Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery

by Sarah Graves

  Over the years, the non-chapel area had sometimes been used as living quarters, and intermittent attempts to clean these rooms had been made. But the result was that each parlor still held stacks of things nobody wanted, but no one wanted to take responsibility for throwing them out, either.

  A wicker birdcage, for instance, complete with stuffed bird (a parrot, Jake thought) stood on a tall stack of old National Geographics in one parlor, while a jumbled collection of skis, ice skates, and snowshoes stuck every which way from behind an old steamer trunk in the other.

  A winding stair led to the second floor. “No one down here,” Ellie reported, dusting her hands after disposing of the vase pieces.

  Jake looked up the stairs. “Mmm. Someone was, though. Unless you think that vase hopped off the podium by itself.”

  “No,” Ellie agreed unhappily. “And that front door didn’t end up standing open by itself, either.”

  Jake dropped the dog’s leash and made an after-you gesture, Ellie returned it theatrically, and while they were standing there debating the question of who went first, Prill started up, her muscular legs making quick work of the stairs.

  But at the top the dog let out a low growl, and Jake hurried up after her into the smells of long-abandoned clothing, long-unused bedding, and mouse droppings.

  “What is it?” called Ellie from below.

  Jake stared, reaching down to calm the suspicious animal with a pat on the flank. “I’m not sure. Maybe nothing.”

  Prill tended to growl first and ask questions later. “Be careful,” Ellie warned as Prill advanced along the hallway to an open door, toenails clicking.

  “I will,” Jake said, taking a step forward onto the hall’s old linoleum. Its pattern, tan lattice entwined in cabbage roses, was one she recognized from her broom closet at home.

  “I’m just going to—” she began, and then too late realized she’d hit a trip wire of some kind, Prill’s lower profile having passed without triggering it.

  A swishing sound came through the air, and so did a paint can. The can flew at her, missing her head by inches as she ducked fast.

  Then it sailed on by, hitting the wall beyond with a hollow-sounding clank. White primer splashed out over the wallpaper, a faded lavender scenery print of milkmaids lugging milk cans.

  “Jake?” Ellie sounded alarmed. Jake stared at the paint trickling down as if running into the wallpaper’s milk cans.

  Then she found her voice. “I’m fine,” she called. Prill came out of the first bedroom and stalked into the second one, ears pricked and neck hairs bristling.

  Ellie reached the landing, took in the situation. “Wow,” she breathed. “Someone set up a—”

  “Booby trap,” Jake agreed. The trip wire was a thread stretched waist-high between the top railing post and the wall, where a hook had once held something: a baby gate, maybe.

  Something long gone. Like her jokester/assailant was now.

  “You okay?” Ellie’s face was full of concern.

  “Yeah.” Still, her heart thumped against her ribs. “Surprised me, is all.” She sat down on the top step, unwilling to admit how much it had unnerved her to see the shape flying out of the hall’s gloom.

  But Ellie knew. She stepped past Jake, to give her a chance to compose herself. “Prill?” she called.

  The dog came obediently out of the second bedroom. Ellie turned to the door to the third-floor stairs.

  “We’re going up,” Ellie told Jake. “Whatever this is, we might as well get it over with.”

  With that, she opened the door and went through it; Prill followed as Jake got to her feet and hurried to catch up.

  “Hey, you two …” The stairs were narrow and steep.

  At the top, Ellie passed through another door, with the big animal close behind. Again Jake followed, emerging into a light, airy chamber, framed and plastered but with no further ornament.

  Even the doorframes, unlike the elaborately carved and varnished woodwork of the lower floors, were plain, flat planks, two simple uprights capped by another untrimmed board.

  “Wow,” she said inadequately, almost whispering it.

  Windows on all sides let the sky into the empty room, its raw plank floors bleached by sunlight over the decades. Nothing had been stored here; too many stairs, she supposed. “This is …”

  Beautiful. The walls, the floors … all bare, and someone had whitewashed the plaster a long time ago, so that now it was the color of old bone. That and the room’s emptiness made it feel almost weightless, as if it might sail off the top of the house.

