The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  Her face clouded; possibly Sadie had been told that the same thing might happen to her someday if she didn’t mend her ways.

  The confidence returned to her face. “Is it a love letter? I bet it’s a love letter.”

  Then she dashed outside again and, grabbing up some of the remaining slushy snow, crammed it wetly together in her hands and flung it at me.

  It missed, spattering against the outside clapboards, but in my state of mind that was no consolation. “Sadie,” I told her, “you’re a brat. Get out of my sight or I’ll wring your neck.”

  Just then her mother’s voice rose from the next street over, calling Sadie’s name in tones of hope and terror: hope that Sadie had not yet done something truly awful, and the realistic terror that any day now, Sadie would.

  “I’m going to tell what you said,” Sadie informed me. “I’m going to tell my mother you called me a brat.”

  “Do that,” I replied distractedly, looking at the note, about which the first question for me was not who, but why?

  “What an idiot,” I said in puzzlement, to myself.

  “Idiot!” Sadie shouted at the sky as she ran off, energized by this fresh bit of ammunition. “Idiot, she called me an idiot!”

  Once the sound of her voice had faded away, I put the note on the kitchen table and frowned at it. Aside from the melodramatic disguising of the handwriting and the shoddiness of the pastel notepaper, the very presence and message of the thing were silly.

  Whether or not I believed in Ellie’s confession, the police did; otherwise she would not now be in a courtroom. Trying to discourage my nosing further into the matter would only alert me—and perhaps the police, too, in the event I told them—that further nosing was warranted.

  Not only that, but how had anyone known I had been taking any interest at all?

  The whole matter was so perplexing that it took me a moment to realize: my eyes were watering, my nose was running, and a haze was filling the room with the smell of roasting chestnuts, if the chestnuts happened to be made of styrofoam. As I thought this, a piercing, intermittent howl of the type ordinarily used to signal nuclear reactor emergencies began blaring, driving all thoughts of notes or disguised handwriting from my mind.

  The smoke detector. I grabbed the fire extinguisher from its mount by the kitchen door. In old wooden houses there are few blocks to prevent flames from spreading quickly in the balloon-framed walls, so it pays to have an extinguisher within reach even when you are in the bathtub.

  Unfortunately, once I had it in hand I couldn’t find anything to shoot the extinguisher at. The air in the kitchen had thickened so fast that it was impossible to see where the fire might be; meanwhile, Monday came romping in from the dining room, expecting a biscuit, and got instead a snootful of smoke.

  Just then, luckily, Sam came home from school. “Yikes,” he said, and ran to call the fire department, then ran back to grab a coughing Monday and take her outside, while I alternated between flinging open windows and yanking open cabinets, drawers, and cupboard doors, aiming the extinguisher into them, then moving on like a SWAT team member trying to clear a building of terrorists.

  Sam ran back in and stopped. “You know,” he said, “that smell, it’s like …”

  His voice trailed off as he strode to the oven and opened the door, leaning back as a cloud of ghastly fumes billowed forth.

  “Cripes,” he said, grabbing a potholder and pulling out the object smoldering inside. It was a package of hot dogs from the deli counter at the IGA, wrapped in melted plastic and sitting on the melted stuff that used to be the hot dogs’ molded foam tray.

  “I didn’t,” Sam said, holding up his hands as the men from the volunteer fire department thundered up onto the porch.

  “I know you didn’t,” I assured him as they flung open the door and swarmed in, dressed in rubber coats and boots and their big, yellow fire hats, dragging heavy fire hose behind them.

  We looked at Monday, who had come in with the men to see what all the excitement was about, and to find out if firemen carried dog biscuits.

  “Nah,” Sam said, looking at me. “Couldn’t be. She wouldn’t cook them. Would she?”

  By now the smoke was beginning to clear away, and Sam had turned off the oven and the smoke alarm. I made coffee for the firemen, and offered them doughnuts, and apologized for bringing them out in the truck. They were very nice to me in return—George would have been with them, they said, but he had gone up to Calais; something about a load of gravel—but I knew by tonight it would be all over town that Mrs. Tiptree put meat in the oven without even unwrapping it, and forgot it in there, and jeez did it stink.

