Unhinged (13 page)

“Yup. And I’ve kept in touch with the landlady.” Tim grinned briefly sideways at me. “Wait till you meet her, she’s a sketch.” We turned onto a side street. “Almost there.”

“I hope she’s still up.” Now that we were here, I was even less certain than before that this was a good idea.

Tim barked a laugh. “Oh, she’s up, all right.”

We pulled over. “Listen, if you’re not ready to talk about your thing, maybe you can help me on something else,” he said as we got out of the car. “Wyatt Evert.”

The street was silent, dead-ending a block away. Beyond lay two hundred or so dark miles of fields, trees, and rivers before any other street began; in Maine, when you’re on the edge of town you are also on the edge of real wilderness.

“What about him?” We were going up a narrow walk leading to the steps of a glassed-in porch. The house was smaller than I had expected, with a grassy little rut of a side driveway and a one-car garage.

“I asked him what else he does besides the tour groups,” Tim replied as we mounted the steps. “For a feature we might run on the different jobs people do to string a living together around here.” He knocked and after a moment the porch light went on.

“Crooked answer?” I said as a face appeared at a window.

“Says he runs a nonprofit, it benefits endangered species,” Tim said as the inside door opened. A woman in slippers and fuzzy robe, her hair in a towel and cream all over her face, came onto the porch.

“Just a sec!” she called fretfully through the glass.

Tim’s absence of scorn aside, I was even sorrier that I had given in to what was obviously a truly dumb notion.

“Thing is,” Tim went on as the woman fussed, muttering, with the balky door lock, “I looked up the organization Evert mentioned, in the lists of nonprofits registered in any of the fifty states or with the federal folks, the IRS.”

The lock popped. A greasy face peered out doubtfully at us.

“No such outfit,” I guessed. You register nonprofits to get tax-exempt status, among other things. I’d done lots of them.

“Bingo,” he confirmed. Then: “Mrs. Sprague? It’s me.”

The woman frowned, still squinting. Just as I’d feared, she’d been getting ready for bed. And we hadn’t even called first; I wanted to sink through the sidewalk and disappear.

“Tim, let’s just go—” I began.

But then a huge grin, its toothlessness rendered irrelevant by its happiness, broke through the face cream.

“Thimmy!”
the woman shouted joyfully, and ushered us in.

Mr. Ash was a lovely man,” Sheila Sprague told us
fifteen minutes later. She’d put her dentures in, abolishing her lisp without diminishing her cracked, radiant charm.

“He was working for the road crew where they were blasting for the new bridge, down at Cherryfield.” Still wearing the face cream, she’d brought us into the parlor where she served us iced root beer and Ritz crackers with slices of processed cheese.

To my surprise, I was thirsty and starving. Mrs. Sprague beamed approval as I devoured crackers and slugged down the root beer, meanwhile taking in my surroundings.

Brown shag carpet covered the floor. The heavy furniture’s thick, sturdy upholstery was a hideous orange plaid, above it on the walls a collection of heavily framed paint-by-numbers scenes.
Reader’s Digest
condensed books lined up on a low shelf; a black china planter in the shape of a crouching panther, a philodendron straggling gamely from its back, stood on the TV below a wooden cuckoo clock whose strike of each quarter hour was prefaced by a cataclysmic whirring of internal machinery.

In short, it was crowded, crammed full of bric-a-brac, and so utterly, undemandingly comfortable I wanted to move right in. And I gathered I wasn’t the only one; a half dozen empty chairs crowded in a semicircle in front of the TV.

“All six of my gentlemen go to bed early,” Sheila explained to me. She was a sketch, all right.

A
sharp
sketch. If Ellie’s eyes were X-ray, this lady had CAT-scanners installed in her forehead. “They’re all working men, and need their rest. So I have the evenings to myself. For,” she touched a fingertip to her face while batting her skimpy lashes self-parodyingly at me, “my beauty routine.”

The house didn’t seem big enough to accept one tenant, much less six. “Mrs. Sprague keeps the rent down by boarding two to a room,” Tim told me. “Fellows here, mostly just getting going again.”

“Like you,” she agreed, beaming through the face cream. Her affectionate regard for him was obvious. “And just as I predicted, haven’t you done lovely for yourself? I knew that you would.”

