Mallets Aforethought (3 page)

“Did a little research,” he replied wisely. “Used to be, the drug companies all had salesmen. They would go around to doctors’ offices with a satchelful of samples.”

Ellie’s ears had pricked up, too. “And that was Jan’s job? She sold pharmaceuticals?”

“Yup.” He preened, happy to be listened to. “See, doctors now don’t make all the decisions the way they once did. Somebody needs medicine, they could be stuck with what the insurance company or HMO will pay for. Used to be different. A good detail man kept his customers happy and satisfied, just like any other salesperson, kept them using
his
company’s line of goods.”

“And you learned all this how?” I persisted.

He hesitated. “Well, you know those services on the Internet where you can get background checks on people? I thought maybe if I could find out something on her, I could get her to go away.”

My face must have showed how likely I thought this was.

“Hey, it could happen,” he protested. “Matter of fact you’re right, it didn’t turn up any juicy stuff. I didn’t want to pay what a serious search costs. Lot of dough.”

And anyway, talk about bait and switch. Some of the online services promise the moon and deliver green cheese.

“But she’d won herself a business award once so there’d been an article about her,” Will added. “Little more reading on the drug business, I could figure out what she did. And it was like I said, sales.”

“Very enterprising of you,” I commented, then turned to George. “And how about you? Any online investigating you want to tell me about? Or any other kind?”

George on a computer was as easy to envision as me on a high wire. He had enough to do in the real world, never mind the virtual kind. Still, if the browser on Ellie’s computer was going to reveal a suggestive history—a search on Hector’s name, for instance, or on Jan’s—I wanted to know about it.

But he just made a face. “Nope. Sales is right,” he told Will. “Sold my Aunt Paula a load of bull.”

“So you think Jan might have been squirreling drug samples away over the years?” Ellie asked Will. “And maybe used them when she and Hector were softening up their victims?”

“Don’t know,” he replied. “Don’t even know if it’s possible. Fake her records or something. But it’d make sense. Even went and asked her once. I said, what’s the deal with you and Gosling? How come bein’ friends with you two’s so bad for the health? And she told me, watch what I was saying or she’d slap a lawsuit on me.”

He bridled, remembering. “That’s a hot one,
her
suing
me
. I told her so, too. Those poor women shut away far from home . . .”

“If a person goes into care in Eastport,” George agreed, “it is different. Nursing home, or the poor farm here in town.”

It wasn’t a poor farm. It was a place to live if you weren’t quite sick enough for constant nursing and you weren’t quite well. But everyone called it that and it had the best water view on the island.

“There people can check on you, even if it’s only when they are visiting their own folks,” he said. “People
know
.”

“George,” I began, trying to think of some way to change the subject. But too late: he was on his horse again.

“Poor old Aunt Paula,” he mourned. “Witch that she was, I had a soft spot for her. Wouldn’t have let those two Evel Knievels go to town on her if I had known.”

“Not your fault,” Will reminded him. “She wouldn’t talk to you. How were you to know those vultures had their claws in her?”

It was the reason Will himself had come home to Eastport: his own last living relative, his elderly aunt Agnes Bonnet, was a natural next target for the predatory Hector and Jan.

“If you hadn’t told me what’d happened to Paula,” he added to George, “
I’d
never have known.”

“How is she, Will?” Ellie inquired kindly. For it seemed Jan and Hector had gotten a start on Agnes, too.

Will shrugged sadly. “Not good. I don’t know what that woman might’ve given her, and
she
says she never gave her nothing.”

Anything, I corrected him silently. Will was a charming guy, but he was a little rough around the edges.

“Doctors can’t find a thing. She’s so fragile, though, it could have messed her mind up even after she stopped taking it.”

It occurred to me that the doctors might not be doing drug tests. So his Aunt Agnes
still
could be taking it. Whatever it might be.

“You know, you might want to look around in the house.”

He was living with her now, caring for her as best he could despite her increasing dementia. “In case there is anything, she might be confused and think she should swallow it,” I added.

