Triple Witch (22 page)

She nodded emphatically, just as an explosion of barking, growling, and general canine intimidation erupted out of the dark at us, followed by the energetic clank of a chain against a post.

“Oh, Christ,” I said, my heart punching like a fist against the wall of my chest; as you may have gathered, posts in Eastport vary widely in their age and condition. “Not another dog.”

Ellie aimed her flashlight. “Not,” she corrected, “just any dog. I think it’s Cosmo.”

A woman’s voice shouted from an upstairs window; the dog fell silent. Just then Ned strode out of the gloom at us. “Who’s that?”

He aimed his own flashlight at our faces, but his battery was dying so the effect was perhaps not as paralyzing as he wished.

“It’s just us,” Ellie said as he hurried toward us.

“Oh, well, then.” He switched off the flashlight.

“Is that Ken’s dog?” I asked. “I wondered what happened to him.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Too much dog for me, though. But I’ve got a fellow out in the country, has a lot of property. I think he’ll take it.”

“So how is it going with the other patrollers?” Ellie asked.

“They’re fine.” The officiousness returned to his voice. “Seems like we accomplished our mission for tonight. Everything is nice and quiet.”

I’d wondered why Ned would bother doing anything for the town; it was so much like work. But now I thought I understood: he was loving this. It made him feel important.

“This is what it takes,” he went on. “Decent citizens scare the lowlifes right back into the woodwork.”

“Ned?” His wife’s voice came from the upstairs window again. “Ned, what are you doing out there in the dark?”

“I’m trying,” he replied in tones of strained patience, “to keep order in this town.”

A porch light went on, showing Ned’s lawn. At one side stood a couple of trash cans overflowing with bagged garbage; the rest of the lawn was a broken ankle waiting to happen, littered with plastic toys. Where, I have always wondered, did the toy manufacturers find those virulent shades of orange and blue: in a psychopathology textbook?

Ellie had begun looking at him oddly, and following her gaze, I noticed that his sweater had … stuff on it. Lumps of stuff clung here and there like lint, or dried grass clippings.

Also, he kept fingering something in his sweater pocket.

I had the sudden bad notion that maybe I wasn’t the only one toting more than a heavy flashlight, and the idea of Ned with a gun gave me some pause.

(Which parenthetically brings me to the gun thing in general, and I suppose I do have to say something about it. So here it is:

1) We have had guns in this country for over two hundred years, and

2) we have had television sets for about fifty years, and

3) before television, kids didn’t take guns to school for the purpose of mowing down their teachers and classmates, and
4) now they do.

Your assignment: figure out the variable.)

“Anyway,” Ned went on, “I’ve found work driving my truck. So I’ll be hiring another fellow to go out to Crow Island and do the necessary for Tim’s bunch of strays, you can tell George.”

But when he finally took his hand out of his pocket, the pocket didn’t sag: no gun. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

Ellie’s eyes were still on Ned’s sweater. What
was
that stuff, anyway? Then, in an inspired maneuver, she slung a casual arm around him. “You’re doing a fine job of keeping the peace, Ned,” she said, and when we got home we immediately examined the stuff she had lifted from his sweater.

Picking apart the fibers twined together like flax strands or rotted hemp string, we poked at the green, oddly familiar-looking bits thickly distributed among them, bits flecked with black and a rich, bluish white, like fine stationery.

“Fur?” asked Ellie, using the end of a pencil to separate the strandlike stuff as we sat at the kitchen table.

“Not fur,” I answered. “More like hair. And what’s that other material?” Then suddenly the lightbulb in my head went on and I saw it:

That green. A
familiar
green. The color of …

Money.

34
Much later that night, Wade put aside the pair of lovely old Italian dueling pistols he was appraising for an antiques dealer in Camden, and we went downstairs to work on the shutters.

Funny how harmless they had looked, back in the
Dumpster. But as the day of Felicity’s arrival loomed, that shutter pile grew taller and more ominous.

“What say I take all the hardware off?” Wade suggested.

“Great. Makes them easier to burn.”

He looked at me, his eyes amused. “Scrape,” he instructed gently. “We can finish in a few hours.”

