by Sarah Graves
Also, he wasn’t friendly. Not for the first time I was glad that Ellie was around to introduce me. But he asked us into the house and it was wonderful in there, the fragrance of gingerbread wafting deliciously from the woodstove hulking at the center of the kitchen. Around it a bewildering variety of craft items lay in various stages of completion:
Stenciled birdhouses. Punched-tin lanterns. Doilies knitted, crocheted, and woven in a rainbow of bright colors. Tea steeped in a stoneware pot set on a cast-iron trivet. There were bentwood chairs with plump homemade cushions, and bright braided rugs on the wide-plank, neatly swept wooden floor.
“I know your husband,” Mike said to me. His handshake was firm, his look not as suspicious after Ellie’s introduction. “I took Molly,” he nodded at the girl, “in to see him a week ago. Headaches. Took her to the clinic, they said it was nothing. But I wanted to be sure.”
Victor hadn’t officially been seeing any patients. But when word of his presence got around town, people took notice, not paying much attention to his actual specialty. And he didn’t like to turn them down if they came and asked for his help; he could practice basic medicine, and it was touching how much he wanted to be accepted.
“Nothing serious, I hope?” The little girl looked healthy if a bit listless and red-eyed, hanging back now behind her father.
“No,” Mike said. “Guess the clinic doctor was right. Maybe nerves, your husband said. His place was so clean, and so was he. It gave me a lot of confidence in what he said. What he really thought, he told me, was that the headaches were nothing and would probably go away by themselves. And mostly, they have.”
At this the two of us smiled in the time-honored way that a couple of experienced parents will when the children have turned out not to be sick, and the ice was broken.
“I suppose now you want to talk about Reuben,” he went on resignedly. “He’d turned into such a booze hound, I’m surprised he didn’t die sooner. But that was Reuben, make as much trouble as he could, even dying. And now you want to hash it over.”
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “I’ve heard he was your friend, and I’m sorry for your loss, but—”
His harsh burst of laughter cut me off. “Loss?” He waved us to chairs, set out mugs. “Oh, that’s rich.”
The tea was strong and welcome after the climb. “When Reuben left town the last time I went to church and lit a candle,” Mike said tiredly. “But nobody believes it. That’s the trouble with a small town, you can never escape your past.” He set gingerbread on a plate.
“My husband—my ex-husband,” I clarified, and he glanced comprehendingly at me—“is in some trouble over Reuben’s death.”
On a sideboard stood a framed photograph of a happy family group: Mike, Molly, and the woman I’d run into outside Paddy Farrell’s studio. So that, I realized, was Molly’s mother. I hadn’t mentioned the collision to Ellie, had in fact almost forgotten about it.
Until now. “But how did you know we would want to talk about Reuben?” I finished.
He shrugged. “Bob Arnold,” he replied in a tone that let me know he was no fan of Eastport’s police chief.
Or of any official persons, I guessed; Mike was off the grid in more ways than just no power or telephone. His place was like one of those survivalist homesteads you read about, in Utah or Wyoming, where they are preparing for nuclear winter. The pantry was loaded with labeled glass canning jars, a clean quarter inch of wax showing at the top of each: jams, jellies, and preserves. On a shelf over the soapstone sink, next to a neatly organized array of veterinary supplies for the animals, I spotted a CB radio set hooked up to run on a battery.
“He came up to tell me Reuben was … gone,” Mike said. “See what kind of reaction he got from me, too, I’ll bet.”
“Why would he do that?”
His laugh was mirthless. “In case I killed him, I guess. As if I’d waste my time on that little—”
“Until just recently I had no idea that you even knew Reuben,” Ellie said.
Mike got up, put the kettle back onto the wood-stove’s cook top. “Well, I did. Twenty years ago, I was his…”
Not his friend, surely. Mike was in his mid thirties or so, no older. Which would have made him—
“Mascot, I guess you’d call it. Sidekick. Or pet. He was a lot older than me, in his late teens.” He glanced fondly at Molly as the child, who had vanished somewhere, came back in again.
