by Sarah Graves
And then I had it: what deep down he’d probably wanted all along. Ephraim woke up, reaching fretfully for his dad as I spoke.
“Somebody call Bob,” I said. “I think I might know where Lionel is.”
* * *
We drove to the campgrounds in Wade’s pickup truck and pulled over where he’d parked the last time we were here, under the big pines. The podcast crew members’ cars were gone, but the big RV that Henry Hadlyme had lived in was still here.
Crossing the gravel driveway to where it bulked in the bright morning sunshine, I hoped we weren’t too late. “Lionel? Are you here?”
I rattled the door handle. It was locked, but the hatch on the empty cargo area at the massive vehicle’s rear was still open, just as it had been when we last saw it.
“I don’t think knocking will work, do you?” Ellie said quietly.
Shaking my head, I climbed up behind her into the dim, cavernous cargo space. The low sliding door into the living area moved easily; inside, we crawled through a closet and out onto the bedroom floor.
Sunshine slanted hazily in through the window onto the room’s high-end fixtures: king-sized bed, real wood trim, marble in the bath. The living area was the same as I recalled, also: leather upholstery, polished brass, massive wall-mount TV.
“Lionel?” I ventured into the stillness.
“Over here,” said Ellie. Between the bathroom and the living area was a walk-in closet, still holding the same drawers, hangers, a full-length mirror on the wall . . .
And Lionel, crouched in a corner with his face in his hands. Wrapped in his arms he had the red leather jacket I’d seen that day on his father.
I crouched by him. “Lionel? Lionel, come on, now. You’ll have to do it eventually, right? So get up and we’ll help you.”
Wearing a plaid flannel shirt, brown corduroys, and Hush Puppies on his feet, he let out a bitter chuckle of skepticism and buried his face farther into his arms.
“Come on, now,” I repeated. “It’s okay. It’s all going to be all right.”
Maybe, I added silently. If he hadn’t done the actual deed, he might manage to plead guilty to some lesser involvement, testify against his half sister, and get off with a lesser punishment.
“Lionel,” I persisted, and finally, after many more platitudes and half truths that he was too upset to recognize for what they were, he struggled to his feet.
Slowly, almost tottering, he let me guide him out to the living area, where he sat shakily on the edge of one of his dad’s leather chairs.
“Did you kill him?” Ellie cut to the chase.
“No!” He looked shocked. “They’ll see, Amity did it. I saw her do it and there’ll be her fingerprints on the—”
He stopped, realizing what he’d just said: that he’d been there and hadn’t stopped it.
A heavy sigh rushed out of him. “Yeah, I was there,” he added dully. “I was supposed to do it myself, that’s what we’d agreed on, but when I couldn’t, she—”
“Okay, never mind that,” I cut in. “What about the aunts, Karen and Willetta? How’d they get hooked into this?”
I already knew, but I wanted to hear it from him.
He shook his head. “Short answer is, she bullied them into it. See, Aunt Karen’s got a criminal history, an old assault case that kind of went dormant somehow.”
I glanced at Ellie, who shrugged: I don’t know. But Karen was no pushover; running that half-wild homestead of hers took guts. So I could imagine it happening.
“Karen said she’d been defending herself and never should’ve been charged,” Lionel went on. He seemed relieved to be talking; I thought again that, really, he was just a kid.
“I don’t know details,” he added, “but Amity said that because she’s a cop she could get the authorities interested in Karen again.”
Which I guessed maybe she could have. “And Karen hated Hadlyme, anyway,” said Ellie, to which Lionel nodded emphatically.
“Willetta did, too,” he agreed. “But what Amity told her to make sure she stayed in line was scary. She said bad things could happen to her horses, maybe a fire in the barn or something, unless she helped with all this.”
I let out a deep breath. “And what about you, Lionel? When Amity told you her plan, did you really think that somehow it would help you two reconcile?”
Him and his father, I meant. Lionel looked surprised that I’d figured this out, seeming not to have realized how obvious it was, what he’d really wanted all along.
“No,” he said finally. Tremulously. “I didn’t think holding him at sword-point would make him like me better, okay? I’m not quite that stupid.”
His voice strengthened. “All I wanted . . . all I ever wanted,” he repeated urgently, “was for him to listen. I wanted to know he’d heard me, that for once that son of a bitch understood what he’d done.”
But then he put his face back down in his hands. “But when I hesitated, Amity grabbed the sword from me and . . . and . . .”
Yeah. I could imagine the rest of it. Just one more thing:
“She was a cop, Lionel. Why would she leave behind a murder weapon with her fingerprints on it?”
Could she have thought that because she was on the job, she wouldn’t be suspected? But that didn’t make sense, and the answer when Lionel finally produced it was something else entirely.
