“Well, you found him.”
Behind Wendell’s lanky frame, she could see that the classic Maine barn had been converted into a workshop. A boat occupied the main floor, and the space that had once been stalls was now lined with workbenches and various tools. “I was down at Gaites’ boatyard because I need some work on my boat, and he sent me to see you.”
“Pearly Gaites sent you here?”
“I guess so. He had grey hair and a Red Sox cap.”
“That’s him.”
He stared at her through sawdust-coated glasses for an uncomfortably long time. Sarah guessed he was in his mid-fifties. She tried to nudge the conversation along. “There are a couple of broken ribs, I mean frames, and he thought you might be able to tell me how to fix them.”
Oliver glanced at the Herreshoff. “That’s serious work.” He walked over to get a closer look. “She’s one of the newer boats. Must have been built in the late thirties, after they switched over to mahogany trim.”
“I was going to fix it myself, but I need someone to tell me what to do.”
“Unh, huh,” he muttered.
“I’ve done some work on it already, the paint and a new shear plank.”
Like Pearly yesterday, Oliver had climbed onto the trailer’s fender and was leaning over the rail, trying to get an inside look at the broken frames. “Which side?” he inquired.
“The one your leaning on.”
Once again, like Pearly, Oliver did a satisfying double-take and ran his fingers over the varnished mahogany.
“I used a plane and a chisel. And lots of sandpaper,” she said, feeling a sense of déjà vu.
“Nice job,” he said.
“What about the frames?”
“I can see two that are broken,” he said, craning his neck over the rail, “but there might be more.”
“Why would they break like that?”
“Well, they’re only about an inch square, and that’s a pretty sharp bend at the turn of the bilge where they broke. This was cutting-edge yacht design a hundred years ago, and Herreshoff pushed the limits to make the boat as light as possible,” he replied. “She may have hit something hard enough to crack the frames years ago, and they finally got dry and brittle enough to let go.”
“The boat has been sitting in a barn for years.”
“That doesn’t help,” he commented, getting down from the fender.
“How do I fix the frames?”
“Pearly didn’t explain that?”
“No. Mostly he just wanted to get rid of me.”
“Mmm.” Oliver studied the planking.
The dog sniffed the right leg of her jeans. She hoped he wasn’t about to mistake her leg for a fire plug. “What does ‘mmm’ mean?”
“Pearly has a lot on his plate right now.” He turned to Sarah and said briskly, “Okay, here’s what you do: First, you take off part of the deck, and some of the planks, so you can get at the broken frames to sister in new ones. Next, you cut new frames out of oak, steam them, and fit them in. Then you put it all back together. The devil is in the details, but that’s the general idea.”
“What do you mean by ‘steam?’”
Oliver gave her pained look. “You put the frames in a steam box. Pearly has a long box made out of four boards, and he feeds steam from an old boiler into one end and has a lid on the other end. When they’ve been in there the right length of time—not too long and not too short—they’ll be nice and limber so you can bend them.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
He gave Sarah a look of despair. “It may not sound bad, but you’re talking about a seventy year old boat. There’s no telling what you may find: rot, corrosion, more broken frames. Every screw in the hull may have to be replaced. Herreshoff built these to last twenty-five or thirty years, not seventy. You could have more of a hobby project here than a boat.”
Sarah turned away, brushed at her eyes irritably. “All I want to do is sail it this summer.”
Oliver shifted his feet, clearly anxious to be somewhere else.
“There may be another way,” he said. “If the rest of the fastenings are all right. And that’s a big if.”
“What?”
“You could laminate new frames out of thin strips that bend easily and glue the strips together with epoxy right in the boat. You wouldn’t have to take anywhere near as much apart.”
“Can you show me how to do that?”
“I’ve got a boat to finish.”
“Just tell me what to do. You won’t even know I’m here.”
“Here? You’re thinking of working here?”
“That would be easier, wouldn’t it?”
“For you maybe,” Oliver muttered. He looked at her suspiciously. “Do you have tools?”
“Of, course,” she replied airily.
“Well . . .” Oliver gazed at Sarah’s new shear plank and rubbed the back of his neck. “Pearly sent you? I’ll have to charge if it takes too much of my time.”
“That’s fine. Where do I start?”
“Take off the seat on that side so you can get at the frames.” He nodded to a spot beside the barn door. “You can park the boat over there.”
“How do I get the seat out?”
“How did you take the old shear plank off?”
“A hammer and a big screw driver.”
He looked at her, horrified. “Jesus. We can do better than that. Come on.”
He strode towards the barn and Sarah followed, the dog trotting at her side and bumping into her leg with unwarranted familiarity. She began to wonder what she had gotten into.
Chapter 5
It was almost lunch time, and Oliver was leaning over the rail of a slender rowing boat, applying sandpaper to the inside of the boat’s narrow stern when his uninvited guest appeared with a collection of boards in her arms. They seemed to be in one piece.
When he first looked at Owl, Oliver had run his hand along the new shear plank, his fingers finding only a few tiny imperfections in the shaping of the wood, nothing obvious to the eye. It was a very impressive piece of workmanship.