She jumped up, her slippers padding away swiftly. “If you’d like to see Mr. Ash’s room, you’re welcome to. It’s just now come vacant again. Though I don’t know what you could find. He didn’t leave much, and it was quite a long time ago.”

Tim followed me as I followed her to a back stair. The kitchen smelled of Ajax, the floor’s linoleum covered with brightly woven rag rugs, the appliances quaint relics from five decades ago. A round-shouldered Frigidaire wheezed beside a Formica table, its six red leatherette-and-chrome chairs neatly pulled up to it.

Upstairs, she put a finger to her lips. The carpeted hall was dark except for the glow of the night-light in the bathroom, whose door stood ajar. “Let’s be mice, now,” she cautioned sweetly, opening a hallway door. “Everyone’s asleep.”

The cell she showed us was barely large enough to walk into. It featured a narrow bed, a dresser, and a tiny closet containing a few wire hangers. Another braided rug lay on the floor. She pulled a string to switch the bedside lamp on.

“This is a single room,” she said unnecessarily as I blinked at its small size. If she’d turned all her spare rooms into rentals, this one must’ve been the linen closet.

“I’ve rented it several times since Mr. Ash was in it,” she whispered. “But it’s just the same as when he left. He took all his things with him, of course, not that he had much. Not a man for a lot of possessions, Mr. Ash.”

She gestured at a shelf under the bedside table. “Except a few books. They’re still here. That was one funny thing. He asked me when he left if anyone ever came looking for him, to give them his books.”

I knelt to peer at them: Kessel’s
Handbook of Explosives
, a biography of Frederick the Great, and a grammar text:
Synonyms, Homonyms, and Antonyms
.

“I thought it was odd,” she added. “But harmless. Why don’t you take them along with you, dear?” she whispered.

I gathered them up. The handbook and the biography had the soft, handled feeling of books well read; the grammar felt crisp; the smell of a new, unopened binding rose poignantly from it.

Back downstairs, she had little more to tell us about Lian Ash. Quiet, hardworking. A gentleman; it was the term I’d have used about him, too. As for his past:

Mrs. Sprague put a gentle hand on my arm. “I don’t ask any of my tenants about that, dear,” she said. “For so many of them the past is what they’re trying to get over. You understand.”

She’d taken in the damage to my face without comment as if to demonstrate the wisdom of this policy. She was not, perhaps, as simple a woman as her decorating style suggested; the opposite, possibly. The moment passed; she was disappointed we couldn’t stay longer. She planned a snack of tomato soup and crackers, and wouldn’t Tim and I like to join her in it?

The soup sounded good, safe and normal like the rest of her kitsch-filled but oddly appealing little refuge. Still, I wanted to get home, call the hospital to check on Wade, and see Sam, who was probably home, too, by now. Ellie would be with him and both of them were certainly wondering where in the world I’d gotten to.

“After her soup she’ll make bag lunches for the boarders to take to work tomorrow,” Tim told me as we drove back down toward the center of Machias.

He’d hugged her warmly, heedless of the face cream. It was late, everything hushed and surreal-looking in the lights from gas station and convenience store lots, mostly empty.

“She helped you a lot, didn’t she? Mrs. Sprague.”

“Saved my life,” he agreed bluntly. “She started taking boarders after her husband died, get enough income so she wouldn’t lose the house. But now I think taking care of guys who forgot how to take care of themselves, guys on the skids, is what keeps her going.”

“Do they all turn out to be gentlemen, like she said?”

“Yep. Mrs. Sprague’s a sweetie, but she’s shrewd, knows how to pick ’em. In fact it was Lian Ash who said something to her once about getting her a gun, just in case. But nothing ever came of it.”

“Was Mr. Ash on the skids?”

He shook his head. “Worked all the overtime he could get and never spent a dime he didn’t have to. But it seemed he had what he needed.”

“So that’s how.”

Tim glanced a sideways question.

“The house he bought on the shore road,” I explained. “He was saving up for it, probably.”

“Oh. The down payment. Yeah.” A silence. Then:

“Doesn’t it bother you, Tim? Sitting in a bar every night?”

“No,” he replied easily. “I was never much of a bar drinker. I only drink alone. Drank,” he corrected himself, “alone.”

But then he changed the subject. “So was it a goose chase?”

