by Sarah Graves
“Gah!”
“What is it?” Ellie’s face appeared worriedly in the square of light above me.
“Nothing.” A moose’s head, stuffed and mounted, hung on a wooden post, its glass eyes reflecting the flashlight’s glow.
“You think George is hiding something, don’t you?” she said in a different tone, after a moment.
“Ellie, I’m starting to think he’s being set up just like you said. The strychnine, the note on Gosling’s body, the paperwork from his aunt’s attorney . . .”
“I’d never seen . . .” she began insistently.
“I know. I believe you about not knowing about the will. I also know you’re not in the habit of locking your doors. Anyone could’ve put those papers in your house. But my point is that if George would say where he was, none of it would matter.”
I peered around some more. “The only way George could be set up like this is if someone knows he’s got something else he needs to keep secret, so he won’t say what he was doing. And that’s what I’m worried about.”
I stepped off the ladder. “So yes, I do think he’s hiding something but at this point I have no idea what. You’re sure he had no idea about any inheritance from his aunt?”
“I’m sure. Believe me, I would know. And I’d remember.”
“Yeah.” From upstairs came voices, purposeful footsteps, and the whap!whap!whap! of someone using a nail gun.
“Yeah, I’m sure you would. Do you think he’ll call you?”
The plan had been to visit him and impress upon him that in this case silence wasn’t golden. Instead it was fool’s gold.
“Sure,” Ellie replied. “He’ll just sit for a while waiting. But when it dawns on him that he’s really stuck there . . .”
That he wasn’t in Eastport anymore, where everyone liked and trusted him. George might not have been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but the light he shed was warm and steady. Her voice trailed off sadly. “Then he’ll call.”
The flashlight picked out an ancient coal furnace, a few shiny black cinders lying around its door. Behind it was the old coal bin. Into it deliveries of the fuel had made their entry via the coal chute.
“Jake?”
A complicated system of pipes and valves connected an old boiler to the heat and hot water systems. Brick arches spread the weight of the chimneys that, before central heating, vented the stoves and fireplaces.
“I’m here.” Small rooms as far as possible from the furnace would’ve held hung meats, fruit and vegetables canned and stored up against the winter, and root vegetables, carrots and potatoes and parsnips, laid away in sand.
I took a few more steps. Nothing but another old cellar like mine. In fact I was willing to bet there was a . . .
Yep. I found a switch string and pulled it; a bulb snapped on. My heebie-jeebies nearly vanished as the darkness went away.
But they didn’t vanish completely. Ellie’s voice came down through the trapdoor hole.
“This wasn’t always a secret room,” she reasoned. “You could go through the door in the parlor before it got plastered over.”
“Uh-huh. But what was it for?” Then it hit me.
“Ellie, are there marks on the floor up there? Out in the parlor, in front of the mantel where a stove would stand, if there’d ever been one? Can you see where maybe its feet were?”
She went away, came back swiftly. “Yes,” she confirmed. “And there are char marks on the floor, too, from embers. And screw holes in the wall here, big ones. A pulley, maybe, to haul up a coal scuttle?”
She’d followed my thought. Why bring coal all the way around up the cellar steps when you could haul it up through the floor?
“Maybe that’s why the trapdoor’s here. And when Chester redid the house he got rid of the stoves, put in the furnace.”
“He had an art collection,” she remembered aloud. “Gone now, of course. But once he didn’t need coal upstairs maybe he had the door plastered over just to get more wall space?”
Good enough. Even without an art collection I’d been sorely tempted to jettison my old cast-iron radiators; between them and all the fireplaces, there was barely enough clear space for furniture.
“Fine. So the next puzzle is, how did anyone know this room existed? Someone, I mean, who put Hector in it not long ago?”
“Well, if you were in the cellar just snooping around and you saw that ladder standing there, wouldn’t you figure it must go somewhere?”
I’d already thought of that. “Which means the ladder wasn’t there. If it had been, Eva’s body would have been discovered sooner. By, for instance, whoever redid the electrical work.”
