Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  “Yeah,” my son replied with a rueful laugh, “I’m still on. Which one you think he wants to talk me into going to this time, Princeton or Cal Tech?”

  Victor had never abandoned his dream of Sam’s attending what Victor termed a real college. Luckily, Sam’s own self-esteem was robust enough not to suffer from his father’s pep talks.

  “If he offers to pay for either one, come and talk to me,” I said. “We’ll work something out.”

  “After I pick myself up off the floor,” Sam agreed. Somehow Victor’s ambitions for his son always included silver platters.

  Without warning Sam changed the subject. “I wish Bob Arnold were here. I’m kinda worried about George, myself.”

  “Nothing Bob could do now.” Me, either; not about George or whatever was bothering Tommy. Not until I knew more. So instead I got started on the project Ellie had lined up for the day.

  Which was chasing a wild goose.

  “Listen,” I said to her an hour later, “what if we get all the way out there and then you decide to have the baby?”

  We were driving toward the mainland, over the long causeway with the bright, blue-green water spreading away on both sides, the racing waves whitely foam-topped.

  “I’m not deciding anything, the baby is,” she replied from the passenger seat. “At this stage of the game, anyway.”

  I didn’t tell her that in my experience “this stage” lasts forever. Let her keep her illusions; she’d find out the reality soon enough.

  “And it’s not coming for a while,” she added, “no matter what the doctors say. Why should it? Everything’s just ducky where it is. Why give up a good thing?”

  Berries still clinging to the mountain ash trees stood out like blood clots against their leafless branches in the fields on either side of the road. Campaign signs for upcoming elections clustered in the dry grass next to ones for a hunters’ breakfast at the Grange Hall.

  “Will stayed late last night,” I observed. She’d waited to call me until after he went home.

  “Yes. It was okay, though. After dinner he went over and got the truck. The police were finished with it.”

  From the Mobil station, she meant, where George and Will had taken it when it wouldn’t start. Two days ago, but it felt like two years.

  “And he put some shelves in the spare room for me. Just . . .” She raised her hands, let them fall. “I think Will’s lonely. His aunt, I guess, is not very much company. I didn’t mind.”

  Past the causeway I took a left and slowed for a hay-wagon lumbering along behind an antique tractor, the bales on the wagon swaying hugely every time the wagon went over a bump. Around the farmhouses, meadows had been cut, gold stubble sticking up in geometric grids like the pattern of a patchwork quilt.

  Canada geese arrowed overhead. “I still don’t see what you expect to accomplish with this trip,” I told Ellie. The wagon turned off. A couple of cars had lined up behind us, in the rearview.

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure either. What’s wrong?”

  I looked in the rearview again. “Nothing. I thought . . .”

  But the car that had seemed to be following turned off too. Not one I recognized.

  “Just because people’s names come up in rumor doesn’t mean they’ll say anything helpful,” Ellie conceded.

  But that was her plan. Because rumor had touched on Jimmy Condon and Ginger Tolliver in relation to Hector, she meant to visit both of them and see what, if anything, we could glean from them.

  “It was all just talk about them maybe having reasons to want Hector dead,” she admitted. “But it’s also all I’ve got.”

  She sighed. “And you never know, maybe they will turn out to have hated Jan Jesperson, too.”

  I thought choosing interview subjects based on their names having come up in idle chatter was about as likely to pan out as selecting them by throwing darts at a telephone book. Still, she had her heart set on this.

  “So it’s a fishing expedition,” I said. “Fine, I get the picture. Look for the turn, will you? It’s been a while since I’ve been out this way.”

  The road meandered prettily between old homesteads, each with its barn, rail-fenced garden, and row of apple trees. Sheets and pillowcases strung on wash lines bloused out in the cool breeze, gathering the scents of balsam, sweet woodruff, and new mown hay.

  “There,” Ellie said. But I’d already spotted it, a collection of buildings very much like the others we’d passed but polished looking, somehow. More disciplined; near the trim farmhouse an old maple with a last crimson leaf still clinging to it presided over the immaculate yard.

