by Sarah Graves
Fright stabbed me. “Does George?” It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have long-term problems.
“No,” Victor conceded grumpily. “He will likely regain his memory a little at a time. Eventually.” But not immediately; not in time to do him any good.
“Listen,” Victor said, “before we start can you help me out a little?” He walked me over to a window. “This won’t stay open by itself and with all these people in here, it gets so hot,” he complained.
He waved dismissively at the project. “It shouldn’t take too long, should it?”
This was standard for Victor; if even his ex-wife can do it, he believes, any fool can. I considered just breaking the glass. That would keep the freaking window open, wouldn’t it?
But that might be perceived as petty. And anyway, after I’d fiddled with the window a minute I saw that I couldn’t fix it.
“Victor, it’s the kind with a sash cord and counterweights inside. It’ll need a new cord, we don’t have one, and besides, I don’t know how.”
He looked at once incredulous and vindicated. “What do you mean? It’s a window, isn’t it? I thought you were the expert on household repairs.”
Whereupon, having neatly disposed of that little notion, he accepted my verdict and we propped the window open with a Bangor phone book.
By now Sam was across the room kneeling by his Resusci-Annie doll and the other students were doing the same. That included my new partner, a big cop from the Machias police department standing by our own exercise mat. He sent a beckoning look my way. We were going to go through the whole resuscitation procedure today and he’d already made clear that he wanted to get it done with and vamoose.
“About Therese,” I began to Victor. “You know it wasn’t your fault that . . .”
But he shut me down. “Forget it,” he said brusquely. “I can’t save the world.”
Which in a way was reassuring; if he ever turned into a fully functioning human being for more than a few minutes at a time, I’d have to start watching for other apocalyptic events, too.
“Got it,” I muttered, and went to join my new CPR buddy.
“Hey,” the cop said, positioning himself at the doll’s head. Not friendly; like most of the students he was only here because he had to be, to re-up his professional certification.
“Let’s do it,” I replied, not chummily either. If anything, I wanted to be here even less than he did. But I had no choice; everything had to look perfectly normal if what I planned was to work out.
The cop responded to the briskness in my tone better than if I’d made some bogus try at being a pal. “Yeah,” he replied. “Not that I got any big treat to look forward to.”
Like Therese, he already knew CPR techniques, and he inflated the doll’s lungs expertly while I pressed its breastbone down.
“What’s that?” I asked as we switched positions. “I mean, what are you not looking forward to?” Remembering what Therese had showed me about extending the doll’s jaw, I yanked firmly on it and pressed my lips firmly to its rubbing-alcohol-tasting mouth.
“Gotta transport a guy when I get done here.” The cop pushed the doll’s breastbone down energetically. The breath I’d blown in rushed back out of its lungs: whoosh.
“Guy named Ronny Ronaldson,” he went on. “Local guy, I’ll be getting him out of your hair for a while.”
“Yeah, actually I know him. Friend of a friend.”
Ronny, the not-too-brilliant helper that Will had taken out fishing two days earlier along with the blond-ponytailed fellow, Weasel Bodine, whom Tommy had disliked so much.
The cop’s verbal assessment of Ronny was less charitable than my mental one. “Guy’s dumber’n a box of rocks,” he commented.
Across the room, Sam and his partner were being singled out for praise; once again Sam had shown his handiness with the real world, absorbing the nuts and bolts of resuscitation in a gulp.
“How come? What’d he do that makes him so dumb, I mean?”
“Guy walks down Water Street,” the cop told me, “puts a rock through a store window and runs. Broad daylight, what’s he think, nobody’s gonna see him?”
“Who picked him up?” Eastport was still being policed by the state cops, who last time I looked weren’t doing foot patrols.
“Store owner ID’d him, I went to his house and grabbed him, he’s locked in my squad outside right now.”
The cop sat back on his heels. “Good news for Eastport,” he went on, “bad news for me, I gotta do the paperwork before I can go home. I was supposed to be off this afternoon,” he added injuredly.
