Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  She took a deep breath. “And when I got up this morning he was gone again. Out on another job already.”

  She didn’t know what job. The police had already spoken with Cory Williams and learned that George hadn’t gotten there until around nine. She only knew that in order not to disturb her, he’d spent the night downstairs.

  He must have slept, she told them, on the daybed in the kitchen. He hadn’t made coffee before he left, though, and there had been no pillows or blankets in evidence.

  “He could have gotten his coffee at the convenience store. And George would make his bed, not leave it for me,” she parried.

  But when asked to say for sure that he’d been home at all the previous night, she couldn’t. Whereupon a disbelieving George was put in handcuffs, informed of his rights, and driven away.

  Then came the worst part.

  Chapter 3

  Let her talk it out,” said my ex-husband Victor Tiptree. “I don’t want to sedate her and she wouldn’t let me, anyway.”

  I’d called him while the officers were still handcuffing George, and to his credit he’d come over at once. Now he tucked his stethoscope back into his bag, his hands moving precisely as befitted a brilliant brain surgeon, even one who’d given it all up for a remote general practice.

  “And the baby’s all right too?” I asked Victor.

  “Absolutely. No reason it wouldn’t be. Ellie’s vital signs certainly aren’t showing strain. Girl’s got a constitution like a sixteen-year-old.”

  Which was only a bit younger than I was when I had Sam, and I don’t remember feeling sixteen in the days before our son appeared. More like a hundred and sixteen.

  “Changed your mind about the CPR class?” Victor inquired mildly. Trust him to get a zing in, whatever the situation. “Sam says you forgot,” he added. “Maybe on purpose?”

  I swallowed a retort: The way you forgot you had a wife and baby son, back when you had so many girlfriends it was all you could do to keep track?

  If Victor had carved notches in his bedposts he’d have ended up sleeping on toothpicks. But I refrained; he’d come when I called, tonight, and done what was needed. And nowadays that was enough.

  Mostly. “Finding the dead bodies was a distraction, Victor.” Never mind that I’d forgotten his class before we found them, or that Victor’s analysis was perilously close to being on target.

  “Sorry if I missed a pearl of wisdom,” I went on. I keep the peace as much as I can, but there’s no statute of limitations on postmarital vengefulness. “We’ll be there next week.”

  “Tomorrow,” he corrected briskly. “What with the storm, so many couldn’t come that I rescheduled it. I’ve called everyone.”

  So the class would be held on a Sunday morning, and never mind whether the change suited anyone else. If I had as much self-assuredness in my whole body as he does in his little finger, I would be Genghis Khan by now.

  On the other hand, there’s not much worse than an insecure brain surgeon. “Fine,” I replied.

  We were standing in Ellie’s kitchen with its green enameled woodstove, bright woven rugs, and big oak table with a pitcher of red rose hips at the center of it. Ranged on the windowsills were a dozen quilted-glass jars of grape jelly, glowing royal purple.

  “Nice,” Victor remarked, glancing around. He looked just like Sam: same hazel eyes, lantern jaw, and confidential you’re-the-only-one-in-my-world smile. Sometimes that smile was the only thing that kept me from killing Victor, because Sam had it too.

  A basket of kindling stood by the stove, a pine rocker and low footstool pulled up in front of it. Tucked into one corner was the white enameled daybed with a quilt spread on it. “I ought to try something like this,” Victor said.

  Victor’s kitchen, in the big white Greek Revival house just down the street from mine, was about as cozy as the inside of a refrigerator. He paid ready lip service to style and comfort but rattled around his own old place like a marble in a box, trying and failing to solve the mystery of ordinary human-beingness.

  Which was the other reason I didn’t kill him: that he tried. From the table he picked up the papers the police had questioned Ellie about before they left.

  “This,” he said, “is strange.”

  I’d put the place back together from the mess the searchers had made of it. The baby’s room, newly painted in pale yellow and white, smelled of garlic and tobacco; I had opened a window.

  “Right,” I said. “It’s what’s upset her most, I think.”

