Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  “Because George didn’t tell. Where he’d been, whatever he was doing, he didn’t want anyone to know.”

  As soon as he said it, it made perfect sense to me. Whatever George wanted was good enough for Tommy, even if he didn’t have a clue to the reasoning behind it. Why wouldn’t it be? Of the few adult males who had ever taken anything but a malicious interest in Tommy, George had gone the extra mile.

  Standing up to Perry Daigle wouldn’t have been a snap for George. Daigle outweighed him and was in addition the kind of guy who resorted to violence at the drop of a hat. But George had done it anyway to help Tommy and Tommy’s mother.

  And Tommy had felt that when push came to shove, he could do no less. But he couldn’t stand keeping the secret any longer.

  “I went over to the station right after Ellie called you, when they were searching the house,” he said. “I figured maybe I could get into the truck before anyone else did. And I remembered seeing some papers in the cab.”

  “Where?” I demanded. “Were they hidden, or… ?”

  “Stuck under the floor mat,” he replied. “Like they’d just slid there. You know, like the kind of things that fall on the floor of a truck.”

  Sure I did. Grocery receipts, out-of-date coupons, and the tickets for church raffles I hadn’t won tended to litter up the floor of my own car, when I’d had one.

  “So I didn’t think much of it when I first saw them. I just thought I’d give it all a cleaning after the repairs got done,” Tommy went on. “He’s always got stuff in the cab, like soda cups, junk mail . . .”

  It was where the cup I’d used to pour gas into the truck’s carburetor had come from. Probably that was still there, because Tommy’s face said he’d lost interest in cleaning the truck or in anything else except for the papers he’d handed hopelessly to me.

  They consisted of a parking-garage slip and a receipt from a store called A Taste of Honey Foods. The garage ticket said “parking” on it and was stamped with a time and date, but nothing more. The store whose name was on the receipt was one of a chain with outlets in every large city in the country.

  Tommy didn’t understand what that implied. But I did. The receipts told me that George had been away when Hector Gosling died. And perhaps more important, they told me he hadn’t been alone.

  And they hinted at how Therese could’ve known it. “If whatever he was doing was so secret he wouldn’t even get himself out of a murder charge with it,” Tommy said, “I wasn’t going to tell. Or let the cops find out about it, either. I figured probably he was protecting someone, like you guys said. It made sense to me, it was what he would do. But then . . .” His face clouded again.

  “But then,” I filled it in for him, “George got attacked. Badly injured. And after that you felt you couldn’t tell. Because we might think it was all your fault,” I suggested gently, “that he got hurt.”

  A sob escaped him. The blow it must have been to him when he found out who’d attacked George hit me secondhand.

  “Perry’s nuts,” he said. “He’ll do anything. And George was on my side, so . . .”

  “You think Perry attacked George because of you?” It would have made Tommy doubly guilty, not just that he’d possibly lengthened George’s jail stay by failing to come to me right away, but also that even the motive for the attack was on his shoulders.

  “Tommy, I don’t think so. You know how Perry hates being in jail.” And what he’d done to George put him at risk for a prison stretch. “I was surprised he even bothered your mother again.” Violating an order of protection had been certain to put Perry inside, where he least wanted to be.

  On the other hand, maybe Perry had even fewer beans in his bag than any of us thought. “At least he can’t get at George anymore,” I said. “As long as George is in the hospital . . .”

  “But what about when George wakes up? They’ll send him back. And Perry will just try for him again.”

  “They will keep them apart,” I assured Tommy. “If Perry’s still even at the jail then, and not in the state prison system already.”

  And if, I added mentally, George does wake up. But there was no sense saying that.

  “Hey,” Sam said, coming in. The dogs danced to greet him. “What’s going on?”

  I explained briefly. “Tommy hung onto this stuff because he thought the police might be able to figure out where George was by looking at them, and he knew George didn’t want that.”

  “Jeez,” Sam said, and went over to punch Tommy gently in the shoulder. “You idiot,” he said, but sympathetically.

