Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  And considering who the fallback suspects could turn out to be, I decided not to argue it.

  Yet. Maggie finished her orange juice and started working on her last slice of toast. Ellie took Leonora to the ladies’ room to change her.

  “So,” Bob said, and I could see him deciding whether or not to bring up Maggie and the car.

  Around him the breakfast rush was starting to slack off. Men in boots and work clothes were downing the last of their coffee and lining up at the register to pay their checks.

  “That take care of your questions for me, for this morning?” Bob said at last.

  I nodded. “That’s it. Thanks, Bob.”

  He wasn’t going to ask. Not immediately. But we both knew he was just giving me enough rope to hang myself, should I feel so inclined. He didn’t like it that I was keeping something from him, and as he departed his backward glance at me said I’d better end up having a good reason for doing so.

  That wasn’t the only thing fueling my unease, though. As I’d sat there with my brain cells popping open under the influence of all that coffee, I’d had the growing sense I was missing something.

  Something important. And now as I waited at the counter to pay the check, whatever it was I still didn’t know felt like an open trapdoor.

  Gaping wide, just waiting for me to put my foot through it.

  Outside the sun had climbed higher in the sky, turning the salt marsh to a mirror of pale blue, each duck neatly doubled and each cattail growing out of its own reflection. Maggie gave the Fiat’s black top a yearning glance, but left it up out of deference to Leonora’s complexion.

  “You still haven’t told me what you want me to do,” she said as the little car’s engine growled to life.

  I looked at Ellie, curled in the rear beside the baby’s car seat. “We want you to visit Bill Imrie,” I said.

  Maggie let the clutch out too fast, nearly stalled, but recovered smoothly and pulled out onto Route 1.

  “Does that idea bother you? You don’t have to, if . . .”

  “No,” she responded quickly, taking the turn to Eastport. “My foot slipped.”

  She looked straight ahead, jaw taut and hands tight on the wheel. “Why do you want me to talk to him?” she asked.

  Ellie spoke up. “He won’t talk to us anymore. Still touchy about his reputation.” Briefly she explained Imrie’s connection to Jim Diamond’s old crime. “That makes him want to avoid a pair of snoops like Jake and me.”

  “Right,” Maggie said. “His reputation.” She seemed privately amused by something. But that could have been my imagination.

  “Okay, then,” she agreed. “What should I talk to him about?”

  She actually sounded eager. Suddenly I wondered what it was that had her so intrigued.

  “The notes, right?” she went on. “You want to know if maybe Imrie sent them?”

  Good pickup; the girl was talented at this. She slowed for the speed zone at Pleasant Point, then accelerated onto the causeway between the bay and Carryingplace Cove.

  An eighteen-wheeler roared by, buffeting us hard. “Right,” I said when my ears quit popping from the burst of air pressure. “Because the thing is, Bella swears she hasn’t told anyone about them.”

  “Bob Arnold says no one from his shop would have been likely to talk about them, either,” Ellie added.

  Officers from Bob’s cop shop disobeyed his instructions at their own peril; besides, it wasn’t the kind of assignment they’d have been interested in gabbing about.

  “Which means that for practical purposes, no one else knew about those notes,” I said. “Except the person who sent them.”

  “So what we’d like you to do is work the conversation around somehow, not mention the notes, but give him a really good chance to bring them up himself, if you can,” Ellie finished.

  “To see if he makes a mistake,” Maggie concluded correctly. “See if he says something about them, when he’s not even supposed to know about them. Sure, I can do that. I’ll go to his place.”

  “Wait a minute,” I objected at once.

  Her tone was reasonable. But her calm act was a fake. I knew from her taut posture, her grip on the wheel, and the way her lips parted that she wasn’t merely willing to go interview Bill Imrie.

  She was dying to do it. Suddenly I wished I hadn’t suggested this idea. “Talking to me, he might forget himself, speak without thinking,” the girl went on.

  “Maggie, I don’t want you going to his place. I want you to talk to him at the bank, during business hours, or maybe at the Blue Moon. But not all alone.”

