Unhinged

by Sarah Graves

  Bob shrugged. “Coast Guard guys said they saw him go over the side with his toes pointed, I guess that’d carry him deeper, and then he must’ve just swum like a son of a bitch, far as he could get, prayed for the best.”

  George spoke up slowly. “Sometimes a guy, he’s done all the right things, everything he should’ve but he drowns. Another guy, water’ll spit him back out even though by all the rules, he’s the one who ought to’ve gotten made into fish food.”

  He looked toward the dining room where Victor’s voice went on in a low, reassuring murmur. “That guy, what turned the trick for him was, it just wasn’t his turn to go.”

  Thank you. Another siren went off somewhere, joining the cacophony of car alarms, bank alarms, smoke alarms, and all the other alarms that howled steadily as people struggled, mostly without success, to get them turned off again.

  Bob looked around at us. “Gotta go.” His eyes met mine. “You tell the old fellow in there—”

  His head angled toward the dining room, “…that I guess we won’t be needing to have that conversation, after all.”

  About bombs, he meant. About who knew what about them, and why.

  I felt my throat close again in gratitude; if a sparrow fell in Eastport, Bob knew it. Did something about it, if need be; all in good time.

  But if not, then not.

  Soon after Bob had departed, Maggie arrived, struggling up the porch steps and gamely insisting she was fit as a fiddle. She had refused another trip to the hospital. “But my mom’s not home yet,” she explained, “so I thought I’d come here…”

  She put a pale hand on a kitchen chair to steady herself, as Victor returned to fill a new glass of whiskey and refill his own. “Young lady,” he told her, “please step into my consulting room.”

  My own head was clear, ears as soundlessly normal as they’d been before I tumbled off the ladder. Victor paused to peer at me.

  “I’m fine,” I told him calmly. “No ringing, no dizziness.”

  He took my chin in his hand, turned my head gently. “Hmm. I think when he manhandled you, it jolted your ear again. I always said you needed a good smack. I suspect the vertigo won’t come back.”

  “Oh,” I said. He took his hand away. “Victor…”

  Don’t go, I wanted to say. Which was ridiculous, of course. So I said nothing and after a moment he took his glasses of whiskey and went into the parlor with Maggie and Sam.

  “Here,” Ellie said a little later, holding a tray out to me. Lian Ash was in the dining room alone. “Why don’t you take it in to him?”

  I’d said nothing to her about who he was. But she’d seen us together, our two faces side by side, each illuminated with its own new knowledge. And it was Ellie, so all she’d really needed to know was in her generous heart. On the tray she held out were a small silver coffee pot and cups trimmed with a pattern of blue forget-me-nots.

  He’d told me some lies. He’d hoped I would check them. The story he’d spun that day at the kitchen table about mistaken identity; the grammar book, the biography, and the handbook of explosives:

  All clues. He’d known me well, as he should have. He’d been watching for years, afraid to approach. Hoping against hope that I would find him, somehow. Fearing it, too.

  Like me. Outside it was raining, the spring storm roaring in suddenly as if to make up for the long wait with the violence of its arrival, gusts lashing the torrents through the dark streets.

  He’d never been incarcerated, of course. Another lie, some bad stuff up front so I would trust him; as I said, he’d known me well. But a man with his past couldn’t afford crime. So he’d never seen the inside of a cell, other of course than the one he’d inhabited, that he had built for himself. And from that, only I could release him.

  The decision was easy.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the tray from Ellie, and went in to sit with my father.

  Chapter 12

  Summer did come, and it seemed only a heartbeat later autumn did, too, green leaves igniting in an explosion of yellow, burnt orange, and crimson against the pointed firs.

  Sam aced the underwater demolition test for the seminar with coaching from his grandfather, whose identity he did not know even now but seemed somehow to understand. It was as if, in the days after the storm and over the summer afterwards, all the things I’d been so afraid to say got said anyway.

  Or didn’t need saying. In September, we gathered at camp to view Roy McCall’s music video, airing it on a battery-powered VCR.

  “Jake,” Ellie said as the film began with a swooping aerial overview of Eastport and the bay. “It’s the whole town! They must have shot it from a helicopter.”

  Streets and harbor, sea and sky, the boats tiny scale-model versions and the people too small to be seen. As a camera panned serenely over rocky cliffs, glittering inlets, and back to the miniature buildings of Water Street again, you would never guess there were people in Eastport at all, much less that some of them were being murdered.

