by Sarah Graves
That more than anything was what had attracted her to the old structure, she supposed, the idea that if you stayed in such a place long enough, you might come to resemble it. That a person might eventually learn to live by its dignified example.
So far it hadn't happened, but one could hope.
Just then a car pulled up alongside her and a familiar hoot issued from its open window. "Ja-ake!" called Eastport's closest equivalent to a human foghorn, Billie Whitson.
Reluctantly, Jake turned. Billie was a recent arrival to the area, fresh from the sunny climes and even sunnier financial prospects of Carmel, California. She was full of marvelous plans for turning Eastport into a Maine island paradise.
That it already was one seemed not to have occurred to her. "Now, Jake, I want you to tell me I can put you on the list," she declared.
The California sun had turned Billie's short, straight hair to yellow straw, and her face into a leathery mask of bright paint, jangly earrings, and black-rimmed eyes. "If people see how beautifully you've rehabbed that old monstrosity," she went on with a wave at Jake's beloved antique dwelling, "they'll be more likely to buy one of the truly good old homes that I'm in the business of selling."
Feasting her eyes upon Internet photos of cheap shoreline property and unaware that in Maine what you saved on land, you spent on heat, Billie had wasted no time getting a Realtor's license and setting up a Web site of her own. Now she wanted to put Jake's place on her virtual home tour, "just to show what you can do with even the worst old heap," as she so flatteringly put it.
"Maybe after the sidewalk's fixed," Jake told the clueless real estate maven, not quite meeting her avid gaze. When Billie fixed her sights on you it was like being stared at by a bird of prey that had spotted something edible.
"Don't wait too long," Billie advised, letting her face show what she thought of Jake's efforts with the fractured concrete. Where she came from, home-owners had staff to take care of things like that. "You wouldn't want it to fall down any more than it has already, before people get a chance to see it."
Unless it falls on you, Jake thought as Billies red-tipped fingers twitched in a farewell wave.
"Bella and my dad are due home in a week," she told Bob once Billie had zoomed off in her silver MG convertible, her trailing scarf provoking a final, thoroughly uncharitable thought. "When he comes up the front walk, it would be good if I could keep him from breaking the other foot. So I'd better get started."
She faced Bob squarely. "But about Campbell. He's here. Or on his way. Mark my words," she added as Bob started to object again.
True, she had no evidence. But she didn't want to look back someday on her suspicions and say if only. Not about a man who, thirty-five years earlier, had strangled a woman with his bare hands while her child looked on, then ripped one of the earrings from her ear and taken it away with him.
He'd worn it ever since, brazenly insisting she'd given it to him as a love token long before she was murdered. "And you see most everything that happens around here, so…"
"Yeah, yeah. Keep an eye out for weirdos." Bob got into his car, settling onto the torn black seat. "I always do. Although I still don't get why you and Lee can't come and stay with us for a few nights."
At his words, a new unease struck her. But that really was just paranoia, surely; Campbell had no way of knowing about the three-year-old girl staying with Jake while her parents, Jake's dearest friend Ellie White and Ellie's husband George Valentine, were away on vacation.
Nor would he have any reason to care. Still, Jake wished all at once she hadn't decided to keep Lee here, that instead she had taken up Ellie and George's offer to bunk over at their place for the duration.
Bob seemed to read her thought. "We've got plenty of room," he urged, "and you know Clarissa would love it."
Jake didn't doubt it. When she wasn't in a courtroom bashing holes into prosecutors’ supposedly watertight arguments, Clarissa was a peach. He squinted around, suddenly seeming to realize what was missing. "You don't even have the dogs here, do you?"
"Nope." No dogs, no people, just herself and a little girl who would likely go early to bed. Jake had been looking forward to the solitude, actually.
Until now. "Sam's starting school in Portland in a couple of weeks," she went on. "He's in a brand-new apartment there, has a new job; he's getting himself settled."
At twenty-one, her son was trying yet again to make a life for himself. "Wade's at work," she added. Her husband, Wade Sorenson, was Eastport's harbor pilot, an expert at getting big cargo freighters in and out of the tricky local waterways.