  She ignored me. “If he doesn’t mention them and I can’t get him to, it won’t prove anything. But if he does . . .”

  She paused, her brow furrowing. “Hey, wait a minute, what if someone else did know? And the someone else told him about them?”

  “Then find out that,” Ellie said before I could come up with anything useful to add.

  I was trying to think fast, but apparently I still had a coffee deficiency. One conclusion was jumping out clearly at me, though. Maggie was eager to meet with Imrie at his house, when it would’ve been perfectly easy for her to see him elsewhere.

  “Listen,” I said, annoyed, “if you can’t do this our way—”

  “What? Then I can’t do it at all? How are you going to stop me, Jake? Tie me up in your basement?”

  She laughed merrily, curls of her dark hair flowing back from her face as she drove my little car fast. If I hadn’t known better I’d have thought it was the old Maggie, mellow and sweet.

  But it wasn’t. Maggie had thought of something, and whatever it was had made her . . .

  Well, not lighthearted, exactly. But way too close to it for my comfort. The Imrie plan fit in with some wish or scheme of her own.

  “Look, I’ll be fine. He won’t connect me with you and Ellie. Why should he? He’s not in my social circle and I’m sure no one he knows ever talks to him about me,” Maggie assured me. This thought made her chuckle again. “And he’ll be way more relaxed at his place, you know he will.”

  Probably true. But I still didn’t like it. “Jake,” she said. “I’m not a little kid anymore. Now do you want this done or not?”

  It was her voice that clinched it, suddenly devoid of humor and all business; she could do it, all right. If only her whole manner weren’t screaming ulterior motive so clearly . . .

  I looked back at Ellie, whose gaze said, You opened this can of worms. You fish with ’em.

  “Fine,” I told Maggie. “Do it your way. But don’t,” I added, “even hint that we sent you.”

  She shot me a sideways look. “Of course I won’t. I’ll tell him it’s for the local history project, get him to talk about his dad’s sawmill and so on.”

  Her eyes returned to the road. “He might really have useful information, too. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself.”

  Damn. This girl had an agenda, all right, and it had nothing to do with the Historical Society. But I knew better than to think I could pry it out of her now.

  “Because if Bella didn’t tell him, and a cop didn’t tell him,” Ellie recited . . .

  Correct. There was another way Bill Imrie could have found out about those notes. It all added together: that maybe he had written them himself.

  I just wished I knew why Maggie had apparently done the same arithmetic and come up with something else.

  For the rest of the morning I had the kind of jitters you are only supposed to get before your wedding, or major surgery. I’d been so certain Maggie’s assignment to interview Bill Imrie posed no risk to her.

  That is, I had until she’d changed it. Half a dozen times I picked up the phone to call her and cancel, then put it down again.

  Because I’d warned her. I’d told her to make him aware that other people—although of course not me or Ellie—knew she was there. I’d told her not to let him get between her and the door, and not to eat or drink anything, assuming he i
nvited her inside. And to be sure she could reach me in an emergency I’d even lent her my cell phone, with my number programmed into it.

  Not that any of it would be necessary. She was just checking out a coincidence—

  —Imrie’s gambling history, and thus his possible ongoing need for money, combined with the fact that Jim Diamond could’ve known Imrie or his father, on account of that custom sawmill—

  —and she would call me, I told myself firmly, when she had something to say.

  Meanwhile I went on reminding myself of all the reasons why the coincidence—I didn’t know that Bill Imrie had needed money and so might have been a silent partner in Diamond’s scam, nor was I sure that Diamond and Imrie had been acquainted—was probably meaningless.

  But the argument in my head kept going the other way. “If Imrie was the bag man for the money Diamond stole, then when Diamond got out of jail and wanted his share, it would give Imrie a reason to kill him,” I explained to my father.

  “But for framing Bella to make sense, he’d have also needed to know the domestic history, that the notes would be perceived as part of a pattern of harassment,” I added, pouring coffee.

