Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  Would they ever know what happened? I thought of Wade and Sam looking for me. Not finding me until too late. Tears pricked my eyes; furiously I blinked them away.

  “And Jan Jesperson had been squirreling away drug samples,” he continued. “Using them on people, get hold of their property.”

  Another wallop of fear blindsided me, disorienting as a kick to the head. A desperate, gagging protest gargled past the tape pressed thickly to my mouth.

  A scraping sound came from the plaster bucket. “Once I figured that out,” Will went on, “I knew just what to do. Take her stash and use her for window dressing, like George got so mad he killed her, also.”

  Thwack. “George set his part up for me so well. Him and his righteous anger. What a motive he gave himself. Worked great.”

  A thunk as he dropped his trowel into the plaster bucket. “Anyway, it won’t be long now,” he finished.

  Because Ronny would take up where Perry Daigle left off, if he hadn’t already. Stay calm, I ordered myself. But my breath came in short, sharp gasps and my heart slammed painfully against my chest.

  “Too bad about you,” Will added. “You weren’t in the plan. I’m sorry, Jacobia. Honestly I am. It’s just one of those things that happens, unfortunately.”

  But he didn’t sound sorry. I heard no trace of the mingled self-doubt and reflection he’d been tiptoeing around, earlier. Whatever story he’d had to tell himself to get through this part of his plan, that’s the one he’d told.

  The sad part was, probably a lot of the story was true. But it wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that he’d gone all the way over from planning to doing. And for the life of me—literally—I didn’t know anymore how I was going to stop him.

  There was the sound of newspapers crumpling, being stuffed into—I guessed—a plastic trash bag. Probably he’d set it up so there wouldn’t be any evidence of a fresh plaster job.

  Now he was disposing of the newspapers he’d used to cover the floor. “I think if I just apply the paste to the wet plaster, press the paper on, it’ll dry pretty neatly, don’t you?”

  He was right, it would. And even if it didn’t, people would just think Ellie and I had hung the paper that way, a quick and dirty solution.

  Which meant that if the trapdoor didn’t let me out of here—assuming I could first get the tape off my wrists and get the circulation going in my hands again, so I could lift it—no one was ever going to see the wall and realize I was in here.

  But if I thought I at least knew the grimmest element of the situation, I was all wrong. He had been saving the real chiller, the part that set me yanking at the tape on my wrists again.

  “The kid, though,” Will Bonnet said. “That stumped me for quite a while, the idea of Ellie having a baby. I wasn’t counting on any little rug rat to screw up the picture. Especially not any of George’s.”

  A needle of horror pierced my heart at this new depth, what this piece of damaged goods was actually contemplating.

  “But hey,” he went on, “accidents do happen. Kids can die in their sleep. She’ll forget George and his offspring. And then . . .”

  His aunt’s house, his friend’s wife, a sizable inheritance; I was seeing it all, now.

  Too late. A choked noise came from my throat: fear, rage, and disgust, all in one tape-muffled outburst. But Will was too busy congratulating himself to hear it.

  Meanwhile part of me was still arguing with him, trying to find the reason for his behavior. If I’d had his life, his biology, his upbringing, I might have turned out just like him, I thought. An outsider looking in, conscience-free and in the end perhaps simply unable to figure out how to be human.

  Most of me didn’t think so, though. Not really. Because Will might not have had a choice about who he’d turned out to be.

  But he’d made the choice to stop fighting it.

  And now his voice was moving away. With a thud of anguish I realized I hadn’t heard any sounds of plastering or cleaning up for quite some time.

  The job was finished.

  A door slammed as he left the house.

  Back in the days when I was a surgeon’s wife I used to pick up lots of little hospital tips and tricks, none of which I ever expected to be able to use.

  For instance, you can only tear adhesive tape if you don’t let it see you coming. Approach it tentatively, it will beat you every time. But with a fast right-angle snap to the edge, it will rip straight across as easily as if you had cut it with scissors.

