by Sarah Graves
“Yes, do tell,” said Wanda Perrone, who looked as if she’d stepped straight out of Vogue magazine; this, I thought, was half the value of the Reading Circle, all these women way out here at the back of beyond bravely keeping the side up, armed with plenty of Camay soap.
“This skull,” Cartwright intoned, “belonged to Jared Hayes.”
Well, even I gasped at that. “How do you know?”
He glowered wisely at me. “Isn’t it often the way that a man may be little-known at home, yet famous in the greater world?”
“Indeed it is,” said Hester Sawtelle, who had been a great beauty in her day and was still knockout gorgeous at ninety. “You all remember Dr. Honigsberger.”
Murmurs of agreement: Honigsberger had retired in Eastport to raise, we thought, garden-variety dahlias. Not until after he died did we learn he’d been one of the greatest plant geneticists of all time, much published and world-respected.
Cartwright went on: “The same is true for Hayes. Although,” he added wryly, “perhaps not for the reason he might have wished. You see, Jared Hayes …” — here he paused for effect—“was a pirate. Oh, he didn’t go out on raiding parties himself,” Cartwright added. “But…”
Another pause, more dramatic, then a growled declaration: “But he shared in the booty!”
It wasn’t as far-fetched a story as it might at first have seemed. Eastport is perfectly situated for all varieties of waterborne criminality, surrounded by so many coves, inlets, and other hiding spots for small boats that it would take an army of customs officials to monitor them all.
And to the ladies, many of whose male relatives were engaged in, shall we say, interesting activities as we spoke, it sounded entirely reasonable.
“Hayes traveled often to Boston and New York,” Cartwright said, “as a touring musician. Which gave him a good excuse; he was, in today's parlance, a ‘fence’ for the pirate treasures of a man by the name of Josephus Whitelaw.”
At this point the ladies began to look knowingly around at one another; the Whitelaw name was familiar to them, apparently.
“Whitelaw's angle was pirating the pirates,” Cartwright said. “And pestering the British, in his younger days. So locally he became a hero. But later he began preying on American vessels, and that was his downfall.”
“Don’t forget about Jane Whitelaw,” Priscilla Ware put in. An unmarried lady of a certain age whose white collar was trimmed with lace she designed and made herself, she was an incurable romantic.
“Indeed,” Cartwright replied. “Jane, daughter of Josephus. What shall we say of her other than that she undoubtedly presided over many an elaborate dinner in this very room?”
Cartwright looked at me. “A gentleman musician, a pirate's beautiful daughter. It's a pairing worthy of literature, wouldn’t you say? Tragic,” he added, “literature.”
“Why tragic? And how do you know so much?” I demanded again.
“Hayes and Jane Whitelaw were lovers,” he replied. “The sort of lovers people write operas about, passionate and doomed. It was Hayes's plan to win her heart by becoming wealthy beyond even Jane's greedy dreams.”
Maggie looked up. “Doomed? But why?”
“Because, unfortunately for Jane's father Josephus, he was in the act of looting a local vessel when several ships belonging to the U.S. Navy hove into view in Passamaquoddy Bay. The sailors seized Josephus, clapped him in irons. Hayes was in Boston; when he returned, the authorities were waiting for him, as well.”
“And then?” I glanced at Ellie; she was listening intently.
“Even then, Josephus might have talked his way out of it. As I say, he had been a great favorite. But when Hayes got back, he found a reward had been offered for information against Josephus and a warrant had been issued for his own arrest, the Navy having got wind of his part in the piracy. So to save his own skin—and for the reward—Hayes ratted.”
I thought of those old account books, full of expenditures yet devoid of comparable income. That was where it all had come from: piracy. No wonder he hadn’t kept records of it.
“Wow.” Sam scowled down at the skull. “You jerk.”
Maggie nodded in assent. “Turned in his girlfriend's father. That's pretty harsh.” There was a moment of silence.
Then: “Eeeuw, what's that thing?” came a petulant voice from the dining room doorway. “Sam, I thought you were going to meet me downtown. I had to drive up here.”
