Nail Biter (2 page)

This person who was not supposed to be here, but was. In one hand: a paper bag, folded and stapled at the top. Eugene licked his lips as he caught sight of it.

There, only a few tantalizing inches away from him, was his six thousand dollars. Then very reluctantly he turned his attention to what his surprising visitor held in the other hand.

Oh, in the other hand.

Staring, Eugene thought about bad luck, reflecting that in spite of all his earlier mental whining he'd never really had any such thing, never in his whole life. But now . . .

In the other hand was a gun.

Aimed at him. Again he considered running. But the shed door was jammed, so to do it he'd have to get
closer
to the gun.

Nope. Better try to talk his way out of this. Eugene opened his mouth but no sound came out. Or maybe he couldn't hear it through the sudden, impossibly loud explosion happening
inside
his head.

Abruptly he was looking up at the ceiling. Hell, he thought. Here a gun was aimed right at him and he couldn't even summon the breath to say anything about it. Those mossy bricks were cold and uncomfortable on his back, too, and the window had become drafty all of a sudden.

On the other hand, his ankle didn't hurt anymore.

Which was exactly the kind of dumb thought that hit you, Eugene Dibble realized with a stab of regret, when you were about to die. Plus a whole laundry list of irrelevant stuff like how amazingly much of the world there was, and how very little you had managed to experience of it in what had turned out to be your too-short life.

And how big the sky was, the sky outside if you'd only managed to make it there, and how high and bright the moon would be tonight if only you were still around to see it.

If only. Contrition pierced him suddenly. For the pocketbook pilfering. For all of it.

“This what you were looking for, Eugene?”

The paper bag, held up right over him, inches from his face. But it wasn't important.

Not anymore. A couple of the old windows reached all the way down to floor level. Eugene turned his head to somehow signal his partner in the weeds at the back of the yard.

Signal for help. But the baseball cap had vanished.

“Look at me, Eugene.”

He looked, still not quite comprehending how everything had gone so suddenly sour.

“I . . . I don't get it,” he managed. Because he was
supposed
to be here, he was
supposed
to find the—

“No, of course you don't. I guess it was too much to hope for that you would. But it doesn't matter. In the end it doesn't matter at all.”

Eugene thought about this in a series of moments that seemed at once to pass in a flash and yet to go on forever, deciding finally that it was true. Nothing mattered: not the paper bag or the gun, or where the baseball cap had gone to.

Or who'd been wearing the cap, which by now Eugene could no longer quite remember. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a small movement behind his assailant.

A white, shocked face, a pair of frightened eyes.

But they didn't matter either. All that felt the least bit important now was how wide the world was, how vast the sky.

Wonderingly he noticed too how swiftly and effortlessly he seemed to be sailing right up into it, leaving his body stuck to the earth like a dead bug impaled on an invisible pin.

Going up,
he thought in surprise, in the last few sparkling broken-mirror shards of awareness that remained.

Now there's a piece of luck I wasn't expecting
.

I said goodbye to my ex-husband Victor Tiptree on the day
our divorce was final, back in Manhattan, and hello again to him nearly every day thereafter for the next ten years.

Because he wouldn't let go. He didn't want me, but once I'd dissolved our legal connection Victor clung to me with the desperate tenacity of a selfish three-year-old, unwilling to let even his shabbiest, most unplayed-with toy be taken away.

A three-year-old being in many areas exactly what Victor was. On the other hand he ended up showing some pretty impressive maturity, all things considered.

But that was later. On the bright autumn morning when he walked into my big old house in Eastport, Maine, made a beeline for the refrigerator and located the last slice of blueberry pie, then sat down at the kitchen table to devour it without so much as a word to me, he was the same old Victor.

Rude, inconsiderate. And somehow proud of it, as if in his head he was hearing the applause he always felt he deserved.

Although now when I think of it I wonder whether applause was really what he was hearing, or if even then it was more of a slow, deliberate drumbeat.

Victor finished the pie, licking his fork before dropping it onto the stained plate.

