by Sarah Graves
“Or maybe Wilbur had been in touch with you earlier about it? That Raines, I mean, was looking for one?”
Washburn looked from one to the other of us, cottoning on to what we knew already.
“Why,” he wanted to know, “am I talking to you? Is there some benefit to me standing here shootin’ the breeze?”
“Maybe it's because I’ve still got one of those ‘colonial’ tables you sold to the lady from Connecticut,” Ellie said mildly.
“Now, you can’t prove I had anything to do with—”
“I don’t have to prove it, Howard,” she told him sweetly. “I just have to talk a lot, especially to the people who run all the hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, where the summer tourists stay.”
He took her point. Maybe there were some legitimate finds in that old barn of his, but no tourist would ever make the trip to see them if word of those Sears tags started spreading around.
“And then there's your other business,” she went on. “Games of chance? Things no one wants to follow up on. Unless I persuade them.”
Bob Arnold wasn’t going to rattle Howard's chains about any minor-league gambling. He had enough to do chasing criminals whose victims hadn’t gotten their own selves into trouble.
Not unless someone complained. Ellie smiled sweetly again.
“Mapes was out here, coupla weeks ago,” Howard admitted grudgingly. “Said he had a sucker from Boston lookin’ for an old Stradivarius.”
“Go on.”
“Mapes’d sold the sucker a buncha stuff out of an old trunk. Music books, sheet music as was handwritten, old ink pens, kind that’re made out of a quill, you know? And a lot of other papers, old diaries and such. And a violin.”
My heart thumped suddenly. “Not the one the sucker said he was lookin’ for,” Howard went on. “But I guess it encouraged him, the sucker, I mean. Stuff belonged to the right old guy, one as was supposed to have had the really valuable fiddle.”
Jared Hayes. “Once he’d vanished, his house would’ve been emptied, eventually,” Ellie said. “And at that point the story about the Stradivarius hadn’t really heated up yet. An old trunk full of things could’ve gotten anywhere.”
“Ayuh,” said Washburn. “Up in an attic, Mapes said, house he cleared out for some people a long time ago, they’d had a chimbly fire.”
Chimney, he meant. My house: the fire that hadn’t burned it to the ground, by some miracle. And if some of Hayes's things had still been in it when the fire happened …
“Smoked up all their stuff, they just wanted to get rid of it all.”
From the corner of my eye I spotted Monday, sniffing around the corner of the old barn. “Okay for the dog to run?” I asked.
“Oh, ayuh. Way out here, no cars. I don’t put out no rat bait or no traps or nothin’. ’Cept in trappin’ season, then I put out a coupla lines. Got me some nice fox furs.”
He eyed me hopefully. I used to think foxes were smart, beautiful, and romantic animals, on account of the way they were portrayed in nature programs on television. Then I moved to Eastport, where they make their dens in the backyards of old, unoccupied houses and lope through the night like feral ghosts, emitting when confronted a cry like a cross between a rusty door hinge and person in the act of having his throat slit.
“No, thanks, Howard,” I said politely. I don’t care for foxes, but I am even less fond of the obscenity known as the leg-hold trap. Talk about a crime that actually does have an innocent victim: if you’re going to kill something, put a bullet in its head and be done with it, is my attitude.
“Jonathan Raines,” I reminded Howard. I got the sense that sticking to the subject was not his forte.
This probably accounted for him being the one who got sent to prison in the hit-man affair, since after ten minutes in his presence I had come around to Ellie's point of view. In fact, I was already certain that (a) he wasn’t the hit man himself, and (b) he could not possibly have been ringleader of a plot to kill somebody.
Or any kind of a major player in any plot. What Howard was perfect for, in fact, was (c) the role of the fall guy.
“Yeah, him,” Howard said. “I didn’t know him. Knew the old man, though,” he added. “Mapes mentioned him, my ears pricked up right quick.”
“Winston Cartwright?” Here was a wrinkle I hadn’t expected. “How do you know him?”
