Wreck the Halls

by Sarah Graves

  Actually parts of me were hurting quite intensely but if I said so, Ellie would insist on taking me to the clinic where Victor was on duty. And rather than submit to my ex-husband's critical speculations on how my injuries had happened, I’d have gone outside and fallen off that ladder all over again.

  “I guess I can't be in your eye-color experiment, though,” I said. Like Sam, in the fall Maggie would be a sophomore at the University of Maine. “I don't think I should put the lens back in right away,” I explained.

  The experiment, for a psychology-class project, was to see how long it takes a person to get used to a new eye color. If my own reaction was any indication, the answer was never. It was astonishing how jarring the past week had been, seeing a green-eyed alien with my face looking out of the mirror at me.

  Disappointment flashed in Maggie's glance, at once replaced by concern. “Oh, I don't care about that silly experiment,” she declared.

  But she did. She had designed it, proposed it, and with some difficulty gotten it approved, to get credits while staying in Eastport—where Sam was, not coincidentally—for the whole summer. It wasn't easy getting people with normal sight to wear the lenses, either. I was among the six she'd persuaded, the minimum for the project. “It's you I’m worried about,” she added.

  The girl was going to make someone a wonderful daughter-in-law someday. But it wouldn't be me if Sam didn't hurry up and get his act together. Other mothers fret if their kids get romantically involved too fast, but my son's idea of a proper courtship verged on the glacial.

  Luckily in addition to her other sterling qualities Maggie was patient. “You should put something on it,” she said. “A cold cloth or some ice.”

  “That,” Ellie interjected acidly, “would mean she'd have to sit still. And you're allergic to that, aren't you, dear?”

  Dee-yah. Catching the renewed threat of a clinic visit, I sat down and accepted the ministrations she offered: aspirin, a cloth with cracked ice in it. If I didn't, she might hogtie me and haul me to Victor's clinic. She could do it, too; Ellie looks as delicate as a fairy-tale princess but her spine is of tempered steel.

  Also, I’d begun noticing that something about Newton's law had hit me in a major way. Sunshine slanting through the tall bare windows of the big old barnlike kitchen wavered at me, and the maple wainscoting's orangey glow was shimmering weirdly.

  “Oh,” I heard myself say. “Psychedelic.”

  “Jake?” Ellie said in alarm, reaching for me.

  Then I was on the floor, Prill's cold nose snuffling in my ear while Monday nudged my shoulder insistently. Faces peered: Sam, Maggie. And Ellie, her red hair a backlit halo, green eyes gazing frightenedly at me and even the freckles on her nose gone pale.

  “Okay, now,” I began firmly, but it came out a croak.

  “… call the hospital?” Sam asked urgently.

  “Lift your feet up,” Maggie advised.

  So I did, and felt much better as blood rushed back downhill to my brain again. Newton's law apparently had advantages, although if my brain planned depending on gravity for all of its blood supply, I was still in serious trouble.

  Which was how things stood when my husband, Wade Sorenson, walked in. Tall and square-jawed, built like a stevedore, with brush-cut blond hair and grey eyes, he surveyed the scene with an air of calm competence that I found hugely refreshing under the circumstances. And while Sam asked again if he should phone the hospital and Maggie insisted I put my feet up higher and Ellie was all for summoning an ambulance right that instant, Wade said:

  “Hey. How're you doing?”

  He doesn't freak out, he doesn't screw up; he's the only man in the world into whose arms I would trustingly fall backwards.

  Or forwards, for that matter. Crouching, he assessed me, smelling as always of fresh cold air, lime shaving soap, and lanolin hand cream. He'd already noticed that I was breathing and had a blood pressure. The dogs backed off and sat.

  “Your pupils are equal,” he commented mildly. Meaning that I likely did not have the kind of brain damage that would kill me. Or not right now, anyway.

  Victor would have scoffed at the notion of Wade assessing anything medically, but guys who work on boats learn how to eyeball injuries pretty accurately, reluctant to forfeit a day's pay for anything but the probably-fatal. And as Eastport's harbor pilot, guiding freighters safely through the watery maze of downeast Maine's many treacherous navigation hazards, Wade works on boats pretty much the way mountain goats work on mountains.