  Me too. I kept trying to understand those papers: that because of them everything was suddenly so much worse than I’d thought. Ellie’s voice went on from the parlor: quietly, but the edge of hysteria in it was audible.

  “Does it mean what it looks like?” Victor asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then how could they not… ?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Together the pages comprised a copy of the last will and testament, prepared by a Bangor law firm, of Paula Valentine, George’s recently deceased aunt. Jan Jesperson was listed as executor. The envelope they’d come in was postmarked a few days earlier.

  The warrant officers said they had found two copies of the document in George’s shed, and they’d taken one with them, Ellie insisting she’d never seen either copy before. Now I searched through the pages again, hoping I’d been wrong the first time I read them.

  As I did so Will Bonnet came into the kitchen, poured a cup of mint tea from the pot on a trivet atop the stove, and returned to the parlor to offer it to Ellie.

  “Come on, hon,” I heard him telling her solicitously. “Drink a little of this.”

  Will was a kind man, I thought distractedly; his own elderly relative was lucky to have him. “It means,” I told Victor, “that Gosling and Jan Jesperson didn’t quite get the last laugh.”

  Not that it was any consolation now.

  The opposite, in fact. “So all this legal stuff about trusts and predeceased and so on . . .”

  “Victor,” I cut in impatiently, “it means that George inherits everything. His aunt left her estate in trust to Hector Gosling but only for so long as Hector lived. After that . . .”

  After that it belonged to George. And if what I’d gathered about his aunt’s net worth was true, it was a jackpot.

  Her house was a gorgeously restored Victorian overlooking the harbor, with a fabulous bay view. Every tradesman in town had drunk from the well of its never-ending maintenance: plumbers and landscapers, painters and roofers, electricians and purveyors of custom-built windows, to name but a few.

  And Paula paid in cash, which she’d gotten by unloading about a zillion acres of timberland back when the paper companies were buying instead of selling it. So there’d be liquid assets, too.

  “You know,” Victor said, “this might not look so good.”

  Like I said: a brain surgeon. “Right, and if he hung a sign around his neck saying ‘I did it,’ that probably wouldn’t look so good either.”

  Because if George had known about this will before Hector died, he’d had a far better motive for murder than I’d feared.

  Victor picked up his medical bag. “Look, I doubt Ellie will need me any more tonight. Call if she does. And . . .”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “You did,” he added thinly, “manage to remember to tell Sam you’d signed him up for the class?”

  Ah, yes; there was the Victor we all knew and loved. If he hadn’t bought his own house he could’ve moved into a wasp’s nest. The other wasps would never have known the difference.

  “I told him.” It’s amazing how well you can speak and bite your tongue at the same time, when you have as much practice as I do. “And Victor, you remember. You’re not to talk about this.”

  As it was, the news of George’s arrest would be a sensation and Ellie would be facing it soon enough.

  He frowned. “You must think I’m a fool.”

  I smiled sweetly at him. “Tha
nks for coming. Really, Victor, it was awfully good of you. I appreciate it.”

  Sam says Victor is like an English muffin: butter lightly. Mollified, he went out into the darkness.

  Standing in the doorway while he got into his car, I watched a skunk shuffling among the trash cans. George hadn’t had time to bring the cans in before the police took him. Victor’s headlights showed the skunk trundling away; George was so tidy, there wasn’t a meal for a housefly in those cans.

  Will was in the kitchen when I came back inside. “Hey, good job on those steps at Harlequin House,” he said. “I was driving by and saw them.”

  “Thanks. But how’d you know it was me?”

  “Well,” he smiled, tipping his head, “the rest of the volunteers are a little shy with the hammer-and-nails stuff. You seem like the only one willing to bash something apart to fix it. I wish there were a few more like you.”

  “Oh,” I said, pleased. Hardly anyone ever compliments me for bashing things apart.

  “Actually, there are some other things that could use your attention,” he went on. “I made up a list.”

  He pulled it from his pocket. “There’s a window on the first floor that won’t come out. The side trim needs a crowbar. And on the second floor, the ladies want to wallpaper over a hole. Could you maybe plaster it first? You know, just fill it so you can’t put a fist through the wallpaper.”

