Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

He glanced around at the brightly colored water scenes and landscape portraits decorating the walls. Behind the counter the shop's proprietor, Jerome Wallace, worked on another one.

  “This”—Hecky jerked a gnarled fist at the paintings—“is what we show the folks from away, want to come and see the real downeast Maine as it oughta be. All bright an’ cheerful.”

  He frowned thunderously at me. “Not them old stories about murder and mayhem. Bad women”—wimmen—“an’ dark deeds such as ought to’ve stayed buried with the men who done ’em.”

  I tried not to look as curious as I felt; this was the first I’d heard of Hayes doing dark deeds or being associated with bad wimmen.

  From behind Hecky, one of the other men in the shop winked elaborately at me. Truman Daly was tall, wiry and white-bearded with a gleam in his eye that could turn to lightning if you got him riled. As courtly a gentleman now as forty years ago, lively and involved in everything that was interesting, he was Eastport's best-known citizen—welcome in the fanciest parlors and lowest saloons, though he visited the latter very infrequently and only for soft drinks—and he treated Hecky Wilmot as if Hecky were a younger, less diplomatic brother.

  Now Truman smoothed his long, white beard with one expressive hand and made a discreet yap-yap motion with the thumb and finger of the other, as he and the other men began edging toward the door of the shop.

  When Hecky got on a rant, the best thing was to leave him alone to it. As the little bell over the shop door jingled, I caught a sniff of wood smoke again, decided it was only the stove downdrafting.

  Hecky leaned toward me, his bushy white eyebrows beetling in sharp contrast to his dyed black hair.

  “ ’Twas a curse old Jared Hayes lived under,” he intoned, “and another as took ’im. I ain’t such a fool as to dabble in it, nor should you be, or anyone from away. Especially from away.”

  He glared around. “It oughta be let alone,” he declared, his old voice quavering with emotion, and with that he stomped out, leaving Ellie and me blinking at each other.

  “So much for helping Jonathan Raines get accepted in town,” Ellie said after a moment, laughing weakly.

  “Right,” I agreed, still a little shocked by the old man's fervor, “and we never even got the chance to tell our lies. Maybe we should’ve told Hecky that Raines was a literary agent.”

  “It sounds to me as if he's just jealous of his turf,” Ellie said, echoing my own thought. “With his book coming out and all.”

  “Do you think he's getting nervous? I mean, that somebody like Raines, with his supposed academic credentials, might decide to say that Hecky the hometown amateur has gotten it all wrong?”

  Jerome dragged his gaze away from his painting. “Hecky's pretty touchy lately about that book of his, all right,” he said. “Way he talks, it's going to set the whole town on its ear, what he's written. Truman Daly says he thinks maybe Hecky put in a few things he wishes now that he hadn’t.”

  “Huh.” Now, there was a thought worth pondering. It would be poetic justice if for once Hecky was worried about what other people were saying, instead of him doing all the saying himself. “Whose old skeletons has Hecky been rattling, do you suppose?”

  Ellie shrugged, spreading her hands. The smoke smell was stronger; not the woodstove, I realized. And now I heard sirens.

  “Something's put a bee in his bonnet,” Ellie agreed, peering out the storefront window.

  Across the street in the parking area by the fish pier, a small antiques-and-crafts fair was being set up: quilts, jellies and jams, and a variety of other homemade items covered the red-and-white-checked cloths.

  “Oh, dear,” Ellie murmured, “the quilt for the crafts fair.”

  In what she laughingly called her spare time, she and the other ladies of the Quilt Guild were completing a sampler quilt; the squares were finished, but the quilting—all hand stitching, in red and blue for the Fourth of July—was Ellie's job, as she has the finest quilting hand in all of Washington County.

  “I’ve got to buckle down,” she instructed herself firmly, at which I managed not to laugh out loud; Ellie is one of the most buckled-down persons on the planet. But I promised to remind her about it, meanwhile continuing to observe the activity across the street.

  Among the workers I spotted Lillian Frey, a tall, rangily constructed woman in her late forties, with wiry, pale blond hair and a deeply tanned face. She had a nail gun in her hand, a big stapler sort of device with the nails in a strip hanging down like ammo in an old-fashioned machine gun, and she was fastening lengths of two-by-four, bam-bant-bam one after the other, bracing the legs of the table in her booth.

