Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (22 page)

Monday charged, yanking on her leash; Prill hauled in the opposite direction. Then they reversed, and suddenly both leashes were wrapped around Jake’s legs. She sat down hard while the dogs tried pulling her arms out of their sockets; when that failed, they tried crushing her to death by sitting on her.

Sorrysorrysorry
, their heaving sides, lapping tongues, and panting breaths seemed to say very urgently in the darkness.
But it was a
cat
!
they emphasized.
A
cat!cat!cat!
It was a—

The animal that had caused all the commotion, of course, was
long gone. Probably it was back in the bushes there somewhere, laughing its head off, she thought sourly.

And painfully, Jake moved her arms and legs around, checking for fractures. None were obvious; the palms of her hands and one knee felt hot and sticky, though.

Like the skin had been removed from them, and half of it probably had. Also, her butt felt like somebody had just smacked it with a two-by-four.

“Yes, I
know
what it was,” she said grouchily, clambering up. And then, “Yowtch.”

Brushing her hands on the sides of her pants made embedded pebbles fall out of the wounded flesh. Also, straightening her right leg out was no barrel of laughs.

“I swear, from now on both you dogs are going to wear—”

Choke collars
, she was about to finish, although she would never really have done any such thing to them. Then she noticed Monday hiding behind her leg. Prill stood at military attention.

“Uh, hello?” she said, exasperated, to the animals. “You want to let me in on what it is this time? That you’re going to drag me to my death about? Or should I just lie down and bang my head on the sidewalk here, and save you the trouble of—”

A shape stepped out of the fog. At the sight her voice froze in her throat.

A man, his features blurred by mist and darkness, stood motionless, maybe half a block from her.

The night seemed suddenly very still, the houses so far away she couldn’t have reached any of them in time to—

She opened her mouth to shout. A croak came out. Prill’s low growl was barely audible.

“Hello?” she whispered. Stupid, stupid, why had she not just taken the dogs out to the backyard?

Eastport was so safe at most times of the year, it was a shock when the holiday filled it with strangers. Unpredictable ones, who might …

The shape was gone. She blinked—no one, and both dogs were now sniffing around unconcernedly.

And now that whoever it was had gone, she too felt relief wash over her. And a bit of embarrassment …

Dark and foggy, yes. But, that’s what it was on an Eastport night in midsummer. No big surprise there …

Or anything to get spleeny about, either, she told herself,
spleeny
being what Eastport natives said when they meant nervous without any good reason.

“Come on,” she commanded, doing an about-face on the sidewalk. A stroll in the other direction, toward the streetlight at the far corner and the much-more-brightly-lit houses around it, suddenly seemed vastly preferable to the wet gloom ahead.

Fifteen minutes later they were back inside, all the doggy chores completed and the porch light switched off. And as it turned out, the break had refreshed her; once she got started again, it took only a few more minutes to finish rewiring the hall switch, and after that, replacing the chandelier bulbs was easy.

Though getting up and down the stepladder wasn’t; her leg twinged, and she’d never been much of a heights specialist. Done at last, she emitted a sigh even deeper than the one she’d let out when the mysterious fog-figure stepped back into the mist.

If he’d even been there at all. Maybe he hadn’t. Nerves from the long, worrisome day, the empty house, and then those glasses of wine …

It was, Jake thought, just as likely that a combination of darkness and fog had produced the shape, a breeze had dissolved it, and the dogs had merely been staring after that dratted cat.

Now both animals padded upstairs, Prill big and ungainly but as athletic as a racehorse, her muscles moving powerfully under her glossy coat, and Monday climbing stubbornly, determined to go up, too, despite her age.

As Jake stowed away the stepladder and slotted the tools back into
the toolbox on the hall shelf, the low hoot of foghorns drifted through the locked screen door.

The inside door was open because it was summer, but the screen door was locked because she wasn’t a complete fool.… The pleasures of solitude, she was beginning to think, were a tad overrated.

Finally she closed the inside door and locked it, too, and made a cup of chamomile tea to bring with her up to bed. Prill had Wade’s side of the mattress already staked out for herself, lying the long way on it, while Monday stretched across the foot.

