Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  “Oh,” I finished in a small voice. “You think . . .”

  She slowed between a dairy farm whose barbed-wire-and-cedar-post enclosures featured salt licks the size of concrete blocks, and an auto graveyard whose sign promised Good Used Partz!

  “I mean the last time you saw that life jacket, Mac Rickert was wearing it.” We started downhill. “And if he'd wanted to kill you . . .”

  We passed a Grange hall, its front porch decorated with dry corn sheaves, a wreath of mountain ash berries and hydrangea blossoms, and a poster: Jack-o'-Lantern Carving Party To-nite.

  “Right,” I said. “By that time he had my gun. One shot, even if anyone heard it and decided to investigate—”

  “Which is pretty unlikely, right there,” Ellie put in.

  “—he'd be long gone by the time they got out there. And if I hadn't found the life preserver . . .”

  “He could've come back to rescue you himself,” Ellie agreed. “You were likely too busy not drowning to notice how far away he actually went.”

  True. And it put a whole new spin on the matter, didn't it? Having a near-death experience, that is, then finding out it was not much more than a fistfight followed by a cold bath.

  That Mac Rickert might never have meant to harm me at all. “Hey, where're we going, anyway?” I asked.

  Ellie had turned onto a tiny dirt lane; now she followed it between a double row of massive cedar trees to a gravel parking area and stopped the car.

  I looked around. A hand-carved sign read Elderberry Cottage but there was no dwelling visible, just a curving white pebbled path leading off into what would have been a forest if it weren't so well groomed, not a fallen branch or rotten stump in sight.

  Through the trees, water sparkled distantly as I got out of the car into a silence so complete that it made my ears ring. The air smelled richly of crushed apples, damp leaves, and the smoke of a hickory wood fire burning slowly somewhere nearby.

  “Ellie, what are we doing here?” I asked as a little black spaniel danced welcomingly out of the woods toward us. “I really don't have time for . . .”

  I wanted to call Bob again myself and confess the whole hideously embarrassing story of my escapade, plus the information it had yielded. Such as it was, but at least it might change the state cops' mind about Wanda being a crime victim.

  Even if it wouldn't help find her. “Etta,” Ellie greeted the spaniel familiarly, smoothing its ears, and in response the dog danced joyously around some more.

  And then to me: “Lunch,” she pronounced, though I saw no food unless you counted the acorns under the trees. “Trust me, lunch is good for screwing heads back on,” she declared.

  I could agree with that, though I still didn't see where we were going to get any. Also, it was too early for lunch.

  Etta pranced in delighted circles around my feet. “And while we eat it I'm going to explain a few things to you,” Ellie told me.

  She took the Scotch bottle from my hand, put it back into the glove compartment. “But first I have activities planned.”

  She guided me onto the pebbled path with the black dog still gamboling around us. I must've glanced back rather wistfully at the bottle.

  “Don't worry,” she finished confidently. “Where we're going, you're not going to need that.”

  Ellie was right; I didn't need the Scotch. Instead I had the mineral baths, a mud soak, an herbal wrap, and special eyelid-soothing gauze pads soaked in something cool and puckery-feeling, as if all of my puffy skin cells were being shrunk into positions they'd last held when I was about eighteen.

  And there was more: a pedicure. I'd never had one before. Plus acupuncture, which I wasn't sure I wanted until the pain in my shoulder suddenly gathered itself and fled, flapping its dark wings before magically exiting the top of my head.

  After that, bliss. A little over three hours later, dressed in my own clothes, which had been washed, dried, and—oh, best of all, ironed—I sank into a cushioned wicker chair at a table in one of Elderberry Cottage's three small private dining rooms.

  “Better?” Ellie inquired, beaming. She'd had a facial and a vitamin-enriched hair wash.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked, sipping mineral water. “My whole body has been replaced.”

  By, I might add, a newer model, one with features the old body never dreamed of possessing. A mind, for instance, that was running on all its cylinders.

