Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  Banks pushed up his shirtsleeves. Arnold stood looking at the boy’s arms in a silence that lengthened until Banks couldn’t take it anymore.

  “All right?” he demanded. “You got your rocks off, staring?”

  “Shut up, Banks,” Arnold replied, and turned away.

  “Hey!” Banks cried out, suddenly aware that he had lost his privileged victim status.

  “I’m gonna press charges, you know,” he yelled. “I wanna make a complaint. He broke my tooth, he can’t do that. And he can’t say that stuff about me, he’s got no proof. I got a skin condition, is all. Hey, I know my rights!”

  Arnold spun on him. “Yeah, you’ve got rights. You’ve got a right to be watched by me every minute of the day and night from here on out. And you’ve got a right to press charges. So you want to make a complaint against Mulligan, there, you come down to the station later on, and bring your mom with you. We’ll talk it over. We’ll talk it all,” he emphasized, “over.”

  Banks’s bruised chin jutted out truculently, but he appeared to recognize the foolishness of any further discussion. The squad car backed away across the lawn to the street, with Mulligan in the back seat.

  “Do you want me to call someone for you?” I asked Corey Banks when it had gone. “I could call your mom. Or you could come up to our house with us and call her from there.”

  He was at the moment a terrifically unattractive young man. But he was also another mother’s son, and despite the fact that he wasn’t as injured as I had feared, I couldn’t just leave him.

  “No,” he responded sulkily. “Get away from me.”

  I had a flashback of Hallie Quinn, telling me the same. But I couldn’t force him. So I got into Wade’s truck, and when I looked back Corey Banks had begun limping painfully across the library lawn with his arms clutched over his chest, alone.

  38 “He would do it for me, if our positions were reversed.”

  We had finished writing up the arrangements for Ken’s and Tim’s burial service, scheduled for July third when many people who had known them would be in town. Now Ellie and I were sitting in my front parlor, working on the lists for the Fourth of July events.

  Rather, Ellie was working and I was worrying.

  “He wouldn’t just let me go, like I was nobody.” She tipped her head at the activities schedule. “I think we’ll keep people busy with all this. The tourists will get a run for their money.”

  Which was putting it mildly. The Fourth of July festivities began at dawn with a flag-raising service down on the dock, and ended nobody knew when. There was a salmon supper on the Baptist Church lawn, strawberry shortcake on the library steps, tours of a Navy warship, and a performance by the Marine Band Choir. There were children’s activities, too: a karaoke contest, a pet parade, a talent show, and of course the fireworks.

  Also, there was Felicity Abbott-Jones’s visit, in whose honor George Valentine had just finished replacing the metal quonset he usually used for tools, in favor of a temporary—very temporary—ancient-looking wooden shack.

  If she stayed out of the shack, George had remarked, Felicity would think it was an authentic eighteenth-century construction, and if she went in it would probably fall down on her head, and no one would have to worry about her, anymore.

  “Ken would find out,” Ellie persisted, “who killed me.”

  “That’s because Ken didn’t have anything better to do.” I was getting cold feet about the Willoughby expedition.

  Ellie looked sorrowfully at me.

  “Oh, all right,” I relented. “Ken wasn’t as bad as Benny Joe Stottlemeir, I’ll give him that much.”

  Benny Joe Stottlemeir was a legend in Eastport. As a boy, he put bees and dry straw into Mason jars, then lit the straw on fire. He tossed dogs into wells, hung toddlers by their heels, and taped stray cats to the undersides of parked cars, to wait for the fun when the engines got started.

  Later on, people sent their daughters on round-the-world tours, just so they would not marry Benny, who was pathologically handsome and who in spite of his claim of having killed two men—some said five—could be personable when he chose to be.

  But Benny’s luck ran out when a man who could not afford to treat his daughter to the wonders of the world—or perhaps just felt stiff-necked about the notion of paying for such a tour, just on account of Benny—began suspecting Benny of introducing his daughter to wonders of another sort entirely.

