Nail Biter (20 page)

Or an X-marks-the-spot. I didn't know why the idea occurred to me so strongly, but it did.

“I guess it means that even long-gone things can be found again,” said Ellie.

“People, maybe, too,” I agreed.

Or so I hoped. I dropped the thing into my pocket, felt it weighing there, and wondered whether the old piece of gold might also help restore my peace of mind.

But I didn't expect this. With few exceptions I'd given up on magic a long time ago, or it had given up on me.

Same difference.

“Old Horeb Cathcart,” Ellie's husband George Valentine
said that night at the dinner table, “was a water witch.”

He'd learned while being introduced to Marge Cathcart that she had family connections in the area. Now he was enlarging upon the topic while she and the other Quoddy Village tenants met rappie pie.

With, I thought, varying degrees of pleasure. “Though I've noticed it ain't takin' no magical mumbo jumbo to get some of 'em to eat it,” Bella Diamond observed from her post in the kitchen, on the other side of the butler's pantry pass-through.

“Now, Bella,” I said, trying not to smile, “keep your voice down.” I handed her some plates. “Seconds on these, please?”

She rolled her eyes at me. “I'll bring 'em in. Need to fill up Dr. Tiptree's glass, anyway. You want another bottle out?”

“Yes,” I said, momentarily worried. Victor's appetite, ordinarily so dependable, was picky again tonight. But unlike the last time he'd been here, he was drinking more than usual.

“Horeb could find water by holding a branch out, seeing how it felt to him in his hands. When the branch bent down, he would say ‘Dig here,'” George continued as I sat down again.

“Oh, come on,” Greg Brand reacted skeptically. “That's just old wives' tales.”

Bella's glance at him was deceptively mild as she put filled plates in front of Wade and Jenna Durrell and placed a new bottle of wine on the table. Chicken and potatoes baked with gravy in a pie pastry, green beans, and rolls plus spiced cranberry sauce and a relish dish had hit the spot with those two, anyway.

But Victor poured another glass of wine immediately, having pushed his plate away. I looked a question at him but he only smiled dismissively, then reached to pat Monday, who blinked up at him in surprise at the gesture.

“Wives' tales or no, people would find water,” George said. He ate some chicken and potato. “And water wasn't all Horeb Cathcart found, either. Back when I was a little boy he went out to try to find a missing child. For hours people'd searched all over the island till at last someone thought to ask Horeb.”

“And?” Marge Cathcart asked breathlessly. The story of a lost child must have flown like an arrow to her heart; I was surprised she had been willing to sit down at a table with Greg Brand at all.

“He cut a willow switch,” George said, and drank some wine. “Put his hands on it, followed that twitching tip out to the edge of the kid's parents' yard, into the brush and trees.”

Noticing that Victor had begun petting Monday, Prill leaned in on his other side. I braced for the explosion of fuss-budgetry to erupt from Victor.

It didn't. “Then what happened?” Ellie wanted to know.

George picked his cap up from where he'd set it by his plate and turned it thoughtfully in his hands. “Horeb followed that switch through the underbrush till it led him to an old well they'd all forgotten about. And when he looked down—”

“Oh, come on,” Greg Brand interrupted. “You're just trying to put one over on—”

“When he looked down,” George repeated, “there was a little boy clinging onto a tree root, bawling his head off, only nobody had heard him. You
couldn't
have heard him, 'less you stuck your head over the edge, leaned way down in there.”

At this, even Wade paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. It seemed he hadn't heard this story before either.

“And the way I know it's true,” George said into the silence at the table, “is that the little boy was me.”

“George,” Ellie said. “You never told me that.”

He shrugged. “
Quoddy Tides
has an old photo of me hangin' on that root while the men lowered a line. Had a time gettin' me to grab it. But when I got more hungry than I was scairt, I did.”

Victor got up, taking care not to step on any dogs. “Quite a story,” he remarked, patting George on the shoulder genially. “Glad you made it out of the well.” Then, offering his apologies all around, he excused himself.

I went to the door with him. “Are you all right?”

He hadn't even wanted any of the quince jam, though I'd offered him some. Now his eyes were bright; with wine, I thought. And one of them was bloodshot.

