by Sarah Graves
She jumped guiltily. Then she sighed. “I shouldn’t have left it out. I know you were trying to help me.”
Trees crowded the road on either side of us once more. Fifty yards off the pavement, you could be lost for hours or days.
“But I was ashamed for anyone to know I’d knuckled under to him. I thought if I gave him what he wanted, he’d stop bothering me. But,” she added, “he didn’t.”
She sucked in a shuddery breath. “He just kept after me, and then the notes started and they could never catch him at it, and anyway they thought he couldn’t have done it.”
She turned, her face shadowy in the dashboard lights’ glow. “Written,” she clarified unnecessarily, “all those big words.”
So she still believed Jim had been behind the threats. And she had probably told the police investigators so, too.
“They were fooled,” she went on as we sped through the dawn, “and why ever shouldn’t they be? It’s no one’s fault he was such a clever devil. No one at all would’ve taken him any notice until he murdered me in my bed.”
“Oh, now, wait a minute,” I objected as we climbed through a series of winding curves. “Isn’t that going a little far?”
As we rounded the last turn I had a clear look at a pileated woodpecker clinging to the side of a white pine. His huge crested head with its flash of bright red was like a danger flag.
“You may think so,” Bella replied stiffly. “But I don’t. I was the one married to him, after all.”
To which I had no ready answer. Up until almost the day I divorced him, my friends thought Victor was the husband from the highest, most exalted level of heaven.
The few who weren’t already sleeping with him, that is. We shot out onto a straightaway between a dairy farm and a paved lot where prefab houses sat on trailers, waiting to be delivered.
By now it was a little past five A.M. “What all else did you tell them, anyway?” I asked Bella. “The police, I mean.”
Again she sighed wearily. “I told them what they asked. Why shouldn’t I?” she added defiantly, “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Famous last words. “Did he threaten me,” she said, “had I been there recently, could anyone say I’d been somewhere else at the time he was attacked. Whenever that was.”
“And could anyone? Say you were elsewhere, that is?”
But she was right: It wouldn’t be so easy coming up with an alibi for an attack whose timing was uncertain.
Bella just shook her head. “Except for when I was working at your house, I was alone.”
As we crossed the causeway onto Moose Island, a heron sailed off toward the forested cliffs of the Shackford Head State Park.
“Bella, I hate to say this,” I began as the bird’s wingtips skimmed the water in the distance, “but you had a terrific motive to kill him. Having to give him money, thinking he was threatening you, that he might hurt you?”
She gazed morosely back out over the water on the causeway’s other side. There a massive freighter idled waiting for clearance and for Wade to come and pilot her into port.
“Also,” I said gently as we passed the long, flat expanse of Quoddy Airfield, “you don’t seem to have any alibi. I mean, not even in a general way.”
Her voice hardened. “That’s right. Didn’t know I was going to have to account for my time, did I? But I guess the worst part must have been the key. They looked very grim when I told them about that.”
I glanced questioningly at her. “The one I had,” Bella added, “to the door of Jim’s apartment.”
At this I just about drove off Water Street, down the dock, and right into Passamaquoddy Bay. “Bella, why in the world would you have a key to Jim’s—”
“Home,” she interrupted insistently. “I want to go home.”
I’d been about to go the other direction, toward my house. There were more things I wanted to ask her, such as for instance whether they’d told her when she could expect to be in handcuffs.
And about that damned skillet; she hadn’t mentioned it and I wondered if the police had. But she already had a death grip on the Fiat’s door handle; I was pretty sure she’d just jump out if I didn’t go where she said. So I followed her instruction.
“The key,” I prodded. “Tell me about it, Bella. Now.”
She sighed heavily. “When Jim got out of jail, he needed a place. He tried to move in with me, but I wouldn’t let him.”
We climbed Adams Street past the long uphill row of white frame houses, each with its neat square of green front lawn. “And no one would rent to him,” she went on. “Because everyone knew where he’d been and what he was like.”