  “Now, though, I’m trying to figure out the same thing,” I went on, “and I think Tommy might have given the cops a little too much credit. There’s nothing here to say where these places are.”

  Then I saw the bitter dejection still on Tommy’s face. “Tommy, it’s all right,” I told him. “You trusted George, is all. You did what you thought was the right thing. You couldn’t know how it would turn out.”

  His look of misery eased a little. He’d been guilty and scared; convinced, I supposed, that none of us would ever forgive him.

  “It’s a hard thing to learn,” I told him. “That your hero, someone you trusted so much, can make a mistake. That sometimes the guy you needed can end up needing you.”

  I watched him comprehend the bitter truth of this. “But I’m starting to think that might be what happened,” I said. “George should’ve said where he was right from the start, but for some reason he didn’t.”

  Sam had taken the parking ticket and receipt and was scrutinizing them.

  “Anyway, it’s a good thing you finally decided to bring the stuff to me,” I told Tommy. “Now, is there anything you’re still not saying? Anything left to tell?”

  He shook his head morosely. “No,” he uttered bleakly.

  But Sam was still examining the two items. At last he spoke to Tommy. “The truck was at the garage last weekend too, wasn’t it? I mean before all this started?”

  Heavy sigh from Tommy. “Yeah. Checkup. Not that there was a lot to do. He’s always tinkering on it, changes the oil about every other week. He buys it wholesale from a guy, by the case. Because . . .”

  We recited George’s auto-care mantra together: “ ‘If you want to keep a car on the road forever, keep the oil clean.’ ”

  But in the midst of our laughter we turned instantly somber again. All three of us remembered where George was now.

  “It needed a spark plug, fix a tire that was leaking. That’s all,” Tommy said. “Why?”

  He looked impatiently at Sam, annoyed at being questioned about such trivia. But Sam wouldn’t quit.

  “A three-thousand-mile checkup. And for those, you write the mileage on the door sticker, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” Tommy looked even more vexed. “But I don’t see what that’s got to do with… Oh.”

  He brightened cautiously. “Hey, maybe you’ve got something there.”

  Sam’s face smoothed the way it always did when a problem suddenly straightened itself out in his mind. His trouble with mathematics was the opposite of most people’s, purely numerical calculations being more difficult for him and “word problems”—“if Bob has two apples and he gives Jane one,” for example—much easier.

  Because Sam was good at things, the nuts-and-bolts physical real-world objects of any situation. Without them he required all the tutoring Tommy could give. But with them . . .

  With them he was the prodigy his father had been, and more. “Can someone get me a map?” he asked, looking around impatiently. “And Tom, is that protractor of yours still around somewhere?”

  When Sam’s strangely literal brain got revved up, you could almost smell the ozone. “Okay,” he said when we’d brought him the map, Tommy’s protractor, and the receipts.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “But with this stuff I think I might be able to get an idea of where George was when Hector got murdered.”

  Sam once fixed a turtle’s s
hell while it was attached to the living turtle.

  Rather, at that point it was a dying turtle; the animal had been hit by a car while trying to cross a remote road. Sam used a big darning needle, antibiotic powder, and some suture wire he’d gotten from his dad to bring along on his camping trip, plus a pair of needle-nosed pliers to draw the broken edges of the shell back together.

  Later when he took the animal in for professional treatment, the vet said all that could be done was already accomplished, and the turtle recovered. Where to put the sutures, how tight to pull them, and how much antibiotic powder to use all came from Sam’s remarkable ability with things.

  Now Tommy and I stood in the driveway by George’s old truck, hoping for similar magic. The door groaned, its grease sludgy in the chilly air, as Sam pulled it open.

  “Tommy,” he instructed. “Write this down.”

  Tommy brandished the legal pad Sam had equipped him with as Sam read the mileage from the sticker pasted on the inside of the truck’s door.

  “You wrote this here the weekend before last? When you did the check on the truck?” Sam asked.