Which was a nicer way of saying
in case she’s as sneaky as any other addict
. My own son Sam used to hide pills in ballpoint pens or rolled up in his toothpaste tube. Once he glued capsules behind his ears; when he pulled them off some cartilage came too, and he’d needed plastic surgery.

“Yeah, huh?” Will replied thoughtfully. Before coming home to Eastport he’d been in Boston for a dozen years, and city life had made him quick to pick up on the behaviors people might be getting into. “Yeah, maybe I should,” he agreed.

“That Jan Jesperson,” George said, understanding also what I was suggesting, “is one tricky piece of work.”

With this I had to agree, if only because nothing alleged against Gosling or Jesperson had ever been proven. On the face of it, George’s aunt had simply died of old age. By the time George heard about it she’d been cremated, on instructions that Gosling and Jesperson had helped her issue shortly before she expired.

“You know anything yet about the estate?” Will asked.

George shook his head. “Don’t guess I’m going to, either, at this late date. You aren’t in it, they don’t tell you about it.”

Which we assumed must be the situation: that George’s aunt had left her estate to that pair of shameless carrion-eaters.

“But it’s not about the money. It’s that I could’ve tried harder,” George insisted stubbornly. “She could’ve had us, ’stead o’ bein’ alone in that big house of hers, rattlin’ around amongst a lot of tarnished silver and dusty old furniture.”

He looked at Will. “It was her own choice the way she shut herself off from everyone but I don’t b’lieve she’d’ve ever been suckered by ’em if she wasn’t so lonely. Aunt Paula was always smart. You, though, you’re lucky. You got back before things got too bad.”

Will shrugged sympathetically. “Maybe. I hope you’re right, but we’ll see. Agnes was in pretty sad shape when I arrived.”

George got to his feet. “Anyway, I better go double-check the stuff I was using this morning. I need to make sure the rain didn’t seep in and wash it anywhere I don’t want it to go.”

Will followed him to the door. “I should get moving too. Almost time for Agnes’s lunch.” He’d been a restaurant manager in Boston and hoped to start one of his own, a seafood joint, here in Eastport.

Which was another story; I had my doubts about it.

“At least she’s eating well,” Ellie told him approvingly.

But then George’s remark struck me. “Stuff? I thought you were working out at the marine center, putting in the new dock.”

“Weather’s too bad.” He took his slicker from its hook in the hall and draped it over Ellie’s shoulders.

“So I got started on those red ants over to Cory Williams’s. Christ in a handcart, but he’s got a case. Never saw so many.”

Decades ago some big schooner must’ve come in here with stowaways: European fire ants. Furiously aggressive and equipped with a fierce formic acid bite, the ants had multiplied.

“And you know,” George went on, tucking Ellie’s hair under the earflaps of his sou’wester, “Cory’s trying to raise little pigs. Pot-bellied pigs, sell ’em as pets. Says people keep ’em in their houses like dogs. Smart as dogs, too, he says.”

At this Prill and Monday got up from the dog bed where they were lying together and left the room, which was probably only a coincidence. Meanwhile, with that day-glo yellow slicker and black rain hat laid on over the rest of her outfit, Ellie appeared to be wearing an entire storewide clearance sale.

“I’ll make the cop call,” I told her quietly. “And you call me if anything happens.” The baby, I meant, and she promised to.

“So Cory,” George went on, “has to eliminate the ants.”

Unlike the rest of us, who doused ourselves with bug dope in summer and with cortisone ointment on the many occasions when bug dope didn’t work. Boric acid sometimes got rid of them, though, and was unlikely to have been the stuff that eliminated Hector.

For that my money was still on strychnine. The awful grin on his face was a giveaway. So I felt better.

Temporarily. “Turned out, Cory’s got another problem, too, with all the feed and the straw and the refuse,” George added.

“Yup,” Will agreed, pulling on a windbreaker. “Although he keeps those pigs so clean you could lie down next to ’em and sleep. He’s set up such nice pens for ’em, you might not mind it.”

I would mind. But it was what George had said that had my attention now. “Other problem?” I asked.

George checked his pocket for his key ring, pulled out a massive one loaded with the fifty or so labeled keys he used on a regular basis, working around the island for people. It also held a truck key as backup for the one in the vehicle’s visor.

