Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

But Ellie and I were equally opposed to fast-food burgers and we didn’t know St. John well enough to have any regular restaurants at our mental fingertips. So we abandoned Mudge’s instructions temporarily, threading our way through downtown streets.

  “Stop!” Luckily we were at an intersection and the light was red. The last time Ellie had uttered that syllable so forcefully, I’d been about to back off the end of a pier.

  “What?” No lunch places were in evidence, only an Army-Navy store, a stationery supplier’s, and other vehicles.

  Lots of them. “Back there,” Ellie said. “On a cross street. I think I saw—Go around the block, will you?”

  I obeyed even though we were in the wrong lane for the left turn. But New Brunswick drivers in cities weren’t anywhere near as blood-thirstily goal-oriented as the ones I’d encountered out on the highway. Thus only a few earsplitting honks and vividly interesting hand gestures later, we were on the desired side street.

  Moments after that we pulled up in front of a small diner whose tattered awning read Le Mont Bleu. A French diner; despite grimy windows and a gray, cruddy-looking exterior, my heart lifted hopefully; that meant they might have…

  “Poutine,” Ellie and I pronounced together when we got into a booth. The waitress, wearing a shiny black uniform dress with a white gauzy apron and black shoes, smiled approvingly, exposing nicotine-stained teeth.

  “Et vin? ” she asked, her pen poised.

  Oh, indeed. Two jelly glasses of red house wine appeared; an unpretentious little vintage poured from an unlabeled gallon jug.

  I took a swallow. You could’ve tanned leather with the stuff. “Nice place,” I managed, blinking tears away as I glanced around.

  It was a long narrow room with suspended schoolhouse lamps, an octagonal-tiled floor, and mirrors behind the counter opposite the row of booths. Men in rough work clothes sat at the counter eating lunches of sausage and potato and drinking their vin, dragging on Gauloise cigarettes between mouthfuls and conversing in a patois that I supposed was related to French.

  Our plates of poutine arrived, smoking hot. “Bon appétit,” said the waitress, but bon wasn’t the word for it; angélique, maybe. Because poutine can consist of frozen french fries, canned gravy, and Cheez Whiz, slopped together and nuked in a microwave until the mess bubbles unappealingly.

  Or it can be this: fresh homemade fries peeping crisply from beneath a generous topping of crumbled cheese curds, the gravy ladled over it a rich, medium-brown liqueur of piquant beefiness, the whole dish sizzling and served on a plate too hot to touch. With it came lettuce and tomato, choice of dressing. No arugula.

  “Wow,” I managed around a mouthful; with enough poutine, I am certain that you could achieve world peace.

  We devoted ourselves to our food until every scrap had gone. “Why do you think Mudge led us to Trish at all?” Ellie wondered aloud after our coffee arrived.

  One glass of the jug wine had been plenty. I unwrapped and ate a sugar cube from the bowl of them. “Maybe he thought one of us had already recognized him. I’d seen him in Eastport.”

  “So he probably figured he’d look guilty of something if he ran,” Ellie agreed.

  The waitress poured us both more coffee: real cream, a hint of chicory. “Still, it seems to me he’d only think that if he was guilty of something,” Ellie added.

  I ate another sugar cube. After that lunch, I’d have smoked one of the Gauloises, too, if I could’ve done it without choking.

  “Maybe not. It could be he’s just a furtive little guy.” I dug out my stash of Canadian bills for the lunch check.

  Paying was a double pleasure, first because even with a generous tip the amount our good lunch cost was so tiny, and second because no matter how much of it I am spending, I do so enjoy money with the faces of women printed on it; there were benefits to having a Queen, I decided, even a distant one.

  Outside, we waddled to the car. Poutine is delicious but it isn’t inclined to make a person feel lively; more like ready for a nap. “What’d he talk about with you?” I asked Ellie.

  We pulled out into the city traffic. “Well, like I said, he makes all his puppets. The costumes, too. That whole first floor of his house, the part that would be a basement apartment? That’s his workshop. Although I didn’t see it.”

  Signs pointed out the route back to the highway. “He puts on elaborate puppet shows all over New Brunswick and Nova Scotia,” Ellie went on. “For charity. I gather he doesn’t need the money.”

