Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  “And since he is here, I guess it also makes sense to try to use him to find out what the heck this place wants,” I conceded.

  Which for me was like saying that maybe the earth is really flat. Three years earlier, the idea of a place wanting anything would’ve made me hoot with scornful laughter.

  Nowadays, I was more likely to hoot at the sensation of an ice-cold finger placed suddenly on the back of my neck. And when I turned, of course no one was ever there.

  So maybe Ellie was right and it was all in my mind. “By,” I went on, “helping Raines try to find an old violin and paying attention to any old Hayes facts he digs up while he's looking.”

  I pulled out the first-floor bolt. “But what I don’t get is, why would he need help? Raines, I mean.”

  Ellie rolled her eyes at me. “Because no one in Eastport is going to tell him anything at all otherwise. About the old days around here or Jared Hayes or anything else. You must understand that much by now, Jacobia.”

  Right again: in Eastport, people will know all about you ten minutes or so after your car tootles over the causeway onto Moose Island. Deciding what to think of you, though, and whether or not to give you the time of day … well, that could take years.

  The final floor bolt snapped off as I was removing it. As it did so, I realized … “Ellie. How the heck did Raines get onto the island?”

  If you didn’t happen to be driving a car over the causeway, getting here was no easy matter. No bus, no subway, not even a pay phone at the stop on the mainland where the bus from Bangor would let you off. I said as much.

  “But he didn’t come in a car,” Ellie said. “Or at any rate there's no extra car in your driveway. He walked downtown?”

  “Yes. So how did he arrive in the first place?”

  Ellie shook her head, clipping Monday's leash to her collar. “I guess we’ll have to ask him.”

  “Just let me get this all straight, though,” I said, “before you go.”

  I held up three fingers. “We don’t know for sure that Jared Hayes hid anything of value. We don’t know that it was a violin if he did. And we certainly don’t know it was a Stradivarius.”

  I took a breath. “To the contrary, actually.”

  Back in the city I’d had a client who collected old musical instruments. And from him I’d learned that in the discovery department, it's all over: finding an unknown Strad—in Eastport or anywhere else—was as likely as going out to dig in your own garden and unearthing another Rosetta stone.

  “All we do know is that Hayes's diaries mention a violin, a special one. And that they talk about a treasure.”

  It was how I imagined the story about a Stradivarius first got started: the diaries, along with letters, account books, and musical manuscripts, were at Eastport's Peavey Memorial Library.

  “But nothing in his handwriting actually says a violin was what he meant. And we don’t know his disappearance was linked to any of it.”

  “I’d say that sums it up pretty well,” Ellie agreed.

  “But,” I went on, “we let Raines try to find a Stradivarius, anyway. And while he's looking …”

  “We peek under every rock he turns over. See if information about Hayes's disappearance might be lurking there. And with it, a clue to curing your case of the heebie-jeebies.”

  Which didn’t really give me a very good feeling at all. For one thing, when you turn over a rock what you find underneath is often slimy. For another, the term heebie-jeebies didn’t please me when applied to myself, though I had to admit it was accurate. Finally, Ellie's plan still seemed nebulous to me: what rock?

  But when you’re up against a problem you quite literally cannot put your finger on, I supposed nebulosity might be as good a strategy as any other.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go along with it.”

  “Good,” she replied, as if there had been any chance of my saying otherwise. Ellie looks as delicate as a portrait of a lady painted on porcelain, but she has more horsepower than the Indy 500 once her mind is set on something.

  “So, let's get to it,” she said to the dog.

  “Mmmf,” Monday uttered, wriggling eagerly.

  “Besides, if we don’t pave the way for our new visitor,” she said as they crossed the back porch, “he might ask nosy questions where he shouldn’t and get dropped off the fish pier.”

  It was one of the things I had liked about Ellie right from the start: that she would speak to a cat or dog as naturally as to a human being. When they had gone, I went to the front of the house to watch them as they headed down Key Street under the maples shaking out new summer-green leaves in the June sunshine.

