Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  She paused. “And sometimes the house was a morgue. They say Chester took the bodies on the night ferry over to the mainland, paid the ferrymen ten dollars to keep quiet about it. And to help bury them.”

  I thought of my old friend Jemmy Wechsler, sitting somewhere in Federal custody. He knew where bodies were buried, too; some financial, others that had been living and breathing till someone decided they were a liability and had to go.

  “The house got to be a social club,” Ellie said. “Off the beaten track, and pretty in summer. Like a resort, they could relax. And at Chester’s, it was parties ’round the clock. So the men brought girls there. You can imagine what local people thought of that.”

  Indeed; bobbed hair, bright makeup, and bare legs bouncing scandalously to the newest dance craze, the Charleston. But the images didn’t replace my other thought: that someone had gone to a lot of trouble hiding those two bodies. Once eighty years ago, and again much more recently. So why put a note in Hector Gosling’s pocket, then hide him where no one would ever read it?

  “The town,” Ellie said, “was all agog.”

  Nor could I duck another memory Ellie’s tale triggered. I’d asked Jemmy once, unwisely, if it mustn’t be just an awful job getting rid of the bodies. I’d been teasing him, knowing that he handled mob money but not what that really meant. I’d felt sure he had nothing to do with any actual murders.

  Or rubouts, as the tabloids called them. Jemmy was eating a Philly cheese steak when I asked, and he didn’t miss a bite.

  “From what I hear,” he said, chewing, “they put the body in somebody’s bathtub. Somebody, he hasn’t got any wife or kids to get too nosy. Run the shower, drain all the blood out before they chop it into pieces. Makes it neater. Easier all around.

  “Not,” he’d added, dipping his sandwich in ketchup, “that I would really know.” Which was when I’d understood for the first time just who Jemmy’s associates were.

  Jemmy, who had no wife or kids to get inquisitive.

  Now the Feds wanted to know, too, and if he told them (or if he didn’t; his take on the witness protection program was dead-on in my opinion) Jemmy was mincemeat.

  Ellie went on. “And sometime around then, Eva Thane dropped out of the picture. Just vanished. The woman,” she added for Will and Wade’s benefit, “that Jake and I found today. Her body.”

  She met my gaze and I knew what she was thinking: that we should have just done it. Walled them both up again and let the chips fall. She spoke again.

  “She was a lost girl, Eva. A runaway from some little town, I suppose. Chester’s girl for a while. Too wild for her own good was what people said then about a girl like that.”

  More recently too. My mom’s folks, for instance, had said it about me.

  “So when she disappeared people knew she wasn’t around, but you couldn’t say they missed her,” Ellie continued. “No one was looking for Eva anywhere, probably. Not anymore.”

  I knew that tune as well, because I’d sung it myself, and if it hadn’t been for Jemmy it probably would’ve been my swan song.

  “So she was gone,” Ellie said, “and who cared? But then . . .”

  Her story drew me back to the cozy parlor where the fire was burning and the lamps were glowing and the phone wasn’t ringing.

  “But then, Eastport girls began disappearing.”

  Much later when it was nearly morning, Ellie’s voice came out of the darkness. “Jake, did you know about what George said the other evening at Duddy’s?”

  I had decided to stay the night with her; that she’d agreed without argument let me know how truly frightened she was.

  “Yes,” I replied. She’d overheard the police questioning George about the threats he had made against Gosling. Or anyway they’d have interpreted his remarks as threats.

  “George doesn’t always tell me what he’s doing all day, you know. And if he’s out late I don’t ask where he was, necessarily. Why should I?”

  We were in her kitchen, Ellie in the rocker pulled up to the stove with a blanket around her. I’d put myself in the daybed, not wanting to go upstairs when she wouldn’t.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “I don’t ask Wade, either.”

  Not always. For me it was a welcome sea change after having been married to Victor, whose whereabouts I used to obsess over. With Victor my suspicions had usually been inaccurate only in the sense that what he was really doing was worse.

