Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  “Oh, sure.” The girl’s mouth twisted. “What about me? What am I supposed to remember him by?”

  I spotted a line of scabs on her arm as she fingered the medallion. Then she slammed into the trailer again, emerging a few seconds later with a bulging canvas satchel.

  “I hate you! You’re all alike. You all just want … want …”

  Fists clenched, she shrieked out a howl of grief. The dog looked up, alarmed, but did not move.

  “Cosmo!” She uttered a command, then scrambled off the deck, darted across the clearing, and vanished into the scrubby woods.

  After an uncertain moment—I thought again that she didn’t know how to handle the animal, that the command she’d given was somehow wrong, or inappropriate—the dog gave up and followed, sailing in among the trees behind her in long, athletic bounds.

  Ellie sighed. “Well, so much for social work. Come on, let’s get whatever Tim might want and get out of here.”

  “Who’s that girl?” I asked as we went in. Then I stopped, unable for a moment to credit my perceptions.

  “Hallie Quinn,” Ellie replied. “I should have figured she’d be out here, it’s perfect for giving her father a heart attack.”

  She frowned. “Do you see what I see?”

  The trailer was immaculate. “Strange but true. Looks like someone has turned into Holly Homemaker.”

  “Hallie,” my friend corrected distractedly, leafing through some papers on a countertop. “Hey, look at this.”

  It was a stack of bills: fuel, electricity, and so on. Each was marked “paid” and initialled with a circled HQ, in a childish hand that I figured was Hallie’s.

  The curtains were certainly her work, also; peeking between them I spotted a big Trans Am with an open hood, an empty engine compartment, and a bad frame twist. Patches of Bondo smeared the body, and the headlights were empty sockets.

  “There’s the Ken we all know and love,” I said. “Tim’s full of beans. Kenny didn’t have any deal going, or he’d have fixed up the car. He just found a girl willing to clean up after him.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Takes more than Windex to pay bills.”

  “Huh. You’re right,” I conceded. “He must have had money coming in. See any ledger or checkbook? I could get an idea of his cash flow.”

  She gave a little snort. “I don’t think so.”

  I opened drawers and peered into them: old tide tables, fishing lures, balls of twine. No financial records.

  “I guess you’re right about that, too. Ken probably didn’t even file income taxes.”

  “He filed,” she corrected me quietly, “a 1040-EZ. I’ve been doing them for him, for years.”

  I turned in surprise and found her eyes brimming with tears. “Damn it. Timothy was right—he shouldn’t have died that way.”

  “Hey, Ellie. I mean, if it’s any comfort to you—”

  “I know. A bullet in the head—it’s the way you’d put down a good old horse. Quick and painless, and I can’t do anything about it now. But I wish,” she finished earnestly, “that I’d been kinder to him at the end. I was so busy with my life, and being married to George, and all …”

  Through the window a flash of something metallic caught my eye; the medallion, I realized. Then I saw Hallie standing at the edge of the clearing, gazing wistfully back at the trailer.

  “Look,” I murmured, and Ellie stepped up beside me.

  “Oh,” she exhaled. “Let’s go, so she can come back.”

  “She’s not coming back.” The girl slipped into the brush and was gone. “I thought so too at first, but that bag she took? It’s got her things in it. There’s nothing of hers left, here.”

  Ellie frowned. “I said we wouldn’t take anything except …”

  “It’s not what we’re taking. It’s that we’re here at all, and even worse, that the police have been. She might have put up with one visit, even from cops. But not two. Did you notice the marks on her arm? Those are needle tracks.”

  Ellie stared at me, but after a moment she accepted it, aware that I knew what I was talking about.

  Back in the city, Sam always insisted he wasn’t using any hard drugs. But his friends were, and I got to know the signs. I had hoped I would not see them again, and around him I never did.

  “But—” Ellie peered at the cleanliness of the place.

  “Junkies can function,” I said. “For a while.”

  I stifled the urge to stride out after the girl. It wouldn’t do any good. “Let’s just do what we need to, and go home.”

