Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  “Or maybe,” Ellie went on, apparently thinking I might like a change of subject, and she was right, the day I’d gone on the stand against Dewey Hooper had been one of the most upsetting of my whole life—

  “Maybe it’s because in the paper back then, there was a picture of her from before she married him. Marianne Hooper, and when we saw it we both said—”

  “Right, that she looked like you.” In fact, before Hooper got hold of her, Marianne had been the spitting image of Ellie: that hair, that face. That is, before the fractured cheekbones, split lips, and other injuries they found at autopsy.

  “That’s still no reason for me to feel anything about it now, though,” I countered.

  Ellie lifted the carryall I’d been filling, unfazed by its weight. Her slender build and fine features made her look as fragile as a china figurine, but she was an Eastport girl born and bred.

  So under all that extravagant prettiness of hers, she was as tough as an old boot. “Right.” She drew the word out skeptically.

  The resemblance, she knew, had bothered me a lot back then, as if just looking so much like the dead woman might put Ellie in danger. But that was clearly unreasonable, and Hooper was now headed directly away from our area, which as Ellie had said made sense; he was crazy, not stupid, and people around here knew him by sight. So we dropped the subject, and she went out to the backyard with my two dogs, Monday the old black Lab and Prill the Doberman.

  Through the kitchen window, I watched the animals dancing around her in anticipation, just in case she should accidentally drop any biscuits. Which—accidentally, of course, from one of those patchwork pockets that just happened always to be full of them—she did. Next came her laughter, and the dogs speaking for treats, a trick they would do only at her expert command.

  Listening, I suddenly felt very grateful for her. She’d been my friend since practically the day I arrived in Eastport, still shell-shocked from a divorce battle so vicious that it might as well have been fought with rocket launchers, and accompanied by a teenaged son so rebellious and moody I’d been tempted to make him ride in the car’s trunk. In fact, back then Sam had hated me so much, he’d probably have preferred the trunk. Also it was dark in there, and all the recreational drugs he was hooked on at the time had made his eyes sensitive.

  But now everything was different. Ellie and I had been pals for a dozen years. She had a daughter, Sam was a clean and sober young man—I’d been a very youthful mom—and Victor was gone.

  He was, damn it, I told myself again. Gone …

  But not forgotten, apparently. “Okay, so now are you all ready?” Ellie wanted to know, coming back into my big, bright kitchen with its tall pine wainscoting, high, bare windows, and scuffed wooden floor.

  “Well. There is one other thing.” Swiftly I told her about Dan Weatherston’s call, during which he had been able to make an outrageously impossible task sound doable.

  “He wants me to write down how I transformed a two-centuries-old Federal-style house with three full floors plus an attic, forty-eight antique double-hung windows, three brick chimneys, and a bathroom so primitive it belonged in the House of Usher …”

  I took a breath. “Into one that’s at least not immediately likely to fall down on your head,” I finished.

  The key word there being, of course, “immediately.” What the house might do next week I had no idea; only the fact that it had lasted nearly two hundred years already gave me any confidence at all in its standing-upright potential.

  At least the bathroom didn’t still look like Edgar Allan Poe would feel right at home in it; maybe if I kept on being able to communicate with ghosts, I thought, I could get him to write a newspaper column about it.

  “Oh, Ellie, I can’t believe I told Dan I would …”

  “Never mind. Sit.” It sounded like one of her dog commands; reflexively, I obeyed.

  “Now, as I understand it,” she said, “first you and I are going to drive up to the cottage.”

  At the old soapstone sink, she ran a glass of cold water and handed it to me. I drank it to humor her, and also because I felt faint again about what I’d promised to the Tides editor.

  “Five thousand words,” I managed. The Tides would run it in sections, but the editor wanted to see the whole thing all at once, right up front. “About rehabilitating an old—”

  “Where,” she went on, ignoring me, “after spending the day with you, I’m going to leave you there, along with the supplies you need to stay there for a week.”

  Her tone conveyed what she still thought of that idea. The cottage we were headed for was a remote, rustic lakeside cabin thirty miles distant, at the end of a dirt road with no running water, no TV or Internet connection, and just enough solar power from the collecting panels propped on the outhouse roof to run a reading lamp in the evening.

