Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

With him at the table was another local guy, Will Bonnet; he and George had grown up together. Will took in Ellie’s drenched condition silently, then went back to the newspaper he was reading.

  “I’m fine.” She leaned affectionately against George but didn’t sit. “I just need to get these wet clothes changed, that’s all.”

  Wisely, George backed off. Ellie was the oxygen in his air, the stars in his sky, his own personal moon over Miami. But he knew better than to try making her do what she didn’t want to.

  “Hop in a warm bath, though, why don’t you?” I said, putting the kettle on. “Seriously. You’re giving the kid a chill.”

  Which was the secret: most of the time you couldn’t get her to do anything strictly for herself. For the baby, though . . .

  “Dry clothes of yours are in my dresser,” I called after her as she went up the stairs. Over the years I’d known her, our two houses had intermingled until they had become virtual annexes of one another. “Clean towels in the linen closet.”

  Then I turned to George, who was still eyeing me narrowly. He was a small man with dark hair, grease-stained knuckles, and the milky-pale skin that runs in some downeast Maine families. But his size was made up for by an alert, banty-rooster bearing and thrust-out chin; most folks didn’t give him any backchat.

  “George, she wouldn’t let me get the car,” I began before he could reproach me. “It was either stand in the cold rain arguing with her or make a dash for it. It wasn’t raining when we started out earlier.”

  He relented. “She is hard-headed, isn’t she?” Hahd—the downeast Maine pronunciation. The radio started in on a fiddle-and-banjo version of “Beaumont Rag,” a tune that always makes me feel like dancing.

  But not now. I glanced around the big old barnlike kitchen with its tall bare windows, pine wainscoting, and bright braided rugs on the hardwood floor. It seemed a haven against any storm.

  Still, I had a feeling the sensation of safety wouldn’t last much longer. There was a window sash standing in the corner by the washing machine; I’d removed it earlier and now just to keep my hands busy I began tinkering with it.

  “George. We found two bodies in that house.” A length of metal weatherstripping lay atop the washing machine, along with a sharp chisel, a hammer, and some small nails. “And one of the bodies is Hector Gosling’s.”

  He’d returned to his chair to wait for Ellie so he could take her home. Now he peered blankly at me, his look unreadable.

  Will looked up too. By contrast he appeared delighted. “Ain’t that,” he pronounced succinctly, “a goddamned shame.”

  “We haven’t told anyone,” I went on. “We need to inform Bob Arnold.”

  I’d already nailed weatherstripping into the sash channels. Now I turned the window sash so the bottom edge faced up. “And George, the police will want to speak with you.”

  But George shook his head. “Bob’s mom took ill last night in Kennebunk. State boys’ll be covering us till he gets back.”

  Which was not welcome news. Something Bob Arnold might’ve given instantly—such as for instance an ironclad character reference for George—wouldn’t be available at all from a cop whose usual task was patrolling the interstate, 200 miles away.

  “Anyway, why would they want to talk to me? And who’s the other one?” he inquired mildly. George had a way of not getting too exercised over anything not relevant to him.

  A dead body, for example. If it wasn’t his or Ellie’s, and it wasn’t someone from my household—my son Sam, my husband Wade Sorenson, my ex-husband Victor, who lived down the street, or any of our animals—then to George it was an item to be read in the newspaper and that was the end of it.

  But Will, a big, handsome fellow with jet-black hair, blue eyes, and a deeply cleft chin—in red plaid shirt, narrow jeans, and polished boots, he was the Hollywood version of Paul Bunyan—had begun looking even more interested. “Yeah? Whose was it?”

  “The other one’s too old to make any difference to us,” I said. Let Ellie tell the rest of that story, I decided, sometime when we didn’t need George awakened to his own personal peril.

  A bomb might do it. Or an air-raid siren. George’s feisty nature was controlled by a routine of daily habits; in his youth he’d been a terror, racketing around with Will Bonnet and getting into all kinds of mischief. But with time—and after an incident that he didn’t like talking about, nowadays—he’d learned to behave.

