Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  He tested the lighter he’d brought with him; it hissed once and ignited. Good. He placed it in the wrecked sink, where he would be able to find it even in the dark.

  The candles would be atmospheric; gaslights, he thought, would be even better, and from the small, round holes in what still remained of the plaster, he knew there had once been some here.

  Even the threaded ends of the copper piping still protruded from a few of them, and there was a tank in the yard whose gauge he’d examined, discovering that it was even now partially full.

  A home owner or tenant had put it there years ago, no doubt, and by some oversight no one had ever removed it.

  Experimentally he turned the knob on the wretched old stove. A hiss and the reek of rotten eggs said that the flammable stuff still flowed. But he doubted the gas fittings in the walls were still connected, and anyway, there weren’t any gas lamps in the house.

  Too bad; they’d have been an interesting touch. He turned off the stove knob, noting by his wristwatch that it was already nearly one o’clock. That meant Jacobia Tiptree’s last morning on this earth had drawn to a close; now it was afternoon, and in only about seven hours night would fall.

  Then it would be dark in here.

  That is, until he lit the candles, and by their flickering, elemental glow he would do what he’d come to do. Afterwards he would live in triumph, having avenged all. And then …

  Well, then he’d need something else to occupy himself. But there was a whole world full of people to wreak vengeance upon, wasn’t there?

  So maybe he wouldn’t go to the Philippines right away. Once Jacobia Tiptree was gone, he felt certain he’d be able to think of someone else who needed attention in the getting-what-they-deserved department.

  And he—cold, perfectly unfeeling, and experienced in these matters—

  He’d be the man for the job.

  CHAPTER

  6

  TALKING TO EASTPORT’S CHIEF OF POLICE, BOB ARNOLD, was easy. But convincing him wasn’t.

  “You think he’s on a vendetta,” Bob said flatly, leaning back in the chair behind his desk in the police station.

  “Exactly,” said Jake.

  It was one-thirty in the afternoon. The state cops and the medical examiner were already on their way back to their armory in Machias and laboratories in Augusta, respectively.

  The bruised and bloodied dead girl on Sea Street, they’d decided, was an accident victim; for one thing, it was simpler and easier on the family than calling her death a suicide, which was the other option. No evidence of anything else, they’d said.

  “For vengeance,” Bob said. “Thinks you as good as killed his old man. So now he’s come here to do the same to you.”

  “Precisely,” she responded, encouraged that he understood so well. “You’ve got it completely right.”

  “You know this because he emailed you a picture that could have been faked.”

  “And a dead rat,” she added. “Don’t forget that.”

  “And a dead rat,” he agreed drily. “Don’t worry, I’m not forgetting it.”

  Bob was a good friend, one who’d pulled Jake’s feet out of a few fires over the years, when her nosiness and stubbornness had gotten her and Ellie into … situations.

  Deadly ones, some of them, punctuated by screaming, gunfire, or (to Jake) intensely nerve-racking combinations of the two.

  And she’d very much like to prevent that kind of thing from happening again; to rule it out completely, that is, instead of trusting what was turning out to be a rather thin patch of luck at the moment. But her story was too weak, the evidence too thin.…

  “And you think,” Bob said, “that just for starters I’m going to get the medical examiner and the state boys to change their determination on the girl’s cause of death, based on your story.”

  “Um, well …”

  “A dozen people saw her staggering drunk last night. A dozen more saw her wandering away. Alone,” he emphasized.

  “It’s dark back there,” she pointed out. “Someone else could have showed up. And anyway, I’m not asking you to—”

  “You heard me requesting five officers for today. You stood right there and listened to me doing it. Well, I got them.”

  “Great! Then you might have a little time to—”

  But there she stopped, because the truth was, she didn’t know what she wanted him to do. She hadn’t even come in here to ask him to do anything; it was Bob who’d assumed she had.

