Wicked Fix
Page 28
A bat swooped past, twittering as it gobbled the last of the autumn insects. “This afternoon he was working the phone so fast I thought it was going to melt in his hand. He’s got a new idea to add to his plan. And it’s such a hot money maker, he’s already got folks begging to be in on it. Alternative therapies.”
She glanced sideways at me as we headed downhill past the Quoddy Tides building, its little frame structure perched neatly on an outcropping overlooking the boat basin. Beyond, Leighton’s Variety was doing brisk business in quarts of milk, packs of cigarettes, all the things people suddenly discover they want in late evening, or they just want a little ride to the store.
“Herbs,” I explained. “Acupuncture, massage, hypnosis.” People wanted those things, too. And increasingly their insurance would pay for them. The trauma center would be a great resource for Eastport, but with the alternative-therapies clinic he was now planning to add, I thought Victor had actually stumbled onto something brilliant.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. But Victor’s planning something else, too. He’s going to Portland tomorrow.”
Her face lit up. “Terence?” she asked, her voice not daring to sound optimistic.
“Uh-huh. He’s stabilized but still comatose. Victor says he won’t get any better until somebody removes the blood clots from the injury, and that would be very risky.”
I took a deep, lung-cooling breath of the damp, salt-tangy air, more delicious than any champagne.
“Victor wants to do it, though, and he wants to go after the scar tissue at the same time. I don’t understand all of it,” I confessed. “But Victor’s been on the phone with the surgeons in Portland, and he seems to think he can get Terence through it.”
What he’d said, actually, was something about one hand tied behind his back. But I was sure he would really use both of them.
She frowned. “What about Terence’s illness? And doesn’t somebody have to give permission? For the surgery?”
“There’s no reason people with HIV can’t have this surgery, Victor says. That’s not a factor, given Terence’s good health otherwise. And Paddy can give permission.”
A thump of regret hit me as I thought of this. If I hadn’t been so diverted by the diaries, I’d have paid more attention to the letter Terence had written to go with them, to Terence’s attorney.
“Terence was confused. But Paddy was right, he had enough sense left to know something bad was happening to him. In his last lucid moments he gave Paddy power of attorney and appointed him his legal guardian. The letter was to tell his lawyer so.”
I heard Ellie sigh. “So Terence will get a chance.”
Out on the water, the ferry was making its final passage to Deer Island for the night, its deck a puddle of light. The waves of its wake began slopping desultorily on the gravel shore.
“A little chance,” I agreed.
Which I guessed was all any of us got. Only for some of us, little miracles happened too.
“Sam’s staying around here and going to college,” I said. This time he seemed really sure of it. “He told us at dinner. He’ll work part-time at the boatyard, commute to the University of Maine in Machias. Best of both worlds, it seems to me.”
Also, it gave him a way to start that he felt he could handle. Later, Dan Harpwell would help him plan how to go on.
“Wonderful. How did he decide, finally?” Ellie reached down and took an urchin shell out of Monday’s mouth.
“Victor. Can you believe it? He told Sam that he, Victor, I mean, really needed Sam around to help him—to assist him in the task of acclimating himself to downeast Maine culture, was the way he put it, and if Sam wanted to go to school could he please find a way to do it and stay here in town? Two minutes later, it was decided.”
“Huh,” Ellie said. “You know, that’s the truly annoying part about Victor. Which is he? Blackhearted, or heart of gold?”
We turned back toward home. “Neither,” I said as we passed Peavy Library and began climbing Key Street, beneath the bare-branched maples looming spectral under the streetlamps. “Victor’s heart, I have decided, is a two-tone model.”
At my house, the workshop on the top floor of the storeroom ell was occupied, Wade’s shape moving behind the window shades. He was reconditioning the storm windows, as he’d promised; he’d done the rest of the weatherstripping, too, while I recuperated.
A little help from my friends: so hard to ask for.
But it was getting easier to take.
Inside we found there’d been a visitor in our absence: some books lay on the kitchen table, and a note from Paddy. It seemed he’d found them in an old strongbox in the rubble of the studio: sheet music, and ancient leather-bound volumes, all handwritten.
