by Sarah Graves
“No,” I assured her. “I mean yes, I won’t, and I’ll tell you all about it later. With any luck,” I added, “I’ll have cleared up the whole Maggie thing, anyway, by the time I get back.”
I believed it, too, as I drove away down Key Street again; that I could clear it up. Out on the bay the running lights of vessels coming in for the evening twinkled serenely. Every time one of them bobbed into the boat basin, it was a promise kept: that even in the face of danger and uncertainty things could turn out all right.
So as I drove toward the studio apartment Maggie had taken for herself in a small complex of remodeled industrial buildings at the south end of the island, I felt reasonably optimistic.
Passing the old salt factory whose massive, dark-windowed remains loomed silently against the night sky, I drove on until I reached a long, low trio of wooden buildings extending out over the water. In the old days, the labels for sardine cans had been printed here. A slag heap of other old equipment still hulked by the long dirt drive leading in to the parking area.
The air was cool, tinctured with the sharp smell of exposed seaweed as I got out of the car. Below, a half-collapsed wooden pier staggered out over the shallows of low tide.
But the building itself had been sturdily reinforced, and the walkway out to it felt solid under my feet. Lamps burned behind the curtains at Maggie’s windows as I crossed the deck leading to her door, then knocked.
Inside, music was playing and I smelled something cooking; it was another of the things I liked about Maggie, that she took good care of herself. When she opened the door, though, my optimism evaporated. She took one look at my determined face, then dropped her hands to her sides in a gesture of utter surrender.
My heart dropped, too, at what she said.
“Jim Diamond was already dead,” she said desolately, “when I found him. Or I thought he was.”
She burst into sobs. “Oh, Jake, what am I going to do?”
Chapter 12
Could it have happened the way she said?” I asked Victor a little while later, after I’d persuaded Maggie to come back with me to my house.
“Oh, sure,” he replied, closing his medical bag. Maggie had seemed so distraught, I’d been worried about her, but by the time he arrived she’d calmed down enough to let him tend to her.
“People survive with iron bars in their skulls,” Victor informed me. “They regain consciousness after dozen-year comas. Once in a while, they even wake up in morgue refrigerators.”
He loved grisly stories like that. “It’s amazing what brain-injured people can do,” he said. “Diamond looked dead to Maggie, lingered on for twenty-four hours or so, went out with a bang. It’s not,” he added, “even that rare.”
At which point he looked ready to supply me with colorful examples from his experience, but I cut him off with a gesture. My memory of the way Diamond had gone out was colorful enough.
“What was she doing visiting his place at all?” he wanted to know.
Just then Maggie appeared in the door of the front parlor, looking pale but resolute. “I thought if I paid him, he might go away,” she answered.
She’d refused Victor’s offer of a sedative, insisting she just wanted to lie down. But being all alone upstairs obviously hadn’t set too well with her, either.
“I had a thousand dollars with me, everything I’ve saved. I was going to offer it to him, if . . .”
If he would leave, so his stepdaughter Kris might decide to get lost, as well. To go to beauty school the way she’d planned.
And leave Sam alone. Just as I’d theorized, Maggie had taken matters into her own hands. “How did you know he was there, or that his leaving might clear the way for Kris?” I asked her.
“Sam told me. Back when he was still confiding in me, trying to defend Kris, he told me about her stepfather. He said Kris hated him and wouldn’t move away from her mother as long as he was around. Made Kris sound like a real martyr. But then I thought, hey, maybe it’s true, and it could work. Me trying to get rid of him, I mean. I was ready to try anything, because by then I had found out about . . .” She stopped.
“Found out what?” I pressed her.
“Nothing.” A pause, then: “I don’t understand,” she burst out plaintively to Victor. “He wasn’t breathing when I found him, I’m sure that he wasn’t. And he didn’t have a pulse. I’d never have left him if he wasn’t already . . .”
She’d found Jim Diamond’s door open just as I had, and called out several times to see if anyone was there. Then she’d gone inside.
