Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  Praise for the

  Home Repair Is Homicide

  mysteries of

  Sarah Graves

  “Just the right prescription for a post-repair rest.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Everything’s Jake—until she starts snooping.”

  —New York Daily News

  “With an intricate plot, amusing characters and a wry sense of humor, Sarah Graves spins a fun, charming mystery that is sure to make you smile and keep you guessing right up until the end.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “Charming.”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “A winning addition … A sleuth as tough as the nails she drives into the walls of her 1823 Federal home enhances a clever plot…. Many will relish the vividly described Down East setting, but for anyone who’s ever enjoyed making a home repair it’s the accurate details of the restoration of Jake’s old house that will appeal the most.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Graves gives us a lively look at small-town life in charming down-east Maine. Her characters, as always, are captivating examples of Americana and their relationships with each other are inspired.”

  —The Old Book Barn Gazette

  “Author Graves has a tart wit and an eagle-eyed perspective … producing a handy-dandy mystery with a handsome cast of local color.”

  —The State (Columbia, S.C.)

  “Atmospheric appeal … [Graves] captures the charming eccentricity and outdoorsy flavor of life in a town full of seagulls and bed-and-breakfasts … with zingy dialogue and a brisk pace.”

  —The Santa Fe New Mexican

  “The ride is fun and Sarah Graves seems to be having a blast.”

  —Maine Sunday Telegram

  “A reading pleasure.”

  —The Snooper

  “Working around the house can definitely be murder. Sarah Graves’s Home Repair Is Homicide series is a much more pleasant way to kill time!”

  —Bangor Daily News

  “What distinguishes the novel are its likable, no-nonsense protagonist-narrator, her references to home repair that the author cleverly fits tongue-and-groove into the story and, especially, the detailed descriptions of the town.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Eloquently depicts the beauties and hardships of life on an island in Maine…. Filled with believable and engaging characters, exquisite scenery and extravagant action.”

  —News and Record (Greensboro, N.C.)

  “One cool caper.”

  —MLB 2001 Gift Guide

  “The town of Eastport and its warmly wondrous citizens continue to enchant!”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “The prose is brisk and the jokes are funny.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Appealing.”

  —USA Today

  “Ms. Graves has created a bright and personable new detective who has been welcomed into the Eastport community with warmth and affection.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Graves affectionately creates believable characters… who lend depth and warm humor to the story…. The cozy details of small-town life and home repair make for an enjoyable read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “No cozy this, it’s amusing, cynical, yet warm, populated with nice and nasty characters and some dirty secrets…. All the ingredients fit the dish of delicious crime chowder…. I am already drooling for [Jake’s] return.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “Jacobia has a witty and ironic voice, and the book resonates with good humor, quirky characters, and a keen sense of place.”

  —Down East magazine

  “Sarah Graves’s novel is a laudable whodunnit, but it’s also a love letter to Eastport, celebrating the cultural contrasts between the town and some misguided souls from the Big Apple…. The funky, low-key fishing community wins every time.”

  —Kennebec Valley Tribune and Morning Sentinel

  ALSO BY SARAH GRAVES

  The Dead Cat Bounce

  Triple Witch

  Repair to Her Grave

  Wreck the Halls

  Unhinged

  Mallets Aforethought

  Tool & Die

  Nail Biter

  Trap Door

  The Book of Old Houses

  “I don’t see why Reuben Tate had to come back to town at all,” Ellie White complained, digging into her lobster tortilla.

  We were at La Sardina, Eastport’s Mexican restaurant. The menu was south-of-the-border with a downeast Maine twist—thus the lobster—but the atmosphere was all laid-back Key West:

  Strings of tiny, twinkling colored lights framed the tall front windows. White gauze beach umbrellas slanted over the old wooden tables. And potted plants grown to enormous sizes lent a tropical flavor: palm, spathiphyllum, a flowering bougainvillea like a tree full of purple butterflies.

