by Sarah Graves
She emptied the can into the sink. “In fact, Ned, I think that’s exactly what you would like. After all,” she went on, “you have already tried killing Jacobia, once.”
Ned blinked, puzzled by her tone, and by the sudden change in the atmosphere. “What? Hey, what’re you saying?”
Arnold stepped into the kitchen.
“You shot at her,” Ellie said, “with your hunting rifle. The one Peter Mulligan found right here in this house, while you were in the cellar. But whose was it? Not Wade’s, or Jacobia’s. And it had to come from somewhere.”
“Wade,” I remembered aloud, “told me you once had an old deer rifle.”
The gun was now in Arnold’s office, locked up as evidence until he could decide who was going to get charged with what.
Ellie aimed a steady finger at Ned. “Which you had brought to use on us, if you couldn’t talk your way out of the mess you were in, and if you could, you’d say you brought it for Wade to check it out for you. That’s why you left it upstairs, so you didn’t have to commit yourself until you knew which way the conversation would go. Isn’t that right?”
Ned flushed, realizing suddenly that he had been in Arnold’s custody—or ours—since we found out he’d warned Willoughby.
“The same rifle,” Ellie went on, “you probably used to kill Ike Forepaugh, because if no one ever found Ike he’d keep getting blamed for everything, wouldn’t he? Suspicion wouldn’t turn,” she finished meaningfully, “to you.”
“Gossip was true, for once,” Arnold said. “There’s a body been dug up on Crow Island and it sure looks like Forepaugh.”
Arnold turned slowly. “Met him after he got away from us, did you, Ned? Maybe he even called you for help. You tell him you would drive him somewhere, get him out of town? Want to bet we match a bullet?”
“You ever register that old rifle, Ned?” Wade asked.
“Y-yes,” Ned replied, too scared suddenly to lie. “But—”
“When you saw Jacobia heading for Dennysville that morning,” Ellie pressed on, “when you were on your way back to Eastport, you jumped to the conclusion that her trip must have something to do with Ken’s death, because you had a guilty conscience. And you got scared, so you decided to take her out of the picture.”
“You didn’t go all the way back to town. Instead you hid in the brush on Carlow Island and waited for me to come back,” I said, recalling now having seen his car that day.
“But,” Ellie finished, “you’re not a great shot. You missed.”
Montague stared. “That’s—that’s not true!”
“You’d already started insinuating yourself into Ken’s life,” Ellie said, “when he started paying his bills with the proceeds of the drug trips. Ken was keeping his head down pretty well, but you smelled money and wanted to know where it was coming from.”
Ned made a disparaging sound. “Nickels and dimes, from that little blonde’s dope deals. She’d met some guy in Portland, he wanted her to distribute. She’d lined Ken up for the boat work. They were the criminals,” he protested, “not me.”
So I’d been right. It was Hallie behind the drug smuggling.
“Nickels and dimes were more than you were earning,” Ellie pointed out. “But then Ken made his mistake. He let you in on his bigger deal, didn’t he? Because Ken didn’t have a driver’s license and Willoughby couldn’t tolerate that.”
Ned’s soft lips pouted sullenly. This was all too accurate for his comfort.
“There you were, having to share this great racket with your loser cousin. Who’d miss him? And you needed the money. So Ken had to go,” Ellie said, “because you wanted the whole thing for yourself. Then Tim started talking about Ken’s ‘big deal,’ the only one Tim knew about. He meant drug runs for Hallie, but you were afraid he meant the money runs and you couldn’t risk that.”
She took a deep breath. “On Willoughby’s orders, you took his money stash out to Crow Island and hid it in plain sight, ready for the next leg of the journey, using the dog food sacks Tim had saved up so carefully. That must have been when you killed Tim.”
But Tim’s dying, I thought, hadn’t been on Willoughby’s order. Why hide money at a death scene? No, the old man’s “suicide” had been all Ned’s idea. The guy was as bluntly purposeful—and as blindly stupid—as a tunneling grub.
The old man might know something. Besides, Ned wanted the island. Case closed.
“You even used Ken’s boat to get out there,” Arnold said, “didn’t you?”
