The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Do not,” I commanded him in my best I-am-your-mother-and-I-control-your-allowance voice, “touch that telephone.”

  But it was too late; Sam’s ten best friends were programmed into the speed dialer, and for the next hour and a half I could hear his excited murmurings, interrupted by periods of silence during which he did his homework, and by tiptoeing trips to the storeroom door so he could observe and report the latest details of what was happening out there.

  Which, I am sorry to say, was not very much. Some men from Guptill’s had come over with jacks and crawled down into the space beneath the storeroom, set the jacks up, and began hauling on them, which was when I discovered that jacking a floor up is not at all the same as changing a car tire. When you jack up a floor, you are allowed to raise the jack a scant quarter-inch per day; otherwise you end up with nice, high floor jacks around which the house has collapsed. Also, no one had told me about the sounds an old house makes while it is being lifted. An antique house, as it turned out, sags because it wants to, and the unholy creaks and groans of agonized protest that I endured all afternoon made a dead man’s presence seem not only natural, but positively required.

  Sam hung up the telephone, and I heard him rummaging in the closet under the stairs. A moment later he appeared in the living room doorway with his cross-country skis over his shoulder.

  “Hey, Mom, the guys say it’s gonna snow three feet! And all my homework is done, so can I go out in it before it gets dark?”

  Sure, I wanted to say, and take the stiff with you. Special duty or not, I was feeling less reverent by the minute.

  Sam took my silence as assent; it was a trick of his, lately. First he hit me with some thoroughly mind-boggling request, like could he drive to Caribou to go ice-fishing? The other guys’ moms had already all said okay so could he please, please go, and he would only need the car for two days? And then while I was still struck dumb by the outrageousness of it, he went ahead and did it.

  Only this time he didn’t. “Unless,” he ventured, “you want me to stay with you. While he’s out there, I mean. The dead guy.”

  Occasionally, and by that I mean very rarely, a teen-aged boy will happen upon a perception so accurate, and react to it so sweetly and manfully, that it takes all the strength a mother has not to throw her arms around that boy and weep. George had gone down to the office on Water Street to file a police report, and after that he had traffic duty, because in the snow a few cars would be certain to slide off the causeway. In weather like this, his habit was to sit in a squad car at the causeway’s end until the tide went out, so that any drivers who did slide off the road would not compound their bad luck by drowning.

  “No,” I told Sam, “if you’ve finished your homework and left it out for me to look at, then you go on and ski.”

  For a sixteen-year-old, it was a very conservative request, and I was saving my ammunition; next time he’d be demanding to know if he could row to Deer Island, or go bear hunting. “Bob Arnold’s coming,” I added.

  I let my hand rest on his arm for the instant of contact allowed to mothers of teenaged boys. He was taller than I was, and solid muscle on account of all the outdoor exercise he got, and I remembered with a burst of nostalgia when he was a skinny little twerp. “Besides,” I said, “I think your dad’s going to call, and I want to be able to tell him you’re out.”

  Sam nodded. He’d been putting off discussing his college plans with his father, whose wish list included Harvard and Yale.

  “Thanks. Mom, do you think Dad will ever understand?”

  No, I thought. “Yes,” I said, “of course he will.”

  Sam’s own plan was for the local technical college, and a course in the fundamentals of boat building. He was looking forward to a two-day visit to the school, but had not yet informed his father of his intentions.

  “Go on, now. And be careful,” I called after him as he went out into a rumble of young male voices.

  “Be care-ful, Tiptree,” rose a mocking falsetto as they glided away in a mob down the snowy street. I recognized the voice as that of Sam’s closest pal, Tommy Daigle. “Don’t get hurr-urt.”

  He would, though, and probably soon; to my ex-husband, the technical school was about as real an education option as one of those earn-your-veterinary-assistant-certificate-at-home schemes they pitch on cable TV. In his view, Sam just didn’t try hard enough; never mind that Sam would have sat down in front of a freight train if he thought it would please his father.

