Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  But there wouldn’t have to be. As he’d said, Marcus was very protective.

  “And the other night? When he came to Heddlepenny House, was Reuben up to his old tricks? Or was it really, as Marcus says, a pastoral visit?”

  He tipped his head slightly, in apparent contrition. “I told Marcus that so he wouldn’t worry. Tate wanted money.”

  “Surely that didn’t surprise you?”

  His shoulders moved in a sigh. “I had hoped that my tactic with Reuben Tate had finally borne fruit. But I was disappointed.”

  “What tactic?”

  A little silence. Then: “I’m an old man. I don’t care what people say anymore. Nor did I ever, really. But Marcus—he cares very much.”

  Not an answer. I began thinking that Heywood Sondergard, for all the simple, beaming goodness of his public persona, might be a slick character.

  He dipped the paddle again. “Still, there’s little enough love in the world as it is. I won’t condemn any variety of it, even by denying a story that isn’t true. Not anymore.”

  “But Marcus might. For your sake or his.”

  He feathered the paddle expertly, replied with subtle skill. “Marcus is a young man. From my point of view, anyway. He has never had much to do with women at any time in his life. Except, of course, with his mother.”

  Suggesting, I thought, that Marcus could have been the actual blackmail target instead of Heywood. But not admitting it. Blowing smoke at me was what he was doing. On the shore a deer drank placidly: young male, fuzzy nubs of antlers.

  “He has a woman friend now,” Heywood went on. “Lovely woman. Lives in Portland. But I fear she may be growing impatient. We all feel time passing as we get older.”

  “Why don’t you tell him to go?”

  If you know he’s ruining his chances, I meant. Heywood heard the implied criticism, replied easily to it.

  “It’s not that simple. Marcus has a sense of duty. And what would he do? There aren’t,” he added gently, “a lot of employment opportunities for a man who has spent his whole adult life as an itinerant Bible thumper, banjo player, and freelance do-gooder.”

  Correct; I just hadn’t thought of it.

  “No, if I wanted to send Marcus out into the world without me, I should have started thirty years ago. As it is, he’s stuck with me until I die.”

  The thought hung in the bright air. “And then?”

  The kayak shot skimmingly on the water. “I made provision,” he admitted, “once I realized how I’d crippled the boy. Without me there’s no musical duo, and Marcus is no solo artist, he knows that. Even that small source of income will be closed to him when I’m gone. But …”

  He turned the kayak back toward shore. “I arranged a sizable life-insurance benefit. He’ll land on his feet.”

  The water was crystalline, minnows flashing as we went over them. “And,” he added, “despite the lady’s impatience, I believe she thinks half a million—and Marcus, of course—are worth the wait.”

  “Practical move,” I said, considering it with my financial head. A stake like that, properly invested, was just about right. Interesting too the way he’d dangled diversionary bait in front of me, so that suddenly we were talking about Marcus instead of about Reuben. I aimed my next question carefully.

  “Do you think he resents it? Marcus, I mean. That you acted in certain ways when he was young, and that’s turned out to have influenced his whole life?”

  But not carefully enough. His answering laugh was hearty and knowing. “You’re asking whether my son is psychologically damaged enough to commit a murder in a particularly hideous fashion?”

  That was fair. “Actually, yes.”

  “Well, he’s not. Marcus couldn’t kill anyone. Take it from a man who really knows him. But why don’t you suspect me? Too old?”

  Suddenly I liked the Reverend Sondergard a lot despite the way he was evading me, or maybe even because of it. He was smart, a clever talker, impossible to offend, and no fool. Because you don’t have a wound on your hand, I wanted to tell him.

  But Marcus did have. Or might have; I still didn’t know what the mark was.

  “I’m just trying to understand it all,” I said. “I know Reuben threatened you. It was you, not Marcus? Since you raised the question, really; I want to be absolutely clear about it.”

  A nod. “It was me.”