“This trip? I don’t know. Probably it was.” There was another reason Tim had been willing to make it, I realized. A way not to be alone. “I didn’t get any questions answered, but I didn’t find out anything bad, either. Probably there’s a perfectly simple reason for what Lian Ash told me. And if Mrs. Sprague thinks he’s okay . . .”

“Yeah. She’s a good judge of character.”
I hope
, his tone added wistfully, on his own behalf.

He slowed for the S-curves just outside East Machias, then accelerated for the long run up the coast. We drove in silence a while longer, Tim lost in his thoughts and me in mine.

It was a Frederick the Great story that Mr. Ash had told me when I asked about his past. The Kessel handbook was an annual, a new one published every year; Sam had one for the demolition seminar he was going to, and a blasting handbook made perfectly good sense for a man with a job on a road crew, handling explosives.

The grammar book didn’t fit. But I’d spent half an hour in his presence, tops; not nearly enough, surely, to explain all his choices in reading material. “Some people aren’t good at recalling how long ago things happened,” I said.

“Sure,” Tim agreed. “And maybe he thought mentioning a stay in a boardinghouse that caters to recovering drunks wouldn’t boost your confidence in him.”

“That, too. But he asked me if falling off the ladder meant I would dislike heights even more than before. I just wish I knew how he knew
that
.”

Tim glanced over incredulously. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

“Well, mostly, I guess. Because the rest I can rationalize, but . . .”

“Hey, Jake? Seen yourself in a mirror lately? Anyone asked you how it happened?” Tim sounded amused.

“Well, no. Not around Eastport. Because . . .”

Because they already knew
. The whole town knew. Bob Arnold hadn’t given it a second thought; Purlie Wadsworth hadn’t even commented. As Sam would’ve said:
Doink
.

“Oh,” I said embarrassedly. “So I guess that explains it.”

“Yeah. Believe me, no one who falls off as much as you . . .”

“. . . enjoys going up,” I completed Tim’s sentence. And of course it was well known; in Eastport, what wasn’t? “So let’s say he walks into Wadsworth’s, mentions who he’s working for . . .”

“Purlie fills him in,” Tim agreed. “‘Geez, don’t let her go up any ladders.’ That, or he figured it out for himself. It’s not,” Tim finished, “exactly a stretch that if you’re not vastly skilled at something, maybe you don’t enjoy it.”

“Right. I guess not, huh? Okay, then,” I said unhappily.

I felt like an idiot; another simple explanation, and likely the truth. This trip had been a fool’s errand and while I was gone, anything could have happened. Suddenly I wanted to be home even more than before.

“Are Sam and Maggie serious?”

I blinked, jolted from my musings. “Serious about what?”

We were in Whiting already, passing between the general store and the white two-room schoolhouse that served this area to grade eight. Tim lifted one finger in a minuscule wave to the state cop idling in a squad car in the darkened lot beside the store.

“About each other,” he replied mildly, turning uphill into the last long stretch of wilderness before the turnoff to Eastport.

I glanced at him in surprise. “Maggie just joined the Quoddy Choristers,” he explained. “Singing group. Nice alto she’s got. I belong, too. I just wondered, that’s all.”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask her.” The notion of Maggie taking up with someone else gave me a pang. But it would happen sooner or later if Sam turned out to be foolish enough to let it.

Maggie was no beauty queen, any more than Mrs. Sprague; you had to look hard to notice loveliness that didn’t come out of a cosmetics ad. I sensed Tim had that kind of vision, though, that he’d tried the other kind of beauty and found it wanting.

But if not Tim, then someone else would come along to steal Maggie away from word pairs that sounded the same and Scrabble contests that went on for hours. After another long silence I said:

“About Wyatt Evert. You think he’s got some racket going?”

Tim frowned, taking the turn off Route 1 onto 190. It was the last leg of our journey. “Dunno. I think there’s more to his story, though. All that ecology crap he spouts, I think that’s a smoke screen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the environment.”

“Right,” I replied evenly. “And I’m not against banks. Just against bank robbery.”

He laughed, taking my point. The first thing any con artist working a charity racket said was, “How can you be against . . . ?”

Starving children, vanishing forests, the ozone layer. Fill in the blank: there was a racket to exploit it.

“Anyway,” Tim said as we crossed the causeway. Across the bay the lights of the Canadian cargo terminal shone whitely like airport beacons in the surrounding blackness of maritimes night. “I’m in no hurry. Want to be sure I’ve done my homework before I confront him.”