  “They’ll want to speak with you,” I told George, “because you are the one who hated his guts the most.”

  If your window locks with a top clasp that holds the bottom sash down tightly, you can make it draft-free by installing some weatherstripping on the bottom edge of the window.

  “And,” I added to George, “everyone knows it.”

  There was another more specific reason, too, but I didn’t want to mention it yet. Maybe I wouldn’t have to at all. I positioned the length of weatherstripping in the window well, cut it to fit by tapping the chisel on it with the hammer, and lay the cut-to-fit strip on the bottom edge of the sash.

  “Join the club,” George said, perusing a section of the newspaper he’d picked up. “Can’t think of many who didn’t hate him. Can you?”

  “No.” I began nailing the weatherstripping to the sash with little taps of the hammer. “But they weren’t talking it around that if they could find a good way to do something to Hector, they’d do something to him.”

  He looked unimpressed. “So you think I should get my ducks in a row? Trump myself up a good old-fashioned alibi?”

  Tap, tap. “That’s just what I think you should do, but a real one, not trumped up.” I didn’t think he was taking this seriously enough.

  “And the more wide-ranging and comprehensive the better,” I went on, “because . . .”

  Because we didn’t know yet just when Gosling had died. But a week earlier while Ellie was at a baby shower, Will and George had gone out on the town together. They’d ended up in Duddy’s Tap, drinking beer and regaling the crowd with hilarious schemes.

  And what all those schemes had in common, I’d been told the next day by one of Duddy’s regulars who’d been there too, was the sudden, violent, and unsolvable murder of Hector Gosling.

  “I just think you ought to,” I finished, lifting the sash and placing it back into the window opening. The sash trim went up in a twinkling; I hadn’t even bothered taking the nails out. Now I slid the sash experimentally up and down, then locked it.

  It worked, the weatherstripping pressed tight by the locked window. “Nice,” Will Bonnet observed.

  “Thanks.” A little burst of pleasure flooded my heart. “And it will be even nicer this winter.”

  “Hey, there.” George’s face brightened as Ellie returned, a towel around her head and the rest of her swathed in an enormous hot-pink sweater. With it she wore fuchsia leggings with crimson flowers printed on them, and a lime-green crocheted vest. Purple legwarmers, plaid socks, and sandals completed her costume.

  “Oh, I feel so much better,” she beamed.

  Will Bonnet grinned at her and I suppose I must have, also. You couldn’t help it; combined with the outfit, her smile made her look like an explosion at the happiness factory.

  “George, did Jake tell you what we found?”

  “Ayuh. She seems to think folks’ll b’lieve I did it.”

  “Well.” The smile dimmed a few watts. “Bob Arnold is going to want to talk to you. So you’d better be ready.”

  But she didn’t sound nearly as concerned as before. I hadn’t mentioned the Duddy’s Tap stuff to her, feeling it was not a part of my duty as a friend to tattle on George. Now I guessed she must have thought things over again and decided that we were just worrying too much, earlier.

  Which left me for the role of Chicken Little. “Bob isn’t around,” I started to tell her as I began clearing up tools and scraps of weatherstripping. But she’d begun rubbing the towel over her hair and wasn’t listening. On the other
hand, the sky wasn’t falling, either… so far.

  “Hector was a crook,” George declared. “Whoever’s done for ’im should’ve done it sooner. Before”—he emphasized this with a shake of the sports pages—“Gosling and his quack pal Jan Jesperson got near my Aunt Paula. Rest,” he added sadly, “her poor addled soul.”

  This was the crux of the matter and the reason for George’s dislike of—black hatred for, actually—Hector the Objector.

  That Hector didn’t object to swindling town ladies out of their money. Or anyway, that was the rumor: that over the years he and his partner in crime Jan Jesperson had conspired to identify women who were alone in the world, and befriend them.

  Next, people said, Jan wielded a pill-bottle and Gosling worked the social angle. Hector wooed the ladies with old-fashioned courtliness while Jan turned them into doped zombies from whom it was child’s play to extract shaky power-of-attorney signatures.