"And the dogs are away at training camp," she finished. Wade sent them out there each late summer to get them ready for turkey season, partridge season, duck season, grouse season, deer season, moose season, rabbit season, and any other season that he and his hunting buddies could come up with. If he could've taught the animals to play cards and drink brandy, he'd have taken them ice-fishing, too.
"They'll be there a few more days. I still think I'll stay here, though." A quiet house, a bathtub available for long, hot soaks, plus glasses of wine, a free hand with the TV's remote control, not to mention its Off button—
"Thanks anyway, Bob. Tell Clarissa I'll call her, will you?"
"Yeah, all right," he gave in. "Anyway, I gotta go. There's a lady out near Dog Island complaining that kids were partying on the Knife Edge last night. Like that's anything new."
Beer parties on the cliffs at the south end of the island were a perennial problem. Only a few town kids attended out of the many who lived here, but when they got going, it seemed like a lot. "Trust teenagers to want to get drunk at the edge of a hundred-foot drop," he added resignedly. "So I need to go calm her down, I guess. And there was an accident a little while ago out by the causeway, car hit a deer."
No surprise there, either; car versus deer incidents were a dime a dozen around here. "Anyone hurt?"
He spread his hands. "Only the deer. Venison for the food pantry. And the car's totaled, belonged to a guy staying out at the campgrounds for a week. He's from Connecticut, and he says he's suing the city for not putting up Cyclone fencing to keep the deer off the roads."
He glanced heavenward as if praying for relief from visitors who thought they'd be swaddled in cotton wool here, just the way they were at home. "They're still clearing up the broken glass on the road and so on; guess I'd better have a look," Bob said.
Then another thought occurred to him. "Kid still biting?" He rubbed the side of his head in remembered pain.
Lee, he meant. "Unfortunately, yes." It was the toddler's only seriously bad habit, but it was a doozy; just that morning, Jake had nearly lost the tip of a finger.
"Mistook your ear for a chew toy, did she?" Jake asked Bob. The pediatrician said Lee would grow out of it, eventually, but Jake wasn't so sure.
"Few days back," Bob confirmed, grimacing. "You ever find a way to make her let go?"
"Nope. Pry bar, maybe." His radio began sputtering just as, back in the house, her phone began ringing. With a wave he drove off to check on the deer-car mishap; she stepped over the hole in the front walk on her way to answer.
Inside, the house shimmered emptily: silent, serene. Solitude was a rare luxury for her, and as she picked up the receiver she thought again about the ways in which she planned to enjoy it.
"Hello, Jacobia," the voice on the phone said, and then it struck her, just exactly how alone she really was here.
Once they found the house at the end of the dirt road, Marky settled down some and on account of that Anthony felt better, too, less worried and more able to size up the situation. But as soon as he lugged the heavy boxful of gear in from the Monte's trunk, they'd gone into town to get the lay of the land.
As they crossed the long, curving causeway onto the island— Welcome to Eastport! said the sign—Marky remarked sourly that if he had to live way out here in the boondocks like this, he'd just kill himself and get it over with.
> But Anthony wasn't so sure. To him the town's big old white houses with green shutters and red chimneys were like dwellings out of a child's storybook, one of tales simpler and luckier than his own. Even the less well-kept places here looked better than his crummy room and hotplate back in New Jersey.
Marky turned the car away from the neat clusters of houses, following small hand-painted signs with arrows on them that read See the Old Sow Whirlpool! The signs led to a grassy bluff ending at a gravel turnaround, perched on a high cliff.
From here you couldn't see the town, only water in a nearly 360-degree panorama, churning and swirling. Danger, announced the placard posted by the weedy, crumbling edge of the cliff.
No kidding, thought Anthony as Marky got out of the car and slammed the door, striding away. A chilly feeling hit Anthony as he let his gaze stray to where a section of cliff stuck straight out over the waves like a big stone bridge to nowhere.