  Unfortunately I’d already struggled with my bonds so much, the tape was blood-moistened and rolled at the edges. No hope of tearing it, so I didn’t waste time trying; instead I rubbed my chin over its surface, trying to peel it off.

  That didn’t work either. It was too mushed together for a loose end to exist. And the candle was burning down . . .

  Think. Something sharp. I scanned the tiny room, noticed something that hadn’t been there the last time I was in it. Over in the corner where Hector Gosling had lain a few days earlier stood a pair of wooden crates, one with its top slightly ajar.

  I inched myself over to them on my butt, bumped the top off the crate. Inside, the crate was completely filled with jars.

  Caviar jars, and where the hell had those come from? But I didn’t have time to wonder about it and they were packed in so tightly that with my wrists bound, I couldn’t prize one of them out.

  Then I remembered that maybe I didn’t need to. The lids on these jars were like the lid on the jar I’d taken from the kitchen cabinet at Will’s, then dropped into my bag… I rolled and felt the bag’s lumpy presence inside my jacket.

  Even better, I could smell fish, which was wonderful because it meant the jar had broken. I spent the next ten minutes working the bag up inside my jacket with my arms, all the while telling myself that if I could only keep my head and work methodically I still had a chance. That “methodically” had never been an adverb that applied to me was a thought I decided to avoid confronting, just at the moment.

  And eventually the bag popped out. Then of course I had to get some broken jar pieces out of the bag; fortunately I hadn’t had time to zip it back at Will’s house. And it is astonishing what a person can do to avoid having her life flash terminally before her eyes; I finally got hold of a piece. But there was now only a quarter-inch of candle left and the flame fluttered dangerously.

  An eternity passed before I managed to position a biggish shard of the broken jar between my sneakers, sharp edge up. Then, working with care so as not to add a severed artery to my list of difficulties, I sawed at the soggy tape till it fell off.

  Which freed me to dig in the bag again. It didn’t contain what I really needed: a rocket launcher, say, or one of those handy combination ratchet-tool-and-help!-flare gadgets they sell in the TV ads around Christmas.

  Also while I was digging in it my keys fell out and vanished with a jingle and clank through the iron grate over the old heating duct. But… there. I dug the miniature flashlight out and turned it on just as the candle died.

  All right, now, dammit, I thought furiously, encouraged by the flashlight’s beam. Ripping tape from my mouth I tore the old carpet from over the trapdoor, pushed my fingers into the crack. Let’s see how our buddy Will likes having the nasty story he told thrown right back in his . . .

  Damn. The trapdoor was nailed shut from below. He could get the nails out when he wanted to when he came back through the cellar to get his boxes of caviar.

  I couldn’t.

  Don’t panic, I instructed myself firmly again. There was still the door he’d covered with plaster. And since I was free sooner than he’d expected, there was a slim chance that the plaster had not yet hardened enough to keep me from bashing through it. The lath would be thin, little more than popsicle-stick width; he’d said as much. I need only get the door open and . . .

  That was when I noticed that the door lacked a doorknob. Of course; you couldn’t plaster over a doorknob stem. Now the square hole f
or it was a small, darkly staring evil eye. I stared back, thinking of Ronny arriving at the county jail.

  Ronny, whom Will had threatened with something dreadful if he didn’t kill George, and afterwards endured in silence the prison term that would result. Not that poor Ronny was going to survive long enough to do otherwise. I had no doubt that Will would find a way of shutting that particular mouth forever, too.

  But I was still staring at the door, and it still wasn’t open. Unless I could get it open, it wasn’t going to be until someone opened it and found my body.

  Someday. Poor Sam, I thought as self-pity washed over me. I wished he were here right now. Oh, did I ever.

  Then it struck me that if Sam were here, he’d probably have this problem solved already. To do it he would use things, ones he found here, jury-rigged to suit his purpose. All I needed to do was identify them and use them, too.

  This I thought shouldn’t take long. But the way my day was going it should’ve come as no surprise that I was wrong again.

