by Sarah Graves
I wished I could consult that old fix-it expert; the patch's edges were straight, smooth, and clean, as if someone had simply cut a square opening in the wall, then filled it in. In the morning, I resolved, I would take care of it: yet another patch, then the wallpaper. I had a spare roll of the old gold-medallion pattern, fortunately.
“You and Sam should go down there, though,” Raines went on to Maggie, “make a weekend of it. You can hear any kind of music in Boston, and play it, too. There are jam sessions in the clubs. You do play?” he added, sounding sure of himself.
Her face lit up at the thought of going somewhere with Sam, as well as at the idea of a jam session. And, of course, at the attention Raines was paying to her. “How did you know?”
“Your fingers,” he smiled. “Calluses on the left hand, and your nails on that hand are clipped short. Marks of a musician.”
Maggie beamed and I began liking Raines a lot in spite of myself. All day long I’d kept trying to phone his cousins again, but one had gone upstate with a federal prisoner, one was getting ready for a RICOH trial, and one was undercover. So it would be a while before I talked to any of them.
And meanwhile here was Raines, behaving like a perfect, gentle knight of the Round Table. What he said next didn’t hurt my opinion of him, either.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He brought a package up from under his chair. “Your light fixture,” he said, offering it to me. “I went up to Calais, to the Wal-Mart, and they had another one.”
“Why, thank you. But—how?” It was twenty miles to Calais, our nearest big market town. “For that matter, how did you get here?” I asked, taking the package.
Raines stuck his thumb up in pantomine. “Caught a ride with the same man who brought me over to the island,” he said. “White panel truck, dog in the cab, maybe you know him?”
Ellie and I looked at each other: we knew him, all right. Wilbur Mapes worked as an urchin diver in season, when he worked at all. The rest of the time, when he wasn’t out hunting, he went to farmhouses, barns, anything that was being torn down, scavenging odd items.
Besides a shotgun and a dog so mean, people said, that it would bite you as soon as look at you, the other thing Wilbur had in the cab of that truck was a canning jar full of homemade white lightning.
“Interesting man,” Raines remarked dryly, at which point I liked him even more. The jar, the white lightning, and Mapes himself were infamous in and around Washington County. A ride with him could scare the hair right out of your head, unless you possessed a considerable amount of intestinal fortitude.
Still, I wasn’t about to let Raines completely off the hook. “I suppose if a rumor got started about a lost violin, a very valuable lost violin, way up here in Eastport, Maine, you’d be in a position to hear about it in Boston?”
George got up, taking his cleaned plate out to the kitchen. The blast on Campobello, he’d told us, had been the full fuel tank of a big pleasure boat, the property of an inexperienced, sozzled mariner from Montreal: flashy but noncatastrophic, except to the hapless mariner who’d lost his vessel and barely escaped going up in the explosion.
The smoke Ellie and I smelled downtown, however, had been a grass fire raging in the dry fields above Pirate's Cove, not far from Eastport's freight docks: much less dramatic but potentially a lot more dangerous. Now George was going out with the rest of the fire company to check for hot spots.
Raines looked transparently at me. “Yes, I suppose I would hear about such a violin. And being as the last one—I assume you’re talking about a Strad—sold for one-point-three million, it might be an interesting rumor.”
The candles flickered warningly, but of course it could have been a breeze from the open window. Raines swallowed some wine, folded his napkin, and placed it beside his plate.
“If,” he added, “I were the unscrupulous type.”
“Which you’re not.” I was trying to hide my shock; the last time I’d looked, the going price had been $750,000. It was what my client had paid for the one he bought, back in the city.
Raines held my gaze. “Which I am not. Unscrupulous, I mean. But enough about me,” he segued smoothly, turning back to Maggie. “Do you know what makes the tone of a real Stradivarius so fine?”
Maggie smiled shyly, surprised at being made again a part of the conversation. “Well, the whole aging process, I guess. Being old. And something about the wood they used?”
