Wicked Fix (45 page)

"A note of his own."

Molly's face reappeared at the upstairs window.

"Is that her room?" I asked. "With the roses, and the

view?"

He smiled. "Yes. At night she can see the stars. She

loves her room. She feels so safe there. I know people

think I'm too strict with her," he added, walking with

me toward the house. "But I want her to have a real

childhood, not be smearing on makeup and wearing

sexy clothes at eleven or twelve years old. There's

plenty of time for her to be a grown-up later."

The little girl emerged cautiously onto the back

step of the cottage. "Dad? Can I go play with Barney?"

At the sound of his name, the pony in the railed enclosure

looked up hopefully.

"All right," Mike allowed. "But stay away from

those feed sacks. Something's got into them again; I'm

going to have to clean them up. And don't get too

dirty, please. We need to go to town, and we don't

want to look like little ragamuffins."

Molly scrambled happily down the porch steps and

ran to her pet, an apple for his snack clutched in her

small fist. Ellie looked up from where she had perched

on a rock overlooking the bay, came to say goodbye.

"Mike, did Reuben say anything else the last time

you saw him? Anything at all that might help me?"

He shook his head. "Only that we were all going

to remember him. That he was going to make a big

splash."

Well, he'd gotten that much right, although not, I

guessed, in the way that he intended or could have

foreseen. As we were leaving I noticed again the pretty

well-house, its stone cistern and peaked roof surrounding

a red-painted hand pump.

"It must be a project in winter," I remarked.

"Doesn't it freeze up?"

Mike laughed. "Oh, you can keep it running okay

if you know how," he replied. "No one had running

water in the old days, and they didn't die of thirst."

Yes, but what's past is past, I was about to tease

him, then decided not to. Mike Carpentier had taken

what he wanted from the past and made a paradise

of it.

The rest he'd put firmly behind him, with an effort

of will and an amount of hard labor that I could only

imagine. It didn't seem right to make fun of it.

So I didn't. Making my way downhill behind Ellie

to where the Jeep was parked, I thought that if grit and

a willingness to work could be bottled and sold, Mike

would be a millionaire by now, except of course that

money wasn't what he wanted.

"Peace of mind," I said, breathing in the fresh, salt

air at the foot of the path. "If more people went after

it, they might find out that things aren't important.

Even," I added, glancing back up, "running water and

electricity."

"Personally, I like my peace of mind to be

equipped with modern plumbing," Ellie retorted, "and

central heating. It's lots easier to give up things when

you know you can have them back anytime you want

them. Like," she added, "Mike Carpentier can."

I glanced in surprise at her as she swung the vehicle

around and gunned it toward town. "Molly's mom,"

she reminded me, "is in the merchant marine, after all.

They make good money."

Which put a faint new gloss on things: that Mike

had income would have been common knowledge to

people in Eastport. Maybe including Reuben, who

might have wanted a piece of it. That could have been

why he had bothered hotfooting it up that hill. But I

believed Mike, that he hadn't felt threatened by Reuben

anymore.

Still, I felt a little disappointed. "So he's not exactly

subsistence-farming that acre," I said. Somehow it tarnished

the fantasy. On the other hand, the fantasy had

been unrealistic; making a living for yourself and a

child off a Maine acre would take more than a hard

worker.

More like a miracle worker. Meanwhile, I'd

thought we were heading home, but at Route 190 and

Washington Street Ellie didn't turn left as I'd expected.

Instead she shot straight forward.

I peered at Ellie's gas gauge; she likes to let the Jeep

run on fumes periodically, and after my empty-tank

episode of a couple of days earlier, I was still gun shy.

"It'll get to Perry and back," she said, and glanced

in the rearview. "Huh. Didn't Mike say they were going

to Eastport?"

"That's what I thought. Why?"

"He's behind us. Molly with him."

"So he changed his mind. Going to Calais,

maybe."

"I guess." She drove in silence awhile.

"So why are we going to Perry?" I asked finally.

"Is there someone we should talk to there, too?"

Spruce trees, cedar posts, fields, glints of water

went by. "No," Ellie said, pulling up to the corner at

the end of 190.