Howard spread his hands expansively. “Hell, he's legend. You deal in antiques, books, maps, anything old-like, you don’t even need to know about him.” Wondering at the idea, he shook his head slowly. “Even a little guy, likes o’ me, bank on it. He’ll know and get hold o’ you.”
Fascinating, and very likely true; the notion of Cartwright as a spider at the center of a web struck me once more.
But so did what Howard said. “Maps? What made you think of maps?”
He flinched guiltily; damn, there he’d gone again, saying more than he’d meant to. But once he’d done it, he stepped up to the result manfully and talked some more, yet another mark of the born blame-magnet. I began feeling sorry for Howard.
“Mapes said if the violin everybody says is so valuable was hid, stood to reason whoever’d hid it would’ve made a map to it,” he said. “ ’Cause everybody in town knows the old story about the violin, hid in that big old house in town. But it ain’t there, ’cause that old house has been gone through. Gone through good. So if there is one, it's somewhere else.” He said it with certainty.
“How do you know?” I gave him the stare I used to use on clients who were tax cheats, who wanted me to sign off on returns so fictional, they should have had literary agents instead of money managers.
“Well,” Howard stalled, digging a hole in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “I know ’cause I knew a guy who did it. Had a gadget, it could see shapes right through the walls. Did it with sound waves, he could tell what was inside there.”
Like a carpenter's stud-finder, I guessed. It senses density so you can locate the solid structure behind the plaster.
Howard looked strangely at me, having figured out something. “Say, that ain’t your house we’re talkin’ about, is it? I heard a lady from away bought it. That you? ’Cause if it is,” he went on, “I bet you’ve seen some funny things.”
“What’re you talking about?” Meanwhile, I was still thinking about the search his friend had made. The book inside the dining room wall should have shown up if he’d looked with a device like Howard was describing. So why hadn’t it?
Howard shivered expressively. “My buddy said that place gave ’im the creeps. And he wasn’t the type to get spooked. He came out o’ there, wouldn’t turn the lights out for three nights.”
Great, just what I needed. “And if he’d found it,” I steered the conversation around again, “this buddy who I’m sure you were the one who told him to look there in the first place. Somebody from Portsmouth?”
Howard frowned. “No. Afterwards.” Prison buddy, he meant.
“He’d have handed the violin over to whoever owned the house then, right? Because naturally the owners knew your buddy was doing this. He’d gotten permission.”
“Well, not exactly,” Howard admitted. “This guy, he was not exactly a big hander-over of stuff.”
An unpleasant memory fled across Howard's face and was gone. “But it never mattered anyway. He didn’t find nothing.”
“But if it existed, and it's not in the house …”
He nodded vigorously. “Right. Then Mapes's idea made sense, see? Map to it, X marks the spot. Never found no map neither, though,” he added mournfully.
Monday came back from wherever she had wan- dered off to. She always knows somehow when it is time to get back in the car and is so optimistic that she regards the end of one outing as merely a punctuation mark, signaling the delightful start of another.
My silence wasn’t meant to be accusatory, but it must have made Howard nervous again. “Okay, you want to know about Raines, I’ll tell you what he talked about,” How
ard said.
His own attention span had obviously been exceeded, and he’d talked more than he’d meant to about things he didn’t understand, and it all made him uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.
“You met him? Jonathan Raines?”
“Yeah. In La Sardina.”
Oh, damn and blast the bartender's legendary code of ethics; maybe it was good business, but it was getting to be a pain in my tail. No one had asked Teddy Armstrong about Howard Washburn, so Teddy hadn’t mentioned him.
“But all he talked about was a girl, about how she was so gorgeous”—gore-juss—“and smart. But she’d busted up with him. Busted his heart. Oh, but he was sweet on her. The old man broke ’em up, he said; that's how the old man's name came up. He was going to get her back, Raines was, if it was the last thing he ever did.”
He folded his arms, glaring at Ellie and me. Apparently, telling the truth about anything went against his principles, but he had done it, by God, he had done it, and were we satisfied?
“Thank you, Howard,” I said quietly, wanting to weep. Partly for Howard; you could see how he had wound up behind those prison bars. And he wasn’t a bad guy, really, just terminally inept.