“He was breathing,” Victor said. “Just not very often. You probably didn’t look at him for long. And his pulse would have been too weak for a layperson to feel.”
“So I left him to die,” she said in tones of self-revulsion. “If I hadn’t, he might’ve—”
“No.” Victor pronounced it with authority. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
He pulled on his jacket. “The damage was already fatal. At the end something changed, a blood clot in his brain shifted or his pressure dropped enough for the swelling to subside a little. So he got one last hurrah, lunging up at Jake the way he did.”
He looked at Maggie. “The brain injury he suffered was terminal as soon as it happened. I saw it, Maggie. Afterward at the hospital. And believe me, I’m the man who knows.”
Deep sigh from Victor. “But under the circumstances I can’t say I’m surprised you’re not convinced. Try not to feel guilty.”
“But I do! How can I not? I should have called the police! A man was killed.” She gazed at us, distraught.
“But after I found him I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been there. So,” she finished in tones of self-disgust, “I ran, and I didn’t tell anyone. All I could think of was myself.”
Victor looked at her for a moment. “You know, Maggie, it’s not so bad to think about yourself. You should do it more often.”
That stopped her cold. We left her in the parlor looking miserable, as I followed Victor to the door. “Thanks,” I told him.
He shrugged. “No problem. Poor kid, she’s devastated.”
“Yeah. She told me on the way here that it was Sam she was thinking of when she ran from Diamond’s. That if Jim was dead, what did it matter who found him? And she thought Sam would be mad at her for trying to interfere.”
“Yeah. Probably he would.” He paused uncomfortably, leaving a good deal unsaid between us. As usual.
I hated seeing Maggie so hurt and made a fool of by Sam, in part because I’d been made very much the same kind of fool years earlier by the man standing before me.
So I knew how it felt. And I had a funny intuition that now Victor did, too.
But this wasn’t the time to explore it. “G’night, Victor,” I said finally, closing the door.
Back in the parlor I found Maggie sitting quietly with her hands in a praying gesture, fingers pressed to her lips. Her long dark hair hung loose about her shoulders; she looked beautiful, and utterly wretched.
“Maggie,” I ventured, “are you sure you don’t have anything more to tell me?”
But she said nothing, having derived I supposed a measure of relief, however incomplete, from telling the truth about what had happened.
And not wanting to start lying again now.
“I never,” Bella denied vehemently a few minutes later.
I found her in my kitchen, where she’d insisted on staying to wash up the dishes after Ellie had cooked dinner for everyone.
“I don’t know what that Duckworth woman is talking about,” Bella declared.
She had a dish towel in her hands, an apron around her waist, and a look of apparent incomprehension on her face.
“I just treated her friendly, like I would anyone doing a charity job,” she insisted. “I didn’t know her, and I didn’t know who she was, either. She never said.”
Ellie stood by the refrigerator with a Tupperware container of Maine shrimp in garlic sauce in one hand—
by all accounts it had been delicious—and the baby’s bottle in the other.
“Bella, she told us,” Ellie said, sounding impatient. “We saw Lydia Duckworth and she told us you were there to see her.”
The housekeeper shook her head, but as she did so a sly look flashed across her face. I glanced at the shrimp dish, thought about having some, and knew that if I did it would turn to shrimp wiggle in my stomach.
And on top of the other events of the day, Bella’s look of duplicity was the last straw. “All right, Bella,” I said. “Finish up, then, and go home. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Once Bella was gone Ellie reached into the refrigerator, got the bottle of beer George had brought along to drink with dinner but hadn’t—perhaps feeling delicate about it at the table with Sam there—and handed it to me.
“Jake. Go take a hot bath,” she ordered.
Which I did, and between the bubbles in the bathwater and the ones in that beer, I came back down an hour later feeling better. The situation was better, too, or so it seemed at first.
