Triple Witch (21 page)

This was a scheme. What he wanted was to torture me, and he had happened upon the perfect method.

“So,” Victor said, “I’ll just have to reconsider my options. Think it over. Take my time, reinventing myself.”

He smiled, hideously. “You won’t mind if I stay for a while longer with you and Sam, will you, Jacobia?”

Wade watched me carefully.

“Not at all,” I said, and a gleam of triumph lit in Victor’s eye, while Wade looked disappointedly away.

I took a deep breath. “Stay as long as you like. I
want to talk to you in private after dinner, though. We need to get a few things straight around here. About Sam, and about your behavior while you’re in my house.”

A silence descended as everyone—especially Sam, who looked thunderstruck—waited to see how Victor would react.

“Fine,” he agreed at last, blithely, as if whatever I might have to say to him couldn’t possibly be very important.

But, as a small smile curved the corners of Wade’s lips, we all saw Victor’s gaze waver a fraction.

Score one for me.

32
Later that night, the town had two burglaries and another mugging. By the time Hank Henahan got the ambulance back home again the local people had organized into citizen patrols, willing and able to stomp out everything from misdemeanors to major felonies.

Well, maybe not particularly able, I thought, peering out the guest-room window the following morning.

Victor and I had not after all had our fight scene; pleading a headache, he’d rushed upstairs after dinner.

Which was par for the course, for Victor, and precisely what I’d expected; when he knew you wanted to talk with him, he never wanted to, especially if you sounded determined. He wasn’t around now, either; somehow he’d managed to get up and out of the house without my noticing.

Frustrated, I scanned the street to see if I could find him, spotting instead Miss Violet Gage tottering up the hill with a long umbrella in her hand, gimlet-eyed and ready to bonk someone.

The menacing effect was spoiled, however, on account of her having put her corset on over her dress. She was frightening, all right, but not in the way she intended, and at the sight of her I went hastily out to meet her, and brought her inside.

“It’s all organized,” Miss Gage gasped flusteredly, gazing around my kitchen as if she might spy some most-wanted criminal, and bring him to justice. “Ned Montague has got a list, and he is going to assign us all to patrol our territories.”

I gave Miss Gage a cup of tea, and took the umbrella away from her; as long as she was holding it Monday would not come into the kitchen, not even to eat her breakfast.

“Nice doggy,” said Miss Gage.

I had spent the previous evening until past midnight in the cellar, working on the old shutters, so I was feeling toxic from the late night and also from the knowledge that my ex-husband was still under my roof instead of under a granite monument.

Pouring a cup of coffee, I sat down across from Miss Gage. She smelled of talcum powder, chamomile, and sassafras tea, and her face was as sweet as a sugar doughnut.

“Are you sure Ned meant you should personally go out chasing criminals? Because,” I added tactfully, “I should think that with your knowledge and awareness, your experience, you might be best utilized in the planning area. The strategy, and so on.”

Miss Gage looked gratified. “You are quite right … oh, what is your name, again?” She shook her head vexedly. “Never mind, it’ll come to me. But I must discharge my civic duty. Age is no excuse when one’s community is threatened. Our very way of life, my dear, is under attack.”

She drew herself up seriously. “No Gage has ever shirked his or her responsibility where defense is concerned,
not since those red-coated bastards marched in here and stole our freedom!”

She said it the Maine way—
bahstads
. “This,” she breathed dramatically, “is war!”

A button popped ringingly off her corset.

“Yes. Well. Probably it is,” I said. “But still, I can’t stand to see your talents wasted this way so I wonder,” I ventured, “if I might help.”

You had to go carefully with Miss Gage; she was a dotty old lady but not a bit stupid, and she knew when she was being inveigled.

“Y-e-es,” she drawled skeptically, eyeing me from under the brim of her big straw hat.

“My thought is, I might replace you on the front lines. Take on, as it were, the actual military portion of the activity.”

She lowered her eyelids. The effect was wickedly knowing and wildly attractive, reminding me that Violet Gage was the belle of the ball in that excellent year, 1932.

