Mallets Aforethought (11 page)

With that she hung up.

Victor’s CPR class was held at the Eastport firehouse, out on County Road next to the youth center. Behind the big metal prefab building loomed a sand pile already being heaped up for the coming winter. The tinny spatter of a radio scanner came from the tiny dispatch office as I passed it on the way in.

“Nice of you to drop by,” Victor commented when he saw me, and of course I didn’t smack him. Fortunately just then a pretty EMT-trainee flitted by and he forgot all about me.

I looked around, wanting to be here even less than when I’d walked in. A dozen blue exercise mats with life-sized mannikins lying on them had been placed around the room, and bringing a big rubber doll back to life wasn’t my idea of entertainment.

Besides, I’d done CPR before—successfully—without taking a class. I’d just thought Sam might need backup for the reading part of the course, since naturally Victor refused to believe any son of
his
could have any learning difficulties.

Just then, though, Sam waved at me from across the room, indicating he’d partnered with another student whom I recognized from U. Maine functions. And since Sam’s reputation for smarts at the practical end was well known, there would soon be a quid pro quo: Sam’s partner reading aloud to him in exchange for help with the hands-on part of the program.

So I was redundant and on the point of taking off when a snatch of conversation caught my attention.

“. . . gruesome,” a young woman was saying to four others. All five wore nursing uniforms and name tags identifying them as Calais Hospital staff. The four listeners’ expressions were alike, too: barely repressed impatience.

“. . . stiff as a board, half tied in a knot, and that awful grin,” the first one said with what seemed to me very un-nurse-like relish. “Like Dr. Sardonicus.”

The others—not horror-film fans, apparently—glanced at one another. In their eyes I caught pity mingled with contempt, and the way they turned their backs on her was unmistakable, too: not our crowd.

“Hey,” I said to the old-movie buff as she stared after them. Her badge said her name was Therese Chamberlain and from what she’d said I guessed she’d been on duty when Gosling’s body reached the hospital. The ER in Calais would have been Hector’s first stop on the way to the morgue in Augusta.

“You need a partner?” I asked.

She did, latching onto me gratefully as Victor started the class. He began with a ten-minute lecture on the rigors of resuscitating people whose hearts had stopped when they were—inconveniently and he seemed to feel also deliberately and spitefully—not in a hospital.

He also treated us to cautionary tales on why CPR was worse than useless when it was bungled: torn livers, broken ribs, and stomachs blown up like balloons were among the potentially fatal results of inept cardiac massage and rescue breathing.

Which didn’t exactly make me want to learn these techniques officially. A sloppy paint job is about as far as I care to go in the bad repairs department, especially if I happen to be holding a current Red Cross certificate making me responsible.

But my new partner, a very skinny, dark-haired young woman with chapped lips and chewed fingernails, already knew real CPR and—this was the crucial part for me—could do it on the doll.

“Don’t worry,” Therese pronounced as we knelt on opposite sides of the floor mat. Called Resusci-Annie, the rubber model was anatomically designed so you could practice all the maneuvers of bringing a nearly dead person back to life without risking the opposite by practicing on a live one.

“I’ll walk you through it,” Therese told me. “It’s easy after you get the hang of it.”

Right, and tightrope walking was probably easy too when you’d been at it for a while. But if you put a foot wrong you’d only be killing yourself.

“You’ll probably never have to do it in real life anyway,” Therese added.

Famous last words. But it was after all only a rubber doll. “If you can do it, why are you here?” I asked her.

Therese shrugged, wincing at the hard concrete floor under her bony knees. If there was an extra half-ounce of flesh on this girl anywhere, I couldn’t see it.

“Renew my certification,” she replied, pushing on the doll’s forehead and pulling on its chin. Its neck arced sharply up into what seemed an uncomfortable and possibly even crippling angle. I mentioned this hesitantly.

“Pine box is uncomfortable too, and it’s where the victim’s going, you don’t get that airway open,” she replied.

Tough little nut. She pinched the doll’s nose and blew into its mouth. The rubber chest rose with a whooshing sound.

She swabbed the doll’s mouth with an alcohol pad. “Now you.”

