Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  It was raining steadily under here, the water from last high tide not all drained before it rose again. A dollop of wet seaweed touched my neck. Wade, busy doing something I couldn’t see, ignored the little shriek I made.

  Another splash. At that moment, I wanted dry land more than anything in the world. “What was that?”

  He turned to me, his face ghostly in the reflected light of the flash. Its glow, bouncing up from the moving water, cast wavery reflections on the enormous, creaking wooden structure all around us and made the seaweed seem to slither unnaturally.

  “Casting rod. Lying up there, somebody left it. I dropped it when I tried to snag it. And the platform was already loose, part came down earlier. The rest of it just now.”

  He peered into the forest of dock pilings. “Damn. Nice rod, too. A little too nice, actually… . You hear something else?”

  “N-no. But I really think that…”

  He swung the rowboat around, powered the engine up a little, and aimed us—how he knew this, I have no idea—out from under the dock. “There.” He pointed.

  A shape in the water, like a small, shiny rock, moving fast. A splash and a riffle of waves on the surface; then it was gone.

  “Harbor seal?” I asked. Wade was motoring after it.

  He shook his head. “Nope. Diver. God bless it.”

  Which is Wade's way of uttering a profanity. He swung the boat back toward the boat basin, didn’t say any more until the boat was tied and we were making our way up the floating finger pier. “Well, so much for that.”

  “I’m not sure I get it. What would a diver be doing … Oh.”

  He slung the float cushions along with the rest of his gear into the bed of his pickup. “I guess somebody else saw the tide was right, just the way we did. Decided to come and collect a few things he’d left lying around. A platform, maybe. Tear it off the dock. And maybe a nice casting rod.”

  He started the truck. “I’ll tell you, Jacobia, this idea of yours sounded like moonbeams to me. I mean, that somebody hooked Raines, pulled him off that dock.”

  “You mean you brought me down here to show me it couldn’t have happened that way?”

  Indignation struck me. I was cold, wet, and embarrassed at how scared I’d been minutes earlier; you wouldn’t think a little seaweed and pitch-darkness could be so unnerving. But it was.

  “Yup,” he said. “Hey, there's no sense chasing a notion that couldn’t physically be done.”

  Well, he had a point. “But now,” he went on, “I’m not sure.”

  “Couldn’t we have just followed that diver?” Mapes, I now recalled, was an urchin diver in season, and I’d seen his diving equipment out at his place.

  He shook his head. “Can’t spot him, not in this fog. Especially in the dark. He could go anywhere, and if he spots us, he's just not going to surface. Now he's probably got that casting rod I dropped, too, and by tomorrow that plywood’ll be floating halfway to Lubec. I gave it a smack, tried to grab it up, all I managed to do was knock it away, then the rod fell off. I’m sorry, Jacobia.”

  He pulled into my driveway, mad at himself.

  “Don’t be,” I said. “We’re no worse off than we were, and at least now we know that what I suspected really could’ve happened. In fact, I think that now we can be pretty sure it did. Because there wouldn’t have been a diver at all unless somebody wanted to get that stuff out of there. Would there?”

  “Huh. I guess not. So now you can tell Bob Arnold that—”

  “That we saw a harbor seal,” I finished firmly. It didn’t have to be Mapes in the water. With the amount of diving gear on our little island in Maine, you could equip the Navy SEALs.

  “Let's just keep this all to ourselves awhile, shall we? Because maybe the diver doesn’t know we saw him. And anything we know that someone else doesn’t could be in our favor.”

  Wade eyed me wryly. “If I’d known you were so devious, I’d have been afraid to get involved with you.”

  “Too late.” I slid nearer to him. “It was awfully nice of you, going down there with me.”

  “Yeah? How nice?” he asked mock-innocently.

  Suddenly I wasn’t so sure at all about getting married. It would be a shame, I thought, to cast a pall of official sanction on our illicitness.

  But I didn’t get to go any further with the thought, or for that matter with anything else, because just then Jill Frey's car pulled into the driveway at an angle that put us out of her line of sight, so she didn’t notice us. And in the truck's rearview mirror I could see that she and Sam had beaten us to it in the romance department. Two seconds after she turned the engine off, they looked like a couple of starfish that had gotten tangled in each other's arms. Or legs.

