by Sarah Graves
“I told him Bob Arnold asked you two to stay here and set up an aid and refreshments station for all the personnel who’ll be coming,” she explained.
“Oh. Okay, then.” So maybe she wasn’t a complete bull . . . uh, I mean she wasn’t a complete liar.
Her neat outfit looked rumpled and dusty, with a splatter-shaped dark stain on those good gray slacks of hers, I saw now.
Blood, I realized. “Get that doing first aid, did you?”
Ellie was bringing chairs out. Amity sank into one of them and shrugged tiredly.
“Guy got glass-sprayed when windows shattered. It seemed bad at first, but he’s okay. Pressure, tourniquet . . . heck”—she waved at her bloody pants leg—“I probably look worse than he does at this point.”
“Yeah, huh?” I felt my heart unhardening slightly. “Anyone else hurt?” I felt a pang of guilt at not having asked sooner.
She shook her head. “Nothing bad. Could’ve been a lot worse.”
“Well, good for you for helping. You want some coffee, glass of water or something?”
Amity looked grateful, and happier still when the drink Ellie brought turned out to be a Sanpellegrino lemon on crushed ice.
“You guys sure do know how to put on a festival,” she said with a sigh when she’d finished it. Across the street, past debris-littered Overlook Park and the boat basin, the dark sailboat still hunkered ominously.
“Right, we sure do.” I matched her sarcasm while wondering how we’d get rid of the menacing-looking vessel. “Can’t anybody find out who it belongs to, at least?”
Because that might go a long way toward figuring out who was firing explosives from it. “Too bad we don’t have artillery of our own,” I added.
Probably the Coast Guard had weaponry that could handle the problem, a gunship or something, but it would take hours for that help to get here. Besides, what I really wanted was for us to sink those bastards ourselves, just blow a big hole in the boat: glub-glub.
“There aren’t any registration numbers on the hull,” Amity Jones said, “so there’s no way to track an owner down until somebody manages to board the thing, and maybe not even—”
“In fact,” I went on over the sound of her voice telling me why things couldn’t be done, “it’s a darned shame we don’t have a—”
But then I stopped in the middle of covering more paper plates full of snickerdoodles with plastic wrap, because we did have one.
A cannon, that is. Not the reproduction one that Wade had used in his demonstration but a no-kidding military weapon, nearly two centuries old but perfectly functional, safety tested by my very own husband for use in the pirate festival’s closing ceremonies.
Ellie looked mystified. “Jake, what’s that smile about? You look like you swallowed a canary.”
When I wasn’t wrapping cookies I’d been arranging plates of cake slices and other tempting goodies on the table outside. Now even the coffee urn stood wheezing at the center of the table, brewing more of the dark ambrosia that Ellie makes out of ordinary Maxwell House.
So I was free to go find some—
“Cannonballs,” I replied to Ellie’s question, glancing again at the dark boat, its gun ports still aimed straight at us.
They, I supposed, were why the Coast Guard hadn’t just swarmed the vessel immediately to find out for sure what was going on, not to mention stopping it in its tracks; they didn’t want to provoke more shooting.
Wait for the big guns to arrive was the plan, I supposed, and I could understand their caution.
But I wasn’t feeling cautious. “Yep, I’m thinking about some good old-fashioned cannonballs,” I said, feeling a smile spread on my face. “And you know what?”
They both looked back at me, Ellie in amused resignation and Amity with the sort of thoughtful expression that means someone is wondering what size net to use on you.
I grabbed a snickerdoodle and took a big bite. “I think,” I said through the cookie’s crispy sweetness . . .
I chewed some more. “I think there’s a few of them . . .”
They really were very good snickerdoodles.
“I think there’s a few of them piled up behind the hay bales in my garden shed, and . . .”
Cannonballs, I meant, not cookies. And the cannon was there, too, if I wasn’t mistaken.
“And I’m going to go get them!” I finished.
