Triple Witch (35 page)

I remembered the overflowing trash cans out at Ned’s place. But Al Rollins had just collected. The trash wouldn’t have been there if Ned hadn’t been disposing of it some other way. Dumping it, for instance, illegally.

“You suspected him all along, didn’t you?” I asked Arnold. “That’s why you stuck so hard to saying you thought it was Ike. And why you downplayed my getting shot at. So Ned, here, wouldn’t suspect he was already on the hot seat, and maybe take off before you could get him dead to rights.”

Arnold shrugged. “Something like that. Because look: after the boat’s run aground, later the tide comes in, frees the boat up, she’s found drifting. So I asked myself, who around here could ground a boat like that? A scrape’s one thing but nobody hits hard enough to make such a dent on purpose. Because sure, it floats now, but sooner or later it’ll cost money to fix. And when I added up two and two, Ned kept making four. The receipt only put the frosting on it.”

Arnold glanced at Ellie, meanwhile giving Ned a small shove. “ ’Course, it didn’t hurt, you mentioning Willoughby to Clarissa, then I find out who’s driving the truck for him. Ned being hooked up with Willoughby
and
being the lousiest boat handler in Washington
County
and
being a guy who will pollute the whole world with his trash, just to save two lousy bucks a week …”

He sighed. “Come on, buddy. And if you’re thinking of doing anything else stupid, keep in mind that I’m carrying my service revolver. I don’t want,” he added with quiet emphasis, “any more prisoners escaping.”

“Hey, Ned,” I called as they prepared to depart.

I couldn’t help it; I just had to know. “How’d the llamas get into the money?”

Because first it was out on Crow Island, and after that the cops had it, for evidence. It had been a couple of days between the time that money was at Willoughby’s, and the llama spat it at Ned. So …

Ned turned, replying bitterly. “They didn’t. That slime-gob you saw on me the other night? And I knew it, I
knew
you’d seen it, and I
knew
it would get you going. Both of you are just so damn nosy. But I couldn’t
do
anything about it—”

His fists clenched in thwarted fury. “It wasn’t even Willoughby’s cash on my sweater. That was
my
money. I’d dropped a dollar bill I was planning to use for the tolls, on the way to New York. One of ’em grabbed it. Chewed it, and—”

Nothing like a well-aimed spitball to ruin your day. And, in Ned’s case, your whole life.

He looked poisonous. “It was the llamas I should’ve used the damn rifle on, not—”

Then he stopped, realizing what he’d almost said.

“Everybody gets away with everything. Everyone but me,” he complained on his way out the door.

I could have argued the point. For one thing, I was going to be in a lot of trouble about Willoughby, once it got sorted out exactly how he’d died. I was betting on involuntary manslaughter, and although under the circumstances I would probably be off the hook about it eventually, getting off would be no picnic.

More sobering, though, was the growing knowledge that I would never be off the hook about it with myself.

And at that moment—and ever since; not a day goes by that I don’t think about Baxter Willoughby—the only one I wanted to talk to about it was Kenny Mumford.

Even now I remember him downtown on a Sunday morning, parked on the bench in front of Wadsworth’s hardware store, red-eyed and miserably hung over. Thinking, maybe, about some of the things he had done, maybe even wanting to change them.

Wishing; knowing he couldn’t.

I think Kenny would understand.

50
The Fourth of July celebration was muted that year, by the murders and by the arrest of Ned Montague. We didn’t have the pirate-battle tableau, either, on account of Fake Death having turned out not to be so fake, after all. And finally, on the morning after Ken Mumford’s funeral, Felicity Abbot-Jones turned out not to be what any of us had expected.

“Fishing boats,” she noted, glancing with approval at the vessels bobbing in the little boat basin.

She was a large, gorgeously flamboyant woman of fifty or so, with flaming hennaed hair, blue eyes peering from behind thick-lensed tortoiseshell glasses, and a brisk manner.

“Real working ones, not just rich men’s toys. How,” she finished, making a note in her notebook, “authentic.”

Driven by Ellie, accompanied by me, and not seeming to notice the discomforts of Ellie’s old Land Rover, Felicity directed us to Estes Head, where the construction
of a brand-new, 635-foot dock for container vessels was nearly finished, the men working on it earning triple-time on account of the holiday.

