Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  On a low table, the day’s heap of letters and journals lay where the detectives had left them, after bringing them in and going through them. Wade squared up the pile and set it on a bookcase in which Victor’s medical books were grouped by category.

  “But I just don’t believe in that kind of justice,” I said. “Maybe there are exceptions to the rules we’ve come up with to deal with renegades, but I wouldn’t know how to pick them. And it worries me,” I finished, “to find out that maybe you do.”

  I could see him thinking about how to reply as we went into the rest of the downstairs rooms, then to the cellar. Wade checked the pilot light on the furnace, rattled the cellar door, peered into the fuse box. Everything seemed shipshape.

  But it was like going through a house after somebody in it had died. Back on the main floor in the front hall stood Victor’s antique instrument case, its glass doors open, its contents taken away. Evidence, I supposed, though I didn’t see of what.

  “That collection was the only thing he brought with him from New York,” I said, hoping someone had at least made a list of it. “That and his clothes. Back in the city, he kept souvenirs of his girlfriends: photographs, letters. He had a little black book the size of the Manhattan telephone directory.”

  Or so it had seemed to me when I’d come upon it one day when I was still married to Victor, while I was cleaning closets.

  “But Sam says he got rid of it all,” I said. “Took the black book and tore the pages out of it, tore those up, and flushed them down the toilet. Sold his little sports car, stereo, all that kind of thing. All his city toys.”

  We went up to check the second floor, and Wade climbed the third-floor stairs to make sure the attic door was closed.

  “Don’t want squirrels moving from there into the house,” he explained, coming back down again. “So Victor was really turning over a new leaf.”

  “Right,” I said. A bitter little laugh bubbled up in me at the idea of Victor having squirrels in his attic.

  Real squirrels, I mean. “He was never going to be what you might call personally well adjusted,” I went on. “But he was trying. For once, he was trying hard. Which is another reason why what’s happening to him now isn’t…”

  We went back downstairs. The investigators had left a light on in the display case. Wade reached in and switched it off, its fluorescent hum leaving a louder silence where it had been.

  “Justice,” he finished my sentence for me. “You’re right, it isn’t. I don’t think Victor killed Reuben any more than you do. And you’re wondering if I think what happened to Reuben out there at Hillside Cemetery—if I think that was justice.”

  “Something like that,” I agreed. “That’s part of it. And if you do, why?”

  It struck me that there were a hundred other things Wade could have been doing, and that I could have closed up Victor’s house myself. He just hadn’t wanted me to have to do it alone.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, “have a drink, just the two of us in peace and quiet at the kitchen table.”

  “That sounds wonderful.” But Wade’s face was stony.

  “And I’ll tell you,” he finished, “a story about justice.”

  When Sam was a little boy, he peered curiously at the pages of the storybooks I read constantly to him. But no matter how often or patiently I pointed at the words and pronounced them, or sounded them out for him, he couldn’t learn to read.

  What he liked were jumble puzzles. Every morning starting when he was seven or so, he seized the comic pages, located the anagram puzzle and solved it speedily and triumphantly. Some of the words in the puzzles were really rather difficult, but not for Sam. Yet he couldn’t decode the simplest printed sentence, a trouble that frustrated us both.

  Later I learned that the wiring in his brain was a tiny bit scrambled. His perception problem was such that if the letters of a word were presented to him separately, or in jumbled fashion, he could sort them, but if they came at him all at once or in proper order, he couldn’t.

  Now, sitting alone at the kitchen table in my old house in Maine, I thought about another little boy with the improbable name of Boxy Thorogood. He’d had a reading problem, too, Wade had told me; Wade himself had been a teenager at the time, but he’d heard his mother and Mrs. Thorogood discussing it.

  Boxy’s real problem, though, had been more serious. A lot more serious.

  On the table before me lay that dratted Ouija board, which Sam and Tommy kept moving in and out of the dining room. Idly, I fingered the planchette.

  Wade hadn’t remembered why Reuben Tate had taken such a harsh view of Boxy. A foolish reason, he said, or no reason at all. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Reuben would do something to Boxy, to hurt him. All the boys knew it; Boxy did, too. They just didn’t know what or when.

