Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (36 page)

“Alakazam was a filly in her second season that year,” Jake said.

Sam looked interested. “And she won? So like you thought, he took the money you gave him and—”

She nodded. “Bet it on a horse. Maybe he meant to take his son out, the way he said. But once he got money in his hands …”

Just like she’d thought he would do. “She was a long shot. The horse, I mean. Twenty to one.”

And Garner was a photographer in his day job. He could have set up a picture, made it look like he’d been murdered.

“The thing is, he had a wife who was already mentally ill, a son who was heading that way also—”

Recalling the look in the little boy’s eyes that day, she shivered. They hadn’t changed, either, those eyes.

“—and some very bad guys after him,” she finished, the real question still being why she hadn’t suspected the truth before.

But in her heart she knew that, too, now. “Twenty to one,” Sam
repeated, and she watched him do the math in his head. “So if he bet it all …” He looked up. “Ten thousand. Not bad.”

She nodded. “Not enough to get the loan sharks off his case. But it was enough to run with.”

“And you think—”

Again she nodded, this time to hide a grimace of pain as she got up. “I don’t know for sure, of course. No one ever heard from him again. But …”

But it was what she would have done.
What I nearly did
 …

A husband who scorned her, a son who seemed to hate her, and a life she could so easily have left behind … 
I never suspected what Steven Garner Sr. did, because I didn’t want to face how close I came to doing the exact same thing myself
.

“Ouch,” she murmured aloud, and Sam looked anxiously at her.

“You okay?” He got up and draped his jacket around her shoulders. She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the warmth of his body still in it.

“Thanks,” she said, holding back tears.
So close
 … Out on the water, small boats bobbed, their running lights shedding red and white gleams on the waves.

“He was badly disturbed before anything happened to his father, though, you know. It wasn’t only about what I’d done or not done.”

After collecting his body out of the old-house wreckage on Washington Street, the New York police had shared more of what they knew of the house his mother had been found dead in: locks on the doors, bars on the windows, monitoring cameras.

Old ones, dating from Garner’s childhood. They’d found a lot of medical bills and records, too—his and his mother’s. “It turns out that he was in fairly intensive treatment, even as a child. And he was watched constantly.”

It was the answer to why a man would bring his son along to beg for money to pay a gambling debt. Now she knew that he’d been terrified to leave the boy at home, for fear of what the child might do.

Or what his mother might do to him … “But when his father died—or went away, if that’s what he did—that all ended. The treatment, the intense supervision.”

Because his mother was sicker than he was
. “So,” she told Sam, “a short explanation is that he thought his father was murdered—”

Or couldn’t face the idea that he hadn’t been, that he’d simply run away
.

“—and that it was my fault. That I deserved to suffer for it. So he made it happen.”

Around them on the grass and perched on the massive granite boulders overlooking the boat basin, crowds had begun gathering. The Fourth of July fireworks—its first disastrous attempt had sent half a dozen men into the water but injured none—had once more been rescheduled, this time for tonight.

“But why now?” Sam asked reasonably.

She shrugged—
ouch
. “From what I can gather, he’d finally lost what little bit of self-control he had and killed his mother.”

Her father looked up from where he sat nearby on a blanket with Bella. “And after that he had nothing else to lose?”

Jake nodded as a cheer went up; the fireworks barge had pulled away from the breakwater. “Uh-huh. Because you know, his mother might’ve been difficult—to put it mildly—but somehow they’d found some kind of a workable equilibrium.”

Ellie White was on the blanket, too, with little Leonora squirming next to her, waiting for the show. “Without her, all he had left was his obsession about you?”

“I guess,” Jake replied, not really knowing whether he had missed his mother or felt sad. And there was no one left to ask.

Sam crouched beside her. “Listen, I’m still really sorry I didn’t come down and find you right away when—”

She shook her head. They’d been over it before. He just felt terrible about it. “Sam, there was no way for you to know. It was nobody’s fault, what happened. Just bad luck, that’s all.”

“Here, put these on,” said Bella, handing over a pair of the
earmuff-style hearing protectors Jake usually wore while using tools, everything from sanding machines to claw hammers.

