Repair to Her Grave (13 page)

His expression said pretty clearly what he thought of that. He’d have been likelier to believe in ghosts.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “It does sound farfetched. Some mysterious unknown person opposing him: when he said it, even I thought it was a ploy just to get my sympathy.”

Now, though … “He's stopped, isn’t he? Stopped cold.”

Just then a siren sounded from a vehicle coming our way, and the radio on Bob's desk crackled to life. I couldn’t decipher the sputter-and-crackle of it, but he could.

“Damn,” he uttered, and headed for the door. “Another fire. First one was just trash, but…”

But you never knew. I followed him out as another siren in the distance howled nearer.

“Let it go, Jacobia,” he advised as he slid into the squad car and fired up the engine. “We’ve got our own problems around here, real ones. For all I know, Raines stuck that mackerel jig in his vest himself, for a souvenir or to make it look authentic.”

I blinked. Trust Bob for the commonsense angle. With a businesslike wave, he pulled out and sped away, while Charlie from Wadsworth's and Zeke from the marine store and the other men, fishermen and carpenters and truckers, hopped into their own trucks and raced off to try to stop the latest in the string of mischief done by this year's firebug.

Probably another brush fire, I thought as I headed home with the shellac in the tin can. But that, like so much else that day, was too much to hope for.

“Two hundred years,” Ellie mourned, striding up the sidewalk beside me. “A little old wooden school-house, not hurting anybody.
How
could someone be so mean?”

I’d met her on my way home; she had been visiting the Happy Landings, arranging to borrow a coffee urn for my Reading Circle meeting, when the call came in for any fire company members who were in there: to get on the stick.

But the damage was done, according to Millie Wilkins, who had taken the call when the tiny, picturesque building on the Shore Road, over on the mainland, was already a heap of embers. The task now was to keep the fire from spreading to the dry fields and brush lots beyond, Ellie said sorrowfully as we passed the library.

But then she changed the subject. “I saw Sam a little while ago with Jill Frey,” she said.

Uh-oh. “And?”

“They were kissing on the breakwater,” she said. “They were sitting in her car necking. Sort of, um, enthusiastically, if you catch my drift.”

Oh, great: my son the exhibitionist.

“It was quite the show,” she went on, not liking to have to tell me this. It's another of her pleasant traits, that she thinks bad news doesn’t need her help to spread around.

“So I thought I’d better give you a heads-up,” she said, “before Hecky Wilmot or somebody walks up and asks you about it right out in front of God and everybody.”

“Right. I’m seeing Victor later, to talk to him about this very topic. Not that it’ll do much good, but I’ve got to try.”

She nodded, and we finished climbing the Key Street hill to my house. The big old white Federal loomed ahead of us, its crisp green shutters and massive granite foundation making it look like a three-story beacon of solidness and safety.

That is, it did from the outside. Inside, it still resembled a remodeling project being attempted by monkeys who had recently escaped from the zoo.

Patience, I counseled myself for the millionth time as once again I had to slam the back door hard merely in order to get it to latch. Also the radiators needed painting again, as there was not enough stain-kill in the world to keep red enamel—what
had
somebody been thinking?— from coming through white semigloss, so they were all turning a hideous sort of mottled shrimp-pink.

I left the can of shellac in the hall as Ellie stopped ahead of me in the kitchen doorway, tipping her head curiously.

“Quiet in here,” she remarked. Then: “Why, hello,” she said to someone as I peered past her.

“Hello,” Charmian returned the greeting matter-of-factly, just as if she were not standing at the ironing board, wielding my steam iron over the pages of the old book we’d found earlier in the dining room wall.

“Remember when I said maybe these pages really could talk?” she asked. “This is what I meant.”

“Invisible ink,” I said as understanding washed over me. I could already see the lines of handwriting, a translucent, pale greeny-brown color, spidering across the pages.

“Charmian, I’m impressed.”

Her fragile laugh tugged at my heart. “Jon's glasses and his fiber-optic eyepiece gave me the idea. Plus a book without words: you had to
look
for something.”

The connection Ellie mentioned; Charmian had sensed it, too, and taken the next step.

