Trap Door

by Sarah Graves

  And more imminent. “Jemmy!” I cried a final time. But there was no answer, only the stealthy crack of a stick behind me on the path.

  I whirled, instinctively putting my hands up, but whoever it was stayed nimbly at my back, unseen. Next came a crashing pain, the thud of impact, and a white, bright light in my head…

  The light faded to gray, then black.

  From: hlrb@mainetel.net

  To: ddimaio@miskatonic.edu

  Subj: Best policy

  Dave,

  Glad you agree on the disclosure matter. I think the only way to do it is in person, don’t you? We might write up a short biographical sketch of her book’s author along with some historical context, and send it to Ms. Tiptree in advance of a meeting. To prepare her for…well, there’s no other way to put it…our more upsetting revelations.

  Cheers, and Lang sends best—

  Horace

  Waking up after you’ve been hit over the head, I can report from sad, hideously vivid personal experience, is a matter of the spirit being willing but the flesh being the consistency of loose Jell-O.

  “Jake, are you all right?”

  I moaned, tasted blood, and shifted painfully on the cold ground outside the cottage.

  “Jake…” The voice faded in and out. Blackness dissolved to gray again, a static-filled roar in my ears. My vision was like a snowy TV screen.

  “Easy, now…” Eastport police chief Bob Arnold put his big hand between my shoulder blades, supporting me.

  Ellie was with him, her face gray with anxiety. Somewhere nearby, Leonora whimpered, then let out a howl they could probably hear all the way across the lake.

  Pine needles stuck to my cheek. I brushed them off and put my hand to my scalp; my fingers came away stickily wet.

  “What hit me?” But it was coming back to me. I sat up; the world spun only a few times.

  “Hey,” Bob Arnold cautioned, “watch out for that first step.”

  I managed a grim chuckle. I could speak and understand okay, my gut wasn’t in upchuck mode, and I wasn’t sleepy or woozy. So I probably hadn’t suffered a concussion; having a brain surgeon ex-husband, even a dead one, came in handy sometimes.

  I had, however, been clobbered by someone. “Where are the dogs? Are they…?”

  “They’re fine. Ellie’s got ’em.” The next thing I knew, I’d been helped into Bob’s squad car and he was driving me away from the cottage. Then I remembered the other thing:

  Jemmy. I stiffened, sending a sudden bolt of pain crashing through my skull. Simultaneously another question that had been floating around in there solidified. “How did you find me?”

  Bob maneuvered the car around the potholes and rocks. “Ellie called me. She said she thought you ought to be back home by now and that she had a funny feeling about you.”

  “I see.” He misjudged a pothole; the resulting bump in and out of it only made my skull scream in agony a little bit.

  “So,” I managed. “She had a funny feeling and on account of it you dropped everything to drive her up here.”

  He glanced over at me. “I had a feeling, too.” By now we’d reached the smoother paved road, for which I was so grateful I could’ve knelt and wept. “Remember how it happened?” he asked.

  I started to shake my head; bad choice. I waited until the stars cleared. “Yes. I heard a sound and then somebody hit me.”

  He didn’t comment. A warmish trickle ran into my eye; a head wound, serious or not, bleeds like the devil. Without taking his eyes from the road, he pointed at the tissue box on the dashboard.

  Minutes later we pulled into the hospital’s emergency room parking area and Bob spoke again. “You know a guy named Mudge?”

  The hospital was a low yellow-brick building with an asphalt parking lot. Two sliding glass doors with EMERGENCY stenciled on them in big red capital letters led to a small waiting area.

  Bob Arnold wasn’t supposed to know anything about Mudge. “What about him?” Feet on the floor, check. One foot in front of the other…well, I was working on it.

  “Ellie heard from Bella, who heard it from somebody in the IGA, that a fella with a strange mustache got muscled into a car on Water Street this morning.”

  The world did a weave and a bobble. “That’s Mudge. Who saw it happen, did Bella say?”

  “Yup. Bert Merkle.” Bob took my arm steadyingly as we crossed the waiting area and through another pair of double doors toward the examining room. I guessed he must’ve called ahead to say that we were coming, because no one stopped us.

