by Sarah Graves
And also the last, I earnestly hoped, but that was another story. Bob pulled over to let a pickup truck loaded with lobster traps pass by him, the big wire cratelike traps stacked high in the truck bed.
“So what’s she said about it, anything?” Bob asked, meaning Mika.
“Not about Moran,” I said. “I don’t think she’s heard about him yet. But last night at dinner she said she’d sold milkshakes all day.”
It was a week after Memorial Day, and a few early-season tourists were already in town, but I doubted she’d recognized many of them.
“You can ask her yourself, though,” I said. “What about you, have you heard anything else?”
“All Moran’s friends are shut up tighter’n ticks,” Bob said. “To hear them talk, the guy didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
“Hmph,” said Ellie. Like me, I guessed, she’d decided not to say anything until we got the lay of the land figured out a little better.
Because for one thing, why would he drink something that stank of bug killer?
Another truck rattled by, this one loaded with clam hods. Also in the truck bed were boots, clam rakes, shovels, and a lot of slat-sided crates full of empty beer bottles; clamming is thirsty work.
“Have they talked yet to any of Moran’s old girlfriends?” Ellie asked. “I mean, besides Sharon?”
It never failed to surprise me how many of them there had been. But the idea that a truly terrible guy was just waiting for the right woman to reform him was as beguiling here in Eastport as it was anywhere else, apparently.
Bob grimaced wryly. “Oh, yeah. Been calling them all morning. Got ’em lined up to talk to, all this afternoon.”
He sighed at the prospect. “I don’t expect much, though. Seems they all were with people last night.”
Drat; they had alibis, in other words. Not that I wished any of them ill, but it wasn’t their wedding that Ellie and I were relying on to save our business.
Just then an old station wagon packed with mooring chains rumbled by, its registration sticker out of date and its weight-challenged rear end shooting sparks from the vehicle’s dragging muffler.
Bob gave it the hairy eyeball and let his own car creep forward. I could see him planning a chat with the driver.
But right now, he was chatting with me. “Meanwhile, I know what you two are probably thinking of, and I want you to stay out of this whole thing, you understand?”
Ellie and I glanced at each other. Bob could be forgiven for his suspicion that we might snoop into Toby Moran’s murder, especially because one of our own milkshakes had been the weapon, it looked like.
Besides, we’d meddled in local mayhem before. There was the time, for instance, that another young man had met his maker and my own ex-husband (now deceased, but at the time he’d been an awful pain in the tail) had ended up as the main suspect.
And although there’d been plenty of things I’d have liked seeing him get nailed for—during our marriage he hadn’t seemed to know the difference between me and a piñata, for instance—murder wasn’t one of them. So Ellie and I had pursued the real killer, and the killer had pursued us right back, with near-fatal results.
Now Bob eyed me warningly. “I mean it, Jake. Besides the state cops all swarming around here investigating, with this big wedding coming up we’ll have plenty of extra people in town, lots arriving in the next few days.”
He hadn’t thought yet about the fact that, if things stayed as they were, there wouldn’t be a wedding. And considering how insistent he was about our not snooping, I figured I wouldn’t remind him.
What he hadn’t done, though, was explicitly forbid us to do any snooping.... Down the street, the loaded station wagon went over a bump in the pavement. More sparks flew, as did chunks of the ramshackle vehicle’s rotting undercarriage.
Bob winced. “So I’ve got lots of aggravation already. That radio call was about a copper theft out near the airport.”
By this he meant someone had broken into an unoccupied house and stripped the pipes out of it; you could do this, I’d learned, with pliers and a pipe cutter, and it didn’t take long. The next step would be to sell the stolen pipes to an unscrupulous scrap-metal dealer.
And yes, it was a dirty trick. But the people who did it didn’t care; they just wanted the money. So now Bob had to deal with it.
“Which means I don’t need any more trouble,” Bob finished, then took off after the station wagon whose driver had apparently decided he didn’t need that raggedy old muffler anyway, and sped off without most of it.