  Or whatever. “Dammit. Now we’ve either got to get out and catch them necking or sit and pretend we’re not here.”

  “No, we don’t.” Cheerfully, Wade leaned on the horn.

  The doors on Jill's car popped open as if those two starfish had exploded inside there, and Sam and Jill hopped out looking startled.

  Well, Sam looked startled, anyway. Jill looked furious. She slammed back into the car and roared out in reverse without another look at him.

  “Jill,” Sam called helplessly after her, but nothing doing. Wade got out and strode toward him, hands spread apologetically.

  “Oh, man, I am so sorry,” he said. “There was a spider on the dashboard, it was scaring your mother, and I gave a big swat at it and … man. Really, I am very sorry.”

  I got out, too, amazed at what I was hearing. To get Wade to lie, you practically have to torture him with electric wires.

  “Hey, that's okay,” Sam said, not very much to my surprise. It was what you would say if you were trying to be nice about it. And Sam was a nice guy, most of the time.

  But then I got a look at his face, and what I saw there really did surprise me. Because it was. Okay with him, I mean.

  Sam looked flustered: his hair messed and his lips puffy, as if he’d been kissing someone for a long, long time. But now that his surprise had evaporated, mostly he looked as if he’d just had a very narrow escape.

  And … he looked relieved about it.

  Wade and Sam went to bed while I took Monday outside, then sat alone in the darkened kitchen as she padded upstairs. Fog crept just outside the tall, bare windows, seeming to touch the old glass panes with insubstantial fingers.

  It should have made me nervous, I guess, but it didn’t. Not anymore; the feeling in the house was peaceful, as if it were getting what it had wanted for so long and didn’t have to agitate for whatever it was any longer.

  Or maybe it had only been my imagination all the while: the sense, so strong it was nearly a physical sensation, that someone or something in the house wanted—needed—something very badly. But now … nothing.

  Later, upstairs with Wade in the dark: “Wade. Do you … do you believe in ghosts?”

  A silence. He knew why I was asking. But he will do this: leave me alone to sort a thing out or get over it, not pestering me about it. It was why he wasn’t mentioning the getting-married idea, either; not pushing it.

  “Well. I’ll tell you a story.” He settled his arm around me, leaned his head down against my own. “After the old man got laid off from the paper mill and he’d started drinking heavy, Mom made him move out into the shed.”

  At the foot of the bed, Monday sighed and settled herself contentedly. “And some nights, if he didn’t come home at all, I’d go out there, sleep in his bed.”

  I said nothing.

  “So this one night I’m out there and I hear him come in. He didn’t know I was there and I was scared I might give him a heart attack, startling him in the dark. But for once, I knew just what to say to him.”

  At night, in the dark, the house seems to breathe in and out very slowly, as if animated by the myriad lives that have been lived in it, all the sleeping and waking. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Dad. It's me. Do
n’t be afraid.’ ”

  “And he said? Was he drunk?”

  Another silence. Then:

  “I don’t think so. And he said, ‘I love you, Junior.’ Nobody ever called me that, see. Even he didn’t, unless he really wanted me to listen up. I still don’t know why I didn’t get up, give him his bed. But somehow I figured he didn’t want it, so I didn’t. I just went back to sleep.”

  “That's nice.” I wondered what the point of this was.

  “Next morning, there was a cop car outside our house.”

  Oh.

  “Dad,” Wade said, “had been killed the night before. Beat up out in front of that bar in Derry.”

  A longer silence.

  “Course, I guess I could have dreamed the whole thing, and him dying just that night could’ve been a coincidence. It's not like I’ve got proof of anything.”

  Right. Me neither.

  “So you ask me if I believe in ghosts, and I don’t know what to say,” Wade went on quietly.

  He will do this, too: tell you a story suddenly, like a boy shyly offering you some small found treasure, a robin's egg or a bit of beach glass, after a long time during which you had begun thinking he might never tell you anything more of himself at all.

