by Sarah Graves
And then there was where the victim had been found, and by whom. “And with all that stuff lined up against me,” I said, “I guess maybe you’re right, they might not beat the bushes too hard for—”
“For a different suspect,” Ellie agreed. “So Bob said to tell you to watch your step, and don’t go gabbing any . . . any things to any people whatsoever. Any things,” she emphasized, “even if you’re just being sarcastic.”
“Who, moi?” I tried sounding innocently unfazed, but just then on the street somewhere nearby, a string of firecrackers exploded, and after what Ellie had just said it felt to me as if they’d gone off inside my head.
“Ellie, I came in, I did some baking, I went downstairs for the mop and bucket the way I’d said I would, and then I found him. That’s it, that’s all there was to it.”
She sighed. Since I’d seen her last, she’d changed out of her pirate-queen costume into blue jeans, a dark sweatshirt—in downeast Maine, early autumn evenings were cool—and sneakers.
“Right,” she said, “and you just stick to that. Don’t add on any gory details. In fact, like I said, just don’t talk about it at all.”
Black high-top sneakers, to be exact; it was her snooping outfit. I’d seen it before, and I suppose it should have alerted me.
Or maybe somewhere in my heart of hearts I’d already known. I mean, was it a coincidence that when I got home from the hospital earlier, I’d showered and put on a pair of black Levi’s, a dark gray turtleneck, a navy sweatshirt, and my own pair of black Keds? No wonder Bella had been hovering so vigilantly over me.
I got up. Outside, flaming torches and battery-powered lightsabers flared, the evening’s carousing now having begun in earnest. But the dark window reflected the room behind me, too, and Ellie’s face hovering unhappily.
“What?” I demanded, and then it hit me that there was even more evidence against me. There must be, from the way she looked. And then it came to me.
“The parrot,” I said, still gazing out at the happy crowd on the firelit street. “And the cutlass itself. Bob mentioned those things, too?”
She nodded. “He was pretty worried about them, if you want to know the truth. Because it’s hard to see how anyone else got their hands on them. Do you have any ideas about it?”
“Nope. Our house is like firearms central what with Wade fixing and restoring them all the time.”
His day job was being the harbor pilot for the cargo port, where most days he hopped onto a tugboat, rode it to a waiting freighter, then guided the freighter in through the treacherous tides and tricky currents, over the rocks and granite ledges with which our waters were so plentifully furnished.
But his passion was his weapons collection, along with all the arcana of history, manufacturing, and repair techniques he’d come to know—or in many cases to invent for himself—over the years.
“But it’s not like somebody could just walk in and grab one,” I said. “All the guns are always locked up securely, and the bladed weapons, too.”
Flintlocks, carbines, derringers, pepperboxes, cannons, rapiers, sabers, daggers, and yes, even cutlasses were all represented in my husband’s extensive antique weapons collection. In addition, he owned a lot of hunting firearms, plus accessories and ammunition.
Without exception these items were in gun safes and lockboxes, especially now with baby Ephraim in the house. But I knew where he kept the keys for the gun safes and the blade collections; I could have taken one of the weapons whenever I wished.
And I could’ve used one of them on Hadlyme, only—“Ellie, how would I have had the time?”
I couldn’t even figure out how he’d managed to get killed at all, in the forty minutes or so that had passed between my arguing with him and finding him stabbed to death.
And then there were the parrot and cutlass. “Also,” I said, “why would I go to so much trouble to implicate myself?”
“No idea,” replied Ellie, shaking her head, “or why someone else would want to frame you, either.”
She took our cups to the kitchen, then came back with her jacket on and a dark scarf tied over her bright hair.
“But that’s what happened, and that’s why we’re going to go out right now and find out about a few things,” she said, hustling me out of the shop once more and locking the door behind us. “Before somebody who doesn’t have only your best interests at heart gets to them first,” she added.
* * *
On the street, happy revelers waved tankards of hot rum punch in tipsy toasts, while across the way in the fish pier parking lot a jolly quartet played Cajun dance tunes on fiddles and an accordion.