“Got something in it,” he explained the redness. “I'm going to go home, wash it out. I've got an early morning tomorrow, too, so I should call it a night.”

His words weren't exactly slurred but they weren't crisply enunciated, either. “You're not driving, are you?” I asked.

I stepped onto the back porch with him as Sam pulled up in the street out front in Victor's car, tapped the horn gently.

“He's taking me,” Victor said. “Thanks for dinner.” Pulling me nearer he planted a swift, chaste kiss on my forehead.

Throughout my whole history with Victor I might as well have expected a thank-you from one of those dogs. I wanted to ask what was going on, but he hustled down the steps and out to the car.

“You're welcome,” I said into the night as it disappeared around the corner.

When I returned to the table Jenna Durrell was telling Wade about her adventures in boat rental; it seemed her struggles with rowboat navigation had been nothing compared to the hard time she was having learning to run even a small outboard engine.

But she was cheerful enough about it. Meanwhile Greg Brand gave the rest of the table the benefit of his knowledge regarding, it seemed, just about everything; at the moment he was pontificating about food.

“. . . peasant cookery,” he pronounced condescendingly, a lofty wave of his left hand indicating the rappie pie.

He took another greedy bite of it, continuing as he chewed. “It's a bowdlerized version of the higher-class form of the dish, altered to include whatever game meat happens to be available to the working folk.”

“Bowdler,” George pronounced appreciatively. “That's some kind of a hat, isn't it?”

His own was an old black gimme-cap with the words
Guptill's Excavating
embroidered on it in orange script.

Greg didn't answer, rolling his eyes—I guessed that at the high-class meals he was used to, this constituted good manners—while beside him Jenna went on working on her second helping.

“Go on,” she told Hetty Bonham. “Your diet won't fail on one night of decent food.”

But Hetty remained hesitant. With her blonde hair teased in glamor-queen style and her nails polished tomato red, she wore so much eye makeup along with her fake lashes it was a wonder she could even see her food, much less notice its likely calorie content.

“I suppose,” she allowed doubtfully, forking up a green bean and eating it, then favoring the rest of us with a big smile as if this were a photo op.

“I remember rappie pie,” Marge Cathcart remarked sadly. She wasn't eating much, either.

“My great-aunt used to make it for Sunday dinner when we visited her. She was from New Brunswick, just over the Canadian border from here,” she explained.

George finished his buttered roll and looked for another; I handed him the basket of them. After a day out fixing whatever had gotten broken in the storm—a fallen gutter, a split tree, or a strip of shingles peeled from the slant of an old roof—he was hungry enough to eat the gold off the rim of his plate.

“So you must have heard the stories about Horeb,” he said.

“He was my husband's grandfather,” Marge agreed. “I never met him but the family said he did even more than find water and lost kids. He was,” she said, scorching Greg Brand with a look that dared him to disagree, “a talker to animals.”

“I did hear one time that he had a tame fox,” Ellie put in. “But I don't know if it was true. I was little when he died.”

“Brought him rabbits.” George nodded. “I know it for a fact. Fox hunted for him, he was so old an' poor by then he couldn't get meat no other way.”

George cast a sideways eye-flicker at Greg, whom he had not forgiven for the comment about low-class food. “He used to give my folks some of the rabbits when he had more'n he could use. But like I say, he was an old man by then.”

He ate part of his roll. “Last time I saw Horeb he was out at Ship's Point, sittin' way out there on the high rock, all by himself.”

He took a final sip of his wine. “Anyway he was alone if you don't count the lynx by his side, and what I was pretty sure was an osprey perched on his arm like one o' them trained birds, what do you call 'em?”

“Falcons,” Wade supplied quietly. There was a long moment of silence around the table as a sudden vivid picture popped into my head, not of old Horeb Cathcart the talker-to-animals, but of his great-granddaughter Wanda.

With that bat. Somehow the memory gave me hope, and when I looked across the table at Marge I could tell she was thinking something similar: Wanda was a strange child, and maybe in some way none of us could imagine, her strangeness would help her.

