The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Well, that’s good. Poor old Can Man.” Wade finished a cedar rose, his blunt fingers working the jackknife to create a thorn the size of a flea on the tiny stem, and started on another.

  “It really annoys me,” I said, “that Nina thinks she can just do all this.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Do all what?”

  “Put a whole peaceful little town into an uproar, that’s what. Kill her husband and make it look like someone else did it, so Ellie winds up stuck in the middle.”

  I squeezed about a cup of basil pesto from the freezer bag I had preserved it in, into the top of the double boiler. Along with the lavender, Ellie and I had grown masses of basil in the sunny, sandy patch of soil stretching the length of Victor Sawtelle’s fence, and now we were having it for dinner with angel-hair pasta.

  “I mean,” I went on, putting the garlic bread into the oven, “you can bet your life nobody local is behind all this. People in this part of the world aren’t the kind who do murder.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I remembered the guy who had nailed his relatives into the mobile home and set it on fire.

  “I wouldn’t,” Wade said evenly. With his knife tip, he put a dewdrop the size of a gnat’s eye into a cedar rose petal.

  “Wouldn’t what?” I got out the tossed salad.

  “Bet my life on it. You found Bobby Taylor yet?

  “No,” I replied, “and it kind of worries me. It’s not like him to take off without a word to anyone.”

  Bobby Taylor hadn’t been at Heddlepenny House. His toolboxes had been stacked in his garage, at the little house that had once been a cider mill out on Prince’s Cove. Bobby had put all the shingles back onto the house and installed big eight-over-eight windows, whose frames he had painted crisp, park-bench green.

  The green against the grey of the cedar, and the perfectly proportioned windows, created an air of elegance. His regular work habits weren’t the only reason he was steadily employed. He was handy with a hammer, all right, but he also had a great eye.

  The doors and windows were all locked, and his truck wasn’t there. When I got home, I’d called his mother, making it sound as if I wanted to hire him, so as not to worry her.

  But she was already worried. She hadn’t seen him in two days, and she was afraid he might have gone back on the bottle again.

  “That girl,” she confided worriedly, meaning Janet, “isn’t good for him.” She said it the Maine way: guhl.

  I didn’t think so, either, but then, I do not have a stellar win-loss record in the romance department, myself, so who was I to comment? I just told her I was sure he would show up soon and got off the phone as gently as possible.

  “Did you call Janet?” Wade asked. “She might know where he is.”

  I shook my head, stirring the pesto over the warm water. If you heat it too much, it separates.

  “If I tell Janet I’m looking for him, she might tell Nina. And even though Bobby Taylor is probably a lot harder to run down with a Lincoln than Can Man, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  The sequence of events was clear, or at least it was to me: Nina sees Can Man coming out of my house, Nina knows Can Man saw her going into the Whites’ house, and Can Man nearly gets run over by something blue, just like the car Nina happens to have driven into town that day.

  Wade put the cedar roses aside, and cleaned up the wood chips. “You could,” he pointed out, “just call up that Clarissa Dow woman, put her into the big picture.”

  “Clarissa Dow,” I retorted, “has made it plain that she does not want to be put in the big picture. She likes the picture right under her nose, which is the only place she wants to look because it’s uncomplicated, and it is the one that will lead her, she thinks, to a promotion.”

  I stirred the pesto some more. “Which,” I finished irritably, “I’m sure is all she cares about. She really hated it that I’d figured that out about her, which makes me more sure that it’s true.”

  I set the pasta water boiling, and turned from the stove just as Sam stuck his head in.

  “Mom?” He sounded worried. “I was looking at my calendar.”

  I dripped olive oil into the pasta water. “Whatever it is, you can tell me in a minute, when we sit down. Wash your hands, please, and please do not wear your Bleeding Skulls T-shirt to the table. The mashed eyeballs spoil my appetite.”

  “Aw, Mom,” he responded predictably, sloping off upstairs to pull a sweatshirt over the offending garment, but he didn’t sound too peeved. Having a mother who could pronounce the words “mashed eyeballs” in just the right tones of lip-smacking irony took some of the sting out, I assumed.

