The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  On the fourth morning I found him sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, in the big old barnlike kitchen with the tall maple wainscoting and the high, brilliant windows. He was drinking a cup of coffee and looking at a set of papers, registration forms for the upcoming year at Shead High School. Carefully, in the labored but rigorously correct block printing that, at age ten, he had finally managed to master, Sam had filled in all the spaces except one.

  Parent’s signature, the line read. “I think,” Sam said, “that you should sign this.” So I did.

  And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

  3

  George Valentine came up the back steps, wearing a black cap with Guptill’s Excavating lettered on it in orange script. Dark-haired and with the milky-pale skin that downeast Maine people have been passing on for generations, George had the stubborn jaw, diminutive build, and sharp, banty-rooster bearing of a man who, if he did not always have a lot of other people’s problems to solve, would chronically be creating a lot of them for himself. As it was, I had been depending on George since practically the day I moved here, and while I was not convinced that he could walk on water, I thought he would probably take two or three steps before he went down.

  “Miz Tiptree,” George said, slapping his cap against his leg and stomping snow off his boots. Outside the sky had gone grey; to the west, past Carryingplace Cove and the Moosehorn Refuge, loomed a wall of clouds as blue and heavy as lead.

  “George,” I began, “I can’t explain this. I don’t even know who that man is. I just found him a few minutes ago and Ellie went out there to make sure he’s really dead, but—”

  Just then Ellie came back, looking pale and oddly shaken.

  “H’lo, Ellie,” George mumbled, and if he’d been wearing his cap he’d have tipped it gallantly at her. If he’d been wearing a cape, he’d have spread it across a mud puddle for her, too, and if any dragons had been present he’d have slain them or died trying.

  “Hi, George,” she said, breezing past him. George said privately that Ellie was still the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, and Ellie said privately that she had survived thirty years unmarried, and thought she could stand another thirty years the same way, but if she did get married it would certainly not be to that tongue-tied, beer-drinking, pickup-driving, gimme-cap-wearing little Eastport clam warden, George Valentine.

  I did not point out that George was also a part-time police officer, and thus a very responsible young man in town, since in Ellie’s opinion this was only a ploy to get his beer-drinking buddies out of whatever trouble they might, and by Ellie’s report habitually did, get their own damn-fool selves into. Somewhere along the line, I thought, George Valentine had said or done something that marked him in Ellie’s book as no-account, and that, in Ellie’s opinion, was the end of it.

  Now his mouth wobbled as in her presence it tried and failed yet again to form a simple English sentence.

  “Jacobia,” Ellie said, “I’m going home. Mother’s got a doctor visit to go to and a hair appointment at Shirley’s, and Dad’s got his lunch at the Happy Landings.”

  When she wasn’t at my house, Ellie spent much of her time taking care of her aged parents, for while her ferociously independent mother still insisted on driving the car and her father kept in touch with his broker, in other respects both old people depended utterly upon her. Today, Ellie had promised to do driving duty, since her mother could not take her dad to his weekly social group while at the same time getting a blue rinse put into her white hair.

  Ellie dropped the pepper-seed packets into her coverall pocket and swept crumbs of potting soil from the kitchen table, dusting her hands over the wastebasket.

  “I’ll call you later,” she said, sounding oddly detached, “and see how things turned out. I couldn’t,” she added, “do anything for him.”

  This did not come as a surprise, but the look on Ellie’s face did. Everything okay? I telegraphed wordlessly at her, and her gaze back at me was as loaded with meaning as the clouds barreling down out of the mountains at us were full of April snow.

  “I’ll talk to you,” she repeated, “later.” Then in a burst of cold air from the back door, she was gone.

  “Have a nice day,” George managed at last as the door closed, but when he turned back to me he was all business again.

  “Now,” he said, “about this body.”