I aimed the flash at the ceiling and the wiring snaking over it. Contrary to my earlier belief, it was modern insulated stuff. “This is new. The historical society must have had it redone when they bought the house,” I said.
Which suggested another question. Why had there been a fire? For a while after we’d arrived today an electrician had been here examining the place, but nothing dangerous had been found.
“If the ladder had been there when the wiring was installed, someone would’ve been curious enough to climb it,” Ellie said.
“Uh-huh. That’s what I mean. It suggests that the ladder’s placement here is more recent. Close the trapdoor, will you?”
She complied. The cellar ceiling was a jumble of old boards and beams. Even with the light on, without the ladder to clue you to it the trapdoor was practically invisible.
“Darn,” I grumbled as Ellie opened the door again. I was getting a clearer picture, now, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to find that room,” I told her. “Someone who was looking for a good place to put Hector’s body. Whoever it was, once they found that trapdoor, they placed the ladder and hauled Hector’s body up. And then . . .”
“Left the ladder on purpose.” She finished my sentence.
“Uh-huh. They hid him, but they wanted him found. It makes sense of that note in Hector’s pocket, and it confirms the idea that someone’s setting George up. But . . .”
Dragging Hector in through the front door of Harlequin House still bothered me, though, even after my efforts at rationalizing it to myself. Too dicey, secrecy-wise. Could there be some other way, I wondered?
Standing on tiptoe I pulled on one of the boards nailed over the coal chute’s opening, at the top of the old wooden coal slide. The board came off easily, as if it had been removed before. “Ellie, I think Hector slid in.”
That accounted for the grime on his face and clothes. Then, somebody had hauled the body up the ladder into the room. All of which argued for a plan, especially the part about leaving the ladder like a big wooden arrow: this way up.
But there was one other possibility. I climbed the ladder again, moving quickly. The less time I spend on one of them the less chance there is of my departing it in, shall we say, an unregulated manner.
The police could have stood the ladder against the trapdoor themselves, when they were in here. But they hadn’t; at the top I found two big nails toenailing it in place. And the last time I looked, cops weren’t carrying claw hammers on their utility belts.
Someone else had wanted to make very sure that ladder stayed there; wanted it so that one way or another somebody working on the well-publicized rehab of Harlequin House would be likely to find Hector dead.
All of which was still theory. But I had a bad feeling as I clambered crabwise from the ladder’s top into the little room.
The feeling got worse as, getting up, I found myself staring into the face of a person who would actually rather be found dead than clambering anywhere. It was the patronizing face of Sally Crusoe.
“Intrepid,” she murmured. Her ultrarefined tone always made me want to stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers at her.
“I came to let you both know that we have a small luncheon prepared for everyone here today,” Sally continued, “in case either of
you wish to partake.”
Her look registered my disheveled condition; I’d managed a shower before the CPR class, but on essentially no sleep I still felt like the bottom of a birdcage.
“Jacobia, dear,” she began once Ellie had gone to inspect the food. Warm aromas were drifting in; they smelled delicious.
“It’s probably not important,” Sally went on, touching a manicured hand to the back of her hair. The gesture was meant to let me know she was uncomfortable with what she was about to say.
Which was nonsense; due to her entire nervous system having been replaced by the Social Register, Sally wouldn’t have been made a bit uncomfortable if she were drawn and quartered, a plan I heartily approved.
Also, she thought everything she said was important. “Spill it, Sally,” I told her. “I’m busy.”
That she was speaking to me at all indicated that she wanted something, and I was constitutionally inclined not to give Sally anything she wanted.
“Well.” She steeled herself prettily. “I don’t know if you know this. Or if Ellie does.”
I waited.
“But Jimmy Condon, who used to work for me until he stole all that firewood . . .”
Whereupon I nearly shut her down right then and there. Jimmy Condon was a well-liked local man whose business was cutting big woodlots for other people, selling the wood, and paying himself from the profit. The terms of the deal were spelled out: what got cut, what was to be left, and what the owner received.
