The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Well.” Wade finally spoke as we continued down Washington Street toward a row of nineteenth-century red brick storefronts and the pea green water churning beyond them. “That’s a motive, all right. Ellie thinks the sun rises and sets on old Alvin. I can see her getting mad about it.”

  “I wish,” I said, “it was only that.”

  He pulled the Toyota to a stop on the street outside my house, glanced in the rearview to make sure the snow-plow wasn’t coming, and looked inquisitively at me.

  “Alvin also says Mcllwaine promised to leave him some money,” I said. “A lot of money.”

  Wade closed his eyes momentarily at this further piece of bad news. “Ellie believed it?”

  “Alvin says she did. He only told her about it recently. But he says George Valentine also knew that when Mcllwaine died, there would be something set aside for Alvin. Something big. Seems Ellie and George have been seeing each other again, recently, on the quiet. Or,” I added, “as quiet as you can be here.”

  At the end of my driveway loomed a huge pile of burlap bags, each filled with construction gravel, that the truck from Eastern Building Supply had unloaded while I was out shooting. I made a mental note to let George know they had arrived, as they were for a project he was working on in my cellar.

  Meanwhile Wade and I went on sitting in unhappy silence, watching an unmarked state cop car pull up in front of the Whites’ house. Three men and a woman got out, one officer in uniform, the others wearing sober business attire.

  “Money solves problems for people,” Wade allowed regretfully. “Or they think it does.” His tone expressed his own opinion: that money might raise a sunken boat, but it wouldn’t bring back the guys who’d drowned on it.

  “Uh-huh.” The state people went up to the White’s front door, knocked, and were let in by someone I couldn’t see.

  “If Alvin could afford to hire full-time people to help with Hedda, maybe Ellie would feel she could get free of Hedda. Maybe,” he added, “even take up serious with George again.”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  There had been, Alvin said, an argument between himself and Threnody Mcllwaine, yesterday. It degenerated to shouting; Ellie couldn’t have helped but overhear. Then Mcllwaine went out to the pantry, where the ice maker was, for another drink; he liked his eye-openers in the morning, though Alvin had stuck to coffee.

  When Mcllwaine didn’t come back, Alvin thought he’d changed his mind and gone away angry. Alvin had wanted Mcllwaine to make good on Alvin’s loss, seeing as he felt Mcllwaine was responsible for it, but Mcllwaine had refused.

  “George was working there yesterday,” I added unhappily. “He could have overheard the argument, too.”

  The uniformed officer came back out of the Whites’ house, unholstering his radio and speaking into it, then waiting by his car for a second squad car to pull up.

  “If he did overhear, he’d have realized,” Wade agreed, “that the little boat he was maybe hoping for was sinking.”

  He rested his hands on the steering wheel, thinking aloud. “Ellie turned her back on him, hard, when they broke up. No sense wanting what you can’t have, I guess she thought. But if her folks were taken care of, that might change, he could’ve figured.”

  “And the only way to refloat that particular boat, now that Alvin had lost his financial holdings, was over Mcllwaine’s dead body, with the money he was supposedly leaving Alvin. Either one, Ellie or George, might have worked that out. And so will the police,” I added.

  From the second squad car emerged a young Asian man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses. A blonde woman, clearly his assistant, carried a large, crush-proof metal equipment case and looked deferentially to him as they went up the sidewalk, another uniformed officer following. All three newcomers accompanied the first uniform into the house and closed the door behind them.

  As they did so, the Bangor TV van we’d seen earlier pulled up, follow by another van and three late-model sedans with sun-faded, weather-buckled “Press” placards on the dashboards. Some of the men and women in the vehicles got out and gazed around at the sweetly silent, snow-filled neighborhood of venerable old Federals and white clapboard Colonial houses. The rest began unloading sound and video equipment from the vans, scouting places to set it up.

  “But Ellie,” I finished, “is the one who’s confessed.”

  “Yeah, that’s the hell of it, all right,” Wade agreed grimly, watching the TV technicians train their camera-eyes on the Whites’ front door. With their bright winter outerwear flashing against the snow, the news crews looked as exotic as tropical birds, and as misplaced.

