by Sarah Graves
Then she’d paused, as if searching for the right words, and I’d wondered if any of us who were from away would ever find them.
“But I can’t see,” Alvin said now, “how I’ll pay a lawyer. Looks like I’m going to lose whatever I can get on the house, if I manage to sell it. So even if I can ever bring Hedda home someday, I don’t know where I’ll bring her to.”
I sipped my champagne, thinking.
“This place, it just captured me,” Clarissa had said. “It’s where I belong. Although,” she’d finished, “I can’t imagine how I’ll get people here to ever like me or accept me, after what I nearly did to Ellie.”
Now I thought I knew how. She was, after all, an attorney, and a big local case would get her firmly established in Eastport. Someday she could even defend little Sadie Peltier, whom I had managed to shoo away earlier in the day, bribing her with a handful of oatmeal-lace cookies.
But she would be back. That was Sadie: she always came back.
Arnold strolled over to me. “That fellow you knew, from the boat basin. Guess he picked a pretty spectacular way, end it all.”
“Yeah, I guess he did.”
Arnold gazed at me, unfooled. “No way of proving that the dynamite he used is the stuff missing out of the Quoddy boys’ warehouse, though. Guess I’ll have to mark that one unsolved.”
“Yes,” I told Arnold. “Probably you will. Too bad. But you know where it went, even though you can’t prove it. That ought to count for something.”
Pack it against the fuel tank, Wade had explained to me. Detonate by radio, once you’re far enough away not to be killed by the underwater concussion. It would be simple, if you were up for that sort of thing, equipped for the cold water and so on.
“Yeah,” Arnold conceded. “Yeah, I guess it does.” He headed thoughtfully back to Clarissa’s side.
“You know, Alvin,” I added, turning to him again, “I’ve got a feeling you’ll have a good lawyer for Hedda, after all.”
She might even come home, someday: suitably medicated and supervised, of course, so that she was no threat to Alvin or to anyone else. He might get his wish. It was within the realm of possibility.
Stranger things had happened.
“You think so?” he asked, unconvinced. But then, as he looked at Arnold and Clarissa, and at Ellie and George, something seemed to dawn on him: that this particular bad old nightmare was over, whatever tomorrow brought.
“Well, maybe so, at that,” Alvin White said.
56
“You got those papers and the photograph Hedda had torn up, and left them in that little box in the attic for me to find. You knew it was Hedda, even before she told you, as soon as you recognized the ice pick, but you wouldn’t say.”
It was midnight, and everyone had gone home except Ellie, and Wade was asleep in front of the television. I washed another plate, rinsed it, and set it in the rack.
“I couldn’t.” Ellie dried another champagne glass. “No one would have believed me, you know that. They’d have thought I was only trying to get rid of Hedda. Besides …”
“I know, I know. You promised.”
It was the bottom-line reason she hadn’t said a word. I sighed, expressing what I thought about the sensibleness of this.
But on the earlier count, Ellie was right: Hedda’s well-known abuse of her daughter would have made Ellie’s accusation come out sounding like the vengefulness of an ill-treated child, especially since Ellie had possessed no proof.
“I was so sure that it was Nina,” I said, wielding the soapy sponge. “And her horrible cousin.” They’d lit out of town soon after my house fire, after I’d told Nina—wrongly—that I knew what she’d done. Last I’d heard, they’d been picked up in Canada, which had some very interesting, little-publicized reciprocal arrangements with U.S. authorities where war crimes were concerned.
Ellie looked at me. “Jacobia, think about it. If you knew your husband was likely to die in six months, no matter how much you hated him, would you risk killing him?”
“That depends on the husband,” I said, thinking of Victor.
But I took her point, which I had missed earlier on account of Nina being such a greedy little minx.
“Anyway,” Ellie went on, “I knew if I were caught meddling with the ice pick, people would believe my confession, and then you would go on and find out what really happened, especially if I kept nudging you about the portrait.”
She stopped, looking down at her hands. Ellie had recognized her mother in the old photograph, abandoned when Hedda’s relatives left my house years earlier. Alvin would have, too, of course, but I hadn’t ever gotten around to asking Alvin.
