Repair to Her Grave (27 page)

It was the part I disliked most. I couldn’t imagine that any sane woman—and Jane, however nasty, sounded in full possession of her faculties—would deliberately endanger her own child, no matter how urgent the errand.

“Hey,” Ellie said softly. She’d come to the very back of the book, where the linen thread that fastened in the pages still gleamed faintly in the glow of the hanging light bulb between the stacks where we sat. “Look at this.”

I peered over her shoulder. “It's torn?” I put out a finger to touch the break in the green leather binding, where the inside of the back cover met the final page.

“No,” Ellie said, “it's …” She poked a finger into the open place. “The binding's slit, and recently. See? It's unfrayed.”

A sudden memory of Charmian's fancy penknife came to me, in the handbag that I’d returned to her. “Raines got old books from Mapes. Mapes had read them, of course, but didn’t examine them well enough. I think this might be one of them, and something was in the binding of this one.”

“Another map, maybe?”

“It would’ve been the perfect spot for one. And what
else
would have sent Charmian off in such a hurry, she didn’t even put the diary away again?”

Ellie nodded energetically. “And if Hayes
did
tell Jane about his plan, that he hid something valuable …”

“Wanting her to love him,” I said slowly. “Bragging, maybe, about how much money he was going to make by his scheme: selling a fake Stradivarius
and
a real one. But not knowing …”

“How really, truly
bad
she was,” Ellie finished. “He told her where he hid it. Maybe she even made him tell her where. And he
gave her a map.
A copy of his own, which is probably the other one, the one we can’t read. Do you think?”

She jumped up. “If he did, maybe that's what Jane was doing out at North End at the cliffs that night: trying to follow it. And speaking of sneaky women, what’ll you bet that Charmian's already hooked back up with her supposedly evil uncle, whom she supposedly despises so much—”

“But she only despises him for our benefit?”

“Exactly. So she rushed out of here, and the two of them are on their way to find Hayes's real Stradivarius this minute?”

“Wait a sec.” I followed Ellie from between the tall stacks to the checkout desk. “I thought we decided it's rotted away by now. The violin, I mean. And they must know that. Or ought to. So why would Charmian and Winston …”

“It depends on what the map said,” Ellie replied. “Maybe it says the violin's somewhere the weather couldn’t get at it, Jacobia. And it really
has
been here in Eastport all these years.”

If he’d wrapped it up properly, made it safe against the elements … Something still bothered me about all of this, but we didn’t have time to worry about it. At our question, Mina Sirois turned harriedly from guiding the children in for their story session.

“She made a phone call,” Mina confirmed, and then: “Kids, let's sit quietly, please!” she appealed. At this a crowd of youngsters charged into the reading room, to the despair of the lady trying to read Harriet Beecher Stowe.

But one of the older youngsters had escaped Mina's expert supervision and was now busily copying his face on the copying machine, on a low table by the front desk. Grimacing, he closed his eyes and pressed the copy button, having pushed aside the thin yellow volume still splayed open on the machine's glass.

It was a phone book from the collection behind the desk: our local phone book, open to the pages of M's.

M for Mapes; I called the numbers. He answered on the fourth ring.

“Wilbur, if she's out there with you, I think you’d better tell me so right this minute, or the next call I make will be to Bob Arnold.”

“Huh? Dunno what you’re talkin’ about. Who's out here?” But he sounded nervous.

“Wilbur, I mean it, you—”

He hung up. So I did call Bob, but the town dispatcher said there’d been a development in the arson case, and Bob was busy arresting a firebug—her tone implying there would be a parade later to celebrate the occasion—and did I want to leave a message or call back?

“What?” Ellie wanted to know, seeing my face.

“They got the firebug. Anonymous tip,” I whispered. To the dispatcher: “Tell him I’m on my way to Wilbur Mapes's place and I need him to meet me,” I said. “As soon as he can.”

But when I’d broken the connection, I had second thoughts. “I couldn’t tell if she's really out at Mapes's place or not,” I said. “We’d better check around here before we go hightailing it out there, or we might miss her.”

