Mallets Aforethought (26 page)

“No.” I stopped them. “Sorry, Tommy. But you’re on your own for this. I’ve got another job I want Sam to take care of for me. And another one for you as well.”

I wrote down my long-distance PIN number so he wouldn’t have to spend money doing the phone research I’d asked for.

“Take the truck to the garage,” I told Tommy, “I think the cops probably have George’s big key ring but the truck’s spare key is still under the visor like always.” I knew because it was the one I’d been using. “Do whatever you think the truck needs so it’s absolutely one-hundred-percent ready for when George comes home.”

That wouldn’t be much, considering the recent tune-up. But as I’d suspected, the boy badly needed to feel he was doing something useful for George. My belief was confirmed when I observed that if he’d brightened before, he was positively glowing now.

“Pile all his lobster traps in the bed of the truck too,” I said as an afterthought. “That way he won’t have to do it himself when the season comes.”

That George hadn’t even woken up yet was a fact I figured didn’t need discussing, just at the moment. “Okay,” Tommy agreed happily. “Yeah, you bet.”

“Mom, the hardshell lobster season doesn’t start till winter,” Sam said when Tommy had gone. “Stacking George’s traps now is just busy work.”

“Yes, but it’ll make him feel better and after all he’s been through over this, he deserves to. Meanwhile I would appreciate it if you would go over to Will Bonnet’s and ask him for another jar of that wonderful caviar he fed us the other night.”

“Fish eggs? What are you going to find out from fish eggs?”

“Just get it, please,” I requested sweetly. “Tell him that I want to pay him for it. Say that Ellie’s developed a late-term craving for the stuff and I want to give it to her as a gift.”

Because among the many things I didn’t know there was one I thought I did. George hadn’t been visiting a fancy food store. To him, a french-cut green bean was as fancy as food needed to get.

Will was our resident food enthusiast, a likely customer for a gourmet specialty store like A Taste of Honey. And if what Sam brought back was a brand of caviar you could purchase there, I was going to start getting darned suspicious that maybe Will had.

That in fact he’d been in Boston, driven there by George, when George was supposedly here in Eastport committing murders.

And that now, Will wasn’t saying so.

Once Sam and Tommy had gone off on their errands, I sat back down at the kitchen table. The dogs nuzzled me, trying to cheer me up, then went away dejected, and even Cat Dancing glared ominously from atop the refrigerator for a while, trying to get a rise out of me.

But none of it was effective because for all the energy I’d fired up in the boys I was out of it myself. I needed to talk this all over with someone, to juice myself with theories, strategies, and harebrained notions.

But Wade was at work, my father had quietly left while Tommy was making his confession, and having just commanded Ellie to lie down, I couldn’t very well rouse her up again.

So instead I got up from my chair and looked around the big old kitchen. The channels of the tall bare windows were equipped with brass insulation strips; I’d learned to install them by the simple method of getting some and trying. The radiators worked too, on account of the air having been bled from their valves.

By me, with a wrench in one hand and a book of home fix-it instructions in the other. Even the little bathroom off the hall was in good order due to my stubborn efforts. In short, what I’d learned from my old house was that when something gets broken, usually there’s a way to fix it. Maybe not one the old-house experts would endorse, but a way; all I had to do was find it.

I was still standing there thinking when Sam came back in. “Here you go, Mom,” he said, tossing the little jar at me.

I caught it. The label was lettered in what I guessed was Russian, beautiful but unintelligible. “He says he’s not going to take your money, though.”

I’d figured he wouldn’t. “And Mom—he says he’s never heard of a pregnant lady craving fish eggs.”

That too. And I hadn’t heard of many with cravings this late in their pregnancies at all, other than the craving for it to be over with as soon as possible. But it was the best I’d been able to come up with on such short notice.

“I’m heading over to the boat school now,” Sam said. “Unless you need me.”

“Fine,” I replied distractedly. The Taste of Honey receipt hadn’t come from a bar-code reader, so there were no shorthand clues to what had been purchased. But I had a Boston phone book and as Sam went out I began paging through it. Moments later I was talking to a store clerk whose cah was pahked in the yahd.

