Trap Door (19 page)

He considered this briefly. “Who do you think was following you?” he asked.

Paddling out, I’d told Jemmy about the car in St. Stephen, Sam’s accident, and about my near-miss episode the night before on Sullivan Street. “I don’t know.”

I dipped the kayak paddle, watched slow blue waves ripple from it. A hundred yards off floated the buoy Ellie and I dropped to mark the sunken dock block; over dinner we’d regaled the company with the story and George had promised to crank the block in on a winch for us.

Minutes passed. “So did Dr. Destructo ever get rid of that piano?” Jemmy asked out of the blue.

Dr. Destructo had always been Jemmy’s name for my ex-husband Victor. “No. It’s still in his house. New people bought the place furnished.”

When I met him Victor had been the kind of guy who thought he had great untapped musical talent, that if only he weren’t a medical student he would have turned out to be Billy Joel.

The truth was, Victor had memorized three chords at age sixteen and never forgotten them. Surgery was his talent; that and the ability to charm women’s socks off in minutes.

I let my hand drag in the cold water. “Near the end,” I said, “he got fond of a drink we called Clammy Mary. One-fourth clam juice, one-fourth tomato juice, and the rest straight gin.”

A breeze riffled my hair. The concoction had at last become the only thing Victor was able to keep down; nowadays I couldn’t even look at a bottle of clam juice.

“Didn’t matter what kind of gin,” I went on. “But he liked rotgut best, I think. And he liked a slice of lime on the glass, thin enough to read a newspaper through.”

A fish jumped nearby, landed with a splash. “Not that he was reading any newspapers by then. I miss him,” I said.

More silence. Jemmy was as sensitive as a snake’s flickering tongue when he wanted to be. Too bad the other associations the thought summoned about him were equally true.

He changed the subject again. “Jake, don’t you get it? Walt Henderson came here just to keep an eye on
you
. He built that big house in Eastport in case I showed up.”

So Jemmy had seen the house. I processed the thought without comment. “Now he’s warning you off,” he went on. “He didn’t mean to hit you last night or to hurt Sam. He just wanted to make an impression.”

Near the far shore a loon sat on the water, its thick neck curving snakelike above a blocky, black-and-white feathered body. Behind me my father said something I couldn’t quite hear; Bella’s laugh in reply was like a violin being scraped with a stick.

The loon took two long splashing steps before rising toward its nesting place on the next lake south. The evening star came out, suddenly bright. “And he knows I’m here,” Jemmy said.

Lights went on in the cabin. Since he’d moved in, Jemmy had put the solar panels on the roof and gotten them connected to the storage batteries. By mounting a barrel on a rack under the eaves, he’d gotten running water to the sink in the kitchen, too, and to the basin in the loft so you could brush your teeth.

I hadn’t thought he would do very well out here, but he’d surprised me. Then again, he’d always been adaptable, another of the secrets to his success.

And to his survival. “That guy’s got nerve endings like a cruising shark,” he went on. “He knew the minute I hit town. He can
smell
me.” Yet he had hit town anyway instead of avoiding the place. And it wasn’t like Jemmy to force an issue unless he was under a lot of pressure.

With only about half an hour of light left, I was ready to go in, but he paddled toward the birch-clad spit of land dividing our cove from the rest of the lake. Mist hovered on the water.

“How come he’s lasted so long?” I asked. Unlike the rest of his ilk: dead or in jail, their kids not amounting to much.

“Henderson? Takes precautions, is why. Works alone. He never even hires guys directly, keeps ’em distant and cuts ’em loose as fast as he can.”

So it was as I’d suspected. If I could get rid of Henderson the rest of this would end, too.

“Nobody’s ever been able to get near him,” Jemmy went on. “Wearing a wire, anything like that. There was some talk not too long ago about trying again, but… ”

I looked over at him, interested; seeing this, he changed the subject abruptly. “How did
you
keep them from following you here, anyway?” he asked.

My old clients, he meant. Ahead a beaver swam anxiously back and forth, trying to block our way into the narrow flowage leading to a stretch of wetlands. A massive dam crossed the far end of the flowage, flanked by a beaver lodge.

Thick white birch saplings stripped of their bark formed the lodge’s top, a mound about fifteen feet in diameter rising five feet off the water. “I never let any of them tell me anything they didn’t want repeated,” I said.

