The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  The hurt on Janet’s face was painful to watch. “But what,” she implored, “about me? Why didn’t you ever try to find me?”

  “You?” Hedda sounded incredulous. “Why, what in the world would I ever need you for?” She dismissed the girl with a cruel wave.

  Watching Janet’s eyes, I had the distinct feeling that Hedda was making a serious tactical mistake. But Hedda was oblivious.

  “Really,” she added in an obvious, deliberately wounding drawl, “you youngsters do exaggerate your own importance. You gave me a drink when I wanted it, and a pill if I made myself pitiful enough. And you helped to kill him and gave me an alibi afterwards. My overdose,” she added to me, “was a nice touch, didn’t you think?”

  Her hooded eyes lowered evilly. “‘Poor Hedda. It must have been,’ ”she finished with dreadful relish, “‘that awful Janet’s fault.’ ”

  “So you’d have gone on that way,” I said to Hedda, “pretty much forever. Taking your pound of flesh an ounce at a time, but then it stopped working. Because Threnody Mcllwaine got sick, and knew he was going to die. So nothing you could reveal about him seemed important anymore, and he stopped submitting to your blackmail.”

  A few feet away, Janet’s face was still adjusting to the fact that she’d been nothing but Hedda’s tool, all along—that she’d been used. And was being used now.

  “Precisely,” Hedda replied. And then, with a simpering little smile that mingled craziness with malice, “Well. I couldn’t just let him get away with it, could I? Not just let him escape.”

  Janet sniffled, and burst out with more of her hard-luck story. “Without me knowing, when it was all I’d ever wanted and he knew it was, he knew it was and he laughed—”

  “Stop whining and get to the point,” Hedda snapped. “I want you to tell her how stupid she was. So she’ll know.”

  Janet flinched, looking resentfully at the older woman. But a lifetime of obedient approval-seeking conditioned her response.

  “Hedda wanted a drink,” she resumed more quietly. “I went down to get it, down the back stairs and into the pantry. I didn’t know he was still there, but when I saw him I lost my temper.”

  This was her chance; she would never tell this story again. Her voice strengthened as the trucks’ roar grew louder, drawing nearer.

  “I screamed at him,” she said. “I told him I knew the truth, and I asked him how he could do it? Hide it from me that way, when it was all I’d ever thought about, the one thing that would have made me happy. How could he do it?”

  But I knew. It was part of getting back at Alvin, another part of his revenge. And as usual he hadn’t thought how his actions might affect anyone else, only about what he wanted.

  Only about power. About pulling the strings from behind the scenes. About being boss.

  “He just stood there and laughed at me,” Janet said. “Asked me why I thought he’d adopted me at all—did I think it was that he wanted me?”

  She shuddered. “All along I was just a tool for him, too, a way to stay one up on Alvin. He told me so.” The way you just did, her glance at Hedda said clearly, but Hedda didn’t see.

  She stopped, gathered her thoughts. “I had the ice pick, and I was so mad by then, I swung it. It scratched his head—”

  The blood, I remembered, that Clarissa said had been there.

  “—and he grabbed at me, at my throat. I swung it again. The ice pick. It stuck in his head.”

  “And that,” Hedda interrupted, “is Janet’s tale of woe.”

  The trucks were getting nearer. Hedda stepped forward and put the tiny barrel of that damned little pearl-handled revolver right up against my forehead. It felt like an ice-cold fingertip.

  “Get up,” she told me. “Walk toward the basement door.”

  “Janet,” I said softly, “you don’t have to go through with this. You can stop her …”

  “I do have to,” Janet whimpered. Reliving it all again had dissolved her scanty composure; that, and realizing how things really stood. She’d realized her dream—finding her mother—and the dream had turned out to be her worst nightmare.

  “He attacked you,” I said. “You defended yourself. You didn’t mean to kill him. People know how he was, they’ll understand.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up,” Hedda grated. “Do what I told you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Janet pleaded; to whom, I wasn’t sure. “I didn’t mean to hurt him, not really. But I was so angry, and then Hedda came down, and—”

  “Quiet!” Hedda stamped her hard-soled shoe on the floor, the sound on the hardwood like a rifle shot.