He put a CD in the player: Bela Fleck playing “Metric Lips,” an old banjo tune from the New Grass Revival group, before Bela put together the Flecktones. The plunkety sounds echoed liquidly in the low-ceilinged cellar, spreading on my heart like salve; Ellie’s story about driving with Ken had made me feel frightened and sad, regretful over the way good things go by.

And then, hefting one of the fragile old objects, Wade said: “Look at this. These things are dowelled, not put together with screws. Man, somebody built these so long ago. Built ’em by hand. It’s great that you managed to save them, Jacobia.”

Which was what I needed to hear, and he knew it; he is like that. Renewed, I applied the chisel to the shutter’s surface.

The trick, when you are chiseling off old paint, is to aim the blade at an oblique angle relative to the grain of the wood. Chiseling with the grain will inevitably dig up a splinter, and the splinter will run deeper and deeper until it makes a groove you will never be able to sand out, while chiseling across the grain digs a square, toothy gouge, as if some ratlike animal has been munching on the wood.

Wrapping a thick rag around your chisel thumb helps, too, unless you are actually trying to get one thumb to swell up twice the size of the other. But after a while I fell into the rhythm of the work, monotonous and hypnotic, comforting in that there was no strategy to it, only the long, slow doing of it.

Meanwhile my brain kept working the ideas of money and hair, nibbling at them as insistently as the
constantly moving blade of the chisel, but with less result. I didn’t notice when Wade went upstairs, but I did when he came back with two bottles of beer.

Gratefully, I accepted one of the icy bottles and laid it against my head, before taking a long, scouringly cold swallow. “Thanks. Couple more evenings, we’ll be ready to paint.”

He looked surprised. “Jacobia. You’ve been down here six hours, and so have I. We can paint these shutters tomorrow, second-coat ’em, too.”

I blinked and glanced around wonderingly, coming out of my trance. “Six
hours?
”

But there they were: all the shutters, their louvers scraped clean. On the floor, old green paint scrapings lay in drifts.

“I’ve been taking them away as you finished, putting new ones in front of you,” Wade said. “It’s wicked late, but you were going so well, I hated to stop you.”

He had done half of them himself. “My hero,” I said.

“That,” he chuckled, “is the idea.”

He’d been changing the CDs, also: now it was the Dillards, complete with lots of sweet, swoopy fiddle flourishes. Wade grabbed me and waltzed me around the cellar, ducking where the old pipes hung down, until I was breathless and laughing.

“Stop,” I begged, clinging helplessly to him, giddy with the music, the late hour, and half a bottle of beer.

Tiptoeing upstairs, we kept humming the waltz tune, our arms around each other and our heads close together like a couple of teenagers. Silence from down the hall, Sam and Victor both asleep. In my room, pearl-colored dawn light flooded in through the curtains, as I closed them.

“Now I’ve got you,” Wade said comfortably.

No question about it.

So it was full daylight before I sat up and realized: long fibrous strands and chewed-up bits of stuff.

The llamas had gotten into some money.

35
Living alone on a picture-book saltwater farm overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay, at age fifty-five Berenice Waugh was a flower I child for the nineties: by day the quintessential organic farmer and keeper of rabbits and llamas, by night the maintainer of a voluminous e-mail correspondence with wool-raising enthusiasts and textile artists all over New England.

So Ellie had informed me when I called her to tell her my idea about the material clinging to Ned Montague’s sweater.

“Llama hair,” she said as we drove toward Berenice’s house. “What’s Ned doing with llama hair?”

“He is driving,” I replied, “a truck. His truck, with Baxter Willoughby’s llamas in it. My question is why? And why with money? Because it’s starting to seem obvious now that there must be a connection. Don’t you agree? With the money, I mean, from Crow Island.”

Turning off Route 1 onto the shore road, we drove between farmhouses whose window boxes were brilliant with red petunias.

“He takes the llamas for rides?” Ellie asked puzzledly.

We rounded the long turn uphill between dark stands of pines, coming out along a fenced acre where white-faced cattle all stood facing the same way, their heavy jaws rotating in slow motion.

“Well, no,” I said. “But they don’t walk to Willoughby’s. He must buy them somewhere, and bring them home in a truck. Wouldn’t you think?”

“I suppose. Still, they don’t ride up in the cab, I don’t imagine, so how would they get their hair all over Ned? And what does the money have to do with it? Who lets llamas eat money? And,” she finished, “what does Willoughby want them for, anyway? The llamas, I mean.”

