Mallets Aforethought (28 page)

So it was clear I had to do something. Ronny’s arrest was not only bad news for the officer who had to transport him to the county lockup. It was also bad news for me, because Ronny was going to be in jail very soon. And unless I missed my guess, once he got there he would try finishing the job that Perry Daigle had started.

Back home I got on the phone at once. But the officer on clerk duty at the jail had little patience with me. The whole thing was nearly impossible to explain, the panic in my voice wasn’t making me more believable-sounding, and I wasn’t halfway through it when he interrupted.

He wanted to know if I thought prank calls were funny, and did I realize my phone number and address were on a screen right there in front of him? He could send a cop out if he wanted to, bring me in for making a false report.

He did tell me that George was alone in the sickroom, that the beds were bolted down, and that there were no heavy objects or other items in there that could be turned into weapons. But he wouldn’t promise George would
remain
alone. And when I asked him if Maine State Police Trooper Hollis Colgate was by any chance at the jail and if I could possibly talk to him, the officer hung up on me.

Trying to stay calm, I took deep breaths of the kind that are supposed to help your thinking by oxygenating your brain. But they only made me dizzy. What I needed were facts and with time suddenly so short I had nowhere to get them.

Nowhere but straight from the horse’s mouth. I’d meant to get an unsuspecting Will over to the house tonight and somehow get the truth out of him. Tricks, lies . . . if worse came to worst I was ready to ask Wade to smack him around, if necessary.

And Wade would’ve done it. But now I would have to confront Will much sooner than I had wanted to, and manage to convince him that I knew for sure a lot more than I really did.

Jail officials might believe Will if he told them
he’d
sent Ronny to kill George. No one would say such a thing unless it was true, they would probably figure. So I had to make Will think he was caught, get him believing that if the plan to kill George went through, it would only make things worse for him.

And I had to do it in front of witnesses, or killing me could just put Will Bonnet right back in the driver’s seat again. I just hoped it wasn’t too late to stop him.

Grabbing up my keys and tossing them into the nifty little bag Ellie had given me, I rushed out to Harlequin House, where I thought Will might be this morning. It would’ve been perfect; the fix-up was back on track and there’d been a work session scheduled.

But no one was there and the door was locked. Taped to it I found a poster announcing a historical society meeting at Will’s aunt’s house, starting in a few minutes. Grimly I set off, intent on adding another item to the meeting’s agenda.

A few blocks away just across from the Presbyterian church, Agnes Bonnet’s lovely old Federal house was a near-twin to my own: white clapboard, multiple chimneys. I knocked, noting that cars were already lined up in the street.

Footsteps came to the door. “Coming,” Will’s voice called.

Steady, girl.
A door latch clicked and the door swung open.

“Hey, come on in. The others will be here shortly,” he said.

Step into my parlor, said the spider to the . . .

Anxiety seized me. But I couldn’t very well run. That would surely tip him to my suspicions and perhaps seal George’s fate.

Besides, I had plenty of company here with the meeting going on. “Hi, Will,” I said brightly. “Got a minute?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “Coffee’s on, we’ll have some.”

And sure enough, I did smell fresh coffee, yet another sign of the gathering about to begin.

So like a good little fly, I stepped inside.

“What’s the meeting about?” I asked as I followed him into Agnes Bonnet’s charmingly old-fashioned kitchen. A fire flickered pleasantly in the small isinglass-windowed woodstove. An elderly cooking stove, its rounded knobs and raised gas-grate burners reminiscent of the 1930s, stood nearby. The south-facing windows admitted bright sunshine through ball-fringed curtains.

From the other room came mingled voices. “Oh, you know. The usual. Who does what, all that,” Will replied.

Into the serene setting he had introduced numerous large, shiny kitchen gadgets including an espresso machine and a fancy breadmaker whose contents seemed to have exploded out of its top, creating a crusted-on, neglected Vesuvius effect.

“The hot water pipe in the Harlequin House kitchen needs soldering before we can turn the boiler on,” he said. “Ditto for the gas. I think we should get somebody over to look at it.”

