Trap Door (5 page)

“Hey, who’s that?” Ellie wondered aloud suddenly. We were passing the fish pier with the two big tugboats, the
Pleon
and the
Ahoskie,
snugged up against the pier’s black rubber bumpers. Under the pier loomed the forty-foot wooden pilings, thickly draped in seaweed and encrusted with generations of barnacles, that kept the pier’s deck dry at the highest of tides.

Today at the pier’s far end a man stood, staring out at the water and, to judge by the movement of his lips, saying something to it. I recognized him as Bert Merkle, a crusty old character who regularly reported seeing UFOs among the junk cars, rotting boat carcasses, empty metal barrels, and bundled newspapers that formed a vast wasteland in his backyard.

But that wasn’t who Ellie meant. On one of the green park benches across from the pier sat another fellow; not a local guy, and it was still a little too early in the season for tourists.

“Don’t know,” I told her as we drew nearer. But I’d been eyeing him too, because…

No, it couldn’t be. The guy had thinning hair, dark horn-rims, a white shirt with an open collar and the sleeves rolled up, and a nice pair of flannel slacks.

His oxblood loafers had tassels on them. “Oh my God,” I said softly, feeling my heart pound. He took the horn-rims off and his profile without them was the giveaway.

“That’s Jemmy Wechsler.”

Ellie knew the name; I’d talked about him enough over the years. But she stayed cool, not doing anything until she knew what I wanted.

“Turn around,” I said at last, so she made a neat three-point reversal against the curb in front of the Moose Island General Store’s corner doorway and we went back.

When we reached the fish pier parking lot, Jemmy was on his feet waiting for us. As we pulled alongside he swung up into the pickup’s backseat as calmly as if murderous mobsters hadn’t been hunting him practically forever, hoping to collect the price on his head by the simple method of delivering it on a plate.

“Jemmy,” I began, “what the hell are you… ?”

Back in the city, before I married Victor and had Sam and became a hotshot money professional, Jemmy and I were pals. In fact, I owed everything to him, since if he hadn’t taken me under his wing when he did I’d be dead.

Because sure, I was a cautious kid. You couldn’t grow up the way I had—in rural hill country with my mom’s folks, who always looked as if they were sucking on sourballs and whose family life was the equivalent of a sackful of rabid cats—without learning that.

But when I ran away at fourteen I still had very little idea of what to be cautious about, which in a nutshell is why the life expectancy of even the wariest young girl on her own in the city is measurable in weeks. “… doing here?” I finished lamely.

Jemmy smiled. He’d had extensive dental work, bright white choppers replacing the stained, crooked originals, and now I saw he’d undergone some facial surgery, too. Cheeks, chin, even hair implants…

“Jake,” he said, ignoring my question. “How are you?”

Close up, I couldn’t even have said what it was that I’d recognized so surely and almost instantly; something around the eyes, maybe, a look of amusement mingled with a clear-sighted awareness that the world’s a perilous place.

It was what had made me trust him back when I was a teenager and Jemmy was an experienced, twenty-eight-year-old man of the world: that unlike any of the other adults I’d met since stepping off a Greyhound into the concrete jungle, he never even bothered pretending any differently.

“When did you get here?” The last time I’d seen him was a couple of years earlier. He’d been racing away from Eastport on a boat, until the boat blew up. The event saddened me greatly but not long after it I received an e-mail from him, suggesting that rumors of his death in the blast had been exaggerated.

Faking his own death had been his only option. The problem was an enormous sum of money that he’d stolen from some guys who hadn’t exactly been known for their forgiving natures.

Or for faulty memories. So if Jemmy was here now all of a sudden, it meant that somewhere else must’ve become terribly unsafe. And
that
meant…

Trouble,
Ellie’s eyes said as she glanced briefly sideways at me.
Big trouble
.

Jemmy didn’t answer. “See that guy?” he asked.