Raines looked wise. “Pickling,” he pronounced. “They’re just finding out that the Strads—there was a whole family of them in Cremona, building great instruments—well, it's coming out that those guys soaked the wood in brine and it altered the molecular structure.”
“Salt water,” Sam said thoughtfully. “That makes some sense. Some of the stuff we find while we’re diving, well, you wouldn’t think it’d have lasted so long. Leather, and even some wood.”
He turned to Raines. “You should see it down there. One spot sand, washed clean as a whistle, and right next to it’ll be some little fragile clay pipe or something, so perfect it's like it’d just got put there. And things we find that should’ve rotted.”
“Well, but a lot of that is the peat,” Maggie pointed out. “The effect of it, I mean. They shipped it in the old days from the port, and I guess they must have spilled lots,” she explained to Raines.
“The acid in it preserves things,” she went on, “and if it collects in the sort of backwater places that the tide doesn’t wash out, whatever got buried in it seems to last forever.”
She frowned. “But not always. Remember that leather sack we found, Sam?”
“What was in it?” George asked interestedly, returning for the cups and glasses.
Maggie shrugged. “We don’t know. We touched it and it just fell apart, like it was dissolving.” She turned back to Raines. “When the silt cleared, whatever was in it had just”—she made a presto! gesture with her hands—“washed away.”
Sam nodded, letting her talk, wearing a patient expression that reminded me of my ex-husband. I didn’t enjoy it and Sam looked a lot like his father anyway, with his green eyes, lantern jaw, and dark, curly hair. And it didn’t help any that Sam had been acting like such a knucklehead about Maggie: as if when he wanted her around, well, naturally she would always be there for him, and if he didn’t, she wouldn’t.
“It's the tone that would have made Jared Hayes want one,” Raines said. “A Stradivarius. I don’t play, myself. But musicians say it's not a matter of degree, the difference between them and any other violins. They say that it's like playing a whole other instrument; the music flies out. Like,” he finished, “the music was just in there, waiting to be released.”
Behind him on the gold-medallion wallpaper the tiniest spot of red appeared suddenly, like a droplet on a pricked fingertip.
Or didn’t. When I blinked and looked again, it was gone.
Maggie nodded dreamily, thinking I suppose of the music just flying out, and she and Sam got up together. They’d made a small business of selling things they’d discovered underwater, listing the items on the Internet via Sam's computer: old china, coins, those clay pipes. Just now they were selling a clay Schweppes jug, and the proceeds from it would buy Sam's books for the fall semester.
“We’ll do the dishes, Mrs. Tiptree,” Maggie said graciously, “and thanks for dinner.” Sam, looking put-upon but with no good way to escape, followed her out.
“So it's not just hype, then,” Ellie said when the two had gone. “People thinking that because the violins are so rare, there must be some special something about them. Some mystery.”
Raines shook his head as the happy blare of a Cajun dance tune came from the kitchen; Sam was a fan of distant sports-radio programs we could sometimes pull in on clear nights, but Maggie liked the Montreal stations.
“No,” Raines said. “The specialness is real.”
As he spoke, an odd look crossed his face: one part heartfelt longing, another part rationally assessing. But
in the next instant it was gone, as George returned to rest his hand briefly on Ellie's shoulder, waiting to say something.
“There were only eleven hundred or so Strads ever made,” Raines went on musingly. “I say only, but it's a big number, really; the old man worked practically until the final moment of his life. Into his nineties.”
The music from the kitchen cut off and a man began talking about a batting streak that somebody was having.
“And this was when?” George asked, still waiting. He looked straight at me, so I would know it was me he wanted to talk to.
“In the 1700s,” Raines replied. “No electric light to work by, no power tools. Just an artist, making musical instruments.”
“By hand,” George said approvingly.
“And by ear,” Raines added. “Now only about six hundred and fifty instruments are left. Not all violins; the family also made harps, guitars, cellos, and violas. And the reason no more will probably ever be found is, almost every instrument they made has already been accounted for.”
