Repair to Her Grave (6 page)

Later I understood that I’d been meant to hear it, that it was important. But I was still thinking about Sam.

It would never occur to him that a girl like Jill Frey could do him any harm; he’d spoken to her twice on the phone already this evening, and I was sure it would ring again anytime now.

“Fellow's camera equipment, tripod and so on, piled by the edge,” George answered Maggie's question. “Lady walking her dog found the stuff. No camera.”

He swallowed some Budweiser. “Probably had it with him on a strap around his neck. And you can see by the branches all broken off fresh where he scrambled down for a better view, that's the way he went.”

The phone rang; Sam jumped up to get it.

“And mainly,” George finished, “if he didn’t go over, where is he?”

Ellie looked skeptical. “He might not’ve scrambled, though. Maybe he fell down right from the top. We don’t know what he was doing out there, not for sure.”

She sipped some wine. “There ought to be a sign there, you know. That edge has been crumbling for two hundred years. It's a safety hazard.”

At the north end of the island, she meant, where the view takes in the whole bay: Deer Island, the Canadian waters beyond, and mounded in the distance the hills of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Sam came back, his eyes bright and his cheeks flushed, a secret smile he couldn’t quite manage to hide on his lips.

“It's enough to tempt anyone who doesn’t know how shaky it is, the soil at the very edge of those cliffs,” Ellie said. “To get too close, and …” Her hands made a
whoops!
gesture, indicating what could happen next.

Having given up on the topic of the library, apparently, Raines glanced up from his plate of potatoes, salad, and cabbage rolls. He was, it had turned out, a rabid vegetarian; he’d made the cabbage rolls himself, steaming the purple cabbage and saving the water for, he said, a health drink.

The notion of which made me shudder. But he’d been a perfect pleasure to have in the kitchen, cleaning up after himself as he went along, and he was so matter-of-fact about his diet that even George—who thought meat and potatoes were two of the five major food groups—wasn’t holding it against him.

“So this isn’t the first time?” Raines asked. “I mean, that someone has fallen?”

Sam shook his head. “Nope. Every couple of years somebody goes over, usually a visitor. Mostly they get rescued, but… see, it looks real safe. But you get out there, step just a little too close—not everywhere, but in some spots—and bingo.” He took a swallow of milk. “Next thing, you’re in the water, and the current there is vicious. That body's halfway to Lubec by now, maybe farther.”

The next town to our south, he meant, along the wild, rocky coast where the land tumbled into the water. And you would tumble, too, if you didn’t watch yourself carefully.

“If,” Sam said, “it didn’t wash up into one of the caves.” He ate some more casserole. “Man, they say that some of the caves at the north end run clear to the other side of the island, like a honeycomb. Course,” he added with a cautious look at me, “I’ve never been in any of them myself.”

“Right,” I said, not believing him for a minute. The idea of him spelunking in underwater caves still gave me the willies, and he knew it. So he—and Maggie, too, I strongly suspected—tended to shelter me from reports of their more outrageous adventures.

On the other hand, I was pretty sure Jill Frey wouldn’t be joining Sam on any of these strenuous capers. Despite her athletic build, from what I’d heard of her she didn’t seem to be the outdoor type. As a result, I bit my tongue when the topic of sporting activities came up; however dangerous, they were still better than the indoor ones that Jill might suggest.

“Anyway,” Sam went on, “it's a cinch he's not alive anymore. The water in Passamaquoddy Bay's about fifty degrees,” he told Raines. “Which makes survival time maybe fifteen minutes, even with your head above water. Your muscles lock up and you go into hypothermic coma even before you drown.”

Sam related these sobering facts with some gusto, but Raines absorbed them gravely and the rest of the company went quiet, too; I thought it was time to edge the table talk away from dead bodies. Besides, I had some questions that I wanted answers to, from Jonathan Raines.

“So,” I invited him brightly, “tell us about your life in Boston. It must be an exciting place to be, lots of intellectual activity and all. I suppose if any new musical manuscripts turn up, I mean of the old historical pieces, you’d be among the first to see them. As a graduate student of music history, I mean,” I added, letting him hear the edge in my tone.

“And the music clubs,” Maggie said wistfully. “Bluegrass and jazz.” Maggie had a lovely, note-perfect contralto singing voice and was a dedicated country-fiddle enthusiast.

