Home Repair 04 - Repair to Her Grave

by Sarah Graves

  And it wouldn’t have gone over well, anyway: Judge, I’ve got to live with my repeat-offender father, so that he won’t slice my mom up with a box-cutter again.

  Oh, sure. “So you went out to North End that morning. Your mother followed, I saw her go. And …”

  And what? It was the next part I couldn’t quite picture. Had Lillian's ex attacked her, and Jill intervened?

  I didn’t have to ask why Jill had made a point of telling Lillian where she was going, whom she would meet. I already knew that now; it was because Lillian's reaction was so important to Jill. The way mine was to Sam.

  The pounding on the door stopped.

  “Tell him if he comes out here, I’ll jump right away,” Jill said.

  I shouted to Bob. Lillian's face showed in the darkness behind him, at the foot of the outside stairway.

  “Jill,” she said pleadingly, “I—”

  “Say one more word and I’m going right this minute,” Jill threatened, her voice wavering near tears suddenly. “I mean it, Mom. There's nothing you can do. Because I’m up here, I’m calling the shots, so you just keep your mouth shut.”

  About what? Because sure, she was a real mess, and considering what she’d been through in her sixteen years, I had to admit I didn’t think a lot of it was her fault.

  But there was more in her voice now than the guilt-ridden, hysterical bossiness of a seriously distraught kid. Something … as if they both, Jill and Lillian, knew something I didn’t.

  “Jill,” I said, “Sam's going to feel very bad about this. He really cared a lot about you, you know. There must be at least something good about you, for him to feel like that. Some part of you that deserves another chance.”

  But this was the wrong tactic, too. “Yeah, his good opinion of me just lights up my life,” she sneered.

  In the moonlight, her swaying body cast a thin shadow on the cedar decking. “You listen to me. You know what I’m like? I’m like a picture somebody's drawing, they wreck it, and they should tear it up and start over. If Sam liked me, he's stupider than I thought, got it?”

  A little flicker of intuition seized me; I glanced down at Lillian. Swinging like a loose sail, Ellie had said of Sam, and Jill was nearly the same age as he was. “Unlike your mother, who is worth saving? Don’t you want to be around to help?”

  No answer. I looked at the camera. Why had Jill put it in the bookcase, I wondered, instead of taking it upstairs with her? It was, I thought, a sort of keepsake to her: something that had belonged to her father. But why hide it?

  “Jill, why are you telling me all this? If there's nothing I can do, I mean. If you’re going to just end it?”

  “I wanted someone to know, that's all.” Her tone remained stubborn; hanging on to the little, proud part of herself that she had left. “I just wanted someone to know.”

  “Yeah.” I could understand that. Sitting there trying to come up with something to say in reply, I pressed a button on the camera in my lap. Not for a reason; just fiddling with the thing.

  A two-inch video display lit up on the back of the device.

  And suddenly everything was different yet again. “Jill?”

  “What?” Distantly, as if for all but the very most practical purposes—pulse, a blood pressure—she was already gone.

  I stared at the picture on the display, not believing it: a small, extremely sharp color photograph. A dateline in the corner of the screen told me when it had been taken: date and time.

  Then Jill saw it. “No!” she shrieked, lost her balance for an instant, and swayed. “Give me that! Give it to me, you—”

  It was a picture of Lillian. Rapidly, I clicked through all the images on the disk: her face, getting closer and closer. The scar all down one side of her face, ruddy with emotion, and the pictures one after another, like a mean joke.

  He must have known she hated it and you could practically hear the guy laughing as he took the shots, firing it at her as if it were a weapon.

  But she had the last laugh because in the final picture, the nail gun was in her hand. You couldn’t see his face, but you could imagine the look on it as he realized what she could do.

  And then she’d done it. She must have grabbed the camera as he staggered, in case it should be found with his body, tell the truth of how he’d died.

