Repair to Her Grave (7 page)

“So it's not just hype, then,” Ellie said when the two had gone. “People thinking that because the violins are so rare, there
must
be some special something about them. Some mystery.”

Raines shook his head as the happy blare of a Cajun dance tune came from the kitchen; Sam was a fan of distant sports-radio programs we could sometimes pull in on clear nights, but Maggie liked the Montreal stations.

“No,” Raines said. “The specialness is real.”

As he spoke, an odd look crossed his face: one part heartfelt longing, another part rationally assessing. But in the next instant it was gone, as George returned to rest his hand briefly on Ellie's shoulder, waiting to say something.

“There were only eleven hundred or so Strads ever made,” Raines went on musingly. “I say only, but it's a big number, really; the old man worked practically until the final moment of his life. Into his nineties.”

The music from the kitchen cut off and a man began talking about a batting streak that somebody was having.

“And this was when?” George asked, still waiting. He looked straight at me, so I would know it was me he wanted to talk to.

“In the 1700s,” Raines replied. “No electric light to work by, no power tools. Just an artist, making musical instruments.”

“By hand,” George said approvingly.

“And by ear,” Raines added. “Now only about six hundred and fifty instruments are left. Not all violins; the family also made harps, guitars, cellos, and violas. And the reason no more will probably ever be found is, almost every instrument they made has already been accounted for.”

Almost. He knew a lot about them, I realized. “Lost in shipwrecks, burnt up or exploded—the firebombs in Dresden during World War II got a lot of them,” he continued. “The ones that do still exist have individual names of their own, like Greatorex or Messiah.”

“So if somebody finds one in their attic …” Ellie began. “I mean with a label inside, that says it's a Stradivarius …”

“Right. Chances of its being real are a zillion to one against.”

Which seemed like stiff odds, considering what I thought he was really here for. Still, when he turned back to Ellie and me, his eyes held a spark of teasing merriment:
I’ve got a secret.

“All right, now,” I began, annoyed. “I think I’ve had just about enough of—”

“But I hear from some of your neighbors that you two have been involved in some mysteries yourselves,” he remarked, deftly changing the subject.

I just stared at him; I knew how to interrupt people that way, too, and make it seem to everyone else as if I hadn’t. It was a technique I’d learned while steering wealthy people into financial plans that did more for their portfolios than for their egos. It took nerve and practice. And he was good at it.

Too good. “Solving crimes in a small Maine town? It's too wonderful to be true,” he added. “So, like the rest of the place, I guess it must be.” Smooth, very smooth.

“Wade back tonight?” George asked casually. It was what he’d been waiting to say, and I understood; he liked Raines, so far. So far, though, was as far as it went. Back in the city I could have had a street gang in my apartment and they could have murdered me, and if they didn’t let my body decompose too badly, no one else in the building would even have noticed. Here it was different.

“After midnight,” I said.

Most of the time, Wade Sorenson was Eastport's harbor pilot, which meant he guided big vessels in through the deep, tricky channels, shifting currents, and treacherous tides that led to the port. But starting two days earlier he had become part of a two-vessel team delivering a tugboat to its new berth on Grand Manan Island, and right now he was still out on the water, the lights of Eastport not yet even in sight.

“They promised to radio Federal Marine if they’re delayed,” I told George. “I’ll let you know if they do.”

Satisfied—George would fight dragons for me and Ellie, and probably would manage to slay quite a few of them, too, if push came to shove—he went out, as we gathered the remaining serving plates. In the kitchen, Sam and Maggie had formed an efficient assembly line for the dishes; not for the first time, I saw how well and happily they worked together.

Sam, I thought, you dunderhead; I’d tried to raise him right, but he was nevertheless an eighteen-year-old American male, so naturally his idea of female beauty was like Jill: tall, blond, and just enough older than he was to seem sophisticated. Twenty or so, I calculated. Sam was just eighteen.

“It's true,” I admitted to Raines, averting my eyes from the spectacle at the kitchen sink: unrequited love on Maggie's side, obliviousness on Sam's. Really, it made me want to swat the kid. “There was a string of deaths,” I went on, “and we got to the bottom of them. Untimely,” I added reluctantly, “deaths. And unnatural.”

