by Sarah Graves
From the notes on the shopping list posted by the back door tomorrow’s dinner would be coq au vin, the next night’s garlic shrimp in champagne sauce; enjoyable indeed.
“Now,” she said, not waiting for a reply as she guided us into the sitting room. Here cooking aromas were replaced by light perfumes of lavender, cedar, and lemon oil, floating together in the still air of the pristine room.
“What can I do for you two this morning?” she asked, placing thin china cups of steaming liquid before us and setting out a plate of raspberry shortbreads.
From Mimi’s, I guessed; apparently the new bakery was taking Eastport by storm. Merrie eyed us wisely from behind her spectacles.
“When people come to see me, it’s often because they have some kind of historical question,” she prompted.
“And generally, Merrie knows the answer,” said Ellie, taking her cue.
Aha, I thought; so this was the part where I redeemed myself by listening with appreciation. And I could get behind that, as Sam would’ve put it. I sat back and sipped my tea, then tried one of the fruited shortbreads, which was excellent, while the banjo clock ticked distantly and Ellie spoke.
According to her, the Fargeorge farm had been in Merrie’s family since 1789 when Simon Fargeorge arrived. Soon he became a well-to-do farmer and victualer, supplying meat and vegetables to the ships, military and commercial, that came into the harbor, and to the soldiers at Fort Sullivan.
Since then, generations of Fargeorges had grown up here; most had gone away. But not Merrie; as the last local descendant of one of Eastport’s most revered founding citizens, she had her own float in the parade each Fourth of July, a front pew in the Congregational church was dedicated to her family by a bronze plaque—she sat in the pew each Sunday—and when the ladies of Eastport decided to fete someone, Merrie was the obvious choice.
With, this time, unfortunate results for me. Not that I was about to interrupt Ellie’s history lesson by mentioning this; the party was supposed to be a surprise. So for once I kept my lip zipped.
That is, until we got to the real point of our visit. “It’s about Jason Riverton,” Ellie told Merrie.
The tea had begun cooling. “We realize this may sound like a strange question. But we want to know if you think he’s capable of committing murder.”
The Rivertons had a car, though I hadn’t seen it, and Jason could’ve made it to Orono and back in four hours, plus maybe an hour for evil doings. And I believed him now about his mother not noticing his absence.
And I didn’t believe he’d refuse Bert Merkle a favor, maybe a violent favor. But I still wondered if the venerable Miss Fargeorge would blacken the name of a former pupil, even if he deserved it.
So it surprised me that she didn’t even ask why we wanted to know such a thing. And her answer surprised me more.
“Jason was the most unrewarding student I ever taught,” she announced, putting her teacup down. “And with a good deal less excuse than most. I think his poor mother was at least half the reason why I stayed involved, even after he graduated.”
She frowned, remembering. “Although they didn’t always seem unfortunate, any of them. Before his father was killed in a hunting accident and his mother became ill, the family appeared solid.”
I glanced at Ellie. We really didn’t have much time; back at my house there were ever so many chores still to be completed in preparation for this afternoon. But:
Patience, my friend’s answering glance instructed. So I nibbled the last shortbread and tried to obey.
“Although,” Merrie added, “I suppose we never really do know what goes on behind closed doors, do we?” She sipped tea. “And at any rate that changed later, their . . . normalcy.”
I looked questioningly at her. “The accident, of course,” she explained, although as before, the word accident got an odd little twist as it came out of her mouth.
“Jason was only ten,” she went on with her story. “He and his father were out in the woods, in October I think it was, with a pair of rifles.”
Her lips tightened briefly. “Deer hunting,” she added. “They will take the boys young, around here. Mostly I suppose it works out all right.”
“But that time it didn’t,” I guessed, and she nodded slowly at me. For an instant the atmosphere in the Riverton house closed around me again, dim and strange with a layer of sour, sorrowful dampness overlaying everything.
It had felt like the kind of hidden, unpleasant place where if you wanted to, you could grow your own mushrooms. But now I wondered if what I’d sensed instead was a crop of bad memories.