  “It’s okay that you didn’t tell me,” Ellie said.

  “I know. It’ll get straightened out soon.”

  “Mmm,” she replied, her tone expressing what I was thinking: probably not. Clarissa had called at last, but her message hadn’t been what we’d hoped for. George was being charged with Gosling’s murder. He would have a bail hearing eventually, Clarissa said, but we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

  Not that there was much chance of that. I’d wanted to question Ellie about the will; how could she and George not have seen it? One of them must have opened the envelope. But she’d been so despondent after talking with Clarissa that I hadn’t dared return to the topic.

  Or to the other thing bothering me; that if George wouldn’t detail his activities it meant there was a hole in his time that he didn’t want to account for.

  “Local girls must’ve thought Chet Harlequin was glamorous,” I said instead. “Fast money and easy living.”

  I didn’t really expect the deliberate change of subject to distract her, but it seemed to. “And what else did most of them have to look forward to?” she agreed. “A mean little house, maybe a mean little husband. Hard work for the rest of their lives.”

  I drew the quilt around my shoulders. It was almost morning but neither of us had slept.

  “They were young and wanted to have fun,” she said. “Chester and Eva had screaming fights over the way he flirted with those girls, my grandmother used to say.”

  From her kitchen window I could see up the bay to Cherry Island, its red light flaring intermittently against the hills of New Brunswick, darker mounds against the indigo sky.

  “Then one girl vanished,” Ellie said, “and another. By the time the third one disappeared, town people were ready to burn Chester’s house down with him in it. His gangster pals were long gone when the men went to drag him out of there, make him talk, whatever it took.”

  Of course they were gone, skedaddled at the first whiff of trouble like most crooks. The sky paled; suddenly the lighthouse at the tip of Deer Island materialized.

  “But Chester wasn’t there,” Ellie said. “He’d lit out ahead of them. And in the attic they found the stabbed bodies of three girls. The ones who’d gone missing from Eastport.”

  Buddy Russell’s little boat, the Wahine, puttered out into the channel on its way to the Deer Island ferry landing where he would begin readying the ferry for its first trip of the day.

  “No one ever heard from Chester again,” Ellie said. “They buried the girls and closed the house. And there it stood, with whatever happened inside just… soaking into it.”

  Brr. “I don’t want to go back,” I said.

  Grey light filled the kitchen. “Me either. But we have to.”

  “Because we said we would?” Volunteer work in Eastport was as serious as a religious vocation. But despite Will Bonnet’s urging I was having second thoughts about her involvement in the strenuous project, especially now. “Ellie, no one expects you to . . .”

  “No.” She got up and put the kettle on. “I still don’t think Chester killed those girls, you know. He just ran because he knew they’d lynch him if they got their hands on him.”

  What the heck, I thought, let her ramble if she wants to. Or even work on that old house if it makes her feel better. Throwing off the quilt, I swung my feet down onto the cold floor, then yanked them back cringingly.

  Ellie smiled, tossing a pair of knitted wool slippers at me. The church ladies made them by the carload for benefit sales and we bought them dutifully; bet
ween the itchy wool and the bumpy stitches they were as comfortable as sacks full of sharp pebbles.

  But the floor was so frigid I’d have happily worn footgear made of red-hot coals. Pulling them on, I continued, “So who do you think did it? Killed them. And Eva, too, probably.”

  “Someone who knew Chester well enough to make it look as if he had,” she replied immediately.

  “I don’t know, Ellie, maybe your ancestor was the original Chester the Molester. He makes advances, they resist, he’s got a screw loose, so he flies into a rage and murders them.”

  She eyed me over the bowl of eggs she was scrambling. She’d also gotten the coffee on, bacon sizzling, and slices of homemade bread toasting, while butter melted fragrantly in the skillet.

  So much for me taking care of her. I pulled the quilt back up while I waited for the woodstove to begin radiating more.

