Triple Witch (36 page)

Wade put the heel of his hand to his forehead, “Oh no. Don’t tell me it was—”

“That’s right. Tim Mumford. When he was working, and his wife and kids were all alive. In the old days, before all Tim’s troubles arrived, and long before Ellie even knew him, Ken lived in that house. It’s nothing anyone bothers mentioning anymore, but people were talking about it, Ellie says, at Ken’s funeral. That’s how she found out.”

“Maybe Kenny went out there to have a look at the old place, before it was gone forever,” Wade said contemplatively.

“Thought he’d revisit what was lost when Tim went broke,” I agreed, feeling bad about it.

So many things are tied into money, it seems: getting it. Keeping it. Not having enough.

Especially that. “Instead,” I said, “he’d have met Baxter Willoughby. And once he did, everything else just … happened.”

Wade shook his head. “You know, if he hadn’t got caught, Ned would have ended up trying to take Ken’s boat out to hook up with a big vessel. Guy can’t even tie a decent slipknot, he’d have found out how bad he needed money. Bad enough to drown for.”

Just then my cell phone
thweeped
.

I dug it out and listened without saying anything, holding it for a moment to Wade’s ear so he could hear, too. Then, still without speaking, I pressed the disconnect tab, closed the phone up, and moved the little power switch to
off
.

“How is he?” Wade asked, having recognized the voice.

A call from Hargood Biddeford was getting to be a frequent event. Bunny was not only expecting; she was having twins, and Hargood was beginning to panic over the need for a bigger hutch.

“In a scramble as usual. Got out of gold, thinks the market’s too risky on account of the Asian factor—”

That was my punishment for aiming Hargood at Toyota.

“—now he wants to get into commodities. You know, things that people burn, build with, or eat. He wants to know if I know anything about hog bellies.”

Wade chuckled quietly. “And do you?”

“I know you can’t build with them. Which is more than Hargood knows.”

Actually, I knew a fair bit more than that. “But for now I think Hargood and his troubles can wait.”

“Yeah. Guess we’d better head ashore.” Wade began preparing to get the
Little Dipper
moving again.

“There was another thing I was wrong about,” I
said. “Why Ken never took any of that money and spent it.”

“Ken only spent what Hallie gave him or Willoughby paid him. Nothing more,” Wade said slowly.

“Even the money Ike had in his pocket when they caught him,” I agreed, “was legitimate. Ellie’s settling Ken’s affairs, and it turns out that Ken had started a bank account. Two hundred bucks, all withdrawn the day before he died. He’d been saving to pay the debt he owed Ike.”

“Which Ike would otherwise have taken out of Ken’s hide.”

“Correct. But even with that over his head, he didn’t touch any of Willoughby’s cash. And it was for the one reason that never even occurred to me.”

Wade started the
Little Dipper
’s engine; a pale burble of turbulence spread out on the moonlit water behind us.

“Ned told Arnold Ken didn’t even know he was running drugs. He was just doing what Hallie wanted, because he was in love. And he didn’t take the money,” I finished, “because it didn’t belong to him.”

Wade came over and stood with me at the rail, the boat just sitting there idling, poised between water and sky.

“He was,” I concluded, feeling that I was pronouncing Ken Mumford’s epitaph, “a decent guy.”

52
Back at my house, Ellie was waiting for me in the kitchen and the coffee was on, which I suppose should have alerted me.

“Here,” she said, putting a dish of strawberry shortcake in front of me on the red-checked tablecloth.

“I don’t need this,” I said, eyeing the whipped cream. Unlike Ellie, I do not burn five hundred calories just blinking my eyes.

“I got a call from Felicity a little while ago,” she said, ignoring my protest as she dug into her own shortcake.

The coffee was ready, and I poured us some. It was late, and Wade had gone straight up to bed; he’d be out on the water again in only a few hours.

“Felicity? As in Abbott-Jones? But I thought she was—”

“Right. In Lubec, getting rid of the rest of the grant money.”

Lubec was the next town down the coastline: small, isolated, and just as interested in grant money as Eastport.

“
And
on the way there, somebody told her about us, and about the murders,” Ellie added.

If there was one thing we hadn’t wanted Felicity knowing about, it was the murders. We didn’t think she would find them at all authentic or progressive. We’d kept quiet about them, and so, we had hoped and expected, would everyone else.

But now I guessed not. “So I suppose she’s changed her mind and decided Eastport’s too deadly to be deserving?”