  “Is there anything else I ought to know about Ellie?” I ventured. “Any trouble she’s in, anything she’s got going on that she might not want to say right out? Something she needs done?”

  I couldn’t shake the renewed awareness that there was still a great deal I didn’t know about Eastport, and even about Ellie. Nor did I know what to make of her request. If she was confessing to keep the truth from coming out—or, god forbid, because she really had killed Mcllwaine—why ask me to try to figure it out?

  “Ellie has her head on straight,” Wade asserted stoutly, reinforcing my own belief. “I’ve known her a long time, and if that’s the feeling you got, it’s the one she meant to give. But I sure don’t know what she’s got in mind now,” he finished a little helplessly. “I wish I did.”

  One of the reporters began staring at the Toyota. I could see the idea of interviewing the neighbors forming in his brain.

  “How about driving me around to the back and letting me out there?” I asked Wade, and in reply he dropped the Toyota into four-wheel, energetically attacking the snow-choked alley. But the back door to my house, as it turned out, presented its own problem.

  12

  Hedda White didn’t like any adults but she did like naughty children, which was lucky for little Sadie Peltier. The youngster visited Hedda whenever Ellie was away or otherwise occupied, to load up on the sweets and soft drinks that Sadie was forbidden to accept and Hedda was forbidden to give, but of course Hedda did it anyway.

  Now as I slogged in from the alley through my side yard, I found Sadie swinging around the lamppost at the end of my back walk, licking a lollipop that she clutched in her grimy mittened hand and singing, I thought, a rhyming song to herself.

  From a distance, Sadie was charming: long, black ringlets, snapping dark eyes, a blue quilted jacket over a flowered dress, leggings, and loose galoshes, her urchin face smeary with lollipop juice. As I neared, though, I could hear the words that she was singing:

  “Dead, dead, smash her head, put dead bugs into her bed …”

  She glanced up brightly as she caught sight of me. “Do you know if Mrs. White’s still home?”

  “Well, yes, I think she is,” I replied. “But I don’t think she’s taking visitors right now. Besides,” I added, gesturing at the candy, “I can see you’ve already been there once today.”

  Sadie’s parents never gave her candy, in the hope (so far unfulfilled) that restricting processed sugars might put a damper on the little girl’s destructive energy. No cats or dogs had gone missing from the neighborhood yet, but people kept watch on them; Sadie was a terror.

  “I can go back,” Sadie informed me freshly, “anytime I want.” She took a tentative poke at me with the lollipop. “So there.”

  Her small nostrils flared in defiance, and it crossed my mind that I would be seeing that face on a wanted poster someday. Sadie’s parents were really very lovely people, and by all accounts at the end of their rope with the tiny sociopath they had produced, but that didn’t keep Sadie from tormenting the neighbors. Pulled flowers, broken fences, and smashed windows trailed in her wake like the path of destruction after a small tornado.

  “Because,” Sadie added, “I’m her helper. Anyway, I’m guarding this sidewalk. So you better get out of my way.”

  She let go of the lamppost, pretending to fall so she co
uld swipe the sugary-red, dripping lollipop at me.

  I stepped aside quickly as a smile of satisfaction lit her face. Then I feinted past her and hurried up the steps to the back door before she could strike again. There was no use arguing with Sadie, or trying to scold her. But if I ignored her, she would get tired of me and leave—eventually.

  The trouble was that with Sadie, eventually was never soon enough. If you chased her off, she found a method of getting back at you: a broken window, a tipped-over trash can, a scratch on your car. And no way, of course, to connect it to Sadie, except that for the next week or so the child would hang around you, sweet as cream but with those bright points of triumph dancing in her dark eyes. All I wanted was for her to forget about me.

  But Sadie’s attention, once captured, was as focused as a laser beam, and she had sensed my annoyance. For the next half-hour, as I laid the Bisley open on the kitchen table and got out the soft cloths and gun oil and began cleaning the weapon, and later when I came up from the cellar after locking the gun away, I could hear her stomping up and down my back porch.