Which turned out to be a good idea, just not quite the way I expected. Charmian wasn’t anywhere in town, but down at the breakwater we spotted Winston Cartwright, having a hot dog outside the small red snack stand called Rosie's, by the Quonset warehouses.

“Have you seen Charmian?” I confronted the big man.

Sharp eyes peered from under the disreputable slouch hat. At my words he tossed the hot dog into the trash abruptly, his jowly face creasing with concern. “No. What's happened?”

“I’ll get the car,” Ellie said.

“She found a map, we think, in Jane Whitelaw's old diary.” I tried to summarize for him as quickly as possible. “Raines got it from Mapes, hid it in the library. Charmian found it there.”

“And you think she might be trying to follow it.”

“Yes. A map Hayes gave to Jane Whitelaw because he wanted Jane to love him. So he trusted her with it.”

I took a deep breath. “It
might
be a copy of another map, an unreadable one. It could be, Jane's copy survived but the original didn’t.”

Saying this, I realized what was bothering me: if Raines knew the map was there—and why else hide the book?— why hadn’t he simply taken it and used it himself?

“Anyway, we think she might be in trouble,” I finished.

It was as slippery and treacherous a progression of thought as Eliza crossing the ice floes in Harriet Beecher Stowe's old story, but Cartwright followed it without any difficulty and looked horrified.

“She doesn’t have a car,” I added. “She called Mapes. Then someone, maybe Mapes, must’ve come and picked her up.”

“Oh, dear God. Charmian, if anything happens to her …”

He seized my shoulder with his large, surprisingly strong right hand. “What are we waiting for? We’ve got to find her.”

My thought exactly, but as Ellie pulled up and we piled into the car, I had an instant to wonder: just what was behind Winston Cartwright's sudden anxiety? Concern for his niece, or …

He caught my unspoken drift. “You’re still wondering about my motives,” he said heavily from the back seat as Ellie sped out Route 190. “The evil old uncle from the city, here to thwart his young relative's plans.”

He didn’t sound evil now. The contrary, in fact. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” I said. “Maybe if I heard your side of the story …”

“I’ve tried my best,” he said, as if trying to reassure himself more than persuade me. “Two lively little girls dropped on my doorstep. I was,” he pleaded, “a scholarly, solitary man immersed in books and antiquities.”

Right. And in twisting the collective earlobe of the art world's criminal scene to get at its secrets. But that all seemed far away now.

He sighed. “There were toys, tiny items of clothing, a trail of crayons and dolls all through my bachelor rooms. Dolls that
squawked,”
he recalled.

I remembered it well, from Sam. But I wasn’t interested in a tale of Cartwright's old domestic travails. It was current events I wanted some accurate reporting on, and fast.

“Winston, are you and Charmian in on some plot to find a long-lost Stradivarius and steal it away from here? Either with Jonathan Raines or in competition with him? Is that why Charmian's painted you as such an ogre, just as a smoke screen? But now maybe she's turned the tables on you?”

It could account for his shock at discovering she’d gone off without him. But when I turned to face him, the worry and grief in his eyes remained real.

And the regret. “No,” he said gently. “Charmian hates me and it's all my fault. I wanted to save her from that foolish young adventurer Jonathan Raines. Like me, in my youth, always haring off after a new treasure. When my real treasure was right there at home.”

I must have looked mystified. Meanwhile, Ellie drove as fast as she dared, slowing only for the speed trap at Pleasant Point.

“My wife,” he explained. “She was ill—I didn’t realize how ill. At the time, I’d located an ancient manuscript in Rome. It doesn’t matter what,” he added. “It wasn’t worth the trip. She’d begged me not to go, but I told her I’d be back soon. It's what I always said when I left her. Only this time …”

His voice threatened to break. “She died. I broke my wife's heart, and she died before I could come back and make amends.”

We crossed Route 1 and jogged onto the narrow two-lane that wound between widely spaced farmhouses, trees, and fields.

“What about the bet? Charmian says you were holding her to some silly wager, making her work for you instead of going off on her own with Raines. Holding her sister hostage.”

He shook his head impatiently. “Charmian took it seriously. It was she who was holding herself to the wager, not me. A sense of honor I foolishly inculcated in her … but I’d have never held her to it myself.”

