Triple Witch (10 page)

Whereupon my prayer was answered by the sight of Zenna Henderson, planting her booted feet in a lawn belonging to the venerable Miss Violet Gage.

Until she was eighty, Miss Gage had lived with her mother, because (as she said) her mother was such a fine cook. Now at age ninety, she lived alone, doing her own cooking as well as almost all of her own gardening, only relegating the heavy chores to youngsters like Zenna.

Who was no spring chicken, either, and also no slouch; white-haired and indomitable, Zenna ran Eastport’s landscaping service single-handed, driving an old Ford pickup and disdaining such foolishness as riding lawnmowers. For her labors today, Zenna wore a crisp white blouse, blue serge trousers, and pearl earrings, because (as she said) hard work was no excuse for carelessness in personal appearance.

Between Zenna and Miss Violet, I reflected, there was enough strength in Eastport to move Mount Katahdin a foot or so, and some left over for me. Refreshing myself by means of their instructive example, I watched Zenna pull the starter cord on her gasoline-powered edge trimmer, whose roar cut through the afternoon like a chain saw ripping into soft pinewood.

But the trimmer was not loud enough to drown out what Victor said next.

“Maybe it’s okay for you,” he announced generously. “But it’s a good thing Sam’s not thinking about coming back here.”

I turned suddenly, my good humor vanished and a voice in my brain shouting loudly:
suspicions confirmed
.

Sam hadn’t said anything to Victor yet, and I hadn’t either.

But somehow, Victor could smell it.

17
Tim Mumford’s body turned slowly at the end of the knotted sash cord, in his dog shed out on Crow Island. A stepladder lay overturned beneath him.

Ellie and I had gone back out to the island as planned to deliver Kenny’s belongings. Now Tim’s dogs milled nervously around us in the shed, whining. They’d been gathered on the beach at our arrival, like castaways awaiting an uncertain rescue.

“I,” Ellie had said upon seeing them, “don’t like this.”

I hadn’t liked it, either, and I liked even less seeing the way Tim’s hands were tied behind him, with a slip knot. It made the whole sad thing too imaginable:

Poor old Timothy, heartsick and despairing, climbs up on the stool, puts the noose around his neck and his hands through the loop of the slipknot, steps on the cord to tighten it, and kicks away the footstool.

It was why the cord had bothered me so much, I realized now: because in the back of my mind I’d been seeing how he could use it. I just hadn’t wanted to believe it.

“I guess Tim finally went off the end of the dock, just the way he said he would,” I told Ellie as we made our way back to his ramshackle dwelling. The dogs trotted hopefully behind us as if, now that we were here, everything would be all right.

Ellie said nothing.

In Tim’s shanty, the token items we’d brought from Ken’s trailer looked shabby and pathetic. Without Tim, the place itself looked worse, too; its gritty disorder had fallen into simple filth now that he was not present to energize it.

From the cold cookstove I figured he must have been dead awhile, probably since early morning. A small kerosene lantern over the old sink still burned with a guttering bluish flame, dying as the fuel dwindled.

Ellie just stood there gazing at it, her hands at her sides. Her silence was making me uncomfortable.

“Okay,” I said, “look. I’ll feed these dogs, and make sure they have fresh water. You just wait here, and then we’ll go back and tell Arnold that old Tim finally made good on his threat.”

Ellie turned, pale and glittery-eyed. “You didn’t see it, did you?”

I just blinked at her. “What? Of course I saw it. Tim hanged himself.”

“The knot,” she persisted. “You didn’t … but no, of course you wouldn’t. Why should you?”

“Ellie, what does the knot have to do with …”

Then I got it, sort of. “Oh, no. You’re not telling me …”

That, you see, is the important thing about a slipknot: it slips. And Ellie, being like Tim a Maine seagoing type—

—everyone on Moose Island, or anyone who’s grown up here, anyway, knows more knots than a Boy Scout—

—had spotted something interesting about this one.

“For what you are thinking he did,” she said, “that knot is backwards. You’re assuming he tied his own hands as a kind of insurance, in case he lost his nerve at the last minute.”

“So? I don’t see what that signifies. I mean, obviously he was upset, or he wouldn’t have killed himself. So maybe he just tied the thing backwards, and—”

Her look stopped me. “Jacobia. What he didn’t do—that’s not the point, and never mind either that Tim hasn’t tied a slipknot backwards since he was about two years old.”

