by Sarah Graves
“Lillian, he's a big boy now.” And he's his father's son, I added silently. Which could turn out to be as troublesome as Jill being her father's daughter. But that wasn’t Lillian's problem.
Meanwhile, once I’d gotten used to the fresh smell of raw wood, I smelled something else: gun oil. It was so incongruous in these surroundings, I thought at first I was mistaken.
But nothing else smells quite like it, sweet and clean and a little oily. Then I spotted the familiar orange-and-red-striped box: Winchester.
It was tucked on a high shelf, above the chisels and router blades. I was so surprised, I reached up and grasped the rolled rag lying next to the box and brought it down before I realized how rude I was being.
When I turned, Lillian was watching me bemusedly. “Go ahead,” she said with a wry smile.
“Sorry.” I unwrapped the rag. “I just… it wasn’t what I was expecting to find here, that's all.”
The object in the rag wasn’t what I was expecting, either. But I’d been around Wade and his antique gun catalogs enough to recognize the thing: a 1905 Colt .45 automatic with blued steel and a checkered walnut grip, in what looked like mint condition.
“It came with some other stuff from an estate sale,” she said. “Go ahead, check it out.”
Well, you can’t live in a house with a gun professional and not learn a few things, including gun safety. Releasing the empty magazine, I removed it and pointed the muzzle safely, then pulled the slide back to check: no cartridge in the chamber. Markings stamped into the side of the slide read: Automatic Colt/Calibre 45 rimless smokeless.
Meaning the ammunition in the Winchester box. I released the slide again, let the hammer down slowly, and snapped the magazine back into the weapon. “Jesus, Lillian, this thing's a cannon.”
And not locked up, either, I noticed.
She shrugged. “If I’d gone to buy one on purpose I’d have got something smaller, I suppose. But it's not that bad to fire.”
Yeah, if you were used to getting kicked by a mule. I guessed the ear-protection headpiece on a hook by the band saw was used for more than woodworking. I wrapped the weapon again, put it back up on the shelf. Like so much else I’d been running into in the past few days, it was none of my business.
“Jill doesn’t know it's here,” Lillian added, reading my thoughts.
In my experience, kids know everything. For one thing, they start out so helpless, they pretty much have to be supernaturally perceptive about what their parents are up to, just to feel like they can survive.
Or Sam had been that way, anyway. “If you say so,” I told Lillian. “You ever want a lockbox for it, Wade will sell you one at cost.”
Hell, he’d give her one if she asked, and so would I. But she didn’t. There was the tiniest awkward moment as she sensed my unease. I was thinking about the other thing that could make a fellow fall off the end of a dock: a gunshot wound.
But someone would have heard it. A sound from downstairs made Lillian flinch, but it was only a cat, its cross-eyed face appearing a moment later at the top of the stairway.
“Christ,” Lillian said, letting a breath out. “I’m so wired up, I jump at shadows. I still keep expecting he's going to show up and grab her, maybe clobber me to get at her. Jill's dad, I mean.”
Jumping at shadows is not a trait I like seeing in a person who has a weapon. But I said nothing.
She gazed out the big window. “Or maybe he would smack me around a little just because he feels like it. To show me who's boss, you know? It wouldn’t,” she added, “be the first time.”
She put her hand to her face. “He gave me this. Box-cutter. He was drunk.” A bitter laugh; I thought she was going to say more. But then she straightened abruptly.
“Let's get out of the poor-little-me groove,” she pronounced as if instructing herself, and from her wry look I could see she was not only talented; she was tough and smart, too. Maybe she was on the ragged edge right this minute, but the decision to survive was one she made every day.
Thinking this, I told Lillian about the violin I believed Raines had been looking for, and that I wondered if he’d mentioned anything about it in La Sardina.
I didn’t tell her I thought he’d been murdered, or about the blind set up underneath the dock. Or about the diver Wade and I had spotted in the water, an omission I was glad of, later.
