Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  “Clarissa, do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell Arnold what I’m about to say. Or at least not the way I’m going to say it.”

  Her eyes grew cautious. “Jacobia, you know I can’t promise anything like that.”

  “Not even if it works out best for Arnold? Because listen, the thing is this: I think there’s something funny about Baxter Willoughby. Maybe even something connected to the investigation. But if I mention Willoughby to Arnold, either Arnold won’t listen to me because he’s so set on Ike, or he might go roaring out to Dennysville, demanding to know what’s up.”

  Clarissa smiled, recognizing the truth of this.

  “And believe me,” I went on, “the prudent thing would be if Arnold could just keep his ears open. With this guy, it would be best not to let him know there’s any interest in him at all.”

  I went on to tell Clarissa about my own history with Baxter Willoughby. I also mentioned that, as a candidate for secret ownership of two million dollars, I considered him top-drawer.

  “He’s the only guy around here right now with a connection to big money. On the other hand,” I finished, “I have no idea why he’d stash two million bucks in cash on Crow Island. And there’s other things wrong with him in the likely-suspect department. But if, for instance, he wanted people murdered and he had Forepaugh working for him …”

  “No physical violence in Willoughby’s history,” Clarissa assumed correctly. The switch from DA’s investigator to private law practice had done nothing to blunt her naturally sharp mental processes. “But Ike could take care of that stuff for him?”

  “Exactly. If they were connected, that might be the way it would be. The thing is, though, this is all so …”

  “Circumstantial.”

  “Very. I could be seeing things where there aren’t any. But if Willoughby is involved in all of it somehow, and somebody scares him without being able to arrest him, then he will scram.”

  Clarissa smiled, tenting her fingers over the desk. “I see. How about if I bring it up at the dinner table, then, that there is such a guy as Willoughby? And maybe that in the past, he’s had big money, and a less-than-savory reputation. So the name will be fresh in Arnold’s mind, if it pops up somewhere else? I might get the phrase “flight risk” in there, too, just very tactfully.”

  “Perfect. I appreciate it, Clarissa.” An uncomfortable thought struck me. “You do know that I’m not casting aspersions on Arnold’s intelligence.”

  “Of course I do.” Her pale blue eyes, the color of ice on a pond, were luminously intelligent. “Fortune favors the prepared mind, that’s all. And sometimes certain minds have to be prepared not to charge in like a bull in a china shop.”

  She rose from behind her desk. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “No problem. Anything else going on in the investigation you can let me in on? I’d like to tell Ellie, if there is. She’s pretty upset about Ken and Tim.”

  Clarissa shook her head regretfully. “No big breaks, if that’s what you mean. APB for Forepaugh, ballistics check on the weapon, toxicology tests on the bodies, all the usual.”

  Then she changed the subject. “But Jacobia, there’s still no reason for Ike Forepaugh to be taking a shot at you even if he does have a gun. And even if he’s working for Willoughby—well, he doesn’t know you’ve got suspicions about him, does he?”

  “No. I haven’t given him any reason for that. I don’t think he even recognized me when I saw him. He didn’t act like he did.”

  “Good.” She walked me to the door. “By the way, Ellie might want to hear Ken’s body is coming back tomorrow. Tim’s, too.”

  At my look of surprise she grinned. “The autopsies should’ve taken longer. But I used to date the medical examiner, back in Portland, and I told him he owed me one for not marrying him when he asked me, and I guess he agreed.”

  I had a feeling the favor Clarissa had pulled in was a bit more substantial than that. In Portland, she’d been a mover and shaker. But she knew it would mean a great deal to Ellie, having the funerals over and done with.

  “Thanks, Clarissa,” I said again as I was leaving, thinking I’d gotten my message sent cleanly and efficiently, and without any loose ends dangling. “Oh, and—listen. If the people with the painted French poodle and the car trunk full of you-know-what were to find that both those situations had been fully repaired, do you think they would …?”

  “Let Sadie’s folks off the hook? Yes. But I really don’t see how that could happen.”

  “I might have an idea. I’ll give you a call if it works out. But Clarissa, don’t let Sadie know about it.”