  “And other than the puppet stuff he does…?”

  “Highway toll-taker,” she confirmed Trish’s report. “Although he canceled some shows and took a leave of absence from Canada Transport when Trish showed up. So he could spend time with her, he said.”

  I could imagine how well Trish liked that. “He told me a few horror stories about the way Cory treated Trish,” she added. “How he brought another girl to her apartment once when she was out at an obstetrician appointment, if you can believe it.”

  I could imagine that, too, and I must have frowned just as Ellie glanced over at me. “Oh, sorry,” she said; she’d known my ex-husband well.

  Once when I was pregnant I went out to keep a doctor’s appointment but she—my own obstetrician—didn’t show up. And later I learned that’s who Victor was with back at our apartment, only I didn’t find out until after she delivered Sam, which to this day puts a whole new gloss on my memories of the event.

  “Never mind,” I assured Ellie. By now we were approaching the final highway overpass before our on-ramp approach to the harbor bridge. “I don’t…”

  Something moved fast on the overpass just as we were about to drive under it.

  “Jake!” Ellie cried in the fraction of an instant before the windshield exploded.

  “Tossing a brick at a car is a punk’s trick,” Jemmy Wechsler said when we’d finished telling him the story a few hours later.

  By some miracle, no one was badly injured when the windshield exploded; somehow I pulled over without hitting any other cars or being hit by them. Ellie came out of it the worst, with a flying-glass cut over her eyebrow that I thought deserved stitches, but the emergency room doctor who saw her in St. John hadn’t agreed.

  Then by the time we left the clinic it was too late to catch the last ferry of the evening, so we drove all the way around on the mainland back to the States and while we did, the cut started bleeding again. Thus we’d come here to the lake, where I had—courtesy of my late husband’s medical bag—a really good first-aid kit. “Ouch!” Ellie said.

  “Sorry.” I pressed the wound’s edges together, then taped it shut with Steri-Strips from the medical bag.

  “What’d the cops say?” Jemmy asked, examining Fred Mudge’s business card.

  In our absence, he’d been busy as usual, splitting and stacking wood for the stove, painting the cabin’s concrete-block interior chimney a warm chocolate brown, and setting up a propane heater so the kitchen sink now boasted hot running water.

  Like I said: adaptable. In fact, after only a few days of Jemmy’s attentions the whole place looked like a feature out of Ladies’ Home Journal by way of Outdoor Life.

  Also, something was cooking; chicken, maybe. I sniffed the fragrance hungrily. “The cops said what we say,” Ellie told him. “That somebody dropped a brick off that overpass and hit us.”

  Jemmy raised an eyebrow at me. “So let’s get this straight. This Mudge guy shows up at the same pawnshop you’re at, and later you get ambushed while following directions he gave you?”

  “Yeah,” I said tiredly. “But it’s the only good way to drive in or out of St. John if you’re going where we were. Because you have to get on the bridge unless you want to take side streets, which we don’t know how to do. So anybody who knew we were there in the first place might figure we’d show up near that overpass on our way home.”

  He looked skeptical but went on. “Okay, so who did know?”

  “Nobody. And there was no one on
the ferry with us when we left Eastport.”

  He made a face. “So if someone was following you in Eastport and saw you get on the ferry…”

  I caught his drift. “The same person who followed us in St. Stephen.”

  “Sure. It was foggy, right? So in Eastport you might not’ve noticed. Somebody knows that Trish lived in St. Stephen, guesses you’re on her trail and maybe also knows she went to St. John…”

  “How would anyone know that?” Ellie objected.

  Jemmy turned mildly, pushed the Maritime Sentinel at her. “The fourth paragraph,” he said.

  I hadn’t gotten that far in the article, which turned out to name Trish Bogan as the last occupant of the burned St. Stephen house and her destination as St. John.

  “Guess we weren’t the first people those girls in the park talked to,” Ellie commented sourly. “So if you knew or guessed we were on our way to St. John, you could hop in a car, drive around to it the long way on the mainland, and get there ahead of—”

  “Wait a minute, wouldn’t that take too long?” I interrupted.

