Wreck the Halls (12 page)

But it wasn’t what she’d gotten and if no one did anything about it, it never would be; nothing would be salvaged of that smile or that bright hope, nothing at all. Even chopped in pieces and wrapped up in butcher paper, Merle would’ve won.

Forever. I closed the album, not commenting on it. Ellie, either; we both knew why she’d brought it.

By the time I’d poured more coffee—without brandy, this time; I wanted to be relaxed, not comatose—Ellie was funneling batter into the coffee cans lined with buttered waxed paper. She’d already checked the oven temperature as carefully as if it were a vital science experiment.

“There,” she said finally, dusting her hands together.

The aroma of fruit, nuts, and spices in a batter rich with butter and brown sugar filled the room, covering the faintly rank smell I had noticed when I first walked in. I got up and washed my hands.

“Now you can tell me all about it,” she added. So I did, omitting the smell I kept smelling and a few other things, such as the way my hands still felt: sticky. As if they couldn’t get clean of something.

“I’m getting the feeling that maybe Peter and Faye Anne's breakup was one-sided,” Ellie said. “But not one-sided the way Peter told it. It sounds more to me as if she broke up with him, but…”

“Right. Peter didn’t accept it. Following her. Hang-up calls, too, according to Kenty. And who knows what else?”

“Melinda said neither of them were at the meeting?”

“Uh-huh.” A mental picture of her popped up. “Criminy, Ellie, you should have seen her, dressed in just a sweater. Melinda must have antifreeze in her veins. But anyway,
that's right: Kenty says Faye Anne wasn’t home. But Melinda made a big thing of how she called in case Faye Anne needed a ride. Zinged Peter about being absent, too.”

“Which means they were together,” Ellie concluded, as I had. “Peter and Faye Anne. And she’d told Merle she was going to the meeting. That's how she got out of the house. But if Melinda talked to Merle, then…”

That part, I hadn’t thought of. “Until Melinda called Merle, he must’ve thought Faye Anne was at the club. Melinda spilled the beans, that Faye Anne wasn’t where she’d said she was going.”

Just then Sam came in the back door and began rummaging in the hall closet, but he didn’t sound as if he needed my help creating even more chaos than was already in there, so I left him to it.

“Kenty said she went over there,” I went on, “to give them some of the cookies she’d baked, after Faye Anne got home. Everything was hunky-dory at the Carmody house at… what, maybe eleven or so?”

Ellie nodded. “That's another thing Melinda didn’t like about the original garden club, you know. Too much business, not enough partying. With this group you’ve got to fight off the dry martinis. And the meetings go so late, I can’t get up at a decent hour the next morning.”

By which she meant five-thirty or so, at the latest; in Eastport, early rising is a moral imperative. “It's why I don’t attend a lot of them,” she finished.

“… gloves?” Sam muttered. His work gloves, he meant. Tommy had decided to save up for ear surgery, after all, so they were working on Tommy's car instead of paying someone to try getting the backfire out of it.

“Here they are,” I heard Sam say, then rummage some more.

“Kenty was strange,” I mused. “One minute sort of… loosey-goosey and emotional. Couldn’t stick to a subject.

Then suddenly as clear as could be, very focused. You couldn’t believe she’d been an author and a TV personality, until she… switched herself on, or something.”

Sam paused in the doorway with the gloves in his hands. “Sounds like some of the guys in my class who take Ritalin,” he said. “You want to talk about before-and-after. It's like a magic wand, that stuff.”

“I thought only little children had to take that,” Ellie objected.

“Nuh-uh. Anyone can.” He’d been tested, back when we were trying to find out why he had such a hard time in school, for just about every learning disorder human beings could have.

A light went on in my head. “You know, I remember thinking when I was there with her that it was as if a drug of some kind had just kicked in. One of her medicines, maybe.”

With a wave Sam went out again, as Ellie checked the oven. “You know, these cakes have to bake for hours. Which gives us time.”

Uh-oh. But she was already pulling on her coat, a silvery quilted one that would’ve made anyone else look as big as the Goodyear blimp.

She looked smashing in it. “After last night, don’t you think we had better keep hands off?” I asked. “We’re in enough trouble with the law-enforcement establishment already. And besides…”

There's an old sailor's phrase, rude but accurate, about doing something into the wind. I quoted it to her.