During the day a snake as thick as my forearm often lounged atop the lodge, but it had gone in. “Sure,” Jemmy said skeptically.

The beaver rolled into a dive, his big flat tail making an angry
slap!
“Gimme a break, Jake,” Jemmy protested, “you knew it was all blood money, and they
knew
you knew it was… ”

“Not all of it.” The beaver resurfaced, sleek and dark, his eyes full of fury.

The truth was, I’d had documents; if anything happened to me they would’ve surfaced and the result would’ve been unpleasant for my clients. But the papers didn’t exist anymore, the clients knew it—to avoid misunderstandings I’d destroyed them when I left Manhattan—and anyway it wasn’t any of Jemmy’s business.

“Whatever I did must’ve worked, though. Because they didn’t follow me, did they?”

I pivoted the kayak, turning to watch the circling animal; I’d never heard of a beaver attacking anyone. I’d had one of them pop up a few feet from the side of my kayak, though, close enough for me to inspect its curved yellow incisors.

This beaver kept its distance. “Besides, that was then and this is now,” I said.

Jemmy laughed, not pleasantly. “Okay, so we’re not going to hash over old times.”

“We already did. Unless you want to talk about you getting your start as a car thief. Stealing them to order off streets and out of garages, chopping them up for parts yourself to save on the middleman.”

Jemmy liked to pretend he’d always worn good clothes and had clean fingernails. But I knew he had been a wizard with ignition wiring once upon a time, so good he didn’t even have to break anything. If it turned out his buyer didn’t need that particular car after all, Jemmy could put it back where its owner had left it with nobody the wiser.

“You have warrants out?” For his arrest, I meant, knowing he probably did.

“A few,” he acknowledged as I sidled the kayak parallel to the beaver dam. It was about seventy-five feet long, twelve feet thick at its underwater base, made of mud, grass, and sticks. A little water trickled through but not much.

“How’d you hear about another try at getting next to Walter Henderson?”

“What is this, Twenty Questions?” Jemmy back-paddled away from me. “I hear things, that’s all,” he acknowledged finally.

“From who? Someone in the program?” Jemmy had always been on speaking terms with a variety of people in and out of the Witness Protection Program.

But this was different. His paddle trailed droplets in the dying light. “Maybe,” he conceded.

My ears pricked up; this was the first time he’d ever talked to me about the program without mocking it. “Don’t look shocked,” he said.

“I’m not shocked.” But there was only one reason for him to be in recent touch with any of those people. And they wouldn’t protect him unless he testified.

Against Henderson; maybe even against me? And all the head games I’d played with myself back then—no blood money, indeed—wouldn’t cut any ice with a federal prosecutor.

“Well,” I said. “This is a development.”

And yet another reason for Walt Henderson to want to kill Jemmy. Anxiously I scanned the shoreline where the new leaves had thickened the underbrush to a screen, especially at night.

“It’s not a development unless it has to be, Jake, and I’m a long way from it. And don’t look so nervous, Henderson won’t show up while you’re here.”

We paddled back to the cove and approached the shore; with no dock the kayak dismount was tricky and I reached out to steady his boat for him. But he was, as I should also have remembered, as agile as an eel.

Slippery, ingenious. The thought wasn’t as comforting as it might have been. “And tonight when we’re gone?” I asked him as we climbed the path to the cottage. “What about Henderson then?”

It was already nearly pitch dark. Night fell fast here once the sun went down. “I’m a light sleeper,” Jemmy said with a small laugh meant to reassure me.

It didn’t.

A full day
every week with his daughter Leonora was a privilege George Valentine guarded jealously, so the next morning Ellie and I set out, minus the baby, for St. John, New Brunswick.

Fog wrapped Eastport like cotton batting; the streets gleamed with moisture and the bright banners in front of the Water Street shops hung soddenly. The tugboats at the fish pier hunkered half-seen, their massive sterns turned to the dead-calm water and their lines creaking with the incoming tide.

As we pulled into the ferry-boarding area the
Island Hopper
materialized out of the mist. We drove down onto the beach as the vessel’s metal ramp lowered, scraping the stones.

