by Sarah Graves
I did. But: “That’s my story,” Ellie said, plucking Marla’s spare house key from under the doormat. “And I’m sticking to it.”
She stepped inside; I followed hesitantly. The house had been bright in the morning sunshine, but now in the afternoon the rooms were dim and shadowy.
Ellie snapped lamps on. The spare, simple lines of Marla’s handsome Arts and Crafts furnishings, the vintage rugs and leather upholstery, and the dark polished wooden floors were all even more attractive by lamplight.
“Nice,” Ellie commented, following my gaze.
“Schoolteachers were paid well in Connecticut where Marla’s from, I guess.”
In the fireplace hearth a ceramic-glazed woodstove had been installed; on the mantel above, the elegantly framed photograph of Yosemite was by Ansel Adams.
And the table lamp in the front hallway was real Tiffany, if I wasn’t mistaken, which I wasn’t. Back in the city long ago, I’d had that kind of money, too.
Ellie tapped her wristwatch. “Tick-tock, those cheesecakes aren’t going to hop out of the oven by themselves.”
Or the next ones hop in. Meanwhile, we weren’t really just here for the dog’s things, were we? I hurried behind Ellie to the cellar steps and down them, into the dark.
“Where’s the light string?” I fumbled in my bag for my tiny flashlight, couldn’t find it. From below I could hear Ellie moving around.
The light went on. Brightness flooded the cellar. Then: “Oh no.”
Ellie’s voice came from inside the small corner room. I hurried to join her. “Ellie, what’s . . . Oh.”
Inside, the steel shelves on the walls still gleamed dully and the air remained cool and still; it was why Marla had chosen it for chocolate storage in the first place, I assumed.
But now—I stared at the shelves. Empty.
Nothing on the gorgeously sealed and painted concrete floor, shining glossily under the fluorescent overhead lights. Nothing on the shelves, either; not anymore. Gone . . .
I took the cellar stairs two at a time, and the flight to the second floor the same way, racing along the upstairs hall to what we’d earlier identified as Marla’s office space, cleverly hidden behind a closet door.
Pulling the door open again, I saw what I’d feared I would: Someone had been here after we left and had taken the laptop along with the rest of the chocolate bundles in the cellar.
And the money bundles, if there’d been any. “Now what?” Ellie asked disconsolately, appearing behind me.
We returned to the kitchen, where Maxie’s food and water bowls stood on a rubber mat by the sink. His food was in a plastic bin on the counter.
A huge sigh escaped me. “I don’t know. We go on as before, I guess.” We sat at the vintage Formica-topped table, on the neatly re-covered matching chairs with their bright upholstery buttons and shiny metal trim.
Money, I thought again. All this interior design represented a lot of—
“Wild out there,” Ellie observed in discouraged tones as she gazed out the kitchen window.
“Yeah.” Leaves fluttered from the copper beech tree by the back door as the wind tore at it in gusts. Down on the Coast Guard tower, just visible between the breakwater and the port authority buildings, the storm flags played crack-the-whip.
We took all the dog equipment, but left everything else just as it was. We turned the lights out and locked the door. I’d have called Bob Arnold about the ransacking, but what would I say?
Outside, the wind smelled sweet, with a touch of the tropics riding on it. Sam, I thought yet again as I got back into the car.
My cell phone lay stubbornly silent at the bottom of my bag, my son still not communicating. Or maybe he’s not able to communicate, my mind added slyly, but this thought sent a bolt of fright through me and I shoved it aside.
Ellie knew, though. Like I say, we’d been friends for a long time. “He’s fine,” she said quietly.
“Yeah.” We backed out onto Water Street. It was time to go back to the Moose, but first I drove out to where the street ended in a gravel turnaround overlooking the bay.
The tide was running hard, all the foamy white turbulence on flamboyant display. “Or I hope he is, anyway,” I said.
Across the waves the narrow white beach at the end of Deer Island looked deserted, not one car in the distant parking lot of the normally crowded Canadian tourist destination.