“Do any sculling?” Sam asked. “I hear that's a big sport in Cambridge, on the river, there.” He ate another cheese biscuit.

Even George joined the interrogation; usually taciturn, he seemed to have taken to Raines. “Got a girl?” he asked joshingly.

Raines laughed but seemed uncomfortable at being the focus of so much interest, which under the circumstances I thought was not surprising. Considering, I mean, that he was lying through his straight white teeth.

“Not, alas, anymore,” he replied to George's question a bit sadly. Removing his thick glasses, he polished them with the hem of his white napkin; true to her word, Ellie had raided her linen closet, so we were well supplied with them.

Now, if I could only deal with the rest of the Reading Circle arrangements so handily; at the moment, redecorating requirements were looming rather large. The hole in the plaster, for instance, gaped yawningly at me from across the table.

“The girl—well, she dumped me,” Raines said ruefully.

Sam looked surprised. No girl had ever dumped him, and his confidence in this department was so extreme, he didn’t realize that not everyone in the world shared it. I watched him turn the notion over in his mind, then discard it.

Raines turned to Maggie. “There are lots of clubs in Boston, but I don’t get to go much. Studying,” he explained, with a quick look at me. He hadn’t forgotten my question or missed its reason. Jonathan Raines, it was turning out, didn’t miss much.

Across from him, the broken plaster patch gleamed whitely amid the mottled grey of the older material: horsehair plaster. In the nineteenth century builders added horsehair to make it stronger, and looking at it always reminded me of sunny pastures.

But if you didn’t happen to be as fond of horsehair plaster as I was, it was hideous, especially since my patch was centered like an irregular bull's-eye in another, earlier one. A hundred and fifty years ago, someone else had faced the same problem as I did now—a hole in the wall—and had solved it.

I wished I could consult that old fix-it expert; the patch's edges were straight, smooth, and clean, as if someone had simply cut a square opening in the wall, then filled it in. In the morning, I resolved, I would take care of it: yet another patch, then the wallpaper. I had a spare roll of the old gold-medallion pattern, fortunately.

“You and Sam should go down there, though,” Raines went on to Maggie, “make a weekend of it. You can hear any kind of music in Boston, and play it, too. There are jam sessions in the clubs. You do play?” he added, sounding sure of himself.

Her face lit up at the thought of going somewhere with Sam, as well as at the idea of a jam session. And, of course, at the attention Raines was paying to her. “How did you know?”

“Your fingers,” he smiled. “Calluses on the left hand, and your nails on that hand are clipped short. Marks of a musician.”

Maggie beamed and I began liking Raines a lot in spite of myself. All day long I’d kept trying to phone his cousins again, but one had gone upstate with a federal prisoner, one was getting ready for a RICOH trial, and one was undercover. So it would be a while before I talked to any of them.

And meanwhile here was Raines, behaving like a perfect, gentle knight of the Round Table. What he said next didn’t hurt my opinion of him, either.

“Oh, I almost forgot.” He brought a package up from under his chair. “Your light fixture,” he said, offering it to me. “I went up to Calais, to the Wal-Mart, and they had another one.”

“Why, thank you. But—how?” It was twenty miles to Calais, our nearest big market town. “For that matter, how did you get
here?”
I asked, taking the package.

Raines stuck his thumb up in pantomine. “Caught a ride with the same man who brought me over to the island,” he said. “White panel truck, dog in the cab, maybe you know him?”

Ellie and I looked at each other: we knew him, all right. Wilbur Mapes worked as an urchin diver in season, when he worked at all. The rest of the time, when he wasn’t out hunting, he went to farmhouses, barns, anything that was being torn down, scavenging odd items.

Besides a shotgun and a dog so mean, people said, that it would bite you as soon as look at you, the other thing Wilbur had in the cab of that truck was a canning jar full of homemade white lightning.

“Interesting man,” Raines remarked dryly, at which point I liked him even more. The jar, the white lightning, and Mapes himself were infamous in and around Washington County. A ride with him could scare the hair right out of your head, unless you possessed a considerable amount of intestinal fortitude.

