by Sarah Graves
Smiling to himself because Walter now knew what the score was, which the kid so clearly did not that it was pitiful. That conversation was the other reason why if the kid was out here in the barn tonight, Walter was going to kill him.
And he was here, no question about it. Being very quiet. But with senses sharpened by thirty-plus years at the top of a human food chain so brutal it made jungle man-eaters resemble tenants of some particularly benign petting zoo, Walter could feel it.
Smell it, too, as if the new creatures he meant to acquire for his estate were already inhabiting and fouling the place. Walt’s nose wrinkled involuntarily as he took another step into the darkness.
And…that sound again. Creak-creak. Was it a beam? In its faint regularity it summoned the mental picture of a boat tied to a pier, moving with the gentle swells of the sea, a rope rubbing against wood. Creak…
Creak. Only not quite. Familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He knew the smell, though. He hadn’t been expecting it, not yet, but all at once its identity came to him.
The smell of death. Oh, Christ…
Jen. No…
Dropping the pistol as a rush of ice-watery terror poured through him, Walter Henderson scrambled back to the barn door, its window a rectangle of deepest marine blue against the darkness of the wall.
Had the kid killed her? He fumbled against the particle-board panel to the right of the door, where the new circuit breaker box and the light switches were hung.
Had he? Walter’s breath came in painful gasps. Oh, sweet Jesus God in heaven, had the stupid little son of a bitch done that?
“Jen?” he shouted, all possible need for stealth evaporated. Never mind the kid, who could and most certainly would be dealt with later. All Walter wanted, all his every shrieking brain cell required absolutely right now, was to see…
His frantically searching hand found the light switch and flipped it. White light flooded the barn’s interior, from the fluorescent panels hung on chains beneath the rafters.
Half blinded by the sudden brilliance from above, Walter turned in a helpless circle, feeling as if he’d been impaled on an icy spike.
“Jen? Goddamn it, Jenny, I know you’re in here.”
Frantic, he flung himself at the loft stairs, the gun all but forgotten as he tossed heavy straw bales aside.
“Jenny?” he gasped. Then a bright scrap of cloth caught his eye. It was one of her silk scarves. She had a drawerful of the things, a tumble of them in jewel-toned colors like a sultan’s riches.
Snatching the scarf up in both hands, he pressed it to his face, inhaling the perfume he’d smelled earlier, drunk with it as he turned. “Jenny!” he bellowed.
No answer. Staggering forward, he peered over the railed edge of the loft, down the side wall of the unfinished office room and across the barn floor.
Silence again. Hope pierced him; maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe this time she hadn’t been lying to him. Maybe she’d been upstairs in her bed all along. Asleep, safe…
Then he felt it through the thin soles of his moccasins, up through the loft’s floor. An odd vibration; slow, rhythmic, and occurring in time with the sound he had heard.
Was still hearing now. Creak… It came to him all at once, what the sound was. What he would find when with trembling, sweat-slick fingers he grasped the big iron handle set into the top of the loft’s closed trap door.
Nearly weeping, Walter strained at the heavy thing, hauled it up and fell to his knees at the opening’s framed-in rim, the sweet-smelling silk scarf still clutched between hands pressed together as though in prayer. Below him through the square trap door opening lay the office room: dark, enclosed, silent.
Or almost silent. “Jen?” Walter whispered. The soft perfumed folds of her scarf caressed his cheek. “Jennifer, honey, are you down there?”
Creak… The sound slowed, stopped. Steeling himself, the most respected and feared professional killer on the whole east coast bit back a whimper.
And peered over the edge.
My name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first moved to Maine, the last thing I expected was for my dead ex-husband Victor to end up haunting my house. My idea was to repair the ramshackle old dwelling and live happily ever after in it.
Which right there was absurd. I no more knew how to rehabilitate an antique house than I knew how to jump off the rooftop of one and fly.