* * *
Back at the house, Wade sat at the kitchen table and listened carefully. He was angry about the explosions downtown, just as I was. But he didn’t think that the cannonballs were a good idea, or the cannon, either.
“Jake, it’s one thing to fire it for exhibition purposes, like I meant to. But I wasn’t ever planning to use a full powder charge in the thing. Seriously, the last time it was fired in anger must have been in the early eighteen hundreds.”
By full charge he meant powder enough to hurl a heavy projectile far enough, and with enough force, to damage the Jenny.
“But Wade, if we could sink the Jenny . . .”
Before coming inside to talk with him I’d hauled half a dozen of those cannonballs—each heavy enough that I had to carry one at a time—from the garden shed, where they’d been stacked in a pyramid, to the lawn, where we could back up Wade’s truck to load them.
So now I really wanted to use them, if only so I didn’t have to haul them back into the shed again.
Well, and for other reasons, too. But: “It could explode,” he said. “The cannon, that is. The whole thing could fly apart, and I’d be the one who was lighting it off, by the way, standing right behind it.”
Hmm, that did put a different complexion on the matter. I was still very ticked at whoever was shooting at us from that sailboat, but not enough to want Wade to lose important body parts over it.
Or any parts, actually. “Besides, if we do sink the Jenny,” Wade added, “it’ll be on us, whatever might happen afterward. And we have no idea what that might be.”
I eyed him over the cannonballs lying on the grass like part of a giant’s game of croquet, thinking about how much I didn’t want to carry them again.
“You know,” I said, “I love you, but you’re annoying when you’re correct.”
Laughing, he grabbed up three of the round black projectiles, wedging two under his arm and palming the other as he straightened easily. “Hand me one more, will you?”
I bent, fastened my hands around one, and muscled myself back up into a standing position. The thing was about the size of a coconut, and so heavy it felt as if it might drag me hands-first right down through the grass into the earth.
When he was fully loaded, I followed Wade back to the shed where he stashed the cannonballs once more, and the old cannon that I had dragged out of there, too.
But then he paused. “You know,” he said, frowning thoughtfully at the pint-sized piece of antique artillery, “maybe I’ll just take that thing up to my workshop and clean it up a little before I stow it away.”
The stink of cleaning solvents floated unpleasantly through my mental memory. “Dad just put an exhaust fan in his studio’s window,” I said, “to get rid of the turpentine smell in the house. So can you do it—”
Wade was already nodding. “Outside, sure,” he agreed.
He picked the cannon up. “No sense exchanging one set of fumes for another, is there. I’ll take it out back, though, where it’s not visible from the street.”
Which made sense; he’d already had one antique weapon stolen recently.
“Are the cops downtown saying anything about who might be on that sailboat?” he asked, changing the subject.
“They’re not.” I told him what Amity Jones had said about no registration numbers on the Jenny. “I gather reinforcements are on the way, but so far all anyone’s done is set up a perimeter to keep civilians out of the line of fire.”
Around me the peace and quiet of Key Street was punctuated only by the sound of my grandson, upstairs yelling his head off abou
t not wanting to take a nap.
I could’ve taken one, no problem; over the past twenty-four hours I’d had enough exercise for two weeks, and my head still felt like a used pinata.
“I guess they’re trying to come up with a plan,” I finished. Which was all I knew, and it still seemed to me that putting a hole in the side of that boat was a good idea.
But it wasn’t up to me. “Anyway, thanks,” I told Wade, then went inside and climbed the hall stairs up to my dad’s studio on the third floor, wondering again not just who was on the Jenny, but—
“What do they want? And what if anything has it got to do with Hadlyme’s murder?” I wondered aloud after filling my father in on new developments.
“Because let’s face it, for both those things to be happening in Eastport at once,” I told my father, “is an unlikely coincidence.”
Or coinky-dink, as Sam would’ve put it.
“Ayuh.” My dad peered out from behind his easel. For his painting session today he wore a paint-spattered white smock over a sweatshirt and jeans, a navy bandanna knotted around his neck, and a purple beret perched jauntily on his head.
