by Sarah Graves
Or almost grateful; after the story I’d heard, a bat under a full moon was not the most reassuring image I could think of.
“That,” Hank replied quaveringly, “is what I’m afraid of. I know they’re out here, somewhere.”
We kept trudging, shining our flashlights—Hank had found a second one and given it to me—into the shallow ditch along darkened Route 1, in the Moosehorn Refuge. Behind us the back doors of the ambulance still gaped wide, blown that way by the impact and now impossible to close.
When the doors burst open, the stretchers—each with a body on it—had flown out. The stretchers had wheels, so if they had hit the pavement, they could have rolled.
“You sure you’re okay?” I scratched a fresh mosquito bite.
“Yeah. Little bounced around, that’s all. Sure wish a car would come along, though.”
“Hank, you better pray we find those bodies before one does. Do you know what kind of story this is going to make in Eastport? Lost the dead guys—they’ll hear ’em laughing at us in Canada.”
“Come on,” the paramedic replied defensively, “it’s not our fault the damned—gurk.”
That was the sound he made, leading me to believe that at least the dead guys weren’t lost, anymore. And I was right: when I reached Hank he was holding one hand over his mouth and aiming a flashlight with the other, gazing down goggle-eyed.
Ken Mumford wasn’t on his stretcher any longer. He wasn’t in his body bag, either; a broken pine bough had ripped hell out of that. And he wasn’t in his plastic morgue wrappings; they’d come apart on impact.
Also, owing to the postmortem surgery that had been done on him, to track the path the bullet took in his head and so on, he was not looking very attractive. The big line of heavy black sutures where his hairline had been sewn back to the top of his face, plus similar stitches put in to hold his eyelids and mouth shut, reminded me irresistibly of a B-movie zombie in the moment just before the creature clambers to its feet and begins shambling toward you.
I grabbed Hank’s shoulder. “Come on. You don’t need to see this.” I sat him down in the ditch by the ambulance.
“Hank? Listen to me, Hank. He’s dead. Really. There’s not a thing he can do to hurt you. You don’t have to be scared of him.”
“I’m not scared.”
I shone the flashlight past him, so I could see his face. But in the glow it was not fearful, as I’d expected. Instead it was gentle and full of sorrow.
“I’ve been an ambulance guy for twenty years,” he said, seemingly apropos of nothing.
But I understood: Evil beings, or haunted houses, or bodies in bags lying silent behind you—all those things were the stuff of Hank’s nightmares: the awful unknown.
What he’d seen just now, though, was different, and in Hank’s job he saw it all the time: the face of someone he’d known all his life, after catastrophe.
A tear rolled down his nose. “I wish those things didn’t happen to people,” Hank said.
Just then a pair of headlights shone out of the dark at us, and not long after that we had bagged up Ken again, found Tim, and were riding toward Eastport in an old grey Econoline van with the legend, “S & M Remodelers, We’ll Whip Your House Into Shape!” lettered in white script on the side.
Only after we were moving did I learn that the van had an engine problem, limiting its top speed to twenty-five carburetor-clogged miles per hour. Which was when—
—owing to the fact that the van only had one seat and the driver was presently sitting in it, so Hank and I had to sit in the back with a dozen gallons of paint, two extension ladders, a toolbox, and four disassembled sawhorses, plus the bodies—
—I really did start wanting that champagne.
27 “He never did tell me anything about my house,” I complained to Ellie the next morning. “Or about his supposed experience with the undead.”
The Waco Diner consists of a counter and a row of booths with a long, narrow aisle between, leading back to the kitchen. On the wall behind the counter hangs a magic-markered menu, a mirror with plates and glasses stacked before it, and a color TV.
“People in Eastport are like that,” Ellie said as we made our way to a booth and sat. “They might talk a blue streak, but they won’t soon tell you anything really personal about themselves.”
Which was actually a welcome change from the city, where I’d listened to people at cocktail parties relating the gory details of their psychoanalysis, five minutes after I’d met them.
“Or,” she added significantly, “about your house.”
