by Sarah Graves
“I see,” I said evenly, when what I was really thinking was ker-blooey! Because a picture of Bella’s predicament was coming clearer to me now, and it wasn’t pretty.
According to Bob Arnold, Bella’s peculiarities were well known. And Dinah’s agency wasn’t going to use her anymore, either, if she failed with me.
“So you thought Ellie and I might find out why she’s off the rails, maybe even come up with a way to do something about it?”
Dinah nodded. “You two have done things like that before, in worse situations. And she’s such a nice woman. We hated the idea of having to let her go.” She put out the cigarette. “On the other hand, we can’t keep sending her out the way she is, and if we fire her it’s pretty certain no one else will . . .”
Yep, that swishing sound I’d been hearing was Bella’s whole ability to support herself, circling the drain.
That is, unless I put a plug in it fast. On the sound system Sarah Vaughan started singing about a small hotel and how she wished she were there.
Right then I wished I were anywhere. Else, that is. And not together with anyone or anything, except maybe a double martini.
Instead I ate the last of my brownie. It tasted like dust, because it was one thing to think about having Bella around for one more day while I decided what to do about her. But it was quite another to commit to having her actually working in my own house for another—egad—three more whole weeks.
In three weeks, Bella would no doubt scrub the plaster off my walls. “But if it didn’t work out, you’d send me someone else, right?”
For the first time, Dinah looked truly uncomfortable.
“Dinah?” I prompted her.
“Well.” She swirled the ice in her glass, not looking at me. “The truth is, Jake, we don’t have anyone else to send. We’re booked up for the season.”
“How nice for you,” I said evenly, when what I was thinking was oh, drat.
“Yes,” she responded, brightening. “At first we worried we might not have enough customers. But with all the summer visitors to Eastport this year . . .”
She glanced around. At nearly noon half the occupants of the tables were “people from away.” Some wore khakis and rugby shirts and dock shoes from L.L. Bean. Others, like Dinah, looked as if they’d been transported here from somewhere intensely urban, with untanned or ethnic faces.
As a summer destination it seemed that while I wasn’t paying attention, Eastport had arrived. “I see,” I told Dinah unhappily. “So the bottom line is, if I fire Bella, you do, too. Even though there’s so much demand?”
She nodded, reluctantly but firmly. “Azenath and I talked about it a lot. We think sending her out on another job would be just shooting ourselves in the foot. Word might get around that you can’t depend on our people, that they might . . .”
“Alienate your spouse, infuriate your children, destroy your belongings, and drive you bonkers,” I finished for her.
To give her credit, she did look sorry. But Dinah’s spine was apparently made of space-age materials, designed not to bend.
Lunchtime arrived, as an avocado, tomato, and swiss cheese sandwich on nine-grain bread with alfalfa sprouts went by on a thick white plate. Dinah blinked at the sandwich, fished the lime slice from her mineral water glass, and bit into it.
“We aren’t sending Bella out again,” she declared in tones of unmistakable finality, rising, “unless we feel she’s got her head back on straight.”
A vivid mental image of Bella’s head spinning popped into my own, which wasn’t exactly feeling so solidly anchored at the moment, either.
“It’s your choice, of course, Jake, if you want to let her go. And we’ll send you the prize in cash. Azenath and I decided that—”
“—together,” I finished for her. When one of them spoke, the other one’s hand probably moved as if it were manipulating a sock puppet, I thought only a little bitterly. “Okay, I understand.”
Then I got up, too, because pretty soon my ex-husband would be at my house expecting something like one of those sandwiches. It didn’t matter how spur-of-the-moment the invitation was; when Victor came for a meal he wanted something you could put a linen napkin alongside, plus the napkin itself.
“Dinah, one more question,” I said as we got to the street. “Do you and Azenath know why Bella is behaving so erratically?”
She shook her head. “She said she was getting death threats. But we just don’t believe it. And don’t spread that around, all right?” she added anxiously.