  And at whose hand. “Jill, I see that you mean to sacrifice yourself. You feel like you’ve done so many bad things. So why not confess to this one, too, and then die—so your mom can have a life, right? Presto, everything taken care of.”

  But I still couldn’t figure out why Lillian kept the camera and the disk with the damning photographs on it.

  Until I remembered: Lillian was like me. Low-tech, out of the stream of electronic progress. The two of us were a couple of stones on the banks of the river of progress as it went rushing by. Which meant:

  She didn’t know how the camera worked any more than I had, and what she’d needed was to be sure those images were absolutely unrecoverable. And maybe—just maybe—she had wanted to gloat over them, too.

  But finally she’d come to the only truly reliable solution: she’d started the woodstove though the night was warm, and gotten it blazing.

  All the high-tech in the world wouldn’t survive the inside of that woodstove. Then Bob and I had arrived, whereupon she hadn’t had much time to hide the camera, so she’d simply shoved it behind the old books and put her game face on:

  Thank God you’ve come. We would give Jill a talk-ing-to, she must have thought, and then she could finish what she’d started.

  But Jill didn’t know Lillian had the camera at all. And with our arrival she had come to a decision of her own.

  “I thought it went over with him,” she said, staring at the camera. “But everything happened so fast, and I was crying, and I didn’t see it. I kept thinking that his body would wash up and then they would find the pictures. I was so scared. But she had it all along, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. And eventually you decided she was safe, didn’t you? Until we drove up here tonight. You thought we were after her.”

  She nodded. Suddenly I wanted to put this whole evening on rewind and start over, but of course I couldn’t do that, either.

  “What I’ve got here is proof of who really killed him, Jill. And you know it. Your mother was going to burn the camera, but we showed up, so she didn’t get the chance. Still …”

  Under the circumstances I thought this could still turn out all right, I was about to say. A history of abuse, violence, and criminality: I felt sure a good lawyer could help Lillian Frey out of the trouble she was in.

  But Jill didn’t give me a chance to say any of that. “Give it to me,” she wheedled. Her voice turned threatening. “Or I’ll tell you something you’ll really wish you didn’t know.”

  “Wow, Jill. Way to win me over.”

  You had to hand it to the kid: even teetering on the edge of a railing, pitiful and wretched as she was, she could still make you want to give her a push.

  But I hadn’t spent all those years of my life dealing with another monster of emotional arm-twisting for nothing. “You’re going to tell me that you slept with Sam's father. You’re going to say that was how you really got his wristwatch. Right?”

  Rage twisted her face. And pain; humiliation. Seeing it made me stop, put the film on rewind at last.

  Made me say the one thing I should have said to her in the first place: “Ever since Sam met you, Jill, I’ve treated you like a thing, like an obstacle in my way, nothing more. I never really saw you as a person at all. And I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

  Because she was a twisted little brat, all right, but she was also a scared kid; even Victor's stolen wristwatch was only a bid for attention, a plea for help.

  As I spoke she looked straight at me, and I’d like to think it made a difference, what I’d said. I like to think she already had let go of the railing with her other hand.

  It would be nice, thinking that.
/>   Wicked nice. But wishing won’t make it so.

  She let go with her other hand. I rushed at her, screaming something, I don’t even know what—

  —as Bob Arnold hurled himself at her from behind, from the darkness at the other end of the deck.

  “No,” she sobbed, heartbroken as he hauled her back up. “You should’ve let me go, you don’t understand …

  But I did. Bob Arnold, too.

  And so did Lillian. When we got Jill to the ground, Lillian was standing there, looking as if all the blood had been let out of her and replaced with embalming fluid.

  Her scar was dead white in the moonlight, like a lightning bolt down the side of her face. In her hand were a man's wallet and some car keys. Stolen with the car, I supposed.

  “Here,” she said, dropping them.

  “Lillian,” I said. “It's going to be …”

  Okay. Yeah, sure it was. She wasn’t listening, anyway.

  She looked at Jill with … what? Regret? Apology? I couldn’t tell. “I’m so tired,” she whispered.