  Ellie chatted animatedly while the black dog trotted beside her, listening. I thought how charming they looked going along so companionably together, and as I thought this a cup flew straight out of the dining room sideboard and smashed against the tiled fireplace surround.

  I had a startled moment to wish that Ellie had been there to see it. Then the boom arrived: a blast so loud it shocked starlings out of the maple trees, a flapping cloud of them rising up in squawking confusion.

  Simultaneously a distant fire siren began blaring; that was when I realized there had been some kind of explosion somewhere and the flying cup had been an effect of it, nothing more.

  Peering out, I spotted a billow of black smoke coming from Campobello, the Canadian island lying directly across the bay; something, as the men around here would have put it, had gone up sudden.

  But there was nothing I could do about it, so when I’d swept up the china cup pieces I returned to the task at hand: actually lifting that porcelain bathroom fixture off the floor.

  And it took all my muscle power, but I moved the thing. Then I took out the old wax plumbing seal (like a collar around the cast-iron pipe in the floor), whose age and resulting leakiness were the source of the problem in the first place, and replaced it. And just about that time George Valentine happened to come in the back door, so he helped me lift the fixture again and get it settled back onto its original footprint.

  Which was when it hit me, the first thing I’d noticed about Jonathan Raines: why was he wearing a shark's tooth pendant? Like his fit-looking physical condition, the daredevilish ornament didn’t fit any mental picture of him that I could come up with.

  But to this, as to so many other questions that had arisen that morning—such as where I would ever get enough chairs to accommodate the Ladies’ Reading Circle—I had no ready answer.

  “Hey, way to tackle it,” George said approvingly, standing back to eye my plumbing handiwork.

  George has dark hair, milky-pale skin, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Thin, permanent black lines were etched into his knuckles from the dirty work he was always having to do around town somewhere; in Eastport, George was the man you call for a dead car battery, a fallen tree limb, or an underground fuel line that has broken and needs to be dug up, pronto.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Big noise across the water a while ago.”

  “Ayuh. Don’t know what, yet. Sent some of the fire crew over on the Coast Guard cutter, see if they can help. You’re okay with the rest of the job?” He gestured at the little bathroom.

  “I hope so.” All that remained was to put in the floor bolts and turn on the water; the moment of truth was fast approaching. “I guess we’ll see in a minute.”

  “Ayuh,” he allowed evenly again. “Guess we will.”

  George was Ellie's husband and one of my main cheerleaders in the household fix-it department, partly because before I began attempting them I used to call him at all hours to come over and do things like unstick a balky window sash or flip the switch in the fuse box. Not that he ever complained about this or even mentioned it; what he did instead was, he began replacing his tools.

  One at a time, he went out and bought himself new hammers, pliers, and screwdrivers. The old ones, somehow, always wound up living at my house, and eventually I got my own toolbox for them, too. Whi
ch was either the beginning of it all or the beginning of the end, depending on how you look at it.

  At any rate, I put back the floor bolts. “Voy-lah,” George said as I hooked the water up again and the tank began filling.

  “Yeah, maybe, huh?” I said hopefully.

  Noticing that no water was spreading out onto the floor, I allowed myself a small moment of triumph before hurrying to the basement to check that I had not inadvertently transformed the steps down there into a waterfall.

  I had not. Well, this was looking auspicious. Cheered by the thought of the infinite number of dollars I had saved, I went up the basement steps, which was when I noticed that the water was still running in the little bathroom; it shouldn’t have been. And whipping off the top of that porcelain tank, I saw why.

  The filler mechanism was bent so the float had snagged on the tank's side, jamming the shutoff mechanism. As a result the water level had already risen nearly over the edge of the tank; flooding was imminent. Pressing the flush handle to empty some of it, I crouched to turn the small round knob on the filler pipe to stop the inflow.