A bully and a crook, recently released from jail. I could see why those might not be on a landlord’s top ten list of desirable tenant characteristics. “So you vouched for him,” I said as we pulled up in front of her house.
In daylight it looked even smaller and meaner than it had the night before. I thought about saying I’d been inside, decided not to.
Not yet. “And finally you found him a place in Lubec.”
“I paid the deposit,” she agreed in a monotone. “I told the landlord I’d be the responsible person on the lease. And I took a key, because if he skipped out—Jim, I mean—I promised I’d clean the place. After he was gone.”
I shut off the Fiat’s ignition. In the brightening light of summer morning on the island, the silence was pristine, the scent of beach roses floating sweetly in the still, clear air.
“So,” Bella finished, “that’s why I had a key. Making sure he had a place and a little money was the only way I could think of to make him stop coming around wanting something all the time. Which it didn’t, anyway,” she concluded miserably. “But thank you for coming to get me and—”
“I’m coming in with you. No, don’t argue with me.”
We got out of the car, Bella still insisting she didn’t need anyone to accompany her inside.
“Humor me,” I said, brushing off her protests. “And watch it. Looks like there’s a patch of something on your doorstep.”
It was the ashes I’d left there, undisturbed. Ignoring her curious glance at me I waited until she’d unlocked the door, then followed her in.
Here too the light of day was unkind. It showed worn carpets, old curtains faded from many washings, everything cheap but neat and orderly, and clean as a whistle.
Bella looked around disconsolately. “I’ll have to make some kind of arrangements for Kris,” she murmured. “I don’t know what, but she can’t be trusted living alone if they do really decide to . . .”
Her voice trailed off as she wandered into the kitchen.
There were no ashes on the rug. Nothing in the living room had changed from the way it had been when Ellie and I were here eight hours earlier. I picked up a book I hadn’t examined before, noting that it was poetry.
“Do you have relatives she could stay with? Your aunt?”
A line from the first poem jumped out at me, assuring me that if I faced the void confidently, useful thoughts would ensue.
Yeah, sure they will, I replied mentally as I put the book down. Silence in the kitchen; I decided to wait until Bella had calmed down a little more before asking her about the missing skillet. “Or maybe you have some friends who could take her, until—”
A breathy scream of fear interrupted me. I ran, noting as I did so that there were no ashy shoe marks printed in the hall or leading from the bedrooms. In the kitchen the floor was unsoiled, too. But Bella leaned on the kitchen table with one hand.
The other, pressed to her heart, clutched a sheet of yellow notebook paper. “Another note,” she gasped, thrusting it at me.
I looked around again. No ashes anywhere. Someone had been in here, but somehow had managed to avoid leaving any trace.
Except for the note, its cruel words gouged harshly into the paper as before. It was as if someone had known about the trap I had laid, and evaded it to taunt me.
“Oh, Missu
s,” Bella moaned, her harsh features twisted in fear. “What am I going to do?”
“Bella,” I said, “did you ever have one of those days when everyone seems to be trying to get your goat, just to prove that they can do it?”
She nodded, her lower lip trembling and her work-reddened hands in a palsy.
“Well,” I said, “the good news is, I think two can play at that game. And as of this minute, I’m going to.”
Maybe it was being tired, or being worried about Sam, or wondering how I would cope with a dozen visiting relatives. Or maybe it was knowing that somebody was laughing, thinking they’d made a fool of me. But starting now I intended to find out what was going on:
Jim Diamond’s murder, the suggestion of Bella’s involvement, the threatening notes, Maggie’s worrisome behavior, and anything Kris might know about all or any of it, too . . .
In short, the whole intensely annoying mess. I was going to put a stop to it and never mind that so far, I had no idea how.
Something would come to me.
“So someone was there between the time we left and the time you brought Bella home,” Ellie said thoughtfully.
