Trap Door (11 page)

Ordinarily my housekeeper wouldn’t say a bad word if she had a mouth full of them. “Cory Trow no more killed himself than I’m the Queen of Sheba,” she insisted while scrubbing feverishly at the kitchen sink.

Bella was so emphatically not the Queen of Sheba that it was tragic. But I wanted that sink to retain at least a little of its remaining enamel.

And what she’d said was what I thought, too. So I climbed down from the washing machine, took away her scrub rag, sat her at the table, and put one of the blueberry muffins she’d just baked plus a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. “How can you be so sure?”

Morning sun glared in through the suddenly naked windows, covered all winter with those plastic sheets so heavy-duty they resembled waxed paper. I wasn’t even sure they kept the place any warmer, but at least they made me feel I was doing something to plug drafts.

“Don’t take no genius,” Bella said scornfully. Then she told me why, whereupon I very nearly choked on my own muffin.

“Married?” I repeated in disbelief. “And… a life insurance policy?”

She nodded. “Boy like that, who’d a thought he’d have a care for the end of his life?
Or
have a wife an’ child?”

But it seemed Cory Trow had. “Even his mom never knew he got married,” Bella told me. “His pals knew, though, an’ one o’ their moms called
his
mom last night, dropped the big bombshell on ’er in the middle of her grief.”

I gazed at the windows, wondering if next winter
two
layers of plastic might… but no. Beautifully old-house-atmospheric as they were, the antique windowpanes had the thermal efficiency of tissue paper. And one of these times when I climbed up on top of that washing machine, I was going to break my…

“But wait, there’s more,” Bella pronounced, polishing off the rest of the muffin. “That policy won’t pay if he killed himself, his mom says. Because it’s too soon after he bought it.”

Just then Ellie came in with her own child under one arm and a large ham under the other. Both were suitably wrapped, although from Ellie’s harried look I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a pair of toddler-sized coveralls pulled onto the pork and a sheet of aluminum foil fastened around Leonora.

But I wasn’t finished with Bella. “How does his mother know the insurance policy won’t… ”

“Jake, you’ve got to help me,” Ellie exhaled.

I ignored her for the moment. “How’s she even know so fast that there
is
a policy? The friend wouldn’t have known it and it’s too soon for the insurance company to have—”

But my question was cut off. My father and the dogs came in behind Ellie, each canine competing with the other for who had the most sheer animal energy and which one could demonstrate it most disruptively. Dropping their leashes, my father made his escape, headed for the cellar and his tools while they bounded around, all gummy grins and clicking toenails, greeting us slobberily and demanding to have their breakfast.

“Coffee urn,” Ellie said a little desperately as I got up to feed them. “A sixty-cup coffee urn, a good-size sheet cake, fifty sandwiches, and paper plates. By,” she added in naked appeal, “eleven-thirty tomorrow morning.”

Lee chose that moment to open her mouth wide; at once, most of the unhappy sounds in the world began coming out of it.

“Cream,” Ellie recited, ignoring her daughter’s wails, “and sugar. And lemonade, I suppose, for the children. And… ”

Loud
sounds from Leonora. Simultaneously, a stream of water began leaking from beneath that vintage refrigerator.

“Ellie, what in the
world
… ” I began. But then through the din—Ellie’s husband, George, said that in an emergency you could set Leonora up on the firehouse roof and use her for a siren—I realized: “Cory’s funeral?”

Ellie slid her daughter unceremoniously into the playpen we kept in the kitchen for her. As Leonora’s plump, padded bottom hit the playpen’s cushioned floor, her mouth fell shut with a nearly audible snap.

“Goo-goo,” she uttered happily; she adored the playpen.

“Yes,” Ellie replied. From atop the refrigerator Cat Dancing observed the baby, then leapt down into the playpen beside her.

“Well, not a funeral exactly,” Ellie amended. “A gathering to commemorate his life. Because you can’t very well have a real funeral without a body, and
his
body… ”

Was by now on its way to the state medical examiner’s rooms in Augusta, where it would be autopsied as was usual in nearly all unattended deaths in Maine. “
Prutt,
” said the cross-eyed old feline as the child gripped her tail.

“That cat,” said Bella Diamond balefully, “will suck all the baby’s breath out of her.”

