by Sarah Graves
Beside me, someone let out a low whistle. It was Bob Arnold, his round, pink face looking grim. “Wow, that’s some boat,” he commented.
“Yeah. Whose is it, do you know?”
He shrugged. “Maybe another pirate wannabe?” His tone said he was not a fan of the celebration at the moment, and since he’d been policing it for the past twenty-four hours, I could understand this.
“Not my problem till they’re on land, though,” he went on, his eyes still on the dark vessel. “Until then they belong to the Coast Guard and maybe the border patrol.” If they’d come over from Canada, he meant. “You heard from the state cops yet?”
I shook my head, still watching the boat. Never mind Canada; with its dark sails and pitch-black cabin windows, the newly arrived vessel looked as if its home territory was the river Styx.
“Yeah, me neither,” he replied, glancing at me. “They might be in town by now, but I suppose it’s too much trouble for them to let me in on their plans.”
It was a common complaint of his. “Jake, I hope you and Ellie aren’t sticking your noses into what happened to Hadlyme.”
“Who, us?” I attempted to look innocent, and you can probably imagine how well that went. “Now, Bob, you know I’m just—”
He grimaced, shaking his head. “Oh, sure I do. I know you both way too well, actually. Have you forgotten what happened last time?”
I hadn’t forgotten. It had involved a poisoned milkshake from the Moose, and without going into too much detail, let’s just say it had also involved a drowning, an unpleasant amount of bleeding, and some seriously scary near-death experiences.
Too near, and several of them had been my own. “Bob, I promise you, I just came down to check the shop one last time this evening.”
Which was not strictly true, but it made sense, as I saw when at that moment a crowd of young men dressed like eighteenth-century deckhands—blouses, pantaloons, laced leather jerkins—poured out of the Waco Diner, singing loudly if not very harmoniously about drunken sailors and what to do with them.
Then from the other direction came an equally rowdy posse of laughing young ladies in low-cut blouses, high-heeled boots, and long black skirts with red petticoats peeping from beneath their hems.
Nobody looked worrisome, just happy and sozzled. The revelers met and greeted one another, clearly pleased to be finding themselves in opposite-gender company.
“Seems like some mingling is about to occur,” I remarked, and Bob shot me a look.
“But they don’t look exactly sober, do they?”
Yeah, no, they didn’t. Not enough to get behind the wheel, anyway, and they were headed for their cars, which to Bob was the equivalent of lighting a book of matches while you’re carrying a bunch of dynamite. He despised buzzed driving.
Me too, actually. “Good luck,” I told him.
Then I quickstepped the rest of the way down Water Street to The Chocolate Moose. But when I got there I hurried past, since to my unhappy surprise the lights were on inside and some guys with plastic ID badges on lanyards around their necks were moving around in there in a very well-organized-looking way.
And a white van with state police plates was parked outside, too; so Bob had been right. They were evidence technicians, probably. The landlord must’ve let them in; Ellie and I were in talks to buy the building, but the deal hadn’t gone through yet.
Yikes. I strode on toward the post office building, all the while expecting to feel a hand dropping onto my shoulder. They were going to catch up with me sooner or later, after all, and when they did they might even have a warrant ready.
On the other hand, they must’ve arrived fairly recently, or Bob would’ve seen them and mentioned it to me. That meant they’d probably be working for a while, and that meant they probably wouldn’t show up where I’d actually been headed all along.
Crossing the street by the post office building, I passed the hot dog stand, the Port Authority building, and the red-roofed Coast Guard headquarters. Two blocks later, uphill past the lobster pound, I reached the Oyster House, a bar and restaurant spread out along a little inlet at the water’s edge.
The parking lot was crowded with cars, of course; the pirate festival tide floated every business in town. Inside, I slipped between crowded tables and made a beeline for the bar.
“Hey, Weasel.” I slid up next to the guy on the end barstool.
He looked like he’d been there a while. “I was hoping I’d find you here.”
