Triple Witch (8 page)

Arnold sighed. “Anyway, Hallie’s a smart kid. Ask me, she’s smarter’n her parents. And like any kid will, she wants things, you know, some of ’em things that the parents never even thought of wanting.”

He shook his head worriedly. “But now she’s got
herself in a pickle, got herself into that heroin, I think, and what I hear, she can’t get herself off. Not,” he added, “that I believe she’s made much of a try at it. She hasn’t gotten to the hurting part, yet, I guess.”

Remembering the pale, twisted face peering at me from out of the scrub woods, out behind Ken Mumford’s trailer, I thought that possibly Arnold was wrong about the hurting part.

“I don’t know where they get it,” he declared, “but I mean to learn. And when I do—” He slammed a solid fist into his palm.

Monday pounced on a nugget of toffee and began chewing it, her jaws working with comic industry.

“A little pot,” Arnold added, “is one thing. But heroin will be the death of us. This town—”

He gestured at the granite curbstones, antique storefronts, and turn-of-the-century glass windows that comprised the village of Eastport’s brave little downtown commercial area—

“We aren’t ready for that kind of thing. Crime, overdoses—and once it’s here it doesn’t ever go away. I’m worried,” Arnold said seriously, “and I don’t know how to stop it.”

Nights in Eastport, you could walk stark naked down Water Street with the Hope Diamond in your hand and no one would molest you. Gossip about you, yes; and Arnold would arrest you, and your name would be in the paper. But nobody would hurt you.

So far.

Meanwhile, Arnold had gotten his wind up. “I tell you, Jacobia, you can take the nastiest guy in town—and till now, I’d of told you it was Ken Mumford—a guy, he thinks a six-pack is breakfast, he’s addicted to those dirty 900 numbers, and he’s light-fingered around a cash register, too, if you are foolish enough to let him get near one—”

He took a breath. “A real joker. But he won’t rob or murder you, and if you are in trouble, he will help you.
That’s the way it’s been, here. Until,” he finished unhappily, “lately.”

“Now, Arnold,” I said, “don’t get all bleak and miserable about it. We’re not gone to hell in a handbasket yet. The town’s been around for two hundred years, it’s hit bad patches, before. We will,” I tried to encourage him, “get through this.”

What I should have been telling him was to call out the Marines. But on a summer day in Eastport when the water and sky make you feel that things just cannot get better, it is hard to believe they are about to get worse.

A lot worse.

“Yeah, well,” Arnold said, “Hallie just turned eighteen, so I don’t have to take her home. I don’t want to. Her old man hits the bottle pretty good. Hits her, too, is the word in town.”

He squared his shoulders. “But I am,” he emphasized, “going to bring her in and bust her for possession if I can, and scare her so she tells me where that garbage is coming from.”

In the boat basin, the big white pleasure cruiser—her name, painted in swirly gold script on her bow, was
Triple Witch
—still floated, resembling a dream of luxury.

“So if you see her again,” Arnold told me, “you let me know. Don’t go adopting her like some stray cat, Jacobia, I mean it. I need her to help me or we’re going to have a problem around here.”

I promised Arnold I would tell him if I saw Hallie again, and we parted in front of Leighton’s Variety Store, which was doing a brisk business in hot coffee, doughnuts, and packs of cigarettes for the truck drivers and stevedores gathering by the warehouse.

After that, Monday and I continued out Water Street to the part of town called Dog Island, the white clapboard houses giving way to frame row houses, cottages, and the windswept fields overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay. Across the bay, Campobello sparkled under a
turquoise sky, with the swirls of the whirlpool, Old Sow, churning the aquamarine waters in the channel.

Returning through Hillside Cemetery, I let the dog romp among centuries-old tombstones inscribed with the names of early sea captains, a litany of their wives’ names, and the solemn stone faces of angels. We paused at the cast-iron planter that once was a horse trough, and at a mound of stones and earth, the remains of Fort Sullivan’s powder-house in the War of 1812.

But finally I couldn’t delay any longer. At home, the
Bangor Daily News
stuck out of the letterbox, and when I got inside the welcome fragrance of the coffee I’d brewed earlier greeted me.