  The result: Benny, dead of a gunshot wound. It was only a hip shot but he was gone when he hit the ground, which demonstrates what I said before about the Bisley; it’s not the wound that’ll kill you, but the shock.

  “Benny Stottlemeir,” Ellie said quietly, “was mean. Kenny was only foolish. Do you think fifty quarts of whipping cream will be enough for the strawberry shortcake?”

  I thought a minute, envisioning the steady stream of locals and tourists trooping up the library steps, all wanting dessert to top off their afternoon meal of grilled salmon. The shortcake was made with homemade biscuits, not the sponge cake stuff you can buy at the supermarket, and the strawberries would be fresh, hulled and sugared, sliced into blueware bowls.

  “Seventy-five,” I said.

  “Anyway,” she went on, writing on her shopping list, “when I look down in that grave, and the first shovelful of dirt falls on Ken, I intend to be able to tell him who put him there. And that,” she finished, “is my final word on the subject.”

  When people say something is their final word on the subject, more words are usually forthcoming, but Ellie is a Mainer born and bred, so there were none.

  Wade had gone with George to find out if the old horse trough from Hillside Cemetery could be moved to its original spot in front of the bank building for Felicity’s visit. They meant to tie up some ponies there, tame ones suitable for a children’s-ride concession, thus creating yet another holiday activity while also furthering the cause of historical correctness.

  Upstairs, Sam was huddled in his room with Tommy Daigle, where they were mending an old turnbuckle salvaged for use in tightening the shroud on their sailboat. While they worked, Sam was trying to convince Tommy that a muffler was a necessary item of automotive equipment for his old jalopy; Tommy wanted to spend the money on a raccoon tail.

  And Victor, once again, was already in bed. He had come home from his real-estate trip looking thoughtful, quiet in the storm-on-the-horizon way that in the old days forewarned a tantrum and now cast an air of ominous silence over his end of the dinner table. In honor of the warm weather, we’d had cold couscous with shrimp, chilled leek soup, a fruit salad, and breadsticks, after which he had gone upstairs without a word to anyone.

  “What do you suppose is really wrong with him?” Ellie asked. “Because I still think there is something. Beyond the usual, that is. And more than trying to make a career switch.”

  Ellie is the one who understands most how troublesome Victor can be. She was around when he sent me a dozen apples and a note, inviting me to guess which one was poisoned. She was there when he phoned every ten minutes for six hours, hanging up each time I answered, and when I took the phone off the hook he called Arnold to say there was an emergency at my house and that Arnold should send a SWAT team. And she was present when Victor, upset that I had allowed Sam on a fishing trip—

  —Victor regards fishing as an activity more simian than human, on a level with tail swinging and flea picking—

  —arrived brandishing an emergency order of custody removal, and demanding that I hand Sam over.

  Fortunately he was drunk at the time, so Ellie could step up and snatch the order of removal away from him, and burn it in the sink.

  “What’s wrong with him is, I confronted him on his behavior and told him I intended to have it out with him. And I told him I wanted Sam to be there.”

  Ellie looked at me as if I’d reported taming a Bengal tiger.

  “But he doesn’t want to,” I went on. “For one thing, it would show his true colors to Sam.
Victor’s finessing Sam, so a blowup’s too blatant for his purposes. Probably we’ve seen the last of him for tonight.”

  Ellie frowned, poring over her list. “It’s early. He could wait until Sam goes out with Tommy, and then come back down. Of course,” she added, “we could manage not to be here …”

  “Oh, sure. Trap me in a squeeze play. Either I get to go to Willoughby’s, or I can get stuck in whichever level of hell Victor turns out to be landscaping for me.”

  She shrugged. “We can avoid Willoughby if we’re quiet and careful. As for Victor, though, I’m starting to think he is like the poor, whom we shall always have with us.”

  Now there was a ghastly thought. Before I could reply she got up and went to the hallway, returning with a canvas satchel. I saw a flashlight sticking out, a spare cell phone, other items stuffed down into it.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ve put together our kit. Equipment for trespassers. And I told Wade to meet us out front at eight.”