And somehow Ellie and I had developed a knack for revealing the skulduggery behind such events; for a while, people in town had begun joking that Ellie's nose actually twitched at the smell of blood. Recently, however, things had quieted down.

Or they’d quieted down until now. I wasn’t happy at the thought of an unidentified man, driving a stolen car, coming to Eastport and then immediately falling off a cliff.

Still, no one was calling it murder. “Mostly we were just in the right place at the right time,” I said to Raines.

He found a roll of plastic wrap and covered the casserole. “I’ve heard of that,” he said. “But I’ve got a feeling it's not going to happen to me. Not here.”

Also, he put the butter, salt and pepper, and salad dressing away without anyone having to tell him where they went. Then, knocking my socks off, he found the dog biscuits in the cookie tin on top of the refrigerator, opened it, and fed one to Monday.

“Jared Hayes's story would make a wonderful Ph.D. dissertation,” he said. “It would make up for my being late with it, I’m sure. Something fascinating, not dry like so much academic writing is. A real man, a talented composer, with real secrets and real…”

He paused, as if thinking perhaps he’d said too much, and I agreed; while he was talking the lights had dimmed briefly, but he hadn’t seemed to notice. And of course it could simply have been a power dip; out here on the island, you could get a hefty brownout if the PTA scheduled a food sale and everyone decided to bake cookies on the same night.

Still, a prickle went over the little hairs on my arms.

“Even after one day I can tell I’m not going to get anywhere with Hayes,” Jonathan Raines went on. “Eastport people seem warm and friendly,” he allowed. “Really charming, not fake at all. But I’m a stranger here, and of course they think I’ve come because I want something. That I’m using them, or that I’m trying to.”

He finished wrapping the leftover cabbage rolls and put them in the refrigerator, right next to the jug of cabbage juice, which resembled purple ink.

“Not,” he added with a chagrined little laugh that didn’t sound happy, “that I’m having any success at that, either.”

It was what I thought, too, that he was using us. And reports of his activities around town had only hardened my heart on the matter: that Raines, dressed in a many-pocketed fishing vest like some mad angler trolling for information, had been spotted trying to interrogate Eastport's dourest citizen, Elmore Luddy, actually chasing the old man across his own lawn before Luddy slammed the porch door in Raines's face.

That he’d visited the Waco Diner, where the vest would have been about as popular as a red flag in a bull ring. The fishermen who ate in the Waco wore plain rubber boots and sweatshirts from the discount store and disdained hats until the gale warning had been up for twenty-four hours. A fancy fishing outfit bought from the Orvis catalog was the kiss of death to the guys in the Waco.

But according to Ellie, who heard everything that went on in town, Raines had stood out at the end of the fish pier in that vest, too, where everybody downtown could see him in it, and in a pair of silly yellow Wellington boots.

And of course he’d met Hecky Wilmot, antagonizing him with talk of writing and of old, unsavory Eastport secrets, both of these being Hecky's private property in Hecky's opinion.

So, as Raines himself suspected, in the snooping department he’d screwed up royally. And too late he seemed to have realized this, so crestfallen that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. I could confront him later, I decided, turning from his harmless, suddenly boyish-looking face.

Sam was putting the wineglasses away on the top shelf of the cupboard, while Maggie rinsed the sink. “Want to get our gear ready for tomorrow before we check the bidding on the Schweppes jug?” she asked, wringing out the sponge.

The suits, gloves, and other insulating garments they wore in the cold water lay in the hall awaiting maintenance. With them stood the pair of outrageously bright yellow Wellingtons.

As Maggie turned, Sam stood on tiptoe to put the last glass up, his arm outstretched and his face unselfconsciously young and attractive. “Yeah, good idea,” he said. At which Maggie's own face suddenly was suffused with such melting affection that it embarrassed me to look at it.

Maggie gave the sink a final, unnecessary wipe. When she finished, there was nothing but her usual good humor in her expression.

