Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  Just then Sam came in, glanced darkly into the kitchen, and thumped upstairs, not speaking. Ellie was still staring at Hecky.

  “Florida?” She breathed it in disbelief, as if he’d confided that come the winter holidays, he was planning on having a roast leg of Rudolf for Christmas dinner.

  “Time to make a change. Variety is important, you know,” he said stubbornly. “Anyway, guess that ain’t worked out. Mebbe I’ll visit m’ sister, down to Portland.”

  I thought if Hecky intended to escape to Portland, he ought to make it Portland, Oregon. The phone lines to Hecky's sister were humming right now, I had no doubt.

  “What you got me over here for, anyway?” he demanded to know. “Now I got to find a way home, they’re out there waitin’ with the knives all sharpened up, a-ready to scalp me.”

  “Ellie will give you a ride home in my car,” I said. “On the way, she's got a couple of questions to ask you. About,” I emphasized severely, “Jonathan Raines. And Hecky, I want you to tell her the truth, no nonsense and no embroidery.”

  If he’d been a rooster, his comb would have bristled up in reflexive anger. “Young whippersnapper, comin’ in here where he had no business—”

  “Yes, well, you did have business here, and you’ve mucked it up pretty well yourself, haven’t you?”

  He slumped, understanding: Hecky would have to go some ways to clean up the mess he’d managed to make in his own nest.

  “All right,” he allowed reluctantly, getting up. “Ask away. I guess it cain’t do no harm now, can it? Me and my big mouth.” He was beginning to accept the enormity of what he had done and the impossibility of taking it back.

  “Well, Hecky, at least from the size of that crowd down in front of Bay Books, you have a best-seller on your hands.”

  He looked hollow-eyed at me. Ah, the perils of first-time authorship. For Hecky, I had a strong feeling it was probably the last time, too. “Ayuh,” he agreed shakily, but turned at the door in a last burst of unfocused antagonism.

  “You got it all wrong, you know, you and that know-it-all fella with the cane. Winston Cartwright,” he sneered, giving the words a sour, frightened twist. “Him and his stories. He got the whole thing twisted up backwards.”

  “Really? In what way?”

  Hecky gave a disparaging snort. “Jane Whitelaw. He says she fell off o’ them cliffs the day b’fore Jared Hayes disappeared. But that ain’t so. My fambly was livin’ in Eastport already, even then, an’ they carried the story down as it happened, not the way that blowhard got it from some old book.”

  “So how did it happen?” Micah Whitelaw could’ve gotten that detail wrong, I supposed. Still, what difference could it make?

  “ ’Twas the day after,” Hecky asserted. “And it weren’t any accident she died of, my fambly folks say. Story is, she wrote it all down b’fore she died, what her troubles was, in a diary. She was an eddicated girl, read books. Likely that was her trouble,” he added with a dark look at me.

  He had, in addition to his many other charming qualities, a suspicion of any female whose activities ranged beyond home and hearth.

  “They say it's where the boy, Micah Whitelaw, got his diary-keeping habit,” Hecky went on. “Nobody ever found what she wrote, that Whitelaw woman. One thing's f'sure, though.” He aimed a gnarled finger at me. “Jane Whitelaw didn’t die accidental. Nossir. My take on it, she was kilt !”

  With that, Hecky stumped out, and I heard him muttering all the way down the back porch and out to the car. In the silence he left behind I watched the sugar bowl on the kitchen table move a quiet, deliberate six inches to the left and back again.

  Whereupon I abandoned the kitchen and went upstairs to have a heart-to-heart talk with my son, and found him in his room with a gleaming object in his hands.

  Victor's wristwatch.

  “Mom, it was a joke,” he insisted. “She was going to give it back. When I told her how upset he was, she was horrified.”

  “I see.” I sat on the bed beside him.

  Over the years, Sam's bedroom-decoration theme has gone from gangsta rap (hideous), through model shipbuilding (delightful), into a brief, intense infatuation with very old cars (messy), and finally to a crisp, shipshape arrangement of desk and bookcases, indicating his final decision to return to school in the fall.