“Ohh,” breathed Ellie when Bob had gone. “I wish he hadn’t said anything about the wedding. I’m already nervous enough about it.”
“Me too,” I said, not adding that what I was nervous about was mostly whether or not it would still happen at all. Thinking this, I walked with Ellie up Water Street past the art gallery, the coffee shop, the pharmacy, the water company, and Wadsworth’s Hardware Store.
“Don’t worry about the cake, anyway,” I said as we reached the corner. “Mika will get that part of things under control; she’s good at that stuff.”
She was, too, but privately in this case I wasn’t as confident as I sounded. Making a whoopie-pie wedding cake was challenging enough; the real difficulty in doing it successfully, though, was still getting the thing to stand upright.
“The whole problem with it,” said Ellie, “is still that darned frosting.”
Too soft and the thing leaned sideways; too stiff and it stuck to your teeth. And I wasn’t sure even our beloved Mika could find a happy medium between the two.
“I mean, assuming the cake we end up needing isn’t one with a hacksaw baked into it, so Andy can break himself out of jail,” Ellie added bleakly.
Which from what I’d heard so far was also a real possibility; it seemed Andy Devine had the motive as well as the opportunity.
“All those state cops need now is to find out he’d gotten hold of one of our milkshakes, somehow, and presto, instant murder suspect,” she said.
I couldn’t disagree with that, either, and on that sorry note we turned up Key Street toward my old house: white clapboards, three tall redbrick chimneys, two porches, and those forty-eight old wooden windows, each with its own pair of dark-green wooden shutters.
On the back porch we made our way past a stroller, two bicycles, a mop bucket with a mop standing in it, and a bunch of fishing poles rigged up and bristling with multiply-hooked mackerel jigs.
From inside the screen door floated the tantalizing aroma of hot apple pie. I opened the door and a plastic rattle flew past my head.
“Gah!” said Ephraim, grinning at me from his playpen in the middle of the bright, spotless kitchen.
“Gah, yourself,” I said as he hurled another toy; he knew I was a reliable retriever.
Then, with the faint sound of alarm bells already ringing in my head, I peered around. With its tall, bare windows, pine beadboard cabinets, and an antique fireplace hearth on which our modern propane stove now stood, my kitchen also held a large butcher-block table, a trio of potted pink geraniums that Bella had raised from cuttings over the previous winter, and an antique soapstone sink perched on four white metal supports as thick as piano legs.
What wasn’t in the kitchen was Sharon Sweetwater.
“Blrgh!” commented Ephraim. I’d been nervous about having a baby in the house—colic, diapers—but this one was at least easy in the daytime, if not at night. Today he wore a yellow knit onesie with ducks printed on it, plus a grin with a spit bubble in it.
“Flrfl!” he enthused, while at the stove, my housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, stood frowning over the pie.
“Bella, where’s Sharon? She said she was coming here.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.” She frowned harder, peering down at the pie crust. “I think I might have burned this.”
Small and wiry with large grape-green eyes, frizzy henna-dyed hair, and a bony, buck-toothed face
beautifully softened by its owner’s possession of the kindest heart imaginable, Bella was our resident household goddess.
“Better let me test it,” I said, whereupon she cut me a generous slice, and one for Ellie, too.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked, digging in. “And are you sure you haven’t heard from Sharon at all?”
Bella had begun as my part-time employee, since when I first bought the old house I’d been too busy repairing it to have any time to clean it. Only later had she moved in and married my dad.
“I said I don’t know about her,” Bella replied with a touch of asperity. “I’m sure I can’t keep an eye on everyone around here; it’s a full-time job just trying to keep track of your father.”
Uh-oh. I didn’t like the sound of that. Since regaining his health he’d seemed devoted to the project of letting us know he could do whatever he pleased, whenever it pleased him.
Which, of course, didn’t please Bella one bit, especially since lately what he liked was either unsafe, illegal, or—most often—both. He was a big fan of homemade fireworks, for instance, a hobby he’d been pursuing—sometimes even professionally—all his life.
