Tool & Die

by Sarah Graves

  “That still doesn’t explain who wrote the notes or how Lydia knew about them,” Maggie persisted. “If . . . wait a minute, was that the same day Bella told you about them?”

  “Correct. Lydia had come up onto my back porch that day—she really was doing volunteer work, that part was true—and she recognized Bella’s voice, again from the trial . . . remember? Lydia said Bella spoke within earshot of her but not directly to her.”

  “Yes, and Bella does have a distinctive voice,” Ellie put in.

  “So when Lydia heard that voice again at my house, she stopped to eavesdrop,” I went on.

  Lydia had told me this part and more while we waited for Bob Arnold, relating it distantly and a bit wonderingly as if it had happened to someone else.

  “So that’s how she found out about the notes and that Bella thought Jim was behind them,” I finished.

  At the foot of Kendall’s Head Road I stopped for an eighteen-wheeler loaded with particle board, headed for the freighter Wade had piloted into harbor that afternoon.

  “As it turned out, Bella had no alibi for the time when Lydia went to Jim’s place,” Ellie added.

  Improvising skillfully to get in, Lydia had told Jim that Bella had given her the skillet to give to him. And while his back was turned, she’d hopped up fast onto a chair and clobbered him from above, before he had time to react.

  I pulled out behind the big truck. “But that was just luck. Even if Bella’d been able to place herself somewhere else . . .”

  “Yes,” Maggie interjected, “what then? If Bella had an alibi . . .”

  The truck’s backwash buffeted us. I slowed, letting it pull away. We were in no hurry now, and that felt like luxury.

  “Even then, Lydia wouldn’t be suspected,” I said. “The only real risk she took was getting in and out of his place unnoticed. After she got past that hurdle . . .”

  “Which she’d have known she had, once the body was found and no one started looking for a woman fitting her description,” Ellie put in.

  “Exactly,” I finished. “Lydia knew then that no suspicion was likely to fall on her. That she’d gotten away with it. Bella being blamed was just going to be an extra layer of insurance.”

  That is, until Bill Imrie did a U-turn away from her, that day in the street. “So who . . . ?” Maggie asked again.

  The truck’s taillights vanished around a curve. “Think. Who else had the ability, opportunity, and the motive to write those notes?”

  It was the ability part that had flummoxed me. I’d paid too little attention to those crossword puzzle books in Bella’s house. But Maggie had seen them, too.

  She let out a breath of sudden realization. “Bella thought if people believed Jim was threatening her, then he might get sent back to jail? Is that it? Bella wrote the notes herself?”

  To our right, islands lay on the water like mute animals, their humped shapes distinct against the shining ripples.

  “I think so,” I replied. “Bella knows a lot of words, but she’s real-world naive. She thought her story might be enough to make the police get rid of her ex for her. When they didn’t cooperate, she tried the story on me, hoping I’d somehow scare Jim enough that he’d leave town. The last note was just window dressing, to keep me interested.”

  Because by then, Bella really had needed me. As for the ash trap I’d laid on her porch steps, no one had stepped in it; no one had needed to. Bella had taken that final note from her bag, again merely pretending that it had been left by someone else.

  Suddenly Kris spoke, jammed with Ellie into the backseat. “So I guess you’re going to tell Sam,” she uttered bleakly.

  Maggie turned to her. “About the locket? That you were cheating on him with Bill?”

  Bill Imrie had been only a backup for Kris, I guessed, nothing more, in case Sam didn’t work out. I remembered her impassive expression when she’d seen Bill’s corpse.

  “No.” Maggie said it firmly. “You can tell Sam if you want to. Or don’t. Whatever.”

  As we crested the final hill toward town, the full moon broke suddenly free of the horizon, suspending itself over the bay.

  “He wouldn’t believe me,” Maggie added. “And anyway, I don’t care.”

  Below us lay all the little houses of Eastport with their windows aglow, the tugboats hunkered together alongside the fish pier, and a few last small boats puttering into the boat basin, running beacons alight.