Ellie sighed patiently. “Jacobia. Remember the story I started to tell you? About my mother's funeral?”

“I do. So what?”

Stubbornly, I remained seated at the table. The brandy bottle was looking good to me, again. And the smell was back, coppery sweet.

“And do you remember the Shasta daisies, enormous vases of them, along the altar that day?”

Resignedly, I got up. “I remember them, too. But what does that have to do with…” And then I got it. “Faye Anne. From her garden.”

“Correct.” She pulled her boots on, short brown furry ones that should have thickened her ankles and made her calves appear clumpy.

They didn’t. “Shasta daisies look simple to grow: those big white flowers with yellow centers. Nothing to it, right?”

Wrong. It's the little white chamomile daisies that are simple. Those big, luscious Shastas are the devil to winter over; right then, a dozen new plants were in my garden border, bedded down so carefully and lovingly that you’d have thought they were newborn infants.

Probably they were already dead. Ellie went on: “After Mom passed away, Faye Anne didn’t say anything to me about those flowers. She just went out the morning of the service with a pair of garden shears, and cut down her whole border of them.”

“Oh,” I said inadequately, wiping my hands dry.

“When I saw them in the chapel, I started to cry,” Ellie said, “and it was the only time I was ever able to do that about my mother.”

She paused. “Funny, isn’t it? Not being able to, I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” Ellie knew all about my own mother; all I knew, anyway.

Sam stuck his head back in, looking puzzled. “Hey.”

“What?” I snapped at him, looking for the hand cream. Between the cold weather and all this washing, I was getting raw.

“Did I hear you two say Kenty Dalrymple was over at the Carmodys’ delivering cookies at eleven o’clock at night?”

A little silence fell. “Well, yes,” I began doubtfully as my
son went out again. The unlikeliness of that part of Kenty's tale hadn’t occurred to me. But now it did.

“So anyway, don’t tell me we aren’t helping Faye Anne.” Ellie's tone rose heatedly again as she pulled on a wool knit hat. The purple yarn tassels poking out of the top were particularly fetching. With a sigh I began hauling my own boots back on.

“Because I’m not having it. Stay here if you want, but darn it, I’m not giving up yet, and…”

Jacket, mittens, scarf. “Fine,” I said, grabbing Monday's leash.

All around me, urgent household tasks loomed: painting steps, renewing radiators, caulking more windows, insulating attic rooms. But even higher now loomed a fascinating question: why had Kenty Dalrymple looked me in the face and lied?

And then there was Ellie. “What?” she said, blinking back tears of angry determination as we got outside. To the east in the already-waning winter daylight, a huge, peach-colored moon peeked over the watery horizon.

“I said, fine.” My eyelashes prickled with the brutal cold and the hairs in my nose froze instantly. “You’ve got a plan. I don’t know what it is, but I’m out here, aren’t I? So let's go do it.”

“Oh.” Her answering smile was beatific, as if she’d caught sight of that moon floating up into the sky.

Or something.

Ellie's plan turned
out to include more hot coffee, which by the time we got downtown I’d have preferred having pumped into my veins. A wind like a knife's edge was rising off the water as daylight faded. The moon was higher now so that each wave-top shone, laced with a silvery glitter.

Inside the Waco Diner, I stamped my feet which felt
leaden with cold and sent Monday to lie down by a radiator, which she did happily, the weather outside being too frigid even for a Labrador retriever. Then we settled ourselves: me shivering, Ellie pulling layers off, as in her native-Eastporter opinion the day was a little nippy but nothing to exclaim over.

“Sorry, my aunt Fanny!” Dimity Wilson replied to Ellie's report of my running into Melinda that morning. I didn’t know why Ellie wanted to start that way, but it was her party.

Dimity smacked two coffee mugs down in front of us. A tall, raw-boned woman with glossy black hair and a big, square jaw, she wore yellow stretch pants and an oversized red sweatshirt with the slogan I

“Melinda Devine's never been sorry about anything in her whole life,” Dimity pronounced, “other than the fibs she's been caught out in, and the mean tricks she's pulled, like on that poor woman at the library.”

We were in the old section of the Waco: worn yellow linoleum between the long Formica counter's red leather stools and a battered row of comfortable booths, a chalkboard listing the day's specials. In summer, Dimity opened the new back room where sliding glass doors looked out onto the deck's Cinzano umbrellas.

