Wreck the Halls (2 page)

You, she would have finished; Ellie had been my friend since nearly the moment I’d arrived in Eastport, four years earlier. But just then we heard it, through the howl of Bob Arnold's approaching squad-car siren: the sound, like a muffled half-sob, of a person waking in pain.

The heap of quilts on the daybed shifted and sat up.

It was Faye Anne Carmody. Frowning and blinking in the bright, warm sunlight of her own blood-splattered kitchen, she peered fretfully at us. Her eyes seemed to focus partway; an uncertain smile twitched her slackened mouth.

“Oh,” she breathed, swaying a little.

Then the quilt fell, exposing the apron she wore, a bibbed canvas butcher's apron, and her hands encased in yellow rubber gloves. The front of the apron was entirely painted in red, the gloves’ palms and fingertips clotted with rusty material.

She’d been burning the rags, I thought, in the woodstove. But before she could finish she’d collapsed onto the daybed. A gust of frigid air came in from the hall, the front door fell shut with a rifle-shot bang, and footsteps approached the kitchen.

“Didn’t occur to you,” Bob Arnold said admonishingly, “he might still be here? Lurkin’ around in a drunken fug, one o’ them big sharp cleavers o’ his, still in his hand?”

Merle Carmody, he meant, because if anything had
happened to Faye Anne then Merle had done it. Bob knew it as well as anyone and better than most; Faye Anne wasn’t the only local woman whose husband thought a smack in the head was the ultimate—or indeed the only—useful method of domestic communication.

Bob's face was pink with cold, his reddened hands rubbing together. He wore an open denim jacket over a plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans, the earflaps of his fleece-lined cap snapped over the top of his head; no native Eastporter ever buttoned a jacket or pulled a pair of earflaps down until the red on the thermometer sank convincingly below the zero mark and stayed there.

From where he stood behind us he couldn’t see Faye Anne, and neither of us had yet really begun believing that we were seeing her, so we said nothing. And Faye Anne still seemed stunned.

So there was a moment of silence. Then:

“Holy moley,” Bob said. The place looked like an abattoir. “That son of a bitch really went to town on her, didn’t he?”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I said. Over in the corner, Faye Anne was still having trouble focusing. But she was getting there.

“Bob?” Ellie looked at me and I could see she was beginning to suspect the same thing I was: that our old buddy Merle wasn’t lurking around here with a cleaver in his hand, in a drunken fug.

Or in any kind of fug whatsoever. Noticing again the door with its slide bolt and hooks and eyes fastened, imagining the butcher shop beyond with its cutting block, slicing machine, and rack of sharp knives arrayed by the cooler and the walk-in freezer, I had a sudden, very clear and detailed notion of exactly where that wife-beating bastard Merle Carmody was at that moment.

And may heaven forgive me but what I wanted to do was
stand there and cheer. But then it hit me, what that meant to Faye Anne.

If I was right. If…

“Well,” Bob began, “I’d better secure this scene. State boys’ll want in on this one, you can be sure, God forbid I don’t set it up right. Poor girl has got to be here somewhere, too, I imagine, might as well get an ambulance, tell them they’re going to have an awful job.”

He sighed heavily. “And I can get on the horn, tell Timmy to grab Merle up from wherever he's prob’ly still lying drunk.”

Tim Rutherford was Bob Arnold's second-in-command in the Eastport Police Department. Bob eyed the open stove door without comment, then said: “Neither one of you went in any further than right here? Or did moire’n that?” He waved at the stove.

“No, Bob,” Ellie said patiently. We both knew better than to try interrupting him when he was confronting a situation. It got him irritated, and he was already plenty irritated.

“You know,” he went on, “there are people, I hate to say it, but there are people who if this happened to ’em, you wouldn’t mind so much.”

Over in the corner Faye Anne was peering around, a frown creasing her forehead. A bit of brown blood above her eyebrow flaked away; she blinked, tried brushing at it, then noticed with a look of intense puzzlement that she was wearing the gloves.

She hadn’t yet looked down at the apron and suddenly I didn’t want her to. I didn’t want to ask her what had happened, comfort her, or find out for sure that she was—as she appeared to be—whole and unharmed.

