Trap Door (10 page)

“Oh,” I said mournfully as the fabric floated away and vanished. I scrambled down from the ladder and bent to search the floor for it, unsuccessfully.

For the one tiny bit of hard evidence, I mean, suggesting that perhaps Cory Trow hadn’t really committed suicide.

That instead he’d been murdered.

“Here it is,” Ellie said, coming down the loft stairs with a sheet of paper in her hand. Blue-lined and ordinary, it could’ve come from anywhere. Mindful of a hanged man still dangling a few feet from me, I peered at it.

Printed in pencil, a couple of lines gouged into it. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED. I HOPE YOUR ALL HAPPY. F*** YOU. CORY

“So can I phone Bob Arnold now?” asked Ellie.

“Sure.” Interesting, I thought while she dialed, that Cory had used a kind of paper so unlikely to be traceable, and printed his suicide note in pencil. From someone who was getting ready to do something so permanent, I’d have expected ink.

But that was grasping at straws. “What’s wrong?” Ellie asked after speaking into the phone and hanging up.

“Nothing. A piece of something was stuck to his fingernail, is all.” I described the delicate fabric.

“Oh,” she breathed, looking around for it just as I had but with no more luck. Moments later the wail of a siren cut off and voices approached outside, one of them familiar: Eastport police chief Bob Arnold’s. The other was Henderson’s.

“… crank call,” he was saying, sounding irritated. “You’re welcome to check, but I guarantee you there’s nobody in that—”

He must’ve come home after Ellie and I left his house. The barn door opened and Walter Henderson stopped on the threshold, looking from me and Ellie to the body behind us, its dangling legs framed by the doorway of the small room. He said nothing as Bob Arnold appeared behind him.

“Jake,” Bob said, his tone annoyed. “Ellie.”

A line from an old TV classic echoed in my head:
Lu-cee, you gotta lotta ’splainin’ to do!

But there was nothing comic about the way the barn’s owner absorbed what he was seeing. No emotion showed on his face, not even surprise; suddenly I felt glad I hadn’t wasted time trying to decide what to say to him. Because it was even clearer to me now than before that the idea of reasoning with Walter Henderson was ridiculous.

Silvery brush-cut hair, small neat features, pale lightly freckled skin. And those eyes, the color of sapphires, with all the human warmth of the gemstones.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said when they turned on me again.

“Hello, Jacobia,” Walter Henderson replied. “Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?”

He smiled; not a pleasant expression. “In fact I’ve had some people tell me they’d kill to be in my position.”

When I got
home Bella Diamond was making coleslaw. This time of year, when we were all so hungry for fresh stuff, she put everything but the kitchen sink into it, broccoli and carrots and in prudent doses even slices of raw cauliflower.

She’d assembled the slivered vegetables and begun adding the dressing, a high-end bottled brand to which she added plenty of celery seed. After that she put in her secret ingredient, its identity so closely guarded by her that even I hadn’t been able to discover it.

“Now,” she recited to herself as she always did at this stage of the proceedings. “Right before we serve it we’ll pour off some of the liquid and add a dab more cabbage. That way most of it’ll be limp and creamy, but not floppy. Just,” she finished, “the way we like it.”

Snapping the top onto the plastic container, she placed it in the refrigerator. The round-shouldered old vintage model hummed and clattered in response to having its door opened even briefly. Then she confronted me.

“That boy ain’t home yet,” she said, brushing cabbage shreds from the cutting board into the palm of her hand.

“No, Bella, he’s not. And I’m afraid he’s not going to be. Ellie and I found Cory in Walter Henderson’s barn a little while ago. He’s dead.”

Bella’s face fell, and her eyes searched mine penetratingly.

“Oh,” she said at last. “Then I imagine things around here are going to get somewhat”—
summat
—“complicated.”

Yes, I imagined they were.

