Triple Witch (24 page)

After all, maybe Victor would fall through a floor in one of those old houses he was looking at. For Victor—

—whose only real skill or state of grace lay in his uncanny ability to open up the heads of other human beings, and repair whatever flaw he found therein—

—it was a distinct possibility.

Cheered, I started on the drainpipe, but here I encountered more difficulty, because, like so many people whose only previous contact with plumbing repairs involved complaining about the bill, Victor thought that if you tightened a connection securely enough, it would
not leak. But the key to successful plumbing repair isn’t force; it’s finesse, especially in an old house like mine, where the application of a hairsbreadth too much torque is often enough to pull the pipes right out of the walls.

Still, once I had taken the trap section out, cleaned it, and put on the appropriate amount of thread tape—two wraps all the way around, pulled tight so the threads bite into the Teflon—the whole thing went together again fairly easily. Which made me wonder why I hadn’t taken care of this problem earlier, so I could use the bucket for the leak under the bathroom sink.

Victor hadn’t yet taken an interest in that, possibly because the first thing you see when you open the cabinet under the bathroom sink is a collection of cleaning products, and of course he wouldn’t have gotten past any of those.

Giving the pipe nut a last gentle turn with the wrench, I got up feeling confident that the challenges vouchsafed to me so far were within my ability to handle.

So when I went down to the cellar to see what Victor had meant by his remark about the screw holes, I was feeling a sense of light, pleasing buoyancy, of having escaped a myriad of troublesome—and for Victor even possibly fatal—household disasters.

And then I actually saw the hardware on those shutters, and the problem was this:

Victor had taken the craftsmanlike approach: he had drilled new screw holes.

On the wrong sides of the shutters.

The hardware was on, all right: all one-hundred-and-ninety-two hinges and ninety-six latch-halves of it, solidly and securely.

And backwards.

37
Arriving home to find me in high dudgeon, Wade had bundled me and the Bisley into his pickup truck, and driven us out of town. Now we were standing behind Bud Abrams’ mobile home, on the neat half-acre at the end of a back road in the town of Pembroke.

“So,”
I said, “I backed all the screws out—thank God for the electric screwdriver—and filled up the screw holes with plastic wood. Tomorrow morning I can finally paint them.”

“Why not tonight?” Wade asked sensibly.

Bud had put a firing range into the terrain: steel backdrops with target butts in front of them, spaced out over the hillside behind his place. To each side, maples and spruces gave the range a private feeling and soaked up sound.

“Um,” I said. “Actually, I’m going to be busy tonight.”

I filled him in on the plan.

Wade listened bemusedly. “You don’t think Baxter Willoughby killed the Mumfords and Hallie Quinn, do you?”

“Well, no. It seems too hands-on for him. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would hire other people for the heavy work. There wasn’t any violence involved in his previous crimes.”

I checked the Bisley’s firing chambers, saw the six dummies there, and closed the magazine.

“But if I found out he was shipping contraband to New York, I could tip Bob Arnold to alert the state police, so they could go down there and catch him at it. And to save himself, he’d probably tell them who else was involved.”

Wade nodded. “What do you suppose he’d do, if he caught you two at it? Assuming you’re right and he’s behind it all, that is.”

“Probably something drastic,” I admitted, “if we’re right and if he caught us snooping around.”

But it was the only method I could think of to find out more about what was going on out there. I know enough law from talking to Hargood Biddeford to understand that, to get a search warrant, you need probable cause. And probable cause was precisely what Arnold and the state cops would never get—especially since they were still all focused on the legendary Ike Forepaugh—unless Ellie and I snuck in and got some.

Leveling the revolver, I squeezed my hand around the grip. The weapon fired with a loud, concussive report that scared nearby starlings out of the trees; even with my ear protectors on, it was the kind of noise that made my chest thud.

Fifty yards away, a bright splotch of ketchup spread over the head of the silhouette printed on the target sheet.

“Huh.” Wade scratched his head. “You adjusting?”

“Nope. Sighting normally. These dummies don’t drop as fast as I thought they would.”

“Right. I expected the trajectory to be a lot different. But hey, that’s what we’re out here for.”

By this he meant that a cartridge with powder in it is heavier than one that is loaded with ketchup and wax, so momentum ought to carry it farther before its flight line starts dropping. But in practice, fifty yards wasn’t enough distance for that sort of effect to show up.