Everything was quiet. In the parlor, Kris and Sam sat on the sofa watching TV, Sam’s arm tight around the girl’s skinny, bare shoulder. The maid’s room door was shut, Ellie in there changing the baby and settling her for the rest of the evening, while Wade and George had gone up to Wade’s workshop where Wade was showing off a new shotgun, because if summer was here then hunting season couldn’t be far behind.
And Maggie had taken the dogs out, no doubt feeling about as comfortable as I did in the company of the two lovebirds. She returned as I was putting the beer bottle into the recycling bag.
“You all right?” I asked her.
“Fine,” she said quietly, hanging the leashes up.
But she wasn’t, and what happened next proved it. I suppose I should have known better than to let Maggie get anywhere near Kris and Sam, but by then I was a little tipsy, and so exhausted I figured everyone else must be tired, too, and would call a truce.
Sure, and after that the lions and the lambs would lie down together. “Thief!” Kris shrieked moments later from the parlor.
“Slut!” Maggie shot back.
And those were just the nicer remarks. By the time I got in there, things were threatening to degenerate into a hair-pulling contest, with Sam backing away in horror as if his nice little harem situation—with himself at the center of it as the grand pooh-bah, of course—had turned into a nest of snakes.
What goes around comes around, I thought nastily at him, but of course I didn’t say this. For one thing, I was too busy keeping Maggie and Kris from scratching each other’s eyes out.
“I know you stole it!” Kris accused Maggie venomously. “My locket, you’re always staring at it. Now it’s gone, and who else would take it?”
“Who would want it?” Maggie shot back scornfully. “Piece of junk jewelry with something inside it that was anywhere near your scabby scalp? Yecchh.” She shuddered dramatically.
I hadn’t even noticed the locket was missing. But now I saw the cheap little gold-plated trinket wasn’t in its usual annoying position, just above the girl’s overexposed cleavage.
“Ohh,” Kris exhaled, lunging at Maggie. “I’ll make you tell me, you big fat . . .”
I stepped between them, seizing Kris’s bony shoulders and sitting her down, hard. “All right, now, you just stop.”
“Maybe if you put something in your body besides booze and birth control pills, you’d gain some weight, too,” Maggie rejoined from behind me. “Then you wouldn’t look like a drugged-up hag.”
Kris tried to stand up. I pushed her down again. “I mean it. Sit down. And keep quiet.”
“Which is what you’re going to end up as, anyway!” Maggie persisted.
Sam left the room. His father used to do that, too; Victor was an expert at instigating things without ever seeming to. When the going got tough, however, he got going elsewhere.
I’d have liked to go myself, only if I did this pair might kill each other. “Maggie, that’s enough out of you, as well.”
But Maggie wasn’t listening. The strain of the previous few days had been uncorked by Kris’s unwise accusation. “Meanwhile,” she went on, her voice lowering dangerously, “you’d better start being a lot nicer to me.”
A flicker of caution crossed Kris’s face. “Why should I be nice to you?” she demanded sullenly.
But from her look I thought she really wanted to know. And, I thought, wasn’t that interesting?
“Because I know something about you,” Maggie answered, her words confirming my sudden suspicion. “You just think about what it might be, and I bet you’ll guess.”
Kris shifted uneasily on the couch. “You’re lying. You’re just jealous; you want to get Sam back. So you’ll lie about me.”
Maggie laughed grimly. The gloves were off now, and though Kris was managing to put up a good front, I thought Maggie had her on the ropes.
“Sure I am,” Maggie retorted. “You keep telling people that. But you know, and I know. We’ve got a little secret, the two of us.”
This was it, I realized suddenly: what Maggie hadn’t wanted to talk about. It was something about Kris, who was now staring at Maggie with real fear in her eyes.
“And sometime,” Maggie steamrolled on, “when you think you’ve got everyone where you want them and you’re least expecting it—”
“Stop!” Kris shrieked, putting her hands over her eyes in a theatrically childish gesture. “Sam, make her stop!”
But Sam wasn’t there and Maggie didn’t stop, leaning past me to tower over her victim. Her final words came in a singsong whisper so cruel, it raised the hairs on my arms.