Another fib: I’d known. In his thirties, Weasel Bodine was small and long-snouted with two fanglike yellow front teeth protruding from between liver-colored lips. He wore a faded black KISS T-shirt, denim jacket, and dungarees, and this was his usual haunt.
“What’s shakin’?” he asked with a grin, and I relaxed inwardly. Weasel was in a good mood.
“I heard you had trouble,” he said, only slurring a little bit. Generally Weasel seemed sober right up until the moment when he fell down. “Guy got himself killed in the cellar of your place, I heard.”
I signaled the bartender for another beer. But none for me; I’d had one at home already, enough anyway to wash the caterpillar taste out of my mouth, and with my head still aching after the fall I’d taken earlier, I needed to keep my wits about me.
Such as they were. “Saw the guy,” Weasel said, reaching without looking to catch the bottle sliding toward him.
“You did?” This didn’t surprise me as much as it might have; Eastport was a small place, and Weasel Bodine knew everyone, heard everything, and showed up wherever anything was happening in it.
He’d talk to anyone who asked him about it, too, if the beers kept coming. Now he tipped the bottle back, his skinny throat moving rhythmically as he swallowed.
“He went around back of your place,” Weasel went on after putting down the beer. “Not long after you two were yelling at each other.”
Into the narrow canopied alley behind our building, he meant, where our exterior cellar doors was.
“Really? And you followed him?” Oh, tell me that you did.
“Ayuh,” he said. “Partway. It was like somebody was beck-onin’ him from in there. And the guy kept glancin’ over his shoulder.”
Another long swallow. “Sneaky-like,” Weasel went on after wiping his lips with the back of his hand, “like he didn’t want anyone to know what he was doin’.”
He set the empty bottle down and dragged his hand over his mouth once more. “So naturally I did want to know. You know?”
Yeah, I did. Weasel and I were very different in a lot of ways, but we shared one affliction. Around us the general hilarity cranked up a notch. I raised my voice in the din.
“So then what happened?” The bartender raised his eyebrows at Weasel’s empty bottle; I shook my head.
Weasel shrugged. “Dunno. He didn’t come back out of the alley, I know that much.”
A laugh escaped me. Trust Weasel to put his skinny nicotine-stained finger on it. “No, he sure didn’t.”
Weasel managed a smile, too, though by now he was pretty loaded. That last beer was one of a long line of them this evening, I gathered.
“I stood there a while ’cause the race was still going on and I didn’t wanna get run over by them little monsters on wheels.”
Right, the soapbox derby. “And nobody else came out?”
Because that was the problem, or one of them. I’d come in from the street and was working upstairs, so nobody could escape that way. And if whoever it was hadn’t gone out the cellar door, either . . .
But here his helpfulness ended. “Dunno. Not for a couple of minutes, anyway, but after that I got out of there,” he said.
Catching the bartender’s eye I laid a five next to Weasel’s empties. Leaving the bar, I slid between folks dressed in everything from jeans and T-shirts like Weasel’s to elaborate pirate apparel, all laughing and dancing; it was a happy bunch around here tonight.
Well, except for one guy who was coming acros
s the parking lot toward me when I got outside. Tall and skinny in a gray fleece vest, black turtleneck, dark pants, and sneakers.
It was Lionel, the snake-owning snapshot-stealing member of Hadlyme’s podcast crew. He got a look at me, turned on his sneakered heel, and scampered back up to the top of the Oyster House’s steeply sloping driveway.
When I got there, he was running away down the street.
* * *
Luckily for me, the sneakers had red LED lights in their heels. Every step he took signaled, Here I am!
So I followed him easily as he hustled back downtown. I sauntered casually behind him as if wringing his neck was the furthest, etcetera.
At the breakwater he slowed, sliding in among a crowd gathered to watch something happening in the harbor. I slowed, too, still keeping track of the red shoe-flashes moving steadily away from me, out onto the dock.
Past Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand, the boat ramp, and the Coast Guard building, the flashes slowed and stopped. Then Ellie was beside me suddenly.
“Him,” she uttered, her eyes narrowing as they followed my gaze.