  “Look,” said Ellie, turning from the bare window.

  Crossing to it, Jake peered out. Even without binoculars, she could see the concrete-mixing trough leaned up against the cellar doors, the hose coiled by the spigot.

  She could see the corner of the front porch, too, where earlier she had set the near-empty gallon can of white primer.

  Now it was gone. “He used it,” she said, staring out at her house. Her own home, where her family lived …

  “He walked right up onto that porch and took the paint can, probably while we were around back mixing concrete, and brought it here.”

  She turned from the window. “This is all my fault. I could have prevented all this.”

  But Ellie replied indignantly, “Jake, it is not. Anybody who thinks anybody should just hand them—”

  Fifty grand. A lot of money. But for her, it really hadn’t been, not back then.

  “Still, he thinks it was. An eye for an eye, I guess, is what he’s here for.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll eye-for-an-eye him.”

  Below, the island spread out green and lovely, the gardens pristine and houses festooned with flags. Snippets of patriotic tunes drifted up even through the attic’s closed windows, and the bay’s silvery glitter made everything seem to shimmer.

  Ellie let an impatient breath out. “I swear, Jake, sometimes I wonder what happened to all those smarts you had in Manhattan.”

  Jake turned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Ellie said reasonably, “if you’d given him the money, what would’ve happened? Anything different from what had happened before, anytime he’d had any?”

  “Probably not,” she admitted. One last all-or-nothing fling at the racetrack—how would Garner have been able to resist?

  “All right, then,” said Ellie, satisfied, and then, “Look.”

  Through the high attic window, they watched the parade begin snaking at last out of its staging grounds, out on County Road between the firehouse and the Youth Center. A man with a bullhorn waved his arms; from here, he was the size of an ant.

  “No sane person would have done what he asked,” Jake said. “And even if I had, it wouldn’t have—”

  You don’t know that, her mind contradicted her cruelly. You might’ve saved his life, if only you’d …

  The fog bank still lay like a line scrawled with gray crayon on the southern horizon. “—it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

  She turned toward the stairs. “And we’ve found what he meant us to, so let’s go.”

  They descended two flights and made their way between the old pews toward the exit. Here in the chapel area, the place wasn’t so bad. Spare and serene feeling, the room was lined with tall bare windows still paned with early-nineteenth-century glass.

  “I hope those F-18s Wade’s so excited about don’t end up breaking all the old windows in town,” Jake said, gazing around distractedly.

  The flowers that Ellie had rescued and put into a coffee can on the long wooden table by the stacks of literature didn’t hurt, either. The other rooms, though, full of boxes of old letters and books with their spines broken, unlabeled film cans, and more …

  Much more. On her way through, she’d glimpsed ancient bank statements, receipts tumbling out of their manila envelopes, old membership lists. Other boxes held a moldy variety of old clothes and jumbled kitchen implements.

  “Someone
should really clean this place out.” She stepped into the sunshine with a sense of relief. “A Dumpster and a few days of filling it with all that crap could be some benevolent person’s gift to this place,” she said.

  The gutters could use replacing, too, and a couple of the window-panes on the second floor needed …

  “Right, it’s the rest of it that’s such a problem,” Ellie agreed, still lingering inside. “Meanwhile, I’m glad it was just a paint can that jumped out at us.”

  Jake went on assessing the old structure, unable to help seeing all that it needed. At least the entry had been remodeled, with a ramp and a set of wide steps built of pressure-treated lumber, so people wouldn’t break their legs going in and out.

  “Yes,” she said, “I guess he must’ve just wanted me to know he’d gotten close enough to my house to …”

  “Um. Jake?” Ellie’s tone alerted her. Reluctantly she went back inside, where Ellie was at one of the literature tables.

  From among the profusion of tracts and sign-up sheets—a spiritualist lecturer, a community organizer’s talk on motivating volunteerism—she’d plucked an item unlike the rest of the long table’s offerings.

