Repair to Her Grave (15 page)

I hung up the towel. “Also, you know a lot about a lot of things they don’t teach in finishing school. Invisible inks, old languages. You learned from your uncle, I imagine. Probably you share his interests. So, are you sure an old violin isn’t really all
you
care about, here?”

By now she was very near tears, and furious at me. Which was exactly the way I wanted her: ready to hit back with anything and everything she had in her.

And in her anger, she might tell me the rest of the truth.

She took a shuddering breath. “All right. My parents died when my sister and I were very young. Uncle Winston took us in and raised us. He's still my sister's legal guardian; she's only sixteen. When I got out of college, I went to work for him, in his … Well.”

She straightened. “Everyone calls it a research firm.”

Right; that was a nice, socially acceptable term for what good old Uncle Winston did. Other people might call it
fighting fire with fire.

Or hand-to-hand-combat. She turned the opal ring on her finger. “That's where I met Jonathan. He's like Uncle Winston, smart and adventurous. But not so …”

“Ruthless,” I supplied, and she nodded gratefully. “You’ve met Jon. He couldn’t hurt anyone, not for anything, no matter how valuable. To get back the
Terra Forma,
Uncle Winston actually …”

Her face creased in remembered horror. “I can’t say it.”

But I already knew. He’d kidnapped the baggage guy who’d had the keys to the airline storage warehouse. And then, using a pair of ordinary hardware-store pliers, he’d pulled out one of his own teeth.

If the guy wanted similar dental work done, Cartwright had said, well, Uncle Winston would be happy to oblige. Otherwise, he should spit out the identities of the men who’d stolen the
Terra Forma,
and its current whereabouts, or he’d soon be spitting out one of his own incisors.

As in,
right this very goddamned minute.

“It wasn’t a real tooth,” I said, and Charmian gazed at me in astonishment.

“But…” Obviously even she had thought that it was.

“Sorry, but I can’t tell you how I know,” I said.

It was my old buddy Jemmy Wechsler, onetime banker to the mob, now a man with a price on his head—especially if the head was “severed off,” as the man who’d put the price on in the first place had expressed it—who’d told me the story. Jemmy and I had crossed paths fairly often back in the city and a few times since then; now he was evading the Mafia, whose money he’d stolen, with humor and élan.

But to everybody else's knowledge, he was dead. And far be it from me to contradict this—for Jemmy—convenient notion.

“Trust me,” I said, “it was a fake tooth.” With a realistic-looking fake root. Jemmy was hilarious about it.

“Anyway, the rest of your involvement. This is all personal, you mean? Between you and your uncle?”

She nodded. “As I said, Uncle Winston didn’t like Jonathan. He didn’t want us to see one another. We fought over it all the time, my uncle and me, until in an angry moment I made him a bet: if he got to the violin before Jonathan did, or if it was never found, I would go on working for him for as long as he wanted me to.”

“And otherwise?” Ellie put in, though by now we both knew what the answer to that must be. Charmian didn’t disappoint us.

“If Jonathan won, I would marry him, and he and I would be a team. Traveling all over the world, finding exotic items that no one ever thought could be found. Having adventures,” she finished wistfully, “together.”

“And that's what you and Jonathan fought about,” Ellie said acutely. “The bet you made with your uncle.”

Charmian nodded brokenly. “He said, what if he failed? But I was so sure he wouldn’t, and now … now I can’t welsh on the deal because of my sister. I can’t stay with Uncle Winston after what I think he's done. But if I leave, he’ll make her life hell just to punish me. I’ve
got
to find that violin.”

She pressed her clenched fists to her lips. “Jon was awfully angry when we met last. So was I. But how could he have believed me when I said I never wanted to see him again?”

She twisted the ring. “How
could
he?”

Interesting question, I thought as I went upstairs to clean up for my meeting with Victor. But it was not among the questions that I now most wanted answers to.

Those were: (a) could I believe Charmian? And (b) why did I care so much? Because …

(c) darn it all, I definitely did.