But the cat didn’t; soon Leonora turned to counting her own toes. “One, one, one, one, one,” she said accurately.

Next Bob Arnold came in, surveyed us, and spotted the platter of muffins; since Bella had begun baking them regularly, my kitchen had started resembling Grand Central Station in the morning.

Although not smelling like it. You could practically see the baked cinnamon-sugar aroma grasp Bob’s nose, leading him along irresistibly. “You ladies missed a trespassing charge by the skin of your teeth yesterday,” he informed us.

“Um. Yeah. Thanks for your help,” I said, meaning it.

“I told old Walt you were just a harmless pair of town do-gooders, putting together a survey on local library usage,” our police chief said. “Got past the two dogs onto his porch by dumb luck, I told him, and then had to run for it.”

Which was close enough to the truth to make me wince; the dumb part, anyway. Not that Henderson had believed it; his look as he’d greeted me still made me feel as if a set of crosshairs was centered on me.

“Don’t like the cut of that guy’s jib, never did since he moved here,” Bob said, looking sour. “Henderson’s got more pull than a team o’ Clydesdales when he wants something, I don’t know why.”

He finished his first muffin, washed it down with coffee. “Look at the way he got that big house o’ his built there. Land was s’posed to be in a nature trust, all of a sudden he’s gotten himself a mansion on it,” he said, taking another.

“
I
heard he also had something to do with the Trow boy being convicted on stalking,” Bella said. “Payoffs or something.”

Or maybe just the right lawyers. Either way… “Henderson’s shaping up to be quite the steamroller, isn’t he?” I asked. “Where his interests are concerned.”

I didn’t like what I thought that meant for Jemmy. I’d driven up to check on him that morning, watching all the way to be sure I wasn’t being followed by anyone, but I hadn’t been and Jemmy was okay.

So far. “What did Henderson want yesterday morning?” I asked Bob. “When he was talking to you on Water Street? He looked upset about something.”

Bob nodded. “His lawyers’d already called him to say Cory Trow hadn’t showed up at his sentencing hearing in Machias. So of course Walter came charging downtown to find me and let me know in no uncertain terms that I’d better do something about it toot sweet.”

His face conveyed what he thought about that, the rosebud lips twisting as if instead of sweet blueberries he’d encountered a lemon slice. “He asked about you,” Bob added.

“Walter Henderson did? But I thought you told him we were just… ”

“Not at the barn,” Bob clarified. “Before, when I was with him on the street and you both were driving by with that guy in the backseat of Wade’s truck.”

It was a useful trick of Bob’s and one of the traits that made him such an effective day-to-day police officer in Eastport, his ability to seem fully engrossed in one thing while at the same time observing every single pertinent detail of another.

But I had the feeling Walter Henderson knew the trick, too, and five would get you ten it wasn’t me or Ellie who’d drawn his attention as we drove by.

It was Jemmy, even hidden behind his new face. Bob finished the muffin. “So do you want to let me in on what you were really doing out there?”

Yeeks. Rushing in where angels fear to tread, was the honest answer. In this case honesty probably wasn’t the best policy, though, because Bob was another reason Ellie and I had exited the snooping business.

The last time we’d done anything in that regard, Bob had been quietly in favor, but by the time it was over, Ellie and I had nearly gotten killed. So afterwards he’d reversed his policy.

Bella spoke up. “They were trying to find Cory. His mom asked me to ask ’em. So they did,” she defended us stoutly. “And as for this suicide nonsense… ”

“Bella,” I intervened quietly as Bob got up. She looked at me and fastened her trap.

“All right,” Bob conceded. “Kid bein’ such a damn pest with runnin’ after the Henderson girl, guess maybe it was reasonable thinkin’ he might be there.”

This of course hadn’t been our only errand. But there was no sense telling Bob about Jemmy, either. He turned to Bella. “But the boy did hang himself, you know. They’ll probably find booze or marijuana in the blood test, too, maybe even some pills.”

Heading for the door, he threw over his shoulder: “Guess I might want a ration of chemical courage myself if I decided to do what Cory Trow did. Anyway, autopsy’ll cover all the bases.”

