Mallets Aforethought (29 page)

If he did I’d have a chance. It meant he was going to leave me alone, maybe long enough so I could squirm out of the bonds somehow and get help. But no such luck; he wasn’t only a worried con man.

He was a careful one. “Ronny,” I muttered as he half-carried me down the stairs. My feet kept tangling and my brain felt like a pinball machine. “What’d you tell him to make him do it?”

He cleared his throat uncertainly, his grip on my arm moist with nervous perspiration. And he didn’t quite answer me.

Instead he seemed to be encouraging himself. “If at first you don’t succeed,” he recited. Then, more forcefully, “Too bad about Perry Daigle. I had hopes, but Perry always was a screwup.”

“You paid him.” We reached the downstairs hall. “You gave Perry money, made promises, so he would hit George on the head.”

“Yup,” he replied. “Decent down payment, a few years in jail, big payday at the end. More’n he could earn on the outside. And everyone knows Daigle hates jail, so no one would suspect the truth. Not,” Will said, “that he was going to reach that payday. But Daigle’s not a long-term planning type of guy like I am.”

If he tried taking me outside someone would see . . . but that hope sank too as instead he muscled me through a breezeway to the garage without ever going outdoors at all. “That’s how I knew I had to have a backup,” he went on, “in case Daigle missed.”

He slammed the door behind him. “Which he did. George lived. But you’re right, now Ronny can finish what Daigle didn’t.”

My knees buckled as he guided me toward the car in the garage. “Ronny doesn’t bribe ’cause he doesn’t understand about money,” Will confided, “but he scares real easy. Pretty soon no more George, just the way I planned in the first place.”

“So Perry Daigle killed Hector and Jan Jesperson while you and George were in Boston? And somehow you got George not to tell anyone where the two of you had gone. That way he’d have no . . .”

Alibi,
I wanted to finish. But I couldn’t remember the word. And anyway, that wasn’t it. A triumphant look spread on Will’s face as he opened the car’s trunk.

“Wrong,” he pronounced. “It’s better than that. I had plenty of time to plan, back in Walpole. Get in.”

I tried stalling him. Once he had me in there he could take me anywhere. No one would know.

“You knew Jan was dead because you’d killed her. Saying your aunt wanted to see her, that was just to make it look as if you thought Jan was still alive?”

“There you go. Now you’re back on the right track.”

He shoved me hard. “I knew as soon as I laid eyes on her the Jesperson woman was bent. It takes one to know one,” he added a little sorrowfully.

“Will, you don’t have to do this,” I implored.

“Really? You’re going to let me get away, I suppose?”

Well, no. Not if I could help it. “Anyway I can’t stop now,” he added, turning sullen. “It’s got to go the way I planned.”

One last try. “No. No, it doesn’t, and if you do stop now I’ll help you.”

I meant it, too. Partly because it could save my life, but for another reason also.

“Damn it, Will, there’s no such thing as too late. Not while you’re breathing.”

I was looking at Will but I was thinking of my father, Sam, and myself.

All the second chances we fortunate people had been given to live down our mistakes. “You can turn this around and if you do I’ll stick by you,” I said. “I’ll get lawyers, expert witnesses.”

A forensic hospital and treatment was better than a jail cell. I was still looking straight at him, my own gaze managing to focus for a few moments. Something moved in his eyes.

Hope, I realized. But not for long. He was just too far gone. “I’ll bet you would,” he said quietly at last. Regretfully. “I’ll just bet you would, and if you did go to bat for me, do you know what would happen?”

Yeah. I knew. That was, as Sam would’ve put it, the fly in the oinkment.

“I’d get out and do it again. Not the same thing, but something. Because that’s who I am. That’s what I do. I’m a bad guy. Truth is I wish I hadn’t ever come back here.”

He had, though. Back here to us. And now we were caught in his scheme like so many flies in a Venus flytrap. He had, I figured, about as much choice in the matter as one of those, too.

His expression hardened again. Oops, time to talk fast.

“How’d you know Jan was a crook?” I asked, hoping to keep the conversation going. When it ended I was sunk. And at first, my ploy actually worked.

“Hey,” he replied, brightening. “You think she bought all that stuff in her house with sales commissions? No way.” He chuckled.

