Repair to Her Grave (24 page)

Another sign advised
AUCTION AHEAD
! How far ahead, was my big question. We were high on a hill with what looked like all of Maine spread below us: the mill at Woodland puffing white smoke, a lake's irregular borders cut into the solid evergreen of a pine forest. Patches of pasture lay like quilt squares spread out on the hillsides.

Suddenly the biggest sign of all was upon us:
YOU’RE HERE!
A crushed stone drive cut through brushy undergrowth, bordered by a rail fence upon which bittersweet climbed with riotous vigor. At the top was a parking lot the size of a football field.

Well, half a football field, but it was big, and so was the barn: gambrel-roofed, four stories high, bright yellow. A big bay door stood open at the near end, the shadowy interior pitch-black by contrast with the brilliant day. Shafts of sunlight slanted down from hayloft windows onto a plank floor.

A beater of an old Ford Escort was pulled up alongside a shed. Other Fords, each one missing some vital component of its equipment—one had wheels but no tires, another four bald tires piled on its hood but no wheels—lined up by the Escort.

A man in a blue coverall slid from beneath the vehicle at our approach, a wrench in his greasy hand. Hopping up, he grinned eagerly, showing a set of false teeth that didn’t fit and making me wonder uneasily where they had come from originally.

“Howard Washburn, good t'see ya, how ya doin’? Wonderful day, ain’t it? How can I help you two young ladies? Got some fine bargains out there in the barn, new stuff every day.”

The teeth clicked loudly with every syllable. “Got a new washing machine, poor lady died before she could use it.” The knuckles on his right hand were bleeding through a coat of black grease.

“Mr. Washburn, we’re not here to buy anything.”

The teeth snapped shut. Sharp suspicion replaced the bright, false welcome in his eyes. “You cops?”

“No.” I looked around curiously: no house. But a teardrop trailer was parked at the end of the row of Fords, a card table and two lawn chairs set up just outside it.

“Mr. Washburn, we need to ask you about Jonathan Raines.”

I saw him jump before he could hide it. Prison, I suppose, can do that to a fellow. So he knew the name.

“Say, I know you,” he said cheerfully to Ellie. “You’re the one who came out here to … Oh. Now I remember.” His eyes, brightening at the sight of her, narrowed with sudden caution again.

“Right,” Ellie said gently to him. “I came out here one time to tell you that so-called colonial furniture you were selling still had the Sears tags on it.”

She turned to me, her expression indulgent. “Howard found a way to distress furniture so it would look antique. But he kind of forgot about the undersides, didn’t you, Howard? If you want to fake stuff, you’ve got to do the whole thing, take it apart to get at all of it. Howard just did the tops.”

Clearly Howard wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. But he was a good sport about it. He grinned embarrassedly, looking down at his grease-stained hands. “I don’t do none o’ that stuff no more, anyway. All on the up-and-up now.”

“Right, Howard,” Ellie said. “Sure you are. Now, my friend here wants to know how you’ve heard of Jonathan Raines.”

Howard Washburn made a show of trying to remember. “Wilbur Mapes said this Raines fella was from away and o’ course I didn’t like that, right off the bat.”

He peered at me through the automobile grease that smeared his face. “They come here, think the home folks is idiots. Try to buy the fambly treasures for peanuts and a song.”

And if anyone was going to do that, it should be Howard, he clearly felt. “Ain’t right,” he pronounced stoutly. “Ain’t fair.”

“Uh-huh. Did Wilbur mention an old violin?”

Washburn's look turned sly. “Might have. Might not. I wasn’t payin’ a whole lot of attention, tell you the truth.”

There was a concept: Howard Washburn telling the truth. I’d already decided he couldn’t have found it with both hands and a road map. I lowered the boom.

“Or maybe Wilbur had been in touch with you earlier about it? That Raines, I mean, was looking for one?”

Washburn looked from one to the other of us, cottoning on to what we knew already.

“Why,” he wanted to know, “am I talking to you? Is there some benefit to me standing here shootin’ the breeze?”

“Maybe it's because I’ve still got one of those ‘colonial’ tables you sold to the lady from Connecticut,” Ellie said mildly.

“Now, you can’t prove I had anything to do with—”

“I don’t have to prove it, Howard,” she told him sweetly. “I just have to talk a lot, especially to the people who run all the hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, where the summer tourists stay.”

