Unhinged (15 page)

Monday gazed at Mr. Ash for a long moment, then lifted her paw and deposited it in his hand as I stared in astonishment. She was a wonderful dog but she could no more do tricks, even simple ones, than I could jump off a building and fly.

Until now. Abruptly, I came to my final decision: not to confront Lian Ash about the books or anything else. He was working on my cellar, not marrying into my family; whatever questions his past might’ve held, the answers could remain there, too.

“We’ll stay,” Mr. Ash amended as Ellie came up behind us. “Me and the critters’ll hold down the fort.” I had the odd feeling that if he’d known about my snooping he might not have minded, that he’d have understood my reason and sympathized.

Still, I hoped he wouldn’t find out. “Got work to do,” Lian Ash said peaceably. “I like work. Always have.”

He looked at Ellie and me, his mild, utterly benevolent gaze as unreadable as the drifting fog.

“And,” he added, “I like it here.”

Five minutes later
Ellie and I slid into a booth at the Waco Diner: smells of coffee, hash, bacon, and eggs, amplified by heat from the energetically hissing radiators. Red leather stools at the counter were occupied by burly men in coveralls, sweatshirts, and rubber boots, devouring their morning meals.

Chilled by the fog, I shivered gratefully in the warmth of the booth. Ellie looked refreshed, her eyes glowing with renewed energy. But Ellie grew up here, where people wear T-shirts on the first day of spring no matter how hard it is snowing.

And
there
was a bad thought: What if the storm didn’t come as rain? What if it came as . . .

“Snow,” Edna Barclay predicted dourly, setting mugs in front of us. “I’ve seen snow in Eastport in every month but August.”

Eastpawt
. Edna’s hair this week was a particularly vivid electric blue-white, her bracelets jangling, her eyes ringed with mascara, and her lipstick vivid.

“Nah,” one of the men at the counter contradicted her. “Wind out of the south, gonna swing around. You wait, that sucker hits outta the northeast? Man, she’s gonna
blow
.”

“We’ll see,” Edna muttered darkly. After thirty years at the Waco she still believed she might be discovered and wafted off to her rightful place in Hollywood, in the pantheon of the stars.

But not today. “Video’s done for,” she announced gloomily. “Boys over to the boat school heard McCall’s lost his financing,” she added, and went back behind the counter.

“There goes my paying guest,” I moaned to Ellie. Roy McCall’s presence had taken some of the sting out of the need for the new clapboards. But Ellie wasn’t listening.

“That’s why,” she murmured.

“That’s why
what?
” I swallowed hot coffee. Fog off the water applies itself from the outside but chills from within.

“Why we
can’t
let Harry Markle leave.”

“Ellie,
what
are you talking about?”

Edna glanced over curiously at me.

“Look,” I went on more quietly, “I do owe Harry and I am going to try to help him, or I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror. The thing is . . .”

Behind the counter, Edna raised her hand casually to one of the tight, blue-white curls just above her left ear, which I knew was the location of her hearing aid.

I hastily dropped my voice to a whisper. “I’m convinced, okay? Harry
is
the reason Sam got hurt. Wade, too, and probably Samantha. I don’t understand how, but I do know one thing. If Harry changed his mind again and decided to leave town, all this—whatever
this
is—would be over just as quick as it started. And things would go back to normal. Safe. End of story.”

There, I’d said it. But Ellie was shaking her head. “No, Jake. That’s not what would happen at all. Remember what Mr. Ash said?”

“What’s he got to do with anything?” She always did this: picked up some little detail, then drew out a string of reasoning as if she were pulling a loose thread.

Even more annoying was the fact that, usually, she was right. “Okay, it’s been a year now since Harry left New York,” she said.

“Correct. He moved around the Northeast a little, made one brief visit back to the city, ended up here.” Our Internet research confirmed it via his credit cards; I may not be a hot-shot money person anymore but I can still get in the back doors of some nifty databases.

“And as far as we know, nothing’s happened since then,” she persisted. “Since he left New York the first time. Until now, here in Eastport.”

Right again. “But maybe Harry didn’t stay anywhere long enough to get it all going again until now.”

“But he hasn’t stayed very long here, either, has he?”