  “Alone,” she added, leaving me no doubt about her opinion of that part of the plan, either.

  The truth was, I felt a little hesitant about it myself. I’d never spent so much time there alone before, and the deck job was a sizable one even though most of the heavy work was already finished; only the bet I’d lose if I didn’t do it spurred me on.

  Although now that I’d cleverly arranged to have a writing assignment hanging over my head, too, what I really felt like doing was leaving the country. Or maybe the planet.

  “Ellie,” I began again, annoyed with myself now, “every bit of this is absolutely my own—”

  Fault, I was about to say, ignoring Ellie’s try at breaking it all down into bite-sized chunks so it didn’t seem so bad. The no-plumbing part, especially, was starting to weigh on me; in the wake of last night’s storm, colder air had begun rushing down from Canada, and when it was frosty outside, a late-night trip to the facilities could put, as Sam had once expressed it so vividly, an icicle on your bicycle.

  In fact, the whole project was beginning to seem the exact opposite of the lighthearted lark that I’d imagined it would be, back when I was just planning to do it. Despite my wager, I was about to ask Ellie how she thought I might bail out of it even halfway honorably, but just then my live-in housekeeper, Bella Diamond, hustled in, hauling a rented rug shampooer.

  Rawboned and hatchet-faced, with dark henna-red hair skinned so tightly back into a rubber band that her eyes pulled sideways, she wore a navy blue sweatshirt with the Maine Maritime Academy’s gold anchor emblem on the front of it, jeans whose fraying knees were heavily patched with darned-on squares of red plaid, and an expression that suggested she was experiencing the pleasure of a mouthful of lemon juice.

  “Hello,” she uttered, wrestling the rug machine on into the dining room, where I knew she intended to do battle with a stain on the carpet. But she said nothing more, except for a muttered oath when the rug machine ran over her sneakered toe; Ellie and I rolled our eyes at each other and kept prudently silent.

  Grouchy, Ellie mouthed. Supremely, I agreed, wondering if maybe a week up at the cabin wasn’t a good idea after all. Bella had recently married my father, becoming my mother-in-law as well as my employee; the combination had created a domestic situation that, for its yield of hilarious scenes centered on our differing opinions on household hygiene—Bella was a clean freak right down to the molecular level, me not so much—I’d actually come to enjoy.

  Only not lately. Something was eating Bella, and she wouldn’t say what. “You still here?” She came back for the bag of rug-shampooing attachments; Ellie moved toward the door. “Because I don’t want to start on this until after you’ve gone.”

  “Almost,” I told Ellie, meaning I wasn’t quite ready to go yet.

  “Yes,” I told Bella, meaning the obvious. “I am still here. But start whenever you want.”

  “Hmph,” said Bella, going out again. Grumbling, she hauled the bag into the dining room; a moment later I heard her dump the attachments unceremoniously out.

  “What’s with her?” Ellie asked.

  “No idea. I’m hoping while I’
m gone she’ll get over it.”

  We got busy hauling the bags of supplies; in the driveway my husband, Wade, had just finished checking the oil and tire pressure in the pickup truck.

  “You sure you want to do this alone?” he asked, wiping his hands on a rag as he dropped the hood.

  Wade was tall and broad shouldered, with blond, brush-cut hair, a square jaw, and pale, intelligent eyes that were blue or gray depending on the weather. Stuffing the rag into the back pocket of his Levi’s, he strolled toward me.

  “You’re the one who bet me a hundred bucks I wouldn’t be able to,” I retorted. “So it’s all your fault.”

  Working together on weekends all summer, Wade and I had cut up all the broken sections of the old deck and hauled them away. We’d dug new foundation holes, filled them with gravel, then set in concrete blocks and bolted a half-dozen upright posts to them. Finally, we’d built the frame and fastened in the joists, which were the crosspieces all the decking boards would get nailed to.

  By me, and I didn’t like the pockmarks the nail gun made, so I’d be hammering them in by hand; my arm hurt already, just thinking about it. But I’d made that bet, and now I was stuck with it.