She had sad pink-rimmed eyes and bad skin. “Mostly everyone here,” she informed me, amplifying her answer to my earlier question, “is a cop, EMT, or a nurse. Couple college students,” she added, gesturing at Sam and his partner. “You have to keep taking these courses to stay certified if you are on a health-care job.”

“Oh.” I assessed the doll. At least I wouldn’t be in danger of lacerating its liver.

“What’d the cops say when they brought Gosling in?” I asked, trying to sound casual and hoping she’d forget I hadn’t been part of her audience earlier.

“That they knew who did it.”

Around us other students were blowing into dolls’ rubber lips, compressing their rubber chests, and shouting the CPR formula’s question at them. “Annie, are you all right?”

The dolls didn’t reply. “How did they know that?” I asked Therese.

Steeling myself, I followed the other students’ example and tried to inflate our doll’s lungs. No good; it was like blowing against a brick wall.

“Here,” Therese said. “Like this.”

She pulled sort of
up
on the jaw and sort of
out
. I tried again without result. Apparently when I’d done it in real life I’d just had good luck. Unlike now, until finally:

“All right, Annie,” I snarled. “Do you want to die? Because if you don’t, you’d better cooperate.”

Then I
pushed
on the doll’s forehead and
yanked
on its jaw, meanwhile pinching on its nose and jamming my lips to its hard, inhuman-feeling mouth. Whereupon to my surprise my exhaled breath rushed easily into the doll’s rubber lungs.

“Hey, you did it,” Therese congratulated me. “Now press on the chest like this.”

She demonstrated, meanwhile going on with her reply. I got the feeling she didn’t often have anyone to talk to.

“The cops said everybody they’d questioned so far had named one guy, this George somebody? As the guy who wanted Gosling dead? But no one wanted to? Name him, I mean?”

Somewhere, Therese had picked up the tic of ending nearly every sentence with a question mark. And now that she’d strayed from a topic about which her profession made her feel confident, the tic was surfacing. Ellie called the question habit an insecure person’s way of making sure you agreed with whatever they were saying, before going on. I just found it annoying.

I didn’t like the information Therese was giving me either. If lots of people named George as the man with the motive, even reluctantly, there’d be a few who would do it in court, too. The whole fiasco was closing around him like a trap.

Correcting my cardiac massage position, Therese put the heel of my right hand on the lower third of the doll’s breastbone. “You want to squeeze the blood out into the vessels, not break a rib and push the sharp end into the victim’s heart,” she lectured me.

Great. Not only was George in even hotter water than I’d realized, it was starting to look as if any dying person I might encounter would be better off taking his chances with St. Peter.

“Didn’t anyone mention anyone else who might have wanted to kill Hector Gosling?” I asked. Because it was still a case of the more reasonable doubt the better.

“Like I said, no one
wanted
to mention anyone at all, from what I heard,” Therese replied. “But when the cops asked a direct question? Who wanted Gosling dead the
most
?”

She put her own hands on the doll’s chest and pushed. “It was this guy George whoever whose name kept coming up.”

I wanted to ask more but the class was nearly over, Victor strolling around to observe how the students were doing.

“I hope you’re not planning on meeting a nearly dead person, Jacobia,” was all he said when he got to us.

Me, too.

But as was true of almost everything that overlapped my life with Victor’s: drat the luck.

“He kept blathering on about how crucial everything was, how dumb it would be to do it wrong, and he kept adding unappetizing details,” I reported indignantly to Ellie later when we met in the parlor of Harlequin House.

I opened a fresh trash bag. If we wanted to hear gossip we couldn’t just grab my tools and go; we had to hang around.

Meanwhile I was dying to tell her about Jan Jesperson, but I couldn’t. Clarissa Arnold was a friend, but she was also a tiger when her instructions weren’t followed.

I turned my mind from the topic. “Such as,” I went on, “the fact that you’re not only giving the person air, with rescue breathing. When you blow into their lungs you’re also removing excess acid from the body by way of what he called waste gases.”

I swept up yet another dustpanful of sawdust and dumped it into the bag, along with some wood splinters. “Which is just the person’s exhaled breath,” I added.

