by Sarah Graves
Mapes would live, unless I missed my guess; there’d been a lot of blood, but the ambulance fellows hadn’t looked desperate. They’d known what to do, and Victor had assembled a crack team of trauma experts at his medical facility.
So Jill wouldn’t be guilty of murder in the shooting attack on her uncle Wilbur, assuming it could even be proved without a gun.
The ambulance still wasn’t here, or Bob Arnold, either. I wished they would come. I wanted to be away, back in my own house with its familiar haunts.
“Anyway, he can’t save the girl and grab the gold, can he?” Jill's tone was smug now.
Raines, she meant. “And that tunnel goes a long way,” she went on, “probably all the way to the other side of the island.”
She shuddered. “When you get way in there, it goes uphill, and then it's all red ants and spiders, crawly roots hanging down. Ugh.”
Wade nodded minutely. It was what he’d been telling me about the caves earlier: that they were supposed to go, some of them, for miles. Although until now, no one had believed it, because no one had been foolish enough to try following them wherever they led. Or to where they ended in a flood of icy water, down there in the dark.
Cartwright's face darkened further. “That young blackguard,” he began. But just then Bob Arnold screamed up in the squad car and skidded to a halt in the sand by the side of the road.
We told him what had happened. “His air's run out by now,” Sam added glumly, meaning Raines.
The ambulance pulled to a halt behind Bob's car and the fellows got out of it, looking around for someone to rescue but not finding anyone. Bob waved at them to wait.
“Let's just have a look-see,” he said in the patient tones that meant he was on the very edge of losing his temper, which if he did we were all going to be very, very sorry, indeed. He went to the edge, and we followed him.
But there was nothing at the foot of the cliffs but water and rocks, their bare top surfaces sloshed over with foam. We all looked hard, too, praying to see something: an arm, a face, some hint that someone might be recovered out of this disaster.
There wasn’t any. “Better get the Coast Guard out, tell ’em we’re looking for bodies again,” Bob Arnold said reluctantly. “Divers need to check inside the caves again, too, far as they can go, see if there are any remains caught up in the entries.”
Wade headed back toward his truck. I took a deep, sorrowful breath, looking out over the water on a bright summer day with the seagulls circling and the white clouds floating carelessly.
Jill hunkered on the pavement, her lips a tight, thin line of sullen resentment. “I don’t see why you think all this is my fault,” she said injuredly to no one in particular.
“Okey-dokey,” Bob sighed, and trudged on over to collect his prisoner as the rest of us made our way to our own vehicles.
At the car, Winston Cartwright gazed sadly at Charmian's opal ring. “If I’d let her marry him, she’d be alive now,” he said.
Lillian came over, too, looking beaten. “Jacobia, I just want to say I don’t hold any ill feeling on account of—”
Jill turned as Bob Arnold was putting her in the squad car. “Say so long to your dad for me, Sam,” she called. “Tell him I’ll miss him.” Her eyes glittered with this last malicious thrust.
Damn you, I thought, knowing suddenly what she meant. What she must mean, because in spite of it all she was a pretty girl. And a pretty girl is like a melody, I thought with bleak sorrow.
A melody to the same old song. I didn’t look at Sam.
“Get in,” Bob Arnold told Jill, holding the squad door open. “Watch your head.” Through the cage that divided the car front from rear, I could see her face: even more frightened now. Beginning to wonder if she would get out of this at all.
Then they were gone. Wade and I looked at each other across the pickup hood. The whole thing just felt so unbelievably not possible, everything gone so hideously wrong, so fast. Not until we’d actually gotten into the truck and were preparing to drive away did one of the ambulance guys come over and peer in at us.
“Folks?” he said in tones of puzzlement. “You sure we’re all done here? Because …” He waved toward the cliff edge.
“Yeah,” I began dully. “We’re done.” And then I saw a figure staggering toward us across the bluffs. It was Jonathan Raines. And with him was …
A great bellow of joy erupted from Winston Cartwright.