  But Janet wouldn’t be quieted; not any more. “I stabbed him, he fell, but he wasn’t dead. He was just sort of shocked, bleeding, and then Hedda came downstairs. She wanted her drink, and she saw him lying there.”

  “Be quiet, you foolish girl,” Hedda spat, “we haven’t time.”

  Janet rushed on. “He made a sound. Looking up at her, he said something to her.”

  “What did he say?” I asked, stepping forward slowly.

  Possibly I could push past Janet, perhaps grab the gun, but first I would have to get closer.

  “‘Sorry,’” she said. “I think he said he was sorry.”

  Maybe he even had been, not that it mattered. “What happened then?”

  I took another slow step, as Hedda frowned, turning at a small sound on the back porch.

  “Hedda,” Janet said, “took off her shoe. I didn’t know why.”

  “And then?”

  “She raised the shoe up. She hit the ice pick with it. Like,” Janet said wonderingly, “pounding in a nail.”

  Yes, just like that. Two wound tracks; the second one fatal. A real monster, my ex-husband had said.

  “We had to clean up, and get rid of him,” Janet babbled on. “So I went to get rags, and Hedda went out to the front hall, to be sure Alvin wouldn’t go into the pantry. But he must not really have been dead. And when we came back …”

  Mcllwaine had vanished, leaving only the mess of blood.

  “Why didn’t you go after him?”

  “We didn’t think he could live long. And Hedda said as long as he died somewhere away from the house, no one would suspect us. She said if we just cleaned up, everything would be all right. We killed him,” she concluded hopelessly, “together.”

  So she still thought she was as guilty as Hedda, a misapprehension that had served Hedda’s purposes very well. Once I began rooting around in the matter, it was Janet—not at Nina’s direction, but at Hedda’s—who had tried to discourage me.

  Hedda, so swollen with her grandiose greed for revenge that she had thought she could scare me off with a bullying note. Of course, I realized belatedly, it would have to be Hedda. No one else thought the world ran purely at her whim.

  “How did Ellie know?” I asked Hedda. The trucks were almost here. Their racket would cover a gunshot nicely.

  She sneered, relishing her victory. “Why, I told her, of course. Told her all of it, and that she’d better keep her mouth shut.”

  The trucks roared. “She would do anything for Alvin, just as she always has. And that,” Hedda finished, “turned out to mean protecting me. So his poor heart,” she added mockingly, in an awful parody of baby talk, “wouldn’t be broken. So she wouldn’t break her sweet little promise, ’cause her such a good girl.”

  Her face was a horror. “She actually,” Hedda pronounced with scathing contempt, “confessed to murder.” Then she looked up sharply. “Enough,” she snapped. “I want it done now.”

  “Listen,” I began as we approached the hall. The cellar door stood open, about three feet away, tall and narrow as the opening to a grave. Just before me, a square of lamplight from the kitchen fell onto the hallway floor.

  I didn’t remember turning on that light. An awful suspicion hit me, worse than anything so far. Not the ghost.

  “Hurry up,” Hedda repeated, jabbing the gun.

  As we passed
the kitchen door I turned, not caring in that moment if she shot me for it.

  Sam looked up from the kitchen table, surprised. In the din of the slow-moving trucks outside, he hadn’t known we were here.

  “Mom.” He was tinkering with the gift his father had brought him, trying to repair it. That had been the sound Hedda had heard: Sam coming in.

  He didn’t see the gun. “Listen, Mom, I’m sorry about what I said.”

  You just don’t think it can get any worse, sometimes, but it does. “Jacobia,” called my ex-husband, stomping up the back steps.

  “I want—” Victor began as he came in without invitation, spotted Sam in the kitchen, and broke off his preemptory demand as he saw what Sam was doing.

  “Sam, I told you,” he said, his voice heavy with strained patience, as if he could not believe how stupid Sam was being, “you can’t—”

  As usual, he was well into his exasperated spiel before he bothered to notice the facts of the situation. Then he saw the gun, and his mouth formed a soundless O.