She made a face. “The point is what he couldn’t do, which is tighten that knot himself. The way that knot’s tied, stepping on the long end of the cord would only have pulled it looser, not tightened it. It wasn’t,” she
emphasized, “
possible
. Somebody else tied his hands behind him that way. It was a landlubber’s knot.”

I sat down hard in one of Tim’s dilapidated kitchen chairs.

“Somebody,” Ellie said, “killed him. And sooner or later I’ll know who it was. And when I find out …”

She sank into the other of Tim’s chairs, lost in thought. Then, startlingly: “Do you have bullets for the Bisley, Jake? Real ones, I mean, not the ketchup dummies?”

I looked at her. “Yes. I’ve got them.”

Ellie nodded, but she didn’t say anything more, and I was afraid to ask her.

“Come on,” I said to the dogs, and went on out to feed them, leaving Ellie with her hands clasped quietly on Tim’s table. Her face when I glanced back was as cold and scary as the deepest bay water, with icy, pitiless currents running beneath it.

Ellie is my friend, and I would do almost anything for her.

But not what she was thinking right that minute.

Out by the shed I found empty kibble trays and a water trough with a scant inch of water at the bottom of it. Tim hadn’t gotten to his chores before somebody got to him. Grateful for the work to take my mind off what I’d seen in the shed, I pumped water and hauled it to the trough. The dogs lapped eagerly at it, starting to get their wind back now that someone was caring for them. Once I had the water up to its normal level, I started on the food.

Along the outside of the shed were a number of covered bins, each filled with a different kind of dog kibble, but I had no idea which dogs got which kibble, or even if it mattered. Nor did I see how Tim got the kibble to the trays, which were nailed to a heavy, immovable feeding platform that he had built from wooden pallets.

Stacked away from the bins, though, covered by a tarp, were about twenty fifty-pound sacks, each labeled
Purina. They’d been donated, I supposed, by the animal shelter and rafted out here, but not yet stored in the shed. Seeing them, I decided to pass on the bins entirely, and just haul a whole sack of the new kibble down to the trays.

Which was how I discovered that the contents were not what the labels promised. Hefting one, I staggered momentarily at its unexpected lightness, then tore the bag open.

Looking pristine and as if they had never been opened before, the sacks contained money. Cash money in rubber-banded bundles, each sack comprising—I riffled one bundle, doing the astonishing sums rapidly in my head—approximately a hundred thousand dollars.

The end of each sack had been glued, so it looked brand-new. You would have to lift a sack, as I had, to get a clue otherwise. There were—I scanned the heap again—exactly twenty of them, which meant old Tim had been sitting on a fortune.

Whether he’d known it was there or not, I had no idea. I only knew his killer hadn’t found it.

Or I thought I did.

18
For pure entertainment, even a pair of murders couldn’t compete with two million dollars in Purina Dog Chow sacks, and by evening it was the talk of the town.

Down at the Happy Landings Cafe on Water Street, the rumors flew as thick and fast as the burgers and onion rings coming out of the kitchen: there were human bones in the bags with the money; other bodies were known to be buried on Crow Island; and in one particularly unlikely version of the story, old Tim had been a satanic-cult leader whose followers gave over all
their worldly possessions—thus the two million—to follow him in the paths of ungodliness.

“Cult leader,” George Valentine snorted, seating himself beside Ellie at our usual table, across from Wade and me. “Load of bushwa. Only cult in Eastport’s the one worships Wednesday night beano,”—bingo, he meant; it was a Maine thing—“over to the Community Center.”

Then for a while we busied ourselves with the menu, even though we knew it by heart. George and Ellie chose haddock dinners with cole slaw, George asking for gravy on the side for his french fries, while Wade and I dared to order the Saturday Night Special, which Wade always jokes is as explosive as the weapon it’s named for: pork barbecue simmered to falling-apart tenderness, guaranteed to produce muzzle-flash later but delicious now.

Fortunately, Sam had taken his father out to dinner at the Baywatch, where Victor could eat something a little less likely to bite back, and where he could be spared the Happy Landings’ idea of musical entertainment. George had dropped a quarter into the jukebox, and Flatt and Scruggs were highballing through “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” to the disdain of a tableful of high school students bemoaning “that old redneck stuff.”

