Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  I sighed; oh, for a shred of actual, solid information. “I don’t know either, Peter. Listen, can you talk to your folks about this? Or a guidance counselor, somebody at school?”

  He made a rude noise. “None of them,” he said, “are on my mental level. My IQ is in the genius range. So I have,” he confided unnecessarily, “a hard time communicating my concerns.”

  Maybe, I wanted to say, you could write them some letters. But that would have been too cruel.

  “Thank you,” he said, nodding to Ellie as she joined us, “for giving me a chance to ventilate my emotions. I’m feeling a lot of stress. I’ll go and confer with Chief Arnold.”

  “You do that, Peter,” I said, and he strode off: head high, practically whistling now that he’d ventilated his feelings. Personally, I was glad it was me carrying a weapon and not Peter, or I’d be worried about him ventilating something else.

  Or someone. Then I got a look at Ellie’s face.

  “In the park at Shackford Head this afternoon,” she burst out, “two tourists were mugged and robbed. One of the people on the pier just told me, some guy menaced these tourists and ran away with their wallets.”

  I looked around: blue sky, sparkling water, salt-fresh air. That kind of thing didn’t happen here, and certainly not at the state park at Shackford Head, a wild, remote area where the most menacing event in recent history was the sighting of a black bear urging a cub up the hill toward a raspberry thicket.

  “Has Arnold heard?”

  “Yes, he’s up at the Happy Landings with the tourists, now, trying to get them calmed down enough to get information out of them. I understand he’s fit to be tied.”

  He was, too. By the time we got home, Arnold’s squad car was parked outside my house, where he had gone looking for George.

  “This is it,” Arnold said explosively. “I have had it.”

  George was there, too, tinkering with the valve stem on the new radiator. “I don’t suppose,” George asked me, “that you have any chewed-up chewing gum?”

  Once upon a time, a cast-iron radiator cost a few dollars and required no attention whatsoever, other than being painted gold or silver if you wanted it cooler, and white if you wanted it hotter. Nowadays, a radiator costs hundreds of dollars, and needs more maintenance than a zoo animal. At the moment, this one was behaving like a zoo animal, too: hissing and spitting.

  “Because,” George went on, “I think I’d better repack that valve stem, and I used up my packing over at the grade school.”

  “I’ll go,” Sam offered, looking up from the table where he was working on the sketch of the square-rigger, complete with miles of hemp lines and acres of canvas sheets.

  “Hey, Arnold,” George remarked. “I hear you found some more of that illegal trash, out South End way.”

  George understood the seriousness of the situation. But he thought going along normally was a good approach to most things, until positively shown otherwise.

  “Yeah,” Arnold replied disgustedly. “Household trash. Some cheapskate can’t put it out for the truck like civilized people. Al Rollins is going through it now.”

  He took an outraged breath. “But that is the least of my concerns, right this minute. I have had it to the eyes, damnit. There are not going to be any more murders. Or muggings. Or escapes,” Arnold said thunderously, glaring around at us. “I am here to guarantee you of that.”

  We all nodded obediently, because it was what he wanted: for all of us to agree with him. After that, he would go back out and do his job, but right now he needed—as Peter Mulligan had put it—to ventilate.

  “Do you,” Sam asked George, “want valve-stem packing? Or chewing gum?” He put his sketches into their folder and removed them from the table, planning ahead for dinner.

  George looked at the radiator, thinking about what it said in his plumbing manual versus what he knew from fixing radiators all over town for fifteen years.

  “I’m not going to tolerate any more of this nonsense,” Bob Arnold declared. “I am going to put a stop to it here and now.”

  George took his gimme cap off and examined it, still thinking about his decision.

  “There is not going to be more upset in Eastport,” Arnold predicted forcefully, “or any more crime wave. Not at all.”

  “Chewing gum,” George said. “It’ll work a lot better, is my professional prediction.”