Instead I wanted these dazed, muzzy moments of confusion to go on, for Faye Anne Carmody at any rate if not for the rest of us. Because it was clear that whatever had occurred here—fueled by the contents of a trio of empty wine
bottles on the floor by the foot of that daybed, perhaps—she didn’t remember it.

Yet. But she was going to. And when she did…

Quietly, I backed away from Ellie and Bob. Not thinking too clearly myself, maybe. Not reckoning the cost of my actions any more than Faye Anne had been, the night before.

No, I just wanted to know.

Winter in Eastport
came early that year. Starlings massed in the treetops in August and frost clamped down on the gardens overnight in mid-September. Lawn mowers were stored away, the children's Hallowe’en costumes peeped from beneath heavy scarves and jackets, and we ate our Thanksgiving dinners to the wheep-and-jingle of the snowplows massively to-ing and fro-ing outside, pushing up white mountains and spraying fountains of brown sand so we would not be killed in collisions, going home.

Now I let myself out of the Carmody house into the picture-postcard brilliance of a Maine island winter. It had snowed three days earlier and the air felt crystalline, smelling of iced saltwater, fresh-cut pine, and the sweet smoke of parlor stoves cozily burning all over town.

In the side yard my boots creaked in the frozen white stuff, plowed and shoveled from streets and sidewalks but lying pristine everywhere else. It blanketed the roofs of two-hundred-year-old clapboard houses and surrounded brick chimneys, drew thick white lines on slats of green shutters and atop picket fences, capped red fire hydrants and clung like white moss to the north sides of the fir trees.

I let it all dazzle me, feeling cleansed by the whiteness and cold. A few blocks downhill—past Town Hall, the old grammar school, and the soaring white clock spire of the Congregational Church—the blue, unbelievably cold water
of Passamaquoddy Bay showed glitteringly between the redbrick commercial buildings on Water Street.

An evergreen wreath with a fat red bow hung on the Carmodys’ front door; two weeks till Christmas. I stood looking at it, taking deep breaths and thinking about how murder divides everything into before and after. Then I followed the shoveled path along the side of the house out to the shop Merle ran in the ell and found the key under the doormat.

Everyone in Eastport, if they bought their holiday hams or turkeys from Merle Carmody, knew about that key, because on most holidays Merle started drinking two days beforehand. So if you wanted a suckling pig—or your venison, which you’d shot in the autumn and Merle would have butchered and kept frozen for you, for a fee—you had to get into the shop and retrieve it without his help. And Faye Anne of course would be busy with holiday cooking, herself, since heaven forbid Merle shouldn’t get a good dinner to wash down with his bourbon.

Thus Faye Anne had taken to leaving the key. The meat, wrapped in butcher paper, would have your name on it along with the price; you left your money in the cash box, made change if you needed to, and tucked the key back under the mat when you were finished.

The locked door being only a signal, in other words, that Merle was absent, not a way of preventing entry. I let myself in.

Everything was clean and as silent as death in the shop, the knives and cleavers gleaming in their racks and the air smelling faintly of Clorox. Nervously, I glanced around in case Merle really was lurking here somewhere, waiting wild-eyed with one of his butcher tools, ready to strike.

But I knew he wasn’t. I took a slow step toward the walk-in freezer but stopped when I noticed something unusual in the glass-fronted display counter. After the shop closed each
evening, Merle cleaned the display case thoroughly. Anything left over he ground into sausage meat, or if it was fish he chopped it into chowder pieces and sold it cheaply. You never saw anything left sitting in that display case overnight.

Except this time. I took another step. There were a dozen or so biggish packages wrapped in butcher paper in there now, each sealed with a strip of tape upon which ordinarily a price would have been marked in Merle's black grease pencil.

Not on these. From the case I removed the largest one and—holding my breath, my hands shaking—forced myself to open it.

Whereupon its contents, even only half-unwrapped because that was where I had to stop, told me what must be in the remaining ones:

Merle Carmody, there in his own butcher shop, resting in pieces.

Chapter 2

W
hen I first came to Maine I was familiar with
one kind of tool: the capitalist tool. At the time, I was a New York financial manager specializing in the blue-chip portfolios and slick tax-shelters of the fabulously wealthy. And at caretaking the fortunes of the fortunate I was the cat's silk pajamas: when they came to me with dotcoms they wanted to invest in I raised the gypsy hex sign, uttered imprecations, and shooed them into underwriting the dot-com companies’ big initial public offerings, which was the real moneymaker.

