by Sarah Graves
“What’re you doing with that bottle?” I asked. We were both still shouting.
“Magic. Or something. All I know is…” Ellie leaned into the backseat. “Presto, chango,” she uttered, waving the bottle.
Lee’s howling mouth clapped shut; her plump hands reached out eagerly. “Wow,” I said into the sudden silence. “How does that work?”
“I have no idea,” said Ellie. “And I’m afraid if I try to find out, it might stop working. So…”
“Bah,” Lee whispered confidingly to the eyedropper bottle. “Bahbah.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t mess with success.” The light changed and I made the turn onto Market Street, headed back to the border. “Now, as for Trish…Bogan’s her maiden name, is it? And did her friends mention how to find her in St. John?”
Unlike St. Stephen, so small that you could locate somebody just by asking around if you kept at it long enough, St. John was a biggish city.
One she could hide in if she wanted to. “And…did any of them say why she was moving?”
“They said she was scared but she wouldn’t say of what, only that she and the baby weren’t safe here.”
“I guess not,” I said. But how had Trish known? A car pulled out from the curb behind us, one of those anonymous small white rentals you can get at most any airport and lots of other places, too. It bore a Maine license plate but I couldn’t quite see the driver.
“I asked if Trish ever left the baby with any of them,” Ellie said. “Or with anyone else.”
I took my eyes off the car in the rearview long enough to grin at her. “You genius. Like maybe the night Cory died?”
Because I was sure now that if he’d been murdered, Henderson had done it. Call me crazy, but the combination of a dead guy and a known killer with a grudge against the victim was just too much of a coincidence for my taste.
But that didn’t mean I’d ignore other theories. To nail Walt Henderson the way I needed to do it, they all had to be ruled out.
“Yup,” said Ellie. “But Trish was home that night, they said. Most other nights, too.”
The white car stayed behind us. “It was their one negative comment,” Ellie went on. “That she was picky about taking care of the baby. They said she made them feel she didn’t think they were good enough.”
It was past midafternoon and the sun’s glare kept me from seeing into our tail-car’s passenger compartment. I couldn’t tell if it was the one that had nearly run me over the night before, either. I put my signal on, swung a fast U-turn in the middle of St. Stephen’s downtown traffic; no cop around, luckily.
Or unluckily, depending on how this turned out. “There was one other thing,” Ellie said, taking a cue from my body language and glancing in the mirror herself. “They said the police were there for a long time at the fire. Everybody got out safe,” she added, “but it was close.”
“And?” Once we left the downtown area the city thinned to a couple of shopping malls, fast-food joints, some car dealerships, and a garden center. After that it was an hour and a half or so through the hinterlands until the city of St. John.
Too far to go today. “And,” Ellie replied, “the women said the fire in Trish’s building was definitely arson.”
I frowned, peeking at the rearview again. “Oh, come on. How would they know? It would take days for an investigation, and…”
Ellie shook her head as I put on my signal, waited for a chance in the oncoming traffic, and turned left into the parking lot of a veterinarian’s office. A lady with a Great Dane in the passenger seat of her VW bug gave me a dirty look, then pulled out.
“That’s what I thought. But one of those moms lives right next door to the burned building,” Ellie replied. “She heard all the sirens and went outside to see what was going on.”
Leonora slept. Ellie reached back for the eyedropper bottle just as the car that had been behind us shot by, too fast for me to glimpse the driver.
“And her husband’s a Boy Scout troop leader,” Ellie said. “And you know how when they go on camping trips, they’re supposed to start the fire by rubbing two sticks together?”
I highly doubted that this particular blaze had been started by rubbing two sticks together. “Ellie, just where are you going with this?”
“But it’s not easy,” she went on. “Half the time the scouts can’t do it. So troop leaders always bring along these tablets.”
“To write on? But why would…” Then the light dawned. “Oh. You mean trioxane tablets.”
