Repair to Her Grave (26 page)

“Sam's got to deal with it himself,” I said as we passed the old redbrick library building.

Inside, Charmian was cataloging the historical collection. Inviting her to lunch would have been a hospitable action. But I wasn’t feeling hospitable.

“Ever since we came here, Sam has been the absolute model of a good son. Funny, pleasant to be around. But now—”

“Separation,” Ellie said succinctly. Out on the bay, the children's sailing class was having a practice regatta, a dozen small craft skittering across the waves like so many waterbugs.

“He's going away in the fall,” Ellie explained to my look of surprise. “Living in the dorm in Machias during the week, away from here. Away,” she finished, “from you.”

“He’ll be home weekends,” I protested.

“And feeling of two minds about it, is my guess,” she went on, ignoring me. “Because he likes you, you know. He does. And he likes it here. But he's got to go. So he's … at war with himself, sort of.”

Of course she was right. It fit his behavior perfectly. Now that she’d said it, I wondered only why I hadn’t seen it before.

“So you think he's fastened on to this unsuitable girl just as a way to … cut the umbilical cord in advance? So when the real separation comes he’ll have already …”

“Dealt with it,” she agreed flatly. “And more importantly to him, he will have made you deal with it, too; in some ways he's just trying to get a rise out of you, I think. Although of course he doesn’t realize it.”

“Maybe that's why he looks relieved to get away from her one minute”—the look on his face the night before rose up before me—“and in the next insists he's going to marry her? Because it's all about independence? Breaking the bonds with me?”

She nodded. “Sure. After all, he's only eighteen. It's natural for him to swing back and forth like a loose sail. And he's probably got a lot of … issues.” She pronounced the jargonish word reluctantly, but it was right for the stuff she meant.

“And you’re right: attacking her will make things worse. You know how gallant he can be.”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of the old days when Sam would run psychological interference between me and his father. It hadn’t been good for him. But at the time I took any defense I could get.

We reached the stairs leading up past the shoe repair shop to the Starlite Café, above the antique stores looking out over the boat basin to the islands beyond. From the café floated the good smells of the Starlite's idea of lunch: homemade vegetable soup, toasted onion bagels, fresh chocolate brownies, and fresh-ground, brewed-a-heartbeat-ago Blue Mountain coffee.

My step quickened. At the top of the stairs was a barnlike room furnished with shabby-chic antiques, ferns on wire stands, and tables equipped with backgammon boards. The front was a wall of windows whose dazzling light mellowed as it poured in.

“Anyway, Hecky says the same as everyone else,” Ellie said when she had ordered her usual: an avocado and Swiss sandwich with tomato and mustard sprouts on seven-grain bread. I had the soup and half a bagel, and not much later, our lunches arrived.

“Raines didn’t say anything except about Charmian and how he meant to win her back, in La Sardina. But Hecky says Raines
did
look like he’d just swallowed the canary, and sounded very sure of himself, which of course just drove Hecky half nuts.”

Hecky liked people to sound
unsure,
because it made him feel
more
sure. She bit into her sandwich.

“My thought is,” she said when she had negotiated all the grains, greens, and other chewy stuff she was eating, “we need to, um, amalgamate. Or something.”

She waved the sandwich; looking at all the things that were in it, I got her drift. “You put the different ingredients together and you get…”

All the bits of information we’d been gathering; no one of them was helpful on its own. But…

She nodded energetically. “Right. Something entirely new.”

So, think: an old violin but not a precious one, along with an old book that Raines bought from Mapes. Add Washburn's habit of distressing new furniture to look like valuable antique stuff. Then there was Mapes's own cluttered dwelling: some treasures, but a lot of junk, too. And Hecky Wilmot and his book troubles; his big Florida hopes and his lack of money to realize them.

All mixed up with Charmian's odd talents, and Winston Cartwright's story about Jared Hayes's love for Jane Whitelaw. Hayes's plan to win her heart by getting fabulously wealthy.

Finally, there was Eastport itself: full of guys who might seem to be one thing—ex-cons, or junk collectors, or retired fellows puttering quietly in their gardens raising dahlias—but who were really another.