  And that, I thought, was that. But when I reached the bottom step, she stopped me. “Jacobia? There is one small thing more.”

  “Yes?” I replied, thinking uh-oh.

  “About the ambulance ride with the bodies?” she went on. “Hank Henahan is awfully nervous about it. Arnold told him he’d go with him. But tomorrow’s our six-month wedding anniversary.”

  She smiled: appealingly. Inexorably.

  Inescapably. “And you’d like Arnold to be here for it.”

  “That would be pleasant, yes. So could you …?”

  I felt a sigh of resignation rising from my toes. “Okay, Clarissa. I’ll go on the morgue run while you stay home with Arnold and drink champagne out of a slipper.”

  What the heck, I figured it was the least I could do. If she hadn’t expedited those autopsies, Ken and Tim could have wound up not getting released until winter, by which time the earth would have frozen too solidly to bury them, and they would sit around until spring.

  So the next morning I set off for Bangor with Hank Henahan in the ambulance, and the trip didn’t start out badly: cool, fresh breeze, coffee in a thermos, Route 1 curving south along the coastline toward Ellsworth, through green trees and past blue inlets bright and colorful as Kodachrome.

  As I say, it didn’t start out badly. But by the time we were through, I was wishing for some of that champagne: one bottle to drink, and another to break over Hank Henahan’s head.

  “Durned red tape,” Henahan muttered as we made our way through what passes for evening rush-hour traffic in Bangor. The Penobscot glittered in late-afternoon sunlight as we crossed the bridge, Hank slowing for the double line of cars heading out of the city. “You’d think we was adopting those poor fellers.”

  The road ahead was two-lane, with plenty of cross streets, businesses, and other impediments to getting this errand over with. Hank refrained from putting on the siren or beacons, though, partly because he was a good, safe, ethical paramedic who knew his business, and partly because his hands were shaking too hard.

  Driving from Eastport had been okay, and pulling into the ambulance bay of St. Joseph’s Hospital, where the bodies had been sent from Augusta, had gone like clockwork. I guessed Hank had been pretending he was delivering a live one, not picking up two dead ones. Even the long waiting around we’d had to do, with lunch in the hospital coffee shop and plenty of time to peruse the magazines in the lobby, hadn’t fazed him much.

  Now, though, his pale, sweaty face and haunted expression were beginning to make me feel like someone in a Stephen King novel. In the book I would be the character who pooh-poohs supernatural horrors, and who subsequently is devoured by one of them.

  In my lap lay the large manila envelope of paperwork we’d gotten at the hospital. The secretary in the pathology department there had made a point of telling me not to lose it, as among other things it contained copies of the autopsy reports for me to give to Bob Arnold. The envelope was stamped CONFIDENTIAL in large red letters.

  Which I ignored, removing the sheaf of papers as Hank gaped in dismay. “They don’t,” I told him, “come to your house and shoot you for this,” and he harrumphed disapprovingly but didn’t offer further objection.

  Scanning the autopsy reports, I found Kenny’s to be what I expected. There were a lot of exotic latinate phrases, but they all boiled down to gunshot wound to t
he head. Tim’s, however, was a surprise.

  He hadn’t died by hanging. He’d been dead when somebody put him up there, of a heart attack that happened while someone was in the process first of strangling him and of finishing the job by smothering him. Probably with a pillow, the report said; the fabric weave was imprinted in his skin. Thumb bruises showed on his neck, partially obscured by the rope marks but not entirely.

  Which cleared up a small mystery I’d been pondering: how had somebody gotten Tim onto his makeshift gallows? Surely he’d have seen what was intended, I’d believed, and would have fought like a dozen demons, yet there hadn’t been any marks of a struggle on him, or any sign of a blow to the head to knock him out.

  Now I understood: he’d already been dead, and the ligatures were all applied later, in part perhaps to cover up the thumb indentations. So at least we didn’t have a torturer on our hands.

  Only a multiple murderer.

  Meanwhile, we continued heading to the back of beyond with a couple of corpses in tow, as evening gathered around us.

  “What was that?” Hank glanced fearfully in the rear-view.