  So Sam went out to buy a pack of Wrigley’s, all of which he promised to chew to the proper consistency on the way home. And although I felt doubtful, wondering if a roll of packing from Wadsworth’s might not be the better choice, in the end George’s prediction turned out to be right.

  Unlike—unfortunately—Bob Arnold’s.

  31 The way to a man’s heart is supposed to be through his stomach, and since I had never found any other route I decided to try it with Victor; maybe I could soften him up before I lowered the boom on him. So for dinner we had avocado-nut loaf, a tofu-based herb sauce, baby carrots, and whole-wheat oven rolls, all of which turned out to be a satisfying meal that even he ate without any complaint.

  “Soapstone sinks,” he enthused over dessert, a compote of strawberries and blackberries.

  In the house he was thinking of buying, he meant; in which he would become my neighbor.

  “Butler’s pantries, and fireplaces—lots of fireplaces, one in every room!”

  For what it would cost to bring those old chimneys up to code, you could heat the house by burning bricks of money and still end up considerably ahead. But Victor for once in his life was in a wonderful mood, and no one wanted to spoil it.

  Or anyway not right this minute.

  “So, George,” Victor asked, “what do you think it would take to get a Jacuzzi into that house? With,” he added, “separate tub and shower stall, maybe a steam cabinet, twin lavatories. That’s all, nothing fancy.”

  George smiled, visions of full employment until sometime in the next millennium dancing in his head. “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, spooning up strawberries. “Shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  Compared, say, to building the Egyptian pyramids by the original labor-intensive methods, with maybe a few of the hanging towers of Babylon added on. Just getting a Jacuzzi unit up the staircase would be an interesting project, and at the idea of hooking it to the jerry-rigged network of old pipes that must be the house’s plumbing, I nearly inhaled a berry.

  “The question is,” Ellie put in, “and only if you don’t mind my asking: what are you going to do here?”

  Victor looked surprised. “Do? Why, I’m going to do surgery. Because back in the city there’s a neurosurgeon every half-block, but here, it’s special. It’ll probably take a little time to get my credentials transferred, but after that—”

  “Victor,” Wade put in. “Have you visited the hospital yet?”

  Wade had taken to behaving as if he were Victor’s uncle, mostly on account of wanting things to go well for Sam and me.

  “Well, no,” Victor harrumphed, irritated. “But I’m sure it’s a fine, perfectly modern—”

  “Dad?” Sam put his hand on Victor’s shoulder. “Listen. It is a good hospital, for where it is, out here so far away from everything. But, Dad, they transfer compound fractures.”

  The implication being that it didn’t matter how good a surgeon Victor was. To do his job, he needed a very high-tech support system: special instruments, teams of technical staff, cutting-edge therapeutic techniques, not to mention an intensive care unit wired like the control room at NASA. The hospital in Calais is excellent, but it’s not set up for that stuff.

  Which meant that Victor, so spoiled by the big city that he imagined all ninety-bed regional care facilities possessed the same sophisticated diagnostic imaging systems he used in New York, might not be staying in Eastport after all.

  Not that it was going to save him from the conversation I had planned for him. Still, it was a pleasant prospect.

  “All,” Victor asked Sam intensely, �
��compound fractures?”

  “Well, no,” Sam admitted. He’d done volunteer work there. “Not all of them. But the terrible ones, the trauma-center ones where big bone ends are actually all mangled and sticking out, they put you in Hank Henahan’s ambulance to Bangor. And the bad head cases go on a helicopter from Quoddy Airfield.”

  Personally, while I am eating my dinner, I do not want to hear about bone ends sticking out. But it was worth it if it got rid of Victor.

  “They stabilize you,” Sam continued. “Then they ship you. Somewhere bigger where they have, you know, a lot more technology.”

  Delighted as we all were to think that we might soon be seeing the back of Victor—his good humor was a freak thing, believe me, like a rain of frogs—it was sad to see his dream busted.

  Or I assumed it was, anyway, for one brief, shining moment.

  “Well, then,” Victor asserted, lifting his head and gazing imperiously at all of us. “I’ll have to change my plan.”

