by Sarah Graves
“Just another minute or so,” I added, which was maybe a little optimistic. But I was very determined....
Hadlyme’s podcast crew had gone inside and now they’d begun arguing again—louder now, maybe because they’d been drinking. Through the window I’d seen quite a pile of Sam Adams empties already heaped in the kitchen sink.
And as I struggled to get up, I gathered also that none of them really knew where any of the others were when Hadlyme was murdered.
“But you went . . . no, you wandered off on your own to . . . wait, I never even went near the . . .”
I used their raised voices to cover the sounds of my own hasty scrambling out of the thicket at last, then hurried to Ellie’s car.
She was already in it; I hurled myself in as well, taking care to close the door very quietly. Then I squinted into the car’s visor mirror to get a look at myself, checking for injuries.
A bloody scratch ran across one of my cheeks, but that was all. It wasn’t enough to cause much bleeding, so how . . . ?
“Look,” said Ellie, letting the car roll silently downhill and out from under the pines. She took a hand from the wheel to point at my open collar and the skin beneath it, where I’d felt—
Not blood; there was no wound whatsoever, in fact. But something was running there, all right. A lot of somethings. . . .
“Blearrghh!” I exclaimed, and many other emphatic syllables, too, but none of them quite captured the way I felt about all those caterpillars—small, soft greenish-white ones—spilling from the squirming mass of them that tangled up in my hair while I was stuck halfway underneath the cottage.
“Ellie, stop the . . .” Car, I was about to say, but then one of the caterpillars made it into my mouth and got bitten, which kept me very busy and unable to say more while she (a) popped the clutch, (b) got the engine running as quietly as she could, and (c) got us the heck out of there, pronto.
Down the lane, past the campsites where lights were beginning to go on as people returned from the evening pirate festival activities, Ellie drove while I picked little caterpillars off myself and flung them out the window, meanwhile trying not to throw up.
In my mouth. That wiggling larva had been in my mouth....
But then she did stop, pulling over onto the gravel at the side of the road, where she snapped on the passenger compartment’s overhead light and then inspected me for remaining critters.
“Okay, there’s one, and there’s another one, and . . . okay, you’re clean,” she pronounced after picking off the last half-mashed dead insect plus a few more miraculously-still-living ones.
Then she dug out the spray bottle of lavender water that she kept in her bag and handed it over. “Here, use this.”
I stepped out of the car and sprayed liberally. “That’s better,” I breathed. It was, too. I wasn’t covered with critters anymore. Or cuddled up to a pet snake named Linda.
“Good. Now get back in the car, Jake,” Ellie said. “We’ve got more work to do.”
* * *
Back on Key Street, my house was lit up like an airport, all the windows illuminated from within and the yard lamps and the porch lights blazing. I threaded my way to the porch between a broken snowblower and a plow blade with a chunk missing from its edge; Sam did winter yard work, too.
“Hello?” I called, climbing the steps and letting myself inside.
Bella had already gone upstairs for the night; I could tell by the spic-and-span kitchen with its porcelain stove top gleaming, the hardwood floor swept and mopped, and the dishes all washed and dried and put neatly away right down to the last curve-handled baby spoon.
Even the sink glowed with recent scouring, and the place smelled as it always did in the evening when she’d finished with it, like a bucket of hot Ivory Snow soapsuds plus about a tablespoon of bleach.
“Anyone?” I called down the dim hall where the old grandfather clock ticked hollowly.
Still no reply, but from upstairs I heard the shower running at one end of the house and a lullaby tinkling out of a music box at the other. So I knew Sam and Mika were putting little Ephraim to bed—he was fussing, and I hoped it wasn’t about that missing parrot—and Wade was home and getting himself cleaned up after bringing another cargo freighter safely into port.
That left me alone for once, and ordinarily I might’ve enjoyed it; around here lately, solitude had become a scarce commodity. But now that I was alone, I could feel the soft bodies of little white larvae moving on me again.
Also, I could hear Ellie’s words to me on the way here: “Jake, I don’t care if they do have motives,” she’d said.
I’d been talking about how good it was that Hadlyme’s podcast crew hated him, or anyway that they disliked him so very thoroughly. Their reasons might not eliminate all suspicions about me, but they’d have a diluting effect, surely.
But Ellie wasn’t convinced. “No one else knows how they all felt about him, or at any rate no one else around here does. And I doubt that they’re going to be as forthcoming with the police as they were just now with one another,” she’d said.
And she’d been correct, as usual. But there was not much more I could do about any of it tonight, so to distract myself I grabbed a pair of beer bottles from the fridge, then climbed the stairs to the third floor and my dad’s painting studio.
Back in the 1800s when the house was built, servants’ rooms were up here under the eaves. When I’d first moved in, I’d imagined them in the tiny rooms, warmed by the few sticks of wood they were given for their woodstoves and saying their prayers by gaslight.
Even now the antique gas pipes remained in the walls, their threaded ends exposed and ready for antique lamps to be screwed onto them in places that hadn’t been rehabbed yet. But most of the third-floor space was now a modern apartment for Bella and my dad.