Almost. He knew a lot about them, I realized. “Lost in shipwrecks, burnt up or exploded—the firebombs in Dresden during World War II got a lot of them,” he continued. “The ones that do still exist have individual names of their own, like Greatorex or Messiah.”
“So if somebody finds one in their attic …” Ellie began. “I mean with a label inside, that says it's a Stradivarius …”
“Right. Chances of its being real are a zillion to one against.”
Which seemed like stiff odds, considering what I thought he was really here for. Still, when he turned back to Ellie and me, his eyes held a spark of teasing merriment: I’ve got a secret.
“All right, now,” I began, annoyed. “I think I’ve had just about enough of—”
“But I hear from some of your neighbors that you two have been involved in some mysteries yourselves,” he remarked, deftly changing the subject.
I just stared at him; I knew how to interrupt people that way, too, and make it seem to everyone else as if I hadn’t. It was a technique I’d learned while steering wealthy people into financial plans that did more for their portfolios than for their egos. It took nerve and practice. And he was good at it.
Too good. “Solving crimes in a small Maine town? It's too wonderful to be true,” he added. “So, like the rest of the place, I guess it must be.” Smooth, very smooth.
“Wade back tonight?” George asked casually. It was what he’d been waiting to say, and I understood; he liked Raines, so far. So far, though, was as far as it went. Back in the city I could have had a street gang in my apartment and they could have murdered me, and if they didn’t let my body decompose too badly, no one else in the building would even have noticed. Here it was different.
“After midnight,” I said.
Most of the time, Wade Sorenson was Eastport's harbor pilot, which meant he guided big vessels in through the deep, tricky channels, shifting currents, and treacherous tides that led to the port. But starting two days earlier he had become part of a two-vessel team delivering a tugboat to its new berth on Grand Manan Island, and right now he was still out on the water, the lights of Eastport not yet even in sight.
“They promised to radio Federal Marine if they’re delayed,” I told George. “I’ll let you know if they do.”
Satisfied—George would fight dragons for me and Ellie, and probably would manage to slay quite a few of them, too, if push came to shove—he went out, as we gathered the remaining serving plates. In the kitchen, Sam and Maggie had formed an efficient assembly line for the dishes; not for the first time, I saw how well and happily they worked together.
Sam, I thought, you dunderhead; I’d tried to raise him right, but he was nevertheless an eighteen-year-old American male, so naturally his idea of female beauty was like Jill: tall, blond, and just enough older than he was to seem sophisticated. Twenty or so, I calculated. Sam was just eighteen.
“It's true,” I admitted to Raines, averting my eyes from the spectacle at the kitchen sink: unrequited love on Maggie's side, obliviousness on Sam's. Really, it made me want to swat the kid. “There was a string of deaths,” I went on, “and we got to the bottom of them. Untimely,” I added reluctantly, “deaths. And unnatural.”
And somehow Ellie and I had developed a knack for revealing the skulduggery behind such events; for a while, people in town had begun joking that Ellie's nose actually twitched at the smell of blood. Recently, however, things had quieted down.
Or they’d quieted down until now. I wasn’t happy at the thought of an unidentified man, driving a stolen car, coming to Eastport and then immediately falling off a cliff.
Still, no one was calling it murder. “Mostly we were just in the right place at the right time,” I said to Raines.
He found a roll of plastic wrap and covered the casserole. “I’ve heard of that,” he said. “But I’ve got a feeling it's not going to happen to me. Not here.”
Also, he put the butter, salt and pepper, and salad dressing away without anyone having to tell him where they went. Then, knocking my socks off, he found the dog biscuits in the cookie tin on top of the refrigerator, opened it, and fed one to Monday.
“Jared Hayes's story would make a wonderful Ph.D. dissertation,” he said. “It would make up for my being late with it, I’m sure. Something fascinating, not dry like so much academic writing is. A real man, a talented composer, with real secrets and real…”
He paused, as if thinking perhaps he’d said too much, and I agreed; while he was talking the lights had dimmed briefly, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. And of course it could simply have been a power dip; out here on the island, you could get a hefty brownout if the PTA scheduled a food sale and everyone decided to bake cookies on the same night.