He took her point. Maybe there were some legitimate finds in that old barn of his, but no tourist would ever make the trip to see them if word of those Sears tags started spreading around.

“And then there's your other business,” she went on. “Games of chance? Things no one wants to follow up on. Unless I persuade them.”

Bob Arnold wasn’t going to rattle Howard's chains about any minor-league gambling. He had enough to do chasing criminals whose victims hadn’t gotten their own selves into trouble.

Not unless someone complained. Ellie smiled sweetly again.

“Mapes was out here, coupla weeks ago,” Howard admitted grudgingly. “Said he had a sucker from Boston lookin’ for an old Stradivarius.”

“Go on.”

“Mapes’d sold the sucker a buncha stuff out of an old trunk. Music books, sheet music as was handwritten, old ink pens, kind that’re made out of a quill, you know? And a lot of other papers, old diaries and such. And a violin.”

My heart thumped suddenly. “Not the one the sucker said he was lookin’ for,” Howard went on. “But I guess it encouraged him, the sucker, I mean. Stuff belonged to the right old guy, one as was supposed to have had the really valuable fiddle.”

Jared Hayes. “Once he’d vanished, his house would’ve been emptied, eventually,” Ellie said. “And at that point the story about the Stradivarius hadn’t really heated up yet. An old trunk full of things could’ve gotten anywhere.”

“Ayuh,” said Washburn. “Up in an attic, Mapes said, house he cleared out for some people a long time ago, they’d had a chimbly fire.”

Chimney, he meant. My house: the fire that hadn’t burned it to the ground, by some miracle. And if some of Hayes's things had still been in it when the fire happened …

“Smoked up all their stuff, they just wanted to get rid of it all.”

From the corner of my eye I spotted Monday, sniffing around the corner of the old barn. “Okay for the dog to run?” I asked.

“Oh, ayuh. Way out here, no cars. I don’t put out no rat bait or no traps or nothin’. ’Cept in trappin’ season, then I put out a coupla lines. Got me some nice fox furs.”

He eyed me hopefully. I used to think foxes were smart, beautiful, and romantic animals, on account of the way they were portrayed in nature programs on television. Then I moved to Eastport, where they make their dens in the backyards of old, unoccupied houses and lope through the night like feral ghosts, emitting when confronted a cry like a cross between a rusty door hinge and person in the act of having his throat slit.

“No, thanks, Howard,” I said politely. I don’t care for foxes, but I am even less fond of the obscenity known as the leg-hold trap. Talk about a crime that actually does have an innocent victim: if you’re going to kill something, put a bullet in its head and be done with it, is my attitude.

“Jonathan Raines,” I reminded Howard. I got the sense that sticking to the subject was not his forte.

This probably accounted for him being the one who got sent to prison in the hit-man affair, since after ten minutes in his presence I had come around to Ellie's point of view. In fact, I was already certain that (a) he wasn’t the hit man himself, and (b) he could not possibly have been ringleader of a plot to kill somebody.

Or any kind of a major player in any plot. What Howard was perfect for, in fact, was (c) the role of the fall guy.

“Yeah, him,” Howard said. “I didn’t know him. Knew the old man, though,” he added. “Mapes mentioned him, my ears pricked up right quick.”

“Winston Cartwright?” Here was a wrinkle I hadn’t expected. “How do you know him?”

Howard spread his hands expansively. “Hell, he's legend. You deal in antiques, books, maps, anything old-like, you don’t even need to know about him.” Wondering at the idea, he shook his head slowly. “Even a little guy, likes o’ me, bank on it. He’ll know and get hold o’ you.”

Fascinating, and very likely true; the notion of Cartwright as a spider at the center of a web struck me once more.

But so did what Howard said. “Maps? What made you think of maps?”

He flinched guiltily; damn, there he’d gone again, saying more than he’d meant to. But once he’d done it, he stepped up to the result manfully and talked some
more,
yet another mark of the born blame-magnet. I began feeling sorry for Howard.

“Mapes said if the violin everybody says is so valuable was hid, stood to reason whoever’d hid it would’ve made a map to it,” he said. “ ’Cause everybody in town knows the old story about the violin, hid in that big old house in town. But it ain’t there, ’cause that old house has been gone through. Gone through good. So if there is one, it's somewhere else.” He said it with certainty.