“. . . I’m going to tell!”
Much later that night I lay in the crook of Wade’s arm while he read shotgun-shell reloading specifications.
“I wonder what it is,” I mused aloud, averting my eyes from paragraphs containing words like CAUTION, EXPLOSIVE MIXTURE, and my own personal favorite, SERIOUS INJURY MAY RESULT.
Wade glanced down at me over his reading glasses. “What what is?” he asked distractedly.
“What Maggie knows about Kris.”
Wade nodded slowly, returning his attention to his reading material. “Could be a lot of things. Maggie went to bed?”
“Uh-huh. She wanted to go home, but I insisted she stay. I’m worried about her, Wade. Something’s still eating her. And she feels so guilty that if she hadn’t stayed here, I’d be concerned she might do something . . . I don’t know. Something foolish.”
Sensing my unease, Monday shoved her glossy black Labrador head under my right hand, while Prill resettled her enormous red Doberman pinscher body on my leg. Winter had favored us with a goodly number of two-dog nights, and the canines wanted them to go on right through summer.
“Why don’t you just ask Maggie what else is bothering her?” Wade suggested. The dogs never seemed to want to crush him, maybe because they knew he would dump them unceremoniously to the floor the moment they tried it.
“I did. She wouldn’t say. It might be something about that locket Kris made such a fuss about, but I can’t imagine what. I do think it’s got to do with Kris somehow, though. The way Kris reacted . . .”
“Sounds like that might be just something between the kids. Maybe you’d better let well enough alone?”
“Mmm. Maybe.” I loved him madly, but his calm disposition was annoying sometimes. Also, his habit of being right; the enmity between Kris and Maggie was a side issue.
“You poor thing, though,” he sympathized, turning a page of the reloading manual.
“Yeah. And on top of that I’d like to know what the deal is with Bella and Lydia Duckworth,” I groused, sitting up.
Despite my fatigue I couldn’t sleep, and there was no point pretending I’d be able to. Sam and Kris had gone out who-knew-where and would be back who-knew-when, and of course George and Ellie had gone home.
So I was alone, since a husband who is pe
rusing a shotgun-shell reloading manual does not qualify as company. Ten minutes later, as I was sitting in the front parlor with a glass of milk and a headful of still-unanswered questions, Sam came in, whispering in the doorway with Kris for a long time. Finally she left and he went upstairs, and the house was silent again.
After that I wandered around for a while, trying and failing to figure out what was going on while at the same time performing a variety of useful household tasks just to keep my hands busy.
In the kitchen, I fixed the latch on the door to Wade’s shop. It wasn’t perfect—I’d have had to jack the end of the house up for that—but afterward it only took me leaning my whole weight on the door—instead of two or three people—to close it securely.
Next I worked on a squeaky floorboard. I’d tried putting talcum powder between the boards and it had worked for a while, but now I tapped small finishing nails at an angle between them; when I was done you could step on that spot without it sounding like a cat was being stepped on.
Finally at around two in the morning I pulled a jacket on and went outside, hoping a sky full of stars would make me and my problems seem unimportant. But it only reminded me of how alone we all were, and how we needed one another.
Shivering, I went back in and decided to call Ellie. If she was up she’d have her phone turned on, and if not, not. But as I picked up the handset, my own phone emitted a short brinng!
“I’m here,” I said, expecting it to be Ellie calling me.
Only it wasn’t. “Jacobia? This is Lydia Duckworth. I’m very sorry to be calling you at such an outrageous hour, but . . .”
“That’s all right, Lydia.” I imagined her in her tidy parlor in the house next door to her late husband’s failed business, maybe with the aging Irish setter asleep by her feet.
“I’m up,” I said into the telephone. “What’s going on?”
“I’m examining my conscience.” She sounded unhappy. “There’s something I didn’t tell you today. I kept telling myself that it couldn’t matter, that the police looked into it all very thoroughly at the time, so how could it be important now? But in the end I couldn’t convince myself.”