Repair to Her Grave (12 page)

There was little warning. Some say a ring formed around the full moon the night before, others that the sun rose red. What is known is that the storm came on so fast there was not much time to prepare, and that in any case no preparation could have been adequate for what happened next.

It hit like a freight train. People who were there watched the Wadsworth's building lift up and float off the wharf, tilting slightly as it careened on the massively high tide, rocking on waves that rose impossibly against the streaming sky. The two-story structure and everything in it sailed across the heaving water, broke apart, and sank into the boat basin, while the wharf buckled and collapsed. Even today, if the tide is very low, you can still find odd items from the old Wadsworth's store shelves in the mud at the foot of the boat launch ramp.

Thinking about this, I glanced at the stubs of the old wharf pilings sticking up from the low water, then went into the new store, its walls covered in tiny wooden drawers filled with nuts and bolts in all sizes. You could buy a hatchet, a tide clock, a sink trap, or roofing nails weighed out in a counter scale and dumped into a paper bag. Buckets of deck paint and paint remover stood side by side, testimony to the constant scraping and painting that is a major feature of work-boat life.

I still had a couple of hours before the lunch date from hell with Victor, so I got a ten-inch spreading blade for plaster smoothing, a putty knife, and a twenty-pound sack of plaster mix. I paid the nephew of the original storekeeper, Charlie Wadsworth, and asked him to deliver my purchases to the house.

But Charlie was out of the quart tins of stain-killing white shellac, and I wanted to apply some before I started the wallpaper patch. You never can tell how old wallpaper and new materials will act together, and I figured a coat of stain-kill right now might save a lot of problems later.

The working men in Eastport however, are not accustomed to buying quart tins of anything, and Charlie had just sold his last small can of shellac to a woman from away, who wanted it because she was painting a gazebo.

“What's a gazebo, anyway?” Charlie wanted to know. “Sounds like some kind of exotic zoo animal.”

Which in Eastport it very nearly was; our lawn ornaments run more to wooden whirligigs shaped like lighthouses. I explained to Charlie what a gazebo was— realizing only as I finished that he was putting me on; he knew perfectly well—then strolled up the street to the Quoddy Marine Store by the Quonset warehouses on the freight dock. There I asked Zeke Watkins if he could help out a person who did not need a whole tanker-truckload of shellac, which is what a gallon of it seems like when you only want a quart.

Zeke eyed me silently from under his thick, salt-and-pepper eyebrows, then went to the back of the store and returned with a fast-food Big Gulp cup.

“Better pour this into a jar, something, you get it home,” Charlie advised, saying it the Maine way:
Jab.

I took the cup, a little dazzled as always by the glimpse of another world that the marine store afforded me. There were five-ton towing blocks, nine-inch lobster bags, and four-man life rings, as well as whole aisles full of propellers, cotter pins, lines, lubricants, and fuel additives. There were spinning rods and packing compounds—both synthetic and genuine oakum—for pounding in between the seams of deck planking.

“Fellah visitin’ you was in heah,” Zeke said. “Too bad what happened to him.”

“Right,” I said distractedly, gazing around at many-hooked mackerel jigs, fly tying supplies, and an old Johnson seven-and-a-half-horse trolling motor, perfect for the wooden rowboat George Valentine was reconditioning.

“Zeke, put that away for me, will you, please?” I wrote out a check unhesitatingly; George has been so good to me since I came to Eastport that I couldn’t make it up to him sufficiently if I went out on the water and rowed him around myself.

“Fellah needs to be careful, foolin’ around that dock,” Zeke commented, and I agreed that a fellah did.

Then I went back downtown, carrying the Big Gulp cup that was already getting soggy and wondering what to do with it. By the time I reached the massive old foursquare granite post office building, the stink of shellac had begun competing heavily with the sweet perfume of the wild roses massed along the waterfront, just now unfurling their big wine-pink blooms.

Even in the open air the fumes were making me dizzy; passing the police station storefront, I spied Bob Arnold inside and decided to beg him for a better container.