Not a good sign. Now that he’d dropped his good-guy facade, he wasn’t bothering to hide his mood swings, either. “So I found out more about her, figured out she must have assembled a stash. Which,” he finished smugly, “she had.”

“How’d you get them to come here? To this house?”

Howth.
My little few moments of clarity were dissolving as the second phase of whatever he’d given me kicked in hard.

But he understood. “Jan and Hector? It was easy. Told ’em I could prove what they’d been up to. First her and then him. That Jan, she hotfooted it over here so fast . . .”

Yeah, so fast she hadn’t turned off her coffeepot or locked her house, or even put away her laptop. Hector would’ve been extremely eager to know what Will had on him, too.

And each of them must have accepted a drink, right there in his aunt’s kitchen where I’d done the same. It was a poison-laced concoction for Hector; for Jan probably a sedative like the one he’d given me, so she’d be easier to strangle.

After that, the back side of Harlequin House was so thickly overgrown that all he had to do was get the car in unseen, get the trunk unloaded, and open the coal chute. And presto, delivery accomplished.

The car trunk looked suddenly even more unattractive. He could drive to the wilderness on the mainland and leave me, walk or hitchhike home. Then he could come back later, bury me in the woods.

Or whatever. I leaned on the fender. “Will, is it about that boat trip? Is it drugs, are you smuggling them? Maybe with help from someone else?”

His laugh this time was genuinely amused. “Oh, please. Show some imagination. Try seeing the whole picture. The big show.”

My head lolled back. I tried to fix it, but failed. My eyelids were lowering dangerously. “Tell me.”

He inspected me. “Okay. Maybe I will. The boat was a ruse,” he said cruelly. “You fell for it like a ton of bricks.”

He checked my bonds—and where had
they
come from?—grunting with satisfaction as he yanked them. “You really believed I didn’t know how nosy you are? I had Perry take the boat out just to give you something to chew on.”

“I don’t see . . .” God, I was out of it. He’d tied me up without my even realizing it was happening. But then I did understand. “The boat was to make it look as if George was involved in something illegal.”

“Yeah. Slow you down a little. You dig too deep, you might come up with something nasty on Mister Goody-Two-Shoes. You sure wouldn’t want to do that,” he added sarcastically.

He was right. He’d been even farther ahead of me than I had realized. And now as if to reassure himself that he really was the villain he fancied himself to be, his manner roughened more, too.

“Tell you something else. You want to bring in a big score, you don’t put it on a boat.” He shoved me first one way and then the other, positioning me in front of the car’s trunk.

I wobbled woozily, barely staying on my feet. “Way too much security for that nowadays,” he went on. “Those Customs guys see everything. So what you do is, you attach it.”

He prodded me experimentally. I nearly toppled over but caught myself. “Underneath,” he went on. “Then you move the boat. Out to Deep Cove, say. Haul your stuff up when no one’s around.”

“What stuff?” My feet felt as if they were dissolving and my head as if it were filling with concrete.
Thtuff.
“What did you bring in that . . .”

“You’ll see. Real soon, you’ll figure it out. For now let’s just say it was the other reason I went to Boston, to finish the arrangements on a deal I’ve had going for a while.”

His tone chilled to subzero. I didn’t buy it. It was still as if he was trying to live up to some tough model in his head. But his efforts were working well enough to put a hitch in my git-along, as George would’ve expressed it.

“A
good
deal,” Will added. “But right now I want you out for the count. Absolute silence, no ruckus while I’m driving, maybe somebody hears you. So we’re going to just sit here till the junk you’ve got on board finishes working.”

He grinned engagingly. Falsely. It was all bluff. Maybe it was always all bluff with guys like him, I didn’t know.

And at the moment, it made no earthly difference to me. “The eyes are the window to the soul, Jake, did you know that?”

Yeah, I thought sourly, I’ve heard it somewhere.

Meanwhile his own eyes showed flickers of panic again. They’d begun darting around like little creatures hunting for an escape route.

It hit me again that he wasn’t as sure of himself as he wanted to seem. But the cracks in his psychological underpinnings were not helping me. “You have,” I mumbled, “an unoriginal mind.”