Guilt needled me. I remembered that there was another base, one Bob didn’t know about. I thought of revealing to him what had happened to the shred of cloth on the boy’s fingernail, decided again not to. After all, what possible good would it have done?

Besides getting me in a heap of trouble. Something in my silence must’ve alerted him, however. “I’m going to have a word with the workers at Henderson’s place,” he said, turning and eyeing me curiously. “See if they saw anything. Even though Horner says the kid likely died Sunday night when none of ’em were around.”

Harold Horner was the county deputy medical examiner, the one who’d have referred the death to the state’s medical examiner. Bob held my gaze a moment longer. “Either of you think of anything else interesting, call me,” he ordered on his way out.

“Ellie,” I said when he’d gone. Bella had already washed his cup and was hovering impatiently for mine.

But she would have to wait a little longer. “Ellie, why do you suppose a kid like Cory Trow would buy life insurance, then kill himself before the suicide clause expired? And why
didn’t
Henderson’s alarms go off? Heck, a place like that, he might even have more high-tech stuff installed, maybe even outdoor motion detectors.”

“Well,” she theorized reasonably, “it was the middle of the day. People going in and out, the housekeeper doing errands and all, you wouldn’t want to be fooling with alarms all the time. Maybe he only turns the alarms on at—”

“Right. Okay, maybe he only turns them on at night. So if they were on, on Sunday night, how’d Cory Trow get in there? And how did he get past the dogs? Unless someone
let
him in… ”

Our eyes met. “Jennifer,” we pronounced together.

Walter Henderson’s teenaged daughter, the one Cory had been headed to jail for stalking, might’ve turned off the alarms and penned the dogs up if she was expecting a nighttime visitor. And once the alarms were off, I supposed there was the barest chance they might not get turned on again until the next night, when it was likely that someone would’ve made a habit of checking them.

“Maybe she and her father didn’t agree on Cory’s undesirable status,” I speculated. “In fact, his being forbidden fruit might just have made him
more
desirable.”

“You think?” Bella inquired sarcastically, wiping furiously at a kitchen counter that was already so clean, a new white glove would’ve contaminated it. “From what I heard, that Jennifer girl was all over Cory like scales on a mackerel, right up until the minute
he
put his foot down.”

Henderson’s foot, she meant. Just then my own father came up from the cellar again and caught the end of the conversation. “Jen Henderson?” he said as he opened a work-roughened hand so I could see what it held.

Nails. Old ones, rusty and useless. “Out of the roof,” he explained as Ellie turned to him.

“You worked on the Henderson place for a while, didn’t you? Last summer when they were putting in that… ”

“Barn foundation,” he agreed. Smiling, he crossed to the playpen and bent to offer Leonora a calloused finger. “Baby,” he crooned tenderly at her, and she babbled deliriously in reply.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. But there was plenty I didn’t know about my dad, including where else he worked and what he did when he wasn’t here at my house, laboring to keep the whole place from collapsing.

“That girl had Cory right around her little finger, his mom says,” Bella sputtered indignantly. “And all the time he had a wife and baby over in St. Stephen, Canada, not forty miles from here, that he was keeping a secret.”

“Sounds right,” my father said, straightening. “Part about the Henderson girl, I mean. Hate to say it but from what I saw, she’s what we used to call a man-eater.”

He dropped the old nails into the wastebasket by the sink and I didn’t protest. I used to save ruined parts of the house just out of sentiment, but as soon as I discovered how vastly they outnumbered the working parts, all the bloom went off that rose.

“Fellow with a blood pressure and a toolbox risked his life just walkin’ onto the property, seemed like to me,” he remarked, just as Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, came in and made a beeline for the now pathetically diminished pile of muffins.

“What’d you think of ’er?” my father asked him. “Henderson girl. You were out there too last summer, I seem to recall.”

George was a pale-skinned, compactly built fellow with a bluish five-o’clock shadow always darkening his stubborn chin. From the glint in his eye you could gather the strong notion that getting on his bad side might be unwise, and you would be correct.

But George’s sense of humor was even quicker than his temper, and longer lasting. “Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch,” he chuckled in reply. “I could get in a whole heap of trouble making remarks about that.”

But by the way he seized Ellie around the waist and hugged her, we all knew he couldn’t. “Hey, girl,” he said, gazing into her eyes.