He was still working on the portrait of my mother. “Used to do it that way, myself,” he remarked, squinting at his easel again and then adding a touch of red.
“What? Used to do what yourself?” I demanded.
But I could guess; decades ago when my mother was alive he’d been a radical activist, with emphasis on radical. That meant he’d built bombs, not to put too fine a point on it, and placed them where they’d do the sort of damage that his counterculture client had asked for.
Not to people or animals; he had an unblemished record of “do no harm” when it came to living creatures of any kind. But if you needed destruction done right, safely, and to make a political point, he was your man with a plan.
But that was then; he’d paid for his deeds and now rarely discussed them, which was why what he’d said surprised me.
“It’s not enough for things to go boom,” he added, eyeing me wisely over the top of the easel.
“The explosions,” I said slowly, “they have to be . . . ?”
He nodded, one bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrow arched. “Done in the right order, for one thing. So first you’d set off a smallish one under a trash can, say, just enough to get people . . .”
His gaze was on the canvas, but a reminiscent smile curved his lips. “Interested,” he finished.
He touched the brush to his work. “Get the bomb squad, fire trucks, bunch of New York’s finest all crowded around where you want them to be, maybe even the Commissioner might show up, if . . .”
Another brush-touch. “If there were cameras,” he added.
“And then the real thing would happen somewhere else.”
The real explosion, that is. The one that mattered: a Brink’s truck, a politician’s limo. None of them occupied, all thoroughly destroyed, the cops all somewhere else.
So nobody got hurt. Or caught. He looked up again, aimed the crimson-tipped paintbrush straight at me. “All to create . . .”
He made Come on motions with his fingers, wanting me to supply the answer. “A distraction,” I said finally, thinking, Of course....
“Very good. Now while you’re here, would you just turn your head a tiny bit? That way, yes, just a . . . good. Done.”
Who, me? “But Dad, why d’you want me to . . . ?”
I walked around the easel. The woman in the painting still had dark wavy hair, deep-set eyes, and full red lips pursed in a smile.
“Mom was beautiful,” I said. In the painting she wore a dark emerald-green sweater that showed off her swanlike neck and creamy skin. Now I thought it looked familiar.
“Yes. Yes, she was,” he said, looking pensive.
“But Dad,” I said, still thinking about all that destruction downtown being a distraction for something else, as he’d suggested. “That’s my sweater in the painting, isn’t it? The green one?”
He put his brush down, turning to me. “Yes to both questions,” he said with a gentle smile. “But that’s not your mom. I can see how you might think so, but . . .” He waved me nearer. “Jacobia, don’t you see? This painting is of you.”
* * *
By midafternoon when I got back downtown, the county sheriff’s deputies had finished cordoning off the blasted section of Water Street and had set up sawhorse barriers, exempting only our treats-laden sidewalk tables and the coffee urn.
“Do not,” Amity Jones warned Ellie and me sternly out in front of The Chocolate Moose, “go past the sawhorse barriers, or somebody will surely arrest you for interfering with a police investigation.”
In reply we both nodded obediently like the pair of cooperative little puppets that we were.
Or that we wanted her to think we were. “So where am I in all this, now?” I asked, setting out more paper cups, creamers and sugar packets, and stir sticks.
An army of state cops had hit town in armored vehicles with the Maine Tactical Activity Squad logo stenciled on their sides. So we were doing a land-office business in coffee and snacks—we’d be donating the proceeds to the cleanup effort, of course—but I still wanted to know if I was about to be charged with murder.
“I don’t know, yet.” Amity Jones eyed me. “I do know about the cutlass and the stuffed parrot, though. Where they both came from, I mean,” she said darkly.
The weapon used to kill Hadlyme, the bird perched on his dead shoulder. “You don’t think that’s all a little obvious?” I asked.
Because really, the guy might as well have had a sign taped to his back: JAKE DID IT. “That I’m being set up?” I added.