We were passing a new, small bookstore started up by recent transplants from Portland in one of the old two-story storefronts on Water Street. Called Mainely Murder, the store looked tantalizing and I planned a session of browsing as soon as possible.

But right now another sight was even more interesting to me. In front of Mainely Murder stood Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, a plump, pink-cheeked fellow with thinning blond hair, an amiable expression, and rosebud lips, wearing a cop uniform.

With him was the guy Jemmy had pointed out: fiftyish, gray hair clipped short on a bullet-shaped head, a no-nonsense look about him that I happened to know he deserved. “Sure, Jemmy, I see him. That’s—”

It was Walter Henderson, Eastport’s lowest-profile but perhaps most controversial Person From Away. A year earlier Walter had blown into town and immediately bought up the best of Moose Island’s remaining shorefront. Then he’d built himself a McMansion on it, huge and ostentatious as hell.

Or so I’d heard; I hadn’t seen the place myself. “Uh-huh,” Jemmy agreed quietly.

“Ellie, pull over.” She looked questioningly at me but did as I asked, into the tiny gravel parking lot of the Snack Shack. Inside the low metal Quonset building, Bodie Wanamaker hovered behind the counter displaying today’s newspapers.

It was damp at the cottage this time of year, and without fresh newspaper it would take an age to get a decent fire going. Besides, I suddenly wanted a few words with Bodie; that is, in the unlikely event that I could get more than one.

“Morning,” he uttered unsmiling, his gnarled hands spread flat on the counter between the cash register and the lottery ticket machine.

“Good morning, Bodie.” I picked up one of the papers while trying to think of how to wangle an answer out of the store’s famously silent proprietor.

“Nice day,” I tried. Bodie was somewhere in his eighties, with a bald freckled scalp and wattled neck, but without any of the mellowing that great age is said to confer on people. Wade said that somewhere under all that dour Yankee flint beat a heart as warm and tender as a hockey puck.

No answer from Bodie. “I see Bob Arnold’s taking complaints on the street nowadays,” I hazarded.

More silence greeted this. “I wonder what Walter Henderson is complaining about,” I tried again, angling my head toward the harbor. “Down street,” I added, that being how the locals would’ve described the direction I was indicating.

Bodie eyed me, unpersuaded by my stab at the local lingo. His thin pink lips, pressed tightly together like two slices of unidentifiable lunch meat, parted reluctantly.

“You a-goin’ to buy that there newspaper,”—
pay-pah,
the Maine way of saying it—“or just stand there a-maulin’ it with your fingers?”

Fing-gahs
. “I’m going to buy it, Bodie,” I gave in. So much for a little advance notice of what was on Walter Henderson’s mind this fine morning.

Although I already had a feeling I might know. “You’re Ellie White, aren’t you?” Jemmy was asking her when I got back in the truck.

She nodded at him in the rearview while she took the turn onto Washington Street. “You’re as pretty as Jake told me,” he offered smoothly.

“Mm-hmm” was her unimpressed reply. We passed the massive granite-block post office building, the Arts Center comfortably housed in the old Baptist church—the congregation had a modern new building now, and an acre of parking on the edge of town—and headed uphill on our way off the island.

Behind us in my mind’s eye Bob Arnold went on listening to an obviously unhappy monologue being issued by Walter Henderson, who hadn’t so much as glanced at us as we passed. But…

Jemmy’s gaze remained mild. “Ellie, can you drive faster?” he inquired casually.

He didn’t have to ask twice.

Professor David DiMaio

Miskatonic University

Providence, Rhode Island 03666

Dear Dave,

Just got a hurry-up note from the Eastport woman and I’m not sure what—or how much—to tell her. Still recovering from opening the parcel and seeing the old book, actually. I know we always said there was a chance of this happening, that under the proper conditions real physical evidence might’ve survived. But to see the thing, hold it in my hands—!

Unless—could it be a forgery? Some sort of elaborate hoax? It would take a lot of doing and she doesn’t seem the type, but I’ve enough sad experience in that department to wonder. Anyway, drop a line when you can. I know finals and graduation probably still have you hopping, but once things calm down Lang and I would love to see you.