Used for starting campfires quickly, the tablets were small, easily obtainable—from hunting-supply catalogs, for instance—and they burned hot. I knew about them because in the old days Jemmy’s pals used them on nightclubs they’d muscled in on, after they’d ruined them by laundering money through them and running through the original owner’s line of credit.
Then when the clubs were so bad off that they couldn’t even run hookers out of them anymore, they burned them. “Some of the tablets were lying around on the ground,” Ellie confirmed. “The girl I talked to recognized them.”
I turned back, toward St. Stephen and the border crossing. “So maybe Trish was right to hightail it to St. John when she did.”
The white car that had been tailing us pulled over onto the highway’s shoulder, waited for its chance to merge, then swerved in a fish-tailing U-turn of its own.
Still following. Lee’s eyes snapped open again. I guessed she’d noticed the eyedropper bottle was gone.
“Give it back,” I told Ellie, returning my attention to the road. “Give it back to her now.”
“Wah,” Lee uttered experimentally, her breath beginning to come in gasps. “Wah!”
What happened next drove just about everything out of my head, other than the strong desire to encase it in styrofoam or maybe even concrete to protect the fragile structures inside.
“Wah!” Leonora cried. “Wah! WAH!” The noise was stunning, an onslaught of outraged, not-to-be-comforted distress. Through the barrage it was all I could do to keep my concentration focused enough to drive without crashing into something.
Because this time the magic eyedropper bottle didn’t work and neither did anything else. Wrapping what was left of my mind around the idea of just getting home fast, I gripped the steering wheel and let the sound wash over me. It was a tactic I’d learned long ago while driving Sam places in downtown Manhattan traffic; he’d hated his car seat, too.
So it wasn’t until we got on Route 1 headed south past the turnoff to the cottage that it hit me:
Barbecue. Wade’s barbecue at the lake, set for today.
That’s what I’d forgotten.
Being stalked is possibly my least favorite way of getting attention, and it didn’t help my mood any that when Ellie and I finally got to the lake, we found my husband, Wade, her husband, George, and my old pal Jemmy all sitting around the table inside the cottage plotting murder.
Sam was outside, looking like death warmed over. “Sorry,” my sobered-up son moaned miserably as I approached.
“No kidding,” I said, stepping around where he sat on the cottage steps with his face in his hands.
If my tone was crisp it was only because I was so angry with him I could’ve spit. Also my nerves were still ragged from having been tailed by a strange car.
Come to think of it, the rest of the situation was pretty nerve-racking as well: a dead kid, a burned building, and a girl and her baby missing. Oh, and have I mentioned my friend Jemmy Wechsler and a notorious hit man, locked in mortal combat?
At least the car hadn’t followed us across the border, or anyway I hoped it hadn’t.
Sam was dripping wet. That plus his expression and a fresh pattern of damp footprints told me that someone—probably Wade—had wrestled him down to the edge of the water and pushed him in.
Too bad; right then I’d had poor-Sam-and-his-drinking-problem up to the eyeballs. “Go get some dry clothes on,” I told him, “or we’ll be nursing you f
or pneumonia, too.”
“What can I say?” Ellie apologized, coming up behind me and looking just as shell-shocked as I felt. “The eyedropper bottle trick doesn’t always work.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her, thinking that if all my own kid did was scream, I’d be a happy camper. Carrying Lee, who’d fallen silent as she was lifted from the truck, she went inside and I followed.
“…shotgun,” Jemmy was saying. “I could do it with a…”
Noting my expression, Wade frowned questioningly; I nodded at him, signaling I’m all right. Next Sam came in, regarded us all in hung-over silence, and climbed to the loft for dry apparel.
“Too messy,” George Valentine objected to Jemmy. “And too obvious. You need something more accidental looking. A drowning, maybe.”
They were talking about Walt Henderson. Killing him, I mean. Or at any rate they were humoring Jemmy about it. Wade rolled his eyes at me so I’d know he and George weren’t really serious.
But I thought Jemmy was. “Hmm,” he said of George’s drowning suggestion. “Yeah.”
