by Sarah Graves
“I mean, you keep saying it’s okay to drink alcohol in front of somebody who doesn’t drink,” Maggie said.
Which was true. He’d quit, but he didn’t see why anyone else should have to just on his account. It was his job, not theirs, to make sure he avoided whatever he needed to.
“Come on, Mags, I’ve explained and explained it to you—”
Outside, wind still rattled the gutters. But the rain had at least stopped, this brief relative calm a welcome breather before the second half of the gale roared in.
“—but it isn’t okay to taunt someone with it,” Maggie went on, not listening. “And don’t tell me she doesn’t taunt you. I’ve seen her practically pouring it down your throat.”
He sighed; Maggie was right. Carol made no secret of her wish for him to drink with her. “Oh, come on,” she’d wheedle, her look kittenish. “What can it hurt?”
He wondered what she’d say if he told her: the binges, the rage. One time a few years ago, Bob Arnold had actually had to throw a net over him to bring him home.
He tried changing the subject. “Listen, I’m going out soon, see if I can find Harvey Spratt.”
But that wasn’t a safe topic, either; he could practically see Maggie frowning doubtfully. “That kid? What d’you want with a little gangster like him?”
Sam sat up, leaning his back against the headboard of his narrow pine bed. He liked the bed, with its faded plaid bedspread and carved wooden bedposts. Homely and plain, it felt normal to him, and all he wanted nowadays was normal. Except sometimes …
Oh, those sometimes. “I’m not sure,” he answered Maggie’s unhappy question. “But he might know something about all the trouble my friend Chip’s in. So I’m just going to ask Harvey.”
“Uh-huh,” said Maggie, her tone cautioning. “He sells Oxys, you know. Not just pot and booze.”
Sam had known, actually. Irritation seized him, that she’d thought he was ignorant and that he needed the warning.
And that she was the one to give it, like she was his mom or something. “Yeah, well, I’m not going to buy any pills from him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He stuck his pen in his pocket, swung his legs down off the edge of the bed. “Look, I’ve got to go.”
Silence. Maggie was a babe—a smart, talented, crazy-in-love-with-him babe, and he loved her, too, most of the time—but she was impossible to talk to when she got like this. Finally:
“All right,” she gave in. “Do what you want. You will anyway, I know that much about you. But this is how it happens.”
He pulled his boots on. “How what happens?”
Not that he needed an answer. “First hanging out with party girls. Then socializing with druggies. Next thing you know—”
“Maggie, I’m not socializing with him. I’m just going to ask him a few questions.”
“Like what?” she snapped back. “Have you planned this? Do you even know what you’re going to say?”
He finished tying his second bootlace, wondering if maybe she thought she should be doing that for him, too. And wipe my nose for me, maybe. And my …
“No. I don’t, okay? I have no freaking idea. All I know is, my friend is in trouble. And if Harvey Spratt’s going to talk to anyone, he’ll talk to—”
Me, he’d been about to finish. But that way lay disaster, because Maggie didn’t know the half of what trouble Sam had been in himself before he got sober. Bad enough to need a cop’s net thrown over his squirming body while half the town looked on, bad enough to need an AA meeting (or two, or in the early weeks even three) every day for a year.
Bad enough, at the bitter end there when he really could’ve used hospitalization, to be buying prescription painkillers from Harvey Spratt. But no one knew that, or needed to.
“He’ll talk to another young guy like me,” Sam said.
A silence. Then: “Sam. I’m sorry I sounded pushy. But—”
“Aw, Mags.” He knew what she was about to say.
“… but the way things are between us, you need to make some decisions, because … because I’ve made mine.”
She sounded definite. No, he thought. Don’t. But even as he thought this he continued pulling his jacket on and flinging his long scarf, the navy striped one that she’d knitted for him, saying that it made him look like a Harvard man, around his neck.
A Harvard man. Yeah, that’s a hot one. I can’t even keep a boatyard job. “Maggie—”
“Don’t call me,” she interrupted. Not harshly, but that only made it worse. “And don’t come over here, all right?”