He took a sorrowful breath and continued. “I didn’t want what happened to my wife to happen to Charmian. So I opposed her romance with Raines. He’d do the same as I had, I knew. He's got the bug, it's in his blood, I saw it as I’d seen it in myself.”

We passed the rusting railroad trestle, the salt marshes, and the grange hall, its white paint peeling gently in the sun. “And once a man's infected with the desire to find old things …”

Cartwright sighed miserably again. “Oh, I’m a fool.”

“We’ll find her, Winston,” Ellie said quietly. She gunned the car onto the dirt part of the road, the car jouncing on the washboard surface littered with stones.

A partridge poked its head from the underbrush, cocked its beady eye. Overhead, a brown hawk circled serenely, riding the thermals rising from the warm, dry land. “We’ll find her before anything bad can happen to her.”

But the truth was, none of us was certain of that outcome.

Not at all. “So you wouldn’t have destroyed a Strad if you found one, to save what remains of a professional reputation that is, according to Charmian, already badly fading?” I asked.

At this, his laugh was genuine. “Oh, my. That's what she's told you? No wonder she thinks I killed Raines. Encouraged that poor young vegetable-eater off the end of a dock to save people's good
opinion
of me? Oh, heavens.”

Our eyes met, and in that moment I genuinely liked Winston Cartwright. He was a large, wheezy, gouty, opinionated old man, but with a steely will and a lot of good, old-fashioned spinal cord, not to mention the kind of wiliness it took to beat the professional art-world tricksters at their own game.

He had what George Valentine would have called gumption. But I couldn’t help realizing, too, that I had no proof of the story he was telling. And he
had
tricked plenty of art-world criminals, to get their loot.

Which meant he could still be tricking me.

“My reputation,” he said dryly, “is rather more secure than my dear Charmian understands. Not all one's exploits receive the sort of publicity that most academics secretly crave, you see. My days of
wanting
any reputation are rather ancient history.”

Of course; getting your face all over the magazines, or even your name in professional journals read by others in the trade, could get in the way of achieving similar success in the future, in the kidding-the-kidders department. But I wasn’t ready to let our large friend off the hook quite yet.

“How much farther?” he asked anxiously as we rounded a curve.

I fastened on the remark. “You ought to know. You must have been there.” At which he looked taken aback.

“Charmian was quite certain he’d had dealings with you,” I persisted.

“Indeed. By mail and phone. There was never any need to meet him personally.” Understanding dawned on his face. “But you still think …”

I’d had enough. “Look, there's a very valuable object around here somewhere—or everybody seems to think there is, anyway—and you’re a prime candidate for wanting to find it. Give me one reason why you’re not as much a suspect as anyone else.”

“Because it's not. Here, I mean. A Stradivarius violin—I’d wish it as much as anyone, but…” He made an impatient sound. “Can’t you people get it through your heads? The odds against it are fantastic. Even if it once was here, time takes
everything,
my friends. Especially things made of organic materials like wood and glue. And,” he finished resignedly, “us, sooner or later.”

It was just what Lillian had said, and it still made sense, so I didn’t bother arguing with him. We rode on in silence until we reached Mapes's trailer. Getting out, Cartwright gazed around in the unusual stillness: no dog barking, no angry thumping footsteps on the trailer porch. Nothing but sky and the wind moving distantly in the lines of trees at the far end of the clearing.

No Charmian. And no other car but ours, pulled up alongside Mapes's old pickup truck. I put my hand on the hood; it was cold.

“Look at this,” Ellie said. “Looks like Wilbur was getting ready to head for the hills for a while.”

Two big cardboard boxes of groceries sat in the truck bed: canned soups, packets of noodles, sacks of trail mix. Cooking implements, too, and jugs of water and a box of kitchen matches. Something pinged my memory as I surveyed the collection, but then Cartwright was shouting.

“Here, over here! Good heavens… where's Charmian? Tell me, man, what have you done with her?”

The dog crept from under the pickup truck, the fight gone out of him as he blinked nervously at me, then slunk forward as if to shove his big head under my hand.

“Okay, boy.” He wasn’t hurt, but something had scared him very badly. He padded alongside me, tail tucked, ready to bolt.