Triple Witch (14 page)

As we went in, Bob Arnold sped by in the squad car, looking grim, and I supposed it was because of the escape. Having a guy whom you are going to charge with double murder slip out of your cruiser is embarrassing.

I was feeling grim, too, on account of what Victor was up to, and passing the For Sale sign down the street from my own place didn’t help.

The house looked perfect for him: an old Greek Revival, big enough to make him think he was living in a mansion, but in decent repair. There was even a parlor
with its own entrance off the pillared front porch, if, indeed, he really wanted an office, or in his case possibly a torture chamber.

So I didn’t give much thought to the look on Arnold’s face. Besides, the hardware store always distracts me completely with its buckets of galvanized roofing nails, drawers of wood screws and plaster buttons, racks of brushes, tin snips, and linoleum cutters. Way in the back hang the buoys and anchor chains, with links as big around as your wrist, or your head; there are drill bits the size of hypodermic needles, and generators big enough to run a hospital.

In short, it is do-it-yourself heaven. I got my sander belts and shutter dogs, then wandered around waiting for Ellie to make her purchases. Outside, another squad car zoomed by. But I hardly noticed, too busy gazing at a shop gadget I had long coveted: a Dremel Moto Tool, which is a device sort of like a dentist’s drill—and with as many attachments—for shaping, sanding, polishing, etching, or otherwise altering the surface of almost anything. You can even cut bone with it, the package advised, which I thought might come in handy if I ever decided to dismember Victor.

Through the store window I saw the tourists begin moving as if in a tide, sluggishly at first. But I was busy, getting the Dremel box down from the shelf. It was richly, satisfyingly heavy, just as I had always imagined it would be, as I carried it to the counter.

But Ellie did not smile and agree with me at once, as she usually did when I decided to make an extravagant purchase. Instead, spotting George through the window and seeing his expression, she ran to meet him and bury her face in his shoulder.

Henry Wadsworth stood watching the scene in some puzzlement, tugging at his suspenders. “Some sort of excitement, over to the dock. You don’t suppose that big white boat is sinking, do you?”

From the look on Ellie’s face, it would have to be the
dock sinking, not the boat. “Henry, put this on my account, and ask Charlie to deliver my things, will you, please? I’ll pay him then.”

“Ayuh,” Henry said with a snap of the suspenders. “Will do.”

I rushed outside. People streamed past me on the sidewalk toward the waterfront side of the street.

“George, what’s wrong?”

George took a deep breath and let it out in a rush, his arm still around Ellie. “Body,” he muttered unhappily. “Some fellows from away rented a boat from Hugh Crowe. Going fishing, opened their bait bin, dump the ice in. And there was a body. I saw it.”

Which didn’t quite account for his discomfort. Over the years, there are a lot of bodies in small towns, and in Eastport George had seen most of them.

But this one had knocked him for a loop. “For a second, I thought it was Ellie,” he explained. “The hair. It looked red.”

There is always some water in the bottom of a bait bin, and George didn’t have to elaborate on what had stained it. I could figure that out for myself.

At the dock, the town’s two squad cars idled with their headlights on and their cherry-beacons whirling, a state car pulled alongside them. Henahan’s ambulance was moving slowly out past the quonset warehouses, the forklifts pulling over to make way. A couple of tourists had gotten out there, too, eager for a glimpse.

Arnold urged them back as the ambulance opened and a white-sheeted stretcher angled down the gangway to the finger pier.

A bad thought hit me. “George. Who was it?”

“Young girl from town, you’ve probably seen her around.”

A man rushed up. “Listen, George. You got to tell me. You tell me that it is a mistake.”

George looked sorrowfully at the man. “Harley. You need to talk to Arnold, now. You know I would do
about anything for you that I could, Harley. But I can’t, hot this time. So go on, now, and Arnold will talk to you. Please, Harley.”

A scared sort of stillness settled on the man’s furrowed face, in its weatherbeaten grooves. He stared at George, the look in his eyes still disbelieving.

“I want,” he repeated, “for you to tell me.”

Suddenly he turned with an oath and started running, pumping his skinny, bare arms like a sprinter toward the dock.