  “I guess sometimes we make too much of old stories,” Wade finished. “Or of feelings. But sometimes …”

  His shoulders moved in the dark.

  Yeah. Sometimes we don’t.

  Much later, in the small hours of the morning, I heard rain begin gurgling in the gutters, muttering in the downspouts. From the window I saw it slanting thickly through the cones of yellow light under the streetlamps, the pale spray gleaming.

  I decided to pay a visit to Lillian Frey.

  She lived on an old apple farm on the mainland, overlooking Clamshell Cove. The place had been a haven for swarms of young, mostly well-educated but disaffected back-to-the-land enthusiasts of the 1970s, when kids with physics degrees and fancy Manhattan upbringings decided to grow vegetables, haul water, and keep pigs on places that even native Mainers had abandoned as too stony and harsh to provide decent livings.

  Some of those kids were so determined to give their wealthy parents the middle finger, they actually succeeded in becoming real farmers. But Lillian hadn’t been one of them. She’d bought the place from a communal religious group that abandoned it to move to Belgium to await the millennium, and at just about the moment when the apocalypse disappointed them by not arriving, Lillian had been razing the old farmhouse which by then had nearly crumbled to sawdust.

  In its place, she had built a trilevel cedar structure with windows and decks overlooking the water, planter tubs full of evergreens on the railings, perennial beds all around it. As Bob Arnold said, it looked more like California than Maine.

  The rain, so promising the night before, had ended quickly and the fields around the house looked as dry and flammable as ever. A small sign said simply, FREY

  VIOLINS.

  As I climbed the cedar stairs to the entrance level, I heard a band saw whining. Another sign by the door told me to RING BELL so I did, and the saw's whine cut off a moment later.

  “Hi.” Lillian was wearing jeans, a purple, paint-stained T-shirt, and canvas sneakers. Her blond hair was tied with a scrunchy, a few wisps escaping down over her face. Viewed close up, the long scar on the side of her cheek made me wince inwardly.

  But not, I hoped, visibly. “I guess you must’ve come about Jill,” she said before I could explain the real reason for my visit. I’d made a few stops in town before coming out here, and Teddy Armstrong down at La Sardina had confirmed what he’d told Bob: that Jonathan Raines had been in the place just before he went off the dock.

  And as if Bob's comments hadn’t been impetus enough for me, Teddy had also said—in answer to my direct question, or he’d never have mentioned it—that Lillian had been in there, too.

  “I want to apologize for whatever behavior she's been up to,” Lillian said as she led me into the bright, spare kitchen. It was furnished with the bare minimum of appliances, no clutter on the granite-topped counters, no dishes in the brushed-aluminum sink. A wall of windows looked out onto a field of gnarled apple trees and from there to a vast expanse of blue water.

  Lillian put a blue-glazed teakettle on the gas stove and lit a match. A Siamese cat stalked in, stared imperiously at me for an instant, and stalked out again. Lillian's hand trembled the faintest bit, lighting the gas burner.

  “I’m sure if I were Sam's mother I wouldn’t appreciate Jill's ways,” she went on. “I don’t appreciate them myself. But she's angry. I just won a custody battle with her father, much against her wishes. I’m hoping she's going to settle down.”

  Her voice was taut; despite her effort at hospitality, I sensed the strain she was under. It couldn’t be easy, having a daughter who fought with you right in the middle of the street with everyone watching. The scene of a few mornings earlier when Jill had confronted her at the crafts fair—with, to make things worse, a photographer around, for heaven's sake—was still fresh in my mind, as I was sure it was in Lillian's.

  Also, there was a pile of what looked like bills in the cubby of a desk by the window, and it struck me that keeping this place running probably piled up a sizable nut each month. I wondered how she managed.

  Meanwhile, though, I thought I’d better hear the rest of what she had to say. You never knew; Jill might end up being—perish the thought—my daughter-in-law.

  “Custody battle,” I repeated, puzzled. “Isn’t Jill a little old for that?”

  Lillian eyed me knowingly. “She's sixteen. She just thinks she's ten years older. And smarter than everyone else, of course. Thinks she knows it all.”