I looked up sharply. My own house had been owned by a sea captain once, too.
“Ellie, do you know things that you haven’t—?” But just then the waitress arrived.
“What’ll ya have, girls?” asked Dolly Henderson, navigating the narrow aisle with three loaded plates and a tray of brimming coffee cups balanced on her arms.
At a good six feet tall, Dolly has black, curly hair that she hacks off with scissors whenever she happens to think of it, a big, hulking body whose soft parts sway alarmingly this way and that way, and a wandering white eye that stares past you even while she is looking straight at you.
But Dolly sees more with one good eye than most people do with two. That was why, the morning after my ill-fated trip with Henahan—I was a little sore but otherwise suffering no ill effects—Ellie and I had come to visit Dolly.
“Just coffee, please,” I said as Ellie and I slid into one of the red leatherette booths.
“And maybe a little conversation, if you’ve got time,” Ellie added. Now that Ken’s and Tim’s bodies were back, she was more set than ever on finding out what happened to them. And Ellie was not the type to sit back and let someone else do things; while they remained to be done, she would be in there pitching.
“Hey, I always got time for talk,” Dolly cackled, setting our coffees in front of us. “Who d’you want the scoop on?”
“Well, we’re wondering what you might have heard about Ken, lately,” Ellie said quietly.
Dolly’s bushy eyebrows waggled up, down, and sideways, her stray eye pinwheeling as she glanced at me.
“He came in, weaseled a few Cokes out of me here and there. Sometimes had a load on, sometimes a hangover. Sometimes not.”
I let Ellie do the talking. As she’d said, people from Eastport don’t take kindly to talking personally about themselves or their own, in front of people from away.
Which I would be, even if I lived here until my dying day. I had not grown up in one of the old houses, with a family whose family business all the other families knew. I hadn’t been under a lens of inspection and evaluation from the moment I was born, so that everyone would know what to expect of me just the way they did of one another.
“Kenny,” Dolly said, her voice turning gentle, “was a poor, sad soul. And you know why? Because Kenny never gave up. It was always something. The next time, he would hit it big. You know?”
Ellie nodded. “Tim said that, too. That Ken had another big deal in the works. And you know, all that money they found out on the island, you have to wonder if that was connected to it.”
Dolly shook her head. “Kenny didn’t have two cents, I know it for a fact. You think he’d a let that boat of his go to ruin, he’d a had any money? He kept it floating, all right, but even that he did mostly on old, used parts he begged off’n fellows who felt sorry for him. I stood right here An’ watched him do it.”
Back behind the counter now, Dolly put the coffeepot on the warmer coil and dumped the old grounds. “Kenny started payin’ his bills when that Quinn girl took up with him. I know ’cause he’d run a tab up on me, and one on Jim Krill runs the diesel pump, over to the dock. Also he got the power turned back on, out to his trailer. But she was behind it all, and he never had any to spare.”
She gave a sniff of disapproval. “Thick as thieves they was. I don’t know what she saw in him. It wasn’t his bright future.”
Two men in ov
eralls and boots came into the Waco, settled at the counter, and peered up at the menu, finally ordering pie and sodas. Dolly served them with her usual brisk, cheery efficiency, trading jokes and wisecracks before returning to our booth.
“I do know,” she went on, “Kenny decked one of the Peltier boys, teasin’ Ken about jailbait. Gave that boy a good shiner. He didn’t like nasty talk about that girl. Funny, you wouldn’t think Ken was anybody’s knight in shining armor.”
Ellie’s glance softened, and I remembered what she had said about Ken being a gentleman. “I guess everybody’s got their good side,” she said. “Even Ken.”
Dolly’s clear eye fixed on Ellie. “Maybe so. But everybody’s got their dumb side too, and that went double for him. You ask me, that girl was usin’ him. Cute little thing, and smart as the dickens. Maybe too smart, seein’ how she’s ended. But what’d she want with a fool like him?”
