Repair to Her Grave (25 page)

“Well, then I guess we stiffen our spines and talk to Hecky Wilmot, if we can find him,” Ellie said.

Hecky being the last of the varied group that had been in La Sardina with Raines before Raines took his unscheduled dive off the pier, and the third man in Mapes's old marijuana-smuggling operation.

“I guess,” I said disconsolately. The thing was, in Eastport you could look for nefarious schemes, but what you found instead were flower sales, craft shows, and a freighter coming in, getting tied up at the town dock. That and fellows like Howard Washburn, who might look bad on paper but in reality were just guys trying to make a living.

“Ordinarily all you’d have to do is walk down the street,” Ellie went on. “But I heard from Truman Daly that Hecky's book's due out today, so Hecky's routine has probably been disrupted.”

“Criminy, that's right. Today's the day.” With everything else going on, Hecky's big moment had slipped my mind. But bound copies of his memoir of Eastport were due to arrive at Bay Books any minute so he could sign them for people. “He must be …”

Thrilled,
I’d been about to say. But:

“What's going on?”

Just ahead, at the foot of the hill leading down to Water Street, a group was forming. I saw several members of the Ladies’ Reading Circle, men from the Elks Lodge, and more whose specific affiliation I couldn’t identify, only that they were all angry.

“Traitor!” somebody shouted.

“Turncoat!” yelled somebody else.

“Goodness,” said Ellie. At the head of the crowd, glancing over his shoulder as he hurried along, was an elderly-looking man with dyed black hair; sharp, suspicious little eyes that spied everything; and a look of terror on his age-mottled face.

“I don’t think we’ll have to go looking for Hecky,” I said, slowing the car almost to a stop.

On the sidewalk, stroking his long, white beard, Truman Daly looked on in consternation and amusement. As a rule, Truman did not enjoy witnessing other people's troubles, but it was hard not to relish the sight of Hecky getting his comeuppance, for once.

The crowd wouldn’t let me pass. “Hit the horn,” Ellie said quietly.

“Huh?” Unless you counted Wade leaning over to honk it at Sam and Jill, I hadn’t heard the horn on this car since I’d moved here; in Eastport, you couldn’t very well blast today at someone you’d be sitting next to at the church supper tomorrow night.

Ellie reached out and leaned on it. The crowd jumped and scattered away like startled deer, with Hecky running ahead of them. I caught up to Hecky, who had a book in one hand, his hat in the other, and an egg splattered across the back of his plaid flannel shirt.

“Get in,” Ellie told him, and he followed this advice without hesitation.

“Key-riminy.” Hurtling into the backseat, he slammed the car door and we sped away. Monday began licking the raw egg from his shirt, which under the circumstances I thought was probably the best way to dispose of it. “Those people have gone nuts!”

“What seems to be the problem, Hecky?” Ellie inquired.

“Problem?” he sputtered. “Those folks just can’t take a dose of old-fashioned home truth, is the problem. What’d they expect, a lot of dishwater-dull foolishness?”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly enlightened. “The book.”

“Damn right,” Hecky said stoutly.

I glanced in the rearview mirror. Perspiration had dissolved the dye in Hecky's hairline and was running in inky rivulets to form black ruts in the wrinkles of his forehead.

“Cut a little close to the bone, did it?” Far behind us, the thwarted literary critics had stopped chasing us and were forming into angry little groups on the sidewalk in front of Wadsworth's Hardware.

Debating, probably, the merits of running Hecky out of town on a rail versus the equally attractive advantages of hanging him in effigy. Meanwhile, Ellie had taken the book from him and was paging curiously through it.

“ ‘… fourteen illegitimate children, seven of whom had coffee cups with their names on them in the town jail, then located down in the ground-floor rooms of the bank building …’ ”

She looked up at him in alarm. “Hecky Wilmot, are you out of your tiny mind?” She flipped more pages.

“ ‘… drove getaway car for the notorious Hoover boys … fan-dancer at a saloon in Nevada …’ ” She snapped the volume shut. “Is it all like this?”

“Every bit,” Hecky agreed proudly. “Course”—he frowned—“I figured there might be some upset about it.” But this idea seemed to bring on a flock of others he didn’t find comfortable.