  Eager to lose my invalid status, I sat up. Not a good move. “Hey, hey,” Wade cautioned as the room whirled madly. “Take it slow.”

  “Okay,” I said grudgingly. That Newton guy was beginning to be a real pain in my tailpipe. But I was not lying down again.

  Ellie was just waiting to bushwhack me into the clinic, Sam resembled a six-year-old who wanted his mommy, and Maggie-Well, Maggie looked solid and unruffled as usual, for which I was grateful since I had an idea I’d be needing her, later.

  For one thing I’d planned a special dinner in honor of the tenant who'd moved into my guest room that morning, an aspiring music-video producer filming his first effort here in Eastport.

  For another, somewhere between the ladder and the ground I’d had an important epiphany. Harriet Hollings-worth wasn't just missing.

  She was dead. And she'd probably been murdered.

  “She had no car, no money. No family as far as anyone knows. So how did Harriet drop off the earth without a trace?” I asked a little while later, sitting on the edge of the examining table at the Eastport Health Clinic.

  The clinic windows looked out over a tulip bed whose frilly blooms swayed together in the breeze like dancers in a chorus line. Across the street, a row of white cottages sported postage-stamp lawns, picket fences, and American flags. Beyond gleamed Passamaquoddy Bay, blue and tranquil in the spring sunshine, the distant hills of New Brunswick mounding hazily on the horizon.

  “Well?” I persisted as Victor shone a penlight into my eye. “Where'd Harriet go? And how?”

  The clinic smelled reassuringly of rubbing alcohol and floor wax. But years of marriage to a medical professional had given me a horror of being at the business end of the medical profession. Ellie had brought me here while Wade finished the gutters, knowing that otherwise I’d go right back up the ladder again; if you let any element of old-house fix-up beat you for an instant, the house will get the upper hand in everything. And although I wasn't graceful or surefooted I was stubborn; so far, this had been enough to keep my old home from collapsing around me.

  Victor snapped the penlight off. He'd tested all the things he could think of that might show I was non compos mentis, which was what he thought anyway. When I came here from New York and bought the house he'd had a world-class hissy fit, saying that it showed my personality was disintegrating and besides, if I moved so far from Manhattan, how would he see Sam?

  I’d said that (a) at least I had a personality, (b) if mine was disintegrating it was under the hammer blows he had inflicted upon it while we were married, and (c) as it was, he hadn't seen Sam for over a year.

  That shut him up for a while. But not much later he'd moved to Eastport, too, and established his medical clinic.

  “Normal,” he pronounced now, sounding disappointed.

  “A person needs money to run,” I reminded Ellie, “even when money trouble is why they are running in the first place.”

  “She scavenged, though,” Ellie countered. “Cans, returnable bottles. Over time, Harriet could have gotten bus fare to Bangor from that.”

  “Then what?” I objected. “Start a new life? Harriet was barely managing to hang on to the old one. And what about all that blood at her house?”

  “Nobody reliable ever saw any blood,” Ellie retorted.

  After her boot was found, a story went around that a lot of blood had been seen on the top step of Harriet's porch. By whom and when was a matter of wild speculation, and when I’
d gone to see for myself it hadn't been there, so I’d discounted the rumor. But now…

  “Ahem,” Victor said pointedly. He had dark hair with a few threads of grey in it, hazel eyes, and a long jaw clenched in a grim expression. Partly this was his normal look while ferreting out illness and coming up with ways to knock its socks off.

  Also, though, it meant I was not regarding him with sufficient awe. “Could you,” he requested irritably, “pay just a little more attention to the situation at hand?”

  Reluctantly I focused on him. This took some doing, a fact I’d failed to mention when asked about symptoms; blurry vision, I understood, could mean Something Bad. But I was determined not to become a patient if I could help it, and I had just taken out the contact lenses…

  “You might have a mild concussion,” he pronounced at last.

