Read Repair to Her Grave Online

Authors: Sarah Graves

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths

Repair to Her Grave (11 page)

BOOK: Repair to Her Grave
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“These are fakes,” Ellie said. “No prescription at all. But for what? So he would look more intellectual?” She peered through them again. “Or to make it look as if he needed them. Like a disguise?”

“I don’t know, Ellie. And what difference does it make now, anyway?”

I dropped the last chunk of plaster into a trash bag and swept up the dust, already making a mental list for the hardware store: more plaster, and new filters for the respirator I’d be wearing when the plaster dried, so I could sand it all down again without having to get in line for a lung transplant.

And that sanding needed to be complete inside of four days, since last time I looked, the untimely death of a mysterious visitor that no one knew anything about was not grounds to cancel a Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting.

I tied the trash bag with a wire twist—wondering if maybe I could just crawl inside the bag and stay there— and set it in the butler's pantry, which was turning into ground zero for the repair project.

Tools, tarps, a bucket, and a jumbo packet of sandpaper like a harbinger of the dark days to come stood where the good china and crystal had resided, in the golden days before I moved here. Once upon a time, this house had been home to people of quality: vigorous businessmen and ladies whose housekeeping outranked mine by several orders of magnitude.

Sadly I regarded the pantry shelves, where now the only eating or drinking implements were a set of plastic cutlery, paper plates, and a thermos for when we went on picnics.

And then I spotted it, glittering in the corner beneath the low shelf: some kind of high-tech gadget. Battery-pack handle; it was obvious that it twisted, to turn the device on… .

At the other end, the glassy, rounded tip of a long, stalky appendage glowed suddenly. Ellie peered over my shoulder to get a closer look at the thing. “Is that an eyepiece?”

She pointed at a roundish, eye-sized aperture in the body of the thing. “May I see it?”

She grasped the black stalklike part in one hand to keep it from waving around, held the cylindrical body of the object with the other hand, and peered into it.

“Oh! Jacobia, it's a …”

I’d figured it out: a fiber-optic viewing device. Victor, my ex-husband the philandering brain surgeon, had brought this sort of thing home sometimes to show to Sam, in case Sam might like to follow in his father's footsteps.

The thought made me shudder, especially since right now Sam was with his father and, probably, one of his father's young lady friends. Victor found them even here in downeast Maine, and when he couldn’t find them, he imported them. And of course Jill Frey was with them, too.

I frowned at the high-tech gadget. “What the heck's it doing here?”

“Raines must have had it,” Ellie concluded. “No one else in the house would have one, would they? Sam wouldn’t, for diving?”

“I don’t think so. He’d have been showing it to us at dinner last night if he had.” Perhaps due to his father's influence, Sam adored fancy gadgetry, could fix just about any of it, and vastly enjoyed demonstrating it for other people.

Ellie frowned. “But what would Raines want with … Oh.”

Her face intent, she approached what was left of the wall: a two-foot-high section of intact plaster extending upward from the floor trim. Carefully she placed the stalk's long end behind the plaster, twisted the device to make the light go on, and …

“There's something down there.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. It's a …”

My mind was racing. “I’ll bet Raines meant to take that wall down all along.”

Or take some wall down, anyway, to peek behind it, in case a Stradivarius happened to be hidden there. I’d inadvertently focused his attention on
this
wall by removing the wallpaper, so he saw the old plaster patch centered behind my new one.

Then he’d done just what we’d been hoping he would do: he’d
seen
with fresh eyes. The old patch was square, with clean, straight edges; it hadn’t been put in to fix something broken. It had been done to fill a hole that was deliberately cut.

And he had realized this. “Oof,” Ellie said, craning her arm down. “I think there's something … What have you got in the house with a hook on the end? Maybe we can fish it out.”

“Nuts.” I’d had enough. “Take that gadget out and stand back.” With the claw hammer I gave the remaining plaster a smack.

Naturally, however, when you are trying to break plaster it becomes durable. So it was ten minutes and a lot of claw hammering before we got at it: a thick packet of papers bound in leather.

An old manuscript: eagerly, we opened the cover.

The pages were blank.