  “Well, yeah,” Wade said, meaning the all-his-fault part; he was generous that way. “But honestly, Jake, I didn’t think you’d take me up on it. Your judgment,” he added delicately, “may have been clouded at the time, besides.”

  What he meant was that while we discussed it he’d made me a quince margarita, a drink that for firepower belongs right up there beside an AK-47. “I think,” he murmured into my ear, “I’m going to mix that drink for you more often.”

  “Fine,” I said into the sweet-smelling flannel of his shirt. As Eastport’s harbor pilot, Wade guided big cargo ships into the freighter terminal, through the wild tides and contrary currents of our local waters. When not doing that, he repaired antique guns here at home in his workshop.

  “But for now,” I added, stepping from his embrace, “the bet is still on.”

  Having Wade’s arms around me generally makes me forget any other plans I may be pursuing. But I’d gotten my gumption back now, and I was determined: “I’m going, and I’m doing it.” The deck, I meant, and the newspaper column; the day was crisp and bright, the air tangy with sea salt, chamomile, and beach roses.

  So why not? Let them all be amazed, I thought, when I came back next week—my laptop, whose battery could be charged off the truck’s battery, was in my pack—having finished the project and written five thousand publishable words.

  I certainly would be. “I’ll say goodbye to Sam and your dad for you,” Wade said as he walked around the truck one last time, eyeballing the tires and peering under it for fluid leaks.

  “Thanks.” I swung up into the cab. My son, no longer a sourpussed little renegade but an accomplished, pleasant-to-be-around young fellow now that he wasn’t drinking, had gone to the boatyard earlier to try helping a guy with a sailboat.

  Sam said the boat had a few problems but at least it hadn’t sunk yet, which he thought was a good sign. Meanwhile, my dad was spending mornings downtown lately at the woodworking shop he shared with a couple of other older Eastport gentlemen; thinking of him made me hope Bella’s bad mood wasn’t marriage-related.

  But even if it was, I couldn’t do anything about it. Ahead, Ellie pulled out in her own small sedan; I followed, pausing at the end of the driveway to look back at the house. With its neat white clapboards and forest-green shutters, red-brick chimneys, and porch flanked by pots of blooming geraniums, it looked solid and safe, like the kind of place I’d always wanted to live in.

  It looked like home. But then on impulse I glanced up, just in time to glimpse the faint, stealthy twitch of a curtain at one of the attic windows. If you go, you might never see any of this again, that furtive curtain-twitch seemed to signal.

  And that really was silly, I scolded myself. Maybe the deathiversary was preying on my emotions even more than I’d thought; even now, it seemed that my deceased ex-husband, Victor, had retained his talent for making me feel bad.

  That is, unless I stopped letting him, by going about my business as planned. And anyway, with Wade waving behind me and Ellie already pulling out ahead, I didn’t have much choice.

  So, swallowing the sudden lump in my throat, I set off down Key Street in the pickup truck. After all, there was that deck to complete, and a newspaper column to write—or try to.

  Besides, the lake was beautiful this time of year, with cool brilliant days whose sunshine was pale as champagne, night skies full of stars glittering like ice chips. It was quiet, too, now that the summer visitors had mostly gone home, the only sounds in the surrounding forest made by the wind and wildlife.

  If nothing else, I would have a peaceful time there.

  Yeah, sure I would.

  Once Jake and Ellie had left for the lake, Bella finished shampooing the carpet. She brought the rented rug shampoo machine back to the store, then managed to kill a little more time by mopping the kitchen floor, scrubbing all the knobs on the front of the stove with Comet cleanser and a toothbrush, and dusting the parlor piano, then polishing it with her secret mixture of lemon juice, olive oil, a drop of rosewater, and beeswax.

  But her real task for the day still waited, and although she had been dreading it for weeks, she couldn’t put it off forever. Once each year, rain or shine … So with her kit of cleaning gear she trudged upstairs to the guest bedroom.