The Cannery Restaurant was built on the remains of the old sardine-processing factory at Rice's dock overlooking the ferry landing. From a window table you could look past the decorative buoys, heaped lobster traps, and the tiny gift shop operated out of the hut where the sardine tins used to get their labels pasted on, to the blue water spread out like somebody's daydream of a Maine island summer.

Victor was already there, drinking what he liked to call a “martooni.” He would pronounce the word with an impish smile as if no one had ever thought of calling it that before; then with his eyes still on you he would eat the olive, crushing it between his strong white teeth as if daring you to try to stop him.

He glanced pointedly at his watch as I sat down. It was the classic black Movado museum piece, black face and no numerals on it, just the gold dot. Victor loved that watch.

“Nice of you to make time,” he remarked, chewing the olive.

I let the comment pass, recognizing it for what it was: a reflex. He’d heard someone say it sometime or another, and he’d admired the sound of it. Now he was repeating it like a parrot.

“I’ll have a Pepsi,” I said when the waitress returned, and he rolled his eyes at the hopeless gaucherie of my choice. Real grown-ups, he believed, drank martoonies with their lunches.

“Are you gaining weight?” he asked, by way of opening the conversation.

“No, Victor,” I said patiently. “I’m not.”

He made a careless, have-it-your-way gesture. “Oh. I thought you had.”

It was not, as anyone else would have known, a promising start. But then, Victor had always been an idiot savant of human-beingness. If a patient needed something, he would know it and take care of it immediately, even if he’d already been up twenty hours or if the patient couldn’t pay. He was kind to them, too, hearing their fears and complaints and inquiring about their lives with genuine interest.

Which made it the more strange that, outside the clinical sphere, Victor had all the keen interpersonal perceptiveness of a colony of toenail fungus.

Eons later, or it felt that way, anyway, the waitress had arrived and gone away again, and our orders came. “You should chat with your son,” I said. “About girls.”

He glanced up from his chef's salad in wry surprise; he was capable, actually, of flashes of insight. It's one of the things that made him so dangerous. “Who, me?”

I ate some haddock. Lunch with Victor was a routine we’d developed after he moved here; I thought of it as vaccination, exposure to a small, controlled dose of toxic substance to keep my system ready to deal with a no-holds-barred onslaught.

Which Victor still managed to deliver, on occasion. “Yes, you,” I said. “He's picking up your attitudes, and it's not good for him. You know that it isn’t.”

He bridled uncomfortably, a tall, still-attractive man with green eyes, a lantern jaw, and a just-between-you-and-me smile he used to his advantage at every possible opportunity.

“Just because we couldn’t make a go of it…”

Him and me, he meant. I drank some Pepsi. “That's not what happened.”

He will do this: work it around in his mind—and in mine, if he can—so that I bear most of the responsibility for ending our marriage.

“There's a girl who's in love with Sam, and he's behaving like she's some sort of fashion accessory, something he can put on and take off whenever he happens to feel like it.”

Victor frowned as this description hit a little close to the bone in the personal behavior department. “And?”

“And you zipping him around in the power boat every weekend, or in the car, bringing a different woman along each time, that's what. That debonair act you put on when he's with you. He admires it. He wants to be like you, don’t you see that?”

His face softened. “Huh. Sam admires me. Thanks for telling me that, Jacobia. It means a lot to me, really. Thank you.”

He smiled sincerely; seeing this, I gathered my wits about me. Just sitting at a table with Victor, inside his personal force field, makes you believe against all your better judgment that he is a nice, normal man with normal feelings. A conscience.

That you can trust him.

“Come on, Jake, what's the big deal? He's a kid, he's going to behave like one.”

I suppressed my impatience. “He's not just any kid. He's had too many chances to go off the rails already, and barely escaped them. Now he's just about to get into college.”

At the University of Maine in Machias forty miles away; he could come home weekends. Also, Sam had a part-time job at the local boatyard set up to start again in fall, with mentoring from the boatyard owner, Dan Harpwell. It was perfect.