That is, if by “homemade fireworks” you actually mean small bombs, but that’s another whole story.
“Right now,” said Bella, “he’s at the health center getting a complete physical.”
I put down my fork. Since his heart attack, he’d been getting checked out every month by his own doctor, a cardiologist in Bangor.
“Why?” I asked, suddenly anxious. “Has something happened?”
He was the youngest old man I’d ever met: big-hearted, broad-minded, and as wide-eyed at all the many wonders of the world as his great-grandson, Ephraim.
But he was still an elderly guy, with all the potential for sudden, irreversible disaster that phrase really can’t help but imply, and he’d had one heart attack already.
“Now that his eyes have checked out he’s even more set on driving again,” said Bella, her tone conveying what she thought about that.
He’d given up his license after he’d gotten ill, saying he didn’t want to be the kind of old fart who drove through a store window.
But now, I gathered, he wanted to be the kind of old fart who’d changed his mind.
“I guess the eye doctor must not’ve discouraged him,” said Ellie, scraping up the last bits of pie.
I guess not, too . . . unfortunately. Just then the phone rang, and Bella hurried to answer while I smeared some pie juice onto my finger and offered it to Ephraim.
“What do you think, buddy?” I asked him. “D’you know where Sharon Sweetwater might be? Because she’s making me nervous.”
I mean, of course, she could’ve changed her mind and gone somewhere else. But—
“Glrk,” Ephraim pronounced, sniffing interestedly, then latched on to my pie-smeared fingertip so hard with his baby mouth that it was a wonder my whole hand didn’t go down his throat.
Removing my finger, I glanced to make sure it still had flesh attached, which miraculously it did, just as our German shepherd, Max, wandered into the kitchen. Large, long-haired, and with big black toenailed feet so huge and furry they could’ve doubled as dust mops, the dog ambled over to the playpen and stuck his snout through the bars.
I jumped up again; the kid didn’t have teeth yet, but Max did, and in the nose-bopping department little Ephraim was already a champ. But before I could get there, tiny fingers had already found Max’s ear.
“Ohh,” the baby breathed, touching the dog’s soft ear leather with a look of wonderment.
“Umph,” said Max, his whiskey-colored eyes quizzical. Then he withdrew very slowly and gently, lowering himself to the floor by the playpen with a sigh of doggy contentment.
From the phone alcove I heard Bella’s voice rise in inquiry. “She what? Where? But, Marienbad, why is she—”
Well, at least it wasn’t about my father. But then I realized who it almost certainly was about.
“Ellie,” I said warningly. She’d put our pie plates in the sink and was rinsing them; Bella was the type of housekeeper who if there was a dust mote within range, that dust mote was history.
And so were you, if you didn’t rinse your plate. Now she returned from the phone alcove, looking annoyed.
“That was Marienbad,” she reported. “From the Rubber Duck.”
Marienbad Jones—named after the film, of course, and no, I have no idea why her parents thought that was a good idea—was the Duck’s owner and usual bartender.
Crossing her ropy arms exasperatedly over her flat chest, Bella went on. “Sharon Sweetwater is in there. All upset, Marienbad says, and drinking hard. Marienbad wants you two to come and get the girl, says she’s going to fall off the bar stool if somebody doesn’t.”
Bella took a breath. “Sharon will, I mean, not Marienbad.”
Ellie sighed. We’d meant to spend a few hours here testing more whoopie-pie fillings, looking for one that could glue big wedding cake layers together securely while also not cementing your molars together permanently.
But Marienbad must have seen Sharon sobbing her way into our shop, earlier, and on the basis of that flimsy connection had decided to call us, now that the prospective bride needed rescuing from herself.
Two
My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and when I first came to Maine I was leaving behind a husband so mind-bendingly atrocious that my marriage license should have had a skull and crossbones stamped on it.