Soon after I moved in, for example, I found a springy spot in the hall floor. And springiness, I’d heard, meant weakness. So I jumped energetically on the spot in order to test just how weak it really was, whereupon my foot went through and the rest of my leg followed, all the way to my hip.
And there I stayed. I couldn’t pull my trapped leg up past the broken floorboard, whose sharp splintered ends already threatened several of my favorite arteries. I couldn’t go down, either; the floor around the hole felt solid as concrete.
So I waited: one hour, then two. Monday, my black Labrador retriever, came and sniffed me, then went away again, bored. The trashman came, and the meter reader. Neither heard my shouts, and the mail carrier passed by without stopping.
Finally my son Sam came home from school and found me there, furious and humiliated. “Mom,” he said gently, looking down at me and taking in the whole sad situation. “You know, I think maybe the next time you decide to make a hole in the floor…”
Right. Cut it with a saw. Although at the time I’d have preferred just using a bomb, and if it blew me up, too, I might not have minded very much. Because the alternative was repairing the house, which as a personal-injury generator was already showing itself to be (a) efficient and (b) murderously creative.
Meanwhile, my ability in the happily-ever-after department looked doubtful as well. For instance, back in the city I’d just finished divorcing a guy whose idea of faithfulness consisted of leaving his wedding ring on his finger while he slept with other women, an activity he pursued so regularly you’d have thought he’d entered a contest, and if there’d been one for most commandments broken in a single marriage, Victor would have won it.
And I had Sam, whose idea of sobriety was…well, I’m not sure what my son’s notion of sobriety consisted of then. Before we moved here he was mostly too drunk, too stoned, or too strung out to think much about it at all; at age thirteen, his liver most likely resembled a pickled herring, his eyes were so bloodshot and frantic that they looked as if they belonged on a cartoon character, and as for his brain, I preferred not to imagine its probable condition.
And I wasn’t feeling so good myself. Until coming to Eastport, we’d lived in Manhattan in a building so exclusive, it took genetic testing to get approved to move in. Afterwards, though, the standards of behavior in the place were so trashy—fights, screaming, howled threats to actually cut up the goddamned charge cards—I thought they should have parked junk cars out front and set up a broken washing machine in the lobby beside the potted palm.
But never mind, it was a roof over our heads and it’s not as if I didn’t have plenty of trashy troubles of my own. Victor’s girlfriends, for instance, had gotten the idea that I was their pal, a sort of comrade-in-arms in the sordid little romantic tragicomedy they shared with my husband, instead of a person who badly wanted to bash all their heads together.
Victor liked girls who were dewy-eyed and innocent, ignoring the fact that by the time he got through with them they’d be such bitter harpies, the only way to get near them was with a diamond bracelet dangling at the end of a long, sharp stick.
Often they called me weeping, two or three of them at a time—one of the girls, I gathered, had sounded out the words in the phone book where it gave instructions on how to make a conference call, and she’d taught all the others—complaining about what an awful son of a bitch Victor was.
Like maybe I didn’t know that. I felt like asking them, since he made no secret of the fact that he was married, who the hell they had been expecting, the Dalai Lama? That maybe by some miracle he wouldn’t leave them twi
sting in the wind the way he’d left me?
I mean unless he needed something: his good shirts sent to the laundry, say, or a button sewn on. Then he’d stay home just long enough for me to start believing that this time, everything might somehow miraculously manage to turn out hunky-dory.
After a while I started sabotaging those buttons, getting up in the wee hours to hide in the utility closet with a flashlight and cuticle scissors, snipping half the threads on each one from behind where it wouldn’t show. That’s how desperate I’d become: hotshot money manager by day, button snipper by night.
Oh yes, I had a career, too, mostly based on the same variety of freakish inborn talent that produces perfect pitch, double-jointedness, and the ability to win at poker by memorizing all the cards and the odds. In short, at the time I was the kind of money management magician who could make a nickel walk smoothly across the tops of my knuckles, and by the time it got to my little finger it would be a silver dollar.
