Repair to Her Grave (2 page)

He straightened, and right then I began thinking there was something not quite kosher about him, as I spotted the gold chain he wore around his neck. For a professional student it was a very strong-looking, muscular neck, and from it a small white pendant hung dead center at the hollow of his throat.

A shark's tooth. How unusual, I thought as he adjusted his glasses, scanned the room through them, spotted a final shard of glass, and dropped it onto the newspaper.

“Thank you,” I said. “You can put that mess in the dustbin. Come along and I’ll show you.”

If I could get him downstairs, I could get him out onto the porch, and from there to a motel or a bed-and-breakfast. Waiting for him to go ahead of me, I put my hand on the doorknob. It was loose, like all the rest of them; patience, I counseled myself.

“Meanwhile,” he asked casually, as if inquiring about the weather, “do you still think this place is haunted?”

Whereupon every door in the house but the one I was holding slammed shut with a window-rattling
bang!
TVs and radios began playing, the washer began filling and the dryer began spinning emptily, and Monday let out an eerie, piercing howl that reminded me unpleasantly of the Baskervilles.

Raines didn’t turn a hair. “Well,” he said cheerfully, on his way downstairs with the broken glass and newspapers, “I guess that answers my question.”

We had reached the front hall, where the chandelier's crystal pendants were still shivering. From there I could see into the dining room, where one wall stood stripped of its gold-medallion wallpaper: my replastering project. At its center the remains of a fresh plaster patch gleamed whitely, cracked down the middle.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” I said, forgetting my fright in a burst of exasperation. “I’d take all the ghosts in the world if I could just get that plaster to set up right.”

Which wasn’t quite true, but I was very irritated. Raines returned from depositing the bits of broken glass in the dustbin.

“I’m not sure that's a bargain you want to make, here,” he said thoughtfully. In one hand he gripped a brown duffel bag; in the other, a shaving kit. “May I take these upstairs?”

He looked hopeful, and utterly unfazed by the events he had just witnessed. The appliances all shut off abruptly.

“All right,” I gave in crossly, thinking about having to mix plaster again. But considering the kind of visitor I’d been having around here lately … I narrowed my eyes at him.

“You
are
alive, aren’t you?”

“Indubitably,” he replied, grinning, “alive.”

“Try,” I advised him, “to keep it that way.”

Which was the first remark I wished, later on, that I hadn’t made. But not the last.

From the dining room where I began gathering up the ruined chunks of plaster, I heard Raines go upstairs, his step jaunty and the tune he was whistling somehow familiar. I should have put it all together right then, of course, but I was distracted by the wreckage. So it didn’t hit me for several more minutes just what that tune was:

That it had been composed right here in my own house, I mean, by a man named Jared Hayes who had lived here before me over a century and a half earlier.

Lived here, that is, until he’d vanished from the house.

Without a trace.

My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and once upon a time I was the kind of person who thought home repair meant keeping the building superintendent's phone number on my speed-dialer. A sought-after, highly paid financial consultant and money expert, I lived in a townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with my husband, a noted brain surgeon, and my son, Sam, a noted baby.

Also at that time, I was the kind of person who survived on takeout. If it came in a cardboard carton and I didn’t have to cook or clean up after it, I would eat it. And since my husband back then thought food meant whatever they happened to be serving in the hospital cafeteria, and Sam in those days was subsisting on the stuff that came in jars labeled Gerber, this worked out fine.

But after what seemed like fifteen minutes and was actually fifteen years, I learned that while I was still happily eating Thai noodles my son had discovered Thai stick, a very potent form of marijuana. Also, my husband had begun competing for the title of Philanderer of the Western World.

And my job was if possible even more miserable than my home life. Because look: you get up in the morning, drink your coffee, and yell at your son or he yells at you or both, assuming you even know where he is. The rest of the day you spend helping rich people make more money while paying, if you can imagine it, even fewer taxes.