She had needed some help at first, but she was good with her hands, and more important, seemed to have a natural gift with tools. Once underway, he hardly knew she was there. All in all, not as bad as he’d feared.
“Looks like you got the seat off in good shape,” he said.
She came to a stop with her burden. “Can I put this in here somewhere out of the way?”
“It’ll be safe in the corner over there.”
“Thanks.” She put the boards down and turned to admire the rowing boat. “It’s beautiful.”
“Mostly, it’s late.”
She ran her fingers tentatively over the hull. “I know I’m being a pest, and I’d like to make up for it somehow. I’m pretty good with sandpaper.” She looked around. “Or I could sweep the floor, maybe tidy things up . . .”
The scent of her perfume mingled with the aroma of cedar and paint that filled the shop. Oliver preferred to work alone and her presence made him uncomfortable in a variety of ways, not the least of which was the fact that she stirred up memories and emotions he had locked away when his wife was killed.
On the other hand, maybe he was getting too set in his ways, and she seemed willing and able to help.
“Well, the inside of the hull needs to be sanded up in the bow,” he said. “You can see where I couldn’t reach with the power sander.”
They worked for a while in silence, Sarah at the bow, Oliver at the stern. Wes lay in the sun by the doorway and watched these strange goings-on closely.
“You don’t seem like a typical Massachusetts tourist,” Oliver commented. “What brought you up here?”
“I spent summers at Camp Migawoc when I was a kid.” She looked up. “Are you from Maine?”
“I grew up in Massachusetts. A little town called Wissonet on Buzzard’s Bay.”
“And your father is John Wendell, the yacht designer.”<
br />
“Yes.”
“I gather he must be well known,” she added.
“One of the last of the big-name designers of the fifties and sixties.” He glanced at her and changed the subject. “What brings you back after all these years?”
“I had the summer free and the Merlews invited me up. Did you design this boat? I like the shape; it reminds me of Owl, my sailboat. They both have such graceful, almost delicate, lines.”
Oliver studied her face for a moment, a newfound respect in his eyes. He nodded. “Yes. Graceful and delicate, like works of art. The old timers like Herreshoff were artists as much as designers. They believed that beauty and function were the two ultimate goals.” He shrugged. “I didn’t design it, though. This is a Whitehall rowing boat. They were developed on the New York waterfront in the early 1800's. Some were quite big, but a Whitehall this size might have been used as a water taxi.”
“A water taxi?”
“In the old days, you’d hire one if you needed to go someplace along the waterfront, or get out to a ship. They’re still popular because they row easily and go well in choppy water.”
“I suppose the streets weren’t always safe in those days,” she said, thinking about her experience with the red pickup. Of course that was just an accident.
“The waterfront could be tough in those days,” he agreed.
Silence fell again, and she noticed him glancing in her direction every once in a while, presumably checking on her work.
Finally, he asked, “Where did you get the Herreshoff?”
“It belonged to Myra Huggard. She left it to me in her will.”
Oliver stared at her with awe. “Myra gave you a boat? You must be somebody special. She wasn’t what I would call generous. And to give you a boat—”
“I sailed Owl in camp, and taught sailing there too. I suppose she was putting her affairs in order and thought I’d like to have it.”
Oliver nodded. “Myra probably didn’t know it, but Herreshoff 12's have gotten pretty valuable. One in good shape can be worth twenty grand or more today. It’s too bad. She could have used the cash. Of course, the boat could be pretty much worthless, if it’s in bad shape.”
Sarah stared across the room, her thoughts far away. “The girls at camp used to sing a kind of nursery rhyme whenever they walked past Myra’s driveway. You know, ‘Old Mother Huggard went to the cupboard to fetch—’” Sarah caught herself. “Most of it was obscene, but you get the idea. We did it to be mean. I feel guilty now.”
“You were just kids, and she wasn’t exactly a friendly person.” Oliver returned to the sandpaper. “We’d better look the boat over before you put in too much work. Fixing one can turn into a lifetime job.”
“You mean like checking the fastenings?”
“Yes. And rot. The transom tends to rot out on those.”
“Can I ask you a question?” She said.
He shrugged.
“Why does everybody around here look at me like I’m from another planet?”
“Everybody? Like who?”
“Like you, for starters. And Pearly Gaites. And the Merlews. And some nutcase on a bicycle.”
“It’s just that you look a lot like someone who disappeared recently. At least from a distance. She’s a lot younger, though, in her twenties.”
“You mean Cathy Leduc?”
“You know about her?”
“Only that she was a friend of Myra and she disappeared right after Myra died, which sounds a little suspicious.”
Oliver put down his sandpaper. “The word around town is that Cathy and Myra were arguing about something last winter, and it didn’t help when Cathy disappeared a day or two after Myra died. Anyhow, some people think Cathy killed Myra and ran off.”
“Could they have fought over the Oak Hill Development?”
Oliver gave her a surprised look. “I doubt it, but you never know what people will fight over in a small town. Cathy is a kind of an environmentalist, and she hates the development as much as Myra did, but Eldon Tupper is her boyfriend, and Eldon’s brother is a builder who makes his living off developments.”