She blew a breath out. “I been lookin’ at people’s faces a long time, and what I know is, Ken Mumford was hopeless in love with her, and she let him be in love with her, ’cause he had something she wanted. And that is the long and the short of it.”
“Dolly,” I said, remembering Hank’s story again suddenly, “did he ever talk about a dinghy? Buying one, I mean. An inflatable.”
It just didn’t seem like something he would have, and Ellie had agreed with me when I’d asked her about it.
Dolly blew a breath out through pursed lips. “Hell, no. Them things cost real money. And that reminds me.” She stuck her plump hand into her apron pocket and came out with a five-dollar bill, thrusting it at Ellie.
“I hear you’re taking up a collection for the arrangements. You put this in,” she finished brusquely, turning away.
“Thanks, Dolly.” Ellie put the money in her bag, and made a notation on the yellow pad she was carrying around with her.
“Hey, Ellie,” said one of the fellows at the counter as we passed on our way out. “This here’s for the Mumfords, too.” He opened his wallet and shelled out liberally, as did his partner.
“Christ, can you believe I’m gonna miss the dumb son of a bitch? And what d’you suppose is gonna happen to that old boat? An’ that rust-bucket car he was always bitching about tryin’ to get the money to fix up?”
“Ned got the boat,” the other man said, “for all the good it’s gonna do him. It’s too bad about that car, though. Kenny set high store by that vehicle, even after he lost his license on that last drunk charge. Guess by now it’s hardly worth haulin’ it to the dump, way it’s sat.”
Outside, we squinted in the afternoon brilliance, sunshine slanting down from the sky and caroming off the water.
“I guess Hallie figured Ken was somebody safe to stay with,” I said as we walked up Water Street. In the back of my mind those shutters still hovered ominously, like a flock of albatrosses.
“Maybe,” Ellie replied. Out on the bay, a couple of fishing boats bobbed jauntily, their fresh paint jobs bright watercolor splotches against the blue water and their engines a low grumble at this distance.
“Funny, though,” she added. “She must have had other places she could’ve used as crash pads. If that’s what she was doing.”
“Probably. But what else could it have been? Sam says they weren’t sleeping together, according to the teenage grapevine.”
“And the couch in the trailer did look slept on, didn’t it?” Ellie agreed. “You just didn’t think of anybody wanting anything from Ken, though. Because he didn’t have anything.”
Up Water Street, the shops and restaurants and the Motel East gave way to small cottages set cheek-by-jowl along the inlet overlooking Sea Street. At low tide the rotting wooden skeleton of the old boat ways, where new-built wooden ships once slid into the water for the very first time, poked through the inlet’s calm surface like the stubs of broken teeth.
“It puts,” Ellie admitted, “a different slant on it, the idea of Hallie using Ken.”
By then we had reached the Quinns’ house, a white frame structure whose aggressively neat exterior showed the effects of constant maintenance: crisp new siding shingles, shiny gutters, freshly pointed chimney, and bright white squares of concrete forming the front walk. Flower beds bloomed with marigolds, and even the water in the birdbath looked freshened that morning.
It should have been attractive, but instead it was faintly off-putting, too neat. Every window shade was lined up perfectly with every other one, and a little white sign tacked to the front door ordered visitors to WIPE FEET.
The woman who came to the door resembled Hallie, if you didn’t count the pink nose, tear-swollen eyes, and a thirty-year age difference. They didn’t look as if they’d been easy years and the upcoming ones weren’t going to be, either, her face said. Peering through the screen, she looked wildly from me to Ellie and back, as if still hoping we might have come to tell her that it was all a mistake.
As usual, Ellie got around the introductions with ease and grace; before I knew it, we were in a terrifyingly clean living room, being served a terrifyingly polite cup of tea. But this time it was my turn to do the talking.
“Mrs. Quinn, Hallie came to visit me just before she died.”
Mrs. Quinn gasped, her hand going limply to her throat. “You saw her? Harley,” she called out harshly, “come here! This woman says she saw our Hallie!”
He came into the living room, his face full of grief, anger, and abruptly freshened aggressiveness. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What was she doing with you?”