  Maggie took it in with the soft, wondering expression of a person who is seeing it for the very first time.

  Or the last.

  Chapter 15

  As we turned the corner toward home, I noticed something odd going on at the top of Key Street.

  There were lights up there, lots of them, and the shapes of many vehicles, their brake lights winking on as they maneuvered out of the traffic lane and parked.

  Bob Arnold was there, too; he’d left the scene out at Imrie’s to the state police and departed before we had. I slowed beside the squad car as he finished waving the last big vehicle over to the side.

  “What’s up?” I asked when he came over to the Fiat’s driver-side window.

  “Better find a parking spot. You got yourself a traffic jam here,” he said.

  Yeah, no kidding. I pulled over. Then another thought hit me. “There are animals at Imrie’s that need taking care of,” I said to Ellie. “But I guess you and I can do that.”

  “And do something about Lydia’s dog, too; the poor old thing,” she agreed.

  “No, I will,” Maggie volunteered from inside the car. “You have company.”

  I’d been trying not to notice. But I couldn’t ignore forever the people getting out of the enormous vehicles, or the sound of their voices as they spoke in the excited tones of travelers who have completed a long journey.

  Nor could I mistake their long-unheard yet familiar accents. They were flocking into my yard now, carrying tote bags and suitcases, exclaiming softly to one another and to my father who stood there alone, his hands in his overall pockets.

  The relatives were here. “Jacob,” said one and then another of them as they flocked around my father. It was his name: Jacob.

  But hearing them say it made it new again for me, as if I’d never really known it, before. Their voices were twangy, some scratchy with age and others youthful. But all carried that same dissonant note of odd music, like an old fiddle being played lonesomely with an unwaxed bow.

  Reluctantly my father drew his hands from his pockets, hesitantly extending them to a small wiry woman who stood waiting before him, her own hands clasped. Carefully, as if one or the other of them might break, the two embraced.

  Then the rest crowded around, too, uttering his name again in soft, glad tones. It was as if, instead of them being the ones arriving, they were welcoming him.

  “Your dad,” Ellie observed, “isn’t running away.”

  “Right,” I murmured through the lump in my throat.

  Someone in the house turned a yard lamp on. My father smiled in the round patch of light it threw, peering into one long-lost face after another, embracing women, gripping men’s shoulders.

  Knowing full well, of course, that he was the long-lost one. But I could see they were all much too tactful to make reference to that. And . . . they had come in recreational vehicles!

  “Beds!” I said aloud, realizing the implications of this. “Little kitchens and bathrooms. All the comforts of home.”

  So they wouldn’t need the guest rooms. Somehow Wade must’ve reached them and told them . . . but then the next thing hit me.

  They hadn’t seen me yet. Ellie hugged me hard, released me as the music of their voices mingled, my father’s the deep bass note among them. He sounded surprised, overwhelmed.

  And happy. Mostly he sounded happy.

  Ellie gave me a little shove. “Go on, now, silly. Go on over there and say hello to them. They’re your family.”

  Whereupon, at her gentle urging and after a last, alm
ost-but-not-quite-paralyzing moment of fear, I stepped from beneath the dark canopy of the maple leaves into the circle of light.

  Moxie doughnuts are made very simply by substituting boiling Moxie for some of the liquid in the doughnut recipe. Achieving a good batch of Moxie doughnuts, however, is something else again.

  For one thing, you first must make ninety-nine bad batches, each only a fraction less heavy and indigestible than the one before; mine resembled grease-sodden hockey pucks with holes in the middle.

  But Bella Diamond had mastered the art of the light, tasty, crisp-on-the-outside and cake-on-the-inside example of this unique Maine delicacy. For our Fourth of July picnic, she also assembled pounds of fresh crab salad, a cooler of potato salad, red hot dogs, and enough cold drinks and scalding coffee for an army.

  Which was what we resembled as we all gathered on the hill behind the high school on Fourth of July night, to eat and watch the fireworks.