Then I would go home, and Victor's messages would be there: on the answering machine, and in my e-mail, which he loaded with virus bombs. By then I’d divorced him, and he bitterly resented it, even though he was so promiscuous I felt lucky my e-mail was the only thing requiring disinfection. It got so I would stand at my apartment door with the key in my hand, staring at it, unsure whether I should even go in.

And then one day I didn’t. Instead I found Eastport, and came here in the same sudden, oh-to-hell-with-it way that I might have eloped with a traveling salesman or joined a circus.

Which is the short version of why nowadays I am:

adept at the sort of recipe that starts out by directing you to peel and seed five quarts of Concord grapes, then stew the pulp in a kettle big enough to float a battleship, and the kind of person who won’t call for repair help unless orange flames are actually shooting from the electrical outlets.

It's also why I’m never going to make that kind of money again, that I made in the city. But Sam is happy and no longer a dope fiend, and when I get up in the morning it's not a toss-up: should I go to work, or just put a bullet through my forehead?

In other words, my personal bad old days are gone. But when Jonathan Raines arrived in Eastport that bright June morning, I was about to find out how easily the past—even someone else's past, if it is bad enough— can come back to haunt you.

The facts about Jared Hayes were simple. It was sorting them out that was so complicated, and if I didn’t manage it soon …

But that idea was too unpleasant to finish, so I didn’t. And Hayes wasn’t my prime concern at the moment, anyway; Raines was.

He didn’t add up. So as soon as he walked out of the house I tried calling those New York cousins of his.

Or at any rate I knew the three of
them
were cousins to each other. So I supposed—on very little evidence, I’ll admit—that was also his relationship to them. But they couldn’t be reached, so next I called every music department at every college and university in the Boston area, discovering that no registrar at any of those places had ever heard of him.

“How did he know you think it's haunted?” my friend Ellie White asked later that morning, shaking out a fresh sheet. The scent of lavender from the linen closet wafted sweetly into the guest room, triggering as always a burst of nostalgia for a time long gone:

Jared Hayes, born in 1803, had acquired my house in 1830 from its original owner, a wealthy shipbuilder and merchant. At that time, the wallpaper had been fresh and the floors level, the rooms bright and alive with housemaids hustling up and down the back stairs, which were located where the tiny bathroom just off the kitchen hallway was located now.

“I suppose his cousins must have told him,” I said, digging another blanket from the cedar chest. “All three of them were up here last summer, and I confided to them my … feelings about it.”

Feelings that no one else had any reason to share; the odd things that went on in the house were always explainable. Only my sense that they were also purposeful was out of the ordinary, as if the house were sending a message particularly to me.

“And the favor I owe one of those cousins is so massive, I might never be able to pay it back, guest privileges or no guest privileges,” I went on. “So I can’t just kick Raines out.”

“But it didn’t bother him?” Ellie asked. “When it all…” She waved her hands to indicate those slamming doors, which could be pretty startling even if you did think it was only the wind.

“Not hardly.” We’d shoved a bed back into the room, and a reading lamp, and a desk I’d bought for a dime at a church tag sale earlier that spring. “He almost seemed to like it.”

I tossed a quilt atop the blanket. Being from Boston, Raines wouldn’t be accustomed to Maine summer nights; not unless the out-of-the-country trip he’d mentioned included plenty of Arctic exploring. And the fireplaces, one in every room, had been shut up years ago, after a chimney fire that by some miracle hadn’t burned the place to the ground. Someday, I thought, I would have all the chimneys relined and open the fireplaces again.

Someday. But this thought brought back all the worry I was trying to repress; angrily, I slapped on the chenille bedspread.

“You’re sure he really is from Boston?” Ellie asked.

“I think so. He’d written my address on the back of an old envelope sent to him in Cambridge. I found it in here,” I added, “when I came in with his towels. So that much is true.”

“Huh,” Ellie said. “Interesting. You know, especially if he
believes
in ghosts, you’d think the woo-woo stuff would’ve got rid of him in no time flat.”

The woo-woo stuff. It cheered me immensely, hearing her put it that way, making the unease I felt sound manageable, even trivial. Slender and pretty, with pale green eyes, red hair, and freckles like a sprinkling of gold dust, Ellie had been my friend since almost the moment I got to Eastport three years earlier.

