by Sarah Graves
George set his cap on his head and squinted. “Well,” he admitted, “I’ve been wondering about it myself.”
He took a deep, considering breath. “ ’Cause what she’s all het up about, basically, is an old boyfriend.”
“Yeah. And that’s why, I guess, I was wondering.”
When I was new in town, George came to my house to remove a bee’s nest from my attic vent. When the job was done, he was dripping with decades-old honey, the yard was littered with ancient honeycomb, and he’d been stung twenty-four times.
But he wouldn’t take a penny. He just said I could do him a favor sometime, maybe, and not to fuss about it.
“Did you know,” he said now, “that she taught him to read?”
“No. I didn’t.” Those books, I realized, and the look in her eyes when she saw them at Ken’s trailer. She’d been proud of him.
“Well, she did,” George said. “And I guess she told you she broke up with Ken, couple months before she started seeing me.”
“She did say that.” Suddenly I knew what he was about to say.
“I’d asked her, though. A number of times. Turned me down. She had something to take care of, she said, before she could.”
Wade and Ellie were coming down the wooden deck steps toward us. George watched her, his eyes lighting up at the sight of her.
“She broke up with him,” I said, “so she could start seeing you. But she waited a decent interval so it wouldn’t be …”
George nodded. “A slap in the face to him. She’s like that. And I appreciate your concern, Miz Tiptree—”
No matter what, I could never get him to call me Jacobia—
“—but as for Ellie and me, anything she does, or anything she ever wants to do—”
She came up and took his arm confidingly.
“Well,” he finished, smiling down at her, “don’t worry about me in that regard.”
“What are you two talking so seriously about?” she asked, looking from my face to his.
“Old times,” he replied comfortably. “And about those dogs of Tim’s. I’ll do for them until the shelter can find ’em homes.”
Because, he meant, he didn’t want Ellie out there anytime soon, refreshing her memory of Tim’s death scene.
I looped my arm through Wade’s as we strolled downtown, while Ellie and George headed up to Calais to see a movie, George hoping it would take Ellie’s mind off things and her agreeing to it for his sake.
“Why’d you pay Ned’s check?” I asked.
Wade chuckled. “I didn’t. I paid his wife’s check. You know it’d come out of her household money.”
He shook his head. “Carla Montague. Pretty girl, once. Bet she wishes she’d married Kenny instead. She’d be shut of him.” Instead of doomed, he meant, to more years with Ned.
I glanced at him. “You’re not usually so cynical.”
“I don’t usually sit at a table with Ned Montague, either.”
“You guys sure don’t like him.”
He shrugged. “It’s that constant poor-faced act he puts on. Like he doesn’t have anything but feels entitled to everything.”
At the dock, Ken Mumford’s little vessel the Drifter sat at a mooring where the state cops had left it when they’d finished with it, a paint-peeling wooden boat with an operator’s shack amidships. “Like that,” Wade said, waving at it. “Belongs to Ned, now.”
“You don’t suppose Ned killed Ken for the boat, do you?”
Wade laughed. “That tub? No, you’d have to be dumber than he is to kill for the Drifter. And he won’t be any dab hand, fixing her up, either. Boat like that, it needs taking care of.”
He shook his head. “Heck, I used to go out after deer with old Ned, bunch of other fellows. He would never bring along the right stuff, end up borrowing from everybody, then act all hurt about it when the other guys got mad at him. Had a decent old deer gun he got from somewhere, he keeps saying he’ll bring it over for a cleaning. But I doubt he ever will.”
Then he reached out, grinning wickedly, and ruffled my hair. “Want to go out on the dock and smooch? Give the folks a thrill?”
And me, too, probably. “Why not? I’m already a scarlet woman in this town, on account of you.”
“Hey, we aim to please.” He slung his arm around me as we made our way toward the waterfront. “So where d’you suppose that two million bucks came from?”
“No idea.” My first thought had been Baxter Willoughby. The size of the stash was in his financial ballpark.