Meanwhile I do very much like intelligent old ladies, and the dottier the better. A little misarrangement in the corset department, I feel, is as nothing in the grand scheme of things.

“Freeing you,” I went on, “for the brain-power part of the program. Where Ned,” I added delicately, “might just require a bit of …”

“Shoring up,” she supplied crisply. “The boy is a fool.”

“Ah, yes. Well. That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. At any rate …”

I searched my mind, trying to think of some further way to persuade her that at her age, racketing around chasing juvenile delinquents or worse was as good a way as any to land herself in the hospital for a hip replacement; they did those, in Calais.

“And of course you would be doing me a great favor, too,” I went on, feeling that I was babbling, now,
and sure that at any moment I would insult her, or worse, hurt her feelings.

“Because you’re right, we must all do our duty, and I would not want to be accused of …”

“Quiet, girl. Quit blithering. I understand, and I accept.”

When I turned, she had taken off the hat and was carefully straightening the black grosgrain hatband. In the light slanting in through the kitchen window her hair was the color of an autumn leaf, red with white frost on it.

She placed the hat on her head and regarded the front of herself. “I don’t recall this dress lacing up this way. How,” she pronounced, “curious.”

Then she looked up at me, shrewdly and humorously, as if, having tolerated the quirks and missteps of others throughout her long life, she would now be as charitable about her own.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you might perform another small service. I seem to have left my glasses at home, or I would do it myself.”

“Of course, Miss Gage,” I said, feeling humbled and proud that she should trust me this way. “Stand up, and we’ll make the adjustment.”

So she stood, holding out her slim, graceful arms, her head held high with the big hat perched on top of it, while I undid the many tiny buttons of the corset. When I had finished I put it into a paper shopping bag for her, and she received it gravely.

“I believe,” I added, “that at some time I must have borrowed your umbrella.”

Miss Gage, as we both knew, never lent her umbrella.

“Thank you.” She smiled graciously, accepting it. “And now I must go home, and prepare for the mission. Plans and strategies, attacks and counterattacks.” She made way for the door.

“Meet at the corner of Shackford Street,” she instructed,
“eight sharp. Mind you’re not late. Bring a flashlight. A heavy,” she added with considerable charming menace, “flashlight.”

But at the door, she paused suddenly. “Who is that man?” she asked. “Not Wade Sorenson,” she added. “Everybody knows him.”

They not only knew him; they knew he and I were an item and had been for nearly two years.

“The one I mean is so,” Miss Gage hesitated, “…  dubious-looking.”

Ah, that one. “That,” I told her, “is my ex-husband.”

“Ex-husband?” she repeated.
“Ex?”
She hefted the shopping bag with the corset in it as if weighing the implications.

Then, decisively, she came to her conclusion, one that buoyed me all through the rest of that long day, and into the frightening night.

“Smart girl,” Miss Violet Gage said.

33
That evening at the corner of Shackford and Middle Streets, a small group of citizens bent on defending Eastport against a crime wave had already gathered. As promised, Miss Gage had supplied a list of territories matched to the volunteers, and Ned Montague passed these around with much harrumphing and bossing.

Ellie and I drew a plum route: out South End to Sodom Wharf, back County Road to Hawkes Avenue, up High Street, and home. If we saw anyone or anything suspicious, Ned ordered pompously, we were not to try to handle it ourselves; we were to go to the nearest house and phone Bob Arnold, who would come in the squad car.

So we set off, heading first through a low, hilly area of apple trees and lupine, the bay glittering in the moonlight on our left and the railway bed on our right. The tracks were long gone but the wooden ties still lay in the earth, and the night was so silent you could almost hear the engine chuffing as the eye-beam of its headlight rounded the curve, strafing through the foliage.

Near Johnson’s Marina we paused to look down at the lights of town, on a backdrop of water and twinkling stars. Here and there flashlights of other patrol members glowed briefly as they moved among the quiet houses.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said, gesturing at them. “They’ll do it for a while, but pretty soon people will go back to normal life. And even if they don’t, we don’t want to patrol the town, do we? We want a town we don’t have to patrol. The way,” I finished, “it used to be.”

“That’s what George said, too,” Ellie responded quietly.