  Once I started looking, I found several more items I hadn’t known were there. The gun, for instance.

  And the suicide note.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t understood it all earlier. Maybe because once you start thinking of someone as a victim, it’s hard to envision them as the villain.

  The heating grate pulled up easily; its bolt-holes had been stripped long ago by repeated removal and resetting. Once upon a time the house had suffered heating trouble, it seemed. The grate itself was a lovely, heavy old cast-iron object, its openwork the shape of a fleur-de-lis, substantial enough that I figured I could use it to bash through the plaster. But when I’d lifted it I spotted something lying barely visible in the duct below.

  Not my keys. They’d apparently slid on down. Instead I found the sweetest little antique derringer you ever saw, small enough to fit in a lady’s purse, and a crumpled piece of deckle-edged notepaper.

  The cops, I realized, hadn’t opened the grate. I plucked the gun and the note up out of the duct. Covered with writing, the note was signed “Eva”; in it, the woman whose body Ellie and I had found here confessed to murdering three Eastport girls in the 1920s.

  But she couldn’t stand seeing Chester Harlequin blamed and didn’t have the courage to tell the truth while she was alive, the note explained. An especially clever bit was how she’d removed the doorknobs and doorknob stem, then pulled the door of the tiny room shut till it latched. She’d known workmen were coming the next day to plaster over the door and hang wallpaper. They wouldn’t realize she was inside, dead.

  Or as Eva had put it, that she’d gone on to meet her Maker. What a little hysteric she must have been, I thought. She’d surely known the impression she would make when she was found; nothing like time to turn a tawdry soap opera into a tragedy.

  And by doing things the way she had, she’d arranged a double triumph for herself. Saying she wanted Chester cleared. But since neither she nor the note would be found soon, making sure that in fact he remained a suspect. Let’s see, now, how slowly can you spell m-a-l-i-c-e?

  Sure, Eva, I thought bitterly. Now that it’s too late you spill your guts. And naturally even after almost a hundred years it’s still all about you. How about a few hints from the grave on how I’m going to get out of here?

  But on this topic the murderous flapper was unhelpfully silent. Why she’d crumpled the note and dropped it down the grate instead of just leaving it on the table I supposed I would never know either; just another quirk of bad-girl mischief, probably.

  I could guess how the gun got there, though. I could see it in my mind’s eye. Eva’s right hand, the one that almost certainly held the gun, would’ve jerked reflexively in the moment of her death. The little gun flew across the table, hit the old floor, and fell through one of the openings in the heating grate to the duct below, where it landed with the note.

  Sheesh. Chester Harlequin had been framed, all right, just as Ellie insisted, by someone he trusted. Just like George.

  But I didn’t have time to dwell on the ironic parallels. Instead I took a page from Sam’s book and pulled a thick splinter out of an antique floorboard. This I jammed as firmly as I could into the hole where the doorknob stem should have been.

  There: not quite a doorknob. But wrapping Eva’s note around it made it thick enough to grasp, to try turning . . .

  Damn. The wood broke off in the hole. Now I was worse off than before, unless… Okay, I told myself, fighting panic once more. So maybe it was a two-step process.

  But it had better be a fast one because now my flashlight was failing; just finding a bent nail in the gloom was a project and wiggling it back and forth until it came out of the floor was worse. Then I had to bang the nail’s sharp end into the wood in the doorknob hole, using the heating grate’s edge for a hammer.

  Careful, careful… Mindful that this was my absolute last chance, I grasped the head end of the bent nail, its pointed end firmly lodged—or so I very much hoped—in the wood jamming the doorknob hole. Then gently, gently I pushed down on it, using the nail as a latch-handle.

  If the nail turned in the wood I was doomed. But if the wood turned the latch mechanism inside the door, there was a chance—just the barest chance—that the door might open.

  Holding my breath, I felt the latch-set’s inner mechanisms turn gratingly. The door moved a fraction… outward. There hadn’t been room enough in the little chamber for it to open in.