“After you were gone, I examined it again, and where the sun shone through the glasses, something showed. Like a photograph being developed. It was the heat, I thought, through those glass lenses. So I applied some more heat, and—voilà.”

Or voy-lah, as George would have put it. “This girl,” I said to Ellie, “has possibilities.”

“Clearly,” Ellie agreed, and Charmian looked pleased. She wouldn’t have, if she’d known what else I was thinking. A pretty girl, a story of heartbreak, but she’d been Johnny-on-the-spot as soon as Raines met misadventure, hadn’t she? As if, once he was out of the way, she could move right in.

“I suppose the clipper ships carried lemons,” she said, “to prevent scurvy, in the old days. And lemon juice makes a fine invisible ink. Any acid will, really, especially if you spray it with cabbage water to reveal it. But I didn’t want to stain the book purple unless I had to.”

“She's right,” Ellie said. “Until the sailors realized that Moose Island's wild rose hips are full of vitamin C—well, they didn’t know it was vitamin C, of course, but they did know about scurvy—the ships carried lemons.”

All at once the significance of Raines's cabbage rolls, and the perfectly disgusting-sounding health drink he’d said he would make from the purple water, was coming clear: another tall tale. But how could he have known in advance that he might find a book with invisible writing in it?

Charmian warmed another page. “The Elizabethans,” she went on conversationally, “used spoiled wine. Vinegar, you know. They were big on secret writing, although mostly they used codes. All the fights over the English throne they had, so they had lots of secrets.”

She peered at the book, touched the iron carefully to one spot. “And in the Revolutionary War ferrous sulfate was a common one. Nowadays there are new chemicals like ferric chloride, potassium thiocyanate, and invisible inks that reveal themselves under ultraviolet light, for secretly marking things.”

I was familiar with these latter methods. Paper money has UV-sensitive ink in it, so it can be distinguished from realistic but non-UV-sensitive counterfeit. Stock certificates, too.

But none of this was the kind of thing a person just fell out of bed already knowing. So how did she?

“That kind of secret printing,” Charmian recited, “began in the 1940s, in Moravia, I think, although at the time it was just fluorescent, of course.”

Of course. She was chattering nervously, building herself up to something but not yet quite able to say it.

“The newest is the kind that shows when a sort of magnet is applied. Electrophoretic invisible ink, it's called. But I still think the cleverest invisible writing was done by a Roman soldier in 50 B.C. who shaved a slave's head, wrote on his scalp, and let the hair grow back. When the slave was sent past enemy lines to the allies, his head was again shaved, and the message appeared.”

She looked up. Ellie and I were staring at her.

“Oh, dear,” she managed weakly.

As she spoke, I’d been moving nearer to the book on the ironing board. Now I could see its pages clearly and the tantalizing lines of writing moving across them.

Tantalizing but illegible. The elaborately penned letters had come back only partially, creating a sort of connect-the-dots puzzle. A manuscript-reconstruction expert might have been able to decipher what the pages said, given hours of work and plenty of other samples of the author's handwriting.

Or if the pages had only been a copy or draft of something, and that something were available, then the text could have been figured out.

But not otherwise. One page was particularly infuriating: comprised of lines that formed the shape of Moose Island, dotted with circles, crosses, and tiny legends that didn’t even look like English, it might almost have been a readable map.

Almost. Charmian looked over my shoulder. “That's Latin, I think. If only there were a little more of it, I could …”

Right; Hayes had been classically educated in the European style, which at the time meant languages ancient and modern. The natural sciences were big in those days, too: gentlemen bent on ruling the world not only financially but intellectually.

“Charmian,” I said, “I think you’d better tell us the rest of your story. Bob's busy for a while, so you’ll have plenty of time. Which,” I added, eyeing her sternly, “I suspect you’re going to need.”

She sighed, her violet eyes regarding each of us in turn.

“Yes,” she agreed, switching the iron off. “I suppose I’d better. Let's walk outside a little and let some light onto more of the story than this old book tells. Which is nothing.”

She made a tiny frown at it. “Lemon juice, what a letdown. You can see why modern methods are so much more satisfactory.”

