Mallets Aforethought

by Sarah Graves

  “And you got the message,” I interrupted, pleased at having transmitted it to him so flawlessly via my expression.

  “Well, not exactly,” he demurred. “Unless you were trying to tell me you were getting ready to lose your lunch.”

  “Oh,” I replied, crestfallen. “What, then?”

  “Just a hunch. What I thought of, actually, was Sam. A kid like yours, his whole presentation of himself . . .”

  He glanced across the room at his own two kids. It was, he’d explained, his weekend to have them, so he’d brought them along. The pair of young teenagers had latched onto Sam like a couple of bright barnacles, to Sam’s bemusement.

  “Sam’s a genuinely good guy and he got it from somewhere,” Colgate said. “From you, mostly, I figured. But that didn’t jibe with you being drunk and disorderly. So I guessed you weren’t. Which led me to wonder if maybe you were up to something else.”

  “And you just let me go on with it, whatever it was?”

  He laughed. “Hey, snap judgment. I could’ve been wrong. But I didn’t see a downside. You were already in custody, after all.”

  “Yeah.” I repressed a shudder at the memory. “Luckily not for long. So anyway, Will confessed to all this? It doesn’t seem like him.”

  Telling me about it was different. I’d been supposed to die. Colgate set his glass down. “He stonewalled hard for a week or so. But Massachusetts wants to talk to him about quite a few things, not just his probation beef. That caviar, for instance. They got his associates on it.”

  Two hundred pounds of the valuable stuff; besides framing George he’d been arranging delivery of it during the Boston trip.

  “One way and another it turned out to be worth his while,” Colgate added, “us not giving him up. So he spilled his guts.”

  The Maine State Prison at Thomaston, I gathered, being a less brutal destination than Walpole, Massachusetts. But Thomaston would do nicely as far as I was concerned.

  Near the refreshment table I spied Siss Moore, Tommy’s old teacher. Dressed appropriately in battleship grey, she fixed her sights on him and began steaming toward him.

  Tommy stood his ground. In fact he looked glad to see Siss. She must’ve wondered about it.

  I didn’t. But Colgate was speaking again. “So how’s that other matter you were worried about turning out?” he asked me. “Your friend and the Feds?”

  Standing nearby, Clarissa Arnold overheard and shot me a look of warning. Bob’s mother was better; their family was back in Eastport and beginning to settle themselves after the crisis.

  “That’s been cleared up,” I replied carefully. “My friend is no longer a target of the investigation.”

  Because as Clarissa said after I’d told her the whole story, a picture is worth a thousand words; a picture, for instance, of a well-known and eminently recognizable political bigwig chummily entering a money expert’s office in the company of a mob banker. No matter how long ago it had happened it would make said bigwig into a “known associate” overnight.

  Bad news for the bigwig. “But good news for you, Jake,” Clarissa had said. “If you’re up for a game of hardball.”

  She was, it turned out, quite a bit more bloodthirsty than I’d ever given her credit for. Bottom line, I’d promised never to show the photographs to anyone in return for the bigwig’s not using all the considerable powers at his disposal to try getting them away from me.

  It was a major deal; between them, my father and Jemmy had a lot of charges pending. But I’d done major deals before. And I had a lot of pictures. So it ended up being to everybody’s benefit that we trust one another.

  Sort of. I still had the pictures and they still had the ability to bring new charges. But Jemmy was free and after three decades on the run my dad was no longer a wanted fugitive. It was the kind of resolution I now believed Jemmy had intended all along.

  And one I could live with. My father came up to us and put out a gnarled hand, touching the pink, chubby one thrust out to him and laughing when the tiny fingers curled around his own.

  “Dinner on me tomorrow night,” he said. “Jody Jones paid.”

  The guy that he’d been building a chimney for, he meant; I blinked at him. “That’s amazing. You must hold the record for getting Jody to… Dad, how’d you do that?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t much. A little chimney magic. Thing wouldn’t draw till he did pay up, is all. Smoke from the fireplace poured right back out into the room. Old mason’s trick.”

