by Sarah Graves
“Nice of you to make time,” he remarked, chewing the olive.
I let the comment pass, recognizing it for what it was: a reflex. He’d heard someone say it sometime or another, and he’d admired the sound of it. Now he was repeating it like a parrot.
“I’ll have a Pepsi,” I said when the waitress returned, and he rolled his eyes at the hopeless gaucherie of my choice. Real grown-ups, he believed, drank martoonies with their lunches.
“Are you gaining weight?” he asked, by way of opening the conversation.
“No, Victor,” I said patiently. “I’m not.”
He made a careless, have-it-your-way gesture. “Oh. I thought you had.”
It was not, as anyone else would have known, a promising start. But then, Victor had always been an idiot savant of human-beingness. If a patient needed something, he would know it and take care of it immediately, even if he’d already been up twenty hours or if the patient couldn’t pay. He was kind to them, too, hearing their fears and complaints and inquiring about their lives with genuine interest.
Which made it the more strange that, outside the clinical sphere, Victor had all the keen interpersonal perceptiveness of a colony of toenail fungus.
Eons later, or it felt that way, anyway, the waitress had arrived and gone away again, and our orders came. “You should chat with your son,” I said. “About girls.”
He glanced up from his chef's salad in wry surprise; he was capable, actually, of flashes of insight. It's one of the things that made him so dangerous. “Who, me?”
I ate some haddock. Lunch with Victor was a routine we’d developed after he moved here; I thought of it as vaccination, exposure to a small, controlled dose of toxic substance to keep my system ready to deal with a no-holds-barred onslaught.
Which Victor still managed to deliver, on occasion. “Yes, you,” I said. “He's picking up your attitudes, and it's not good for him. You know that it isn’t.”
He bridled uncomfortably, a tall, still-attractive man with green eyes, a lantern jaw, and a just-between-you-and-me smile he used to his advantage at every possible opportunity.
“Just because we couldn’t make a go of it…”
Him and me, he meant. I drank some Pepsi. “That's not what happened.”
He will do this: work it around in his mind—and in mine, if he can—so that I bear most of the responsibility for ending our marriage.
“There's a girl who's in love with Sam, and he's behaving like she's some sort of fashion accessory, something he can put on and take off whenever he happens to feel like it.”
Victor frowned as this description hit a little close to the bone in the personal behavior department. “And?”
“And you zipping him around in the power boat every weekend, or in the car, bringing a different woman along each time, that's what. That debonair act you put on when he's with you. He admires it. He wants to be like you, don’t you see that?”
His face softened. “Huh. Sam admires me. Thanks for telling me that, Jacobia. It means a lot to me, really. Thank you.”
He smiled sincerely; seeing this, I gathered my wits about me. Just sitting at a table with Victor, inside his personal force field, makes you believe against all your better judgment that he is a nice, normal man with normal feelings. A conscience.
That you can trust him.
“Come on, Jake, what's the big deal? He's a kid, he's going to behave like one.”
I suppressed my impatience. “He's not just any kid. He's had too many chances to go off the rails already, and barely escaped them. Now he's just about to get into college.”
At the University of Maine in Machias forty miles away; he could come home weekends. Also, Sam had a part-time job at the local boatyard set up to start again in fall, with mentoring from the boatyard owner, Dan Harpwell. It was perfect.
“He wants to be a boat designer, he's lined up a future for himself, and I can’t stand to see him tiptoeing around the edges of another pitfall,” I finished forcefully. “And your lover-boy act makes Sam think that it's okay behavior,” I said.
Victor looked innocently at me. “Well, but it is. For me.”
Sudden fury struck me speechless for a moment, because this is the other thing Victor will do every time. It's all about him.
“It's not as if I’m married,” he went on reasonably. “There is no reason I shouldn’t have an active social life. And I don’t promise these women anything, Jacobia. Not ever.”
