Nail Biter (28 page)

“He must've taken off as soon as we were gone and the coast was clear. Dad, how did I let all this get so screwed up? Now the cops think Mac killed Gene Dibble
and
Joey, and Wanda Cathcart's more missing than ever.”

“Hmm,” he said, frowning down at the project he'd been working on when I arrived, under the set of hanging fluorescent lights installed over his workbench.

With the help of some of the town men who'd been working on the water pipe at my house, he'd taken home the big section of old foundation with the wooden box still encased in it.

“Things've got to get worse sometimes, 'fore they improve,” he offered.

Old Maine license plates, glossies of classic cars, and cheesecake-calendar pictures of actresses from a bygone era were thumbtacked to the shop's interior walls, courtesy of the previous tenant.

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “I've got half a mind to go down to Bob Arnold's office right this minute and tell the state cops the whole—”

“Oh?” he interrupted coolly. “Tell 'em you met with Rickert and his brother, followed the brother around, now the guy turns up dead? You do that, I can tell you what tomorrow's headline'll read, Jacobia.”

Right. I felt my shoulders slump.
Drug House Owner Eyed in Pair of Suspicious Deaths . . .

Not the news I wanted all my neighbors absorbing with their morning coffee. Also, once I started talking, it would come out
why
I'd been doing all that, and Bob Arnold's guy here in town would lose his kids.

“Chief Arnold hasn't brought you into it already, though? Not a word about your involvement?” my father asked. He got out his rock tools from one of the kitchen cabinets: chisels, a bunch of miniature pickaxes in various sizes, plus a hammer.

“No, he'd just have the same problem. Owning the rental house isn't enough reason to get Ellie and me snooping as hard as we've been doing, and with them being detectives and all, you know they'd tumble to the fact that we were doing it because
he
wasn't being allowed to,” I said.

“So Bob said it was an anonymous tip?” my father concluded.

“You got it,” I agreed. “That's exactly what he told them.” If you didn't already know it was a lie, I supposed it was reasonably believable. Or anyway, it was working so far, according to Bob.

“At this point they think Joey was in on the drug deal with Mac and Gene Dibble, and Mac's been eliminating his partners,” I went on. “But if you knew those guys at all, that wouldn't make sense. Mac didn't murder his brother, I'm really pretty sure.”

“And you know this because . . . ?” His tone was skeptical.

“Wade says those two have been loyal to each other their whole lives,” I explained. “And I believe it. Heck, all I did was badmouth Joey one time, and Mac jumped all over me.”

But then I paused; no sense going into detail about exactly which time that was. My dad was as sensitive about my safety—or the absence of it—as Wade.

“Besides, Mac needed Joey's boat to get off Tall Island.”

This notion seemed to interest my father. “Did he, then? Get off the island? Cops searched the whole place?”

He had a point. “Well, no, they didn't. They found the campsite. No one was there. Then I guess Joey's body turned up out on the water and that diverted them.”

To put it mildly. And since the tip about Mac's whereabouts
had
been anonymous, they'd decided not to canvass the entire island's difficult terrain on the basis of it, turning their attention instead to the evidence they
did
have: another dead man.

“And Mac didn't actually need Joey to get off the island,” I amended. “Mac's own boat's big enough for around here. But to get clean out of the area, somewhere he wouldn't be recognized right off the bat, the
GhOulIE gUrl
was Mac's only option.”

“And now it's gone.” My father eyed the big chunk of granite and mortar now occupying his workbench, raised his stone chisel consideringly, and brought it down with a metallic
clink!

A much bigger section of stone than I was expecting flew off it and whizzed across the room, tearing a paper chunk out of Rita Hayworth's left thigh before landing in the corner.

“Right,” I said. Another chisel strike; a section of mortar cleaved off like an iceberg calving off a glacier. “You know, you really are pretty good at that.”

He looked at me, amused. “I've had,” he said drily, “a fair amount of experience.”

Stone masonry being a fine way to support yourself while you are on the run; plenty of work, few questions asked, and payment in cash at the end of the day if that's the way you want it.

“Anyway,” he said, eyeing his task again, “what I think is that if I was Mac Rickert at the moment, I'd be doubling back.”

It was why I'd come to see my dad in the first place: to get his read on what an experienced fugitive might do under similar circumstances.

A successful fugitive. But now I just stared at him. “You mean you don't think Mac left Tall Island? That he's still . . . ?”

“Yup.” He put down the chisel. “Because you said yourself his own boat isn't big enough to go far. And if I was a cop it's probably the last place I'd check again, at least for a while.”

Where a tip
hadn't
panned out . . . it wasn't a great option but it was among the few available to Mac Rickert right now. So it made sense.

And it was worth a try. But at the door I paused, struck by a question that popped into my mind out of nowhere.

Along with the courage to ask. “Dad, do you think Mother would've forgiven you? I mean, if she'd known . . .”

If she'd known in advance that his radical activities would result in her death, in the explosion of a house everyone thought he'd blown up, accidentally or deliberately. That was why the Feds had chased him for so long; they'd thought he was responsible.

I'd thought so, too, until I learned different.

“Your mother,” he said softly, “forgave me everything the first minute she laid eyes on me.”

He hesitated, meanwhile testing the blade of his chisel with a callused finger. I guessed I wasn't the only one with memories too painful to scrutinize closely.

“Anyway,” he said, “it's not other people forgiving us that's so difficult. Or us forgiving other people.”

He examined my face. “When you get to be my age you might even start thinking it hardly matters who did the bad deed in the first place,” he went on.

“Hard part's forgiving ourselves for not being smarter or stronger or . . . whatever fault we think we had, or we're afraid we had, that let the bad thing happen at all,” he finished.