But in the bedroom doorway, she paused. It was ten o’clock; plenty of time yet, really, to do at least one more chore. The float in the toilet tank needed replacing, for instance, as did the bottom square of carpet on the stairs up to the third floor, where her father and Bella lived in their own cozy apartment.

The top hinge on the closet door needed tightening, too, and the bottom one needed shimming, to square the door so its bottom edge no longer scraped the old hardwood floor.

Or
, she thought wryly as she got into bed—or as far in as the dogs would let her get, anyway—
I could just cut a quarter-inch of wood off the door’s bottom, the way everyone else does
.

Either way, it wouldn’t take long, and neither would any of the other small tasks that needed doing in an old house: window weather-stripping (in Maine, July was not too soon to begin on winter chores), radiator repainting (likewise), or sanding the old floor in the guest room (not a winter task, but likely to become one if she didn’t get to it soon).

And that was just the start of her chores list. But instead of doing any of them, she decided to relax against the pillows and have a sip of tea, and then rest her eyes only for a moment.

The dogs snored: Prill daintily, Monday adenoidally. Leaning back, feeling how tired she was, she thought she should probably get them both off the bed.

If Wade were here, he would do it. She wondered if he’d gotten to the container ship yet, out on the water. She wondered if Bella and her
father were having a good time in St. Andrews, and whether they would come home tomorrow or stay another day.

She thought it was probably a good thing that Sam might’ve found a girlfriend, even if she did live somewhere else; he was lonely, she knew, though he tried putting a good face on it.

She hoped the girl didn’t drink, and thought she would ask Sam about it when the opportunity presented itself. If it did.

And that was the last thing she thought until sometime later, when the crash of breaking glass woke her.

SHE JERKED STRAIGHT UP IN BED, IN THE DARK. AT SOME TIME
she must have shut off the light and shooed the dogs onto the floor. Now Prill’s big toenails were already clicking out into the hall, her steps hurrying downstairs.

Jake snapped the light on, her legs swinging out of bed even as she tried blinking away the clammy remnants of a bad dream. Now there was only silence except for Prill’s anxious patrolling from room to room.

But a moment ago … no, she definitely hadn’t dreamed it. She went to the bedroom window, put her face up to the screen, and listened, at the same time trying to remember the exact quality of the sound that had woken her.

Window breaking? Auto glass? Real vandalism was as rare in Eastport as other serious crime, the black-jacketed boys who were a thorn in Bob Arnold’s side lately being the exception.

In the darkness of the hallway, she crept to the small front-of-the-house guest room whose floor she’d been thinking of sanding earlier. From its window, she could see down the street to the water.

Under the mist-shrouded yellow streetlights, the white fog still drifted in billows. But nothing else moved and the lights in the nearby houses were out. Then …

Another crash, followed by the tinkle of glass shards, came from down there somewhere. But this time it was a familiar sound: a bottle breaking.

She tried to remember when she’d heard exactly that sound before, realized it was a memory connected with Sam, and chose not to pursue it. But there was no doubt now what it was. Or that it came from the other end of her house, the driveway side.

Slipping downstairs, she tiptoed through the kitchen with Prill by her side. Silent as a ninja, the dog padded toward the kitchen door leading to Wade’s shop, then through it.

Outside, another bottle smashed. “Go lie down,” Jake told the Doberman, who swerved smoothly at the command and headed back to her bed in the kitchen.

Then Jake went on, thanking her stars that when the chips were down, the dog was so obedient. If Garner were out there, of course it would be a different story. But this was just some beer-bombed neighborhood offspring, probably, whose parents would not be happy if their kid limped home with bite wounds. And she could always call Prill if she needed her.

“Good dog,” Jake called over her shoulder. Prill’s low answering grumble meant she didn’t like it a bit, but she stayed put.

Only then did Jake open the back door and peer out. Sheets of mist swept like ghosts between the maples and the long, thin arms of espaliered fruit trees against the new lattice put in by her father.

