Nail Biter (11 page)

She shook salt into the sauce. “Anyway, there was a brace of partridges in the kitchen, all ready for the oven, along with the casseroles and other things people had been bringing on account of Eugene, and when I asked her where they came from she said she thought them partridges was from Mac Rickert.”

She pronounced it the Maine way:
pah-triches
. “Really,” I said, and then because she'd been so informative so far, I decided to tell her the rest of what I'd been up to for the last twenty-four hours.

“So does all that plus a bag of pills smell like partnership to you?” I asked when I had finished. “Because it does to me.”

Bella turned, spoon in hand. “Well, I wouldn't know for sure. But I can tell you this much—Mac Rickert wouldn't be caught dead within a mile of that goofball Eugene Dibble unless he had
some
reason.”

At my questioning look she explained, “When Mac was out an' about more he only hung around with the hunting guys, loggers, some of the commercial fishermen. 'S all you'd ever see him with, not fools like Eugene.”

Cat Dancing stood up, peered around for possible stray shrimp, and settled herself once more with a soft thump. “And now he's not around at all?”

Bella shrugged expressively. “That's the other thing. He's around, all right. Once in a while you'll hear a boat, no running lights on a foggy night, or some hunter'll catch a glimpse of somebody a long ways from the road, slippin' 'mongst the trees.”

She paused, thinking. “Or a car will go missing out of some driveway, stay gone for a day or so, then show up again like it was never gone in the first place, 'cept the gas tank's empty.”

“So not a bad boogeyman, exactly?” Unless he'd taken Wanda. “Because from what you're saying, shooting people and kidnapping girls doesn't sound like Rickert's M.O.,” I added.

Bella nodded agreement. “Mac's more the type to go out and shoot a turkey, dress it all out, and leave it on somebody's back doorstep. Like them partridges.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Somebody who can't afford to buy a bird for Thanksgiving,” she explained. “That's the rumor, when it happens people say it was Mac.”

“A Robin Hood boogeyman, then.” Only in Eastport, folks.

“Jenny Dibble said one other strange thing,” Bella continued. “She said Gene'd been real cheerful lately. Which I imagine was unusual. As if something was going right for him, she said.”

Which was pretty unusual, too, I supposed. Picking up the garlic press, Bella broke half a dozen cloves from the garlic head, removed the peelings, then put them through the press into a bowl that already held another stick of butter.

So maybe our arteries would harden but at least we wouldn't have to worry about vampires. “I'd like to talk to this Rickert,” I told her.

She tipped her head doubtfully as she mashed the garlic into the butter with a fork. But before she could answer, my dad stomped up the cellar stairs, a string of profanities issuing from his mouth.

Stopping when he saw us. “Oh. Sorry about that,” he said. He crossed to the sink and drew himself a glass of water, guzzling it down without pause, then let out a sigh.

“But I've just discovered there's a
box
hidden in that wall,” he added. “Or at any rate I think there is. And I don't mind telling you two it's driving me plumb nuts.”

He ran more water. “A big box. At least two feet long and a foot wide from what I can tell.” He held his hands out to indicate the item's dimensions.

They were big, work-gnarled hands, knuckles grimy and joints knobby with early arthritis. “A
wooden
box. But—”

In every old-house task there is always a “but.” You can depend on it.

“. . . I can't get the box out without taking apart a lot more wall,” he went on. “And I don't know what they used for mortar, but here we are almost two hundred years later and it's still harder than the stone.”

He drained his glass again. “So what I need is to find out the true size of the thing,” he said, his frustration easing somewhat as he aired it out by talking to us. “Just start outwards and work in till I get to its edges, so I don't have to take down more old mortar and stone than I need to.”

“And you'll find out the true size,” I asked, “by . . . ?”

“Drilling,” he replied firmly. “Drill some test holes with a mortar bit, I don't hit wood, then I haven't hit the box.”

Frowning, he went on. “I already nicked it once, wood chips came out on the pick edge. Mahogany, it appears, which is why I think it's a box and not just a structural part of the house.”

Indeed, I thought; let's not damage any of those. The place already had an alarming tendency to fall down at one end faster than I could prop it up at the other.