It was Jill Frey, her pixie-cut blond hair making her resemble an evil sprite and her narrow face tightening in further annoyance as she caught sight of Maggie.
At Jill's appearance, Sam jumped up as if flicked with a whip. “Oh, hey, I’m sorry. I forgot.”
He thrust the skull at Maggie's not-entirely-willing hands. “Let me just go clean up a little in the kitchen. Everybody, this is my friend Jill Frey.”
Jill bestowed a smirk on the assembly and said nothing, but took a petit-four. Not until she had eaten it did she spot the camera Cartwright had put down again on the table in the parlor, whereupon a look of frightened guilt suddenly came over her face.
She snatched it up, then seemed to relax as she examined it more closely; I had a moment to wonder what nerve in her rudimentary conscience the little gadget had plucked so strongly.
In the end, though, I didn’t care; it was my own son whose conscience I thought needed attention, and plenty of it. Maggie bit her lip, looking away as I followed him into the kitchen.
He was washing his hands at the sink. “Sam. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
He slapped water on his face, wiped it. “Huh?”
“Maggie's your friend, too,” I said. “Don’t you realize what you just did to her in there?”
“Oh, hey, Mom, you think Maggie and I are—”
“I’m talking about what she thinks. What you let her think, until somebody you think is more glamorous walks in.”
His face hardened. “I know what this is all about, you know. It's about you and Dad.”
Nobody's ever accused me of raising a stupid kid. And the parallel was pretty obvious. But—
“Let it alone, Mom. I hate to say this to you, but it's none of your business.”
“Sam,” Jill whined from the hall, “are we going, or what?”
“Mom.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t look up.
“See you later.”
“Yeah.” Neither one of us giving an inch. I guessed Victor hadn’t been in any rush to get to that father-and-son talk he’d promised to have with Sam.
If he’d meant to have it at all. Jill's car fired up, roared away; when I got back to the dining room Maggie was gone, too, out the front door to avoid running into Sam and Jill, and the skull sat on the sideboard staring at me with its empty eye sockets.
“So Josephus was hanged, and his ship burnt to the waterline in what is now called Pirate's Cove,” Winston Cartwright finished.
Which didn’t explain why Hayes's skull should be found there almost two hundred years later. “Who put the curse on Hayes?” I asked, remembering what Hecky Wilmot had said.
But my heart wasn’t really in that question, either. I kept wanting to follow Maggie Altvater, say something useful to her. Or consoling. Not that there was anything.
“My great-grandfather said his great-grandfather saw Jane,” Winifred Cooley said. She was a big, white-haired woman who ran a vegetable farm on the mainland and made molasses doughnuts so light you had to snatch them out of the air to eat them.
“No one knows what she was searching for,” Winifred added, “but she was seen running on the bluffs at North End at midnight, a flaming torch in her hands, with the baby in her arms.”
“Oh, yes,” Hester Sawtelle agreed. “My great-aunt Hepzibah told the story, how they searched all that night on the water in the dark, towing rafts with bonfires on them to light the way. But they never found her.”
“A child? Hayes and Jane Whitelaw had a child?” I looked at Cartwright, who nodde
d solemnly back at me.
“Heard her shrieking,” Winifred recited, “damning Hayes and all who would deal with him to her own fate. And then—”
“Yes, the curse. And then she fell,” Cartwright pronounced, “just one day before Hayes vanished. And someone saw her, because she was never found but the infant, Micah Whitelaw, was saved. A fortunate turn of events, indeed.”
As he spoke, it occurred to me that in all the excitement of the past few hours, I had yet to tell Ellie about Charmian's trip out to Mapes's place, or Raines's Wellington boots.
“The arrowhead, by the way, is what clinches identification on this old fellow,” Cartwright said, picking up the skull. “It's not what killed him, however.”
He turned the thing in his hands. “Earlier in his life, Mr. Hayes had been shot by a Passamaquoddy gentleman whom he’d tried to cheat in a trade. By some miracle the wound was not fatal, but the point of the weapon broke off and stayed in Hayes's head. A bird-tip”—he fingered the foreign object stuck in the cranium—“just like this one.”