  I felt taken aback. This hardly seemed the time or place for going over fix-up plans. But Will continued.

  “. . . washstand in the kitchen lavatory. I hate to say it but someone’s going to have to take a sledgehammer to that.”

  He grinned winningly at me. “Seems right up your alley.”

  It was. But . . .

  “Will, don’t you think we should postpone the repair plans? Maybe until tomorrow? After all, with George being accused of a murder, I don’t think . . .”

  He was shaking his head. “No. Absolutely not. Everything can go on just as it has been, and in fact it should. Because look,” he added as my face must have shown the doubt I was feeling, “George didn’t do it,” he said earnestly. “You know it, I know it, and pretty soon the police are going to know it, too. That they’ve made a mistake.”

  His shoulders straightened. “Tonight of course Ellie’s upset and she needs us here, for support. But starting tomorrow, we all have to hold our heads up, and show by our behavior that we know how this is going to come out for George. That he’s innocent, and that’s all there is to that.”

  I have to admit his ringing endorsement went a long way toward making me feel better. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Okay, you give me the list and I’ll see what I can do about it.”

  “Great. Maybe George will even be back in time to bash that washstand apart,” he finished encouragingly, and went on into the parlor while I stood thinking about what he had said.

  That George was innocent, and the cops would realize it. Of course, about the former part of the statement I was sure. I just wished I had as much confidence as Will did in the latter part.

  Distantly I heard Will gently persuading Ellie into conversation, which I thought was probably a good thing. He had located Clarissa Arnold somehow, too. Now he was easing this waiting time for Ellie until Clarissa called back.

  Alone in the kitchen, I looked around. The woodstove burned steadily with a sound like tinfoil being crumpled. On the freshly waxed floor lay not a speck of ash or other mess. The fixtures gleamed, the windows glittered behind crisp lace-trimmed gingham tiebacks, and the appliances, counters, and cooking surfaces were so clean that Victor could have done surgery on them.

  All George’s work. Ellie said the only thing she wanted him cleaning was his plate but lately he hadn’t been letting her lift a finger. Between that and his own jobs, dawn to midnight in his effort to earn enough to take care of the baby, I didn’t see how he’d have had the time to do any bad deeds.

  So why wouldn’t he clear himself by revealing where he had been when Hector Gosling was murdered? As I joined the others waiting in the parlor for Clarissa Arnold’s promised call, I had an unhappy suspicion that I already knew.

  “Once upon a time,” Ellie said slowly, in the age-old way that people have always begun telling stories: to quiet children, or to entertain the company.

  Or to pass a terrible time. The lamps were dimmed in the small, low-ceilinged room with its worn Oriental rugs, polished brass andirons, and drawn curtains. Ellie sat in the big old overstuffed armchair with her feet on a hassock; someone—Will Bonnet, I supposed—had draped a shawl over her shoulders.

  “Once upon a time, Harlequin House belonged to my great-uncle, Chester Harlequin, who after Benedict Arnold was probably the most disgraced man ever to live in Maine.”

  Her voice was weary. The telephone sat on a table by her chair. I willed it to ring.

  It didn’t. “In those days, Eastport was smugglers’ heaven,” she continued. “Whiskey or the ingredients to make it came over the border so fast, people joked they should call the St. John River the Mash-issippi. For sour mash,” she explained with a wan smile.

  Wade sat beside me on the loveseat before the fireplace. The room was warm but I shivered even with the fire blazing. Wade put his arm around me and I leaned gratefully against him.

  “All the little coves and inlets around Passamaquoddy Bay, hundreds of islands, there’s lots of places to hide things,” Will Bonnet said. Ellie smiled wearily, letting him take this part.

  “George and I used to explore ’em when we were kids, in his little boat. We’d pretend we were smugglers and Hopley Yeaton’s men were chasing us in their cutters. When,” he added, “George wasn’t busy getting my tail out of some fool trouble or another.”

