by Barbara Ross
“Did you mean it when you said I could take a day off whenever I needed to help Cabe?” It would be a much heavier workday at the clambake than the day before. The early morning haze had burned off and I could tell the afternoon would be beautiful. Sonny and Livvie would have lunch and dinner to cope with.
“Of course. Take whatever time you need. We have everything under control.”
“Thank you, Livvie. And thank Sonny. Are you feeling okay?” That should have been my first question to my sister. Today and for the next seven months.
“I’m fine. Good luck.”
I left the house and hit the open road.
Chapter 38
On Route 1, traffic headed Down East was light. The morning’s fog still hovered in a few areas along the coast. I tried to remember to breathe. I had three hours alone in my mother’s car to think about my problems. Not good.
I’d left things in such a terrible place with Chris. He wanted to know if I returned his feelings. If I loved him. It was a reasonable request.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d been the schoolgirl with the crush. My feelings for him had been unrequited for years. I’d been on his boat, in his bed. And now, I was the one who hesitated.
There was no future in it. This is what I’d told myself over and over. Chris was a creature of the harbor. He loved the wild Maine coast. He’d do anything to stay. It was impossible to imagine him away from it. He belonged.
I didn’t. I never had. Though Livvie seemed to think that had more to do with me than it did with Busman’s Harbor. Could she be right? Did my sense that I didn’t belong come from inside me? I’d just told Bunnie to extend herself to a neighbor in order to be accepted. Was I talking to myself?
That gave me something to work on as I sped along.
Chris hadn’t asked me to marry him. All my ruminating about where we’d spend our future was profoundly premature. He’d asked me if I loved him. In the moment. Why couldn’t I at least answer yes to that? My knees went weak whenever I saw him. His touch took my breath away. I couldn’t be near him without wanting to touch him. I lusted for him, that was for sure. And he lusted for me. Not just generically, as all men lust, but he lusted specifically for me. I knew it. I could feel it. I trusted my feelings. My feelings toward him physically were unambiguous.
But my attraction to Chris was so much more than physical. He was the person I told everything to. Not just my problems, but also my triumphs. Both were hard for me to share with people. I had more of Mom’s Yankee reticence than I cared to admit. Chris made me feel safe.
Except for one thing. The thing that couldn’t be ignored. The thing that wrapped itself like a python around my heart. He had a reputation as a bad boy. He occasionally disappeared without explanation. My openness with him wasn’t reciprocated, in one critical way. He had asked me to trust him, but could I?
I thought about Cabe’s situation and immediately felt like a self-involved child. Cabe was about to be accused of murder, and I was worried about my boyfriend.
I passed through Ellsworth and hit the open road, going as fast as Mom’s old car allowed. So fast, I almost missed my turn onto the Route 182 bypass. So fast, I definitely missed the state cop parked just before the turnoff.
His light bar blinked on and his siren blared.
“Damn.” I pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
“License and registration, ma’am,” the cherubic-faced trooper said through my driver’s side window.
I pondered my excuses as I flipped through my mother’s glove compartment for the registration. I didn’t know I was going so fast, sounded idiotic, compounding inattention with excessive speed. I’m in a hurry, I thought he might have heard before. I turned over the registration and my license without saying a word.
“Is this your vehicle, ma’am?”
“It’s my mother’s.”
The trooper looked at me doubtfully. I was about a decade too old to have to borrow my mother’s car.
“See.” I pointed to the two documents he held in his hand. “Same last name.”
“You’re a long way from home. Does your mother know you have the car?”
“Of course she does,” I answered, a little too vehemently. I hoped Mom had found my note.
“I need to check to make sure this vehicle hasn’t been reported stolen.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“Did you say something?”
“Nothing.” He went to his vehicle while I sat and steamed in the August heat. How bad could it be? I didn’t think Mom’s old Buick could even go that fast.
“Here’s your citation. You’re free to go.”
“Two hundred and fifteen dollars!”