That still left another big room up here, though, with four tall south-facing windows where he’d put an easel plus rows of shelves for his other supplies. A fan had been mounted in one of the windows to exhaust fumes of turpentine and other solvents.
“Hey,” he said mildly now, looking up from his canvas. Despite the quietly whirring fan, up here the sweet smell of oil paint was intoxicating. “Come on in.”
In his eighties, he wore his long, thinning gray hair tied back in a scraggly ponytail. Denim overalls sagged on his thin, stooped frame, and his mottled hands, curved with arthritis, looked way too much like claws for my comfort.
Or for his own; he took a lot of pills nowadays, and some of them were for pain. He’d become a father so late in life—my mother was several decades younger—that most people thought he was my grandfather. But he held his brush steadily enough and managed to get around okay; now he aimed the brush at an orange beanbag chair placed over against the wall.
“Have a seat,” he invited; another thing that hadn’t faded with his age was that he always knew when I needed to talk.
Other than the shelves and long, wide worktable, the beanbag chair was the only furniture in the room, and I thought its awkwardness was deliberate; this place wasn’t for socializing. So I plopped into the thing, adjusted myself until I was at least halfway comfortable, then got right to the point.
“Dad, I’ve got a problem,” I said. “I’m suspected of murder, or about to be.”
Those podcast-crew members of Hadlyme’s were busy getting their individual stories straight, I felt certain now that I’d had time to think about it. They’d been learning whatever they could from one another while not giving away too much themselves.
That’s what all the low-level quarreling had been about out at the campground cottage; everyone feeling the others out as to motives and opportunities, nobody wanting to get blamed. And they were smart to do so; it was in all of their interests to alibi one another if they could.
But if they did it right, that left me holding the murder bag.
I passed my dad one of the beer bottles I carried, then took a long swig from the one I still held.<
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“Murder, hey?” My dad’s tone was unfazed. He’d been accused of a few things in his time, too.
And he’d done a few of them. “You guilty?” he wanted to know.
“Dad! No, I didn’t—”
“Just asking.” He shrugged, touching his brush to the canvas he was working on, then eyed the result and did it again, glancing from the photograph he was trying to reproduce to the canvas and back.
“Makes a difference, though, you know. In,” he added, “the whole getting-out-of-a-pickle department.”
“Yes, I’m sure it does,” I replied. “But like I say, I didn’t.”
Back in the old days my dad had been an expert at getting out of pickles, mostly because he’d been so good at getting into them. For a long time, for instance, a great many homicide cops—local, state, and federal, too—thought he’d murdered my mother.
Which he hadn’t. He’d loved her the way his lungs loved oxygen. But since he couldn’t prove his innocence, he’d spent thirty years avoiding his pursuers.
Avoiding me, too, actually; it’s a long, difficult story. But in the end, and after he’d been exonerated, we got over it. Anyway:
“Your son’s collection of lawn-care equipment is filling up the whole yard, you know,” he told me, changing the subject.
Or seeming to. “Yes, well, he’s got his landscaping business going great guns finally, and he needs that stuff to do all the work he’s getting.”
A sweet little mental picture of the flower-and-vegetable plots I wanted to have out there flitted through my mind and vanished. Patience, grasshopper, I told myself.
“Sooner or later he’ll be able to afford a separate place for it all, but—”
My dad’s bushy eyebrows went up and down skeptically. “Wouldn’t count on that. The sooner part, anyway.”
He squinted at the canvas, at the photograph, and finally at me.
“Jacobia,” he began. That’s my whole name; his is Jacob. You do the math. “Jacobia, tell me, when a healthy young woman like Mika starts losing her breakfast every morning before breakfast, when she never had any such trouble before, what d’you suppose it means?”
I drew a blank, briefly. Then: “Oh no. You mean she’s . . .”
My dad’s skinny shoulders moved under his flannel shirt, which was so paint-daubed and faded with washing that its original color was unknowable. His gaze was still on his work in progress, but now it flickered over to me occasionally.
“Your stepmother is sure of it,” he said. “And not a bit happy about what it’s going to mean.”
Me either. Another baby was going to put a serious wrench in our already chaotic household’s monkeyworks. Still: “It’s not any of our business how many kids they have,” I said.
He put his brush down carefully. “Jake, it’s not how many, it’s where. Bella loves Ephraim, and she’ll love a new one, too, you know she will. But it’s not about having another one. It’s about where to put it.”
Correct: if my son and daughter-in-law were expecting, we needed to make a plan, since if we just started trying to shoehorn another person into this house willy-nilly, the ones who already lived here were going to start popping out the windows.
On the other hand, they hadn’t told us they were expecting, had they? Not yet, anyway....
“Okay, look,” I said, getting up. “Let’s give them a little time to break the news to us the way they want. If there’s news,” I added. “I mean, maybe she’s just got a stomach bug.”
His bushy eyebrows moved up and down once again, silently remarking on what a vain hope this was, but I could see him at least partly coming around to my idea.
“And meanwhile we can be thinking about it,” I said.
About Sam and his little family finding their own place to live, I meant, and the very idea nearly made me burst into tears.
