The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Watching me, Arnold seemed to follow my line of thinking, and it made him mad.

  “Come with me,” he growled, heaving himself up out of his chair. “I want to show you something.”

  21

  Dying in winter is a troublesome business in Eastport. Saturated by fog and by squalls blown in from the North Atlantic, overlaid with ice for weeks at a time, the island’s soil—and it really is an island, connected to the mainland only by the one narrow causeway—freezes hard as the granite ledge beneath, requiring that the dead be committed not to the earth but to the mausoleum in Hillside Cemetery. From this fact the serviceberry bush received its name, for when the tiny white flowers of the common shrub are in bloom, we may begin holding graveside rituals for those who have passed away from us since autumn.

  Waving the reporters off curtly, Arnold backed his squad car out of its angle spot outside the storefront, made a U-turn in front of the fish dock, and headed back up Water Street toward Dog Island. On our way we passed the white clapboard Quoddy Tides building, home of the easternmost newspaper in the United States, then climbed the long hill past the entrance to the Deer Island ferry and into North End, where two-story wooden row houses gave way to frame cottages and then to the wide grassy bluffs overlooking Harris Cove.

  When we got to the cemetery, Arnold pulled onto the shoulder. Ahead, now invisible in the mist, lay the lighthouse at Deer Point with Indian Island beyond and the Friar Roads to its south, to our left the Western Passage leading up to the mouth of the St. Croix River and the distant hills of New Brunswick. The fog had gobbled snow at the rate of an inch per hour, so that the yellow meadow grass and the black-cherry canes of rosa rugosa had already begun showing through the drifts.

  “I’m really sorry about George having to turn in his badge,” I began. It was what I’d gone down to talk to Arnold about; George had seemed so horrified by my question that I thought I’d better mend some fences.

  “You didn’t do anything.” Arnold broke his silence angrily. “You didn’t go off and do any damn-fool thing, get all liquored up out there in Colorado with your buddies, smoke yourself some pot, get caught with enough of the stuff so possession with intent would stick like stink on a skunk. Dammit, I’ve known George all his life.”

  He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket and rolled the car window down; it was against the rules to smoke in the squad car, and besides, he was in the habit of not leaving smoke smell for George to suffer in.

  “It wasn’t even his. The pot the cops found in the car, one of his buddies already had a felony pop. George took the weight.”

  “You knew about it?” It was against the rules to make a cop out of a convicted felon, too.

  Arnold was silent a moment. “Yeah, I knew,” he admitted. “George told me about it when he applied for the job. I told him I didn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought about it in Augusta, the job was his, and if we caught flak about it, we’d handle it when we caught it.”

  He shook his head. “Show you what a damn fool I am. I even went out and talked to Mcllwaine one time myself, see if he could maybe use his influence, help George get a pardon. Mcllwaine had reach in the statehouse, out in Colorado. And in just about every other damn state, I guess.”

  “What happened?”

  Arnold made a face of disgust. “Didn’t have any more luck with him than Alvin had. Oh, he talked a good game. Nothing ever come of it, though.” He dragged hard on the cigarette.

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, blowing smoke in a stream. “Somebody asks me a question, I’ll give an answer. Otherwise, all of those state guys can go piss up a rope. Bad enough George’s lost his badge. And I’ll tell you another thing, he didn’t kill anybody.”

  A breeze stirred up, shifting the mist and dropping it, so that the yellow summer cabins on Harris Point materialized for an instant and vanished again, like a magician’s trick.

  The same thing seemed to be happening inside my brain: a hint of something and then not. Or something that ought to be there but wasn’t.

  “Aw, hell, Jacobia.” Arnold broke the silence. “I’m sorry I got so mad at you. I guess those investigators’ll know about George’s trouble, anyway. They get on a thing like this, they run everyone through the computer.”

  Right. I had it: how?

  “Arnold, do you know the joke about the thermos bottle?” I asked. “Why it’s the most miraculous invention in history?”

