Trap Door (32 page)

Still, ten days after the events in the barn, everyone convened for a party at the cottage by the lake to celebrate my survival. Heaven, I imagined, was a day just like today: sun shining, birds singing, and a little breeze blowing so it wasn’t too hot. The new dock stretched out over the water in pristine, solid-as-a-rock glory, finished by Wade and George as a surprise for me upon my homecoming from the hospital.

Ripples lapped peacefully around it as Bob Arnold and I sat on it together. “Jemmy still says he didn’t hit you?” Bob asked.

“Yeah.” My old pal had insisted a dozen times already that the birch-long-on-the-head incident really had been a blowdown, and not another of his attempts to motivate me.

“Honest, Jake, I was long gone when it happened,” he’d told me. “I did mean to vanish while your back was turned, I’ll admit that. But hit you? Come on, I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

I wanted to believe him. “And the brick through the truck windshield?” Bob asked now, putting his glass of seltzer down on the deck’s bright new surface.

“Jemmy says he meant it to hit the hood of the truck, not the glass. He says I must’ve sped up just as he let go.”

Mm-hmm, Bob’s skeptical look said. “What about the car things? Sam’s accident, your near miss on Sullivan Street… How’s he explaining all that? How’d he even get cars at all?”

“Well, he
was
the best vehicle booster-to-order in the tri-state area, once upon a time,” I confided. And there’d been that little problem with cars going missing from the hospital parking lot.

“I see,” said Bob. “That explains it, then.”

Jemmy had known about the cockamamie plan to gather everyone in Henderson’s barn because he’d been lurking outside my house when Bella left to deliver the invitations. He’d followed, wondering what all the envelopes could mean, and when she dropped one in Henny Trow’s mailbox he’d waited for Bella to leave, then scampered up and read it.

“What would he have done if you’d spotted him spying in the days previous?” Bob asked. “Or if Walter Henderson had?”

“I’d have been no problem. He could’ve just said he hitched a ride to Eastport to visit me. He did work up a disguise for any daylight car trips,” I answered.

Jemmy had told me about this part with some embarrassment. Having to disguise himself from me was pretty sneaky, he felt.

As if the rest of it weren’t. “And meanwhile Henderson really was waiting for the Cory Trow dust to settle before he did anything to Jemmy? But now Henderson doesn’t want to kill Jemmy at all anymore?” Bob asked.

I nodded. “Jemmy outed the spy in Walter Henderson’s camp. Saved Henderson’s bacon. So they’re even now, Jemmy says. And I believe him.”

The spy being Ann Radham, who really was a federal officer. Bob Arnold had been debriefed pretty thoroughly by her superiors, who were of course rather annoyed at the injury he’d inflicted on one of their number.

They’d gone to a lot of trouble to get her situated where she could acquire evidence on Henderson, Bob had reported later to Ellie and me, although once they heard his story they’d agreed he had little choice but to shoot Ann.

Just as she, from her own point of view, had been forced to kill Cory. His big mouth could’ve torpedoed her plan to get the dirt she needed for a Henderson arrest. The bottom line was that she’d meant to let Walter Henderson kill Jemmy; then she’d gather evidence of the crime and nail Henderson with it.

But not if Cory blabbed about
her
. If that happened, Ann’s big career triumph went kerblooie, along with any plans she might have had for celebrating her next birthday.

So she’d murdered Cory. High over the lake an osprey sailed, wings outstretched. “Where’d Jemmy hide Trish and Fred Mudge?” Bob wanted to know.

“Their place.” As I’d suspected, someone
had
paid Bert Merkle to concoct the kidnapping story: Jemmy again.

“Even after you talked to the St. John cops,” I went on, “they still figured the likeliest thing was that she’d taken off and he was hunting for her. So Jemmy loaded Fred and Trish up with supplies and they kept their heads down. Or she did,” I corrected myself. “Jemmy had an assignment for Mudge.”

Jemmy had chuckled while describing this part, his surgery-smoothed face wrinkling into a smile. “God, Mudge is talented,” he’d marveled. “All I had to do was describe what I wanted and show him a picture of Cory Trow.”