  “That's all?” Ellie questioned. “She seems quite shaken up.”

  She was complicating my exit strategy: find the nearest door and scram through it, lickety-split. I rolled my eyes at her to get her to pipe down; the room lurched, spinning a quarter turn.

  “The simplest possible explanation is usually correct,” Victor intoned. “ ‘Shaken up,’ is as good a description as any.”

  “So I can go?” I slid hastily off the examining table. If it meant getting out of here right now, I’d have hopped off a cliff.

  Which, it turned out, was just exactly what getting off that table felt like. Somewhere were my shoes, making contact with the tiled floor. They seemed far away and not entirely reliable as if connected to my body by long, loose rubber bands.

  Feets don't fail me now, I thought earnestly. If I had to, I would take floor-contact on faith.

  The way, once upon a time, I’d taken Victor. “Someone would remember if Harriet took the bus,” I told Ellie.

  Victor frowned. He feels everyone should keep silent until he finishes giving his opinions. And as he will finish giving his opinions a day or so after his funeral, mostly I ignore him.

  But now we were in the land of traumatic head injury, where Victor is king and all he surveys is his to command. He'd gotten reeducated for country doctoring, but back in the city Victor was the one you went to after all the other brain surgeons turned pale and began trembling at the very sight of you.

  So this time I listened. “Twenty-four hours of bed rest,” he decreed. “Watch for headache, disorientation, and grogginess.”

  Breathing the same air as Victor made me groggy. We'd had a peace treaty for a while, but now Sam was away at college most of the time and without him to run interference for us, Victor and I were about as compatible as flies and flyswatters. And guess what end of that charming analogy I tended to end up on.

  “Great,” I said glumly. It wasn't enough that I looked like I’d gone nine rounds with a prizefighter. My X rays were clear but my face was a disaster area, and the click in my shoulder had gone silent, probably on account of the swelling.

  But I couldn't lie down. I had things to do: dinner guests.

  And Harriet's murder. First, I had to convince Ellie that it had happened. I had a pretty clear idea of how to do that, too; Harriet hadn't owned much, but she had possessed one thing…

  “Well, maybe not actual bed rest,” Victor allowed. “But if you won't take it easy,” he added sternly, “I’ll admit you to the hospital for forty-eight hours of observation.”

  An odd look came into his eye, and I realized he could make good on this threat if he came up with dire enough reasons. Wade might believe Victor, if he sounded sincere; Ellie, too.

  And Victor was good at sincere. “I will,” I vowed, “take it easy. Um, and is it okay to put the contact lenses back in?”

  Because if I could, Maggie's project might get saved. Victor looked put-upon.

  “Oh, I suppose,” he replied waspishly. “It looks bad but the orbital processes were spared, the swelling's minimal, not in the eye at all, and you have no signs of neurological dysfunction.”

  Never mind if your face looks like road kill; if you can follow his moving finger with your eyes and touch your nose with your own, you're good to go. “But why in heaven's name are you participating in amateur-hour science?” he wanted to know.

  “Thank you, Victor,” I cut him off. It's yet another of his talents, making me feel like a rebellious child.

  Leaving Ellie to settle up at the business desk I made for the exit before he could decide to prescribe a clear liquid diet. Maybe I’d learn later that I’d knocked an essential screw loose and it needed replacing right away, before my brains fell out.

  But I doubted it. And I doubted even more that the gleam in his eye had been benevolent, when he realized that if only for an instant there, he'd had me in his power.

  Again.

  So I was getting the hell out of Dodge.

  My name is Jacobia Tiptree and once upon a time I was a hot-shot New York financial expert, a greenback-guru with offices so plush you could lose a small child in the depth of the broadloom on the floor of my consulting area. I was the one rich folks came to for help on the most (to them) important topics in the world:

  Getting wealthier, and

  Getting even wealthier than that.

  Everything was about money. Fallen in love? Break out the prenuptial agreements. Somebody died? The family is frantic not with grief for the dearly departed but because the old skinflint stashed his loot in an unbreakable charitable remainder trust.