“No,” Merrie answered, “it didn’t go well at all.”
She considered a moment. Maybe she was wondering how much of her old student’s privacy she was betraying, then decided to go on nevertheless.
“They found Jason crying, covered in blood and holding one of the guns, alone on one of the old logging roads. He’d been out there all night, that’s why they sent a search party.”
“So they’d gone missing,” I began; she stopped me with a look.
“Indeed. But the search party knew the general area they’d been in. And when the searchers followed a hiking trail into the woods, they found the father.
“Richard Riverton,” Merrie said grimly. “Well-known. Not,” she added judiciously, “well-liked.”
She looked back and forth at the two of us. “In fact his death, or rather the manner of it,” she refined her comment carefully, “was one of the very few things that ever got hushed up effectively around here.”
Which at first I found hard to believe, even with downeast-history expert Miss Merrie Fargeorge testifying to it. In Eastport if you get a hangnail at nine-fifteen, people start waving pairs of fingernail clippers at you by nine-thirty at the latest.
“People liked Margot Riverton, you see,” Merrie said, seeming to understand my skepticism. “And her health was so shaky, even then . . . no one quite knew what might happen to her if word got out that her son might’ve murdered his father.”
The words hung starkly. “I never heard anything like that,” murmured Ellie after a brief, shocked silence.
Merrie glanced coolly at her. “No, dear, of course not. They made a pact, all the men from that day, that they wouldn’t talk.
Not about what happened, and not about the end of the story.”
The clock in the kitchen chimed the hour; a fresh bout of impatience seized me. But I had to hear the end of the story.
“One of them was my student,” said Merrie. “Arlo Bonnet. Arlo was a soft-hearted fellow, always had been. And it bothered him, you see, what had happened. He needed to tell someone.”
“If the father was dead and the boy had a gun, what ‘rest of it’ was there?” I asked. “And what did Jason say had happened?”
“Accident,” Merrie replied tersely. “That’s all Jason told them. But Arlo told me when they went down the logging road searching, they saw the boy before he heard them.”
“And that was because?” I pressed.
“Crying too hard, Arlo said, to notice anything.”
Merrie paused, recalling it. “Arlo told me,” she said, “that it looked to them all as if Jason was trying to get the gun barrel into his own mouth, to reach down and pull the trigger.”
“To kill himself.” Ellie said it softly. “A ten-year-old boy. Out of . . . fear? Or grief?”
Merrie looked disapproving, as if someone had failed to work up to grade level. “Guilt,” she corrected sharply. “I’m certain of it. Arlo said it was obvious, from what else they found. Only Jason couldn’t do it. Couldn’t reach the trigger, because his arms were too short.”
Maybe so, but the story still didn’t make sense to me. And neither did the way Merrie was telling it, as if there were no question at all that Jason Riverton had murdered his own father.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Without witnesses, how can anyone be sure it wasn’t an accident? He’d still feel guilt about it,
and if he was frightened enough—”
“Think about it,” Merrie interrupted.
Another silence. I spoke first. “Maybe,” I said, “the father was shot in the back? Or even . . . the back of the head?”
In other words, way too high. Accidental hunting deaths are almost always body shots, I’d learned after spending nearly a decade’s worth of hunting seasons in Maine. That’s because the chest on an adult male human being is just about shoulder-high on your average white-tailed deer.
Which is what the accidental shooter usually thinks he’s shooting.
The old schoolteacher nodded slowly again, her look grave. “They couldn’t be certain. But the medical examiner said he believed it was the back of Mr. Riverton’s head, yes.”
The medical uncertainty, I thought, was interesting in a nightmarish sort of way. But Ellie picked up on a different angle of the story.
“But that’s outrageous,” she said. “People’ve known it all this time . . . you’ve known what happened? How. . . how could you?”
Keep the secret, she meant. Obstruct justice, cover up a murder, let a kid loose who ought to have been in detention, or worse. But Merrie Fargeorge had an answer for that, too.