But then Greg was talking again. “Sorry, but I can't swallow that nonsense,” he said. “Turning some old codger into a myth is all you're doing, and—”

George interrupted him smartly. “Come on, Greg, aren't you a magic teacher? Got these here folks to pay up for your expensive seminar, teach 'em to harness their powers and so on?”

He gave the word “powers” just enough of a twist so we all knew what he thought of Greg and his seminar. Then, without waiting for an answer:

“Tell the truth, I think I've probably got some magic powers myself.” He eyed Greg up and down, not disguising the fact that he didn't like the other man even a little bit.

“Bet I could make you disappear,” he said flatly. “You and your hocus-pocus.”

Greg didn't answer, having perhaps become aware of the sudden atmosphere in the room: not Greg Brand–friendly. Instead he got up and excused himself curtly, leaving before I could follow him to the door with even a sham apology.

“George,” Ellie admonished. “That wasn't very nice of you.”

“Ayuh,” he concurred. “Guess the peasants are rowdy tonight. Good dinner, though, even if it weren't quite up to Mr. Brand's highfalutin tastes.”

And that was George, so laid-back and mellow you could get the impression it was safe to patronize him. It wasn't a mistake you'd be likely to make a second time, however.

He got up. “Come on, Wade, let's help Bella with the dishes, pay our way for all this fine grub. We can have dessert later and watch some of the football game while we eat it.”

It was a suggestion Wade liked, freeing him as it did from Hetty, who'd begun trying to flirt. So this time I decided to let the fellows do kitchen duty, just as they wished. And when they'd gone, Hetty instantly found a new topic: Greg Brand himself.

“Poor Greg,” she commented acidly. “He's not himself tonight. Guess he's upset about Eugene Dibble. And about Wanda of course,” she added to Marge.

She was drunk, I suddenly realized. “Why would he be upset about Gene Dibble?” I asked innocently.

Because it was one thing for Greg to confide in me about his old partnership with the local ne'er-do-well, but I had a feeling Hetty's slant on it could be something else entirely.

She smiled slyly around the table. “I've known Greg a while, and I
happen
to know they were friends a long time ago.”

She refilled her wineglass, drank it down. “Those two were thick as thieves then,” she declared, clearly pleased to have an audience. “They ran a con on women Greg met, a lonely-hearts scam, in Massachusetts. They targeted women who didn't have husbands or boyfriends but who
did
own houses.”

Tactfully Ellie poured a little more wine into her own glass and a lot more into Hetty's. “How did that work?” she asked.

“Greg got a lady's confidence, took her out, romanced her. Then he introduced her to Gene and
he
sold her . . . oh, vinyl siding. Driveway resurfacing. New windows, a roof.” Hetty swallowed more wine, looking smug. “Any kind of crap that Greg could convince her she needed, and that Gene could get a down payment on—I mean a
really
hefty one—before starting the job.”

Up until this point Jenna had been paying a lot of attention to her plate. But now she looked up.

“And then he wouldn't do it,” she said harshly. “Or if she had a lot of money and they could keep running the con on her for a while, it would get done but shoddily.”

She aimed her fork at Hetty. “Substandard materials, lousy workmanship—by the end the house was a wreck and she'd've run through all her money, every cent they could get out of her. She might even lose her home.”

“How'd you find that out?” Hetty asked, blinking owlishly, but Jenna didn't get to answer. Instead, Marge Cathcart seized her own wineglass suddenly and flung it.

“You
knew
? How
could
you?” she shrieked. The glass missed Hetty and shattered against the fireplace mantel. “Because we're plain people it's all right to take advantage of us?
Fool
us? And now my daughter's gone because of
you
!” A sob escaped her. “Oh, how could I have been so
stupid
. . . .”

Jenna studied her hands; apparently when she'd clued Marge in to Greg's real nature, she hadn't added any information about Hetty. When her head came up again I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Give me a break,” the ex-cop said in reply. “You saw Hetty giving Marge the mother-hen treatment out at the house. What was I supposed to do, take that away from her, too?”

She had a point. Poor Marge was pretty clearly at the very edge of a breakdown; it wouldn't take much more to push her over. I wasn't sure I'd have told her about yet another betrayal either.

And I certainly wasn't going to press her now for more details about Wanda; so much for the main point of this evening.