The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  So it was a skunk stalemate. He wanted to get rid of us so he could live in the whole house, and we wanted to get rid of him so that we could live in any portion of it at all; by now even the orange juice in the refrigerator tasted like wild animals, and people were beginning to look oddly at us when we went into the library or the grocery store, on account of the aroma we had begun radiating.

  And then one day a fellow came to the door, who said that his name was Homer—only of course he pronounced it the Maine way: Homah—and that he had heard we had a skunk problem.

  I didn’t quite fall down and kiss Homer’s feet, but I did bring him into the kitchen. I poured him a cup of coffee and gave him a sweet roll and begged him, positively implored him, to tell me how to get rid of the skunk.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Homer said, chewing appreciatively on the sweet roll. He swallowed. “I come ovah, late one night, and blow ’im to nevah moah. You can keep the cahcass if you want, or I can take it with me.”

  I told Homer he could keep the cahcass, and any others he happened to find on the property, at which he brightened. “There is,” he confided, “a nest of squirrels in your shed roof, fouling your attic ventilation.”

  But there wasn’t for long. One night soon after I met Homer, our whole neighborhood sounded like a battle between the Hatfields and the McCoys, and the next night we did not get fumigated by a skunk. It wasn’t a solution any animal-welfare advocate would have appreciated, but we enjoyed being able to go to bed without having to wear gas masks; soon even Monday would come downstairs without whining, and my eyes stopped resembling peeled grapes.

  So I had to rethink my attitudes about firearms, and without getting too deeply into the murky area of my childhood history—deeper, that is, than my knowing all the words to “Ring of Fire” must inevitably, I imagine, suggest—may I simply say right here that for one thing, the whole idea of shooting a varmint without having to pick the birdshot pellets out of it and eat it afterwards came as a revelation to me. Then in my fast-paced city-dwelling adulthood—before I came to Eastport to work on the house, relax, and just breathe in and out for a while—the word “shoot” got itself linked with such tabloid phrases as “convenience-store clerk,” “domestic dispute,” and “postal worker,” not to mention the ever-popular “gang-style execution” and the ubiquitous “romance gone tragically awry.”

  But here in Maine, I was learning very quickly, things were different. People had shotguns, rifles, and handguns of all descriptions, and mostly they didn’t shoot their neighbors, their co-workers, or their kids. Women didn’t blow their husbands’ heads off, men didn’t romp around the household threatening to add extra apertures to their wives, and generally if somebody wanted to use a weapon on someone, they bonked them with a telephone or smacked them with a two-by-eight, or in the tougher cases ran over them with their cars. Maine could be violent, especially in winter when people drank more—witness the trailer-home fire up there in the numbered township—but it was low-tech violence; for one thing, ammunition was so expensive. Guns, I decided, especially rifles, weren’t so bad, particularly during deer season when they put venison on the tables of people who otherwise couldn’t afford to eat meat.

  And that was where I had gotten to on the topic of firearms, on the morning—about six months before Mcllwaine died—when a big, burly fellow named Wade Sorenson waltzed into my life, carrying a six-shooter the size of a cannon and enough cartridges to re-enact the gunfight at the OK Corral. He was going, he said, target shooting.

  And at the confident look in his pale grey eyes, the soothing, unhurried sound of his big, deep voice, and the easy, no-problem expression weathered into his rugged face, I’d felt a bull’s-eye forming in bright, iridescent circles around my heart.

  Now Wade took the revolver back and closed the barrel up. “So how’d that happen? Them letting Ellie go home, I mean.”

  “Well, the state guys didn’t want to, at first,” I replied. “There was too much wind to drive anywhere by then, but they were all for putting her on a fishing boat to Lubec, and having someone from Machias pick her up there. Or calling in a helicopter, if you can imagine that. I don’t know who they expected would fly it, in this weather.”