  Bert Merkle, I thought despairingly as a hospital aide went by the cubicle Bob led me into and did a double take. Glimpsing myself in the mirror over the washbasin, I saw why; my face with its short, dark hair, high cheekbones, and unremarkable mouth—a lipstick-free zone—looked as if I’d been beaten up in an alley.

  Merkle was the guy Ellie and I had seen out on the fish pier just before we’d met up with Jemmy Wechsler. Merkle, the UFO nut and grand-prize winner of Eastport’s Least Likely to Be Believed About Anything contest…

  Bummer, as Sam would’ve said. Dried blood caked my eyebrows and an area in my scalp was split wide.

  “I’ll be back,” promised Bob Arnold. “Hospital’s been having some trouble about cars getting swiped for joy rides from the employee parking lot; I’m going to chat with the Calais cops in case the offenders turn out to be from our neck of the woods.”

  Then Ellie arrived. “I’m okay,” I assured her again, though I wasn’t yet certain of it. “What’s this about Bert Merkle being the one who spotted Mudge getting grabbed?”

  “It was him,” she confirmed unhappily. “Ranting about it now to whoever’ll listen. Which most people won’t but he doesn’t seem to mind that.”

  Correctamundo; another Sam-ism. Oh, why did it have to be Merkle when just about anyone else was more credible? “How’d Bella know it was Mudge?” I asked.

  “She didn’t. She described to me what she’d been told, about the mustache, and I realized. So now all three of them are…”

  “Yeah. Trish, him, the baby.” Vanished. Jemmy too; not good. “What else?”

  Because she looked even more miserable than I felt. “Lee’s got an ear infection. It started when George was at the pool with her. So I’m going to have to drop everything and…”

  I’d thought that howl at the lake sounded even more glass-shatteringly loud than usual. “Of course you are,” I told Ellie. “To take care of her, the poor little thing. But she’ll be all right?”

  Ellie nodded. “I left her with the nurses for a minute down in the pediatric clinic. She’ll be fine. But…”

  “But you’re sticking close to home for a while,” I agreed.

  She nodded resignedly. “I know it’s a minor thing…”

  “Don’t be silly. Listen, when Sam was little I used to agitate for the pediatrician to give him antibiotics just to have his fingernails trimmed, I was so cautious.”

  Which the pediatrician wouldn’t, of course. But I understood Ellie’s feelings completely. “You just go on. Really, it’s okay,” I insisted.

  She looked relieved. “We might hang around your house. Your dad’s got George working with him so he can…”

  Get the job site ready for the really expensive workers to do their stuff on it, I finished her sentence silently. But I tried to put a good face on it.

  “That’s even better. George’ll be with you, and you’ll be there to keep track of me…if you hadn’t come looking for me I’d still be up at the lake, you know, lying there unconscious.”

  Just then the X-ray technician arrived. “Merkle say anything else?” I asked Ellie as the technician waved for me to seat myself in the wheelchair she was pushing.

  I knew the protocol better than to insist on walking. Ellie shook her head. “No. I guess I’ll go, then. See you at home. You sure you’ll be all right?”

  “Absolutely,” I told her calmly as the tech wheeled me away.
My confidence, however, remained secretly a little shaky, since when you have a potentially serious head trauma they X-ray you first, before stitching your scalp, on account of no one’s sure yet that they won’t have to open your skull up with a bone saw.

  Immediately. Because a possible complication of head trauma is hematoma, which is when a blood vessel begins leaking like a pipe down in your basement: slowly at first, then faster until it reaches your brains’s fuse box.

  Whereupon it starts putting your lights out.

  As it turned out, the doctors didn’t have to use the bone saws, and on the way home an hour and a half later I told Bob Arnold the whole story.

  Or almost all of it. Praying that I was doing the right thing, I kept my mouth shut about Jemmy. Bob listened silently until I was finished.

  “Little scrap of cloth,” he repeated, surprising me.

  I’d confessed to him that I’d touched Cory’s body as it hung in Henderson’s barn, and that in doing so I’d dislodged and lost what I now thought might be evidence.