I’d swung by to pick her up on my way back from Bella’s, and we’d stopped to pick some of the wild strawberries ripening in the fields at the south end of the island overlooking the bay.
Gulls cried distantly in the wake of a small fishing boat. “Seems so,” I said, popping one of the tiny fruits into my mouth. The baby was asleep on the backseat of the Fiat.
“And that means there’s more going on than meets the eye. A sneaky intruder who knew enough to avoid your trap . . .”
“Nothing’s meeting my eye,” I pointed out as another berry burst tartly on my tongue, its taste mingling with the fruity aroma of the lupine blooming in tall purple spikes all around us.
“Nothing useful anyway,” I added.
Ellie wore a yellow smock, a red T-shirt, yellow leggings, and green clogs over a pair of argyle socks. The effect was of an explosion at the Institute for Primary Colors.
And it was almost more good cheer than I could take under the circumstances. I got up, feeling my knees creak with fatigue.
“You know, we said we weren’t going to snoop in murders anymore,” I reminded Ellie as we drove back toward downtown. “Now that you’ve got the baby . . .”
Out past the channel markers under a cloudless sky, the Deer Island ferry chugged through the swirling currents of the Old Sow whirlpool. “Are you firing me?” Ellie asked lightly.
“Of course not. But with Bella under suspicion, this could get a little hairier than we expected, that’s all.”
What I wanted was to give her a graceful out, if that’s what she wanted. And I thought she might; before Leonora was born she had sounded pretty firm about it. But her answer surprised me.
“So let’s just snoop in the notes,” she replied, her tone disingenuous.
Hearing it while the ferry was on the whirlpool reminded me of the time I’d told Sam not to go out on the water. Later I’d learned that he’d made it to Campobello during one of the biggest storms that autumn. And when I confronted him about it he said he hadn’t been on the water; he’d been on a boat.
But before I could draw any of the obvious parallels, Ellie stopped me.
“I know,” she conceded, once again reading my mind. “This is all more complicated than we expected. But Jake, before Lee came I was full of ideas about how I would change when I was a mom. Everything was going to be different.”
On Water Street, merchants swept doorways and climbed onto stepladders to water hanging baskets of petunias. In the pale morning light, a man tossed bundles of newspapers from a truck onto the sidewalk.
“Now that she’s here, though, I’m not so sure that I should change,” Ellie went on. “Because what if it just makes her think there are things she can’t do, too?”
“You mean, when she’s a mother?”
“No,” she answered seriously. “Just because she’s a girl.”
I turned the corner onto Key Street. A trio of volunteers was painting and glazing the sashes of the big old redbrick public library’s antique windows.
Ellie went on, “I mean, I don’t want to get too overly . . .”
She paused, searching for the word.
“Militant?” I offered. We’d touched on this topic before.
“Right. Too militant. And I’m not going to wade into things foolishly, either. Especially not dangerous things. But George reminded me of something last night after you left, and it’s got me thinking.”
“About Jim Diamond?” At the top of the hill my own house came into view. Porch steps, shutters, window screens, doorknobs, I thought automatically.
And guest rooms. “No,” Ellie replied. “About Bella. She has two brothers. George knew them in school, but I didn’t.”
“So? What’ve Bella’s brothers got to do with anything?” I pulled into the driveway. Wade’s truck wasn’t there because he was on the freighter, or headed there. Sam’s car was gone, too.
“Nothing directly,” Ellie said as she unfastened Leonora from her car seat and lifted her. “But the brothers both went to college. One lives in a suburb outside Seattle now; he works for Microsoft. Other one’s in Belgium, does something in gemstones.”
“Ellie, I still don’t see what that has to do with . . .”
Inside, pairs of clean cereal bowls, juice glasses, and coffee cups stood on the drainboard. Apparently Kris and Sam had breakfasted together.
“Guess they made up their quarrel,” Ellie observed.