  Ordinarily, Bob Arnold would have had to drive Ellie thirty miles to Machias, where they had modern conveniences like fast-food restaurants and jail cells, but because the sheriff’s deputy and the state guy were already here, Arnold said that one of them would probably end up doing it after the snow stopped.

  “Arnold could have put her in the lock-up at the Coast Guard station,” I said, “but that would have meant putting a seaman on duty there, and in an emergency he couldn’t stay with her.”

  Once they realized the tabloid nature of the situation—murdered billionaire; remote, snow-choked town; beautiful young suspect—neither the deputy nor the state officer had wanted to take custody of Ellie without first receiving further instructions from his superiors. A case with national publicity could kill you or cure you, career-wise, Arnold had explained, and in the event one of their agencies decided later to punt, they didn’t want to have created a tar-baby.

  “And since they couldn’t get a lawyer over here in the storm, anyway—”

  The district attorney in Calais had been notified, and had promptly passed off to the attorney general and his crack team of prosecutors and investigators in Augusta. The state police out of the barracks in East Machias would still begin the investigation, and a local assistant DA would file a complaint in district court, but all of that, Arnold had said, was just the opening act. In Maine’s two-tiered judicial system, district courts handle mostly misdemeanors, sending serious offenses up to superior court.

  “They read her rights to her, but they didn’t want to take her statement until she’d had legal advice,” I added to Wade. “So the way it ended up was, Ellie promised to surrender into custody tomorrow morning, and then she went home and the state cops went down to the Bay-watch, had dinner with Arnold, and went to Motel East for the night.”

  Which to me had been absolutely astonishing, but when you came right down to it, what else were they going to do? The town’s only attorney had made it off the island ahead of the blizzard, which made him about as accessible as the moon; snow alone probably wouldn’t have stopped anyone, but the wind was now truly ghastly.

  Meanwhile the phones in Eastport worked perfectly well—we are nothing here if not self-sufficient—but the mainland phones went out soon after Arnold had his chat with the district attorney, and Bangor and Augusta were both shut down for the night anyway—on the mainland, the storm was what old-timers called a gullywhumper, massive and paralyzing—so that even via radio the officers couldn’t get fresh orders immediately.

  “Not to mention what would have happened to her parents,” I went on, “if she’d had to go so suddenly, without any warning. The upset alone would have been awful for them.”

  And as Arnold pointed out, if Ellie didn’t mean to turn herself in tomorrow, why confess? It wasn’t as if she had a big city to vanish into, or even any way to get out of town. Besides, he’d told the state and county men stoutly, he’d known Ellie all her life and she’d never broken a promise yet that he knew of; he doubted she would start now.

  “So Arnold talked the deputy and the state cop into waiting,” I finished. “No one’s going anywhere tonight.”

  Actually, Arnold hadn’t precisely talked them into anything, but he can move block granite with his voice box when he’s motivated. Discovering that neither of the officers knew what their next move should be, he’d simply told them what to do, and they had done it as if by reflex.

  Wade popped the cylinder back into the revolver and tightened the catch-screw. “Nothing more to be done about it, then, for now. Things’ll start straightening out in daylight, I expect.”

  Wade’s idea of trouble was no land, no lifeboats, and a bilge pump operating as ballast. Boarding a big vessel preparatory to bringing it into port, he wo
uld step from the pilot boat’s open deck to a gangway up the vessel’s side. Sometimes the gang led to a hatchway and an enclosed stair. Sometimes it didn’t, and Wade scrambled up over a rolling sea.

  “I hope so,” I said. Upstairs, Sam had turned off his stereo and gone to bed hours earlier, tired out from skiing and exhausted from a long conversation with his father, which I had not after all been quick-witted enough to prevent, nor had the phones gone down early enough to do it for me. And then there was Ellie, who was clearly in terrible trouble, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  Wade looked up questioningly at me, seeing something in my face, then got up and put his arms around me. “Cat got your tongue all of a sudden?” he asked softly, and I nodded against him.