Victor—that was his name, appropriately—thought fidelity was a savings and loan outfit. At the big-city teaching hospital where he was a brain surgeon—it was the perfect job for him, messing with people’s heads—he was known for his habit of sweeping young student nurses off their feet and into his nearby secret bachelor apartment.
Not in that order, of course, and at the time I didn’t know about the bachelor apartment, either. Not that I could have done much if I had, being by then so vastly pregnant that it was all I could do just to waddle across a room, gasping.
Then after Sam was born the whole twenty-four-hour-a-day baby-care routine kicked in, trapping me in our Manhattan apartment. Sirens and car horns from twenty stories below drifted up to me like faint signs of life from a distant planet, and taking the garbage down the hall to the chute felt like an exotic trip.
Meanwhile, Victor bought a sports car and began commuting in it to another hospital, this one in Connecticut. I’d say he had admitting privileges there, but the man never admitted to anything in his life, so I won’t, and somehow we went on.
Years earlier, however, I’d wrangled a freakish talent for large numbers into a career as a money manager for the kind of people whose cash arrived packed into fancy briefcases, carried by stone-faced men whose expensive jackets didn’t quite hide their shoulder holsters.
So after Sam started school, I went back to work, and for a while I was one of the few people on Earth who could: (a) guide your average dim-bulb mobster through a thicket of tax rules so thorny that he would surely be ensnared by them otherwise, and (b) keep her mouth shut about it.
That last part being crucial. One peep out of me and I’d have found myself in a barrel at the bottom of the East River. Instead I salted away some decent money over the course of the next few years.
Not millions; crime didn’t pay that well. But by the time I began finding bits of unfamiliar black lingerie in my bed—
Sam, meanwhile, had begun running with a crowd of boys whose idea of fun included riding the tops of speeding subway cars while high on better pharmaceuticals than even Victor’s patients had access to—
By then I not only had some decent money saved, I had a plan, and step one of it was getting the hell out of Dodge.
And oh, boy, did I ever: on the day when it all finally blew up irrevocably, I got a sulky, recalcitrant Sam into the car by explaining to him very sincerely that if he didn’t make it snappy, I’d run him over with the damned vehicle. He knew I wouldn’t real
ly do it, of course, but I was desperate and the look on my face when I said it must’ve been awful, because in response he hopped in silently and speedily, even fastening his seat belt without my having to nag him about it.
All the way up the east coast, I kept him quiet with Funyuns and McDonald’s, a combination that made the car smell like fast-food purgatory. But since it was getting me out of hell, I didn’t complain, especially when a few days later we reached what looked like heaven: Eastport, Maine, a remote island fishing village with a population of about 1200, lay at the end of a long, curving causeway six miles from the mainland. The island itself, seven miles long and two miles wide, smelled like sea salt, chamomile, and blooming beach roses, and when we got there even Sam looked around and pronounced it “bitchin’.”
Walking up and down the little streets full of picturesque old wooden houses, we fantasized living in one of them, although, of course, we couldn’t afford to; as I said, I hadn’t saved that much money. As we strolled, Sam peered wide-eyed at bikes and skateboards scattered on the lawns where the kids had left them when they ran in for supper.
“Won’t they get stolen?” he asked, and when I told him I didn’t expect so he looked thoughtful. Later we discovered Eastport’s harbor and the boats bobbing in it, and for him I think right then was when it got decided, even before I found out that one of those old houses cost about a tenth of what I had been expecting it would.
So we were staying, come hell or high water, both of which we promptly encountered. The house we chose—two centuries old, full of ramshackle charm and with a half-dozen working fireplaces, but at the time no operable furnace—had a few defects I wasn’t told about at the time of sale.
For instance, that quirky little dip in the roof beam wasn’t a feature. Also, the house leaked; not just the roof, but all the drafty, 200-year-old wooden windows as well.
And don’t even get me started on the cellar, a dirt-floored, cobwebby horror so chronically full of water you could’ve run a trout farm down there. By that time, a taunting refrain had begun repeating itself in my head: Move to Maine, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.