He glanced up at the bare hanging bulb over his workbench. “In my case it was lack of imagination, I guess. When I was a young man I thought I was a bad guy, the worst there was.”

But he'd been wrong. There were much worse.

One of them had killed my mother, while trying to get at him. “You think about these things too much, they'll drive you crazy,” he said, picking up his chisel again.

It was a
long walk home past the old white clapboard houses of town, many with piles of autumn leaves already heaped against their foundations and plastic sheets stapled over their windows against the coming winter. But I was glad for it, thinking over what my father had said.

Mac Rickert ought to have been miles away by now. If he had any sense he'd have left Wanda behind to make his escape. But instead he'd stubbornly stayed here with her right up until last night.

If not longer. Which meant not just Wanda but something else about Tall Island was important to him.

Only . . . what? His reasoning seemed as impenetrable to me as the old well George Valentine had fallen down, back when he was a boy and the talents of Wanda's water-witching ancestor, Horeb Cathcart, had been required to locate him.

Too bad I couldn't call Horeb for help now. If the stories were true he might've sent a posse of animals to terrify Mac and escort the creature-loving Wanda to safety.

Instead the escort would have to be me. And if what my dad had suggested was true, probably the rescue had to happen pretty much right this minute.

“Mom?” Sam's voice came from the front parlor as I went in.

“What're you doing here?” I asked. The dogs appeared, galumphing down the hall at me affectionately, and Cat Dancing yowled a welcome.

“I needed to talk to you,” Sam said as I bent to greet the canines. He followed me into the kitchen, where I'd begun mentally listing the equipment I meant to take with me: a life jacket, an outboard engine—in the cellar was a little seven-and-a-half-horse Evinrude that I thought I could muscle into my car trunk—and a gun.

A big one this time, the kind of weapon even a guy like Mac Rickert would be impressed by. Enough, I hoped, to do what I told him to, especially once he understood the deal I'd be offering.

But now here was Sam. “Listen, it's about Dad,” he said.

And about the basketball games, no doubt; Sam still wanted my approval. Likely Victor had helped him come up with a slippery argument to try to get it, too.

“Sam, I don't like it but if you want to go I suppose it's your decision. I think your dad's just using you to try to get the better of me, but—”

“No,” Sam put in impatiently, “that's not it. Mom, don't you understand? Weren't you listening to me the other night?”

Cat Dancing twined around my ankles. “Of course I was, but now I know your father didn't mean what you thought . . .”

He was shaking his head. “He's not at any seminar. He just said that so you wouldn't worry, or ask him a lot of questions.”

Sam took a shaky breath. “Mom, he's at a clinic in Denver. They're going to try some new last-ditch experimental treatment they've got there.”

I sat down at the table. What Sam was saying didn't compute. With Victor, it was always other people who got sick.

Always. And when they did he always fixed them. “Sam, are you sure about this?”

He nodded, and sat down across from me. “It's big, the tumor he's got, it's growing fast and it's in a place where you can't operate on it.”

His forehead creased. “That whole thing about flying to the Celtics . . . I didn't want to do it. But it's like he needs a future to plan for, so he can go on right now.”

Monday put her glossy black head on his knee; he patted her distractedly. “He tried to put a good face on it. But you know Dad, he always has. Even back when I was little and I'd have a birthday or Christmas was coming . . . he could talk a good game.”

Right.
I'll be there,
Victor would always say. To blow out the candles, or open the presents . . . he could always convince me this time would be different. But an aneurysm, a blood clot, or a tumor would happen, and instead he would be away fixing it.

For somebody else. “Sam, if your dad thinks this clinic has a treatment that might work . . .”

But we'd both lived with Victor long enough to know that
might work
also implied another, darker possible outcome:
might not
.

“Listen, I told them I'd be at school soon but if you want me to stick around . . .”

“No,” I said, getting up to put my hands on his shoulders. “It's okay, you should go. There's nothing that we can do about it right now but sit and worry, and your dad wouldn't like that.”

My chest felt as if there were a boulder on it. “Did he say he would call?” I added. “Or how we're going to know if . . . ?”

“Either way, he'll be home in a few days,” Sam said. “He'll know then if he has to make more trips, to get more treatments.”

He got up. “Otherwise . . .”

That word: “otherwise.” Fleetingly I let my mind touch on the notion of a world without Victor. Half the time on those holidays he hadn't been in the operating room at all; instead he'd been in the bedroom of some pretty lab tech or X-ray technician.

But even though Victor wasn't the sun in my sky anymore, he was still the moon and several important stars. For one thing he was Sam's father. And . . .

Well, we'd known each other quite a while. I hugged Sam. “We'll talk more later,” I promised him. “Try not to worry.”

“Yeah,” he replied, and after he went out I cried hard for a long time.

You might not notice the moon very much. White and silent, it shines a cold light that is merely a ghost of the beloved day.

But you'd miss it if it were gone.

A lot.

“I'm going to go out there and offer him the same deal as I
meant to last time,” I told Ellie determinedly when she showed up around noon. “Only
this
time, I'm not going to let him dump me in the water
and
I'm going to sweeten the pot.”

On the table lay my cash stash: five grand. But it was worth it if it put an end to this mess.

“Mac's got to get away,” I said, “and for that he needs real money. And I don't think he has any way to get it anywhere else. If he did, I bet he'd be long gone now.”

I'd thought it over and it was the only reasonable answer to why Mac was still on Tall Island.

If he was. “What if something happens to you out there?” Ellie argued. “Then Sam will be left without you
and
maybe without his father, too.”