  She’d had me fooled, all right. In fact, I was stunned. “So she doesn’t want to be here?”

  Lillian shook her head. “To put it mildly.”

  Close up, she was even more fit and tanned than she looked from a distance, with cheekbones that were to die for. Even with the deep scar running angrily from the end of her eyebrow to her jawline, you could see how Jill got the good looks she traded so shamelessly on.

  The scar itself, though was deep and seriously disfiguring. Once you got talking to her, you kind of forgot about it.

  But if I’d been her, I’d have been shy of having my picture taken, too. She put mugs on the table and filled a teapot from the kettle. The spicy fragrance of Constant Comment tea floated into the air.

  “She was living in Boston with her dad, not going to school. Not doing anything but hanging out. That's his lifestyle, you see.”

  She pronounced the word with an ironic twist. The tea was strong and delicious. “You didn’t approve,” I said. “That's why the custody fight.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me until now that Jill was young enough to be fought over that way. Her self-possessed manner was indeed that of a twenty-year-old, going on forty-something. “Even so,” I went on, “she's got a car. Why doesn’t she just leave?”

  Lillian sighed. “Jill's dad is a loser.” She glanced up at me. “And not just because he's my ex. I was nuts about him, and I would have stayed that way. But it's hard to stay romantic about a guy who keeps going back to jail for the same dumb stunts over and over. Fraud, mostly. Arts-type fraud. And theft.”

  She got up. “He's completely irresponsible and unpredictable and she can’t stay with him if he won’t have her. Which,” she added, “he won’t, now that he knows what it's like. It cramps his style. He never really wanted custody, just a fight with me. And Jill has no money, no other friends to go to.”

  “So she's stuck.”

  Lillian nodded tiredly. “She stayed with my brother for a while, but that didn’t work out, either.”

  I felt again that she was putting up a good front, but the circles under her eyes, her stiff posture, and the harsh control in her voice all said she was a woman on the ragged edge.

  She rubbed her neck, trying to get the tension out of it, then ralli
ed with an effort. “Want to see my workshop? I’ve got some wood cooking up there, I want to check on it.”

  What I wanted was to go, quickly; despite the sweet scent of the tea, the air here was thick with anxiety and anger. But I wasn’t finished with her.

  “Sure.” Carrying my mug, I followed her out a sliding door onto the deck, where the breeze whipped my hair wildly, then up a flight of open stairs to another doorway.

  “Wow,” I said when I got inside. The studio was a single open room, high-ceilinged and, like the rest of the place, almost fully walled with triple-glazed, enormous windows. It was like being in a fire tower, high above the treetops and the cove.

  But in this tower, every bit of space was cunningly designed for a woodworker who despised clutter. There was a drill press, a planer, the band saw I’d heard running, and the nail gun I’d seen her using on Water Street at the crafts fair.

  “Lots of tools.” There was a device for heating, softening, and bending sheets of wood into shape for the violins’ sides, molds and templates for the tops and sound holes. Racks of chisels, awls, knives, and wood shavers, plus dozens of other tools whose names and uses I had no idea of, were neatly arranged.

  What there wasn’t was any mess whatsoever. Sawdust had been swept into a single pile so tiny and neat, you got the feeling it didn’t dare go anywhere. And I noticed no computers or other automated stuff; nothing to draw or cut shapes out of the wood except knives and pencils. Everything here was done the old way, by hand and by heart.

  Lillian peered into a saucepan steaming on a small hot plate. In it were several thin sticks. “I’m boiling them so I can shape them,” she explained. “But they’re not done yet.”

  “Look,” I said, refreshed by the sense of tradition up here, and by the change in atmosphere, “I didn’t come to talk about Jill. I’m not crazy about her and Sam's relationship, but…”

  Now that I knew how young she really was, the idea of her victimizing my baby … Well. The whole thing didn’t seem so one-sided anymore.

  Lillian looked curiously at me. “Really? I thought you’d come out here to demand I put my daughter in leg irons. Sam's always seemed so … I don’t know. Just so clean-cut.”