  Arnold turned his long-suffering face to me, as if in light of the foolishness that had gone on so far, this was just par for the course. “No,” he said patiently. “Why is it?”

  “Well, all a thermos bottle does is keep hot things hot and cold things cold,” I said. “The miracle is, how does it know?”

  A grudging smile twitched the corners of Arnold’s lips. Out on the bay the mist had thickened to rain: showers marching in angled lines toward the shore, greying the water’s surface.

  “What if somebody else knew George was in trouble while he was away? Somebody other than Mcllwaine, I mean.”

  Mcllwaine himself was too canny a wheeler-dealer to talk George’s problem around, here or away. He might not help if there wasn’t enough percentage in it for him, but he’d keep it under his hat, in case he ever needed Arnold to keep something quiet in return.

  Arnold frowned. “And killed Mcllwaine just when George was around, hoping he would get blamed for it? Knowing he’d get looked at hard, because he’s got a felony record?”

  “Maybe knowing the whole thing, Arnold. The record, and that Mcllwaine’s death was going to help George out. Knowing it would look like George had a wonderful motive. But not,” I added, “knowing what Ellie would do. Her confession would have been an unexpected piece of luck for somebody.”

  He put the cigarette out by holding it into the rain, then tucked the butt into his cigarette pack. “Awful dicey. Too many things would have to go just right. Besides—”

  “Yeah, but it looks like they all did go just right, doesn’t it?” I interrupted. “That is, if we’re assuming neither Ellie nor George did it.”

  Which we were: I could see by his face that Arnold would suspect George of murder when pigs flew, if then.

  “Huh,” Arnold replied. “I guess that’s true enough. If you were patient, you could bide your time, wait for your chance. Some time when George was there to get suspected, and when you could do it without being noticed, yourself.”

  Then he shook his head, as something else seemed to occur to him. “But come on, sneaking in and out of that house while there were people in it. And anyway—”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the chance came along, and somebody grabbed it. Then the question isn’t how much somebody planned. The question is, how did somebody know about George?”

  Arnold sat considering this, but he still just wasn’t going for it. Below us the new section of the cemetery, called Bayside, spread out: marble monuments jutting up through the melting snow. Here and there among the marbles stood stacked bricks of sod, showing the final destination of folks who had died over the winter.

  The marbles weren’t the only things that were as hard as rocks around here, I thought impatiently, eyeing Arnold’s head.

  “Look at that cut work,” he said in a distant voice, indicating a monument a few yards away. “Not too many stonecutters around can do that anymore.”

  The monument, in polished black marble, showed the name and dates of a local boy lost when a dragger snagged up and capsized off Grand Manan. Below the stark facts, the stonecutter had created—in perfect, lithographic detail—a dinghy with her oars shipped.

  Arnold put his hands atop the steering wheel and looked over them to the water. “You know, after my father died, George buried him here. In February, two years ago this week.”

  “But you can’t dig …” I began, but Arnold went on as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “Dad had an
awful horror of the mausoleum, of being shut up in there with all the other bodies. Tried to hold on until the ground thawed, but in the end he couldn’t. And George, he’d shot the breeze with my old man enough to know all his stories.”

  He took out another cigarette and lit it. “He’d been buried alive, my old man, in the war over in Germany. A bunker got blown up. All his dead buddies around him, pressing on him in the dark. And rats, he said. Lots of rats.”

  Arnold shuddered, shook it off. “Dad made me promise not to winter him over in the mausoleum, and I said I wouldn’t. But I didn’t know how I was going to keep that promise. I just said it to give the old man some comfort. ’Long as he was alive, I didn’t have to keep it. And the old man knew that, of course. Fought for every damned breath.”

  “But then he died.”

  Arnold nodded. “Then he died, and jeez, it was cold outside. Worst February a lot of us had ever seen. Next morning George went up to Calais and rented a backhoe, brought it out here. Got down three feet, hit rock ice, dropped some fertilizer and black powder charges in the hole, dug it the rest of the way.”