“Coffee?” he asked, peering around as if the pot were not on the kitchen counter as always, and as if he didn't know perfectly well where the cups in my house were kept.

I'd been out target shooting before breakfast—bleak skies and chilly mist always made me feel like shooting something, and the early-morning weather had been dreary—and his tone made my trigger finger feel itchy again.

The .45-caliber Bisley six-shot revolver I'd been practicing with at the target range wasn't even stowed away in its lockbox yet, I mused as he went on eyeing me expectantly.

But instead of pursuing this thought I fixed coffee for him without complaint, dosing it with cream and sugar just the way he liked it, because I needed to talk to him and I knew from experience that waiting on Victor was a good way to soften him up a little.

Giving him, I mean, what he believed was really only his due. At the time, I felt that I was merely kowtowing to his ego as usual, in that moment of simple service when I set the white china mug, steaming and fragrant, on the table in front of him.

But these days I am grateful for it. Anyway:

“Victor, I do wish you'd stop spoiling Sam the way you have been lately.”

Sam was our son; bright, charming, and dyslexic, he was a twenty-year-old boat-school apprentice and student at the nearby community college.

Victor went on stirring his coffee with his fork. Apparently I hadn't gotten the sugar dissolved quite perfectly. He frowned briefly at the tiny crumb of piecrust floating on the surface of the coffee, picked it out with a fork tine.

“What do you mean, spoiling him? He needed school clothes,” my ex-husband said innocently.

Victor always tried innocence first. Next came shouting and sulking. But not this time, I thought determinedly. It was October and Sam had just recently started classes again, his time divided between the campus in Calais—the next town to our north, thirty miles distant on the mainland—and the boat school here in Eastport.

I kept my voice even. “Yes, I appreciate your taking care of that for him. But he didn't need the four-hundred-dollar leather jacket, did he? Or the hand-sewn leather loafers.”

If Sam ever starts loafing I will take him to the hospital for a battery of blood tests. By harnessing half the energy that boy generates on a slow day, you could light up the East Coast.

Victor smiled a little, sitting there in my big barnlike kitchen with its high, bare windows, scuffed hardwood floor, and tall wooden wainscoting surrounding the old soapstone sink.

“Or,” I went on, “those hundred-dollar-plus work boots from the Eddie Bauer catalog.”

From her usual perch atop the refrigerator, Cat Dancing opened her crossed blue eyes and yawned expressively, then stood and stretched.

“All Sam's friends . . .” I began.

Mmrph,
the Siamese uttered, leaping down onto the washing machine and across to the kitchen table. There she deliberately walked around Victor's plate three times, twitching her tail in his face while he tried swatting at her before she streaked from the room.

“. . . dress out of the sale bins at Wal-Mart,” I finished; good old Cat Dancing. “He'll have to scuff up those boots with a wire brush just to seem normal.”

Victor grimaced, brushing fastidiously at the area around his plate. He was a good-looking man in his forties with long-lashed green eyes, a lantern jaw, and lots of dark, curly hair just beginning to go a little gray at the temples.

“. . . and as for that cowhide book bag you bought him . . .”

Also, Victor was a cleanliness nut. Today he wore a spotless white V-neck cardigan over a white turtleneck, cream slacks, and a pair of ten-year-old driving moccasins that looked as if they'd just come out of the box.

Irritably he plucked Cat hairs off the cardigan. “Hideous beast,” he muttered, and it was a good thing Cat Dancing didn't hear him; tail-twitching was the least of what that animal could accomplish when somebody riled her.

I pretended I hadn't heard him either. “. . . it's ridiculous,” I persisted. “Donald Trump should be carrying that book bag. And Sam surely didn't need season tickets to the Boston Celtics.”

We were getting to the heart of the matter now, the thing I objected to way more than any of the rest of the stuff Victor had been treating Sam to during the past few weeks.

“It's six hours to drive there and he still has his weekend job, so during the school year—which may I remind you is mostly when professional basketball is played—he can't even
get
to the arena to
see
the games,” I said.