  A yellow leaf pinwheeled from a branch onto the mirrorlike surface of the lake. At the dock’s far end, Prill and Monday lay gazing at the water and dreaming, I supposed, of floating Milk-Bones, while Cat Dancing prowled the cabin’s foundation pillars, demolishing — at last she had found her true calling — mice.

  “Ain’t no wharf there,” George objected to the picture on the television screen. They-ah: the downeast Maine pronunciation.

  McCall’s minions had employed creative license in cutting the video, rearranging Eastport’s geography to suit their needs. Roy was back home in Los Angeles, now; he’d been cordial enough for the rest of his stay, here, but I doubted we would see him again.

  “Nevah has been,” George went on indignantly. “No lobstah boat nevah came intah the habbah that way, neithah.”

  And more in this deliberately exaggerated accent, as an idealized version of our small world unreeled. Eastport had never looked so polished nor bounced so exuberantly to such noise as the sound track blared. Even Maggie, who liked all music, winced, then turned the sound down.

  She was going to Bar Harbor in a few days to take courses at the Jackson Laboratory, and work at a paid internship she had set up for herself, there. She’d dated Tim Rutherford once or twice but nothing came of that and anyway, Tim was gone to the news desk at the Boston Herald. She needed, Maggie had told me calmly, some time away.

  “You heard from Wyatt Evert lately?” Wade asked. We sat on the deck, glancing back into the cabin now and then to see what new fiction McCall had perpetrated on us. At the moment, six cat-costumed dancers were boogaloo-ing down an improbably prosperous-looking Water Street, to a reggae beat.

  “No. He’s into whales now. It’s a wealthier demographic.” Or so Fran had told me, calling to report also that Wilma’s cat had reappeared as mysteriously as it vanished.

  Fran came back to Eastport, still, but only to visit Wilma. Fran and her daughter lived in Portland now, in a group house with other single women who also had children. She’d straightened out her Florida probation situation, and she sounded well.

  “You know who I wish I’d hear from, though?” I added, but Wade answered before I could finish.

  “Still no Jemmy, huh?”

  I shook my head. “I wrote to him about the graveside service in case he wanted to come.”

  The NYPD had found Harry Markle’s body in a shallow grave in Brooklyn, from the map left in his killer’s notes. And since Harry had no family, I’d been able to claim it, have it shipped here to Eastport for a proper burial. I’d thought it was the least I could do.

  Now his remains lay in Hillside Cemetery under a granite marker I’d had cut for him: Ever Faithful. I had wanted to keep the shield as a memento of him, but in the end we pinned it to his dress uniform, which was buried with him.

  A person’s interment was, after all, a special occasion. “It would be just like Jemmy to show up: blitz in, blitz out,” I ventured, looking out at the lake’s still water.
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  The dock was brand-new, glowing yellow-pine-colored in the slanting light of early evening. The spring storm had taken six boats, a dozen roofs, scores of trees and a vast amount of other property along the coast and on the mainland, including Wade’s dock.

  It had also taken the rest of the siding from the back wall of my house. The Shingle Belles were repairing it: the siding, and the structure beneath the siding.

  “Maybe he still will,” Wade said. “Jemmy, I mean. Show up.”

  I didn’t think so, though. It was a problem: where Jemmy was, why he wasn’t in touch. And what, if anything, I should do about it.

  But a problem for another day. “Sleeping any better?” Wade asked.

  “Some,” I lied. White nights, seeing it all again.

  Behind us Victor came into the cabin, began complaining: couldn’t the road here be paved? Why wasn’t electricity run into this place? And…

  In the end, Victor had decided to stay in Eastport. At his nattering, Wade chuckled; somehow it just wasn’t a party without Victor. You could always count on him to bring the whine.

  Then: “You had to do it, Jake. The guy could’ve killed us all. And he would have, if not for you.”

  Once my attacker’s fingerprints were linked to the New York homicides and a severely edited story of the rest of it was told, what I’d done was ruled self-defense. Tim Rutherford was still here, then, but surprisingly he didn’t call to ask about it, and never probed into the past of Lian Ash.

  Or maybe it wasn’t surprising. Tim was quick on the uptake, not so quick to upset applecarts if he sensed they shouldn’t be.