Or so our experiment with these cartridges indicated. It was important, because we would be shooting dummy bullets at people—albeit ones covered in protective gear under their costumes—and we didn’t want to hurt them.

Wade took the Bisley, sighted it, and fired five more shots. Five splotches circled the silhouette head with a ketchup halo.

“Okay,” he said judiciously. “I’ll try some more before the day of the tableau, to make sure. But I think we can shoot them normally, at the distances we’ll be working with. Tell everybody, though, no hotdogging.”

No unscripted firing or getting in the way of the weapons for any reason, he meant. At greater distances, these slugs could drop suddenly out of their expected trajectory and there would be a lot of people around. We didn’t want any trauma.

Just to be sure, we ran through a half-dozen more cartridges, with the same result. Aiming the Bisley with the dummy cartridges in it would be the same as firing real ones.

With, of course, one important exception: the result.

“Let me just try something,” I said as Wade began clearing up to leave. Loading the revolver again, I waved him out of the line in front of the target area. “Come back here with me.”

I carried the Bisley onto Bud’s deck, where Bud’s wife Tillie had set out lawn chairs, a table, and citronella candles to ward off blackflies. Ordinarily, they would be here: Tillie offering glasses of lemonade and showing off her new square-dancing dress—at seventy, she had the fastest feet in four counties—and Bud giving Wade a few shooting pointers, because while Wade was a very good marksman, Bud Abrams was supernatural.

Today, though, the two old people had gone to Heaven, a town way up past Woodland, in Aroostook County, because Bud was also a sharp, lively, and enormously popular square-dance caller, and the state championship contests were being held there.

I got my sight picture from the deck, looking down the blue barrel of the Bisley. If the slug didn’t drop in the first fifty yards, what would it do in the second fifty? The silhouette-head wavered as I hesitated, then steadied in the middle sight picture.

Then I just raised my aim a fraction, heard the smack of the report, felt the weapon jump hard all the way up my arm.

A bright bloom of ketchup obliterated the target head.

Wade’s eyebrows raised appreciatively. “Nice. Hundred yards? So, how much correction?”

“I aimed above the target butt. Double the distance, that sucker drops. We need to tell people, be careful.” Somebody trying to knock off a stop sign or paint ketchup on a seagull could put someone’s eye out.

He nodded, frowning. “You know what? I think the only ones firing these guys are going to be you and me. Because it’s a great idea, but you know, it’s just too dangerous.”

I reloaded the Bisley with dummies while he finished clearing up the firing table. Then we put the box with the weapons and unfired cartridges into the bed of the truck. As usual, shooting had cleared a couple of days’ worth of irritation; Victor and all the repressed fury associated with him seemed, suddenly, ridiculous and irrelevant.

“You’re right,” I said as we drove back toward Eastport. “We don’t need to be putting guns into anyone’s hands. No sense taking that kind of risk.”

I stopped, hearing what I’d said. Meanwhile Wade drove easily, with his elbow out the window; not a care in the world.

And not commenting.

“You think it’s too dangerous, don’t you? Willoughby’s place, I mean. You think I’m out of my mind.”

He glanced sideways at me, grinning. “Yeah. That’s why I like you, though. You’re not a slave to your inhibitions. Well,” he amended, putting his hand on my knee, “one of the many reasons.”

I slid over next to him. “We could use a driver.”

“Think so? Somebody for backup and lookout?”

“Little insurance policy,” I wheedled, “couldn’t hurt. I could carry a cell phone. You could have another one. We got into trouble, it wouldn’t be too difficult to summon reinforcements.”

He squinted, thinking. “Tell me again why you’re doing this?”

“Because Arnold thinks Ike Forepaugh killed the Mumfords and Hallie. And maybe he did. But I’ll bet he didn’t come up with the idea himself.”

I paused, gathering my thoughts. “I think maybe Willoughby really has changed his spots. He didn’t used to like cash, but his situation has changed. A smuggling operation could replace a lot of the money he lost by going to jail, paying fines and losing his trading credentials.”

We took the curve onto Carlow Island. Two state patrol cars stood on the sandy berm, their cherry-beacons whirling, evidence that the search for Forepaugh had not yet been given up locally.