I tried to make allowances for his bereavement, but all I could think of as his beery breath gusted into my face was that I understood why Hallie had wanted so badly to get away from him.
“She came to tell me I might be in some kind of trouble, if I tried to find out more about the Mumfords’ deaths. She came to try to help me.”
His lips pulled into a snarl. “She’d be sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. That’s like her. But you didn’t think to hang onto her, did you? I oughta call the cops and turn you in.”
“Harley,” his wife pleaded, “let her say what she’s come to tell us.”
I was already calculating the time before Ellie and I could get out of here. “I came to tell you how much I regret not doing more for Hallie when I saw her,” I began. “I tried to get her to stay with me, or to let me take her to the drug rehabilitation place in Portland.”
At the mention of drugs, Quinn’s face reddened in new fury. “You shoulda called me, I’m her father! I know how to handle—”
He stopped suddenly, perhaps realizing that the only ones who would be handling his daughter now would be preparing her body for burial. But the effect didn’t last.
“And I wanted to ask you,” I went on, ignoring his outburst, “about … well … I feel bad about not offering her money. I feel now that if I had, she might have been able to leave town. That’s what she was talking about doing. So—”
“She had money,” Mrs. Quinn interrupted dully.
He shot her a look that promised her a beating, as clearly as anything I’ve ever seen in my life. Just you wait, that look said bullyingly, and I swear he enjoyed her flinching at it.
But she went on talking. “I don’t know where she got it, or from who. I tried to get her to tell me, but she wouldn’t. When she was with that Mumford fellow, I went out there.”
The veins bulged in Quinn’s stringy neck. “You went there. You knew where she was and you didn’t. Tell. Me.”
“Hallie was a bright girl,” she went on, with what strength I could not imagine. “But she and her father had tempers.”
She looked up, pathetically. “I thought some time away would be good for both of them. They could get over their pride, let things settle down a little.”
You could feel it in the room, the slapping and screaming, him roaring out ultimatums and Hallie shrieking her defiance. You could feel it on your skin, like acid.
“So you let her go whoring to that bum,” he went
on, his tone ugly. “And you kept it a secret from me?”
His fingers opened and closed convulsively, as if he wanted to wrap them around someone’s throat. I recalled suddenly that Arnold said Hallie had been strangled, that the beating had been only the beginning.
“Harley, what would you have done if I told you?” Mrs. Quinn asked. “The last time, you broke her eardrum.”
Quinn reared back in exaggerated affront, shocked not so much at the accusation as at her saying it in front of us, and at the reproach in her tone. I got the feeling that reproach was not something he encountered on a daily basis.
Meanwhile it was obvious that she didn’t care anymore: what he did to her, what might happen after Ellie and I were gone. The worst had already happened.
“Should I,” she asked her husband, “have let you kill her?”
He got up. “You and I will talk,” he pronounced ominously, “at another time.”
He left the room. The refrigerator door slammed. Then came the unmistakable snap of the pop-top on yet another beer can, and the thump of footsteps on the cellar stairs.
Mrs. Quinn looked up at us. “I’m sorry. He’s upset. I should not have said that to him.”
She might as well have been wearing a big Kick Me sign. “Well,” I said, getting up, “please accept my sympathies. I thought I ought to let you know I had seen her.”
And to try—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to find out where Hallie’s supply of money was coming from.
I picked up my bag, tried to come up with some comment to ease our way out. Somehow I didn’t think “gangway!” was exactly appropriate. But I didn’t see how I could just leave Hallie’s mother like this, either. She was cruising for a bruising the minute we were gone.
So I pulled one of my cards out. “If you need anything,” I began. “Any help.” I glanced significantly in the direction her husband had gone.
But she waved me away, avoiding my gaze and refusing the card. “I’ll be all right.”
Sure, I thought helplessly. A few more steps and we would be in fresh air, free from the sad, oppressive atmosphere of the house. I could practically smell the sea breeze, everything in me yearning for sunshine and escape.