“Who was the store owner?” I asked, suspecting the answer and trying to adjust mentally to this new, unexpected development. I’d thought I would have more time.
The cop shrugged. “Well, not a store, actually. Going to be a new restaurant downtown. Guy renting the space was there when it happened, made the complaint.”
He shook his head. “That’s what’s so dopy, guy was standing right there watching him when he did it. Name of Will Bonnet?”
Victor strolled by. He’d been observing our performance from afar, which was the distance I preferred him to keep.
Especially now since he’d gone back to his usual, non-warm-and-fuzzy persona. “All right, you two. That’ll be fine,” Victor pronounced.
He handed us each a sheet of take-home exam questions and a date when we would all return, do the hands-on portion of the CPR test, and receive our certifications. Whereupon the Machias cop left before I could even try to talk him into hanging onto Ronny for a while.
So it was clear I had to do something. Ronny’s arrest was not only bad news for the officer who had to transport him to the county lockup. It was also bad news for me, because Ronny was going to be in jail very soon. And unless I missed my guess, once he got there he would try finishing the job that Perry Daigle had started.
Back home I got on the phone at once. But the officer on clerk duty at the jail had little patience with me. The whole thing was nearly impossible to explain, the panic in my voice wasn’t making me more believable-sounding, and I wasn’t halfway through it when he interrupted.
He wanted to know if I thought prank calls were funny, and did I realize my phone number and address were on a screen right there in front of him? He could send a cop out if he wanted to, bring me in for making a false report.
He did tell me that George was alone in the sickroom, that the beds were bolted down, and that there were no heavy objects or other items in there that could be turned into weapons. But he wouldn’t promise George would remain alone. And when I asked him if Maine State Police Trooper Hollis Colgate was by any chance at the jail and if I could possibly talk to him, the officer hung up on me.
Trying to stay calm, I took deep breaths of the kind that are supposed to help your thinking by oxygenating your brain. But they only made me dizzy. What I needed were facts and with time suddenly so short I had nowhere to get them.
Nowhere but straight from the horse’s mouth. I’d meant to get an unsuspecting Will over to the house tonight and somehow get the truth out of him. Tricks, lies… if worse came to worst I was ready to ask Wade to smack him around, if necessary.
And Wade would’ve done it. But now I would have to confront Will much sooner than I had wanted to, and manage to convince him that I knew for sure a lot more than I really did.
Jail officials might believe Will if he told them he’d sent Ronny to kill George. No one would say such a thing unless it was true, they would probably figure. So I had to make Will think he was caught, get him believing that if the plan to kill George went through, it would only make things worse for him.
And I had to do it in front of witnesses, or killing me could just put Will Bonnet right back in the driver’s seat again. I just hoped it wasn’t too late to stop him.
Grabbing up my keys and tossing them into the nifty little bag Ellie had given me, I rushed out to Harlequin House, where I thought Will might be
this morning. It would’ve been perfect; the fix-up was back on track and there’d been a work session scheduled.
But no one was there and the door was locked. Taped to it I found a poster announcing a historical society meeting at Will’s aunt’s house, starting in a few minutes. Grimly I set off, intent on adding another item to the meeting’s agenda.
A few blocks away just across from the Presbyterian church, Agnes Bonnet’s lovely old Federal house was a near-twin to my own: white clapboard, multiple chimneys. I knocked, noting that cars were already lined up in the street.
Footsteps came to the door. “Coming,” Will’s voice called.
Steady, girl. A door latch clicked and the door swung open.
“Hey, come on in. The others will be here shortly,” he said.
Step into my parlor, said the spider to the . . .
Anxiety seized me. But I couldn’t very well run. That would surely tip him to my suspicions and perhaps seal George’s fate.
Besides, I had plenty of company here with the meeting going on. “Hi, Will,” I said brightly. “Got a minute?”
“Absolutely,” he replied. “Coffee’s on, we’ll have some.”