Dear Horace,

Still a few tests left to run but they’ll only confirm what we both suspected. Age of ink and paper, chemical composition of the glue, stitching thread analysis and that “leather” binding—all consistent. Let me finish up and I’ll give you a full report. Then we can decide what to tell the book’s owner; needless to say, in this case the unvarnished facts might not be appropriate.

Speaking of which, perhaps coincidentally—though I think not—I got a call from Bert Merkle yesterday. “Just keeping in touch,” he said. I’ve heard he’s claiming he’s from Harvard now. Guess our halls aren’t ivied enough for him. But he asked about you, which seemed odd since you were never friends. He’s living in Eastport; odder still, don’t you agree?

Bert always did have a nose for news. I wonder what set it sniffing? Brilliant, of course, and naturally talented. Trouble is, I’m never completely sure which side he’s on.

So—word to the wise, Horace. If Bert comes snooping you might want to give me a call. My love to Lang—is it too paranoid of me to suggest that you two take a little vacation somewhere together?

Cheers,

Dave D.

My beloved 1979 Fiat Sport Spyder convertible had rack-and-pinion
steering, double overhead cams, five speeds forward, and a professionally applied apricot paint job on a jazzy little Pininfarina body, plus black leather bucket seats and a black cloth top.

It was a thing of beauty and a joy for about as long as it had taken the original owner to drive it from the showroom; after that it had started living up to its acronym,
Fix It Again, Tony
. But I still treasured it.

Too bad that a few hours after Ellie and I found the body in the barn, the car sat in a ditch where my son Sam had put it, on a side road near the tiny mainland town of Cooper, not far from Eastport.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sam said, for the fifth time. “But honestly, there was nothing I could do. The guy was crazy, he came right at me. For a minute there I thought he was trying to hit me.”

It was one A.M. and pitch dark; cold, too, with the kind of icy chill you can still get in Maine at night even in mid-May. I wrapped my sweatered arms around myself.

“Okay,” I told Sam through gritted teeth, trying to keep them from chattering. Since finding Cory’s corpse that afternoon, I’d been afflicted with a kind of free-floating anxiety that made me feel as if I were chewing on broken glass.

A car crept by, the driver’s face a pale featureless blur as he rubbernecked us. We’d set emergency flares a hundred yards down the road both ways, though, and we were lit up pretty well right around our vehicles, too.

“I understand,” I said. Working in the floodlight mounted on the rear of his truck cab, my husband, Wade, put a chain around the Fiat’s front axle, then hooked the other end to his tow bar.

But Sam wasn’t satisfied. He still thought I was angry. Or he was protesting too much as he sometimes did when he really was guilty of something.

“It was like the guy was trying to run me off the road on purpose,” he complained as Wade swung into the truck cab and put it in gear.

Sam looked sober. Sounded sober, too. And as far as I could tell out here in the chilly fresh air, he even smelled sober.

Unfortunately, in Sam none of that was any guarantee that he actually was sober. “Mom,” he said, reading my expression, “I haven’t had a drink in a week.”

That either. “Okay,” I replied as the truck pulled forward slowly and the front end of the Fiat emerged from the saplings and brush it was stuck among. From what I could see, the car was a little scraped up but essentially undamaged, and Sam said he hadn’t hit anything hard on the way off the pavement.

“You’re sure you’re not hurt?” In the harsh light from the flares his face looked ghastly.

“Yeah.” He’d been coming back from an AA meeting in Machias, or so he’d gone on insisting. It was why I’d lent him the car at all; he’d owned it for a while but when he couldn’t afford the maintenance he’d given it back to me.

“Little shaken up, I guess,” he added. Wade set the brake on the pickup and jumped down from the cab, got the chain off the Fiat, and stowed the tow bar in the truck bed, one efficient move after another.

“Scared me, was all,” Sam said. “You want me to… ” He waved at the Fiat.

“Drive it home?” Somebody had to, assuming it would drive at all. I still didn’t know what kind of mess the trees and brush might’ve made of the car’s undercarriage. My first impulse was to let Sam ride with Wade and drive the vehicle home myself to check it out.

