Repair to Her Grave (16 page)

What I meant was, you can’t come
or
go unnoticed here. And maybe the guy who’d gone off the bluffs wanted people to
think
he had drowned, but instead …

“You should leave this to the police,” Victor said, ignoring my line of thought entirely in favor of his own. He was wearing his patented wise-and-superior expression now; to go with it, he was using his poor-foolish-Jacobia voice.

“I see,” I said evenly. “And this would be because …”

“There's absolutely no reason for you to be involved in it,” he said. “You don’t know any of these people. You’ve got the girl in your house right now, for all you know she's tearing down more walls and so on even as we speak. She could be a co-conspirator in crimes which might possibly include murder.”

“She's sitting at the kitchen table with Bob Arnold,” I demurred, “or she's with him looking at the dock where it happened.”

Bob had arrived as I was leaving. The schoolhouse fire on the mainland had been put out, but no suspect was in custody.

“Be that as it may,” Victor said, dismissing easily my attempt at parrying his comments. In a debate, Victor was like nuclear weapons against a rock pile, some primitive clubbing instruments, and a couple of sharpened sticks.

“It's none of your business,” he pronounced primly, glancing at his watch again. “You should get rid of her.”

Which of course was when I decided for sure that I would do no such thing.

“You’ll talk to Sam,” I said as we went out into the June sunshine: seagulls crying, a salt tang in the air, the snapping
whuff!
of sails as a couple of boats came around in the practice race course marked off by yellow buoys out in the channel.

“I said I would,” Victor replied impatiently.

And maybe it was only that it was such a beautiful spring day, with the summer stretching goldenly ahead of us. Or maybe it was that my house had gone so serenely silent, after months of having my hair stand on end every time I walked into a darkened room. Maybe I thought that after one such unlooked-for miracle, another could follow.

“If you’re so worried about it, I won’t wait. I’ll speak with him today,” Victor said, getting into his little sports car.

Anyway, I believed him.

5

The day of the Eastport Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting dawned damp and chilly, with fog filling up the shallow basin of the bay like cold soup in a bowl. It had been this way for two days, now, and the plaster patch in the dining room wasn’t drying at all, a dark, ominous wet spot remaining at the center of it like the middle of a half-baked cake.

As a last resort I’d cut a wallboard square, glued it in there with Krazy Glue, and slapped wallpaper over it. The result wasn’t anything the TV home-repair shows would have approved, and it was going to be the devil to take down and redo properly. But it worked for now, and I was admiring it when the phone rang.

“Jacobia? This is Clinty Havelock, over to the garage? I rented a car to a lady a little while ago, she says she's staying with you? And now Homer says …”

Homer was Clinty's husband, the town mechanic.

“What?” Ellie said from across the room, seeing my face.

“She's rented a car,” I said exasperatedly.

Charmian had been spending her time at the library reading Hayes papers; Raines's body still had not been found, and I’d thought it was as good a way as any to keep her safely situated.

She hadn’t said anything more about doing any investigating herself, and I’d hoped she’d given up the idea. But now I guessed she had gotten impatient.

Or something. “Go on, Clinty, what did Homer say?”

“Says that car ain’t fit to be rented, he wasn’t done on it and I should call you ’fore it…”

Oh, fabulous. “… breaks down,” Clinty finished.

I told Clinty not to worry, that I would take care of it, and then I hung up to try to start figuring out how. But before I could, the phone rang again.

“Bettah come get the guhl,” a surly voice advised, a voice so full of downeast twang it took a moment to understand:
girl.

Damn.
“Wilbur Mapes?” I asked, although I already knew.

In the background, his famously grouchy dog was barking as if a team of burglars were in the act of breaking into the place, which meant that a single, solitary stranger might be somewhere within five miles of Wilbur's property.

“Ayuh,” he said. And unfortunately, I knew who that stranger probably was: Charmian.

“I’m coming, Wilbur. Just wait for me, all right?”

In the background, something that sounded like a pile of empty tin cans fell with a clatter. Then Charmian came on.

“Jacobia?” Her voice was breathy and frightened, whether of Wilbur or his dog, I wasn’t certain. “Oh, Jacobia, I’m so sorry to put you to this trouble, but my car died out here and this house was the only—”

“Don’t worry about it, Charmian. Just sit tight. Their bark is worse than their bite.”