Like I said; annoying. And persistent:

“What
I
think is, Harry was right. Someone
knew
he’d stay in town. After all, if Harriet’s involved, the trouble began weeks ago,” Ellie said.

“And she is involved. Otherwise why that newspaper in her hand, with the story about Harry? But how would someone know . . . ?”

“That Harry was staying? Maybe because if you buy a house in a place, it’s a pretty good bet you’re planning to stick around?” Ellie replied.

Another thought hit her. “Jake, we don’t even know for sure the nature guy isn’t part of it, too. The one who drowned, from Wyatt Evert’s group.”

“Oh, Ellie, that’s really . . .”

Pushing it,
I’d been about to say. But then George Valentine came in and spotted us, and came over to our booth.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, alarmed. “I thought you were with Sam and Maggie, at the hospital. And who’s watching out for Wade?”

George put a hand on my shoulder, slapped a copy of the
Bargain News
against his leg with the other. He was always on the prowl for old engine parts and tools. “Took Sam home, Maggie over to her house. Set a fan up in the hall, paint thinner stink’s nearly out. And Wade gets
really
mean when he’s in pain, did you know that?”

Wade wouldn’t get mean if his leg was in a bear trap. “Just kidding,” George added. “But he said he’s coming home, don’t need a baby-sitter, and did I want my nose punched? So I took off.”

I gathered Wade was getting his gumption back. “And I didn’t walk in your varnish-stripping project or let the animals in, and Mr. Ash is with Sam,” George finished.

He bent to kiss the top of Ellie’s head. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She preened unconsciously; Ellie in love was like roses in bloom, or Paris in springtime. She’d resisted George’s courtship for longer than was good for either of them but now his mere presence made everything hunky-dory for her.

“I was just about to tell Jake about the nature guy’s boots. Is it okay?” she asked.

Over behind the counter Edna Barclay fiddled madly with the hearing aid, not even bothering to hide it. The guys eating their pie were listening, too, their talk of boats, the forecast storm, and the fishing regulations newly publicized in the Maine
Record
ominously silenced.

And by the look on George’s face, Ellie’s question had hit a nerve. “Funny you should mention that,” he said. “Come on.”

We followed him out past Edna’s thwarted scowl into the fog. In the few minutes we’d been inside, the weather boom had lowered. You couldn’t even see the end of the fishing pier except for the dim glow of the beacons on the tugboats lurking massively in the gloom, headlights on passing cars blurry smears in the murk and foghorns bow-
whonk!
ing lustily.

“I’ve been thinking about that all night,” George began as soon as we’d lost our audience. “Because at the time we didn’t want to get stories started. And Bob Arnold agreed there was nothing solid, nothing to follow up on. But . . .”

“George,” I demanded, “
what
are you talking about?”

“That tourist’s boots,” Ellie replied. “George happened to see them, thought there was something funny about them, back when it happened. After the man drowned.”

“The tourist from Wyatt’s group?”

“Ayuh. But Arnold said if he tried getting the state cops in on it, they’d just laugh,” George continued.

“So you talked to Wyatt?” Of course he had. George would hop over and have a word with Satan, if he felt the situation called for it. And by the look he wore now, the conversation with Wyatt had come out just about the same way.

“I told him, Wyatt, those boots that guy was wearing looked kind of fiddled with. And Wyatt, he near to had a stroke. He said if I ever said anything like that to anybody else, it’d hurt his tourist business and he would sue me, make me pay big-time.”

“To which I said, so what if he sues?” Ellie put in stoutly.

“But Ellie,” he reminded her, “we talked about it. I don’t know what’s true. And if it came to a lawsuit over it, you got to defend against those things, y’know, or the other guy wins.”

“He does if it’s not a frivolous lawsuit,” I agreed, “and it could cost thousands to defend. And you could lose, especially if Bob had to testify that there wasn’t evidence enough for him to pursue it. If Wyatt could prove he had real material losses, you might have to pay. But . . .”

Wyatt Evert’s tourist-herding business had never made much sense to me; he didn’t like people enough to be around them so much. But if it was a way to line rich suckers up for donations to some phony nonprofit, as Tim Rutherford had begun suggesting the night before, it made more sense.