  When I glanced out, impatiently and in spite of myself, I could see her, too: swinging the lollipop, kicking my steps, and singing the bug song at the top of her horrid little lungs.

  So that eventually, and even though I knew I ought not to, I went out and shooed her away.

  13

  An episode of family psychodrama was not what I was after later that afternoon when I finally headed out to the Mcllwaine house, a huge faux-Victorian eyesore too top-heavy with turrets, towers, gables, and other items of conspicuous architectural consumption, perched on the bluff at Mackerel Cove.

  But that was what I got, along with a creeping sense of unease that began when Nina Mcllwaine opened the door herself, greeting me like a long-lost pal.

  “Darling,” she exclaimed, enveloping me in a cloud of Joy perfume.

  Nina was a determinedly well maintained thirty or so, with dark, straight hair, gold-flecked brown eyes, and the kind of lean body that always reminds me of a switchblade, the product of careful diet and a long line of skinny ancestors. A white silk tunic, black trousers, and espadrilles completed her elegant appearance.

  “You are truly a courageous person to come out in the storm,” she said, welcoming me in.

  “It wasn’t so bad,” I replied, stomping snow onto the mat. I’d followed the town plow out County Road, squinting past the snow and the flapping of my windshield wipers to spot the turnoff for the cove road. A sudden downhill swoop led me along an inlet whose stony beach glistened wetly, with little waves slopping up to nibble the edges of the melting snow.

  Finally I’d reached the ornate iron gates that stood open at either side of the narrow private lane leading to the Mcllwaine compound: twenty acres of professional landscaping with tennis courts, a domed indoor pool, guest quarters, and a putting green. Mcllwaine’s own plow and truck kept the lane clear, so driving the quarter-mile to the house had been no problem. Still, coming from the deliberately plain style of Eastport, where gratuitous displays of wealth were about as welcome as a plate of bad clams, the grandeur of the compound made me feel like I ought to have a visa to get in.

  I wasn’t the only one hoping for entry papers. Around the gates huddled little groups of bundled-up reporters, squinting between the bars and hunching ineffectually against the wind, which must have felt razorish out here without any protection from the weather. They moved in on me as I pulled between the gateposts, pressed the small black button on the intercom, and announced myself, whereupon a fellow in an enormous hooded down jacket appeared from a gate hut just the other side of the iron fence, and waved me in, the reporters gazing hungrily after me.

  “Is kind you made this trip only for me,” said Nina in her heavy Eastern European accent, her face revealing nothing but eager avarice.

  The tie pin Nina wanted was in my pocket, but once I got into the tiled foyer I resisted handing it over at once.

  Aside from getting the pin out of my possession, this was perhaps my only chance to snoop further into the topic of Mcllwaine’s money, specifically why he had handed so much of it over to Alvin. So I did the only thing any reasonable, forward-thinking person would do under the circumstances—I barged in.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I murmured, pulling off my parka and handing it out for her to take.

  “Oh,” Nina answered, nonplussed, but then a quick recalculation occurred in her dark eyes. Moving to hang the parka on a coat tree among a rich-looking collection of minks and curly lamb, she hesitated at its damp aroma of dog; when Monday could get at the parka, it was her favorite bed.

  “Let’s just dangle it here for a while,” Nina said, finally dropping it on a doorknob. “That way, it be drying quicker. Now, what can I get you?”

  Having adjusted at once to my intention to stay, she made it seem she’d thought up the idea herself. “I can’t thank you so much for coming, you know,” she added.

  Despite my having met Nina a few times around town, her accent and word choices were still jarring to me, a weird mixture of central Europe and old Hollywood movies: Katharine Hepburn, I thought. Mcllwaine, I remembered hearing somewhere, had met and married Nina in one of those tragic, impoverished little countries whose precise borders and ethnic/religious identities the inhabitants are always killing one another about, apparently on account of having so little else left to fight over. That these wars have been engineered specifically to enrich strongman dictators and arms-dealers does not occur to them, mostly because—again deliberately—they are all too hungry, cold, and tired to be able to worry about it.