Pile drivers thudded, cranes swung on flatboats, and trucks beetled hurriedly around the massive site; the Estes Head project was thoroughly modern, and Ellie and I held our breath.

“Progress.” Felicity jotted appreciatively in her notebook. “The nineteenth century was an age of progress, you know. Oh, yes, this is
most
encouraging.”

I looked at Ellie, who carefully didn’t look at me, so as not to burst into giggles. We’d been prepared for a gargoyle who would deprive us of indoor plumbing, any and all conveniences that ran on electricity, and central heat, but now it seemed we should have hurried to install Victor’s Jacuzzi.

Next we proceeded to Prince’s Cove, where from a barge near the fish pens men hefted sacks of salmon food, tossing them onto rafts from which the food would be scattered to the salmon swimming below. Felicity observed with interest an activity that amounted to farming the ocean, an enterprise hardly conceived of in the 1800s.

“Very,” she commented, “ingenious.”

Just then a jalopy
ooh-ooh-gahed
into the turnaround just above the cove. In the old car were Tommy Daigle and my son, who seemed to have recovered admirably from his near-death experience.

Oo-ooh-gah
, the jalopy’s horn blatted again. The car varoomed out the drive with a clatter of loose fenders, a clank of rotted tailpipe, and a rumble of old, almost certainly illegal muffler.

“Young people,” Felicity breathed, turning to gaze happily at us. “How delightful for you.”

She jotted in her notebook again, while Ellie and I glanced at one another in amazement.

“I am
so
glad,” Felicity said as we drove back
toward town, “that you have not put on an inauthentic false front for me.”

Considering that all of the town’s home businesses had taken down their commercial signage, that all TV satellite dishes had been covered, moved, or camouflaged, and that the computer with its public Internet connection, located in Peavey Library, had been replaced with an old manual typewriter salvaged from a yard sale, I thought this was not strictly true.

On our way up Water Street, we passed a kiosk on the library lawn; in it, Corey Banks’s mother was selling bottles of Clean-All, the spot-removing formula she had invented. Ordinarily, this might not have been the most ingenious marketing strategy. But she had added a twist:

Nearby, Corey was busily cleaning the trunk of a Cadillac, using his mother’s cleaning solution. Everyone in town knew what he was cleaning out of it, too: cat droppings. From the sidewalk, little Sadie Peltier looked on in a fury, stomping her foot and shaking her fist at passersby, an unwitting advertisement for the miracle cleaner.

Also on the lawn was a miniature French poodle, pure white and without a trace of any paint on it; with the animal, feeding it tiny dog biscuits, sat Clarissa Dow.

Clarissa waved happily at me as we went by, and so did Mrs. Banks; the cleaning solution was selling like hotcakes. Corey did not look so pleased, but I figured he would cheer up later, when he found out about the college football scouts who were coming to look at him.

Noting the boy’s size and quickness and his obvious need for direction, Bob Arnold—an alumnus, to my surprise, of Purdue—had made a couple of phone calls. He’d also sat with Corey while Corey suffered through heroin withdrawal, and arranged the boy’s counseling and medical follow-up.

Like Arnold had said: in Eastport when you need help somebody will help you.

“Isn’t that enterprising?” Felicity approved as we passed the cleaning-solution kiosk; so far, so good. But there was another hurdle yet to clear: we were about to drive past my house.

Turning onto Key Street, I got a clear, heartsick look at the results of the shutter project. George, Sam, and Wade had worked until nearly dawn getting them up there; it was not until close to four in the morning that I had heard the extension ladder being lowered, signaling the end of their labors.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t see very well while they were working, because it was so dark, and as a result they’d hung the shutters upside down, so that when it rained the water would run
in
through the louvers instead of
out
.

As a system for irrigating nineteenth-century clapboards—leading, eventually, to their becoming unpaintable and having to be replaced with (gasp) vinyl siding—it was perfect, and I had no doubt that Felicity would notice the problem immediately.

“Stop,” the dictator of historical correctness demanded. “Will you
look
,” she breathed, “at
that
.”

Miserably, I gazed at the ridiculous shutters. They could be taken down and rehung, of course. The problem, Wade had assured me with some chagrin, could be easily corrected.