“You can let me off here,” he said. He lived in a tumbledown Victorian mansion that had belonged to his great-grandfather, the Honorable Hector B. Wilmot: either the finest attorney the state had ever produced or a lowdown dirty rotten scoundrel, depending on whose version you accepted. I wondered which one Hecky had put in his memoir.

“No, Hecky,” Ellie said firmly. “You’re coming with us.”

He looked mutinous. “Now, don’t you try telling me—”

“Or we’ll take you back downtown and let your fans tell you what a great author you are,” she added, at which he fell silent and allowed himself to be driven to my house and hustled inside.

“You must have known something like this would happen,” Ellie scolded the old man exasperatedly. “People around here don’t take kindly to having their laundry publicly aired. Now the whole world's going to know Philomena Parr was a fan-dancer in a saloon out there in the gold rush in Nevada before she got so respectable here.”

Philomena's headstone in Hillside Cemetery was so ancient and moss-ravaged, you could barely see the fan engraved into it—until now, I’d thought it was a religious symbol of some sort—and the gold rush had happened a hundred and forty years ago. But this, by Eastport reckoning, was only the blink of a gnat's eye; you didn’t go casting aspersions on the acorns folks’ family trees had sprung from in Eastport. You just didn’t.

“There's plenty of people with stories about you they could be telling,” Ellie went on sternly. “Certain dealings in certain substances. Growth and transport.”

Hecky shifted uncomfortably under my gaze. “That's all past history. I don’t have aught to do with any of that anymore.”

“Hmph. But after the hoo-hah there was about it, and how you were so upset about the way people talked about you, I don’t see how you missed realizing the way they would feel when you wrote about them. What's the title of this thing, anyway?”

She snatched up the book again. It was soft-cover, nicely produced, with a picture of a square-rigger plowing bravely up Passamaquoddy Bay. The artist had done a particularly good job on the Jolly Roger, a skull-and-crossbones insignia clearly visible from where it flew on the mizzenmast.

“Rum-Runners and Downeast Scoundrels …
but that's not the title you told everybody it would be. Oh, Hecky,” Ellie sighed, mortified. “How could you
do
this?”

“Well, I didn’t want to publicize the real title in advance of it. I had a sneaking notion some people wouldn’t care for it much.” Under the kitchen light his black hair shone dully like a fresh lump of charcoal, and his wrinkles all sagged downward morosely.

“S’posed to be in Florida by now, tell the truth,” he added. “But money for the ticket and moving tab didn’t come through.”

The penny dropped. He’d thought he could be a famous author
and
escape the town's wrath. Hecky Wilmot, grand old storyteller of Eastport, had meant to hightail it out of here ahead of the lynching party and relocate to warmer climes.

Eye for the main chance and the hell with all the rest, Bob Arnold had said about Hecky, and I guessed it was true. And for that, Hecky would have needed money… .

Just then Sam came in, glanced darkly into the kitchen, and thumped upstairs, not speaking. Ellie was still staring at Hecky.

“Florida?” She breathed it in disbelief, as if he’d confided that come the winter holidays, he was planning on having a roast leg of Rudolf for Christmas dinner.

“Time to make a change. Variety is important, you know,” he said stubbornly. “Anyway, guess that ain’t worked out. Mebbe I’ll visit m’ sister, down to Portland.”

I thought if Hecky intended to escape to Portland, he ought to make it Portland, Oregon. The phone lines to Hecky's sister were humming right now, I had no doubt.

“What you got me over here for, anyway?” he demanded to know. “Now I got to find a way home, they’re out there waitin’ with the knives all sharpened up, a-ready to scalp me.”

“Ellie will give you a ride home in my car,” I said. “On the way, she's got a couple of questions to ask you. About,” I emphasized severely, “Jonathan Raines. And Hecky, I want you to tell her the truth, no nonsense and no embroidery.”

If he’d been a rooster, his comb would have bristled up in reflexive anger. “Young whippersnapper, comin’ in here where he had no business—”

“Yes, well, you
did
have business here, and you’ve mucked it up pretty well yourself, haven’t you?”

He slumped, understanding: Hecky would have to go some ways to clean up the mess he’d managed to make in his own nest.

“All right,” he allowed reluctantly, getting up. “Ask away. I guess it cain’t do no harm now, can it? Me and my big mouth.” He was beginning to accept the enormity of what he had done and the impossibility of taking it back.

“Well, Hecky, at least from the size of that crowd down in front of Bay Books, you have a best-seller on your hands.”

