by John Philpin
“The question is whether these two would have killed or arranged murder again if they had not been caught. Warmus had earlier relationships where she quickly became obsessed with the men, possessive. When they backed off, or dated other women, she went ballistic. Pardon the pun.”
She smiled.
“She wrote letters to these boyfriends, called them repeatedly, threatened them. She focused most of her attention on any other women in the picture. One guy had to get an injunction to keep her away from his wedding. Past behavior is the best single predictor of future behavior.”
“For her to do it again,” Squires interjected, “I think she’d have to be involved in a nearly identical situation, an impossible relationship.”
“We don’t have any reason to believe that she would suddenly, spontaneously change.”
“What about feelings?” she asked. “Warmus and Smart must have felt something.”
“Smart’s nickname was the Ice Princess. She had appetites, wants. I doubt that she felt much of anything unless someone ignored her demands or got in the way of what she wanted. An affront or snub that you or I might disregard elicits rage because it is seen as an attack, a threat to the entire structure of the personality.”
“That sounds like what the experts speculated about during the O.J. Simpson murder trial,” she said. “Nicole was pulling away from him. Her family snubbed him at the dance recital. The model he was dating, Paula Barbieri, broke up with him. I remember commentators saying that he’d always controlled his world and suddenly it was coming apart.”
As Squires prepared to leave she said, “I wonder if I sat and talked with Pam Smart before, or even after, she’d arranged her husband’s death, would there be any way to know?”
“You have a keen interest in the subject,” I observed, “and you’ve obviously read extensively.”
Again, Squires shrugged. “I’m trying to understand,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any place for conscience.”
I watched as she walked away, unsettled by the feeling that Squires was not examining a hypothetical situation. She struggled with something far more personal.
I DROVE NORTH TO THE FLATS, THINKING ABOUT A fourteen-year-old child strong enough or panicked enough to wage war with a roomful of adults hell-bent on wrapping her in canvas restraints. Harper Dorman—her father, someone she trusted to protect her and comfort her—had dragged his daughter into horror. I empathized with Lily’s suffering, understood her rage. Now I was beginning to have a sense of what she had become.
When I saw the small, shingled building with its weathered sign, I slowed the car and pulled off the road. Loudermilk’s.
I pushed open the door and a bell jingled.
Ben Loudermilk was a short, wiry man in his late forties. He wore a trimmed goatee, and his steel-gray hair appeared to have been shocked into a Beethoven mop. He sat behind a drawing table, where a gooseneck lamp illuminated an ink sketch that held his attention. Loudermilk gazed down through rimless eyeglasses.
“This is the time of year when I do most of my design work,” he said. “Business is slow. After we get the first snow, I don’t bother opening the shop during the week. Tourists don’t want any part of Maine winters unless they’re over in ski country or running snowmobiles. You don’t look like a tourist.”
“No,” I agreed.
Loudermilk sketched a necklace of interlocking fish. His attention to detail was impressive.
“Local kids come in,” the garrulous silversmith continued. “They want single earrings. Loops for their pierced navels, studs for their tongues, chains for their nipples. One kid whipped off her shirt and attached three different pieces while I was making change.”
He shrugged. “Used to be that everyone wanted tattoos. It’s a fad. It’ll pass. Although I guess their parents get pretty upset. Is there something I can help you with?”
“I hope so,” I said, and handed him the scrimshaw letter opener.
“I sold this piece,” Loudermilk said.
He riffled through the contents of a shoe box and produced a Polaroid photo. “That’s it right there.”
In the snapshot, the scrimshaw rested on a bed of blue velvet.
“The date’s on the photo. What was it, two years ago?”
I nodded, studying the photo. “Who was the customer?”
He held his hands in the air. “Why?”
I showed him my identification. “I’m working as a consultant to the Ragged Harbor police. I’ll be happy to wait while you verify that with Chief Jaworski.”
“Hang on,” he said, opening a wooden box of five-by-eight cards.