And—Dave, take pity on me and let me know what’s what with that damned book. It’s making me nervous.

Best!

Horace

Jemmy rode quietly as we sped over the curving causeway
toward the mainland, with Passamaquoddy Bay heaving deep blue and whitecapped on our right and the calmer, paler sand-and-water expanse of Carryingplace Cove to the left. It was low tide. Gulls swooped and flapped among smaller, delicate-legged terns moving in flocks on the gleaming clam flats.

“You look different,” I said to Jemmy.

“Yeah, I’ve been transforming myself. No disguise like a surgical disguise,” he added matter-of-factly. Glancing into the rearview mirror, he ran a hand over his shiny forehead.

“Next time they’re going to give me more hair,” he added with a lilt of anticipation.

He’d started balding in his twenties. “Will you look at that?” he said, eyeing himself admiringly. “Joan Rivers’d kill for that jawline, wouldn’t she?”

He’d always been vain. But also realistic: “Someday I’ll go back, though, have the surgeon take out the implants and put it all the way it was before,” he went on. “In a heartbeat I’ll look like that guy in the story about the painting, that Dorian Gray.”

He laughed then, just making conversation; about himself of course. He’d always been that way, too easily entertained by his own cleverness. The thing about Jemmy, though, was that he made you feel clever right along with him.

Except sometimes. Like now, for instance. What the hell was going on? “Sorry to hear about Victor,” he said in a completely different tone.

I didn’t know how he’d heard about Victor. But Jemmy had his methods. Must have, to stay alive this long. Also, he’d despised Victor.

“Thanks,” I said. “It was very fast.” My ex-husband had been a brain surgeon and he’d died of a brain tumor so virulent that it belonged in a horror movie.

“Not that it felt fast when it was happening,” I added. For the thousandth time since his death I averted my thoughts from what Victor had been reduced to in those final days.

“Yeah. Well. He must’ve had his good points,” Jemmy conceded generously.

This was so transparently not what Jemmy had ever thought of Victor that I laughed aloud, and the mood lightened.

Mine did, anyway. Ellie just kept driving, as fast as she dared through the speed trap just over the causeway, then faster, her gaze fixed stonily on the road ahead. When we got to Route 1 she waited for a log truck to pass, then turned north.

“So,” he began as she stomped the accelerator again; the truck took off as if supercharged.

I shut up, hung on, and let Jemmy talk. “So listen, Jacobia, I hate to put you to any trouble but the truth is, I need a place to hunker down for a while,” he said.

As if I hadn’t come to that conclusion already. “Guys who’re looking for me got a whiff of me back where I was before,” he added.

By “whiff,” he could’ve meant anything from “I had a funny feeling” to “a slug from a .38-caliber automatic made a whizzing sound as it passed through what’s left of my hair.”

The road wound through the forest, deep evergreen mingled with stands of gray-trunked hardwood and thorny bramble thickets. The leaves weren’t out yet, so the undergrowth looked deceptively penetrable. But even now, any more than a dozen or so yards off the pavement and you could get lost so badly you might never find your way out again.

Another eighteen-wheeler, this one loaded with pulp from the paper mill twenty miles north, roared by in the opposite direction on its way to the loading docks in Eastport. Six inches of clearance between our fender and its massive spinning tire was apparently regarded by Ellie as plenty; she didn’t flinch.

But in the truck’s buffeting backwash she spoke up. “How’d that happen? Them getting a whiff, I mean.”

Jemmy shook his head ruefully. “Electronics. Guys who want me, they’ve got these programs, watch the e-mails to and from all a person’s contacts.”

That was so clearly and massively a crock, I didn’t bother commenting. First of all he didn’t use e-mail anymore; he wasn’t stupid. And second, he didn’t have any contacts. In the past couple of years he’d become as isolated as an asteroid in space.