  I sat at the kitchen table. “Jim demanding money and so on,” I went on. “Not to mention all the rest of it—that Bella had the skillet, and a key to Jim’s apartment. He’d have had to get hold of the skillet, too, and kill Jim at a time when he knew Bella didn’t have an alibi—”

  My dad washed his hands at the kitchen sink. He’d been down in the cellar trying to make the washing machine hose straighten out, so he could stretch it across the ceiling instead of along the wall where it froze up promptly every December.

  “And,” I went on, pushing a plate of doughnuts across the table at him as he sat down, “he’d have had to get into her house to deliver the notes without being discovered.”

  “Which,” my father pointed out, picking up a doughnut and examining it, “someone did. Neatly avoiding the trap you’d laid.”

  “Yes,” I concurred unhappily. “Someone did, to leave that final note. Someone did all those things, and it could have been Imrie. Unless this is a fool’s game and Bella really did kill Jim.”

  “You think so?” He bit into the doughnut.

  “I don’t know anymore,” I answered miserably. “She’s lying about other things. About seeing Lydia Duckworth, anyway, though I can’t imagine why.”

  Maggie had said she was going to get right on the job, but the phone wasn’t ringing. “What do you think?” I demanded miserably.

  My father chewed his doughnut, drank some coffee. “I think,” he pronounced slowly, “that if I was about five feet tall, and I wanted to kill someone about six foot two who I knew pretty well, then I don’t think my first plan would be bonkin’ ’em on the head with my own skillet.”

  He ate some more of the doughnut. “Or,” he added after a reflective pause, “any other over-the-head-type weapon, either.”

  The simplicity of it took my breath away; the over part.

  “Too tall,” I exclaimed, remembering how Diamond had towered over me. “He was too tall for her to have hit him that way easily, and she would have realized that ahead of time for the simple reason that she’d been married to him.”

  My father nodded. “So why not do it some other way, right? Not sayin’ it couldn’t happen, o’ course. There was an overturned chair, remember? In the apartment when we found him that day.”

  Right, there had been, and Diamond’s killer could have stood on it. But would he stand there cooperatively and let you hit him?

  I didn’t think so. “Versus someone who didn’t know him well enough to picture him clearly, or was taller,” my father added.

  Rats. Bill Imrie was about six feet tall, and that telephone still wasn’t ringing. As I pondered this, Sam came in and saw me, then went on into the dining room, demonstratively silent.

  Great. Another difficulty for an already complicated day: My son wasn’t speaking to me. And as if I didn’t have plenty on my plate already, the whole family reunion thing was still hanging over my head like an unexploded water balloon.

  “Good doughnut,” my father commented.

  “Dad—” I began as he got to his feet.

  It was bad enough that there was still no progress on the disastrous guest rooms. Worse was the fact that when the guests did get here, I had a feeling my father might take one look at them and head for the hills.

  “Yes?” he inquired mildly.

  I thought about asking him to turn his attention to building a doghouse out in the backyard. A nice roomy one, since if this all kept on the way that it was currently going, I’d be living in it soon.

  Even more than I was already. Sam’s silence hung in the dining room like a big, black cloud, the kind that threatens to go on raining on you for weeks, possibly even months.

  But my throat closed as if one of those doughnuts had gotten stuck halfway down it. Because even though in the old days I’d faced titans of industry so aggressive they should’ve been quarantined for rabies, the truth was that I was terrified of my father’s reaction to the upcoming family gathering.

  And his reaction to me, too, for allowing it to happen. And now that I’d let all this time go by without telling him . . .

  “Nothing,” I mumbled at last. “Nothing important. If you need help with that washing machine hose, just let me know.”

  He nodded, heading back to the cellar while I, screwing up what little I did have of courage, headed for a talk with my son.

  “How’re things with the ice ship?” I began lightly. What I needed, actually, was an icebreaker. But for starters maybe we could have a conversation, just to raise the temperature a little.

  “I’m kind of busy here,” he replied flatly.