  And after that, it was Katie-bar-the-door: estates looted in the name of investment opportunities, ladies dumped into distant “assisted living” facilities that later turned out to be little more than grim boarding-houses and sometimes much less.

  “She’s not a quack, though,” Will corrected George. “Not a doctor at all. She’s what they used to call a detail man. Or,” he added, “in her case, detail woman.”

  I turned curiously to him. “How do you know?” Jan Jesperson was in her late sixties or so, I estimated: single, retired, and tight as a tick about her private life.

  “Did a little research,” he replied wisely. “Used to be, the drug companies all had salesmen. They would go around to doctors’ offices with a satchelful of samples.”

  Ellie’s ears had pricked up, too. “And that was Jan’s job? She sold pharmaceuticals?”

  “Yup.” He preened, happy to be listened to. “See, doctors now don’t make all the decisions the way they once did. Somebody needs medicine, they could be stuck with what the insurance company or HMO will pay for. Used to be different. A good detail man kept his customers happy and satisfied, just like any other salesperson, kept them using his company’s line of goods.”

  “And you learned all this how?” I persisted.

  He hesitated. “Well, you know those services on the Internet where you can get background checks on people? I thought maybe if I could find out something on her, I could get her to go away.”

  My face must have showed how likely I thought this was.

  “Hey, it could happen,” he protested. “Matter of fact you’re right, it didn’t turn up any juicy stuff. I didn’t want to pay what a serious search costs. Lot of dough.”

  And anyway, talk about bait and switch. Some of the online services promise the moon and deliver green cheese.

  “But she’d won herself a business award once so there’d been an article about her,” Will added. “Little more reading on the drug business, I could figure out what she did. And it was like I said, sales.”

  “Very enterprising of you,” I commented, then turned to George. “And how about you? Any online investigating you want to tell me about? Or any other kind?”

  George on a computer was as easy to envision as me on a high wire. He had enough to do in the real world, never mind the virtual kind. Still, if the browser on Ellie’s computer was going to reveal a suggestive history—a search on Hector’s name, for instance, or on Jan’s—I wanted to know about it.

  But he just made a face. “Nope. Sales is right,” he told Will. “Sold my Aunt Paula a load of bull.”

  “So you think Jan might have been squirreling drug samples away over the years?” Ellie asked Will. “And maybe used them when she and Hector were softening up their victims?”

  “Don’t know,” he replied. “Don’t even know if it’s possible. Fake her records or something. But it’d make sense. Even went and asked her once. I said, what’s the deal with you and Gosling? How come bein’ friends with you two’s so bad for the health? And she told me, watch what I was saying or she’d slap a lawsuit on me.”

  He bridled, remembering. “That’s a hot one, her suing me. I told her so, too. Those poor women shut away far from home . . .”

  “If a person goes into care in Eastport,” George agreed, “it is different. Nursing home, or the poor farm here in town.”

  It wasn’t a poor farm. It was a place to live if you weren’t quite sick enough for constant nursing and you weren’t quite well. But everyone called it that and it had the best water view on the island.

  “There people can check on you, even if it’s only when they are visiting their own folks,” he said. “People know.”

  “George,” I began, trying to think of some way to change the subject. But too late: he was on his horse again.

  “Poor old Aunt Paula,” he mourned. “Witch that she was, I had a soft spot for her. Wouldn’t have let those two Evel Knievels go to town on her if I had known.”

  “Not your fault,” Will reminded him. “She wouldn’t talk to you. How were you to know those vultures had their claws in her?”

  It was the reason Will himself had come home to Eastport: his own last living relative, his elderly aunt Agnes Bonnet, was a natural next target for the predatory Hector and Jan.

  “If you hadn’t told me what’d happened to Paula,” he added to George, “I’d never have known.”

  “How is she, Will?” Ellie inquired kindly. For it seemed Jan and Hector had gotten a start on Agnes, too.

  Will shrugged sadly. “Not good. I don’t know what that woman might’ve given her, and she says she never gave her nothing.”

  Anything, I corrected him silently. Will was a charming guy, but he was a little rough around the edges.

