by Sarah Graves
“Aren’t you the sly one,” Ellie commented appreciatively as she followed me outside.
In the driveway I paused. “But I’m starting to think there really might not be any more notes. Because it’s just too coincidental, that skillet missing from Bella’s.” I voiced my worst thought. “Ellie, what if someone sent the notes to give Bella a good motive for killing Jim?”
“Sent the notes, stole the weapon, and used it on him. Then sat back to wait for Bella to be blamed. It could work, maybe . . .”
“In that case, no more notes will come. There’s no need for them anymore. We’ve wasted our time at her house tonight.”
Except for finding Maggie there. I didn’t even want to think about that, much less mention it. But I had to.
“Maggie was in Lubec the same day Jim was attacked, too,” I told Ellie. “She’s not admitting it yet, but I’m sure of it.” I went on to explain about the car.
“Oh, Jake,” Ellie protested. “Surely there’s some explanation. We both know her too well to think she could have . . .” She faltered.
“Clobbered Jim herself,” I finished grimly. “And she’s certainly got the least convincing motive of anyone, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes. Killing Jim and framing Bella . . . well, it might get rid of Bella, if Bella really ended up being blamed,” Ellie mused.
I couldn’t believe we were even discussing it. “But getting Bella convicted of a crime wouldn’t guarantee getting them both out of town.”
“Right. If Kris got left here alone, it could drive her even further into Sam’s arms than she already is,” Ellie agreed.
“Exactly. She might even marry him, just as a meal ticket. And that would be the opposite of what Maggie wants.”
“But Maggie might not have thought it all through that far,” Ellie pointed out unhappily. “Still, I just can’t believe . . . no, I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t, there must be some other . . .”
“I sure hope so.” But at the moment I couldn’t think of what it might be, and Maggie wasn’t telling.
Ellie waited with the yard light on until I was in the car, before going inside. Glancing back, I saw the newly shingled roof of her house shining in the moonlight. The lamp in the kitchen went out and the one in the baby’s room went on.
Then I drove home. At one in the morning the store windows along Water Street shone vacantly, not a soul around. At the fish pier the tugboats rode a high tide smooth as polished onyx. Down the bay, tiny lights twinkled on the bridge at Lubec.
Over it all hung a white, cold moon, as silent as the town. So silent that before I even turned onto Key Street up toward my house, I could already hear it: screaming.
Somebody was screaming.
As I crested the hill, the unmistakable strobing of a cop-car cherry beacon lit Key Street. It was pulled up in front of my house, the driver’s door open and figures moving around it.
When I got nearer I saw who they were: Sam, Kris, and Bob Arnold. An icy little pulse of fear throbbed under my breastbone as the rest of me was already in Mom-mode: unnaturally calm in case I needed to remember how to get a bean out of a kid’s nose, or how to tie a tourniquet. I pulled up and got out.
“. . . do that?” Sam was shouting at Kris. “You tell me! I just want to know how you could . . .”
Bob Arnold had stepped between them, but he wasn’t having any luck shutting my son’s mouth. Or Kris’s, either.
“Don’t be such a baby!” she snarled contemptuously. “Just a scared . . .”
“All right, now,” Bob Arnold pronounced with authority. “I told you to cut it out.”
Bob was ordinarily a calm, genial fellow. But he had a voice like a razor strop when he wanted one.
And he wanted one now. Sam stopped short and took a step back from the combat zone, which unfortunately was the middle of the street. The neighbors were watching from behind cracked shades or frankly between opened curtains.
“Yeah, tell him to keep his hands off me, too,” Kris snapped when she saw Bob Arnold scolding Sam.
But this was a tactical mistake. Bob rounded on her. “You’ve had too much to drink, young lady. Go have a seat in the squad car.”
She hesitated mulishly. “Go on,” he repeated. “Considering what’s happened in your family situation I was inclined to cut you some slack. Don’t do anything to make me change my mind.”
By now Wade was outside. “What’s going on?” he asked with a stern glance at Sam, then approached Bob to find out the story.
“Mom,” Sam said when he saw me bearing down on him. His hands spread in a bid for understanding.
Or mercy. Neither of which I was in the mood to grant. No resuscitation needed, apparently, but a good swift kick seemed fairly appropriate. “Mom, I was not drinking,” he added hastily.
“Glad to hear it,” I said, restraining myself. “So what is your excuse for fighting in the street? And what’s that Kris said about keeping your hands off her? Sam, did you hit that girl?”
Never mind that I felt like slapping the fillings right out of her teeth, too. She wasn’t my responsibility.
Sam was. He shook his head defensively. “She was hitting me so I pushed her away, that’s all. I didn’t—”
“Oh, great.” Then another thought struck me. “What’s Kris even doing here? I thought she was gone with Bella to . . .”
Sam’s forehead furrowed. “You didn’t know? They didn’t go to the aunt’s. They were all ready to, but . . .”
Just then Bob Arnold came over, Wade alongside him. Kris sat a few feet away in the squad car, the interior lights showing her bored, get-me-out-of-here expression, as if we were all just too annoying.