To our left, a log cabin with matching outbuildings perched on a hilly rise. Sunflowers lined the driveway,
their huge yellow heads aimed east like a row of bright faces, into the morning.

“Maybe Ned loads them into the truck, and that’s how he gets close to them. And maybe Willoughby thinks gentleman farmers need livestock. Or maybe,” I added, remembering the perfection of his place, “he keeps them for the atmosphere. Like outdoor furniture.”

Ellie sniffed. “Pretty expensive furniture. A llama is a fairly exotic animal. I’ll bet it has an exotic price tag.”

“Willoughby,” I assured her as we passed the log cabin’s mailbox and turned up the drive, “is an exotic guy.”

Up ahead, I spied rabbit hutches, a tractor, and a watering trough. Everything looked spiffy, freshly painted and gleaming in the summer morning. By contrast, three hours of sleep and a breakfast in the company of my ex-husband had shorn me of whatever girlish energy I had temporarily possessed.

“After dinner tonight,” I’d told him firmly, and he’d shot me an “oh-yeah?” kind of look, then gone on drinking his orange juice.

“With Sam,” I’d continued, stifling an urge to smack him. “We’re going to have a conversation about a few things.”

“Such as?” he inquired dismissively.

I didn’t want to get into the meat-and-potatoes of it right then; Sam had gone out of the house before I got up. I wanted Sam to see me sticking up for myself, to know he didn’t have to do it for me.

“Such as the way you’ve been behaving around here,” I told Victor. “Treating me like the maid, and this house like a motel.”

Victor had smiled at me, recovered from the uncertainty he’d shown at the dinner table two evenings earlier.

“You know,” he’d said softly, with a hint of menace, “I’ve been taking it easy on you for Sam’s sake.”

Well, no; that wasn’t quite why, and I wouldn’t have called it taking it easy on me, either. But keeping up a halfway decent front made it easier for him to pretend I was the crazy one, so he rarely showed his truly mean side in front of anyone else.

“After dinner,” I’d repeated. “And Sam will be with us.”

Then I left the house before I could succumb to temptation, and give him the only meal he really deserved: a knuckle sandwich.

“Berenice Waugh,” Ellie said now, “knows
everything
about llamas. I’m sure she’ll say something useful.”

I got out of the car and stopped, struck by the small green paradise Berenice Waugh had created. In the dooryard, mint plants grew profusely from an old washtub. Potted herbs tangled together on the porch rail, and the backyard was a botany lesson: ginseng, goldenseal, aloe, yarrow, and echinacea were among the species names printed on the stakes in the growing beds.

Everything was silent. A marmalade cat stood and stretched in the sunshine by the cellar doors. Then I spotted the llamas, their coats as smooth and flawless as ranch-raised mink, peering from a corral. Not a one of them looked ornery, or curled a lip to spit.

The back door of the cabin flung open abruptly and a bundle of merriment whirled out into the yard at us. “Hello, hello!”

Berenice was a short, round figure in blue denim coveralls, a red flannel shirt, and enormous hammered-copper earrings. “Ellie, so good to see you. And this must be Jacobia, welcome!”

Her hair was thick, bowl-cut, and pure white, a fringe of bangs stopping short above a pair of bright blue eyes. More copper braceleted her wrists, which at first glance looked plump but were actually just very
thickly muscled. Her hands, strong and capable-looking, sported clean square-trimmed fingernails.

Inside, Berenice moved mail-order catalogs from one chair and a black cat unceremoniously from another. “Sit. I’m waiting—”

—she bustled around the kitchen: wood-burning cookstove, a bright-red pump handle on a venerable old sink, and an enormous galvanized kettle simmering on the woodstove’s firebox—

“—for a communication.”

The room’s decor included peace symbols, yin-yang diagrams, and a deck of tarot cards. The window coverings were made from strips of bamboo, and a curtain of multicolored glass beads divided the kitchen from the rest of the little bungalow. On a shelf above the sink were jars of strange-looking substances: curled-up mushrooms, dried leaf fragments, greyish bits of moss.

“Here, dear,” Berenice said, setting a steaming cup in front of me. “Drink this tea. It’ll make you feel better.”