by Sarah Graves
“Not that the self-sufficiency routine does too much,” Ellie added, “for Molly’s social life. From what people say around town, I guess Mike doesn’t think Molly’s peers are fit companions.”
She swung out of the Jeep and walked with me to the house. “I wanted you to meet him,” she went on, “before I told you much about him, so you could form your own impression. But to tell you the truth I wasn’t surprised that Bob Arnold had gone to see him. Mike’s a good father but otherwise he’s pretty strange.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I kind of enjoyed him. Just because he’s independent, likes to do things his own way. I don’t see why it should make a person feel suspicious of him.”
I held out the remaining gingerbread. “Want a piece?”
Ellie stopped by the porch steps. “No, thanks. Interesting he should bring up the Sondergards, too. Maybe we ought to talk to them. I think his mentioning them was no accident; he isn’t a fool. And the same with Willow Prettymore …”
Her voice trailed off thoughtfully.
Checking the mailbox, I found it empty, then remembered it was Sunday. “Come on, Ellie. Aren’t you making him out to be more subtle than he is?”
I opened the back door. “Mike’s a plain-looking, plain-speaking guy who does what he wants and says what he thinks, from what I can see. I admire that.”
Inside, Monday galloped to meet us. “It was weird, his story about Reuben. And I’ll admit I had a bad moment with the blood on the chopping block. But all he’d done was kill a chicken for his Sunday dinner. Whacked,” I finished, “its head off.”
“Huh,” Ellie said skeptically, ruffling the dog’s ears. “I’m surprised he bothered.”
I turned on the coffeemaker. “What do you mean by that?”
She eyed me levelly. “The cat Molly was burying? Did you get a look at it? A good,” she emphasized, “look?”
“No, why?” I picked up the gingerbread again, meaning to put it in an airtight container, since Ellie didn’t want it.
“Because,” Ellie said, patting Monday’s head and making more kind noises at her, “somebody had wrung that cat’s neck.”
I dropped the gingerbread in the trash.
“Oh, and one other thing,” she added. “The man Paddy said was going to testify against Reuben? But instead got found with a bump on his head,” she finished, “down in his own cellar?”
“You know about that?”
The coffeemaker burbled. I turned from the refrigerator where I was getting out the cream. I had not mentioned that part of my trip with Paddy and Terence.
“Uh-huh.” Ellie reached up into the cabinet, came down with cups and saucers. “Paddy always likes to tell that story when the topic of Reuben comes up, so I figured he’d told it to you. But for some reason there’s always one aspect of it he leaves out.”
If he thinks leaving something out’ll make him look better, Wade had said of Paddy, he’ll do it. “What part is that?”
Sunshine from the tall kitchen window fell slantwise on the cup Ellie was holding, filling it with milky light.
“The man in the cellar was Paddy’s father,” she said.
The telephone rang.
“Jacobia. Good to talk to you. Wish it were under different circumstances.”
“Hello, Ben.” It was a voice from the bad old days. Bennet Berman had handled Victor’s side of the divorce. “Since when are you doing criminal cases?”
“Since never. Just getting the ducks in a row for your ex. He’ll have a criminal defense attorney, of course. I’m not even licensed to practice in Maine.”
Right; divorce as a metaphor for all-out nuclear war hadn’t yet gotten fashionable up here in moose country, so there wasn’t much real call for Bennet’s area of expertise.
“But Victor wants me on the team,” Bennet went on. “He seems to feel there are ways I can be effective.”
I banished memories of just how effective he’d been against me; as Mike Carpentier had said, that was then and this was now.
And Victor needed all the help he could get. “So what kind of quacking are you hearing, Ben? From the ducks in the row.”
His laugh turned mirthless. “Well. It’s still the weekend, so things aren’t high gear yet. But I’ve got a faxed preliminary medical report on the victim. Victor said”—Bennet’s tone was puzzled—“that you would want to hear it.”