“We think of Hayes,” I said slowly, “as this dignified man. A musician and composer, we think of a sort of high-flown, high-minded person. Someone who could write in Latin, for instance. The pirate association, his high style of living, his fencing of stolen goods—all this time later it just adds a note of glamour in our minds, doesn’t it?”

Ellie nodded, understanding. “But what if he wasn’t?”

“Precisely. Years later, we’ve turned him into a bigger-than-life figure. But what if he was more like the guys we’ve been talking to, Hecky and Mapes and Howard Washburn? Just… guys. The kind who, some of them, get bright ideas and pull a few schemes?”

As I spoke, Harriet put a CD into the player: Vivaldi's
The Four Seasons.
Spring trilled out of the speakers.

“What,” I went on, “if Hayes really did get a Stradivarius? Say, in some pirate loot or something.” There’d been no record of such a purchase in his account books. “And his first plan was to sell it, make money. But then, because at heart he was really just an ordinary guy like Mapes or Howard Washburn, Hayes got a bright idea.”

“A scheme. Like Howard's ‘distressed’ Sears furniture: fake one, and sell
that.”
Ellie's eyes shone.

“Uh-huh. He's got a model in the real one. So he buys, or has built, an inferior, cheaper instrument and alters it so that it looks like the real thing. If he can sell them both, he’ll make twice as much. Only …”

“Not right away. It wouldn’t be credible for him to have two of them, would it? So …”

“He hides the real one, meaning to sell it later, or even to keep it. But before he can do anything, even sell the fake …”

There’d been no record of any violin sale in the invisible-ink book, either.

“He vanishes,” Ellie finished calmly. “Ends up in Pirate's Cove. And the fake article could be the violin Raines found. He would know how to tell a fake from the real thing, though, so he wouldn’t be fooled by Hayes's counterfeiting attempt.”

I spooned up the last of my soup, decided to indulge in a brownie for dessert, and accepted a refill on my coffee.

“Okay, so what does that mean? For all we know, he did sell a Strad, for instance, and never wrote anything down about it. We can only go so far on theory.”

But Ellie shook her head. “No. If such a violin existed now, that had been sold from here back then, people
would
know about it. Cartwright would know, and Raines would’ve; the experts would be aware of such a thing, its history. Wouldn’t they? Raines said individual instruments are so famous, they have their own names.”

“Good point.” I thought some more. “And Lillian Frey says if it is still here, it's probably sawdust by now.”

“So it could’ve rotted away in a hiding place somewhere. But wouldn’t Raines have thought of that, too?”

In other words, why would he be so hot to find a handful of wormy firewood? “Well, maybe he was hoping against hope. Or …”

Something else. But I couldn’t quite latch on to the third possibility. It had to do somehow with Hayes's money and account books, and it hovered infuriatingly at the edge of my mind like something glimpsed unreliably from the corner of my eye.

Drat. “Anyway,” I said, finishing up my coffee, “if Raines was on to something, it's almost surely something he learned either from that book in my wall— though I still don’t see how—
or
from the diaries he bought from Wilbur, in the trunk of old stuff.”

Ellie's brow furrowed as a new thought struck her. “Jacobia. Howard did mention old diaries in that trunk. But Winston Cartwright said
he
had all of Micah Whitelaw's diaries. And as far as we know, all Hayes's are accounted for, too. We’ve seen them. So
what
diaries do you suppose Raines bought from Wilbur?”

I stared at her. “Ellie. You’re a genius. What if one of them was Jane's? Jane Whitelaw's?”

I got up and paid the check, followed Ellie down the stairs to the street. We walked in silence until we got to my house.

“The thing is, Hayes wanted Jane,” Ellie said. “He meant to win her with money. So wouldn’t he tell her what he intended to do? Confide his plan, sort of dazzle her in advance?”

“Never mind what
he
wanted,” I said, letting us in the kitchen door. “What I want to know is, where are they now? Jane's diary,” I mean, “if that's what it was, and the old violin Raines found, too. But I’d rather have the book.”

Just then Sam came downstairs, looking slicked-up and ready for action. I didn’t ask him who he was going out to meet, and he didn’t offer to tell. But he overheard Ellie's last comments, and in an effort to be congenial offered a smiling remark, along with a look at me that I interpreted to mean,
Truce?