  An only child, fatherless, skinny and small for his age, the boy spent weeks trying to avoid his nemesis. But each night after supper, Boxy’s mother—a good woman, but she had her habits—sent him for a pack of Pall Malls and a half-pint of Seagram’s, brooking no argument if Boxy tried getting out of the errand.

  So poor Boxy rode his bicycle down Washington Street fast, night after night, knowing that sooner or later Reuben Tate was going to be there to pounce on him. He could run, but he couldn’t hide; it wouldn’t end until Reuben got whatever cruel pleasure he wanted. Reuben always did.

  Then one day Reuben took Wade aside, and some of the other boys, too. “Boxy,” he said, a weird grin spreading on his face. He took a roll of high-test fishing line from his pocket, showed it around.

  “Boxy,” he repeated, and giggled. He was sixteen, then. Wade was seventeen, and the other boys were around that age, too.

  Boxy Thorogood was maybe eleven, the same age Sam was when I found him one afternoon in his bedroom, sobbing. The teacher, he said, had called him stupid. Anyway:

  None of the boys who heard Reuben threaten Boxy said anything to their parents, or to any adult. They didn’t tell Boxy, either. It was hard to explain, Wade said, but somehow they didn’t think Reuben would really do it. It didn’t seem … real.

  It got real, though, the next night as Boxy flew down the hill on his bike. Someone had stretched a length of high-test fishing line from one side of the street to the other.

  At the speed Boxy was traveling, the fishing line was almost a guillotine.

  “He flew off the bike,” Wade reported, “hit the big brick building at the far side of Water Street, bounced off, landed on the sidewalk.”

  The building that Paddy had turned into a design studio years later. Wade didn’t see the attack, he had added, but plenty of people did: not who’d done it, but the result. Wade hadn’t found out until the next morning. When he got up, his parents were over at Boxy’s house already, trying to take care of Boxy’s mother.

  “It happened,” Wade finished, “because I didn’t tell what Reuben was planning.”

  He looked at me. “So when you talk about justice, keep Boxy in mind. It’s why some people think the only thing wrong with what happened to Reuben is, it didn’t take long enough.”

  He got up and put his hand on my hair. I reached up and held it tightly, understanding now precisely the depth of Reuben Tate’s evil, what it had done to Wade and would go on doing as long as he lived.

  “You weren’t drinking at La Sardina because you knew he was around,” I said. “You didn’t want to be…”

  “Yep. Don’t want a buzz on, I see Reuben. Clear head, plenty of self-control.” He sighed deeply. “It’s the only way.”

  He spoke as if Reuben were still alive. “And you didn’t tell, afterwards? About Reuben and Boxy?”

  His hand slipped away. “I did. The others, too. But Reuben denied it, said we were all liars who had it in for him, and the fact was, no one had seen him do it. There was no proof. In the end, nothing happened to Reuben.”

  The refrain was getting familiar. “Well, something’s happened to him now. Thanks for telling me why
you’re not sorry. I wouldn’t be, either.”

  It was very late. Wade hesitated. “I never told that story before,” he said finally, looking a little startled and perhaps a shade sorry at the realization that, irrevocably, now he had.

  I thought about how I might feel, as opposed to the idea of how I ought to. “And you’d like to be alone a little while?” I asked. “Get used to the idea?”

  His face cleared, and the look he gave me was warmer than any embrace. “Go on,” I said, “try to get some sleep. I’ll be up in a while.”

  Moments later I’d heard him going upstairs. I don’t know how long I sat there at the table after that, thinking about justice and wondering what was in Reuben’s heart, at the end. And about what Terence Oscard had said about evil: that in time it begins to seem normal.

  “Mom?”

  Sam’s voice startled me; coming to myself, I saw that my hand was moving the planchette on the surface of the Ouija board, sliding it in short arcs.

  Sam stood in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas, milk glass in his hand.

  “Need a refill?” AEDAAA, my hand spelled out meaninglessly; EEDDDAAADDD. An idle motion, like worrying a cuticle or twisting a lock of hair.

  “Yeah. Didn’t know you were here. What’cha doing with that?” He opened the refrigerator.