  Loot being the operative term; most of my clients were so crooked their limousines should've flown the Jolly Roger. But I didn't care, mostly on account of having started out with no loot whatsoever, myself. Until I was a teenager my idea of the lush life was glass in the windows, shoes that fit, and not too much woodsmoke from the cracks in the stove chimney, so I could read.

  At fifteen I ran from the relatives who were raising me, trusting in my wits and a benevolent universe to pave my path, which is why it was lucky I turned out to have a few wits about me. Getting through Penn Station I had the sense I’d have been safer in a war zone; men sidled up to me, crooking their fingers, weaving and crooning. In my pale shiny face and hick clothes, lugging a cheap suitcase and in possession of the enormous sum of twenty dollars, I must've looked just like all the other fresh young chickens, ready for plucking.

  Fortunately, however, all my cousins had been boys. Something about me must have said I knew precisely where to aim my kneecap, and the nasty men skedaddled. Before I knew it (well, a couple of weeks after I hopped off the Greyhound, actually) I was living in a tenement near Times Square where I’d found the best job a girl from my background could imagine: waitress in a Greek diner.

  My feet were swollen, my hair stank of fryer grease, and in the first couple of days I learned thirty new ways to buzz off a lurking creep-o. Meager wages and no tips; Ari's Dineraunt wasn't a tipping kind of place, except on the horses. But it was all-you-could-eat and most of the other girls didn't enjoy the food. Too foreign, they said, turning up their well-nourished noses.

  Which left more for me. Short ribs and stuffed grape leaves, moussaka and lamb stew; ordinarily the owner was tighter with a dime than a wino with a pint of Night Train, but for some reason Ari Kazantzakis thought it was funny to watch me shoving baklava into my mouth.

  Maybe it was because he had enough family memories of real hunger to know it when he saw it. Ari had a photo of Ellis Island behind the counter, and one of the Statue of Liberty in his fake-wood-paneled office. The tenement where I lived was just like the one his parents had moved into when they got here. Or exactly the one.

  Whatever. Anyway, one day Ari's accountant didn't show up and the next day they found him floating in the East River, full of bullet holes. Suddenly it wasn't all sweetmeats and balalaikas at the Dineraunt anymore. More like hand-wringing and sobbing violins until I said I was good at math and that when I wasn't slinging hash I was taking accounting courses. By then I’d gotten a high school equivalency and talked my way into night school.

&nb
sp; I’d figured it was the only way I would ever get near real money, which was true but not in the way I’d expected. Two days later I was carrying a black bag, the one the accountant had been expected to pick up and deliver. That was how I got to know the men at the social club, several of whom later became my clients.

  They thought it was hilarious, a skinny-legged girl with big eyes and a hillbilly accent running numbers money. But they didn't think it was so funny a few weeks later, when every other runner in the city got nabbed in an organized crime crackdown.

  All but me. Like I said, I’d had boy cousins, and if there was anything I was good at besides math, it was evasive action. A few years later when I’d finished school, gotten married, begun solo money management, and had a baby, one of the guys from the social club came to my office.

  He wore an Armani suit, a Bahamas tan, and Peruggi shoes. The diamond in his pinky ring was so big you could have used it to anchor a yacht. His expression was troubled; they always were on people with money woes. And this guy's familiar hound-dog face was the saddest that I had ever encountered. But when he saw me behind my big oak desk, he started to laugh.

  Me, too. All the way to the bank.

  And there you have it: my own personal journey from rags to riches. Victor's another story, not such a pleasant one; first came the hideous coincidence of our having the same uncommon last name. At the time, I regarded this happenstance as serendipity. And I’ll admit I was still full of bliss when our son Sam appeared. But soon enough began the late-night calls from lovelorn student nurses whom I informed, at first gently and later I suppose somewhat cruelly, that the object of their affections was married and had a child. And in the end I got fed up with the city, too.

  I’d thrived in it but when Sam hit twelve it began devouring him: drugs. Bad companions. And our divorce half killed him. So I chucked it all and bought an old house that needed everything, on Moose Island seven miles off the coast of downeast Maine.