  Tommy nodded as Sam got behind the wheel to recite aloud the mileage on the truck’s odometer. “Now . . .”

  “Good old subtraction,” Tommy said. He looked radiant. “Good old math. You can’t beat it with a stick.”

  “You betcha.” Sam slid from the truck cab and we trooped back into the house, where he spread the map on the dining room table.

  “Okay, miles per inch,” Sam said. “Where’s that ruler?”

  Tommy supplied it from the heap of study materials they’d been using to try getting geometry from a book into Sam’s head.

  “You, my man, are some kind of genius,” Tommy breathed as Sam laid one end of the ruler on the map dot labeled “Eastport.”

  “Yeah, right,” Sam said sarcastically, and kept working.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  He looked up. “The difference between the number of miles on the odometer now and the number Tommy wrote down when he did the three-thousand-mile check. That’s how many miles it was driven in about ten days, right?”

  I nodded.

  “And we know that mostly it’s been in George’s yard or at the service station, because it wouldn’t start,” he said.

  “Also true, but . . .”

  “So,” Sam asked, holding up the legal pad, “where’d a few over eight hundred miles on the odometer come from?”

  “Wow,” I said. Which was putting it mildly. “That’s amazing. I don’t know.” It seemed to me just getting the thing to run that far at all was amazing. But then my jaw dropped even more as I understood what else my son was doing.

  “Let’s say a hundred miles around here,” Sam said. Including my trip to Calais that sounded about right. “That means a round-trip of… okay, 700 miles. One way that’s three-fifty.”

  He pulled the map in front of him. “On here, a hundred miles is half an inch. We measure out to the right spot on the map, and put the point of the protractor on Eastport, and—”

  Neatly, Sam drew the proper-diameter circle with Eastport as its center. “Viola,” he said.

  Tommy and I looked over Sam’s shoulder. Most of the circle he’d drawn was in interior Maine; lakes and forests and mountains, few roads or none. But the southern part crossed neatly over Boston, Massachusetts.

  “Maybe he lent the truck to someone else?” I wondered aloud.

  “No way,” Tommy said. “He would never let anybody else drive that truck anywhere near that far.”

  He looked around at us. “I asked him, once, could I take it to Bangor. George wouldn’t let me. He said he could make it but the truck would strand me and I’d end up hitchhiking.”

  “You’re right, George wouldn’t have lent it for such a long trip,” I agreed. “To an enemy maybe, but not to anyone he liked.”

  And until lately I’d have said he didn’t have any enemies. “Tommy,” I added, “do you feel like redeeming yourself?”

  I wrote down the name of the hotel Therese Chamberlain had stayed in when she’d attended the nursing convention in Boston. “Get on the phone and find out whether there is one of these food stores anywhere nearby.”

  The literature for the nursing convention Therese had gone to named the parking garage for which paid convention registrants received vouchers. If I could put George in the same garage, it might account for her being so certain about his whereabouts that night, maybe because she’d been there that same night and seen him.

  Not that I knew how I was going to place either one of them there for sure, or even what good it would do if I could, now that Therese was dead. But it seemed worth a shot; for one thing, at this point it was the only shot I had.

  “You got it,” Tommy said earnestly. It was dawning on him that if George could make mistakes, maybe he could too, and be forgiven. “I won’t let you down,” he promised me. “Come on, Sam.”

  “No.” I stopped them. “Sorry, Tommy. But you’re on your own for this. I’ve got another job I want Sam to take care of for me. And another one for you as well.”

  I wrote down my long-distance PIN number so he wouldn’t have to spend money doing the phone research I’d asked for.

  “Take the truck to the garage,” I told Tommy, “I think the cops probably have George’s big key ring but the truck’s spare key is still under the visor like always.” I knew because it was the one I’d been using. “Do whatever you think the truck needs so it’s absolutely one-hundred-percent ready for when George comes home.”