“Nobody knows what happened,” she said coldly. “All we knew for sure was that if Jason was prosecuted and found guilty, Margot would be alone. And we knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t be able to take it.”
She got up to clear the cups and biscuit plates. “What was done, was done. Mr. Riverton was gone. He couldn’t be brought back. And whatever the reason was, we knew it wouldn’t happen again. Or,” she added, “we thought we did.”
“Why was that?” I got up, too, following her and Ellie back to the kitchen with its placidly ticking clock and smells of good cooking. Merrie pulled an apron on and began rinsing the cups at the sink.
“Well, isn’t it obvious?” Her back was to me as she replied. “A boy only has one father. And what that father did to provoke a ten-year-old boy to murder, we didn’t know.”
She turned, wiping her hands on a linen towel monogrammed in red. “Margot often had bruises. A cut lip, a black eye . . . she said it was because her sight was failing.”
The dog, Caspar, pranced to the door, wagging to be let out. Merrie complied, looking past the animal to the excavation site where we’d interrupted her.
“We were so sure nothing like Jason’s ‘accident’ would ever happen again,” she said. “But now . . .”
The towel’s red monogrammed F seemed to drip from her hands as she turned back to Ellie and me.
“Maybe we were wrong,” she finished, hanging the towel on its hook.
“Okay, so I guess now we know the reason for Jason’s guilty look,” I said as Ellie and I walked back down Water Street toward my house.
“Uh-huh,” she said distractedly. From the expression on her face I could see she was considering what Merrie Fargeorge had said.
And not liking something about it. “And I think we know why Merrie doesn’t like Dave DiMaio going around Eastport asking questions,” I went on. “She and some of her contemporaries covered up Jason’s dad’s possible murder. She doesn’t want Dave stirring all that stuff up again.”
“Maybe,” Ellie replied. “Maybe that’s it. But it doesn’t quite make sense as far as DiMaio’s actual interests go, does it? Because you know, he wasn’t asking people about the recent past.”
We climbed Adams Street toward the high school, past wood-framed houses whose tiny fenced yards were wedged into crevices in the granite hill; halfway up I turned to look out over the blue water below. Loaded with sightseers wielding cameras and binoculars, the Deer Island ferry was chugging back from Canada into the cove; near the landing two uniformed U.S. Customs officers got ready to check the passengers’ IDs.
“Did it strike you as odd, though, that Merrie didn’t even ask why we wanted to know about Jason?” I asked Ellie. “I mean, talk about your loaded question . . .” But Merrie hadn’t flinched.
“Mmm,” Ellie agreed. “As if she’s just been waiting for someone to come along and ask. Which doesn’t fit with wanting to cover it up, either, does it? The way she spilled the beans so fast.”
The hill wasn’t a shortcut to my house, distance-wise, and it certainly wasn’t an easier way to get there, exertion-wise. But this route at least avoided downtown Water Street, where we would be delayed by enough casual conversation to fill up Merrie Fargeorge’s archeology dig.
I thought a minute. “Maybe she’s been wanting to unburden herself, too, like her student. D’you suppose Bob Arnold knows?”
It was hard to imagine otherwise. But if he did, why hadn’t he done anything about it?
Meanwhile there was still something else going on in Ellie’s mind, I could tell by the furrows between the gold-dust freckles on her forehead. “So?” I prompted.
She blurted it out suddenly. “Jake, I’m pretty sure Merrie wasn’t telling us everything. Because I never realized it before, but I think my father was in the search party that day.”
Ellie’s folks were dead now, buried side-by-side in Hillside Cemetery. Eastport old-timers joked it was the only time in fifty years that the two ever lined up in the same direction; Ellie’s mother would’ve spun in her grave, they said, to turn her back on Ellie’s dad.
“Really,” I commented, and waited for more. Clearly whatever memory Ellie was tiptoeing around wasn’t a happy one.