  Then I saw what was in her other hand, close by her side.

  Too late. “I’m sorry,” she told Jill. And then, before we could do anything to stop her, she shot herself with that old Colt pistol she kept. That cannon, I’d called it. She was dead by the time we got to her.

  12

  It was midnight, but the lights were still on in the kitchen and parlors when I pulled into the driveway. Wade came out to the yard to meet me, and threw an arm around my shoulders.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” I’d called him from the hospital, told him the nuts and bolts of what had gone on.

  Basically, Bob Arnold had signed a petition for Jill Frey's involuntary temporary commitment, and a judge had gotten out of bed to grant it. But after the ninety-six hours specified in it were up, I had no idea what would happen to her.

  Even if no charges were brought, I doubted Wilbur Mapes would be judged a fit guardian when she was released, and I felt like somebody who’d just dropped an unwanted dog off at the pound.

  “Wade, I couldn’t just bring her home.”

  “No. Don’t beat yourself up. Some jobs need professionals.”

  Still, I couldn’t get her face out of my head: through the window of the van that had come to take her. She’d put her fist to the glass as if to pound on it, then let it fall. I couldn’t hear her, but her lips were moving: Tell Sam I’m sorry.

  We went up the porch steps. “Bob went through

  Lillian's desk while we waited for the ambulance,” I said. “It was all going to crash down on her: her ex had gotten the custody order appealed.”

  He didn’t want Jill and probably couldn’t get her, but he wasn’t going to let Lillian have her without a big fight, either. “And she had money troubles, more than we knew. It costs way more than she was making to live the way she lived.”

  Then she’d killed someone, and while Bob and I were trying to save Jill, Lillian had realized that I had the camera. “Love and money and the end of her rope,” I said. “Like Jane Whitelaw.”

  Same old song. And much as I knew it was probably not a good idea, I knew, too, that whenever Jill got out of that clinic, I was going to be there. Counseling, therapy: possibly something could still save her, and I was going to try to find it. I was going to make Victor help, too, whether he liked it or not.

  Because maybe it was the same old song, but somebody's got to write a new verse, now and then.

  Somebody's just got to.

  “You know, I keep thinking,” Wade said slowly, “about all those years ago. When Jared Hayes was alive and none of us had even been born yet. Then it was his turn to live. And now …”

  Now it was ours. “Let's do it, Jacobia. Let's just go ahead and get married. As soon as we can.” He opened the door.

  “All right,” I said calmly, amazed that in the end it was as easy as that. We went into the house together.

  In the phone alcove, the little red light on the answering machine was blinking. I pressed the button and it was the cousins from New York, the federal fellows, wanting to know if they could visit again this summer: two weeks in August.

  From the phone I could see into the dining room where a lamp burned, illuminating the Elvis painting. In it he was still young and handsome, a touch of pale blue putting a glint in his hair and his grin rakish. Painted on velvet, frozen forever in Day-Glo acrylics, he was not yet the sad, sick old man his life had made of him at the end.

  Spread out on the table like jewels at his feet lay Ellie's finished quilt, all bright geometry and careful handiwork in red and marine blue. I thought a minute and then I erased the message on the answering machine: sorry, guys. Maybe next year.

  In the kitchen, Sam looked up. Wade had filled him in on the evening's events. Now Wade went upstairs to his workshop.

  I sat in silence as Sam put the kettle on and made cups of tea. Finally: “If I hadn’t gone out there tonight …” I began.

  “If I’d never gotten involved with Jill …”

  “If I hadn’t been so stubborn, so worried you were turning out like your father …”

  “If only I’d listened.” Monday padded in, settled in her dog bed.

  “You planning to say anything more to him?” I asked.

  To Victor, I meant, about Jill Frey. Sam understood.

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “Besides, he already knows I know. He didn’t mention it to me, but you know Dad. What he's got of a conscience is written all over his face.”