And sure enough, I did smell fresh coffee, yet another sign of the gathering about to begin.
So like a good little fly, I stepped inside.
“What’s the meeting about?” I asked as I followed him into Agnes Bonnet’s charmingly old-fashioned kitchen. A fire flickered pleasantly in the small isinglass-windowed woodstove. An elderly cooking stove, its rounded knobs and raised gas-grate burners reminiscent of the 1930s, stood nearby. The south-facing windows admitted bright sunshine through ball-fringed curtains.
From the other room came mingled voices. “Oh, you know. The usual. Who does what, all that,” Will replied.
Into the serene setting he had introduced numerous large, shiny kitchen gadgets including an espresso machine and a fancy breadmaker whose contents seemed to have exploded out of its top, creating a crusted-on, neglected Vesuvius effect.
“The hot water pipe in the Harlequin House kitchen needs soldering before we can turn the boiler on,” he said. “Ditto for the gas. I think we should get somebody over to look at it.”
He got a cup down from a cabinet. “And they took the front hall banister down to the boatyard to refinish it there, in the spray booth,” he went on. “So it’ll have to be brought back and reinstalled.”
“Big job,” I observed, looking around a little more. “But a spray finish will be faster than using a brush, I guess.”
It was the result that might be horrid, too thick in some places and not enough coverage in others. Hardly anyone seems to rub down enough between coats of spray finish; thus the armies of garishly gleaming old tables and chests of drawers you see in so many “antique” shops.
“Anyway,” I said, “anything’s better than nothing.” Again not my true opinion, but far be it from me to discourage anyone who was actually doing something, whether I approved of it or not, on a project as big as Harlequin House.
“Yeah,” Will said. Back turned to me, he poured coffee from a badly-needing-a-scrub carafe. “Here you go,” he added, handing me the cup.
Apparently his food enthusiasms only included cooking, not cleaning up dirty dishes afterwards. If it even included that; the coffee was bitter. I gulped at it nervously, keeping an eye on the back door in case I needed to dash for it and wishing hard that some of the historical society members would join me out here.
Then as a burst of music interrupted the chattering voices, I realized that they were coming not from live people, but from a television set. No one was here.
“Will, I thought everyone… What are all those cars doing parked outside?”
“Church service. Memorial for Hector. Not that anyone much cared, but I guess they thought they had to do something.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” That back door started looking very good to me. On the other hand I was here now, and . . .
“Our group ought to be showing up soon, though,” he said, glancing at the clock over the stove. “Stay here a second and let them in when they come, would you? Drink your coffee. I promised I’d bring Agnes a cup, too. Back in a jiffy.”
He left with a tray. Upstairs I heard a door open, and then a low, incoherent mumble cut off as the door closed firmly again.
Sad as I was at this fresh evidence that Agnes was failing, I couldn’t very well ignore the opportunity he’d given me to look around. I just needed to be careful: as he’d said, people would be coming in any minute.
So I got up and opened the nearest kitchen drawer. It held only a jumble of kitchen utensils including a spatula with egg dried on it and a cheese grater with a greying scrim clinging to it. But the next one contained papers.
Lots of papers. Hastily I rummaged through them. They included a report from the Board of Prisons of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, numerous copies of probation reports, and a little card like the one the dentist gives to schedule your next appointment.
The card, dated nearly a year earlier, set a time for Will to see a probation officer. I didn’t see any more recent cards. The paperwork said he was out on parole after serving a sentence in Walpole, in Massachusetts, for extortion and assault.
There were newspaper clippings too. I scanned fast: an arson fire at a Boston seafood place. Owner found inside with his legs broken, swore he’d fallen trying to get out.
Yeah, right. I opened a cabinet. Inside were a dozen jars of the imported caviar he’d fed us, but no other fancy foods unless you counted Fluffernutter, Froot Loops, and Ring-Dings, plus a variety of salty things in barbecue flavors.