But also for Jonathan Raines. The last thing he ever did.
“You’ve been very helpful,” I said.
Not really; coming out here, I’d had some idea he might be a part of some grand, nefarious scheme. Fat chance. But I found myself wanting to say something nice to him, the poor schmuck.
Howard brightened. “Well, then. Glad to do that for you two nice ladies. Now, how about a fine deal on a brand-new …”—the false teeth clicked like a pair of castanets—“well, nearly new,” he amended hopefully, “Ford Escort?”
Driving back, I told Ellie about Victor's wristwatch, and she was all for finding Jill Frey and shaking her until her teeth rattled harder than Howard Washburn's.
“No,” I said as we rounded the curve into town. “It will only make Sam want to defend her even more than he already does.”
In the IGA parking lot a two-and-a-half-ton truck was unloading flats of annual garden flowers, the blacktop a riot of geraniums and petunias, zinnias and marigolds. Next came a row of antique white clapboard houses snugged up to the sidewalk on Washington Street. In the eighteenth century, property taxes were based on the size of the front yard, so thrifty Mainers had promptly eliminated them.
“Well, then I guess we stiffen our spines and talk to Hecky Wilmot, if we can find him,” Ellie said.
Hecky being the last of the varied group that had been in La Sardina with Raines before Raines took his unscheduled dive off the pier, and the third man in Mapes's old marijuana-smuggling operation.
“I guess,” I said disconsolately. The thing was, in Eastport you could look for nefarious schemes, but what you found instead were flower sales, craft shows, and a freighter coming in, getting tied up at the town dock. That and fellows like Howard Washburn, who might look bad on paper but in reality were just guys trying to make a living.
“Ordinarily all you’d have to do is walk down the street,” Ellie went on. “But I heard from Truman Daly that Hecky's book's due out today, so Hecky's routine has probably been disrupted.”
“Criminy, that's right. Today's the day.” With everything else going on, Hecky's big moment had slipped my mind. But bound copies of his memoir of Eastport were due to arrive at Bay Books any minute so he could sign them for people. “He must be …”
Thrilled, I’d been about to say. But:
“What's going on?”
Just ahead, at the foot of the hill leading down to Water Street, a group was forming. I saw several members of the Ladies’ Reading Circle, men from the Elks Lodge, and more whose specific affiliation I couldn’t identify, only that they were all angry.
“Traitor!” somebody shouted.
“Turncoat!” yelled somebody else.
“Goodness,” said Ellie. At the head of the crowd, glancing over his shoulder as he hurried along, was an elderly-looking man with dyed black hair; sharp, suspicious little eyes that spied everything; and a look of terror on his age-mottled face.
“I don’t think we’ll have to go looking for Hecky,” I said, slowing the car almost to a stop.
On the sidewalk, stroking his long, white beard, Truman Daly looked on in consternation and amusement. As a rule, Truman did not enjoy witnessing other people's troubles, but it was hard not to relish the sight of Hecky getting his comeuppance, for once.
The crowd wouldn’t let me pass. “Hit the horn,” Ellie said quietly.
“Huh?” Unless you counted Wade leaning over to honk it at Sam and Jill, I hadn’t heard the horn on this car since I’d moved here; in Eastport, you couldn’t very well blast today at someone you’d be sitting next to at the church supper tomorrow night.
Ellie reached out and leaned on it. The crowd jumped and scattered away like startled deer, with Hecky running ahead of them. I caught up to Hecky, who had a book in one hand, his hat in the other, and an egg splattered across the back of his plaid flannel shirt.
“Get in,” Ellie told him, and he followed this advice without hesitation.
“Key-riminy.” Hurtling into the backseat, he slammed the car door and we sped away. Monday began licking the raw egg from his shirt, which under the circumstances I thought was probably the best way to dispose of it. “Those people have gone nuts!”
“What seems to be the problem, Hecky?” Ellie inquired.
“Problem?” he sputtered. “Those folks just can’t take a dose of old-fashioned home truth, is the problem. What’d they expect, a lot of dishwater-dull foolishness?”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly enlightened. “The book.”