Ellie and Arnold had figured it out long before me. It was why Arnold had kept Ned calm all evening; so Ned wouldn’t run.
“That trip was a way to get the money away from Willoughby’s place, where it was making him nervous, out into a convenient spot,” Ellie went on, “and it was a dry run with the boat, for you. A short run before you had to attempt the big project.”
Ned had begun to sweat, his eyes darting anxiously around the room. But Arnold blocked his only escape route.
“What you didn’t realize,” Ellie added, “was that anyone would try to take care of Tim’s dogs, because it wasn’t something you’d have bothered doing. They weren’t valuable dogs like Cosmo. You didn’t think anyone would find the money or Tim’s body so fast.”
“But I told you, if anyone did all that, it must’ve been Ike. This—this is libel! Or slander! Isn’t it?” Ned turned, his eyes appealing to Bob Arnold.
“Right, Ned,” Ellie said scathingly. “I guess Ike Forepaugh probably kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, too. And after that, he shot himself, and buried himself. Quite a guy.”
“Crow Island,” Arnold added, “makes a better place to start from, if you’re smuggling something. Set out from the cove at the north end of it, nobody on shore here sees your heading.”
“Tim wouldn’t have suspected you,” Ellie said, resuming her attack. “With his crippled leg, he must have been an easy victim. And I guess you’re the only guy besides Willoughby in fifty miles, can’t tie a decent slipknot. And then there was Hallie.”
Her eyes shone with anger. “First you sweet-talked her, gave her gifts, probably. Made promises. She was too young to know that a guy like you couldn’t really do anything for her. To her, you probably looked like her ticket out. Didn’t you?”
Ned squirmed at her tone. “Then you started blackmailing her for those nickels and dimes, I suppose,” Ellie went on. “If she didn’t pay, you’d tell Arnold. That’s why she kept meeting you.”
“But after Ken died,” I put in, “you took it all. You found her stash in Ken’s car and appropriated it, just the way you did his boat.”
Montague looked trapped. “You can’t prove any of this. You just want somebody to blame for it. And with you here—”
He glared at Arnold. “I think I ought to have a lawyer.”
Arnold shook his head innocently. “Me? I just stopped by for a cup of coffee. Haven’t asked a single question.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not saying anything more.” Montague’s chin thrust out belligerently as he got to his feet again.
Ellie stepped up to him. “Ken Mumford,” she told him softly, “was a loser, like you thought.”
She stuck her finger in Ned’s chest. “But you know what? He had dreams, and I remember them. He was worth ten of you.”
Before he could stop her she’d reached down into his jacket pocket, and I saw her fingers close on something there.
“Hallie argued with someone that night on the seawall,” she told Arnold, still staring at Ned. “But when Mulligan approached, that person faded into the shadows. After that, Hallie rejected Mulligan again. But Mulligan never really said he killed her, did he? She sent Mulligan away,” Ellie said. “And then …”
Her hand came out of Ned’s pocket, her fingers wrapped around the silver medallion.
“… someone else killed her, tipped her body over the seawall, rolled it to the water of the boat basin, and dumped it in the nearest bait bin. The question is, why? There w
as no reason to move that body.”
“Or,” she turned to Ned, “was there?”
His face had gone fishbelly white. “I wanted—” he began.
“Shut up, Ned,” Wade advised, his expression one of disgust mingled with pity.
I took the medallion from Ellie. “You know, this chain is just like the one I wear,” I said. “I noticed it when Hallie came over here. And it’s the very devil to open. Especially,” I added, “if you can’t see it. Say, in the darkness on the seawall. And the nearest light is under the big lamps, by the boat basin.”
“I only wanted it back,” Ned said sullenly. “It’s silver. She’d just end up shooting it in her arm. Only she wouldn’t give it to me.”
“Still, why risk being seen near her body afterwards just to get a piece of jewelry?” I asked.
His answering look at me was hateful.
“Because,” I theorized, “the risk of leaving it was even greater? As it would be, for instance—”
I turned the medallion over. “If your initials and Hallie’s were scratched on the back.”