“I’d walk the plank to get away from that accordion,” I said as Ellie urged me into her car; my poor head felt as if it were splitting. Then she got behind the wheel and pulled out carefully, since by now many of the pirates were past worrying about being run over.
They were in a festive mood, though: they wore eye patches and fake scars, their grins punctuated by painted-on gold teeth. Some of their shirts were even stained with fake . . .
Blood. The sudden memory of Henry Hadlyme’s, oozing out around the blade in his chest, made my stomach turn over abruptly. I almost asked to be taken home, but Ellie was determined to see this thing through and I didn’t want to make a fuss without at least first finding out where she was going.
At the corner of Water and Washington Streets she turned uphill past the post office building, pausing so a trio of baggy-pantalooned sailors could cross safely, then headed out of town. Minutes later we passed the Bay City Mobil station, a hair salon called the Mousse Island Clipper, the old power plant, and the airport.
Finally, as the village’s streets lined with houses gave way to stretches of scrub acreage, we turned onto a narrow lane between towering pines, with a six-hole golf course on one side and a row of older mobile homes with wood-framed additions and pressure-treated decks on the other. Next came a small campgrounds with widely separated campsites, each featuring a concrete pad where an RV could park, a hand pump, and a barbecue grill.
Past those stood a row of cottages overlooking the water. She snapped off her headlights, slowing as we approached the cottages.
“Ellie, what are we doing here?” I looked around puzzledly.
Tents and a few fifth-wheel campers were at the campsites, but no one seemed to be home: no lights, music, or flickering blue TV screens broke the night’s dark silence. No campfires, either.
The small rough-hewn wood cottages were set between gnarly old pines on a high bluff looking out over the bay. They each had a red brick chimney, a small gravel parking area with a stone barbecue pit at one corner, and three tiny windows on the driveway side; more windows, I supposed, looked out toward the water.
All the cottages’ porch lights were on, but only one of the interiors was lit. “Ellie?” I said. “D’you want to give me a hint, at least, about what we’re . . .”
But she still didn’t answer—just kept driving until we were up nearly under the big old trees that lined the cottages’ clearing, and then up another short, sharp rise in among the low branches until our car was hidden completely.
Three
Under the pines, their massive needled branches a canopy for our car, the first crickets of early autumn chirped tentatively. In the distance, waves crashed endlessly onto rocks.
Everything else was silent. Ellie pulled to a stop on the carpet of pine needles beneath the trees. In the clearing by the cottages overlooking the water stood two cars with New York plates, a van with the familiar crossed-knife-and-fork Eat This! logo stenciled on the doors, and a bus-sized recreational vehicle.
A luxurious-looking recreational vehicle . . . Suddenly I knew whose it must be. Had been, rather.
Hadlyme’s, of course. Far be it from him to want to rough it in one of the campgrounds’ charming but tiny, relatively primitive cottages; slumming with the riffraff, I guessed he’d have called it.
Ellie squinted at the
small log-built structures. Shrubbery clustered thickly around them, and I could see her thinking about that.
Planning how to take advantage of it, I suspected. “Please tell me,” I began, “that you’re not getting ready to . . .”
Her lips clamped together stubbornly. “Break in? What else do you suggest?”
She turned to me in the car’s front seat. “Jake, don’t you get it yet? We’ve got to get ahead of this thing. I’m serious, when the state cops get here—which by the way they’re going to do any minute—you’ll be in real trouble if we don’t straighten it out first.”
In Maine, only the Bangor and Portland police departments have their own homicide divisions. Murders elsewhere in the state are handled by the Maine State Police.
And she was right, they were going to get here real soon, and then I would be in trouble.
But not for long, surely; how could I be? I mean, obviously I was innocent.
But I could tell that she was thinking very differently about it as she switched off the car’s interior lights so they wouldn’t go on when the doors were opened.