That Gopher Baroque workers were in the habit of getting death threats, she meant. Bad PR, again, because if you hired one of them you most certainly didn’t want the threats coming to your house.
“Anyway, we think there’s something else going on with her. Azenath and I do, I mean,” Dinah finished unnecessarily.
Just then down the street a large, colorfully dressed woman with long, dark hair stepped out of Wadsworth’s Hardware Store, her arms wrapped around a lot of packages. The copper bracelets on her wrists glinted in the sun. It was Azenath Jones, whose smile as she glimpsed her friend Dinah could have lit up an airport.
I was about to tell Dinah that I’d seen one of the notes for myself, that it wasn’t just Bella trying to provide herself with an excuse for her obsessive behavior, but Dinah cut me off.
“Otherwise all I know about her is, she’s lived here all her life, she has a daughter I know absolutely nothing about, and she’s so broke she just about got on her knees and begged for another chance to work for us,” Dinah said. “So we sent her to you.”
As she spoke, another familiar figure caught my eye. It was the lady who’d been at my house the day before, canvassing for the blood drive, her straw hat gleaming yellow in the sunshine.
Crossing Water Street just then, too, was our local bank manager Bill Imrie, young and blond and nattily dressed as usual in a white shirt, blue suit, and a red-striped tie.
His step was jaunty, but at the sight of the blood-drive lady he changed course abruptly and got back into his car, started it, and drove hurriedly away.
“Anyway,” Dinah finished, “who could possibly want to kill Bella?”
That was starting to be my question also, and as I watched Bill zoom off it seemed my sanity might depend on my ability to answer it correctly.
Still, I’ll admit I didn’t yet understand the kind of trouble I was getting into.
It didn’t even occur to me, for instance, that the penalty for a wrong answer could turn out to be my life.
Chapter 5
Back when we were married, my then-husband Victor Tiptree used to cheat on me with everything but the mannequins posed in department-store windows, and at the end there I was beginning to be suspicious of a couple of those. No blood pressure, of course, but they had the other attributes he liked in a woman: long legs, not a lot of opinions.
Lately, though, we’d come to a sort of accommodation. He didn’t cheat on me, a situation I had arranged by divorcing him, and I didn’t throttle him, an activity I avoided by keeping my hands a safe distance from his throat.
“There aren’t any moose on Moose Island,” he announced through a mouthful of deviled ham and hot baked beans on toast triangles.
We were sitting outside at the picnic table under the apple tree in my yard, because Bella was still inside and if he ate in there she might grab the fork out of his hand and wash it.
Up in the tree a nest full of baby robins cheeped vigorously. “How’s your lunch?” I asked Victor.
With it he was having a tall glass of Moxie: an herb-based soft drink, popular in Maine, that resembles a cola in much the same way as, say, the H-bomb is like a firecracker.
“Fine.” He forked up another mouthful. It was all I’d been able to put together on such short notice, and Victor maintained that this sort of food could destroy a discriminating palate in twenty minutes.
But he devoured it whenever he got the chance, mostly at my house. “Bella,” I cal
led through the kitchen window. With the newly repaired screen on it, she could hear me clearly. “Stop scrubbing.”
She stopped instantly but her hands remained poised, her fingers clutching the scrub brush in a death grip. And to judge by what I’d seen of that previously cud-slimed kitchen, Victor was right: not only were there no moose on Moose Island, there were none anywhere in the world.
The place was so clean, he could have done surgery in it. No paint smears, either. I sent a prayer up to heaven that I would be allowed to keep Bella a while longer. If this went on, someday I might be able to come downstairs in the morning without getting hit by a wrecking ball of housework-based guilt.
“Bella,” I called to her again, “will you please go home and get the rest of those notes? I want to look at all of them.”