“Did that make problems between Cathy and Eldon?”
Oliver looked as though he was about to tell her to mind her own business, but instead he replied, “Personally, I think Myra got careless with her wood stove, and Cathy took off for reasons of her own, maybe figuring people would blame her. I wouldn’t say that in front of Eldon, though.”
“What’s Eldon like?”
“You’ll know him when you meet him—works for Pearly. He’s big, really big, and ‘some ugly’ right now, as the saying goes. The cops have been questioning him about where Cathy is and what happened to her.”
“What about the guy on the bicycle?”
“Sounds like Ziggy Breener, the can-man. I don’t know about Massachusetts, but lots of places around here have a can-man. Ziggy rides all over town picking up cans to collect the deposit. I didn’t think he was back yet, though. Ziggy disappears in October and heads south for the winter. He won’t tell anybody where.”
“He goes south for the winter?”
“According to Ziggy, cans are like flowers; they bloom in the summer. I’ve been told he was an emergency-room doctor before he had a nervous breakdown of some kind and moved up here. He’s got a shack out on Meadow road.”
Oliver made a half-hearted effort to dust off his shirt. “That’s enough for now. Let’s look at that boat of yours.”
A hammer and a wicked-looking icepick in his hand, Oliver ambled outside to where Owl sat. “With luck, this won’t hurt a bit, old girl,” he said.
Sarah wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or Owl.
* * *
The Explorer made its way home in a more sprightly fashion without Owl behind it. Sarah felt more sprightly too, after Oliver pronounced the Herreshoff repairable, at least for another summer. Brian’s Volvo swept by she neared the Merlew’s drive. She waved, getting a big grin and a wave in return. Things were looking up.
Sarah’s equanimity came to an abrupt end as she entered her apartment.
“Where were you? I’ve been cooling my heels for an hour.”
Sarah gave a startled shriek. Claude was sprawled on her sofa, his feet resting on the tiny coffee table, Gucci loafers twitching impatiently.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
You wouldn’t talk on the phone yesterday, so I came here.” He got up and handed her a pair of envelopes.
“What are these?” she asked, taking them warily.
“A peace offering.”
“A peace offering?” She looked more closely. “They were mailed way back in January! Have you been sitting on them all year?”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind, thanks to you.”
“Where do you get off stealing my mail!”
“Steal? That’s harsh.” He tried to look contrite. “I’ve been seeing the shrink, and going to that silly anger management class, just like your pet judge ordered, and I’ve learned how to control my temper, and I realize now where our relationship went wrong. We’ve made mistakes—I’ve made mistakes—and we’ve had our differences, but our relationship is bigger than that. We need each other to be whole.” He gave her an almost desperate look. “I need you to be whole.”
Claude paused, looking earnest and a bit confused by his own emotions. Sarah stared, open-mouthed. Could he really have turned over a new leaf? Did the shrink do that?
“Walking through our house,” he went on, “made me see how much of our lives we’ve shared. It felt so empty without you—like my life.” He made a helpless, flapping gesture with his hands as though unable to express himself. Sarah stood, speechless.
“Remember when we first moved in,” he said, “and didn’t have any furniture for the place, and we even had to buy a bed?”
“And a new sofa?” she said, smiling.
“And that awful rug the Willets gave us?”
“And ho
w peeved they were when we got rid of it?”
“And the second-hand washing machine that exploded?”
“With half our clothes in it?” Sarah laughed. Those had been good times. “And remember when we bought the dining room set?”
“Yes,” he said, momentarily distracted.
”And that beat-up old Volvo, so we’d have two cars for the garage?” she paused. “Wait. Where’s your Porsche?”
“I hid it in the woods.”
“And luscious Lolita?” she demanded, the spell broken. “Did you hide her in the woods?”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her Lolita. It’s insulting.” He gave a dismissive shrug. “I dropped her off in Freeport. The important thing is I think we should try again—”
“What! Let me get this straight. You dropped off your baby bimbo to go shopping while you came here to con me?”
“Lurlene means nothing—”
“Nothing? How many other nothings have there been?”
“This isn’t going the way I’d hoped,” Claude whined.
“Out!”
“Think of all the good years we had. You can’t just—”
“I’m calling 911!”
“Here? The nearest cop-shop must be an hour away. Face it, you’re a city person. You don’t belong out here in the woods.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed.
“Damn, why didn’t I see it before? You’ve got some hick boyfriend hidden away up here. I should have known.”
“You’re accusing me of infidelity? You’re the one who’s been fooling around!”
“How do I know you haven’t too?” he demanded.
“Get out!” Sarah backed into the kitchenette, while she groped behind her for the phone.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything.” Sam Merlew appeared in the doorway, a double barreled shotgun broken open over one arm. “Just wanted to let you know I’m hunting rats in the barn, so don’t be surprised if you hear a shot.”
Claude nearly fell backwards over the coffee table.
“It’s just rat-shot,” Sam said, “like sand. Couldn’t kill a person with it.” He pondered for a second. “Well, maybe close up.”
Gravely Dead: A Midcoast Maine Mystery Page 4