There’d been one in the library’s copy of the high school yearbook; snipping Cory out of the group shot was yet another of Jemmy’s recent misdeeds. “When I told him I needed a full-sized dummy of Cory,” he’d said, “Mudge stitched it up in a couple of hours. Pretty lifelike, wasn’t it?”

Or deathlike, more to the point. Getting Mudge to trust Jemmy had been easy, too; once Jemmy told him the plan, Mudge’s creativity had kicked in and the rest had been smooth sailing.

“I got him a connection in the city,” Jemmy had added proudly. “On Broadway. Fellow I know there handles designers, craftspeople. Guy’s gonna have a career.”

Terrific, I’d thought, and Trish would be happy also since it meant Mudge would be in New York, while she and the baby meant to stay with Henny Trow in Massachusetts. Their first meeting had gone swimmingly and the infant Raj’s future would be financed by the proceeds of Cory’s insurance policy, the issuing company having already reversed itself on the matter of benefits payment.

I leaned back on the dock, soaking in the spring sunshine. “Was Ann really stealing from Jennifer?” I asked Bob, because I still wondered about her reaction when I accused her of it.

“No,” he said. “But you scared her pretty good when you threatened to say that she had. See, she was getting automatic deposits, her FBI pay to a checking account in New York. Under another name, and she didn’t access it much. But if Henderson ever dug into her finances in any serious way—say, if he had someone follow her around when she went to the city—”

“He’d find it, and the jig would be up,” I finished for him. “That makes sense.” Something else still didn’t, though.

I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what. Bob smiled reminiscently. “Sure wish I had a picture of the look on her face when that dummy came zipping down the wire,” he recalled. “And what the hell did it say, anyway, did you hear?”

“No. I mean… maybe. I’m not sure.” Short-term amnesia was common after an injury like mine, the doctors had said, a mental blurriness that would clear on its own with time. But right now, remembering the episode in the barn was like trying to touch something with the tip of my tongue and not quite being able to.

“I asked Mudge but he said he didn’t remember,” Bob added. “In all the excitement he just blurted out something, he told me, too busy throwing his voice at all to think about what he said.”

“Is that so?” I replied evenly.

“Jemmy said he didn’t hear, either,” Bob went on. “Didn’t even have a plan for what would happen after the dummy appeared, according to him. Just figured he’d try something radical. If it didn’t work, no real harm done, but shaking things up might speed matters along, he thought.”

“Uh-huh.” It was what Jemmy had said when I asked him, too. Exactly what he’d said, word for word.

Bob finished his seltzer. His gaze traveled to the lake’s farther shore where, among last year’s pale broken reeds, Sam sat motionless in a kayak with the paddle across his knees. “Hope
he
ends up okay.”

Me too, but somehow I no longer believed I could do anything about it. Suddenly I felt exhausted. “I’m driving back to town,” I said, getting up. “I need to get a head start on a good night’s sleep.”

“Want me to take you?” Bob offered.

“No, thanks. I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. You stay here and relax awhile.”

It was what I told Jemmy as well when I encountered him after retrieving my car keys from inside the cabin.

“Okay,” he agreed, smiling vaguely while swatting at a pesky mosquito.

It was the second last time I ever saw him.

“I didn’t ask you to do this for me,” I said.

It was past eleven that night when I walked back to where Jemmy sat at a table in the rear of the Bayside Café. Despite my earlier intentions I had not gotten a head start on a night’s sleep, and what I’d thought about while I tried wasn’t pleasant.

Because as the doctors had promised, my memory was clearing. And as a result it seemed to me now that as often happened, Jemmy had been so impressed by the cleverness of his own idea that he’d taken it too far.

“You killed that kid just as sure as if you put a gun to his head,” I told him.

Jemmy looked unsurprised. This was the way we used to meet years earlier when we both knew we still had something to talk about: local place, end of the evening, no appointment required.