  I turned onto the crunchily pea-graveled drive past a sign that read Saltmeadow Farm. A dog the size of an elk got slowly up from the front porch and stood there, eyeing us measuringly.

  My fingers tightened on the door handle of the car, which I had unwisely exited prior to scanning the area for carnivores.

  “Grr,” said the dog, narrowing its eyes with interest.

  “Oh, grr, yourself,” Ellie said, waving a hand dismissively as she strode toward it.

  “Ellie? I think . . .” The dog leapt from the porch, traversing the lawn in a couple of long, slavering bounds. “Ellie!”

  I love dogs; just not the possibly murderous ones you tend to meet in strange dooryards. The dog kept snarling, growling, and threatening right up until the moment it stopped short in front of Ellie.

  “You big faker,” she said, ruffling its ears, and went on toward the porch where Maria Condon had come out, wearing a red corduroy smock over a navy turtleneck, scuffed clogs, and navy leggings with a patch in one knee.

  “Ellie, it’s you. I didn’t recognize you at first. Somehow yesterday you didn’t look so . . .”

  “Huge.” Ellie completed the woman’s sentence without rancor. “All those protective work clothes covered it up some. But don’t worry, I’ll be back to my normal size soon.”

  Another illusion I’d failed to dispel. I’d gotten back to my own normal size right around the time my son picked up his first marijuana cigarette. That he’d done it right in front of me, with the defiant flair only a twelve-year-old dope fiend can really master properly, may have accounted for the sudden, complete, and terrifying loss not only of my appetite but also most of my mind for the next couple of years.

  “This is my friend, Jake Tiptree. I don’t think you two met yesterday. Jake, Maria Condon,” Ellie introduced us.

  Maria had a thick brunette braid, dark eyes, and the remnants of the deep summer tan she’d have gotten working in the big garden that lay at the end of the mowed yard. The small hard muscles of her arms were visible even under the turtleneck sleeves. A boy of about five with bowl-cut blond hair and red cheeks came out onto the porch behind her.

  “Hello,” Maria said to me. But then something changed in her eyes as she looked from me to Ellie and back. “Porter, go back inside, please.”

  Silently the child obeyed. I wondered what Maria had used to instill such instant, protest-free compliance. But it went with the perfect orderliness of the place, the trim painted and the porch swept and the ruler-straight rows in the garden. No weed ever grew there, I’d have bet; it wouldn’t dare to.

  “You’re here about Hector, aren’t you?” Maria asked. “Because of what Sally’s been saying. I told you yesterday she’s a troublemaker. And I know the kind of thing you two get up to,” she went on. “You want to know if Jimmy could’ve killed him, maybe Jan too. My husband,” she added pointedly to Ellie, “instead of yours.”

  Ellie didn’t duck the accusation. “You’re the one who brought it up to me, that Sally was bad-mouthing Jimmy again and that you wanted a stop put to it. Well, if we can rule Jimmy out for sure, that will put a stop to it.” Then she looked around curiously. “Where is Jimmy, anyway?”

  Maria bristled. “In the woods. Despite that horrible woman’s slander, people do still hire him.”

  “So was there trouble between Jimmy and Hector?”

/>   Something flickered in Maria’s dark eyes. “He didn’t do it,” she declared flatly.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  Brass tacks being a game two can play at. If she started in on the old “he was here with me the whole evening” story, I’d do an about-face on my earlier opinion and start thinking maybe he had done it.

  But instead Maria faced Ellie. “I know in the same way you know George didn’t,” she replied. “Because I know him. And I know you, too, Ellie. I can’t believe that you’d want to make Jimmy a scapegoat.”

  A real goat looked up inquiringly from behind a rail fence. Past his enclosure lay a tranquil pond, yellow corn stalks, and a pumpkin patch with big orange spheres thickly strewn among the already-withered vines. The cultivated land ended at a stand of hardwood, maple and oak interspersed with dark-green cedars.

