The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  Presto, on with the collar again and the job was done; good old Wade, he really knew what a girl wanted. And a good thing, too, since without plenty of water in the kitchen I shuddered to think what the rest of the day would be like.

  “Here,” said Bella when I returned from putting the new tool in the toolbox. But she wasn’t talking to me; instead she thrust a trayful of freshly washed glasses into the hands of a large, very serious-looking lady I’d never seen before.

  The lady wore black, thick-soled orthopedic shoes, old-fashioned beige nylon stockings rolled down to midcalf, and a housedress with a border cross-stitched in purple thread on the skirt. She was somewhere between fifty and seventy.

  “Hello,” I said, and she gave me an affronted look as if to ask me what I thought I was doing here, then took the tray on into the dining room.

  “Hired ’er,” Bella said before I could ask. “For the party. Daisy Dawton. Her boy, too. He don’t talk much, Jericho doesn’t. But between ’em they don’t have two dimes to rub together nor a pot to—Oh, hello, Jericho.” She broke off abruptly as yet another complete stranger strolled in as if he owned the place.

  Daisy Dawton’s boy turned out to be a smallish fellow with a mop of pale-yellow hair, plus a huge coffee urn under one arm and a half-dozen folding chairs under the other.

  “There,” instructed Bella, pointing to where his mother had gone, and he hustled in that direction before I could get much more of a look at him.

  “And they’re both hard workers,” Bella added when he was out of earshot again.

  She didn’t ask me if it was all right that she’d hired them, since (a) she knew perfectly well that it was; she had free rein around here in domestic matters, and (b) what choice did I have? The party was in—oh, dear god—only a few more hours.

  From three to five this very afternoon, to be exact, and the closer it got the more I thought I’d rather have dental surgery. Still, Bella seemed to have everything under control—

  Well, everything but the lemon bars, gingersnaps, brownies, dream bars, deviled eggs, shrimp puffs, and pepper crackers with curried eggplant dip, all of which Ellie and the other ex-Merrie-students of Eastport had promised to provide, plus sherbet and ginger ale for the punch.

  Next, not quite staggering under its weight, Jericho Dawton muscled the biggest glass punch bowl I’d ever seen in through my back door, angled it expertly as he made his way down the hall in order to avoid smashing it into a radiator, then set it down as gently as if it were a bomb at the center of the dining-room table.

  From my earlier glimpse at his straight, pale hair, boyish build, and the knobby wrists jutting from his too-short sleeves, I’d made him out to be about twelve. Only when he turned did I realize from his stubbled jaw that Daisy’s “boy” was at least thirty-five, and possibly forty.

  And that Daisy was watching carefully for my reaction to her son’s presence. “All right, then,” I said, turning away.

  Because in Daisy Dawton’s look I’d spied the kind of downeast pride that will cut its own nose off to spite its face, and poverty be damned. And anyway I didn’t want to mess up my housekeeper’s first try at subcontracting, which was such a good idea I wished I’d thought of it, myself.

  In the kitchen, Bella got out cake plates, tossed linen napkins into the washing machine, and polished silver teaspoons so fast that in her hands they were little more than a brilliant blur.

  “Let me handle this,” she said when I tried helping. Daisy trudged heavily in and went out again, struggling with the coffee urn.

  “Here, Ma,” said Jericho, taking it from her. “Ain’t it what you brought me for, heavy things like that?”

  Whereupon Daisy grumbled something ungrateful, but in reply her son turned upon her a look of such melting sweetness that I knew these two were going to work out just fine. Bella, I thought as they went on companionably helping one another, could probably use extra hands for the heavy cleaning when springtime rolled around again, too.

  And with so many people working on it, even the party might turn out all right. That is, if I could manage Merrie Fargeorge’s disagreeable presence.

  Before I dealt with her, though, there was yet another small matter to be handled, and like most unpleasant confrontations I knew the sooner I got it over with, the better.

  Carrying my cup to the phone alcove, I dialed the Motel East and asked for Dave DiMaio. He answered on the first ring, sounding as if he, too, had been up for hours.

  “Listen, Dave, you know that little gun I hid away for you in the lockbox in my cellar?”