  Out on the water, the big ship Star Verlanger resembled a toy ship, making way for Head Harbor and the open sea.

  “Next day,” Arnold went on, “we had the graveside service. Only winter service I ever remember in Eastport, and when it was over George hauled the backhoe to Calais again. Cost him an extra hundred bucks, get it back late, not countin’ what he’d paid out to hire it, rent the flatbed.”

  Arnold shook his head, remembering. “Said he didn’t want to miss the old man’s last party, and he wouldn’t take a dime, not that I had two dimes to rub together, then or now.”

  He pointed. “That’s Dad’s stone right over there.”

  It was a small white granite obelisk: all, I supposed, that Arnold had been able to afford.

  “Dad never spent a single night in the mausoleum,” he said, “rubbin’ shoulders with a bunch of other dead bodies. And I didn’t break my promise, on account of George Valentine.”

  More promises: the island seemed full of them today, and people kept them, here. You couldn’t vanish into the anonymity of a mass of people, and pretend you hadn’t given your word. In Eastport, there wasn’t a mass of people; just you and your neighbors, every one of whom knew your name and where you lived. It was yet another reason I was determined to keep plugging away at this: not only because Ellie was my friend, but because I had given her my word.

  Arnold pulled the car around the paved circle at the end of Dog Island and headed it back uphill, toward town. Rain spattered the windshield.

  “You know,” he said, “when you came to town, people wondered about you. Here’s a woman with a kid, buys a big old house. Pays cash, she’s got no job and no husband. That’s food for thought in a town like Eastport.”

  For gossip, he meant. Personally I didn’t mind my neighbors knowing my business, which was lucky since if you burp at one end of Moose Island, someone will start mixing up a Bromo-Seltzer for you at the other end.

  “But you settled in real well,” Arnold went on. “And when Wade Sorenson took to you, that was a point in your favor. People around here think a whole lot of Wade.”

  “I’m glad,” I said drily, “I’m getting such a high approval rating.”

  Arnold smiled. “You’re doing okay. The thing is, there’s some things people here won’t tell you, or at least not right off.”

  Belatedly, I began sensing what one of those things might be. He nodded, knowing I was getting it.

  “Oh,” I said, deflated.

  “It’s a good thought, there maybe being somebody in town who found out George’s deep, dark secret, used it in some complicated plot to frame him up for murder. But it depends on George having a deep, dark secret, doesn’t it?”

  He pulled into his parking spot in front of the police station. “The trouble is, just about everyone in town knows about George’s drug bust in Colorado. Everyone who’s from here, that is. Just not,” he finished gently, “many people from away.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “Well.”

  “No one talks about it much ’cause they know that if word got off the island, George couldn’t be a part-time cop anymore.”

  He shut the ignition off. “Have to take some crap about it now, I suppose. Kinda doubt they’re going to send a firing squad all the way from Augusta, though, and if they do, we’ve probably got ’em outnumbered.”

  He seemed entirely unperturbed by the prospect. “George was awfully upset about my knowing what happened,” I said.

  “He likes you. He’s worried you’ll think less of him. He knows that in bigger places, sometimes people do.” Arnold turned his calm, assessing gaze on me. “So do you?”

  “No. Of course not. He’s George, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Good.” His eyes sought the middle distance for a moment, and I guessed he was thinking about that granite obelisk.

  “That’s how I feel, too. He’s George, and he didn’t kill anybody. And if you’re thinking about shifting suspicion from Ellie to George just to get her out of trouble, think again. I won’t stand for it, and she wouldn’t, either.”

  Nor would I; even thinking about going down that road was about as attractive as deciding which kitten to drown. The trouble was, at the moment I couldn’t think of any other options.

  He pulled the keys from the ignition, then frowned as an official-looking car pulled in alongside of him. “Hell. I bet that’s the woman from the attorney general’s office, called up earlier. I’d better get ready, hear some big-city nonsense.”