Ellie glanced up from the glider chair by the grape arbor where she was giving Lee a bottle of the stuff the pediatricians in Portland had prescribed. The feeding portion of the mommy program hadn’t worked out at all the way that Ellie had hoped, but after a scary struggle when the baby was first born they’d finally found a formula she could thrive on.
Bella put the scrub brush down, looking as if she wanted to say something but didn’t dare to.
Something like oh thank you thank you thank you.
Moments later she scuttled out to the garden and approached me cravenly, an attitude I didn’t like at all; I thought if she tried kissing my hands I might have to get that scrub brush and smack her with it.
But she didn’t. “All right,” she said, a shy little quaver of hope coming into her voice. “I’ll get the notes right now.”
Whereupon I abandoned my plan of smacking her. No one had helped Bella in a long time, as far as I’d been able to learn. Wasn’t it only natural that she might have trouble getting used to it?
“Bring them all,” I repeated. “Try to put them in the order you received them. And come right back. We’re going out later.”
Aren’t we? I added silently to Ellie, whose smile over the baby’s head was all the answer I needed. During the day when the men were working on her house, she often brought the baby here.
But what the infant possessed in eating troubles she more than made up for with her sleeping abilities. So there were long hours in which Ellie—because I wouldn’t let her do my household chores—felt underutilized.
Besides, like me, she was a snoop at heart.
Victor scraped the last baked bean from his plate and washed it down with a final swig of Moxie. “Do you,” he asked hopefully, “happen to have any of that orange Bundt cake around here?”
He still hadn’t told me what he wanted to talk about, but since we only really had one thing in common anymore I was afraid I knew.
And I wasn’t looking forward to it. “Yes, and I’ll give you some,” I began.
His eyes brightened greedily. “If,” I added, “you’ll concede that I really saw a moose.”
Whereupon Victor gave in at once. After all, he could always deny that he’d said it, later. My ex was good at denying.
“You cut me a slice of that cake,” he declared, “and I’ll cheerfully agree you saw little green men getting out of a flying saucer, right here in the yard.”
Which only stiffened my growing determination to try solving Bella’s problem, because if little green men landed in my yard they would need machetes just to hack their way to a place where they could ask to be taken to our leaders. I’d cut a few ragged paths to the picnic table and glider, but the rest of the place was fit only for a team of jungle explorers.
“Fine,” I agreed, going in to cut him a slice of the cake. Meanwhile I hoped Bella really did know how to use a lawn mower, as she kept insisting.
On the other hand, she had figured out how to remove soaked-in paint from the kitchen floor. Contrary to her usual energetic cleaning methods, she’d taken a small wire brush, dipped it in hot, soapy water—because it was latex paint; if it had been oil, I suppose she’d have used turpentine—and rubbed the brush gently along the grain of the wood, removing the paint. Afterward she’d scrubbed the whole floor very thoroughly so the treated spots didn’t stand out, then coated it with Mop & Glo.
And the result was brilliant. Noticing it as I put Victor’s cake on a plate, it struck me that maybe I was underestimating Bella. Hapless she might be in the managing-the-ex-husband department; at coming up with a way of getting an unorthodox job done, however, she was clearly a shining star.
But I didn’t have time to pursue this thought; when I got back outside, Ellie was putting the baby up over her shoulder.
“I think we’ll have a nap,” she announced, glancing meaningfully between Victor and me, and took Leonora inside.
Which left just me and my ex-husband, which was a bit like leaving just dynamite and a pack of matches. After a career as the brain surgeon you went to when all of the others had told you that (a) you should start making peace with your lifelong enemies and (b) those long wooden boxes were really quite comfortable, especially with the nice satin pillows they were putting in them nowadays, Victor had relocated to Eastport to be near Sam and, I believed, to scramble my brains whenever he got an opportunity.
Like now. “So, what’s going on?” he mumbled through a bite of orange cake.