Too bad the folks for whom I made fortunes were the kind I’d have preferred not to spend much time around; not unless I’d drenched myself with holy water and equipped myself with a mallet and wooden stake. Because let’s face it, my clients were the kind of individuals for whom the term “ill-gotten gains” was invented.
Say, for instance, that you were a person who just happened to be skimming the profits off a chain of specialty clothing stores. Before I came along, you could invest your loot in strip clubs or in other shady establishments known primarily for their habit of burning down regularly. Alternatively, you could pack the cash in a satchel and bribe or threaten some poor fool to carry the bag to Puerto Rico for you.
You can’t do that anymore; the security noses at airports have gotten better at sniffing cash. Instead you can…
But on second thought I’m not going to give details. I don’t want to screw it up for whoever’s doing my old job now; honor among thieves, and all that. To make a long story short, though, back then I helped introduce what’s commonly known as the underworld to the concept of investing on Wall Street.
Legitimately, I mean, as opposed to their usual way, which was called the pump-and-dump. And no, I’m not going to tell you how to do that either. The point is that on a referral from a friend I took on a few shady clients; next thing you know, I was money manager to the Mob.
In the end, however, I chucked it all, dumped Victor, and moved out of Manhattan in a sad, last-ditch effort to salvage my pathetic life. And to save Sam, who by then was very little more than a walking sickness. Extracting my son from the city was like pulling a rotten tooth: no matter how bloody, painful, or disgusting the process may be, you’ve got to maintain your grip.
Which I had. So fast-forward a few years to me and Sam still living in Eastport, a city of about two thousand on Moose Island, seven miles off the coast of Maine. The house I’d bought wasn’t all fixed up yet, but it hadn’t fallen down either; over time I had come to regard this as a glass-half-full situation since if I thought of it any other way I would spend every minute weeping.
And not only on account of the vast, yawning money pit…er, I mean lovely, historic dwelling I’d come to call home. For one thing, Sam had grown up into a handsome, strapping twenty-year-old but his substance-abuse woes hadn’t resolved quite as permanently as I’d hoped. And for another, about three months after we buried him, Victor began haunting the place.
The entire island, I mean, not just my little piece of it. Although on the pleasant morning in May when what we later called the Trap-Door Fiasco began, it was my house that my deceased ex-husband seemed happiest to have learned the trick of infesting.
“Hex screws,” my friend Ellie White said, checking this item off our list. We were sitting in my big old kitchen with its tall bare windows, pine wainscoting, scuffed floor, and antiquated appliances, getting ready to start on a building project.
Behind me the refrigerator rattled and hummed as if the ice maker were running. But it didn’t have an ice maker; not unless you counted the way the inside of the freezer frosted up solidly every week or so.
“Lag bolts, nuts, and washers,” I said; Ellie checked the list again.
I’d spent the early part of the morning outdoors, trying to fix rust spots already bleeding through the nearly new paint on the house. Note to self: Next time you sand vast amounts of old paint off 175-year-old clapboards, try to remember to rust-block the equally old iron nails in the boards before putting new paint on.
“And the battery-powered screwdriver,” I added, glancing over to make sure this indispensable item was plugged into its charger on the kitchen counter. It was, and with any luck the little green light on the device meant it really was charging, not just pretending to do so.
Victor stood—transparently; what a show-off—a foot or so to the left of the counter, his smile fading and reappearing like some especially obnoxious version of the Cheshire Cat’s.
I ignored him. “Chain saw,” said Ellie.
Or I tried. Turns out that a dead ex-husband is even harder to ignore than he was when he was alive. “Check. I already put it in the bed of the pickup truck.”
Ellie smiled. “Jake, you’re so efficient,” she said, marking it too off the list of essentials.
With pale green eyes, red hair, and tiny freckles like gold dust scattered delicately across her nose, my best friend, Ellie, resembled the kind of impossibly fragile fairy princess who flutters around laughing musically and granting people’s dearest wishes with a wave of her magic wand.