  “Jill's mom told me she's been having a bad time,” I said. “Maybe she just wanted to get a little attention, huh?”

  He nodded eagerly. “Right. Play a joke, everybody laughs. If they do,” he finished, his face falling. “But instead, everyone's decided she's some kind of criminal.”

  “You know, Sam, when fall comes you’re going to be involved with a lot of new things. Classes, meeting new people. …”

  Other girls, I was thinking hopefully. But he was way ahead of me, shaking his head. “Jill's the one. I’m going to marry her. Mom, I’ve just never met anyone like her before.”

  Military school, I thought wildly; or a tough-love camp. But Sam was too old for those. In fact, he was old enough to do just about anything he wished.

  Including ruin his life. “She's smart, she's funny, she's really brave,” he went on.

  She's blond, beautiful, built like a fashion model. She's got all the moral sense of a piranha. Perfect marriage material.

  For another piranha. “She is a very attractive young woman,” I allowed.

  “Oh, yeah,” Sam said impatiently, “humor me. You think I’m going to get over her. But I’m not,” he insisted. “I’m just not.”

  I got off the bed. Gone were the days when I could smooth his hair and administer a baby aspirin. “Sam …” I hesitated at the door. “About the watch.”

  “Yeah?” He glanced cautiously at me.

  “When you went to see her, how did you put it to her? I mean, did you bring it up first? Or did she?”

  His face snapped shut as he took my point: would Jill have mentioned it if he hadn’t? If Victor hadn’t accused her? Or would she have kept the watch in that event, said nothing about it?

  “What kind of a question is that?” Sam demanded. “Oh, man. Just leave it, Mom, okay? Leave it, I’ll take care of it.”

  He turned his face to the wall, shutting me out.

  “I’m sorry, Sam, I shouldn’t have asked,” I said, feeling the answer like a clump of cold seaweed gathering in my heart.

  By the time Ellie returned and we’d gone out together, I’d thought it over.

  “Sam's got to deal with it himself,” I said as we passed the old redbrick library building.

  Inside, Charmian was cataloging the historical collection. Inviting her to lunch would have been a hospitable action. But I wasn’t feeling hospitable.

  “Ever since we came here, Sam has been the absolute model of a good son. Funny, pleasant to be around. But now—”

  “Separation,” Ellie said succinctly. Out on the bay, the children's sailing class was having a practice regatta, a dozen small craft skittering across the waves like so many waterbugs.

  “He's going away in the fall,” Ellie explained to my look of surprise. “Living in the dorm in Machias during the week, away from here. Away,” she finished, “from you.”

  “He’ll be home weekends,” I protested.

  “And feeling of two minds about it, is my guess,” she went on, ignoring me. “Because he likes you, you know. He does. And he likes it here. But he's got to go. So he's … at war with himself, sort of.”

  Of course she was right. It fit his behavior perfectly. Now that she’d said it, I wondered only why I hadn’t seen it before.

  “So you think he's fastened on to this unsuitable girl just as a way to … cut the umbilical cord in advance? So when the real separation comes he’ll have already …”

  “Dealt with it,” she agreed flatly. “And more importantly to him, he will have made you deal with it, too; in some ways he's just trying to get a rise out of you, I think. Although of course he doesn’t realize it.”

  “Ma
ybe that's why he looks relieved to get away from her one minute”—the look on his face the night before rose up before me—“and in the next insists he's going to marry her? Because it's all about independence? Breaking the bonds with me?”

  She nodded. “Sure. After all, he's only eighteen. It's natural for him to swing back and forth like a loose sail. And he's probably got a lot of … issues.” She pronounced the jargonish word reluctantly, but it was right for the stuff she meant.

  “And you’re right: attacking her will make things worse. You know how gallant he can be.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of the old days when Sam would run psychological interference between me and his father. It hadn’t been good for him. But at the time I took any defense I could get.

  We reached the stairs leading up past the shoe repair shop to the Starlite Café, above the antique stores looking out over the boat basin to the islands beyond. From the café floated the good smells of the Starlite's idea of lunch: homemade vegetable soup, toasted onion bagels, fresh chocolate brownies, and fresh-ground, brewed-a-heartbeat-ago Blue Mountain coffee.