  Ellie smiled. In addition to all the other ministrations that had been applied to me, I'd had a massage so therapeutic it was as if my joints and major muscle groups had been disassembled and put together again, in vastly improved ways.

  After that my hands were anointed with herbal oils, wrapped in cloth light and slippery as silk, and placed in a mysterious sandalwood box with a switch on it that, when turned on, emitted a warmish hum so deeply soothing I'd wanted to stick my head in there.

  “But Ellie, who's paying for all this?” In the cottage's large main room youngish women in flowered smocks took appointments on the phone, showed clients to the dressing rooms, and generally behaved charmingly while displaying skin so perfect it might have been scrubbed with soft brushes.

  Which around here maybe it had. As lovely aromas floated from an unseen kitchen I sipped my cold wine, savoring the fruity wallop. “Because,” I added guiltily, “it must cost a . . .”

  Fortune. And of course I'd be paying for it; who else? No way I would let Ellie cover it.

  Another thump of guilt hit me, and not only about the money. “Ellie, what am I doing here? There's a kid out there somewhere and Mac Rickert's got her.”

  She eyed me across the table. “Okay. I understand that. But which is better? Trying to do anything about it the way you felt before, or now? Or anyway, after we eat,” she added as a woman in a white apron arrived bearing plates of food.

  On mine was a toasted whole wheat roll stuffed with chicken salad, avocado slices, and lettuce. Beside it were potato wedges crispy with broiled butter, coleslaw redolent of buttermilk and celery seed plus fresh dill weed, and a chunk of goat cheese with olive oil glistening iridescently on it, stuck on a toothpick.

  I regarded it all for a moment. “Now,” I decided, answering Ellie's question and addressing the feast with an energy that I would've thought impossible a few hours earlier.

  “Wade's paying,” Ellie said later as we were eating dessert: chocolate mousse, real whipped cream, and a candied violet on top.

  “He said was there anything I could do in a few hours that would really take care of you, and I said yes but it was kind of expensive, and he said go for it,” she went on.

  I sipped my coffee: Jamaican Blue Mountain.

  “He also said we'd better find Wanda Cathcart before you got sick over it,” she added. “Or really got hurt.”

  Implicit in this comment was Ellie's awareness that I hadn't called her last night, either.

  That I'd gone out alone. “So,” I asked lightly, changing the subject, “what else have you been doing while I've been having my chassis waxed?”

  Because did I mention? Leg waxing. From knee to ankle I was as smooth as a baby's behind, and it felt fabulous.

  Ellie pulled out a sheaf of notes. “Thinking,” she answered briskly. “And writing it down.”

  “About how I blew it.” Another sobering wash of shame flooded me.

  She looked up, surprised. “What are you talking about? I meant what I said before. You really did elicit an amazing amount of information, Jacobia. And you accomplished something else very important, as well.”

  News to me, but with that we got up. Outside, sunlight slanted through the trees in that poignant, October-afternoon way that meant evening would be here before we knew it.

  “First of all,” Ellie said as she put the car in gear and headed us back to the road again, “you got Wanda's pills to her.”

  I'd expected to go home but she turned in the other direction, past a small lakeside park with picnic tables, a wooden dock that had alrea
dy been pulled out of the water for winter, and a boat-launch area.

  “So that's one worry taken care of,” she said. “And we know two more important things, too, on account of you.”

  Oh, goody. “What?” I asked, feeling that at this point it was probably a fine idea to let her summarize them; I didn't have a clue.

  “First, that he didn't mean to kill you. He tossed that life jacket at you, he must have. You were just too busy to notice.”

  “Then why did he dump me in the water in the first place?”

  “To be sure of getting away,” she replied simply. “Because if he just let you off on shore, you might get to a house with a phone and call the Coast Guard.”

  Instead, by the time I'd made it to the house, it was already too late.

  We came to a fork in the road; she chose the right-hand turn, passing a small white church with a bell-tower steeple and a neatly mowed graveyard out back. About a quarter of a mile down the road a small sign said Passage East Gallery.