“Sit down, honey,” he said. “Eat some ginger-bread, and work on your plant hanger. We’re going,” he added, “to a crafts fair, and Molly’s bringing some of her things to sell.”
Molly ignored the snack, seating herself at the table and concentrating on one of her projects. Her deft fingers spun long strands of string swiftly and cleverly, knotting them to form an intricate pattern in macramé, threaded with wooden beads.
“She knows all the macramé knots, don’t you, honey?” Mike said proudly.
“That’s very nice,” I told her sincerely, and her smile was lovely. She was the spitting image of her mother.
Ellie was explaining to Mike more about why we were asking about Reuben Tate. “Would you rather discuss it somewhere else?” I put in, indicating Molly.
He considered. “Honey, if you’re not going to eat, take that stuff upstairs.” Silently, the little girl obeyed, grabbing the cleverly knotted string plant hanger.
Then: “Reuben was a sickness,” he said when his daughter was out of earshot. “It was like he somehow put a spell on me. I was fascinated by him at first. His wild ways.”
“Later,” Ellie drew him out for my benefit, “you married…” With a nod at the photo, he mentioned a name I didn’t recognize. A good mother when she could be, Mike said. A cook in the merchant marine, so she wasn’t around a lot. They were divorced.
“I got custody,” Mike said. “She agreed to it. I’d been in a little trouble in the past, but not anymore. No time for getting stoned when you’ve got a kid to take care of.”
Molly’s mother had been in town, in fact, on the ship that had come into port the previous Friday evening, the Star Hoisin, Mike said. She had come to the cottage, taken Molly on a couple of outings.
Which explained a bit more about why the child seemed a little withdrawn and weepy now. He didn’t elaborate on the reason for their divorce and I didn’t ask. It was Reuben I wanted to know about.
“So you hung around with him as a kid. He liked you. He never bullied you or hurt you? That wasn’t exactly his usual behavior, from what I’ve heard of the way he operated back then.”
A look of regret passed over Mike’s plain face. “I wouldn’t say he never bullied me. Like I said, I was a little kid he could … I don’t know. Own, almost. He wasn’t abusive sexually if that’s what you mean,” he finished.
It was. I still didn’t understand the attraction, on either side. “How did you end your relationship with him?”
He looked sharply at me. “I didn’t end it. He left town. I grew up. Life went on. And that was that.”
“He came back,” I pointed out. “Several times, according to what I’ve heard. He didn’t try to get in touch with you then?”
“Well,” he temporized, “he did, the first few times. But I was married, and then we were pregnant with Molly. I didn’t give him any encouragement, so he lost interest. Went on,” he added, “to bigger and better things.”
His laugh didn’t sound convincing. “So how come Bob Arnold wanted to talk with you,” I asked, “after Reuben got killed?”
He poured more tea. “Not many people remembered about me and Reuben. You know, it was just one of those little-kid phases. But I guess Arnold recalled, and you know him. God forbid he shouldn’t cover all the bases. And something about the way he talked to me about it, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be the last one dredging up old stories.”
Resentment tinged his voice briefly, went away again. Wade had remembered it too, I recalled, so probably Mike was right.
“But for
me, what’s past is past and that’s the end of it. This was twenty years ago, remember. Like I told Arnold, in my book Reuben Tate was ancient history.”
Not pleasant history, from his expression. But he didn’t seem to mind talking about it. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt him?” I asked.
Ellie had wandered outside, carrying her tea. Now she came back in and went to the window, where a profusion of houseplants flourished like an indoor jungle. Peering through the glass, she gazed out at the domestic animals and the gardens.
Mike looked rueful. “Oh, there were plenty of those. Open the phone book and point. Reuben was mean … and he was smart.”
Everyone said so. “In what way? Knowing how to hurt people? Their weaknesses?”
He nodded emphatically. “And how to get some advantage out of them. Just for instance, the only jail time he ever served, it was six months for breaking and entering. Before,” he added, his tone even, “he stopped getting sent to jail, because no one would testify against him, here.” That matched what Paddy had said.