No reply from Victor. Encouraged, I went on. “There's not a thing he can even
do
with those tickets except sell them, so . . .”

But then I stopped, alerted by something even sneakier than usual in Victor's expression.

“Oh, no. Tell me you didn't.”

Victor put his cup down, spread his hands placatingly. “I know it's extravagant. But you're right, the tickets are useless if he can't get to the games. And since I'm planning to use one of those tickets myself—”

“You're chartering down,” I said flatly. “To Boston, out of Quoddy Airfield and back.”

When I first moved to Eastport I thought our little island airport, with its wooden sign, bright orange wind sock, and metal quonset hangars, was charmingly quaint. Then I learned that it is (a) big enough for a Learjet and (b) so well maintained that it is regarded as a safe haven by pilots for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Also, you can get on a plane there in the afternoon and be in Boston by evening.

“Victor, that's outrageous. It's out of the question. What do you think he is, a movie star?”

“Jacobia, it's not—”

“No,” I said flatly. “It's just way too out of line for his financial circumstances. I mean, I know
you've
got the money to do it, but . . .”

Before following me here to Maine in order to drive me crazy and incidentally also (he maintained) so that he could be nearer to Sam, Victor was the kind of brain surgeon you would go to when the other surgeons had all washed their hands of you because your neurological situation was so ghastly, it terrified even them.

And Victor's take-no-prisoners brand of scalpel-wielding chutzpah—not to mention his win-loss record on the operating table, which wasn't half shabby, either—hadn't come cheap.

So he could afford this stuff. But I couldn't, and neither could Sam. “Victor, I just don't want him thinking he can—”

“What?” he demanded. “Have something that not everyone else can, once in a blue moon? Something special?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Or is it only a big problem for you when the something special happens to be supplied by me?” His tone had turned waspish.

I opened my mouth to explain very specifically and in detail why he was wrong, which would have turned the conversation into a verbal slugfest. But I was saved from this by the arrival of my friend Ellie White.

“Hey, everybody,” she called out cheerfully as she swept in lugging two brown paper bags in one arm while leading my two huge dogs on their leashes with her other hand.

Although “leading” was a gentle term for what those dogs were like, clipped to the ends of leashes. “Are you ready for the big storm?” she asked, not even out of breath.

Ellie was tall, redheaded, and so slender that she could wear green sweatpants, a big yellow sweatshirt, and a turquoise fleece top without impersonating something that has been inflated with a bicycle pump. Also, for today's three-mile midmorning dog-jog she wore white sneakers with thick pink socks puffing up over her pants cuffs.

“Going to be a humdinger,” she added; Ellie liked what she called big weather.

“Because,” Victor continued, glowering at me and ignoring her, “I notice that when Wade takes Sam hunting, they charter a seaplane right into the hunting camp up in the Allagash. But
that's
fine.”

Wade Sorenson, my current husband, was a gun-repair expert, prizewinning target shooter—he'd taught me the basics and given me the Bisley .45 as a wedding gift—and devoted outdoorsman when he wasn't too busy being Eastport's harbor pilot, guiding huge freighters in and out of our deep-water port.

“The Allagash is different,” I said. “It's nature, it's . . .”

I waved my hands inadequately. In fact Wade had intended to go deer hunting today, at his camp on Balsam Lake with a few buddies. But instead he was on a tugboat headed out to a big vessel diverted here for repairs.

“. . . character building,” I declared, and Victor grimaced.

The freighter's diversion was bad news for Wade, but not for local truckers, since the repairs required offloading the cargo with cranes and land-hauling it elsewhere: good money for all the stevedores and drivers.

“
That's
just great,” Victor fumed. “Whatever
Wade
does . . .”

The dogs snuffled eagerly at his pants legs, causing him to pull his feet sharply up like a man whose toes are about to be nibbled by alligators. Prill the red Doberman turned away at this gesture of unwillingness to socialize, but Monday the old black Labrador went on nuzzling him; she figured he was just playing hard to get.

“. . . out
doors
with a
gun,
” he groused . . .