“I clocked you at sixty-two in a forty mile an hour zone.”
He got back into his patrol car and watched while I gingerly pulled Mom’s car onto the road and set off a couple miles an hour below the speed limit. If I’d been unhappy with the state cops before, because of Binder and Flynn’s behavior, I was furious at them now.
As the road turned back into Route 1 and curved toward the coast, the mist returned in the form of a low ground fog. I cursed my bad luck. If the fog had come up sooner, or the cop had been positioned later, I wouldn’t have been speeding. Following Phil’s directions, forty minutes later, I pulled to the side of the road, grateful to get out and stretch. Yellow totes full of blueberries lined the field, waiting for the truck to pick them up.
Out in the blueberry barrens, the pickers moved in the mist like ghosts, swinging their rakes like Death’s scythe. As I wondered how on earth I was going to find Phil, a tall figure walked out of the fog and met me at the edge of the field.
“You made it,” he said.
“Have you got it? The storage device?”
“Yes.” Phillip reached into his camera bag and pulled out a plastic box about the size of a smart phone. “But I don’t think it’s going to help you. There are over ten thousand photos. Since you don’t know what time the body was dumped, it may take days to go through them.”
I nodded to show that I understood and slipped the device into my tote bag. I did have some sense of the time frame. Cabe had said that he’d left the pier around 2:00 and returned before 5:30.
“She’ll know what to do. I know she will.” A slender figure appeared out of the mist almost next to me.
“Cabe!” I threw my arms around him.
My joy morphed to anger. “Why didn’t you tell me you were here?” I whirled back to Phil. “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”
“Hey, don’t yell at me. I’m the one who persuaded him to see you.”
I turned back to Cabe. “You need to come to Busman’s Harbor with me and meet with Lieutenant Binder. Right now, he still only wants to interview you as a witness, but I’m not sure how long that will last.” Behind me, a vehicle door slammed.
Cabe didn’t respond. He turned and ran.
“Outatheway!” A hand struck me in the back, pushing me to the side.
I lost my balance, twisted around, and fell flat on my back. Sergeant Flynn leaped over me and brought Cabe down.
“You’re under arrest!” he screamed at Cabe. “Do you understand me?”
Chapter 39
“You okay?” Lieutenant Binder and Phil Johnson stood above me, looking down. Binder stuck out a hand.
I grabbed it and started to get up. As soon as I put weight on my left foot, pain seared up from my ankle. “Yowza!”
Binder grasped both my forearms and pulled me to my feet.
“Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
“Sorry about that. As a policy, it’s a bad idea to get between Flynn and a suspect.”
“I didn’t know Cabe was a suspect. And I didn’t know I was in between. Did you follow me up here?” I demanded.
“Of course not.”
“The speeding ticket! You knew I was on Route 1 because of the speeding ticket. And then you tracked me here.”
“You got a speedin
g ticket?” Binder chuckled, adding insult to actual injury.
“You know damn well I did.”
“When?”
“About an hour ago.”
“Julia, what do you think this is? CSI: Pine Tree State? How would I get here from Busman’s Harbor in an hour? Do you see a chopper anywhere?” He took off his dark glasses and wiped the lenses with a handkerchief. “This kind of operation doesn’t come together in a day. The blueberry fields are tribal lands. State cops don’t come busting in here without letting local law enforcement and the Passamaquoddy leadership know.” He let that sink in. “Honestly, I didn’t know you were here. I wasn’t even completely sure you knew where young Mr. Stone was. It was a bit of a shot in the dark when Flynn accused you.”
“I didn’t know where Cabe was when Flynn accused me. I just found him.” Really, I hadn’t found him. He’d let Phil summon me, but I didn’t say that to Binder. Nor did I tell him about the storage device in my tote bag.
Phil, standing nearby, also said nothing.
“I’ve been helping you. I gave you the camera, for goodness sake. You used me to get information, yet told me nothing. You treated me like a fool.”