  As I watched, a photographer from the local newspaper, the Quoddy Times, showed up; reflexively, Lillian backed away. From this distance the scar on her cheek didn’t show much, but it was common knowledge she didn’t like having her picture taken. When the photographer moved to another booth, she went back to work.

  Beside me, Ellie frowned. “Hey, who's that?” she wanted to know as a car swung into the lot and skidded to a halt.

  In her outfit of pencil-slim jeans and black sweater Lillian looked smashing as usual, like the country antique items she sold as a sideline to her main business: handmade musical instruments. The scar only added a rakish touch, though I was sure she didn’t feel that way about it.

  But her smile of satisfaction at finishing the nail job vanished as a girl slammed from the car Ellie was squinting at. “That's Jill. Lillian's daughter,” I said.

  She was built more like her mother, athletic but long-boned and with finer, more delicately-modeled features. The scowl on her face spoiled her attractiveness, though.

  “Wow,” Ellie said, “she looks tough.”

  “Right,” I sighed. “As usual.”

  Piled in the back of Lillian's station wagon were handsome old things—a banjo clock, a Thomas Moser chair, a wicker plant stand, and some very nice hooked floral rugs—along with several small musical-instrument cases that I supposed held violins: the hand-built instruments that were Lillian's specialty.

  Jill slammed her fist on the wagon's fender as she went by; the women began arguing about something.

  Which didn’t surprise me; the chip on the girl's shoulder was already legendary. “She's been hanging around Sam,” I said.

  I was not best pleased to see her. “She's been in town about a month. I keep hoping she’ll leave again any minute.”

  “She looks old enough to be out on her own,” Ellie appraised the girl, “that's for sure. And plenty older than Sam.”

  “Right,” I agreed sourly. I thought so, too: old enough to be on her own with a job and an apartment, preferably on the other side of the country.

  Or the world, even. The argument reached its peak, Lillian and Jill standing flat-footed, face-to-face. Then the girl turned, stalked to the car, and sped off. Lillian stood looking after her a moment, the nail gun still in her hand, then got into the station wagon and followed, her face grim.

  I had a moment to feel sorry for Lillian and to wonder why she didn’t let things cool off instead of going after Jill while they were both still so angry. But it was none of my business, and we’d started out to clear the way for Jonathan Raines, not snoop into Lillian Frey's obviously unhappy family matters.

  “He's probably gone over to the diner,” Ellie said, meaning Hecky, so we set off to try to locate him there. But he wasn’t in the diner, or the hardware store, or the five-and-dime. He wasn’t at a table in the Happy Landings Café or on a barstool at La Sardina, East-port's Mexican restaurant.

  “We really need him,” Ellie said. “Right now he's out there somewhere doing the opposite of what we wanted. In Eastport Hecky and his big mouth can fix it so that not only will people refuse to help Raines, they won’t even look at him.”

  “I know,” I said, frustrated. Ellie's plan had actually started seeming possible to me. But an hour after we’d begun we were back where we’d started, at the art gallery.
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br />   Suddenly a heavy thwap-thwapping sound filled the air and an aircraft swooped low over Passamaquoddy Bay. It was the Coast Guard helicopter, its red markings clearly visible on its chunky white body as it beat its way north.

  “What in the world is going on out there?” Ellie said. The smell of smoke had never really gone away and grew stronger again now, hanging over the town in a pale haze; not a woodstove or anything like it. Something around here was burning like hell.

  Jerome Wallace came outside. He was a big, rawboned man with faraway blue eyes, a thatch of greying hair, and a quiet manner, his clothes habitually paint-smeared.

  “Just talked to the dispatcher,” he said. “Some guy went off those high bluffs up at North End, into the water. No one seems to know who he is and they’re all out there trying to find the body.”

  Ellie and I looked at each other.

  “Some guy,” Jerome finished, “from away.”