  And then I was alone. All around me, the big old house seemed to hunker down against the coming blizzard; what we’d had so far was only the teaser. Reports out of Bangor and Augusta said Routes 9 and 1A were closed, which meant that about a trillion reporters were holed up in Holiday Inns and Ramadas, waiting to descend. I went around checking windows for drafts and plugging them when I found them, trying not to remember that what I saved in heating oil I was probably spending on rope caulk.

  Trying not to think, too, of a certain harbor pilot of my acquaintance, who if memory served was right now out on the icy water, guiding a freighter into port. It ain’t the fog that’ll do you, he’d said of his job, nor tides, nor the ledges, neither. It’s the wind. When the wind comes, look sharp.

  Another gust rattled the windowpanes. As real weather came on, the wind was rising and swinging around out of the northeast. By the time Wade Sorenson got the good ship Amaryllis within sight of the harbor beacons, it would be blowing a gale.

  I caulked the last window and started on the drafty doorways: tacks and felt weather stripping. One of the pleasures of fixing up an old house is knowing that you can never be finished; there is always another small task, a creaky floorboard or a leaky radiator valve, to keep your hands occupied and your mind from becoming the devil’s playground.

  A creaky floorboard, for instance, like the one on the other side of the storeroom door.

  Which was ridiculous; there was nobody out there but the dead man. Probably the jacks were making the floorboards creak.

  Only, not to the rhythm of stealthy footsteps.

  Steeling my nerves, stiffening my spine, and praying hard for whoever it was to go away, just go away and leave me alone, I yanked open the storeroom door. This, in retrospect, was probably the stupidest thing I could have done, but at the time I’d had it to the eyes.

  “What’s going on out here?” I bellowed, loud enough to bring Monday barking to defend home and dog chow. Seeing who it was, she gave me a look and ambled back to her fort beneath the dining room table, where she had been dismembering a rawhide bone.

  The bare lightbulb hanging in the storeroom swung wildly in the gusts from outside, hurling Ellie’s shadow against the walls and snatching it back before the door leading to the yard slammed shut. “Jacobia,” she said weakly, jumping up, and her tone broke my heart; Ellie never sounded weak.

  For an instant I thought of asking her why she had come in by the storeroom door. Then I saw the ice pick, glinting from beneath the body where she had been trying to hide it. The idea, I supposed, was that while Mcllwaine was still alive the weapon had fallen from the wound, or he had taken it out, and then he had rolled onto it. The theory might have flown—maybe he really wasn’t quite dead when I found him—if George hadn’t turned the body over, then turned it back. But now Ellie might as well have left the police a little note: Weapon Not Here Earlier.

  She might as well have signed it, also, because there would be fingerprints, and because I had already told George the truth.

  She saw it in my face. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’d have told him, too.”

  I went to the outside door, opened it, and peered out. The wind had dropped off, gathering its gumption for another blast. In the moment of stillness before I pulled the door closed again, I glanced across the yard to the pale lighted windows of the Whalen house, ghostly in the snow, and the arrowhead shapes of the pines forming a windbreak along its white clapboards. To the side, a low palisade fence separated my d
riveway from Victor Sawtelle’s trim, empty bungalow; Bath Iron Works was hiring, and Victor was bunking over there for the duration.

  The foghorn at West Quoddy Light honked in the dusk. It was only four-thirty, but the snow had pulled around us like a thick curtain, smelling of salt and woodsmoke. The red glow of the sanctuary lamp in Christ Church spread bloodily through the plastic-sheeted windows, diffusing onto the white lawn.

  One street over, Sam and his friends were having a snowball fight, their shouts muffled by the falling flakes. I latched the door, and the silence in the icy room was huge. “At least you’ve got the money to hire a lawyer.”

  “Not anymore.” She broke off staring at Mcllwaine and looked up at me, and I thought that if it came to a choice between the truth about the ice pick and the truth about the expression on her face, I’d take the ice pick.

  “Not after what he did. Threnody Mcllwaine,” she spat, “the big-deal expert. I wish I’d slit his throat for him, that’s what I wish.”

  Which was when I got the message, finally, or thought I did. “You know, Ellie,” I told her, taking her arm and guiding her through the passageway, sitting her down at the kitchen table, “you need to shut up.”