  “And that drove you out of town. You don’t care anymore, but Marcus still wants it kept quiet. You both think Reuben had to do with the death of your wife, but neither of you can prove it. And you still haven’t explained what you meant about the tactic you mentioned, why you and Reuben kept ending up in the same places.”

  Another silence, longer. “It’s true that when I decided to leave back then, he threatened to follow.”

  Suddenly I understood. “So the hunter became the hunted. I suppose you had a connection here at the post office, to keep you current of his forwarding address.”

  Wade had done it too, but he had stopped there. Going on with it was a brilliant turnabout, the one thing Tate would never have expected. To be pursued …

  “What I still don’t see, though, is the reason.”

  He dug his paddle in. The kayak tilted startlingly. I leaned the other way from reflex, crossed my arms over my chest.

  The craft settled. When he spoke again his tone was harsh. “No, of course you don’t. Why would you? I’m an old guy who sings Jesus music. I’m surprised you even noticed.”

  He pushed us toward the beach. “He’d killed my wife, scared my son, mortified my spirit. But yet I was a man of religion.” He said it resignedly, as if it were some chronic, incurable disease.

  “So I prayed over it. What could I do when confronted with an evil like that? What was my task that had been set for me? What,” he intoned, “was my duty?”

  A flock of mallards rose from a cove all at once, the sound of their beating wings huge in the bright noonday silence.

  “I wanted his soul,” Heywood Sondergard said. “I wanted his immortal soul. And I was determined to have it.” He set the kayak parallel to the dock.

  “So you and Marcus followed him. What did he think of it?” I tried to imagine. “It must’ve driven him nuts.”

  Heywood chuckled. Somewhere an outboard roared, then fell into a low, steady rumble. Across the lake, a kid ran off the end of a pier, landed in the water with a splash, shouted at the cold.

  “At first he would try to attack us. Throw things, try to start fires under the Winnebago, that kind of behavior.”

  Heywood sounded almost indulgent. “Then he began trying to avoid us. To Reuben, we were the conscience he never had.”

  “So the other night, why did he …?”

  “Visit, and threaten? I suppose back on his home territory he felt stronger. He thought he might get the upper hand again. But he didn’t. I refused his demand, laughed at his threat, and told him we were going to follow him till the day he died.”

  At the memory, Heywood sounded pleased. “And you know what? I think Reuben finally believed me. He looked … frightened.”

  “And you figured what, that he’d break down someday? Throw himself on your mercy and beg forgiveness? Embrace salvation?”

  Heywood waved a hand as if acknowledging the unlikeliness of any such thing. The kayak slid in against the dock pilings.

  “I didn’t know. I only knew I had to try what I could, that if he were saved it would have made it all worth it.”

  He set the paddles on the dock. “That a change of heart was the only thing that could make any of it worth it.”

  A car was pulling up to the camps. “My ride,” Heywood said.

  I had a last question but didn’t know how to put it. The killer almost surely didn’t know about the skin shred in Weasel Bodine’s mouth, and if I tipped that domino over I didn’t know what might happen. Besides, I’d promised Bob Arnold not to mention it.

  I could ask one thing, though: “Was Wesley Bodine ever a membe
r of the youth group you had at the church?”

  He didn’t have to think about it. “I don’t remember anyone by that name. And I would; I knew all the youngsters quite well.”

  “I see. Well, thanks for talking to me. You cleared up a lot of things I’d worried over. And I don’t suspect Marcus anymore,” I added, putting just the right touch of shamefaced apology into it. “I’m afraid my imagination must just’ve kind of gotten away from me.”

  As I’d told Marcus, I’d met some great liars in the city. What I hadn’t said was how much I’d learned: watching, listening. Or how much I’d practiced the art myself.

  Heywood had told the truth about not knowing Wesley Bodine. Now he smiled forgivingly, turned to walk toward the car.

  “Oh, and by the way,” I said casually, “if Marcus ever wants a cosmetic surgeon to check his hand—for that scar or birthmark or whatever it is—my ex-husband can refer him to a great one.”