  Only I hadn’t. I hadn’t taken any hot dogs out of the freezer because we were having chowder, and I had already cut up the haddock pieces, sliced potatoes and onions, and remembered to buy pilot crackers. I hadn’t forgotten to turn off the oven, either, because I had let a casserole bubble over in it the night before, and I remembered turning the oven off the instant I smelled it.

  “Maybe it was the ghost,” Sam said when the firemen had gone and we were going around opening more windows, letting the breeze off the harbor blow the smoke smell away.

  “Maybe,” I agreed. But I didn’t really think so.

  I thought whoever left the note had also been in the house.

  23

  Back in New York, I used to believe that car phones were handy gadgets that allowed me to conduct essential business while speeding on a highway packed with road-rage-afflicted maniacs. But now that I have become a Maineiac myself, my car phone has become emergency gear; who knows when I might hit a moose?

  “He had,” said my ex-husband, “six months to live. Tops.”

  I was driving north along a curving, narrow stretch of Route 1 through Red Cliff, a bit of shoreline created by rose-colored granite being slowly beaten away by the sea; its nickname, derived from the only known case of stranger-murder in remembered local history, is Dead Lady Beach. To my right in the cove, a couple of fishing boats bobbed at their buoys near the remains of a herring weir, its thin poles sticking up out of the water in a crisscross pattern, it nets long rotted away.

  “Autopsy found an aneurysm as big as a grape,” said my ex-husband, “in his brain stem. Inoperable, and ready to blow.”

  Translation: Mcllwaine’s head had contained a blood vessel that was about to rupture.

  “Would he have known that?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s records on him. He had the full workup.”

  After Red Cliff came a straight stretch of two-lane: hills rolling away on the left, rocky farms and ancient Grange halls crumbling a stone’s throw from the pavement, which after the storm was mottled with salt residue like splashes of thin white paint.

  “But here’s the funny thing,” my ex-husband went on. “From the rest of the autopsy results, you’d think he was trying to kill himself. Big-time gastric erosion. The guy was an aspirin eater.”

  “So?” I was entering Calais, border town on the St. Croix River between the U.S. and Canada. Here fast-food restaurants, new motels, and used-car lots mingle with some of the loveliest old structures still standing anywhere. You’ll be driving along wincing at the gritty storefront of a down-and-dirty, no-frills plumbing supply outfit, then get smacked broadside by the sight of a two-hundred-year-old Federal boardinghouse, set on the original bit of sloping, unsidewalked street, its red brick mellowed over the centuries to dusky rose and its trim and foundation stones painted the color of the ivories on an antique piano. Seeing it is like falling suddenly through the viewer of an old stereopticon, and your breath is just taken away.

  “What?” I said, over the sound of my ex-husband’s voice droning on academically. “Sorry, I was distracted there for a minute.”

  “I said,” he replied with heavy patience, summing it up for me, “aspirin makes you bleed.”

  After the note and the fire—I’d called Arnold, and he had listened patiently but unenthusiastically—I’d had
to get out of town, off the island and away from everything, to sort my thoughts. Thirty miles of two-lane highway through a countryside dotted with saltwater farms, tiny crossroads villages, and the occasional glimpse of a bald eagle soaring overhead—along with a sense that if I wanted to I could drive straight on to Labrador and never be heard from again—didn’t quite assuage my restlessness.

  But it was a start. In town, I slowed past the old railroad station and the car barn where trolleys used to be housed, back when Calais had trolleys, and looked downriver to the site of the first European settlement in the New World north of St. Augustine, in 1604. More than a third of the settlers died over that first winter; in spring, the survivors moved away.

  “So,” he went on, “the weapon caused bleeding. In you or me, the bleeding would stop. We’d get a hematoma, probably need some surgery, end up with a droopy eyelid, a little facial paralysis, something minor. But in Mcllwaine, the bleeding kept on.”