  “Looks like they’re having a good time,” Wade observed, carrying his plate over to sit beside me on a blanket. “You ever hear your dad play the mandolin before?”

  “I didn’t know he could.” Right now my father was ripping through a tune called “Blackberry Blossom,” while a nephew accompanied him on a pennywhistle and a niece kept time on a washboard.

  I bit into my second red hot dog. The sizzling skin popped tastily under my teeth. “I’ve never heard him laugh that hard before, either,” I added.

  Under the influence of his long-lost relations, my father had reacted like a creaky old door hinge that has suddenly been supplied with grease. “And I’ve never seen him dance.”

  Which he was doing now, his booted feet astonishingly sprightly. “Thank you,” I told Wade, and meant it with all my heart, “for all the arrangements.”

  The recreational vehicles, I meant. Wade had called the town hall in the little mountain community Dad’s relatives all hailed from, got a cell phone number for one of them, and presto, talked to my aunt Eunice.

  And of course she’d understood. After that, he’d called the fellow in Limestone who owned the Harper’s Ferry rifle that Wade was restoring. The fellow wasn’t short of money; Wade had been doing the guy a favor, that was all, simply because he could.

  And that fellow owned an RV dealership. Wade grinned, his eyes twinkling in the light of the bonfire we’d built.

  “Least I could do for my best girl,” he answered. Then, “You know, Jake, what I still can’t figure out is where that woman stashed all the cash.”

  I glanced at him, surprised. “Lydia Duckworth? Well, it’s a funny thing.”

  Not ha-ha funny, precisely. “But back when I first talked to Bill Imrie about the Jim Diamond mess—that Bill was terrified his reputation had been ruined, I mean, on account of him maybe being in cahoots with Diamond . . .”

  I took a breath. “Well. Bill said he thought people would rather put their money under a mattress instead of in his bank.”

  Wade looked puzzled. But then his face cleared. “And that’s where she . . . ?”

  “Not under it. But in it. Diamond always took the stolen cash out of his account as soon as he could, took his cut, and turned the rest over to her.”

  A snapshot of Lydia’s elaborate needlework projects rose in my mind’s eye. Stitches fine as hairs . . .

  “Each time he did that, she opened her mattress and tucked the cash in, then stitched it back up again so perfectly that you’d never know it had been done. And no one did, even when she let the police investigators search her house.”

  “Huh,” Wade remarked appreciatively. “Some stitchery.”

  Right, that and the same kind of fearless, take-no-prisoners chutzpah Victor had every time he delved into someone’s brain. Like Victor, Lydia had the arrogant confidence to know she could do it and believe it would work.

  Which in large part were the reasons that it had. Meanwhile, cleared of murder and not charged with anything else—

  —when he heard the whole story, Bob Arnold looked severe, but decided to let the whole authorship-of-the-threatening-notes question wither away quietly, and I agreed—

  —Bella Diamond had settled down very satisfactorily in the housekeeping department, so much so that the word-puzzle books strewn on my kitchen table now seemed always to have been there. We all wondered how we’d ever gotten along without her, especially Lydia Duckworth’s old dog, whom Bella had adopted and whose comfort had become Bella’s special mission.

  “Hey,” Wade said, angling his head at Sam, who sat apart from the rest of us, staring out across the bay. As we watched, Victor went over and sat beside him.

  “He okay?” Wade asked. Near the musicians, Ellie and George danced with Leonora held up between them, all three laughing.

  “I guess,” I replied. “Just that he’s pretty quiet.”

  Kris wasn’t here tonight; she’d split up with Sam the morning after the events at Bill Imrie’s, and we hadn’t seen her since.

  Maggie wasn’t here, either; the message on her answering machine said she’d decided to go away for a while, and would be in touch when she got back.

  I wondered if she ever would be. But at the moment she was the least of my worries.

  “Wade, do you really think Sam ought to go?” I asked anxiously. “Do you think it’s even safe for him to be living away from us?”