“Man Found Dead on Downeast Beach,” announced the paper’s headline. I poured some more coffee and scanned the piece while I drank it, but it reported nothing that I didn’t already know.

Except one thing: the reporter had apparently tried calling me. I was mentioned by name as one of the two Eastport women who had found Ken’s body, and was described as not wanting to comment—“according to a family spokesperson.”

Just then Victor wandered into the kitchen, looking frowzy in a blue-striped bathrobe and slippers.

“Coffee,” he muttered, squinting through reddened eyes, and made a beeline for it.

I held the pot away from him, waving the newspaper. “Did you do this? Refuse comment on my behalf, without even telling me?”

Not that I particularly wanted to be interviewed. Keeping my own and my clients’ names quiet had been second nature to me for too long, in New York. But the idea of Victor making the decision for me made me want to pop him one.

Victor made a face that I am not even going to describe. “This family,” he intoned, “does not need that sort of attention.”

He grabbed for the coffeepot, missed, and reached
for the table to steady himself, then sank into a chair. “Head hurts,” he said froggily into his splayed hands.

I just stood there holding the scalding-hot coffeepot, gazing at my ex-husband. Then I put the pot down and got out of the house, for two reasons:

First, I really did need to find out about those shutters of Baxter Willoughby’s.

And second, if I stayed in Victor’s presence for even a moment longer, there was going to be another murder.

14
Wade had left his pickup parked in my driveway with the keys still dangling from the ignition, so I took that, figuring that if I did get the replacement shutters, I could haul them home.

What I didn’t figure on was the transmission, lurching and grinding unpleasantly, but once I was out of town and cruising on the causeway with the water sparkling on both sides, the trouble went away by itself; the truck apparently liked fourth gear, and motored along happily in it.

Approaching the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point, I slowed for the thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone, nodding at Joseph Lookabaugh stationed in his green squad car across from the tribe’s local community center. A few minutes later I was headed south on Route 1, with the gearbox grinding in protest again, though Wade hadn’t said anything about trouble with it. I put the clutch in and babied it, and eventually Tab A consented grudgingly to enter Slot B, and the engine regained power once more.

Keeping an eye on the oil pressure, the engine temperature, and the rearview mirror, in case any truck parts began falling off and clattering down the highway
behind me, I made my way between spruce trees and acres of purple lupine, the tall spikes moving in the breeze like waves.

Crossing the bridge over the river at Dennysville, I glanced down at the water tumbling and foaming over the rocks, feeling the bridge deck thrumming beneath the truck’s tires and experiencing a sensation of vast good luck. This was mine: I was not a tourist or houseguest. I lived here.

As if to prove this, Bill Martin’s panel truck went by in the opposite direction, the legend DOWN EAST ELECTRICAL CONTRACTING painted on the door. He flashed his headlights as he caught sight of Wade’s Toyota, and waved at me as he passed.

I smiled, humming along with the country tune playing on the truck radio. Maybe I was from away, not a downeast native, but people knew me. They even gossiped about me, a situation I did not regard as ideal until Ellie mentioned the alternative: not caring about me. But now that I understood, I was happy for them to know the amount of my bank balance, the color of my bedroom curtains, the date on which Wade first left his truck in my driveway overnight, and even the size, color, and preferred fabric of my underwear.

Which, believe me, everybody in Eastport does know, and I know the equivalent about them. Briefly, it occurred to me that in a town whose gossip network made the Internet look like two tin cans tied together with string, somebody knew something else, too: where Hallie Quinn was getting that heroin.

But then I had to start watching the route George Valentine had described to me, for getting to Baxter Willoughby’s house. I’d been out here before, but in November, and summer in downeast Maine is the equivalent of seeing in color after years of black-and-white; everything looks completely different.

Just past the gas station on the far side of the Dennysville bridge, I took a left onto a narrow, curving
macadam road leading between ancient maple trees. Next came an old brick schoolhouse with a wooden bell tower, a granite doorstep, and two front doors: one for boys, one for girls. Finally, I spotted the turnoff.

And blinked, startled at the change since I had seen it last. Where a dirt lane had rutted between cedar hedges, now a straight blacktop path ribboned up, the cedars lopped off and hauled off. I had a moment to mourn them before the next shock came.