“That,” George said sadly at my questioning look, “is Harley Quinn. It was his daughter, in the bait bin. I guess that Arnold must have called him, didn’t want him to hear some other way.”

“Hallie,” Harley Quinn howled terribly as he ran. “Damnit, Hallie, you get the hell home, now. You get home or you’ll get the whuppin’ of your young life!”

But, as Arnold confirmed later, Hallie already had.

22
“If I had stopped her, she’d be alive right now.”

“Jake.” Wade put his hand on mine. “You did what you could.”

“That’s right,” Ellie put in. “She wasn’t going to listen.”

“Yeah.” I swallowed some wine. The two of them had taken me to the Baywatch to try, as Ellie diplomatically put it, talking some sense into me. It was almost noon, and we sat at the bar, with sunshine glittering in the glasses stacked against the mirror, glinting in the brass bar rail.

Sunshine that Hallie Quinn wasn’t going to see, anymore. My stomach knotted painfully around that knowledge.

“What I want to know is what she was doing down there,” Ellie said, sipping a lemon soda. “That’s not the smartest place to pick up a ride out of town.”

“Yeah, well, she wasn’t the smartest kid, was she? Or not in any of the ways that could have saved her life.”

I felt a burst of fury at poor, foolish Hallie, so certain that she could take care of herself. She couldn’t have been dead, Arnold had told us, more than a few hours. He’d spared us most of the details, but he did say she’d been beaten and strangled. The blood she’d lost hadn’t been from a cutting wound, he said; only from her nose being broken.

Only.

“Did she ask you for money?” Ellie wanted to know.

“No.” And I wouldn’t have given her any; it would have been tantamount to shooting the dope into her arm myself. But if I had offered her money, would she be in Portland, now, instead of in the ambulance with a sheet over her face? And what if I’d called Arnold the moment she left, instead of thinking it over first?

“Jacobia.” Wade’s tone was serious. “Quit hitting yourself.”

“Right.” It’s like they tell you in the stock market: don’t chase your losses. I sat up straighter.

“That’s better.” Wade slid off the barstool. “Now, I’m going to go finish up that Remington. I guess you two are going to sit here and talk about girl stuff. Needlepoint, slipcovers. How to put on makeup. Stuff like that. Right?”

“Right,” we echoed together, eyeing him innocently.

Wade shook his head, undeceived. Since I’d known him, he’d never tried to stop me from doing anything I really wanted to do, and some of those things—in hindsight, anyway—had been pretty foolhardy. But there was a flash of warning in his eye as he left us, and I knew what he’d left unspoken: keep your cell phone handy, keep your eyes open, and don’t mess up.

Because he knew I wouldn’t let go of it, now. There were just too many things wrong with it. Such as:

(1) Two million dollars on a beach just begging to be taken.

(2) Three bodies—one a young girl’s—in a single week.

And (3), the notion that Willoughby’s presence in town was awfully coincidental. Maybe cash wasn’t his
forte
, but big money and bad deeds were, especially when the two were linked together.

Besides, it kept me from dwelling on the upcoming carnage in my own life: I’d decided I was going to tell Victor about Sam’s plans, myself. That way, the fight would begin before Sam could do anything to prevent it. And I was going to win, even if I had to end up replacing Hallie’s body with Victor’s in that bait bin.

Ellie took another sip of her lemon soda. “So,” she said, “how do you think she was planning to get out of town? If,” she added, “you really think she was going.”

“Oh, I think so. She told me she came to warn us, but she looked pretty scared, herself. And she must have known the cops were looking for her. I don’t see how she expected to get a ride so late, though. Do you suppose she already had money?”

Ellie shook her head, anger sharpening her features. “Don’t know. All I know is, Ike Forepaugh gets out of custody and Hallie gets murdered. Sounds like a one-two punch to me. If she knew he killed Ken and Tim, then he probably killed her to shut her up.”

“Huh. But that means he came back here. Would you, if you were facing a murder charge?”

“I might,” she replied, “to get rid of a witness.”

“Which would account for Hallie being so scared. What if Hallie and Tim both knew about something Ike and Kenny had going? Something big enough to be worth Ike’s murdering all three of them for, so Ike could have it all for himself.”

“All,” she agreed, “of two million dollars.”