Calmly he drank some of his second martini while I struggled with the small, shrill voice in my head, the one that in spite of everything I’d been through with him kept crying out:
But you did. You promised me.
“Fine,” I said finally. “Seeing as once again you have managed to make a conversation refer to yourself and your wishes, maybe you could just point out to your son that if he wants your life, then behaving like you is the way to get it.”
Alone, I meant. Emotionally impoverished, dimly aware that other people had something he didn’t. I still wasn’t sure if Victor was unable or just unwilling to do what it took.
Victor once broke up with a woman he’d been seeing a long time, after our divorce; she’d suffered a serious back injury and was in traction for a number of weeks. And when I asked him what had happened to the relationship—he split with her right after the injury—he told me with a straight face that she was no fun anymore, so he had stopped seeing her. Not ironically, but as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world.
“Maybe,” he allowed now, “I might mention it to Sam.” Like I say, he has these flashes of insight. “I’m moving a bunch of my medical books out to the clinic soon, maybe he’ll help me.”
After he got here, I’d helped Victor establish a new medical facility whose purposes were:
(a) giving emergency care to badly injured people who would otherwise have to be Life-Starred to Bangor or Portland, and
(b) keeping Victor occupied and out of my hair. “Anyway, I’ll talk to him,” he added, as I must have looked impatient again. He sipped at his drink. “So, who's the girl you have staying at your house? I saw her,” he added, “go in with an overnight bag earlier on my way to work.”
This was his way of letting me know he still kept tabs on me, and I found it about as charming a remark as you may imagine. But it was also my cue to let him change the subject, unless I wanted a battle that made Normandy look like a church picnic.
“Girlfriend of the guy who fell off the dock last night,” I said. “She's here to claim his body if it can be found.”
Eyebrows up. “Really. Sounds cheerful. Sam said she was lah-di-dah. His term, not mine,” Victor added with a grin.
Then: “I’ll talk to him, Jake. Honest. I will.”
A beat, while I decided how much to say. “Okay.”
Then, to let him know I didn’t lie around all day eating chocolates and watching soap operas—if I didn’t impress him otherwise, he would accuse me of this—I related the events of the busy morning and described Charmian further.
“She knows languages,” I finished. “Latin. Probably others.” I went on to detail her deftness with small tools and knowledge of spy and/or crime techniques like invisible ink.
I drank some soda. “So, considering who raised her,” I went on, “she can probably pick locks, fake early masterpieces, and forge passports.”
“Not to mention forging the signatures onto the early masterpieces,” Victor joked. He wasn’t taking this seriously.
He finished the good parts out of his chef's salad and began picking at the greens. “Are you going to eat your roll?”
“What? No, have it.” It was another annoying thing he did, eating off my plate as if we were still married.
“And there's one more thing that still bothers me, too,” I said.
Just thinking aloud. My conversation with Victor was already over, for practical purposes. He tipped his head, chewing.
“That guy who went off the bluffs a
t North End,” I said.
He swallowed. “But that was—”
“I know. Before the dock accident Raines had. If that's what it was. But his body hasn’t been found, either; the guy from the bluffs.”
I finished my Pepsi. “And I’m just thinking: if people saw you come into town—which you could hardly avoid because there's only one way over the causeway, isn’t there?—and then you wanted people to think you were gone …”
He’d stopped listening again; it made him the perfect person to bounce random ideas against. Maybe after they caromed off that invisible shield that surrounded him, they would fall into order.
I thought a minute more, working it out. “But you couldn’t be seen leaving because you weren’t really gone, then. …”
What I meant was, you can’t come or go unnoticed here. And maybe the guy who’d gone off the bluffs wanted people to think he had drowned, but instead …
“You should leave this to the police,” Victor said, ignoring my line of thought entirely in favor of his own. He was wearing his patented wise-and-superior expression now; to go with it, he was using his poor-foolish-Jacobia voice.