Not quite, though; determinedly I bit my feelings back. I’d lived with Sam for a long time and always enjoyed it; despite a few bumps in the road he was the son I’d always hoped he would be.
And I’d miss him terribly. But now as his mother I had to be brave and generous, or try. “What’re you painting?” I asked brightly.
My dad stepped back, gesturing me around to the front of the easel.
“Oh,” I said, surprised. I’d intended to praise the work even before I got a look at it, or at least to find something positive about it.
But it was much better than I’d expected, and now I did see: it was a painting of my mother, age sixteen or so, done from the old photograph he’d been looking at while he worked.
I hadn’t seen the photograph before, either, or at any rate I didn’t remember it. “She’s beautiful,” I said.
His gaze softened. “She surely is. I used to watch her, you know, when she didn’t know I was looking at her. Back then, she had no way of knowing I loved her so much.”
I’d been three when my mother died in the house explosion that my dad was accused of causing. Now I slung an arm around him.
“That’s okay, Dad. She found out.”
A smile deepened the wrinkles in his face. “Yes, she did. She’s still as beautiful today as she was then, too.”
Which surprised me even more. He never talked about the hereafter; I’d never even known that he believed in it. My sense of him was that he felt his proper business was “now,” and if he did okay with that, then he’d probably do all right with the “later,” too. But I figured I could question him about this some other time.
“Got a lot of work to do on it yet,” he said, dipping his brush and wiping it on a rag. “But that’s all right. One step at a time. Labor of love, and all that.”
His voice trailed off thoughtfully. Time to go, I realized. In a house where space and privacy were at a premium, this was his refuge, and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.
But I couldn’t stop gazing at the portrait and wishing I looked exactly like it, not just sort of. The wavy dark hair, dark eyes, and crooked smile of the woman in the picture were the same as mine, and I now wore the ruby studs that had gleamed in her ears back then.
The woman in the painting, though . . . I mean, it’s not like I scare small children or anything, but she was beautiful.
“Now, this murder you mentioned,” he said, still doing something with his brush and the turpentine.
I could almost remember her voice. Like I say, I’d been three. Hi, Mom, I thought, and turned from the portrait.
“I did hear something earlier today about a body,” my dad added as he turned off the exhaust fan in the window.
Bella thought the turpentine smell in the house was too much for little Ephraim otherwise, and I agreed. “Right,” I said. “In our shop’s cellar, right after my public fight with him. And . . .”
I was pretty sure Wade hadn’t missed the antique cutlass from his weapons collection yet. It could take a whole day to get out to meet a freighter, board it from his smaller boat, and then wait for the tide and the currents to be favorable before guiding them into harbor. When he got back at last, he was always beat.
“. . . and there are other problems,” I finished, and left my dad locking up his studio, which, like Wade’s weapons collection, was off-limits to my grandson.
“Maybe just lay low,” my dad offered as I reached the stairs. “Let it blow over a little. After a while other information could come to light, and once the dust settles a bit the cops might just decide to get interested in someone else.”
“Maybe,” I replied doubtfully, and back downstairs I took the rest of my beer onto the porch and sat in one of the green-painted wooden Adirondack chairs, pondering my options.
I would tell Wade right away about the stolen cutlass, I decided; he’d find out soon enough, anyway, either when he missed it himself or when the cops learned who around here had a lot of old weapons and showed up to ask him about them.
And—inspiration struck me—I could buy a new stuffed parrot for Ephraim, too, just like the old one but
without any murder cooties on it. I could do it online right now, in fact, so I fetched my laptop and did.
But the “related products” display on the shopping website led me directly to the other subject my dad had mentioned: babies.
And that raised a question I couldn’t answer. We’d find space for another kid somehow, I supposed, but where? Ephraim shared a room with his parents and was getting nearly big enough to need his own. We didn’t have another one, though, so if Mika really was expecting....
Well, for that I had no ready solution. But there was still one thing that maybe I could do something about:
Murder. Bloody murder, to be exact. My dad’s advice to lay low and see how things developed was probably correct. It had the strong advantage of not risking life and limb, too.
My life and limb, that is. But the disadvantage was that if it was wrong and over time the cops just got more fixated on me, there’d be no second chance, because one of the main things you can’t do from inside a jail cell is snoop.
So I decided to resume doing it. Starting right this minute.
* * *
Strolling down Key Street in the dark, I passed beneath the branches of the ancient maples, their leaves blocking the streetlamp’s glow and making the night seem mysterious. Big old wooden houses like my own loomed on either side, their dark, many-paned antique windows peering down balefully at me.
At the corner between the red-brick Peavey Library and the Motel East, with its parking lot full of out-of-state cars, their owners here for the festival, I turned left onto Water Street, still crowded with clusters of fake pirates and bouncing to the beat of a rock band set up across from the fish pier.
The bay shimmered with moonlight, silvering the fishing boats at their moorings as they moved gently with the waves and tide. But as I passed I spotted another shape out there, too.
Black as night and with its black sails spread against the sky, a boat nosed ponderously into the harbor. A figure on the deck shoved an anchor overboard—it hit the water with a muffled splash—then in a series of efficient movements lowered the sails and furled them until they were wrapped around their masts as tightly as bat’s wings.