I sensed a fellow neo-Luddite.
“This may not be real quick,” Loudermilk said. “When I go through these cards, I see names, sketches of pieces I’ve made. I like to remember. I do remember her, but not the name.”
He continued sorting through the file, occasionally examining one of his sketches. “Here it is.” He handed me the card.
“When the tourists leave, a sale like that is completely unexpected. She paid in cash.”
I looked at the name: Melanie Martin. There was an innocent, even innocuous, explanation. MI funded nearly everything related to the college. Expensive gifts for visiting instructors could be a routine line item. Jaycie was an MI intern, so her informal welcoming committee made the delivery.
I didn’t buy it. Martin had personally attended to the purchase two years earlier. When I opened the package, Jaycie expressed pleasure and surprise. Only Amanda Squires knew the box’s contents.
“You said you remembered her,” I prompted.
Loudermilk’s eyes shifted down as he considered. “She was tall. Dressed… fashionably, I’d call it, in a blue suit. Blond hair. She wore eyeglasses, tinted, the kind that adjust to the light. Late twenties, early thirties.”
“She was in only one time, two years ago,” I said. “What made her so memorable?”
“She was in twice,” he corrected. “She wanted the sketch embellished.”
I looked again at the card. “Is that what these notations are?”
Loudermilk emerged from his work area and pointed at the card. “That was enjoyable work. I studied photographs and drawings of snakes, then did my own sketches. I consider myself an artist, not a merchant. I could never forget a customer like that. She arrived in a limo.”
“No address? No phone number?”
He shrugged. “She was quiet, private. It was a cash transaction.”
Again, I looked at Loudermilk’s notes: timber rattler. “This was your choice?”
“I narrowed it to five. Ms. Martin chose that one.”
Loudermilk crossed the room and pointed to a display case that contained dozens of delicate whalebone and walrus-tusk etchings. “This is a popular depiction of a folk tale from the 1840s. She didn’t want one of the old renditions. She wanted her serpent to be real.”
Again, he shrugged. “People have their quirks. The oceans have their monsters.”
“What about her driver?”
“He waited outside. Big, African-American, bald.”
I thanked Loudermilk, pocketed the whalebone, and turned to leave.
“There’s a song about that one,” he continued. “‘The Wreck of the Lily D.’ ”
I froze. “The what?”
“She was a Maine whaler. No one knows what happened to her. She sailed on what was supposed to be a three-year voyage. That was common in those days. The Lily D. never returned to port, which wasn’t uncommon, either.”
I stood, riveted.
“When a ship went down in a storm, wreckage washed up, or word of the tragedy drifted back to the crew’s home port. Sometimes it was years before families learned what happened to their sons and fathers and brothers. The Lily D. vanished without a trace. The ship had a remarkable record. The captain knew the best whaling waters in the North Atlantic and always sailed his ship into port laden with whale oil. Every sailor heard and retold stories of mo
nsters… giant squid, whale sharks, sea serpents. The folk tale about the Lily D. grew around the notion that a serpent took the ship, its crew, and its cargo, in payment for their years of pillaging the sea’s treasures.”
“Vengeance,” I said.
Loudermilk nodded. “We don’t always know our sins, but we pay for them.”
ON THE DRIVE SOUTH, I ALLOWED MY PUZZLE PIECES to grab whatever random assembly they wished.
The woman in the limo visited Mellen Street and asked for Harper Dorman. A similar woman visited Katrina Martin. Two years ago, Melanie Martin arrived in a limo and supervised Loudermilk’s design modifications to the scrimshaw. She selected the timber rattler as her serpent.
Were Lily Dorman and Melanie Martin the same person?
Always, there were questions.
Amanda Squires presented the gift of etched whalebone that depicted a tale of vengeance.
Was Squires connected to Martin?
Days later, someone crept into my house and deposited a timber rattler in the study. After that, a knife impaled an orange on my kitchen counter.