  Seeing it, Ellie nodded minutely to herself, then dropped the bombshell. “And he didn't kill Gene Dibble,” she finished. “Despite what he said.”

  We turned between a pair of enormous copper beech trees, their trunks swooping gracefully up to form an entry to a pine- needle-carpeted parking area surrounded by evergreens.

  She turned to me. “And how do we know this?” she inquired in a bright, professorial manner.

  Got me. I felt my face screwing up in a way that should've had a dunce cap on top of it, whereupon she patiently supplied the information herself.

  “The gun, Jacobia. Think about the gun that killed Dibble.”

  “It was a .38,” I said. “The medical examiner . . .”

  Then I stopped. Not a .22 like Wade's. “But Rickert said—”

  “Exactly,” Ellie responded, pleased.

  Ahead spread a grassy field lined on one side by a bed of daylilies, groomed and mulched for the coming winter. A small log house with a screen porch stood at the end of the lily bed, its narrow brick walkway laid out neatly in the jack-on-jack pattern.

  “Mac was lying about killing Dibble, Jake. I don't know why, maybe he just wanted you to think he's dangerous. An ego thing, you know?” She thought a moment. “Or . . . maybe he wants to take all the suspicion off somebody else, someone we don't know about yet?”

  We got out. I still didn't know what we were doing here. A crow's harsh call sounded once somewhere very nearby.

  “What we do know is, he admitted to doing murder but if he doesn't know what kind of gun it was—”

  “Then he didn't,” I finished for her as she led me along the path. “But if he didn't kill Dibble, then Wanda couldn't have seen him do it, could she? So why take her?”

  But I thought I knew the answer to that. Because he wanted to, that's why. Because he'd seen her and wanted her.

  A wisp of smoke curled prettily from the granite chimney and now I could see the things artfully arranged inside the porch.

  “Don't know,” Ellie replied. “And neither do you,” she added emphatically. “But I've been thinking about where he might've taken her, too,” she finished.

  She opened the screen door to where the gentle warmth of a woodstove radiated a welcome; it was only two-thirty but the afternoon's gathering clouds added to the chilly gloom, the last leaves in the maples flaming redly against the fading sky.

  “And?” I demanded, but Ellie was already examining the lovely objects in the screen porch: bentwood chairs and matching footstools with crazy-quilt cushions in jewel tones, bunches of dried flowers poignant with the sense of summer gone by, and a birdhouse made to resemble an old-fashioned general store, with tiny shingles and real glass panes in its miniature double-hung windows.

  “And I'll tell you all about it when we're done here,” Ellie decreed firmly. “Go on into the main room.”

  I obeyed, wondering a little impatiently about what further restorative measures she could have arranged. Whatever they were, they surely couldn't hold a candle to what I'd already enjoyed or make me feel more fully repaired.

  Or so I thought.

  An hour later, equipped with several pairs of new earrings apiece and feeling the pleasant sensation of well-being that can only be produced by really good retail therapy, we did go home.

  “The thing is this,” Ellie picked up the conversation again as we drove. “Mac's probably got the girl off-island. Because now we know he's moving around by boat.”

  So the roadblock on the causeway wouldn't have bothered him. But if that was true Wanda could be anywhere; there were a thousand places Mac could reach with that little boat of his.

  “Still,” Ellie added encouragingly, “that doesn't widen the territory as much as you might think. Because it's deer season, remember?”

  Speeding down the hill we'd climbed earlier was a good deal more exciting than going up, especially as Ellie seemed to think I needed a thrill ride on top of everything else.

  “Ellie,” I began when she didn't put the brakes on. But she was already talking again.

  “Deer season means people in the woods. And he wouldn't want that. He wants privacy. So where would you go?”

  I thought a minute, long enough for my heart to climb back down out of my throat as we reached the foot of the hill. Then:

  “Tall Island,” I said, remembering. “It's a preserve, no hunting at all, not even bowhunting. George said there are poachers, but . . .”