  Whereupon the knob popped off into my hand and water began jetting merrily. Reeling back in drenched surprise and forgetting what a tiny room I was in (this was, after all, originally only the entrance to the back stairway, and servants were not expected to take up much room any more than they were expected to make much noise) I cracked my head on the doorframe, my knee on the porcelain, and my elbow on the wall.

  Well, I made a lot of noise, and luckily for me George was still around—after all those fix-it trips to my house, he’d gotten to feel at home there, and he was making a peanut butter and banana sandwich and pouring himself a cup of coffee when I yelled—and he remembered the cellar location of the main shutoff. So I swore and sputtered while he ran down there and twisted the main knob, which fortunately did not break off in his hand or the house would have floated away.

  “Huh,” George said, coming back upstairs to survey the pool of water spreading out into the hall. He straightened his gimme cap, which was black, with GUPTILL's EXCAVATING lettered on it in orange script. “Guess that old filler pipe handle must just’ve been ready to go.”

  “Right,” I said through gritted teeth, thinking that what plumbers really get paid for is aggravation. “Go eat your lunch, George, okay? I’m not fit to be around right this minute.”

  “Yep,” he said prudently, and skedaddled.

  Whereupon I cleaned up and went back to Wadsworth's for a new filler pipe handle and a kit of new insides for the toilet tank, the installation of which turned out to be as complicated as rewiring the space shuttle. And by then George was gone, but I managed it by adding an extra part I devised out of a paper clip.

  That, bottom line, is the thing about house repairs in a very old house:

  Any part of it that you touch is apt to be as fragile, and as likely to topple over onto something else that is even more fragile, as a row of dominoes. So on-the-spot improvisation is often needed.

  That floor bolt, for instance, that broke while I was removing it. If I’d tried getting the rest of it out of the floor before proceeding, I would probably still be there trying.

  Instead I’d tapped the stuck shaft of the bolt down into the floor with a nail and screwed a new, slightly larger bolt into the same hole right on top of it. The new bolt had pushed the old one farther along into the hole ahead of it and held just fine.

  Voy-lah, as George would have remarked.

  Meanwhile I kept thinking about improvisation, and about how I felt that somehow Jonathan Raines was doing it, too.

  When he’d arrived, for instance, I’d assumed I must have invited him. He, anyway, seemed quite certain of it. But now upon reflection I thought something else was also possible: that he’d made the invitation up out of whole cloth. Heard of me from his cousins, phoned me merely to find out for himself what sort of person I was, and decided to wing it, not wanting to risk a refusal.

  Trusting in his Flim-flam talents to convince me that I had asked him here.

  Which, if true, implied two more fairly interesting things:

  First, he was an excellent con man; the Flim-flam had worked beautifully.

  And second, Eastport in general wasn’t his target area.

  A motel or one of the town bed-and-breakfasts wouldn’t have suited him. No, he’d wanted to stay with me; had lied, perhaps, in order to engineer precisely this result.

  He was after a priceless, probably mythical, old violin.

  And I was his target area.

  2

  Hecky Wilmot was a short, wizened old fellow with dyed black hair, sharp, suspicious eyes that spied everything, and a lined, age-mottled face that looked as if it had been carved out of a walnut. A native Eastporter who’d lived here all his life, he was fond of saying he knew all about the town that a decent man could report, and plenty that a decent man couldn’t.

  “So,” I said to Ellie, “we tell Hecky that Jonathan Raines is your cousin, right?”

  I’d decided to get out of the house for a while, and had run into Ellie downtown. Between us, Monday mooched happily along the sidewalk.

  “That's right,” Ellie said. She’d been thinking. “My good old cousin Jon.”

  Like Hecky, Ellie was an Eastporter born and bred, and around here, being related to an Eastporter was almost as good as being one yourself.

  “And then we ask Hecky please not to let it get public that Raines is my relative,” she added. “Hecky will like the idea of a man who doesn’t want to trade on his family connections, but you know he’ll gab it all over the island that there are some.”