“Here, here,” Bob scolded, seeing me with the seeping mess of waxed drink cup and dripping shellac. He grabbed an empty coffee can from the shelf underneath the coffeemaker, dumped the smelly white stuff into it, and put a cover on it.

“I swear, Jake, the monkeyshines you get up to,” he groused. “What’re you doing slopping that messy stuff all over town? Why, I oughta charge you on a count of littering.”

“I’m trying to keep an Eastport architectural treasure from falling down,” I retorted. “Although this morning I’m not having much success.”

I updated him on what Charmian Cartwright had told Ellie and me about Jonathan Raines, and what we had found.

“Fake eyeglasses, a blank manuscript book, and someone who supposedly wanted to stop him from whatever he was up to,” I said. “This someone, of course, has not yet put in a personal appearance. And,” I added sorrowfully, “meanwhile, once I get all this paint stripper home, I have to go see Victor.”

Bob nodded in sympathy, saying nothing. He’d been a witness to my struggles with Victor since I’d moved here. “Sam getting along with him all right?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, hearing the acid in my voice. “And I used to think that was a good thing.”

He nodded again. In the role-model department Victor was one half of a wonderful fatherly example: gainfully employed, not a substance abuser, and so hellbent on maintaining some kind of a relationship with Sam that he had actually relocated here.

Unfortunately, the other half resembled a case study from a sociopathology textbook. And in summer, the other half reared its ugly head with thrilling abandon, because in summer Victor drove his sports car around town—a new one, to replace the one he’d sold when he moved here—and ran his sleek, bullet-shaped power boat at high speeds up and down Passamaquoddy Bay.

“Playing his old tricks?” Bob asked.

“ ’Fraid so.” The toys, chosen in part by Victor for their bright colors and shiny surfaces, attracted females in the same way—and, I was convinced, by pretty much the same biological mechanism—as flowers attracted butterflies.

Or in Sam's case, I was afraid, the way blood drew sharks.

“Women,” I sighed. “Or girls, when we’re talking about Sam. Not that there's a difference between the two in Victor's mind, of course, if they are over eighteen.”

Victor's main question about any good-looking female that he met was the same as his question about any car he admired and had a hankering for: street-legal or not? After that, it was merely a matter of strategy.

“Ayuh,” Bob commented tactfully. He’d seen it as often as I had: Victor tooling around with the latest in a series of young ladies decorating the passenger seat in shorts and halter tops. Or if they were in the boat she would always be wearing a teeny bikini, never mind that this was downeast Maine and when you got out on that water even in August, what you wanted was a heavy parka.

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m going to try to talk to him about it at lunch.” Which I knew would be about as productive as shouting down a well; when he first came here, I’d harbored high hopes of his having reformed. But the calm we experienced in the few months following Victor's arrival was, I realized later, caused by culture shock, not by any real change in his character.

Still, there was no point recapping all this to Bob, who had enough troubles already with the firebug, the guy who’d fallen off the cliffs, and now Jonathan Raines.

Glancing around, I spotted a garment on the rack by the soda machine: a tan, many-pocketed sleeveless item. “Is that it?”

He nodded: Raines's fishing vest. I reached out and touched it, almost superstitiously, but the wicked-looking thing stuck into the front of it made me pull my hand away again.

It was a mackerel jig like the ones I’d just seen in Quoddy Marine: about four inches long, roughly cylindrical, with black and silver paint approximating the scale markings on a fish.

“Nasty item,” I remarked. From the cylinder dangled a dozen barbed fishhooks; a broken length of high-test fishing line was knotted to the eye at the end of the lure.

“Guess somebody lost it,” Bob said. “You know how the hooks snag on the pilings sometimes when people are fishing off the end of the pier.”

He poured himself some coffee from the inky-looking pot on the warmer. “The only way to get it freed up again, you do that, is to cut the line, say goodbye to your mackerel jig,” he said, waving the pot at me.

I shook my head. On a good day, Bob Arnold's coffee makes a fine substitute for crankcase oil. And the sight of the mackerel jig stuck to the vest had popped a picture into my head:

Someone under the pier, casting upward to hook that fishing vest. And
pulling …

“That's it,” I said. “That's how you could make it look like someone was falling, with no one nearby who could’ve pushed him. From a distance, it would seem as if he’d lost his balance, but he’d be getting pulled from underneath.”