“Care to get to the point?” I suggested.
People around here operated on margins so thin you could read the newspaper through them, and Jimmy was no exception. His mistake had been taking the trash wood from Sally’s woodlot. It was stuff so small no one else would want it or so full of pitch it would turn your chimney into a tar pit, so she’d have had to pay to get it hauled away otherwise.
She bridled faintly. “That wood wasn’t in the contract,” she insisted, sensing whose side of the argument I was on.
Right, it hadn’t been. Still, she’d been fine with it until she found out Jimmy used it to boil maple syrup at his little farm, where he also sold vegetables, eggs, goat’s milk, and pumpkins.
Then she’d raised hell. It wasn’t, she’d protested, for his personal use, as she had believed; it was for a business, and a pretty successful little business at that. There was, as she had told anyone who would listen, a principle involved.
The principle being that she could no longer imagine Jimmy’s family huddled around the fire she had so charitably provided, a picture I was sure she’d summoned up on a regular basis, with herself as the benevolent lady of the manor, gooey with noblesse oblige.
Anyway, Jimmy had ended up buying the wood to stop her bad-mouthing him—a woodman with a crooked reputation might as well go pound sand—and that along with the next year’s poor sap yield had put him out of the maple syrup business.
Which was another reason I so disliked her. “He was about to be ruined by Hector Gosling,” Sally said. “Jimmy, I mean.”
“Really. What makes you think that?”
My first reaction was that Sally just wanted to finish Jimmy off. Everyone knew what she’d done to him, and no one appreciated it; suggesting he might’ve had a bone to pick with Hector would make him look worse and her somehow better, she probably imagined.
But then I thought again, because Sally’s patrician nose was exceptionally good at sniffing out news. “How could Hector’ve done anything to Jimmy Condon?” I prompted her. Because Jimmy could be as innocent as the day was long and still deliver a heaping helping of reasonable doubt over to George’s side of the table.
“You’ll have to ask Jimmy,” she replied primly. “Or you could talk to Maria. She’s out there now with Will Bonnet helping him prepare lunch. I shouldn’t,” she added, “be telling you this much.”
Which meant she’d probably extracted the information from her husband, a loan officer at the bank. Meanwhile I’d forgotten that Maria Condon was a historical society member; my, what an interesting connection, I thought, suddenly hopeful again.
“Jacobia.” Sally stopped me as I moved away from her.
I turned back to find her gazing at me, wearing as usual a skirt and sweater set, stockings, and low heels, her pearls and makeup flawless and her white hair beautifully combed into a style that had been au courant thirty years earlier.
Chin up and shoulders back. Tummy flat; I’d have bet any money she was wearing a girdle. She looked, I realized all at once, lonely as hell.
“I hope it turns out all right for George,” she said softly. “He’s a good man.”
I believed she meant it; even a stopped clock, and all that. But she’d been sealing her fate since moving here from Newport, Rhode Island, two years earlier, bringing along with her a down-the-nose gaze for anyone not meeting her standards. People just didn’t like, as George would’ve put it, the cut of her jib.
So I couldn’t help feeling a kind of sympathy for her. But I didn’t have time—and let’s face it, later I wouldn’t have the inclination—to begin trying to exhume Sally from the grave she’d dug herself into.
“Thanks,” I said, and left her alone in the ruined parlor.
In the next forty minutes I had jobs of my own to do, but I was also constantly being summoned to a remarkable variety of others. Intervening at the last instant before the power saw was applied, I saved an old panel door from being chopped off at the bottom; that lopped-off half-inch would’ve kept it from sticking, but would also have prevented the door from hanging straight ever again. Instead we rehung it on new hinges; afterwards it swung smoothly, unmutilated.