“Well, darn,” Ellie said indignantly as Monday nosed in to find out what we were excited about: hidden dog biscuits?

“No, Monday, there's nothing here.” I flipped through the empty pages in disgust. “Well, that's par for the course lately. Raines tore down the wall for nothing.”

But Ellie looked dubious. “Why would anyone hide a book of blank pages?”

I snapped the book shut, dust clouds from it billowing into the air. The soft antique-leather binding seemed to mock me with its aged look of importance, its sense of having been hidden away for some secret reason.

“I don’t know,” I said. “And I don’t care. What I do know is that the Reading Circle meeting is getting closer by the minute, and if I don’t want those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off to be full of plaster dust, I need to get busy.”

Because it was obvious now that there was no percentage in further effort. Raines was a stranger, he’d showed up here, and now he was gone: end of story.

Blank pages, indeed; I yanked sharply at the last scraps of wallpaper. “And Charmian?” Ellie asked.

“Waiting for the body to be found, that's all. And talking to Bob Arnold this afternoon. I hope he convinces her that she shouldn’t wait around forever.”

I picked up the hammer and pulled out the rest of the broken plaster. Plaster mix, I said stubbornly to myself. Lath pieces, nails, wallpaper paste. Tools and materials for reconstructing what was broken. Doggedly, I swept up the plaster bits.

But Ellie wasn’t ready to quit. “Fake glasses. A high-tech snooping device. And a book without words,” she said. “There's something connected about those ideas. But what's the link?”

“They’re all part of an annoying and ultimately meaningless puzzle,” I said. “One that at the moment resembles my life.”

I emptied the dustpan into the trash bag with an impatient shake. “Why couldn’t Jonathan Raines have picked some other house to demolish? Darn it, I wish I’d never heard of Hayes. I’ve got half a mind to burn the place down and see how he likes
that.”

Then I waited: for all the alarm clocks to go off, or the smoke detectors to begin shrieking, or the windows to slam open and closed by themselves.

But nothing happened at all, and it struck me suddenly that my haunted old house (or my haunted old head, if you subscribed to Ellie's theory) had been eerily inactive since the power came back on.

Or since Jonathan Raines had disappeared.

“Why would he leave it there?” Charmian asked.

I didn’t know how long she’d been standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs. She came into the room.

“If he had the eyepiece and had torn down the plaster, why would he leave before he looked? He’d done all that work, so why stop at the critical moment? And if he did look, why go out just as he might have discovered something important?”

Good questions, but I didn’t have answers to them, either. “Did you know what he was searching for?” I demanded.

She flushed slightly, biting her lip. “Yes. An extremely valuable violin. A Stradivarius. Everyone else says there’ll be no more ever found. But Jonathan … well.”

So there it was, out in the open. “What convinced him that everyone else was wrong?”

Those remarkable violet eyes were pink-rimmed; she’d been weeping. “Jon … well, he marched to a different drummer, that's all. He got hunches and went along with them. I’m not sure where he got this one from, but it would make his career if he found an unknown Strad. He said he would find it if it killed him.”

She laughed brokenly. “And now … the instrument didn’t kill him, but someone did. I’m absolutely sure, because I know Jon, and he would never have just walked away from a clue that might have put a Stradivarius in his hands in the next moment. Someone
lured
him. That's why he left just when he was about to discover something. And then …”

The conclusion was obvious. She still believed that someone had killed him.

But the objection was obvious, also: “Men on fishing boats saw him out there on that pier,” I said. “Saw him alone, saw him go over, no one to push him.”

Unless a ghost pushed him off that pier, I simply didn’t see how it could have been done.

And that far, even I was not yet ready to go.

Ellie put her hand on Charmian's arm. “Would you like to come with me and talk to the men?” she asked. “It might calm your mind to know from them how it happened, to hear it from a person who was there at the time. Then you could …”

Rest easier,
she had been going to say, or something like it. But Charmian refused this comfort, as I’d expected she might. She didn’t look like the rest-easy type.

“No, thank you. I appreciate your offer. But I don’t want to talk to people who think he fell or jumped, because he didn’t.”

Now that she’d seen what Raines had been doing just before he died, in fact, she looked like a young woman who was bound and determined to find out exactly what was rotten in Denmark.