  So we did: I found a Boy Scout manual and Ellie snagged Ken’s fishing rod. In the living area, next to a sofa with a sheet and a blanket neatly folded at one end—the pillowslip on the pillow bore the blue initials HQ, embroidered in a delicate chain-stitch—I picked up a framed snapshot of Tim and Kenny. In the sleeping alcove was a Swiss Army knife. There was a book on the bedside table: Stephen King’s Christine.

  “I wouldn’t have figured Ken for a reader.”

  Ellie looked over, her glance softening. “Ken liked reading. Took him a while to get the hang of it, but he did, finally.”

  Moments later we were out of there. Leaving the clearing I looked back, still hoping I would see Hallie and persuade her to come with us. But all I saw was the dog; as soon as we’d come out, he’d returned to the deck.

  More evidence, I thought, that the girl didn’t really know how to control him. Now he lay watching us with eyes that were calmly professional. I felt bad leaving him there, but I assumed he wouldn’t have come with us, anyway.

  Driving home, we passed the barracks-like building that had housed the Quoddy Dam workers, back in the 1940s when the Navy’s never-completed project to produce electricity from the tides had been in its heyday. A two-storied frame structure with dozens of windows, a red-shingled peaked roof, and a porched entrance, the building now stood empty, its shutters hanging askew.

  Ellie gazed at it as we went by. “Too big,” she remarked.

  “What?” I replied, distracted. I’d been thinking of Hallie: how pretty she was. Some of Sam’s friends, both male and female, had been pretty, too. Once upon a time.

  “Those shutters,” Ellie said, “on the barracks. But they’re too big for your house. Didn’t Felicity Abbot-Jones say last year that she thought all Eastport houses ought to have shutters? And I thought you meant to do something about it.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling a thud in the pit of my stomach as I remembered: murder or no murder, Felicity was coming—and soon.

  Months earlier I had hired a crew to take down my old shutters, most of them irreparably damaged. But now without them my house resembled a woman who has, for some ungodly reason that probably seemed sensible at the time, shaved her eyebrows off.

  The difference being that a woman’s eyebrows will grow back.

  “Good heavens,” I whispered inadequately as we pulled into the drive. “I don’t even have an extension ladder.”

  We tiptoed into the house, where the silence was absolute, as if someone had filled the place with anesthetic gas.

  “But,” I said, peering around—the radiator was gone, and the spot underneath it had been swept, scrubbed, and coated with wax; good old George—“that’s not the real problem.”

  The dining room was empty, and so was the parlor. No sound came from Sam’s room, and Monday was asleep in her dog bed.

  “The problem is, I have nothing to haul up there. No,” I finished, “shutters. Ellie, where is everyone?”

  Ellie picked up a note from the roll-top desk that Sam had found, abandoned in a barn in Lubec. When he brought it home, it looked like a load of firewood, but now it gleamed with all the sanding, staining, and finish-rubbing that he had put into it; it was, he had informed me proudly, bird’s-eye maple.

  “ ‘Gone to movies. Victor asleep. Look in refrigerator,’ ” the note said, and it was signed by Wade.

  So I looked, and found a split of champagne, along with two rose cr
ystal glasses that I had admired in a shop in Calais. The card tucked under the bottle read, ‘Do not open until midnight.’

  “Too bad he didn’t put some shutters in there,” Ellie said.

  “Probably he would have, if they’d fit and he’d had some. Do you suppose we should check on Victor?”

  “Uh-uh. If he’s dying, I don’t want to resuscitate him.”

  I shot a look at her.

  “Oh, all right,” she relented. “I guess it wouldn’t be so good if Victor stopped breathing. Although,” she added, “it would mean that he would also stop talking …”

  “Ssh.” I slipped along the upstairs hall ahead of her. A small lamp burned on the guest room’s bureau, so we could see his chest slowly rising and falling.

  “Okay, he’s alive,” Ellie said. “Now let’s leave him here. Having him at my mercy like this is too tempting.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Just … look at him.”

  Asleep, Victor resembled one of those Botticelli angels that used to get painted on the ceilings of cathedrals. He could be funny, too, when he wanted to be. When he wanted to, Victor could charm the birds out of the trees.