  I just loved all the things my ex-husband thought were minor. No matter what might be annoying me at the time, a peek into his world always reminded me to be grateful that I could blink my eyes without assistance, close my mouth well enough to drink through a straw while not supporting my lip with my index finger. Probably if he’d been camped on the St. Croix that first winter, he’d have told the dying settlers that scurvy was a minor nutritional imbalance.

  “But wait, there’s more,” he said, whereupon the cell phone abruptly fritzed out.

  “Blast.” I smacked the handset down, knowing that it was his connection busted, not mine. Technology in Maine works wonderfully well, for the most part, on account of its not being swamped by so many users that it cannot work at all. Also, when something breaks here, there is somebody to fix it, and generally it is somebody who cares.

  I drove, and waited for the handset to beep. My ex-husband always calls again, unfortunately, and better his nickel than mine is the attitude I have developed about it.

  It happened as I was driving home, laden with items that can only be purchased in Calais unless you want to drive to Bangor: Eukanuba dog food for Monday, raw sunflower seeds, more than one artichoke at a time, ginseng and tea tree oil from the health food store. I never put much stock in herbs until I met Ellie, but she is gung ho about them, and the tea tree oil has done wonders for Sam’s complexion and the ginseng has a kick like a Kentucky mule.

  “Okay,” said my ex-husband, “the tracks of the weapon.”

  I blinked at the plural. “What?”

  “One entry, two angles. The first as the weapon penetrated, then a second track, shifted anteriorly.”

  “Translation, please.” Approaching the Perry post office, I slowed for a cherry-red Ford pickup with an Irish setter grinning out the passenger window, then made my own turn.

  “Somebody stabbed him in the skull,” my ex-husband said, “and then gave the weapon a second shove, harder. A lot harder.”

  “Criminy.” More pickups were pulled to the side of the road on Carlow Island, the bent figures of clam-diggers scattered on the glistening flats and the herring gulls wheeling above. Cormorants clustered on the rocks, black cutouts against the tide pools.

  “You got that right,” he said. “That second track was a monster. You owe me for this,” he added, which should have alerted me. “Anyway, is Sam around? I need to talk to him. He sounded kind of uncertain about himself the other evening.”

  “Mm,” I said, refraining from further comment. “I’m on the car phone.”

  But he was not to be deterred; it was payback time.

  “Then maybe I’ll come for a visit,” he said. “Next weekend. I’m seeing somebody, and I think she might enjoy a little rural charm.”

  I bit back several very uncharitable comments. “Fine,” I lied heartily; if he sensed any reluctance on my part, it would harden his resolve. “Come whenever you want. As long as you understand, I’m seeing someone, too. I wouldn’t want you to be surprised.”

  The silence that ensued while he processed this did my heart good.

  “Oh,” he said finally. “That’s great.” He was lying through his teeth. Until I came along, no one had ever dumped him before, and where women were concerned my ex-husband was the original dog in the manger, as well as the original dog.

  “What is he,” he went on, “some rustic practitioner with a sign hanging off the porch? I know you always went for doctors and lawyers, and there can’t be many of those way up in the sticks where you are.”

  He chuckled, and of course I could not punch his lights out over the phone. “He’s a harbor pilot. Drives big boats around dangerous obstacles.”

  “Oh,” said my ex-husband, losing interest. “Picturesque.”

  Yeah, well, picturesque this, I thought. I could hear people talking in the background.

  “Listen, I gotta go,” he said hastily. “Tell Sam I’ll see him this weekend, get his future straightened out for him.”

  “Oh, good,” I replied, pulling into my driveway, wondering whether it could be moved to the moon by next weekend, or perhaps to Aroostook County. Many of the roads there are one-lane and the logging trucks have right-of-way, and with any luck at all my ex-husband might meet up with one of them.

  “Listen, that might not be the best time,” I began, suddenly remembering something else going on then, although not precisely what.

  But he had broken the connection.