“I want to preserve the thing whole, if I can,” he said.

I wanted it, too. A mysterious box dating from when the house was built . . .

“But it's not going to be easy.” He wiped his forehead with his bandanna. “There's an old pipe of some kind in the wall. I'd rather not hurt that. And like I said, some old-time builder put that box in there to stay.”

He eyed the counter where Bella stood spreading thick slices of a French loaf with the garlic butter. “Course,” he added, “some other old-timer might just manage to get the jump on the situation, he's well fueled enough.”

Bella sniffed. “Go on with you, shedding grit an' grime all over my clean kitchen. Supper ain't for hours, yet.”

But then her face softened, which on Bella was really saying something. She was no oil painting but when she looked at my dad she was almost pretty.

“Here,” she added, reaching into the cookie jar and coming up with a couple of homemade date bars. “Wouldn't want it to be said I turned my back on a starving man.”

She thrust them gruffly at him and when he'd departed with them she turned back to me. “Missus,” she began; one thing I hadn't been able to train her to do was call me by my first name.

“Missus, here's what I think. Eugene Dibble's brains had about enough powder to blow him to hell, which I'm guessing is what happened one way or another. And from what I've heard, Mac Rickert is exactly the man Eugene would've needed if he was all involved in some kind of drug deal and it was too big to handle by himself.”

“But would Dibble be smart enough to realize that?” I asked. “I mean that he needed someone else, with experience in this kind of thing, badly enough to consider sharing the profit?”

Which he'd have had to do and from what I knew of Dibble myself, I felt confident it would've half killed him. Bella shook her head, sliding the casserole into the oven.

“No, I wouldn't expect so. But you never can tell, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And what if for once he did something the proper way for a change?

“That is,” she amended darkly, straightening, “if there is a proper way to do a thing like that.”

“Huh,” I said, thinking over what she'd told me as footsteps thudded up the back porch. Moments later Wade came in, kissed me on the ear, and went upstairs to change his clothes.

Behind him came Sam with the two dogs, Monday white-faced and arthritic beside Prill, a youngster by comparison. But at the moment they were both so invigorated from their walk, their names might as well have been Romp and Stomp.

“Sam, put them out in the ell until they calm down, please,” I said, and he was quick to comply. Though we'd finished the chartering-a-plane talk, he knew I wasn't at all happy about it, and he wanted to appease me.

Last came Victor, uninvited and unexpected. But that man could smell shrimp casserole a mile away. “Hello,” he said pleasantly, putting an extra bottle of wine on the table, then went on into the living room without offering even one critical remark.

Bella watched him go. “Is he mellowing?” she asked me. “Or is it my imagination?”

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed, “and after that, Hannibal Lecter's going to become a vegetarian.”

I'd have gone on but Sam called out from the hall closet to say he'd just broken the light switch in there and did I have any more of them so he could replace it?

That keep-Mom-in-a-good-mood program could operate to my advantage, I realized, if I figured out how to work it right. The trouble was, Sam didn't know how to fix a light switch.

Also, I didn't have any. So I ran down to the hardware store again and when I got back I had to turn off all the power in the house because I couldn't remember which circuit ran the closet wiring, and we did replace the thing.

Power off, old fixture out, wires onto new fixture—wrapped clockwise around the connection screws—and lastly, new fixture in. Not counting the hardware store trip it only took us about fifteen minutes, though afterwards Sam said he was glad he hadn't decided to become an electrician.

Too much nitpicking, he opined of my efforts to teach him how to avoid becoming an electrocuted person; he'd have assumed the circuit was dead once the breaker switch was pulled, instead of checking with the circuit-tester gadget I made such a religion of using.

But it was pleasant, doing it together. Then while I was putting the tools away Ellie arrived, along with her husband George Valentine carrying baby Lee, her high chair, and what I estimated was most of the other baby equipment in the world. Soon after that the oven timer went off, the baby woke up shedding clothing items and demanding to be entertained, and the dogs decided banishment to the spare room was boring, so could they dig a hole under the door?