  I filled the kettle and smacked it onto the stove. “Because,” I went on, determinedly filling air time since if I did not she was only going to talk some more, which in her situation was about as helpful as washing cyanide down her throat, “you and I may be good and dear friends, and we are, but what we aren’t is married.”

  I slapped mugs onto the table. “And that means,” I said as she opened her mouth and I gestured sharply to make her shut it again, “that means I can be required to testify against you. Which naturally I would be loath to do, and I would go to jail to avoid it, except of course that if I did get put in jail, Sam would have to go and live with his father and I don’t know what might happen to Monday.”

  I flung tea bags into the mugs. “So don’t put me in that position any more than I am already.”

  Back in the old days, Ellie’s ancestors had made a living off the blockades intended to keep Americans from trading with the British, many of whom lived within sight of Eastport just across Passamaquoddy Bay. After a few skirmishes, both sides figured out what a silly waste of ammunition this was, what with the War of 1812 going on and all. Thereafter, the American traders began quietly allowing the seizure of meat, grain, and other delicious items much hungered after by their British neighbors—cargoes they just happened to have taken out for a sail, of course, just to give them a breath of fresh air—and the British traders in ports like St. George and St. Andrews bought the seized cargoes. Finally, the payments made their way back to the American traders, who promptly ransomed their boats and went home to start the process over again.

  All of which was of course very strictly forbidden, and subject to punishments including fines, confiscation of boats, and in the worst cases, being hung for the crime of treason, and this, if you ask me, is among the many historical reasons why downeast Mainers are such silent types: like navigating in the fog or knowing how to dress out a deer, it runs in their blood.

  Ellie watched me pour boiling water onto the tea bags, and waited for me to set out the sugar and cream, then dosed her mug liberally with each. Putting her face over the rising steam, she inhaled it gratefully, then lifted her mug and took a sip.

  “There,” she said, seeming to accept my warning. “That’s much better.”

  And then we said nothing, sitting companionably together while the windows rattled and the clock ticked and the woman in the portrait propped on the kitchen mantelpiece watched over us, her eyes luminous and intelligent. In the portrait she was wearing a white linen shift, shirred at the smooth, round neckline, and a strand of pearls. Her dark hair was beautifully cut to take advantage of its wave, and sidelit so that it shone like sun on water; her complexion was smooth and apparently without makeup, her expression serene but not dramatically so.

  There was nothing of theatricality about her, and nothing of impatience. She neither smiled nor frowned. She simply was, in that long-ago moment when the shutter snapped and the image of her became captured, to be passed down through who knew how many years and generations until one day, while sorting through a pile of age-stiffened draperies in a forgotten cupboard, I came upon her.

  No one knew her: not her name, or whose wife or mother or sister or cousin she was, or if my house had once been hers. She might have lived twenty years ago or two hundred, so timeless was her unspoiled serenity. I was about to ask Ellie again if she could think of anyone else in town who might remember, when footsteps clomped up the steps.

  Sam, I thought hopefully, or Wade Sorenson, back early from the boat. But of course it wasn’t, and now here was Ellie at the scene of the crime.

  “Jacobia,” said Bob Arnold, his round face ruddy with cold. Snow crusted his hat brim and the furry rims of his earflaps. “Hey, Ellie. Wicked bad out. Cars all over the side of the road.”

  He looked hopefully around for coffee as two more men came in. The insignias on their jackets said they were from the Washington County Sheriff’s Department and the Maine State Police. I shot Ellie a look to tell her to keep quiet; if she had anything on her conscience she could unburden herself later, preferably to an attorney, should unburdening prove necessary.

  But it was no use. Ellie looked at Arnold and smiled, her silence not bred in deep enough, or perhaps it was, but some long-ago pirate’s briny lies were bred in stronger and deeper. Cargoes are not only for trading, after all, but for heisting, and this is especially so for illegal shipments, and that was how Ellie’s forebears had made their bloody livings: by the hissing of steel cutlasses, at the dark of the moon, on nights so cold that rags of sea smoke trailed over the water like remnants of tattered sails.