  Heywood stopped, turned back again slowly, his blue eyes fixing me in a gaze that was deliberately transparent. The belt buckle winked slyly at me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  Walking back along the rutted dirt track, I found the farm ruins still mouldering in the slanted sunlight, gnarled branches of old apple trees casting crooked shadows. Thick clumps of pale, blue-green iris foliage marked the old perennial garden, ancient roots pushing out of the earth like massive knucklebones.

  A scallop dragger puttered in the channel at the end of the old Toll Road as I crossed the causeway back onto the island. In my rearview a line of cars had begun forming; off-islanders, most likely, impatient to reach their destination after a long drive.

  There was nowhere for them to pass and I’d been just loafing along. I hit the gas hard and sailed into a long uphill curve, my thoughts still on Heywood’s last comment. He’d been lying.

  The engine coughed. I glanced at the dash. The gas gauge’s needle sat on E. Impossible—but there was no time to worry about the implications of it; I was already into the curve.

  The engine died, slowing me suddenly. The power steering went too, and to make matters worse, a car behind me was speeding up, pulling out, trying to pass.

  Disastrously worse, actually: An air horn shot my attention forward again. An eighteen-wheeler, coming the other way around the curve …

  I hauled the steering wheel, struggling to get off the road. The right front tire bit into the soft, sandy shoulder, slowing me further but not, I felt suddenly, slowing me enough. Ahead was a metal guardrail, beyond it thin air followed by a three-hundred-foot drop to the water, and of course I had no power brakes at that point, either.

  The truck got bigger, its air horn blasting again. The car that had been trying to pass was now right beside me, aimed head-on at the truck. He couldn’t back off; the other cars had pulled up, closing the gap. But the big vehicle didn’t have anywhere to go either, because to its right was a vertical granite cliff, the continuation of the ledge that the road had been built into. The only area of shoulder was occupied by the massive, disabled crane-hauling rig I’d seen earlier, on my way out.

  Oh, it was fascinating, and happening so fast, yet slowly, too. Gracefully, inevitably. In the next few instants, several of us were going to die, not a thing I could do about it.

  Suddenly the car beside me slammed mine, with a thud that snapped my head sideways. It jolted me toward the rail, which was a puny thing, toylike, and then I couldn’t see the rail at all because it was underneath my front bumper. Thin air yawned ahead of me and he jolted me again, trying to get by; a metallic groan said the rail was giving under the pressure.

  Then with a shriek of metal on metal the other car scraped past, skinning the eighteen-wheeler and my front fender by a matter of inches. My front bumper bent the guardrail out another fraction, trying to uproot the rail’s support posts, stopped.

  And then it was over, the big rig’s air horn howling one way, the car speeding away in the other. The ones behind me kept on going too; there was nowhere for them to stop.

  I just sat there, looking out over the dashboard to the water. A seagull swooped down, peered curiously at me with a sideways flash of his beady eye, flapped away again.

  Finally I picked up the car phone and called Bob Arnold, my hands shaking and my voice an odd, breathless cartoon version of itself. And then I waited by the side of the car, its emergency blinkers on, hoping the vehicles coming up from behind would see the flashers and not give the car a final, over-the-edge bump. It didn’t take long before I heard the crunch of a car pulling onto the narrow verge, and I turned expectantly, figuring that Arnold could put his squad’s cherry beacon on, stop traffic long enough for me to empty a gas can into my vehicle’s tank and get into the driving lane again.

  But it wasn’t Arnold. It was the blond woman I’d collided with outside Paddy Farrell’s and whose photo I’d seen at Mike Carpentier’s cottage: Molly Carpentier’s mother.

  “Hey,” she said cheerfully, getting out of her rental sedan. “Problem? I’m Anne Carpentier.”

  She strode toward me. “Hope you’ve recovered from that smack I gave you. I get to barreling along on some errand, don’t always watch where I’m going.”

  She stuck her hand out and I shook it, introducing myself. Her grip was firm but not overwhelming in that crushing, I’ve-got-a-point-to-make way that some very physically fit women affect.