I hoped. “Oh, blast and damnation,” I said, hanging up, but there was no help for it; she had to be fetched.

A little wildly, I looked around the kitchen, now so full of fragile crockery I was almost afraid to move in it. Ellie had arrived bearing china teacups, sterling silver, more napkins, and a collection of cake plates for serving the cookies, petit-fours, and sandwiches to the Circle. Also we’d lugged the coffee urn in and set it up on top of the washing machine, which was the only place where we could fit it.

Fortunately, I was not in charge of providing the meeting's speaker; there was a committee for that, and it had chosen, of all things, a mystery writer who’d recently moved to Eastport. Personally I thought this choice was a bit lowbrow, but as I say, it was not my decision.

“I’ll come with you,” Ellie said as I grabbed my car keys.

“No. We still need sugar cubes for the tea table.”

The house was as clean as a house with a teenage boy in it ever gets. The sandwiches were made and covered with plastic and the puff pastries and petit-fours were stowed safely away in the refrigerator; we would cut the crusts from the sandwiches, set the table, and frost the petit-fours later.

In short, we were coming down to the wire on eleventh-hour preparations, which for a shining instant I’d actually believed I could complete successfully.

“Wade?” Ellie said. When the ladies arrived, we wanted our decks clear of unnecessary personnel.

I searched for my bag. “Ship coming in. Peat and particleboard. Won’t be back till late.”

“Sam?” She found the satchel, shoved it into my hands.

“Out with Maggie. The dive class members are still in the team that's looking for Raines's body down the coast.”

The search would’ve been called off by now, only Charmian was being a thorn in everyone's side about it. Still, at least it kept Sam out of Jill Frey's clutches for a while; she had begged off the search party efforts. Too much like work, I guessed.

“I don’t know about after that,” I finished on my way out the door. “If they show up, give Sam a heads-up to steer clear. Pay him if you have to.”

Drat Charmian. She’d been talking about retracing Raines's footsteps, but I hadn’t thought she would do anything about it. Slamming into the car, I headed past the Moose Island Shellfish Co-op, the farmers’ market on Route 190, and the clam beds in the inlet below Redoubt Hill. Crossing the causeway, I spotted the vessel Wade was coming in on, white and massive in the fog as it awaited an earlier vessel's departure. Finally I slowed for the 35 mph zone through the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point.

Then it was onto the mainland, across Route 1, and out the winding two-lane road past the old grange hall. When the pavement ended I juddered along on washboard dirt, crossed the old rail line whose rusting trestle spans a salt marsh thick with sawgrass and cattails.

The fog thinned mischievously, then slammed down again like a grey wall. Half the time I crept along, knowing I was on the road only by the feel of the tires on the rough surface. A mile felt like ten; then suddenly the fog lifted and I was there:

A rock-strewn clearing, barren as the surface of the moon, reached uphill from the dirt road. A rutted, dusty track served as a driveway, at the head of which stood a house trailer, added onto with ramshackle accretions of wood, tar paper, and tin.

Mapes's beat-up pickup truck was parked there, with a sheet of streaked, age-greyed particleboard propped against it. In big red letters with dried drips of red paint running down from them, the signboard read: NOTHING HERE IS WORTH YOUR LIFE.

With which sentiment I absolutely agreed; stretched over the clearing, peeking out of the last wisps of the thinning fog, was the tag sale from hell. A row of used toilet seats, three stacks of galvanized buckets, two anchors, and a thick coil of rotting hemp rope lay under a broken ping-pong table beside a rusted-out tractor. Cardboard boxes of paperback books in a stack four boxes high and half dozen long were turning to papiermâché. Juicers, coffeemakers, toasters, waffle irons, and crock pots stood on a board-and-sawhorse table.

And there was more, including whatever was in the falling-down shed at the rear of the property; picking my way toward the back of the trailer where a rickety-looking set of steps led to a back door, I shuddered to think how much of the moldy, scabrous, rusting, and all-around depressing detritus of daily life Mapes had managed to collect back there.