Sure, I thought, why let a little screaming match out in the street get in the way of True Love?
Monday and Prill trotted in to say good morning while Cat Dancing scowled cross-eyed from atop the refrigerator. Meanwhile I went on noticing transparent efforts to get on my good side.
There was coffee in the carafe and a note on the table from Sam: He’d fed the animals and taken the dogs out. The counter had been wiped, the floor swept, and the bread and cereal put away.
Still, I wasn’t placated. When he knew I was mad at him Sam always went on super-fine behavior; after the boat-in-the-storm incident he’d made his bed, cleared the dinner table, and taken the trash out every day for two whole weeks.
After which he’d forgotten all about it, this being another way in which he resembled his father. “Wait here a minute,” I told Ellie, and went upstairs.
The air smelled of shaving cream, mouthwash, and the faint steamy aroma of showers having been taken recently; not together, I hoped, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. Drops of moisture ran on the bathroom mirror and damp towels crammed the hamper.
Sam’s room was empty. So was Kris’s.
Which was a relief. I wanted to talk with her about drinking in front of Sam; after all, somebody had to and he clearly wasn’t going to do it.
But right now at least I didn’t have to see her pinched face confronting me smugly while she explained to me that her behavior—and Sam’s, she surely believed—was none of my business.
Then I saw the note written in what looked like eyeliner pencil, lying on her bed. Thank You, it said. She’d stripped the bed, too, and bundled up the linen, placing it on the floor.
The message and her unexpected delicacy about the sheets weren’t what struck me most, though. That dubious honor was reserved for the material she’d written her message on.
It was a small, nondescript sheet of yellow notebook paper, just like the one Bella had found a little earlier on her kitchen table. On the other side was a short shopping list: nail polish remover, cuticle cream, breath mints.
I carried it downstairs where Ellie took one glance at it and absorbed the possible implications in a visible mental gulp.
“My, this looks familiar,” she said. But as usual her next reaction was pure common sense. “The writing isn’t the same as on Bella’s note, though. And anyone can get this kind of paper.”
“The writing on Be
lla’s note could have been disguised,” I pointed out.
“By Kris? Just because it’s the same kind of notepaper? But I don’t see why she might . . .”
“Try to scare Bella? Or worse, implicate her? Me either,” I said. A sigh escaped me. “And you’re right, it probably doesn’t mean anything. So go on, finish your story.”
Whereupon Ellie did, but there wasn’t much more. The gist of it was simply that Bella’s two brothers had both gone away to college and made lives for themselves, but she hadn’t.
And now she was barely supporting herself. “Maybe she just didn’t have the smarts for more school,” I suggested.
But Ellie shook her head. Bella, she pointed out, had brains enough to survive here in Eastport, where just figuring out how to make a living—with or without a college education—could be a task as challenging as translating the Rosetta Stone.
“It wasn’t about smarts. The boys went to school. The girl stayed home. It was what girls did and sometimes still do, that’s all,” Ellie said flatly.
I still didn’t understand what she was getting at. “Even,” she added, “me.”
Which was when I got it, finally. “And what goes around comes around?” I asked.
Of course; the phrase was becoming my theme song. Or mantra. Whatever. “Even on to the next generation, sometimes?”
“Yes,” Ellie replied. “Because think about it, Jake: After high school no one said a word to me about going to college. My dad needed me at home to help with my mother, and that was that.”
Ellie’s mother, whom I had known, had been a manipulative bitch. There is simply no other way to describe her. But her dad had helped things get bad at the end, there, too.
“So I stayed,” she said. “Not that I’m sorry now. But if I’d been a boy . . .”
“It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to think you ought to,” I finished for her. “Much less criticize you, as people certainly would have if you’d gone away.”
“Exactly. It didn’t occur to me to do anything else, see?”
Of course I did. The idea of options hadn’t occurred to me, either. It was why I’d run away all those years ago, because running was the only choice I’d thought I had.