  “Nothing. Just fidgeting. Sitting here thinking.”

  “Uh-huh.” He frowned at me, pouring the milk. “That thing only works with two people, I thought. Or more. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.” The board’s surface was smooth and somehow relaxing under my hand. The sliding helped me to think.

  “So why,” Sam asked quietly, “does it keep on saying that?”

  “Saying what?” I asked innocently, and then I saw it. But of course Sam had spotted it first, the anagram over and over:

  DEAD DEAD DEAD.

  The next morning Ellie and I drove past the lot where the Eastport railway depot once stood. In the nineteenth century the town had been a hub of shipbuilding and commerce: its society as stratified as Boston’s, its culture refined, its fads as intense and frivolous. Spiritualism—seances, mediums, and so on—had enjoyed a heyday here, for example, in the 1890s.

  “I have no idea,” I confessed, “what to think of it.” The Ouija board, I meant. The moment I’d seen what it was spelling, it had gone motionless.

  In the vacant lot, bindweed and wildflowers had taken over the place where whalebone-corseted ladies had stood on the rail platform, supervising imperiously their trunks being transferred from wagon to baggage car, while the great steam engine took on water and its firebox expelled glowing cinders. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was felled by polio at his summer place on Campobello, it was from Eastport that he began the sad journey home: to war, and into a pair of leg braces.

  “I don’t see,” Ellie replied, “why you should think anything of it at all.”

  Now the once-massive roundhouse foundation was a circular patch of cracked concrete, grown through by asters. At its edges you could still find clinkers from the locomotives’ fireboxes.

  “After all,” she continued reasonably, “just because a thing produces words doesn’t mean it’s got anything to say.”

  Which I thought was a little beside the point. But her brisk commonsense tone eased my mind somewhat, and it was a brilliant day: the sun shining, white popcorn clouds scudding across the blue sky, waving fields of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod so lovely you forgot all about hay fever.

  Ellie turned onto County Road, heading south toward Sodom’s Head and the water. Just before the road slanted down to the old salt works, she made a sharp right; moments later we were driving along the coveside, past a few small dwellings interspersed with unkempt pastures and abandoned cellar holes.

  “I hope Mike Carpentier’s got something to say.” I braced myself against the dashboard as Ellie stopped suddenly for a pair of eiderducks waddling across the road. When they had passed she shoved the Jeep grindingly into gear again and trod on the gas.

  “He’s a place to start,” Ellie replied as the road surface roughened, heaved by freeze and thaw and the attentions of winter snowplows. She swerved for a pothole, hit another. My teeth only loosened a little bit. When I got control of them again, I told her more about my trip with Paddy and Terence.

  She listened without comment. As I finished, we were nearing the end of the Cove Road. To our left lay the quiet inlet, calm as a wading pool. Straight ahead: Cobscook Bay and a sharp, two-foot chop, whiffs of sea foam blowing off the whitecaps.

  “If they were having a fight, Paddy might give him the cold shoulder. To show him,” Ellie went on, “what it would be like if they really separated.”

  “But when Terence collapsed in pain, Paddy dropped the act and showed his real feelings.”

  “Something like that, I’ll bet. Paddy adores Terence,” she said. “As who wouldn’t? Terence is a sweetie. I hope there isn’t anything serious wrong with him. Or between them, either.” She swung the Jeep off the pavement, to the grassy side of the road.

  A chill, bracing wind blew steadily across the water. In the distance, little boats hustled back and forth from the shore to the salmon pens: feeding, medicating, and tending the thousands of fish being raised in net enclosures under the water.

  I got out. “Where’s the house?”

  She pointed. “Up there.”

  I followed her gesture past an old Ford Escort nosed into the grass, saw a hill the approximate size of Mount Everest plus plenty of burdock. It was an especially prickly species of the weedy vegetation, too: the kind that, defying common sense and all the descriptions in the botany books, can leap six inches to get its hooks into you.

  Fortunately there was a path, but halfway up it the score was already me nothing, burdocks a million. Eventually I called a halt to pull some of the clinging, maddeningly prickly spheres of dark brown plant matter out of my socks.