  He chuckled. “They’ll do that, sometimes. But they let loose when they’re ready.” He put his face against my hair. “Anyway,” he said in tones of quiet amusement, “the spoken word can be a highly overrated item.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. “A lot of times,” he went on, “words don’t even make sense.”

  He lifted his hand and moved it in a flying-away gesture. I could feel his muscles, as powerful as heavy-duty springs, through his flannel shirt.

  “You don’t,” he assured me, “have to bother with ’em anymore, tonight.”

  Whereupon a little clamp, tight and sharp-edged as steel, unpinched itself somewhere in my chest.

  Later, after he had cleaned up the newspapers and put away his gun things, we went upstairs, and for a while we said nothing that made sense to anyone but us.

  To whom it made perfect sense, indeed.

  7

  Just before dawn I got up and stood at the hall window, and watched the snow as it swirled on down through the streetlight.

  At this hour, when the house shoulders into a storm and the windows are rattling like snare drums, it is possible to remember how exposed we are, here on our little bit of rock out in the Atlantic. For that is where we sit; only the Canadian islands and Nova Scotia are farther out in the chilly ocean than we are. The Vikings even made it here in wooden boats, leaving runic artifacts not two miles off as the crow flies, in what is now Lubec.

  The Vikings were newcomers to Maine, of course, as are we. Before them were the Abnaki and the Etchimin, People of the Dawn and People of the Sea, and before them the mysterious Red Paint People. No one knows where they came from or what they believed, only that they buried their dead with red ochre and that their remains predate five-thousand-year-old shell heaps—remnants of much later native shore picnics—still found along the Maine coast. In all, it is believed that people have been living on Moose Island—one and a half miles wide, four and a half miles long, with an elevation of two hundred feet at its highest point—for perhaps ten thousand years.

  Which tends to put my little problems into perspective, but it didn’t this time.

  Downstairs, I found the issue of Fortune magazine that contained the Mcllwaine profile and settled on the sofa with it. Mcllwaine had originally been an Eastport boy, which explained at least in part why he made a habit of returning to the tiny town on the island just off the northeast seacoast. As a young man, the article said, he had gone to New York immediately after high school, swiftly displaying a cutthroat talent for business as well as the ferocity and drive for acquisition that, over the years, had become legend.

  He’d started out in the trucking game, short-haul transport and trash collection, mostly, but by the age of thirty he’d diversified so much, you couldn’t really tell what business he was in, only that it was all profitable. Now the Mcllwaine empire spanned the globe, with emphasis on mining, shipping, timber, and resort properties, although he would snap up anything if it looked the least bit vulnerable.

  Or if he could make it vulnerable. Skirting the libel laws, the Fortune writer managed to note that unions had a habit of getting out of the tycoon’s way; that house fires, car crashes, and sundry other instances of bad luck had a tendency to afflict his more stubborn opponents; and that his string of ex-wives, in particular, routinely refused comment about him. The exception, a fiery Bolivian beauty who had agreed to be the primary source for a book about him, had actually been on the point of traveling to New York to work with the author on the project when, on the eve of her departure, she was struck by a violent gastrointestinal illness and died, apparently after eating a bad oyster.

  The rest of the article had to do with the nuts and bolts of the business magnate’s major interests: board feet of lumber, rates of occupancy, short tons shipped, and outlooks for tourism in the various exotic places where Mcllwaine had put his luxurious resort destinations. The photograph showed him gazing out through the French doors of his Chicago mansion, across a slate terrace onto what looked like approximately ten acres of lawn manicured to the fineness of a putting green.

  On the terrace were two large Irish wolfhounds, relaxed and smiling with the illusory good humor of a couple of well-trained hit men. The wolfhounds’ grins, wide and predatory, were very much like Mcllwaine’s own as he posed for the photographer.