But I was helpless in any other department. If I happened upon a TV program meant to explain how to repair a loose doorknob, I thought it was the Sci-Fi Channel. I owned a small screwdriver for prying the battery out of my cell phone; otherwise I went through life secure in the belief that if something got broken, somebody else would fix it.

The idea was reasonable for a person like me, with a neurosurgeon husband who couldn’t change a lightbulb and an infant son, Sam, who obviously couldn’t change one either, living in a luxury Manhattan co-op with a doorman, a porter, a housekeeper, and a maintenance specialist whose number was on my speed dialer. And it might have gone on
being reasonable if over the course of the next dozen years my husband hadn’t turned into a philanderer so promiscuous, the nurses at the hospital where he worked took to calling him Vlad the Impaler.

And if partly as a result I hadn’t just chucked it all and moved to a Maine island. The house in Eastport was a white, 1823 Federal clapboard with three full floors, eight fireplaces, forty-eight heavy old double-hung windows with green wooden shutters, and a two-story ell that was dangerously close to tumbling into the cellar. I loved the house on sight, but I no more comprehended the demands of old-house maintenance than I understood chaos theory—which, by the way, I have since found that old-house fix-up work strongly resembles.

For instance, the first night I slept in the house I was awakened by pitter-pattering. Mice, I decided. I would buy mousetraps. But the next morning I discovered that the sound was of plaster crumbs raining down onto the sheets. The ceiling was collapsing.

Which was how I found out that plastering is a pain, but it isn’t difficult. You just stand on a ladder, trowel in the patching compound, and sand the result until little drops of blood begin popping out of your forehead.

Or until the new plaster is smooth, whichever comes first.

Anyway, soon after Sam and I moved here (he was fourteen by then, in a period of his life involving rage, hormones, and a laundry list of illicit substances; also his father and I had divorced, in a period of my life involving rage, hormones, and a laundry list of expensive lawyers), I set up an account at Wadsworth's hardware store on Water Street in Eastport.

The owners of the store have assured me repeatedly that when they saw me coming they did not go out immediately and buy a boat. But they got a dinghy and I’m sure I’ll see it
any day now, trailing behind a yacht. The amount of stuff I bought just in that first week must have financed the teak deck chairs, none of which I’m going to be reclining in any time soon; four years later, I’m on the mailing list of every tool catalog printed in English, meanwhile struggling to maintain the land-locked equivalent of the Titanic.

Because the patter of falling ceiling pieces turned out to be a signal from the house: SOS! Just try imagining one of those many-armed Hindu goddesses, each graceful hand firmly grasping a hammer, a saw, or a forty-pound sack of plaster mix, and you will get an idea of what my life has become nowadays, pretty much on a daily basis.

Which brings me to what was waiting on my back porch that morning when I returned from discovering Merle Carmody's disassembled remains:

A package.

Well, as you
can imagine, I was in no mood for a package. For me any pleasure I might feel about opening any packages whatsoever had gone kaput about forty-seven minutes earlier. This one, however, did not appear to contain body parts, bearing as it did the return address of one of those tool catalogs.

So after I got inside and scrubbed my hands twice, I did open it, and what I found in it instantly wiped all Merle Carmody's parceled-out anatomy portions from my consciousness.

It was a Fein “Multimaster” combination spot-sander, polisher, and cutter complete with sanding fingers (single-and double-sided), two scraper attachments (rigid and flexible), grit pads in every possible grade from gravel to diamond dust, and more sharp cutting accessories than Jack the Ripper.

I’d wanted one badly, since besides falling plaster my old
house came equipped with door frames, moldings, window trim, sashes, chimney pieces, balusters, bannisters, mantels, chair rails, pillars, posts, pilasters, and numerous other intricately hand-carved wooden geegaws, all thickly encrusted in old paint.

So after experimenting with a variety of chemical paint-stripping substances—I especially liked the one whose instructions listed a number of indoor applications, then warned me to USE ONLY OUTDOORS or to TURN OFF ALL
POWER WHEN APPLYING
because the stuff was
EXPLOSIVE!
— I’d ordered the Multimaster as an early Christmas present to myself. Now I began examining it, laying it with the box's other contents on the table in my big old barnlike kitchen.