  That night, Jonathan Raines sat cheerfully un-drowned at one end of the dinner table, and George Valentine sat at the other. George was chief of Eastport's volunteer fire department as well as its unofficial man of all work, so he knew the whole story of what had happened at North End.

  “From away,” he repeated, forking up some of the bay-scallop casserole that Ellie and I had prepared. With it we were having steamed endive vinaigrette, cheese biscuits, and some of the new baby potatoes that Ellie had dug that morning, with fresh parsley and butter.

  “It doesn’t matter that he was somebody from away,” I said, and George looked up kindly at me.

  “Course it doesn’t, Jacobia. But it's all we know about him so far, ’cause the car he drove has come up on a stolen list in Massachusetts. Must’ve had his wallet, ID and all, on him when he went over. Keys, too, if he had ’em.”

  Also with us at the table were Sam and his friend Maggie Altvater. The two of them were taking advanced scuba lessons this summer and had gotten in just in time for dinner.

  “How do you know for sure he went over at all?” Maggie asked reasonably. “I mean, just because the car is there and he's not. If it's stolen, maybe he just abandoned it.”

  In the candlelight her creamy complexion glowed with health, her hazel eyes bright with good humor and quick intelligence. And her honey-colored hair was a wonder, falling in masses to the middle of her back.

  Unfortunately, it was her habit to spoil the effect with plaid flannel shirts, baggy jeans, and thick-soled hiking boots, none of which did anything to flatter her ample figure.

  An unhappy picture of Jill Frey flashed before my eyes: slim as a switchblade and dressed fit to kill. Maggie was a wonderful girl, accomplished and mature; on top of everything else, she was a volunteer emergency medical technician complete with a scanner and a cherry beacon on the dash of her pickup. But Sam treated her like a comfortable old shoe, partly on account of her always presenting herself as if she were one.

  “Wonderful library you’ve got here in town,” Raines said, apropos of nothing. “I saw it this afternoon,” he added with an odd, intent look at me.

  Meanwhile, Sam took another forkful of scallop casserole and chewed happily; at eighteen, he was as strong and good-looking as a healthy young horse, and as stubborn.

  “To the library,” Jonathan Raines repeated significantly, still looking at me, “after I went everywhere else that I went.”

  Later I understood that I’d been meant to hear it, that it was important. But I was still thinking about Sam.

  It would never occur to him that a girl like Jill Frey could do him any harm; he’d spoken to her twice on the phone already this evening, and I was sure it would ring again anytime now.

  “Fellow's camera equipment, tripod and so on, piled by the edge,” George answered Maggie's question. “Lady walking her dog found the stuff. No camera.”

  He swallowed some Budweiser. “Probably had it with him on a strap around his neck. And you can see by the branches all broken off fresh where he scrambled down for a better view, that's the way he went.”

  The phone rang; Sam jumped up to get it.

  “And mainly,” George finished, “if he didn’t go over, where is he?”

  Ellie looked skeptical. “He might not’ve scrambled, though. Maybe he fell down right from the top. We don’t know what he was doing out there, not for sure.”

  She sipped some wine. “There ought to be a sign there, you know. That edge has been crumbling for two hundred years. It's a safety hazard.”

  At the north end of the island, she meant, where the view takes in the whole bay: Deer Island, the Canadian waters beyond, and mounded in the distance the hills of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Sam came back, his eyes bright and his cheeks flushed, a secret smile he couldn’t quite manage to hide on his lips.

  “It's enough to tempt anyone who doesn’t know how shaky it is, the soil at the very edge of those cliffs,” Ellie said. “To get too close, and …” Her hands made a whoops! gesture, indicating what could happen next.

  Having given up on the topic of the library, apparently, Raines glanced up from his plate of potatoes, salad, and cabbage rolls. He was, it had turned out, a rabid vegetarian; he’d made the cabbage rolls himself, steaming the purple cabbage and saving the water for, he said, a health drink.

  The notion of which made me shudder. But he’d been a perfect pleasure to have in the kitchen, cleaning up after himself as he went along, and he was so matter-of-fact about his diet that even George—who thought meat and potatoes were two of the five major food groups—wasn’t holding it against him.

  “So this isn’t the first time?” Raines asked. “I mean, that someone has fallen?”

