Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  Ellie had gone very white. Now she braced herself and said, “Will he be all right?”

  “There is every possibility of full recovery,” he replied. “I have evacuated the hematoma and stabilized his ICP.”

  Intra-cranial pressure. It’s amazing how much you can pick up just by listening to people. Back when I still thought he walked on water, Victor would describe his surgical procedures, complete with every single retractor, sponge, and hemostat.

  I took him aside as a nurse with a glass syringe went in to draw some of George’s blood. “What’s the deal?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. Smack to the skull. Couple of neurological signs I’m not too keen about.” He looked unhappy.

  “Brain damage? You mean permanent brain damage?”

  He angled his head to where Ellie still stood by the bed. “I don’t see why. But the truth is that I just left the ICP monitor in as a precaution. He should be waking up by now, only he isn’t. He’s fully comatose and has been since right after the injury.”

  “Oh, God.” It was another thing I’d learned when I was with Victor; sometimes for reasons that no one has been able to figure out, comatose people don’t wake up.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Wait and see, or . . .”

  Will Bonnet came down the corridor with Tommy right behind him.

  “CAT-scan him again later,” Victor replied. “In twenty-four hours I’ll reassess. If I were anyone else I’d be transferring him.”

  To a bigger hospital with better specialists, he meant. But Victor was the better specialist. And he’d furnished the Calais hospital with enough gear and trained so many of its nurses that if brain transplants could be performed anywhere, he could have done them here.

  “What happened?” I asked the guard posted by George’s door when Victor had gone. “Was there a fight?”

  “No, ma’am.” The guard shook his head. “Way I heard, another fellow clobbered him. Ready to hit him again when a supervisor ran in, broke it up. Guy by the name of Daigle.”

  Perry Daigle. Tommy’s uncle. My jaw must have dropped a foot. And the look on Tommy’s own face was dreadful as Ellie and Wade came out.

  Will went to Ellie’s side immediately. “He’ll be fine,” Will said. “George’s a hard-headed little son of a bitch, Ellie, you know that. He’ll be just fine.”

  He offered his arm. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  “No!” She looked alarmed. “I’m going to stay here. He,” she insisted, her voice breaking, “wouldn’t leave me.”

  Fortunately, Victor returned at that moment and stepped in. “Ellie.” He seized her hands. “I’m going to take care of him. And there is absolutely nothing in this world that I won’t do to make this come out right.”

  His eyes held hers. “Do you believe me?”

  She nodded shakily; of course she did. When he wanted to, Victor could persuade the stars down out of the sky.

  “Now, what do you think he would say if he knew you and the baby were here, worrying and getting exhausted, maybe even making yourself sick?” he asked her.

  She bit her lip. When she spoke it trembled. “He’d be angry, wouldn’t he?”

  “That’s right.” He let her hands go. “Now, I won’t be going anywhere. If anything changes, anything at all, I’ll call Jake up and she’ll call you. All right?”

  Reluctantly, she nodded at him. “All right.”

  Thanks, I mouthed at him. Victor may be the world’s biggest jerk most of the time, but he’s magic with patients and their families.

  Will had wandered gloomily away; now he returned. “I guess I don’t need to go in again,” he said. Then another thought struck him.

  “Listen, maybe I should get the locks changed on Harlequin House. What do you think? It’s kind of after the fact, but right now everyone in the historical society’s got a key and… I don’t know. It’s just, who knows what else’ll happen?”

  It was a good idea. After agreeing to take care of it he turned back to Ellie. “Now let’s get you home.”

  Another excellent plan; Wade’s truck would be a tight squeeze for the three of us. “You two go on,” I said. “I’m going to make sure the charge nurse has all our phone numbers.”

  Ellie’s eyes yearned back into George’s room. But in the end she went, Tommy remaining stubbornly just outside George’s door.

  At the nursing desk I recognized Therese Chamberlain, the nurse from Victor’s CPR class. Wearing a rumpled uniform, her hair messily pulled back from her pale, picked-at face and fastened with bobby pins, my partner in rubber-doll resuscitation looked even more washed-out and exhausted than the last time I’d seen her.