  He spoke confidentially. “What I did was, I cemented a piece of plate glass in there. Blocked the chimney but when you looked up, you couldn’t see it. He paid, I went up on the roof, dropped a brick down the chimney.”

  “Breaking the glass, so the smoke would . . .” I gazed at him in admiration. “But don’t a lot of people know that old trick?”

  He smiled innocently. “Yes, they do. But not the other old trick I know, to get around what they know. And I,” he added with sly satisfaction, “am not telling that one.”

  Ellie returned to check on the baby as my dad strolled away. “Ellie, she’s so beautiful,” I said. “Thank you for . . .”

  Leonora had been my mother’s name. Ellie looked levelly at me. “There should be one. Another Leonora, don’t you think?”

  Ellie looked lovely too, her red hair tucked up into a topknot, soft tendrils of it curling around her face. George wrapped an arm around her shoulder as she spoke; his own hair was growing back in the place where Victor had shaved it.

  “I told Agnes Bonnet we’d take her home early,” he said to Ellie. “Ginger wants to finish moving in today.”

  Ginger herself had just come in with Mark Timberlake, the two of them shaking off the downpour outside in a flurry of shed raincoats and happy greetings. If Mark Timberlake ever washed out of the merchant marine, he could get a job modeling for Greek statues. Even Siss Moore’s face softened when she saw the two of them together.

  “Gosh, he’s young,” Ellie commented.

  “And she’s gorgeous.” Her face glowing and her hair piled in a coronet, Ginger resembled the mythic heroine of some impossibly romantic German opera. And although pain still etched tiny lines around her eyes, at Mark’s insistence she was about to begin new treatments; they’d married three days earlier, so she was now covered by his medical benefits.

  “What persuaded them to reconcile?” Ellie wondered aloud as the newlyweds moved away toward the refreshments table.

  “Well, as I understand it,” I said, “Mark and George had a little confab in which George advised Mark to try, try again.”

  Which was precisely what George had done, fervently and unceasingly, to persuade Ellie into marrying him. Now the newlyweds had undertaken to care for Agnes Bonnet, with whom Ginger would live when Mark was away with the merchant marine.

  “So all’s well that ends well?” Ellie asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Tommy breathed, with his arms wrapped around Leonora. He looked as if he might never want to give her up.

  But just then Siss Moore reached him and planted herself before him. “Young man,” she intoned into a chance silence, and everyone laughed; it was that kind of moment.

  Except for me. Turning away, I guessed only I was imagining poor Eva Thane’s sad ghost fluttering in the old house. For one thing, only I knew what had really killed her; Wade had gone over her little derringer rather carefully as he’d restored it, then placed it with a photo of her in a display case he’d made and given to the historical society.

  Now as I glanced at it, hung in the hall by a portrait of Chester Harlequin whose name had at last been cleared, I wondered again how close I’d come to repeating Eva’s mistake.

  But suddenly a different question occurred to me. “George,” I asked, “what did you buy at the Taste of Honey store, anyway?”

  Will Bonnet had been obdurate on this point, Colgate said. He had done some shopping during the trip to Boston, but not at Taste of Honey. Then he’d left George alone for a few
hours and they’d started back.

  Which meant the receipt in the truck was from some purchase of George’s after all.

  “Oysters,” Ellie replied embarrassedly. “Smoked oysters, not the usual kind. Those little French ones?”

  She’d gotten some in a gift basket once. From me, actually, and months earlier she’d been heard saying she craved a few more. So when George got a chance he’d braved the fancy food store to grant her wish. Will hadn’t known or he’d have destroyed the receipt. And they’d both forgotten the parking stub, apparently.

  Outside, rain began crystallizing into snow; it was getting to be the season for more indoor projects, I realized. Plaster and new tile for the bath; over the winter, I might even finish that panel door. . . .

  But now I watched with interest as Siss Moore stood before Tommy. He’d told me the night before what he intended to say to her; I wondered if he really would.

  “Um, Mrs. Moore?” he managed faintly. “I was wondering . . .”