  Wade looked thoughtful. “There is something I do want you to do, though,” he said. “I want you keep the Bisley out.”

  I’d thought about it since he’d mentioned it, that afternoon.

  “You know my position on guns in the house with Sam. Locked up, or not at all. I don’t think I want to make an exception.”

  “Sam’s not a problem. I’ve already explained to him that if he touches it, I will take his arms and legs off and feed them to him.” He smiled when he said it, but it was the smile on the face of the tiger—have I mentioned that his teeth are as white and straight as the ones in toothpaste ads?—and I felt sure that whatever he’d really told Sam, it had been impressive.

  I put the plates I was holding down onto the kitchen counter. “You’re serious.”

  Wade held his big calloused hand up and counted on his fingers. “Fire. Note. Tires. Can Man’s accident. That doesn’t sound like a stretch of calm weather, to me.”

  “You think it’s going to get worse.”

  He looked levelly at me. “I think the way to beat a storm is to face right into it, not wait for it to blow you over sideways.”

  “Yeah,” I said reluctantly, “I guess you’ve got a point. I’ll think about it some more.”

  Which was when the oven timer went off, the pasta kettle boiled, and the olive oil began separating out of the basil pesto, threatening imminent ruin. So it was not until we were all at the dining room table, with the candles lit and a nice fire crackling in the only one of the six fireplaces not absolutely guaranteed to burn the house down if you strike so much as a kitchen match in it, that Sam got to drop his bombshell.

  “Mom,” he said, forking up some angel-hair pasta with basil pesto, “you know the weekend of the boat-school tour?”

  It was raining, and I noticed with satisfaction that water was not streaming down the insides of the dining room windows, seeping behind the clapboards and rotting the wood below so that you could reach in and pull it out by the crumbly handfuls. We home-repair enthusiasts take our little triumphs where we can get them.

  “Yes,” I told Sam, “I know the weekend, and yes, I will do your paper route.”

  “But Mom,” Sam said, unappeased, “don’t you remember what weekend that is?”

  A feeling of floating, nonspecific but definitely impending doom seized me, much like the one I felt on the day I realized that all the thick, whitish stuff wrapped around all the hot-water pipes in the basement was asbestos.

  And then I remembered. “Oh, no. Tell me it’s not.”

  “It is,” said Sam. “It’s the same weekend Dad’s coming.”

  “Maybe,” I heard myself say in a small, hopeless voice, much like the one I used while agreeing to have, at hideous expense, all that asbestos removed, “maybe they will decide to reschedule the boat-school tour.”

  Sam looked pityingly at me and ate another forkful of angel-hair pasta with homemade pesto, which might just as well have been SpaghettiOs for all he noticed.

  “Maybe,” he said in equally hopeless tones, “Dad will have to go to an emergency.”

  “Right,” I agreed, but I knew as well as Sam did that his father would not have to go to an emergency the weekend he was scheduled to come here. Having been married to a neurosurgeon for a good long while, I can tell you with perfect certainty that o
n the day that you sprain your ankle, or your son comes down with chicken pox, or the plumbing all backs up, or you go into labor, that is the day when a blood vessel in somebody’s brain will pop like the bulge in an old inner tube.

  But on any day when you do not want your neurosurgeon husband hanging around, all brains within a thousand-mile radius—even ones that have not been working well for decades—will abruptly begin functioning flawlessly. When I was married to my ex-husband, it got so I believed that even the embalmed brains down in the pathology department would all start bobbing maliciously around in their formaldehyde jars, vibrating with healthy vigor, just on the bare suspicion that I might need to get rid of him for eight hours or so.

  I looked up to find Wade grinning at me. I had taken care not to complain, but Wade had been present on the day the ex-husband in question had sent me a dozen roses, cutting them first so that when I lifted them from the box all the fragrant, red blooms fell off like so many severed heads, and on the day when the telegram arrived demanding to know why—this was months after Sam and I departed and several years after my ex-husband and I were divorced; that was how crazy he could be—the laundry had dealt improperly with his good white shirts, and had not ironed his undershorts the way he liked them.

