Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  Just then, Paddy’s face showed at the window of the artist’s studio. “It’s about time he remembered that we’re here,” Terence remarked as if nothing had happened, and turned back to the car.

  His walk wasn’t right. He was dragging one leg. “Terence,” I insisted as I hurried after him, “wait.”

  But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. As I followed I could hear him breathing in harsh laboring gusts as if he were in sudden pain.

  “If you’ve got that far,” he advised, grating the words out, “think about something else. Ask yourself…” He stopped, stiffening with anguish, “… whether Reuben Tate’s body up on that cemetery gate, displayed there like some bloody, appalling human banner—”

  He reached the cottage’s rail fence, fell against it. “Maybe Reuben’s death, and the way he died, wasn’t the whole message.”

  Paddy rushed out, his face full of concern. Twenty minutes later we were back on the ferry as the sun began setting, filling the sky with red. When I asked Terence again what the trouble was, he muttered indistinctly something about an old back injury.

  But back injuries don’t make you put little stones into your mouth. And Paddy still looked distraught, in contrast to his cool manner to Terence earlier.

  Later, when he had Terence settled on a bench alongside the pilot house, Paddy stood with me at the rail of the ferry as it plunged through the chop, spewing salt spray. A breeze had come up suddenly, the weather feeling changeable and the clouds still hanging on the western horizon; they had been there for days.

  Paddy spoke regretfully, but not about Terence, and at the private, fiercely protective look in his eyes I decided not to ask. Instead, he talked about the past.

  “I’ve often wondered why we let it go on,” he mused. “All of us guys who went around together back then. We knew, but somehow we didn’t believe. How bad Reuben could be. How evil.”

  I felt that he was trying to direct me away from the topic of his most recent meeting with Tate. For now, I let him.

  “Did Wade know? Or George Valentine? Were they also in the group that hung around together?”

  Paddy nodded, his eyes fixed on the bright points of light that were Eastport, gleaming in the dusk.

  “Yes. But Reuben wouldn’t bother them, Wade especially, and George, I think, because he was Wade’s friend. Something happened between those two, Wade and Reuben. I’m not sure what.”

  He turned suddenly to me. “It wasn’t the first time, you know. That necktie thing. It was Reuben’s doing, I’m sure of it. He’d done it that way before. Or anyway,” he added, “everyone in town said he did. It wasn’t,” he gave the words a bitter twist, “anything that could be proved.”

  Of course not. This was Reuben Tate we were talking about. From the sound of it, he could have gotten away with kidnaping the Lindbergh baby.

  It was nearly full dark but in the deck lamps of the ferry Paddy’s eyes shone unhappily. “What bothers me,” he said, “is why we tolerated him, even after we knew the things he’d done. It was as if…” He broke off, sounding mystified.

  “That’s the trouble with evil,” Terence said suddenly from behind us. His voice was tired but it had regained the amused, faintly ironic tone it usually carried; at the sound of it I saw Paddy’s shoulders sag with relief.

  “The banality of evil,” Terence said. “After a while, it comes to seem so … normal. You get used to it. Like,” he finished mildly with a glance at Paddy, “almost everything.”

  Paddy flinched; something, I thought again, going on between them. The ferry nosed in toward the dock.

  Once ashore Paddy offered to drive me home, but I refused in favor of the privacy of my thoughts, riding along only as far as the design studio. Terence didn’t speak again at all, except to say goodbye with his usual politeness. But by then he didn’t have to say any more, or Paddy either:

  They’d told me—not meaning to, but it was in their faces and voices—that more had gone on between Paddy and Reuben than Reuben’s threat and Paddy’s rejection of it.

  The mood between them remained uncomfortable too, despite Paddy’s newfound solicitude; whatever was happening to them in their personal lives, it wasn’t a pleasant development.

  And something else: Terence had articulated an intuition I hadn’t known I had.

  A message: if I could find out what it meant and whom it was intended for—

  —or so Terence seemed to believe, and at the moment I was taking his opinion seriously; he had fought through a lot of pain in order to finish telling it to me—

  —I might have a line that led to the killer, or at any rate to enough reasonable doubt to begin taking the heat off Victor.