Right, and it was especially disappointing if it was your wall that had been torn down to get to the book.

“Besides,” she said, “the one thing it doesn’t tell even if we could read it is the thing I’m going to learn before I leave.”

She regarded its yellowing pages sadly. “Who killed Jon, and why?”

“Enough,” I snapped at her, and she looked up, startled.

“Don’t play dumb,” I said, “it doesn’t suit you. You knew he was coming here. You knew how to get a charter to Eastport; if you hadn’t, it would have taken you much longer. Probably the way you knew is that Jonathan had done it first. I doubt he ever rode anything so slow as a bus from Bangor in his life. And he probably discussed his plans with you.”

I turned to Ellie. “Wilbur Mapes didn’t pick Raines up on the mainland at the bus stop. He picked him up at the airfield.”

Back to Charmian: “Which I’m sure Mapes will confirm if we ask him. And when I finally get to talk to Jonathan's so-called cousins, I’ll learn they’ve never heard of any Jonathan Raines, won’t I? That was a story just to get me to let him stay here.”

Raines had done his homework, all right: on me. Somehow, he found out that I owed one of those fellows a big favor. And if I’d discovered his lies—if, for instance, I’d managed to get a phone call through and find out about the whoppers he was telling—he’d have talked his way around them somehow.

He’d been good at that: talking around things. Charmian reddened silently, confirming at least part of my opinion. There was no longer any point in leaving more messages in New York.

“Jonathan had to testify in an art-fraud case,” she said. “That was last autumn, he was a prosecution witness, and when it was over he had drinks with the three government lawyers. I think they even played squash together or something. Are they the ones you mean?”

“Yes.” They were the Three Musketeers of the squash courts
and
of the federal courts. I could just hear them telling Raines about their vacation in a house up in Maine—one that the owner thought might be haunted by a ghostly musician—and about the rumored Strad, which they’d have known would be of interest to him.

And I could see him listening carefully, filing it all away for future reference and research.

“There's something else, isn’t there?” I was taking a stab, but from the way she flinched I knew I was still on target.

And I’d had it with silly stories. “Pretty brave statement, saying you’ll find out how and why Jonathan Raines died. Unless of course you already think you know who did it. I’d say that ups your chances of succeeding, wouldn’t you?”

“Let's take a walk,” she said quietly again, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Nuts,” I responded. “We’re staying here. I’ve got more to think about than your problems, you know.”

I waved toward the front of the house. “I’ve got twenty ladies due in that dining room in four days. So I’m going to work on the plaster right now, and you’re going to talk
and
help.”

“First of all, Jonathan was no dorky academic guy the way he wanted you to believe,” Charmian began slowly.

In the dining room, I prepared the section of the wall for replastering: knocking away the rest of the loose bits around the edges, brushing out the crumbs, and identifying the lath pieces that would need fixing.

“So you’ve told me.”

There were a couple of old wooden pallets in the cellar and I’d decided that I could use those to repair the broken lath. It didn’t need to be pretty, only strong enough to hold the weight of what would cover it. So I’d set Ellie to work with the small hand axe, splitting crosspieces from the pallets into strips.

“He was a professional finder of fine things,” Charmian went on. “For museums, mostly, or private collectors. He specialized in musical items: instruments, manuscripts, letters of famous musicians, and even rare old recordings.”

“I see.” Ellie delivered a small bundle of what looked like stove kindling and was really the future skeleton of my plaster repair. The lath was the bones and the plaster would be the flesh securely suspended from them. I hoped.

“Sometimes he had to figure things out, or travel, to find what he wanted,” Charmian said. “Sometimes both, working on only a few clues he picked up in a library or from conversation. But once he was on the track, Jon would go anywhere, do anything. He was like a cross between Lord Peter Wimsey and Indiana Jones.”

I thought this a somewhat romanticized and idealized version of Raines, but I let it pass. Also, she hadn’t yet confided how a pretty girl who’d obviously had a lovely upbringing knew so much about invisible ink. But I figured I would find that all out in good time, too; in fact, I was determined to.