  “What’s the catch?” She wasn’t rambling. She hadn’t been last night either, I realized suddenly. She was going somewhere with this.

  “The catch,” Ellie replied, “is what the other girls said. The ones who went to his parties and danced and flirted with him, but didn’t vanish.”

  “Ah.” She poured our juice: orange for me, the usual tomato-Tabasco-and-lime for her. In addition to her other qualities the woman had a galvanized digestive system. “And they said… ?” I asked.

  She downed the juice. “According to my grandmother, they said he was a gentleman. Always made sure they got home safely and if anyone else bothered them he’d pitch a Chester-sized fit.”

  I looked a query at her as I dug into a breakfast fit for the linen-covered table of a swanky hotel. Ellie’s perked coffee was infinitely superior to the lukewarm swill that drips from a Mister Contraption, and she’d put out real cream for it.

  “Oh, did I forget to say?” She piled egg on a bite of toast. “Chester weighed—conservatively—about three hundred fifty pounds.”

  Oops, there went my image of a lithe, dark figure slinking through the night. In its place came a picture of a very fat man trying to overpower a series of strong young girls: nope.

  “It’s not easy to stab somebody,” I said, beginning to be interested. “Not like they make it look in the movies. For one thing, a guy that size’ll have trouble just getting close enough.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And that’s why you and I are going back to Harlequin House.”

  “Um, yeah.” I drank more coffee, waiting for the caffeine to penetrate my brain cells. But it was five-thirty in the morning so they were feeling about as permeable as paint is to paint stripper.

  In other words not very. “Uh, why is that, again?”

  “Because,” she repeated patiently, “someone framed Chester. Someone who killed those girls and wanted him to get blamed. Now why would you do such a thing?”

  “So you wouldn’t be blamed,” I responded obediently, still not understanding. “So you could go right on living here free as a bird, only without . . .”

  She nodded. “Without the person—or persons—you wanted to get rid of in the first place. Now, probably we cannot solve the murders of those poor girls . . .”

  Trust her to put it that way: probably.

  “. . . although,” she finished wistfully, “I’d enjoy clearing Uncle Chester’s name too. But the main problem now is George.”

  Her green eyes met mine determinedly across the table. “The fact that now someone’s done it to him.”

  Good heavens, so that was it. She wanted to snoop. “Ellie, just in case you haven’t noticed lately, you’re in absolutely no condition to—”

  She ignored this. “What was Hector Gosling besides the most disliked man in Eastport?” she interrupted.

  I looked down, noticed that she’d finished all her breakfast and was starting on my toast. “A real-estate speculator. And . . .”

  “Right.” Ellie looked triumphant. “And he was president of the historical society. So where do we go to hear gossip about him?”

  Her technique was stellar: wave a cluster of antique murders in front of me, ones we couldn’t solve, to get my nose twitching.

  Then pull the old switcheroo. “But Ellie, we already know why people hated him. On account of sharp real-estate deals, and because Hector and Jan Jesperson were supposed to be swindling a series of helpless old ladies out of their . . .”

  Personally I’ve never found elderly ladies to be helpless at all. They generally possess good genetics, excellent problem-solving ability, and a sharp umbrella or the equivalent thereof, aimed unerringly at the backside of any silver-tongued devil who is fool enough to try hornswoggling them.

  But Gosling and Jan Jesperson weren’t garden-variety silver-tongued devils. They were sharpies from away; she originally from Los Angeles, he a long-ago transplant from one of the western Canadian provinces, one of those places where land was only worth anything if you could grow something on it, not like here. And both had that odd, faintly forbidding air of professionalism, the sense you get from people who know things that you don’t.

  And what folks want when they’re trying to decide what to do with their money or land, of course, is someone who knows. This I thought accounted for the success of the unscrupulous pair, whom George had begun calling the gold-dust twins long before his aunt even got tangled up with them.