  It was Terence’s idea about the message having more parts, though, that bothered me the most. There had, after all, been two murders: one with a tie, the other with Victor’s antique scalpel.

  Maybe Reuben had done the first one, as Paddy thought.

  But maybe not. Maybe Paddy was lying, or simply wrong, and someone else had committed both crimes.

  And if they were linked, and intended to mean something, if they’d been done to communicate something, somehow…

  Then it seemed to me that a clear, unambiguous translation was needed.

  Soon.

  Before the next bloody syllable got transmitted.

  It was past dinnertime, and I was thinking tiredly of just ordering pizza. But by the time I got home, Ellie had taken over my kitchen and prepared a feast of local delicacies: bay scallops en casserole with buttered bread crumbs, fresh tomatoes drizzled in basil vinaigrette, tiny potatoes steamed in their crisp, dark-red jackets, and blueberry cobbler.

  “Oh, thank you,” I said, taking in the air of calm, domestic competence that had descended on my household like a blessing, as she handed me a glass of wine. “How did you know I would be…”

  So late, I was about to say, but of course she had known; no doubt somebody downtown had seen me boarding the ferry. The wine was very cold, scouring away the bad taste the afternoon had left in my mouth. And fresh whipped cream, I noted happily, had been made for the cobbler. All I had to do was sit down at the table and eat it, which is the part of Maine cuisine I am best at.

  “I don’t understand half what I saw and heard today,” I said when we were all gathered in the dining room. Ellie had lit candles, and the tin ceilings, pressed with the pattern of acorns and oak leaves, glowed warmly with the flickering light. “But I’m sure Paddy Farrell wasn’t being straight with me.”

  I didn’t mention Terence’s illness or that his relationship with Paddy seemed to have hit a snag; it didn’t seem pertinent.

  “Paddy said Reuben wanted him to help blackmail Victor,” I went on, “but that doesn’t strike me as particularly likely. Why would Reuben think Paddy would help him with anything?”

  “You’ve got that right. He hated Tate like poison. But Paddy Farrell,” George Valentine said, applying himself to his meal, “can be cagey when he wants to be. He isn’t what you’d call the gold standard for information about Tate.”

  “You mean he lies? But why?”

  Wade shook his head. “Wouldn’t go that far, necessarily. But Paddy will leave things out of most anything, when it suits him. Which,” he added, “plenty often it does. Might go further, if he thought a fib might make him look better.”

  It was true enough about his taxes, certainly. He’d tried deducting Terence’s vitamins and herbal potions, for heaven’s sake, under the heading of “miscellaneous chemicals.”

  “And for a while there,” Wade continued, “Paddy was real scared of Reuben.”

  I remembered Paddy’s angry defiance, which in retrospect did seem like protesting too much. “The way he went on,” I said, “you would think Reuben was the one afraid of him.”

  In the dining-room windows, the candles’ reflections flared like signal lights. “I hope the weather holds,” Ellie fretted, glancing up at them, “at least until after the Salmon Festival.”

/>   “Ellie, you’ve been doing all you can about the festival,” George assured her. “Besides, the weekend is still six days off. Not even you can control the weather from that distance.”

  His tone turned serious. “You might,” he said to me, “want to talk to a few more people. Get a more balanced view of things. If,” he added, “you really want to go on with this at all.”

  “Like who? Besides Paddy,” it was dawning unwelcomely on me as I said it, “I don’t even know where to start.”

  Wade met my gaze. “You could try Mike Carpentier,” he offered slowly. “Knows just about everyone. And he was hooked up with Reuben somehow, seems like I heard.”

  Ellie frowned. “I never knew that. Mike’s years younger. What would he have been doing with Reuben?”

  Wade shrugged. “What I heard. Not saying it’s gospel. I’ll bet he’s got some stories, though, even if that one isn’t true.”

  “But they’ll be stories of…” I began, and then it hit me, as Wade nodded.

