by Sarah Graves
By he, Sam meant Hayes. “Because he loved a woman.”
“Because he loved the wrong woman,” I said. “Wrong for him.”
He sighed hugely. It wasn’t just Jill. For the first time in his life, Sam had come up against the sad fact that wishing won’t make it so. “People don’t change much, do they?”
I hadn’t said anything to him about Victor and Jill. But it was there between us, like the skull on the table, and I thought that was what he meant.
“I guess Jane Whitelaw didn’t go around pretending she was some kind of a Girl Scout, either,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, understanding my mistake. “You mean people changing over time. From one era to another.”
“Uh-huh. Poor old Jared, he was crazy in love with Jane, and never mind he must’ve known she was bad news. You idiot,” he told the brown-stained relic on the table.
A few teeth were missing, the arrow-point in it jutted up roughly, and the hole in the cranium was jagged-edged, beginning to crumble. Altogether, it looked as if it ought to have a black candle burning inside it.
“No,” I agreed finally. “Neither one of them, Jared Hayes nor Jane Whitelaw, was much different from any of us, at heart.”
Love and money, pride and ambition. And lust. The same old song. In the parlor Maggie's fiddle danced with brisk confidence into “Pirate's Revenge.”
And nailed it, negotiating the weird intervals, syncopated rhythms, and sad, minor-key melody flawlessly.
“How did I know that tune?” I heard Jonathan say. “As far as I can see, it's the only mystery left to be solved.”
But it wasn’t; not quite. Bob Arnold returned. “You’re sure about this, are you?”
“Yes.” Suddenly I didn’t want to go where we were going; not at all. But there was no help for it: murder had been done. And—
—so I thought in my innocence at the time—
—murder must out.
11
It was nearly eight-thirty and the last deep pink shreds of the dying evening lay on the western horizon, the smell of low tide floating in from the calm flats as we went over the causeway to Lillian Frey's place on the mainland.
A few cars still lingered in the parking lot at the New Friendly Restaurant on Route 1, but the Farmer's Exchange Market was closed and shuttered for the night; behind them, cattails bristled against the dark gleam of the tide marshes.
At the turnoff, an eighteen-wheeler roared by in a sudden boom of sound and headlights, its turbulence buffeting our car briefly. Then it was only a set of cherry-red taillights in the rearview, and we were alone.
“Nice kid,” Bob Arnold said from the passenger seat. The road here was narrow and curving, fields and scrub trees drawing right up to the edge of the pavement.
We had thought it would seem less threatening if we arrived in my car. And this wasn’t an official visit.
Yet. “Raines,” he added. “A little crazy, but okay.”
“Uh-huh.” I took the left fork onto the Shore Road, past the little white church with the scattering of graves in a fenced plot behind it.
“He caused us a lot of trouble,” I said. “I can’t say I’m entirely pleased about all of it.”
“But all's well that ends well?”
“Maybe.” I wished I shared his confidence. The road led through a stand of pine, past a rail-fenced corral, a dozen white-faced cattle standing at the far corner of it, waiting to be let into the gambrel-roofed barn.
“Right here's where the old school burned,” Bob said, his head angling toward the roadside. A whiff of charcoal smell came on the damp night air, through the open car window.
“It was Raines,” Bob said, “that called in the anonymous tip.”
On the arsonist, he meant. “You’re kidding. How d’you know?”
Bob shrugged. “Thought I recognized the voice, meeting him on the cliffs. Asked him about it, he just looked clever. Said he thought anonymous tips ought to stay that way, wouldn’t say more. Did a lot of walking, saw things, out to Mapes's place, I guess.”
Walking down those country roads. “I guess.”
“He saw a guy toss a match. Took down the plate number.”
There was, we both knew, a reward. But if Raines accepted it, considering the way firebugs tended to hold grudges, my house might be the next target for the arsonist's friends.
And Raines had understood this.
Bob sighed; we were approaching Lillian's long, down-sloping driveway. No streetlights here; I squinted so as not to miss the entrance to it.