  She eyed my car. “It looked like you hit the guardrail,” she said. “So I just wondered if you were okay. Guess it’s not as bad as I thought, though.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, noticing those violet eyes again. Then I explained briefly the fix I was in, not expecting there was much she could do about it but glad, actually, for some company.

  “Bummer,” she commented succinctly. “Hey, I’ve got a coffee Thermos in my car. Want some?”

  I accepted gratefully and found a Styrofoam cup in my backseat; moments later we were chatting like a couple of old pals.

  “I met your daughter,” I said as she poured steaming liquid from the Thermos. “She’s a beautiful little girl.”

  Anne Carpentier nodded proudly. “Yeah. She’s a peach all right. I’ve been a little worried about her, now that I’m away so much.” She went on to confirm what I already knew about her: merchant marine, lots of travel, not very frequent visits home.

  “But Mike’s doing a great job with Molly,” Anne finished. “I wouldn’t be able to keep working if I didn’t think so.”

  I didn’t say anything. The idea of leaving Sam for months at a time when he was little would never have occurred to me; doing it would nearly have killed me.

  Anne drank some coffee, looked pointedly over the cup at me. “Lots of the guys I go to sea with are fathers. Nobody tells them they’re bad fathers, or implies it. People have to make a living, you know.”

  Her tone was gentle but the meaning of her remarks was not. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. It’s just that … Well, you don’t think she’s a little isolated?” I hazarded.

  But at this she only laughed. “You’ve been listening to too much Eastport small talk. I asked Molly about that, and it seems she has a perfectly satisfactory social life at school. And she does see a few other children outside of school, too. It’s just that Mike looks them over pretty carefully, and he’s stepped on a few toes doing it.”

  She looked out over the guardrail at the water. “That’s the thing about him, see. I couldn’t live with him. I never should have been married at all,” she added wryly, “if you want to know the truth. Definitely not to someone as sensitive and complicated as he is.”

  “Because?” It was an oddly personal admission from someone I’d just met, but it didn’t feel that way. I got the sense that Anne Carpentier wasn’t much for meaningless small talk, that she made a habit of cutting right to the chase. I liked it.

  “He keeps things to himself,” she replied. “I don’t pick up on them, then his feelings get more hu
rt. And they stay hurt. I’m more the bull-in-a-china-shop type, wade right in and battle to the death, you know? Take care of things and pick up the pieces later.”

  Her face as she said this was as calm and sunny as a summer morning, her yellow curls bobbing in the breeze off the water, her remarkable eyes untroubled.

  “But Mike would fight wild tigers for Molly,” she finished. “And that’s what’s important, if I’m not there to do it.”

  She put the top back on the Thermos, caught sight of Arnold in the squad coming around the curve. “Looks like your ride’s on its way,” she remarked. “I’m going to get moving.”

  “Thanks for stopping.” I was glad she had. I liked the fact that she would pull off the road for a stranger who looked to be in trouble. “Are you going to be in town long?”

  She shook her head, getting back into her car. “Going out tonight. Hey, nice meeting you. Maybe see you next time.”

  She started the engine. Cars on the road were still passing in a steady stream, and I didn’t see how she would make it back into the traveling lane without help; I stepped over to stop the traffic so she could get out, but she was already nosing the rental onto the pavement, getting the oncoming cars to make way for her by ignoring them, so they had to let her in or hit her.

  Gutsy, I thought. She waved cheerfully and drove off, as Arnold pulled into the space she had vacated.

  “This tank was half-full,” I answered his admonishing look, “this morning.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Sure Sam didn’t drive it? Or Wade?”

  I didn’t bother to answer that; he knew Sam walked and Wade always took his truck. Instead, I told him about Monday’s nose.

  “That makes two incidents,” I said. “Somebody siphoned the gas out of that tank, Bob, when I was out at the lake.”

  He peered under the car. “No leak, or not big enough that I can see.”

  “Bob, the tank’s empty. And don’t you think I’d have noticed if I was leaking gasoline all the way home? I’d have smelled it.”

  “That’s true.” He squinted out at the water, considering.