  With her tortilla, Ellie was having a tomato and mesclun salad with blue cheese dressing, and a Dos Equis. “And I don’t see,” she added, “why he had to come now.”

  Beside me, my son, Sam, went on attacking his combination plate. “You could strip varnish with this hot sauce,” he remarked appreciatively; at seventeen, Sam thought flaming coals weren’t quite hot enough unless you doused them in Tabasco.

  “Reuben’s like a bad rash,” Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, said. “He comes back.”

  He cut a slice off his well-done ribeye steak; to George, the French fry is about as foreign as food needs to get, with the possible exception of the English muffin.

  “The trick,” he added, “is getting rid of him again. But this time I hear he means to stay.”

  At which my friends all sighed sorrowfully. Reuben Tate was the sly, grinning worm in the apple of their happiness that autumn, and it seemed unfair just when everything else in town was looking up:

  Summer had come and gone but we still had the taste of it in our mouths, tart and sweet as a drop of lemonade. Dahlias with bright shaggy heads big as dinner plates bloomed in the perennial beds; ripe tomatoes loaded the vines in our back gardens, and the rosebushes massed along the seawall bowed low under their heavy burden of rose hips, huge and juicy as Bing cherries.

  Also, for once the town had cash. Sea urchins and sardines had been freakishly plentiful that season, the boats coming back half-capsized by the unaccustomed weight of their catches, and scallop harvest promised to be as bountiful. Until then, foreign freighters—their names, unpronounceable, stenciled in white, rust-mottled Cyrillic letters on their towering sterns—loomed at dockside, loading paper pulp and particle board from the mills up in Woodland, making overtime for the stevedores and truckers.

  Finally, at September’s end came the annual East-port Salmon Festival, the last outdoor bash of the year on our little island in Maine, which meant that cash registers in the cafés and shops on Water Street would soon be jingling with tourist money.

  So we were content. Only the thought of Reuben with his quick, twitchy ways, his pale, wandering eye and odd laugh—a harsh, painful-sounding bark like a strangled cough; when he uttered it, he meant to hurt someone—kept putting a damper on people.

  “Could be this time Reuben’s luck will run out,” said my main squeeze, Wade Sorenson.

  Just off the water after guiding a cargo vessel into port—it’s what he does, as Eastport’s official harbor pilot—Wade wore a navy turtleneck, jeans, and a cableknit sweater the color of vanilla ice cream. His gray eyes reflected the light of the candle stuck in the neck of a wine jug on the table.

  “Not soon enough,” my ex-husband, Victor Tip-tree, said sourly, and I glanced at him in surprise.

  “Reuben Tate’s luck,” he emphasized,
“can’t end soon enough for me.”

  “How do you know Reuben?” I asked, and the others around the table looked inquisitively at him, too.

  Six months earlier, Victor had moved here to East-port from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and in remote, thinly populated downeast Maine his arrival had of course been newsworthy. But I hadn’t thought any of the local people were newsworthy to Victor, and especially not a ne’er-do-well like Reuben.

  Tonight, Victor’s dinner had consisted of the olives from his martinis. “It’s not important,” he muttered, and gulped the melted ice from his glass.

  Annoyed but determined not to argue—the rule, when dealing with Victor, is never wrestle with a pig; you both get dirty and the pig likes it—I turned away, as a voice from the next table rose in worried complaint.

  “Did Reuben really say that?” Paddy Farrell, who ran a textile design studio out of an old canning-factory building he’d rehabilitated down on the waterfront, had clearly been listening in on our conversation. Sitting with Paddy was his longtime companion, Terence Oscard.

  “Did he?” Paddy demanded, his close-clipped salt-and-pepper head coming up pugnaciously as he caught my eye. “He’s staying?”

  Paddy wore a navy blazer and a tailored button-down shirt, a maroon silk scarf at his throat. “George?” he persisted as George stolidly went on chewing. “Did you actually hear him say that?”