  “Long night?” I asked.

  She shrugged dispiritedly. “We rotate shifts. I drew short straw for the night shift, I guess. No one asks, they just stick me wherever there’s a hole in the schedule.”

  She frowned at what I’d had her write. “Isn’t he the one they think did the murder last Friday night?”

  Near the main door on the far side of the lobby, Will was helping Ellie put her coat on. Ginger Tolliver passed them on her way out, as the Condons attempted to wrestle a screaming Porter back into his jacket.

  Will looked back over his shoulder at me, flashed me a grim thumbs-up sign, and guided Ellie through the heavy glass doors exiting to the parking lot.

  “Yes, George is the one,” I said guardedly. Maybe she didn’t like taking care of accused murderers. I didn’t need a nurse with a chip on her shoulder to contend with, too.

  But that wasn’t it. She glanced around to be sure no one else was near enough to hear. “And you’re the ones. You and her.”

  She angled her head minutely toward the doors Ellie had just exited. “I’ve seen your pictures in the paper. You’re the ones who are so . . .”

  “Nosy,” I finished for her. “Is there something you wanted to say to us? Or me? We will of course keep whatever you want to tell us confidential.”

  If we can, I added silently. All’s fair, and all that.

  Therese looked down at her bitten fingernails. “Yes. That he couldn’t have done it.”

  “Well, of course not. George wouldn’t hurt a—”

  “No, I mean I know he couldn’t.”

  My heart thudded. “How? You mean you actually . . .”

  Her look of fright cut me off. “No more here.” She glanced at Tommy, so still and silent outside the door to George’s room that I had completely forgotten about him.

  He turned away, hands stuffed into his pockets, as Therese pushed a bit of paper at me. “This is my number. Call me before noon tomorrow. After that I sleep. You won’t be able to wake me.”

  Wade came back in, giving me a brief glimpse of the parking area and of Ellie and Will. The darkness outside made the glass opaque, their faces a near-subliminal flash against something dark blue that I couldn’t quite distinguish. Then they were gone.

  Tommy shuffled unhappily over to stand with Wade as I took the scribbled paper from Therese. “But can’t you . . .”

  “No. And don’t tell anyone.” With that, she strode into the conference room behind the nursing desk and closed the door.

  “Oh,” I said to the empty air. “All right.”

  But it wasn’t. For an instant I debated going in there and dragging Therese Chamberlain out by her unkempt hair.

  Instead, I crossed the lobby to join Wade, leaving George with his chest slowly rising and falling mechanically, his heart drawing a thin green line on the cardiac monitor screen, glowing in the dark.

  Chapter 8

  The next morning Wade lured me into riding the Deer Island ferry with him by telling me we needed some time together to work on our relationship.

  “You’ve been browsing those magazines at the beauty parlor again,” I accused him. The haircutting place we both favored was unisex but its reading material wasn’t.

  “Ayuh,” he replied as we drove down Water Street toward the ferry. But I could tell
he had some other reason for wanting to talk with me alone.

  Downtown, it hit me for the first time how suddenly summer had ended. Under the grey sky the shops had a shuttered look. Most were already closed for the season. The few bright banners remaining hung woebegone over deserted sidewalks, and cars with Maine plates were the only ones around the diner and Post Office.

  There was something I wanted to talk over in privacy too. “Wade, do you think Tommy’s acting… I don’t know. Strange?”

  “Sure.” Wade pulled the truck down the ramp to the parking area at Halpert’s Cove. A granite cliff rose straight up from the water opposite a dock piled high with hundreds of lobster traps.

  “He’s worried as hell. We all are,” Wade continued as we got out of the truck.

  “I guess. He’d do anything for George.”

  The Island Hopper was already waiting, diesels idling, her flat rectangular deck damp with spray. Because it was early and not in tourist season anymore, we were the only two passengers aboard when the vessel cast off.