Dizzyingly high and narrow, the craggy stone trail over thin air widened suddenly at its very end to a tablelike platform big enough to stand on, but not much more. Yeah, like you could even get out that far, he thought. It made the pit of his stomach feel hollow just looking at it.
Scattered beer cans and the blackened remains of a small fire said the Danger sign was regularly disregarded, probably by local kids. But Anthony had no problem obeying it, as Marky made his way to the last bit of solid ground before the precipice and stood there staring.
"What?" called Anthony, but Marky ignored him, squinting out into the morning brilliance over the foamy, turbulent water as if gauging directions and distances while Anthony watched uneasily, then crept to the edge of the cliff himself.
Cripes, but it was a long way down. A little to his right, a path snaked through the loose stones and strangled-looking bushes down to a narrow beach. At the foot of the cliff, a steel cable was clipped to a big bolt in one of the boulders down there.
He let his eyes follow the cable out to where it ended on an enormous black rock jutting out of the water fifty yards distant. On the rock stood a concrete pyramid, maybe four feet high; from a construction job he'd done manual labor on once, he recognized it as an old U. S. government survey marker.
The cable was to help you get out there, he knew. Clip a safety line to the cable, it would keep you from getting washed away. Or worst case, you could go hand over hand…
Watching the waves batter the rock and fall back again, geysers of white foam hurling themselves skyward and subsiding, Anthony was glad he didn't have to get out to the survey marker. Meanwhile, Marky made a point of examining a small red-and-white replica of a lighthouse set a dozen yards back from the cliff's edge, walking around it, frowning and looking from the lighthouse to the water and back, as if fixing their relationship in his mind. Then, seemingly satisfied, he returned to the car.
What new wrinkle was this? Anthony wondered. He didn't know Marky well, but he'd seen him often enough around the bar they both hung out in back in Jersey. And the only scenery Marky was ever interested in there wore tassels and a bikini bottom.
If that. "Never mind," Marky rebuked him before he could ask. "You don't have to know everything."
Anthony had snappy answers for this; plenty of them. But he didn't offer any because for one thing, Marky still had the gun. Besides, why bother? It would only start another whole big thing.
Slamming the car into gear, Marky spun out of the parking area near the cliff and headed back toward town, where Anthony wanted to go, too. Maybe there'd be coffee there.
Eastport's single short market street opposite the harbor was composed of two- or three-story brick or shingle-fronted old buildings with benches and flower boxes arranged out in front of their wide plate-glass windows. Mostly they housed restaurants and souvenir shops but there were a few offices among them, too, including several for lawyers and real estate agents.
Anthony wondered idly what the deal was, anyway, buying a house. Did you have to apply somewhere, were there papers to fill out? Was there a background check? He was curious, too, about what use people around here had for lawyers. None of the faces he saw on the street had the pinched look he associated with crime.
Mostly they were tourists, their pocketbooks and expensive cameras dangling off them like ripe fruit dangling from low trees and their big SUVs just begging to be raced to the nearest chop shop. Back wherever they came from he supposed they could be up to plenty of shenanigans, but here they were on vacation from it.
Opposite a long wooden pier with two tugboats tied up to it, Marky pulled into an angled parking spot. When they got out of the car Anthony smelled that ocean smell again, fresher than before, seagulls crying distantly in it as if trying to tell him that nothing at all in this life was as he'd believed it to be.
That he could just walk away, preferably into the diner that beckoned from across the street. The smell of bacon and eggs wafting from it made his stomach growl hungrily. Washed down, he thought wistfully, with a gallon of coffee…But he didn't walk there or anywhere else, because Marky was waving impatiently at him to quit gawking and hurry on up into the hardware store.
Inside, with the morning sun slanting yellow onto a window display of garden tools and a key machine whirring busily at the back of the store, Anthony picked up a tourist map of the town and folded it into his pocket.
"You really think this'll work?" said the kid operating the key machine. "Copyin’ some other key, replace the one you lost?"