  I thought about leaving Victor there, wriggling on the hook. It would’ve been poetic justice. But in the end I couldn’t. There was enough grief and guilt in Eastport tonight.

  Enough to go around. Besides, something about the decision I’d just come to with Wade made hitting out at Victor pointless.

  Even more so, I mean, than before. “Sam. Things didn’t get as far as Jill wanted you to think. Between her and your father.”

  He glanced at me, unable to keep the relief out of his face. “Yeah, huh? You know that?”

  “Yeah. I know that.”

  He considered. “It's complicated, isn’t it?”

  The house felt… empty. It was gone, that occupied feeling as if any moment the doors would bang open and the windows slam up and down. Whatever had wafted in and out of the old rooms—

  I just wanted someone to know. The sense of many lives lived within the old walls still remained. But that unhappy particular presence, wanting and waiting …

  Gone. “Sam, your father is a very complicated and screwed-up guy,” I began. “But…”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “But that's my dad, huh?”

  He was silent a moment. Then: “Heck. Maybe Maggie and I will go over to his place tomorrow, help him move some of those books of his out to the clinic. Probably he could use a hand with some of the heavy lifting.”

  Couldn’t we all. And some of us were lucky enough to get it, weren’t we? Some of us, like me.

  “This other thing, though …” Sam said, meaning the trouble between his father and himself, and in his voice I could hear him letting go of it.

  Just letting go. A breeze drifted in, smelling of the sea at night: cold salt water and the place, invisible from shore, where the sky begins.

  You can’t see it until you get there.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels featuring Jacobia Tiptree are set.

  If you enjoyed Sarah Graves’

  REPAIR TO HER GRAVE, you won’t

  want to miss any of the exciting books

  in herHome Repair Is Homicide

  mystery series. Look for

  THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE,

  TRIPLE WITCH, WICKED FIX,

  WRECK THE HALLS, MALLETS

  AFORETHOUGHT, TOOL & DIE,

  NAIL BITER, TRAP DOOR, and

  THE BOOK OF OLD HOUSES

  at your favorite bookseller's.<
br />
  And turn the page for a tantalizing

  preview of theHome Repair Is

  Homicide mystery, UNHINGED,

  available from Bantam Books.

  UNHINGED

  A Home Repair Is Homicide mystery by

  SARAH GRAVES

  Chapter 1

  Harriet Hollingsworth was the kind of person who called 911 the minute she spotted a teenager ambling down the street, since as she said there was no sense waiting for them to get up to their nasty tricks. Each week Harriet wrote to the Quoddy Tides, Eastport's local newspaper, a list of the sordid misdeeds she suspected all the rest of us of committing, and when she wasn’t doing that she was at her window with binoculars, spying out more.

  Snoopy, spiteful, and a suspected poisoner of neighborhood cats, Harriet was confidently believed by her neighbors to be too mean to die, until the morning one of them spotted her boot buckle glinting up out of his compost heap like the wink of an evil eye.

  The boot had a sock in it but the sock had no foot in it and despite a diligent search (one wag remarking that if Harriet was buried somewhere, the grass over her grave would die in the shape of a witch on a broomstick) she remained missing.

  “Isn’t that just like Harriet?” my friend Ellie White demanded about three weeks later, squinting up into the spring sunshine.

  We were outside my house in Eastport, on Moose Island, in downeast Maine. “Stir up as much fuss and bother as she could,” Ellie went on, “but not give an ounce of satisfaction in the end.”

  Thinking at the time that it was the end, of course. We both did.

  At the time. My house is a white clapboard 1823 Federal with three full floors plus an attic, forty-eight big old double-hung windows with forest-green wooden shutters, three chimneys (one for each pair of fireplaces), and a two-story ell.

  From my perch on a ladder propped against the porch roof I looked down at Ellie, who wore a purple tank top like a vest over a yellow turtleneck with red frogs embroidered on it. Blue jeans faded to the color of cornflowers and rubber beach shoes trimmed with rubber daisies completed her outfit.