  Because if he meant to use it and then claim he didn’t have it—implying that someone else must’ve taken it and done a bad deed with it—well, let’s just say that as my first serious act of the new day I intended to pound a stake through the heart of that little notion toot sweet, as Sam would’ve put it.

  “Ye-es,” DiMaio answered slowly.

  “Dave, why didn’t you just tell me you’d had second thoughts about the gun? And you wanted it back? I’d have given it to you.”

  In a pig’s eye. I’d have come up with some excuse. But:

  “You didn’t have to sneak in and take it. Which,” I added, “my housekeeper saw you do, so there’s no sense denying it.”

  Liar, liar; this last part was so untrue I could practically smell the smoke rising from my pants. But if he thought he’d been seen taking the gun, he’d be more likely to admit it promptly.

  Instead of a confession, however, there was only a long silence, so long that for a moment I thought he’d hung up.

  Then he spoke again, sounding displeased but calm, as if a piece of bad news that he’d been waiting for had finally arrived.

  “Jacobia, I’m afraid I have not the least idea what you are talking about,” Dave DiMaio said.

  “What do you mean, you want me to check up on him? You just told me you believe him,” Eastport police chief Bob Arnold said fifteen minutes later.

  We were sitting at a booth in the Waco Diner, a long, low building with a blue-and-white awning out front and a brand-new pressure-treated deck overlooking the bay at the rear. Located at the south end of the downtown waterfront, the place was a magnet for tourists at mealtimes, and a popular hangout for the rest of us at all other hours of the day and evening.

  Right now the counter and red leatherette booths were mostly occupied by working men in boots, jeans, and sweatshirts. Some—the ones who’d gotten up even earlier than I had—were crumbling crackers into steaming white-china bowls of fish chowder, while others supercharged their first break of the day with fat wedges of blueberry pie.

  All had coffee in thick mugs. “He sounds believable. But I didn’t say I completely believed him,” I told Bob.

  “Mmmph,” he commented as the waitress set his breakfast in front of him. “Thanks, Rita.”

  He was decked out as usual in full cop regalia: clean, pressed uniform, shiny black shoes, belt loaded with law-enforcement gear including cuffs, radio, baton, and pepper-spray canister.

  Plus of course his weapon, a .45-caliber semi-auto with enough stopping power to put down a moose, which around here was not exactly beyond the realm of possibility.

  “You don’t think he took it, though,” Bob said. “The gun.” He tucked a bite of syrupy pancake between his lips. “And you’d unloaded it, anyway.”

  “Well, that’s just it,” I said. “Yes, I unloaded it. But—”

  I repeated what Wade had said about extra ammunition. “And I could be wrong about him,” I finished. “That’s why I’d like it so much if you’d just—”

  In or out of uniform Bob was an unlikely-looking cop, with a round body that nevertheless was able to move very fast, a soft-looking pink face whose deceptively mild expression had been the surprise downfall of many a crook, and unemphatic blue eyes that failed to hint at the sharp mental machinery behind them.

  I’d already summarized what I knew about DiMaio’s visit so far, including his hunt for Bert Merk
le and his attempts to cover it with a story about wanting to learn Eastport history.

  “Or anyway it’s what we think he’s been doing,” I told Bob. “The trouble is, he’s so darned slippery. Polite, pleasant, even believable, like I said. And yet—”

  Scowling, Bob washed another mouthful of pancake down with orange juice, then chased it with a bite of sausage. His wife and two kids were visiting her mother for a week in Kennebunkport, so he had to get his vitamins where he could.

  “Where’s Wade? Why can’t he scope out your mysterious visitor?”

  “He has, but he was eating dinner with him at the time, not cross-examining him. And Wade’s working nonstop while the boats are so busy, you know that.”

  “Mmm,” Bob said darkly. “Yes, I do know. Few fellas around here, I could wish they weren’t so flush with pocket money. They start spendin’ it in the bars, I end up defendin’ all their wives and girlfriends. But for most of ’em it’s a good thing,” he finished by conceding.