  I don’t know why I suddenly wanted to stall him. The dead man felt all at once like a dreadful embarrassment, the sort of thing no good Eastport housewife would ever let happen. Ellie’s look bothered me, too; her eyes, ordinarily as clear as spring water, had been full of the old, hard-bitten Yankee secretiveness you still run into now and then in places like this, mingled with what I thought was a plea for help.

  George pulled the storeroom door open and our little black Labrador retriever, Monday, made a beeline for the forbidden area, rolling a defiant eye at me.

  “Go on, you knucklehead,” George said, “get out of here,” but she ignored him, flinging herself into the storeroom and locating the scent of the mysterious visitor without delay. Her tail began wagging in the joyous frenzy she reserves for human beings of the unmet persuasion; to this she added the canine version of a buck-and-wing, her nails clicking delightedly on the ancient linoleum.

  And then she stopped, her tail curving down like a lowered flag. She stared at the body for a moment as if to make certain of its condition. Finally she turned and walked back out of the storeroom, into the kitchen, and I heard the soft shushing of the sleeping-bag material in her bed as she turned around on it and lay down.

  “Well, that’s a body, all right,” said George. He looked at the door leading outside, which was closed but unlocked, and at the floor, across which someone had tracked snow. The storeroom was too cold for it to melt, so it lay there in the shapes of boot prints.

  “Miz Tiptree,” said George, “do you have a Polaroid camera?” For while he was indeed a tongue-tied, cap-wearing, beer-drinking, pickup-driving little Eastport clam warden, he was also no fool. I fetched the camera while he called Bob Arnold, the Eastport police chief, and told him what we had found.

  “We don’t need the ambulance, and we don’t need sirens,” said George. “And we don’t need any hurry. Sand trucks aren’t out yet, and it’s snowin’, and this fella’s not goin’ anywhere.”

  I wished he hadn’t said not to hurry. Except in emergencies, Bob Arnold had two speeds—slow and reverse—which after being in Eastport a while I’d found I liked a lot. Bob would think it over before letting his heart beat if he could, which meant he tended to make good cop decisions. Under his slow, non-confrontational scrutiny, guys who would otherwise have charged him with their hats flying and their arms windmilling ended by being driven home peaceably in the back of the squad car to sleep it off. The next day they wound up greeting him on Water Street, too, just as cheerfully as you please, once their hangovers had ratcheted down a notch.

  But now Bob was going to take his sweet time, and I wanted that body out of there, pronto. For one thing, nothing makes a place look so decrepit as a body. Also, the body in question didn’t seem to have an ice pick in its head anymore, and where that had gotten to worried me. The size of Ellie’s coverall pockets, for instance, sprang to mind.

  “Could be worse,” George said. “Could be summer.” He said it the Maine way: summah. “We’d have to get ice.”

  “Here’s the camera.” He took it and, without looking at it, lifted the flash mechanism. It struck me that he had done this sort of thing before, which I suppose should not have surprised me. Not all Maine law enforcement consists of rounding up the good old boys out carousing on a Saturday night. A week earlier, a man in a township so remote that it didn’t even have a name had been charged with double murder, for burning a mobile home with his aunt and uncle in it. And when the fire marshall investigated, he found that in addition to cutting the phone wires and dousing the place with kerosene, someone had nailed the do
or shut.

  George aimed the camera at the boot prints. “Too bad Ellie had to go,” he said. “I sure like Ellie.”

  My heart hardly jumped at all in my throat. “I like her, too. She’s been a friend since the day I came here. I don’t,” I added, wondering if my voice sounded as strained to George as it did to me, “know what I would do without her.”

  The boot print nearest the dead man had finally begun melting. A trickle ran down the sloping floor into the corner where he lay. An inch above his ear, a small purple hole showed through his hairline; from it ran a thin red track along which the hole had bled, across his forehead and onto the floor.

  George took a picture of the hole, and a picture of the blood track, and a picture of the puddle on the linoleum.