  “Yes, Tommy,” she replied, her tone authoritarian; she had the voice of an experienced teacher.

  He quailed. Then, perhaps emboldened by the infant in his arms, he rallied. And in the glance he sent me, so youthful and yet so manfully determined, I knew he understood just exactly what he was doing and that he would follow through on it.

  “Mrs. Moore, you used to say I was smart.”

  She tipped her head. “And?”

  “You said I could go to college, make something of myself. You said,” he continued as she fixed him acutely in her steel-blue gaze, “you’d help me if I decided to try.”

  No reply from Siss. “Mrs. Moore,” he persisted, “back then you said you believed in me. Trouble is, I guess I didn’t believe in myself.”

  Siss glanced over at Ginger and Mark, then at me. “Anyone,” she said, “can make a mistake. What is it you want, Tommy?”

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “Well, that’s the thing. I reckon… I mean I’ve observed”—he corrected himself as her lips tightened—“that lots of guys go to college. They can’t all have that much more on the ball than I do. Can they?”

  He took a deep breath. “So I wondered, would you still help me now?”

  “Why?” she demanded. “Why, after all this time?”

  But Tommy was up to it. “Well, because it’s like you always said. Experience isn’t the best teacher. But maybe sometimes it’s the best first one, Mrs. Moore. It was for me. So now I’m ready for the other kind. I mean . . .”

  He paused. “That is, if you still want to be one.”

  Her lips pursed consideringly. Then: “Tommy, is that foolish vehicle of yours outside?”

  The jalopy, she meant, complete with raccoon tail and oo-oo-gah! horn. The fuel pump had arrived and for the moment the car was in running condition.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said eagerly as Ellie took the baby back. “Just let me pull it up out front.” He hustled away, returned an instant later with her coat.

  “It’s snowing out. I’ll drive you home. We can,” he added boldly as he helped her on with the garment, “talk on the way.”

  “Indeed.” But it was clear that she was immensely pleased. Moments later we all heard the blast of that astonishing horn, as in a thunder of engine backfires Siss’s chariot bore her off.

  What can I say, it was too sweet for my taste. But then, I’m from New York. Wade appeared from somewhere, put an arm around my shoulder. “Hey. Nice party.”

  “It is, isn’t it.” Candles had been lit, bristling swathes of them on the tables and above us in chandeliers. There were fires in the fireplaces and music had begun playing; after supper, we were going upstairs to the ballroom, where there would be dancing.

  Wade looked down at me. In the candlelight his eyes were the mysterious sea-grey of a fog-bound coast, alluring and a little dangerous. “I helped deliver that champagne,” he said, nodding toward the ice buckets.

  He held me tighter. “And,” he whispered in my ear, “I stole a bottle. It’s home now, waiting for us.”

  “Really. That’s fascinating.”

  “Oh, good.” Whereupon he kissed me, which always tends to blot out anything else that may be happening in my vicinity.

  But not for long because next came a prime rib dinner, and angel food cake with ice cream and homemade chocolate sauce. More champagne too; the whole evening was, as George put it later, a real wingding.

  So it ended up being long past midnight with the temperature plummeting and our breaths hanging in frozen clouds when Wade and I finally started home, through the snow sifting through the cones of yellow light under the streetlamps.

  “I still don’t understand about the paperwork from George’s aunt’s lawyer,” Wade said puzzledly. “I know Will must’ve gotten hold of it somehow and planted it at George’s house, but . . .”

  I laughed. “That was easy. He just faked it all. Got some good stationery somewhere and mocked it up on a computer at the public library.” Clarissa had filled me in on this part.

  “Some nerve,” Wade said. “But wouldn’t that be discovered?”

  We stopped at the top of Key Street and looked back over the sleeping town, the big lights over the breakwater standing like sentinels against the black water. A foghorn sounded.

  “Sure,” I replied. “But not in time to do George any good.” Wind blew the snow up into little spirals that whirled briefly in the street before collapsing again.