“Damn right,” Hecky said stoutly.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. Perspiration had dissolved the dye in Hecky's hairline and was running in inky rivulets to form black ruts in the wrinkles of his forehead.
“Cut a little close to the bone, did it?” Far behind us, the thwarted literary critics had stopped chasing us and were forming into angry little groups on the sidewalk in front of Wadsworth's Hardware.
Debating, probably, the merits of running Hecky out of town on a rail versus the equally attractive advantages of hanging him in effigy. Meanwhile, Ellie had taken the book from him and was paging curiously through it.
“ ‘… fourteen illegitimate children, seven of whom had coffee cups with their names on them in the town jail, then located down in the ground-floor rooms of the bank building …’ ”
She looked up at him in alarm. “Hecky Wilmot, are you out of your tiny mind?” She flipped more pages.
“ ‘… drove getaway car for the notorious Hoover boys … fan-dancer at a saloon in Nevada …’ ” She snapped the volume shut. “Is it all like this?”
“Every bit,” Hecky agreed proudly. “Course”—he frowned—“I figured there might be some upset about it.” But this idea seemed to bring on a flock of others he didn’t find comfortable.
“You can let me off here,” he said. He lived in a tumbledown Victorian mansion that had belonged to his great-grandfather, the Honorable Hector B. Wilmot: either the finest attorney the state had ever produced or a lowdown dirty rotten scoundrel, depending on whose version you accepted. I wondered which one Hecky had put in his memoir.
“No, Hecky,” Ellie said firmly. “You’re coming with us.”
He looked mutinous. “Now, don’t you try telling me—”
“Or we’ll take you back downtown and let your fans tell you what a great author you are,” she added, at which he fell silent and allowed himself to be driven to my house and hustled inside.
“You must have known something like this would happen,” Ellie scolded the old man exasperatedly. “People around here don’t take kindly to having their laundry publicly aired. Now the whole world's going to know Philomena Parr was a fan-dancer in a saloon out there in the gold rush in Nevada before she got so respectable here.”
Philomena's h
eadstone in Hillside Cemetery was so ancient and moss-ravaged, you could barely see the fan engraved into it—until now, I’d thought it was a religious symbol of some sort—and the gold rush had happened a hundred and forty years ago. But this, by Eastport reckoning, was only the blink of a gnat's eye; you didn’t go casting aspersions on the acorns folks’ family trees had sprung from in Eastport. You just didn’t.
“There's plenty of people with stories about you they could be telling,” Ellie went on sternly. “Certain dealings in certain substances. Growth and transport.”
Hecky shifted uncomfortably under my gaze. “That's all past history. I don’t have aught to do with any of that anymore.”
“Hmph. But after the hoo-hah there was about it, and how you were so upset about the way people talked about you, I don’t see how you missed realizing the way they would feel when you wrote about them. What's the title of this thing, anyway?”
She snatched up the book again. It was soft-cover, nicely produced, with a picture of a square-rigger plowing bravely up Passamaquoddy Bay. The artist had done a particularly good job on the Jolly Roger, a skull-and-crossbones insignia clearly visible from where it flew on the mizzenmast.
“Rum-Runners and Downeast Scoundrels … but that's not the title you told everybody it would be. Oh, Hecky,” Ellie sighed, mortified. “How could you do this?”
“Well, I didn’t want to publicize the real title in advance of it. I had a sneaking notion some people wouldn’t care for it much.” Under the kitchen light his black hair shone dully like a fresh lump of charcoal, and his wrinkles all sagged downward morosely.
“S’posed to be in Florida by now, tell the truth,” he added. “But money for the ticket and moving tab didn’t come through.”
The penny dropped. He’d thought he could be a famous author and escape the town's wrath. Hecky Wilmot, grand old storyteller of Eastport, had meant to hightail it out of here ahead of the lynching party and relocate to warmer climes.
Eye for the main chance and the hell with all the rest, Bob Arnold had said about Hecky, and I guessed it was true. And for that, Hecky would have needed money… .