Repair to Her Grave (5 page)

“For one thing, Raines doesn’t know
we
know, so we shouldn’t mention it,” she added as the squad disappeared up Water Street. “Besides, I don’t think Hecky would like it.”

This turned out to be an understatement. The little gallery had been a candy store in its previous incarnation; local boys had gathered there in the old days and many of them had not lost the habit. As we entered the shop, Hecky and half a dozen of his cronies were gathered around the little black woodstove in the corner, hashing over the latest news.

Like him, they were smart, spry old men who would relish town gossip for as long as they had blood pressures, and they all looked glad to see us in case we’d brought interesting fodder.

At first. But when he caught sight of us, Hecky scowled and the rest followed suit; in Eastport, Hecky was an opinion-maker.

“Young feller's staying with you was in here a little while ago,” he said, fixing me in a severe gaze.

“Yes, he's—”

“Asking a lot of questions about Jared Hayes and his hidden Stradivarius,” Hecky went on accusingly.

Straddy-varryus.
Oh, damn Raines's eyes; couldn’t he see out of them, that when you went at a guy like Hecky you had to go by the circular route?

But then I made a mistake that was just as bad. “Yes, because he is writing a dissertation on—”

Ellie glanced sharply at me, but it was too late; I’d put my foot in it by mentioning writing, especially any that anyone but Hecky might be doing.

“Just finished m’ book, y’know,” Hecky said darkly.

“Yes, I know,” I began. It was about Eastport and he’d even managed to find a regional publisher for it;
Downeast Deeds: An Eastport Story
was due out any minute.

“I’m looking forward to—”

Reading it, I’d been about to say. But he stopped me. “Don’t see as there’ll be any need for another,” he said flatly.

Of course not; the notion that someone else might trespass on his literary territory wouldn’t be welcome, especially now. Another local author's warmhearted Maine memoir, for instance, entitled
Clyde Found Fruitflies in the Berries,
had gotten the sharp side of Hecky's tongue on more than one occasion lately.

“He's doing it for college,” I hastened to explain. “Raines, I mean. Like a term paper, not
real
writing like yours, Hecky.”

“Hmph,” he retorted, not much mollified.

The shop was a combination art gallery and working studio that ordinarily smelled sweetly of oil paints and turpentine. But now the atmosphere in it soured further as Hecky glowered at me.

“And he's got no business muckin’ about with Hayes nonsense. Damned fool violin and all that other old clattertrap.”

He glanced around at the brightly colored water scenes and landscape portraits decorating the walls. Behind the counter the shop's proprietor, Jerome Wallace, worked on another one.

“This”—Hecky jerked a gnarled fist at the paintings—“is what we show the folks from away, want to come and see the real downeast Maine as it oughta be. All bright an’ cheerful.”

He frowned thunderously at me. “Not them old stories about murder and mayhem. Bad women”—
wimmen
—“an’ dark deeds such as ought to’ve stayed buried with the men who done ’em.”

I tried not to look as curious as I felt; this was the first I’d heard of Hayes doing dark deeds or being associated with bad wimmen.

From behind Hecky, one of the other men in the shop winked elaborately at me. Truman Daly was tall, wiry and white-bearded with a gleam in his eye that could turn to lightning if you got him riled. As courtly a gentleman now as forty years ago, lively and involved in everything that was interesting, he was Eastport's best-known citizen—welcome in the fanciest parlors and lowest saloons, though he visited the latter very infrequently and only for soft drinks—and he treated Hecky Wilmot as if Hecky were a younger, less diplomatic brother.

Now Truman smoothed his long, white beard with one expressive hand and made a discreet yap-yap motion with the thumb and finger of the other, as he and the other men began edging toward the door of the shop.

When Hecky got on a rant, the best thing was to leave him alone to it. As the little bell over the shop door jingled, I caught a sniff of wood smoke again, decided it was only the stove downdrafting.

Hecky leaned toward me, his bushy white eyebrows beetling in sharp contrast to his dyed black hair.

“ ’Twas a curse old Jared Hayes lived under,” he intoned, “and another as took ’im. I ain’t such a fool as to dabble in it, nor should you be, or anyone from away.
Especially
from away.”