Binder put the sunglasses, completely unnecessary in the morning mist, back on. “I never thought you were a fool. I’m sorry if that’s the way it came across.” He pointed down at my ankle, which was swelling rapidly. “You’d best get that seen to. I’ll have one of my people run you to the ER in Machias.”
“My car—”
Phil said, “I can drive her over.”
I handed Phil my keys and they helped me hobble to my car. “Geez,” he said when he tried the door handle. “Did you lock this thing out here?”
We spent two hours in the ER waiting room while my ankle blew up to the size of a softball. People came and went, some obviously in worse shape. A cable news show was on the TV in the corner, its sound turned off.
“What do you think is happening with Cabe?” Phil asked.
“I’m sure Binder and Flynn are taking him to Busman’s Harbor for questioning. I should have reminded him to ask for an attorney.” The moments from when Flynn pushed me down until Cabe was loaded into the state police car in handcuffs were a blur.
“Excuse me,” I said and dialed Chris on my cell. I wasn’t even sure he’d answer. We’d left things in such a weird place. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Chris. Pick up.
“Julia, are you all right? Why aren’t you at the clambake?” He knew my cell phone didn’t work on Morrow Island.
“I came out to Washington County to get those photos I told you about from the night on the pier. Cabe was arrested.”
“What happened?”
I took Chris step by step through the events of the day so far. I left out the part about my ankle, because if I told him, he’d want to come get me. Or he’d go over and punch Flynn in the nose. Neither was productive. I needed Chris to be in Busman’s Harbor, helping Cabe.
“Where are you?” I asked him. “I forgot to tell Cabe not to say anything without an attorney present.”
“I’m in my cab. I can swing by the police station. What time do you think they’ll get here?”
“I doubt they’ll let you see him. Can you call that lawyer, the one who represented you when—”
“I was arrested in the spring,” he finished. For the murder on Morrow Island he hadn’t committed.
“Yes, please. Tell him I’ll pay.”
“I’m sure he’ll help if I can find him. We can work out how he gets paid, later.”
“Okay, and Chris—”
“What?”
I heard him breathing. There were so many things I wanted to say. I hated this gulf between us. But we couldn’t talk now. Phil was sitting next to me, and I was in no shape to get up and move away. And, I wanted Chris to find the lawyer and get him to the station house. “Nothing. Good luck with Cabe.”
“Drive safely.”
“I will.”
When I hung up, Phil looked at me curiously. “You’re really looking out for that kid. He told me he isn’t your brother. Why are you in this?”
“He saved my life once.”
“Is that so?” Phil looked at the silent TV where pundits yelled at one another like a bunch of mad mimes. Then he looked pointedly at the ancient magazine in his lap. “I think you better tell me the whole story.”
Why not? He was involved after all, and we had to pass the time. So I told him about how Cabe had pulled me from the path of the oncoming vehicle. And how the body was found in the fire under the Claminator, which he knew because he was there. I told him the dead man was Stevie Noyes, and about Stevie’s two identities, and about how even though two women had loved him, and had each born him a child, he’d ended up alone.
“Wait, what did you say this guy’s RV campground was called?”
“Camp Glooscap.”
“You know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“In my culture, Glooscap is the first being. The name means, ‘man created from nothing,’ or ‘man created only by speech.’”
“Which Stevie Noyes was.” It made perfect sense. “When he left prison, he wasn’t T.V. Noyes anymore. He created Stevie, the nicest guy in the world.”
The nurse finally called me.
“Does this hurt?” the doctor asked as he manipulated my ankle.
Tears sprang to my eyes.
“Not broken,” the doctor said. “A significant sprain. We’ll bandage you up. Elevate. Ice. No weight-bearing for at least three days.”
Three days! I had a business to run. And Cabe had just been driven off to jail in handcuffs, a place I couldn’t let him stay.