“You’re kidding.” Back in the old days when I was a money manager, Victor seemed to feel my job was the equivalent of being a bank teller. Instead of listening to my financial advice, he preferred to have his stock accounts churned by a sweaty-palmed guy in a cubicle somewhere out in East Omaha.
But Ellie and I had nosed rather thoroughly into Eastport troubles, before—with, I might add, good results—and although Victor had never indicated approval, apparently he had noticed.
“Here goes.” Bennet began reading, paraphrasing as he went: “Death due to major hemorrhage, ligature marks on the ankles, at least one sedative plus alcohol in the blood. Details aren’t in yet, so we don’t know what kind of drug it was.”
So that was how someone had gotten Reuben up on that gate: he’d been alive, all right. But maybe not kicking. Which meant it would have been taken less physical power than I’d envisioned.
“No blood on Victor,” Bennet went on, “which isn’t so good. Seeing as he’d spent the previous evening treating an injury from a bar brawl.”
“Well, but that’s reasonable. He would wash. Victor washes if anybody looks at him cross-eyed, and that wound he’d stitched up was pretty bloody.”
“That’s not how you’d play it if you were the prosecutor, though. Could be the injured guy’s blood Victor washed off. Or …”
Right. Or it could have been Reuben’s. “What about his clothes? Had he thrown them out, or washed them?” Sam had said Victor ran the washing machine and put out a bag of garbage, and the truck had come, though it wasn’t the regular day for pickup.
“Neither. Burned ’em in the burn barrel behind his house. They think they’re going to find blood evidence on the remains of them, which he’d disposed of afterwards in the trash.”
Oh, criminy. “So the laundry was …”
“Towels and whatnot from the shower he took. Won’t be able to type the blood, though, most likely. Same with the blood in the traps,” Bennet continued, “under the sink and so on. Seems that according to Victor, he regularly ran enough hot water and bleach down there to sterilize the whole sewer system.” Even burning the clothes wasn’t so far-fetched, for Victor; once they were contaminated he’d have treated them like any other medical waste.
“Sure,” Bennet said resignedly when I explained this to him. “I can see it. I couldn’t say this to you when we were on opposite sides, Jacobia. But Victor’s a strange little duck, in the hygiene department especially.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. You only had him on your agenda for thirteen months. I had him for a dozen years.”
“But,” he went on, “try floating that Mr. Clean stuff past a jury. They’ll laugh in your face. Because there’s still the small problem of the weapon. How’d somebody else get hold of it?”
Let’s see, now: After explaining to the jury that Victor was so fastidious that he actually carried antiseptic hand wipes in his pocket in case he had to talk on a strange telephone, we could go on to say that he lived in a town where people didn’t always lock their doors when they went out, because for one thing they didn’t need to, and for another, they never knew when someone else might need to get in. Thus, anyone could have taken the scalpel.
Sure. And if pigs had wings, then smoky links could fly. “So what’s the plan?” I asked dejectedly.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll be lining up my Maine colleagues, see if we can try for bail. It won’t work, of course. And we’ll try for a decent alibi. But I doubt that’ll happen, either. Sam say anything to you about seeing Victor that night?”
My heart sank. “Uh-huh. Listen, Bennet, I don’
t care what he saw. I don’t want Sam testifying against Victor.”
A brief pause. “Well, we’re not there, yet. Let’s just see how things develop, all right?”
I already knew how things would develop: like one of the tumors Victor was so good at taking out. But occasionally one of them was so fast and malignant, no one could stop it.
“Bennet, did Victor say how he knew Reuben Tate had been murdered?” It was the part that still bothered me the most, that he’d known before he should have. I could explain all the rest, but even I couldn’t explain that one.
Bennet’s deep, unhappy sigh was the echo of my own. “He says he got two phone calls early that morning, the second from your town cop, Bob Arnold. Arnold wanted to talk to Victor about the other guy who died, with the tie in his throat. So they agreed to meet at your place.”
Which jibed with what Arnold had told me in the cemetery. “And the first call?”
“Well. This is the difficult part. Victor says he got a call from someone he didn’t recognize. That the voice was disguised; he couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. A high whisper was the way he described it.”
