Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  Dead Level is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Graves

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Graves, Sarah.

  Dead level : a home repair is homicide mystery / Sarah Graves.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53456-9

  1. Tiptree, Jacobia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Fiction. 3. Dwellings—Maintenance and repair—Fiction. 4. Eastport (Me.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R2897D43 2012

  813′.54—dc23 2011035914

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design: Jamie S. Warren

  Jacket images (beaver and dam): Jupiterimages/Getty

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Hours after inmate Dewey Hooper, seven years into a twenty-year sentence for manslaughter, escaped from the prison system’s medium-security facility at Lakesmith, Maine, guard Jeff Rohrbach got his orders. He was to collect up all of Hooper’s personal belongings, including books, papers, writings, drawings, and anything else that might give a hint as to the missing man’s whereabouts.

  Yeah, Rohrbach thought scornfully. Like that’s gonna happen. Guy decides to pull a runner, he’s gonna leave clues. Little map, maybe, X marks the spot on it. Jeeze, you’d think some of these supervisors had never seen the inside of a prison before. But:

  Mine is not to reason why, Rohrbach told himself resignedly, stopping at the door to “D” corridor and turning his face up so that the guy watching the surveillance camera could see him. The locked corridor, called a pod, held a group of a dozen cells that constituted a prisoner’s neighborhood.

  While he was here, Hooper had been a good citizen of his neighborhood, or at least a relatively trouble-free one. Took his orders without backchat, no fights, no contraband discoveries. It was as if Hooper had been relieved, really, to have someone else telling him what to do for a change. Arriving for his shift this morning, Rohrbach had been amazed to hear that Hooper had taken the initiative to attempt an escape; that the inmate had actually made it out Rohrbach thought was just short of miraculous.

  He waited patiently while the guard monitoring the camera opened the pod door’s electronic lock: ka-click! when it opened, ka-click! again when it closed behind him.

  Inside, the brightly lit corridor featured identical doors, each pierced with a small window. At this hour of the morning, the cells were empty, their occupants all out at various scheduled activities: work, school, exercise, and so on. Except for Hooper; what activity he might be engaged in this fine morning was still anyone’s guess.

  Rohrbach entered Hooper’s cell, which looked just like all the others: a ten-by-fourteen-foot cubicle with white walls, a white linoleum floor, and a slot window too narrow for a man to get even half his face through, much less his body. The bed was a shelf built into the wall; the combination washstand and toilet was brushed steel, also built in. A desk-shelf with a molded plastic chair tucked under it was the only other furniture. The mattress on the bed was a thin blue plastic pad.

  Brackets in the wall above the bed showed where another bunk could be hung, if necessary. There was nothing else in the room: no books, no pictures on the wall, no calendar. A blanket and a towel, neatly folded, were on the neatly made bed, atop Hooper’s pillow. Cell and corridor smelled the same, like Clorox, sweeping compound, cheap air freshener, and men’s sweat.

  The cell’s stark impersonality came as no surprise. Others on the corridor, in defiance of regulations, had taped clippings of newspaper stories, their kids’ artwork, and other items that were personally important to them on the walls. But Hooper had been, Rohrbach recalled again grimly, a model prisoner, and when the order came down that all prisoner belongings should be stowed in footlockers, not displayed on the walls as if these were college dorm rooms, Hooper, unlike most of the other inmates, had complied at once.

  Rohrbach thought the regulation was stupid. A comfortable inmate was a calm inmate, and a calm inmate was a safe inmate, in his opinion. And unlike the administrators who sat on their butts all day thinking up ways to make Rohrbach’s job harder, when you worked among guys whose nerves were already severely on edge, the last thing you wanted was to make them even more angry, agitated, and resentful.

  But that wasn’t Rohrbach’s call to make, either. His job was to root through that footlocker, dig out whatever Hooper-locating secrets it might hold. The idea that Hooper might’ve left a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of a map or a diary was still stupid; hell, the guy was barely literate, as far as Rohrbach could tell.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t like they had anything else to go on. The prisoner had simply evaporated. Gone like a fart in the wind, as the onetime head of another Maine prison had been known to say.

  Rohrbach pulled the gray molded-plastic box from under the bed. Inmates couldn’t have locks, so it opened easily. Might as well ask a Ouija board where Dewey Hooper is, Rohrbach thought. But when he looked inside the box …

  “Holy mackerel,” he breathed. Notebooks. The footlocker was filled to the top with notebooks, the kind prisoners were allowed to buy with their small work-detail earnings: tape bindings, no plastic or metal, cardboard covers removed in case weapons might somehow be fashioned from them.

  Alert for sharp objects that might be rusty or contaminated—some inmates hid blades, needles, and other dangerous things in footlockers, and although he didn’t expect any such problem from Hooper’s belongings, you never knew—Rohrbach removed one of the notebooks and opened it.