  Sam was moving in the morning to Wade’s little house on Liberty Street. Everybody else seemed to think it was a great idea, Sam being on his own and responsible for himself at last.

  Everyone but me. “Jake,” Wade told me, “he’s got to go sometime. You don’t want him living with us when he’s thirty, do you?”

  Actually, maybe I did. But before I could reply, Aunt Eunice put down her ukelele and came over to me. “Hello, honey,” she said, laying a finger along my cheek.

  My father swung into a fast, jazzy rendition of “Billy in the Lowground.” “Don’t you want to dance?” Aunt Eunice asked.

  I looked over at Sam again. Victor had disappeared somewhere. “Yes, I’d love to, but first there’s something I need to do,” I told her, and went to join my son.

  The two of us sat for a while in silence, watching the fading light as it reflected off the water between us and the mainland.

  “How’s the pykrete boat coming?” I asked finally.

  He shrugged. “Okay. Not a lot of demand for ’em, though. I mean, unless you’re Winston Churchill.”

  He laughed a little when he said it, which encouraged me. “Uh-huh. I suppose that’s true.”

  Another silence. Then: “I was wrong,” Sam said. “About Kris.”

  I decided not to mention the ring he’d bought. “Yeah, well. So are we all, pretty often. Wrong, that is. Don’t worry about it too much, but try to do better next time. That’s all,” I added, “anyone can do.”

  He absorbed this. “Okay.” A pause, then, “I mean, unless you told her to break up with me. Did you?”

  I have to admit I thought about lying to him; I really did. Saving his pride, giving him the chance to make it all about me just one last time.

  But I couldn’t. “No. She did it on her own.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I guess I knew that.”

  Hesitantly, I put an arm around Sam’s shoulders, and after a moment he did the same, there on the final night that we would be living under the same roof together.

  He pointed into the distance. “Hey, what’s out there?”

  Something was in the water; something big, moving toward the far shore. Near the bonfire, Wade got out the field glasses and peered through them.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said, squinting, too.

  “Hey, you two, come on over here,” my father called. “You want to see this!”

  So we went, and the others gathered around as well, paper cups of hot coffee steaming in their hands as dusk fell.

  “Wow,” Sam murmured, peering into the field glasses before handing them to me.

  “Wow,” I echoed
, because through them the creature swimming to the mainland was clearly identifiable.

  It was the moose, a shining wake swirling behind the hump on his back as he neared the pale stretch of beach between water and shoreline forest, then clambered out onto it.

  Wade put his hands on my shoulders. Ellie leaned on George, whose neck little Leonora had made a pillow of. From a few things Ellie had said I got the sense that once the adrenaline quit pumping, she’d been considerably sobered by our narrow escape.

  That despite her earlier protestations, things were going to be different. But we could talk about that later.

  Around us the relatives exclaimed together about how lucky they were: Maine, a family reunion, and as an extra-special bonus a real live moose. Somehow they seemed to feel I had arranged it all, especially my father, whose glance at me was surprisingly tender.

  Suddenly to the east an orange-white chrysanthemum unfolded on the sky, each bright petal opening in a series of sharp pops that showered sparks down onto the bay.

  The fireworks had begun. “Oh!” Ellie said as Leonora’s eyes widened in wonder.

  “That were a good ’un,” Bella enthused over the boom.

  “Mighty fine ’splosions,” agreed Aunt Eunice. She put her arm around my father’s waist and hugged him energetically.

  And they were fine, too; big, showy, and loud. But as the last gleams of evening faded in the west I couldn’t quite stop looking through the field glasses instead, passing them to Sam and taking them from him again at intervals.

  “Why do you suppose that moose ever came to Eastport in the first place?” I asked, not expecting an answer.

  “And where’s he going now?” Sam wondered aloud, not sounding as if he expected one, either.

  With fireworks erupting over our heads we watched the moose’s majestic antlered silhouette dissolve into the night, unable to guess what further adventures might be in his future.

  Or in our own.