In that case he certainly wouldn’t want a client’s death investigated as a murder. But his business records wouldn’t take the examination that bringing a lawsuit would require, either. So . . .

“He was probably just blowing smoke,” I concluded. “Worst case, you’d end up settling out of court.”

George nodded miserably. “We’d be ruined before it even got that far. So we thought, nothing we can do about it, we’ll keep our mouths shut. Not tell anyone. Three of us,” he said, glancing at Ellie. “Us and Bob Arnold. Just go on like nothing happened.”

Which maybe nothing had, though Ellie’s face said it had about half-killed her not to try finding out. But she was like the grave with secrets, and keeping shut of a Wyatt Evert lawsuit was a motive I could definitely get on board with.

It didn’t surprise me, either, that George and Ellie had decided to tell me about it at practically the same moment. Some couples seem to be joined at the hip; with these two, it was more like the frontal lobe.

“So what was it about the boots that looked strange to you?” I asked as an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past, headed for the quonsets at the freight dock.

“They were all chewed. Shredded like some chemical had been eating at the bottoms,” George answered when the noise had faded.

“Corrosive chemicals? Like paint stripper, or . . .”

“Ayuh.” He nodded seriously. “What made me think of it was, my old man had a shoe repair shop. Back in that alley,” he aimed a finger up Water Street, “behind the furniture store.”

A fading arrow painted on the red bricks still pointed up the alley. “Last few years the old man’d lost his concentration,” George said. “Still tried to work, but he mixed up things.”

He put an arm around Ellie’s shoulders. “Story about the Moosehorn accident was, guy just had a lousy pair of boots. The public story. But Wyatt’s nature folks don’t buy lousy gear.”

He frowned some more. “Only other time I ever saw boots half as wrecked, my old man tried resoling a pair, used triple-strong solvent, ’stead o’ glue.”

“You mean maybe somebody could’ve sabotaged the boots?”

It was a fairly uncertain method. Unlike, say, rigging a hot wire to be touched by a person standing in water. But if you were to time it right, I supposed it could be effective.

“Yep. Deep marsh, loss of footing, boots filling up with water. It would be easy to drown,” George replied. “Bob Arnold said so, too. But where the hell is any motive?”

We crossed the street together. “That’s what we decided to think at the time, anyway,” George went on. “And they
were
old boots. Good an’ broken in, the kind a guy likes to wear. Even a quality pair, sooner or later they
will
come apart, you wear ’em long enough.”

“Sure.” Like George’s truck; the wheel hadn’t just come off. It had rolled off, despite his regular maintenance, while he was driving the thing. He could have been killed.

And if pulled on an inexperienced person, the boot trick could be deadly, too. The thought came again: The simplest answer is usually correct. But at the moment no explanations I could think of for any of this were simple.

We started home, past the old clapboard houses like white faces peering at us through the fog. “Where are the boots now?”

George shook his head regretfully. “Tossed out, I guess. No reason to keep them. Like I say, nothing else suspicious. Far as I know, the guy didn’t even know any other group members, ’fore he arrived. Or Wyatt, either. From New York, the guy was.”

And of course it was unlikely that a casual tourist had made a mortal enemy, in town or among the other members of his group, in only a few days. “So the state sent an investigator . . .”

They always did, for an unexplained death. “Stayed an hour. Wrote it up as an accident just like Bob said he would,” George replied.

“Wouldn’t the guy notice when he put them on? The boots?”

He shook his head. “They went out before dawn. You put your shoes on in the dark, do you stop to check the undersides?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Prob’ly didn’t really come apart till the water hit them,” George said. Ahead an old truck materialized from the mist in my driveway, reminding me of another thing.

“Ellie, what were you saying about Mr. Ash?”

“That he said he liked it here,” she replied slowly.

“So?” My house came into view: green shutters, red chimneys. A pane in one of the dining room windows needed replacing.

“So
when
he said it, I was wondering
why
all Harry’s trouble is starting again just now,” Ellie continued. “After so long.”

“Maybe it took a year for someone to find him?”

But Ellie rejected that idea, too. From the cellar came the regular
clang-thud
of stones being pried out with a crowbar.