The big man in bib overalls waiting for his key to be made nodded. "Yeah, mostly all the backhoes use a single key. ‘S why it's so easy to steal ‘em. Hell, you'd think the manufacturers want people to take ‘em," he went on. "I could just as well leave the bent nail I got stuck in the ignition now, keep usin’ that."
Anthony tried to listen without seeming to be, arranging his face so that it looked as if he were perusing a bin full of half-inch steel bolts. He hadn't known that heavy machinery was easy to steal, and the information might come in handy, sometime.
The kid turned the machine off, handed the man his pair of replacement keys. "So why don't you? Leave the nail?"
"Prob'ly will, for now," the man said. Under the enormous Carhartt coveralls he wore a red pebblecloth sweatshirt big enough to serve as a tent, and boots the same size as the three-gallon buckets on sale at the front of the store were on his feet.
"But when I bring the backhoe back to my brother-in-law he's gonna want the real thing," the giant guy finished.
Anthony would've liked to hear more about backhoe theft; a lot more. But his attention snapped back in alarm to his partner when, after the big man had paid for his key and departed, Marky showed the snapshot of the woman from the blue spiral notebook to the clerk behind the counter, and began asking questions.
Why the hell are you doing that? Anthony wondered. He hadn't read the whole instruction notebook—Marky hadn't let him—but this move with the photo was way too ballsy, in his opinion. And as he'd feared, it didn't go well, the clerk giving them both the fish-eye as soon as the first words were out of Marky's mouth.
"Don't know anything about her," the clerk said, looking at Marky with a get-lost expression and then turning it on Anthony. So they got out of there, not even stopping at the convenience store for anything on their way back out of town, as Anthony had been hoping they would.
Presto, one wasted trip, he thought. Or worse, if Marky's stunt blew up in their faces. Annoyed, he decided the first thing he would do when they got back to the house was find a percolator and something to brew in it. Acorns, maybe; they must have a lot of those here, and to hell with what Marky wanted or didn't.
But once they reached the place, Anthony just stood looking at it again. It had about a million wooden shingles on it, a tan silvery color, and its different rectangles were stacked unevenly atop one another but still flowing together, the opposite of the aluminum-sided three-deckers he was used to back in New Jersey.
Big clay pots of dead flowers out front, leave
s matted on the stone walkway leading around to the rear…
The guy who'd sent them here had found this place and made sure nobody would be in it, Marky had informed him. One week in July and another in autumn was all anyone ever used it.
What a life, Anthony thought. An envious pang struck him as he imagined the ritzy cocktail parties the owners probably held here when they did come, with beautiful women in sparkly dresses; fancy, unfamiliar snack foods on trays; and tinkling music played on a real piano.
Nice, he thought; the women in dresses, especially. And if he ever got a chance to try any of those strange snack foods, he decided, still staring up at the house, he was going to.
The last of his earlier panic faded as he imagined himself all dressed up in a tuxedo—smelling like Cleopatra, as he dimly remembered his mother saying once—slurping down an oyster and chasing it with champagne, or maybe a martini.
But then a small, brownish-red creature ran practically across Marky's feet on the front steps, chittering angrily. Marky let out a high shriek and jumped back fast, glaring furiously at Anthony as if to say it was his fault.
Anthony knew Marky was mad because of the shriek, which had sounded like a little girl's. But he also knew better than to say anything about it, or to let his face betray anything.
"C'mon," he said quietly, stepping past Marky.
The key had been right where the guy who'd hired them said it would be, under a certain rock. A bunch of dark, many-legged insects had been squirming under there with it when Anthony first looked, but these hadn't bothered him. He understood insects. Ignoring them once more, he retrieved the key again.
The cardboard box stood in the entryway where he'd left it. "Just a chipmunk or something," he said, flipping a light switch.
Nothing happened. Hurrying to keep Marky happy, he hadn't tried the lights the first time he'd come in. But now he recalled suddenly that he hadn't seen any power poles along the dirt road.
"The freak you know about chipmunks?" Marky demanded. "You some kind of freakin’ nature expert?"