From a distance, the flashlights resembled candles. We walked in silence a little longer. Then:

“Ken let me drive,” she spoke up again suddenly. “A long time ago, he let me drive his car.”

She smiled in the moonlight, remembering. “It was a Mustang convertible, and he had fixed it all up. It was red, and it looked just like new. Kenny was a pretty good scrounger,” she added, “even back then, and Tim hadn’t lost his job, yet. So there was a little money between them.”

Across the bay, the lights on Campobello spilled out onto the water like streams of metallic paint.

“So we went for a ride, up to Woodland, out on Route 214. And after a while, he pulled the car over and said we should switch places. It was a night like tonight. Cool and bright and you could look right on up into forever, it seemed like.”

At the foot of Pleasant Street, Mavis Gantry’s garden spread over the humped-up earth and smooth granite shoulders of rocks overlooking the water, the silvery mounds of the succulent plants iridescent under the moon. Paths of stones and beach glass wound through the garden, shining rivulets among the plants.

“So you switched places,” I prompted as we climbed the hill to Poverty Rock. From here, you could see north to New Brunswick and south past the islands, their dark shapes jagged with firs, to the lights of Lubec afloat on water bright as pewter.

“We did,” Ellie said. “And I thought he would be nervous. He knew I’d never driven before. I thought he’d sit close, so he could grab the wheel if he needed to.”

At High Street we turned left, toward Sodom Wharf and the ruins of the old salt works. The structure’s dark, oblong shape was jagged at the roofless top where courses of crumbling bricks had fallen away, pierced with silver rectangles where light from the water reflected up through the empty, ominous-looking windows.

“But he didn’t,” Ellie said. “He sat back, looking at the sky.”

We walked on, until at the curve in the road we stopped, catching our breaths and looking out over the water.

“I drove,” she continued, “all the way to Caribou that night. It was dawn by the time we got there, and my father was wild when I finally called him. He made me,” she remembered, “put Ken on the phone, to yell at him, too.”

From the curve of High Street, the old salt works is the only human construction you can see, three stories high and as big around as half a city block. In its bleak and barren decrepitude, the salt works looks as if the shell of a building from a major city has been transported
here to this pristine seascape, for what reason no one could imagine.

“So your father talked to Kenny.” Now we were on County Road: farm fields gone to grass, fences of rusting barbed wire strung on leaning cedar posts, an empty cellar hole or a pair of pine trees marking the spot where a working homestead used to be.

“He talked to him, all right,” Ellie said. “Lots of ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ out of Kenny. And then there was a long time when Kenny just listened, while my dad about chewed his ear off.”

Crickets chirped in the sweet-smelling darkness. Ellie’s dad and her mother, too, were gone, now, buried at Hillside.

“And Kenny,” Ellie went on, “when he was done listening to my dad, he said to him, very respectfully: ‘Sir, I don’t know if you noticed. But it’s July, and it won’t be July for very long. Pretty soon it will be winter. And it was an awful nice night.’ ”

We passed Vernal Potter’s red cottage, hunkered down amid stacks of scrap lumber all sorted for size and condition. Vernal’s old coon hound, Rascal, bayed a greeting as we went by.

“It was, too,” Ellie said wistfully. “An awful nice night.”

Ahead, the lights of the convenience store at the corner of County Road signaled the approach of civilization. We’d seen nothing suspicious, and I thought again that we probably wouldn’t.

“Was your father still mad when you got back?”

“No. He’d told Ken to tell me everything was okay, and that I should eat a good breakfast before we came home. So we did,” she finished, laughing. “Sausages and eggs. We were
starved
.”

Her laughter faded, and I knew what she was thinking: no more nice summer nights or big breakfasts for Kenny Mumford.

We turned onto Purcell Avenue, a narrow, winding
road leading down into a little hollow of older wooden houses with mostly older cars parked on the street out front. Here and there a few lights still burned in the kitchens, but by now it was past ten and folks were turning in for the night.

The street had the hushed, preliminary feeling of the moments just before a dream, or a nightmare. “So basically you’re avenging him,” I said. “Is that it? By trying to find out who?”