His heart cracked. A vision of his future, full of wild, glassy-eyed girls like Carol and sullen thugs like Harvey Spratt, opened up before him, bleakly compelling.
He wanted a drink. “Listen, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve been a big jerk about all this, but—”
“No,” she repeated. Not angrily; not anything, really. Just the one word.
Vodka, he thought. Or Jack Daniel’s, tall glass, no ice. Down the hatch. If he started now, he could be loaded by noon. Maybe he should call Carol, give her the thrill (the triumph, his mind corrected him accurately, a win for her team) she’d longed for.
He turned his mind from the thought, from the warm, blurry-visioned comfort it promised, with the ease of long practice. But it was still there, lurking just out of sight, deeply imprinted.
It always was. Maggie went on: “You know how I feel about you, so you decide what you want, me or her. A happy life, or all this … all this racketing around that you don’t seem to be able to give up.”
“Maggie …” Outside, the sky lightened briefly, darkening again as more clouds scudded by overhead.
“But, Sam?” In the background at Maggie’s he heard music, a chamber trio, he thought, and a volley of barks as her brindle cur, Roscoe, spotted a squirrel through the window.
“Don’t take too long, Sam, okay? ’Cause I love you, I do.”
The barking stopped. The music did, too. He stood there, no words coming to his mind that would fix this.
“But even I have my limits, Sam,” said Maggie. Then:
Click. She’d hung up.
“This is Jake Tiptree.” I’d been waiting for Sam to get off the phone, but it rang again before I could pick it up.
And the news wasn’t good. “Yes, Lonnie,” I said, “I know you’ve got other work waiting.”
Lonnie Porter was the local roofer whose wife I’d called, to ask him to visit the church steeple, now unfortunately a crime scene, in hopes of keeping it from falling down on all our heads. But Lonnie was, to put it mildly, not enthusiastic about this.
Much less enthusiastic, actually, than I’d thought. “Ayuh,” said Lonnie. “Other work’s not the whole trouble, though. It’s them cops.” Cawps, the Maine way of pronouncing it. “Don’t matter what I say to ’em. Ain’t goin’ to let me in there.”
They-ah. Just then Sam came downstairs, dressed in jeans, jacket, and boots; with the long striped scarf looped around his neck, he looked just like a Harvard man.
What’s up? I mouthed at him, but he only waved, grabbed an apple from the bowl on the kitchen table, and headed out, looking determined and as if, wherever he was going, when he got there he wasn’t planning to take no for an answer.
Me either. “Lonnie,” I said, “if you tell them the steeple could actually fall, that it might not even be there for them to collect evidence out of unless they let you inspect it—”
“Won’t matter.” Mattah. “Them cops is thick as mud. I told ’em, I said, you guys is gonna get your heads knocked off.”
You-ah. “But they didn’t care. They just looked at me like I was a dumb ol’ Eastporter.”
Eastpawtah. “So I says, okay, then. Don’t come cryin’ to me, that there tower flies off in that big wind, next thing you know you’ll all be investigatin’ it down the bay in Lubec!”
Thet they-ah towah. “Okay, Lonnie,” I said. “You tried, and that’s all you can do, I guess.�
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I peered out the dining room window, just to make sure that Mother Nature hadn’t moved the investigation to Lubec already. At this distance I couldn’t see the whole steeple, but the copper weathervane in the shape of an arrow still juddered in the stiff breeze up there, pointing due north.
So we were still okay for now. “I mean to go back, take the Eastport zoning guy with me. Maybe he can talk sense into ’em. Way that shaky steeple’s creakin’, maybe they’ll get smart.”
Smaht. “I appreciate it, Lonnie,” I said, and hung up to confront something else that was shaky: my own house. A patch of shingles approximately the size of Texas had torn off in the storm, or it looked that big anyway when I’d gone out front to try estimating how much tar paper to buy.
Also I’d need shingles and roofing nails, and while I was at it the chimney flashing looked iffy. And I’d need somebody to do it all, too, since the idea of me going up a ladder to reroof a house was about as likely as me going up one to visit the moon.