  Grumbling, I pulled on the navy sweatshirt she thrust at me, and pulled the watch cap she offered over my hair. She wore a dark cotton pullover, dark pants, and a scarf, all of which made her appear dashing and slightly madcap; together I thought we resembled Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz.

  But she was going, and I couldn’t very well let her do it alone. “Is this how Kenny got you to go with him to Caribou?”

  I hitched the satchel over my shoulder. “Just kind of muscled you and bullied you, and swept you along, until you felt you had no choice?”

  Ellie stopped, gazing out the dining room window toward the water. On the horizon hung a nearly full moon, its glow the bright orange of a forest fire. That moon was going to light Willoughby’s place like an arena.

  “Ken Mumford,” Ellie said, “never bullied or muscled.”

  39 Flying down the highway on a clear summer night in the back of a pickup truck, you forget about air bags and seat belts. The sky is II enormous, and the stars wheel around like the glass shards in a kaleidoscope until you feel you will fall right up into them.

  Wade had one of the cell phones; I had the other. I pressed the COM button on mine.

  “Yeah.” He angled his head slightly toward me. “What?”

  “Wade, if he catches us I’m going to leave this open, so you can hear what’s happening.”

  “Sure, but he’s not going to catch you. I’ve been thinking.”

  “And?” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice.

  “Worst case, you’ll create some commotion.”

  We’d make a commotion, all right: the kind that gets you tossed in an unmarked grave. This wasn’t Wall Street, where when somebody catches you doing something, they call the Securities and Exchange Commission. This was downeast Maine, where security was provided by yard dogs, barbed-wire fences, and buckshot.

  At least Baxter Willoughby didn’t have any yard dogs.

  That I knew of.

  “So I figure,” Wade said, “I’ll make a ruckus right up front. Drive up the driveway, tell him my dog jumped out of the truck bed, took off across his property. That way, he hears any unusual noises, he’ll think it’s the dog.”

  “Smart. But if you’re there they might not do whatever they are planning for tonight.”

  Ellie had called Ned’s house, asking for Ned, and his wife had said Ned was gone and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow: bingo.

  “Good thought,” Wade said. “Tell you what, I’ll racket around a while, then tell him I’m giving up, the dog’ll have to find its own way home.”

  “Uh-huh. Then, if anything unusual happens, he’ll still think it’s your lost animal. Instead of us two lost animals.”

  Wade grinned. “Want to know why I’m doing this, don’t you?”

  Ellie looked sideways at him, but said nothing. In the soft glow of the dash lights, her face was implacable.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Ever ridden in a truck bed at night before?”

  “No, but what does that have to do with—”

  He pulled the truck to the side of the road, saying something to Ellie that I couldn’t hear, then swung into the truck bed with me. Ellie threw the truck in gear—it ground a little, going in; I should have said something to Wade about the transmission, I realized belatedly—and we were moving again.

  “Lie down on the floor,” Wade instructed.

  I did. He lay down beside me, and I rested my head on his chest. “Look up,” he said.

  The night sky filled all of my vision, enormous and flooded with moonlight. A meteor streaked across it like the flickering slash of a scalpel. There was no wind, just the rush of the air moving on the truck’s sides, the engine noise muted and distant.

  “Now,” Wade said, “the way I see it, you made your decision. Ellie wants to do something, wants it bad, you decided to help her. I respect your choice. And I could decide whether to make it a little safer or not. Simple as that.”

  Which for Wade it was, unlike in the city where there is always another layer of machination, another motive beneath the ulterior motive. With Wade, what you see is what you get.

  “You had to come back here to tell me that?”

  He pulled me against him. “No. I wanted to be here with you.”

  “Sneaky devil.” Another shooting star streaked through the sky. “I wish I could get things to be that simple with Victor.”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve been meaning to say something about that, too. I know what I said about not kowtowing, but I don’t want you to feel you have to go head to head with him just because I—”

  “It’s not that. It’s Sam. I don’t want him thinking he’s got to do things that aren’t right for him.”