And there they were. Good old Hallie: maybe she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but she was consistent: initials everywhere. And the way it turned out, she might as well have carved an “M” for murderer in Ned’s forehead.
“You’re related to two of the victims,” I said. “You couldn’t afford to be linked to a third. Once she was dead, you had to get the medallion.”
“You don’t …” he began hopelessly.
I tossed the thing at Arnold, who caught it without taking his gaze from Ned. Like I say, Arnold can be quick when he wants to be.
He hadn’t spooked Willoughby, even though I felt certain Clarissa had told Arnold all that I had reported to her. And although while Ned was here with us, Arnold had stayed away doing all the other things he had to do, he’d showed up double-fast when we’d called to say we were leaving Ned alone.
And he was here for the finish. “How’d you know?” I asked him, as he applied his handcuffs to a silent, subdued Ned Montague.
Arnold snapped the bracelets shut. “Wouldn’t say I knew. But it was the gash in Ken’s boat for starters. And the dinghy. Ken would never’ve had such a thing, but there it was, stowed up like it’d always been there. I kept asking how those things linked.”
“You can’t prove …” Ned protested weakly, but Arnold just talked over him.
“Simple answer that covered everything was that somebody’d got out to the boat on the dinghy. Killed Ken, then grounded the boat by accident.”
He turned Ned around a little more roughly than was strictly necessary. “Somebody had to change his plan, jump off, walk home. Meant to use the dinghy to get away but he couldn’t, and he sure didn’t want to be seen dragging it. So he stowed it, make it look like it belonged.”
“It wasn’t my dinghy,” Ned objected. “I never had one. Never even saw it.”
“Really?” Arnold responded, and dropped his bombshell.
“So how come we found a receipt for it in the household trash you dumped, out at South End? Stuff with your name on it, receipt all torn in pieces, but we put it back together, me and Al Rollins.”
Arnold shook his head scornfully. “Your problem, Ned,” he finished, “is that you are a cheap bastard, and a greedy bastard. And also, you are a dumb bastard. Should’ve spent the money Willoughby paid you on something for your kids, ’stead of that dinghy. Or you should’ve burnt the receipt.”
I remembered the overflowing trash cans out at Ned’s place. But Al Rollins had just collected. The trash wouldn’t have been there if Ned hadn’t been disposing of it some other way. Dumping it, for instance, illegally.
“You suspected him all along, didn’t you?” I asked Arnold. “That’s why you stuck so hard to saying you thought it was Ike. And why you downplayed my getting shot at. So Ned, here, wouldn’t suspect he was already on the hot seat, and maybe take off before you could get him dead to rights.”
Arnold shrugged. “Something like that. Because look: after the boat’s run aground, later the tide comes in, frees the boat up, she’s found drifting. So I asked myself, who around here could ground a boat like that? A scrape’s one thing but nobody hits hard enough to make such a dent on purpose. Because sure, it floats now, but sooner or later it’ll cost money to fix. And when I added up two and two, Ned kept making four. The receipt only put the frosting on it.”
Arnold glanced at Ellie, meanwhile giving Ned a small shove. “ ’Course, it didn’t hurt, you mentioning Willoughby to Clarissa, then I find out who’s driving the truck for him. Ned being hooked up with Willoughby and being the lousiest boat handler in Washington County and being a guy who will pollute the whole world with his trash, just to save two lousy bucks a week …”
He sighed. “Come on, buddy. And if you’re thinking of doing anything else stupid, keep in mind that I’m carrying my service revolver. I don’t want,” he added with quiet emphasis, “any more prisoners escaping.”
“Hey, Ned,” I called as they prepared to depart.
I couldn’t help it; I just had to know. “How’d the llamas get into the money?”
Because first it was out on Crow Island, and after that the cops had it, for evidence. It had been a couple of days between the time that money was at Willoughby’s, and the llama spat it at Ned. So …
Ned turned, replying bitterly. “They didn’t. That slime-gob you saw on me the other night? And I knew it, I knew you’d seen it, and I knew it would get you going. Both of you are just so damn nosy. But I couldn’t do anything about it—”
His fists clenched in thwarted fury. “It wasn’t even Willoughby’s cash on my sweater. That was my money. I’d dropped a dollar bill I was planning to use for the tolls, on the way to New York. One of ’em grabbed it. Chewed it, and—”
Nothing like a well-aimed spitball to ruin your day. And, in Ned’s case, your whole life.