“Would somebody like to tell me what happened here?” I said.
Bob looked deeply unhappy, Sam was wearing the “someone else started it” look I’d last seen when he was seven years old, and Wade appeared ready to knock some heads together, preferably the ones belonging to the now-embattled young lovers.
Finally Bob spoke. “What I oughta do is yank ’em both in and slap on a misdemeanor apiece. But under the circumstances . . .”
“What circumstances?” I demanded. “Is it too much to ask that I be let in on what all of you seem to know?”
Wade put a hand on my shoulder. “Kris showed up here a little while after you left,” he told me. “Very upset. I let her in, she wanted to see Sam, and they went out together.”
“I know that much,” I said impatiently. “I can see they must have . . .”
But then I realized: the threatening notes, Bella’s erratic behavior, Jim’s dead body. And the skillet . . .
That damned missing skillet. If I’d noticed it, the police investigators could, too. They’d have spoken with Bella, probably at her house, and noticed the empty space in her kitchen rack.
Only they wouldn’t take an extra mental step and decide that Bella might have been framed. Why should they?
They’d just figure Bella had done it.
Bob confirmed my suspicions. “State cops have been keeping their investigation pretty much under wraps,” he said.
Kris remained sitting in the squad car. Not protesting, not crying, not looking around to see if and when Bob Arnold might be coming to let her out. Just . . . sitting.
Her mother was sitting somewhere right now, too. And not somewhere good. All at once I felt an unwilling pang of sympathy for Kris Diamond, whether she deserved it or not.
“Putting the pieces together one by one,” Bob went on, “the state boys were, asking questions nice and careful until they—”
“Bob,” I broke in impatiently, “I know how careful they are. I’m a big fan of the meticulous investigation techniques used by the state police. But will you cut to the chase, please, and just tell me what happened?”
He pursed his lips briefly at me as if to say there was room in that squad car, and did I want it? But instead he went on.
“So they came up here, took Bella in for questioning in he
r ex’s murder. And you know what that means,” he added.
Yeah, I knew. It meant Bella was in deep and serious trouble, the kind she wouldn’t have any idea how to deal with.
“But she isn’t actually in custody? We can go get her when they’re done with her?”
To my relief, he nodded. That meant they didn’t have all they wanted yet. Not enough to arrest her and charge her.
They had just enough so that one little slip on her part could snap the trap shut. “All right,” I said, coming to a decision.
I could worry later about what Bella might be saying and how to get her a lawyer if she needed one. “You go on inside,” I told Sam in my best “I’m your mother and you’ll do what I say” voice.
And to my astonishment, apparently it still worked. He swung around silently, stalked toward the house. The door slammed, and a moment later the light went on in his room upstairs.
I turned to Wade. From the look on his face I could tell he knew what I was going to say next, and didn’t enjoy the prospect. Which was why what he said next took my breath away, as it always did when he stepped up to the plate so generously.
“Bob,” he said. “About the girl.” He angled his head at the squad car where Kris still sat.
“Yeah, I don’t know what I should do about her,” Bob agreed.
In the neighbors’ windows the shades had quit twitching and most of the curtains were closed, as people figured out that all the excitement was probably over for the night.
I sure hoped so. Even with Wade being so good about it I was unsure how this was going to work out.
“I mean it’s not like she’s a kid or anything,” Bob went on. “But I hate to just send her home alone.”
“Listen,” Wade said. “Why don’t you just release Kris to us? She can stay here for the night and we’ll go get Bella and bring her home, when the boys are done questioning her.”
Bob looked as if he’d just been offered the grand prize in the Publishers Clearing House contest. “It’d be some nice to have her off my conscience,” he said. “Though I doubt she’ll make the sweetest guest, the mood she’s in.”
That was probably putting it mildly. The girl was a hellcat. But none of us felt easy about sending her home to an empty house. And it’s like I said before. What goes around, comes around.
The trouble was, none of us had any idea that in this case it was going to come around so hard.
Chapter 7
Back in the house, the sight of the telephone reminded me again that Kris wasn’t the only guest I would be dealing with in the near future.
In the past I’d listened with mild interest to stories of Eastporters whose relatives descended, bringing unusual sleeping habits, desires for hard-to-find brands of liquor, wish lists of scenic excursions requiring the map-reading skills of a jungle explorer, and the cheerful conviction that the hostess’s kitchen was in fact a twenty-four-hour short-order grill.
But none of these tales had ever applied personally to me, so I decided to use Kris’s presence as a sort of dress rehearsal. It didn’t work out very well, though, since I wasn’t rehearsing for the visit of a sullen five-year-old, and a tipsy one at that.
“You can wear these pajamas,” I told Kris gently, handing her a pair of mine.
She snatched the set of flannels from my hand, wrinkled her nose at them, and flung them onto the guest room bed.
“Thanks,” she said flatly, not meeting my gaze. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Yeah, I’ll just bet you do, I thought uncharitably at her. But I pointed her in the right direction, at the same time offering a towel and washcloth.
“In case you want to clean up a little,” I said with all the restraint I could muster when she looked impatiently at them.