“You don’t need any more loud noises in those poor ears of yours,” Bella declared.

“Thanks,” Jake said, taking them and putting them on, glad for the evening’s darkness suddenly. It hid the tears she’d felt springing to her eyes way too regularly in the past few days.

Tears of gratitude for surviving, and for having this life and this family. And of sorrow for someone who, through no fault of his own, it seemed, hadn’t had any of that.

Just then Bob Arnold arrived, looking disgusted; she pulled the headgear off. “Well, I’m done with that,” he said, dusting his hands together. “State guys took that little bastard Jerry Finnegan away with ’em.”

He caught Sam’s interested look. “Finnegan,” he explained, “killed the girl on Sea Street after she told him about her baby on the way.”

There’d been an autopsy, Jake knew. Bob’s face creased with distaste. “Too bad for him, his pals saw him do it. One of ’em gave him up to save his own butt.”

“Oh,” Jake breathed, beginning to understand. “But maybe the pal wasn’t the only one who saw it?”

Because the Finnegan boy—ginger-haired and black jacket–clad, his scowling image rose in her mind—had also been charged with placing a homemade bomb fashioned of wired-together M-80s plus a remote-controlled firing device on the fireworks barge, after his fingerprints had been found on part of it.

But Finnegan wouldn’t have been daring enough to do that on his own. He’d have needed a reason; blackmail, for instance.

“Yeah,” Bob said sourly. “Garner saw Finnegan beat the girl up that night. Lost his temper, beat her to death. Finnegan’s pal says that later, Garner told Finnegan to create a diversion downtown, on fireworks night.”

He sighed tiredly. “I guess Finnegan figured the simplest way was the direct approach. Had his bomb-building instructions and another
radio controller he’d gotten off the Internet, did it just like he’d done before. Then he just sneaked the stuff onto the barge. Did it while he was supposedly unloading the truck.”

He made a face, and a slapping-something-onto-the-side-of-a-barge gesture with one hand. “Bingo,” he concluded.

But Ellie’s brow knit skeptically at this. “I’m sorry, but that makes no sense to me. Why didn’t he just—”

She applied a mother’s time-honored ear protection devices, her own hands, to Lee’s ears. “Kill Steven Garner?”

She took her hands off. “To shut him up. He’d already done it once.”

Which made sense to Jake, too, actually. But Bob just looked levelly at Ellie.

“Well, let’s see,” he began, tipping his head in pretended thought, then gesturing at Ellie to cover Lee’s ears again.

She did, and Bob spoke. “Twenty-five-year-old guy, dressed like an older woman right down to the hat and stockings, wounds you and your friends with a hat pin, for God’s sake, killing one of them, and you never even saw it coming.

“On top of which,” he added, holding up a finger, “this guy also knows something very bad about you, that no one should. No one but your wounded friends. And while you’re lying there, this guy tells you about it.”

He signaled the end of ear protection time. “Kind of spoils your tough-guy self-image for you, I’d think. I think you’d have qualms,” he finished, “serious qualms about crossin’ the guy.”

“Yeah,” Ellie said thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’ll bet you would, if you were Finnegan. Scared witless, maybe.”

Bob nodded just as Lee lost patience and jumped up suddenly. “Where. Are. The.
Fireworks?
” she demanded, each word punctuated by a stomp of her small foot.

“Wow,” Jake sighed, not meaning Lee.

The lab in Portland had traced the electronic communications from her laptop, discovering not much more than what they already
surmised: that Steven Jr. had spent a lot of years messing around with computers, and in the process had become an expert at covering his online tracks.

And at computer fraud, too—all the equipment in his pack and back at his home had been bought on fraudulent credit. Ellie settled her rambunctious daughter on her lap.

“The other thing I still don’t get, though, is the gas explosion. I mean, there was a fire in there, for heaven’s sake.” In the Washington Street house, she meant. “So if there was going to be a blast, why didn’t it—”

“Happen right away?” Jake’s dad finished. “I can answer that one for you.”

He’d been back to the ruins; Jake hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to go yet. “The old propane tank out in the yard never got picked up by the company after the last people moved out,” he said.

