Triple Witch

by Sarah Graves

  On our way up Water Street, we passed a kiosk on the library lawn; in it, Corey Banks’s mother was selling bottles of Clean-All, the spot-removing formula she had invented. Ordinarily, this might not have been the most ingenious marketing strategy. But she had added a twist:

  Nearby, Corey was busily cleaning the trunk of a Cadillac, using his mother’s cleaning solution. Everyone in town knew what he was cleaning out of it, too: cat droppings. From the sidewalk, little Sadie Peltier looked on in a fury, stomping her foot and shaking her fist at passersby, an unwitting advertisement for the miracle cleaner.

  Also on the lawn was a miniature French poodle, pure white and without a trace of any paint on it; with the animal, feeding it tiny dog biscuits, sat Clarissa Dow.

  Clarissa waved happily at me as we went by, and so did Mrs. Banks; the cleaning solution was selling like hotcakes. Corey did not look so pleased, but I figured he would cheer up later, when he found out about the college football scouts who were coming to look at him.

  Noting the boy’s size and quickness and his obvious need for direction, Bob Arnold—an alumnus, to my surprise, of Purdue—had made a couple of phone calls. He’d also sat with Corey while Corey suffered through heroin withdrawal, and arranged the boy’s counseling and medical follow-up.

  Like Arnold had said: in Eastport when you need help somebody will help you.

  “Isn’t that enterprising?” Felicity approved as we passed the cleaning-solution kiosk; so far, so good. But there was another hurdle yet to clear: we were about to drive past my house.

  Turning onto Key Street, I got a clear, heartsick look at the results of the shutter project. George, Sam, and Wade had worked until nearly dawn getting them up there; it was not until close to four in the morning that I had heard the extension ladder being lowered, signaling the end of their labors.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t see very well while they were working, because it was so dark, and as a result they’d hung the shutters upside down, so that when it rained the water would run in through the louvers instead of out.

  As a system for irrigating nineteenth-century clapboards—leading, eventually, to their becoming unpaintable and having to be replaced with (gasp) vinyl siding—it was perfect, and I had no doubt that Felicity would notice the problem immediately.

  “Stop,” the dictator of historical correctness demanded. “Will you look,” she breathed, “at that.”

  Miserably, I gazed at the ridiculous shutters. They could be taken down and rehung, of course. The problem, Wade had assured me with some chagrin, could be easily corrected.

  Just not in time for Felicity’s visit. “I know they’re not quite proper,” I began, then realized: she wasn’t looking at the shutters at all.

  She was staring at the house down the street: the one with the double parlors, separate entrance, and wide pillared front porch. While we were out, the For Sale sign had come down, replaced by a white wooden placard hanging from two new gleaming brass chains.

  In black lettering, severe and dignified, the placard read: Victor Tiptree, M.D., Physician & Surgeon.

  Felicity squinted through her glasses, the lenses of which were thick as Coke bottles. “A doctor,” she breathed, gratified. “This is an excellent development. A doctor in town.”

  Given who the doctor was, I didn’t feel so sure. I thought that, given a choice, the townsfolk would have picked an old-fashioned general practitioner, complete with a black bag and kindly manner, over a high-tech neurosurgeon with a screw loose.

  But Felicity was convinced. “Industry. Progress. Young people. And,” she finished, “a doctor, setting up practice here.”

  Content, she sank into the Land Rover seat, so uncomfortable that it could have doubled as an instrument of torture. But she didn’t seem to mind; in fact, she seemed to enjoy it. She was, I was coming to realize, an enjoying type of person.

  “I believe I must give Eastport my highest recommendation,” Felicity said.

  Then she glimpsed the front of my old house: bright white clapboards, crisp, dark green trim, and green shutters, each and every one of them clearly and obviously upside down.

  Felicity blinked. Her forehead creased faintly. She adjusted her thick-lensed glasses, then tried peering over them without success.

  “Lovely,” she murmured obliviously. “Just lovely.”