The one in the church tower had been bad enough, and that one had only been about one-fourth as tall as the distance up to my shingling project. Maybe when Lonnie was free again, I’d ask him. Meanwhile, the resulting roof leak had brought down a small patch of plaster in the guest room; luckily, I had half a can of Spackle left over from yesterday’s pipe explosion. So while I worried about Chip being in jail, Sam being jobless, Lizzie Snow finding or not finding her niece, and the church steeple blowing down onto the town’s citizens—including moi—I would at least keep busy.
Or I could have if fat, wood-stained water droplets weren’t still seeping through what was left of the guest room ceiling. Upstairs, I watched them ooze, each drop forming and quivering awhile before falling with a plop into the pail I’d set beneath, thinking that what I really needed was a blowtorch.
With it I could either dry out the area above the wet spot or burn the house down. At the moment both options seemed equally acceptable; very-old-house repair is satisfying, it’s confidence-building, it’s even tranquilizing sometimes.
But other times, it’s a pain in the behind. Still, with more rain forecast I’d be better off waiting; no sense doing the job twice. So finally I went back downstairs to smooth out my state of mind with coffee and one of Bella’s freshly made blueberry scones, and that’s where I was when the phone rang and I learned that the murdered girl’s dad, Hank Hansen, was missing once more.
He’d slipped out of his house again, reported Wade, who’d been with the bereaved man. But this time, he didn’t have a .22 pistol so old and bunged up that—according to Wade, who’d examined the weapon after confiscating it—you could hold it to your forehead and pull the trigger and still not be sure of hitting anything.
He’d have sworn, Wade said, that Hansen didn’t have any more firearms handy. He and George Valentine had questioned Hansen very closely and looked through the house as well as they could.
Nevertheless, from the sales slips and customer literature that Wade had found scattered around the place after Hansen came up missing for the second time, it looked as if on this trip he’d taken along a box of cartridges and a Marlin 336 rifle with a telescopic sight on it.
• • •
Hank Hansen drove carefully out Route 190, past the bank and the Mobil station and around the long curve at the edge of town. He didn’t want to get pulled over by any of the cops swarming all over the island, investigating his daughter’s murder.
Not that it needed any investigation; not anymore. Hank knew the suspect was already in custody. Bob Arnold had said so while he’d tried calming Hank down, the day before out on the bluffs.
City guy, Bob had said. State boys had him in a locked room down at the county courthouse in Machias. Right next door to the jail, Bob had informed Hank soothingly, while Hank slumped in the police chief’s embrace and tried hard to get hold of himself.
Tried to stop weeping, shaking, all but screaming, which was what he’d really wanted to do. Screaming to be allowed to go back to when Karen was alive, to when she’d still been sassing him and defying him, and he’d still had a chance to do right by her.
But now he never would. His chance to turn it all around—not today, not tomorrow, but someday—had been stolen from him. Floating around the periphery of his mind was the truth: that it was the murdering of his fantasy—a dream that he could change, that anything would ever be any different between him and his only child—that truly enraged him.
He couldn’t look straight at it, though. All my hopes, all my dreams … That the operative word in all his pain was me, that it was about him and how he felt—didn’t penetrate. Only his loss, mostly of his ability to go on fooling himself, sank in.
But his anguish … well, that was real, certainly. Jesus, how had it come to this? Wondering, he clutched the steering wheel, fighting the impulse to drive straight into a tree or a maybe a loaded log truck barreling down Route 1 like an oh-so-convenient engine of destruction, trailing the smell of pine sap in its turbulent wake.
But that wouldn’t help Karen, would it? Karen was past and gone, like everything else in his life that was ever any good.
Because he’d ruined it all. A sob escaped him; he swallowed it down as a cop car came over the hill at him in the opposite lane, heading toward Eastport. He straightened behind the wheel, did his best to look normal, ordinary.
Not-crazy. Which for him was a stretch, he knew. Stringy hair, broken nose, lips like liver slabs … he was no oil painting, and the look in his eye under the best of circumstances suggested a recent encounter with a booze-fueled hallucination or two.