Few in her childhood were. “You know,” she asked, “how when a beaver gnaws down a tree, it leaves the stump chewed to a point?”
She was still striding ahead of me. Gasping, I paused to catch my breath at the entrance path to the old Fort Sullivan site. A nice white-pine bench seemed to beckon conveniently to me from alongside the path.
Ellie didn’t stop. “Yes, I do know, actually,” I said.
Whippy maple and ash saplings had been chopped down around the bench to make a clearing. Personally I thought there should be public oxygen tanks there, too, for people who tried climbing the Adams Street hill behind Ellie.
“But d’you by any chance want to tell me what in the world pointy beaver stumps have to do with anything?” I managed.
A small wooden sign marked the path to the spot from which you could see down the bay to the Narrows, where ships from the south entered our waters. It had been the lookout place back in the old days, too, when Fort Sullivan’s establishment had signaled the American desire to hang on to the region.
A desire that got squelched as decisively as a candle’s flame being pinched out; now the fort was only a memory, all its keen youthful vigor lying under the saplings and matted grass. Still, I could never pass without thinking about how awful it must have been, that first sight of the British warships in 1814.
“That is the point,” Ellie said finally. “What I overheard my father telling my mother that night . . . I didn’t understand it. Hey,” she added defensively, “I had my own problems.”
That was for sure. She sighed, remembering. “And anyway, when I heard it I was half-asleep. But now after what Merrie told us, I think I do.”
She paused, half-turning to me. “Understand, that is. What my dad said, down in the kitchen.”
Near the top the hill grew even steeper, past the ruin of an old Carpenter Gothic–style house with no windows and hardly any roof left on it. Through the empty front door-hole you could see straight into the parlor to the sodden wallpaper and shredded window-lace, once some Eastport woman’s pride and joy.
Somebody had stacked old lumber in there recently. Ahead of me, Ellie resumed walking uphill steadily; I swear that woman had the lungs of a Tibetan sherpa.
“And here’s the detail Merrie didn’t want to describe but my dad did,” she went on again after a while. “When they found Mr. Riverton out there in the woods, he’d fallen face-forward.”
I forced my aching legs into brisker action, to keep up. “Face down,” Ellie elaborated, “right onto the pointed end of a gnawed b
irch sapling. Impaled, actually. His head . . .” She faltered.
“Yuck,” I said as we crested the hill at last. No wonder the medical examiner had been uncertain. Perspiration dripped stickily down my back and my lungs felt seared with exertion.
“Yuck is right,” she agreed. “I don’t remember Jason’s dad too well but he was a large man. His weight brought him down hard and the sapling pierced his skull, my father said, so—”
We turned left on High Street past the grade-school playground. Two hundred years earlier, this table-like area just short of the island’s highest point had been home to Fort Sullivan’s barracks, munitions storage, and parade areas.
“So the sharp stump went through-and-through,” Ellie said. “That’s what I heard my father saying that night. Must’ve been.”
The mental picture her words summoned up was so grisly, I understood now why she’d repressed it. But it explained a lot.
“And that,” I said, “would’ve obliterated the bullet’s entry and exit holes.” We started downhill.
“There’d be nothing to use against Jason even if they wanted to,” I went on. “So maybe it wasn’t exactly a complete cover-up. More like a judgment call.”
Still . . . “But how’d they decide he even might’ve been shot in the back of the head, then? Did your dad talk about that?”
“Not directly. But from what I recall it was something about the bullet still being in there.”
So the medical examiner might’ve guessed from its position, but couldn’t have known for sure; once a bullet gets in a skull, it tends to bounce around in there before coming to a halt. My ex-husband the brain surgeon used to talk about it.
“Gosh, isn’t that strange?” Ellie’s voice was a little dreamy-sounding. “I remember being in my bed, and my dad and mother talking downstairs. All the gory details . . . but when I woke up the next morning, it felt like a bad dream.”
She shook her head wonderingly. “So I just forgot it. And I haven’t thought about it again. Not once in all those years.”