  “Right, he looks harmless enough, now,” Ellie said. “So does a wasp’s nest if you don’t know what’s in it. Why you put up with him the way you do, I can’t understand.”

  As if in reply, Victor snorted and sat up suddenly, his face twisting peevishly into an expression of anger tinctured with paranoia. Then the alcohol hit him, and you could practically see every blood vessel in his skull reacting to the blow.

  “Oh,” he moaned, clutching his temples, and saw me standing there feeling sorry for him in spite of myself.

  “Well,” he snapped, “what are you waiting for? Go get me two aspirin, and some bottled spring water. And hurry it up.”

  12 Later that evening, upstairs with Wade, in the dark:

  “Move your elbow a little, will you?” I said. “Right, that’s better.”

  We’d nixed the champagne—Victor’s presence in the house would probably just make the bubbles go flat, anyway—and then Monday had decided to get up on the bed with us, so now the three of us lay companionably under the quilt.

  “I’m going out in a couple of hours,” Wade said.

  To work, he meant; to go out on the water. The tug often went out to meet a freighter while it was still dark.

  A breeze moved the curtains, moonlight shifting in the lace. A foghorn honked at the lighthouse a couple of miles away. Wade put his arms around Monday and me, gathering us in. “Don’t worry.”

  A week earlier, a freighter had capsized off Newfoundland: five saved, sixteen lost. There had been film of the awash vessel on Canadian TV, the craft moving helplessly, being swallowed.

  “I won’t worry.” I made myself smile when I said it.

  If anyone is safe out on the water, it is Wade; that’s well known. He will come home if anyone does. There is not a woman in town who would say any differently. Then again, there’s not a woman in town who will speak of capsizing, who will say the word aloud, not even if you pulled her fingernails out with pliers.

  Which reminded me: “Listen, if Ken’s boat was adrift, how did his killer get to shore?” Not by swimming; the water was too cold.

  Wade’s shoulder shifted. “Another boat?”

  “Maybe.” But it meant Ken had let someone aboard. From listening to Wade, I knew boarding another guy’s boat was nearly impossible without that guy’s cooperation.

  On the other hand, maybe Ken didn’t know Forepaugh meant any harm. Ike could have stolen a boat, then put it back afterwards.

  “You located,” Wade asked drowsily, “those shutters?”

  I found his hand and held it. “Over in Dennysville, some guy remodeling a house. I talked to George when he came to take Ellie home, and he says there are shutters in the Dumpster, out back.”

  I felt Wade nodding in the dark. “Yeah, I know the place. Guy’s got every tradesman in town on the job, turn that farmhouse into a palace. You might know him, up from New York. Somebody in the Waco says the guy was a stockbroker, ran into some trouble.”

  A little pang of something nudged me, but I ignored it. Lots of stockbrokers have run into trouble; it didn’t mean anything.

  “Funny name, the guys said he had. Something like a tree.”

  The pang sharpened. It couldn’t be. Could it?

  “… birch, alder …”

  Sure it could. With Victor around, anything could happen. The man spread disaster like a head cold.

  “… willow. That’s it—Willoughby. Do you know him?”

  Down the hall, Sam slept the untroubled sleep of adolescence, out like a light the minute his head hit the pillow, while in the guest room Victor tossed and moaned, misery seeping from his pores.

  “Baxter Willoughby,” I said resignedly.

  Suddenly, Wade’s last waking defenses fell; his breathing deepened, becoming even and slow, and I felt him slide away into unconsciousness. Monday slept, too, paws twitching as she chased, with dreaming whimpers, a dream rabbit.

  Which left me alone, thinking about Ken, Hallie, and Tim. By now Ken’s body was in Bangor, awaiting forensic autopsy. Timothy was back on Crow Island, grieving for his son. And where Hallie Quinn might have gotten to by now, I didn’t even want to imagine.

  And then there was Baxter Willoughby, on account of whom my planned expedition to Dennysville didn’t seem quite so promising.

  I’d never met him, but I knew him well in the way that a skilled accountant knows you by examining your bank records, charge accounts, brokers’ statements, and tax filings. I knew of every insurance claim he’d ever made, every parking ticket he’d gotten, the names of his children and the address of the vet where his wife took their miniature Schnauzers to be spayed.