  “Not the way you drive.” Which was a good point and made the whole thing sound possible, that someone had picked up our trail after we got off the St. George ferry. With that accomplished, it would be possible to follow us in St. John.

  “But the other thing is, you can’t just stand around on a major highway overpass with a brick in your hand,” Jemmy pointed out reasonably. “Police officers tend to notice people who do.” Meaning the timing was still tricky. “Same with a car,” he said. “You could sit there with your flashers on, but…”

  “I know, I know. Not for long. So what this shakes out to is that someone did know or suspect where we were going, and intercepted us at some point.”

  Jemmy nodded. “Looks that way. Stayed right on you, too, once you got spotted. Close enough to hustle out ahead of you at the right moment, be ready for the brick drop.”

  “There are an awful lot of possible ways for that not to pan out,” I objected. “Lose us along the way somewhere or we take another route out of the city after whoever it was hurried ahead. We might’ve been planning to stay the night, even.”

  “Hey, it’s not like the world would’ve ended if the plan didn’t work,” Jemmy pointed out. “Thing is, somebody tried it and it did work. On account of all the many things that could’ve gone wrong, didn’t.”

  Ellie sighed. “He’s right, you know.” Then she looked around curiously. “What smells so good?”

  Jemmy opened the iron kettle simmering on the woodstove; the aroma of stewed chicken I’d noticed earlier turned into a full-blown sensory event.

  “Mmm,” she said appreciatively. “I know I’m supposed to be the wounded patient and all,” she added, “but I’m starving.”

  Likewise; the wonderful poutine we’d enjoyed seemed long ago and far away, and the jug wine even more so. Jemmy appeared delighted to remedy both deficiencies.

  “Mudge said Cory Trow was wild about Jen Henderson,” Ellie remarked as he ladled the stew out. Each big bowl held a biscuit, assorted vegetables, and the broth, rich with chicken and wild rice.

  “Perfect,” Ellie breathed, sipping it gratefully while Jemmy drank wine and I attacked my own bowl.

  “Fred Mudge says,” she went on after devouring a biscuit, “that Jen was the real problem. He said that even after her dad got that stalking case going, Jen used to call Cory on her cell phone from wherever she was. Invite him over and so on, right up until the verdict got rendered.”

  “Huh. How come you didn’t tell me that?” I asked. The stew was fantastic; Jemmy beamed proudly.

  “I was about to but then the brick hit the windshield,” she explained. “Anyway, Mudge said Jen told Cory Trow that if he was a real man, he wouldn’t be scared of her father.”

  Jemmy let out an amused snort. “More like if he was a dead man. Anyone with a brain knows to be afraid of Walter Henderson.”

  Including, I gathered, Jemmy himself. “Everything been quiet around here?” I asked him as we were getting ready to go.

  We stood outside in the clearing. Behind us the solar lights he’d rigged up so handily suffused the cottage’s interior with a cozy glow.

  An owl hooted. “Yeah. So far,” he answered, slapping a mosquito. “I’ve put up a bunch of check wires.”

  Threads, he meant, tied between the trees at cabin-approach spots. The strategy was low-tech but reliably informative; Wade used it when he went hunting, sometimes. If you went out the next day and any of the threads had been broken, something—or someone—had passed.

  “I’m figuring now on using a scope,” he added. “Maybe do it from out on the bay. If I sit out there in the dark in a dinghy, sooner or later he’ll show up in a window. Don’t you think?”

  “Jemmy,” I began exasperatedly; he was talking about a rifle with a telescopic sight, for heaven’s sake. As far as I knew, he’d never even handled one.

  Which wouldn’t prevent him from trying. “On the other hand,” Jemmy said, “I might come up with another way. I haven’t really decided.”

  “Decide not to. I mean it, Jemmy, I told you once I don’t want to be involved in…”

  But I was. I already was. Jemmy smiled in the near darkness at me but didn’t reply.

  “I’m ready,” said Ellie, coming out of the cabin to join us.

  Driving away from the cottage, I slowed for a pothole on the dirt road and glanced in the truck’s rearview mirror. Jemmy stood watching us go, his shape glowing red in the illumination of our brake lights.