“Oh, now,” I objected, “how could you possibly know that? In fact, how could you know any of this?” I was beginning to wonder if Winston Cartwright was just putting us on.
“No Hayes papers have ever been away from this town, to my knowledge. And even if they had, we’ve been through them and they don’t mention any of what you have been telling us. So how—”
Cartwright beamed darkly, as if he had been waiting for just this objection. “Ah, but Hayes wasn’t the only diary-keeper. And in my spare time, I happen to be a keen collector of volumes such as diaries, daybooks, and so on. Like the ones…”
He produced from his coat a tattered, leather-bound article. “Like the ones kept all his life by Micah Whitelaw, son of Jane Whitelaw and the mysterious Mr. Jared Hayes. Wonderful Micah,” he enthused, “excellent fellow. The tale was still fresh when he was a young man, and he wrote it all down.”
He brandished the volume, tucked it in his coat again. “The point of all this,” he finished, struggling up from his chair at the table, leaning on the walking stick, “is that Jared Hayes was a scoundrel. If he said there was a violin in his possession, then saying so was a part of some scheme that he was planning.”
He looked at Charmian, who stiffened under his gaze. “For Jared Hayes, musician and blackguard, everything was a scheme. You’ve been taken in by him, my girl. As was that young fool you thought you loved.”
“No,” she retorted, her voice quavering fresh anger. “It's you who made the mistake. You let that horrible Mapes person keep Jon's boots.”
Cartwright grew still. The ladies, too, listened with keen attention. “What do you mean?” he asked finally.
“I saw them, today at his trailer. A trailer full”—she looked around wildly at the ladies—“of mean dogs, and guns, and moth-eaten animal heads, all mixed in among them all these amazing, valuable antiques.”
She swung around to face Cartwright. “He's got masses of fine old things; you must know him, you know everybody like that. Horrible people with wonderful things—like you. And you hired him to kill Jonathan!”
In that moment Cartwright's much-rumored professional history came back to me, and I could believe every bit of it. He reminded me of an enormous, possibly venomous old spider, motionless but ready in the next moment to move with deadly speed.
“Mapes has his boots? You’re sure?”
“Don’t lie, Uncle Winston,” she said. “I know you too well.”
Oddly, it was this remark that seemed to wound him. “Do you, now?” he answered quietly. “Do you, at that?”
The ladies of the club had tactfully begun carrying plates and cups to the kitchen, stepping around the heap of the wall wreckage to reach stray teaspoons and crumpled napkins.
“Jacobia, dear,” said Mrs. Bentley Little-Barnes, who had been known even to her sister by her full legal name since the day she married Mr. Bentley Little-Barnes fifty years earlier.
She was also the membership secretary of the Eastport Ladies’ Reading Circle. “You have fulfilled your hostess duties in fine style,” she pronounced. “I am delighted, on behalf of the entire membership, to finalize your welcome to the Circle.”
For a minute I thought there ought to be trumpets fan-faring. Through blizzards and nor’ easters, pea-soup fogs and cold snaps to forty below, the ladies of the Circle faced an uncaring world with teacups lifted, makeup on, and stocking seams straight; when not drinking tea or discussing books, they did charitable deeds all over the county, and I was proud to be one of them.
“Thank you,” I said humbly. Several of them actually did wear stockings with seams, I noticed as they went away down the sidewalk, looking like an army in good dresses in search of a cause to fight for.
“Good-bye,” they called, waving back at me.
“Good-bye,” I called in return. “Thank you for coming.”
I closed the door, feeling drained and exhilarated. “Well, that went smoothly enough,” I said to Ellie, who had begun soaping spoons. “Thank you so much for staying.”
“You’re welcome. I didn’t mind it nearly as much as I’d feared. It's sort of… uplifting, somehow. The company of women.” The sweet smell of hot, soapy water rose from the sink.
“And of course it went fine, Jacobia. What did you expect, to be judged by a point system? Though if you were,” she added, “I believe the entertainment portion of the program would have put you over the top.”