  “You bet,” I agreed. If Raines was related to Ellie, then people would talk freely to him. And he would take, we hoped, new lines of investigation, ones we hadn’t even thought of.

  And later, I thought determinedly, I would pick his brain for whatever he’d found out: thoroughly, like a seagull cleaning the meat from a clamshell. Flim-flam me, would he?

  We’d just see about that. Meanwhile we’d tracked Hecky, the nearest thing Eastport had to a public address system, to an art gallery and studio on Water Street, overlooking the bay.

  Out on the waves, a couple of sailboats tacked against the breeze, making way for Deer Island which lay to the northeast in the whitecapped channel. Just off the dock's end, a flock of cormorants fished diligently, dipping and gulping with undulating movements of their long, curving black necks. The smoke from the earlier explosion on Campobello had dissipated, the Coast Guard cutter back at its mooring.

  “That's how we can get it around town the fastest,” Ellie finished. “By making Hecky think it shouldn’t get around at all.”

  It was the beginning of tourist season and the shops and cafés on the street all sparkled with fresh paint, clean windows, and planters full of red geraniums under flags proclaiming the shops to be OPEN!

  “But do we tell him what Raines is up to?” I asked. “About the violin?” In the fresh salt air, a hint of wood smoke mingled pungently with the smell of pine tar.

  “I don’t think so,” Ellie replied. We turned to go in just as Eastport's police chief, Bob Arnold, went by fast in the town squad car, heading for the north end of the island.

  Bob didn’t wave; Ellie's eyebrows went up curiously.

  “For one thing, Raines doesn’t know we know, so we shouldn’t mention it,” she added as the squad disappeared up Water Street. “Besides, I don’t think Hecky would like it.”

  This turned out to be an understatement. The little gallery had been a candy store in its previous incarnation; local boys had gathered there in the old days and many of them had not lost the habit. As we entered the shop, Hecky and half a dozen of his cronies were gathered around the little black woodstove in the corner, hashing over the latest news.

  Like him, they were smart, spry old men who would relish town gossip for as long as they had blood pressures, and they all looked glad to see us in case we’d brought interesti
ng fodder.

  At first. But when he caught sight of us, Hecky scowled and the rest followed suit; in Eastport, Hecky was an opinion-maker.

  “Young feller's staying with you was in here a little while ago,” he said, fixing me in a severe gaze.

  “Yes, he's—”

  “Asking a lot of questions about Jared Hayes and his hidden Stradivarius,” Hecky went on accusingly.

  Straddy-varryus. Oh, damn Raines's eyes; couldn’t he see out of them, that when you went at a guy like Hecky you had to go by the circular route?

  But then I made a mistake that was just as bad. “Yes, because he is writing a dissertation on—”

  Ellie glanced sharply at me, but it was too late; I’d put my foot in it by mentioning writing, especially any that anyone but Hecky might be doing.

  “Just finished m’ book, y’know,” Hecky said darkly.

  “Yes, I know,” I began. It was about Eastport and he’d even managed to find a regional publisher for it; Downeast Deeds: An Eastport Story was due out any minute.

  “I’m looking forward to—”

  Reading it, I’d been about to say. But he stopped me. “Don’t see as there’ll be any need for another,” he said flatly.

  Of course not; the notion that someone else might trespass on his literary territory wouldn’t be welcome, especially now. Another local author's warmhearted Maine memoir, for instance, entitled Clyde Found Fruitflies in the Berries, had gotten the sharp side of Hecky's tongue on more than one occasion lately.

  “He's doing it for college,” I hastened to explain. “Raines, I mean. Like a term paper, not real writing like yours, Hecky.”

  “Hmph,” he retorted, not much mollified.

  The shop was a combination art gallery and working studio that ordinarily smelled sweetly of oil paints and turpentine. But now the atmosphere in it soured further as Hecky glowered at me.

  “And he's got no business muckin’ about with Hayes nonsense. Damned fool violin and all that other old clattertrap.”