by Sarah Graves
That night in Freeport we ate, showered, and slept, and the next morning we bought a couple of sweatshirts at the outlet store and some toiletries in town. Sam kept glancing warily at me when he thought I didn’t notice. I’d never done anything like this before, and he must have wondered how much worse his mom’s freak-out was going to get.
And what it might mean for him. His home life had been terrible, but at least it had been consistent. I wondered, too. As we drove north once more on steadily narrower Maine roads, I was terrified that instead of saving my son’s life, my impulsive decision might end up being the last straw in the ruining-it department.
But then we reached Eastport, with its quirky old wooden houses perched on steep tree-lined streets angling down to the bay and its harbor crowded with fishing boats. On the water, which was the deep, intense blue of cornflowers, sailboats flew under white sails; bell buoys clanged, and across the waves the long, low Canadian island of Campobello gleamed gold in the slanting rays of late afternoon.
“Wow,” Sam said softly as we stood out on the breakwater that surrounded the boat basin on three sides.
People with fishing rods were there casting lines into the bright water, hauling in fish. “Mom,” Sam asked seriously after watching for a while, “d’you suppose we could buy a fishing pole?”
This request made of his father would’ve resulted in not-very-nice laughter. Victor thought the outdoors was perfect for driving his girlfriends through, toward small hotels where nobody he knew would spot him.
But of course we could buy a fishing pole, and the man at Wadsworth’s Hardware Store on Water Street helped Sam rig it up, too, with a many-hooked mackerel jig. So while my son took his place with the other anglers on the breakwater, I walked up past the ferry dock onto a stony beach.
The damp air smelled of salt water, wood smoke, and chamomile. Crimson rose hips massed on tall hedges gave off the tangy perfume of crushed fruit, while stick-legged shore birds patrolled the waterline searching for snacks.
I sat on a rock, taking it all in and wishing we could stay. But we couldn’t; for one thing, Sam wouldn’t tolerate it. Fishing was fun, but for a city kid like him I thought daily life here would be a drag once the novelty wore off.
Anyway, I couldn’t afford it. The small, well-kept wooden houses on the tree-lined streets looked like heaven, but they probably cost the earth.
Or so I believed. But when I went back to the breakwater to collect Sam and find a place in town to stay for the night—we could look around a little more, anyway, I’d decided, relax and catch our breaths while we figured out where to go next—I found he’d already made a friend.
“Mom, this is Wooley.” The elderly man standing next to him at the edge of the breakwater grinned affably at me, sticking out a work-roughened hand. Ruddy-faced and with a lot of unkempt gray hair poking out from under his Red Sox ball cap, he wore faded denim coveralls over a flannel shirt and sported yellow rubber boots.
“Pleasure,” he uttered, and the next thing I knew he’d poured me a mug of coffee out of his red plaid thermos.
His face, furrowed and grooved by age and the outdoors, was like something you might find carved into an old tree trunk, and his grip had felt as tough as bark. I drank the hot, sweet coffee gratefully while he looked on. Then:
“I hear,” Wooley drawled, angling his head at Sam, “that you two are looking for a place to live, mebbe.”
Hee-yah, the downeast Maine way of pronouncing it. I eyed Sam sternly, but he just bit his lip in silence, staring out at the water.
“And I just happen,” Wooley went on, “to be selling one of those places. For the right price, o’course,” he added judiciously.
“Can we go see it, Mom?” Sam’s face was radiant, suddenly, and right then I’d have put my head into a lion’s mouth to keep it that way. But . . .
Wooley waited expectantly, a grin spreading around the cigar stub clenched in his stained teeth.
“The boy,” he confided finally to me as I hesitated, “might like having a look.”
He lit the cigar again, then went on. “An old sea captain’s house, it is, too big for me now, and I’ve got to go over there, anyway. Why not come along?”
Ovah they-ah. By now Sam was practically hopping with impatient anticipation. “Yeah, why not?” he wanted to know.