He ignored the insult. “That’s how I knew the jig was up. I could see it in
your
eyes, see it coming. And the minute Sam came for the caviar, I was sure. You wanted a better look at it, and that meant you suspected something. You want to put me behind bars again.”

A slow head-shake. “Not gonna happen, though.”

We’ll see, you creep, I thought. I’d had enough of his deep traumas and I was way past the I’ll-help-you-out stage, too. Hey, I’d offered him a hand and he’d turned it down.

So it was time for plan B, whatever that was; by now I was getting pretty unoriginal, myself. There’s not much snappy patter to be found in la-la land, I was discovering.

Or a lot of clever planning ability. “What’d you tell George to get him to drive you to Boston?” I asked.

Didn’t I? Maybe I didn’t. I wasn’t sure anymore how much I was saying and how much I was only thinking.

Perhaps dreaming. “And Ellie,” I persisted, filled with drug-addled inspiration. “It’s something to do with Ellie, too, isn’t it? The whole thing, she’s part of it?” I speculated aloud.

Or possibly not. By now, the gongs in my ears were ringing so furiously I could barely hear myself think.

“You want to know so much,” he said. “Okay, I’ll tell you a bedtime story. And I’ll stop when I’m sure that you are fast asleep.”

He reached out and gave me a little shove, just one-handed. I fell halfway into the trunk, flopped there. He loaded my legs in, bent them, and as an afterthought folded my hands together.

Like the hands of a child who is getting ready to float into slumber. Or praying hard. He lowered the trunk lid.

Darkness; the smell of old dust, the rubbery reek of a spare tire. I tried to push the lid back up and realized again with a bolt of fright that he’d bound my wrists.

Terror filled me. I was losing it. If I fell asleep now I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, fresh and ready for a new day.

And not later, groggy but mad as hell. Not ever, unless I kept my eyes open. But from his manner I knew he didn’t believe I had much choice in the off-to-dreamland department.

Sounds: the scrape of a metal lawn chair on the concrete garage floor. Faint creak as he settled into it. And then his voice, a bit muffled but still audible, and rich with the unexpected pleasure of pouring out his sad story to someone. Because for all I would ever be able to do about it, he could be talking to himself.

Among my final coherent thoughts was the too-late-now-dammit awareness of the mistake I had been making all along. To me the trouble had been that George’s absence fell within the time frame of Hector’s death.

But I’d never seen it the other way around: that appearances to the contrary maybe Hector’s death
didn’t
fall into the time frame of George’s absence.

“Once upon a time,” Will began in the age-old way.

The last story, probably, that I would ever hear. And though I didn’t enjoy it, I will say this much.

It was a doozy.

“Once upon a time . . .”

I woke in near-darkness with my hands still bound and fresh tape over my mouth, propped up against a wall. A candle flickered on a nearby table. From somewhere nearby came a scraping sound, a very
familiar
sound, but I couldn’t quite place it.

Then I did and a thud of fright hit me as I recognized my surroundings. Meanwhile Will had apparently started over: a story so nice he told it twice.

“. . . there was a bad boy and a good boy. Best friends, right here in little old Eastport, Maine.”

I was in the hidden room in Harlequin House where Ellie and I had discovered the bodies of Hector Gosling and Eva Thane.

I battled my fear by tallying up all the physical things around me. There was the old red rug. The board floor, splinters sticking up from it, with a bent nail protruding from one of the boards where someone had tried inexpertly to fasten it back down. A candle like the one that had burned on the table by Eva Thane’s body all those years ago was stuck in a mess of melted wax.

Its flame comforted me. But eventually it would burn down.

“All the bad boy did was get in trouble,” Will went on. “And all the good boy did was get him out of it.”

Beneath me I could feel the edges of the trapdoor. My legs were getting numb, though; I’d been lying here for some time.

And while I was unconscious Will Bonnet had begun walling me up alive. That was the scraping sound I heard: a plaster trowel.

“It got pretty old,” Will said. “The routine. Because it was not like the good boy didn’t get into his share of trouble. Only no one ever held it against him. They were too busy shaking their heads over the bad boy.”

A thoughtful pause. “All talking about him and wishing he’d go away,” Will added bleakly.

Ellie and I had even speculated about it: quick-dry plaster, fresh wallpaper in the new pattern we’d picked. It would work.