Put that way it didn’t sound so bad, but Victor’s commentary had not made doing actual cardio-pulmonary resuscitation seem attractive in the slightest. Which I supposed it wouldn’t be; the details of my own last try had faded mercifully in my memory.

“Apparently if the victim’s blood stays too acid you can’t resuscitate them at all,” I continued. “As if their heart seizing up like an old engine isn’t
enough
of a problem.”

I dumped more sawdust into the bag. “Not that you can do anything about
that,
either. The acid, I mean.”

Ellie listened patiently as I vented the nervous energy I’d absorbed in the firehouse. Most of the professional medical folks and paramedics had been weirdly cheerful, as if eager for a shot at a real tragedy; between that and my newly acquired merit badge in housebreaking over at Jan’s place, I was jazzed.

“In the hospital they give a medical version of bicarbonate of soda to treat the extra acid.” I scraped up another dustpanful of scraps. “But who except ambulance drivers goes around with any of that?”

The bag was full; I twisted the top. “I think he just told us so we’d know how futile
our
efforts are likely to be.”

Ellie made a noise of assent. “Anyway,” I continued, “mostly what
I
learned is, the doll’s lips taste like rubber and rubbing alcohol.
Bleaggh
.”

The taste wouldn’t go away and neither would the disaster we’d made of the Harlequin House parlor. It was early afternoon, we’d torn out everything that had to go, and sunshine streaming in lit up every chunk of plaster, rag of torn-off wallpaper, and scraped, sanded, or otherwise paint-denuded patch of woodwork.

“What a mess,” said Ellie as she contemplated it.

Or I think it’s what she said. To keep her little passenger safe from toxic materials she wore a yellow paper jumpsuit that covered her from neck to ankles, rubber gloves, and a green-and-black respirator that made her look like a bug from outer space. Paper boots and a hair-covering paper cap completed her outfit.

But even through all that I could tell she had her game face on. If anyone here knew anything at all about Gosling’s murder, she meant to discover it.

And so did everyone else. The police were finished with the scene examination, the smoke smell from the near-disastrous fire of the day before had been aired out, and the house was full of volunteers with rumor on their tongues and fresh scandal on their agenda. Many of them came shamelessly up to Ellie, angling for new info, and I’m sure I couldn’t have been as patient with them as she was.

“You poor thing,” crooned Siss Moore, her eyes glittering. “Have they really
charged
him? And what happens next?”

From the hall where a lunch was being set up came an alert silence. Enquiring minds wanted to know. Ellie stopped shoveling plaster bits into a trash bag and pulled off her respirator.

“Well,” she began slowly.

There were a dozen tasks in progress in the rest of the house: floor sanding and woodwork stripping, doorknob replacement and tin-ceiling (in the kitchen) patching, replacement of sections of the wainscoting in the library, and even repairs to the dumbwaiter from the butler’s pantry up to the second floor.

But it all stopped dead as everyone within earshot waited to hear how Ellie would answer.

She paused another moment. Then, “I’m not sure,” she confessed.

A little exhalation of disappointment went through the old house, an
oh!
of gratification denied.

“A lot of court hearings,” she added. She was a genius at answering politely while revealing nothing. “It’s all very confusing.”

No kidding. Speaking of rumors, I hadn’t passed on to Ellie what Therese Chamberlain had said, either. It was just more gossip, this time filtered through hospital shoptalk. And I had already decided not to pass on bad news unless it was news we could do something about.

Meanwhile Clarissa had spoken to Ellie that morning, too, to let her know George’s bail request had been denied. It was what I’d expected; it’s rare for someone to get bail on an actual murder charge. But then Clarissa had added something else, that I hadn’t expected. George had instructed that no one be allowed to visit him, not even Ellie.

I supposed it was understandable; who wants his pregnant wife hanging around a jail? But it put an awful crimp in Ellie’s effort to stay upbeat, one she was attempting to get over now by pursuing her snooping plan with even more determination.

And that meant listening to everyone. “If the police want to arrest somebody for poisoning Hector Gosling, they should try that housekeeper of his, Ginger Tolliver,” Siss Moore sniffed.