  “It’s good,” he said, backing up to frame the whole scene, “that Ellie takes care of her parents the way she does. Otherwise they’d be in a nursing home. ’Course it’s her dad, mostly, that she does it for, but still.”

  “Yes,” I said foolishly. “Very good.” I was babbling, and I couldn’t stop. “Of course, it’s good that her parents have money, too. Or Ellie would have to get a job.”

  George crouched by the body, wrinkling his nose at the pack of cigarettes showing from its shirt pocket; George has asthma, and he hates cigarettes like poison. “Don’t happen to know who this is, I guess.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  He touched the man’s sparse strands of silvery hair with his fingertip. Someone, I decided, had come in and taken the ice pick, and gone out the back door. As I thought this, George got up and opened the door, aiming the camera at the single set of footprints leading to it. The footprints were filling up with snow.

  So much for that idea. The problem was, I couldn’t think of any good reason for Ellie to have taken that ice pick, but obviously she had, and saying so could get her in trouble. On the other hand, no one else had seen it but me.

  “I wonder,” George said, “where the ice pick went.”

  I just stared at him.

  “Head wounds bleed,” he explained, “but a puncture wound won’t till you take the weapon out. That’s why you never pull the knife out of a stabbing victim, if it’s in. Ice pick,” he added, “makes a little round hole like that. Or a tanner’s awl.”

  He pointed. “See that gash?”

  It was a long, jagged cut in the dead man’s scalp, half an inch from the less dramatic but more deadly little puncture.

  “That bled straight down his head; he was upright when he got it. Somewhere else, or there’d be more blood right here. But see, you can tell by the way this other trickle ran, he was down when the weapon got pulled from the main wound. Or he’d have bled toward his neck, the way the scrape did, not to the side.”

  George turned the body over. The dead man was in his sixties, with light green, half-open eyes and white, bushy eyebrows. His nose, which was pushed to the side from pressing against the floor, was large and had been handsomely shaped. At his throat was a blue-and-red-striped silk tie with a bit of dreadfully familiar gold jewelry glittering in it.

  He looked like old money of the kind I used to meet regularly with back in my previous career, trying to persuade it to snuggle down safely in blue-chip securities wrapped up in charitable remainder trusts, and it hit me all at once who this guy must be; Eastport is lovely, but the fabulously rich were not yet flocking here, or at least not in great numbers.

  Only one was doing much flocking here, in fact. “Threnody Mcllwaine,” I said.

  George nodded glumly. “You knew him?”

  “No. I just know he’s a friend of Ellie’s father, and I’ve seen him from a distance. But that’s who wears a tie pin shaped like an infinity symbol with a dollar sign crossed over it.” It had been in Fortune magazine.

  I wanted to sit down, but there weren’t any chairs in the storeroom. “George,” I said, “when I found him, there was an ice pick in his head, and I’m afraid Ellie took it with her.”

  Threnody Mcllwaine was one of the fifty wealthiest men in the world, a corporate raider so aggressive that it was said, only half jokingly, that his limousines ought to fly the Jolly Roger. It was all in the Fortune piece I’d recently read about him, along with his shameless tie pin.

  No way were we going to have a nice, quiet little Eastport police investigation. By tonight, the news of Mcllwaine’s murder wouldn’t only be all over town; it would be all over the globe.

  Which meant Ellie needed help. “Oh, hell,” George said, “I thought you two looked a little hinky. Guess I’d best get on the horn to Arnold again.”

  He made a careful, experimental jumping motion on the floor; it sprang up and down vigorously. “Better call Tim Guptill, too,” he said, “see if he can get over and put a few jacks in, brace these boards up. Going to be a lot of people tramping in and out of here.”

  And so much for Ellie’s prediction; on the other hand, Maine weather has a way of establishing its own priorities. “Um, maybe not,” I said, glancing out the window.