“Charmian!” He stumped as fast as he could across the bluffland, practically pole-vaulting with the walking stick over scrub brush and stones.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Wade said.
“I guess there was a kind of treasure out there after all,” I said, gazing through the pickup's windshield.
Out on the bluffs, the three adventurers laughed and hugged one another, Charmian drenched and tottery but apparently none the worse for wear, and Raines—
Raines allowed Cartwright to seize him in a bear hug and clap him on the shoulder, but his attention was only for Charmian.
Slowly, he reached out and took the opal ring the aging man still clutched and put it back onto Charmian's finger. She smiled up at him with a look suggesting that he could save her out of a drowned cave any old time he wanted. Then she kissed him.
It was a long, lingering kiss, framed by the bright water. “I think Jonathan has recovered the only treasure he really cares about,” I said, and Wade nodded, drawing me toward him.
“You know,” he allowed, laying his cheek which was prickly with stubble against my hair, “you might be right.”
10
“If she’d let me carry her,” Raines groused affectionately, “it would have been a whole lot faster.”
“In your dreams,” Charmian retorted, mussing his hair. “The day I need rescuing like some helpless damsel in a fairy tale, do me a favor and just leave me in the water, all right?”
“In the future,” Winston Cartwright advised Raines severely, “please just make up the quarrel in person instead of faking your death. I’m an old man, I can’t take much more of this.”
Because that, of course, was what Raines had done: jumped off the dock with the fishhook already stuck into his jacket, wearing neither it nor the boots we’d seen out at Wilbur Mapes's. He’d put the platform there earlier and left a fishing rod on it, too, all to further the notion that he’d drowned, not accidentally, to spur Ellie and me to further investigation.
Then he’d made his way out to Mapes's trailer and waited. It was Raines, too, that Wade and I had seen under the dock, taking advantage of the tide just as we had.
“It was the fishing rod, wasn’t it?” I said. “That you had to get back before we found it.”
He nodded wryly. “Right. I got to Mapes's place, looked at the stuff he's got, and realized nobody from around here goes fishing with an Orvis graphite. Borrowed Mapes's dive gear, then I saw the rod and platform go into the water and thought you’d taken care of it all for me,” he added to Wade. “One minute you’d nearly caught me, and the next I thought my troubles were over.”
“You wish,” Charmian said. “From now on, to prevent these little errors, I insist on being a part of all your plans.”
I doubted she’d get much argument over that.
“Did you really crawl to the other side of the island?” Maggie Altvater wanted to know.
She, it turned out, had not gone to Boston at all. Instead she’d gone to Bangor, done some shopping, had her hair cut, eaten three different varieties of ethnic food—Chinese, Mexican, and rathskeller-style German—and seen three first-run movies one after another. And when Sam asked her if she’d been lonely doing all that by herself, she said cheerfully that no, she’d been too busy.
Returning, she’d taken over my house with calm efficiency, having walked Monday, bought groceries, and put a fire in the outdoor grill, covering the big old wooden picnic table with the summer tablecloth: red and white with a pattern of sailboats.
Now she regar
ded Charmian Cartwright in much the same way as, I imagine, little children regard their favorite action heroes. “But you went in. Spiders,” she went on, “and red ants, and all?”
“Red ants and all,” Charmian confirmed. “Fortunately, I had a sprayer of mosquito repellent in my pocket. I assumed,” she added to me, “that's why there's one of them in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, and another in the back hall—that people use them. And when I noticed the number of red ants on the island, I made the connection. The spray works,” she added with satisfaction.
We sat on lawn chairs, sipping the beverages that Maggie had provided: iced tea with mint leaves from the garden for Ellie, me, and Sam, beers for George and Wade, wine spritzers for Jonathan and Charmian, who were toasting their engagement. In the largest chair sat Winston Cartwright, nipping at his flask of cordial.
“That's why it took me so long to find her,” Jonathan said. “She was so far into the cave.”
