Triple Witch (4 page)

While I was melting the wax in a double boiler my son Sam came in, fresh from trying out the sailboat he and his friend Tommy Daigle had just finished building out at Harpwell’s boatyard. At sixteen, Sam looked tan, fit, and older than any child of mine had a right to be, and I blinked for an instant, wondering where the awkward kid I’d produced had gone.

“Hey, nice ones,” he said, eyeing the cartridges. “They look real. Daigle says he wants to try ’em.”

“Right,” I replied, thinking of Sam’s friend, a smart, sweet-tempered kid who as a weapons handler has all the dexterity of a vaudeville pratfall comedian. “In his dreams, tell him.”

“Aw.” Sam grinned, rummaging through the cabinets, the bread box, and the refrigerator. Finally he slapped two hamburgers into a skillet and grabbed the ketchup bottle.

“Hey,” I told him, “don’t use up all of my fake blood.”

“Don’t worry.” He flipped the hamburger patties. “So, could you hit anything with ’em?”

He watched with interest as I slotted a new cartridge into a little plastic hammer, a tool especially designed for the purpose of taking cartridges apart. I smacked the hammer smartly on the table, then dumped the powder from inside the cartridge onto a sheet of newspaper.

“Don’t know,” I said. “I never got a chance to fire them.”

That, originally, was what Ellie and I had been doing,
down on the beach at Prince’s Cove: checking the targeting trajectory of a cartridge full of wax and ketchup, as opposed to one loaded the normal way, with nitrocellulose powder. The Eastport annual Fourth of July celebration was just ten days off, and in honor of a special guest the town was planning some unusual events.

“So who is this Felicia Abracadabra person, anyway?” Sam wanted to know through a mouthful of hamburger sandwich. With it, he was having a few pickled onions, some smoked Gouda cheese, and a half-bag of Oreo cookies, all washed down with a quart of milk. “And how come you’re going to shoot her with fake bullets?”

“Felicity Abbot-Jones,” I corrected him calmly, reminding myself that a teenaged boy, in order merely to maintain the basic functions of life, is required to consume enough calories to power a space shuttle liftoff, apparently on an hourly basis.

“And we’re not going to shoot her with the fake bullets. We are using them to re-enact a historical battle, down on the dock. She’s from Portland, and she is the founder and benefactor of the Maine Endowment to Stabilize and Save Early Structures.”

Sam worked out the acronym and guffawed, nearly losing a whole mouthful of milk and cookies.

“You can laugh now,” I told him, loading the final cartridge into the hammer, “but when Felicity visits here, it’s serious. She’s always sent a representative, before. But this year she’s coming herself, and if she thinks Eastport looks historically accurate enough, she’ll send a year’s worth of grant money.”

I popped the last cartridge open. “To promote tourism, and all kinds of other stuff that puts cash in town people’s pockets.”

Sam considered this. “You think she might fund a model boat show? I mean,” he went on, “old boats. Galleons and frigates and schooners and men-o’-war,
made out of real wood, with real sails and rigging, and real brass fittings, that really float?”

He swallowed his Oreos. “And on the inside, little maps on the chart tables. Little,” he enthused, “dragons on the edges of the maps, see, to show where the known world ends, and astrolabes. Working ones, so they can navigate, but scaled to size.”

He sat up straight, already raring to get started, and I looked wonderingly at him again: so tall and dark-haired, with my long eyelashes and his father’s stubborn jaw, wearing a navy T-shirt, denim cutoffs, and deck shoes. Sometime when I wasn’t watching, he went from choirboy soprano and reasonably attractive to baritone and startlingly handsome.

“So,” he persisted, with the movie-star grin that was going to be some poor girl’s downfall, someday, “what do you think?”

What I thought was that somehow, he had been switched at birth. No one in my family, or even in my ex-husband’s, has so much drive. Also, none of us are that good-looking.

“I think it’s a fine idea. Why don’t you work up a proposal, and maybe some sketches.”

His face fell.

“I will,” I said, “proofread. And make corrections, if any.”

Sam has always been able to design, build, or fix anything. When he was six, he repaired a weimaraner by fiddling around with its back leg, and changing its diet. What he can’t do is read or write very much, at least not without some elaborate strategies.