  It was a photograph, an eight-by-ten, full-color photo that, judging by the blurriness of everything but the central subject, had been taken with a zoom lens.

  “It was at the end, there. Just in with the other pamphlets and so on.”

  Suddenly dry-mouthed, Jake took the photograph from Ellie’s hands. “Sam,” she whispered.

  It was from today, she could tell by the clothes he wore: a view of him leaving the house. Prill’s head showed faintly behind him, framed in the lower part of the screen door.

  A ball cap sat on his dark curls, and his whole long, rangy body looked relaxed and carefree, lips pursed so you could almost hear the tune he was whistling.

  He’d been on his way out with the others to inspect the vacant houses in town, in case Steven Garner might be hiding in one of them. On the photograph, there was a clumsy but effective bull’s-eye target crudely drawn in black Magic Marker around his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Ellie whispered. “I almost wish I hadn’t—”

  “Don’t be. We needed to know.”

  Blocks away, snare drums rang out a rhythmic anthem. A flute trilled “Yankee Doodle.”

  A car backfired. Even at this distance, Jake flinched.

  Sam. With a target drawn on him.

  Around his …

  “Let’s go,” she urged grimly. “We’ve got more empty houses to check.”

  … around his head.

  IN EASTPORT, THAT HOLIDAY WEEKEND WAS NOT A GOOD time to be a big-eared but otherwise ordinary-looking young guy, if nobody knew you.

  Matt Stottlemeir, though, was not aware of that fact. All he knew was that his pretty, blonde wife, Maria, and their two-year-old twins were already here somewhere.

  They were down from Fredericton, visiting the American side of the family. They’d been here a week, and now he was here to spend the weekend with them; once he found them, he intended to watch the parade, have a barbecue with Maria’s American cousins—nice people who made great potato salad and served an abundance of excellent Maine-brewed beer—and see the fireworks tonight.

  If there were any fireworks. Locking the car and leaving it on a side street, Matt cast a doubtful eye at the sky. Hazy now, it had thickened considerably since he’d come through the customs and immigration station at the border in Calais.

  A farmer who cultivated over four hundred acres of potatoes, broccoli, and corn, Matt decided it looked like rain. Odds were, there weren’t even going to be any fireworks tonight, and he had an enormous amount of work to do back at home.

  But Maria had been insistent, and besides, how else was she going to get back with the kids? For a farm family nowadays, if you couldn’t hitch a machine to it, there was no sense owning it.

  Still, he told himself as he strolled toward the sounds of music, sirens, and other parade-related cacophony across town, the beer would be good. And maybe if he got a few bottles of it into Maria, she’d be good to him tonight, too.

  Seeing as he’d come all this way for her. The cousins’ guest room, he remembered with a reminiscent grin, was quite a distance from the rest of the house. Meanwhile, Eastport was a pretty town with nice old homes and a spectacular waterfront looking out onto Passamaquoddy Bay; not bad duty in any case, he reflected.

  Now, where would Maria and the kids be sitting? The parade, he recalled as he reached the corner of Water Street where the library lawn sported a War of 1812 cannon, usually came right by here.

  The cannon did give him pause. My people, he couldn’t help thinking, got shot up by your people.

  But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, just about everyone on this side of the border was cousins with someone over there. Maria and her folks, for instance. Scanning the crowd lining the street and not seeing his wife and kids, he turned uphill, away from the downtown congestion.

  Probably they were on the other side of town, near Maria’s cousins’ place. It was faster to cut across on a side street, he knew from previous visits, and before long he’d reached a narrow lane where he was alone until an old pickup truck appeared from around the corner, muffler dragging and carburetor wheezing.

  And three guys piling purposefully out of the cab. “Hey! You with the ears!” one of them shouted.

  Taken aback, Matt pointed to himself. “Who, me?”

  The men advanced on him. All three of them had the kind of swaggering, no-kidding walk he associated with bar fights.

  Also, they were large. Still, he couldn’t believe it. “Uh, fellas, I think you might be—”

  Making a mistake, he’d meant to finish, but just then one of the guys stepped up and seized him by the collar.