Which is how we found the old house on Key Street, not the small, easily kept homestead I’d been envisioning but a vast, many-roomed extravaganza of domestic architecture from the early 1800s: pantries and back stairs and fireplaces, oh my!
While Wooley did whatever it was he’d come to do, I wandered around entranced. The wallpaper was 1940s era, the plumbing likewise. The kitchen was huge, with a tin ceiling, hardwood floor, tall south-facing windows, and beadboard wainscoting; cast-iron hot-water radiators stood sturdily in every room, and there was no sign of rust on any of them.
Sam chose his bedroom, bouncing in the window seats and then running out excitedly to exclaim to me about the view to the harbor. A confirmed landlubber who wouldn’t even swim at the Y back home, here he already had his eye on those fishing boats.
“But Mister . . . Wooley,” I said when we were out on the porch once more. Up and down Key Street, the elderly maple branches forming a shady tunnel over the pavement, people were mowing lawns and washing windows, planting geraniums and touching up paint.
“It’s wonderful,” I went on, “it really is, and Sam loves it. But I’m afraid we can’t afford such a big house.”
Not to mention all the repairs it would need; even I knew that an old house with no one living in it goes downhill fast. Meanwhile, in the fix-it department, I was as useless as a rubber nail. Back in the city, for any job more difficult than changing a lightbulb I’d always just called the building superintendent.
Wooley mentioned a number. “I beg your pardon?” It was less than half what I’d been expecting. “For the down payment, you mean?”
I peered back in through the wooden screen door at the kitchen with the refrigerator and gas stove, which was ancient and equipped with a wood-burning firebox to one side. There was a washer and dryer as well, and a lot of faded rugs, elderly but usable; the floral curtains hanging at the many-paned windows were faded, with their pinch pleats clotted with thick dust, but otherwise in decent shape.
“No,” Wooley said around the cigar stub. “That’s not for the down payment, it’s what I need to get for the whole shootin’ match.”
He eyed me frankly. “No one wants these drafty old places anymore. I just want to unload it.”
“Mom,” Sam said quietly from just inside the screen door. “Mom, maybe we should think about—”
I had the money. Not on me, but back in the city I’d had a job, and savings of my own—mad money, I’d called it only half-jokingly.
But now I thought I might really have gone mad, because crazy as this was, I found myself seriously considering the idea: the huge old house with its many antique windows and tall red-brick chimneys, the big backyard with pink peonies and blue hydrangeas blooming in it, and that sky—a cloudless indigo with a few bright stars coming out.
A distant foghorn hooted. A bike with a bell on it rolled down the street in the gathering dusk: ring!
All this could be yours, said a soft small voice echoing in my head. All this and more—if you’ve got the nerve.
If you’re strong enough. “Mom?” Sam asked tentatively, sounding not at all like the brittle, damaged youngster I’d dragged up here with me, who’d viewed me until only a few hours ago with dismissive contempt.
“Mom, I’m not sure why I think it, but I really, really think you should—”
“All right. We’ll take it,” I heard myself saying, much to my surprise. But I was even more surprised by what Sam did then:
Wordlessly he shoved his way out the screen door past me, sat on the porch steps with his knees drawn up tightly, and dropped his face into his hands, sobbing.
He sounded relieved. L
istening, Wooley nodded, seeming to take in if not the specific facts of the situation then at least the general drift.
“We’ll just let your young man collect himself, shall we?” said Wooley with surprising delicacy, and I followed the burly old fellow back inside the house again, where we shook hands and agreed on how the money details would go.
Then I wondered aloud where we might find a nearby place with a room we could rent for the night. “A motel,” I said, “or maybe they have a vacant cabin at that campgrounds we passed on our way in?”
Outside the kitchen’s tall, bare windows, the long afternoon was finally waning, fireflies already flickering in the shady part of the backyard, under the lilac bushes.
“Stay?” Wooley asked puzzledly. “But why would you need that?”