“Drat, look at that,” she said. “I’ve lost the tiny hinge screw out of my glasses.” She took off the tortoiseshell pair she was wearing, frowned at the separation, and tucked the pieces into her sweater pocket. “Anyway, where is he now?”

“Walking around town. He had a glass of water while he was spinning me a few more moonbeams about himself, and then he went out.”

I took a deep breath. “It's Jared Hayes he's researching, Ellie. For his dissertation. Or he
says
that's what it's for, anyway.”

“Oh,” Ellie said.
“Now
I get it.”

When Jared Hayes, the Eastport musician and composer, looked out his bedroom window on an early nineteenth-century morning, he saw ships: great, many-sailed trading vessels gathered so thickly into port, the harbor seemed fairly bristling with their masts. The town swarmed with commerce: shipbuilders, chandlers, riggers and sailmakers, dealers in oakum, hemp, and galley provisions, not to mention the goods those ships brought in and out: rum and cotton, lumber and nails, peat from Canada, and of course the fish that swam so plentifully in the ocean.

There was work for everyone; recently released from the loathsome four-year occupation by the British army in the War of 1812—when the news came that the Treaty of Ghent was signed, local people dug out horns and fiddles and played “Yankee Doodle” up and down Water Street to pipe the hated redcoats on their way— Eastport boomed.

And when an economy booms, artists and musicians do well, too: parties and so on. People celebrating their comfortable circumstances. Only not usually quite as well as Jared Hayes had done.

Ellie gave the room a final look-over and dusted her hands together, indicating that we were finished. “But you think—”

“Of course I do,” I said, pulling the door shut. “What else would it be? He's searching for that damned violin.”

We went downstairs to the kitchen, where Ellie fixed coffee and I put out a plate of cupcakes I’d made earlier, in a burst of suspecting that I might be needing them: chocolate with bits of chopped sweet cherries in the batter and dark chocolate frosting.

“There's no violin,” she said as we applied ourselves to the cupcakes. They were pure wickedness, nearly as restorative as I’d hoped. I took another.

“No, there isn’t,” I replied, chewing. “
We
know that. Or,” I temporized, because after all you can’t prove a negative, “we’re pretty sure.”

A hefty dose of chocolate had smoothed down my hackles and settled my nerves. To balance the effect, I took another sip of the hot, strong coffee that Ellie produces like a magical elixir from ordinary Maxwell House; eat your heart out, Starbucks.

“How many people,” I asked, “do you suppose have been through the house searching for it?”

During the decades when the house had stood empty, I meant. Before I came to Eastport on a whim and spotted the huge white structure looming at the top of Key Street like a ghost from a distant era and got the people from the real estate office to let me in. I’d spent hours wandering the vacant rooms, filled with a shimmering sense of having been in them before; by the next day, the house had belonged to me.

Now, through the bright, bare windows of the big old barnlike kitchen, yellow sunlight fell in pale rectangles on the hardwood floor. Outside, a breeze shifted the branches of the cherry tree I had planted the previous summer, sending white petals swirling to the green grass like a shower of snow.

“Half the town,” Ellie replied dreamily. “Looking for Jared Hayes's famous lost Stradivarius. But they never found it. The only treasures ever found here were those dining room curtains, stuffed in a cubbyhole up in a corner of the attic, forgotten.”

They were champagne brocade and we’d run them through the washer and the dryer. They’d survived, and hung beautifully.

“Because”—I held up an index finger—“how would an isolated small-town fiddler and minor-league musical composer like Hayes ever get enough money to buy a Stradivarius in the first place?”

That was the old story, told and retold over the years until it had begun sounding like the truth: that Jared Hayes had bought one of the famous instruments and hidden it, and then he had vanished.

And that it was still here.

There had been a few hopefuls who had wanted me to let them look again—just before Raines phoned, a charming fellow with an Australian accent had called three times and very nearly managed to persuade me— but I had been able to turn them all down with one excuse or another. The idea of the thing appearing someday, however, just wouldn’t die.