  The truck slowed, pulling to a halt under an aspen tree whose leaves shimmered like coins. Wade jumped out and reached up a hand; I hit the ground with both feet, bouncing around a couple of times, overwound with my own energy.

  “I’m glad you came,” I told him, keeping my voice low. “All of a sudden I’m really nervous.”

  “Nothing wrong with being nervous,” Wade replied. “Trick is, knowing what to be nervous about.”

  He looked around, picked out the glimmer of light at the top of the hill: Willoughby’s house.

  “Speaking of which, we’re here.”

  40 We waited in the shadows at the foot of the long drive while Wade took the truck up. In a moment, a light went on at the garage end of the house, and the sounds of men’s voices floated on the night air, one of them Ned Montague’s.

  Which was when I realized what I’d forgotten. But it was too late to worry about that. Ten minutes passed while Wade called and whistled, chasing the nonexistent animal. Then silence.

  “Okay. The stage is set.” Wade backed down the driveway again and his face appeared through the driver’s-side window.

  “What’d Ned say? He knows you don’t have a dog.”

  “Yeah,” Wade whispered back. “And if he had any brains he’d know that if I did, I wouldn’t let it ride in the back of a pickup any more than you would. So I finessed him, said I was trying out a dog I was thinking of buying, it got lost around dusk. Do you know,” he added, “how to make Ned’s eyes gleam?”

  “No,” I frowned back, puzzled. “How?”

  “Shine a light in his ear,” Wade replied, and drove away to wait. I saw the brake lights glow, and the tail-lights wink out.

  And then we were on our own. We picked the worst, brambliest spot full of barberry and raspberry canes that we could find to enter the property, a place where not even a security-systems installer would risk his hide, in case Willoughby had more detector gadgets.

  Picking the thorns out of our own hides, we scanned toward the big house. “There,” Ellie pointed, “is the barn. The llamas must be inside.”

  “Drat.” The main door of the barn was in the animals’ paddock and brightly floodlit. “How are we going to get in there?”

  The idea was to sneak inside and wait for Ned to load the llamas.
That way, we could check around the barn and get a view of the truck’s cargo area, too, when he opened the back of it. But I’d rather have crossed a minefield than that floodlit paddock.

  On the other hand, last time I looked, they weren’t lighting up the exercise yards of maximum-security prisons with that much candlepower. The major-league illumination argued strongly for the notion that Willoughby was—or had been—keeping something important in that area.

  Ellie marched away from me, striding up the hillside.

  “Hey,” I whispered after her, “where are you going? We need to figure out what we’re doing, not just blunder in.”

  “I’m not blundering. See that barn?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” I answered, exasperated. “It’s got all those lights on it, for heaven’s sake. That’s the problem.”

  “It’s the same barn George just disassembled. The quonset. So he could put the shed up. George built that quonset from a kit.”

  “Fabulous, but that doesn’t—oh.” I hurried after her.

  “Lights around front by the big overhead doors,” she went on. “But that style of building has a hinged door in the back, so you don’t have to open the big doors if you don’t want to, just to go in. And that door doesn’t have any lights near it that I can see. It just backs out onto the underbrush. Which probably means,” she finished sadly, “a lot more brambles.”

  “Ouch.” I tripped on a root hump left over from Willoughby’s clearing of the cedars, and nearly went flying. “Bad enough he ruins the scenic beauty, he’s got to create a pedestrian hazard?”

  “Ssh. Get down.” Ellie crouched suddenly as figures appeared on the porch of the big house: Willoughby and the British fellow, peering down the hill in front of them. In the stillness, their voices carried.

  “See anything?” The British guy.

  “Not yet. These goddamned locals and their dogs. Hard to say who’s stupider, the people or the animals.”

  “Right.” Roight. “Humans won’t piss on your leg, though.”