“Most guys,” Mike said, “when they get out of jail, they have nothing more than they went in. It’s just empty time. But not Reuben. When he got out he had a list of homosexual professional men in Maine. Dentists, lawyers … anybody he could blackmail.”
Ellie glanced over from the window, peered back out again. Something in the yard seemed to have fascinated her.
“But I don’t understand,” I said, shocked and revolted at the idea. “How would such a list even get compiled?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. All I know is, someone in jail had a list and Reuben somehow got hold of it.”
“And you knew about it because …”
Matter-of-factly: “He made me type the blackmail letters.”
The notion was chilling; just the thought, for instance, of Paddy or Terence getting such a letter made me feel sick. And two decades earlier, even right now in a lot of places, it would have been devastating.
“I had an old typewriter in my room,” Mike explained. “And he told me what to write. I didn’t even really understand what those letters were saying. Later, though, of course I figured it out.”
However improbable—I still didn’t see quite how it could have happened—it sounded absolutely like the kind of scheme Reuben would have tried: cruel. Terrifying in the extreme.
In short, right up Reuben Tate’s alley. “My ex-husband says that Reuben knew some things about him,” I said. “Things that happened in the past, in New York. Can you think of how Reuben might have found out about them?”
It just seemed so unlikely. But Mike answered quickly and surely. “Oh, he’d have no problem with that. He told me about it, in fact, bragging. Went to your ex-husband’s house when he wasn’t there, snooped through the mail in the mailbox, found out where he’d come from. Then he went to the library, got on the computer, and looked on the Internet in back issues of newspapers. Searched them for your ex-husband’s name. Just a fishing expedition, but after he hit paydirt it was easy.”
So Reuben had been bragging his plan around, not only to Paddy Farrell. As Ellie had said, underestimating Reuben would be a mistake. “This last time he came back, did he come here to the cottage? Did he ask for anything? Maybe threaten you, too?”
“Actually, he did,” Mike replied. “Heard where I lived, climbed the hill. Can’t keep a bad man down, I guess. And he was a real bastard.”
“What did he want?” Ellie asked casually.
Too casually, and her glance at me as she came to the table was pointed. I got up and went to the window where she had been.
“Oh, the usual,” Mike replied. “Had a bottle with him; he’d heard I was divorced. Maybe he thought we’d get to be drinking buddies.” He snorted. “As if.”
Drawing back a gingham curtain, I scanned the yard with its compost heap and neatly kept animal pens, then stopped when I saw the big chopping block made of a squat, upended log.
It was covered with blood.
Those chickens, I thought, my heart hammering foolishly. He butchered a chicken, that’s all. I had an abrupt, unwelcome vision of one of the creatures running around headless; a vision, I gathered, that had been reality not long ago. Feathers littered the area around the chopping block. I let the curtain drop.
“So when you knew him back then, you were eleven or twelve, and Reuben was … nineteen or twenty?”
Mike nodded. “Something like that. My parents didn’t know about it, of course. And the attraction was, he liked to be the power in any situation.”
Reuben Tate was just rising like hell in my estimation. Blackmail, murder, pedophilia or one of its cousins—what would be next among his habits: cannibalism?
“And he liked that I would do what he said,” Mike went on. “Typing, for instance: I could do that. Not fast, but I could. I was a bookwormish kid. So he made me do it if he wanted something typed. I was scared of him, to tell you the truth.”
“But you still spent time with him. How did that happen? I mean, where, for instance?”
“Oh, around,” Mike said vaguely. Then he looked straight at me. “See, I was a child. We weren’t friends in the way any normal person would use the word. He just had a weird thing about me; I don’t know. Like a pet,” he repeated.
“Mike,” Ellie said, “are you sure you weren’t among Reuben’s present-day enemies?”
I’d have asked him about the other victim, too, if I’d been the one putting the question, though I might not have asked at all. It flat-out implied that Mike might be a murder suspect. But he seemed not to take any offense.