  “Long ago,” I finished. “Like Paddy’s but maybe not so many lies. Not embroidered or with things left out. And you think…”

  “Reuben had only been back in town a few days,” Ellie agreed.

  “And the way he got killed, seems like somebody was madder at him than even he could make somebody, in that short amount of time,” George said, following her thought.

  “But,” Sam objected, “if it was revenge for something that happened a while ago, why wait so long?”

  “Right,” Tommy Daigle chimed in; Sam had spent the evening helping him haul the engine out of his jalopy. I hadn’t thought they could do it, but Sam had rigged up a pulley device that he said lessened immensely the amount of work required.

  “Tate was back to town other times, my mom said,” Tommy informed us. “Raised a lot of—”

  Hell, Tommy had meant to say, but caught himself. His mother was an old-fashioned disciplinarian, and it showed.

  “Ruckus,” he finished carefully. “So why now?”

  Wade looked thoughtful. “Maybe revenge wasn’t all of it. You can put bad things in the past, if they happened then and they’re over and done with. But if you thought that same thing was about to happen again…”

  “Once burnt, twice shy,” Ellie agreed, as one of the candles began smoking and George pinched it out.

  Their remarks made me think again about the past and the present somehow coming together, connecting the victims in some way I didn’t yet understand. I took a sip of the wine Ellie had refilled for me, and chose my words carefully.

  “Are any of you”—I didn’t include the boys, of course—“going to be sorry if I start really digging into this? Because you’re all part of this town’s past, too, you know.”

  I let the rest go unspoken: that Reuben Tate’s venom seemed to have touched almost everyone in Eastport. That when you went poking into old secrets, sometimes you also opened old wounds, ones you hadn’t even known were there. And sometimes those old wounds belonged to your friends.

  I wasn’t asking permission, exactly. But I needed to know.

  “Least said, soonest mended, in my view,” George commented. “Bury him and be done with it, my best advice ordinarily. Mess with Reuben or anything to do with him, get messed up yourself.”

  He spoke easily. “But then there’s Victor. Don’t guess you can just let him keep swinging in the breeze.”

  Ellie tapped her wineglass thoughtfully. “Ordinarily, I’d agree: We’re well rid of Reuben and the less said about him the better. But this is different. And he never hung any skeletons in my closet, I’m glad to say.”

  Wade nodded, but not as decisively as George or Ellie. “You just do what you have to,” he allowed, “let the chips fall.”

  Not an especially reassuring reply on his part, but at the moment it was all I would get; Wade wasn’t the type to unburden himself at the dinner table.

  Later, I looked wordlessly at him, and he nodded.

  Afterward in the kitchen, helping to dry the dishes, Tommy Daigle informed me that he and Sam were combining the mystery of otherworldly spirit communications with the technological genius of Samuel Morse, by asking the Ouija board to spell its messages out to them in Morse code.

  Tommy had a round, freckled face that reminded me of Howdy Doody’s, topped with a thick shock of hair so red it made Ellie’s look strawberry blond. He’d stuck with Sam pretty much all day, except when he was at home doing the Saturday chores arranged for him by his mother, and I felt grateful to him for it.

  “Why do you want messages from spirits, anyway?” I asked, resisting the impulse to brush Tommy’s hair out of his eyes. In the city, Sam hadn’t had friends like this: simple, steadfast.

  “Maybe,” Sam said, putting away silverware, “it’ll say who killed Reuben.”

  Tommy brushed his hair back for himself, revealing the dent in his forehead, over his right eye. It was deep and square, a white brand mark without any freckles in it, as if somebody had hit him with a tack hammer a long time ago. I didn’t know how he’d really gotten it.

  “And who killed the other guy, too,” he enthused to Sam. “I mean, hey, it ought to know.”

  Which I supposed was logical but would be unhelpful even in the (I hoped) very unlikely event that it happened; Ouija-board testimony, I felt sure, cut no ice with district attorneys. What we needed was some shred of actual proof.