  “I did it,” she announced. “I killed Threnody Mcllwaine with an ice pick, after he swindled my father out of a fortune.”

  The men looked wonderingly at her.

  “And,” she added in bold, ringing tones that I thought owed plenty to her rascal ancestors, damn their eyes, “I would do it again.”

  6

  “So they let her go home,” said Wade Sorenson. “That’s good. Makes good sense.”

  It was two in the morning, and the Amaryllis stood safe at harbor. From the dining room window I could see her glowing through the gale-driven snow like a beacon somebody has thrown a sheet over, her decks floodlit for the line-haulers laboring to make her fast.

  Waking from an uneasy half-sleep, I’d come downstairs to see whether Wade had returned from the water and found him at the dining room table, cleaning an antique Smith & Wesson revolver. The room smelled sweetly of gun oil but not, I noticed gratefully, of Hoppe’s No. 9 Bore-Cleaning Solvent, which is so awful I sometimes wonder why people bother shooting actual bullets; the stink alone could kill you at twenty paces.

  “Hi,” Wade said, reaching up to put an arm around me, and for a moment I just leaned against him. He had his own little bungalow down at the water’s edge, on Liberty Street, but in his quiet way he had recently installed a spare shaving kit at my house. Coming from Wade, it was a gesture akin to a gift of diamonds.

  I let my arm rest on his shoulder, and my head on his wiry hair. He smelled of soap, shaving cream, and the bag balm he used to keep his hands from cracking in cold weather; his body, squarish and solidly muscled from years of activity on and around the water, had nothing to do with workouts and everything to do with work.

  “Glad you’re back,” I said.

  “Glad to be back. Didn’t mean to wake you.” He squeezed hard around my waist once, then gazed up assessingly at me as if checking the status of some complex machinery that he very much wanted to make sure was operating properly.

  “You didn’t wake me.” I gestured at the table, unsurprised that he was still busy at this hour. A harbor pilot in the act of guiding a thirty-six-thousand-ton commercial vessel up to a cargo dock is one of the more wideawake pe
rsons you will ever meet, and he will stay that way for hours after a job. “What’s the project?”

  He grinned like a kid with a new Christmas present. “A six-shooter. Cowboy gun. 1876. Smith & Wesson made a zillion of them for the Russians, but it turned out a lot of guys here liked ’em, too. See, it’s a top-break, the barrel’s on hinges, opens down.” He broke open the most recent addition to his antique weapons collection and handed it to me, and I took it unhesitatingly.

  Which right there was pretty remarkable. When I first came to Maine I believed that if I even touched a gun, my right hand would shrivel up and fall off. Guns were for guys who drove old pickup trucks riddled with body rot, who took their girlfriends line-dancing on Saturday nights and beat them bloody-faced afterwards, who drank Lone Star and spat plugs of chewing tobacco and said things like, “Ma’am, you look vurry, vurry purty tonight,” while the jukebox played Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire.”

  And mostly, guns were for guys. But then I got to Eastport, and the first thing that happened was this: a skunk settled in under the porch. Every night at ten o’clock, that skunk would come home and direct an aerosol of the most astonishingly penetrating poison fumes I have ever smelled in my life, straight up through the floorboards of the house.

  Well, we just about died. You couldn’t think, you couldn’t sleep, the reek drilled into your sinuses and poured out through your tear ducts. It got so bad that Monday would run up two steep flights of stairs into the attic, which was as far as you could get from the skunk’s residence, and hide in a closet and howl.

  That was what I felt like doing, too. We tried blocking the skunk’s entry-hole with chicken wire, and after he chewed through that we tried filling it with bricks, which the skunk most definitely did not like, and his protest nearly gassed us to death. We bought one of those catch-and-release traps and were all ready to use it, only neither Sam nor I could figure out what to do once we captured the skunk, since neither of us owned a chemical warfare suit and the release portion of the program seemed likely to be fatal without one. We even thought of putting out a bowl of delicious (to skunks) antifreeze, so that he would drink it, stagger away, and die, but then Sam had a bad thought: what if he didn’t stagger away? What if he crawled up under the porch, into the wall, and decomposed there?