“Oh, no,” he said serenely, looking almost amused. “That’s what you still don’t understand. That was then, and this is now. What’s past is past.”
He got up from the table. His hands were red and work-roughened, and there was an ugly-looking recent burn on the back of the right one.
“That looks painful,” I said, but he shrugged off the injury easily.
“Can’t be too careful with a woodstove. One slip, and the next thing you know, hssst! But it’s healing okay.”
Molly returned as he filled the kettle again, from a big metal carboy of water on the sink. “I probably wouldn’t have told you about me and Reuben at all. It isn’t something I like talking about. Too,” he made a little grimace of distaste, “weird. But I hear Willow Prettymore is back in town for the festival and she’s sure to gossip a mile a minute. So—”
He lifted his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture. “I just go on,” he said, dismissing the subject. “Would you like to take some gingerbread? Molly, wrap it up for these ladies.”
The child scurried wordlessly to obey.
“Mike,” I asked, “did Bob Arnold happen to mention anyone else Reuben might have been giving trouble to lately?”
“More than the usual, you mean? No, he didn’t really seem to have a clue about that. And I didn’t,” he went on, “offer any.”
Molly returned, handing me the parcel. She was very self-possessed for a young girl, her manner gravely polite. Yet she had an odd, repressed air of babyish-ness, too; at her age, many girls in the city had already become mall rats.
Mike hesitated as if wondering whether to elaborate on his last remark. Then:
“I hear the Sondergards are playing on the bandstand for the Salmon Sunday supper,” he said to Ellie.
“Dad,” the little girl interrupted insistently, tugging at her father’s sleeve.
As Mike lay a soothing hand on the girl’s shoulder, it struck me that Molly might be a wee tad overprotected, especially way out here with no other children of her age to play with. Given a choice, though, I’d take that over a whole mall full of preadolescent girls in spandex halter tops and eye makeup. In Eastport, a child could still be a child long after the city kids were getting rushed willy-nilly into the adulthood.
“Dad, I need you to help me with this,” Molly persisted. “I need you now.”
So th
e kid wasn’t perfect, and if you dropped her in a mall she’d probably go hysterical from sensory overload. But if Mike Carpentier had chosen to stick to a strict parenting route, lots of his own input and not much from anyone else, I couldn’t blame him. If I’d done it earlier, maybe Sam wouldn’t have had so much trouble.
When we left, the two of them were standing in the doorway, waving serenely, Molly with her macramé project in her hands. The downhill trip was easier and faster than the climb up; in a few minutes we were back at the Jeep.
I opened the gingerbread package; the fragrance of cloves filled the air. “How does he manage up there? No power, no running water. Not even a telephone—what happens if there’s an emergency? Can you really raise somebody on a CB radio? And what about winter?”
I ate a morsel of gingerbread. “Or does he hole up in the cottage until spring? Home-school Molly, eat what they’ve canned from the garden and butcher a few chickens till the snow melts? Pray,” I added, “that neither one of them needs an ambulance, or that the cottage needs a fire truck.”
Ellie glanced wryly at me. “First of all, Mike is prepared for any emergency short of being at ground zero. I looked around a bit while you two were talking—there’s a water tank up the hill in case of fire, a first-aid kit that makes Terence’s look like a toy doctor bag, enough canned goods to stock a supermarket out in the shed. There’s the radio for emergencies. I doubt there’s a whole lot of people Mike chats to on a regular basis, so he doesn’t need a phone. And he drives Molly to school every morning, picks her up in the afternoon.”
“Drives? But … Oh.” That Ford Escort, I realized, pulled to the side of the cove road. “So he isn’t the hermit he appears?”
“Nope. Just when he wants to be.” Ellie pulled the Jeep into my driveway, beside which stood all those storm windows. A pang of urgency stabbed me at the sight of them, because September in Maine is like the condemned man’s last meal: fun while it lasts, but it won’t put off what is coming.