“For one thing, you’ll need a lawyer, and in case you weren’t aware of it, good lawyers cost money,” she said. “Maybe lots of it.”
Well, when I heard that, I got out of the car so fast you’d have thought it was on fire; sure, The Chocolate Moose was doing better financially, lately, but not that much better.
Besides, she was right. What we really needed to do was arrange for me not to need a defense lawyer at all. And for that—well, she wasn’t dressed in her snooping outfit for nothing, and I wasn’t just along for the ride.
Ellie was already hunched over and hustling ahead of me through the shadows under the big pines. Hurrying to catch up, I tripped hard over an exposed tree root, then slammed into a rocky outcropping that suddenly shouldered through the gloom at me.
If Bella had known what I was up to, she’d have murdered me and eliminated the need for my defense entirely. “So, what exactly are you planning?” I whispered to Ellie.
She turned to me in the shadows, her expression intent. “Look, someone killed him,” she told me in low tones. “So probably they had reasons. Let’s start by trying to find out what those reasons were, and maybe when we do, the reasons will tell us who. Dunnit, that is.”
Huh. Reasonable and concise . . . so how could I resist?
“Okay,” I replied simply, following her through the underbrush some more, and after fifty yards or so of weeds, brambles, pricker bushes, and a variety of tripping hazards, we were at the bluff’s edge.
I peered over, only to confront a straight-down plunge to granite rocks and probable death thirty feet below.
Cringing, I eased along the narrow walkway, glimpsing white foam down there in the darkness where the waves crashed mercilessly. Moments later I slipped in beside Ellie among the bushes growing by the only cottage with interior lights on.
“Maybe Hadlyme’s whole podcast crew is in there celebrating the success of their murder plan,” I muttered as voices drifted from the open window over our heads.
“. . . to Henry Hadlyme! May never an egg like his be fertilized again,” pronounced a man’s voice from inside, and a restrained but extremely sincere-sounding cheer went up at his words.
A toast, then, I thought, to the not-so-dearly departed. Another voice came through the window, a woman’s this time:
“I swear, if that handsy little lech put his arms around me from behind one more time . . .”
“You’d have what, killed him dead?” A third voice, sounding only half-joking, piped up.
“I mean, seriously,” the voice went on, “where were you when he was getting stabbed to death? You sure you didn’t lose that famous temper of yours and—”
“With what, the antique sword I keep in my purse?” The other voice, a young woman’s, sounded irritated.
“Anyway, why don’t you shut up, Lionel? Because for one thing you’re really boring when you’re drunk, and come to think of it—”
“Right, you’re the one with the motive, Lionel,” yet another voice, a man’s this time, pointed out. “So I’d watch what I said if I were you.”
Whoever Lionel was, he didn’t reply. Or maybe couldn’t, because someone else, another female-sounding person, spoke first.
“Whatever, he’s dead and good riddance,” she said in placating tones, sounding as if she might be trying to head off a quarrel. “I don’t care if I do end up having to look for another job. It’ll be worth it not to see that horrifying little—”
Suddenly I wanted badly to match these voices with faces, so I squinted, looking around for something to stand on to try to peek inside. After spying a wooden lobster crate with geraniums planted in it, I turned it on its side and stepped onto it, balancing precariously to press my face to one of the cottage’s little windows.
And there they were, the half-dozen hipsterish-looking young people who’d been following Henry Hadlyme around. Two of the women wore their hair in short bobs with square-cut bangs, one black and one dyed a platinum lime green. The third woman’s head held a thick blond braid coiled in a coronet.
“Jake!” Ellie hissed urgently at me. “Come down from—”
“I mean it about the motive, though, Lionel,” said the blond-braid woman. Even from a distance I could see she had those cornflower-blue eyes people rave about.
“Wasn’t he getting ready to fire you? And,” she added, “saying he’d make sure you never got work again, too?”
She grimaced at her beer bottle. “I mean, if you want to talk about reasons . . .” she said, letting her voice trail off meaningfully.