  We got out. “Anyway,” he finished, looking over the hood of the squad car at me, “I’m sorry about the way it happened with Ellie going, the timing of it. I couldn’t do anything. And I appreciate you trying to help.”

  He didn’t sound particularly sincere about that last part.

  “Right,” I said, and then I remembered.

  “Arnold. You telling me about that hole George blasted—it reminded me.”

  I wasn’t sure how to put it, then figured there wasn’t any good way. “Is anyone around here missing, um, any dynamite?”

  He eyed me narrowly. “Yeah. Fundy Construction warehouse called me, couple days ago. Crate and some radio signalers. Why, you know something about it?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe. I just overheard something funny, not sure what it means. I don’t,” I lied hastily as his expression darkened, “know where it is. I’ll tell you about it later, okay?”

  I nodded at the dark-haired, blue-suited young woman who had already stepped from her car and was sticking her hand out at him in brisk, no-nonsense fashion.

  “Yeah,” Arnold said, not letting me off the hook despite the woman’s obvious impatience. “Yeah, I think you better.”

  Then he turned to his visitor, and it wasn’t until I was walking home through Peavey Park, picking my way among patches of slush between the bandshell and the red brick library building, that it hit me: Arnold had missed something.

  If I didn’t know George’s Colorado drug bust was common knowledge, maybe somebody else hadn’t realized it, either. Someone like me, from away, who hadn’t been told.

  Someone like Nina. I nearly turned around, but instead I continued uphill toward the now-untenanted VFW Hall. It was a massive, cedar-shingled 1820s mansion on a corner lot, once glorious but now in a sad state of decay. In the rotting eaves beneath its clipped gables, pigeons nested profusely, and the tall windows of its third-floor ballroom resembled blinded eyes.

  On moonlight nights, an apparition was said to appear in one of those windows, a spectral figure called the Green Lady who glowed the same otherworldly color, it was said, as the radium dial on an old wristwatch. But now in the dull afternoon the windows were blank and lusterless.

  Arnold wouldn’t want to hear any more of my theories. He had told me so, as nicely as possible. Still, I kept thinking about who had a way to know—perhaps from talking with her husband—t
hat George Valentine had a troubled past, maybe even that George wanted Alvin to inherit big-time. Someone with her own motive for wanting the victim dead.

  Nina Mcllwaine, I thought, filled the bill perfectly.

  Approaching the corner of Key Street, I turned quickly to avoid being seen by the reporters still hanging around the Whites’ house, making my way in by the alley to my back door.

  By the time I got there, I was in a hurry to get inside, so I nearly missed the bit of paper caught in the antique mail slot, no longer used officially now that I have put a mailbox on my front porch. Only its pale color against the dark green of the door made me spot it, and pluck it from the slot as I let myself in.

  Shutting the door quickly to keep from being spotted by any intrepid newspersons, I unfolded the thing, expecting a request to contribute to a bake sale or an invitation to a potluck supper.

  But it wasn’t any of those. The note was on lined, colored paper, the kind you can buy in tablets at Leighton’s Variety Store, the writing in ballpoint, shaky and obviously disguised; it was the penmanship, I thought, of a right-handed person producing cursive script with the left.

  Or vice versa. I blinked at the note several times, unable to believe that I had actually received such a thing, then caught myself glancing around guiltily as if merely touching the hideous little missive were a shameful offense.

  Mind your business, it said. Or you will be the next.

  22

  “Got a letter?” demanded little Sadie Peltier. Eastport’s youngest and most troublesome juvenile delinquent had pushed open the door without knocking and was suddenly at my elbow.

  “Lemme see,” she said eagerly, snatching at it.

  I pulled it away, in no mood for Sadie and her fresh ways. “Did you see who put this here?” I demanded.

  She shrank back. “No,” she denied exaggeratedly. “I was over there at Mrs. White’s house. Ellie got arrested yesterday. The cops came and hauled her away.”