  My step quickened. At the top of the stairs was a barnlike room furnished with shabby-chic antiques, ferns on wire stands, and tables equipped with backgammon boards. The front was a wall of windows whose dazzling light mellowed as it poured in.

  “Anyway, Hecky says the same as everyone else,” Ellie said when she had ordered her usual: an avocado and Swiss sandwich with tomato and mustard sprouts on seven-grain bread. I had the soup and half a bagel, and not much later, our lunches arrived.

  “Raines didn’t say anything except about Charmian and how he meant to win her back, in La Sardina. But Hecky says Raines did look like he’d just swallowed the canary, and sounded very sure of himself, which of course just drove Hecky half nuts.”

  Hecky liked people to sound unsure, because it made him feel more sure. She bit into her sandwich.

  “My thought is,” she said when she had negotiated all the grains, greens, and other chewy stuff she was eating, “we need to, um, amalgamate. Or something.”

  She waved the sandwich; looking at all the things that were in it, I got her drift. “You put the different ingredients together and you get…”

  All the bits of information we’d been gathering; no one of them was helpful on its own. But…

  She nodded energetically. “Right. Something entirely new.”

  So, think: an old violin but not a precious one, along with an old book that Raines bought from Mapes. Add Washburn's habit of distressing new furniture to look like valuable antique stuff. Then there was Mapes's own cluttered dwelling: some treasures, but a lot of junk, too. And Hecky Wilmot and his book troubles; his big Florida hopes and his lack of money to realize them.

  All mixed up with Charmian's odd talents, and Winston Cartwright's story about Jared Hayes's love for Jane Whitelaw. Hayes's plan to win her heart by getting fabulously wealthy.

  Finally, there was Eastport itself: full of guys who might seem to be one thing—ex-cons, or junk collectors, or retired fellows puttering quietly in their gardens raising dahlias—but who were really another.

  “We think of Hayes,” I said slowly, “as this dignified man. A musician and composer, we think of a sort of high-flown, high-minded person. Someone who could write in Latin, for instance. The pirate association, his high style of living, his fencing of stolen goods—all this time later it just adds a note of glamour in our minds, doesn’t it?”

  Ellie nodded, understanding. “But what if he wasn’t?”

  “Precisely. Years later, we’ve turned him into a bigger-than-life figure. But what if he was more like the guys we’ve been talking to, Hecky and Mapes and Howard Washburn? Just… guys. The kind who, some of them, get bright ideas and pull a few schemes?”

  As I spoke, Harriet put a CD into the player: Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Spring trilled out of the speakers.

  “What,” I went on, “if Hayes really did get a Stradivarius? Say, in some pirate loot or something.” There’d been no record of such a purchase in his account books. “And his first plan was to sell it, make money. But then, because at heart he was really just an ordinary guy like Mapes or Howard Washburn, Hayes got a bright idea.”

  “A scheme. Like Howard's ‘distressed’ Sears furniture: fake one, and sell that.” Ellie's eyes shone.

  “Uh-huh. He's got a model in the real one. So he buys, or has built, an inferior, cheaper instrument and alters it so that it looks like the real thing. If he can sell them both, he’ll make twice as much. Only …”

  “Not right away. It wouldn’t be credible for him to have two of them, would it? So …”

  “He hides the real one, meaning to sell it later, or even to keep it. But before he can do anything, even sell the fake …”

  There’d been no record of any violin sale in the invisible-ink book, either.

  “He vanishes,” Ellie finished calmly. “Ends up in Pirate's Cove. And the fake article could be the violin Raines found. He would know how to tell a fake from the real thing, though, so he wouldn’t be fooled by Hayes's counterfeiting attempt.”

  I spooned up the last of my soup, decided to indulge in a brownie for dessert, and accepted a refill on my coffee.

  “Okay, so what does that mean? For all we know, he did sell a Strad, for instance, and never wrote anything down about it. We can only go so far on theory.”

  But Ellie shook her head. “No. If such a violin existed now, that had been sold from here back then, people would know about it. Cartwright would know, and Raines would’ve; the experts would be aware of such a thing, its history. Wouldn’t they? Raines said individual instruments are so famous, they have their own names.”