“Tell me again what I’m going to find?” Bob said.
A thump of misery struck me. Now that we were arriving, it all seemed more real. I hoped I was wrong.
“Wallet. Identification, probably. And car keys. They were not in the vehicle when it was towed, were they?”
The stolen one, that the guy had been driving who went off the bluffs. Bob shook his head as we pulled up to the house.
“No. And if you can’t ID a fellow, it's hard to figure out who might’ve offed him. If someone did.”
With all its lights on, blazing in the darkness against the water, the house resembled some ghostly ship asail on an ocean of midnight, the false blue dawn of moon-rise brightening behind it.
I shut off the ignition. Part of me wanted to just let it all go by. But if I did, sooner or later someone else would get in the way, present an obstacle or trigger a murderous rage.
And then that someone would die; maybe someone like Sam.
Or even like Victor. “She didn’t push him,” I said.
Meaning Jill's father. Because when you came right down to it, who else would it have been? “He knew her, he wouldn’t have let her get close enough, right there by the edge of the bluffs.”
Because she was her father's daughter: he would know.
“And she didn’t shoot him; Lillian's gun was here when I came out here. And it hadn’t been fired recently.”
You could smell it, if it had, and all I’d smelled was gun oil. I doubted Jill was clear-headed or knowledgeable enough to clean the weapon, to kill the burnt-powder reek.
As we approached the house, a shape moved in one of the big windows; they knew we were here.
“So?” Bob asked.
“Nail gun,” I said. “If you find him, he’ll have a nail in him. Probably it killed him, but it didn’t need to. Just…”
“Send him over the edge. Lillian Frey's ex-husband. Jill's dad.”
“Right.” I got out of the car. My old mobbed-up friend, Jemmy Wechsler, had a cell phone, and I was among the half-dozen people in the world with the number. And Jemmy knew everyone—that is, if they were crooked enough. “Jill's dad was a bad guy. Habitual wife-beater, stalker. Big criminal record in Massachusetts, too: fraud, theft. You know the type.”
I looked up at the house. “But then he made one big mistake, this tough guy. This guy no one ever dared to say no to.”
We started up the steps. “Which was?” Bob Arnold asked.
I knocked on the door. No answer. Knocked again.
“He said no,” I replied to Bob Arnold, knocking harder, “to his teenage daughter.”
The door opened. Lillian Frey stood in the entryway.
“Thank God you’ve come,” she said.
She took us into the big room overlooking the water. The moon had risen, sending a wash of silvery glitter onto the dark waves. Behind, the lights of the villages on Campobello sparkled. At such a distance, everything always looks so peaceful. A fire burned in the wood-stove, though the night was too warm for one.
“Jill's locked herself upstairs in her room and won’t come out,” Lillian said. “I don’t know what to do. She's so upset, I’m afraid she might…”
Around the room an eclectic collection of small objects stood on display: a metronome and a music stand in one corner, in the other a lectern with an antique dictionary open on it.
“The gun you showed me?” I asked. “Jill hasn’t…”
>
She hadn’t used it the first time, on her dad; the second time, though, to threaten Charmian, she must have. And even though I didn’t think Jill could have salvaged it—she’d had no place to hide it, coming back up the cliffs—I wanted to be sure before Bob or I went upstairs to talk to the girl.
And to my relief, Lillian shook her head no.
But what she said next confused me completely. “I just went to my studio and checked. It's still there.”
Curveball; so what had Jill used? To cover my confusion I turned from Lillian and examined the room. On a table were ranged small procelain items: a pair of red Chinese fighting dogs, a bowl marked with the insignia of the City of New York, showing the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Mrs. Frey, have you had any contact with your ex-husband in the past ten days or so?” Bob Arnold asked.
She looked startled. “No. Why?”
“We think Jill might have met with him. Here, I mean, not in Boston. We think he might have come here.”
She nodded slowly. “It would make sense. He's always saying he’ll do something. Follow me, the way he has before.”