Next I wandered out to the kitchen where a very nice young man thought roofing nails would do for securing a loose corner of the kitchen linoleum, the venerable old kind that was actually made from canvas and linseed oil. Hastily I went to Wadsworth’s Hardware store for a bottle of white glue and pressed it into the young man’s hands, confiscating the roofing nails.
Finally I snatched a can of latex primer from a woman who, looking doubtful, was about to paint the insides of some first-floor window wells. Also, she hadn’t scraped them; apparently she hoped latex primer would hold down the old loose paint chips.
Unfortunately, latex primer won’t even hold itself down when painted onto anything but indoor locations. In a window, you might as well use a child’s tin of watercolors. So I put a chisel to the old paint chips, which practically fell off, vacuumed them up, and gave some oil-based primer to the woman.
“Here,” I told her, thinking I was being a little pushy. “You’ll like the result much better.”
But the gleam in her eye said she didn’t think I was pushy at all. “Thank you,” she said, wielding the paintbrush with new energy and beaming with the lovely zeal of the newly converted. It is remarkable, I have noticed, how the right tools can improve a person’s mood.
At last I got away for lunch, which in its own way turned out to be remarkable, too.
Visitors to Eastport think an unending supply of fresh fish must be among the culinary delights of the place. But fish come in seasons and are in addition very heavily regulated; cod, for instance, once a mainstay of the fishing fleet, is so strictly controlled that the men are obliged to throw back much of what they haul in.
Somehow, though, our newest culinary genius Will Bonnet had gotten some cod, and from it he’d made the most delicious codfish cakes I’d ever tasted; fresh, delicately seasoned, gently crispy, and wildly popular with the historical society members.
“You like?” He stood behind the steam table he’d set up to keep them hot, wearing a white apron and a tall white chef’s cap.
“Oh, indeed,” I assured him through a mouthful. In the wide hall of the old mansion where people stood refreshing themselves after their labors, approving comment about these delicacies had nearly managed to replace talk of Hector’s murder.
“You must be feeling sandbagged,” I told him as I selected asparagu
s from a dish positioned over a warming candle.
“You uproot your life to come home and save your Aunt Agnes, turns out someone steps in, does the job for you,” I continued.
Two perfectly good non-George suspects had just been handed to me on plates, neat as the ones set up here to present deviled eggs spiced with locally made mustard, sweet-pickled baby carrots stuffed with hot peppers, and tiny steamed potatoes with butter and parsley, still in their tender jackets.
But I wanted more. Specifically I wanted Will’s own problems with Hector Gosling and Jan Jesperson given a thorough airing. Because if this all dragged on as long as I had begun fearing it might, I could imagine wanting Ellie to be able to depend on him.
And I couldn’t want that if I didn’t trust him completely. He got my message, though, and to my relief he stepped up to it promptly and frankly.
“Yeah, I guess that’s how it would look. City boy goes home, worried he’ll have to haul his inheritance out of the villain’s clutches. Or worse, that he won’t be able to.”
He slid cod cakes onto another plate, accepted compliments, handsome with that cleft chin and curly black hair. You could see him greeting guests in his own restaurant.
“Might make the guy mad,” Will admitted. “Truth is, though, those two did me a big favor.”
He looked past me to where Ellie stood chatting with Maria Condon. His eyes softened at the sight. “Man, is she a trooper or what? She doing okay?”
“Sure. Reasonably.” I hadn’t had the chance to tell Ellie what Sally had said about Jimmy Condon, and now seeing the two women together I thought Ellie should be running a psychic hotline.
But then I realized from their body language that the small dark-haired woman had buttonholed Ellie, not the reverse. Maria spoke urgently, moving her hands in the quick, intense way that was among her trademarks, the other two being a razor-sharp tongue and a grip on a dollar that could make the eagle scream.
I scanned the crowd for Jan Jesperson. Cozily, she was the historical society’s vice-president under Hector’s leadership. But she wasn’t here, and for that I was grateful. To get away with so much for so long I thought she’d have to be as sensitive as a cat’s whisker; I didn’t want her picking up any vibes from me.