He’d traded his city garb of shirt and gray slacks for a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, and looked fairly convincing in them. Once his hundred-dollar haircut grew out, he’d be all set.
“He could fall off a boat, couldn’t he? Into that cold water in the bay,” Jemmy went on.
“Which means all you need is a boat, a way to get him on it, a way to get him off it, and a way to get back with him not on it anymore without the whole town noticing,” I said, not bothering to conceal my sarcasm.
The groceries for the barbecue were already spread out on the cabin’s galley counter. Grilled steaks, baked potatoes, and salad, plus a store-bought chocolate cake, I saw with relief; in my absence someone else had taken care of it all.
Wade, again, I guessed. “Hey,” Jemmy replied, snapping his fingers. “Easy-peasy.”
“Yeah, well, don’t be too sure. Eastporters are funny that way, they notice murder,” I said.
“Especially some of them,” my father commented from his chair in the corner. Wearing clean overalls, a red flannel shirt, and a vest with slots for shotgun shells sewn into the front of it, he fit right into the cabin’s rustic decor.
When Sam came down we were all drinking sodas. He looked around, shook his head in heavily put-upon dismay, and stuck his hand out for some car keys; any car keys. “I’ve told you guys before, you can drink in front of me,” he said.
Had to, actually. He was rigid about our feeling free to enjoy a cocktail whether he had one or not. The trouble was, sooner or later he always did.
“Come on,” he added. “If you’re going to treat me like some poor boozer who has to have his glass just ’cause you are…”
Then I’m leaving, he meant to finish. But Wade didn’t let him. And he didn’t offer keys. “Sit down and shut up,” Wade told Sam conversationally, smiling.
But under the smile was a sharp glint of something we didn’t often see from Wade, whose capacity for sympathy had finally been exceeded just as mine had, I gathered. Sam was so astonished, he dropped like a marionette with its strings cut, his butt hitting the chair George shoved behind him with a soft, vulnerable-sounding thump.
Then Bella came in carrying a scrub brush and what remained of a steaming kettle of water. “Them fish-cleaning tools somebody left in the shed was mighty powerful in the stink department,” she announced, leaving no doubt as to what she had been up to.
Wade must’ve brought her along, too, and I shot him another look of gratitude; I may joke about her but the truth is that everything always looked better, smelled better, and even tasted better when Bella was around.
Our steaks, for instance; she’d scoured the grill clean of burnt drippings and afterwards insisted on doing the dishes so the others could socialize—my father, I noticed, jumped right in to help her—and so Jemmy and I could go out in the kayaks.
Floating on the silent lake with a lavender sky fading over our heads, Jemmy spoke. “Kid’s got a problem.”
But Sam wasn’t what I needed to discuss with him. “Listen, Jemmy, I can’t have you out here planning…”
Murder. “If I don’t, he’s going to,” he said bluntly, leaning back in the kayak with the paddle on his knees.
I ignored the remark. “It’s not that I don’t care about you. But I’m not going to be an accessory before the fact. I’m sorry, but I’m just not.”
He considered this briefly. “Who do you think was following you?” he asked.
Paddling out, I’d told Jemmy about the car in St. Stephen, Sam’s accident, and about my near-miss episode the night before on Sullivan Street. “I don’t know.”
I dipped the kayak paddle, watched slow blue waves ripple from it. A hundred yards off floated the buoy Ellie and I dropped to mark the sunken dock block; over dinner we’d regaled the company with the story and George had promised to crank the block in on a winch for us.
Minutes passed. “So did Dr. Destructo ever get rid of that piano?” Jemmy asked out of the blue.
Dr. Destructo had always been Jemmy’s name for my ex-husband Victor. “No. It’s still in his house. New people bought the place furnished.”
When I met him Victor had been the kind of guy who thought he had great untapped musical talent, that if only he weren’t a medical student he would have turned out to be Billy Joel.
The truth was, Victor had memorized three chords at age sixteen and never forgotten them. Surgery was his talent; that and the ability to charm women’s socks off in minutes.