But I’d seen, and so had Jonathan Raines, whose sympathetic sorrow he concealed by frowning down at his hands.
She dumped me,
he’d said lightly, but I sensed he didn’t feel light about it.

Maggie must have picked something up from the cooling of the atmosphere, as well. “You could get her back, you know,” she said quietly to Raines. “You could call her and apologize.”

He looked up gratefully. “It's too late now, I’m afraid. But thanks for the thought, Maggie.”

“Come on, Mags, work to do,” Sam broke in, and a moment later I heard them chattering happily, dragging their gear out onto the porch to ready it for tomorrow.

“You two could get to the bottom of it,” Raines said when they had gone, meaning Ellie and me. “What happened to Hayes, for example, why he vanished. All I need to know, and more. You could find out because everybody knows you, and they’ll talk to you.”

Ellie sat down across from him. “We’ve tried,” she said. “We got out Hayes's papers in the library, old issues of newspapers, everything we could find.”

It struck me, then, the other thing I’d been wondering about Raines. A zing of suspicion went through me as I thought just how unusual it was.

“How’d you know where to find the plastic wrap? Where I keep the butter and condiments and so on? And how in the world did you know the dog biscuits are on top of the refrigerator?”

But his answer was ordinary enough. “Oh, well.” He shrugged modestly. “That's not hard. Things are usually where you expect them to be, aren’t they? If you think about it.”

He let out a heavy sigh. “Only not this time. And the trouble is, I can almost smell it. You have no idea the difference it would make to me, and it's here, but I don’t have the tools to get at it,” he finished, his voice hardening in frustration.

Then he caught himself. “The information, I mean,” he added. “About Jared Hayes, to write my dissertation. Get the degree.”

“Jonathan,” I began.
Stop lying to me,
I was about to say to him.
Play straight with us and we might even be able to help you.

But at his mention of Hayes, the lights dimmed suddenly once more and flared again. Up in the attic, something thumped loudly and threateningly three times.

Monday whined. “It must be unnerving,” Raines said, angling his head sympathetically. “Having things so unsettled.”

I could have told him how unnerving it was. But Raines hadn’t confided anything, so I didn’t, either, and that worked out in the end about as well as it always does.

“Squirrels,” I said shortly. “They get into the attic and bump the wires and knock things over.” I was annoyed, so I didn’t feel like telling him anything but a few ground rules.

“Listen,” I began sternly. “You’re welcome to stay here—”

Back in the city, one of Raines's cousins had once saved my bacon. I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say that when Raines's relative finished chatting with the district attorney, my wealthy client no longer had a room reserved for him at a federal prison and I wasn’t being sued anymore.

“—as long as you want,” I finished.

Noting my tone, Raines eyed me contritely. And mad as I was at him, I still liked this strange creature with his gold shark's tooth necklace, his thick spectacles, and custom-tailored shirts.

“However,” I went on briskly, noting with satisfaction that my sit-up-and-listen voice still worked, “there are some things you’re going to do, and not do, from here on out.”

I pointed an index finger. “First, you will confine yourself to library research. Manuscripts, diaries, letters, and account books and so on, things Jared Hayes left behind in the house when he vanished.”

Raines opened his mouth to object, but I got in ahead of him; two could play that game. “But when the rubber meets the road, my friend Ellie White and I will be in the driver's seat, not you.”

I took a deep breath. “No more blundering around in Eastport demanding that people talk to you,” I went on. “If you need that sort of question answered, and I suspect that you will, ask it of us, and we will try to find the answer for you.”

Ellie's eyebrows went up in the
wow, good plan
expression she saves for when I have really outdone myself, and I felt the small burst of pride I always experience on these rare occasions.

Thank you,
I telegraphed at her. “Also, I want you to watch out in general about who you talk to, where you go. Not just when you want to know something, but all the time. And don’t argue,” I added as he made as if to object again.

“… tanks and regulators,” Sam said to Maggie on the porch. “And a few more dive flags.”

I closed my ears to this; the idea of Sam being underwater at all was just one of the many notions I was having to learn to ignore—some more successfully than others—in the process of cutting the apron strings.