But if I said no, it would mean I really did think Sam was intoxicated, and that would start a whole big controversy.

“Sure. If you feel up to it.” Since his dad’s death Sam had fallen hard off the wagon a couple of times.

More than a couple. He got in the Fiat; it started fine. “You go on. We’ll follow,” I said. “Just in case.”

He grimaced, then realized I meant in case the car died on the way home, or wouldn’t steer. Not
in case you really do turn out to be too sloshed to stay on your own side of the road
.

Because this time at least I thought Sam really was sober. When he’d gone Wade and I collected the road flares in silence, not speaking until we were in the truck.

“Good thing you answered the phone,” Wade said mildly as he turned toward home.

“Yeah.” Because when it rings at midnight your average mom knows it’s probably not the Prize Patrol, calling to say she’s won three million dollars. After the crash Sam had walked to a nearby house and gotten the people there to summon me, then waited in the cold and dark.

But I didn’t want to talk about Sam; over the past months it seemed Sam was all Wade and I discussed. “Wade, are you really sure it’s okay for Jemmy to stay at the lake?”

Because maybe I’d acted hastily; the camp had originally belonged only to Wade, after all. He should say who got to use it, I thought, or at least have a vote. But he didn’t seem concerned about that.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered easily, slinging an arm around me. With a sigh so deep it felt as if it had come up from my shoes, I let myself relax against him.

“Hey, you’re my girl,” Wade said in the same deep, calm voice that had captured me back when I first met him. “And he’s pulled your irons out of the fire a few times, hasn’t he? Only fair, help him out in return.”

I nodded, feeling Wade’s muscular shoulder against my cheek. When I first met him I thought he was a man’s man, the kind who went hunting and fishing with his buddies, no girls allowed. He’d be the type who on Sunday afternoon watched endless football, getting up at halftime only to work on his truck, and who thought men’s jewelry was silly with the possible exception of the Timex.

And I’d been right; Wade was all that. In the dashboard’s pale glow his short blond hair gleamed, his eyes scanning the road ahead competently.

“’Bout a week, though, the mosquitoes are going to drive him out of there,” he reminded me. “Or suck him so dry he’ll need a blood transfusion. Blackflies, too.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” But it was true, man-eating tigers would be preferable to the insects at the lake once the weather got warmer, especially the blackflies; the biting swarms hadn’t been locally dubbed “defenders of the wilderness” for nothing.

I hoped Jemmy wouldn’t be there that long. We took the turn toward Eastport, Sam’s taillights glowing steadily ahead of us in the dark.

“Wade… ”

He glanced down at me, a smile crinkling the skin around his eyes, and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

“Never mind,” I said at last.

I’d already told him about seeing the ghost of my ex-husband in the kitchen—if that had been what it was, and not some goofy imagining of mine—and about the reason why Jemmy had come here at all, and about the hanged kid.

Now I wanted to say I thought I might be in a mess, only I didn’t know what kind yet. But there was nothing anyone could do about any of it tonight, so instead we went home to bed. Wade, who’d been up for work at four the previous morning, was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

I lay awake beside him thinking about Cory Trow and Sam. They were nearly the same age; I only hoped they wouldn’t end up similarly, hanging being just a quicker way to get where Sam was headed if something substantial didn’t change soon.

Then I did sleep, tumbling into a nightmare: Sam, my father, Victor, and the hanged kid dancing on my roof, each with a noose end dangling in front of him like a loose necktie.

Until they all vanished through trap doors, each soft-shoe routine ending suddenly in a short, sharp drop, a terminal snap.

“Suicide, my ass,”
Bella Diamond declared skeptically the next morning.

Perched atop the washing machine, where I was tearing thick plastic sheets down from the windows—in winter my old kitchen was so cold that on some days the inside of that ancient refrigerator was warmer—I turned in surprise.