  Then Bob surprised me again: “Nice haircut.”

  “Sheesh.” I glanced in the squad car’s vanity mirror, cringing at the two-inch-wide shaved strip bisecting my scalp. The sutures at its center gave it flair. So did the dark orange stain of the cleanser they’d used before putting in the stitches.

  “It’ll grow back,” Bob said comfortingly. “Listen, you sure what clobbered you wasn’t just a chunk of birch blowdown?”

  “Bob, don’t you get it? I’m trying to report three missing people and an assault.”

  “You know, that dead stuff real high up in the trees,” he went on, ignoring me. “’Specially birches, a big wind breaks it off, it comes down and—”

  “There was no wind,” I interrupted. “Big or otherwise.”

  He drove stolidly, the city’s old Crown Vic devouring the road without fanfare. “Okay. So maybe it broke yesterday, didn’t fall until today,” he said.

  I let out an impatient breath.

  “And that bit of cloth you say you lost,” he continued. “Now you feel guilty, you feel like you’ve got to follow up in case you really did ruin evidence.”

  “Bob,” I began; he held up a silencing hand.

  “I’m just saying, that’s all, Jake. There are lots of possible explanations for things. And sometimes the way things look to us at first, that’s not the way they turn out later.”

  I said nothing.

  “There was nobody at the cottage, Jake. Only you. Just a broken branch and an old birch tree, lot of rot high up in it. Right next to where we found you.”

  Of course there was no one, because Jemmy had vanished. But I couldn’t tell Bob that. Going into custody willingly was one thing, but being taken in—even by cops looking for Jemmy in an attempt to save his life—was another.

  And once any cop learned that Jemmy had warrants outstanding, there’d be no choice. We passed the cottage turnoff. “My car,” I said, remembering that I’d left it there.

  “Ellie drove it home. She came up with me.”

  “Oh. Sure.” We sped through the series of patched-blacktop curves running along the shoreline. I pushed away the thought of Ellie traveling this same way in the Fiat, her foot so thoroughly made of lead that you could’ve anchored a tugboat with it.

  At least somebody was having fun. “Some folks,” Bob remarked conversationally, “b’lieve Bert Merkle when he says little green men with big eyes are visitin’ his junkyard on a nightly basis.”

  “Right.” I leaned back. My head hurt like a son of a bitch. Heart, too. Because now I was alone in this.

  Bob glanced sideways. “Jake, don’t go all sullen on me. You can’t expect me to drop everything and go looking for people who haven’t even been reported missing.”

  I felt a pang of guilt. He’d already spent half his day taking care of me. “Yeah. I guess. And Trish Trow has been reported to the Canadian cops. But Fred Mudge hasn’t and now there’s nobody to report him.”

  His neighbors would take a while to notice. And he’d told Ellie that he’d canceled several puppet shows and taken time off to be with Trish, so nobody was going to miss him at work.

  Bob sighed as we reached the marshes of the Perry inlet, crossed the old Maine Central rail bed, waited for a couple of noisy tractor-trailers, and took the turn toward Eastport.

  “I’ll put the word out, all right?” he gave in finally. “On the county’s squad radios, their descriptions, both of ’em, Mudge and Trish, your standard lemme-have-a-word-with-them stop and check. The baby, too,” he added, before I could do so. “Anyone spots ’em, they’ll give me a holler.” Haul-ah: the Maine pronunciation. “And I could call the St. John folks, say I’d like to know if anything develops on their end. Okay?”

  “Yes,” I told him gratefully. “More than okay. If the St. John police know you’re taking it seriously, then they might….”

  Not that it was going to do any good. But at least I wasn’t out here on the high wire all by myself. “Thanks, Bob.”

  Minutes later we pulled up in front of my house. “I want you to go in and take care of that head,” he said. “Lie down, relax. No running around chasing after something that…”

  That probably didn’t even happen, I finished silently, and got out. He was humoring me but I knew he would do what he’d said he would, and it was the best I was going to get.