  “Who is this guy?” I gasped. “And why does he live behind the vegetable-kingdom equivalent of a moat?”

  “He wants to discourage casual visits, that much is clear.”

  Which didn’t quite explain it. This uphill trip on a narrow burdock-lined path, by turns stony, slippery with damp grass, and infested with red ants, would have discouraged the Mongol hordes.

  “And,” Ellie went on, climbing another twenty yards with the ease of a mountain goat, then turning to smile encouragingly down at me, “Mike is an unusual person.”

  “Yeah. He’s got wings. He doesn’t walk up, he just flies up. Like a vampire bat.” I already had a mental picture of Mike, based on his having had any sort of relationship with Reuben Tate.

  Hard, cold, and an incurable fan of heavy metal music, the louder the better. Plenty of marijuana … probably he had tattoos. But as I scrambled the last few yards up that damned mountain, I began hearing…

  Wind chimes. The bamboo ones that sound like a small stream peacefully gurgling. And chickens: a bright-eyed head poked out of the underbrush at us, clucking inquisitively.

  Then I smelled smoked fish mingled with the perfume of slow-burning applewood. Someone was smoking salmon, which in Eastport is sweet, pink fleshed, and tender, straight out of the icy-cold waters of Passamaquoddy Bay and directly—whenever I can arrange it—onto my bagel. With cream cheese, preferably, and coffee.

  Suddenly the hill didn’t quite seem so steep anymore. My ant bites weren’t stinging like the devil, either. One of his lesser minions, maybe; Eastport ants are fierce. But as I pushed through a screen of old lilacs toward the picture-book cottage that stood before me in the suddenly open clearing, I didn’t care.

  Whoever he was, and whatever he’d done in the past, Mike Carpentier had made himself a paradise. The view from the hilltop was sweepingly of blue bay and sky, Campobello spreading low in the middle distance. Beyond loomed the island of Grand Manan, its pale cliffs vaulting improbably, miragelike, on the horizon.

  “Wow,” I ma
naged inadequately. The breeze shifted, smelling of open ocean tinged with chamomile. Beyond a split-rail fence, a dappled pony placidly munched clover; a couple of goats grazed on the hillside, and there was a rabbit hutch.

  No wonder the place was so far uphill, I realized. It had to be, to be this close to heaven.

  Then I heard the child sobbing.

  She was nine or so, with long golden curls and huge violet eyes streaming tears, crouched over—

  Good heavens. A dead cat. She’d dug a small grave for it and was in the act of laying it in there when she caught sight of me and jumped guiltily.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry about your cat. Are you having a funeral for it?”

  I took a step, stopped short as her eyes flashed hostility, and then, unmistakably, fear.

  “Who are you?” She pushed some dirt over the animal’s body, but not before Ellie stepped up and got a pretty good look at it.

  “My name’s Jacobia. This is my friend Ellie.”

  “I know her,” the child said, pushing blond hair out of her tear-streaked face. She wore a red flannel shirt, dungarees, and old sneakers. On her wrist was a thin beaded friendship bracelet.

  No other children were in sight. A fast guess: This little girl had made the beaded friendship bracelet for herself. Before I could follow the thought, a man appeared at the cottage door.

  “Molly?” he called sharply, then spotted us.

  The child turned and ran for the house without a backward look. We followed under the man’s unsmiling gaze. A small cloud pulled over the sun and I shivered, suddenly uncertain.

  “Mike Carpentier,” Ellie said under her breath as we made our way toward the dwelling, “in the flesh.”

  “So I gathered.” Hollyhocks and black-eyed susans bloomed in the dooryard, mingled with clumps of herbs. A woodpile out back featured an old-fashioned bucksaw, a mallet, and a hand ax. There was a well-house with a bucket fixed to a pulley, near a stone birdbath. A vegetable garden spread on the hillside to the west, as high as possible to catch every last fleeting ray of sun.

  No satellite dish. No power pole. No phone line, even. Mike wasn’t what I had expected, either: big boned and plain faced, wearing thick horn-rims, bib overalls, sandals with socks. His graying hair was chopped short in an uneven hack job he’d probably done himself.