Now snowdrifts pressed against the glass. “Damn fool woman, walking around in shirtsleeves in the middle of December. And so superior about it, as if being a freak of nature was something to brag about, too. If Melinda called Faye Anne the night of that club meeting, and I have no doubt she did, it would be exactly like her, it was to tip Merle off on purpose and nothing else,” Dimity said.

“Why would she do that?” Ellie sipped the ferocious coffee brewed for men who worked outdoors in cold weather:
on the snowplows, at the cargo docks where the big ships loaded, or at the aquaculture plants.

“Two reasons.” Dimity slapped a plate of eggs in front of one of the salmon-pen workers beside us at the counter, and pancakes before another. They’d been out since five A.M., their faces chapped and hands reddened despite the enormous amount of clothing they’d shed as they came in.

“Same reasons why Melinda does everything,” Dimity answered. “Jealousy and spite. I went to a few of those new club meetings,” she went on. “Thought I’d see what it was all about. And I saw, all right.”

The fellows down the counter ate their meals with the grim purposefulness of men shoveling coal into a furnace. Dimity set a full pot of coffee and a bowl of sugar packets between them, and they nodded without speaking.

“First,” Dimity ticked off on her blunt fingers, “she was jealous about Faye Anne and Peter Christie. It just about killed Melinda, handsome fellow like that payin’ his main court to Faye Anne, 'stead of to her.”

That jibed with what I had seen earlier; Melinda didn’t seem to have wasted any time filling the vacancy created by Faye Anne's arrest.

Dimity plunged used coffee mugs into a plastic tub of hot, soapy water, swishing them around. Clean, I thought longingly. And everywhere I went, it seemed, had that coppery smell to it, now, like the taste of an old penny.

“Saw Melinda going by a little while ago, matter o’ fact,” Dimity said, “no coat as usual, and with that foolish string shopping bag she carries so everyone can see all the fine stuff she buys. Endive,” she snorted. “Wild rice and cooking sherry, and probably sirloin tips.”

“Sounds good to me,” I joked, but Dimity wasn’t having any humor on the subject of Melinda.

“For fixing Peter Christie what she calls one of those ‘delicious little suppers’ of hers, probably,” Dimity snorted.

“Way she was all fluttery around him at one o’ those foolish meetings I went to, that won’t be all she's feedin’ him, ’fore long.”

Some men from the road crew stomped in: orange jackets, high boots, and thick wool sweaters. They nodded familiarly at Ellie whom they’d all known since she was in kindergarten, a little less so at me, and ordered pie and coffee.

“But Melinda hates Faye Anne anyway,” Dimity went on as she cut big wedges of lemon meringue. “Faye Anne grows better roses, her compost heats up without her having to put chemicals into it, and she's friends with Kenty Dalrymple, who won’t give Melinda the time of day. And that's not all,” she added, going away with the pie and coffee.

“What's not all?” I asked Ellie, under my breath. “She's already told us everything but Melinda's blood type and Social Security number. What more could there be?”

“Everyone comes in here,” Ellie answered. “And they talk. That's why we’re here. I guess Dimity's heard something.”

“The girls from Town Hall were in the other day,” Dimity confirmed when she returned. By which she meant the clerks and secretaries who actually did the day-to-day town business.

“And you know,” she went on, “they’re careful about not hashing over anything confidential when they’re out in public. Who has a tax lien, who's not paying their sewer bill, so on and so forth.”

We waited as she started a new pot of coffee. “But what they did say was, Merle Carmody and Melinda had a great big shouting match the other day in the town office.”

She turned, hands flat on the counter. “You know that strip of property there at the edge of Melinda's side yard?”

Melinda lived in one of the last houses on Water Street, at the north end of the island looking out toward New

Brunswick; between her house and the next was a half-acre strip of brush and trees, with one enormous old maple at the center of it.

“Well,” Dimity declared importantly. “A couple of months ago, that next house went to auction on a foreclosure. No one paid much attention; some people from away owned it, and talk was they’d worked a deal with the bank to buy it back at the last minute, 'stead of the bank getting stuck with it. But the talk was wrong, and do you know who wound up getting that property?”

She paused for effect. “Merle Carmody is who. All on the quiet-like. Bid on it at auction, walked away with it clean as a whistle.”