And on most days, that suggestion was accurate. He summoned what presence of mind he could, his hair drenching with sweat from the effort of looking as if he weren’t making any effort at all, and was rewarded by nary a glance as the cop sped by.
Phew. He let his breath out. He’d borrowed this car from the shed he’d rented to one of the summer people in Eastport. Key was in it, full tank of gas … and the best part was, nobody was going to miss the vehicle, since no one knew it was there. He had simply driven it away, right under the nosy nose of that damned Mr. Big-Shot do-gooder, Wade Sorenson.
Like he had an idea what Hank was going through. “You aren’t gonna do anything stupid, are you, Hank?” he’d asked, out on the bluffs yesterday.
Even crazed with grief as he was, Hank had nearly laughed in Sorenson’s face. Who, me? he’d wanted to giggle.
Giggle forever, giggle himself right into a freaking grave. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out …
Oh, Jesus. Don’t think about that. About Karen, his sweet baby girl, lying on an autopsy table with her throat …
Stop, his mind instructed itself sharply, but it was too late. The bloody vision of his child, violated beyond all human reason, taken from him …
So now, his mind cut in and instructed him calmly, now he would take back; easy-peasy, simple as that. The Marlin hunting rifle in the back seat had belonged to his father and was one of the very few items of any value Hank owned that he hadn’t lost, sold, or ruined somehow; he’d even hung on to the box it came in and the instructions and safety literature that had come with it. Because it ejected to the right instead of out the top, he’d been able to mount the scope he’d bought for it himself.
Over the years, in season and out, with and without the help of a dashboard-mounted jacklight, he’d shot deer numbering in the hundreds with his dad’s Marlin. Dragged them home, hung them from a tree to bleed and age them, then dressed the carcasses out, cut the venison in pieces and wrapped them for the freezer.
Ate them, too. Venison sausage was Karen’s favorite, doused in ketchup with fried potatoes and eggs for breakfast. Or for a late-night snack, even, the two of them sitting up watching old movies until the wee hours. At least, they had on nights when he hadn’t drunk himself into a stupor by nine …
An axe blade of anxiety chopped the thought off as the cop he’d passed going the opposite direction n
ow came up on him from behind. Suddenly the rifle in the back seat—out of sight under a blanket, but still—glowed radioactive green in his head.
Pulsing its presence, neon flashes of gun! gun! gun! flared through the car’s trunk and out the rear end, into the cop’s mind. Or so Hank felt certain; glancing into the rearview mirror, he was met by the twin mirrored lenses of cop sunglasses, and by the cop’s flat expressionless face.
Reflexively he let up on the gas, but that was a wrong move, too; the car slowed suddenly, the cop roaring up practically onto Hank’s bumper now. Another glance; the cop’s head tipped sideways a little, one hand reaching out for …
Lights. Siren. Damn, he’s pulling me … Hurriedly Hank tried to come up with some reason for having a concealed rifle in the back seat. A loaded concealed rifle …
The sudden high-low howl from behind drilled through his head, bloodying his eardrums, though part of that might have been his awful hangover. The squad car’s red light strobed mercilessly, lobbing his eyeballs around like bloodshot Ping-Pong balls.
Then, with a roar of its big V-8, the squad car surged past him, the cop staring straight ahead, one hand on a dashboard knob and the other barely touching the wheel. As he passed, he didn’t even seem to know Hank and his Marlin existed, so intent was he on whatever sudden errand had arisen.
Hank huffed another breath out, the sudden absence of that awful siren like an intense vacuum, sucking the air out of him. Relief thudded in his chest as sudden rain spritzed thinly out of the low clouds racing overhead, dull gunmetal gray.
Trees went by, long swathes of them on both sides of the road. Here and there small houses sagged in discouragement at the ends of long, rutted-mud driveways. His tires sang over a bridge, crunched through graveled sections, flung bits of tarry hot-top material up into the car’s underside.
Twenty miles still to go, and then fifteen; the road wound over a saltwater inlet where geese rested among cattails, logs rotted to pitchy blackness, and the edge of an abandoned apple orchard sprawled, the autumn fruit all gone up as high as a deer on its hind legs could reach.