  It certainly was for Wade, whose current stint of making hay in the sunshine had been preceded by a spell of less comfortable financial weather. “So you and Ellie think this DiMaio guy’s here on account of the Orono thing?” Bob asked me. “Mugging gone bad, guy got bonked with a . . .”

  “Rock,” I finished for him. “Or something. Yes, that’s the one. Horace Robotham.”

  The waitress came by to heat up our coffees; I waited before going on. “Someone apparently sneaked up on him from behind, in the dark.”

  At the counter a friendly controversy erupted over who would win the pennant this year, the Yanks or the Sox.

  Sawx. “Bob, how many muggings were there in Orono last year? I mean, we’re not exactly the crime capital of the world.”

  “Zero.” He nodded, made an O shape with thumb and forefinger. “Same for murders, armed robberies, and any rapes that didn’t turn out to be date rapes.”

  I opened my mouth to object; he answered before I could. “I know, rape is rape. I’m not denying that.” He drained his juice glass. “But stranger-attackers tend to progress to a whole lot worse, Jake, and you know it.”

  Yeah, yeah; Bob and I had been through this argument before. But the point now was, getting mugged in Orono was like getting tagged with a random act of kindness in New York City: possible, sure, but not what the place was famous for.

  “Anyone look into that, that you know of?” I asked Bob. “I mean, the whole rarity aspect of it?”

  In Orono, if a stranger approached you at night he did not want to bonk you over the head and take your valuables. He wanted directions, or to ask if you’d seen his lost dog, or just to say good evening.

  Meanwhile, Bob really might know if the crime had made Orono cops curious. He kept his law-enforcement contacts all polished up and ready to use, and himself well-informed on what cooked from the cities to the remotest locations, downeast Maine for some reason being a favorite destination for on-the-lammers from other jurisdictions.

  Like maybe we wouldn’t notice them here, where local faces were so familiar they might as well have been carved into Mount Rushmore and every stranger wore an invisible sandwich board.

  Watch Me, said the front sign; Talk about Me, said the back.

  Bob shook his head, mopped the rest of the maple syrup from his plate with the last chunk of sausage and ate it.

  “Nope. No future in anybody digging into the Robotham case. That much was obvious right from the git-go.”

  He drank some coffee, touched his rosebud lips with his napkin, and crumpled it, signaling that he was finished.

  “Victim had no enemies that anyone knew of. Lived with another guy. He was so broken up over the whole thing, ended up in the hospital, coupla nights. I’ve got a buddy over there, we talked about it when it happened,” he added.

  “I wondered if the housemate came under any suspicion,” I said.

  “That guy?” Bob shook his head. “Nah. Can’t fake grief like that, fellow I talked to said. You can tell right away, usually, somebody’s putting on a show for you.”

  The waitress brought the check. “I heard a rare book went AWOL around the same time, though,” Bob added.

  My ears pricked up; this also confirmed what DiMaio said. “From the vic’s book business,” Bob went on. “The roommate said he figured someone came back while the place was empty, stole it.”

  Beyond the booth’s window a pair of seals played tag in the shallows around the rocks. Watching them, I thought about telling Bob it was my book that was missing.

  Because why not? But he was speaking again. “No sign of any break-in, though. And nothing else taken.”

  Laying a pair of dollar bills by his plate, he got up. “The theory’s still that it probably was just an ordinary mugging, some jerk passing through, found a target of opportunity, now the jerk’s long gone.”

  When I slid out of the booth I got a view into the dining room with its sliding-glass doors out to the deck and its built-in gas fireplace burning low to dispel the night’s chill.

  In it, sitting alone eating a muffin, was Bert Merkle. Tall, balding, and unshaven, he wore gray painter’s pants and a once-white dress shirt over an undershirt that looked unclean, plus black socks and leather sandals.

  Looking up from the newspaper he was reading while he ate his breakfast, he met my gaze and held it for a chilly, unsmiling moment.

  Bob was already at the cash register. Catching his eye, I angled my head down the aisle between the counter and the booths toward Merkle. Because just moments earlier I’d finished telling Bob who I thought Dave DiMaio was looking for in Eastport.