  “Good point.” I thought some more. “And Lillian Frey says if it is still here, it's probably sawdust by now.”

  “So it could’ve rotted away in a hiding place somewhere. But wouldn’t Raines have thought of that, too?”

  In other words, why would he be so hot to find a handful of wormy firewood? “Well, maybe he was hoping against hope. Or …”

  Something else. But I couldn’t quite latch on to the third possibility. It had to do somehow with Hayes's money and account books, and it hovered infuriatingly at the edge of my mind like something glimpsed unreliably from the corner of my eye.

  Drat. “Anyway,” I said, finishing up my coffee, “if Raines was on to something, it's almost surely something he learned either from that book in my wall— though I still don’t see how—or from the diaries he bought from Wilbur, in the trunk of old stuff.”

  Ellie's brow furrowed as a new thought struck her. “Jacobia. Howard did mention old diaries in that trunk. But Winston Cartwright said he had all of Micah Whitelaw's diaries. And as far as we know, all Hayes's are accounted for, too. We’ve seen them. So what diaries do you suppose Raines bought from Wilbur?”

  I stared at her. “Ellie. You’re a genius. What if one of them was Jane's? Jane Whitelaw's?”

  I got up and paid the check, followed Ellie down the stairs to the street. We walked in silence until we got to my house.

  “The thing is, Hayes wanted Jane,” Ellie said. “He meant to win her with money. So wouldn’t he tell her what he intended to do? Confide his plan, sort of dazzle her in advance?”

  “Never mind what he wanted,” I said, letting us in the kitchen door. “What I want to know is, where are they now? Jane's diary,” I mean, “if that's what it was, and the old violin Raines found, too. But I’d rather have the book.”

  Just then Sam came downstairs, looking slicked-up and ready for action. I didn’t ask him who he was going out to meet, and he didn’t offer to tell. But he overheard Ellie's last comments, and in an effort to be congenial offered a smiling remark, along with a look at me that I interpreted to mean, Truce?

  I nodded, just as he dropped his innocent bombshell.

  “Always,” he intoned, “hide where there are a lot of the same kind of things.”

  8

/>   “No wonder she's been working in the library,” Ellie said as we hurried back to it. “She knew Raines, knew how he thought. He might even have pulled the same trick in the past, and she knew about it.”

  “And he said he’d been to the library, that night at the dinner table. I should have thought of it myself.”

  We rushed up the steps. “He probably tucked it in with the other old books. It would look as if it's always been there.”

  “And for some reason he wanted it discovered. Otherwise he wouldn’t have made a point of mentioning the library to you.” But here she stopped. “Only, why? He couldn’t have known someone was going to take him out of the picture.”

  “Maybe we’ll figure that out when we find it. If we do.”

  Inside, we looked left and right: to the fiction collection jamming the shelves on one side, the reading room full of white light from the tall arched windows. No Charmian anywhere.

  “Darn, don’t tell me now she's disappeared,” Ellie whispered, and a lady who was reading an old copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin looked up admonishingly.

  We moved toward the checkout desk, past the little alcove that is the children's part of the library: small chairs and low painted shelves stuffed with brightly covered volumes. It wasn’t quite time for story hour, yet; the area was empty.

  Empty, that is, except for a decidedly non juvenile-looking book on one of the child-sized tables, lying there open as if it had been left only for a moment, its reader intending to return.

  It was bound in old green leather, its pages brittle and foxed. “Ellie!” I whispered. The frontispiece, in spidery black ink, read: Jane Whitelaw, this is her book.

  We took the book to the back of the fiction stacks and sat to scan it. The writing was faded, the spelling idiosyncratic, as was usual even for educated people then. But within moments Jane Whitelaw's personality came through as if she were sitting there with us. Not a pleasant personality; as we turned them, a whiff of brimstone practically rose up off the antique pages.

  Sly and greedy, shallow and promiscuous. Self-dramatizing, too: “I want to live as the great ladies do, and I shall, if I have to kill them all to achieve it,” Jane wrote on one occasion.