“She couldn’t get the sword out. Of his body, I mean. It was stuck in his ribs. Then we heard someone upstairs, so we had to get out of there fast, back down the alley into the crowd, and . . .”
He was getting his wind back. I could tell by the way he kept glancing at the door. “So she wiped it, but probably not well enough.”
Suddenly I didn’t like the feeling in the room, and it didn’t help when he began eyeing the big knife rack over the RV’s marble-topped kitchen counter.
Luckily just then Bob Arnold pulled in. The siren whooped once just to let us know he was there; he must’ve seen our vehicle.
Lionel bit his lip, straightened his shoulders, and prepared to run. I could see it in his whole body. But:
“Lionel,” I said, “you’re alone, feeling lousy, and I’m guessing close to penniless by now, too.” That hit home. “Also that flannel shirt you’re wearing won’t do you much good later tonight when it gets cold.”
All of which was true, and I could see in his defeated eyes that he knew it. So he didn’t run.
Not yet.
Twelve
What was left of the fireworks got augmented by donations from the Fourth of July Committee, their celebration having been rained out the summer before. So a week later, we all trooped down to the waterfront to see the show.
Boom! Ephraim’s eyes widened as a pink-petaled peony flared on the sky, dripping sparks. Right behind it came another explosion, this time from a white flashbang; luckily the baby wore ear protectors.
I wished I had some. “What?” I called back to Bob Arnold.
Water Street was jammed with wide-eyed people wearing jackets and hats, many with little kids perched on their shoulders. Bob gestured and mouthed something at me from where he stood by his squad car.
“What?” I said again when I’d reached him.
Older children ran in excited packs, sparklers and Silly String cans clutched in their hands. Bob leaned against his car, chewing a toothpick and watching the crowd.
“Thought you might want to hear some news,” he said.
His gaze kept roving from one little group of fireworks watchers to the next, but casually; his deputies were on duty tonight, and so far nothing was exploding, no one was shooting guns or firing cannon ammunition in the wrong direction, and nobody was getting stabbed.
So he could relax; well, as much as he ever did.
“Lionel escaped again,” he said, his toothpick-chewing stilling as he waited for a toddler fleeing toward the fish pier to be caught and returned to his parents.
Whoosh, the dad snatched the kid up just in time for a pi
nwheel of flame to go rolling across the night sky. A spattering of applause rose from the crowd.
“Deputies were transferring him from county jail to Augusta this afternoon. He was so calm and polite, and I guess persuasive about it, that they uncuffed him so he could use the restroom on the way.”
Bob didn’t say what he thought about that, but I knew. Those deputies did, too, by now; their supervisors would have explained it.
Still: “But I thought—”
Boom! A dozen white stars exploded into a fan pattern overhead. Then Ellie appeared at my side. “Jake, did you hear . . .”
“Yes,” I said, still puzzled by what Lionel had done. Escaping was silly if he’d been coaxed and/or bullied into the whole let’s-kill-Hadlyme idea and hadn’t ever really wanted to do it himself.
And, more important, that he hadn’t done it himself, as the fingerprint evidence would show if his story was true. So why lie, and more to the point right now, why try to escape?
Especially since it was cold out at night already here in Maine. I hunched into my jacket, wishing I’d put on a light jacket and maybe even long underwear.
“I don’t get it. A decent defense attorney could get a lot of mileage out of him just being an accessory.”
But then I stopped. “Oh,” I breathed, “you mean he—”
Bob nodded, watching a teenager on a bike thread through the crowd, then turned back to me.
“They let him out at the snack bar on Route 9 to answer the call of nature.”
He lit one of the little cigars he occasionally allowed himself and puffed on it, then went on.
“Got back near the squad car. Ready to get in, Lionel elbowed one guy in the face, grabbed the gun off the other one, and hightailed it into the woods.”
The place he’d picked to try making a run for it didn’t bode well for Lionel, either; in Maine, the forests that line the sides of the highways aren’t the scrubby back lots of nearby subdivisions. They’re the edges of million-acre forests.
Strings of pop-pop-pop! flashes erupted over the dark water. Out on the barge, Wade and Sam and the other men lit the fuses and kept the fireworks aimed safely away from shore.
“Still, though, maybe he was just—”
Scared, I was about to finish, but Bob interrupted. “They located him as he was circling back around to the snack bar parking lot.”
To grab the car, I guessed. He nodded, seeing me get it.
“And when they spotted him,” Bob went on, “he fired the weapon at them several times. Several times. Pretty fine shot he turned out to be, too.”
I rolled my neck around, wincing at the twinges of head pain each creaky movement still produced. The events of last week were going to take a while to wear off, and not just from my body.