“He wants to be a boat designer, he's lined up a future for himself, and I can’t stand to see him tiptoeing around the edges of another pitfall,” I finished forcefully. “And your lover-boy act makes Sam think that it's okay behavior,” I said.

Victor looked innocently at me. “Well, but it is. For me.”

Sudden fury struck me speechless for a moment, because this is the other thing Victor will do every time. It's all about him.

“It's not as if I’m married,” he went on reasonably. “There is no reason I shouldn’t have an active social life. And I don’t promise these women anything, Jacobia. Not ever.”

Calmly he drank some of his second martini while I struggled with the small, shrill voice in my head, the one that in spite of everything I’d been through with him kept crying out:

But you did. You promised me.

“Fine,” I said finally. “Seeing as once again you have managed to make a conversation refer to yourself and
your
wishes, maybe
you
could just point out to
your
son that if he wants
your
life, then behaving like
you
is the way to get it.”

Alone, I meant. Emotionally impoverished, dimly aware that other people had something he didn’t. I still wasn’t sure if Victor was unable or just unwilling to do what it took.

Victor once broke up with a woman he’d been seeing a long time, after our divorce; she’d suffered a serious back injury and was in traction for a number of weeks. And when I asked him what had happened to the relationship—he split with her right after the injury—he told me with a straight face that she was no fun anymore, so he had stopped seeing her. Not ironically, but as if this were the most reasonable thing in the world.

“Maybe,” he allowed now, “I might mention it to Sam.” Like I say, he has these flashes of insight. “I’m moving a bunch of my medical books out to the clinic soon, maybe he’ll help me.”

After he got here, I’d helped Victor establish a new medical facility whose purposes were:

(a) giving emergency care to badly injured people who would otherwise have to be Life-Starred to Bangor or Portland, and

(b) keeping Victor occupied and out of my hair. “Anyway, I’ll talk to him,” he added, as I must have looked impatient again. He sipped at his drink. “So, who's the girl you have staying at your house? I saw her,” he added, “go in with an overnight bag earlier on my way to work.”

This was his way of letting me know he still kept tabs on me, and I found it about as charming a remark as you may imagine. But it was also my cue to let him change the subject, unless I wanted a battle that made Normandy look like a church picnic.

“Girlfriend of the guy who fell off the dock last night,” I said. “She's here to claim his body if it can be found.”

Eyebrows up. “Really. Sounds cheerful. Sam said she was lah-di-dah. His term, not mine,” Victor added with a grin.

Then: “I’ll talk to him, Jake. Honest. I will.”

A beat, while I decided how much to say. “Okay.”

Then, to let him know I didn’t lie around all day eating chocolates and watching soap operas—if I didn’t impress him otherwise, he would accuse me of this—I related the events of the busy morning and described Charmian further.

“She knows languages,” I finished. “Latin. Probably others.” I went on to detail her deftness with small tools and knowledge of spy and/or crime techniques like invisible ink.

I drank some soda. “So, considering who raised her,” I went on, “she can probably pick locks, fake early masterpieces, and forge passports.”

“Not to mention forging the signatures onto the early masterpieces,” Victor joked. He wasn’t taking this seriously.

He finished the good parts out of his chef's salad and began picking at the greens. “Are you going to eat your roll?”

“What? No, have it.” It was another annoying thing he did, eating off my plate as if we were still married.

“And there's one more thing that still bothers me, too,” I said.

Just thinking aloud. My conversation with Victor was already over, for practical purposes. He tipped his head, chewing.

“That guy who went off the bluffs at North End,” I said.

He swallowed. “But that was—”

“I know. Before the dock accident Raines had. If that's what it was. But
his
body hasn’t been found, either; the guy from the bluffs.”

I finished my Pepsi. “And I’m just thinking: if people saw you come into town—which you could hardly avoid because there's only one way over the causeway, isn’t there?—and then you wanted people to think you were gone …”

He’d stopped listening again; it made him the perfect person to bounce random ideas against. Maybe after they caromed off that invisible shield that surrounded him, they would fall into order.

I thought a minute more, working it out. “But you couldn’t be seen
leaving
because you weren’t
really
gone, then. …”