After that it didn’t take long to learn that the caviar I held in my hand was not available at that store, or at any of the chain’s other branches.

“Sorry,” the clerk said. He didn’t know where the stuff I described to him could be had, either; so much for that.

As I hung up the phone, it rang again and Tommy informed me excitedly that the garage for the Boston hotel Therese had stayed at did have A Taste of Honey store very nearby.

Probably the one whose clerk I’d talked to. The store was open, Tommy went on helpfully, until eleven on Friday and Saturday nights. But the caviar hadn’t been bought there. In fact, the receipt I had didn’t even total enough. On it, someone had bought three of something that cost $12.95 each—not enough for all the purchases Will had suggested he’d made in Boston, either, now that I thought of it.

So the question was . . . well, I didn’t know what the question was, and after a little while the whole confusing situation sent me fleeing up two flights of stairs to the third floor, to puzzle over it. Paint stripper had been simmering on the old door I was rehabilitating for many hours, now, and I needed to get my hands on it, because I needed to think and I wanted my hands busy while I was thinking, or I might start tearing my hair out.

What I found up there made me glad I’d decided to check that door for any reason, since its grungy old paint had transformed itself into a bubbly mess. Sticking a scraper into it I brought up a thick, satisfying amount of sludgy material. This I wiped onto a paper towel, noticing with pleasure the tight, rock-hard grain of the old wood I was exposing.

No hollow-core doors for those old craftsmen; this item was solid. Meanwhile, one thing was obvious, I thought as I scraped paint-and-stripper mixture off the door’s surface. George couldn’t have been out on his boat
and
in Boston, no matter what anyone said about the
Witchcraft
being on the water late that night. By the time I’d cleaned the paint from the screws holding the doorknob’s faceplate to the door, I’d come to another conclusion, too.

Tommy was right. George might’ve lent the boat to someone but there was no way he’d allow anyone else to drive his rattletrap of a truck all the way to Boston. And it was too much of a stretch to think someone else with gourmet tastes had gone with George.

It had to be Will. Maybe he’d stopped at two stores, and the receipt Tommy had found was only for his minor purchases. But what else had they been doing?

I didn’t want to march up to Will and demand that he tell me, though, because as Tommy had said if it was so bad George wouldn’t even get himself out of a murder charge with it, maybe I ought to handle it with the equivalent of tongs, too.

And that was as far as I’d gotten when I confronted the knob on that old door. It should have been taken off before the paint stripper went on but I couldn’t get a screwdriver into the screw slots until afterwards, a typical old-house Catch-22. Now I took the screws out of the faceplate, removed the spanner screws from the collar around the doorknob stem, and set them all aside.

Then, after loosening the knob and removing it—the knob on the door’s other side had been missing for many moons—I slid the latch mechanism out. It was a block almost an inch thick and about four inches tall with a square hole in it for the doorknob stem to go through. Under a plate lay a spring mechanism that snapped the latch tongue out and also let it be pushed back in again; because of it, the door could be shut without turning the knob.

Doorknobs today still work basically on that same principle, which just goes to show how brilliant an idea it was in the first place. But my admiration of it was diluted by thoughts of Therese Chamberlain.

She might have told someone she meant to confide in me. If so, it would be great to find out
whom
she had told. But other than at a séance I didn’t see how I could find out. A pang struck me as I recalled her at the CPR class, determined to resuscitate that idiotic rubber doll.

Scraping glumly at the old door, I imagined her before her addiction: young and vibrant if not actually pretty, possessing the hands-on practical kind of bravery a person had to have to be a member of her profession in the first place.

And then it hit me who might be able to tell me more about her; maybe a lot more. Because not that long ago she had indeed been reasonably attractive.

And she’d been a nurse.

“Yes, I knew her,” my ex-husband admitted. “Not,” he added hastily, “in the biblical sense.”

The biblical sense being the only way he ever knew them, in my experience. But never mind.

“Drink?” he offered.

I’d had to wait until he got home from the hospital so it was six in the evening when I knocked on the door of his wonderful old Greek Revival house, waiting while the strains of a Schubert Liebeslieder waltz wafted out among the enormous white porch pillars.