I hadn’t been sure he’d come tonight, though. “You’d decided you were either going to turn yourself in, which you didn’t at all want to do, or you needed Henderson neutralized,” I said. “So you came here and hatched a plan.”

A good plan, too. But he’d made one mistake: After the Cory thing slid down the wire at Walter Henderson’s barn, it spoke.

And I remembered now what it had said: “Ann.” Which meant Jemmy hadn’t only been trying to shake things up with the thing’s sudden appearance, as he’d insisted. It meant he’d known.

“Ann Radham killed Cory Trow because he knew who she was,” I went on. “But there was only one way he could’ve found that out—the same way
you
knew who’d killed him. Because you arranged it. You set the whole thing up right from the start.”

“Sit down, Jake,” he said. He kicked out a chair.

He was drinking a Rolling Rock. “I don’t want to sit down with you. You told Cory that Ann’s identity was fake. You clued him in to what she was really doing here, too.”

Just walked up to him on the street and told him, probably; that’s all it would’ve taken. Once Cory had gotten a rise out of Ann with the information, he’d have known it was true.

Too bad he didn’t realize just how big a rise he was going to get. “You knew by then that he was the kind of kid who’d use anything he could, and that he needed some leverage.”

I took a deep breath. “Because he was going to jail if he didn’t come up with something to keep himself out,” I added. “And on top of it all you nearly killed me.”

Because that was another thing: blowdown, my Aunt Fanny. It really was Jemmy who’d hit me out at the cottage. That way I’d go on thinking someone
else
had, so I’d continue snooping not only to find Trish, the baby, and Mudge, but with the added incentive that now Jemmy needed rescuing.

Jemmy, who’d saved my life. Not that he’d known I was going to spring a brain-pan leak. But he’d been willing to risk it.

“How come
he
trusted you?” I asked. “Henderson, who was so hot to kill you?”

Without letting Jemmy answer I rushed on. “But you and Mudge got all that stuff into his barn, the dummy of Cory and the wire it slid down on and I don’t know what all.”

They hadn’t sneaked in with it, that was for sure. “So how’d you convince him to let you… ?”

“Hey, Jake? If you don’t want everyone in the whole place listening to you, you’ll sit,” he interrupted mildly.

I looked around, saw I was beginning to have an audience at the tables around us, and sat. Jemmy nodded approval. “Fine. Now look friendly,” he instructed. “People like anger. Friendly bores them, they’ll look away.”

I forced a smile. They did. “I didn’t know she’d kill him,” Jemmy said quietly as soon as they had. “I thought she’d tell her superiors, the way they’re supposed to when anything like that happens.”

Like Cory finding out she was a cop, he meant. Whereupon her bosses would pull her off her assignment and somehow Jemmy would take the credit for it with Henderson, for getting rid of her…

No. It didn’t wash. “Why didn’t she?” I demanded. “Instead of running off the rails she might have been able to find some other way to salvage her situation. Or worst case get yanked off the job, you’re right,” I conceded.

But instead she’d gone straight to premeditated murder, and Jemmy must’ve had an idea she would. Because to cut any ice with Walter Henderson—enough for the information to save his own life or keep him out of federal custody—Jemmy would’ve had to
show
who Ann was, not just have her up and vanish.

“Come on, don’t try to kid me anymore. You knew all about her before you even came here,” I told him.

He said nothing. “Well, didn’t you? Don’t tell me you just blew in without getting the lay of the land.”

When he didn’t answer I recited for him. “Ann Radham was a cop, she got close to Jen Henderson on purpose, cozied up to Jen in the clubs Jen liked to go to so she could spy on Jen’s dad. But Ann was also a loose cannon, she already had a reputation for it, didn’t she?”

A reputation Jemmy’s federal buddies would’ve discussed with him. Because at Jemmy’s level, the cops and crooks talked to one another… and that was the only way
he
could’ve known about her; that her own bosses had told him.

For the first time he looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, she was a real ladder-monkey,” he admitted. “Someone who doesn’t care about anything but the career,” he translated when I looked puzzled. “I figured I’d have a better shot at Henderson without her, is all.”