I let my hand drag in the cold water. “Near the end,” I said, “he got fond of a drink we called Clammy Mary. One-fourth clam juice, one-fourth tomato juice, and the rest straight gin.”
A breeze riffled my hair. The concoction had at last become the only thing Victor was able to keep down; nowadays I couldn’t even look at a bottle of clam juice.
“Didn’t matter what kind of gin,” I went on. “But he liked rotgut best, I think. And he liked a slice of lime on the glass, thin enough to read a newspaper through.”
A fish jumped nearby, landed with a splash. “Not that he was reading any newspapers by then. I miss him,” I said.
More silence. Jemmy was as sensitive as a snake’s flickering tongue when he wanted to be. Too bad the other associations the thought summoned about him were equally true.
He changed the subject again. “Jake, don’t you get it? Walt Henderson came here just to keep an eye on you. He built that big house in Eastport in case I showed up.”
So Jemmy had seen the house. I processed the thought without comment. “Now he’s warning you off,” he went on. “He didn’t mean to hit you last night or to hurt Sam. He just wanted to make an impression.”
Near the far shore a loon sat on the water, its thick neck curving snakelike above a blocky, black-and-white feathered body. Behind me my father said something I couldn’t quite hear; Bella’s laugh in reply was like a violin being scraped with a stick.
The loon took two long splashing steps before rising toward its nesting place on the next lake south. The evening star came out, suddenly bright. “And he knows I’m here,” Jemmy said.
Lights went on in the cabin. Since he’d moved in, Jemmy had put the solar panels on the roof and gotten them connected to the storage batteries. By mounting a barrel on a rack under the eaves, he’d gotten running water to the sink in the kitchen, too, and to the basin in the loft so you could brush your teeth.
I hadn’t thought he would do very well out here, but he’d surprised me. Then again, he’d always been adaptable, another of the secrets to his success.
And to his survival. “That guy’s got nerve endings like a cruising shark,” he went on. “He knew the minute I hit town. He can smell me.” Yet he had hit town anyway instead of avoiding the place. And it wasn’t like Jemmy to force an issue unless he was under a lot of pressure.
With only about half an hour of light left, I was ready to go in, but he padd
led toward the birch-clad spit of land dividing our cove from the rest of the lake. Mist hovered on the water.
“How come he’s lasted so long?” I asked. Unlike the rest of his ilk: dead or in jail, their kids not amounting to much.
“Henderson? Takes precautions, is why. Works alone. He never even hires guys directly, keeps ’em distant and cuts ’em loose as fast as he can.”
So it was as I’d suspected. If I could get rid of Henderson the rest of this would end, too.
“Nobody’s ever been able to get near him,” Jemmy went on. “Wearing a wire, anything like that. There was some talk not too long ago about trying again, but…”
I looked over at him, interested; seeing this, he changed the subject abruptly. “How did you keep them from following you here, anyway?” he asked.
My old clients, he meant. Ahead a beaver swam anxiously back and forth, trying to block our way into the narrow flowage leading to a stretch of wetlands. A massive dam crossed the far end of the flowage, flanked by a beaver lodge.
Thick white birch saplings stripped of their bark formed the lodge’s top, a mound about fifteen feet in diameter rising five feet off the water. “I never let any of them tell me anything they didn’t want repeated,” I said.
During the day a snake as thick as my forearm often lounged atop the lodge, but it had gone in. “Sure,” Jemmy said skeptically.
The beaver rolled into a dive, his big flat tail making an angry slap! “Gimme a break, Jake,” Jemmy protested, “you knew it was all blood money, and they knew you knew it was…”
“Not all of it.” The beaver resurfaced, sleek and dark, his eyes full of fury.
The truth was, I’d had documents; if anything happened to me they would’ve surfaced and the result would’ve been unpleasant for my clients. But the papers didn’t exist anymore, the clients knew it—to avoid misunderstandings I’d destroyed them when I left Manhattan—and anyway it wasn’t any of Jemmy’s business.