“Sure,” I said. He’d come to the door at last with a martini in one hand and a copy of
The New England Journal of Medicine
in the other.

The glass he handed me was cold, and one sip told me that a vermouth bottle had been waved delicately over the gin.

“Thanks,” I said, and followed him past the antler-rack coat tree and the elephant-foot umbrella stand in the hall. The inside of his house hadn’t had a thing done to it since the 40s, and Victor had kept all the safari memorabilia of the previous owner.

“I was about to phone Ellie,” he told me. “George is showing a bit of improvement. Nothing too dramatic,” he added cautioningly. “But I think we can be pleased with his progress.”

“I’ll let you tell her.” The pleasure of reporting decent progress was rare in his world; I thought he ought to have it. “But there’s something else I need to ask you.” I told him about my day, with emphasis on the finding-yet-another-dead-body part of the program.

“So what I want to know is who Therese might have talked to about her plan to confide in me,” I said.

Victor frowned in disapproval. “Jacobia, I’ve mentioned to you how unwise it is, you getting involved in all sorts of . . .”

I noted that he was blathering, which in the old days always meant he was hiding something. “Victor,” I said when he stopped, “are you sure you weren’t sleeping with her?”

I hadn’t really thought he was up to his old tricks, chasing after women as if they were goldfish and he was a shark. I’d just thought he would
know
about her: a shark on a diet.

“No, I wasn’t,” he snapped, applying a gulp of his drink to whatever was paining him. “It wasn’t that at all.”

“What, then?”

Another swallow. “I tried to help her. You saw how well that worked out. Some doctor I am.” His tone was self-lacerating.

“I knew something was going on with her,” he went on. “Everyone did. She was calling in sick more, appearance deteriorating. They put her on nights when she couldn’t get along with anyone. And one more unauthorized absence, she’d be fired.”

“Would a nursing convention count as unauthorized absence?”

“You bet. In fact she’d asked about attending one. I heard her with the nursing supervisor, they were arguing about it. Therese knew her performance reviews were going downhill. I guess she thought attending a convention would help.”

Sure, and the CPR class too. “Wouldn’t it?”

He made a face. “Yes, but showing up for work would help a lot more. And being on nights, the shift is short-staffed already so they couldn’t spare her. But,” he finished unhappily, “maybe her head was too screwed up by then to realize that.”

So she’d gone anyway, which gave her a reason not to speak up for George right off the bat. She’d have to say she’d called in sick to take the Boston trip, and she might get fired for it. But after George was attacked she’d tried telling me, maybe hoping I could give information for her, keep her out of trouble.

“And you knew it was drugs causing her deterioration?” I probed.

“Not for sure. I really didn’t know much about her, who her friends were, what kind of support she had. I asked, but she was too suspicious of me to say. She wouldn’t open up at all.”

He swallowed more of his drink. “No one else could get close to her, either. And pretty soon they didn’t want to. She’d make really inept, off-putting remarks and then wonder out loud, sort of sullenly, why people avoided her.”

I recalled the baffled way she’d tried to socialize with the other nurses at the CPR class.

“But a few days ago the nursing supervisor asked me to talk to her again,” he went on, “so I tried one last time. I took her aside and gave her a lecture. Handed her a bunch of literature from a rehab clinic in Bangor, told her to shape up or ship out.”

He laughed bitterly. “Well, she’s shipped out now, hasn’t she? Just the way I told her to. Very therapeutic, my advice.”

“Oh, Victor.” As usual, he was turning it around so
he
was the important one; what
he’d
done. But at the same time he really did feel bad.

“So you don’t know of anyone she might confide in? A family member, even?”

He shook his head. “The way I heard it, she came from a bad situation. One of those kids who really did pull herself up by her bootstraps, school on a scholarship, all that.”

And look how she’d ended. Victor frowned at his hands. “She reminded me of Sam. I was about as helpful to her, too.”

I studied him, surprised. Victor hadn’t wanted to admit there was anything wrong with Sam, back in the bad old days. He’d simply said Sam’s troubles were all my fault and that I should deal with them.