He aimed the cigar out the screen door to where Sam still sat, no longer slumped but instead gazing around wonderingly; he did not, I realized, want to leave this place, not even temporarily. And it was being sold furnished....
“Lady,” he said, “if there’s one thing you don’t need, it’s any more rooms. Why, you just bought yourself a whole house!”
* * *
Twenty years later as I stood in The Chocolate Moose, I thought of Wooley, now sadly departed like so many of the first friends I’d made here in Eastport. Funny how a stranger with a cigar stub in his kisser could end up being your guardian angel.
But nostalgia wasn’t getting me anywhere, so after dealing with the cookies, the banana bread, the croissants, and the chocolate for the bacon-dipping project, I confronted the job I’d been putting off: cleanup.
The small, ornate cast-iron café tables and chairs, the floor, the glass display case front . . . but especially the floor required thorough attention, still so sticky that the soles of my shoes adhered to it. Now some of the stray napkins were stuck there, too.
All of which meant getting the mop and the mop bucket from the cellar after all, as well as the spray cleaner; if I didn’t, I’d just have to go down there again. And as living in an old house had taught me over the years—yes, we’d stayed all this time, and now it was crammed full of my large, complicated family—you might as well do now what you’ll have to do later and get it over with.
I checked the shop door again to make sure it was locked, turned off the radio so I’d hear if anyone knocked, then went to the kitchen and pulled up the trap door that was set into the floor there.
And at once noticed something odd: the cellar light was on. The bulb, dangling from an orange extension cord, hung from the rafter by the stairs in all its glowing 40-watt glory.
But not that odd, I decided; probably those delivery guys Ellie had mentioned had neglected to turn it off. Its glow didn’t extend far, though, and the dark area of the cellar, where the utility closet was, waited silently for me.
Uncertainly I debated putting off this trip until Ellie arrived; then I’d have moral support, and backup, too, in case of emergency. But I knew if I did that, I would have to postpone the shop cleanup.
And she’d know why, wouldn’t she? Not that she’d chide me about it, but her understanding silence on the matter would be nearly as bad. The matter, I mean, of my being a complete chicken . . . so in the end I said the heck with it, grabbed a flashlight, and started down.
Stabbing the darkness ahead of me with the flashlight, I crossed toward the utility closet. Broom, mop, the metal bucket with the mop wringer in it, I recited to myself, glancing around nervously.
The cellar walls dated from the early nineteenth century when granite, not bricks, was the preferred foundation material. Someone long ago had decided to whitewash the granite blocks, but after many decades the resulting scaly, peeling surface was not an improvement.
Over the stairs, the light bulb swung gently from my brushing against it moments earlier, casting shivery shapes over the cellar’s packed-earth floor. Wrinkling my nose, I paused, sniffing curiously as a faint musty smell hit me, but in an old dirt-floored cellar fifty yards from the water, a smell is nothing unusual, so I thought little of it as I yanked open the closet.
Then I stuck one arm through the bucket’s handle, wrapped my free arm around the broom and mop sticks and drew them tightly toward me, and began making my way back toward the cellar steps. So far, so good, I thought.
Halfway to the stairs, though, I started losing my grip, first on the broomstick and then the mop handle, its rag head already dragging a trail. So I stopped to rearrange them as best I could, and that’s how I saw the blood.
Two dark red gleaming drops of it, gleaming wetly as if newly fallen, lay on the earthen floor.
But . . . an icy shiver went through me . . . fallen from where?
As I stared, another drop joined the first two: plop! Until now, the silence upstairs had been reassuring, but now it no longer seemed even remotely friendly. Nor did a broom and a mop feel anything like sufficient weaponry for my situation.
Whatever that was.... Then I spied the metal door leading out to the alley behind the shop and remembered again Ellie asking me to lock it, hours earlier.
Crossing to it, I found that, sure enough, the door’s heavy metal bolt was still drawn back. After pulling the door open, I peered up and down the damp, mossy brick pathway leading in from the street.