“I thought you were hanging out with Lee tonight?” I said. At eleven, Ellie’s daughter wasn’t quite old enough to stay home alone.
Ellie shook her head. “George wanted the evening with her.”
A devoted father, Ellie’s husband treasured what he called his “dad time.” Ellie eased forward into the crowds of people all still staring toward the water.
“What’re they looking at, anyway?”
I shrugged, squinting around. Somehow Lionel had vanished again. Ellie grabbed my arm. “This way.”
No LED flashes . . . maybe he’d taken the shoes off. “Hurry,” Ellie said, but I couldn’t, distracted by what I now saw happening.
“Look,” I breathed. It was the black sailboat, coming around in the harbor. By the dock lights’ glow, the gold lettering on her stern was visible:
Jenny, it read. “The schooner’s named Jenny,” I said stupidly, unable to stop looking.
“She’ll be a fast one, then,” said a man’s voice nearby. “Lookit the foredeck on her, jabbin’ out like an arrow.”
“Long and low,” somebody else agreed. “All rebuilt, though. You wanta bet somebody’s remodeled that whole cabin area?”
“Betcha she’s smooth underneath,” another fellow commented. “They slide like silk, them new low-friction marine surfaces.”
And more such talk, all of which went a good deal deeper into twenty-first-century boat design than I felt like getting, now or ever. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off the vessel.
“You know, though,” a third voice chimed in, “it was more’n a cabin remodel, you ask me. Got a whole new topside structure on ’er, that cabin stickin’ up an’ so on.”
It was true; what I could see of the Jenny didn’t look quite standard even to my inexpert eye. Like someone took a sailing vessel and turned it into more of a—
“Diesel engine’s on ’er, see the exhaust ports? An’ those other apertures down there on the stern, they look like . . .”
But I couldn’t see them, and the voice faded as its owner walked away along the breakwater. “Whose d’you think she is, then?” someone nearby wondered aloud, but no one seemed to know.
And somehow that seemed right: black as night, without a single light on deck or in any portholes . . . the mysterious Jenny seemed like a boat that was meant to be sailed—or motored, according to the guy who’d been talking about it—by persons unknown.
In the moonlight. Or in the dark.... A shiver went through me. The Jenny just didn’t seem right somehow.
“Jake, let’s go.” Ellie’s voice came from beside me.
“What?” I said, more sharply than I’d intended, tearing my gaze from the dark unknown vessel; boy, that thing gave me the creeps.
“Jake, he’s right over there. . . .”
Sure enough, our fleece-vested skinny-legged quarry stood five feet away, staring at the Jenny like everyone else.
He hadn’t noticed us. “All right, dammit,” I began irritably.
“Wait!” Ellie caught my sleeve. “Maybe we should follow him some more and see where he goes.”
The notion had its charms; we already knew he had reason to run from us, or thought he did. So why wouldn’t he lie to us, too, if we demanded answers out of him? But if we tailed him, we might learn things he’d never say.
“What’re those holes down below the rail on the stern?” someone in the crowd said again. “Are those . . . I mean could they be gun ports? Because they sure do look like . . .”
Oh, of course they weren’t, I answered silently. Because what in the world would a privately owned vessel here in Eastport, Maine, be doing with—
I didn’t finish the thought, though, because just then Lionel glanced around and spotted me again, and I saw him preparing to beat feet, as my son Sam would’ve put it.
Oh, no, you don’t. . . . He’d already turned away, so he didn’t see me coming when I hurled myself at him.
“Oof,” he said as we hit the pavement together. But he didn’t struggle; I had my right knee jammed too hard into the small of his back and his left arm bent up too far behind him.
“Lionel,” I said quietly, “I’m going to let you up in a minute.”
He wiggled unhappily in reply. “But,” I went on, “if you try to run, or you yell and make a fuss, or you do one single thing other than exactly what I say, when I say it—well, if that happens, I’m going to do something very unpleasant to you in return. Got it?”
What the unpleasant thing might be I didn’t know. It was just the only threat I could think of on short notice to make him obey me, which for a wonder he did as Ellie and I marched him between us back up Water Street toward the Moose.