Also, I didn’t tell her that I was concerned about her, or that I understood how difficult Jill was and sympathized. I had my plate full already, I thought, so I didn’t ask her if she needed anything, or wanted to come by for coffee some afternoon when she was in town.
All omissions about which, later, I wasn’t so glad. But as I say, that was later.
“Yes, I was at the bar, and I saw him,” she agreed, meaning Raines. “But he didn’t say anything about any musical instrument that I heard. Hecky Wilmot had him backed into a corner, cross-examining him about something. I wasn’t really listening.”
She began pressing the softened wood pieces onto a molding base, securing them to the curved shape by wrapping them with thick twine. “And as for some hidden violin, all I’ve got to say is, good luck.”
She finished what she was doing, turned. “Look around you. I didn’t put those triple glazings in for the fun of it, you know. They’re all necessary, and so's the insulation you don’t see, and the humidity control.”
On closer inspection, I did see: three hygrometers spaced at intervals throughout the big room. Baseboard hot-water heat that must have cost a mint to put in. Humidifiers, and a wall panel of dials and switches to control it all.
But it was still pretty low-tech as such things went. No computer-aided-design gadgetry or automated cutting jigs to make things come out exactly the same every single time. There was a handwritten checklist by the switch panel; the humidifiers were the kind you can buy at Wadsworth's Hardware. Like me, she was no devotee of twenty-first-century electronic stuff.
While I was wondering again how she’d paid for what she did have, I got the point. “It wouldn’t survive. A fine old wooden instrument. …”
Lillian shook her head emphatically. Behind her in a corner were stacked thin sheets of wood on spacers, thicker lengths for, I supposed, violin necks.
“You could wrap it and seal it, but with so many temperature changes … And they didn’t have the technology then to really pack things right. It could dry out and split, or get wet and rot. And the finer the instrument, the less has to happen before the tone is ruined. Because it's not just the glue joints, it's …” She waved a lean, muscular hand, trying to explain. “It's in the molecules of the wood and a million tiny decisions that the instrument builder made, the thing that makes the sound so …”
That was what Raines had been saying. “Anyway,” she finished, “that's one reason I don’t hold with high-tech ways of doing things, when I can help it. For me, they’re a waste of time and money, mostly, and besides, they just don’t interest me.”
“So the bottom line is, if you’re looking for an old violin, you might find something but it might not be the instrument that was hidden two hundred years ago.”
She nodded. “Almost guaranteed not to be. Miracles happen, I guess.” But she didn’t sound as if she expected one in this case.
Downstairs, I took a last look around Lillian Frey's nearly surgically clean household. The windows all shone as if they had been polished that morning, and the floors gleamed. Combined with the orderliness of her work area, it gave me an insight, one that caused me in spite of myself to sympathize with Jill.
Lillian, perhaps on account of the craziness of life with Jill's father—and partly because of the picky, detail-oriented care required to build musical instruments the old-fashioned way—was a control freak. That was another reason she didn’t give over any instrument-building tasks, even the repetitive ones, to computers; she wanted to keep that control for herself.
She confirmed my opinion by rinsing the mugs and teaspoons and drying the
m—no dishwasher, either, I noticed—then putting them carefully away before walking me to the door.
And then I saw something else, on a hook behind the door so I couldn’t have seen it on my way in: a small leather handbag. It was the one Charmian had been carrying when she first walked in my own back door. Lillian saw me spotting it.
“Oh, good,” she said, “you can take it back to town. Do you mind? I called this morning to let her know it's here, but there was no answer.”
After I’d gone out, probably. “Or I can give it to Charmian when I see her,” Lillian said. “Whichever.”
“I don’t mind taking it if you’ll tell me how it got here. I didn’t know that you and Charmian were acquainted.”
She met my gaze levelly. “We weren’t until the other day. I was working at the crafts fair the morning after she arrived in town and she walked up to my booth. We got talking, and yesterday I brought her back here for tea. Was that not all right?”