  Mcllwaine, the article said, had only two children: Patricia, the product of his marriage to his first wife, and Janet, whom he had adopted from a New York orphanage when she was an infant. His current wife—his sixth or his seventh, depending upon whom you believed; the Bolivian’s status, since her death, had apparently come into question—was “a young foreign-born beauty who manages the family’s social and charitable activities.”

  In other words, she went to parties. I had met Nina Mcllwaine briefly around town. About a year before the article was written, she had taken a fancy to Eastport and now spent most of her time here. Mcllwaine’s two daughters, Patty and Janet, had come with her, and Patty had even married a local fellow.

  But parties here were mostly of the church-supper variety, and I had no idea what Nina did with her time these days. Mcllwaine himself flew in and out on a regular basis, his Learjet cutting through the sky with a racket that rattled the dishes in every cupboard in town before settling on the island’s airstrip, which he’d had lengthened to accommodate the aircraft. Soon after Nina had indicated her liking for the place, he had built a house for her, putting up in record time a dwelling that in Eastport was the equivalent of the Taj Mahal, out at Mackerel Cove.

  I put the magazine down thoughtfully. In his career, a guy like Mcllwaine would have made enemies: bitter, even murderous enemies. Ironic, then, that he should have been done in by a woman with all the killing potential of an embroidered handkerchief.

  If she had, which despite her unfortunate remarks I did not believe for a minute.

  Wade had switched on a lamp when I got back into bed, and shadows gathered in the stamped tin ceiling’s wreathed acorns-and-oak-leaves pattern. A fleck of rust showed in one corner, hinting at a leak above; the third floor of my old house is still piped for gas lamps and chimney-flued for wood stoves, but it is not yet equipped with storm windows.

  Prybar, I thought automatically; a scraper and a sander.

  “Masking tape,” Wade added to my mental list as he followed my gaze. “And paint. Putty, and a putty knife. And glazier’s points, of course.”

  Of course. I closed my eyes.

  “You know,” Wade said after a while, “I’m thinking about what Ellie said. Making such a production of saying she killed the guy. And it reminds me how, in the old days, there were sardine canneries up and down the wharf. Big old buildings, with hundreds of people working in ’em.”

  I nodded against his shoulder, not making the connection but remembering the sepia-tinted photographs of long wooden structures jutting out over the tidal waters, supported by forty-foot pilings too thick to put your arms around.

  Wade’s voice was like the sound of an outboard engine idling, steady and slow. “People worked their whole lives in those canneries, cutting and packing, sealing cans, putting the labels on. Tin, you know. Soldered seams. A fellow could make a career of sealin’ the leaky ones, he had
a mind to.”

  He got up, and I settled into the warm spot where he had been. “Gradually, though,” he said, “sardines went by. Catch fell off, and people didn’t eat them anymore, or not so much. Canneries closed until there was just the one left, and that one had a steam whistle my great-grandfather used to tell me about.”

  He began pulling on his pants. “Whistle used to call people to work, sound the break, send ’em home at the end of the day.”

  I wondered if the woman in the portrait had lived here then. She looked too fine to be a cannery worker. As if replying to my thought, the open bedroom door swung smoothly closed and latched itself shut with a crisp, interesting little click.

  Wade tipped his head, smiling curiously. One day when he had been hammering on the attic hatchway, blocking off the drafts to the rafters that warmed up the roof and made ferocious ice dams of the melting snow, he had reached out for the nails and instead put his hand on a ribbon: pink, with tiny seed pearls sewn onto it. He’d put the ribbon in his toolbox to show me, he’d said, but when he looked for it again, it wasn’t there.

  “Anyway,” he went on after a moment, “my great-grandfather said that at the end of the last day, the foreman sounded that steam whistle for the final time, a great big mother of a blast. And as the sound faded, the boiler ran dry and the machinery went dead. And that was the end of the cannery.”

  There was a restaurant now where the cannery had been, out on the dock. Polished floors, and a grand piano with a fellow playing cocktail music, weekends.

  Wade finished dressing, and fastened his wristwatch.

  “A loud noise,” I said.