  “Examination of the evidence wasn’t in Will’s plan. George wasn’t supposed to live long enough to go to trial,” I added.

  Across the water the lights on Campobello were bright blurs behind a thickening gauze of white. Wade drew me nearer.

  “So it was worth it to risk that the fake paperwork might be found out later, as long as it couldn’t implicate Will.”

  “Yup,” I agreed. “It sealed George’s fate arrest-wise. Maybe it would have tripped Will up eventually, but I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.”

  “He got the poison from George’s shed?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  But now a related thought struck Wade. “Darn, so George doesn’t inherit after all?”

  But actually, he’d hit on a bright spot. “In fact he still might. With Hector gone and George the next of kin—”

  “And the suspicion growing about Hector and Jan Jesperson’s undue influence?”

  “Exactly. Because it turns out Jan did keep backup disks for those computer files. Clarissa warns it’s no slam-dunk. But there’s a decent chance George and Ellie will end up contesting his Aunt Paula’s will successfully.”

  “Huh.” Wade brushed snow out of his hair. “Here we are.”

  “Home at last,” I agreed. With flakes twinkling around it and lights glowing from within, the big old house shimmered like the scene in an old-fashioned snow globe. Inside—

  —once the dogs had been taken out and the furnace had been checked and the proper radiators had been turned on or off in the various rooms, so the oil wouldn’t quite make an actual glug-glug sound while being sucked down by the oil burner—

  —we sat at the kitchen table in thick robes and warm, fuzzy slippers, drinking hot cocoa instead of champagne.

  “We’re domestic,” I observed, too exhausted to say more.

  Wade smiled tiredly. “Yeah. Okay by me.”

  Domestic, I thought, and lucky; me especially.

  I wondered what Wade would say if I told him it hadn’t been ipecac in the bottle I’d guzzled from that day. Later Victor had sniffed at the licorice smell still lingering on the shards.

  Tincture of opium, he’d said; a morphinelike drug. Will must’ve dumped the ipecac, using the bottle to disguise its new contents for some hideous reason of his own. Victor surmised it could’ve been used to keep Agnes Bonnet’s stomach from rejecting the pills Will was dosing her with.

  And atop the other narcotics Will had administered to me, Victor had informed me gravely, what I’d drunk had likely held enough
sedative to kill me. That is, if my stomach hadn’t been so nervous, it revolted, and if I hadn’t been so primed to believe the stuff would do what it had.

  Otherwise I might’ve ended up with Eva Thane in the special fool’s purgatory reserved for accidental suicides. “Wade, do you really think Eva’s gun went off by itself?”

  “Yeah,” he confirmed. “Shoddy piece of junk. It could’ve fired if you just looked at it the wrong way. Could’ve happened easy.”

  He frowned, considering it all again. “What I think is, she changed her mind at the last minute, then put the gun to her head. Just experimenting, but feeling safe because she’d already decided not to. And—bang.”

  It would have been just like Eva, I thought, playacting the ending of her life instead of doing it. Thinking she could still escape, that Chester would go on being blamed for murdering three girls.

  “She’d have gotten an awful surprise if she’d tried getting back out of that room, though. No doorknob.”

  “Uh-huh,” Wade agreed. “She hadn’t expected to want one. And she got a surprise anyway.”

  Because the gun had gone off. And there you had it: in the end, you attracted your own sort of luck.

  Or not. The murdered girls hadn’t thought so, probably, and neither had poor Therese.

  Even Jan and Hector, I imagined, didn’t think so.

  Anyway, I had asked Victor to keep quiet about the opium and he’d promised to. And I wasn’t telling, either.

  For now. Wade ruffled my hair. “Hey, it’s getting late. How about if the both of us head on up to bed?”

  Music came faintly from upstairs; it meant Sam was home. Not that he had to be when I turned in, but I preferred it. All three animals were settled too, Cat Dancing atop the refrigerator and the dogs in their dog bed, their soft paws twitching in dreams.

  So as frost-fronds etched silver witchery on the windowpanes of our old house, the both of us did.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR