Nail Biter (16 page)

Seeing it, I knew suddenly that Wanda hadn't been cold, and I knew why. She'd had a sleeping bag; probably she'd used it for a blanket. The thing on the shelf was its carry sack.

She'd taken the sleeping bag, then, but maybe she'd been in too much of a hurry to stuff the bag in its sack, even though it would have been much easier to transport that way.

More runaway evidence? I thought of mentioning it to Marge, decided not to. It would only confuse her more.

Just as it was doing to me. “Has Wanda ever done anything unpredictable before? Or . . . maybe the two of you had an argument that night that I didn't know about?”

I was grasping at straws. But if she'd gone on her own there was a reason. Marge shook her head slowly. “She resisted taking her pill. But no more than usual. And she's never run away.”

Her posture straightened in defense of her daughter even as another wince of discomfort pinched her face. “She's perfectly intelligent. Just because she doesn't speak . . . we've been to a lot of specialists but no one's been able to tell me why. She's unusual, yes. But not disturbed, not poorly adjusted, or . . .”

Her voice broke. “It's my fault she was here. Such a fool I was, I believed that awful Mr. Brand's lies. Jenna told me about him while we were out. I . . . I believed he was going to
help
her!”

“Now, now,” I said, mentally scolding myself for what I'd been thinking about her earlier, that she'd been a fool to come here. It wasn't so unusual to do desperate things when you were trying to help your child.

I'd done plenty of them. “Try to stay positive,” I added.

As I said this Hetty emerged from the other bedroom, where she'd obviously been listening to us. In addition to the bungalow's many other flaws, the walls were polite fictions in the privacy department.

“Come on, honey,” Hetty crooned, guiding Marge toward the kitchen. “Let's have coffee, you'll feel better. You don't want Wanda to see you like this when she comes home, do you?”

Which was exactly the right thing to say, and it made me feel bad about my earlier opinion of Hetty, too.

“I know, we'll sit down and do your horoscope,” Hetty went on as the two women moved away. “At bad times like this we always can find our way with the stars to guide us.”

Too bad the stars couldn't do anything about that fuse box. But if I didn't check it I'd just have to do it later, so I grudgingly hauled the toolbox down the ladder to the crawl space.

It was like going into a grave: smelling of damp earth and pitch dark until I stepped off the ladder and had a hand free for a flashlight. The yellowish beam didn't stop hanging cobwebs from exploring my face with their shudder-producing tendrils.

Still, I made it to the far wall, opened the fuse box, and soon discovered the reason why Hetty Bonham's hair dryer, Greg Brand's shaver, and Jenna Durrell's electric toothbrush—not to mention the overhead light and the pair of fluorescents on either side of the bathroom mirror—had suddenly stopped working.

Blown fuse. And of course none of them had come down to try correcting the problem, which was annoying, too. But at least I could repair it without much trouble.

Lined up atop the fuse box was a row of fresh fuses in the sizes the various circuits required. Choosing the correct one was a simple matter of matching the blown fuse's color with its similarly color-coded replacement.

In other words, wham-bam. I changed the fuse and dropped the old one in my pocket, and when I was done I aimed the flashlight up into the wiring above the fuse box, just checking to make sure everything looked shipshape.

Which was when the huge spider dropped directly into my hair and skittered across my face. “Blearggh!” I shrieked, or something very like it, and dropped the flashlight to free my hands for wild rubbing, brushing, and swatting motions while my legs did the little hopping dance my nervous system threw in for good measure.

Gradually I stopped, alert for the tickle of spidery feet. When that didn't happen, I groped very cautiously on the dirt floor for the flashlight, found it, and switched it back on—amazingly it hadn't broken—moving the beam over the earth to search for the offending creature.

Relieved, I saw no sign of it. But on the floor under the fuse box I spotted a small white object.

Spider egg,
I thought with another reflexive shudder; squinting harder, though, I saw that in fact it wasn't one. Spider eggs are round, and they don't have a line scored across them to make them easier to divide into halves.

I picked the thing up between my fingers, examined it by flashlight though by now I already knew what it must be; there had been a recent article on rural drug abuse in one of the news magazines Wade and I subscribed to, with pictures.

Some of the photographs had been taken in Eastport, others in a pharmaceutical laboratory.

What I'd found was an oxycontin tablet.

When I left
a little while later, Hetty Bonham followed me to my car. “There's something you should hear,” she told me. “About the dead guy, Eugene Dibble. You know much about him?”

I stopped with my hand on the car door. “Yep. Rabble-rousing self-styled fundamentalist preacher, not of the goodness-in-his-heart variety,” I recited.

“He talked as if fire and brimstone were his personal weapons systems,” I went on. “Liked to hang out with a lot of other losers and get them all fired up against somebody, too. Why, what else should I know?” The oxycontin tab was in my toolbox.

“That he was married before,” Hetty said, her voice hardening. “Before his wife here in Eastport, I mean. First one divorced him after he was convicted of abusing her young daughter.”

She eyed me, gauging my reaction to this, then went on. “His stepdaughter. Girl of about fifteen, I heard about it later from Greg. Dibble got three years, all but six months suspended. So I guess he had some pretty good reasons for wanting people around here to keep focused on the bad stuff other folks did. That way he was more sure of keeping the spotlight off himself.”

“I guess so,” I said slowly, stunned by this news. “Anyone else know about this?”

Hetty shook her head. In daylight the little lines around her eyes were cruelly visible. “Around here? Not from me. I'll tell you what, though,” she declared, throwing her blonde head back angrily.