“There’s a new toothbrush in the cabinet over the sink,” I added. She just smirked, took the pajamas, towel, and washcloth, and stomped down the hall.
“So I guess we’re not up for any of that girlish heart-to-heart stuff tonight,” I said aloud as she departed, but the only reply was the slam of the bathroom door.
While she was in there I turned one of the twin beds down and switched a lamp on, pulled the shades, and laid a quilt over the end of the bed in case she needed it.
Not that I expected her to appreciate that, either. But when she came back and saw it, she stopped short in the doorway.
I’d been working intermittently on the upstairs rooms over the previous winter, so it was the only guest room that had beds in it at the moment. The others lacked shades, chairs, dressers, and important sections of the walls and ceilings; they were, in a word, uninhabitable.
But this one, with its antique floral wallpaper, hooked rugs, and patchwork quilts spread prettily over the chenille bedspreads, resembled a room out of a happy, old-fashioned dream.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Kris said softly. “I can turn down my own blankets.”
Still, she sounded like a child who was absolutely longing to be tucked in. “I know you can,” I said after a moment. “Go to bed now. Is your head spinning? Are you going to be all right?”
“God, will you stop coddling me?” She climbed irritably into the bed and yanked the covers over herself. “I smoked some pot on the way home. It’ll keep my stomach settled.” She snapped the light out. But then, as I was about to pull the door closed, her voice came out of the darkness.
“Do you think my mother’s going to be all right?”
I hesitated, wondering which she needed most: the truth, or a comforting lie?
In the end, though, I didn’t give her either of those. For one thing, even I didn’t know which was which.
“Wade or I will drive down to get her when she’s finished,” I told her. “We can talk in the morning about what’s going to happen next.”
I stepped back into the room. It smelled of forest from the blankets that had been in the cedar chest, and of sheets scented with lavender, and only the faintest sour whiff of alcohol.
So she’d used the toothbrush. “About everything that’s going to happen,” I added firmly, and left her to mull all the possible implications of that.
But she didn’t mull for long because when I went back in a few minutes to check on her, she was already sound asleep with the quilt pulled snugly up around her shoulders and a tear glistening on her cheek.
The phone rang an hour later and it was Bob Arnold, to say that the state cops had called him as a courtesy. Bella was ready to come home.
“You want to go or should I?” Wade asked, looking up at me from the book he was reading: Practical Shotgun Shell Reloading.
“I’ll go.” It was three in the morning, neither of us had been able to sleep, and there was a ship due in port so he would be on the tugboat early tomorrow.
“You stay here,” I added, angling my head at the ceiling, “in case the glitter twins up there decide to get frisky.”
In his big chair by the fire with a plaid wool shawl on his broad shoulders, his stocking feet on a worn leather hassock, and the dogs at either side of him, Wade looked for a moment like a gentleman out of an English country hunting print.
“Jake, they’re not children,” he said gently. Meaning of course that if they got frisky it wouldn’t be for the first time.
But I didn’t care. I was still way too mad at them for the spectacle they’d made of themselves with their silly quarrel to want them to have any fun. Assuming I even wanted them to have any fun in the first place, which I didn’t.
I still didn’t know what they’d been fighting about; at their age it was probably little more than the equivalent of a playground spat, I thought unkindly. On the other hand, when I had Sam I’d been a lot younger than he was now, barely married long enough to wear my wedding ring to his christening.
“Well, try to keep them from swinging on the chandeliers, anyway,” I replied, and went out.
The trip south to Machias went by in a flash: trees, fields, glittering water in the moonlight. O
nce a deer walked up to the edge of the road and gazed blankly at me, but I’d already passed him before he registered enough for me to do anything about him.
Like for instance not colliding with him. When I came out of the woods in East Machias the river had reached flood tide and a sea of cattails bristled on either side of the narrow bridge. Then after climbing the last long hill out of the river valley I was downshifting on the wide road into the village of Machias itself.
At the old redbrick courthouse I pulled into an empty spot in the parking lot. It was nearly dawn. The gray sky made cutouts of the trees and houses, and the daytime lights in the cell blocks of the county jail section of the building were coming on in a series of fluorescent blinks.
At the desk I stated my business to a bleary-looking night shift clerk, then waited on the wooden bench opposite the row of office doors. Moments later one of them opened and Bella came out looking ghastly, practically falling into my arms.
“Oh, thank you,” she exhaled. “You can’t imagine the things they’re thinking about me. I answered all their questions, but it didn’t seem to help any. They don’t say it, but . . .”
Actually I could imagine. And I didn’t like hearing that she had answered all their questions.
“Bella, shut up, okay? I mean it. You’ve talked enough for one night.”
She drew back, affronted. But I just wanted to get her out of there before she could say anything else to dig the hole she was in even wider and deeper. And eventually she did come along with me, allowing herself to be put in the car and driven away.
“Bella, why didn’t you tell me you’d been giving Jim money?” I asked when we’d crossed the Machias River again and were headed for home. If he didn’t have another scam going, I thought it was the likely explanation. And if he had, he’d have had more money.