Still, a prickle went over the little hairs on my arms.
“Even after one day I can tell I’m not going to get anywhere with Hayes,” Jonathan Raines went on. “Eastport people seem warm and friendly,” he allowed. “Really charming, not fake at all. But I’m a stranger here, and of course they think I’ve come because I want something. That I’m using them, or that I’m trying to.”
He finished wrapping the leftover cabbage rolls and put them in the refrigerator, right next to the jug of cabbage juice, which resembled purple ink.
“Not,” he added with a chagrined little laugh that didn’t sound happy, “that I’m having any success at that, either.”
It was what I thought, too, that he was using us. And reports of his activities around town had only hardened my heart on the matter: that Raines, dressed in a many-pocketed fishing vest like some mad angler trolling for information, had been spotted trying to interrogate Eastport's dourest citizen, Elmore Luddy, actually chasing the old man across his own lawn before Luddy slammed the porch door in Raines's face.
That he’d visited the Waco Diner, where the vest would have been about as popular as a red flag in a bull ring. The fishermen who ate in the Waco wore plain rubber boots and sweatshirts from the discount store and disdained hats until the gale warning had been up for twenty-four hours. A fancy fishing outfit bought from the Orvis catalog was the kiss of death to the guys in the Waco.
But according to Ellie, who heard everything that went on in town, Raines had stood out at the end of the fish pier in that vest, too, where everybody downtown could see him in it, and in a pair of silly yellow Wellington boots.
And of course he’d met Hecky Wilmot, antagonizing him with talk of writing and of old, unsavory Eastport secrets, both of these being Hecky's private property in Hecky's opinion.
So, as Raines himself suspected, in the snooping department he’d screwed up royally. And too late he seemed to have realized this, so crestfallen that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. I could confront him later, I decided, turning from his harmless, suddenly boyish-looking face.
Sam was putting the wineglasses away on the top shelf of the cupboard, while Maggie rinsed the sink. “Want to get our ge
ar ready for tomorrow before we check the bidding on the Schweppes jug?” she asked, wringing out the sponge.
The suits, gloves, and other insulating garments they wore in the cold water lay in the hall awaiting maintenance. With them stood the pair of outrageously bright yellow Wellingtons.
As Maggie turned, Sam stood on tiptoe to put the last glass up, his arm outstretched and his face unselfconsciously young and attractive. “Yeah, good idea,” he said. At which Maggie's own face suddenly was suffused with such melting affection that it embarrassed me to look at it.
Maggie gave the sink a final, unnecessary wipe. When she finished, there was nothing but her usual good humor in her expression.
But I’d seen, and so had Jonathan Raines, whose sympathetic sorrow he concealed by frowning down at his hands. She dumped me, he’d said lightly, but I sensed he didn’t feel light about it.
Maggie must have picked something up from the cooling of the atmosphere, as well. “You could get her back, you know,” she said quietly to Raines. “You could call her and apologize.”
He looked up gratefully. “It's too late now, I’m afraid. But thanks for the thought, Maggie.”
“Come on, Mags, work to do,” Sam broke in, and a moment later I heard them chattering happily, dragging their gear out onto the porch to ready it for tomorrow.
“You two could get to the bottom of it,” Raines said when they had gone, meaning Ellie and me. “What happened to Hayes, for example, why he vanished. All I need to know, and more. You could find out because everybody knows you, and they’ll talk to you.”
Ellie sat down across from him. “We’ve tried,” she said. “We got out Hayes's papers in the library, old issues of newspapers, everything we could find.”
It struck me, then, the other thing I’d been wondering about Raines. A zing of suspicion went through me as I thought just how unusual it was.
“How’d you know where to find the plastic wrap? Where I keep the butter and condiments and so on? And how in the world did you know the dog biscuits are on top of the refrigerator?”