I waved at the table. “What about the eyeglasses?” I asked. “They’re fake.”

She nodded. “He did that sometimes. When he wanted people to think he was …”

“Geeky?” Ellie supplied.

Charmian smiled. The effect, on that portrait-pretty face, was of sunlight shining through rain. “He wouldn’t have meant any harm,” she added. “I mean, he wouldn’t have stolen it. The violin, if he’d found it.”

I wasn’t so sure. She sounded convinced, though.

“But as I told you, he was the least geeky person you could imagine,” she finished.

Her own use of the past tense made her lip begin trembling again. Troubledly, she fingered the leather of the old book on the table, opening it without seeming to look at it.

Over the years, the glue in the old binding had loosened and become brittle. With a faint
crack!
the spine separated and the book lay open flat. “I still can’t believe he's gone.”

Gravely she picked up Raines's glasses and set them atop the blank pages. Through the dining room windows the morning sun shone onto the paper, two brighter small circles illuminating the yellowed paper where the lenses focused light on them. The moment lengthened as she seemed to debate whether to say more, finally deciding against it.

“Thank you,” she said finally when Ellie repeated her offer. “You’re very kind, both of you. But I think I’d better stay here and wait to hear from Mr. Arnold.”

She fingered the corner of the book. “I wish it could talk,” I said, not meaning anything by it, just filling empty air.

Meanwhile, in the back of my mind I was thinking about the hardware store. Maybe it was cold of me, but leaving the wall in a mess wasn’t going to bring Raines back. Like the bright day outside, life would go on, and I didn’t even know these people.

Or so I argued with myself. Just the night before, I had worried over someone who was out on an adventure. Only in my case that someone had returned safely home, hadn’t he?

“I wish it could tell you what happened,” I said.

Charmian frowned speculatively at the book. “Maybe it can.”

But I didn’t take that remark to mean very much, either. Books can’t talk unless someone reads them aloud; like me, she was just making noise to fill the unhappy silence.

Before I went out, I did my best to make her as comfortable as possible. This, for a girl of her manners and breeding, turned out to be easy.

“Please don’t trouble.” She managed a smile, took my hand. Hers was smooth and cool, and she was wearing a good perfume, its faint scent reminding me of tinkling music.

“If I’m thirsty,” she assured me, “I’ll find something to drink, and if I get hungry, something to eat.”

I did want to go, and she saw my hesitation. “I’ve already found the bath.”

The one upstairs, she meant. The hall bathroom still wasn’t working; that paper clip improvisation hadn’t served as well as I’d hoped. I might fix it again sometime when I didn’t feel I was being nibbled to death by ducks.

“And I see there's an ironing board out in the kitchen,” she went on. “So I’ll touch up a few things from my bag.”

A cloth overnight bag, it stood in the hall like a harbinger of houseguest doom. I stifled once more the impulse to suggest that she take it somewhere, anywhere else; she was bereaved, I reminded myself, and I couldn’t just send her to a motel.

But I was tempted to go there myself: one where all the plumbing worked and the walls were not falling down. Too bad I had something else on my calendar entirely; a lunch date with my ex-husband, Victor.

“And then I might lie down for a little while,” Charmian finished. “So do what you need to do, please. I’m fine here. And I appreciate your letting me stay.”

Which, according to the highbrow code she had obviously been raised in, translated to:
Please leave me alone.

So I did, with a final glance at the old book lying open on the dining room table, Raines's fake eyeglasses sitting atop its blank pages, looking nowhere.

4

Wadsworth's Hardware Store in Eastport was started in 1812 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's cousin, Samuel. As the black lettering on the glass over the door proclaimed, it was the first ship's chandlery ever established in the United States, and until the Groundhog Day Storm of 1977, it had stood on a wharf directly across from its present location overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay.

But on that fateful day in ’77, a low formed over the Outer Banks and raced up the eastern seaboard, gathering strength as it came. By the time it reached the Gulf of Maine, it had hurricane-force winds fed by freakishly warm coastal waters for that time of year; like a whistling teakettle on a hot stove, the storm was sucking energy from below and spewing it out.

BOOK: Repair to Her Grave
4.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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