Lionel was a wiry young guy wearing a denim jacket over a plaid collar shirt and cargo pants. Leather sandals were on his feet and in his left nostril a tiny gold stud gleamed.
He was the one who’d been trying to photograph me outside The Chocolate Moose, I realized, using that clumsy old-fashioned device called a camera instead of a smartphone.
“Maybe you should try keeping your mouth shut yourself,” he retorted to the blond woman. “It’d be a new experience for you, and I know you’re big on those, right?”
The blond woman glowered, and the rest of the podcast crew looked uncomfortable. Then one of the other two fellows—one plump and heavily neck-bearded, the other a buff bodybuilder type with a buzz cut and a heavily tattooed scalp—spoke up.
“Listen, we all hated Henry and we all had our reasons, and all of us know it. But what we need is to not let anyone else know it.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere, I thought, just as the box I was standing on collapsed under me with a crack, toppling me sideways into the bushes beneath the open window.
At once everyone inside rushed out onto the cottage’s porch, which was so close to the bluff’s edge that it actually stuck out over it a little bit.
Their voices mingled in alarm. “What was that? Did you hear it? Is somebody out there? Who—?”
Sprawled in the darkness with my back hard up against the cottage’s rear wall and my head wedged nearly beneath it, I bit back the remarks I felt like making: cursing interspersed with moans of sudden pain, mostly.
Then I looked around frantically for Ellie but didn’t see her; probably she had already vamoosed and was somewhere nearby, waiting for me.
I sure hoped so, anyway. Meanwhile, as I lay there, cramped and thoroughly uncomfortable, I slowly became aware of the sensation of liquid trickling down my neck and into my shirt.
“Hey, has anybody seen Linda around lately?” Lionel called out, but nobody answered. “While we were all talking I think maybe she—”
Warm liquid; blood, probably. Oh, great . . .
Now Lionel was stomping around the edge of the gravel parking area near the cottages, aiming a flashlight into the bushes and around the tree trunks. Fortunately he didn’t get very far from the clearing, or he’d have come upon our car.
“Linda?” he called. “Hey, Linda, come on, now
, you’d better come on back here and—”
Something long and cold moved slitheringly under my hand. Long, cold, and . . . oh, good heavens, the thing was scaly.
It was a snake, I recognized with fresh horror as the thing went on wriggling unhappily. And due to the way my cupped hand was trapped atop it in the soft earth around the cabin’s foundation, the reptile couldn’t escape any more than I could.
So there I was, trapped, bleeding, and about to be snake-bit. It was almost enough to make me wish for a nice, safe prison cell.
Almost. Lionel returned back to the cottage, still searching around with his flashlight beam. “Linda? Linda, are you out here somewhere?”
The snake under my hand rippled, trying to get away, which was when I figured it out: Linda. The name of the snake.
The flashlight beam probed suddenly into the bushes around me while Lionel kept calling and the snake squirmed harder. I froze as, at last, the creature slid slickly from under my hand, up and out and swiftly slithering away.
Then came an “Oh!” of discovery from Lionel: “There you are!”
He stepped into the porch light’s yellow glow with the snake, passing it familiarly from one hand to the other as it twined between his fingers. Now the whole crew was out there, together on a postage-stamp-sized deck over a thirty-foot drop to the rocks below.
Another pang of anxiety went through me, for their sake instead of my own this time. The deck was fairly sturdy, I imagined, but I wouldn’t have wanted to test its weight-bearing capacity myself.
Besides, I was already busy testing my hemorrhage-tolerating capacity; that blood still seemed to be flowing pretty freely. I tried shifting my weight onto my other hand, without success, and both feet were tangled in the demolished box I’d been standing on.
Then: “Jake?” Ellie’s voice hissed out of the darkness.
“Mmph,” I managed. “Hang on, I’ll be right with you.”
With the snake gone I could at least haul my head out from under the cottage and inch forward slightly. The smells of leaf mold and rotting wooden underpinnings rose up dankly.