Not that he would have answered. His own guilt had kept him obedient, all those years.
“So,” Ellie went on, “I wouldn’t have to accuse her. But I didn’t realize that I’d be putting you in danger by getting you involved. I didn’t know she realty had a gun.”
Telling me about the portrait would have violated the spirit of her promise to Alvin, at first because Hedda simply didn’t want anyone to see the unflattering contrast, the before and after the photograph made clear, later because Ellie realized how damning it was. From it, you saw that Hedda hadn’t merely aged badly, but that something had happened to her, something devastating. And from that Ellie had trusted me to sniff out a motive, and put it together with where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Which of course there had been. All the snapshots of her long-ago dancing days—a platinum-blonde Hedda thickly made up in stage paint, swathed in a feather boa—only made the portrait that much less recognizable, an effect she would have endorsed heartily.
The girl she had been before New York, before Alvin decided that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could—
—the attack and her knowledge of who was behind it ruining Hedda utterly, making her each year afterwards more capable of murder, until finally she was and the opportunity arose—
—that girl was gone, as far as Hedda was concerned, until I propped the portrait on Hedda’s kitchen counter, and she found it there.
And from it, as guilty people will, she’d assumed that I knew all.
Ellie couldn’t say, because she’d promised. But if I found it out myself, that would be all right.
“Remind me,” I told her, “not to get into any theological debates with you. But it’s okay,” I added, and I meant about all of it: the parts that I understood, and the parts—the risk Ellie had taken, the belief in me she’d had—that I didn’t. In the country of kept promises, after all, I was from away, and could not be expected to understand some things.
Or at least not all at once.
“But what if you were wrong?” I said. About, I meant, whether she could count on me.
“Oh, I knew you’d sort it out, Jacobia,” Ellie replied. “Once you knew about the past, the present would be obvious.”
I did not comment at this display of blithe optimism. Ellie folded the dish towel.
“And now that you have,” she went on, “I believe you may be the most experienced murder investigator in Eastport.”
“Maybe by default,” I said, “until Clarissa Dow arrives for good.”
“But Clarissa won’t have time to investigate things, once she is in practice. Will she? She’ll be a working attorney, too busy with that. It will be up to us,” Ellie finished.
I turned from rinsing the last of the soapsuds down the sink, noticing that the door to the storeroom had sneaked open an inch and wondering what Ellie could possibly mean by this extraordinary statement.
But of course I was about to find out.
“Do you,” Ellie asked, “remember that fellow who’s supposed to have nailed his aunt and uncle into the trailer home, up in one of the numbered townships?”
The town without a name. And he’d burnt it, after he nailed them into it. “Yes, I remember.”
“Well,” she said, pouring a cup of coffee and sitting down with it. “It turns out
that this fellow, the accused, is one of George’s uncles.”
I wasn’t surprised. Half of Washington County is one of George’s uncles, and the other half is a nephew or niece. Ellie wasn’t only getting married, she was acquiring a clan.
“Get to the point, please,” I told her, as the storeroom door eased shut again and latched with a decisive click!
“Well,” Ellie said. “It’s true that the uncle was there that night, and it’s true that there was an awful quarrel. And he was seen speeding away just before the fire broke out, so the police are certain he started it.”
I waited while she sipped her coffee.
“And,” she went on, “there is money involved. Quite a lot of money. Forest land, with valuable hardwood on it,” she explained. “And the fire marshall says the fire was ignited by a cigarette. A lit,” she emphasized, “cigarette.”
“And the punch line?”
“The uncle has asthma. As bad as George’s, maybe worse.”
Two different kinds of inhalers, I remembered, and the pills. And George’s deep hatred of cigarettes. He really despised them.
It ran, he’d said, in the family.
I took an oatmeal-lace cookie out of the stash I’d held back from the party. After a moment, Ellie took one, too.
Outside, the wind moved the sharply cut shapes of the pines against a night sky bright with a full moon, streaked with clouds streaming whitely across the scattered stars.
“Interesting,” I said, and we were off.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels featuring Jacobia Tiptree are set.
THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE
A Bantam Book
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1998 by Sarah Graves
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56936-3
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