  “The plastic.” I stared ahead. Just a few miles more and we would be out of the Bangor area, with only tourists and small-town local traffic to contend with.

  “They’re rolled,” I added, “in plastic. Taped and zipped in bags. They couldn’t get out if they tried.”

  I meant this as reassurance; instead, the idea of Ken or Tim trying to get out of their wrappings made Hank’s eyes widen unhappily.

  “Oh, Lord,” he mourned, “I feel like I’m going to faint.”

  Which, even in what in Bangor passes for heavy traffic, wouldn’t have been a good idea. “Hank. Get a grip on yourself. I hate to break it to you like this, but dead is dead. D-E-A-D. If you want a scary idea, think about us ending up in a ditch.”

  Hank was a sandy-haired bruiser with a square, solid jaw and shoulders that bulged like beef roasts, but right then he looked like a little kid. “I can’t help it. When I was a boy, my grandma told stories. I think she gave me a complex.”

  If she had, I thought—unjustly, as it turned out—it was the only complex thing about Hank.

  “And it ain’t true, neither, what you said about deadness. I got a personal experience.”

  He glanced hopelessly into the rearview again. “Oh, Lord, that damn bag is moving.”

  The ambulance swerved toward the shoulder, surprising a pair of pedestrians who seemed to think we were trying to drum up business. One of them shot a middle finger at us as we missed him by inches.

  “Pull in,” I ordered Hank firmly. “Right there, in the driveway of that store. Put the brake on, turn the key off, and take some deep breaths.”

  Hank obeyed shudderingly. “I can do it,” he gasped faintly. “Just let me get my nerves back together.”

  Another small crackle of morgue-issue plastic emanated from the back of the ambulance: Ken or Tim, settling from the sharp turn we’d made.

  Hank moaned. “You city people,” he managed between juddering inhalations, “think you know everything. Why, I could tell you a story about your very own house—”

  Only a hundred and thirty or so miles to go, and it was already past six o’clock. “Hank, get out of the driver’s seat. I’ll take the wheel.”

  “But I’m the only one who is supposed to drive the—”

  “Do you want to break the rules, or do you want to be going through the Moosehorn Refuge in the middle of the night with these two?”

  The Moosehorn is barren and desolate-feeling even in bright day, the narrow road winding between granite cliffs and under old trees that seem to be stealthily reaching down for you.

  “There will,” I added, “be a full moon.”

  “Ohh,” Hank groaned defeatedly, and moments later we were back on the road again.

  “Now, what was it you were telling me about my house?”

  I doubted I could unscare him entirely, but if I could get him talking about dead folks other than those we were transporting, he might be a little distracted. And as I’d hoped, he warmed to his favorite subject immediately.

  “Ain’t nothing to tell,” he began, but this is the standard Eastport way of beginning a story, so I was not discouraged.

  He cracked the window, pulled a pack from his pocket, and lit a cigarette. “Mind?” he asked, glancing at me.

  I’d have let him sniff chloroform if it would calm him down. “Nope. You said your grandmother used to tell you stories.”

  But he didn’t answer, just sat there shaking and smoking. We were out of the suburbs, now, shooting for the hill towns between Bangor and Ellsworth. After that it was a long poke of curving blacktop, the danger of a moose wandering out onto the road ever present; if you hit one of them, it could be all over for you.

  “Want coffee?” I asked as the lights of fast-food places in Ellsworth twinkled garishly in the thickening dusk.

  Hank shook his head as we took the turn away from Blue Hill and Castine, up toward the real downeast.

  “My grandma,” he offered finally, beginning to answer my question an hour after I’d asked it, “she told me one about the Holbrook House. You know, that big old captain’s mansion on the way to Lubec, it got turned into a bed-and-breakfast.”

  He chuckled grimly. “Guess the tourists get their money’s worth there, all right.”

  “Why, what do they get?” The road wound through crossroads towns: church, post office, country store.