  “What I said,” George confirmed after a sip of Miller Lite. “Stayin’ in his mom’s old place out in Quoddy Village, got the little trust fund she left him to live on. It ain’t much, but I guess that’s nothing new to Reuben. He’s never had any job at all, that I’ve known of.”

  Terence Oscard, a big-boned, pale-haired man with a beaky nose and a big, pointy Adam’s apple, wore a light blue chambray shirt, khaki slacks, and Topsiders. Good-looking in the way some very ugly men can be, his jutting features regularized by intelligence and kindness, he sat listening with his usual thoughtful attention.

  But Paddy seemed agitated. “Reuben can’t do that. Why, the town won’t be worth living in. It’ll be the bad old days all over again.”

  Terence leaned over to me. “I’ve got a new Red Cross first-aid book,” he confided. “I’ll be glad to lend it to you when I’ve finished it.”

  He was a martyr to numerous imaginary ailments and, perhaps on account of these, a self-taught first-aid expert. I liked him a great deal; everyone did.

  “Thanks, Terence, I’ll look forward to it,” I said, and he sat back, pleased.

  “Doesn’t anybody,” Paddy demanded, “remember?” He glared at us, fists clenched as if he might punch someone just to refresh people’s recollections.

  “Don’t see as there’s much we can do about Reuben sticking around if he wants to,” George said, his tone unperturbed as he went on eating his steak and potatoes. “Still a free country.”

  I noticed, though, that George didn’t raise his eyes, a sign that he wasn’t enjoying Paddy’s conversation. Paddy was intense, quick to anger, and inclined to pound the table, while George was the opposite: the quieter he became, the more tactfully and carefully you’d better go, or eventually he would lower the boom on you.

  “Unless,” George added to Paddy, “you’ve got some brilliant new idea.”

  At this, the air around us seemed to grow darkly electric, charged with some knowledge I didn’t share. Silence lengthened as the three Eastport natives at our table—Ellie, Wade, and George—went on eating their dinners, concentrating on their plates. Sam and I looked puzzledly at them, while Victor continued drumming his fingers on the table, wanting the drinks waitress.

  “No,” Paddy said at last. “No new ideas. Finished, Terence?” Shoving back his chair, he flung down his napkin furiously.

  Nodding agreeably, the big man got to his feet. Then he staggered, briefly but unmistakably, placing his hand on the table to steady himself. But he recovered smoothly, dropping some money by his plate and smiling his farewell to the rest of us.

  He hadn’t been drinking. Terence never did; the faint muzzy feeling induced by even a single glass of wine always made him think he had some rare neurological condition. And as they left together, he seemed fine again: bending as always to hear whatever Paddy was saying, Paddy accompanying his words with his usual energetic gestures.

  Watching them go, I sensed an ongoing liveliness of interest undimmed by the comfort of habit; they were by all accounts a devoted couple. I thought they were lucky, and that Terence had somehow simply missed his footing.

  But Paddy’s comments had dropped a pall over our table, with George, Ellie, and Wade looking suddenly even more dismal.

  “Come on,” I said. “How bad can it be? I’m sure a few of the boys from the dock can take care of Reuben Tate, if he gets to be too much trouble.”

  Ellie’s lips pursed. “You only know him by reputation,” she began, and was about to say more.

  But just then a harsh bark of laughter was followed by the warning rasp of barstools being shoved back. Next came the voice of Ted Armstrong, La Sardina’s formidable bartender and bouncer.

  “Okay, now, that’s enough. We don’t want to be breaking any expensive glassware, make the price of a beer go up another half-buck just to pay for it all.”

  The scuffling quieted as the sound system began playing a cut of Bela Fleck’s new jazz-bluegrass fusion CD, “Throwdown at the Hoedown.” La Sardina’s owners had eclectic tastes in music, and so as a result did the guys who tended to occupy their barstools.

  Or most of them did. “Throwdown” cut off in the middle of a banjo lick so breakneck, it had to be heard to be believed, and the music switched to something about how lonesome somebody was going to be tonight.