Out on the water, the barge jockeyed itself into position. A flare went up; several pleasure boats backed off prudently.

“So that’s where the gas came from,” he continued as Bella leaned in against him comfortably.

“What no one knew, though, was that the house was already scheduled to be demolished. Bulldozer. They were just planning to drive in and hit it. So—”

“So somebody prepped it,” Jake supplied. “Went in and cut beams. Loosened it all up, to make it easier to—”

“Correct,” said her dad. “Old place like that one. It’s stood upright a long time, stands to reason it’s not going to go over easy. Not unless you arrange for it to.”

She nodded. Her own old house was a fine example of that. Two hundred years of everything mother nature could toss at it, including a few hurricanes …

And including me
, she thought guiltily, recalling now with a twinge the long to-do list of maintenance chores waiting for her at home.
That porch
 …

And dozens of other tasks. Yet there it stood. Her dad went on: “When a couple of vibrations from the fireworks blasts hit it, it was already primed to fall.”

“Fire. Works. Fire. Works,” Leonora chanted.

“Shh,” Ellie told Leonora sternly, but she was laughing when she said it, so the effect wasn’t very disciplinary.

“That busted a gas pipe,” Jake’s dad said. “The house settled and must have crushed it shut again. Only a little leaked out.”

The first, smaller explosion … “Later, when the planes went over and the house shifted some more, the leak reopened. The gas collected, stayed where it was as long as nothing more got shoved around, but when it did, it just took a spark—”

A huge, long-tailed gold streamer rose up into the dark sky, its body casting off bright pinwheels. The boom followed.

A long
oooh
of delight rose from the crowd; Leonora just sat open-mouthed, her eyes shining.

Fireworks
, she mouthed silently, and at the next, a purple chrysanthemum with tongues of red flame licking from its center, the child laughed aloud.

After that, they all just sat watching, the succession of booming reports as the spectacle went on, making talk impossible.

An arm rested on Jake’s shoulder, startling her. “Hey.”

It was Wade. She leaned against him as overhead a fire snake spiraled, spitting sparks. A flaming pinwheel turned; then a white flash lit the night, and another. And …

When the fireworks were over at last, parents gathered up their children and belongings as older folks lugged lawn chairs back to their cars. Middle-schoolers, delighted to be downtown and on the street at night, roughhoused and ran in the parking lots, burning off some of their seemingly inexhaustible energy.

Wade eyed her judiciously. “Want to ride home with me in the truck?”

“You bet.” She felt like the truck had hit her. Out of the hospital
was not, apparently, synonymous with “all better.” She even let him help her into the vehicle; when had that dratted passenger seat gotten so far up off the ground, anyway?

Instead of going straight home, however, he headed out Water Street to the north end of the island; where the street ended in a graveled circle drive, he pulled up and parked.

The water was dark, intermittently flared across by the turning beam of the lighthouse strobe on Cherry Island. Beyond, the hills of New Brunswick loomed, the sky behind deep indigo.

Wade rolled his window down; the fragrant night drifted in, smelling of sea salt, beach roses, and a bonfire of driftwood on the beach somewhere. Leaning together, they sat for a while in silence; she’d thought she wanted to talk.

But there wasn’t anything to say. At last Wade started the truck again and drove slowly home through the soft, island-summer night.

Pulling in, he cut the headlights. Fireflies flashed at the back of the yard. “I want to have his remains sent home,” Jake said, “when the authorities release them. And buried decently.”

It felt like the least she could do, she who had so much. Helping her down, Wade nodded easily in agreement.

A few yards away on the porch sat Sam, Bella, and Jake’s father, with the dogs, Monday and Prill, at their feet. As she crossed the lawn toward them, they all got up, even Monday, whose face opened prettily in a sweet, old-dog smile.

Lucky
, Jake thought, climbing the porch steps with Wade by her side, as they all went into the house for the night.

SARAH GRAVES
lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, in the 1823 Federal-style house that helped inspire her books. This series and the author’s real-life experiences have been featured in
House & Garden
and
USA Today
. She is currently at work on the newest Home Repair Is Homicide mystery.