Ellie had made it, popping it perfectly out of the Bundt pan with a short, sharp rap that always precedes disaster when I try doing so. Also, when I made it that cake always came out as dense as concrete, but hers was so light that you had to hold it down on the plate with one hand just so you could put a fork into it with the other.
Overhead in the apple tree the mother robin arrived; the urgent cheeping grew frantic, then subsided. I will get through this peacefully, I told myself. “With Sam, you mean?”
But of course he meant Sam. It was why I’d let Victor come over here at all, because he’d finally shown some interest and I thought he should know the situation.
Whatever the situation was. “He’s working on his school project,” I told Victor. “Going out in the morning, coming home in the afternoon.”
I took a deep breath. “But then he goes out again at night, I don’t know where, and he won’t tell me,” I blurted miserably.
Victor stopped chewing. “Is he drinking?”
“I don’t think so.”
But Sam also wasn’t meeting my gaze, saying words beyond the few very necessary ones, or smiling.
My bright, funny, exuberant Sam . . . he was never smiling.
Victor sighed heavily. “You know, you handled it all wrong,” he began as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.
Which to him it was; I controlled myself with an effort. It had taken Victor six months to get up the nerve to have this conversation at all. Before now, he had offered me no suggestions and no support, just the slow head shake and silently judgmental gaze that always made me long to punch his lights out.
He scraped a few last crumbs off his plate as I struggled to keep my composure; despite my resolve, my head had begun pounding and a nasty little refrain kept repeating itself in my brain.
Just like always, just like . . . “What do you think I could have done better?” I demanded.
But he wasn’t listening. “You never did know how to handle a crisis,” he said placidly, licking his fork. “Even when he was a little kid, you used to—”
When Sam was a little kid he used to go for days, sometimes a few weeks, without seeing his father at all. Half the time it was because Victor was up to his elbows in somebody else’s skull. And half the time . . .
Oh, never mind. It was the last straw, that’s all. “Victor, put that fork down this minute. Before I stick it in your heart.”
Suddenly I was gasping, feeling my own heart shriveling in anger. “What would you have done?” I demanded. “Tell Sam to find some other addiction? Like maybe women?”
Victor frowned, caught off guard by my unexpected attack. This was forbidden territory if we wanted to keep a peaceful coexi
stence going.
“You don’t have to—” he began defensively.
“Yeah, I don’t have to.” My voice rasped in my throat. “But now I’m going to, because you know what, Victor? You didn’t know what to do about Sam, either, so you stayed away. Because you were scared.”
He blinked, his expression suddenly naked and defenseless. I was cutting way too close to the bone.
“You start out all intense because now that you want to, we’ve got to talk. Then you come over here,” I hurtled on, “with your casual what’s for lunch and what’s going on.”
“Jake, lower your voice,” he said, glancing around uneasily.
I didn’t. “All you really want is to let me know that it’s all my fault. Which you make sure it is by never being around in the crunch.”
After Sam broke down and confessed that he’d been drinking again, it was Wade who had walked me around the island, miles and miles in the snow, until my fear and panic dispersed enough so that I could even think. He’d taken the day off work to do it.
“Sure, you can criticize now,” I went on before Victor could get a word in. “But when something’s actually happening—”
Sam had stayed up in his room all the rest of that awful day and throughout the evening, so silent that I was frightened for him and walked right in on him when he wouldn’t answer my knock, which I’d agreed I would never do. . . .
“. . . then you’ve got a sick patient,” I grated out. “Somebody else who needs your help, not your son, who is a member of your own goddamned family.”
When Sam was born, Victor had been in the operating room doing a neurology procedure; in other words, surgery. Later I found out that it was elective surgery.
That he could have postponed it. Now he stared at me. “I’m very sorry you feel that way about it,” he said stiffly, getting up.
Going into Sam’s room that night, I’d found him facedown on his bed in the dark, weeping his poor heart out. And since then something irreplaceable seemed to have gone out of him. I desperately missed that constant little light of his that we’d both depended upon without even realizing it.