  “So he’s coming for a visit, is he?” Wade asked, taking another piece of garlic bread. There was a glint like a lightning bolt in his eye, though his tone was innocently cheery.

  “Yeah, and at the exactly wrong time,” Sam said. “But listen, do me a favor and don’t make him crazy, okay? You’re just the kind of guy who could really do it, and my dad’s already crazy enough.”

  Wade regarded Sam with friendly interest. “Oh? And what kind of guy is that? Who can get your dad crazy?”

  “The kind,” Sam replied, “who can do a lot of things right. And who isn’t making my mother cry all the time.”

  There was a moment of silence as I digested this. It is a rock-solid maxim of modern family life that one divorced parent does not criticize the other one in front of the children. But Sam was an observant boy, and the realities of his life had put me in the position of having to run interference between himself and his father. Furthermore, for the last part of my marriage, I’d wept nonstop. And Sam, of course, remembered it.

  “When we lived in New York he would show up all the time,” Sam said. “Even after they got divorced, and after I went back to live with my mom—I lived with my dad for a while, I thought I wanted to—he knew how to get her going. And when they were married, he lied. It’s better,” he concluded, “that we live farther away from him.”

  “Seems like you still care about your dad, though,” Wade said, homing in with precise accuracy on the crux of Sam’s difficulty. “Isn’t that the whole problem about where you’ll go to school, what you’ll do with your life? What your dad will think about your decision?”

  No reply to this.

  “As long as we’re on that subject,” I put in quietly, “you should know, Sam, that he’s bringing his girlfriend.”

  He seemed unsurprised. “Yeah, right,” he said, getting up. “I figured he would. If he had two, probably he’d bring ’em both.”

  He picked up his plate and fork. “And you want to know what’s really scary?” he asked Wade.

  Sam took a deep breath. “What’s scary is, when my dad’s not screwing around with women or messing with people’s heads from the outside, his job—”

  He gave the word a sad, bitter twist. “His job is to get, like, a really sharp buzz saw, go in the operating room and cut right into people’s heads. Mess around with them,” he finished, “on the inside.”

  Having delivered himself of that little mixture of opinion, information, and invective, he stomped off into the kitchen.

  In the silence that he left behind, I looked at Wade, who appeared about as bemused as I felt.

  “Where’d that come from, do you suppose?” he asked.

  “No idea. I didn’t realize he was so angry at his father.”

  “Too bad the old man can’t leave out the romantic getaway portion of the program.”

  “Considering he hasn’t seen Sam for nearly a year,” I agreed. “It’s so hard to tell him that, though. Half the time I want him to at least try to have a relationship with Sam.”

  I poured a little more wine for both of us. “Other, I mean, than bossing him around, trying his best to turn Sam into a carbon copy of himself. God forbid,” I added, sighing.

  “And the other half?”

  “The other half, I wish he would vanish off the face of the earth. I mean, you’ve seen the stuff he’s pulled.”

  “He make you cry lately?” Wade inquired acutely.

  “No. For a while, when Sam was insisting on living with his father, there was lots of opportunity for … discord. But not now. Sam’s right; it’s better that we’re farther apart. In fact, he’s been unusually mellow, recently. Quiet, like …”

  Like the calm before storm. “Anyway, he’ll be here next Friday.”

  “I see,” said Wade, eyeing me closely for signs of distress. “Want me to make myself scarce while he’s here? Would that be easier for you?”

  “Absolutely not.” I got up. “If you can stand to stick around I could use your help. But Sam’s right about him, so don’t make him crazy. I mean, any crazier than he already is.”

  Wade smiled imperturbably. The candlelight made the glint in his eye seem to dance.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.