He looked hollow-eyed at me. Ah, the perils of first-time authorship. For Hecky, I had a strong feeling it was probably the last time, too. “Ayuh,” he agreed shakily, but turned at the door in a last burst of unfocused antagonism.

“You got it all wrong, you know, you and that know-it-all fella with the cane. Winston Cartwright,” he sneered, giving the words a sour, frightened twist. “Him and his stories. He got the whole thing twisted up backwards.”

“Really? In what way?”

Hecky gave a disparaging snort. “Jane Whitelaw.
He
says she fell off o’ them cliffs the day
b’fore
Jared Hayes disappeared. But that ain’t so. My fambly was livin’ in Eastport already, even then, an’ they carried the story down as it happened, not the way that blowhard got it from some old book.”

“So how
did
it happen?” Micah Whitelaw could’ve gotten that detail wrong, I supposed. Still, what difference could it make?

“ ’Twas the day
after,”
Hecky asserted. “And it weren’t any accident she died of, my fambly folks say. Story is,
she
wrote it all down b’fore
she
died, what her troubles was, in a diary. She was an eddicated girl, read books. Likely that was her trouble,” he added with a dark look at me.

He had, in addition to his many other charming qualities, a suspicion of any female whose activities ranged beyond home and hearth.

“They say it's where the boy, Micah Whitelaw, got his diary-keeping habit,” Hecky went on. “Nobody ever found what
she
wrote, that Whitelaw woman. One thing's f'sure, though.” He aimed a gnarled finger at me. “Jane Whitelaw didn’t die accidental. Nossir. My take on it, she was
kilt
!
”

With that, Hecky stumped out, and I heard him muttering all the way down the back porch and out to the car. In the silence he left behind I watched the sugar bowl on the kitchen table move a quiet, deliberate six inches to the left and back again.

Whereupon I abandoned the kitchen and went upstairs to have a heart-to-heart talk with my son, and found him in his room with a gleaming object in his hands.

Victor's wristwatch.

“Mom, it was a joke,” he insisted. “She was going to give it back. When I told her how upset he was, she was horrified.”

“I see.” I sat on the bed beside him.

Over the years, Sam's bedroom-decoration theme has gone from gangsta rap (hideous), through model shipbuilding (delightful), into a brief, intense infatuation with very old cars (messy), and finally to a crisp, shipshape arrangement of desk and bookcases, indicating his final decision to return to school in the fall.

“Jill's mom told me she's been having a bad time,” I said. “Maybe she just wanted to get a little attention, huh?”

He nodded eagerly. “Right. Play a joke, everybody laughs. If they do,” he finished, his face falling. “But instead, everyone's decided she's some kind of
criminal.
”

“You know, Sam, when fall comes you’re going to be involved with a lot of new things. Classes, meeting new people. …”

Other girls,
I was thinking hopefully. But he was way ahead of me, shaking his head. “Jill's the one. I’m going to marry her. Mom, I’ve just never met anyone like her before.”

Military school, I thought wildly; or a tough-love camp. But Sam was too old for those. In fact, he was old enough to do just about anything he wished.

Including ruin his life. “She's smart, she's funny, she's really brave,” he went on.

She's blond, beautiful, built like a fashion model. She's got all the moral sense of a piranha. Perfect marriage material.

For another piranha. “She is a very attractive young woman,” I allowed.

“Oh, yeah,” Sam said impatiently, “humor me. You think I’m going to get over her. But I’m not,” he insisted. “I’m just not.”

I got off the bed. Gone were the days when I could smooth his hair and administer a baby aspirin. “Sam …” I hesitated at the door. “About the watch.”

“Yeah?” He glanced cautiously at me.

“When you went to see her, how did you put it to her? I mean, did you bring it up first? Or did she?”

His face snapped shut as he took my point: would Jill have mentioned it if he hadn’t? If Victor hadn’t accused her? Or would she have kept the watch in that event, said nothing about it?

“What kind of a question is that?” Sam demanded. “Oh, man. Just leave it, Mom, okay? Leave it, I’ll take care of it.”

He turned his face to the wall, shutting me out.

“I’m sorry, Sam, I shouldn’t have asked,” I said, feeling the answer like a clump of cold seaweed gathering in my heart.

By the time Ellie returned and we’d gone out together, I’d thought it over.