“Absolutely. Because you know, it’s true there’s not enough market around here for two million bucks’ worth of heroin. But what if the real market for it wasn’t around here? What if this was just the point of entry?”

“Arnold told George that Ken had charts on his boat, for the water out past Halifax. International territory. And on the way back, why would the Coast Guard bother? It’s just Ken. Everybody knows him.”

I took her meaning: Theoretically, you can’t import anything without Customs and Immigration knowing about it. But in practice there’s a lot of water out there, more than anybody can patrol. And as Ellie had implied, Ken Mumford was so well known around town and out on the water, he was practically invisible.

“Once you get the stuff on land,” I mused, “you could take it anywhere: Boston, even New York. Especially if you used, say, a fish truck. Or something else very ordinary looking, that normally would be making trips.”

“Yep.” She slid off her barstool. “Listen, I’ve got to go. I asked them to hold a spot for me, in the
Tides
—”

The
Quoddy Tides
, she meant: the most northeasterly paper regularly published in the United States. I could see a corner of its trim, white-painted Victorian building from here, so cute and sweet you’d have thought a pair of bluebirds lived in it.

“—for Ken’s and Tim’s death notices.” She dropped a ten on the bar. “Keep thinking about it.”

Turning, she made her way through the dwindling lunch crowd in the Baywatch, leaving me sitting at the bar with an empty wineglass and a strong desire to just forget the whole mess: Hallie, Victor, everything.

But I couldn’t forget the girl in the Port Authority bus terminal. I owed somebody something, for the luck that girl had.

I got out of there.

23
Think about it
, Ellie had said, so I did as I drove back to Dennysville, hoping to replace that half-shutter that Victor had ruined. Ken hadn’t been spending much money, but if we were right about what had been going on—some kind of an enormous drug buy that was apparently about to happen when he got killed, with the money on Crow Island all ready to be ferried out to a big boat—he’d had access to an enormous lot of it.

Which just didn’t compute. Even a lout like Kenny knew that if you spent a lot, people would figure you were getting it from somewhere, and in Kenny’s case they weren’t going to figure he’d been made CEO of General Motors. In a town like ours, if he’d even bought someone a drink, someone else would sit up and take notice. They’d figure Kenny had graduated to bigger crimes.

And soon—the Eastport rumor machine being what it was—word would get back to Arnold. Ken would be watched and pretty quickly thereafter, he would be arrested:

End of deal. That would be obvious even to Kenny.

But it wasn’t Ken’s ability to know all this that I doubted. It was the likelihood—given his booze-soaked character—of his acting on the knowledge, by not spending any of the money.

This led me kicking and screaming to the idea that Ken hadn’t known about all that money at all, which pretty much ruled out his having told Ike Forepaugh about it, didn’t it?

Passing the Crossroads Restaurant, a low red-and-white frame place that looks like a lowdown hamburger joint and serves prime rib that is to die for, I passed Ned Montague driving a rust-raddled Chrysler, headed back toward Eastport.

He didn’t see me, or anyway he didn’t wave. In the rear-view, I saw his muffler trailing sparks, bouncing and dragging along on the pavement. This was not exactly
a rare sight around here; hard use, salt air, and long winters are tough on cars in downeast Maine, and a ten percent local unemployment rate—for Ned, it was more like seventy-five percent—doesn’t help.

But seeing Ned’s car reminded me of the one up on blocks, out behind Ken Mumford’s trailer, and that reminded me of Hallie Quinn again, stuffed into a bait bin awash in bloody ice water and fish stink. So by the time I pulled into Willoughby’s drive, I was ready for a change of scenery, even if the place did look way too glossy and overdone, like a farm whose chief agricultural product is the floral pattern on a bolt of Laura Ashley chintz.

The silver Jag was pulled up outside the garage. Beyond the cedar fence the llamas muttered disgruntledly, glancing at me as if calculating whether or not they could spit that far. As I jumped from the truck, Baxter Willoughby slammed out of the house and barreled at me, looking ready to chew nails.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. The bulldog-faced fellow I’d seen last time came out, too, and stood on the porch watching us.

I explained about the broken shutter, laying on the gratitude and apologizing heartily for troubling him again. “But I’d hoped I could have one more look in that Dumpster. It would help me out a lot.”