Once my foot and ankle were wrapped, a process that caused me to bite my hand to keep from screaming, the doctor said, “I’ll provide you with something for the pain.”
“No pain meds. I have to drive back to Busman’s Harbor right now.”
“Don’t be silly. You can’t drive.”
I couldn’t stay. Cabe was in jail, afraid and counting on me. “Why not? It’s my left ankle. I don’t use it to drive.”
The doctor wrote something on my chart. “All right. I’ll give you the prescription. You don’t have to get it filled.”
They gave me crutches and made me practice with them. Walking with crutches was a lot harder than it looked. I hobbled out the ER exit. Phil had gone ahead to bring the car around.
Phil pulled up.
“Get out,” I said.
“What?”
“Move to the passenger side so I can practice driving with someone in the car. It’s a long way back to Busman’s and I don’t want to fly solo on my first time out.”
“You can’t drive home.”
“I can’t stay here. After all I just told you, do you think I’m going to sit around for three days with my foot in the air? I have to get home.”
Chapter 40
The trip back to Busman’s Harbor was long and painful. I drove with my teeth clenched, my back tight against the throbbing pain. At times, I thought I wouldn’t make it, but what would I do if I stopped? When I finally pulled into our driveway late in the afternoon, I sat for a moment, uncertain if I could get out of the car. It wasn’t only my ankle that hurt. I’d landed hard when Flynn pushed me, and the long ride had magnified every ache.
Mom and Richelle rushed out to the porch when they saw me making my way gingerly up the front walk on crutches.
“Julia! What happened? Are you all right?” Concern etched deep worry lines into my mother’s face.
“I’m fine,” I answered, though anyone looking at me could tell I wasn’t.
Mom and Richelle helped me up the porch steps and settled me on the love seat, my left foot up on the ottoman. Mom ran to get me something to drink and an ice pack.
“And some ibuprofen!” I called after her.
“They arrested Cabe,” I told Richelle.
Her sharp intake of breath told me what terrible news this
was for her. “What can we do?”
“I’ve asked my friend Chris to find Cabe a lawyer.”
“But there must be something more. Julia, please. I’ve never done anything for my son. Please help me do something for him now. You still don’t believe he’s guilty, do you?”
I didn’t. In spite of the mountain of evidence, the camera, the running away, even the previous murder accusation, I did not believe Cabe Stone had stabbed Stevie Noyes seventeen times and put his body in the clambake fire.
I wiggled on the love seat to get comfortable and felt the weight of the storage device Phil had given me shift in my tote bag. If Cabe wasn’t guilty, someone else was. And if I could figure out who, maybe I could spare Cabe the trauma of an extended stay in jail and a trial. I just might have the answer on the storage device. As Richelle wiped her eyes, I extracted my cell phone from my tote bag and called a number on my contacts list.
“Bunnie? It’s Julia. I have a favor to ask. I’d like to use the computers at the Tourism Bureau office. And I need some people to work on them. Can you call the committee members for me? Just tell them I need help. Yes, right now.”
Bunnie assured me, with probably more politeness and enthusiasm than I deserved considering the tone of our last conversation, she would do as I asked.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the Tourism Bureau office in twenty minutes.”
“I’m driving, “ Richelle said.
I looked at my swollen ankle resting on the ottoman. “You’re not allowed to drive.”
“Oh, Julia. The doctor cleared me to travel four days ago. I just couldn’t leave town when my son was in so much trouble.”
Bunnie’s big SUV was already in the parking lot at the Tourism Bureau office when Richelle and I arrived, as was Vee’s Subaru wagon. Dan Small’s bike leaned against the deck rail. I was shocked when Bud Barbour pulled up in his ratty old pickup.
Inside, I asked them to take a seat at a computer. The Bureau’s computer workstations were paired so two people sat facing one another, though the monitors blocked the sight of the person sitting opposite. Everyone was quiet. It was the first time we’d all been together without Stevie and I had a little lump in my throat. I could tell we were all feeling it.