But appearances were deceiving; despite her looks, Ellie was about as fragile as a Mack truck. When a task needed the chain saw, she started it, ran it, and sharpened its chain when that turned out to be necessary, too; she was a downeast Maine girl born and bred and took no backchat from machinery.
“Foolishness,” my housekeeper, Bella Diamond, grumbled from her usual place at the soapstone sink. She stood at it so often that there would have been a pair of footprints on the braided rug in front of it if she had tolerated footprints.
Which she didn’t; now with her shirtsleeves rolled up past bony elbows she was washing in hot steaming soapsuds and rinsing with scalding water every plate and cup we owned, none of which had been dirty in the first place.
Letting Bella wash clean dishes was better than the alternative, though, because she was a clean freak and right now it was springtime, which around here meant a housecleaning so thorough even the skeletons in the closets got polished. So it was either boil salad plates or dip all the lamps in the house in sterilizing solution, to get rid of the many germs which Bella swore gave off toxic vapors when sizzled to death by lightbulb heat.
“You two girls up at the cottage all alone with all o’ them sharp tools and big, heavy lumber and who knows what-all, tryin’ to build a dock,” Bella said disapprovingly.
That was the project we were planning. And theoretically we could actually do it. Victor’s smile winked on and off like a flashing neon sign: Hi! Hi! Hi!
“One o’ you,” Bella went on darkly, rinsing yet another cup in a torrent of steaming water, “ ’ll ampertate a hand.”
She’d turned up the thermostat on the water heater when she came to work for us. So nowadays before taking a shower we had to calibrate “hot” and “cold” with the delicacy of someone working the controls on a nuclear reactor.
“Band-Aids,” Ellie said, taking the words out of my mouth. She looked up from the list. “Okay, then, if the thermoses are full of coffee and the cooler is packed with sandwiches…”
“Done,” I confirmed, already looking forward to these. I’d packed them but she’d made them: ham salad on fresh homemade bread with real mayonnaise, sweet pickles, and lettuce out of the cold frame she’d constructed from old storm windows in my backyard. Sometimes I thought I’d have tried building the Great Wall of China with Ellie, just for the lunch.
“…then I think we’ve got everything,” she finished. The lumber and other miscellaneous dock-building items were alr
eady up at the cottage waiting for us.
“Hmph,” Bella snorted skeptically again, which was when I noticed that despite being dunked nearly to her armpits in water that was (a) hot enough to cook lobsters in and (b) soapy enough to clean the Augean stables, she didn’t appear to be in (c) very good spirits.
“Something wrong, Bella?” I asked.
She shoved a limp hank of henna-purple hair out of her face. With bulging green eyes, big bad teeth, skin the color of putty, and the rest of her hair pulled so tightly into a rubber band, it made her look as if she were walking into a wind tunnel…Well, let’s just say most of Bella’s many virtues were on the inside. “Yes,” she snapped miserably. “There is.”
Which gave me pause. I already knew from experience that when Bella was unhappy the house got so clean people couldn’t even live in it. Animals, either; from her place atop the refrigerator Cat Dancing meowed uneasily, tail twitching at the unwelcome notion of our housekeeper on a hygiene binge.
Cat hairs, for instance, might easily come under attack, even ones still attached to the cat. Uttering a feline oath, the big cross-eyed Siamese streaked from the room; Victor vanished simultaneously, the air around him twinkling mischievously in his wake.
“Everything okay?” Ellie asked, noting the look on my face.
“Yeah, fine,” I lied, trying to sound convincing. It wasn’t the first time Victor had been seen around town since his death the previous winter. I had it on good authority that he’d shown up in the IGA where he bought two tomatoes, paying the cashier with what appeared to be real money although the till was short $2.79 at the end of the day.
Soon after that he’d made an appearance at the Peavey Memorial Library on Water Street. There he stuck around for most of a lecture on Native American petroglyphs before departing, leaving in the air a brownish stain that lingered worrisomely.
But it was his first time here at my house. I should count myself lucky, I thought; twelve weeks was a lot longer than he’d ever let go by without annoying me, back when he was alive.