“Darn,” I said. “Those fingerprints on the cutlass that killed Henry Hadlyme are going to turn out to be Lionel’s after all, aren’t they?”
Bob nodded, eyeing the cigar, which had gone out. Shrugging, he dropped it into his shirt pocket. “Yeah, you know, I’ll just bet they will.”
He got into his car. “Anyway. You two just try to stay out of trouble tonight, okay?”
Ellie and me, he meant. He dropped the car into reverse. “As for me, now that the bing-bang-boom portion of tonight’s program is almost over, I’m going home to get some sleep.”
A barrage of multicolored lights turned the night sky fiery, accompanied by artillery blasts so concussive that I felt as if I were being punched repeatedly in the chest.
But that was the finale, and when the last sparks fell spitting and flickering to the dark water, the show was over. Murmuring, the crowd began drifting away, quite a few of them toward The Chocolate Moose.
So Ellie and I went there, too, to sell the dream bars, milk chocolate spinwheel cookies, and chocolate-cream-filled éclairs that Mika had been making all day just for this evening.
Inside, the air was warm and heavy with the aroma of baking. “Oh, this is so much fun!” beamed Mika from behind the counter. She really was feeling better, and I hoped the phase of expectant motherhood would last.
Smiling, she handed over a little boy’s purchase; biting into his éclair, he marched out with his face full of the simple pleasure of running around outside with his friends after dark on a school night, eating chocolate.
Then Wade and Sam came in, with Ephraim grinning and babbling in Sam’s backpack carrier. Behind them were Bella and my dad, and George Valentine brought up the rear.
Wade dropped his arm around me. “Gang’s all here,” he observed.
With Sam’s help, Mika brought out another tray of éclairs. They were selling like . . .
Well, like chocolate éclairs, actually; the pirate festival had been over for a week, but the bell over the door jingled steadily with local customers going in and out.
“Mom,” said Sam once he and Ephraim were settled, “I saw Karen Carrolton and Willetta Beck watching the fireworks just now.”
Both their pictures had been in the paper, even though they’d been released without charges.
“I still don’t get why this Amity Jones person wanted the old ladies involved in her plot in the first place,” Sam added. “I mean, they didn’t do anything, did they? Not really.”
Which is why they’d been let go. “No, they didn’t. They were for backup, in case blaming me went wrong. A pair of spare scapegoats so Amity could say they had done things, maybe even the murder itself.”
Because alone they couldn’t have done it, but together the two older ladies might have managed the deed.
“And Amity stayed with them, used their houses for . . . well, for her hideouts, I guess you’d call it,” I added. If she’d stayed at the Motel East in town, her every move would’ve been under observation.
“So all she really had to manage was not being seen in town the morning of the murder.”
Although if she had been seen, she’d have had a lie to cover that as well, I imagined; she could just say she was here for the festival, for instance, if anyone asked.
My dad sat at one of our cast-iron café tables, munching a brownie while across from him Bella sipped the Moose’s newest offering in the drinks department, a double-chocolate ice-cream soda.
“Tomorrow we’ll start redistributing them,” said Wade. People, he meant; our family members, into their new rooms in our big old house.
“I’m really glad,” he added, “that nobody’s going to leave.”
Me too. Together we stepped outside, where the faint scent of gunpowder was being replaced by the familiar smells of the coming autumn in downeast Maine: wet leaves, chilly salt water, and a hint of woodsmoke.
Across the bay, tiny lights twinkled on Campobello. Wade wrapped his old denim jacket around my shoulders, then bit into the chocolate macaroon Mika had tossed to him on our way out.
“Oh, that’s good,” he said happily, looping his arm around my waist and offering me a bite.
I took it and let the taste linger on my tongue: sweet.
Double-Chocolate Ginger Cookies
Sometimes you just want a dozen fabulous chocolate cookies! Here you go:
Ingredients
¼ stick of butter ( cup)
1 cup plus ⅓ cup chocolate chips
1 egg
¼ cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup chopped crystallized ginger
cup self-rising flour
About 2 ounces white chocolate, coarsely chopped
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Melt the butter and 1 cup of the chocolate chips together, stirring constantly, over low heat. While the butter and chocolate cools, combine the egg and sugar in a mixing bowl, beating until completely blended. Add the vanilla to the butter and chocolate mixture, then add this mixture to the mixing bowl. Stir in the chopped ginger, then add the flour. Finally stir in that last ⅓ cup of chocolate chips.
Place 12 equal-sized spoonfuls of batter onto an ungreased baking sheet, spacing the
m out equally. (This should use up the batter.) Press pieces of white chocolate into the top of each unbaked cookie. Bake for 12 to 13 minutes.