  Sunset spilled onto the water. “I know,” I said. “Trouble is, when I did it, that wasn’t why. It wasn’t that he would have killed me.”

  The moment flooded back, freshly hideous. “Or my father, or anyone. I did it because I was angry. So I shot him. That’s all.”

  I took a deep breath, willing the pain away, but it didn’t go. “In the minute when I was doing it, I was as bad as he was.”

  “No,” Wade said with surprising vehemence. “The idea that it’s how you feel about something, makes it good or bad — that was his mistake, too. But Jake, it’s not the thought that counts. In this world, it’s the action that counts. And the result.”

  “So, Maggie,” Victor said from inside, patronizingly. “How’s that little job of yours working out? Meet any new boys?”

  Glancing back I saw Sam roll his eyes exasperatedly, over his father’s head. “Dad, it’s not a little job. She’s going to be helping to develop new eyedrops for allergic people.”

  The psychology experiment had died after I couldn’t stand to wear the lenses anymore. But Maggie had turned lemons to lemonade as usual; now she smiled tolerantly at Victor. “No,” she told him. “No new boys. Can I get you anything? A drink?”

  Victor harumphed, annoyed at being handled so skillfully, while my father sat watching the music video roll to its end. For Samantha, the dedication line read.

  “Blown up any boats lately, old fellow?” Victor needled him. Victor’s opinion, come to in leisurely, after-the-fact fashion, was that a good bomb man could’ve kept that boat from blowing up altogether.

  No reply from my father. I hadn’t been aware of him for all those years, but he’d been aware of me. Acutely aware; in fact I gathered he’d been quite the well-informed little watchbird.

  It was how he’d known about Sam’s dyslexia — that grammar book — and my dislike of heights, which he’d been aware of long before he ever came here. And back in the city Victor’s behavior had been so bad, the nurses at his hospital had voted him the surgeon whose body was most likely to be found stuffed in a car trunk.

  So I wasn’t expecting much friendship between the two, and in this I was correct: The old man looked at Victor. His hearing had come back. “You’re welcome,” he said, and his eyes said more.

  At this, Victor got up to find himself another drink, his hands trembling. And when you have made a brain surgeon’s hands tremble, you have impressed him; take my word for this.

  Satisfied, I turned back to the lake where it was now nearly dark. Monday and Prill climbed the deck steps, lay by our feet as inside, better music began playing: Chet Atkins’ Stay Tuned.

  “So, listen. I was wrong, what I said about putting down old baggage,” Wade allowed quietly. “Advising you to, I mean.”

  My turn to contradict. “No. You were right. It’s good to put it down, if it’s too heavy.”

  I smoothed Prill’s ears. She’d recovered entirely from her overdose of sedatives, which was what Victor, Sam, and Maggie had been dosed with, too: no lingering effects. As for all the times the dog had stepped between me and the man I’d unwisely given her to…

  Well, she hadn’t been protecting him.

  And she was ours, now. “You’d just better know what’s in the baggage,” I added. “Before you put it down.”

  Inside, my father and Maggie were dancing, him light on his feet. Sam’s hand rested on Victor’s shoulder. A trick of lakeside acoustics brought Sam’s words to my ears:

  “Don’t worry, Dad. The past…”

  The sound faded but Sam’s lips kept moving. I wondered what he was going to do without Maggie.

  I wondered if he cared.

  “…the past is provolone.”

  But not all of it, unfortunately; the don’t ask, don’t tell policy that Bob Arnold had chosen to apply to my father couldn’t last forever. It’s a funny thing about secrets; the good ones may lie low for a long time, maybe even forever. But the bad ones always fester into something ugly, sooner or later.

  And my father was a proud man. I only hoped he wouldn’t be too stiff-necked to let me help him, when the time came.

  Wade got up. “Coming in?” Delicious smells floated from the cabin: lasagna, garlic bread. Salad with the last of Ellie’s red garden tomatoes.

  The last for this year. “In a minute.”

  After he’d gone I sat watching the stars fill the night sky, their glow turning the lake to a milky glimmer.

  In it I saw that young cop’s face again and wished he could know how it all ended, that the questions he’d asked his whole life on my behalf had at last been answered. I wondered if he did know, in some way perhaps that living people cannot fathom.

  A loon laughed, out on the lake.

  About the Author

  SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels featuring Jacobia Tiptree are set. She is currently working on her seventh novel, Mallets Aforethought.

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