The door opened. “Ain’t none o’ that your business. S’posed to use the front door,” he growled.

If there was one, I hadn’t noticed it. What I did notice was how quiet it was out here, nobody around.

No cars had passed since I’d come up the dirt driveway. I’d seen none since leaving the paved part of the road several miles earlier, not even Charmian's.

“Why don’t you just …”

Send her out,
I’d been about to say to Mapes. But then I saw three things simultaneously:

The first was how swiftly nature was attempting to reclaim the barren clearing. A grassy trail leading to the shed from the trailer was bordered with red clover, lushly green in the damp, brightening sunshine, though the trail itself was well trampled, as if it had seen a fair amount of foot traffic recently.

The second was something that appeared to be a Tasmanian devil, equipped with a muscular body, blazing eyes, and a full set of large, sharp, impossibly pointed canine teeth, every one of which looked to be in absolutely perfect working order.

One moment, this ridiculously fierce, snarling creature was exiting the shed. In the next, it was nearly upon me.

The third thing I saw was … well, at the time, the third was only a flash of yellow, as I covered the distance to the trailer door in what felt like a single bound.

“Good move,” Mapes uttered as a heavy
thump!
accompanied by a snarl made the trailer tremble. He was a tall, big-boned man with high cheekbones, very pale blue eyes, and light, curly hair.

Behind him, Charmian looked up in relief. “Jacobia.”

The trailer inside was like the outside: a jumble of things, the largest of them peering glassy-eyed from the walls. A moose head, a deer head, a whole mounted fox… there was even a bear's head, for God's sake, and a ratty black bearskin spread out on the plywood floor.

But the items tucked in among the trophies weren’t junk. Just about every exotic wood I could think of was there among the tables, hutches, desks, chairs, headboards, and sideboards in the collection: ebony, mahogany, even Brazilian rosewood. And the air smelled like furniture polish.

Also, there were guns everywhere: rifles, shotguns, and at least a dozen different handguns, just lying around or standing in racks. But I wasn’t here for a tour of Wilbur's antiques or of his firearm collection.

“Well, this is a fine fix you’ve gotten us into,” I began, angrier than ever with Charmian. “Where's the car?”

“Down the road,” she replied miserably. “I passed this place and was trying to find a spot to turn around—”

“Ain’t no turnaround for miles,” Mapes said dourly.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m running late already, so let's go. How the hell did you ever find your way through the fog, anyway?”

I turned to Mapes, whose primitive country-boy act I’d just about had up to the gills; there was a sharp intelligence glinting in those pale blue eyes. “Wilbur, will that yard dog of yours really tear us limb from limb?”

Because most of them won’t. Some may rush in so close, you can feel their hot breath blowing right up your nostrils. But …

Mapes scowled, acknowledging it; dogs don’t really like to bite people. They’ve been tight with the human race too long.

“Not ’nless I tell ’im to.”

“All right, then.” I had a last curious glance around at Wilbur's indoor stuff: good Staffordshire pottery, a very nice collection of cranberry glass, a lovely old am-berina decanter from the New England Glassworks—I don’t know much, but even I know to keep my eye peeled for these—and a table that unless I missed my guess was real Chippendale.

And more, but I didn’t have time to examine it. “Come on, Charmian,” I said, and went out the way I had come in, ignoring Mapes's protest: “Dammit, I
told
you, you just can’t march around my property like—”

But I was already outside, with Charmian right behind me. I picked my way around Mapes's urchin diving equipment—drysuit, a regulator, gloves, and a tank harness—and made a beeline for the car, making sure the girl's footsteps were keeping up with me and darting a cautious glance toward the shed in case Mapes's opinion of the hell-dog turned out to be less than accurate.

The dog was nowhere in sight. But what I did see— clearly, this time—turned my heart to an icy lump, especially as Wilbur Mapes was now chasing us, his features dark with fury.

That yellow thing I’d glimpsed as I was rocketing toward the trailer turned out, actually, to be two things, stuffed between an old deep-fat fryer and a stack of moldy
National Geographics.

It was a pair of yellow Wellington boots.

Charmian stared straight forward, silently, not protesting even though I was driving like somebody was going to step forward and start waving a checkered flag.