  Biting back the anger that assaulted me whenever I thought of this, I followed Nina past a hall table covered with silver-framed photographs into the living room, where a broad expanse of windows looked out over Prince’s Cove and across the bay to Campobello.

  “Everyone,” she announced a bit too enthusiastically, “look who’s there.”

  Beyond the windows, an elaborate wooden deck hung over the precipitous cliff atop which the house was built, jutting out into the emptiness as if thumbing its nose at the sheer drop. The latest snow squall was drifting down the cove toward the Narrows, looking like salt being steadily poured out in a stream.

  “Jacobia, you know Patty and Gerry,” Nina said, “my husband’s daughter and son-in-law.” She waved me into the sleek, modern room: white walls, wool carpeting, plushly upholstered furniture. There had been an attempt to make it look homey with expensive bric-a-brac, but there wasn’t a green plant in sight, or a pet, or a magazine, except for the six issues of Architectural Digest fanned out on the cherry coffee table.

  “Hello, Jacobia,” Patty Porter mumbled, her voice dull and her eyes puffy-red with weeping. A handsome, athletic-looking woman with big, all-American-girl features, a rangy build, and masses of wavy yellow hair held back by a covered elastic, she was wearing a navy warm-up suit and running shoes.

  “Gerry,” Patty ordered, “get me a new drink. This is watery.”

  Gerry Porter sprang alertly to obey, nodding a nervous greeting to me as he crossed to the drinks cabinet. Unlike Patty, he was an Eastport native, owner and operator of a gas station over on Route 1. He was also a fine mechanic and a good-hearted soul. It made me wince to see him jump at Patty’s command.

  “Hi, Jake,” said Bobby Taylor, grinning at me. He had a Coke in his hand. “Patty, you shouldn’t drink so much. It’ll make you feel worse.”

  Bobby was local, too, a painter and sometime carpenter, tall and sandy-haired like Gerry—probably some relation; there were more cousins on Moose Island than you could shake a stick at.

  “Oh, shut up, Bobby,” Patty retorted, grabbing the drink that Gerry had gone to pour for her. “What do you care? Everyone knows you’re happy Daddy’s dead.” She took a deep, consoling swallow.

  Bob shrugged and sent an amused, what-can-you-do? look at me, while Nina looked on but did nothing to halt the hostilities. Beside him, Janet Fox sa
t looking uncomfortable, staring at her hands and picking steadily at a cuticle, which had begun to bleed.

  “And here is Janet, of course,” Nina said at last, not quite able to disguise the dislike in her voice. Not that Janet was particularly likable.

  That’s not true, Patty,” she uttered just loudly enough to be audible. “You know it isn’t. You say those things to be mean.”

  Janet was small and dark-haired, with a delicately pretty face that was spoiled as usual by a woe-is-me expression, wearing her standard drab outfit of jeans and flannel shirt, as if she wanted to disappear. I knew her story as well as I did that of all the others in the room; in Eastport, gossip is the equivalent of a national sport, and no one needed a Fortune magazine article to know about Mcllwaine’s adoption of Janet when the girl was an infant—the magazine had called it, rather meanly, his only recorded act of charitable whimsy—or that her glum, obstinate search for her birth mother was the central preoccupation of her life.

  “I say it,” Patty retorted, “to be accurate. Someone might as well be honest around here,” she added, with a poisonous glance at Nina Mcllwaine.

  I crossed to the sideboard, examined the ranks of bottles, and selected the Laphroaig, whose smoky flavor I thought would go nicely with fumes of brimstone. At that point I still wasn’t quite sure how knowing more about Mcllwaine and Alvin would help Ellie, only that I found the combination of murder and half a million dollars very intriguing.

  “I’m trying,” Patty went on sloppily, “to keep you from making the same stupid mistake I did. He’s a drunk,” she said, jerking her head at Bobby Taylor, “and he only wants your money. That’s why Daddy didn’t want you marrying him. Daddy did care about you, even if you were only his adopted daughter. Not,” she added with another hate-filled glance at Nina, “that it’ll do you any good, now.”