  Snow on Moose Island is not as common or plentiful as it is on the mainland. But when we get a blizzard, it is the kind that awakens human genetic memories of snow: fat white flakes falling thickly and determinedly straight down, piling up in driveways and dooryards, deepening in drifts and closing the roads so swiftly that the plows may become trapped in the public works barns before the operators can slog their way over from homes and businesses, to get them running.

  An ominous creaking sounded from the century-and-a-half-old rafters. “You know, George,” I said, thinking about the weight of a couple of feet of snow on the roof, “maybe you’d better call Tim Guptill, first.”

  The winter had been freakishly dry, allowing me to think that I might really squeak by until spring, but now the snow was coming down fast. I had the clear mental image of a dump truck, unloading a ton of white.

  “Tell Tim,” I added, “maybe he should hurry.”

  4

  Back in the eighties, I was a money trader for one of New York’s largest financial institutions. Unlike most traders, I made versatility my strong suit: betting dollars against Deutschmarks, selling pesos against pounds sterling, squeezing the last fraction of a percentage of profit out of a momentary spread between rubles and drachmas, and playing chicken against the legendary yen masters, faceless syndicates who moved blocks of Japanese currency across the trading wires with what some said was inhuman, even supernatural skill.

  I earned a lot of money at that job, and nearly ruined my digestion. By eleven each morning the office corridors were filled with currency traders rushing to the lavatories to upchuck their breakfasts; when I caught myself thinking about buying Maalox in large, institutional-size bottles, I decided to pack it in before I, too, became what was known on the street as gut-busted.

  Next I became a financial advisor to the wealthy, which some might say is also an anxiety-provoking line of work. Rich people get rich and stay rich by caring about money, and the richest ones care about it a lot. I once met a dowager who dressed like a queen and whose face resembled your sweet old grandmother’s, who was later arrested for beating her husband with a stick, injuring him quite severely, because she thought he had cheated her out of the return deposits on a case of Hire’s Root Beer bottles.

  But the super-rich are as little lambs when placed up against an ex-Wall Street money hustler, equipped with a take-no-prisoners mentality and fully accustomed to the piquant sensation of having half a billion of the bank’s favorite dollars burning a hole in her trading account. I found that advising the well-fixed set suited me fine, especially after I got married and had Sam and the bottom dropped out of the money business.

  Well, you couldn’t expect the world’s governments to sit quietly while packs of hyenas savaged their currencies, could you? So by the late eighties they began building in safeguards to make money’s value reflect more closely what went on—productivity, national revenue, other real, at least putatively measurab
le factors—and this went directly against the whole underlying idea of money trading in the first place, which was to make it reflect whether or not somebody felt lucky.

  I certainly did. My clients paid huge fees, in return for which I kept them from having to pay the IRS even more. Meanwhile, currency reform sent thousands of my ex-colleagues trudging back to graduate school, or worse, out into the imploded job market (the swishing sound they all heard was their employment prospects circling the drain), and I was happy not to be among them.

  Or at least I was happy until I learned that besides being a brain surgeon and the father of my ten-year-old son, my husband was a lying, cheating, son of a bitch with a stone where his heart belonged.

  Fortunately, I had not spent all that time on the currency desk for nothing, or in the confidence of flinty-eyed tycoons with smiles on their faces and larceny in their hearts, either. By the time I discovered the obligatory bit of black lingerie stuffed into my husband’s coat pocket, I was an expert not only at getting blood from a stone, but at making it spurt bright green cash.

  5

  I couldn’t very well not tell Sam about the dead body, which I was reluctantly coming to think of as our dead body on account of its having been in the house for hours and hours, but I didn’t want to upset him or worry him, either. So when he got home from school that afternoon, I sat him down calmly and explained to him that there was a deceased person in the storeroom. I said that the care of a human being’s physical remains was a very special duty, and the two of us should try to think positive thoughts about the departed, and maybe even pray for him, and that the presence of the body was also an opportunity for Sam to consider the immense preciousness of life.

  “Wow,” he breathed happily when I was done, “a stiff!”