  Sam shook his head. “Nope. Every couple of years somebody goes over, usually a visitor. Mostly they get rescued, but… see, it looks real safe. But you get out there, step just a little too close—not everywhere, but in some spots—and bingo.” He took a swallow of milk. “Next thing, you’re in the water, and the current there is vicious. That body's halfway to Lubec by now, maybe farther.”

  The next town to our south, he meant, along the wild, rocky coast where the land tumbled into the water. And you would tumble, too, if you didn’t watch yourself carefully.

  “If,” Sam said, “it didn’t wash up into one of the caves.” He ate some more casserole. “Man, they say that some of the caves at the north end run clear to the other side of the island, like a honeycomb. Course,” he added with a cautious look at me, “I’ve never been in any of them myself.”

  “Right,” I said, not believing him for a minute. The idea of him spelunking in underwater caves still gave me the willies, and he knew it. So he—and Maggie, too, I strongly suspected—tended to shelter me from reports of their more outrageous adventures.

  On the other hand, I was pretty sure Jill Frey wouldn’t be joining Sam on any of these strenuous capers. Despite her athletic build, from what I’d heard of her she didn’t seem to be the outdoor type. As a result, I bit my tongue when the topic of sporting activities came up; however dangerous, they were still better than the indoor ones that Jill might suggest.

  “Anyway,” Sam went on, “it's a cinch he's not alive anymore. The water in Passamaquoddy Bay's about fifty degrees,” he told Raines. “Which makes survival time maybe fifteen minutes, even with your head above water. Your muscles lock up and you go into hypothermic coma even before you drown.”

  Sam related these sobering facts with some gusto, but Raines absorbed them gravely and the rest of the company went quiet, too; I thought it was time to edge the table talk away from dead bodies. Besides, I had some questions that I wanted answers to, from Jonathan Raines.

  “So,” I invited him brightly, “tell us about your life in Boston. It must be an exciting place to be, lots of intellectual activity and all. I suppose if any new musical manuscripts turn up, I mean of the old historical pieces, you’d be among the first to see them. As a graduate student of music history, I mean,” I added, letting him hear the edge in my tone.

 
; “And the music clubs,” Maggie said wistfully. “Bluegrass and jazz.” Maggie had a lovely, note-perfect contralto singing voice and was a dedicated country-fiddle enthusiast.

  “Do any sculling?” Sam asked. “I hear that's a big sport in Cambridge, on the river, there.” He ate another cheese biscuit.

  Even George joined the interrogation; usually taciturn, he seemed to have taken to Raines. “Got a girl?” he asked joshingly.

  Raines laughed but seemed uncomfortable at being the focus of so much interest, which under the circumstances I thought was not surprising. Considering, I mean, that he was lying through his straight white teeth.

  “Not, alas, anymore,” he replied to George's question a bit sadly. Removing his thick glasses, he polished them with the hem of his white napkin; true to her word, Ellie had raided her linen closet, so we were well supplied with them.

  Now, if I could only deal with the rest of the Reading Circle arrangements so handily; at the moment, redecorating requirements were looming rather large. The hole in the plaster, for instance, gaped yawningly at me from across the table.

  “The girl—well, she dumped me,” Raines said ruefully.

  Sam looked surprised. No girl had ever dumped him, and his confidence in this department was so extreme, he didn’t realize that not everyone in the world shared it. I watched him turn the notion over in his mind, then discard it.

  Raines turned to Maggie. “There are lots of clubs in Boston, but I don’t get to go much. Studying,” he explained, with a quick look at me. He hadn’t forgotten my question or missed its reason. Jonathan Raines, it was turning out, didn’t miss much.

  Across from him, the broken plaster patch gleamed whitely amid the mottled grey of the older material: horsehair plaster. In the nineteenth century builders added horsehair to make it stronger, and looking at it always reminded me of sunny pastures.

  But if you didn’t happen to be as fond of horsehair plaster as I was, it was hideous, especially since my patch was centered like an irregular bull's-eye in another, earlier one. A hundred and fifty years ago, someone else had faced the same problem as I did now—a hole in the wall—and had solved it.