  “This is a message from Wade Sorenson. Better quit hasslin’ his wife,” the guy said.

  “Who?” Matt managed to gasp through the grip of the guy’s fist at his throat.

  The guy shook him hard. “Don’t try to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Beat it. Get out of town.”

  The guy let go, shoving Matt hard. He landed on his butt; no real harm done, he knew right away. But it made him mad, and in the next moment he was on his feet again, fists windmilling and his boots doing a creditable job of butt-kicking.

  In the end, though, it was three against one, so they just grabbed him and held him, none of them even needing to throw a punch. And he still couldn’t figure out why they’d picked him.

  “Don’t forget.” The guy who’d accosted him first aimed a nicotine-stained finger at him. “Next time it’ll be worse. We got a pal, cuts fish bait for a living. You don’t want to meet him.”

  They strode away, leaving Matt standing there in the street catching his breath.

  Sorenson, he thought as the old truck wheezed and clanked to life, then squealed in reverse back to the corner and roared off.

  Wade Sorenson.

  BACK ON WASHINGTON STREET, EASTPORT’S FOURTH OF JULY parade was about to begin. Returned from his errands—the paint can had been an inspired touch, he thought proudly—Steven found a spot on the curb uphill from the post office and sat down to wait.

  Beside him sat an elderly man with a long white beard, dressed in a yellow slicker and sou’wester and carrying a homemade trident. Steven tried not to gawk, but the man didn’t seem to mind being stared at.

  “Hello, young lady!” the old man shouted. “Great day for a parade!”

  “Mmm, yeah,” Steven muttered, taken aback. The trident was made of a broomstick and some wadded-together aluminum foil. This guy, Steven thought, is even more of a nutcase than me.

  The idea was alarming, suggesting as it did that quirks other than his own might be in play today, maybe even affecting his plans. And sure enough, just then a clown from the parade ran over, outsized rubber shoes flapping.

  The clown honked the bright red rubber bulb-horn that was his nose, then presse
d a green plastic toy pistol into Steven’s hands. “Here ya go, madam! Have a blast!”

  Steven took the toy gun, aimed it at the clown, and pulled the trigger. A bunch of paper flowers burst from the barrel.

  The clown looked narrowly at Steven from behind his makeup. Something in Steven’s face seemed to have alerted him that this was not your average lady parade-goer.

  But then he whirled away, his jumbo, white-gloved hands suddenly brimming over with candy, which he kept flinging to the curbs and sidewalks, where the children scrambled for it.

  “Hellooo!” shouted the old guy sitting beside Steven as a float titled The Class of ’65 rolled into view. Struggling to his feet, he hustled gimpily alongside until he was hauled onto it by the class members.

  His father, Steven realized, would have been about their age now. He wondered if his dad would’ve needed glasses, and if he’d have lost his hair. He wondered if by now some sort of emotional connection to the man might’ve arisen in his own heart.

  His father was his protector, his savior from Mother’s wild mood swings and crazy regime. That alone was reason enough to miss him—that if he’d lived, things would’ve been different.

  But would Steven have been different, too? Would he have the things, the sensations or whatever they were, that everyone else called feelings? Those mysterious urges to be close to other people, and somehow to understand—or share, or whatever it was—their feelings?

  Steven didn’t know. He suspected not, actually. At least with regard to other people, the only such sensations he’d ever experienced were unpleasant.

  But maybe he’d have had the opportunity to find out, if his father were alive. Which he wasn’t. And we know whose fault that is, don’t we?

  Indeed, and Steven was in the process right now of taking care of that little matter.

  The matter of vengeance. He shifted uncomfortably inside the dress he wore, unsettlingly loose in some places and too tight in others. On his head, the gray wig was heavy and hot, and squidgy feeling from sweat where it touched his scalp.

  It exuded a perfume smell so strong, it was like having a scented candle in his mouth. On his swollen, bruised feet, the shoes, too, were hideously painful, with their stacked heels and the cutaway places where his toes poked through.