“I don’t think that's why he came,” I told her. “Jill wanted more than anything to go back to Boston; if she called him, told him there was something valuable to find here, he might come and take her back with him, she’d have thought.”
Lillian said nothing. “I wonder, has Jill's attitude toward him changed?” I asked. “In the past few days? Because they might have quarreled. Over whether she could go back with him, maybe.”
When he rejected this idea—rejected her, even after she’d told him a potentially valuable secret—she’d have been angry.
Very angry. But Lillian only shook her head ruefully again. “He always manages to convince her I’m the villain,” she said. “I doubt he was here, though. His business”—she gave the word a bitterly ironic twist— “keeps him occupied in Massachusetts.”
Silence from upstairs. If Jill was having a tantrum, she was keeping it pretty quiet.
“What business would that be?” Bob Arnold asked.
I browsed on: books on a shelf behind the table. A stack of sheet music for violin. A fancy tool catalog. Books about wood, and instrument construction. Lots of antique knickknacks.
“Electronics,” Lillian replied a bit impatiently. “At the moment. He says he's a dealer. The truth is, he fences things after other people steal them: computers, cell phones, all that kind of thing.”
She got up. “Look, I don’t see why you want to know anything about him. I hoped you could talk to Jill. Straighten her out and make her see reason.”
“What was it you wanted us to say?” I turned from a group of crystal paperweights on a shelf, like a collection of glass eyes. And something behind them, something that was not an antique.
Lillian waved a hand. She seemed particularly to want to engage my attention. “Well. That she's got to behave. That she's lucky no one's pressed charges. That from now on—”
A bang from a room above. Bob turned and headed for the open stairway. “What's that?” he demanded as he went, and after a moment of hesitation Lillian ran toward the sound, too.
But I already knew what it was: a nail gun firing, loud and concussive. I’d seen it in Lillian's hands that day at the craft fair, when Jill and Lillian had been arguing.
The sound wouldn’t carry far, but inside the house it was like the crack! of a pistol being fired. Again. And again.
Bob pounded. “Jill! Hear me now, girl, I want you to open this door!” He rattled the knob, gave the door a solid kick, and another. “Jill!”
No answer, and he was too late anyway. I cursed myself for trying to be tactful, trying to save Lillian's feelings instead of just laying it on her: that her daughter was a killer.
Jill had gotten about six shots off from the nail gun. The door was effectively barricaded now, until someone went after it with a crowbar. I pushed the glass paperweights aside, grabbed the thing I’d seen tucked behind the old books: a camera.
And not some cheap, quick-print item, either: this was the camera Sam and Maggie had been yearning for, that put the visual images onto a disk to be loaded into a computer. It was a digital camera like the one Winston Cartwright had explained to me.
Then I had it: electronics. And remembered again the rest of what the unidentified man had been carrying with him as he walked out onto the bluffs. Camera equipment.
At the same time I heard the creak of another door upstairs. And knew what it meant.
Another time, another set of circumstances: no moon, maybe, or the scent of wood smoke not floating quite so poignantly in the air, though the evening was warm. The tide was coming in; below the big windows, foam showed like lacy trimmings around the slick black rocks.
Any other time I might not have understood. But now as I ran out into the darkness, searching for the outside stairway to the second-floor balcony with its awe-inspiring view of the drop over the cliffs, the truth flashed over me, the one fact that no one else understood about the pirate girl Jane Whitelaw:
That when she went over the cliffs to perish in the ice-cold waters, she did it in the dark. It was why they saw her torch as she ran; why men built bonfires on rafts they towed behind their boats, to light their way when they went searching for her.
And the dark of night was a very strange time to search for a hidden treasure, carrying an unfamiliar map.
Jane hadn’t fallen accidentally from that cliff, as we’d surmised from the dangerousness of the crumbling edge. And she hadn’t been kilt, as Hecky Wilmot and — Winston Cartwright believed.