  She turned to me. “Now,” she pronounced, “where is this young man who wants to talk about a boat show? And where are the lemon squares I’ve been hearing about, and something called a Saturday Night Special?”

  We drove on.

  51 That evening, Wade and I went out for a moonlight ride on his boat, the Little Dipper.

  “So,” he said, draping an arm over my shoulder. “Looks like old Victor’s really decided to stick around.”

  On the calm water, the moon’s reflection lay flat as a disk of silvered paper. “Uh-huh. He’s discovered the pleasures of being a big fish in a small pond.”

  Which wasn’t, I supposed, very charitable; Victor had saved Peter Mulligan’s life.

  Wade’s arm squeezed around me. “Don’t worry. If he’s planning to get a neurosurgery department going up at the hospital, he’ll be too busy to be a fly in your ointment.”

  “I suppose,” I said, not feeling convinced. “But I’m never going to get things straight with him, am I? He’s always going to be … unfinished business.”

  “If you could’ve got it straight with him, Jacobia, you’d probably still be married to him.”

  Which was a good point.

  “And,” Wade went on, “he is out of the guest room. I guess that’s as much progress as you can expect to make at one time, with Victor.”

  Which was also true. “Has Sam said anything more to you about Yale?” Wade asked.

  “Not yet.” Another letter had come, detailing Yale’s program for making its studies accessible to dyslexic students.

  A whole new world; maybe he’d want to try it.

  And maybe he should.

  “What,” Wade spoke up again after a little while, “ever happened to the dog?”

  “Cosmo? He’s back in the kennel in Portland where he came from in the first place. Arnold called every police K-9 unit in Maine until he found its original owner.”

  To our north, the light at Deer Island flashed steadily. “If I’d thought about it more, I’d have realized the dog tied Ken Mumford to Willoughby,” I said. “Because Cosmo wasn’t just any dog. He was an expensive dog. It took big bucks, to buy him.”

  Wade nodded thoughtfully. “Willoughby equipped Ken with a dog to help guard the money when it was in Ken’s possession. But what about Ike Forepaugh? How’d he ever hook into it? And how did a guy like Willoughby know Ken Mumford at all?”

  The dark shape of a minkie whale slid gleamingly out of the water, then vanished again into its own cold, fluid element.

  “Ike showed up to get the money Ken owed him. When Ken got killed, suspicion naturally fell on this newly-arrived famous bad guy. Which worked fine for Ned, as long as Ike stayed missing and presumably on the run. So Ned made that happen. As for Willoughby knowing Ken …”

  I took a deep breath, let it out again; this part was sad. “Willoughby’s house. That he’s remodeled, so you can’t even see what it used to be? Guess who it used to belong to, back when you and Ellie were just little kids and Ken was a few years older?”

  Wade put the heel of his hand to his forehead, “Oh no. Don’t tell me it was—”

  “That’s right. Tim Mumford. When he was working, and his wife and kids were all alive. In the old days, before all Tim’s troubles arrived, and long before Ellie even knew him, Ken lived in that house. It’s nothing anyone bothers mentioning anymore, but people were talking about it, Ellie says, at Ken’s funeral. That’s how she found out.”

  “Maybe Kenny went out there to have a look at the old place, before it was gone forever,” Wade said contemplatively.

  “Thought he’d revisit what was lost when Ti
m went broke,” I agreed, feeling bad about it.

  So many things are tied into money, it seems: getting it. Keeping it. Not having enough.

  Especially that. “Instead,” I said, “he’d have met Baxter Willoughby. And once he did, everything else just … happened.”

  Wade shook his head. “You know, if he hadn’t got caught, Ned would have ended up trying to take Ken’s boat out to hook up with a big vessel. Guy can’t even tie a decent slipknot, he’d have found out how bad he needed money. Bad enough to drown for.”

  Just then my cell phone thweeped.

  I dug it out and listened without saying anything, holding it for a moment to Wade’s ear so he could hear, too. Then, still without speaking, I pressed the disconnect tab, closed the phone up, and moved the little power switch to off.

  “How is he?” Wade asked, having recognized the voice.