  Not realizing that Merkle himself sat right around the corner. Too far away to eavesdrop, I thought, unless he had ears like a bat.

  But maybe he did. Bob stepped outside and I followed.

  “No tinfoil hat this morning,” Bob observed.

  “Not good manners to wear one in a public dining establishment,” I replied.

  “Never been big on manners, that I heard of. Merkle’s been summonsed so often to clean up his place, I can’t count ’em all. Anyway,” he changed the subject, “about your pal DiMaio.”

  “He’s not my . . .”

  “Whatever.” We crossed the street toward his squad car, an elderly Crown Victoria with Eastport’s blue-and-orange sunrise decal on the front doors.

  “I think I’ll have a word with DiMaio about that firearm you mentioned. Whether or not he has it now, he had it when he got here.”

  Out on the water in a stiff onshore breeze, the schooner Sylvina W. Beal hoisted her red sails and came gracefully around in the channel, loaded with tourists and headed out for a morning of whale-watching in the waters off Grand Manan.

  Even from shore you could tell which of the passengers had been out before: long pants, sweaters, and even a few down vests on the experienced ones, shorts and T-shirts on the not. Luckily for these latter unfortunates, the Sylvina carried blankets.

  “Don’t know just how it is where he comes from, but around here folks’re generally required to have a permit for that sort of thing,” Bob remarked.

  In Maine, if you could buy a gun legally—that is, if you were over eighteen and not a convicted felon—you could apply for and get a carry permit for the firearm, too, about as easily as you could get a fishing license. After that you could carry the gun loaded anywhere except on school grounds, inside a courthouse, or at the site of a labor dispute. When the weapon was unloaded, you were allowed to transport it in your vehicle.

  But you still had to have the permit, which gave Bob a good way to find out more about what was what. “And,” he added, “it could be our UFO-chasing buddy needs his chain rattled, also.” He glanced back at the Waco. Merkle hadn’t emerged. “But I can’t be the one to do it.”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t you be the obvious one to—?”

  But he was already shaking his head. “Merkle’s got his back up about all the times I’ve been out there at his place lately, citing him
for his mess. Fire hazard, public nuisance, violation of zoning regulations—the neighbors are up in arms. But he insists he’s being harassed.”

  Bob got into his squad car. “So he’s doing what?” I asked. “Talking about suing?”

  I’d been to Merkle’s place once on another matter, and the neighbors had plenty to complain about. It looked as if the guy never got rid of so much as a used tissue.

  But the inside of his trailer was even weirder than the outside: tracts, pamphlets, self-published books written by the kinds of people who thought eyeballs were growing from the ends of their fingertips, and who secretly kind of liked the idea. . . .

  “Yeah,” Bob said. “Suing the city. Ain’t that a pip? An’ the city council has researched the idea; it turns out Merkel could maybe win. And you know there’s always some lawyer, take a case where there might be big money damages.”

  He settled himself in the squad’s front seat, moving his body around to get halfway comfortable on the torn upholstery and busted springs. The door of the glove box was held on with hinges fashioned of silver duct tape, which around these parts was known as downeast chrome.

  “Merkle’s got a friend, though,” he said. “You want to know any more about him, you could talk to a local kid, name of Jason Riverton.”

  By now tourists were streaming from the Motel East, freshly showered and looking for breakfast. I watched a woman in white shorts, a sleeveless shirt, and running shoes get all the way to the edge of the motel’s freshly blacktopped parking lot before turning tail and dashing back to her room.

  “You know this because . . .” I prodded Bob as the woman came out again wearing a heavy sweater; August here is still summer in the meteorological sense. Just not in the sleeveless sense.

  “Jason’s mom complained to me not that long ago about her kid spending time with Merkle,” Bob replied. “Or vice versa, far as the complaint went.”

  “Really? You’re kidding. Merkle and boys? I’ve never heard anything about that.” And around here, of course, the chances were excellent I would have.

  If there was anything to it. Bob’s expression said there wasn’t. “I had a talk with Jason, satisfied myself there was no funny stuff going on, reported back to Mom,” he recited. “I came down pretty heavy on the kid, actually, made sure he wasn’t just trying to hide something from me.”