Why focus on me?
Someone prowled my road, raced away from the Weld crime scene, then dumped the suspect Volvo at the bluff, a hundred yards from my front door.
Coincidence is for fools.
A woman invited me to find Wendell Beckerman’s body, and planted the notion that I killed the young man. The weapon connected six homicides and left the question of my complicity hung on the line like putrid socks after a rugby match.
Whalers were hunters. They captured their prey, lashed it to the side of the ship. A larger predator rose out of the sea and devoured whalers, ship, and whale.
Payment received for damage done.
Vengeance.
Harper Dorman’s murder made sense if Lily Dorman had destroyed and shredded the agent of her horror.
“Wonder if she arrived in a fucking limo,” I muttered.
Why target the three students?
Why kill Steve Weld and Wendell Beckerman?
Why stalk me?
Always, there were more questions than answers.
Martin International connected Jaycie Waylon and Steve Weld, albeit tenuously. Melanie Martin and Amanda Squires also shared a possible connection. Stuart Gilman lurked somewhere in the mix.
The kid with a fondness for LSD was Squires’s friend, but had no MI connection that I knew of.
Where does Beckerman fit?
The hybrid kills people she knows, and she kills strangers.
“Fuck it,” I muttered. “Strip away the horseshit and all you’ve got is another murderer.”
ELLIE MCLEAN STEPPED OUT OF HER TRAILER AS I walked through the courtyard.
“Her soaps are over,” I said.
“I knew you’d be back. I’ve been getting her to take her pills. She showered, cleaned the place. I told her you’d been here. She remembered you, hoped you’d come back.”
“Thanks, Ellie.”
“She said you were a doctor.”
I nodded.
“Why does a doctor wear jeans and not get a haircut?”
“Neckties get in the way when I’m fishing,” I said, walking to number three. “The hair keeps the bugs off my neck.”
The TV glow had disappeared from Katrina’s trailer. I knocked, thinking about the woman I had known briefly thirty years earlier.
Late one night, near closing time, she had walked into the restaurant and ordered an ice cream cone. She sat at the counter, held the cone, and stared at it as it melted. When business slowed, I cleaned her mess.
“Time vanishes,” she said. “It melts away. Everything dies.”
The trailer door swung open. Katrina Martin looked as if she had shrunk. I remembered her as a tall, dazzling blond. Her long, lush, flaxen hair was gone, replaced by a thin fall of brittle white strands. She wore faded jeans and a tan cardigan buttoned wrong.
She looked at me and tried to focus her eyes. Remembering seemed to be a strain for her.
“Lucas,” she said, with a strength in her voice that I had not expected. “Please come in.”
I stepped into the low-ceilinged kitchen. The place was the same vintage as Ellie’s, and we sat at a similar, but damaged, laminated kitchen table.
“I thought this would feel strange, but it doesn’t,” she said. “We were friends one summer. I remember the beach. You look different.”
I stared at her, trying unsuccessfully to see the woman I had known for a few short weeks so long ago.
“Age,” I said.
“Not just that.”
I prodded Katrina to talk about her life, about experiences that I knew were painful. She dropped into silence and stared at the table.
Memory is selective and often unreliable. When she spoke, she erased segments of her life, remembered some events in a rewritten or revised form, and described others with nearly eidetic recall.
“When I left Provincetown, I came home to Portland,” she said. “I went to the hospital where my mother used to go.”
“That’s where you met your husband,” I said.
She nodded, still staring down, and rubbing the back of her left hand with her right. “Harper worked there. He was young, handsome, an electrician’s apprentice. He didn’t drink then. When I was eligible for off-grounds privileges, we started dating. I got pregnant right away.”
Katrina selected a hard candy from a dish, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. She was coping with one of her medications’ drymouth side effect.
“The first place we lived was an apartment on Danforth Street,” she continued. “It was beautiful there. I could see the harbor from the kitchen window. Then the hospital fired Harper because of me, so he couldn’t get his license as an electrician. He worked at the port, did different kinds of jobs. We always seemed to have enough to get by, but then he started to drink. He moved us here when Lily was two.”