“One,” she ticked off on a long, crimson-tipped finger, “if I'd ever faced him with a gun in my hand I'd have shot the son of a bitch myself. Six months, my ass. And two, I've been waiting for Wanda to come back on her own. Because of the jacket and backpack and the sleeping bag, I really thought she would.”

So she'd noticed what I had: that the missing items spelled runaway. Just . . . not quite straightforwardly enough.

“But it's starting to seem like she isn't going to,” Hetty went on. “And that's not the kind of thing I signed up for, some poor little girl in trouble. It's why I figured you'd better know about Gene Dibble, too.”

She straightened determinedly. “So when I go back in that house I'm telling Greg to call your police chief, tell him everything.”

“Right,” I said, “that's just what he should do.”

“Because Gene Dibble was a damned child molester and I don't care what anyone says, those guys never change. What they do is find other creeps to hang out with, share their
enthusiasms
.”

“And if someone
took
Wanda—” I was thinking aloud.

“That's right,” she replied tightly. I thought about what Greg Brand had told me about Hetty; if it was true, she had her own good reasons for hating guys like Dibble.

“Because if some
other
bad-guy creep took Wanda, why else would he be hanging around to even know about her, other than that he was here with Gene?” she demanded.

Again it was what I'd thought, but now the theory had taken on a stomach-turning twist. Hetty stared across the wide cove as if reading her next words off the water.

“While they were here they
saw
her,” she said flatly, her opinion once more mirroring my own.

“Think Greg had anything to do with it?” I asked. Might that account for that pill being in the cellar? Maybe he'd hidden them down there, dropped one somehow.

“You mean do I think Greg knew the drugs were here? Or brought them himself?” She shrugged expressively. “I doubt it. It's not something Greg would do, let someone else complicate his own scene like that.”

By, she meant, ending up dead. I leaned against the car.

“But,” she went on, “I can picture what else might've happened. One guy wants to take Wanda. The other doesn't. Partner says screw you, I'll take the drugs
and
the girl. Shoots Eugene . . .”

I put a hand up. “But then
doesn't
take her?”

“He worries someone might've heard the gunfire, books out of here without anything.” She brushed off my objection.

Hetty was turning out to be a far more detailed thinker than I'd given her credit for. I completed the scenario. “Comes back later but by then the drugs are gone, confiscated by the cops.”

Except for that one tablet, of course.

“But Wanda's still here,” she pointed out. “His consolation prize.”

All of which was still only speculation, but it intensified my darkest worry. I drove home discouraged, filled with a sharp new foreboding about the possible whereabouts of Wanda Cathcart.

And about her possible condition.

Life in my old house has a habit of going on in my absence
whether I like it or not, and when I got home that day my first reaction to its progress was
negatron,
as Sam would've put it.

I'd stopped at Bob Arnold's office but he wasn't there and I didn't want to leave the pill without talking to him. So I went on up Key Street until I noticed that an enormous metal Dumpster had been deposited in my front yard.

I'd ordered it thinking a Dumpster would make it easier to perform step two of the porch-rebuilding project; i.e., disposing of the debris. But due to the press of recent events, I hadn't yet completed step one: turning the porch into debris in the first place. That was why half an hour later I was out there swinging the sledgehammer.

Or it was part of the reason. The other part was that if I didn't take a break from thinking about Wanda, my head was going to explode. It should've made me feel better to know that she probably wouldn't die of a medical problem before she got found. But it didn't, and I didn't know what that oxycontin tablet meant, either.

Nothing good, though. So I'd thrown myself into physical work, hoping it might help calm the emotional stuff down. But this plan turned out to have its drawbacks, too; when the hammer hit a porch board, the nails were meant to loosen and the board was supposed to rise up so I could pull it free with the end of the crowbar.

Only the plan didn't account for two facts: (a) the hammer was very heavy, and (b) the nails were the solidest parts of the old porch. Thus each time the sledgehammer connected with a board, my feet came off the ground.

It was a classic example of too much weight at one end (the whole porch) and not enough (me) at the other. I did manage to chip off a few more small rotten bits but they weren't enough to fill up that Dumpster.

Not by a long shot. Soon I was standing there wondering if maybe I could just hire a construction crane from the marine terminal and get it to deposit the old porch into the receptacle whole, which was where I'd gotten in the project when my father drove up in his battered pickup truck.

“Set yourself a task, I see,” he observed, sticking one big hand into an overall pocket and strolling over to me. His other hand held a heavy-duty drill; more foundation work, I realized. I'd dreaded even going down to look in the cellar.

So I hadn't. “Yeah.” I swung the hammer again. The impact vibrated up my spine and made my eyeballs bobble around as if I were a cartoon character, while the board I'd hit moved upward about a sixteenth of an inch.

“I don't know, though. This is taking forever. I might,” I admitted reluctantly, “have bitten off more than I can chew.”

He eyed the project. “Maybe. But maybe not.”

Inside the entryway lay the tools I'd gathered up at the end of my last work session. My father examined them, first picking his way up the ruins of the porch. It was safer with the rotten bits broken off; at least now you could
see
where your foot was going to go through.

He came out carrying a pry bar. “Dad, you'll never be able to—”

“Just watch.” With that, he smacked the top of the board with the sledgehammer. The board flattened back down onto the support it was nailed to.

But the nailhead stayed
up
a little, because he hadn't
hit
the nail. He'd hit the
board
. So now there was about a sixteenth-of-an-inch gap there, between the nail and the wood.

Not much. Just enough so he could slip the crowbar's claw tip under the nailhead.

“Oh,” I breathed, beginning to get the idea.

But not yet the whole idea. Next he inserted the sharply curved, pronged end of the pry bar under the nail. Then he leaned hard on it, using the bar's curve as a fulcrum so the pronged end pulled the nail upward.