“How do you know?” I gave him the stare I used to use on clients who were tax cheats, who wanted me to sign off on returns so fictional, they should have had literary agents instead of money managers.

“Well,” Howard stalled, digging a hole in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “I know ’cause I knew a guy who did it. Had a gadget, it could see shapes right through the walls. Did it with sound waves, he could tell what was inside there.”

Like a carpenter's stud-finder, I guessed. It senses density so you can locate the solid structure behind the plaster.

Howard looked strangely at me, having figured out something. “Say, that ain’t your house we’re talkin’ about, is it? I heard a lady from away bought it. That you? ’Cause if it is,” he went on, “I bet you’ve seen some funny things.”

“What’re you talking about?” Meanwhile, I was still thinking about the search his friend had made. The book inside the dining room wall should have shown up if he’d looked with a device like Howard was describing. So why hadn’t it?

Howard shivered expressively. “My buddy said that place gave ’im the creeps. And he wasn’t the type to get spooked. He came out o’ there, wouldn’t turn the lights out for three nights.”

Great, just what I needed. “And
if
he’d found it,” I steered the conversation around again, “this buddy who I’m sure you were the one who told him to look there in the first place. Somebody from Portsmouth?”

Howard frowned. “No. Afterwards.” Prison buddy, he meant.

“He’d
have handed the violin over to whoever owned the house then, right? Because naturally the owners knew your buddy was doing this. He’d gotten permission.”

“Well, not exactly,” Howard admitted. “This guy, he was not exactly a big hander-over of stuff.”

An unpleasant memory fled across Howard's face and was gone. “But it never mattered anyway. He didn’t find nothing.”

“But if it existed, and it's not in the house …”

He nodded vigorously. “Right. Then Mapes's idea made sense, see? Map to it, X marks the spot. Never found no map neither, though,” he added mournfully.

Monday came back from wherever she had wan- dered off to. She always knows somehow when it is time to get back in the car and is so optimistic that she regards the end of one outing as merely a punctuation mark, signaling the delightful start of another.

My silence wasn’t meant to be accusatory, but it must have made Howard nervous again. “Okay, you want to know about Raines, I’ll tell you what he talked about,” Howard said.

His own attention span had obviously been exceeded, and he’d talked more than he’d meant to about things he didn’t understand, and it all made him uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable.

“You
met
him? Jonathan Raines?”

“Yeah. In La Sardina.”

Oh, damn and blast the bartender's legendary code of ethics; maybe it was good business, but it was getting to be a pain in my tail. No one had asked Teddy Armstrong about Howard Washburn, so Teddy hadn’t mentioned him.

“But all he talked about was a girl, about how she was so gorgeous”—
gore-juss
—“and smart. But she’d busted up with him. Busted his heart. Oh, but he was sweet on her. The old man broke ’em up, he said; that's how the old man's name came up. He was going to get her back, Raines was, if it was the last thing he ever did.”

He folded his arms, glaring at Ellie and me. Apparently, telling the truth about anything went against his principles, but he had done it, by God, he had done it, and were we satisfied?

“Thank you, Howard,” I said quietly, wanting to weep. Partly for Howard; you could see how he had wound up behind those prison bars. And he wasn’t a bad guy, really, just terminally inept.

But also for Jonathan Raines.
The last thing he ever did.

“You’ve been very helpful,” I said.

Not really; coming out here, I’d had some idea he might be a part of some grand, nefarious scheme. Fat chance. But I found myself wanting to say something nice to him, the poor schmuck.

Howard brightened. “Well, then. Glad to do that for you two nice ladies. Now, how about a fine deal on a brand-new …”—the false teeth clicked like a pair of castanets—“well,
nearly
new,” he amended hopefully, “Ford Escort?”

Driving back, I told Ellie about Victor's wristwatch, and she was all for finding Jill Frey and shaking her until her teeth rattled harder than Howard Washburn's.

“No,” I said as we rounded the curve into town. “It will only make Sam want to defend her even more than he already does.”

In the IGA parking lot a two-and-a-half-ton truck was unloading flats of annual garden flowers, the blacktop a riot of geraniums and petunias, zinnias and marigolds. Next came a row of antique white clapboard houses snugged up to the sidewalk on Washington Street. In the eighteenth century, property taxes were based on the size of the front yard, so thrifty Mainers had promptly eliminated them.