She glanced left, scooted onto Route 1, avoiding a

big old Chrysler making a signal-free left turn into the

Farmer's Union Market and after that a green panel

truck backing out of the Perry Post Office. Then she

turned into the gravel parking lot of the New Friendly

Restaurant.

Mike Carpentier's Ford Escort went on up Route 1

in the direction of Calais, which didn't surprise me;

even someone as back-to-basics as Mike needed the

Rite-Aid or the Wal-Mart once in a while, not to mention

McDonald's or Taco Bell.

The New Friendly was the opposite of all those: a

low, red wooden structure with big white-framed windows

and no hint of mass-produced anything, backed

up against a salt marsh. Cattails waved their chocolate

heads over the tide-filled inlets, small waves making

zigzags of their reflections on the water.

Inside, the eatery was crowded with groups of men

in denims and gimme caps, families ranging from babies

to grandmothers. The special, the board behind

the counter said, was clam pie.

Ellie slid in across from me at the only vacant

booth and opened her menu. "I have to admit it looks

a little bleak," she said. "We've talked to everyone who

might have anything useful to say to us. We've

snooped, and pried, and read diaries that didn't belong

to us. You've gone up in an airplane, for heaven's

sake."

The waitress came, took our orders, went away

again. Ellie resumed: "And now everybody's leaving

town except Mike. And his life, never mind what Reuben

did twenty years ago, is just ducky."

We sat in discouraged silence until the waitress returned;

Ellie bit into her haddock sandwich. My coleslaw

was crisp and peppery.

"It's over, Ellie. Somebody's gotten away with it,

at least for now."

She nodded without quite agreeing. "And what

about your own problems? The money you're losing, I

mean."

Misery over the topic made me sigh. "Well, I'm

going to take a major hit over the trauma-center project,"

I admitted. "Seed money, pretty much by definition,

is money you don't get back if things go wrong."

"And since you can't get Victor out, it's going to."

"Right. We gave it a last shot, but we've done all

we can."

My hands made helpless sawing motions over the

table. "I've got to face it, all the practical stuff that

needs doing. Instead of running around chasing Reuben

Tate's old, evil moonbeams."

"What are you going to do about the money?"

I didn't want to tell her. But I would have to,

sooner or later. "Well. It might take a little while, but I

think I can get things back on track."

Precisely how I would have to do that, though--

that was the hard part. "The big project is to get Sam's

living and tuition money together, now that he's decided

to go to school. If not for that, I guess I could

build a portfolio from here, from Eastport, just on my

own investing. But ..."

But that wasn't all of it. What I didn't say was that

aside from money for expenses I needed a big cash

cushion just to feel decent. Otherwise, I was a poor girl

again.

"I can get a cash flow going if I move back to New

York, set up in practice again. Investment counseling,

financial plans, tax structuring ... all the stuff I used

to do when I lived there."

No more early-morning walks with Monday on

the breakwater, in the salt-fresh dawn. No coffee frappes

at Bay Books, with the new best-sellers and the

latest gossip. No more knowing and being known by

everyone in town; in Manhattan, life had been fast

paced and exciting, and I'd been one of a million busy

strangers.

No Wade. Not for a while, anyway. "I can come

back here," I managed weakly, "often."

She was looking at me as if I'd just arrived from

the planet Mars. "Can I ask you a question?" she inquired

seriously.

Without waiting, she went on. "What do you think

I've been doing with all the investing tips you've been

handing me for two years, wallpapering the bathroom?"

Actually, that was what I had thought, or something

like it. She'd never said any more about them.

"All those ideas you kept on giving me? You think I

wasted them?"

She eyed me incredulously. "Is that what you think

I think of your ideas, Jacobia? All the knowledge and

experience that you worked so hard to get, even

though you don't brag on it now?"

She sounded quite affronted, so it took a moment

before the import of her words hit me. "Beg pardon?

You mean you've been ..."

Crisply, she reeled off the names of a dozen publicly

traded companies, all of which had appreciated

smartly over the previous two years, just as I had predicted

they would. Then, knocking my socks off, she

told me exactly how much each had appreciated, as

well as where it had closed at the end of trading on the

preceding Friday.

Finally, she confided how much money she'd

made, and it was a good thing I didn't happen to be

wearing full dentures when she told me, or I'd have

been searching the floor for them.

"I put in everything my folks left me when they