  A call from Hargood Biddeford was getting to be a frequent event. Bunny was not only expecting; she was having twins, and Hargood was beginning to panic over the need for a bigger hutch.

  “In a scramble as usual. Got out of gold, thinks the market’s too risky on account of the Asian factor—”

  That was my punishment for aiming Hargood at Toyota.

  “—now he wants to get into commodities. You know, things that people burn, build with, or eat. He wants to know if I know anything about hog bellies.”

  Wade chuckled quietly. “And do you?”

  “I know you can’t build with them. Which is more than Hargood knows.”

  Actually, I knew a fair bit more than that. “But for now I think Hargood and his troubles can wait.”

  “Yeah. Guess we’d better head ashore.” Wade began preparing to get the Little Dipper moving again.

  “There was another thing I was wrong about,” I said. “Why Ken never took any of that money and spent it.”

  “Ken only spent what Hallie gave him or Willoughby paid him. Nothing more,” Wade said slowly.

  “Even the money Ike had in his pocket when they caught him,” I agreed, “was legitimate. Ellie’s settling Ken’s affairs, and it turns out that Ken had started a bank account. Two hundred bucks, all withdrawn the day before he died. He’d been saving to pay the debt he owed Ike.”

  “Which Ike would otherwise have taken out of Ken’s hide.”

  “Correct. But even with that over his head, he didn’t touch any of Willoughby’s cash. And it was for the one reason that never even occurred to me.”

  Wade started the Little Dipper’s engine; a pale burble of turbulence spread out on the moonlit water behind us.

  “Ned told Arnold Ken didn’t even know he was running drugs. He was just doing what Hallie wanted, because he was in love. And he didn’t take the money,” I finished, “because it didn’t belong to him.”

  Wade came over and stood with me at the rail, the boat just sitting there idling, poised between water and sky.

  “He was,” I concluded, feeling that I was pronouncing Ken Mumford’s epitaph, “a decent guy.”

  52 Back at my house, Ellie was waiting for me in the kitchen and the coffee was on, which I suppose should have alerted me.

  “Here,” she said, putting a dish of strawberry shortcake in front of me on the red-checked tablecloth.

  “I don’t need this,” I said, eyeing the whipped cream. Unlike Ellie, I do not burn five hundred calories just blinking my eyes.

  “I got a call from Felicity a little while ago,” she said, ignoring my protest as she dug into her own shortcake.

  The coffee was ready, and I poured us some. It was late, and Wade had gone straight up to bed; he’d be out on the water again in only a few hours.

  “Felicity? As in Abbott-Jones? But I thought she was—”

  “Right. In Lubec, getting rid of the rest of the grant money.”

  Lubec was the next town down the coastline: small, isolated, and just as interested in grant money as Eastport.

  “And on the way there, somebody told her about us, and about the murders,” Ellie added.

  If there was one thing we hadn’t wanted Felicity knowing about, it was the murders. We didn’t think she would find them at all authentic or progressive. We’d kept quiet about them, and so, we had hoped and expected, would everyone else.

  But now I guessed not. “So I suppose she’s changed her mind and decided Eastport’s too deadly to be deserving?”

  Darn. And after all that work, too. In her dog bed, Monday yawned hugely and stretched, eyeing us with muzzy contentment, then turned over and went to sleep again.

  “Oh, no,” Ellie replied. “She thinks it’s fascinating. She loves mysteries—on the phone, she actually sounded a little bloodthirsty.”

  “Oh,” I replied, brightening. Yet another reason to like Felicity. “And was that,” I inquired, “the only reason she called? To congratulate us for being so fascinating?”

  “Um, not exactly,” Ellie replied, “it seems that she and her entourage had just visited the meat market in Lubec. You know the place I mean? And the guy who ran it?”

  I knew, and I caught the past tense, too. And so in a manner of speaking had he, I guessed suddenly.

  The market had been a good idea: organic beef, pork, some lamb, and a lot of poultry, all locally raised with no antibiotics or other chemicals in the feed. In a world that was worried about E. coli and mad cow disease, the fellow who’d owned the place had started looking like a genius ten minutes after the market opened.