She moved toward the door; I followed. “Perfectly all right. She's my guest, not my ward. Did she ask you any questions about Raines? Whether you’d met him, anything of that nature?”
“Oh, yes.” Lillian smiled easily at this. “She was quite the little detective. Told me about his ‘quest,’ her uncle, how sure she is that Raines was murdered, and how she intends to find who killed him—and locate the instrument he was supposedly after.”
We were outside now. “And you said?”
She spread her hands. “What could I say? I told her I was sorry to hear of her loss, wished her luck, and warned her.”
My ears pricked up. “Warned her? About what?”
Or who. But Lillian only looked impatient. “The same as I’ve warned you—that no violin, priceless or otherwise, sitting all unprotected through nearly two hundred Maine winters, is going to be worth much. If it's there to find at all.”
“Oh.” That made sense. “You said you’d be seeing her again, though?”
I’d overstayed my welcome. But it seemed that I was just striking pay dirt, so I lingered rudely.
“I’m meeting her for coffee in town tomorrow. She asked me, and she seems like a nice person, and I accepted. Okay?”
At which it struck me what an awful busybody I must seem to her. “Of course it's okay, Lillian. I’m sorry to be so—”
“That's all right,” she said, taking a step away from me like a hostess signaling firmly that the party is over. “Thanks for taking the bag back to her.” She turned to go in.
“One last thing,” I said. “Is Wilbur really your brother?”
It still hardly seemed possible. His chaos was the polar opposite of her cleanliness and order. But the face she made as she turned back said it was true.
“Oh, Wilbur,” she sighed, half laughing.
But half something else; relief, as if she’d thought I was about to ask some other question.
“He's my cross to bear,” she said resignedly. “When I moved up here from Boston, he just kind of tagged along, and … Is he in some kind of trouble again?”
“No.” If I hung around in her driveway much longer I would have to pitch a tent. But she kept dropping bits of information; deliberately or otherwise, I didn’t know.
“I’d just heard that he was your brother and didn’t know if I should believe it,” I said. “You know how the stories get going, and pretty soon the whole town thinks you’re related to the Pope or something.”
Under the deck, a familiar object caught my eye: a diving regulator, and behind it a drysuit.
Something funny about it. “Jill's diving gear?” I asked with a wave at it.
Lillian's face closed. “No,” she said shortly, “it's mine. I’ve been diving for years, Jill only took it up recently. I’m surprised she cares about it, seeing as it's something I enjoy.”
She regained her friendly expression with difficulty. “But maybe it's Sam's good influence. Let me know, please, if she's causing you any real problems?”
Right, I thought, if they run off and get married, you’ll be the first to hear. Thinking this, I took my leave at last, not letting my glance stray again to the diving gear under the deck in case she was watching from inside, noting my interest.
But driving away, I thought hard about it. There were plenty of divers in Eastport, so there were also plenty of drysuits; in the cold bay, it was impossible to dive without one. Still, I’d now run into three of the specialized garments, not even counting Sam's and Maggie Altvater's, in three days:
One under Lillian Frey's deck.
One out at Wilbur Mapes's place, behind his trailer.
And one on the diver Wade and I had seen in the water under the dock.
On my way home I stopped at the IGA, and I was in the cereal aisle trying to decide between oatmeal and granola when the most astonishing thing happened:
“You were right,” said Victor, coming up behind me.
“Really?” Victor was about as likely to begin dictating his medical notes in pig Latin as he was to pronounce that particular phrase to me. “About what?”
“That girl,” he said severely. “Jill Frey. She's pretty, of course. But I don’t like her.”
Which was the second astonishing thing. To get Victor to dislike a pretty girl, ordinarily you would have to do something really drastic, like maybe weld her knees together.
“She stole my watch.”
“What?” I turned from contemplating the boxes of cereal.
“We were on the boat,” he said. “There was a lot of spray. I took it off and put it in the aft storage cubby. When we got in and the kids”—Sam and Jill, he meant—“had gone ashore, I remembered and went back for it. And it was gone.”