  I took my foot off the pedal and he vanished.

  When I got home there was a note on the table and a message on the phone machine. The note was from Wade, saying he’d been called out to work on a freighter that was having trouble with its navigation equipment; he’d be back in a day or so.

  Okay by me. Thanks to a hasty wash at the cabin, I looked halfway decent, but my husband tended to get bent out of shape at things like having a brick dropped on his truck. At least the towing service in St. John had brought it to a garage that offered emergency glass service. By the time we got there to pick it up, the windshield had already been replaced.

  Small comfort; still, it was all I could muster as I stared at the ominously blinking light on the answering machine. Finally I pushed the button; if Sam was in some kind of trouble, I had to know.

  And when I heard Bob Arnold’s voice, I thought that must be it: jail, hospital. Or worse. But it wasn’t.

  “Autopsy results on Cory Trow just came back,” Bob’s voice said. “Little marijuana, some alcohol in the boy’s blood.”

  Not Sam. “Cause of death was a broken neck. Instantaneous,” Bob added. “One other thing…little mark in the middle of his back between the shoulder blades. Bruise, is all. I thought you’d want to know, Jake.”

  That the medical examiner had found no evidence for anything but death by Cory’s own hand, Bob meant. The recording ended as I let my breath out, still relieved that it wasn’t bad news about Sam.

  Some other mother’s son. This time, at any rate. And not a pleasant end for Cory Trow, maybe, but at least a quick one; my imagination let go at last of the slow-motion movies it had been showing me, of the agonies of gradual strangulation.

  The dogs padded in, breaking my reverie. With Wade out on the water and Bella Diamond and my father already gone home, I was the only one around who might give them treats. “Come on,” I said, glad for their company.

  In the kitchen I found a box of tuna crisps that Cat Dancing liked, too, and distributed them liberally. But once that was done I was at loose ends again, alone in the silent house. Adding up the money spent so far by my dad on the roof job and writing a check to him for it didn’t take long. Picking myself up off the floor at the cost of roof work at all, even at the low prices he charged me, was more challenging.

  But even after all that I still faced a long evening. Oh, grow up, I scolded myself firmly, looking around for a project and sp
ying the box of old books Ellie had bought in St. John.

  I’d brought it in without thinking much of it. Now it sat on the hall floor, so I opened it, planning to keep some books, throw some away, and get rid of the box.

  A whiff of mildew rose from the paperbacks it turned out to contain, the shabby covers bearing familiar old names: Christie, Sayers, Ngaio Marsh. I was pretty sure they were all worthless: tattered pages, water stains, some covers even missing entirely. Yet despite my intentions, when it came right down to it I felt unable to throw any of them out, as if in some way I couldn’t put words to, I was their last chance.

  Thus in the end I simply carried the box to the dining room and left it there. Bella could get something she liked out of it, probably, or she would be able to deal with its contents as hard-heartedly as I had not.

  After that I took the dogs out, brought them in and got them settled for the night, and went to bed myself. But that didn’t work very well either; the bed was empty without Wade and I knew I would tell him about the brick through the truck’s windshield the minute he got home.

  So around two in the morning I found myself climbing the stairs to the third floor of my ramshackle old dwelling, carrying a cup of coffee and trying to step carefully so the treads wouldn’t creak, even though I was the only one around who could hear them.

  Stripped of its wallpaper, an old plaster room that has never been painted is gray, tan, and cream, the colors of an exposed skeleton. Switching on the bare hanging bulb, I opened the bucket of premixed patching compound and got out the putty knife that I always left up there for nights like this.

  The wallpaper’s layers had already come off, separating between my fingers to reveal succeeding homeowners’ decorating tastes. While removing it I’d thought about how happy somebody had been, seeing it up there new and fresh; it had seemed only right to admire it a final time before disposing of it.

  Although I confess I’d left a triangle of the oldest stuff in a half-hidden corner, where a lavender lady still twirled a frilly parasol in a lavender garden scene. Now I dipped out some plaster patch with the putty knife, smoothed it into a gash in the old wall, and scraped it smooth.