  24

  In winter, the trail to the overlook clearing on Shackford Head is icy and steep; the woods crowding in around it are filled with snow long after the rain has washed the rest of the island bare. Just below the meadow at the top, the ruins of a Revolutionary War fort run in a broken line between cedar and jack pine, slumping where the old stones have fallen amidst chunks of antique mortar.

  “I’d think Sadie did it, if it was only the fire,” I said. “Setting fires is the logical next step in her development; indoor fires, I mean. She’s already torched a dozen leaf piles. But Sadie couldn’t have written the note.”

  The narrow path opens suddenly onto water and sky; beyond, a scrub thicket ends in a sharp drop. Arnold had decided that I had left the hot dogs in the oven, probably to thaw them out, and that the note was some kid’s prank, even if not produced by Sadie.

  “So your theory is?” Wade squinted out over the salmon pens, which are rectangular floating docks below which thousands of hatchery-raised fish swim inside huge mesh cages. A small raft of eider ducks floated past the cages on the tide, emitting their moaning calls at regular intervals as if urging one another on.

  “I don’t know. Can Man said Nina Mcllwaine’s car was there that morning. Dropping him off, probably, to see Alvin White. But she doesn’t strike me as stupid, and this stunt definitely was.”

  A bright red dragger with black rail and foredeck, the Becky Jo, puttered around the point of Estes Head. Despite the decorative care her owner had lavished on her, she looked all business as she motored out to the middle of the cove, then idled.

  I took a breath of fresh air. “It’s so clean out here. The kitchen still smells like a garbage dump burned in it.”

  “Yeah. Good breeze.” He turned from watching the dragger to look at me. “So what’s your plan?”

  That was what I’d come here for: more thinking, with Wade along as a sounding board.

  “Just keep trying to figure it out, I guess. That’s what I think Ellie wants, although I don’t know why. Nor,” I went on, “do I see why she couldn’t just tell me what she wants. Why’s she being so annoyingly mysterious?”

  “Too bad Hedda didn’t do it,” Wade remarked. “Half the town’d like to see her run out of Eastport on a rail.”

  “Right. I thought about that. But her fingers are so crippled up, no way she could have handled that ice pick, even if she did sneak away somehow from Janet Fox.”

  The Becky Jo’s operator was wrestling with a part of her dragging gear, which was several times larger than himself.

  “Which reminds
me, I’ve got to get over there again and see how they’re doing. Listen,” I went on, “maybe Ellie didn’t really want me to do anything like this. Maybe I misunderstood.”

  I could take out an ad in the Quoddy Tides, I supposed: I, Jacobia Tiptree, do hereby and as of this date renounce interest in all crimes committed by anyone other than myself.

  Wade didn’t answer for a while, and when he did, it was in the oblique downeast fashion I had learned to expect from him. Stepping behind me, he slipped his hands into my jacket pockets and wrapped his arms around me.

  “See that fellow out there on that little boat?”

  At the moment, mostly I saw fireworks behind my eyelids; with Wade there, that beach after a snowstorm was the warmest place I had ever been.

  “Yeah, I see him.” I did, too, although right then I’d have agreed to just about anything. Whoever coined the phrase “animal attraction” was talking about Wade Sorenson.

  The Becky Jo’s operator scrambled into the shack; her engine rumbled briefly. Then he ran back, leaning over the stern as the engine sound cut out and was replaced by the thrum of the hauling motor. I couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but it looked difficult, and one false move would have put him in the frigid water, where survival time was a scant few minutes.

  “He could’ve bought a larger vessel, hired along some help. If,” Wade said, “he’d wanted to boss anyone but himself. Or if he wanted to do things by committee.”

  Finally the Becky Jo began easing ahead, as whatever had been fouled got freed up. “Okay,” I said, “I get the point.”

  He stepped away from me and shook out the yellow slicker he’d been sitting on, and looked out over the water.

  “Place like this, way the hell and gone, it’s far enough off the beaten track that if you want something a certain way, you can still make it that way,” he said. “Unless you let someone stop you. Or you stop yourself.”

  By losing my nerve, he meant, or second-guessing myself. Halfway across the bay, the Becky Jo’s low wake spread in a fantail.