He glared around. “It oughta be let alone,” he declared, his old voice quavering with emotion, and with that he stomped out, leaving Ellie and me blinking at each other.

“So much for helping Jonathan Raines get accepted in town,” Ellie said after a moment, laughing weakly.

“Right,” I agreed, still a little shocked by the old man's fervor, “and we never even got the chance to tell our lies. Maybe we should’ve told Hecky that Raines was a literary agent.”

“It sounds to me as if he's just jealous of his turf,” Ellie said, echoing my own thought. “With his book coming out and all.”

“Do you think he's getting nervous? I mean, that somebody like Raines, with his supposed academic credentials, might decide to say that Hecky the hometown amateur has gotten it all wrong?”

Jerome dragged his gaze away from his painting. “Hecky's pretty touchy lately about that book of his, all right,” he said. “Way he talks, it's going to set the whole town on its ear, what he's written. Truman Daly says he thinks maybe Hecky put in a few things he wishes now that he hadn’t.”

“Huh.” Now, there was a thought worth pondering. It would be poetic justice if for once Hecky was worried about what other people were saying, instead of him doing all the saying himself. “Whose old skeletons has Hecky been rattling, do you suppose?”

Ellie shrugged, spreading her hands. The smoke smell was stronger; not the woodstove, I realized. And now I heard sirens.

“Something's put a bee in his bonnet,” Ellie agreed, peering out the storefront window.

Across the street in the parking area by the fish pier, a small antiques-and-crafts fair was being set up: quilts, jellies and jams, and a variety of other homemade items covered the red-and-white-checked cloths.

“Oh, dear,” Ellie murmured, “the quilt for the crafts fair.”

In what she laughingly called her spare time, she and the other ladies of the Quilt Guild were completing a sampler quilt; the squares were finished, but the quilting—all hand stitching, in red and blue for the Fourth of July—was Ellie's job, as she has the finest quilting hand in all of Washington County.

“I’ve got to buckle down,” she instructed herself firmly, at which I managed not to laugh out loud; Ellie is one of the most buckled-down persons on the planet. But I promised to remind her about it, meanwhile continuing to observe the activity across the street.

Among the workers I spotted Lillian Frey, a tall, rangily constructed woman in her late forties, with wiry, pale blond hair and a deeply tanned face. She had a nail gun in her hand, a big stapler sort of device with the nails in a strip hanging down like ammo in an old-fashioned machine gun, and she was fastening lengths of two-by-four,
bam-bant-bam
one after the other, bracing the legs of the table in her booth.

As I watched, a photographer from the local newspaper, the
Quoddy Times,
showed up; reflexively, Lillian backed away. From this distance the scar on her cheek didn’t show much, but it was common knowledge she didn’t like having her picture taken. When the photographer moved to another booth, she went back to work.

Beside me, Ellie frowned. “Hey, who's that?” she wanted to know as a car swung into the lot and skidded to a halt.

In her outfit of pencil-slim jeans and black sweater Lillian looked smashing as usual, like the country antique items she sold as a sideline to her main business: handmade musical instruments. The scar only added a rakish touch, though I was sure she didn’t feel that way about it.

But her smile of satisfaction at finishing the nail job vanished as a girl slammed from the car Ellie was squinting at. “That's Jill. Lillian's daughter,” I said.

She was built more like her mother, athletic but long-boned and with finer, more delicately-modeled features. The scowl on her face spoiled her attractiveness, though.

“Wow,” Ellie said, “she looks tough.”

“Right,” I sighed. “As usual.”

Piled in the back of Lillian's station wagon were handsome old things—a banjo clock, a Thomas Moser chair, a wicker plant stand, and some very nice hooked floral rugs—along with several small musical-instrument cases that I supposed held violins: the hand-built instruments that were Lillian's specialty.

Jill slammed her fist on the wagon's fender as she went by; the women began arguing about something.

Which didn’t surprise me; the chip on the girl's shoulder was already legendary. “She's been hanging around Sam,” I said.

I was not best pleased to see her. “She's been in town about a month. I keep hoping she’ll leave again any minute.”

“She looks old enough to be out on her own,” Ellie appraised the girl, “that's for sure. And plenty older than Sam.”

“Right,” I agreed sourly. I thought so, too: old enough to be on her own with a job and an apartment, preferably on the other side of the country.