Which made sense. The only way off Deer Island was a ferry, so people were going while it was still possible.
“All right,” said Ellie, straightening. “We need a plan.”
Personally, I thought a fine plan might be to forget all our difficulties, get out of town, and just live on credit cards for a month or so, preferably somewhere that did not have a hurricane or an auction in the forecast.
Palm Springs, maybe. Or Guatemala. Either way, drinks with little umbrellas in them would be—
“Don’t you even think about it,” said Ellie, whose ability to read my mind can be annoying.
Ignoring her, I negotiated a traffic tangle at the end of the breakwater, where a Coast Guard trailer was trying to back down onto the launch ramp. The crowds milling between Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand and the ice-cream parlor made it difficult, though, for the Coasties and for me.
“Nicely done,” she said when I’d gotten through it all and turned into the last remaining parking place outside the Moose.
But the rest of her mind was still on what we should do next.
“Flashlights, batteries, candles, radio . . . ,” she recited as we went in.
I followed her to the kitchen where she checked the oven temperature and compared her wristwatch with our wall clock.
“. . . propane cylinders, Sterno, stove wood,” I added to the litany.
Out here on the island we’d been through enough emergencies—storms, mostly, but once a truck hit a transmission tower and we were out of power for a week—to know the drill.
Finally, “Once we get through this list, we’ll be ready for any weather,” I said. “But as for—”
“Mmm,” agreed Ellie. “The other matter.” Murder, she meant, and would’ve gone on. But instead a sharp knock came at the shop door.
“The money’s a real problem, and so’s Marla lying about those photographs,” I said, crossing to answer.
“Because it’s bad enough the weird way Muldoon died, but all those other things just make it so much more confusing.”
I yanked open the door, feeling frustrated and overwhelmed suddenly by the other list I’d been contemplating all day: a sick parent, a son gone AWOL, a visiting dog, a looming storm, and the prospect of my dearest friend being charged with murder.
Oh, and more unbaked cheesecakes than you could shake a stick at. “What?” I exhaled exasperatedly.
Miss Halligan stood there, looking pained. “Jacobia, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but Bob Arnold called me just now. Is your cell phone not working, dear?”
“What?” I repeated, snagging the phone from my bag and opening it: battery dead. “Will you please just tell me?”
A thousand bad scenarios ran through my mind in the instant before Miss Halligan replied.
“It’s your husband. There’s been an accident,” she said.
* * *
Wade drove a big old green Ford F-150 pickup truck whose fenders were held on with Bondo and duct tape. The truck’s bed, once floored with heavy-duty metal, was a sheet of plywood, and the hood latch had been replaced by a bent wire coat hanger.
But under that hood was a vintage V-8 with enough horsepower for a locomotive, and on the wheels were an oversized set of tires with so much traction that you could give yourself whiplash just by stomping hard on the brake pedal.
Now in the gathering evening I stood with Police Chief Bob Arnold by the side of County Road, watching the Bay City Mobil wrecker hoist the truck’s front end out of the ditch.
Wade was in the ambulance that had pulled over on the other side of the
pavement, being checked out; I could see a swatch of bright blood on the side of his face.
When the wrecker got the truck lifted, the place where the missing front wheel ought to be gaped vacantly. Bob Arnold’s pink forehead tightened when he saw it.
“Has Wade had that vehicle serviced lately, you know of?”
I shook my head, chills of lingering fright shivering through me despite the warm summer evening. “No. Nothing recently.”
It would’ve been a decent explanation, that maybe they’d had a wheel off and hadn’t put it back on correctly. But Wade did his own vehicle maintenance; besides, with him working so much lately, the truck had mostly sat undriven in the port authority parking lot, nowhere else.
Now as the wrecker hauled the vehicle away, Wade climbed down out of the ambulance and strode toward me, grinning.
“Hey, hey.” He held his arms out, wrapped them around me. I’d told myself that I was not going to cry, and I didn’t.
Sort of. “I’m fine,” he said. “Bumped my head a little on the side window when the truck rolled.”