Which reminded me. “Where's Cartwright?” If he was a killer, or even an employer of them, he was an awfully charming one.
Not that charm meant anything; Jemmy Wechsler was charming, too, but I wouldn’t like meeting him in a dark alley. And so, for that matter, was Victor. When he wanted to be.
“He went out the front like something shot out of a cannon, right after Charmian told him about the boots,” Ellie said. “I never saw anyone that big move that fast before. And what about those boots, anyway?”
I brought her up to speed while I took the spoons out of the tray and began drying them; Ellie filled the tray with sudsy cups and began rinsing. “And Charmian?” I asked.
“Upstairs. Meeting her uncle again took the wind out of her. She took some aspirin, said she thought she’d lie down.”
“Good,” I said. “You know, there are a lot of things about all this, not even counting the boots, that—”
“Bother you,” Ellie finished. “Me, too. Such as, I can see why Hayes might tell people he was getting a Stradivarius when he really wasn’t. Or,” she added, “some other very valuable item.”
The violin that was also the treasure. Or was not. I wiped another teaspoon.
“It could have been part of a scam,” she said, “especially now we know what a rascal he was. Can you imagine getting your own child's grandfather hanged?”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering what Sam had said about it and wondering where Sam was right now. “I mean, no. What a jerk.”
“But why lie to his own diary? In a diary, if it was a scam you’d say you were telling people you had something, not that you really did.” She surveyed the kitchen, took off her apron, and hung it on its hook, having done enough dishes for an army mess tent in about fifteen minutes.
“I don’t know.” I flung my towel down. Not wanting to jinx matters, I hadn’t said anything to her about how peaceful the house was lately. Now I thought about it, decided again not to.
Besides, I had another subject entirely on my mind. “Ellie, if you were new in Eastport, how long d’you think it would take you to locate Wilbur Mapes?”
She blew out a breath. “Oh, I guess about twenty years.”
“But Raines and Charmian both found him right away. Raines even got a ride from him, which probably means Mapes knew he was coming.”
She nodded. “And Charmian found that trailer of his,” I went on, “way out on the dirt road, drove there with no hesitation.”
“You don’t suppose it wasn’t thos
e boots that upset her so much? I mean, what if she already knew they were there? What if she just didn’t like you seeing them, so she put on an act?”
“Then I’m not sure why she called me in the first place,” I answered, feeling more confused. “Unless she and Mapes are in something together and they wanted to make it look to me as if they aren’t.”
I thought some more. “He was angry that I went around back. Maybe he didn’t want either of us to see them? Me or Charmian? I mean, maybe he’d kept them for himself, and …”
Ellie shuddered. “A dead man's boots. Still, it is Wilbur.”
People in Eastport liked to say Wilbur would sell his own kidneys if he could get at them, a thought that made me feel a bit shivery about the absence of Raines's body. Whatever he was up to, though, the boots hadn’t walked out there by themselves.
“You know what I wonder about most of all?” Ellie said. “I wonder why Hayes wrote in English, in all the other manuscripts and so on that we’ve got of his. But in that one …” She waved at the antique volume we’d found in the wall. “In that one, he wrote in Latin and used invisible ink.”
“Pretty secretive,” I agreed. And how had his head ended up in the bay? And then there was the fact that, nearly two hundred years later, Jonathan Raines had come to Eastport and immediately shared Jared Hayes's watery fate.
… damn Jared Hayes and all who would deal with him …
Did trying to find his violin count as dealing with him?
I don’t believe in curses, but right about then, with purple twilight gathering stealthily in around the old house, I couldn’t help wondering.
Maybe Jane Whitelaw's curse was finally coming true.
6
Early the next morning, Wilbur Mapes glowered from the rickety back porch built of scrap wood at the rear of his awful dwelling. . The dog barked inside, its body thumping against the door of the trailer.
“Now, Wilbur,” Bob Arnold said calmly, “you know I have got to follow up on things, might have to do with that young fellow.”
Mapes uttered a profanity.
“I’ll take that as permission,” Bob said. Mapes slammed back inside. I hoped he wasn’t in there loading one of the shotguns.