  That was why Eva had had to pull it shut… and now Will’s lath-and-plaster job was blocking it.

  Which was when I went a little crazy. I grabbed up the grate and began demolishing the old door shred by shred. By the time I smelled fresh plaster, my throat was raw from screaming; every time I slammed the grate’s pointed corner into the door, it cut another wound into my hands.

  Finally came the moment of truth. With the door apart at last I stood sweaty and exhausted, gasping and weeping. Staring at the fresh plaster seeping through the lath strips and already half-hardened, I knew there was barely a chance in hell I could ever break through.

  But Wade was on the other side, and Sam was too. Fresh air, and Ellie and the baby. My dad was outside; likewise that damned district attorney who was trying to put Jemmy away.

  All there. Even Victor.

  And Will Bonnet.

  Thinking about them all, I backed as far away in the little room as I could get. Physics, I thought. Time and gravity and the unchanging properties of substances.

  Things. And… pressure. Never mind if I got hurt.

  Soon I’d be hurting a lot worse, unless . . .

  . . . now, I thought. Now or never.

  Whereupon I charged the wall, slammed into it with my whole body, much harder than I’d ever hit anything before in my life. On impact the lath bit hard into my flesh, bowed out, and . . .

  Splintering with a fast, sharp series of cracks! it suddenly gave way, slicing me in a dozen places as I burst through.

  On the other side I staggered wildly to keep my balance and failed. When I fell, my head hit the floor so hard I saw stars for a minute, bright fluorescent explosions I tried blinking away. But I couldn’t do that, either. They had to fade on their own.

  Lying there gasping, I tried to think of where Will would be right now. Or rather, where he wouldn’t be; it was crucial to know this since I was certain I wouldn’t survive another encounter with him. I was bleeding, still half-drugged, and if there was a part of me that didn’t hurt like the hounds of hell were using me for a chew toy, I couldn’t find it.

  But as Wade said once when he drove himself to the ER with a boat hook stuck through his arm, pain is for when you have time. And this wasn’t only about saving George from a murder conviction anymore. It was about saving his life.

  I staggered outside. The fresh air was sweet. But I couldn’t pause to glory in it.

  I needed something sweeter.

  Somehow I needed to stop that son of a bitch.

  Chapter 11


  The new phone officer at the jail was no more helpful than the old one had been, but he had better manners.

  “Your friend’s arraignment has been postponed due to his injury,” he told me. “He remains in the infirmary but his physician has requested that he be allowed no visitors.”

  Victor’s doing: trying to make sure no one came in from the outside to clobber George again. Good try, I thought at Victor. Way to be paranoid when it’s actually appropriate, for once.

  But it wasn’t going to help. “All right, now, please listen to me,” I told the officer. “There’s an inmate named Ronny, he’d have been brought in a little while ago. He was picked up in Eastport this morning and I know this sounds crazy, but—”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the officer said. “Ron Ronaldson.”

  When they start calling you ma’am in that humor-the-civilian tone, the conversation is over. But I tried a last time anyway.

  “The thing is, Ronny’s going to try to kill George. Believe me, I know he is going to, and—”

  “And you know this because… ?”

  “Because his accomplice told me, the guy whose orders Ronny is taking, he had me in a room all drugged up and he meant to—”

  “When did you take the drugs, ma’am?”

  “I didn’t take them, he gave me—”

  A radio sputtered in the background. “Ma’am, I can’t stay on the phone with you unless you need assistance. If you do I can send an officer or an ambulance to your location.”

  My location was that I was roaring down Route 190 toward Route 1 in George’s old truck, and the only assistance I needed at the moment was a pair of jet engines. Or maybe just a regular one that didn’t threaten to conk out on me any minute.

  “No. Sorry,” I mumbled, “to have troubled you.” I pressed the off button of the cell phone that George had installed at Ellie’s insistence in the cab of the truck.