I pulled away from him. “‘Rolled’? You mean it actually turned over?”
I’d thought he’d just gone into the ditch, maybe while trying to avoid a deer. He could’ve lost a wheel then, I had told myself.
“Yeah, well.” He was trying to sound comforting, but I could tell that he wasn’t happy, either.
“No bones broken, no concussion.” He gave me a reassuring squeeze. “Even my mental status is okay. I mean,” he amended, “I did tell those EMTs that the president is Donald Duck, but . . .”
“Oh, you.” Leaning against him, I laughed. He was okay, and considering how bad this might’ve been, I couldn’t ask for more.
The F-150 went by, its front end hanging from the tow hook. Wade frowned after it. “Funny thing, though.”
Bob Arnold finished recording the incident in his notebook, then came up to us, not looking particularly satisfied with what he was thinking, either.
“So you’re telling me the wheel came off, no warning? You’re just driving down the road and wham?”
Wade nodded, then put his fingers wincingly to the bloody spot on his temple. “Yep. Weird too. I had those wheels off a few weeks ago, changing the brake pads.”
He’d had the truck up on blocks out in our driveway, I now recalled; I’d spent the time cringing at every sound, listening in dread in case a block slipped and the vehicle fell on him.
Which it hadn’t, of course, but now this: “And I tightened those things myself with a power wrench,” Wade said.
Bob frowned. He knew that Wade, who’d been doing his own car repairs for even longer than he’d been piloting big boats into our harbor, was as likely to leave nuts or bolts untightened as he was to leave lines unsecured.
In other words, not very. In the fading light passing cars’ curious occupants peered at us as they went by.
Bob tucked his notebook away. “How about I go on over to the Mobil station, have the guys there put ’er on the lift?”
Wade put his fingertips gingerly to his temple again. A lump was rising there, already purple near the split part of the skin.
“Great. I’d like to see . . . Hey.” Catching sight of something, he scrambled down into the muddy ditch where the truck had dug in.
“Got it.” He plucked something from the ditch, then reached out and hauled the truck’s detached wheel out of the weeds where it had buried itself. Clambering up, he shoved the wheel along.
“This is interesting.” He let the wheel down onto the gravel and held his hand out to show the small metal object in it.
“Oh, holy heck.” Bob prodded the object with a fingertip as if uncertain what he was seeing. But even in the gathering dusk the thing’s identity was clear to all of us: it was the shank of a big automotive bolt with a roundheaded nut still screwed onto the end of it.
“Cut right off,” Bob mused aloud, noting the bolt end’s smoothness.
“Sure was,” Wade said. “Looks like somebody slid a hacksaw in there behind the nut and just cut it clean through.”
Bob grunted agreement, squinting. “That possible? Someone could’ve got at it? ”
Wade nodded. “It was parked in an out-of-the-way spot.”
The truck was more duct tape, Bondo, and baling wire than it was factory original, but Wade could be driving a wooden wagon with a mule out in front of it and he still wouldn’t want anyone slamming their car door into the thing.
“I guess somebody must be annoyed with me about something,” he said thoughtfully, not looking at me.
But he might just as well have been. “I guess,” said Bob.
Not looking right at me, either. But he gave me some side eye when he said it, as if he thought someone might’ve been sending me a message. Or wanted me distracted from an interest I was pursuing.
Like maybe Muldoon’s murder.
“Man, when the wheel came off, I thought I was history,” Wade commented.
The idea sent fury rushing through me. “Come on,” I told him, putting my arm through his. “Bob, you’re done with him for now, right?”
Nodding assent, Eastport’s police chief waved me over. “Hey, the state cops called me. They’re still hot on Ellie as number one on their hit parade. Of suspects, that is.”
I let out a breath. “So how come they haven’t just arrested her already, if they’re so sure they can make a case against her?”
Bob shrugged. “Holiday. Storm coming. And for now, I’ve got ’em convinced she’s not a flight risk. But I’m telling you, Jake, once the weekend’s over, they’ll come down on her.”