  “Doctors can’t find a thing. She’s so fragile, though, it could have messed her mind up even after she stopped taking it.”

  It occurred to me that the doctors might not be doing drug tests. So his Aunt Agnes still could be taking it. Whatever it might be.

  “You know, you might want to look around in the house.”

  He was living with her now, caring for her as best he could despite her increasing dementia. “In case there is anything, she might be confused and think she should swallow it,” I added.

  Which was a nicer way of saying in case she’s as sneaky as any other addict. My own son Sam used to hide pills in ballpoint pens or rolled up in his toothpaste tube. Once he glued capsules behind his ears; when he pulled them off some cartilage came too, and he’d needed plastic surgery.

  “Yeah, huh?” Will replied thoughtfully. Before coming home to Eastport he’d been in Boston for a dozen years, and city life had made him quick to pick up on the behaviors people might be getting into. “Yeah, maybe I should,” he agreed.

  “That Jan Jesperson,” George said, understanding also what I was suggesting, “is one tricky piece of work.”

  With this I had to agree, if only because nothing alleged against Gosling or Jesperson had ever been proven. On the face of it, George’s aunt had simply died of old age. By the time George heard about it she’d been cremated, on instructions that Gosling and Jesperson had helped her issue shortly before she expired.

  “You know anything yet about the estate?” Will asked.

  George shook his head. “Don’t guess I’m going to, either, at this late date. You aren’t in it, they don’t tell you about it.”

  Which we assumed must be the situation: that George’s aunt had left her estate to that pair of shameless carrion-eaters.

  “But it’s not about the money. It’s that I could’ve tried harder,” George insisted stubbornly. “She could’ve had us, ’stead o’ bein’ alone in that big house of hers, rattlin’ around amongst a lot of tarnished silver and dusty old furniture.”

  He looked at Will. “It was her own choice the way she shut herself off from everyone but I don’t b’lieve she’d’ve ever been suckered by ’em if she wasn’t so lonely. Aunt Paula was always smart. You, though, you’re lucky. You got back before things got too b
ad.”

  Will shrugged sympathetically. “Maybe. I hope you’re right, but we’ll see. Agnes was in pretty sad shape when I arrived.”

  George got to his feet. “Anyway, I better go double-check the stuff I was using this morning. I need to make sure the rain didn’t seep in and wash it anywhere I don’t want it to go.”

  Will followed him to the door. “I should get moving too. Almost time for Agnes’s lunch.” He’d been a restaurant manager in Boston and hoped to start one of his own, a seafood joint, here in Eastport.

  Which was another story; I had my doubts about it.

  “At least she’s eating well,” Ellie told him approvingly.

  But then George’s remark struck me. “Stuff? I thought you were working out at the marine center, putting in the new dock.”

  “Weather’s too bad.” He took his slicker from its hook in the hall and draped it over Ellie’s shoulders.

  “So I got started on those red ants over to Cory Williams’s. Christ in a handcart, but he’s got a case. Never saw so many.”

  Decades ago some big schooner must’ve come in here with stowaways: European fire ants. Furiously aggressive and equipped with a fierce formic acid bite, the ants had multiplied.

  “And you know,” George went on, tucking Ellie’s hair under the earflaps of his sou’wester, “Cory’s trying to raise little pigs. Pot-bellied pigs, sell ’em as pets. Says people keep ’em in their houses like dogs. Smart as dogs, too, he says.”

  At this Prill and Monday got up from the dog bed where they were lying together and left the room, which was probably only a coincidence. Meanwhile, with that day-glo yellow slicker and black rain hat laid on over the rest of her outfit, Ellie appeared to be wearing an entire storewide clearance sale.

  “I’ll make the cop call,” I told her quietly. “And you call me if anything happens.” The baby, I meant, and she promised to.

  “So Cory,” George went on, “has to eliminate the ants.”

  Unlike the rest of us, who doused ourselves with bug dope in summer and with cortisone ointment on the many occasions when bug dope didn’t work. Boric acid sometimes got rid of them, though, and was unlikely to have been the stuff that eliminated Hector.