  “Look, all I’m saying is—”

  Ignoring her, Bob motioned as if he was talking on the phone, which for a wonder did not happen to be ringing for once.

  “Why, yes, Mr. State Cop Murder Investigator. I’ve got a lady here, she says that your earlier conclusions were all wrong. Yep, she says a weird guy on a bike did it, and she knows ’cause she used to be money manager to the mob.”

  “Not only to the mob,” she replied, stung. “I had my share of perfectly legitimate clients.”

  By some definitions, anyway. But Bob looked unmoved. “Okay, okay,” she said, giving in. “I just wanted you to hear it from me, what happened at my house. And my thinking on it.”

  “Great,” Bob said tiredly. “Now I know your thinking.” But then his tone changed.

  “Jake. I’m listening, okay? But what you’re telling me, it might be annoying. Scary, even. And I get that, I really do. But none of what you could actually swear to—what you know, not just what you surmise—rises much above the level of mischief.”

  “Except the computer stuff.” Her laptop sat on his desk; a call was already in to the Portland computer crimes division.

  “Correct.” He’d written down all the other incidents she’d told him about, too: the harassment on the front porch, the rat, the bike-bell tauntings.

  And he was right, when you listed them all like that on paper, they didn’t look like much. “So what am I going to do,” he asked, “start a house-to-house for the guy?”

  “No,” she replied, softening. “No, I guess not.”

  Bob always did what he could.

  “It’s just that if anything else happens, I don’t want you to say later that I didn’t …” she continued.

  His rosebud lips pursed. “Yeah. Like that’s ever helped me before, knowing in advance what you’re up to. But believe me, Jake, I really wil—”

  Then his phone did ring; waving her away, he answered. On her way out she heard him talking to the Bangor News stringer, supplying the details about the “accident on Sea Street.”

  He really was a good guy, though, she thought as she went out the big glass door of the old bank building, and as she reached the sidewalk she realized that after talking to him, she actually felt better.

  Just not a lot better. The only way to achieve that was to find Steven Garner … and stop him. Fortunately, though, Bob was not only a good guy; he also had good ideas, even if he himself didn’t always see their brilliance right off the bat.

  On the way back up Key Street, sniffing the delicious smells of backyard barbecues getting under way and hearing the slightly hysterical laughter of children galloping through games of tag, she counted in her head the number of vacant houses in town.

  After dwindling for years, Eastport had been undergoing some repopulation recently, mostly by retirees with plenty of cash and a long-cherished dream of living year-round, or at least all summer, in a place like this. Thus many of the architecturally lovely, structurally tragic old dwellings had owners now, people who paid the taxes and had the lights turned on and the water connected.

  That is, if they weren’t being torn down to make way for new, easier-to-maintain homes; the latest in demolition methods some newcomers were trying was to cut all the big beams in an old house, leaving it standing on the strength of the equivalent of a couple of toothpicks. Then they’d hit the place with a bulldozer.

  Which was not a method she endorsed; for one thing, it was dangerous as hell, since you couldn’t guarante
e a house standing on toothpicks would even wait for the bulldozer before it fell.

  A few of the town’s worst old structures, though, weren’t even getting that unorthodox shock treatment. Instead they still had bats in their belfries, not to mention squirrels in the eaves and rats in the cellars. The squirrels were the worst, old-house-maintenance-wise.…

  But never mind; the point was there were a finite number of untenanted old places in Eastport, especially now when the fair-weather visitors were so numerous that permanent residents called them “summer complaint.”

  And that meant a finite number of possible hiding places for Steven Garner Jr., ones that could be identified, located, and inspected, she thought optimistically as she climbed the back steps of her own old house.

  Too optimistically, as it turned out. Like, by orders of magnitude. But just then, all she thought was that maybe this all could be cleared up before the fireworks began tonight.

  And then she’d really have something to celebrate. “Hey, everybody,” she called as she went in.