But the way it was happening wasn’t how Willoughby worked. If he wanted to move money he could do it with all those computer hookups in his house, hopscotching huge sums across continents with a few keystrokes. Actually putting his hands on the cash, for Willoughby, was as likely as Ned Montague plunging his hands into a tub of fish guts; it had never been his style.
Across the water, the island of Campobello shone in the low sun. “Victor say anything to you about last night?” Wade asked.
“About getting so loaded? Nope. Did he to you?”
Wade peered into the water near the dock. “Sort of. Look, the mackerel are running.”
All at once, and for a hundred yards in all directions, fish boiled to the surface of the bay, hurling themselves from the water in gleaming arcs and landing with sharp slaps. Almost as instantly, men with fishing gear arrived, casting mackerel jigs.
We left the pier to the fishermen—the smooching, I resolved, would come later—and went on past Leighton’s Variety Store, where the tangy smell of chili dogs and onion rings drifted up from Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand, nearby on the dock.
Wade stopped, frowning; I followed his gaze.
Unaware of us, two young guys from the bunch of high school students we’d seen at the Happy Landings strode purposefully down the street, looking as innocent as kids who are up to something always do. At the last minute they cut furtively around the corner and, they thought, out of sight.
Intent on their business, they didn’t notice us as one boy dug a small packet from his jeans and passed it to the other one. Then they hurried away in opposite directions.
“Huh,” Wade said. “Wonder what that was all about.”
“I hope it’s not what I think,” I said. “But I’ll bet it is.” Briefly, I related what Bob Arnold had said about hard drugs having found their way to Eastport, and about Hallie Quinn.
“Hell,” Wade said grimly. “That stuff gets started up around here, we’ll be in a pickle.”
“We have already had two murders,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. And maybe they are connected. To,” he added, “whoever is bringing the damn stuff in here in the first place. Or was.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, knowing he meant Ken.
Now that we’d found all that money, it made even more sense that Ken’s “big deal” might have been drug smuggling. Eastport, so handy to Canada and an easy run to international waters, was once a bootlegger’s haven so notorious, it had its own rail spur. And Ellie’s pirate forebears hadn’t gone out for nothing; they’d gone after ships whose cargo holds were loaded with contraband.
So maybe Ken had decided to bring new blood to an age-old, lucrative Eastport industry. And someone else, noticing this, had run up the Jolly Roger.
“But it can’t be that simple,” I told Wade as we walked back toward my house. “Two million of anything takes organization and management skills. And Ken didn’t have them.”
We paused at the corner of Key Street. To the south, the Lubec bridge was an ink sketch against the fading sky, while to the north, Deer Island Light flashed an age-old warning: beware.
“So,” I said, “what did Victor tell you?”
Wade grimaced. “You’re not going to like it.”
“That’s all right. I’m used to that from him. Lay it on me.”
Wade took a deep breath. “Victor says he’s tired of being a brain surgeon. It’s not special enough. So he’s leaving New York.”
&n
bsp; At this, my heart went into the sort of free-fall normally reserved for parachutists, after the ripcord has produced no activity whatsoever and the reserve chute has failed, also.
“So what’s the punch line? What’s he going to do to alleviate his discomfort, eliminate his boredom, and make himself feel—” I nearly choked on the word—“special?”
“He decided this afternoon, after his hangover wore off. He’s moving,” Wade said. “To Eastport.”
19 Carrying all the shutters down to the cellar, I could almost stop believing it. And soon, the pain of all that hauling sent me into such a blur of physical misery, I hardly cared.
Still, underneath all the aching and blisters lurked Victor, sharing a ZIP code with me. In fact, there was a house for sale down the street from mine, and he would probably choose it just to be irritating.
Also, it did not cheer me to find that where I’d thought I had forty-eight sets of shutters, I really had only forty-seven.
Irritated, I went out to the yard and scanned for them, stopping for a moment to gaze at the last light of day; this, in an Eastport summer, is the rich, ripe pink of a raspberry soda floated with blueberry sherbert.