“I see,” I said evenly. “And this would be because …”
“There's absolutely no reason for you to be involved in it,” he said. “You don’t know any of these people. You’ve got the girl in your house right now, for all you know she's tearing down more walls and so on even as we speak. She could be a co-conspirator in crimes which might possibly include murder.”
“She's sitting at the kitchen table with Bob Arnold,” I demurred, “or she's with him looking at the dock where it happened.”
Bob had arrived as I was leaving. The schoolhouse fire on the mainland had been put out, but no suspect was in custody.
“Be that as it may,” Victor said, dismissing easily my attempt at parrying his comments. In a debate, Victor was like nuclear weapons against a rock pile, some primitive clubbing instruments, and a couple of sharpened sticks.
“It's none of your business,” he pronounced primly, glancing at his watch again. “You should get rid of her.”
Which of course was when I decided for sure that I would do no such thing.
“You’ll talk to Sam,” I said as we went out into the June sunshine: seagulls crying, a salt tang in the air, the snapping whuff! of sails as a couple of boats came around in the practice race course marked off by yellow buoys out in the channel.
“I said I would,” Victor replied impatiently.
And maybe it was only that it was such a beautiful spring day, with the summer stretching goldenly ahead of us. Or maybe it was that my house had gone so serenely silent, after months of having my hair stand on end every time I walked into a darkened room. Maybe I thought that after one such unlooked-for miracle, another could follow.
“If you’re so worried about it, I won’t wait. I’ll speak with him today,” Victor said, getting into his little sports car.
Anyway, I believed him.
5
The day of the Eastport Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting dawned damp and chilly, with fog filling up the shallow basin of the bay like cold soup in a bowl. It had been this way for two days, now, and the plaster patch in the dining room wasn’t drying at all, a dark, ominous wet spot remaining at the center of it like the middle of a half-baked cake.
As a last resort I’d cut a wallboard square, glued it in there with Krazy Glue, and slapped wallpaper over it. The result wasn’t anything the TV home-repair shows would have approved, and it was going to be the devil to take down and redo properly. But it worked for now, and I was admiring it when the phone rang.
“Jacobia? This is Clinty Havelock, over to the garage? I rented a car to a lady a little while ago, she says she's staying with you? And now Homer says …”
Homer was Clinty's husband, the town mechanic.
“What?” Ellie said from across the room, seeing my face.
“She's rented a car,” I said exasperatedly.
Charmian had been spending her time at the library reading Hayes papers; Raines's body still had not been found, and I’d thought it was as good a way as any to keep her safely situated.
She hadn’t said anything more about doing any investigating herself, and I’d hoped she’d given up the idea. But now I guessed she had gotten impatient.
Or something. “Go on, Clinty, what did Homer say?”
“Says that car ain’t fit to be rented, he wasn’t done on it and I should call you ’fore it…”
Oh, fabulous. “… breaks down,” Clinty finished.
I told Clinty not to worry, that I would take care of it, and then I hung up to try to start figuring out how. But before I could, the phone rang again.
“Bettah come get the guhl,” a surly voice advised, a voice so full of downeast twang it took a moment to understand: girl.
Damn. “Wilbur Mapes?” I asked, although I already knew.
In the background, his famously grouchy dog was barking as if a team of burglars were in the act of breaking into the place, which meant that a single, solitary stranger might be somewhere within five miles of Wilbur's property.
“Ayuh,” he said. And unfortunately, I knew who that stranger probably was: Charmian.
“I’m coming, Wilbur. Just wait for me, all right?”
In the background, something that sounded like a pile of empty tin cans fell with a clatter. Then Charmian came on.
“Jacobia?” Her voice was breathy and frightened, whether of Wilbur or his dog, I wasn’t certain. “Oh, Jacobia, I’m so sorry to put you to this trouble, but my car died out here and this house was the only—”
“Don’t worry about it, Charmian. Just sit tight. Their bark is worse than their bite.”
I hoped. “Oh, blast and damnation,” I said, hanging up, but there was no help for it; she had to be fetched.