  They were all in the kitchen, even the dogs. Prill ran up to her, stubby tail wagging; Monday smiled from her dog bed.

  “Bob Arnold said something very interesting just now,” Jake announced. House to house …

  “And it gave me an idea.… All of you, listen to this!”

  IT WASN’T SO MUCH THAT THEY WERE STUPID, STEVEN thought as he watched people streaming purposefully out of Jake Tiptree’s house, but that they were so unimaginative. Didn’t they realize he’d have figured out that they might start looking for him? And now here they came, right on schedule.…

  He’d climbed to the ancient tree house high in the maple, in the overgrown backyard of the vacant old house on Washington Street. From here, he could see half the town.

  More to the point, he could see her house. But she couldn’t see him; no one could. The maple leaves hid him.

  Climbing up here at all had been worrisome, first because while he was doing it, people could see. While he’d been hand-over-handing it up the rickety plank rungs, he’d been terrified, just waiting for someone down on the ground to yell out suddenly at him.

  And then, as his father used to say—his dead father, his murdered one—the jig would be up. But no one had yelled, and soon he’d begun to understand that nobody was going to.

  So he was safe. No one was at home in the houses bordering the yard where the maple stood. He could see right into all of their windows from where he perched, and it was obvious: nothing moving anywhere inside.

  On this beautiful early July day, they were out enjoying the weather and the celebration. Music drifted up from Water Street, along with the occasional random toot of a trumpet or rattle of a snare drum. The parade was about to begin, he gathered from the expectant tone in the voices of people now lining both sides of Washington Street.

  Which was perfect: they were all out front, while he was out here keeping an eye on things. On her.

  Ms. Tiptree, he thought, mentally giving the honorific an unpleasant twist. She thought she was so smart. But if she had been, she’d have realized he was already a step ahead of her.

  At least a step. All those people charging out of her place, six of them, including her.… What could they all be doing, looking so determined, besides setting out on a search for him?

  A child could’ve predicted it. And the tragedy was, it all could have been prevented. First by her giving the money to his father all those years ago …

  Thinking this made his gut knot, his lips twisting back in a snarl of mingled pain and fury and his fingers tightening on the maple’s rough bark. If she had …

  But she hadn’t; that part was over and done with. He broke off his thought to watch one of her helpers. The son, it looked like, walked up to an empty house a few doors from her own.

  Steven pulled his digital camera from his jacket pocket and aimed it. The zoom lens was powerful; he’d purchased the camera with just such a capability in mind, not just close-up but truly telescopic. After firing off a few shots—he needed it only to be recognizable, not perfect, to serve the purpose he had planned for it—he tucked the camera away again, chuckling.

  He settled more comfortably on the tree-house platform, then snapped to attention. There she was, coming out of the house after all the rest had gone on ahead.

  His eyes felt suddenly like the ray guns from the comic books his father used to buy and sneak into the house for him so his mother wouldn’t see. Eyes shooting death rays.… If he could have frizzled her to a smoking wisp where she stood, he would’ve.

  But he couldn’t, of course, and the memory of his mother’s outraged shriek when she’d found the comics didn’t help his state of mind, either. Shakily he started down the tree.

  Then halfway to the ground, it hit him how dirty it was. Insects, birds, spiders … Who knew whether they or the invisible vermin infesting them carried disgusting diseases?

  Probably they did. Touching the ground at last, he ran to the house, grateful for the screen of shrubbery and feeling all at once as if he must surely be crawling with filth.

  For a while there, he’d thought the events of last night had freed him. But no … probably he’d be counting the peas he ate again tonight, too.

  At the moment, though, the nastiness cloaking him left no room in his head for that. Inside, in the silent gloom of the old kitchen, he scrubbed himself: arms, legs, hands, feet …

  Everywhere. Finished, he rinsed his mouth thoroughly with a thin mixture of water and the ancient, pearlescent green dish soap in the plastic bottle on the sink.