Katrina broke off her narrative and stared into a corner of the room. A slight smile creased her narrow lips before her eyes rediscovered me. I’d seen the behavior in schizophrenic patients numerous times over the years. Katrina listened to noises only she could hear.
“Katrina?”
“He drank most of the time,” she said, the smile gone, her eyes fixed on mine, as if she had never paused. “I was having problems again, but I didn’t know it. That’s not true. I knew it, but I didn’t want to go back to the hospital.”
She clasped her hands tightly in front of her. “Did you return to Boston after Provincetown?”
I nodded. “I went back to school.”
She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “I never finished school. Is your wife a doctor, too?”
“Savannah is a veterinarian,” I said, seeing no point in explaining that Savvy and I had been separated for years, and that she lived in Africa.
“Lily always loved animals. We had a dog once.”
Katrina’s eyes clouded. “The dog… died. Lily kept snakes after that. She didn’t keep them in the house. They lived in the swamp. She wrote everything about them in a notebook. Even gave them names. The notebook’s here. She asked me to send it to her in the hospital. Then she left it here. I don’t want to talk. I’m tired. You came here for a reason. Tell me what you want.”
“I want to meet Lily,” I said.
Katrina turned away. “She was here. Not too long ago, I don’t think. She and Edgar, her driver, took me to the waterfront in Portland. There’s a little park with benches on Eastern Promenade. I fed the pigeons. We sat on a bench, and Lily sent Edgar to get cracked corn. I watched the ships go by, and I saw the islands. Lily held my hand.”
Again, she hesitated. Then, as if finding a bookmark in her thoughts, she said, “Edgar brought the corn. I fed the birds. Lily was so thoughtful. She said she’d come back and take me out. She hasn’t yet, but I know how busy she must be. I never knew a black person before I met Edgar. He’s a large man, but he’s very gentle, and he protects Lily.”
I was losing her, and there was so much more that I needed to know. I was uncomfortable probing her pain, but I had to. “Harper killed the dog,” I said.
She stared at me, her eyes narrowed. “Who told you that?”
“A police report.”
“They shouldn’t have come here.”
“Lily stayed with your friend Ellie.”
“They took Harper away. He screamed in pain. It’s hard to think of him dead. Whatever else…we were together all those years.”
Her gaze shifted to a corner of the room, and tears rolled from her eyes. I saw no semblance of a smile this time.
“I betrayed Lily. I didn’t know the right thing to do. She left the hospital. She came here, and I was confused. I called Mental Health and told them she was here. Lily ran. This last time when she visited, she said she forgave me for that.”
Katrina’s eyes locked on mine. “I have her back now, and I’m not going to lose her again.”
I was reluctant to push her, but I had no choice. “Katrina, I would like to meet Lily,” I said again.
“Lily is a successful woman,” she said.
I nodded.
“You can’t hate her,” she said, with the first real emotion in her voice. “You don’t know her.”
“I want to know her,” I said, wondering why Katrina would assume that I hated her daughter.
“You’re going to hurt her.”
She pushed away from the table and walked to the window.
“I have no wish to hurt her,” I said to Katrina’s back.
She turned, her eyes darting from one corner to another. “Edgar helps her when things get really bad. I can’t help her.”
“How do things get bad for her, Katrina?” She stared into the living room. “Harper smeared blood on the walls.”
“The dog’s blood,” I said.
“He hurt her,” Katrina said as she returned to her chair, sat, and rocked back and forth. “He held her by the neck. She couldn’t breathe. He made her…”
She stopped talking and spread her palms across her face.
“Katrina,” I said, reaching across the table to touch her hand.
She was gone, wandering among the many realities that her world comprised. When she looked back at me, her eyes cleared, and she nodded her head. Something had clicked for her, but I did not know what.