And it hadn’t been the first time she’d gone there, I was willing to bet. She’d been there before, searching, figured out that Hayes had given her a fake map, and understood: without him, she would never find the treasure she lusted furiously for.
But she’d already killed him, hadn’t she? She was a girl with an eye for the main chance, and now it was gone because she had destroyed it herself. So Jane Whitelaw had jumped.
From grief, or guilt, or fury that her scheme hadn’t worked? To that question I would probably never have a certain answer, but as I found the outside stairs and began scrambling up, I knew Jill was about to do it again.
“Stay where you are.” Her voice quavered at me from above.
I stopped, trying to catch my breath. Inside, Bob still tried to break the door down, slamming himself against it.
“Hey.” I managed a weak laugh. “Guess he's not going to get very far, is he?”
No answer. My eyes began adjusting; when they did, I wished they hadn’t. She was perched on the railing, looking out into a yawning space of nothing. I forced myself to keep my eyes on her.
“Jill? Listen, I know it must seem—”
“No, you don’t. You don’t know how it seems at all.” Her voice was oddly patient, as if I were the child. The nail gun lay on the deck by her feet.
“Anyway, I know you hate me. Because you think I’m not good enough for Sam. And now you’ve got another reason.”
“Jill, I don’t—”
“That I killed my own father.”
And there it was, as pretty a confession as I’d ever heard. I sat on the steps with the camera in my lap. She hadn’t seen it; I hadn’t brought it out here for any particular reason. I’d had it in my hands and never thought to put it down, that was all.
“I don’t hate you,” I said. She made a skeptical face.
Truth time: “Or not the way you mean, anyway. But there's something I don’t understand. Your mother still has her gun, she says. So …”
The gun business just didn’t compute. “So what did you use to get Charmian down those cliffs and into the cave?” I gestured toward her feet. “Not the nail gun. You didn’t bring anything back up the cliffs with you, but here it is.”
She looked at me, her surprise genuine. “Mom has a gun? Oh, that's funny. That's a real scream. I never even knew it. So I never needed … but Uncle
Wilbur has lots of guns,” she explained. “And ammunition. Everything I needed.”
She stayed with my brother awhile, Lillian had remarked.
“I never meant to hurt him. I just went out there to get one of the guns, to use to make Charmian show me where the gold was on the map she found. I wouldn’t have hurt her with it, either,” she added earnestly. “I tried to get her to go back out of the cave when the water was rising. But she wouldn’t.”
“I see.” Charmian hadn’t agreed with Jill's assessment of her own harmlessness, apparently. Nor did I. But I was beginning to feel differently about this girl, nevertheless.
“Uncle Wilbur came around the corner of the trailer and surprised me, that's all. The gun went off, I thought I’d killed him. Then I got scared.”
“So you ran.” Instead of calling help for him; Charmian had been right. Jill wasn’t harmless.
Still, as I sat there I got less of the sense of the malignant criminal I’d thought Jill must be, and more the impression of a sad, screwed-up sixteen-year-old mess.
“I don’t know what's wrong with me,” Jill said from the high railing, her tone conversational. “All my life I was more like my dad, that's all. Bad, like he was. Wanting it all. Not like Mom, I mean. She's got a lot on the ball, actually.”
I looked down at the camera in my lap. Anything I said could be the wrong thing. “But you were in the middle. Between them.”
She glanced gratefully at me. “Right. When he hit her, when she screamed at him for it. When he cut her, that time. Gave her that scar. I had to pull them apart, call the cops.”
Suddenly I felt like the world's biggest jerk, because all at once I realized that I’d had it all wrong. “So is that why you wanted to go back to Boston? To keep him from coming up here?”
She nodded minutely. “It was the only thing that ever worked to keep him away from her; me being there. Even if he didn’t want me there, it kept him focused on something but her.”
“But … why didn’t you just say so?”
“To who?” she demanded, suddenly angry. “I tried to tell it all at the custody hearing. But nobody ever listens to me.”