He got a cup down from a cabinet. “And they took the front hall banister down to the boatyard to refinish it there, in the spray booth,” he went on. “So it’ll have to be brought back and reinstalled.”

“Big job,” I observed, looking around a little more. “But a spray finish will be faster than using a brush, I guess.”

It was the result that might be horrid, too thick in some places and not enough coverage in others. Hardly anyone seems to rub down enough between coats of spray finish; thus the armies of garishly gleaming old tables and chests of drawers you see in so many “antique” shops.

“Anyway,” I said, “anything’s better than nothing.” Again not my true opinion, but far be it from me to discourage anyone who was actually doing something, whether I approved of it or not, on a project as big as Harlequin House.

“Yeah,” Will said. Back turned to me, he poured coffee from a badly-needing-a-scrub carafe. “Here you go,” he added, handing me the cup.

Apparently his food enthusiasms only included cooking, not cleaning up dirty dishes afterwards. If it even included that; the coffee was bitter. I gulped at it nervously, keeping an eye on the back door in case I needed to dash for it and wishing hard that some of the historical society members would join me out here.

Then as a burst of music interrupted the chattering voices, I realized that they were coming not from live people, but from a television set. No one was here.

“Will, I thought everyone . . . What are all those cars doing parked outside?”

“Church service. Memorial for Hector. Not that anyone much cared, but I guess they thought they had to do something.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” That back door started looking very good to me. On the other hand I was here now, and . . .

“Our group ought to be showing up soon, though,” he said, glancing at the clock over the stove. “Stay here a second and let them in when they come, would you? Drink your coffee. I promised I’d bring Agnes a cup, too. Back in a jiffy.”

He left with a tray. Upstairs I heard a door open, and then a low, incoherent mumble cut off as the door closed firmly again.

Sad as I was at this fresh evidence that Agnes was failing, I couldn’t very well ignore the opportunity he’d given me to look around. I just needed to be careful: as he’d said, people would be coming in any minute.

So I got up and opened the nearest kitchen drawer. It held only a jumble of kitchen utensils including a spatula with egg dried on it and a cheese grater with a greying scrim clinging to it. But the next one contained papers.

Lots of papers. Hastily I rummaged through them. They included a report from the Board of Prisons of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, numerous copies of probation reports, and a little card like the one the dentist gives to schedule your next appointment.

The card, dated nearly a year earlier, set a time for Will to see a probation officer. I didn’t see any more recent cards. The paperwork said he was out on parole after serving a sentence in Walpole, in Massachusetts, for extortion and assault.

There were newspaper clippings too. I scanned fast: an arson fire at a Boston seafood place. Owner found inside with his legs broken, swore he’d fallen trying to get out.

Yeah, right. I opened a cabinet. Inside were a dozen jars of the imported caviar he’d fed us, but no other fancy foods unless you counted Fluffernutter, Froot Loops, and Ring-Dings, plus a variety of salty things in barbecue flavors.

In the freezer were stacks of frozen dinners and packages of prepared frozen codfish cakes, their label bearing an address in downtown Boston. The codfish cakes we’d had at the Harlequin House luncheon were, I recalled now, the only dish of Will’s I’d ever eaten that didn’t have serious preparation problems.

Because he hadn’t made it. That was a lie, too. He came back as I opened the refrigerator. “Looking for something?”

“No.” Suddenly I realized I’d taken one of the little jars of caviar out of the cabinet and it was still in my hand, a dead giveaway to what I’d really been doing.

“I mean . . . yes.” Nervousness made my mouth feel rubbery. “I was wondering if you had any milk.”

Luckily my bag was still on my shoulder; when Will turned away I dropped the little jar into it, then stuffed the bag inside my jacket and zipped it halfway up so the bag wouldn’t show, or so I fervently hoped.

He got powdered creamer out of another cabinet and handed it to me with a plastic spoon. “Here,” he said flatly.

Which was when it struck me that he hadn’t done much prep work for the imminent meeting. Where were the silver tea urn, the dessert plates and small sandwiches customary at such gatherings?

“I guess the club is bringing the refreshments?” I asked stupidly as I took a sip of creamer-adulterated coffee. In view of recent events, white powder wouldn’t have been on my list of things I wanted to consume.