  “Okay.” Lights burned in the kitchen and parlor and the Fiat was in the driveway, having survived Ellie’s (no doubt) excellent adventure in it.

  “Thanks again,” I said sincerely, and Bob drove away, secure in the knowledge that I would follow his orders: sane, sensible.

  Uh-huh. Sure I would.

  An hour after I got home I was down at the Bayside watching Ann Radham set up for the gig she’d mentioned earlier in the day. What I wanted was to go to bed, especially after all the fussing Ellie and Bella had treated me to the moment I’d walked in. Soup, pillow, ice pack, a blanket over my feet…

  George had even wanted to call the Coast Guard, have Wade helicoptered in from the freighter repair. But I put the kibosh on that, protesting that all I wished for was the shutting down of the house for the night.

  Finally Sam kissed me on the cheek—wine on his breath, I noticed sadly—and they departed, Bella with another half-dozen old mystery paperbacks tucked into her satchel. Ellie said the housekeeper had pounced on them and begun devouring them the second she’d spotted them, between working on her usual steady diet of crosswords and Sudoku.

  Now strings of twinkly lights crossing the Bayside’s low ceiling mingled with the glow of vintage lamps to give the place a dim, 1950s-era jazz club atmosphere. I stood in a corner, a cap pulled on over my shaved head, unnoticed among cheerful groups of casually dressed folks with drinks in their hands.

  The other act on the bill was an acoustic trio, two guitars and a stand-up bass already performing on the small stage. As they swung into “A-Train” I stepped up behind Ann, who sat at one of the crowded tables with her back to me.

  Leaning down, I whispered into her ear. “You’re going to get me in there again and you’re going to stand watch for me. Smile,” I ordered, my fingers digging into her shoulders.

  She stiffened, but managed to produce the requested facial expression. Smart girl; the way I felt, I’d have had no problem moving my hands a few inches upward and twisting her head off.

  “Why should I?” Ann demanded when I’d marched her across the seating area and through a set of French doors, leading to a hall with the restrooms at one end and the fire exit at the other.

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Jen you’ve been stealing from her,” I replied.

  I knew nothing of the kind. I just knew rich people always suspected something like that. This time the jab hit home harder than I expected, though. Ann’s pixie face blanched guiltily.

  “Hey, I don’t care how far into her pocketbook you are.” I took her arm; she didn’t resist and I walked her out throu
gh the emergency exit, down the gravel-paved alley to the street.

  “Fifty bucks here, a hundred there,” I persisted; might as well have her good and scared. It would make her obey me better.

  But her answering look said I’d underestimated: not fifty or a hundred dollars. More, maybe a lot more. I aimed her at the Fiat, which I’d left at the curb. She gave a little sideways hop to avoid stepping on a crack in the sidewalk, got in and slammed the door.

  As we were pulling away she looked yearningly back at the warm wash of light spilling from the Bayside’s window. “I’ve got to be back in time to—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I gunned the Fiat. “You’ll be there in plenty of time to play your second set,” I told her, heading out County Road to the Henderson place.

  Not that I cared if she was. “So, are they home?”

  “No. Listen, I hope you’re not going to tell—”

  “That you’re a sneak thief? Depends how the evening goes.” I drove past the small wooden houses on either side of Marble Street. Inside, folks were watching television or sitting down with their knitting or taking hot baths; peaceful endeavors.

  Maybe if this girl had been more forthcoming earlier, I’d be doing one of those things, too, instead of nursing a head bump the size of an ostrich egg, complete with a laceration big enough to let the ostrich out.

  “From here on out I’ll ask the questions and you’ll answer. So where are they and how long d’you think they’ll be there?”

  “Jen and her dad?”

  I made a face. “No, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Come on, Ann, let’s not get off on the wrong foot. You won’t like the result.”

  She nodded, replied hastily. “They’re at the ball game. The girls’ team here in town. Jen’s pitching.”

  “Daddy’s watching?” Another grudging nod. And sure enough, as we passed the ball field at the edge of town, tall banks of white lights glowed over the diamond.

  I happened to know the girls’ night games didn’t start until eight. That gave me about two hours; plenty, unless something went wrong.