A little wildly, I looked around the kitchen, now so full of fragile crockery I was almost afraid to move in it. Ellie had arrived bearing china teacups, sterling silver, more napkins, and a collection of cake plates for serving the cookies, petit-fours, and sandwiches to the Circle. Also we’d lugged the coffee urn in and set it up on top of the washing machine, which was the only place where we could fit it.
Fortunately, I was not in charge of providing the meeting's speaker; there was a committee for that, and it had chosen, of all things, a mystery writer who’d recently moved to Eastport. Personally I thought this choice was a bit lowbrow, but as I say, it was not my decision.
“I’ll come with you,” Ellie said as I grabbed my car keys.
“No. We still need sugar cubes for the tea table.”
The house was as clean as a house with a teenage boy in it ever gets. The sandwiches were made and covered with plastic and the puff pastries and petit-fours were stowed safely away in the refrigerator; we would cut the crusts from the sandwiches, set the table, and frost the petit-fours later.
In short, we were coming down to the wire on eleventh-hour preparations, which for a shining instant I’d actually believed I could complete successfully.
“Wade?” Ellie said. When the ladies arrived, we wanted our decks clear of unnecessary personnel.
I searched for my bag. “Ship coming in. Peat and particleboard. Won’t be back till late.”
“Sam?” She found the satchel, shoved it into my hands.
“Out with Maggie. The dive class members are still in the team that's looking for Raines's body down the coast.”
The search would’ve been called off by now, only Charmian was being a thorn in everyone's side about it. Still, at least it kept Sam out of Jill Frey's clutches for a while; she had begged off the search party efforts. Too much like work, I guessed.
“I don’t know about after that,” I finished on my way out the door. “If they show up, give Sam a heads-up to steer clear. Pay him if you have to.”
Drat Charmian. She’d been talking about retracing Raines's footsteps, but I hadn’t thought she would do anyt
hing about it. Slamming into the car, I headed past the Moose Island Shellfish Co-op, the farmers’ market on Route 190, and the clam beds in the inlet below Redoubt Hill. Crossing the causeway, I spotted the vessel Wade was coming in on, white and massive in the fog as it awaited an earlier vessel's departure. Finally I slowed for the 35 mph zone through the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point.
Then it was onto the mainland, across Route 1, and out the winding two-lane road past the old grange hall. When the pavement ended I juddered along on washboard dirt, crossed the old rail line whose rusting trestle spans a salt marsh thick with sawgrass and cattails.
The fog thinned mischievously, then slammed down again like a grey wall. Half the time I crept along, knowing I was on the road only by the feel of the tires on the rough surface. A mile felt like ten; then suddenly the fog lifted and I was there:
A rock-strewn clearing, barren as the surface of the moon, reached uphill from the dirt road. A rutted, dusty track served as a driveway, at the head of which stood a house trailer, added onto with ramshackle accretions of wood, tar paper, and tin.
Mapes's beat-up pickup truck was parked there, with a sheet of streaked, age-greyed particleboard propped against it. In big red letters with dried drips of red paint running down from them, the signboard read: NOTHING HERE IS WORTH YOUR LIFE.
With which sentiment I absolutely agreed; stretched over the clearing, peeking out of the last wisps of the thinning fog, was the tag sale from hell. A row of used toilet seats, three stacks of galvanized buckets, two anchors, and a thick coil of rotting hemp rope lay under a broken ping-pong table beside a rusted-out tractor. Cardboard boxes of paperback books in a stack four boxes high and half dozen long were turning to papiermâché. Juicers, coffeemakers, toasters, waffle irons, and crock pots stood on a board-and-sawhorse table.
And there was more, including whatever was in the falling-down shed at the rear of the property; picking my way toward the back of the trailer where a rickety-looking set of steps led to a back door, I shuddered to think how much of the moldy, scabrous, rusting, and all-around depressing detritus of daily life Mapes had managed to collect back there.