Still, I wasn’t about to let Raines completely off the hook. “I suppose if a rumor got started about a lost violin, a very
valuable
lost violin, way up here in Eastport, Maine, you’d be in a position to hear about it in Boston?”

George got up, taking his cleaned plate out to the kitchen. The blast on Campobello, he’d told us, had been the full fuel tank of a big pleasure boat, the property of an inexperienced, sozzled mariner from Montreal: flashy but noncatastrophic, except to the hapless mariner who’d lost his vessel and barely escaped going up in the explosion.

The smoke Ellie and I smelled downtown, however, had been a grass fire raging in the dry fields above Pirate's Cove, not far from Eastport's freight docks: much less dramatic but potentially a lot more dangerous. Now George was going out with the rest of the fire company to check for hot spots.

Raines looked transparently at me. “Yes, I suppose I would hear about such a violin. And being as the last one—I assume you’re talking about a Strad—sold for one-point-three million, it might be an interesting rumor.”

The candles flickered warningly, but of course it could have been a breeze from the open window. Raines swallowed some wine, folded his napkin, and placed it beside his plate.

“If,” he added, “I were the unscrupulous type.”

“Which you’re not.” I was trying to hide my shock; the last time I’d looked, the going price had been $750,000. It was what my client had paid for the one he bought, back in the city.

Raines held my gaze. “Which I am not. Unscrupulous, I mean. But enough about me,” he segued smoothly, turning back to Maggie. “Do you know what makes the tone of a real Stradivarius so fine?”

Maggie smiled shyly, surprised at being made again a part of the conversation. “Well, the whole aging process, I guess. Being old. And something about the wood they used?”

Raines looked wise. “Pickling,” he pronounced. “They’re just finding out that the Strads—there was a whole family of them in Cremona, building great instruments—well, it's coming out that those guys soaked the wood in brine and it altered the molecular structure.”

“Salt water,” Sam said thoughtfully. “That makes some sense. Some of the stuff we find while we’re diving, well, you wouldn’t think it’d have lasted so long. Leather, and even some wood.”

He turned to Raines. “You should see it down there. One spot sand, washed clean as a whistle, and right next to it’ll be some little fragile clay pipe or something, so perfect it's like it’d just got put there. And things we find that should’ve rotted.”

“Well, but a lot of that is the peat,” Maggie pointed out. “The effect of it, I mean. They shipped it in the old days from the port, and I guess they must have spilled lots,” she explained to Raines.

“The acid in it preserves things,” she went on, “and if it collects in the sort of backwater places that the tide doesn’t wash out, whatever got buried in it seems to last forever.”

She frowned. “But not always. Remember that leather sack we found, Sam?”

“What was in it?” George asked interestedly, returning for the cups and glasses.

Maggie shrugged. “We don’t know. We touched it and it just fell apart, like it was dissolving.” She turned back to Raines. “When the silt cleared, whatever was in it had just”—she made a
presto!
gesture with her hands—“washed away.”

Sam nodded, letting her talk, wearing a patient expression that reminded me of my ex-husband. I didn’t enjoy it and Sam looked a lot like his father anyway, with his green eyes, lantern jaw, and dark, curly hair. And it didn’t help any that Sam had been acting like such a knucklehead about Maggie: as if when he wanted her around, well, naturally she would always be there for him, and if he didn’t, she wouldn’t.

“It's the tone that would have made Jared Hayes want one,” Raines said. “A Stradivarius. I don’t play, myself. But musicians say it's not a matter of degree, the difference between them and any other violins. They say that it's like playing a whole other instrument; the music flies out. Like,” he finished, “the music was just
in
there, waiting to be released.”

Behind him on the gold-medallion wallpaper the tiniest spot of red appeared suddenly, like a droplet on a pricked fingertip.

Or didn’t. When I blinked and looked again, it was gone.

Maggie nodded dreamily, thinking I suppose of the music just flying out, and she and Sam got up together. They’d made a small business of selling things they’d discovered underwater, listing the items on the Internet via Sam's computer: old china, coins, those clay pipes. Just now they were selling a clay Schweppes jug, and the proceeds from it would buy Sam's books for the fall semester.

“We’ll do the dishes, Mrs. Tiptree,” Maggie said graciously, “and thanks for dinner.” Sam, looking put-upon but with no good way to escape, followed her out.