“They caught the fella,” said George when we had eaten our dinners and were starting on coffee and lemon squares. These, as done by the Happy Landings, consist of a half-inch crust of finely ground walnuts, two inches of lemon custard the color of morning sunshine, and whipped cream sprinkled with more ground walnuts and a twinkling of lemon zest.

The high school kids had gone out in a gangling herd, laughing and shoving. Several of them were Sam’s friends, and I thought again how glad I was to have him home.

“The one who was s’posed to have done for Kenny,”
George amplified. “And for Tim, they’re thinking, now.”

George will do this: just go silently along for an hour or more, then come out casually with a bomb of information that makes the rest of us stare open-mouthed at him.

“Heard it,” George went on stolidly, “at the fire station, that we didn’t need to be on the lookout for him anymore.”

Aside from his impromptu duties as primary fixer of whatever catastrophe afflicts us—a break in the water lines, a tree on the school roof, or the equitable division of a deer that has been hit by two cars simultaneously on the causeway—George is also the town’s volunteer fire chief.

“And,” he went on, “I hear the guy, this Ike Forepaugh, had a wad of cash in his pocket, says Ken paid a debt he owed him.”

At the other tables, talk of the money and the murders was beginning to flag, replaced by gossip about the other big doings around town: preparations for Felicity Abbott-Jones’s visit.

People were sticking cut evergreen trees into holes in their yards, to hide their satellite dishes. They were dumping beach gravel on driveways to conceal neat, mud-resistant macadam. And they were soaking old dilapidated wooden storm windows in Git-Rot, trying to make them solid enough to hang for a few days.

Most of those windows were so rotten that afterwards (and in spite of the Git-Rot, a miracle substance so effective that it will make, for a while, anyway, solid wood out of sawdust and termite droppings) people could spray them off with garden hoses.

But longevity was not the requirement. The requirement was that Felicity not see the draft-proof, watertight, aluminum double-hungs with which most of those old houses were actually furnished—historical authenticity
being, in the middle of a Maine winter, pretty chilly.

Ellie listened silently to the talk at our table, and at the others. She had been quiet and subdued ever since we found Tim, and she had not mentioned the Bisley again.

“This is the guy,” Wade asked, frowning, “that Ken was pals with? Back when they were in jail together?”

“Ayuh,” George agreed. “Told Arnold he didn’t know anything about Crow Island. But Arnold says the guy is from down around Searsport way. He probably knows how to handle a boat all right.”

“He does,” Ned Montague put in from the next table. His face, normally mild as a pan of milk, wore a look of grim anger.

“Ike Forepaugh,” Ned pronounced the name scornfully, “was the one who stole that dragger out of Machiasport, couple years ago.”

“Hey, Ned,” George said expressionlessly.

“Sorry for your loss,” said Wade, not turning to include Ned in the conversation, even though Ned was Tim Mumford’s nephew, and Ken’s cousin, which officially made him a bereaved relative.

Undiscouraged by the snub, Ned turned his chair. At his table with him were his wife, a tired-looking woman with faded blonde hair and a sweatshirt that read I LOVE YA HONEY, BUT THE CAT SAYS YOU GOTTA GO, and his little girls: one the plump, gap-toothed picture of health, the other a wan, grey-faced miniature of her mother, picking sadly at a chocolate sundae.

“Eat that up, now, honey. Daddy bought it for you,” the woman urged, as the child stared hopelessly at it.

Ned set his coffee cup on our table, uninvited. “Listen,” he said to Ellie. “I know it must have been an awful thing, finding old Tim like that. And finding Ken, too.”

Ellie regarded him: a small, pale man with pink-rimmed
eyes and hands as soft and ineffective-looking as little paws. His wispy hair was combed to cover the thinning place on top.

“You’ll be hearing from the ladies at the church guild,” she said. “About the arrangements.”

He nodded. “I know I haven’t been on the ball about that.”

Throughout the afternoon, Ellie had been at my house, on the telephone, doing what Maine women have done for generations without fuss or fanfare: making things happen. There was the hall to be set up, funeral hymns to be chosen, and the church altar to be decorated: lupine, everyone agreed, and vases of
rosa rugosa
.