  But I didn’t say this, not wanting to quash their optimism; Sam had eaten all of his dinner and no longer looked so depressed. When they’d finished in the kitchen, they hurried off to tune in the pregame show and question George about his knowledge of Morse code; I heard him tapping dot-and-dash patterns for them on the living room coffee table, while I wiped off the counters a final time and Ellie hung the dish towels on their hooks.

  “Terence thinks one of the visitors for the Salmon Festival may have had it in for Reuben,” I said.

  “That’s possible.” Wearing yellow rubber gloves, she rinsed the dish sponge with scalding water, which is what the plumbing in my old house delivers when it is not delivering ice-cold. “But the problem with Reuben is, there are so many likely candidates for his murder.”

  “So I gather. Too bad none of them were in possession of the weapon. But I was hoping you could narrow the field for me. You knowing just about everyone, I mean.”

  She squeezed the sponge out and stripped off the gloves. “We can’t focus on all his enemies, that’s a given.”

  Like everyone, she seemed to assume that Reuben’s death was the important one, the other just a sort of tag-along. Probably it hadn’t seemed that way to the guy with the tie in his throat; still, in terms of starting to sort this whole mess out, it was very likely true.

  She said as much. “Reuben was the one who would have inspired the big-time motive, enough to commit murder about. I really haven’t heard anything about the other guy, and I would have if he was in the habit of doing anything even mildly interesting. So it does make some sense to focus on Reuben.”

  She snapped off the kitchen light. “The trouble is, there are hundreds of people in town now, not counting the ones who live here, who knew Reuben and didn’t like him. To put it,” she added, “mildly.”

  She spread her hands in a this-is-obvious gesture. “We can’t question them all about their history with him, learn what they were doing before—and during—the time he was being murdered.”

  “Right.” I was getting impatient.

  “But,” she pointed out acutely, “there was only one, thank goodness, of Reuben. We could focus on him.”

  I noted that she’d begun using the first-person plural. “We? Are you sure you want to be involved in this? You don’t even like Victor, and he’s the one who’s really in trouble.”

  Besides, she already had a big project on her plate, getting ready for the festival. And I hadn’t missed her visceral little shiver of distaste whenever the subject of Reuben came up.

  What I kept forgetting, though
, were her bloodlines full of seagoing rogues and rascals. Unlike their tropical brethren, the old cold-water outlaws of the downeast Maine coast were notorious not so much for their savagery to outsiders as for their loyalty to one another. Cross ways with them and they might only relieve you of your valuables; injure one, and the rest would grind your bones to make their bread.

  “What else,” she inquired, “are friends for?”

  Later that evening Wade and I went over to check on Victor’s house; the state police, Bob Arnold had let Wade know, were done with it for now, so we could lock it up.

  The black arrowhead daggers of the old, ornate cast-iron fence around the front yard seemed to bristle at us as we opened the creaking gate. Six tall white pillars formed a long, graceful colonnade along the house front, dropping bars of deeper shadow onto the porch. We passed the green-shuttered windows of the front parlor to a side door that led into a small sitting room.

  Inside, the air was still and faintly stale-smelling, even though Victor’s cleaning help kept the house sparkling enough to do surgery in. It certainly did not have the air of inhabitedness that mine did, the sense of welcome. Without Victor in it, I felt immediately the dark vacancy of the rooms.

  Quickly, I went around turning on lights. The investigators had not made a mess of things, or at least not the awful one I had expected. There were smudges of what I supposed must be fingerprint powder. Papers had been riffled through, not left in the order that Victor would have. Drawers had been emptied, their contents scattered, and manila folders lay out on the desk.

  But there was no sign of the callous ransacking that I had feared. Victor’s fastidiousness was elemental to him, and even after all that had happened between us, I did not, I realized as I noted my own relief, want him utterly destroyed even by proxy.

  “There’s too much I don’t understand,” I complained as Wade pulled the drapes and checked the lock on the back door. “All of you seem to think that what happened to Reuben Tate was justice. As if he, or anyone, could have deserved that … that atrocity.”