“I’m calling the cops,” he kept saying. “You can’t just—”
“Oh, shut up, Lionel,” I told him tiredly. I could have been nicer about it, I suppose, but what with an impromptu boat rescue in the morning, a murder in the afternoon, and snooping at night—
Hey, it had been a long day.
“That’s right,” Ellie put in exasperatedly. “Just keep quiet.” Between us, poor Lionel’s feet barely touched the ground.
“I mean what’re you going to tell cops, anyway, Lionel, that Henry Hadlyme meant to fire you and get you blackballed from other jobs but instead somebody killed him before he could?” she asked.
He sagged in our grip. “So,” he said sulkily, “I was right. There was somebody out there by the cottages earlier. You—”
We reached the shop. The white state-cop van was gone and the lights were out, so I guessed the evidence techs had departed for now, anyway, and no yellow tape barred the door. I let us in while Ellie kept hold of Lionel.
“Sit,” she snapped at him, giving him a gentle shove. By now he was so unnerved that he didn’t even protest, merely stumbling a few steps to one of the small tables and collapsing into a chair.
Outside, the pirate fest went on: bagpipes, a flute-and-fiddle duo, clog dancers. A string of firecrackers exploded pop!pop!pop! and Lionel winced as Ellie returned from the kitchen.
“Here, you look like your blood sugar needs boosting,” she said, setting hot coffee and a chocolate frosted doughnut in front of him.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered, eyeing the doughnut hungrily but with caution.
I grabbed it and took a bite, then handed the rest back to him. “See? Not poisoned.”
Ellie stood in front of him, hands on hips. “Eat. Drink,” she commanded. “Go on, do it.”
Slowly he complied, picking up speed as the deliciousness of the doughnut hit him; also, as a mood elevator there is nothing like a solid dose of chocolate plus plenty of butter, sugar, flour, and vanilla.
And in the case of the doughnuts, some nutmeg and cream of tartar as well, but never mind; after his snack he looked noticeably fresher.
Feistier, too; he actually started to get up. Or anyway, he did unt
il Ellie stuck a finger in his chest.
“Sit,” she said, and Lionel sat once more, his fingers twiddling nervously with the zipper on his vest.
“Talk,” she said, and when he hesitated, she went on.
“Lionel, would you like to see the cellar where Henry died?” she inquired conversationally.
His recently improved color paled again suddenly. “N-no, I—”
“Of course, once you’re down there, you can’t get out again,” she added, still mildly. “Not unless we let you out.”
“I think we could get him down there, though, Ellie, don’t you?” I said, catching her drift. “The two of us could, I mean. Whether or not he wants to go.”
“All right!” He jumped up. “I give in. I don’t understand why you two think I’m the one to pick on, but whatever you think you know about me, you’re wrong.”
We hadn’t known anything, really. He was just the one who’d showed up tonight, acting as if he might have something to hide. And boy, did he ever:
“Yeah, I hated him,” Lionel blurted. “Hadlyme, I mean, I hated his guts. But he was my father, all right?”
I could just hear Wade remarking on this: Kid went down like a ton of bricks.
“Henry Hadlyme was my dad, only he didn’t know it,” Lionel went on. Skinny fists clenched, he gazed bleakly around our little shop. “I was going to tell him. I meant to, I wanted to tell him. But he . . . he was so . . .”
“Yeah, he sure was,” I agreed, and Lionel glanced up at me in surprise, as if other people might’ve liked Hadlyme.
“Oh, give me a break,” I said. “The guy practically had a poisonous cloud hovering around him, he was such a jerk.”
Lionel sank back down into the chair at the café table. “Yeah. Yeah, he definitely was.”
I sat across from him. Maybe we were getting somewhere. “Okay, let’s cut to the chase,” I said. “To start with, where were you earlier this afternoon?”
He knew what I meant. “I split from the others and walked out onto the breakwater alone,” he said. “I was thinking that maybe I’d just quit, go back to New York before Henry had a chance to fire me.”