Then I checked the root cellar, the primitive corner of the basement where the coal bin used to be, and even the crawlspace under the storeroom, finally spying them sticking out of the trash barrel. Or what was left of them: hinges and splintered louvers. In there with them, stuffed at the bottom, was a belt from my belt sander.
“Hey, Mom?” Sam peered down the cellar stairs at me.
“What?” I yanked the light-switch cord hanging over the workbench where my tools lived. The sander lay out on the bench, not neatly put away as I had left it.
“Who’s been messing around down here?” I snarled.
“Uh, Dad was.” Sam came all the way down the steps. “I tried to talk him out of it. But he wanted to help.”
“He didn’t clamp it, did he? That shutter—he just smacked the belt sander down on it.”
“Actually, it was kind of funny. The shutter just—”
Sam waved his arms to indicate a shutter in the process of exploding. “I tried to explain to him, but no deal. He changed his mind when he got a load of the belt sander, though. I mean, after he turned it on.”
I could imagine. That sander would take the hide off a rhinoceros. But I swallowed my fury; it wasn’t Sam’s fault. “So, what’s he doing now?”
I got two pipe clamps down from the rack and unscrewed them, positioning one of the intact shutters on the workbench.
“Taking a walk. I wanted to get him out on the dock, maybe show him the difference between a yawl and a ketch.”
I smiled in spite of myself, remembering how Sam finally taught me this important distinction: when you yawn on a yawl, you can lean back against the mast, because it is behind you, but on a ketch there is no mast to catch you, as it is up front.
“But he wanted,” Sam added cautiously, “to go look at houses. He’s already got his eye on that one down the street.”
“Fine,” I replied, screwing a pipe clamp tight. With one of these turned down securely at each side, the shutter wouldn’t vibrate, so it wouldn’t self-destruct when the sander touched it.
I hoped. “Wade told me your dad’s plan. So you don’t have to worry about that. Have you broken your news to him, yet?”
He shook his head unhappily. For Sam to finish school here would be bad enough in his father’s eyes. But the implications of Sam attending the boat school would be—in Victor’s opinion—disastrous. He wanted Sam to go to an Ivy League college; not only that, but Victor intended to get Sam admitted a year early.
Which I’d thought couldn’t happen, so I’d postponed worrying about it. Ordinarily, students have to wait for their junior year grades to come in before they can apply to college. But Victor had pull at many prestigious institutions and had gotten special treatment for Sam. As a result, during the past school year Sam had—with Victor’s help—filled the forms out, and gone to the interviews at six high-powered, very competitive universities.
“No,” Sam said. “I haven’t told him, yet. I chickened out.”
On account of the handicap imposed by his dyslexia, Sam wasn’t expecting anything to come out of his college applications. He’d just gone through the process to humor his father, he’d said.
But now the day of reckoning was arriving.
“I can understand that,” I said. “Chickening out, I mean. I do it myself when he’s around, don’t I? Although in your case I’d call it choosing the moment carefully.”
Sam’s glance was wary. “Yeah, well. He’s a forceful guy. He, like, wants what he wants, you know?”
Clearly, Sam wasn’t comfortable with this topic. My remark about my own behavior seemed to make him especially uneasy.
“Well, you might as well wait, now,” I said, “until he gets a place here. He’ll take the news better, once that happens. And maybe your boat school plans will go down easier with him, too.”
I put a belt in the sander and pulled on my dust respirator and high-impact goggles. These make me look like an insect from an alien planet, but they are essential equipment; I have no desire to start learning Braille or have a lung transplant.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Sam agreed. “But it wasn’t my idea,” he hastened to add. “I mean, I didn’t suggest him moving here just so he’d go along with my coming back, and everything.”
He sounded so anxious, the poor kid: his father on one side, me on the other. I put down the sander.
