that Imrie runs his late father’s custom sawmill, and the place Jim Diamond victimized was among other things a lumber-supply yard?”

  “Pops Imrie could’ve bought wood from Diamond,” Ellie mused.

  “Correct. And even if not, they could’ve known each other. That’s how Diamond could’ve met Bill Imrie, even though Imrie’s saying otherwise.”

  “The police wouldn’t have . . . ?”

  I shrugged. “If they both denied an association and no one else ever saw them together . . .”

  “I guess,” Ellie replied. “But—”

  “And now we find out that Imrie had gambling problems? Maybe he even still had them when he came back here? So maybe he needed money. And it could be that Jim Diamond found out about that somehow.”

  “I’d think it was a lot more coincidental if Bill had a history of writing threatening notes,” Ellie countered. “Plenty of people need money.”

  The waitress poured more coffee. If I’d had a needle I’d have just mainlined the stuff into a vein.

  “Sure, but as far as we know not ones with these other possible Jim Diamond connections. I’m just saying, that’s all.”

  “So it’s back to the idea that the notes might have been a way to frame Bella, set up a motive for her to murder Jim. And if Bill had a way to get those notes into her house, he’d have also had a way to get that skillet out,” Ellie said.

  She frowned. “But then why the final note? After Jim Diamond was dead?”

  “Not quite dead,” I pointed out. “And I don’t know. I do think whoever hit Diamond with that skillet made the same mistake Maggie did, though. They thought he was dead. And I just think Bill deserves another good hard look.”

  “So you want . . .” Leonora banged the spoon on the tray of her high chair.

  “Right. We can’t talk to Imrie. He won’t talk to us. But Maggie could. If she met with him at the bank, she wouldn’t even have to be alone with him,” I said.

  All I wanted was to give Bill a chance to trip himself up. If he didn’t . . .

  Well, if he didn’t, we’d reevaluate the whole situation. But surely it couldn’t hurt anything if Maggie merely chatted with him, with the safety net of some other people around.

  Just then she returned. “What’d I miss?” she wanted to know.

  But Ellie wasn’t quite ready to answer that question. She liked Maggie. She even trusted her with Leonora, which was like saying she trusted the girl with her own beating heart.

  Now, however, Ellie fixed Maggie in her pale green gaze, the intensity of which had been known to make strong men refuse the last piece of pie and offer to wash dishes instead.

  “Put your hand on the baby’s head,” she said.

  Because maybe I was persuaded of Maggie’s innocence in this mess. But Ellie wasn’t like me. When push came to shove, my friend Ellie could be as tough as Maine granite. And now she wanted proof.

  Or the closest thing to it that she could get. “Look me in the eye and swear that every word you said to Jake last night was true, about the way you found Jim Diamond,” she told Maggie.

  If Maggie was surprised she gave no sign. “I swear,” she said at once, smoothing the infant’s silky hair. “I swear on this baby’s head.”

  A moment passed. “All right,” Ellie replied at last. “I’m satisfied.”

  Just then Bob Arnold got up from the counter and strolled to our table. “Morning, ladies. Mind if I pull
up a chair?”

  As he did so, I realized I hadn’t wanted to see the squad car outside after all. Because Bob was smarter than the average bear, and noticing the four of us there, he’d just figured something out.

  He looked at Maggie and then at me and a fact dropped neatly into a slot in his head with an almost audible click. He knew who was driving my car in Lubec that day.

  Time for a distracting maneuver. “Good morning, Bob,” I said hastily. “Just who I wanted to see. Do you know if Bill Imrie got thoroughly looked at, back during the Jim Diamond investigation?”

  I didn’t care anymore if he knew I was interested; suddenly I had the feeling that push was coming to shove real soon, now. And that when it did I’d better know everything I could.

  Bob looked surprised but answered with certainty. “Oh, yeah. They went up one side of Imrie and down the other on that. Credit card records, bank accounts, any way he might’ve gotten a payment on the sly from Diamond. He came back clean.”

  “Great,” I said. “And one other thing—the notes Bella was getting. You’re pretty sure no one else knew about those? Other than your guys, I mean, when they were watching her house.”

  Bella had told Azenath Jones and Dinah Sanborne, at the Gopher Baroque agency. But she’d insisted she hadn’t told anyone else, and Azenath had assured me they’d kept the information to themselves, not wanting the story associated with their business.

  Bob glanced curiously at me, but his reply was equally sure. “No. Told you before, Jake, I ordered ’em, keep their yaps shut.”

  He eyed me evenly. “Didn’t want anyone copycattin’ that little prank, hear about Bella’s threatening notes and decide to start writin’ their own. Pretty soon we’d have an epidemic. ’Cause that’s what it was, seems like. A prank.”

  He was telling me in his quiet way that this was the theory the prosecutors were going on, that Jim hadn’t sent the notes but Bella thought he had, and that was her motive for going to Lubec and braining him with her skillet.