  “Hopley Yeaton,” Ellie informed the rest of us, “was the founder of the Coast Guard. His house,” she added to me, “is older than yours. 1812, I think. That red one across from the gas station. All its windows are broken out now,” she added sadly. “Too bad.”

  Then to Will: “Remember the broken windows on Water Street?”

  Will took the topic up unashamedly. “Yeah. Broken by me. I was headed for juvenile hall after that, till George promised to be responsible for me. Said he’d make sure I didn’t get into any more trouble.”

  He shook his head, recalling it. “Came down to the police station, George did, and swore to it, his right hand in the air. He wasn’t more’n what, thirteen years old? And the amazing thing was, that’s what he did. After that he was like my shadow.”

  There was a silence, all of us thinking about where George was now, until Will spoke up again.

  “Kept me out of fights, George did. He’d beat a guy up just so I didn’t have to, kids knew I had to stay out of trouble, they would do everything to try to make me mad.”

  Which probably accounted for some of the trouble George had been in back then, I thought, and Will confirmed this. “One time he took a kid down the street, smacked him till he blubbered, then stuffed a note in his pocket when he wasn’t lookin’ so his mom’d find it, when he got home. Bully, it said. Big, fat . . .”

  His voice trailed off as something in our faces must have alerted him. I’d told Ellie about the note in Gosling’s pocket and of course Wade knew, too.

  “What’d I say?” Will asked, looking around helplessly.

  “Nothing,” Ellie replied evenly. “It’s nothing, Will. I wish Clarissa would call.”

  We’d have gone down to the jail in Machias and held a sit-in but the roads were still messy, and besides, Will said Clarissa had sent a message for us to sit tight, let her try to find out what the situation was and if she could do anything about it tonight.

  I prayed she could. But the clock over the mantel ticked on relentlessly and no call came. “Does anyone know if the police’ve talked to Jan Jesperson yet?” I asked.

  Will shook his head. “I’m pretty sure she’s out of town. My Aunt Agnes was raising a big fuss the other day, wanting to see her.”

  He
sighed. “Not that I like the idea, but she sees so few people. And if I’m there with them I doubt it could do any harm. Jan hasn’t been answering her phone, though, and her car’s gone.”

  Which was interesting. “But you were saying, Ellie, about your uncle,” he turned the conversation back neatly.

  “Right.” With an effort, she gathered herself. I’d never seen her so exhausted-looking, so pale and nearly defeated. But even at Victor’s suggestion she wouldn’t lie down, and none of us wanted to try making her.

  “Uncle Chet enjoyed nice things,” she continued her story. “More than a big house, good furniture and so on, all of which he had. No, he wanted things he couldn’t get just by being a country doctor. Big fish in a small pond, which is what it was here then. Busy still, but the boomtown days were over.”

  The days, she meant, of the early 1800s, when my old house and others as fine were built by men with so much money that they could hire architects and put up virtual palaces, homes as solid and beautifully proportioned as anything in Boston.

  “And,” she added, “he liked his cocktails, too. Chester was a good doctor, but what he was famous for—so famous that even today the old Eastport folks still tell stories about him—was money and parties. So it was no miracle he knew some of the men doing the whiskey-smuggling.”

  She paused, sipped from the cup Will had brought her. “Well, it wouldn’t have been a miracle anyway. Everyone knew everyone in Eastport then, just like they do today. And those men knew other men, the ones running the smuggling, and the word got around, up the chain of command and eventually to the top.”

  A fireplace ember exploded with a sudden pop! I gasped, and Wade turned his pale-grey gaze slowly to me. Steady, girl.

  But my mind couldn’t stop racing with the implications of George’s silence and the possible reasons for it, not to mention the conclusions that would be drawn from his aunt’s bequest.

  “Pretty soon Chester’s big mansion—he’d never married, and for a while every girl in town hoped she’d be the one to get the chance to live in it—pretty soon his big house was turned into a hideout,” Ellie told us. “And a hospital for gunshot gangsters who got brought here from the city. It was a place they could recuperate and Chester could treat them without anyone knowing.”