“Seems no matter how clean you are with ’em, if you keep ’em outdoors,” George said, “the feed spills, coupla grains here and a coupla grains there, pretty soon you’ve also got—”

Ellie looked at me and I looked at her, and I could feel our hearts sinking together like anchors. Because she’d seen Gosling too, and I knew she’d have come to the same conclusion as I had.

Strychnine is controlled, now. For all practical purposes the ordinary person can’t even buy it. But once upon a time many households had a tin of the stuff. People used it to kill . . .

“Rats,” said George, stepping out into the storm.

My sentiments exactly.

My name is Jacobia Tiptree and when I first came to Maine, my old house needed more rehab than your average heroin addict. The roof leaked, the floors sagged, and the cast-iron radiators were antique, charmingly ornate containers clogged with mineral deposits and rust.

And speaking of addicts, back then my son Sam needed rehab too. It was why I’d brought him to an island in remote downeast Maine, as a last resort before the horrors of locked hospitals and teenage boot camps.

In the city he’d been a young teen going on twenty or so, running in a wolf pack of friends with eyes as blank and shiny as dimes. Too old for spankings and too young for jail, scornful of school and contemptuous of kids who actually went there, the boys roamed Manhattan with money in their pockets and mayhem in their hearts.

When I polled the others’ parents, hoping for help, I found attitudes ranging from “boys will be boys” to the extremities of tough love; those parents at any rate who could be located and who were sober enough to express an opinion. One youngster, whose dad was a well-known rock star (see sober enough, above) lived in a penthouse with views more extensive than the kid’s own faraway stare. With him lived a maid who spoke no English, his mother’s boyfriend (she was climbing Mount Everest and writing an article about it for
Vanity Fair
), and a down-on-his-luck former dot-com honcho to whom the kid had, for no particular reason that I could discover, given a key.

Not that my own situation was any less ridiculous or desperate. Sam wasn’t yet hooked on heroin but only because he liked other substances so much better. And some of them changed my son into someone neither of us recognized. One night as he was leaving our apartment I caught at his sleeve; in response he swung around, put his hands on my throat, and began squeezing. And when I looked into his eyes to try snapping him out of it, croaking his name through the diminishing space in my airway, no one was there.

No one at all. Why he stopped choking me and slammed out, I have no idea; the next day he didn’t remember any of it.

And then there was Sam’s dad; when I mentioned a divorce he’d pledged a civil, even cordial arrangement, then hired a pack of lawyers who were about as civil as wolverines. Victor was amazed that I’d thought when we were married he would be faithful. To him this was as foolish as believing that once people landed on other planets there would be air there.

Just because people needed it. Just because, actually, they were dying without it. When, after he showed absolutely no sign of leaving—he did get his own phone line which his girlfriends began using; the hots-line, Sam started calling it—I threw him out, Victor had a hissy fit that deteriorated into a meltdown.

And even when it was over—all I wanted was custody, which he didn’t want but fought savagely for anyway just on principle—he kept pestering me bizarrely. For example he stole my wedding dress, wrapped a dead fish in it, and sent it to me in a box.

And Sam, of course, opened it. “It doesn’t mean anything,” I remember telling our son. “He’s angry and his feelings are hurt.”

Sam looked at me, and despite the hots-line I could see him thinking that if his mother weren’t such a bitch maybe his dad wouldn’t be driven to such extremes, and he wouldn’t be opening a package in hopes of finding a Game Boy and coming instead upon a lace-wrapped carp.

So maybe it was that: Victor, and not Sam’s addiction or the increasingly dismal task of being a hot-shot financial advisor in Manhattan. Which I was, and I was a whiz at it, too; big clients and bigger commissions. Let the rest have their fifteen minutes of fame on the financial networks, touting stocks they owned and barking at competitors like a company of trained seals. I was the real deal and publicity was the last thing I wanted or needed.

But the money business had changed and so had the city, and probably so had I. Looking back on it now it seems so impossible that I could have stayed, it’s hard to come up with one reason, a single motivating factor for my departure.

Bottom line, I just needed a planet with air on it.