  “I don’t know, though,” I told Wade. “I’ve seen Tommy in a lot of moods. One way and another that kid’s had plenty to contend with in his life. But I’ve never seen him look… secretive. As if his conscience were bothering him.”

  We leaned together against the rail, a light chop slapping and the wind seeming to blow right through me. The streets full of houses rising behind the waterfront diminished swiftly to picture-postcard size, the breeze freshening as we got out into open water. Land seemed suddenly far away.

  Wade snugged an arm around my shoulder as we hit the current and the ferry’s engines revved. “Maybe Tommy feels he should’ve done more to help George somehow. Kid that age, he might have a kind of unrealistic idea, what he can really accomplish.”

  “Maybe.” Across the water the low outlines of the salmon pens moved on the waves. In the underwater enclosures, thousands of the fish were raised on a scientifically devised diet, then harvested like chickens or heifers. That, I imagined, was what had given Tommy the idea of raising sturgeon.

  I still thought he looked worried about something he’d done, though, not something he hadn’t. But I had little more than an uneasy feeling to go on so I dropped the subject.

  Ahead lay the massive whirlpool, Old Sow, its power merely hinted at by the small round upswellings called piglets swirling on the surface of the water. “Lots of freighters in the last few days,” Wade commented, gazing at them.

  “Could Ginger’s boyfriend have been on one?” I asked.

  We’d been over it all the night before when Wade and I got home from the hospital: Ginger and her ex-fiancé Mark Timberland, the Condons, the poison on George’s workbench. And the nurse, Therese Chamberlain, still a wild card but I hoped somehow a promising one.

  “Nope,” Wade replied. “Talked to him this morning.”

  I turned to him, astonished. “How’d you manage that little miracle?”

  “Called around, found the company he works for, pulled a few favors. He’s in California, I got him on the phone. That hadn’t worked, I’d have tried the union halls. But I didn’t have to.”

  “They keep lists? Of every single person working on the freighters?”

  “You bet. Think about it, Jake. If anything happened . . .”

  Sobering thought. “If the vessel went down or had some other disaster, like a fire or an explosion, they’d need a list of the people on board for the casualties report,” he added.

  I leaned hard against him as we crossed over the whirlpool, deceptively calm on the surface but surging below.

  “First thing I learned, he wasn’t around when Gosling died, or Jan, either. His ship was in transit and he was on it.”

  I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. It wasn’t a good feeling wanting to get George out of a jackpot by getting some other person into it.

  “Had quite a talk with the kid,” Wade went on. “Once he knew who I was, Mark was pretty interested in talking with me.”

  “And he knew who you were because . . .”

  “Didn’t, at first. But his first mate does. I’ve met him a few times out here.” Wade waved at the channel where the big boats traveled between Deer Island and Campobello.

  “So I had the mate call him first, introductory-like. I think it being the middle of the night out there sort of lent a bit of urgency to the whole thing, too. And it turns out Mark wants a career in the merchant marine. So he had a few questions about the tests he’ll be taking for that, how to approach them.”

  Every so often it hit me that Wade had a whole life I knew almost nothing about, one that he led out on the water. “So we talked about it a little,” he went on. “Then I asked him the question.”

  “What Hector Gosling had on him?”

  Wade nodded. “That’s right. And he told me the answer. But I am afraid you’re not going to like it at all.”

  “Why?” A couple of porpoises arced greenly out of the water and submerged again. “How would whatever Hector had on Timberlake have anything to do with me?”

  “He’s dyslexic. That’s the kid’s big secret and old Hector knew it.”

  “You’re kidding me! That’s all? How would Hector know that, anyway? And… what’s the big deal? Sam’s not making a secret of his dyslexia.”

  “Sam’s not hoping to captain a commercial freighter,” Wade replied seriously. “If he were, he might have worried about it as much as Mark has. I had to swear to him I’d never tell, and only because he’d been briefed on my reputation did he tell me even then. That and his realizing that Ginger might be in some sort of trouble.”