  “Hector and Jan’s swindles are just the fake motive.” Ellie demolished my objection efficiently. “That’s why George is supposed to have done it. What we need—well, one of the things we need—is the real reason.”

  “Mmm,” I said uncertainly. “But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Oops, sorry, bad choice of words.”

  It wasn’t, though; it made her eyes twinkle for the first time since all this mess had begun.

  “Very funny,” she said. “But I agree. We can rule George out without ruling out any of the possible motives. Because we don’t know why Hector got murdered. Yet,” she added confidently.

  She finished the rest of my eggs. If I’d eaten that way when I was pregnant I’d have ended up looking like her Uncle Chester. But Ellie burned more calories just by breathing in and out than I could have if I’d run marathons for a hobby.

  “So we go where they are,” she went on briskly, as if it was all decided. Which I supposed it was; once she got going, she was as stoppable as your average freight train.

  “The historical society members,” she went on, “all papering and painting. And talking. Not just about Hector’s longtime bad reputation, but about who might’ve started hating him recently.”

  Well, I supposed it was better than moping. She gazed at me expectantly, you should excuse the expression. Her mood was much improved, too, all the passive devastation of the night before evaporated now that she had a plan. And given the kind of news I expected we’d be hearing later, starting out on a high point did seem like good strategy, morale-wise.

  “Okay,” I conceded. “Right after Victor’s CPR class we’ll go over to Harlequin House and try to pick up some info.”

  By this I meant slog through a sea of useless gossip, a rehash of every old feud and vendetta since 1780 when the first settlers had waded to Moose Island at low tide.

  “But that’s it,” I warned. “I’m not chasing around after any villains with you while you’re getting ready to pop that kid out practically any second.”

  She smiled beatifically despite the fact that low tide was what most of that gossip was going to resemble. Still, if it made Ellie feel we were doing something useful I could endure it.

  Before I left, she brought out a gift for me. “I meant to save it for your birthday or something,” she said. “But I’d just like you to have it now.” She held it out.

  “Ellie,” I said in surprise. “It’s so… feminine.”

  I guess it probably says something about my karma that instead of a neat little purse with a spaghetti strap and space for a cell phone, I had a twenty-pound utility belt with a slot for a claw hammer. Plus safety glass
es and steel-toed boots; the right shoes and accessories make the outfit, I always say. But now I had one of the aforementioned little bags and to my surprise, I loved it at once.

  “Is it all right?” she asked anxiously. “I didn’t know . . .”

  “It’s wonderful,” I assured her. “I’m going to use it all the time. Thank you.”

  As a bonus she’d tucked a miniature flashlight inside, and as soon as I got a new cell phone—my old one was permanently on the fritz—I’d put that in there, too.

  I hugged her hard. “Now you take it easy and I’ll see you at the house. We’ll soak those historical society members for every rumor, piece of gossip, and shred of innuendo they’ve got.”

  It drew another small smile from her. And we’d meant to go back anyway, to retrieve my tools.

  So for her sake I managed a smile in return. But in my heart I was already thinking bummer.

  Double bummer.

  Which thought ended up being not only accurate, but damned near prescient.

  Chapter 4

  Around eight I left Ellie practicing her Lamaze breathing. Personally I thought breathing that rendered you unconscious was the only kind of breathing that could possibly be useful during what she was in for, but of course I didn’t say so.

  Instead I told her I’d meet her at Harlequin House, then began walking home, enjoying the fresh air. Early in spring in a burst of decisiveness I’d sold my old car, but then in a burst of procrastination put off buying a new one. Soon, though, I would have to do something about it, I knew as I hustled along through the chill morning. It was one of those brilliant days in late October when wind hides a razor in its pocket; the sun was warm, but any time now we would have snow.

  The fish pier looked vacant without the two big tugs lined up against it. Beyond on the blue water, halfway to the Canadian island of Campobello, idled an orange-and-black freighter whose size put perspective all out of kilter. The few other boats out this early looked either too far away or impossibly small beside it.