  Only Sam seemed unfazed, still peering at the laser level with the calm, focused attitude of the born repairman. He moved a switch on the gadget, smiled, and moved it again.

  “You, boy,” Hedda snapped. “Get up and get over here.”

  She swung the gun at him, her gnarled finger tightening, and time stretched out in the awful way that it does in the instants before a head-on collision.

  I saw my ex-husband registering the same thought as mine: which one of us could jump Hedda faster? In a flicker of movement that made me forgive him everything, he tensed to leap.

  But he would never make it in time. Only Sam’s maddening obliviousness made Hedda hesitate at all; she wanted his fear, his acknowledgment that at last, she was running things.

  Then Sam looked up at us out of his own world, the one in which nothing exists but the problem to be solved.

  “Look, Mom,” he said happily. “It works!”

  Hedda hissed a breath in and lifted the revolver minutely, as a light glowed from the end of the gadget.

  I felt the thing’s brilliance zip past: a cherry-red needle.

  Hedda shrieked, dropping the revolver, clapping her twisted hands up over her eyes as Janet stood by stolidly, doing nothing to help her. From Hedda’s mouth came a high, keening sound of anguish, like the death wail of the damned.

  Which in a way I suppose it was.

  54

  “What the hell,” Bob Arnold boomed, “is all this?”

  He stood alertly on my back porch, feet planted firmly, his right hand poised over his sidearm. Behind him, her dark eyes full of recent enlightenment, stood Clarissa Dow.

  “Hey,” said Wade, looming suddenly behind Clarissa.

  Now I thought I was seeing a ghost.

  “What’s going on?” Wade asked, looking perplexed.

  “I told you,” said Sam, “that I could fix it.”

  55

  It took ten days for the Federal people to get their foolish, quacking ducks in a row. So I drove downstate to pick up Ellie on the first real day of spring, the sky gone definitively from its palette of chill, drizzly greys and razor-knife blues to the pastel shades, whitewashed aquamarine and creamy azure, which in Maine are a sure sign that winter is over.

  “Oh,” Ellie said at the sight of Passamaquoddy Bay, glittering at the foot of Washington Street.

  Can Man looked up from his task of plucking a Coke can from the gutter at the corner of Water Street, waving at us as we made the turn into downtown. His lips moved as we went by: No place like home.

  On Key Street, Ellie got out slowly and turned in a circle. Nothing had changed, except for the realtor’s “for sale” sign in front of her house. She looked at it calmly, then turned her back on it and went up the green-painted front steps into mine.

  “It’s wonderful,” she breathed, smiling at the clean, fresh wallpaper and smooth new plaster, the gleaming, polished hardwood floors and immaculate tin ceilings. When you do these things yourself, they take forever. But contractors—paid for by fire insurance—can accomplish them in under two weeks. And it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of tasks left for me, on the second and third floors: two lifetimes’ worth, I calculated, down from the previous three.

  “Better come in,” I said. “Everyone is waiting. And you must be hungry.”

  Before I left, I had baked a batch of oatmeal-lace cookies, by rights a summer delicacy to be enjoyed with iced tea, but on the grounds that you never know what tomorrow may bring, I had decided to do it now.

  George Valentine stepped from the front parlor into the hall. He held the black cap with Guptill’s Excavating lettered on it in orange script tightly in both hands.

  “Hi, Ellie,” he said.

  “Hi, George,” she replied.

  “Or maybe,” I said, “you’re not that hungry, come to think of it.” I left them there.

  Out in the kitchen, Sam was debating with his father the merits of the wooden sailing hull over the admittedly less work-intensive but to Sam unromantic fiberglass. Tiffany had made coffee, fed Monday, and put together a plate of ham sandwiches; now she was twiddling with the radio, trying to find NPR.

  “Got it,” she said, and suddenly a horn fanfare, thrilling and sweet, burst out.

  Wade of course had not gone down in an explosion; that had been just another of Hedda’s lies, to hurt me and break my spirit.

  Jemmy hadn’t gone down, either, or if he had, there were post offices in Davy Jones’s locker.