Just not in time for Felicity’s visit. “I know they’re not quite
proper
,” I began, then realized: she wasn’t looking at the shutters at all.

She was staring at the house down the street: the one with the double parlors, separate entrance, and wide pillared front porch. While we were out, the For Sale sign had come down, replaced by a white wooden placard hanging from two new gleaming brass chains.

In black lettering, severe and dignified, the placard read: Victor Tiptree, M.D., Physician & Surgeon.

Felicity squinted through her glasses, the lenses of which were thick as Coke bottles. “A doctor,” she breathed, gratified. “This is an excellent development. A doctor in town.”

Given who the doctor was, I didn’t feel so sure. I thought that, given a choice, the townsfolk would have picked an old-fashioned general practitioner, complete with a black bag and kindly manner, over a high-tech neurosurgeon with a screw loose.

But Felicity was convinced. “Industry. Progress. Young people. And,” she finished, “a doctor, setting up practice here.”

Content, she sank into the Land Rover seat, so uncomfortable that it could have doubled as an instrument of torture. But she didn’t seem to mind; in fact, she seemed to enjoy it. She was, I was coming to realize, an enjoying type of person.

“I believe I must give Eastport my highest recommendation,” Felicity said.

Then she glimpsed the front of my old house: bright white clapboards, crisp, dark green trim, and green shutters, each and every one of them clearly and obviously upside down.

Felicity blinked. Her forehead creased faintly. She adjusted her thick-lensed glasses, then tried peering over them without success.

“Lovely,” she murmured obliviously. “Just lovely.”

She turned to me. “Now,” she pronounced, “where is this young man who wants to talk about a boat show? And where are the lemon squares I’ve been hearing about, and something called a Saturday Night Special?”

We drove on.

51
That evening, Wade and I went out for a moonlight ride on his boat, the
Little Dipper
.

“So,” he said, draping an arm over my shoulder. “Looks like old Victor’s really decided to stick around.”

On the calm water, the moon’s reflection lay flat as a disk of silvered paper. “Uh-huh. He’s discovered the pleasures of being a big fish in a small pond.”

Which wasn’t, I supposed, very charitable; Victor had saved Peter Mulligan’s life.

Wade’s arm squeezed around me. “Don’t worry. If he’s planning to get a neurosurgery department going up at the hospital, he’ll be too busy to be a fly in your ointment.”

“I suppose,” I said, not feeling convinced. “But I’m never going to get things straight with him, am I? He’s always going to be … unfinished business.”

“If you could’ve got it straight with him, Jacobia, you’d probably still be married to him.”

Which was a good point.

“And,” Wade went on, “he
is
out of the guest room. I guess that’s as much progress as you can expect to make at one time, with Victor.”

Which was also true. “Has Sam said anything more to you about Yale?” Wade asked.

“Not yet.” Another letter had come, detailing Yale’s program for making its studies accessible to dyslexic students.

A whole new world; maybe he’d want to try it.

And maybe he should.

“What,” Wade spoke up again after a little while, “ever happened to the dog?”

“Cosmo? He’s back in the kennel in Portland where he came from in the first place. Arnold called every police K-9 unit in Maine until he found its original owner.”

To our north, the light at Deer Island flashed steadily.
“If I’d thought about it more, I’d have realized the dog tied Ken Mumford to Willoughby,” I said. “Because Cosmo wasn’t just any dog. He was an expensive dog. It took big bucks, to buy him.”

Wade nodded thoughtfully. “Willoughby equipped Ken with a dog to help guard the money when it was in Ken’s possession. But what about Ike Forepaugh? How’d he ever hook into it? And how did a guy like Willoughby know Ken Mumford at all?”

The dark shape of a minkie whale slid gleamingly out of the water, then vanished again into its own cold, fluid element.

“Ike showed up to get the money Ken owed him. When Ken got killed, suspicion naturally fell on this newly-arrived famous bad guy. Which worked fine for Ned, as long as Ike stayed missing and presumably on the run. So Ned made that happen. As for Willoughby knowing Ken …”

I took a deep breath, let it out again; this part was sad. “Willoughby’s house. That he’s remodeled, so you can’t even see what it used to be? Guess who it used to belong to, back when you and Ellie were just little kids and Ken was a few years older?”