  That wouldn’t be much, considering the recent tune-up. But as I’d suspected, the boy badly needed to feel he was doing something useful for George. My belief was confirmed when I observed that if he’d brightened before, he was positively glowing now.

  “Pile all his lobster traps in the bed of the truck too,” I said as an afterthought. “That way he won’t have to do it himself when the season comes.”

  That George hadn’t even woken up yet was a fact I figured didn’t need discussing, just at the moment. “Okay,” Tommy agreed happily. “Yeah, you bet.”

  “Mom, the hardshell lobster season doesn’t start till winter,” Sam said when Tommy had gone. “Stacking George’s traps now is just busy work.”

  “Yes, but it’ll make him feel better and after all he’s been through over this, he deserves to. Meanwhile I would appreciate it if you would go over to Will Bonnet’s and ask him for another jar of that wonderful caviar he fed us the other night.”

  “Fish eggs? What are you going to find out from fish eggs?”

  “Just get it, please,” I requested sweetly. “Tell him that I want to pay him for it. Say that Ellie’s developed a late-term craving for the stuff and I want to give it to her as a gift.”

  Because among the many things I didn’t know there was one I thought I did. George hadn’t been visiting a fancy food store. To him, a french-cut green bean was as fancy as food needed to get.

  Will was our resident food enthusiast, a likely customer for a gourmet specialty store like A Taste of Honey. And if what Sam brought back was a brand of caviar you could purchase there, I was going to start getting darned suspicious that maybe Will had.

  That in fact he’d been in Boston, driven there by George, when George was supposedly here in Eastport committing murders.

  And that now, Will wasn’t saying so.

  Once Sam and Tommy had gone off on their errands, I sat back down at the kitchen table. The dogs nuzzled me, trying to cheer me up, then went away dejected, and even Cat Dancing glared ominously from atop the refrigerator for a while, trying to get a rise out of me.

  But none of it was effective because for all the energy I’d fired up in the boys I was out of it myself. I needed to talk this all over with someone, to juice myself with theories, strategies, and harebrained notions.

  But Wade was at work, my father had quietly left while Tommy was making his confession, and hav
ing just commanded Ellie to lie down, I couldn’t very well rouse her up again.

  So instead I got up from my chair and looked around the big old kitchen. The channels of the tall bare windows were equipped with brass insulation strips; I’d learned to install them by the simple method of getting some and trying. The radiators worked too, on account of the air having been bled from their valves.

  By me, with a wrench in one hand and a book of home fix-it instructions in the other. Even the little bathroom off the hall was in good order due to my stubborn efforts. In short, what I’d learned from my old house was that when something gets broken, usually there’s a way to fix it. Maybe not one the old-house experts would endorse, but a way; all I had to do was find it.

  I was still standing there thinking when Sam came back in. “Here you go, Mom,” he said, tossing the little jar at me.

  I caught it. The label was lettered in what I guessed was Russian, beautiful but unintelligible. “He says he’s not going to take your money, though.”

  I’d figured he wouldn’t. “And Mom—he says he’s never heard of a pregnant lady craving fish eggs.”

  That too. And I hadn’t heard of many with cravings this late in their pregnancies at all, other than the craving for it to be over with as soon as possible. But it was the best I’d been able to come up with on such short notice.

  “I’m heading over to the boat school now,” Sam said. “Unless you need me.”

  “Fine,” I replied distractedly. The Taste of Honey receipt hadn’t come from a bar-code reader, so there were no shorthand clues to what had been purchased. But I had a Boston phone book and as Sam went out I began paging through it. Moments later I was talking to a store clerk whose cah was pahked in the yahd.

  After that it didn’t take long to learn that the caviar I held in my hand was not available at that store, or at any of the chain’s other branches.

  “Sorry,” the clerk said. He didn’t know where the stuff I described to him could be had, either; so much for that.

  As I hung up the phone, it rang again and Tommy informed me excitedly that the garage for the Boston hotel Therese had stayed at did have A Taste of Honey store very nearby.