Bob was quick on the uptake, but his voice when he replied was full of skepticism. “How’d you know he was going to be there? Your victim, if you are deciding to pull such shenanigans.”

He waved his cup at the window. “You just wait forever by the dock, hoping he's going to wander by? Too damn cold in the water, I can tell you. And where else, he wouldn’t see you?”

I gazed at him. It was all so clear to me. “Maybe you agreed to meet him there. When you saw him coming, you could duck out of sight yourself.”

That could be why Raines had gone out just as he was about to investigate the hole in the plaster; because he’d made a date to meet someone.

“As for where, that dock has wooden crosspieces under it, like scaffolding. You wouldn’t have to be
in
the water. You could scramble out from shore, one crossbeam to the next, to the end. Or at high tide you could float out there in a little boat, tie up underneath where it wouldn’t be seen. Then …”

“Cast up, hook the guy, pull him in. Cut the line, he drowns and you get away clean.” Bob wasn’t looking so skeptical now.

But then he changed his mind again. “Wouldn’t be easy. It's slippery under there. And you’d have to know the way. Have it in your mind ahead of time, how you’d get out there.”

He held a finger up. “Also, you might get there in a boat, but you couldn’t stay there. Need solid footing, pull hard enough to be sure you’d yank a guy off. And that gets you back to …”

He had a point. Sooner or later you would have to be on some solid spot. And the stuff that coats a wooden dock piling, green and slimy, makes Vaseline seem like tar paper. Also, although in theory your route might look very simple and straightforward, in practice—and in the dark—it would be something else again.

But all that was minor compared to the one thing Bob Arnold needed most, to get interested in any serious way in what I was suggesting: a decent motive.

“Raines just got here,” he said. “Cops in Cambridge called his landlady there for me, let her know what had happened, ask a few questions. He had rooms in her house, it turns out, and she knew him pretty well.”

“And she said?”

Bob shrugged. “Same as the girl. Far as she knows, he's got no relations here. None anywhere, says the landlady. And she says he never talked about knowing anyone here, either.”

So Charmian had been telling the truth about there not being a family to claim his body, or not any that would easily be found.

“So I guess if the body does turn up, it's all hers,” Bob went on. “The girl's, I mean. Point is, though, what reason would anyone here have, go to the trouble of killing him? And it would have to be someone from here, know how to get out to the end o’ that dock quick.”

And be crazy enough to try it,
he didn’t say, but I got the drift. It was the kind of thing only a guy from around here would do: wild-ass daring and potentially fatal.

In other words, the kind of thing half the guys around here did for a living day in and day out: diving, fishing, dragging for urchins, cutting down eighty-foot trees, loading them on trucks. Their daily bread.

“So who …” Bob didn’t finish the question.

“… would want to kill him, and could do it. I don’t know, Bob. I’m just saying. The whole thing's so crazy and unlikely.”

Briefly I explained what I thought Raines was really up to: finding an old instrument whose very existence would make his career.

And whose sale, despite Charmian's protestations of his honesty, would surely make his fortune, if he managed to find it and to sneak it out of Eastport unnoticed.

“I’m not sure about that last part,” I admitted.

I left out the business about worrying whether my house was being haunted, also; Bob ranked ghosts right up there with alien abductions, fat-free snack food, and guys who are only holding the murder weapon for a friend, in the believability department.

“But what if someone else were after the Stradivarius, too?” I went on. “The person he said wanted to stop him. Someone from here who knew he was coming. Or someone from away who followed him here, who
knows
someone here?”

It was time for me to go. “Either way,” I finished, “one-point-three million reasons for murder are waiting for whoever does come up with a previously undiscovered Strad.”

Bob drank the last of his crankcase oil, made a face at the empty cup. “Which, if what you’re telling me is right,” he said, “all the real experts say there isn’t one. And everyone in town has looked for the thing, not found it. And now all of a sudden not one but two crackpots get so het up about it, one of ’em ends up dead and the other one—
who,
may I remind you, no one has seen—is the one who killed him?”