The specialists call his disorder refractory dyslexia, and think it fascinating; Sam calls it a pain in the tail and doesn’t. He’d spent the past six months getting therapy for it in New York, living with his father in Manhattan, but had seen little improvement.

But he had learned, apparently, not to care so much.
“Okay. I’ll do the genius stuff, give the scut work to you.”

“In trade for two nights of dinner dishes. Washed, dried,
and
put away.”

Sam groaned, laughing. “My mother, the drill sergeant. But you’ve got it,” he agreed, getting up and carrying his plate to the sink. “So did you test any of your bullets?”

He nodded toward the table, where I had assembled the Lyman hand press. It comes with metal dies custom-made for specific types and calibers of ammunition, so that after you’ve enlarged the primer pocket and filled it with your load of choice—in this case, layers of ketchup interspersed with layers of melted wax—you pull down the lever on the machine and
ka-chunk!:

Presto, a handy, dandy little nugget of Fake Death that will explode in what looks like a bloody gunshot wound.

Although, I must add, Fake Death is not to be fired at a person or animal at close range, and also not unless the target wears a bullet-proof vest and safety goggles. Even a dummy bullet can do damage.

“No. We found a body, instead.” I said it quietly, but of course there is really no minimizing a thing like that. “On the beach.”

Sam turned slowly from the open refrigerator, another quart of milk in his big left hand. I swear if that boy’s bones grow any more, he will have to take on a whole new set of specialists.

“Mom.” His eyes were mock-horrified. “Can’t you find another hobby?” Other than getting involved in murder, he meant.

“We weren’t out looking for it. It was just there. With,” I added, “a bullet wound in its forehead.”

“Dad’ll blow a gasket when he gets here and hears about it. Which,” he glanced at the clock, “will be in about two hours.”

At the mention of my ex-husband, I looked at the
pile of black powder growing on the sheet of newspaper. I could so easily confuse a real cartridge for a dummy, load the Bisley, and …

“Where I am concerned,” I told Sam, “your dad has already blown all the gaskets he has, some of them several times over.”

I pulled the lever on the Lyman press for a final
ka-chunk!
and one last projectile of Fake Death—we really didn’t know how many we were going to need, so I’d decided to make plenty—meanwhile thinking about dinner. Salmon, I thought, with sprigs of dill and little potatoes in butter, and new peas. Afterwards, we would have strawberry shortcake: buttermilk biscuits, tiny wild strawberries no bigger than the tip of your little finger, and real whipped cream.

“So I think that as far as dead bodies go, we will just keep our mouths shut. Your dad doesn’t need to know everything I do.” I loaded the Bisley with six of the dummies and closed the cylinder.

Whereupon my ex-husband cleared his throat, stepped into the kitchen from the back hallway where he had been standing for who knew how long, and smiled in the reliably infuriating way he had, like a cat whose breath smells of canary.

“Body?” he asked. “Did someone mention a body?”

Owing to his profession, of course he was not fooled by the fake blood on the newspaper. Being a brilliant, death-defying daredevil of the neurosurgical suite, he’s quick on the uptake.

“Hello, Jake,” he said to me, picking up one of the remaining dummy bullets and examining it with clinical interest, as if it were a tumor.

“You’re early,” I said.

Of course he was early; he was always either early or late.

“Keeping busy, I see,” he remarked.

The son of a bitch.

8
“Hey,” Wade Sorenson said, coming into the kitchen an hour after my ex-husband had arrived.

Laconic and even-tempered, Wade has pale grey, unflinching eyes and a face tanned and weathered by years of being out on the water. His hands, calloused from hauling the lines of countless boats and dinged by the scars of accidents over the years—a wayward propeller blade, a blazing carburetor, the unfriendly jaws of an injured harbor seal he was rescuing—are deft and clever, but I have also seen him reach barehanded into a dock brawl to break it up, with immediate results.

“Hey, yourself.” He put his arms around me and I leaned my head on his shoulder. My ex-husband—whose name, appropriately enough, is Victor—had taken his bags upstairs to settle into the guest room, and to speak with Sam. “He’s here.”

“Yeah, I saw the car. Being his usual charming self?” To punctuate this, Wade made piggy snorting noises into my neck.

I nodded. Those were the proper sound effects, all right. “He’s let me know that I’ll have to cook specially for him. Free-range chickens, whole grains, and organic bean juice.”