He looked poisonous. “It was the llamas I should’ve used the damn rifle on, not—”
Then he stopped, realizing what he’d almost said.
“Everybody gets away with everything. Everyone but me,” he complained on his way out the door.
I could have argued the point. For one thing, I was going to be in a lot of trouble about Willoughby, once it got sorted out exactly how he’d died. I was betting on involuntary manslaughter, and although under the circumstances I would probably be off the hook about it eventually, getting off would be no picnic.
More sobering, though, was the growing knowledge that I would never be off the hook about it with myself.
And at that moment—and ever since; not a day goes by that I don’t think about Baxter Willoughby—the only one I wanted to talk to about it was Kenny Mumford.
Even now I remember him downtown on a Sunday morning, parked on the bench in front of Wadsworth’s hardware store, red-eyed and miserably hung over. Thinking, maybe, about some of the things he had done, maybe even wanting to change them.
Wishing; knowing he couldn’t.
I think Kenny would understand.
50 The Fourth of July celebration was muted that year, by the murders and by the arrest of Ned Montague. We didn’t have the pirate-battle tableau, either, on account of Fake Death having turned out not to be so fake, after all. And finally, on the morning after Ken Mumford’s funeral, Felicity Abbot-Jones turned out not to be what any of us had expected.
“Fishing boats,” she noted, glancing with approval at the vessels bobbing in the little boat basin.
She was a large, gorgeously flamboyant woman of fifty or so, with flaming hennaed hair, blue eyes peering from behind thick-lensed tortoiseshell glasses, and a brisk manner.
“Real working ones, not just rich men’s toys. How,” she finished, making a note in her notebook, “authentic.”
Driven by Ellie, accompanied by me, and not seeming to notice the discomforts of Ellie’s old Land Rover, Felicity directed us to Estes Head, where the construction o
f a brand-new, 635-foot dock for container vessels was nearly finished, the men working on it earning triple-time on account of the holiday.
Pile drivers thudded, cranes swung on flatboats, and trucks beetled hurriedly around the massive site; the Estes Head project was thoroughly modern, and Ellie and I held our breath.
“Progress.” Felicity jotted appreciatively in her notebook. “The nineteenth century was an age of progress, you know. Oh, yes, this is most encouraging.”
I looked at Ellie, who carefully didn’t look at me, so as not to burst into giggles. We’d been prepared for a gargoyle who would deprive us of indoor plumbing, any and all conveniences that ran on electricity, and central heat, but now it seemed we should have hurried to install Victor’s Jacuzzi.
Next we proceeded to Prince’s Cove, where from a barge near the fish pens men hefted sacks of salmon food, tossing them onto rafts from which the food would be scattered to the salmon swimming below. Felicity observed with interest an activity that amounted to farming the ocean, an enterprise hardly conceived of in the 1800s.
“Very,” she commented, “ingenious.”
Just then a jalopy ooh-ooh-gahed into the turnaround just above the cove. In the old car were Tommy Daigle and my son, who seemed to have recovered admirably from his near-death experience.
Oo-ooh-gah, the jalopy’s horn blatted again. The car varoomed out the drive with a clatter of loose fenders, a clank of rotted tailpipe, and a rumble of old, almost certainly illegal muffler.
“Young people,” Felicity breathed, turning to gaze happily at us. “How delightful for you.”
She jotted in her notebook again, while Ellie and I glanced at one another in amazement.
“I am so glad,” Felicity said as we drove back toward town, “that you have not put on an inauthentic false front for me.”
Considering that all of the town’s home businesses had taken down their commercial signage, that all TV satellite dishes had been covered, moved, or camouflaged, and that the computer with its public Internet connection, located in Peavey Library, had been replaced with an old manual typewriter salvaged from a yard sale, I thought this was not strictly true.