In the freezer were stacks of frozen dinners and packages of prepared frozen codfish cakes, their label bearing an address in downtown Boston. The codfish cakes we’d had at the Harlequin House luncheon were, I recalled now, the only dish of Will’s I’d ever eaten that didn’t have serious preparation problems.
Because he hadn’t made it. That was a lie, too. He came back as I opened the refrigerator. “Looking for something?”
“No.” Suddenly I realized I’d taken one of the little jars of caviar out of the cabinet and it was still in my hand, a dead giveaway to what I’d really been doing.
“I mean… yes.” Nervousness made my mouth feel rubbery. “I was wondering if you had any milk.”
Luckily my bag was still on my shoulder; when Will turned away I dropped the little jar into it, then stuffed the bag inside my jacket and zipped it halfway up so the bag wouldn’t show, or so I fervently hoped.
He got powdered creamer out of another cabinet and handed it to me with a plastic spoon. “Here,” he said flatly.
Which was when it struck me that he hadn’t done much prep work for the imminent meeting. Where were the silver tea urn, the dessert plates and small sandwiches customary at such gatherings?
“I guess the club is bringing the refreshments?” I asked stupidly as I took a sip of creamer-adulterated coffee. In view of recent events, white powder wouldn’t have been on my list of things I wanted to consume.
But the glass jar was brand new with the safety seal still on it. And dumping the stuff into the coffee hadn’t made it taste better, but at least it tasted different.
“No,” he replied finally. “I fibbed about that, actually. I canceled the meeting. Aunt Agnes just isn’t up to having people over today.”
Then I did head for the door. But as I approached it the door began moving also: taller and shorter, fatter and thinner. Too late it occurred to me that a medicinal taste often indicates an actual presence of medicine in the tasted substance. Coffee, for instance.
Also, that medicine plus no meeting meant I might be in very deep do-do, indeed.
Or dee-dee indood. Oh, I was in trouble. Not the creamer; he had put something in the coffee much earlier, when he poured the cup. And I’d been drinking it all along, whatever it was.
The room tilted interestingly.
“Aunt Agne
s,” Will said, “isn’t long for this world. Poor old dear. But she’s had a good life and now it’s time for her to move on. Let the younger generation take over.”
I looked down at my cup. It was empty except for a tiny bit of undissolved something, a yellow muck-blob at the bottom of it. Not strychnine powder; if it had been I’d be past wondering about it by now. But powdered creamer didn’t leave a residue like that.
Powdered creamer didn’t even . . .
“Sink,” I murmured aloud. It came out think. Which meant I’d better do the latter or I’d be doing the former real soon, now.
“May I use your bathroom? I’m not feeling very well.”
A smile. “Of course. Top of the stairs, to your right.”
Oh God. I made it upstairs, mixed my right up with my left, and flung myself through the wrong door. A grab at the doorknob saved me from falling right onto Agnes’s bed with her in it; tied into it with adhesive tape. Agnes stared up at me, pale old eyes confused, mouth sagged into an O of beseeching semicoherence.
“Agnes, I’ll come back,” I gabbled. “I swear to you I will.” I closed the door on this horror, confronted a fresh one: my own face in the bathroom mirror. Whatever he’d given me had already begun working its lousy magic. My pupils were dilated and sweat was beading on my upper lip.
I tried to make the stuff come up again but it wouldn’t; whatever Will had given me, it had turned my digestion into the calm spot at the center of a roiling maelstrom. In desperation I yanked open the medicine cabinet.
Inside were the items of Will’s much-vaunted first-aid kit, the one he’d been assembling so he could take care of his poor frail old aunt. But now I realized he was using the things to treat the scars of her imprisonment.
The “first-aid kit” consisted mostly of gauze, bandages, and some heavy-duty stuff whose label said it was for bedsores. There were several bottles of prescription tranquilizers, too.
But then I saw what I needed: the bottle of ipecac I’d given Will to complete his supply of remedies. Only just as I was about to twist the top off and guzzle the stuff—somehow I had to get rid of what he’d given me—he was pounding on the door.