The house on the hill had stood vacant for thirty years: gathering cobwebs, sheltering pigeons, and rotting away. Wade and I had come out here to look at the place, but it had turned out to be a sad wreck of its former self, too far gone for us to even think of rescuing it.

Now, though, above the vista created by the slaughter of all those cedars, the old house
gleamed:
new siding, new windows, and a new foundation. The chimneys were rebuilt, the front porch demolished and recreated, with white lattice under the deck. The gutters shone and the glass dazzled with expensive newness; from the wide front steps, a flagstone path led around to—

—yes: a glass-topped indoor swimming pool.

Which in Maine was the luxury equivalent of the Taj Mahal; just heating the thing would cost a fortune, and never mind trying to keep snow from collapsing the roof.

After all that, the fact that Willoughby’s place was also home to a small army of llamas came as something of an anticlimax.

15
Llamas are South American cousins of camels, smaller and without humps. Here in Maine, they are kept for their wool and as pack animals; sure-footed and with pleasanter dispositions than their larger African relatives, they carry tourists’ camping gear on guided expeditions, lending a cheerful, totally spurious air of “roughing it” to the tourists’ outdoor experience.

These llamas didn’t seem happy, though: their black-and-white or desert-tan coats looked a little ratty, and when I approached the rail fence that enclosed them (that, I gathered, was where all those cedar trees had gone), one of them spit at me.

Fortunately, he missed; llamas, apparently, didn’t have the distance on their spitballs that I’d heard camels could achieve. And the animals’ enclosure was furnished with a large trough of fresh-looking water, along with a tub generously filled with small brown pellets, like Monday’s dog food, that I figured was their chow.

Also, the acre enclosure held only a dozen of the creatures, and in one corner stood a barn that looked aggressively new and sturdy. So I thought they weren’t doing too badly, even if whoever kept them wasn’t pampering them with lots of affection. After all, not every animal can live like Monday, who likes to lie in bed at night and eat buttered toast while someone reads mystery novels to her; she particularly enjoys the cat characters.

“Hello.” In the rural silence I jumped at the voice. Turning, I confronted a tall, silver-haired fellow of fifty, resplendent in blue chambray shirt with pearl buttons, hundred-dollar jeans, and moosehide loafers. He stood smiling at me in the cautious, arm’s-length way that people do when they were not expecting you, don’t want you, and really would prefer that you beat it.

I had seen Willoughby’s lean, ratlike face in a hundred surveillance photographs. Now his blue eyes took
my measure as coldly as if he were adding up a column of quarterly profits and not much liking the result.

The question was, did he know me? The llamas looked on with interest. Oh, what the hell, I thought, here goes nothing.

“Jacobia Tiptree,” I introduced myself, sticking my hand out. “George Valentine said you had a bunch of old shutters you didn’t want, that maybe they were still out back in the Dumpster.”

Then I waited, but I didn’t see my name flip any switches. Up at the house, a man in a rumpled suit came onto the porch, peering curiously at us.

“Oh, right,” Willoughby said at last, seeming to relax a bit. “Those old things. Sure, you want to haul them away, you can have ’em. So, how do you like the place?” He waved an expansive arm.

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the glare of the vinyl siding, I could take in a few more details. The roof was made from the kind of shingles that are intended to look like cedar shakes, but don’t. The new shutters were genuine plastic. And the brick chimneys, I realized, were concrete block, false-fronted with brickface. Even the mailbox, intended to resemble wood when viewed from a suitable distance—say, a mile or so—was vintage Rubbermaid.

Still, he wasn’t cursing at me, which I took as a good sign. I glanced again at the llamas, to make sure they weren’t sporting little wind-up keys. “Um, it looks as if you’ve poured in a lot of resources,” I replied, trying to be tactful.

“Hey, that’s for sure,” Willoughby preened. “Goddamned money pit. Knocking out the old plaster, putting up new Sheetrock cost a fortune, and getting rid of the woodstoves—forget about it.”

He gazed proudly at his creation. “And the facilities—who the hell wants a clawfoot bathtub in this day and age? I mean this may be God’s country, but you need some modern comforts.”