The cool, damp air smelled like an ocean wave, saline- and iodine-tinctured. High overhead, the fog thinned swiftly and rags of moonlight trailed through, making the sky dramatic.

Tasting salt on her lips, Jake felt the hairs on her arms prickling sharply as tiny, cold droplets beaded on them. “Who’s out there?”

No answer. She wished she hadn’t put the gun away, and turned to go back inside just as a small shape sailed out of the gloom in a long arc, crashing down onto Wade’s pickup truck. The bottle—a small fruit juice bottle—bounced off the hood.

Probably it had made a dent. “All right, that’s it.”

No creepy prowler was out there. A thrown bottle, that was drunk-and-rowdy material just as she’d thought, the kind of thing some dumb bunny might do after a few too many.

She stomped down the steps onto the driveway gravel. “I’ve called the cops.”

Which she hadn’t, of course, and now she was glad of it, and that the gun wasn’t in her hand, too. Just what she didn’t need, she thought, annoyed, a false alarm so that afterwards Bob Arnold would take her legitimate worries with even more grains of salt.

She strode down the driveway. “So you’d better scram,” she said clearly into the darkness.

Not shouting, though—no sense waking the neighborhood. “I mean it.”

As if it wasn’t enough for some jerk to come suddenly out of the past like some late-night movie monster, lurching up out of a swamp. It wasn’t enough that he’d hassled her in her own yard and sent terrorizing emails, thrown a dead rat into her house and scared her wits out with a target-scrawled photograph of Sam.

No, on top of
that—

“I’d better hear you beating it down that street right
now,
” she growled into the gloom.

—on top of
that
, here was some
other
little jerk who had to use the holiday for an excuse to raise hell.

Oh, but she was burned up over it now that she was completely awake. And Wade wouldn’t be happy about that dent, either.

“I mean it,” she finished from the end of the driveway. And that was as far as she’d gotten when the door—her
own
door, the one into her
house
—slammed behind her with a loud bang.

And then the porch light went out.

For an instant, she just stood there with her mouth hanging open.
Son of a—

The next thing she thought was that she should go next door, or down the street, to any house that she knew definitely had people in it, and pound on the door. Ask them to call Bob, stay there in their house and wait for him—

Anything but go back into her own house, alone, and confront an unknown intruder. But the upstairs window of Wade’s workshop, full
of wood and volatile wood-finishing liquids, not to mention boxes of shotgun shells—

—and a phone, the nearest phone is in it—

That window looked out from a rich cornucopia of burnables, accelerants, and explosives.

And right now orange flames were flickering in it.

THE GUY HAD COME UP TO TIM SAWTELLE ON WATER STREET
. Tim had never seen the guy before in his life. Quickly the guy struck up a conversation, saying he’d noticed that he and Tim looked quite a bit alike.

Which was true. Not a lot alike, but there was a general resemblance. Once Tim agreed that this was so, the guy made him an offer: five hundred bucks if Tim would turn himself in to the cops, using the ID the guy gave him.

The name on the ID was Steven Garner Jr. The photo on it looked like Tim, too; even a little more so, maybe, just on account of it being a lousy photo. The guy said all he needed was for Tim to spend a couple of nights in jail; when he got out, which the guy swore a few nights was all it would be since after all he wasn’t really Steven Garner, there’d be another five hundred for him.

And to Tim Sawtelle, who (as even he would admit) was not the sharpest pin in the cushion, a thousand dollars was a whole lot of money. So now he sat in the darkness of the backseat of the aging squad car as the deputy Eastport cop drove very fast down Route 1 toward the next town south, which was Machias.

The county jail was there, and the courthouse, too. In the morning, Tim would be arraigned on a charge of trespassing, that being what they’d wanted Steven Garner for, as it turned out.

Not much of a crime, especially on a holiday weekend in Eastport. But the cop he talked to had been very interested, for reasons Tim didn’t understand.

And to tell the truth he didn’t much care about them. He’d come
from Bangor to join the fun, not realizing the weather would put a damper on everything and not having anything else to occupy him: no job, no girlfriend.