A palisade fence ran along the opposite side of the alley, and above that an awning of heavy corrugated plastic had been hung, to keep the alley from flooding with the buildings’ roof runoff. So the alley was really more like a tunnel, shaded and gloomy.
No one was in it except a cat, placidly washing its face atop a Dumpster; from where I stood I couldn’t see anyone on the street, and they couldn’t see me.
Unhappily, I closed the alley door and locked it, then realized with a rush of relief: those raspberries from the jar that was broken during the cookie-tasting party—the syrup had run all over the floor. And because the floor was old, over the decades the spaces between the floorboards had widened as the building settled.
I let my breath out. That’s all the red stuff was, gleaming in the flashlight’s beam: berry juice.
Silly. Scolding myself for being a ninny, I turned toward the steps with the broom and mop sticks hugged clumsily to my side once again and the bucket handle over my wrist. But when I was almost to the top of the stairs, the mop and broomstick shifted, and when I grabbed clumsily for them, the bucket slid up toward my elbow.
The next thing I knew, the broomstick and mop were wedged crossways in the stairwell with me perched just below them, balanced precariously on the narrow step. The sticks’ ends had gone between the bucket handle and my arm, with my wrist caught between the handle and the sticks.
Which were also stuck, so I couldn’t go up or down. Jammed very firmly, too, as I discovered when I tried dislodging them.
So I was in a pickle. I couldn’t let go of the stair rail, since my toes had only the narrowest of purchases on the step. If I let go of the rail I’d fall backward until I was dangling by my other arm—the trapped one, that is. Then my weight would likely free the broomstick and mop and I’d fall the rest of the way; luckily no one was creeping silently up the stairs behind me—
Oh, of course there isn’t. But at the thought I jerked my head around nervously because it was awfully quiet down there, and the sudden shift in my position loosened the sticks from where they were wedged tightly between the stairwell’s walls.
Sadly I’d also been shifting my grip on the stair rail just as this happened; moments later I was sitting with the sticks crossed over my lap and the bucket on my head at the foot of the stairs.
Which I guessed was one way of solving the difficulty. Removing the bucket and making a mental note never to visit the cellar again, I got to my feet. I groaned a little, and swore a little, too, since a tumble down the stairs was yet another thing that hadn’t been on my day’s to-do list.
After a swift, wincing inventory of my body parts, I determined that nothing was broken but the bucket handle. Still, I was
done for a while, I decided; I’d get all the cleanup supplies and paper goods later, when I’d rested and gotten over this.
So with an ill-tempered swing of the mop in the direction of the utility closet I’d been headed for in the first place, I turned to go back upstairs.
But then the mop head thumped the closet door, and the closet door swung open.
And a body fell out.
It was Henry Hadlyme, still wearing the black turtleneck and red leather jacket I’d seen him in earlier—still with his frizzy yellow hair and blocky chin, too.
Now, though, he had a bright red-and-green stuffed parrot perched on his shoulder, fastened there with safety pins stuck first through the parrot’s stuffed feet and then into Hadlyme’s shirt.
A familiar-looking bird . . . but the important thing, I thought through my shock, was the cutlass in Hadlyme’s chest, shoved in halfway to the weapon’s hilt. So probably the red droplets I’d seen weren’t spilled raspberry juice after all....
“Oh, man,” I heard myself murmuring. Because this was not good, this was not even a little bit....
“Hello?” A voice from upstairs made me jump. Then Bob Arnold, Eastport’s police chief, stuck his head into the stairwell, saw me, and started hurriedly down, frowning in concern.
“Jake! What the—?”
At the bottom he crouched by me where I’d sat down on the floor again without realizing it. Touching my forehead gingerly, he peered at his fingertips and grimaced: red.
“I hit my head,” I managed, trying to rise. “That’s how . . .”
“Sit.” Bob had his phone out. “Stay where you are. I’m calling an ambulance.”
“But Bob, he’s already . . .” Okay, now, I thought. One foot under me. Then the other foot, my hand on the stair rail, and . . .
No problem. Nothing to it at all. Except . . .