  A limp four-leaf clover fluttered out; as it fell to the floor Rohrbach recalled Hooper’s only idiosyncrasy: superstition. You could make the guy turn his cell into a plain white box, no problem, but don’t try to make him walk under a ladder. Then, as what he was seeing sank in:

  “Man, oh, man,” Rohrbach said to himself, recalling again the passive little guy who’d seemed to live only for work detail, his eagerness for new assignments seeming to suggest he was enrolled in a training program for running a prison, not confined in one.

  Rohrbach flipped quickly through the pages, then slowed, turning them wonderingly:

  They were all the same. Page after page, over and over …

  Day after day. Year after year. Hundreds of times, thousands of times … I guess still waters really do run deep, Rohrbach thought, and then a sound from the corridor made him turn.

  It was Charlie Theriault, here for armed robbery, nine years into a seven-to-fifteen. “Hey,” Charlie said.

  “Hey,” Rohrbach greeted the man in return. Charlie was all right. A little moody but not a problem. The inmate entered his cell, came out with his towel.

  Rohrbach looked back down at the notebooks. “Charlie,” he said, “do you recall her name? Hooper’s wife, the one he—”<
br />
  Killed. Beat to death. He didn’t want to say it, though. Putting violent images in an inmate’s head was never a good idea. And as it turned out, he didn’t have to; Charlie remembered.

  “Marianne,” said Charlie, confirming what Rohrbach thought.

  As he had expected, the notebooks gave no clue as to Hooper’s whereabouts. What had been on his mind, though, through all those quiet years of him being a model prisoner—

  Oh, that was crystal clear. Marianne Marianne, read the first line of the first notebook in childishly rounded cursive script, like the writing of a small boy. And the next line and the next, on both sides of the page.

  Marianne Marianne Marianne …

  Page after page, notebook after notebook. Year after year:

  Marianne.

  CHAPTER 1

  Harold had Facebook, and LiveJournal, and Twitter. He had a BlackBerry, an iPad, an iPod, and a third-generation Kindle.

  He had a pain, mild but constant, a fluttery twinge in the soft tissue just above his left eye, deep in the hollow where you’d put your thumb if you were going to try lifting him by his cranium. Sometimes late at night, in his tiny apartment in a grimly forgotten, perpetually unfashionable corner of Lower Manhattan, he would find himself Googling: twinge, eye, flutter. Or: thumb, skull.

  When it occurred to him what that last pair rhymed with—numbskull—he stopped Googling it. But he couldn’t forget.

  Each weekday, Harold took the subway to his job at a video store a few blocks from Ground Zero, a place with a sale bin out front and a sputtery neon sign in the grimy window. Once it had thrived, but the only videos people rented nowadays were ones they wouldn’t dare view on the Internet for fear of prison time.

  The films didn’t have brightly illustrated cardboard sleeves, or even titles. Furtive men—no women, in Harold’s depressingly extensive experience—entered the store with money in hand, and asked without looking up at Harold for number 19, or number 204.

  Harold wondered if they were ashamed of themselves, or if maybe they just didn’t like seeing his eye twitch. If maybe they were creeped out by him. What he didn’t wonder was what kind of unspeakably sordid images the videos contained; he needed the job too much for that.

  But after three years in the store—the sputtering neon sign, the nagging eye pain, the worn black plastic cassettes or clear jewel cases that he wiped thoroughly with spray cleaner anytime one of them got returned—he also needed a vacation. So when the store’s owner laid Harold off for two weeks due to cash-flow problems, he decided to go to Maine.

  He’d never been, just seen pictures of the place. Probably Maine colors weren’t as bright as they looked in the pages of magazines, with lighthouses as red-and-white-striped as new candy canes, and water as blue as … well, nothing in this life was ever really that blue, Harold felt sure.

  But it didn’t matter what it was like there. It was the idea of Maine that attracted him: clean air, not too many people. Forests you could walk into and not find your way out again, mineral-clear lakes, numbingly cold, where you could wade in and dissolve with a sigh, like a fizzy lozenge.

  Not that he meant to; wade into one of those lakes, that is, and never wade out. But the idea of such wilderness—of surfaces that hadn’t been handled and breathed on, or even looked at, by millions of people—spoke deeply to him, somehow, even though he had never experienced any such place himself.

  So Harold left all his electronic gadgets at home and took a bus from Port Authority to Bangor, Maine, then a smaller one whose seats were made of hard plastic. As they wound out of Bangor, the driver drank Diet Coke and blared Top Forty on the radio propped up on the cluttered dashboard while the bus juddered along the twisty, crumbling two-lane blacktop.

  Hours passed while Harold stared out the window at a world growing steadily more rural and less like anything he’d ever seen before: small wooden houses with garishly colored plastic toys in their rough yards, lobster traps stacked along unpaved driveways, boats sagging on trailers. Next came lengthy stretches where it seemed no one at all lived, the unfenced fields high and boulder-studded and the forests appearing darkly impenetrable.

  At last they reached a small, desolate-looking intersection marked by an out-of-business gas station and convenience store. No sign, but the driver said it was the right place; hoisting his backpack, Harold got out and the bus trundled away, leaving him alone on the gravel shoulder, which was littered with hundreds of old and new filtered cigarette butts.