“Right,” she snapped back at me, “or maybe that’s just what I’m supposed to think.”
“Sure, the old double-reverse fake-out,” I retorted. “Like I’d have come up with that,” I added sarcastically.
But I wasn’t feeling anywhere near as confident as I sounded. Amity Jones had gotten ornery since earlier in the day, and I wondered why.
Meanwhile, though, more pushback was in order, it seemed to me: “You being a detective and all,” I said, “you should’ve figured out by now that murderers aren’t smart enough for complex plans.”
Her eyes were still unfriendly. “Yeah. Except sometimes.”
She left our long gingham-covered table full of baked goods and coffee makings and got into her car, a dark blue state-issued sedan with no markings and no visible cop gear, and lowered the window.
“Too smart for their own good sometimes,” she added ominously, then drove off, leaving me feeling even less confident than before.
“Too smart, my great-aunt Fanny,” I grumbled. “Well, I happen to think she’s just a little too smart for her own—”
“Jake.” While Amity Jones had been keeping me busy, Ellie had been freshening up the table, refilling the cookie and cake trays, and checking on the coffee urn.
“What?” I demanded, watching the dark sedan make the turn onto Washington Street, then head uphill past the post office building.
Good riddance. But not for long, I thought. In the few hours since the explosions, for some reason she’d turned against me. So—
“Jake!”
I spun around impatiently, then stopped short at the sight of my daughter-in-law.
She wasn’t supposed to be inside the cordoned-off area. Only Ellie and I had permission to—
“Please?” she begged winsomely, looking adorable in her crisp white blouse and bakery apron and a pair of black slacks. Flat black shoes with fake jewels on the toes were on her feet, and a pink silk ribbon tied her hair back.
“Oh, Mika,” I said. Broken glass littered the street, and the cops hanging around looked grim. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea . . .”
Ellie was just then selling cookies to a pair of SWAT officers; now she glanced sideways at me. If Mika stayed, we could leave, her look said clearly, and Ellie clearly wanted to go.
“Just for a little
while. I need to get out of the house,” Mika coaxed, and I felt her on that one. When I’d left a little earlier, the baby had been crying again while Bella tried soothing him to no avail, Wade was in his workshop running a power saw, and Sam was dropping a snowplow blade—another one, dear heaven—off a flatbed truck into our driveway.
“Please,” Mika repeated quietly, then took matters into her own hands by stepping in front of Ellie to wait on the next customers.
“I’ll handle it all for a while,” she said decisively; not for the first time I noticed the iron will behind all that prettiness, and boy, did she ever know how to use it.
But even then I couldn’t just leave her, especially if she might be pregnant. “Uh, hey, guys?”
The officers buying food and coffee turned. “Look,” I said, “we don’t want your money, all right?”
Their eyebrows went up. We’d already collected a lot for the cleanup fund, and now we needed a favor.
“You’re helping us, you shouldn’t have to pay. But,” I went on, as Ellie and Mika turned curiously, “there is one thing we’d really appreciate.”
I waved at an armored vehicle parked halfway down the block just opposite the fish pier parking lot.
“Could you, uh, ask them to move that truck up here and position it right in front of The Chocolate Moose?”
The officers looked at me, at the truck, and at Mika, her sweet expression appealing, and agreed to my request; minutes later the big, heavy armored vehicle squatted massively in front of the Moose, protecting it and anyone in or near it from any more shots fired by the Jenny.
Which left me and Ellie free to get our bags and our jackets out of the shop and ourselves into Ellie’s car, and then we got out of there.
* * *
“So listen, do you think I’m . . . pretty?”
Ellie drove fast and well, heading out of town past the bank and the IGA toward the mainland. On the apple trees crowding both sides of the road by the airport, masses of crimson fruit dappled the green leaves backed by a crystalline sky of deep Wedgewood blue.
Ellie cocked her head at me. “Sure I do, Jake. You’re very attractive.”