“Thought you might like to see these,” the note from Paddy finished. “Off to Portland—fingers crossed.”
The first piece of music, written in ink that was faded but still legible, was titled “The Pirate’s Revenge,” and like the frontispiece of each old diary volume it was signed: Jared Hayes.
The fiddler who had lived in our house all those years ago, and had vanished from it …
“Why would these things be at the cannery?” Ellie asked.
“I have no idea,” I replied, paging carefully through the fragile old sheets of music.
Sam’s voice: “Mom? Can you come and look at this, please?”
“Just a second.” I scanned part of a diary: dates and places where Jared Hayes had played. Notes about what he’d eaten, music he was working on, a violin he expected to receive. Very special, he wrote, a wonderful instrument, lovely and fine.
“Jake,” Ellie said quietly, peering over my shoulder. “He quit writing.”
In the workshop, Wade was listening to his favorite Chet Atkins CD. “Cosmic Square Dance” rang out, ending in its weirdly jubilant, minor-keyed violin solo.
“I know,” I said, distracted, still staring at the name on the diary page: Stradivarius. “He vanished, remember?”
It would have been a fine instrument, all right. So how had a downeast Maine fiddler ever dreamed of having one? For that matter, how had he managed to live in this house, which at the time had been a luxurious dwelling, on an excellent piece of property? Jared Hayes had been a musician, not a ship’s captain or a prosperous trader.
“No,” said Ellie, frowning at the pages. “I mean he stopped in the middle of a sentence. The ink trails off, as if … Have you had any more manifestations lately?”
Flickering lights, she meant, or the faint, sad perfume of camellias. Music playing when no one in the house was playing any music.
A cold spot, there on the stairs and gone.
“No,” I said, realizing there hadn’t been. “It’s been quiet as …”
As the grave, I’d meant to say, but decided not to. Monday looked up from her dog bed in the corner, listened intently.
“Mom?” Sam’s voice, from the dining room. “It did it again.”
“What?” I called, distracted.
“Maybe,” Ellie said, “we should look into the disappearance of Jared Hayes.”
A breeze came in, riffling the pages of the fiddle tunes on the table. I went over, meaning to close the kitchen window. But it was already closed.
Outside, the moon had risen, glazing the pointed fir trees with a rime of silver. High in the sky, Canadian geese arrowed southward and were gone.
“Look at this,” Sam said quietly. “Really, I mean it.”
Only a single lamp shone dimly in the corner of the dining room, our shadows moving hugely in the wreathed acorns-and-oak-leaves pattern of the high tin ceiling.
The Ouija board lay on the table. “I didn’t touch it,” Sam insisted. “But it kept pushing against me. Like Tommy was pushing it for a joke. Only, he’s not here. So finally I got up to come and get you two. And then, when I wasn’t touching it at all …”
He waved, mystified, at the smooth wooden board: the letters and nume
rals, the black-painted words: Yes and No.
One in the upper left-hand corner.
And one in the right.
“It moved,” Sam insisted. “When I was nowhere near it. All by itself, it zoomed up into the corner there. See it?”
The full moon shone brightly through the dining-room window, painting a silver triangle on the board’s surface and lighting the planchette, which just then uncannily resembled a man’s hand.
It was pointing to Yes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels featuring Jacobia Tiptree are set.
If you enjoyed Sarah Graves’s
WICKED FIX
you won’t want to miss any of the exciting books in her Home Repair Is Homicide mystery series.
Look for THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE, TRIPLE WITCH, REPAIR TO HER GRAVE, WRECK THE HALLS, UNHINGED, MALLETS AFORETHOUGHT, TOOL & DIE, NAIL BITER, TRAP DOOR, and THE BOOK OF OLD HOUSES at your favorite bookseller.
And look for the next Home Repair Is
Homicide mystery,
A FACE AT THE WINDOW,
coming soon from Bantam Books.
WICKED FIX
A Bantam Book
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2000 by Sarah Graves
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-57084-0
v3.0