Without any warning, Victor had decided that ordinary foods upset his system. He felt his nourishment needed to be mild and pristine, and that I, naturally, should arrange this for him.

“Also his bed linens will need to be ironed every day, but without—and he was very definite on this—any starch. He says his skin …”

I was shaking; in under five minutes, Victor can bring me to the edge of a rage so furious, you could boil lobsters in it, but now a gasp of hilarity bubbled up and escaped me.

“…  his
skin
,” I managed, “has gotten
sensitive
.”

You would need to know more about my ex-husband,
whose skin would repel buckshot, to understand how funny this was to me.

Wade held me away from him, his eyes crinkled with amusement but examining me, too. “Sam okay?”

I nodded, getting my breath back. “Wonderful. Victor seems to treat him with some kind of respect. I think in another life Sam must have been a snake handler.”

Wade peered into the refrigerator and came out with a bottle of Sea Dog butternut ale.

“Yeah,” he agreed, sitting at the table, “probably. Don’t you get snakebit, though.” He was still eyeing me carefully.

“I’m fine,” I replied, looking noble while touching the back of my hand to my forehead in a tragic gesture.

“What about you?” I went on more seriously. “Are you really sure you’re okay about this? Victor staying here?”

He put his beer down. “Well, it’s hard to be jealous of a fellow when you know the woman in your life would like to knock that fellow’s block off. But I still can’t say I like the way he affects you. The way you always end up kowtowing to him, I mean.”

The trouble with Wade is, he is so right all the time. “I know,” he went on, warding off my protest, “it’s easier not to argue with him, and there’s Sam to think of. But there’s a limit to what I’ll watch you put up with, is all.”

“Yeah.” I felt myself nodding unhappily. The score so far between Victor and me was him a million, me darned near nothing, and it’s hard to step back into the ring with a record like that. But I might have to.

Wade drank some beer. “Anyway, it can’t be helped. With the holiday, the motels are full, and besides, if Victor gets comfortable, maybe he won’t make a fuss when Sam tells him he’s not going back to New York.”

Which was the plan; Victor just wasn’t in on it yet. He thought Sam was returning to the special school in
the fall. But Sam meant to stay here in Eastport, finish high school, then go on to the local boat-building school and an apprenticeship at Dan Harpwell’s boatyard. Dan had Sam figured to run the place for him eventually, a situation that Sam regarded as heaven-sent.

Me, too; it was just the sort of work Sam loved and could do really well. All we needed now was to inform Victor, which was why Sam had begged me to have Victor here. So I’d invited him, and to my surprise he’d accepted at once; I wasn’t sure why. Probably he had some nasty surprise up his sleeve, as usual.

“Let me know,” Wade said, “if he gives you any real trouble.”

“And then what? You’ll punch him in the nose?” I stirred a handful of fresh dillweed from Ellie’s kitchen garden into the buttermilk sauce I was making to go with the salmon; to hell, I’d decided, with bean juice, at least for tonight.

“No.” Wade’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll take him out on the water with me. Maybe stop off at the Waco Diner for a couple of drinks, after. Introduce him,” Wade added, “to some of the guys.”

At six foot four and two hundred and twenty pounds, with a chest as solid as the weight bag that prizefighters work out on, Wade is regarded as something of a shrimp by the guys at the Waco.

“You wouldn’t,” I breathed, enchanted by the idea.

Wade guides big cargo vessels into the harbor for a living, motoring to the vessel on a tugboat, then climbing up a gangway, which is a metal ladder hanging over the rolling sea.

“Wanna bet?” He ran a calloused hand over his wiry blond hair, grinning. Wade knows the rocks and the ledges, the channels and currents of Passamaquoddy Bay better than anyone, which is one of the many reasons why he is Eastport’s harbor pilot.

It is also why, if ever he took a notion to, Wade Sorenson could scare the bejesus out of my ex-husband, even without any of the guns that Wade is an expert at shooting and repairing.

“And,” he went on, adding to the fantasy, “the fellows at the Waco will explain to Victor that you are their favorite tax preparer, and they would hate to see you distressed, ’cause then maybe you couldn’t help them give the ‘guvmint’ the middle finger, anymore.”

It is true that I have become a boon to sole proprietorship in Eastport. Before I came, people thought tax deductions were to be plucked up delicately, like thorned roses, but I must say they have taken well to my own more adventurous attitude, which Wade says resembles the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.