  “No,” Ellie agreed at last. “I’m not looking for someone to blame. Please, Maria, I need your help. And,” she added, wincing a little, “I could stand to visit your bathroom, too, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  So maybe it was an unorthodox way to get invited in. But it worked. “All right,” Maria said grudgingly. “I guess you’d both better come inside.”

  There was nothing fancy or new inside the Condon house, just orderly efficiency and the sense of grim, constant making-do. Besides the usual appliances, the kitchen held a slant-topped desk where Maria had apparently been paying bills when we arrived. A fat stack of them remained on the spindle.

  Maria led us through into a chilly parlor. “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said when she’d sat us down. “If Gosling got away with his scheme we’d have lost everything. And it looked to me as if he was going to. To Jimmy, too.”

  I blinked at her frankness; she saw it, shrugged impatiently. “You want the truth. And we have nothing to hide,” she explained.

  Um, maybe. “That woodlot you saw is for sale,” she went on. Beyond the animal pens and garden, she meant; that forest.

  “A hundred acres, you could cut a little every year, open it up right so the little stuff grew big,” she continued. “Keep it going forever if you knew what you were doing. And Jimmy does.”

  “Tree-farm it,” Ellie said comprehendingly; Maria nodded.

  “There’s regulations on what you can cut, but Jimmy knows how. You wouldn’t make a lot of money but it’s steady. Enough to make the payments on the land, plus taxes and a little extra.”

  I got it. “Collateral.”

  She shot me a swift glance. “Exactly. We do have a decent down payment, so pretty soon we could borrow against that land. Again, not much, but . . .”

  She turned toward the kitchen where the little boy was about to put a half-eaten apple into the homemade compost keeper.

  “Porter, if you’re not going to finish that apple, leave it on the table so Mommy can wrap it for you. You can eat it later.”

  Waste not, want not. But I got the sense that here that philosophy was taken to the extreme. “And the next loan, it would be enough for a down payment on another piece?” I hazarded.

  Another nod from Maria. “Beyond the first, another parcel of land also with excellent wood on it. We had it all planned out.”

  “You mean you did,” Ellie pointed out, and Maria flushed faintly.

  “Jimmy,” she agreed, “wouldn’t buy a package of gum unless somebody held a gun to his head.”

  She gestured around. “His truck is older than George’s, and every stick of furniture in this house is second- or third-hand.”

  She said it proudly but something about it didn’t strike me quite right; she was too intense about it. “So you make the money plans and Jimmy goes along with them,” I said.

  Her face revealed that I’d hit home; Jimmy’s contribution to this little operation was a snappy salute.

  And of course cutting the wood. I thought a moment. “The hard part was probably getting him around the idea that you’re a better money manager. You being the woman, I mean.”

  Might there be friction between them about it? If so, Jimmy could’ve felt pushed to prove something about being an equal member of the team. But Maria wasn’t having any.

  “You know what? He’s a better tree cutter than I am. And if I can’t get Porter to go to bed, he can. And—”

  “Okay, I take your point. Everybody does what they do best.” But privately, I still suspected that Jimmy was also pretty good at pronouncing the phrase, “yes, dear.”

  Maria nodded. “I milk goats better,” she added, which struck me funny. But when I glanced over, she wasn’t smiling.

  “It must have made him nervous, though,” I suggested, probing. “Thinking about all the things that could go wrong.”

  If one of them got sick or had an accident, the little extra that greased the wheels of their plan would vanish. I doubted they had health insurance either, or if they did the deductible was bigger than their yearly income. And I certainly knew better than to think they had the luxury of disability protection.

  In other words, Jimmy and Maria were swinging in the breeze and praying that the wind blew fair.

  “He worries about it,” she admitted. “Taking loans and using other people’s money to get ahead. But it’s the only way,” she insisted urgently. “You can’t stay even, I kept telling him, although you might feel safer if you do. Unless you go forward, you fall back.”

  I regarded her with new respect. If I could’ve slapped that fact into the heads of half of my clients back in the city, we’d all have ended up wealthier.