Two cars with New Brunswick license plates came off first, pausing for two U.S. border officers in yellow slickers before vanishing uphill into the fog as if through a curtain. We drove on board; minutes later, the ferry reversed away from the shore, diesel engines roaring.

“Spooky,” Ellie commented as everything disappeared. On a morning like this, if not for the gentle bump of the water under the barge part of the ferry—the
Island Hopper
was powered by a rebuilt fishing boat fastened alongside—you could believe you’d been transported to some other world.

“So we get to St. John and we try to find Trish. That’s the plan?” Ellie said doubtfully, peering into the mist.

Not even the lighthouse beacons penetrated this stuff, and the foghorn when it let out a long mournful bellow made me jump, sounding unnaturally close.

“That’s it,” I agreed grimly. Halfway between Eastport and Deer Island lay the Old Sow whirlpool, the largest in the Western Hemisphere and a notorious mariners’ hazard. “Trow isn’t a common last name. With any luck she’ll have relatives in the phone book. One of them will tell us where she is.”

“Hmm,” Ellie commented. “Or they’ll shut up like clams.” The
Island Hopper
entered the whirlpool with a faint lurch.

There was an Old Sow Survivor’s Club open to anyone who made the crossing, with a plaque suitable for hanging and framing. My breakfast did a buck-and-wing in my stomach, then settled; I was going to earn that plaque, I suspected.

“We’ll just have to risk it,” I said, rolling the car window all the way down and sticking my head out. Why being miserably damp and chilly helped seasickness I had no idea.

But it did. “Because you were right, the way to stop Walter Henderson from killing Jemmy or vice versa is to get Henderson put away.” Also it would keep Jemmy from having to enter the Witness Protection Program, with all the inconvenient revelations
that
might entail.

“You still think Henderson killed Cory?” Ellie asked. Deer Island loomed suddenly out of the fog. The ferry made the turn into the landing and scraped ashore.

“Oh, of course he did it,” I replied impatiently as we drove off. “He wanted Cory to leave Jen alone and Cory wouldn’t. And Henderson’s a man who’s accustomed to getting what he wants, one way or another.”

The next leg of our journey was a narrow, winding lane between stands of old tamarack, pristine freshwater ponds, and clusters of small wooden houses, most with boats in the yards and lobster traps piled alongside the gravel driveways.

“So there’s your motive. As for method, if you hold a gun to a fellow’s head, he’ll probably cooperate pretty nicely in letting a rope be put around his neck,” I added.

Compared to the tiny
Island Hopper,
the St. George ferry was a huge industrial-looking beast with high steel-mesh rails and a towering superstructure, loaded with cars and trucks. As we got under way the sun burned at last through the morning fog; Ellie and I squeezed between vehicles to reach the observation deck.

Cold salt breeze swept away the reek of diesel exhaust, the thrum of engines vibrating in the big steel plates under our feet. “But why would Cory agree to meet Henderson in the barn?” Ellie objected, leaning on the rail. “Seems to me he’s about the last person Cory would want to run into.”

“Maybe that’s not who Cory thought he was meeting,” I said. “Maybe he expected Jen. It would account for a lot if she lured Cory out there, maybe not even knowing what her dad had planned.”

A wonderland appeared through the shining remnants of mist: low gray islands with tiny cabins clinging to rocky outcroppings, bald eagles sailing above. Porpoises arced in the waves, running alongside us; a humpback whale slapped flukes and flippers, then rolled massively and sank once more into the briny depths.

A low shore with wooden piers and a narrow road leading from it materialized on the horizon. “Anyway,” I said as we returned to Wade’s truck—after Sam’s accident in the Fiat I didn’t feel confident enough to take the car on a long journey—“Trish wouldn’t be on the run unless she had a reason. And I want to know what it is.”

Before we find out by accident and it bites us in the butt,
I added mentally. We drove off the ferry past a low motel and a few small dwellings, following signs leading to the main highway. Here it ran through territory so remote and sparsely settled, it had only three lanes: two for travel, a center lane for passing and left turns.

That and the hills, like foothills of a mountain range, made the road feel as if it deserved its local nickname: Death Alley. But owing to my habit of letting even the slowest other vehicles pass, we survived with only a few close calls—motorists out here seemed to believe you really could outrun death if you drove fast enough—and three hours later reached St. John, New Brunswick.