Darn. And after all that work, too. In her dog bed, Monday yawned hugely and stretched, eyeing us with muzzy contentment, then turned over and went to sleep again.

“Oh, no,” Ellie replied. “She thinks it’s fascinating. She
loves
mysteries—on the phone, she actually sounded a little bloodthirsty.”

“Oh,” I replied, brightening. Yet another reason to like Felicity. “And was that,” I inquired, “the only reason she called? To congratulate us for being so fascinating?”

“Um, not exactly,” Ellie replied, “it seems that she
and her entourage had just visited the meat market in Lubec. You know the place I mean? And the guy who ran it?”

I knew, and I caught the past tense, too. And so in a manner of speaking had he, I guessed suddenly.

The market had been a good idea: organic beef, pork, some lamb, and a lot of poultry, all locally raised with no antibiotics or other chemicals in the feed. In a world that was worried about E. coli and mad cow disease, the fellow who’d owned the place had started looking like a genius ten minutes after the market opened.

“Somebody cut him up with a cleaver,” Ellie said. “Carved him, wrapped him, and put him in the walk-in freezer. Felicity thought we might be interested.”

Just then Victor strolled in, spied the shortcake, and made a dash for it; he was sleeping in his house but still eating at mine, until George finished modernizing his kitchen.

“You know,” he said seriously to me, “the cooking around here is awfully plain.”

Studiously, I turned my attention back to Ellie.

“And I am interested,” she went on, “because the thing of it is this: the victim’s wife has a garden. Flowers, vegetables, and—”

She paused, emphasizing the next part. “Herbs, some quite exotic. Exotic enough to use for murder.”

I began to see where she was going. “I get it. You think—”

“Murder?” Victor’s eyebrows knitted disapprovingly. “I don’t think you should get involved in any more—”

“Victor,” I said. “If you don’t shut up, there’ll be another one right here at this table. Okay?”

Victor swallowed shortcake. “Okay.”

Not that his cooperativeness had any hope, long-term. But it was fun while it lasted. Furthermore, he had located a pediatric research program that would
treat Ned Montague’s daughter’s rare kidney disease for free, and pay her travel costs.

And he had sat down with Sam and discussed the fake heart attack—not fully, and not very expertly, but I thought sincerely, and Sam was taking it that way, too. So for the time being Victor had bonus points.

“Let me get this straight,” I said to Ellie. “The butcher has been laid with the packages of chicken quarters in the freezer. And the winner of the arrest warrant is …”

I paused, touching my fingers to my forehead in parody of a mind-reading act. “The butcher’s wife.”

Victor blinked, his shortcake-laden spoon stopping halfway to his mouth. “How did you know that?”

“Because,” I replied meaningfully, “when a husband gets done in with a cleaver, it’s always the wife.”

“Oh.” He got up hastily. “You know, I think I’ll take this shortcake home with me. Give you girls a chance to talk.”

With that, he vamoosed.

“Maybe instead of a divorce you should have bought a carving knife,” Ellie commented. “Scare him into good behavior.”

“If I had, I’d be serving life without parole. So anyway, why is the wife doing it a problem?”

“Well, when they arrested her, she was holding the cleaver in her hand. And wearing a bloody butcher’s apron.”

“Sounds right to me.”

Ellie nodded. “But remember the Calais woman whose husband used to clobber her? Until she poisoned him to death? Or so the authorities were convinced.”

I remembered: the guy at the baked-bean supper. “But they couldn’t find any traces of poison in the food. Or at the guy’s house. Not anywhere. So—”

“So she got away with it.” Ellie looked down at her hands. “I am not supposed to know about this. But according to Berenice—”

Ah, yes, the delightful Berenice, lover of llamas and queen of the backyard psychotropics. I made a mental note to get more ginseng, next time I wanted to resemble a Fourth of July rocket.

“—the substance that was used in the poisoning—”

“—came from the garden in Lubec,” I finished.

I got up and went to the open window. “
But
if you’ve got a garden full of untraceable poison, why chop a guy up with a cleaver?”

“My point,” Ellie said, “precisely.”

Outside, the moon was setting behind the fir trees. A breeze moved, smelling of salt and woodsmoke.

“Maybe,” I offered, “we should try to find out.”

“Or maybe,” said Ellie, “we shouldn’t.”

From the dining room came a bright, musical little
ping!

Which in the end was how we decided.