  Somehow Maria had figured it out for herself, though, that life is risk. The only choice is, are you the taker or the taken?

  “We had to get the land for the collateral, but also for the income. To help make,” she explained, “payments on this house.”

  Yeeks; riskier than I’d thought. “That’s where the first land down payment came from? Second mortgage on this place?” An even scarier thought struck me. “Not from Hector, I hope? The second mortgage, that is.”

  “Uh-uh. I’d never have talked Jimmy into that, even if I’d wanted it.” Maria’s small, determined chin lifted. “No, it was the bank. Preliminary approval and the deal was all made. A lady down the road owns the acreage and she had agreed to sell to us.”

  Uh-oh. “An elderly lady,” I hazarded. “No family. And the land, if you didn’t buy it, would’ve ended up in her estate.”

  “I suppose,” Maria said slowly. “I don’t think she’d been planning to sell it until we asked her.”

  “The money would’ve been there, though,” Ellie objected, “in the woman’s estate, if they did buy it.” Catching my drift: that Hector could as easily have swindled the old woman out of the cash.

  “Yeah, but who knows what kind of rackets he had going? What happened next?” I asked, turning back to Maria.

  “Hector told the lady that it would be worth more if he got it zoned residential for her, put in roads, and parceled it off for house lots. Which we could’ve done, too,” she added. “But we didn’t want to.”

  The child had fallen asleep in a shabby armchair, thumb in mouth. “We thought someday it could be Porter’s.”

  A worthy objective, but they were way out on a limb. They needed to buy more land just so they could hang onto the house they were living in.

  “So the lady started to back out,” I said. “Listening to Hector’s advice and waffling on the deal she’d made with you and Jimmy.”

  “And the trouble was, we didn’t have anything in writing,” Maria confirmed. “And that was where things stood when Hector… Well, you know more about what happened to him than I do.”

  Maybe. And maybe not. This was shaping up to be a much more interesting situation than I’d expected.

  “Where was Jimmy?” Ellie spoke finally. “Last Friday and on Friday night.”

  According to what Victor had told me that morning, the autopsy in Augusta had confirmed the medical examiner’s original estimate for Hector’s time of death: twen
ty-four to forty-eight hours from the time the M.E. had first seen the body

  Which meant George was still firmly on the hook. “Out at the sawmill in Cooper during the day,” Maria replied evenly. “Bird’s-eye maple, he was having it cut for a furniture maker in Rockland. It had to be just so and he stayed till the end, to make sure that it was.”

  “He didn’t leave for lunch or anything like that?” But the moment I’d said it I realized how foolish it was.

  She shot me a look. “I make his lunch. It’s a twenty-mile drive to a lunch place from there. It’s not like they’ve set up a McDonald’s in Cooper, you know. And it’s cheaper.”

  Of course. “Okay, so then what?” I asked her. “How about in the evening?”

  She bridled, not liking the close questioning. Ellie put her oar in efficiently.

  “Look, Maria, if you want Jimmy ruled out of it, just tell us where he was, that he couldn’t have been somewhere else killing Hector, that’s all.”

  Ellie had her best don’t-mess-with-me face on, and she was using her stop-screwing-around-with-me voice to go with it. And for someone who resembled a storybook princess—even one with a watermelon in her middle—she could be very persuasive.

  Maria gave in. “He was at the boys’ clubhouse, playing poker.”

  “Boys’ clubhouse?” I looked at Ellie, who shook her head at me minutely. Never heard of it. “You mean like no girls allowed, swear an oath to get in, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes, sort of.” Maria seemed embarrassed. “It’s Truie Benoit’s place, do you know him? Truman, that’s his real name. Anyway, Truie has a barn behind his house. Has a woodstove, an old icebox with a case of shorties in it, the guys go there in the evenings to play cards and smoke cheap cigars.”

  “So that’s where Jimmy was? Playing poker with the boys?”

  “Yes.” She nodded firmly. “I know he was there all evening because I dropped him off and picked him up. I needed the truck, there was a craft fair to get ready for at Porter’s preschool.”