The answer being yes they could, so I opened it to prevent this; next came dinner and all the hilarity that ensues when you combine babies, current and ex-husbands, shrimp casserole, and rowdy dogs, plus of course a pair of women like Ellie and me who are just trying to get a little food into our mouths, for Pete's sake.

“Got your deer yet?” George Valentine teased Victor from across the table. He knew that in Victor's opinion, hunting was right up there with standing on your porch spitting tobacco juice past the broken washing machine you kept by the front door, and if you were any good at it there was a broken lawn mower sitting out there, too.

“‘The unspeakable,'” Victor pronounced in reply, “‘in pursuit of the inedible.'”

But he smiled when he said it, and he had the good grace not to look surprised when George said he hadn't been talking about foxhunting, which was a different keg of fish.

“Hear there's poachers,” George went on, turning to Wade. The Maine way:
poach-ahs
. “Over on Tall Island. Now, that's a bunch I'd like to chase around with some dogs and a bugle.”

My father had slipped out the back door after shyly saying hello to the assembled company, carrying a covered dish wrapped in a towel that Bella had fixed up for him; sometimes he joined us for dinner, and sometimes he didn't.

George added to Victor, “Tall Island's a game preserve, no hunting at all. Long time ago it got made that way by local ordinance, since then everyone's just kind of agreed it should stay.”

Wade nodded, digging into his dinner. “But it's the same every year. Always one or two can't play by the rules. Doesn't help that you can walk over there at low tide, either.”

To Tall Island, he meant. When the tide went out, the inlet between the island and the mainland was a relatively smooth—though seriously slippery—stretch of sand and rocks. And since poachers of course didn't obey the “no hunting after sunset” rule, either—there was plenty of opportunity.

“Guys hunt without a license, or in protected places. Mostly with illegal equipment,” Wade explained to Victor, whose dislike of hunting was rivaled only by his ignorance on the subject.

Victor reacted predictably. “What, like it's supposed to be a fair fight?”

But Wade's reply was serious. “To a degree, yes. There's not much sport in knocking the animals over with a bazooka. The idea is to bring the population down in a way that's not cruel to your quarry, while also providing a good experience for the hunter.”

He ate a bite of casserole, washed it down with a swallow of the ale he preferred with dinner instead of wine.

“And I think you'll agree chasing a wounded deer through deep snow for half a day so you can finish it off isn't what most folks'd call a good time,” he concluded.

George ducked, narrowly avoiding Leonora's thrown teething biscuit, then nodded agreement as he produced a replacement from his shirt pocket.

“Man, that's the truth,” he said, teasing the baby's lower lip with the biscuit until she accepted it. Strapped into her high chair like an astronaut in a landing capsule, Lee uttered a few wet syllables of appreciation and began gnawing the morsel.

“These guys, though, they don't even bother to chase what they've wounded,” said George. “They just let the poor thing . . .”

Time to change the subject, I thought, but Victor cut in before I had a chance to. “What kind of stuff aren't you allowed to use?” he asked.

Half listening to the answer, I regarded my nearly cleaned plate a little guiltily. What, I wondered, might Wanda Cathcart be having for dinner, and where? But other than that crystal ball out at the tenants' place, it seemed I had little way of finding out tonight.

Correction: no way. “. . . jacklighting,” Sam was in the middle of telling his father. “That's flat-out illegal, blinding 'em with a bright light at night so they'll just stand still like they were hypnotized,” he explained.

“Nothing but a handheld bow, no crossbows or anything like that,” he went on after another forkful of his food; that shrimp casserole was fantastic. “You can't use a substance on the arrow tip to poison them, either.”

“Or God forbid an explosive tip,” Wade put in, making a face at an old hunting memory that I hoped he wouldn't share, and he didn't.

“Got to be a broadhead tip,” George agreed. “And you've got a limit to how heavy a bow you can use. Not,” he added, “that the heavier bow'll improve your accuracy any, anyway.”

He drank some wine. “Pull it back, you're bobblin' around on account o' the draw's way too heavy, half the time all you end up with is your good old-fashioned
kertwang
.”

“Wild shot,” Wade translated for Victor. “Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that,” he added to George, “about Tall Island. Any idea who's been doing it?”