  Bar soap would’ve been better. More traditional, he thought with a pained smile, for even now he was not completely without a sense of humor about his own situation.

  Bar soap was what his mother had used on him, inside and out. But in the end the taste of the dish soap was so nauseating, he figured it must have gotten the job done at least as well as she could have.

  After all, he recited to himself once his stomach settled enough so he could think again, it’s the thought that counts.

  And now it was past two o’clock. Time to get a move on; luckily, he was already undressed. Also fortunate was the fact that there were hardly any raw, bloody places on his skin, though he stung all over as if he’d been dipped in acid.

  The wipes, he’d gathered from the writing on the container of them, were intended for counters and stovetops, not humans. But hey, he told himself, feeling lighthearted after the rub-a-dub session, we do what we can with what we have.

  Thinking this, he began putting on the garments he’d brought along for the next phase of the operation:

  His mother’s second-best dress, the deep purple one with the long sleeves and plain, not-quite-straight skirt. He’d chosen it because he could walk in the shoes that went with it, dyed, low-heeled purple pumps in soft, flexible Italian leather.

  Fortunately, his mother’s feet had been quite large. Like her hands. The better to swat you with, you little …

  He shut off the thought—it was always a lot easier to do that after a good scrubbing, he’d found—then returned to the task of costume assembly.

  Under the dress, he’d put on an old undershirt of his own, the cotton thinned and softened by frequent washings until it was like silk. It didn’t show through the bodice of the outfit, and the skirt was lined so he needn’t bother about that, either.

  Stockings, though. He’d bought a pair of pantyhose in the supermarket at home, tossing them casually into his cart as if he bought them all the time, when in reality his heart had pounded.

  What if somebody notices? he’d thought as he waited in line. A man buying pantyhose … maybe he wanted them for a disguise. Or so the cashier might think, and she might mention it to a friend.

  Or the friend of a friend, and one of them might be a cop. A suspicious cop, who might even have followed Steven all the way here to Eastport, and right now …

  Shut up, shut up, he ordered himself fiercely as he y
anked and tugged at the pantyhose. He was sweating now, and it was hard to get these things on, the mesh pulling the hairs on his legs the wrong way and the pants part seeming to stop mid-thigh. He didn’t need some crazy person in his head providing a running commentary.

  A paranoid running commentary, because no one knew he was here. No one but her—and her few friends and relations, none of whom were any match for him—and that only made it better.

  More rewarding, because the knowledge frightened her. But it didn’t help her. Nothing could, now.

  Nothing at all. Working the stretchy fabric inch by inch, he got the stockings’ waistband up around his middle at last, and by tugging repeatedly at the foot and leg parts got them arranged so that it might actually stay there.

  Finally he bent to his pack to retrieve the one item that made the rest of the disguise work. No need to glue his ears back this time. And not much makeup needed, either; his beard was so skimpy, he could go for days without shaving.

  Carefully he lifted the thing, pulled the tissue paper from inside it. The sharp scent of mothballs mingled with a whiff of Shalimar made his eyes water and his gut clench suddenly.

  Her scent … as if summoned by an evil spell, his mother rose before him. Boy! Answer me! What are you doing in there? Are you getting into my things?

  Then came the clipped, sharp rap of her steps in the hall, a sound he’d learned to dread; just thinking of it now brought the taste of a bar of Lifebuoy back into his mouth, gaggingly.

  Oh, you’d better not be. She’d grate it out at him, drink in hand. The ice would tinkle as she marched toward him.

  You bad, bad, boy.

  “Shut up,” he whispered, dropping the thing he’d held.

  Or had it squirmed from his hands? The nearly overwhelming impulse to begin washing again flooded him, to scrub and scrub until …

  “Just shut up, now. Or … I’ll tell Dad.”

  The vicious monologue cut off abruptly. Her ghostly presence shrank to a wink and vanished. Threatening to tell his father had always worked back when she was alive, too.