  “Somebody cut him up with a cleaver,” Ellie said. “Carved him, wrapped him, and put him in the walk-in freezer. Felicity thought we might be interested.”

  Just then Victor strolled in, spied the shortcake, and made a dash for it; he was sleeping in his house but still eating at mine, until George finished modernizing his kitchen.

  “You know,” he said seriously to me, “the cooking around here is awfully plain.”

  Studiously, I turned my attention back to Ellie.

  “And I am interested,” she went on, “because the thing of it is this: the victim’s wife has a garden. Flowers, vegetables, and—”

  She paused, emphasizing the next part. “Herbs, some quite exotic. Exotic enough to use for murder.”

  I began to see where she was going. “I get it. You think—”

  “Murder?” Victor’s eyebrows knitted disapprovingly. “I don’t think you should get involved in any more—”

  “Victor,” I said. “If you don’t shut up, there’ll be another one right here at this table. Okay?”

  Victor swallowed shortcake. “Okay.”

  Not that his cooperativeness had any hope, long-term. But it was fun while it lasted. Furthermore, he had located a pediatric research program that would treat Ned Montague’s daughter’s rare kidney disease for free, and pay her travel costs.

  And he had sat down with Sam and discussed the fake heart attack—not fully, and not very expertly, but I thought sincerely, and Sam was taking it that way, too. So for the time being Victor had bonus points.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said to Ellie. “The butcher has been laid with the packages of chicken quarters in the freezer. And the winner of the arrest warrant is …”

  I paused, touching my fingers to my forehead in parody of a mind-reading act. “The butcher’s wife.”

  Victor blinked, his shortcake-laden spoon stopping halfway to his mouth. “How did you know that?”

  “Because,” I replied meaningfully, “when a husband gets done in with a cleaver, it’s always the wife.”

  “Oh.” He got up hastily. “You know, I think I’ll take this shortcake home with me. Give you girls a chance to talk.”

  With that, he vamoosed.

  “Maybe instead of a divorce you should have bought a carving knife,” Ellie commented. “Scare him into good behavior.”

  “If I had, I’d be serving life without parole. So anyway, why is the wife doing it a problem?”

  “Well, when they arrested her, she was holding the cleaver in
her hand. And wearing a bloody butcher’s apron.”

  “Sounds right to me.”

  Ellie nodded. “But remember the Calais woman whose husband used to clobber her? Until she poisoned him to death? Or so the authorities were convinced.”

  I remembered: the guy at the baked-bean supper. “But they couldn’t find any traces of poison in the food. Or at the guy’s house. Not anywhere. So—”

  “So she got away with it.” Ellie looked down at her hands. “I am not supposed to know about this. But according to Berenice—”

  Ah, yes, the delightful Berenice, lover of llamas and queen of the backyard psychotropics. I made a mental note to get more ginseng, next time I wanted to resemble a Fourth of July rocket.

  “—the substance that was used in the poisoning—”

  “—came from the garden in Lubec,” I finished.

  I got up and went to the open window. “But if you’ve got a garden full of untraceable poison, why chop a guy up with a cleaver?”

  “My point,” Ellie said, “precisely.”

  Outside, the moon was setting behind the fir trees. A breeze moved, smelling of salt and woodsmoke.

  “Maybe,” I offered, “we should try to find out.”

  “Or maybe,” said Ellie, “we shouldn’t.”

  From the dining room came a bright, musical little ping!

  Which in the end was how we decided.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels featuring Jacobia Tiptree are set.

  If you enjoyed Sarah Graves’s

  TRIPLE WITCH

  you won’t want to miss any of the exciting

  books in her Home Repair Is Homicide

  mystery series.

  Look for THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE,

  WICKED FIX, REPAIR TO HER GRAVE,

  WRECK THE HALLS, UNHINGED,

  MALLETS AFORETHOUGHT,

  TOOL & DIE, NAIL BITER, TRAP DOOR,