  On the mantel in the kitchen where the mysterious portrait used to be stood a small cardboard box; inside was one link of an anchor chain, newly inscribed with an account number and code word. “Give it to the widows and orphans,” the unsigned note had read.

  The body of the other drowned fellow had not been found, but one had been recovered from the incinerated wreckage of the Hoodathunkit. It was too burnt and blasted for identification, but because of it I had a feeling that the guys who go boom wouldn’t be looking for Jemmy Wechsler anymore.

  Or for the money that chain link represented, I made a mental note to find out about the drowned fellow’s family, and how I might manage quietly to assist them with half of it.

  The other half belonged to Ellie, though she didn’t know it yet. There had been, of course, no money for Alvin in Mcllwaine’s estate: yet another of the pirate of Wall Street’s mean-spirited manipulations. But Ellie would know, I felt sure, what to do with Jemmy’s cash, so she and Alvin wouldn’t have to worry anymore.

  “Good party,” Wade said, coming over to drop a bearish arm around my shoulders, “That Tiffany’s a smart kid. What’s she still doing with Victor?”

  “She’s not, actually. She’s with Sam. Platonically,” I added, as Wade glanced at me in surprise.

  “They’re going with Victor back to New York on Monday—Sam’s enrolled in a special school at the university. He’s decided,” I said, still a bit dazed by the ambitious plan Sam had formulated for himself, “to become an expert on dyslexia, starting with his own. So he can fix it, before he goes to boat school.”

  Wade nodded slowly. “You know, I bet he will.”

  I watched Sam wash down a cookie with a long swig of Pepsi, then return to the argument with his father. The two of them looked so alike—dark, curly hair; long, mulishly determined faces; thick-lashed green eyes—that I almost couldn’t stand it, and I didn’t know how I would get along without Sam.

  Wade read my thought. “He’ll be back. Harpwell’s already told him he’s got a place for him on the design team, once he gets his degree.”

  “Do you think he can do it?”

  Sam laughed, and pulled a scathing, you’re-so-hopeless face at his father, who had apparently said something too old-fogeyish. Since learning that there was a name for his trouble, and a strategy he might follow, it seemed the weight of the world had dropped off my son’s shoulders. Gone, too, was Sam’s excessive desire to please his father, whom to Victor’s disco
mfiture and my intense amusement Sam had begun calling “Pops.”

  Wade squeezed my shoulder. “He’ll be fine, Jacobia. And so will we. I guess if you and Sam can deal with Victor, I can, too.”

  I followed his gaze to where my ex-husband sat discoursing about fiberglass, a topic on which he had almost no knowledge whatsoever but of course felt obliged to pretend he did.

  “Every family’s got one,” said Wade amusedly, which was when I realized that ours did, too.

  And that we were. “I’d better go over and socialize with poor Alvin,” I told Wade. “He looks like a lost lamb.”

  Wade went back to his conversation with Bobby Taylor, who looked little the worse for his loss of Janet Fox. She, at the moment, was fresh out of detox, languishing in the Washington County jail, simultaneously awaiting a grand jury indictment and protesting her victimhood to anyone who would listen.

  “Jacobia,” Alvin said, shifting over gratefully to make room for me on the sofa. He had eaten almost nothing, and except for the sip he had taken for George and Ellie’s toast, his champagne glass remained untouched.

  “Hi, Alvin. How’s Hedda doing at BMH?”

  Bangor Mental Health Institute, I meant. It was where the state cops had taken her.

  “Better. They’ve run tests, got her pills straightened out. I went to see her, and she seems in her right mind. Eyes are okay, too; she was more scared than hurt, I think. And sharp-tongued as ever. I don’t guess there’s a therapy for that.”

  In Hedda’s case, I guessed not, too. “Miss Dow says there’ll probably be a trial,” he went on, “but she says with a decent lawyer, it could come down to not guilty on account of mental defect.”

  Across the room, Clarissa Dow and Bob Arnold stood together. She’d gotten halfway to Caribou, she’d said, before she made the U-turn.

  “I don’t know,” Clarissa had told me upon her return, “what it is about this town.”