  Oh-kay. Let’s try this again. “Look, I realize you’re pretty angry with me,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Eyes on his notebook. He was ticked that I’d brought Maggie home the night before, and no doubt he blamed me for the fight between her and Kris, too.

  Right, like it was my fault Kris was a witchy little—

  No, start again. “But you know, that’s not really fair,” I said reasonably. “I don’t insist that you enjoy all my friends.”

  No reply. It was like pounding on the door of a steel vault. “I don’t see,” I went on, “why we can’t just agree to disagree.”

  He looked up. “Because I don’t criticize your friends, for one thing,” he said, closing the notebook decisively. “And what was the idea having Maggie here, anyway? She’s not my girlfriend anymore, Mom. Were you trying to embarrass everyone?”

  “Sam, Maggie’s a family friend. And she needed our help. Don’t you think—?”

  “A family friend?” He looked incredulous. “Mom, what’re you talking about? The only reason Maggie was ever around here was because of me.” His gaze bored into me. “That was it, Mom. Don’t you get it? Not you, not our family. Me. End of subject.”

  And with those few words, everything changed again. Doubt assailed me. Because maybe what he said was true.

  Maybe Maggie had only been tolerating me all along; maybe she still was. That could be why she’d seemed so eager to interview Bill Imrie; not to be helpful, but because she’d figured out some way to use her helpfulness in her battle to recapture Sam.

  By, for instance, staying on good terms with me. Suddenly it seemed more than possible; it seemed likely.

  “Mom,” Sam began, seeing that he’d wounded me more than he’d intended.

  I just looked at him. He wasn’t going to give Kris up. I saw clearly, now, that Ellie and my father had been right. With his eyes wide open, my son was making a mistake and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Simple as that. Then I made one; a mistake, that is. “Forget it,” I told him. “I’m just worried about your health, is all.”

  His face clouded abruptly. “No, you’re not. That’s just an underhanded way of saying you think I’m going to drink.”
/>
  Oh, brother. “Sam, I . . .”

  He shoved his chair back, grabbed his books. “If you didn’t, Kris wouldn’t be a problem. But you don’t trust me.”

  And then what could I say? That my strongest sense of Kris was that she’d love to see him stumble again, even harder than before, just to prove she could make him do it?

  But he didn’t give me a chance. “Maybe she is a little rough around the edges. Not like Maggie, always sweet as pie.” He put a bitter twist on the words.

  “But I’ll tell you what Kris doesn’t do,” he went on. “She doesn’t say one thing to me if what she really means is something worse, the way you just did.”

  “Sam, I didn’t mean to imply . . .” But of course I had, and he knew it as well as I did. So I said nothing more.

  He did all the talking. “She doesn’t look me in the face and lie,” he said slowly, as if explaining this to someone whose IQ didn’t quite reach the cubic zirconia level. “Kris may have her faults, but there’s one thing I always can count on.”

  He paused in the doorway, about to turn his back on me. But first he fixed me in the pitiless gaze of a young man who—for the moment, anyway—has the upper hand and intends to shake it.

  “Kris always tells me,” he declared, “the truth.”

  Yeah, I thought, like that’s a major selling point. Victor used to do it all the time, and I had the scars to prove it.

  Besides, I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t get to say so because the next thing I heard was the back door slamming.

  So there I was with nonfunctioning guest rooms, imminent guests, an angry son, and a father who might at any minute become long-lost again, once he got a look at those guests and found out who had invited them.

  Not to mention a housekeeper who was threatening to become a homewrecker; while I was talking to Sam, Bella had come in and—contrary to my precise instructions—launched into a cleaning project without so much as a by-your-leave from me.

  She was in the kitchen, and by the sound of it the inside of my refrigerator would never be the same. I imagined Sam’s half-finished fruit juice bottles, Wade’s cherished hoard of leftover pizza slices, and my box of ancient but still delicious chocolate-covered cherries, all swept into the garbage with the liquefying cucumber, the leathery cheese.