“You’re sure?” I asked Victor. “And have you mentioned this to Sam?” I began unloading my cart at the register.
“I’m sure. And yes, I’ve spoken to him. And he's made as hell about it—at me,” Victor replied.
“I’ll admit she's charming,” he went on. “I can see why Sam's taken with her.” He drew himself up into the noble posture he always assumed when he was about to make a pronouncement. “But you know, Jacobia, even charming people can be villains.”
Sometimes I wonder what Victor sees when he looks in the mirror. “I’ll try to remember that,” I said, and he eyed me to see if I was being sarcastic.
“Hmph,” he said, as we left the store and started walking to my car. “You should take this seriously, Jacobia. I mean, Sam's involved with some little sneak thief, here.”
“Oh, I do. Really, I do,” I assured him.
I’d told Victor I thought Jill might be a problem, and he’d paid about as much attention as he always did, promising to talk with Sam and then doing nothing about it. But now something had happened to Victor.
So now it was important. Starting the car and beginning to back slowly away from him, I noted that nowadays it took hardly any willpower at all to keep from flooring it and running right over him.
At the same time I couldn’t help wondering why he’d made a point of the incident to me, seeing as it confirmed something I’d said; ordinarily, Victor's tendency is the opposite.
Something funny going on there, I mused. But I didn’t think much more about it than that, because for one thing something funny going on where Victor's concerned is pretty much standard operating procedure.
And for another, on the way home from Clamshell Cove I’d had what I thought was a brilliant idea. So after I put the groceries away I sat down in the telephone alcove and called another one of those old friends of mine in New York: an authority.
Not a mob authority, like Jemmy Wechsler. And not a federal authority, like that trio of cousins Jonathan Raines hadn’t really been related to at all.
A higher authority.
“Yes,” he said, when I told him what I wanted to know and when I wanted to know it.
“No,” he said, when I asked if he expected to have trouble finding out.
“Yes,” he said, when I promised to
call back the next day to get his answer.
Then I grabbed the invisible-ink manuscript we’d found in the wall, filched a roll of quarters I’d been saving for the day when the washing machine finally beat itself to death, and went out intent on getting to the bottom of at least one mystery once and for all.
Uh-huh.
7
The next morning Ellie and I went to pick blueberries behind Hillside Cemetery. There the granite that forms our island pushes up through thin topsoil matted with lichens, their tiny blooms dark orange against the pale grey of the foliage and the blackish emerging rock.
“You gave her the handbag?” Ellie asked, meaning Charmian's.
The blueberry shrub grows thickly nearby, its leaves a dark, glossy green; the berries are the size of pencil erasers but with a shockingly intense flavor.
“Uh-huh. I have no idea what to make of the friendship. Hers and Lillian's, I mean. If it is one.”
Ellie got plastic pails and her sun hat from the car, while I sprayed my shoes, pants cuffs, and shirtsleeves with mosquito repellent. “Maybe nothing,” she said, not sounding convinced.
I put shots of bug dope into my socks. People didn’t come here to pick berries much, not from any superstition about the cemetery but because of the biting red ants that surrounded the bushes and just about everything else on the island—like armed guards. I must have had half a dozen of the little sprayers scattered around my house.
“Where's Charmian now?” Ellie asked, combing her fingers through the blueberry foliage and coming up with a handful.
“Still at the library. Volunteering, she says, to keep busy while she's in town. She says she's really given up on trying to snoop into the circumstances of Jonathan's death, after her scare out at Mapes's place. But I’m not sure I believe her.”
The library was full of old manuscripts—not just Hayes material but a variety of stuff from the 1800s, some very valuable and some not—which Charmian had offered to help sort.
“She says she's only staying to wait for Raines's body to be recovered. But I think all hope of that is probably long gone—Wade says the way the currents are running, the guy who went off the cliffs at North End probably isn’t going to turn up, either—and I think she knows it, too.”