  Tra-la. But then his tone alerted me.

  “I’ll have to give up being a neurosurgeon. After all,” he went on, smiling at me as if he had not just trashed my own dream, which was to say goodbye to him, “you changed your life, Jacobia. Why shouldn’t I change mine?”

  Because, I thought nastily, there is no backhoe big enough for all your bad karma.

  “Work,” Ellie ventured, “is scarce around here. I mean, for a man of your specialized talents.”

  Lying, cheating, bullying, tyrannizing … the list just went on and on. The only other thing my ex-husband was qualified to be was Attila the Hun.

  “Then maybe,” Victor said, “I’ll retire. Enjoy,” he went on, absent visible irony, “the simple life.”

  With, of course, the assistance of that Jacuzzi.

  “I might write some poetry,” he said. “You know, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at poetry. Never had time.”

  This, naturally, being the only obstacle between himself and a Pulitzer. Victor thinks old Burma-Shave signs are the height of linguistic cleverness.

  “But the important thing I’ll do,” he said, “is get to know Jacobia again. Heal,” he added tenderly, “our estrangement.”

  Wade turned slowly, with a look in his eyes that should have incinerated Victor right on the spot.

  Whereupon I thought: There once was a jerk from the city, whose plans for my life were not pretty, and lest you think I was waxing excessively bitter may I just tell you right here and now that my ex-husband Victor no more wanted to heal our estrangement than I wanted multiple stab wounds.

  This was a scheme. What he wanted was to torture me, and he had happened upon the perfect method.

  “So,” Victor said, “I’ll just have to reconsider my options. Think it over. Take my time, reinventing myself.”

  He smiled, hideously. “You won’t mind if I stay for a while longer with you and Sam, will you, Jacobia?”

  Wade watched me carefully.

  “Not at all,” I said, and a gleam of triumph lit in Victor’s eye, while Wade looked disappointedly away.

  I took a deep breath. “Stay as long as you like. I want to talk to you in private after dinner, though. We need to get a few things straight around here. About Sam, and about your behavior while you’re in my house.”

  A silence descended as everyone—especially Sam, who looked thunderstruck—waited to see how Victor would react.

  “Fine,” he agreed at last, blithely, as if whatever I might have to say to him couldn’t possibly be very important.

  But, as a small smile curved the corners of Wade’s lips, we all saw Victor’s gaze waver a fraction.

  Score one for me.

  32 Later that night, the town had two burglaries and another mugging. By the time Hank Henahan got the ambulance back home again the local people had organized into citizen patrols, willing and able to stomp out everything from misdemeanors to major felonies.

  Well, maybe not particularly able, I thought, peering out the guest-room window the following morning.

  Victor and I had not after all had our fight scene; pleading a headache, he’d rushed upstairs after dinner.

  Which was par for the course, for Victor, and precisely what I’d expected; when he knew you wanted to talk with him, he never wanted to, especially if you sounded determined. He wasn’t around now, either; somehow he’d managed to get up and out of the house without my noticing.

  Frustrated, I scanned the street to see if I could find him, spotting instead Miss Violet Gage tottering up the hill with a long umbrella in her hand, gimlet-eyed and ready to bonk someone.

  The menacing effect was spoiled, however, on account of her having put her corset on over her dress. She was frightening, all right, but not in the way she intended, and at the sight of her I went hastily out to meet her, and brought her inside.

  “It’s all organized,” Miss Gage gasped flusteredly, gazing around my kitchen as if she might spy some most-wanted criminal, and bring him to justice. “Ned Montague has got a list, and he is going to assign us all to patrol our territories.”

  I gave Miss Gage a cup of tea, and took the umbrella away from her; as long as she was holding it Monday would not come into the kitchen, not even to eat her breakfast.

  “Nice doggy,” said Miss Gage.

  I had spent the previous evening until past midnight in the cellar, working on the old shutters, so I was feeling toxic from the late night and also from the knowledge that my ex-husband was still under my roof instead of under a granite monument.