“Listen. What you do is your business, what your dad does is his, and if it turns out I have to move to a mountaintop in Peru to get away from him, well …”
Sam laughed; I’d threatened the Peru trip often enough for him to know that I was joking. And the normal, lighthearted expression coming onto his face was all the reward I needed for the enormous amount of self-restraint I was practicing.
Just don’t be surprised, I wanted to say, if when you tell your father, he starts clutching his chest …
But I’d decided to be tougher on Victor, not on Sam. Which was why when I had the chance, I didn’t say it. I didn’t tell Sam, right then and there, the truth about his father.
I just let it go.
“Hey, how about that cruiser at the dock?” he remarked, fiddling aimlessly with some pieces of wood on the workbench. He was, I realized happily, hanging around just to be with me.
“Man, would I ever like to get a closer look at that boat. You think they might let me aboard?”
“Maybe. All they can do is say no. That won’t kill you.”
“Yeah,” he responded. “You,” he added, heading up the cellar steps, “look like a bug in that respirator.”
Right, I thought as I heard the refrigerator door opening up there, underlining Sam’s return to his usual good humor.
Then I settled down to those shutters, and for a wonder, things started going right for a change. I figured I could belt-sand the sides and bottoms, scrape the louvers by hand, glue-and-screw any really shaky sections. After that I could paint them and put the hinges back on. It was a quick-and-dirty fix, but I was out to hang shutters, not preserve them for posterity.
And as I worked I found my mood lightening. There was not after all much structural repair needed; the wood had been good quality, and the old-time craftsmen really knew their joinery. A couple of buzzes of the drill, some white glue and a flat-headed screwdriver took care of the fractured pieces; even the one shutter half that Victor had demolished required no truly major surgery.
The other half still needed replacing, but I decided what the hell: If worse came to worst, I could paint a green rectangle beside one window, and hope Felicity Abbot-Jones was nearsighted.
Once the reconstruction was done I started on the belt-sanding, and I didn’t look up from my work until a creak from the cellar steps told me that Sam had come back for me, to offer me a soda or possibly to say he was going out with Tom
my Daigle.
But it wasn’t Sam. It was Hallie Quinn.
I pulled the bug mask and goggles off. “Oh,” she breathed, relaxing a little. “It is you. I thought—”
“Come on,” I invited. “I’m not going to bite you.”
Tentatively, she took another step down the stairs, the silver medallion she wore flashing in the wash of white light from the fluorescent workshop overheads. In her ears were a pair of little costume-jewelry stud earrings, each shaped like an H.
“I knocked on the screen door. But I guess—” she gestured at the sander—“you couldn’t hear me.”
The chain on her medallion was like the one I wore: heavyweight, so it wouldn’t break. The clasp on mine was the devil to open, but that added to the security; you didn’t go taking it off carelessly and leaving it lying around.
Considering that I wore the key to a lockbox containing two guns and a whole lot of ammunition on mine, security was an issue for me. I gathered Hallie felt similarly about her medallion, even though it was nowhere near as likely to go off and kill people. But my appreciation for her jewelry faded as I heard what she said next.
“Listen, you better not go out to Crow Island anymore. You don’t know what you’re getting into. You and that other lady—”
“Ellie White,” I supplied.
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, people know about you two. That you found the bodies, and that you’re—”
“Snoops.” Hey, it may not be flattering, but it’s accurate.
And, I thought, it was why Hallie Quinn had come to me. She wanted help.
“This isn’t funny,” she frowned. “You don’t know the kind of people you are—”
“Getting involved with. Right. So, Hallie, how much are you using? Your drug habit, I mean.”
The question stopped her cold. “None of your business. And anyway, I can—”
“—stop anytime I want to. But never mind that. What do you say we cut to the chase?”
I dusted paint dust off my hands, feeling annoyed. Dealing with Victor, finding a body, and losing a shutter had all played havoc with my stock of patience.
For which I was later sorry. “Hallie, I’ve eaten lunch with a lot worse people than you are warning me against. So why don’t you tell me who those folks are, that you are so worried about, and I’ll just go out and wipe the floor with them, tonight.”