But the glass jar was brand new with the safety seal still on it. And dumping the stuff into the coffee hadn’t made it taste better, but at least it tasted different.

“No,” he replied finally. “I fibbed about that, actually. I canceled the meeting. Aunt Agnes just isn’t up to having people over today.”

Then I did head for the door. But as I approached it the door began moving also: taller and shorter, fatter and thinner. Too late it occurred to me that a medicinal taste often indicates an actual presence of medicine in the tasted substance. Coffee, for instance.

Also, that medicine plus no meeting meant I might be in very deep do-do, indeed.

Or dee-dee indood. Oh, I was in trouble. Not the creamer; he had put something in the coffee much earlier, when he poured the cup. And I’d been drinking it all along, whatever it was.

The room tilted interestingly.

“Aunt Agnes,” Will said, “isn’t long for this world. Poor old dear. But she’s had a good life and now it’s time for her to move on. Let the younger generation take over.”

I looked down at my cup. It was empty except for a tiny bit of undissolved something, a yellow muck-blob at the bottom of it. Not strychnine powder; if it had been I’d be past wondering about it by now. But powdered creamer didn’t leave a residue like that.

Powdered creamer didn’t even . . .

“Sink,” I murmured aloud. It came out
think
. Which meant I’d better do the latter or I’d be doing the former real soon, now.

“May I use your bathroom? I’m not feeling very well.”

A smile. “Of course. Top of the stairs, to your right.”

Oh God. I made it upstairs, mixed my right up with my left, and flung myself through the wrong door. A grab at the doorknob saved me from falling right onto Agnes’s bed with her in it;
tied
into it with adhesive tape. Agnes stared up at me, pale old eyes confused, mouth sagged into an O of beseeching semicoherence.

“Agnes, I’ll come back,” I gabbled. “I swear to you I will.” I closed the door on this horror, confronted a fresh one: my own face in the bathroom mirror. Whatever he’d given me had already begun working its lousy magic. My pupils were dilated and sweat was beading on my upper lip.

I tried to make the stuff come up again but it wouldn’t; whatever Will had given me, it had turned my digestion into the calm spot at the center of a roiling maelstrom. In desperation I yanked open the medicine cabinet.

Inside were the items of Will’s much-vaunted first-aid kit, the one he’d been assembling so he could take care of his poor frail old aunt. But now I realized he was using the things to treat the scars of her imprisonment.

The “first-aid kit” consisted mostly of gauze, bandages, and some heavy-duty stuff whose label said it was for bedsores. There were several bottles of prescription tranquilizers, too.

But then I saw what I needed: the bottle of ipecac I’d given Will to complete his supply of remedies. Only just as I was about to twist the top off and guzzle the stuff—somehow I
had
to get rid of what he’d given me—he was pounding on the door.

“Jacobia? Are you all right?” His voice was saccharine.

“Yes!” I shoved the bottle into the pocket of my jeans, yanked my shirt down over it and got the cabinet closed.

The door opened a crack. His suspicious eyes met mine in the mirror, peered around. Then the door opened wide.

“Jacobia, I think you’d better come with me, now.”

The window, I could hurl myself out through the . . .

His hand clamped around my arm, turned me, held me up as my knees dissolved without warning.

“Hey, hey. Can’t have our star snoop passing out and maybe cracking her head open on the tub, can we?”

He guided me out into the hall. “No, we can’t have that at all.” His choice of words was smart-assed but his voice sounded frightened, unnaturally high.

“You’re not George’s friend,” I blubbered. Gad, what had he
given
me?

I kept talking, hoping it would keep me from passing out. Not that my own choice of words was well considered, but I was doped up. And besides, he’d been onto me already for a while, now.

“You’re a con man. The kind of bad guy who charms your socks off . . .”
Thocks.
I felt a goofy grin smear itself across my face.

“. . . right up until the minute his fingers start tightening around your throat.”

Froat.
Oh yeah, I was doing real well. The hall looked miles long and I knew he was going to herd me into one of the other bedrooms, tie me up with adhesive tape like Agnes.