  “You lied to him? Said the police were looking at Ginger?”

  He shook his head. “Didn’t have to. Just told him Hector was dead. Then he was eager to talk. Clear his name and hers, because he knows how she felt about Hector. Hated him to death, he said.”

  Interesting phrase. “How?” A seal popped its sleek head up, eyed us briefly and dove again. “How could he clear himself and Ginger?”

  Wade’s gaze went unerringly to the distant place where the seal would come up again. It did.

  “The thing is,” he replied, “in the merchant marine you climb the promotion ladder by good work reviews and taking tests. Do well in both, you rise through the able-bodied seaman levels, then to second and first mate. But there aren’t as many ships as there are people in those ranks.”

  “So you wait to get your own ship.”

  “Right. You have to be chosen. So you tell me, why would the owners pick a guy, if there’s ever an accident the other side’s lawyers can stand up in court and say, So Mr. Ship Owner, did you know your captain can’t tell his right from his left?”

  “But that’s not true, and it’s not fair! Sam can—”

  “But it doesn’t matter, because it might create doubt anyway. Whether or not they took all possible precautions to prevent an accident. It could be construed as a liability even if it never created a handicap.”

  Wade looked out over the waves. “And there are lots of good people waiting for their own ship, who aren’t dyslexic. So Mark Timberlake could end up waiting for his command forever, without anyone ever admitting to him the real reason why.”

  “You know that’s not the way dyslexia works,” I protested stubbornly. “Sam has no problem driving a car, for instance.”

  “I know.” He tightened his arm around me. “But not everyone does. That’s the problem. And Mark’s realistic about it, he knows it could hold him back. He didn’t know how Hector found out, but he says he did take a lot of special classes in school, participated in some medical center studies.”

  “And Hector probably just kept digging till he found dirt,” I said bitterly, thinking of the computer search Will Bonnet had done on Jan Jesperson. Probably if he’d paid enough he could have gotten her medical records, too.

  “But how does that clear Mark and Ginger?” I asked. “Sounds like the opposite, that he told you what their motive woul
d’ve been.”

  “Right. It doesn’t clear them for sure, I agree. But he was at sea. That’s easy to check. And from what you’ve said about Ginger, I doubt there’s a third person she would trust enough to bring in on that kind of thing. To carry Hector, help her get rid of his body, after she’d poisoned him?”

  I thought again about her loner lifestyle, way out in the woods with lots of things to occupy her in solitude.

  “Probably not,” I agreed. “On top of which I keep feeling that somebody picked George to be the fall guy on purpose. And Ginger wouldn’t have any reason to do that, much less know enough about him.”

  “Right. And what Mark said confirmed that. He said to ask around. You’ll find Ginger plays it all very close to the vest. No tight buddies she would have told if she whacked Hector and needed a helper. Hell, the way Mark tells it, she doesn’t even trust him.”

  “But then why would she lie about being in touch with him?”

  The air changed suddenly as we reached the place where land was equally far away in all directions. I felt my shoulders relax as they always did out here, my troubles falling away.

  Or lessening, anyway. For the moment. “Maybe she didn’t lie, exactly,” Wade replied. “Because Mark says he e-mailed her. He’s got one of those wireless gadgets, bounces e-mails off satellites so you don’t need a land line. But she hasn’t replied. He thinks she’s probably not even reading his letters.”

  “Oh,” I said, comprehending. “So maybe she didn’t tell us the facts. But in her mind, she could’ve been telling the truth?”

  “That’s how I’d read it,” Wade agreed. One last thing didn’t make sense, though.

  “So Mark was at sea. But he still told you his secret, even though he couldn’t have been the one who . . .”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Wade said. “Why tell me if he didn’t need to? So I asked a little more. Turns out he thought if he helped me out by being straight with me, I might keep an eye out for Ginger, give her a hand if she needed it. Just in case this whole thing did somehow end up getting stuck to her shoe.”