Or the world, even. The argument reached its peak, Lillian and Jill standing flat-footed, face-to-face. Then the girl turned, stalked to the car, and sped off. Lillian stood looking after her a moment, the nail gun still in her hand, then got into the station wagon and followed, her face grim.

I had a moment to feel sorry for Lillian and to wonder why she didn’t let things cool off instead of going after Jill while they were both still so angry. But it was none of my business, and we’d started out to clear the way for Jonathan Raines, not snoop into Lillian Frey's obviously unhappy family matters.

“He's probably gone over to the diner,” Ellie said, meaning Hecky, so we set off to try to locate him there. But he wasn’t in the diner, or the hardware store, or the five-and-dime. He wasn’t at a table in the Happy Landings Café or on a barstool at La Sardina, East-port's Mexican restaurant.

“We really need him,” Ellie said. “Right now he's out there somewhere doing the opposite of what we wanted. In Eastport Hecky and his big mouth can fix it so that not only will people refuse to help Raines, they won’t even look at him.”

“I know,” I said, frustrated. Ellie's plan had actually started seeming possible to me. But an hour after we’d begun we were back where we’d started, at the art gallery.

Suddenly a heavy
thwap-thwapping
sound filled the air and an aircraft swooped low over Passamaquoddy Bay. It was the Coast Guard helicopter, its red markings clearly visible on its chunky white body as it beat its way north.

“What in the world is going on out there?” Ellie said. The smell of smoke had never really gone away and grew stronger again now, hanging over the town in a pale haze; not a woodstove or anything like it. Something around here was burning like hell.

Jerome Wallace came outside. He was a big, rawboned man with faraway blue eyes, a thatch of greying hair, and a quiet manner, his clothes habitually paint-smeared.

“Just talked to the dispatcher,” he said. “Some guy went off those high bluffs up at North End, into the water. No one seems to know who he is and they’re all out there trying to find the body.”

Ellie and I looked at each other.

“Some guy,” Jerome finished, “from away.”

That night, Jonathan Raines sat cheerfully un-drowned at one end of the dinner table, and George Valentine sat at the other. George was chief of Eastport's volunteer fire department as well as its unofficial man of all work, so he knew the whole story of what had happened at North End.

“From away,” he repeated, forking up some of the bay-scallop casserole that Ellie and I had prepared. With it we were having steamed endive vinaigrette, cheese biscuits, and some of the new baby potatoes that Ellie had dug that morning, with fresh parsley and butter.

“It doesn’t matter that he was somebody from away,” I said, and George looked up kindly at me.

“Course it doesn’t, Jacobia. But it's all we know about him so far, ’cause the car he drove has come up on a stolen list in Massachusetts. Must’ve had his wallet, ID and all, on him when he went over. Keys, too, if he had ’em.”

Also with us at the table were Sam and his friend Maggie Altvater. The two of them were taking advanced scuba lessons this summer and had gotten in just in time for dinner.

“How do you know for sure he went over at all?” Maggie asked reasonably. “I mean, just because the car is there and he's not. If it's stolen, maybe he just abandoned it.”

In the candlelight her creamy complexion glowed with health, her hazel eyes bright with good humor and quick intelligence. And her honey-colored hair was a wonder, falling in masses to the middle of her back.

Unfortunately, it was her habit to spoil the effect with plaid flannel shirts, baggy jeans, and thick-soled hiking boots, none of which did anything to flatter her ample figure.

An unhappy picture of Jill Frey flashed before my eyes: slim as a switchblade and dressed fit to kill. Maggie was a wonderful girl, accomplished and mature; on top of everything else, she was a volunteer emergency medical technician complete with a scanner and a cherry beacon on the dash of her pickup. But Sam treated her like a comfortable old shoe, partly on account of her always presenting herself as if she were one.

“Wonderful library you’ve got here in town,” Raines said, apropos of nothing. “I saw it this afternoon,” he added with an odd, intent look at me.

Meanwhile, Sam took another forkful of scallop casserole and chewed happily; at eighteen, he was as strong and good-looking as a healthy young horse, and as stubborn.

“To the library,” Jonathan Raines repeated significantly, still looking at me, “after I went everywhere else that I went.”