  All around him loomed giant evergreens, their pointed tops etched on a fiercely blue sky. A big white-headed bird—a bald eagle, Harold realized; he’d never seen one of those before, either—sailed above.

  The roar of a diesel engine shattered the silence as a log truck loaded with forty-foot tree trunks hurtled past, the smell of fresh pine sap sharp in its wake. Watching it go, he felt a sudden, drowning sense of isolation and loss, as if his old life had been torn away and had yet to be replaced by anything.

  If it would be. Abruptly, he wished he hadn’t come. Back in the city, he was always so surrounded and assaulted by crowds and clamor, it was easy there to pretend that he wasn’t alone.

  Here it was different. Turning, he heard the gravel crunch loudly beneath his feet. A big dog barked, somewhere on the other side of a line of trees. From the rotting eaves of the boarded-up convenience store, wasps drifted, each one materializing in the gloom at the nest’s entrance, then launching itself.

  Harold wondered suddenly what it was like in that nest, in the insectile dark. But he didn’t think he’d better try to find out. Just then a car pulled up to where the gas pumps used to be.

  “You waitin’ for a ride?” The car was an old, dark blue Monte Carlo with the word TAXI inexpertly stenciled on it in white.

  The driver, a large, whiskery man wearing a fedora, chewed a cigar stub. Harold did not recall any cabdriver back in the city ever waiting so patiently or looking at him so frankly, as if genuinely engaged in this interaction and curious about Harold’s reply.

  Harold hefted his backpack, which he had let down onto the cracked concrete pad that the absent gas pumps had once stood on. Ten minutes later, after crossing a causeway and traversing some of the most astonishingly beautiful geography he’d ever seen—trees, a long beach with legions of small birds striding stick-legged on it, a wide expanse of water, then more trees and water again—he reached the island city of Eastport, Maine.

  “Here you go. That’ll be seven bucks. A buck a mile,” the taxi man explained around the cigar stub.

  Harold blinked, still stunned by the beauty and variety of the fields, forested land, and reedy marshes he’d been whisked through, the ponds, pools, and tidal inlets he’d passed over.

  Chomping the cigar, the driver eyed him wisely. “City boy, eh? Don’t worry. You stay here, you’ll get over it. Eventually,” he added with a wink, taking the ten Harold handed him.

  “Keep the change,” said Harold. The Monte pulled away in a belch of gray exhaust fumes that the breeze, smelling strongly of salt water and creosote, snatched up and dispersed.

  Leaving him alone, again, though here at least there were people going about their business: into the hardware store, the pizza shop, and the T-shirt-and-souvenir store all located in the three-story red-brick buildings directly before him. To his left loomed another brick edifice, an old bank now repurposed into an art gallery, with a fountain and a small terrace in front of it. There was an ornate metal park bench placed on the terrace, which he thought was a nice touch.

  Right behind him was an old-fashioned diner. Through a small screened front window, he saw a long Formica counter and a series of red leatherette booths, and suddenly realized he was starving. He’d been on the road almost two days with only snacks and small bottles of juice to eat and drink, from the vending machines in various bus stations.

  Turning to enter the diner, he got his first view of the bay, which even after all of the water he’d already crossed he hadn’t
realized was so very near. Seeing it on a map had been one thing, the letters printed over it spelling out Passamaquoddy Bay, which he guessed must be a Native American name. But being right next to it was another thing, especially since there was no one on it.

  Or almost no one; dark blue with flocks of gulls hovering over it, the bay was narrow and extended a long way to his left and right, which he recalled from the map were north and south. A few fishing boats puttered, their wakes boiling white, engines puffing up clouds of diesel. The bay itself looked serene, though, not like the busy, commerce-clogged waterways at home.

  He gazed for another moment, inhaling the salty air. But more delay than that, the pangs of his appetite would not allow. A whiff of grilled bacon drifted sweetly out of the diner’s screen window, seized him by the nose, and drew him hungrily in.

  Half an hour later he was sopping up the last bit of egg yolk with his last corner of buttered toast. The waitress was so free with the coffee refills, he thought she’d have left the pot if he’d asked. He washed the delicious mouthful down with a sip from his freshly topped-up cup and, sighing, leaned back.

  He’d made it. He’d gotten here, all the long way to Maine’s downeast coast, so far from the island of Manhattan and, as he had already begun realizing, so utterly different from it.

  And he felt … fine. Scared, a little, and still not sure how he was getting away with such an adventurous, such a previously unthought-of, expedition. He didn’t quite trust his success yet, he guessed. But so far, so good.

  Two men slid onto stools at the counter. They were in their sixties, maybe, Harold thought from their work-bent postures, and they were similarly dressed in jeans, boots, and faded plaid shirts, with Red Sox ball caps on their heads. When they spoke, continuing a conversation that had evidently begun outside, their accents amazed Harold.

  “Pretty fah from heah.” The first man stirred sugar into his coffee.

  “Fah,” the second man agreed. “Nawt thet fah, tho.”