  She nodded, turning left onto Route 1 toward home. “Uh-huh. Tall Island's so wild, and pretty big, too, so a fellow like Mac wouldn't have too much trouble avoiding a few poachers.”

  She thought a moment. “In fact, poachers would probably want to avoid him. Worried he might be a game warden hunting for them. And Tall Island's a difficult water access.”

  I hadn't known that part. And after what I'd been through, I wasn't interested in any water access at all. But what Ellie said next made sense as well.

  “He could've gotten Wanda to Joey's boat when the storm was so bad.” She shot past two cars and an eighteen-wheeler with what felt to me like suicidal glee.

  But in a born-and-bred downeast Maine native, that was normal driving. “It's a few miles from Quoddy Village,” she admitted, “but they could have walked it.”

  I hadn't wanted to. But then, I hadn't been fleeing a murder scene with a young girl in tow, one I wanted to hide pronto.

  “Once the weather settled the next day, he just waited until dark, got her into his own boat, and took her . . . well, wherever he took her,” Ellie continued.

  She slowed for the long curve of the Route 190 turnoff, then whizzed down it. “And he was wearing high boots turned down low, like you said. Correct? You're sure?”

  Leave it to her to pick up on a tiny point of description. But fashion details weren't tops on my list of interests at the moment. “Yes, but what difference does that—”

  “It means I'm right,” she said decisively. “It's somewhere he has to wade ashore, like Tall Island. The way the rocks are there, from a boat you can't get onto the beach without waders.”

  The boots, she meant. “And what do you want to bet Joey's ferrying supplies to him?”

  She wasn't just quick on the uptake and detail-oriented. She was brilliant. “So if we followed Joey . . .”

  “Yep.” She accelerated onto the causeway. “Betcha we'd find Mac. But there's one other thing we need to think about, too.”

  I was following her line of thought more easily now, due to the fact that I felt like a new woman. Eight hours earlier I wouldn't have been able to follow a four-lane highway, and if I'd tried I would've gotten flattened on it.

  But where her thinking led wasn't a comfortable location at all. Because as she'd realized, if Mac Rickert hadn't shot Eugene Dibble then somebody else had.

  And if Rickert hadn't kidnapped Wanda—if instead she'd gone with him even semi-willingly, as he'd implied—then one possible reason was that Wanda knew the identity of Gene Dibble
's murderer.

  And that it wasn't Mac. “If Wanda saw who did it . . .” I began.

  “And she realized whoever it was knew she knew . . .” Ellie put in.

  “Maybe that's why she ran,” I finished.

  Maybe. But one thing was for sure: Before we got Wanda out of a fire, we needed to be sure we weren't dropping her right back into a frying pan, instead.

  That is, right back into the grasp of a killer.

  Autumn dusk was gathering and the other cars had their headlights on when Ellie dropped me off in front of my house.

  In the front yard the backhoe stood idle and the trucks of the town men and water company workers had departed. But a trench six feet deep flanked by two big piles of fresh dirt stood open like a grave from the pavement all the way to my foundation.

  A tarp nailed to the clapboards said the old stones had also been breached. Translation: They'd had to dig into the cellar to reach the water pipe.

  Phooey. On the other hand apparently George Valentine hadn't thought supervising the pipe project and caring for Leonora was enough work for him, so he'd started on the porch steps. As a result the risers for the steps were installed, nailed to a pair of six-by-sixes that he'd fastened to the house with railroad spikes.

  Or anyway they resembled railroad spikes. George had gotten out the circular saw, too, and cut the step treads as well as planks for the larger porch area. Now the whole yard smelled of newly cut, fresh-milled lumber, and the wood itself glowed under the porch light.

  Pleased, I went inside. No one around, but a note from Bella said the dogs had been walked and all three animals fed.

  Better and better: alone, choreless, and fully energized by the pampering I'd received. It went a long way toward balancing the hope and terror I felt at the thought of what Ellie and I had outlined for the evening.

  We'd finalized our plan while driving the rest of the way into town. And right now there was really only a single tool that could express how I felt about it: a nail gun.