“And,” I went on, “if they catch Forepaugh first, he’ll say somebody put him up to it. But Willoughby will know, you see, that Forepaugh has been caught.”

“So if and when that happens, he’ll destroy any evidence he can. Including evidence of a smuggling operation. Which you think Tim and Ken and the girl all knew about, and maybe Willoughby had Forepaugh kill them so Forepaugh could take over the heavy work?”

“Right. Ike Forepaugh being a more experienced—and so from Willoughby’s point of view much more long-term useful—bad guy.”

Wade made a noise. That’s another thing about him: he can find the hole in your argument faster than a blackfly can find the hole in a citronella fog.

“Yeah,” I agreed without him having to say it. “That’s the shaky part. Ken was a drunk, Tim was an old blabbermouth, and Hallie was an eighteen-year-old girl, so one of them should have spilled the beans sooner. And how would Willoughby know anything about Ike Forepaugh, anyway?”

“That’s easy enough. Ken brags to Forepaugh, who bullies Ken into making the introduction. Then Forepaugh muscles in, with or without Willoughby’s
blessing. Unfortunately,” Wade finished, “for the Amateur Hour.”

We took Clark Street back into town, passing Charlie Bower’s row of quonset greenhouses, made of heavy, clear tarp stretched over arched support poles. A row of cars stretched out Charlie’s driveway, as women from town carried flats of pink geraniums, blue pansies, purple asters, and yellow zinnias back to the trunks of their vehicles; with Felicity Abbott-Jones due to arrive in a matter of days, there was a lot of camouflage still to accomplish.

“And maybe,” Wade said as we sailed down the hill toward the foot of Clark Street—

—ahead in the bay, huge whitecaps foamed atop the chaotic waves formed by the whirlpool, Old Sow—

—“maybe they just didn’t have the chance to let it slip to anyone what they were up to, before someone eliminated them.”

Downtown, flags snapped briskly over the heads of the milling tourists getting an early start on the holiday weekend. Children on bikes zoomed in and out of creeping traffic, and if the air did not yet smell of popcorn and cotton candy, the carnival atmosphere suggested that it should.

On Key Street, the cannon in front of Peavey Library was being given a final polish. “Know what Willoughby was raiding in New York before they caught him? Pension funds. People who worked all their lives for a decent retirement.”

Remembering it made me mad all over again. “Know where those folks are spending their golden years? Flipping burgers. Trying to earn enough money so that their own happy meals don’t have to come out of a cat food can.”

Wade pulled the truck over sharply. “Hey, isn’t that Sam?”

Over by the band shell, a dozen or so teenagers were shouting and carrying on like … well, like teenagers.
But Wade was already halfway across the lawn, and seeing his urgency, I followed. By the time I got there, the kids had formed a ragged circle around the main attraction: two boys beating the tar out of one another.

Rather, one doing all the beating and one getting beaten: the aggressor was Peter Mulligan. Sam’s arms were around Mulligan’s neck, hauling the boy backwards, but Mulligan’s own arms kept windmilling, punching the boy he knelt on. The victim’s face was already bloody and swollen, his hands making ineffective flailing motions as Mulligan punished him.

With Sam’s elbow still around Mulligan’s throat, Wade grabbed his legs and they lifted him while he cursed and tried to struggle away. Through the mess Mulligan had made of him, I recognized the victim: one of the boys from behind Leighton’s a few days earlier, the one who had passed the packet of something to the other kid.

“Buh-bastid,” he gasped, and spat a wad of blood.

“Get back,” I snapped at the kids, and they moved away, their faces expressing fear and shock. A punch or two among boys wasn’t a rare occurrence, but this went way beyond squabbling.

“Jesus,” one of the boys behind me said. “That Mulligan, he just went nuts on Corey Banks. Banks didn’t even say anything to him, Mulligan just started trying to kill him.”

Arnold’s squad car screamed up and drove across the lawn, bumping to a halt by the band shell. “What the hell,” he uttered as he got a look at Banks, and at Mulligan still struggling.

Sam’s boat gear and duffel bag lay in a heap where he’d flung it. “Pete,” Sam said, trying to get the squirming boy to look at him. “Hey, man, it’s over. Come on. Earth to Mulligan.”