“Telling him Reuben Tate was dead.”
“Right. Told him Tate wouldn’t be bothering him anymore, and enough more about what happened—Victor says he doesn’t remember the exact words—so Victor knew how Tate had died. Then hung up.”
“This was after Victor had done all his washing and so on.”
“Uh-huh,” Bennet agreed unhappily. “And Victor says he can’t explain why the garbage guy came. Says he didn’t call him. What the garbage guy says, he doesn’t know who it was. His kid took a message, kid’s like five years old. So you see the problems.”
My turn to sigh. “You bet.”
“Jacobia,” his tone was hesitant, “among your complaints in the divorce was that Victor is a rather skilled and habitual …”
“Liar. Sure, there was that. But, Bennet, it was about women. This is different. This is …”
A set-up, I wanted to say, still trying to get used to the notion myself. A deliberate plan to get Victor blamed … But I thought I’d better examine this idea before talking about it.
Bennet, I noticed, wasn’t mentioning it either. Your honor, my client has been framed—
Right. And before that, he was abducted by aliens. “Bennet, is there anything I can do right now to help?”
He cleared his throat delicately. “Well, Jacobia, you can explain how I’m going to get paid. Sorry to have to mention it, but Victor was vague on that point.”
Victor had put every cent he owned into his trauma project: plans, a site workup, architects, regulatory research. Getting a start-up medical thing going was very expensive.
“Oh, I’ll bet he was vague. Send me the bills, Bennet, and I’ll work it out with him when this is all over.”
“Will do. And I’ll keep you posted with any developments.”
Hanging up, I found myself alone in the house. Ellie had signed up to help make costumes for the children’s parade, part of the upcoming festival; she’d gone off while I was on the phone with Bennet, and Sam and Wade were out, too.
So I thought I might work on the windows; heaven knew they still needed it. But the big old house felt echoingly empty all around me, which was unusual for it, and even from upstairs I could feel the presence of that dratted Ouija board.
As a result I hit my thumb twice with the hammer, then took a nick out of my palm with the cuts-all tool. The weatherstripping would not lie flat, curling this way and that like some bright copper snake, wriggly with malicious willfulness.
So after half an hour of doing things wrong, then making them worse by trying to fix them or do them over, I called Bob Arnold and asked him to meet me at Bay Books.
The bookstore on Water Street had been an old-style pharmacy with a soda fountain, in its previous incarnation. Bailey James had kept the red leather stools and booths, the beveled mirror behind the fountain’s marble-topped counter, the fizzy-water dispenser and the bottles of syrups and flavorings. Then she’d brought in bestsellers, the latest mystery novels, a magazine rack that carried WIRED and The Drood Review, and a pay-by-the-half-hour Internet connection.
The result combined the charm of old Eastport with a modern hit of Y2K-and-beyond snazziness; in one visit, you could satisfy your addictions to caffeine, whodunnits, the World Wide Web, and of course that most necessary Eastport commodity, local gossip.
Bob Arnold wasn’t there yet. I slid onto a stool at the counter as Bailey began making my regular drink, a coffee frappe.
“So tell me,” I said as she squirted whipped cream on the concoction of coffee, ice cream, vanilla, and a sprinkling of cinnamon, “about these musicians in town for the festival, the Sondergards.”
In one of the booths, Darcy Morrell from the Women’s Guild was explaining to Heather Banks how to piece a log-cabin quilt; her canvas workbag was open and bright fabric swatches were laid out on the table between them.
“Heywood and Marcus,” Darcy said, looking up from her quilt pieces.
“Father’s a minister. Son too, I think,” Heather added.
In the booth just behind them, Chuck Wilkes broke off from insisting that Passamaquoddy Bay harbored lobsters the size of Volkswagens but you never saw them; they never came up from where they had been spawning for a hundred years.
“Sing-along revivalists,” he said. “Call themselves Bible Belters, go around Maine in a big Winnebago, singing for Christ.”