  Still and silent, the room had a double bed in a spare maple frame, two matching maple bedside tables, and woven throw rugs. A roller shade and a pair of plain white cotton curtains hung at each of the two windows; a small television, never turned on that Bella could recall, stood on the maple dresser.

  Don’t be silly, she scolded herself as, after hesitating in the doorway a moment, she went in. After all, just because a person had died in a room didn’t mean it was haunted, she decided as she took down the curtains, pulled the sheets, the pillowcases, and the white chenille bedspread into a pile, and rolled up the throw rugs. If it did, the whole house would be thronged with ghosts.

  But this was not a thought she wanted to pursue while alone in the old dwelling, and especially not here, in the room where Dr. Tiptree had breathed his last. Grimly she removed her shoes, then stepped up onto the mattress; from there she could reach the overhead light fixture and the ornate glass shade covering it.

  A dead spider inside the shade lay with his legs curled up tightly over his body as if trying to protect himself. I know how you feel, she thought, brushing the poor creature’s husk out onto the floor where she could get it later with the vacuum cleaner.

  Right now, in fact, she felt the same way, hollowed out by anxiety, wishing she could wrap her own arms around her body and curl up into a ball, as if that might hold the fright off. But it wouldn’t, any more than it had held off death for the spider.

  Or for Dr. Tiptree, either, whose presence she still felt in the room even after all this time. Replacing the glass shade, she stepped down with a sigh of relief from the mattress that he had spent his final days on.

  Foolish, she scolded herself. You’re just a superstitious old scaredy-cat, that’s all.

  But she wasn’t. Only in the past few weeks, as the date of his death approached, had she felt some new, unpleasant sense of here-I-am-ness from the deceased man, as if what Jake called his deathiversary were summoning him back for a reenactment. From a faint, easily dismissed notion of some … some otherness, there and gone like a whiff of perfume or a few barely heard signature notes of an old, half-remembered melody, the uneasy feeling had grown until it was all she could do not to shout, sometimes, with the dreadful anxiety it produced in her.

  And that, Bella knew, was ridiculous. First because ghosts couldn’t hurt you, and even more important, because as everyone knew, there was no such thing as them.

  Thinking this, she turned with the bottle of Windex to the mirror over the bedroom dresser and gasped with
shock at the face hovering in it, just behind her. But in the next instant, she let her breath out; it was only the dust rag hung on the bedpost, its shape curved by shadows and her imagination into a pair of eyes, a twisted nose, and a soft, drooping grin.

  Angrily she swiped dust from the mirror, wiped off all the baseboards, brushed fluff from the corners. The closet door stood open a crack; yanking it the rest of the way, she forced herself to look inside.…

  Nothing. Well, of course there isn’t, she told herself as she damp-mopped the hardwood floor. The window shade slipped from her fingers and flew upward with a bang; her hand went to her throat. But she composed herself, and began wiping the top edge of the old window sash, then opening it an inch to air the room. Which could use freshening, she thought, because it smells like …

  Cologne. She recognized it at once: the expensive, dryly witch-hazel-scented stuff that Dr. Tiptree had always used before he started smelling like pain medicine.

  And later, like pain. Bella stepped back from the window, caught in a moment of memory so clear it was like diving into a pool. He’d walked into this room and stood for a second, looking at the bed. Knowing, she supposed now, that he would die in it.

  But not how soon. Awful, that final illness of his, seeking whom it might devour. At the time, though, she’d merely come up with some fresh towels, and when he saw her in the doorway, he’d thanked her.

  For, he’d said, making it all so pleasant. He’d smiled at the flowers she’d put into a bowl on the dresser; peonies, she recalled.

  “Jake always says what a genius you are,” he’d told her as he sat down on the bed.

  Testing it, she supposed: Good to lie in? To die in? “I see now that Jake was right,” he’d said, and even then she’d thought his eyes looked a little sunken in, his lips a little blue. Maybe that had been the light, because the windows in here faced north.

  Or maybe not, because he’d leaned down to unlace his shoes—it was then that she’d smelled cologne, the clean astringency of a prosperous, well-barbered man—and as far as she could recall, she’d never seen him wear them ever again.