Yeah, right. Boom goes the dynamite, I thought sourly.
“So she’d better be prepared. Also,” said Bob, “Millie Marquardt’s lined up a lot of media people—TV news and so on—to cover the festival. If they get wind of the murder . . . Well, you might want to avoid them.”
“Thanks, Bob,” I told him, and then Wade and I picked our way along the shoulder until we got to my car.
“I’ll drive,” he said, glancing at the deep, muddy groove his truck’s axle end had dug when it hit the ditch.
Which had happened because somebody had deliberately made the wheel fall off. Sliding into the car, I felt heat spreading through my chest until I could barely breathe. Suddenly I was so angry. And frightened.
“Okay,” I began as Wade pulled out. Because he was in this now, whatever “this” was. I’d put him in it.
Not meaning to, but I had, and that meant he needed to know all about it, no matter how mad he got when I told him.
“Let’s go out to the park,” I said. Shackford Head State Park was right here on the island: trees, trails, spectacular vistas from the high overlooks. It was where we always went to talk.
Wade looked surprised, but he turned obediently onto Deep Cove Road. The narrow blacktop curved sharply around and along a steep, high bluff, with far views of the water now darkening at day’s end.
“Look, I know you’re busy,” I began. He’d want to get right to work on that truck of his, for one thing, as soon as Bob finished taking photographs and writing up his report.
“But there was a little more to the boat trip Ellie and I took than I told you,” I added.
Wade kept his eyes on the road as it dipped abruptly and then turned sharply again, climbing the long hill above Deep Cove and the boats bobbing at their moorings in it. Finally he turned onto a rutted track meandering between cattail-studded marshlands and grassy fields.
In the park’s boulder-ringed turnaround he pulled the car to a stop and shut the key off.
We got out and walked together toward the trailhead. “Wade, do you think that wheel might’ve fallen off by accident? That is, could you have not tightened it? Or was it defective or something?”
He shook his head firmly. “No. I don’t know why it happened, but there’s some funny business with it, I’m pretty sure.”
“It’s an old truck, Wade. You’re r
eally confident that bolt couldn’t have just sheared off?”
“Yeah,” he replied flatly. “I’m sure.” Then: “But it sounds to me like you think you know something about it.”
Damn, if he’d been doubtful, I might’ve just let it go. But he wasn’t, and his certainty was good enough for me.
Ahead of us a low wooden bridge led over a watercress-clotted creek. On it I paused, readying myself to confide in him. Oh, he wasn’t going to like this at all.
But I had no choice; the best I could do, I thought, was to ease him into it by letting him know the least bad things first.
“So,” I began, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I guess the first thing I should tell you is that we’ve got a new dog.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later we’d hiked up the side of the mountain, the trail winding and rising steadily among old-growth evergreens and ancient sumac thickets to a massive granite outcropping.
I’d been talking all the while: the little boat that menaced me and Ellie, the Salty Dog and Marla, finally our return.
All about our return. “Okay,” said Wade, who’d been listening intently, “so you and Ellie left Lubec ahead of the fog, but it caught up with you.”
“Right.” From the weathered wooden bench at the top of the bluff, you could see all the way down the bay and smell the cold, briny salt water in it.
“In the dark we missed the channel marker,” I recalled, then went on to explain how Ellie had navigated us out of the shipping lane, using the boat’s depth finder to avoid . . .
“Rocks,” I finished. Up here the wind felt as solid as a punch, and on the southwest horizon the massive clouds loomed like raised hammers.
It wasn’t quite dark. Wade gazed out at the watery horizon. “Okay, first of all . . .”
Turning, he kissed me. “That’s for not drowning. And for coming to pick me up just now.” He kissed me again. “And for not getting run over by a ship,” he said, whereupon the light dawned:
He’d already known that his huge vessel had nearly sent me to “Davy Jones’s locker room,” as my son Sam used to call it.
And he’d figured out the rest of it. Of course we must’ve been caught in the fog; why else would we in that big ship’s way?