“Snake-handling,” Chuck’s companion contributed, peering over his coffee. He wore denim coveralls, rubber boots, and a cap that said MOOSE ISLAND MARINE. “Speaking in tongues and so on. Falling down in religious fits. That’s their specialty.”
“It is not. They’re nice men,” Bailey said admonishingly. “I declare, that’s the way foolish stories get started.”
She handed me my change from the old-fashioned register. “They’re up at the Heddlepenny House, staying all week. Heywood has a piano-type contraption and a guitar. And Marcus I believe plays the banjo.”
I thought Bailey might as well unhook the Internet link; all the information anyone could ever need was already there in the store.
“They go to early services at First Baptist when they’re in town,” Heather said. “So they’re probably home by now.”
Just then Bob came in, got a coffee, and walked with me to the booth in the back of the shop, the look on his round, pink face one of abiding disgust.
“This murder business,” he said, sliding in across from me, “is not the kind of tourist attraction the chamber of commerce had in mind when they started advertising us as a big downeast Maine travel destination, tryin’ to get publicity.”
He took a swallow of coffee. “City manager’s office is in a tizzy gettin’ calls from reporters who want to know does Eastport have a serial killer? ’Cause if we do, we can all get on Hard Copy, but if it’s just us folks killin’ one another, that ain’t as newsworthy.”
Oh, he was on a tear. I tried edging him in a new direction.
“Well, but you know what the flip side is, don’t you? It’s that most of the time, the great big world out there leaves us alone, way up here at the edge of the continent. To do things the way we want to, take care of things that way, too.”
He nodded reluctantly. Bailey came over with the cream and sugar, caught my expression, and didn’t stick around to chat.
“Which,” I went on, getting to the point, “I think somebody did when they finished off Reuben Tate. Took care of things their own way, I mean. And I’ll tell you another thing, Arnold: I think somebody set Victor up for it on purpose.”
I didn’t feel so nervous about floating this theory with Bob as I had with Bennet. As a small-town police chief, Bob had seen a lot of odd things, and their odd-ness hadn’t prevented them from being true. His gaze sharpened as I told him about the call Victor said he’d gotten, and the mysterious coming of the trash truck.
“People in town knew Reuben was giving Victor trouble,” I said. “And I know of people who’d been in his house, probably seen his collection of surgical instruments. You can’t walk down the hall without passing it.”
Well, Mike Carpentier had been in Victor’s house recently, anyway, and likely there were more. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard about any fingerprints, by any chance? On, say, the weapon?”
“Nuh-uh. Glove marks on his skin, maybe. Burn ’em, or toss ’em in the bay, they’re gone forever, probably.”
“Darn. But my point is, if you hung back and watched for your chance, you could steal a scalpel from Victor’s collection and kill Reuben with it, on a night when Victor had no alibi for his time. That Victor had threatened Reuben, and that he had a reason to clean up so thoroughly—”
“Him bein’ a few fish short of a bucketful, in the rub-a-dub department,” Arnold put in accurately.
“Right. That would be, from your angle if you were a sneaky murderer, just dumb luck. Whenever you find out about it, you use it, even work it into your plan. Take advantage,” I finished, “of happenstance.”
“Nothing dumb about the rest of it, though,” Arnold said shrewdly. “And the call would seal it. He’d know Reuben was dead when he couldn’t have yet, and he couldn’t prove how he found out. Same with that garbage truck.”
“Seems Reuben was talking up his plan to blackmail Victor, too,” I said, “so more than one person might have thought to take advantage of that. And sometimes when people get away with things, it’s because other things just happened to go their way,” I finished. “Like the bar fight, and Victor’s hygiene fixation. You couldn’t plan that, it would be a couple of lucky breaks you would use, just because they came along.”
Arnold nodded. “Maybe,” he allowed. “But what about the drugs in Tate’s system? I hear he was loaded with sedatives. The state boys,” he added sarcastically, “let me in on a few things.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t say I had it all figured out. But I doubt Victor’s the only one on the island with a bottle of Valium or whatever. For all I know, Reuben had them himself.”