  “He’s in there,” Ellie said quietly. “One thing he hates is decent music. You wait, before the night’s over, Teddy’ll have to toss him out of the place, and then won’t there be hell to pay?”

  “Is there anything,” I asked, “that Reuben doesn’t hate?”

  “Money and misery,” George replied, forking up the last of his baked potato.

  With his dark hair, milky-pale skin, and a bluish black five-o’clock shadow darkening his small, neat jawline, George looks as if he stepped out of the hills of Appalachia about five minutes ago. His black gimme cap, with GUPTILL’S EXCAVATING embroidered in orange script on the front, sat on the table beside his plate.

  “The one he tries getting from you and the other he tries giving you, when he can. Which,” George added, “is pretty often.”

  “Well, what’s the matter with him?” Sam asked. “Is he sick? I mean, you know, disturbed?”

  Sam’s own disposition is so sunny that he has managed to stay on good terms with both his father and me, which as a feat is a little like being Switzerland during WWII, only for longer and with more bombs. In fact, it was mostly due to Sam’s ongoing diplomatic efforts that his father was with us that evening.

  But as I watched Victor fidget, I thought he had some other motive for coming, too, like maybe he hadn’t wanted to be alone for some reason.

  Not that I cared much. Victor and I weren’t having a truce, exactly. More like a cease-fire.

  George looked at Sam. “Reuben Tate’s not sick. He’s broken. Like a dog you can’t cure of being vicious. Stay away from him, Sam. He’s got more ways to clean a guy’s clock than you’ll ever learn. And,” he emphasized seriously, “you don’t want to.”

  Sam blinked. “Wow. Okay.” For George to utter so many words in a row was unusual. In the tone he’d taken, it was stunning.

  “Someone,” Victor piped up from behind his fresh martini—the drinks waitress had taken pity on him—“ought to get rid of Reuben Tate once and for all.”

  As always, he resembled an ad out of Gentleman’s Quarterly: blue striped silk tie, charcoal slacks, tasteful gold cufflinks. Even the hairs on the backs of his wrists looked groomed. Only the look on his face conveyed a sense of rumpled dishevelment, in part I supposed on account of
those martinis. But I remember thinking again that something else was going on with him.

  Wade put down his glass of O’Doul’s. “Think so, do you?” he commented mildly to Victor. “Someone should get rid of him? Just take him out?”

  “Yeah.” Victor glowered. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  When Victor first moved here, I was concerned that he would become a serious fly in my ointment, in the romance department especially. Having your crazy ex-husband living down the street from you might just tend, as a for-instance, to discourage your boyfriend from parking his pickup truck overnight right out in your driveway where everybody can see it.

  Lately, though, Victor hadn’t bothered me quite so much. It wasn’t that he had gotten saner; maybe the opposite. His personal idiosyncrasies—his obsession over physical cleanliness, for example—seemed to have gotten stronger. But here in Eastport everyone’s a skinful of quirks, so in a way Victor was just like the rest of us. Also, Wade parked his pickup where he pleased, as he always had.

  None of this, however, made Victor a congenial dining companion. Now his immaculate, close-clipped fingernails tapped the table again, impatiently, as if he couldn’t just get up and leave on his own whenever he wanted to.

  “So, are you people finished or what?” he asked.

  “Stop it,” I hissed at him, and for a wonder he subsided, though his gaze still strayed anxiously to the bar area and then to the door, as if calculating some daring exit strategy.

  But I still didn’t put two and two together.

  Instead I turned back to Wade; the O’Doul’s interested me. Ordinarily, he enjoys breweries so micro that they measure their ingredients out by the thimbleful.

  But in reply to my silent inquiry he just lifted his glass, and the suggestion his amused gray eyes conveyed to me then was so personal—and so fully detailed, right down to my keeping the dog not only off the bed but actually out of the whole bedroom—that I was struck speechless for a moment.