In the fire foil-wrapped potatoes baked, while on the picnic table similarly wrapped ears of corn waited. Beside them stood a platter with a whole fresh salmon on it: stuffed with onions and shellfish, garlic and lemon slices, and other delicious items; Maggie had marinated and baked it and would finish it atop the grill.
“How’d you know to do all this?” Sam asked as she tossed the salad, and she looked wise.
“You know I’ve got a scanner in my car, Sam,” she replied patiently. “It was pretty obvious what must be going on, and there were already plenty of EMTs on the job, so they didn’t need me for that. But I knew everyone would need to eat when it was over. People were going to be hungry, whichever way it went.”
She set napkins out. “And,” she added, a somber note coming into her voice, “if it turned out badly, people weren’t going to feel like shopping or cooking. But they would still need fuel.”
“Oh,” he said, a new kind of assessment in his eyes as he watched her work. “Say, that's a nice outfit you’re wearing.”
It was, too: green canvas camp shorts, a short-sleeved white shirt, and a silver-buckled belt. On her feet were a pair of top-stitched leather tie shoes, with white rolled-down hiking socks. Altogether she looked neat and complete, her glossy honey-colored hair tied back with a green ribbon.
“Thank you,” she said mildly, and brushed past him to reach the barbecue tongs. He looked a little shell-shocked, but that could have been on account of the events of the day; naturally, I didn’t mention it to him.
And then, just when I thought things had finally settled down and we could eat our dinner in peace, Victor drove by in his little sports car and noticed us all out in the backyard, and included himself.
“Got something for you, Dad,” Sam said, and handed over the wristwatch.
Victor glanced at me, and I’m not certain, but it might have been my clear, unspoken promise to whack him upside the head with an entire cooked salmon that zipped his lip for him.
“Well,” he said. “Glad it turned up. Your … friend found it for me, I gather?” He put it on.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “She found it.”
A beat. Then: “Thanks for straightening that out for me,” Victor said, and turned to accept a glass of white wine from Maggie as if nothing had happened.
It had, though, because Victor hadn’t left that watch in the aft cubby of his boat. And Sam knew it, although Victor didn’t seem to understand this yet.
“How's Wilbur?” I asked as Victor plopped onto the last lawn chair, leaving me standing.
But I didn’t care; when he was sitting down with a drink, at least he was firmly in one place and could be better controlled.
“Not too bad, considering.” Sipping his wine, he looked happily over the proceedings as if he had arranged them himself.
“Lost blood. His sister went over and donated, though, so that's all right.” His face clouded. “But about the girl thing …”
I waited, wondering what he could possibly say, because sleeping around was one thing, but doing it with your own son's girlfriend was something else again.
Way something else. And that wristwatch of Victor's went two places: onto Victor's wrist or into the drawer of his bedside table. Nowhere else, as I knew very well and so did Sam, once Jill's parting shot—say so long to your dad—had made him think of it.
He frowned seriously. “I think you should pay more attention to Sam's companions. I know he's nearly grown up now, but in many ways he's an impressionable boy, and it seems to me that you could take more care over who he sees. I want you to do that.”
Whereupon, of course, I did not wrap him up in aluminum foil, tuck him neatly in among the red-hot barbecue coals, and fasten down the lid of the cooker.
Instead I took a long, calming swallow from my own glass. “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “I am going to pay more attention, from now on, to the habits of Sam's companions.”
Hearing my tone, Victor glanced alertly at me; he was, as we both understood, also one of Sam's companions.
“And when I disapprove of those habits I am going to say so. To him. Loudly and clearly, and in a great deal of very accurate, well-researched historical detail.”
It may have been the threat in my voice that made Victor choke, spluttering white wine. “Now, Jacobia, I don’t mean—”
I lowered my voice, kept an amiable expression on my face, and went on. “You son of a bitch. I don’t care what you mean. You don’t change, do you? You’ll never change. You’re the problem.”
I aimed a finger at him. “Because where women are concerned, you’re a low-life, sludge-dwelling, slime-sucking little predator, and now you’ve gone too far.”
He opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it and writhed guiltily as I continued. “Do you know they’ve got a scorecard for you behind the counter down at Leighton's Variety Store, right beside the one for the Boston Red Sox?”
He looked aghast, and I finally felt I might be getting somewhere. Around here an individual's personal and professional reputation were the same, and if only to hang on to his job, he wouldn’t want people thinking he was daydreaming of young ladies’ anatomies while delving into patients’ brains. Also, he’d lived in Eastport long enough to know that the scorecard idea was not only possible, it was likely.
“Listen, Jacobia, I didn’t sleep with that girl.”
“Yeah, right. Where’ve I heard that one before?”
“I mean it. I didn’t.”
Something in his voice made me look at him. “Why not?”
He slumped in the chair. “She looked old. She acted old. But when I got a good look at her …”
Unclothed, et cetera. I turned away in disgust.
“… I knew,” he finished miserably. “I’m a doctor, for God's sake. I can tell. Not her date of birth precisely, but…”
I understood; I’d seen her, too, out on the bluffs. And with no clothes on, she was just a skinny—scrawny, even—kid. “So,” he said, “I sent her home.”
I had an instant of mean glee as I imagined the moment when it dawned on him. Just the memory was shriveling him now to a cinder of shamed misery.
“She must have been furious,” I said. “That's probably why she took the watch.”
He shot his cuff reflexively to glance at it. “Uh-huh. She didn’t think I’d tell anyone, I guess, on account of the circumstances.”
But Victor loved that watch. He didn’t love much, but when he did, he found a way. “Anyhow, I wanted you to know,” he said.
Poor Victor. The only time he seemed really real to me anymore was when I pitied him. It's part of my karma, I guess, that I have to learn over and over again: wishing won’t make it so. If I want something a certain way, I have to make it that way.
Victor, in the long run, had turned out to be a good lesson in that regard. Maybe it's why I bought an old house, too: to get another one. And maybe it's why once I knew—or thought I did—what had really happened out at North End, I couldn’t let that go, either.
He got up. “Tell Sam I’ll see him later.” The little sports car pulled out and roared away as the aroma of grilled salmon began wafting deliciously from the fire.
And then we all had dinner. Bob Arnold and his wife Clarissa showed up; Maggie had invited them, also based on information gleaned from her scanner. With them was their year-old baby, the devastatingly handsome Thomas, googling and smiling in the way I remembered so well; why, why can’t they stay that way?
“Can’t hang around long,” Clarissa said, pouring herself a glass of lemonade. “I promised that I’d help Hecky Wilmot arrange a book-signing party for tomorrow.”
“Really? I thought it was going to be a lynching party.”
She laughed. “It was, until the Times review came out. They called it a work of naive genius, said he was the Grandma Moses of historical narrative, and that Eastport was a ‘gem of unspoiled Americana’ that Hecky had polished.”
“Yeah,” George put in. “And this afternoon I had a look at the book, and you know, it's pretty darned good. Folks around town are starting to think so, too, now they’ve got their breath back. Got over the shock of seein’ all their skeletons marched out of the closet.”
Which solved all Hecky's trouble; between George Valentine's recommendation and that of the New York Times, I guessed his book was going to do very well, indeed, and that the Florida literary lights would have to shine on without him a while longer.
“Course, he’ll complain that all the autographsignin’ is makin’ his arm hurt,” Bob Arnold said wisely, and we all laughed, imagining Hecky finding the dark side of a lot of royalty checks.
A short while later, while we were still eating, one of the fellows from town stopped to drop by the Johnson trolling motor I’d bought for George, and as I’d expected, George turned all pink and allowed that it would be just the ticket, up at the lake next time he wanted to drown some night crawlers.
“Thank you, Miz Tiptree,” he said. No matter how I tried, I never could get him to call me Jacobia. “It's a wicked nice one.”
Wicked nice; it was George's highest compliment. At which it was my turn to go all pink, and the party went on happily, except that the little motor reminded me of the day I bought it down at the Quoddy Marine Store.