  33

  Later that night, I went down cellar and opened the lockbox containing the Bisley and cartridges. The lockbox was fastened to the wall, like a fuse box, and while I stood there I could hear the house working all around me: water trickling down from Sam’s shower, the furnace rumbling steadily to heat the water, the click of the electric relay on the thermostat in the furnace.

  Wade said shooting someone else’s gun, as a habit, was a way of not paying the bill. He said the only way to know how deadly it was, to understand it on a gut level, was to own the weapon yourself, and keep it, and be responsible for it.

  I thought Wade was correct. It was why I had gone through the background check, and bought the Bisley.

  Over in the corner, the dry-well hole waited silently for George to come and finish it up. I wished I could drop the events of the last few days into it, and let him pile gravel onto them, too. Taking the Bisley out of the box, I hefted it, thinking about Sam.

  Eighteen months earlier, just before I’d found this house, one of Sam’s friends had been shot while examining a gun he found under a pile of his father’s sweaters, on the top shelf of his father’s closet. No one ever expected the boy to find the hidden weapon, or to search out the ammunition stored separately in a carton marked “Xmas decorations.”

  No one expected him to handle the gun, if he found it. He wasn’t, everyone said even after he was dead, that kind of boy.

  Musing over this, I fingered the only key to the lockbox. I wore it on a silver chain around my neck, feeling that any circumstances under which Sam might be motivated to remove the chain were also ones under which I might want him to open the lockbox.

  And otherwise not. Carefully I put the Bisley away again, and turned the key. No one ever expects to need seat belts or air bags, either, but they do. Your chances of having an accident on any given day may be infinitesimally small, but once you are having it, the likelihood rockets to a hundred percent.

  It was, I still believe, the right decision, even though I came to regret it later, and to wish I had calculated the risks differently.

  34

  Around seven the next morning, Bobby Taylor called to say he had heard I was looking for him. He would be working that day at Heddlepenny House, so I went over there at ten, which was when he said he would be taking a break.

  I brought coffee in a thermos, and sour-cream doughnuts from the American Legion bake sale. The sale was to benefit the building fund for the Legion’s new hall, and the dou
ghnuts were so heavy they could have just gone ahead and built the hall out of them. But they were also delicious, and Bobby’s eyes lit up at the sight of them.

  “Thanks,” he said, swallowing some of the coffee gratefully. The day was grey and foggy, with a chilly breeze coming off the water, poking its shivery fingers under my collar and riffling the puddles in the packed-sand driveway of the Heddlepenny House.

  Bobby looked up, measuring how much of the job remained. The house was a sprawling old gingerbread Victorian with big bay windows and a wide front porch overlooking what had been a garden. Everything was in an advanced state of decay, including the wooden gutters that Bobby was replacing, section by section.

  “How do you get them up there?” I asked. He was working alone, and wooden gutters weigh much more than their equivalent in aluminum.

  He pointed at the staging set up against the house. “Bring the staging platform down, put the gutter on the platform, get on it yourself, crank the staging up. It’s okay unless you’re afraid of heights.”

  “Uh-huh,” I replied calmly, faking like mad. What I’d been planning had seemed perfectly reasonable while I was planning it.

  The thing is, staging is a kind of scaffolding. You use it instead of a ladder when you want to work on a wide area of high stuff: for instance, when you are painting a house, repairing clapboards, or performing large-scale gutter maintenance.

  And that was the problem: high stuff. The staging consists of pairs of tall posts set into the ground in a line parallel with the building’s foundation. Clamped to the posts are steel supports upon which are laid pairs of two-by-twelves, so that if the post pairs were the vertical members of capital Hs, the two-by-twelves would be the crossbars.

  Crucial to the arrangement is the fact that the two-by-twelves are not fastened to the supports, nor are safety harnesses issued to persons venturing onto these monstrosities. The boards simply rest there, bouncing gaily up and down when you walk on them and taunting you with the fact that a pair of two-by-twelves laid together is, count ’em, twenty-four inches wide, an amount of space that on solid ground is no problem at all to keep your balance on, but in thin air, it is.