  He’d been a crooked trader—his name, in fact, had become synonymous with the breed—and when the SEC had gotten wind of him, they’d called me: fast, accurate, discreet.

  I’d spent a year creating a flow chart so detailed, it looked like a map of the New York subway system. I’d had phone records, appointment calendars, even the contents of his wastebaskets, all collected by an army of SEC snoops; for twelve months, if Willoughby dropped a tissue, somebody picked it up.

  The point of it all was to prove the SEC’s suspicions: that over a period of approximately fifteen years, Baxter Willoughby had bilked a whole range of victims out of millions of dollars.

  My job was to prove it, and when I was finished, Willoughby went to jail.

  13 Early the next morning, I found the paint scraper I’d been using on the kitchen floor and took it out to the backyard, along with a cup of coffee. Hummingbirds flitted among the dahlias in the garden while I spread newspapers along the stone foundation of the house, then began scraping clapboards.

  It was too late to get Bill Twitchell to come over, with his mile-high ladders and space-age grinders, to scrape and paint the whole house before Felicity got here. But I could get the loose paint off in spots that were low enough for me to reach, and cover the bare wood with white-tinted shellac. That would protect the wood, and make things look spiffier for Felicity.

  I kept scraping until my arm began aching and the rest of the world began stirring: cars starting, dogs barking, the big white garbage truck with the moose painted on the side of it, rumbling down the street.

  Trash day: I’d forgotten it. I scrambled to haul the garbage cans out to the curbside, just as Al Rollins swung off the back of the truck to empty them toward the receptacle’s gaping maw.

  “ ‘Morning, Al. Thanks very much.”

  He muttered a reply, his normally cheerful face clouded.

  “Something wrong?” Al’s good nature is a given, around town.

  “Aw, them illegal dumpers got me hopping. Too cheap to get trash picked up like normal people. They go out, dump it in the woods someplace, make a big mess. Then town hall hires me to go get it. And I don’t mind telling you it’s a lot more trouble,
at the end of some godforsaken dirt track out in the wilderness.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Al. Want coffee? I’ve got some fresh.” Al’s pleasant manner has cheered me up on plenty of occasions; I figured the least I could do was return the favor.

  “Nah, thanks.” He waved at the rest of the street, with the trash cans lined up neatly at the end of each front sidewalk.

  “Worst part is, they got me goin’ through the stuff. You know,” he added at my look of puzzlement, “to find out who it is, doin’ the dumping. Boy, what a lousy chore.”

  “Ick. Well, I hope it lets up soon. And look at it this way, when you find out who’s doing it, Arnold will make them stop.”

  He brightened minutely. “Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? Well, see you next week.” He swung aboard the truck and signaled to his driver.

  “Yeah, see you,” I called as it rumbled away. Al’s comments about trash-sorting reminded me of Baxter Willoughby, whose trash had been gone through so exhaustively by the SEC investigators, and whose Dumpster was one of the tasks on my agenda for today.

  But I wasn’t ready to confront any of them yet, so as the garbage truck turned the corner I went inside, got Monday’s leash, and took her for a walk along the waterfront.

  The air was cool, smelling of chamomile and salt threaded with a hint of woodsmoke; gulls, swooping and soaring over the water, cried raucous warnings to cormorants diving for minnows under the dock. Monday sniffed appreciatively as we passed the Waco Diner, pouring forth a powerful aroma of coffee and pancakes.

  Meanwhile, I pretended our walk had to do with me being a good dog owner. But I was really only putting off the inevitable.

  The SEC guys had sworn up and down that no one would ever know I’d helped them get Baxter Willoughby. More to the point, they’d sworn up and down that he wouldn’t.

  Pretty soon, though, I’d find out how good their promises were: good enough to get me onto Willoughby’s place—and off again—with four dozen pairs of wooden shutters the cost of which, if I had to buy them new, would pay off the national debt?

  Or only good enough to get me chased off, with Willoughby reading me a profane riot act as I fled?