  Pouring a cup of coffee, I sat down across from Miss Gage. She smelled of talcum powder, chamomile, and sassafras tea, and her face was as sweet as a sugar doughnut.

  “Are you sure Ned meant you should personally go out chasing criminals? Because,” I added tactfully, “I should think that with your knowledge and awareness, your experience, you might be best utilized in the planning area. The strategy, and so on.”

  Miss Gage looked gratified. “You are quite right … oh, what is your name, again?” She shook her head vexedly. “Never mind, it’ll come to me. But I must discharge my civic duty. Age is no excuse when one’s community is threatened. Our very way of life, my dear, is under attack.”

  She drew herself up seriously. “No Gage has ever shirked his or her responsibility where defense is concerned, not since those red-coated bastards marched in here and stole our freedom!”

  She said it the Maine way—bahstads. “This,” she breathed dramatically, “is war!”

  A button popped ringingly off her corset.

  “Yes. Well. Probably it is,” I said. “But still, I can’t stand to see your talents wasted this way so I wonder,” I ventured, “if I might help.”

  You had to go carefully with Miss Gage; she was a dotty old lady but not a bit stupid, and she knew when she was being inveigled.

  “Y-e-es,” she drawled skeptically, eyeing me from under the brim of her big straw hat.

  “My thought is, I might replace you on the front lines. Take on, as it were, the actual military portion of the activity.”

  She lowered her eyelids. The effect was wickedly knowing and wildly attractive, reminding me that Violet Gage was the belle of the ball in that excellent year, 1932.

  Meanwhile I do very much like intelligent old ladies, and the dottier the better. A little misarrangement in the corset department, I feel, is as nothing in the grand scheme of things.

  “Freeing you,” I went on, “for the brain-power part of the program. Where Ned,” I added delicately, “might just require a bit of …”

  “Shoring up,” she supplied crisply. “The boy is a fool.”

  “Ah, yes. Well. That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. At any rate …”

  I searched my mind, trying to think of some further way to persuade her that at her age, racketing around chasing juvenile delinquents or worse was as good a way as any to land herself in the hospital for a hip replacement; they did those, in Calais.

  “And of course y
ou would be doing me a great favor, too,” I went on, feeling that I was babbling, now, and sure that at any moment I would insult her, or worse, hurt her feelings.

  “Because you’re right, we must all do our duty, and I would not want to be accused of …”

  “Quiet, girl. Quit blithering. I understand, and I accept.”

  When I turned, she had taken off the hat and was carefully straightening the black grosgrain hatband. In the light slanting in through the kitchen window her hair was the color of an autumn leaf, red with white frost on it.

  She placed the hat on her head and regarded the front of herself. “I don’t recall this dress lacing up this way. How,” she pronounced, “curious.”

  Then she looked up at me, shrewdly and humorously, as if, having tolerated the quirks and missteps of others throughout her long life, she would now be as charitable about her own.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if you might perform another small service. I seem to have left my glasses at home, or I would do it myself.”

  “Of course, Miss Gage,” I said, feeling humbled and proud that she should trust me this way. “Stand up, and we’ll make the adjustment.”

  So she stood, holding out her slim, graceful arms, her head held high with the big hat perched on top of it, while I undid the many tiny buttons of the corset. When I had finished I put it into a paper shopping bag for her, and she received it gravely.

  “I believe,” I added, “that at some time I must have borrowed your umbrella.”

  Miss Gage, as we both knew, never lent her umbrella.

  “Thank you.” She smiled graciously, accepting it. “And now I must go home, and prepare for the mission. Plans and strategies, attacks and counterattacks.” She made way for the door.

  “Meet at the corner of Shackford Street,” she instructed, “eight sharp. Mind you’re not late. Bring a flashlight. A heavy,” she added with considerable charming menace, “flashlight.”

  But at the door, she paused suddenly. “Who is that man?” she asked. “Not Wade Sorenson,” she added. “Everybody knows him.”