I nodded, just as he dropped his innocent bombshell.

“Always,” he intoned, “hide where there are a lot of the same kind of things.”

8

“No wonder she's been working in the library,” Ellie said as we hurried back to it.
“She
knew Raines, knew how he thought. He might even have pulled the same trick in the past, and she knew about it.”

“And he
said
he’d been to the library, that night at the dinner table. I should have thought of it myself.”

We rushed up the steps. “He probably tucked it in with the other old books. It would look as if it's always been there.”

“And for some reason he
wanted
it discovered. Otherwise he wouldn’t have made a point of mentioning the library to you.” But here she stopped. “Only,
why?
He couldn’t have known someone was going to take him out of the picture.”

“Maybe we’ll figure that out when we find it. If we do.”

Inside, we looked left and right: to the fiction collection jamming the shelves on one side, the reading room full of white light from the tall arched windows. No Charmian anywhere.

“Darn, don’t tell me now
she's
disappeared,” Ellie whispered, and a lady who was reading an old copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
looked up admonishingly.

We moved toward the checkout desk, past the little alcove that is the children's part of the library: small chairs and low painted shelves stuffed with brightly covered volumes. It wasn’t quite time for story hour, yet; the area was empty.

Empty, that is, except for a decidedly non juvenile-looking book on one of the child-sized tables, lying there open as if it had been left only for a moment, its reader intending to return.

It was bound in old green leather, its pages brittle and foxed. “Ellie!” I whispered. The frontispiece, in spidery black ink, read:
Jane Whitelaw, this is her book.

We took the book to the back of the fiction stacks and sat to scan it. The writing was faded, the spelling idiosyncratic, as was usual even for educated people then. But within moments Jane Whitelaw's personality came through as if she were sitting there with us. Not a pleasant personality; as we turned them, a whiff of brimstone practically rose up off the antique pages.

Sly and greedy, shallow and promiscuous. Self-dramatizing, too: “I want to live as the great ladies do, and I shall, if I have to kill them all to achieve it,” Jane wrote on one occasion.

On a later date: “These simpletons do not amuse me, and Hayes is the worst of all, the silly little mincing braggart with his muddy boots and inky fingers, playing his love songs.”

Ellie took the book from me. “‘I bid him goodnight, let him think I go to my maiden's bed alone,’” she read aloud. “‘But later I slipped away to the real men, as Hayes scratched out his farm-boy ideas of music. The fool could never imagine my plan or guard against it! Or my father, either.’”

The rest was the same: envy, greed. It struck me that Jane must have been a great beauty, to hide the venom that ran in her veins in place of blood.

“ ‘Hayes has returned. I’ve told him he will be hanged unless he talks, and he believes,’ ” I read. “Ellie, I think this means
she
talked Hayes into betraying Josephus.”

Ellie nodded. “But why would she do that?”

“Here,” I said, putting my finger to a yellowed page. “ ‘The silly minstrel’—that must have meant Hayes— ‘has stolen all he can. The golden goose has laid its final egg and now off with its head.’ ”

“Hayes's head? Or her father's?”

“Both, apparently,” I said grimly. “One hanged as a pirate and the other …”

“Murdered by Jane,” Ellie whispered. “He served his purpose. So she killed him?”

“Or had him killed. By one of the ‘real men’ she hung around with, probably.”

Willful and wanton, selfish and self-obsessed: “ ‘I shall have my own way in all things or repair to my grave,’ ” Ellie read aloud from the final page, then looked up.

“This is so disappointing.”

I felt the same way. “I’d been imagining her as more … noble. Or something. Romantic. Larger than life. Like Hayes.”

“Finding out she was pregnant must have put a real hitch in her plans,” Ellie commented. “There doesn’t seem to be anything here about it, though.”

“Maybe it didn’t,” I said, getting up to peer out toward the atrium. But Charmian had not returned. “Put a hitch in her plans, I mean. Jane doesn’t sound like a woman who would let a child get in her way. Even her own child.”

“And that's why she took the baby with her when she went to the cliff,” Ellie agreed sadly. “Because all she thought about was herself.”