  “Old Captain Holbrook,” Hank related, “back in the 1800s, he went to the South Seas, and when he got there, he got all hooked up in some heathen religion. Not the regular religion the people there had, but some real old, evil kind. Came back with all sorts o’ trinkets, gold and jewels. Each of ’em by itself would’ve made the old captain rich. An’ they did, too. But,” Hank paused significantly, “they had a price.”

  I sneaked a sideways peek at him. “And the price was?”

  “The price,” Hank intoned heavily, “was his soul. The beings as had bought it from him, well, they come and took it. He used to go out on the water in a dinghy, to communicate with ’em, so folks said. An’ finally, one night, the dinghy went out but when it came back he wasn’t on it.”

  He took a breath. “Out of the sea they’d come up in darkness, those strange awful creatures, all that way from them heathen islands they must’ve swum. Folks who was there, and ones heard of it afterwards, they said those heathenish beings plucked his soul from his living body, as he had promised it to ’em. And the screams he gave out, they all said, while the beings did it. The screams was purely horrible.”

  We were in the real country, now, through Milbridge and climbing into the blueberry barrens south of Machias. Hank spoke up again, his tone matter-of-fact.

  “You don’t want to spend the night there, is all I’m saying. He don’t show himself to everyone, that captain, but if he does, he comes in your dreams. And the dreams,” Hank emphasized, “ain’t ones as you will ever forget.”

  Behind us on the stretchers, the two wrapped bodies rode silently, their bulk in the utility light of the boxy compartment now shadowy and portentous-looking. Machias went by in moments: first the college, then the bridge over Bad Little Falls, the short business street and Helen’s Restaurant. Once we got over the smaller bridge in East Machias we were in the boondocks again.

  The full moon was rising, coming up out of Penobscot Bay like a coin dripping silver. A flock of black cormorants vee’d across the indigo sky, heading for evening shelter. A too-fast curve—I touched the brake pedal—made the plastic shrouds of the dead men whisper and crackle.

  “Oh, mother,” Hank muttered, getting nervous again. “Out at night, haulin’ a couple of corpses, under a full moon.”

  “If you light another cigarette,” I began irritably, “it’s not those corpses you’ll have to worry about. They don’t have to breathe in all your—”

  “Look out!” Hank gripped the dashboard. />
  You don’t see their eyes in your headlights or their bodies in your way. All you see are the moose’s legs, looking too long and spindly to hold up that massive body.

  I hit the brakes, spun the wheel, and yelped as the tires hit the shoulder, bounced, and swerved us up toward a big pine. A moment later the front end of the ambulance bounced off the tree’s trunk, nosed around wildly, and smashed into another with a vicious thud, stopping us suddenly.

  After that, the only sound was a loud hissing, there in the pitch-darkness. I knew we hadn’t hit the moose—the impact, I’ve been told, is unmistakable—but if he was still out there somewhere we couldn’t see him, or anything else.

  “Why aren’t there lights?” Hank cried in a sudden panic.

  I just sat, feeling like a computer that has crashed and needs a minute to boot up again.

  “I … don’t … know.” I was pretty sure I wasn’t bleeding, and nothing hurt very badly. I’d banged my knee on the dashboard and the steering column had broken off on impact as it was designed to do, smacking me in the chest but fortunately not impaling me.

  The seat belt had saved my bacon. Too bad it hadn’t saved the radiator; as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see that the hissing sound was engine coolant, boiling up out of—I suspected unhappily—the cracked engine block.

  “Oh my gosh, where’s the light?” Hank fumbled in the supply box, found the flashlight and snapped it on with fingers made clumsy by terror. Being Hank, however, he didn’t use it to make sure that I, his living companion, was all right. He shone it into the rear of the ambulance, to check that neither of his deceased passengers was creeping toward him.

  “Oh!” The shriek Hank let out was terrible. “Oh, oh, oh—”

  I grabbed the flashlight and aimed it where he was looking. “Damn it, Hank, I’ve had about enough of your silly—”

  Our passengers were gone.

  26 “Hank, they’re out here. They’ve got to be out here.”

  A mosquito the size of a B-52 took an enormous bite out of me, causing me to be grateful for the multitude of little brown bats swooping and flapping all around me, feeding on the mosquitoes.