Triple Witch (9 page)

I tried not to wince visibly, then realized that it wouldn’t matter. Willoughby was the kind of fellow who, once he thought he had you pegged, forgot about you for all practical purposes. Your function thereafter was merely to nod and make agreeing noises.

Which I did, while Willoughby poured on the charm of the born salesman and gave me a drastically sanitized version of his life history: business in Manhattan, big success, spiritual awakening. Now he meant to enjoy the stress-free life of a country gentleman.

He liked to talk; all good salesmen did, and in his heyday he’d been one of the best. But nowhere in his recital did there appear the little matter of his conviction for securities fraud, or the fact that his spiritual awakening had occurred—as so many do, nowadays—while he was locked up in the slammer.

The guy on the porch coughed loudly, as if reminding us that he was waiting. Willoughby grinned, showing gold dental work. “Houseguests,” he confided genially. “The plague of the country life.”

In a couple of weeks he was going to discover the real plague of country life, which was blackflies. But I just grinned back at him, relieved that he hadn’t tumbled to who I was.

“Well,” I said, “let me get out of your way. I’ll drive up around in back, load them in, and take off.”

The fellow on the porch went back inside, slamming the door.

“Great,” Baxter said, distracted. “Have a nice day.” Then he hurried away back to the house, his step a little too anxious for the true country gentleman, his chin thrust out determinedly.

To my experienced eye, he looked worried about money. But his money troubles, if any, weren’t my problem anymore. All I had to do was get those shutters.

This, however, turned out to be more work than I expected. I got the truck backed up around the house
all right. And I found the shutters in the Dumpster, where George had said they would be; as promised, there were forty-eight of them. But George hadn’t mentioned what else was in the Dumpster, on top of them:

Wallboard trimmings. Joint-compound buckets. Scrap lumber. Strips of sheet metal, chunks of concrete, splinters of hardwood flooring, and rusty nails, probably dripping with tetanus germs. And had I brought leather gloves, for hauling the shutters out?

I had not. Still, they were there, precious as buried gold. Meanwhile the sky overhead was a clear, perfect blue, with just enough breeze to be comfortable, while across the lawn a flock of robins hopped like an army of feathered groundskeepers, chirping and gorging themselves on the earthworms that were surfacing as a result of the inground lawn-watering system.

Hard work, a gorgeous environment, and a worthy cause: I kept at it for a couple of hours, and just as I hauled the last shutter out I spotted Willoughby and his guest getting into the silver Jag that Willoughby had apparently thought would make a good Maine vehicle. Perched atop the Dumpster’s metal side, I watched the Jag purr away down the drive.

Then they were gone, which of course did not force me to snoop. But bird-dogging a guy is a hard habit to break, so I just looked around a little bit.

The first thing I determined was that Willoughby’s Venetian blinds weren’t shut as tightly as he thought they were. From the inside, the rooms probably looked peek-proof.

But from the outside, they weren’t, if you stood close to the glass and shaded your eyes with your hands. And what I saw through the blinds confirmed my earlier feeling: Willoughby hadn’t changed his spots after his fraud conviction, only camouflaged the smile on the face of the tiger.

Most of the new first-floor windows looked into a standard variety of living spaces, decorated and furnished
to resemble an extremely luxurious Long Island tract home. The kitchen featured Jen-Aire appliances, Corian counters, kitchen island with dishwasher, brushed-steel double sinks, and a restaurant-sized Aga cookstove.

None of which I had any objection to; it was only that you couldn’t tell what the old house had been like. For all the charm he had left intact—the butler’s pantry was now filled with a bank of electronics: stereo, television, CD player and VCR—Willoughby might as well have bulldozed the place and started over.

The black insectile faces of the stereo components seemed to leer at me, and a radium-green flicker caught my eye as I backed from the window. As I did so, I stepped on a heap of brick scraps left over from patio construction, nearly falling into a rosebush.

Regaining my balance, I brushed my footprints out of the rose mulch, the flicker of green brilliance competing momentarily with the demands of the thorns. And then it hit me: what that radium-colored light was.

It was a real-time data connection, the computer display of what was happening on the financial markets, minute by minute and trade by trade. It was the ticker tape.

Fascinating: Real-time connections are expensive, and useful only for traders who need to know
now
exactly what their holdings are doing. Using them, traders play the market like a computer game, buying and selling stock, risking fortunes and besting competitors with the fervor of teenagers blowing up alien battleships.

Baxter Willoughby, after his securities fraud conviction, had been permanently barred from the business.

So what would he need a real-time connection for?

I moved to another window, squinted through the teensy crack between slats of the Venetian blinds.

And there, not ten feet away, were six phone lines, another computer terminal, a fax machine, a clock for every time zone in the world, plus coils of cable and
hard-wired phone connections that kept the real-time connection glowing.

They were the accoutrements of a high-end money junkie.

But nobody was guarding the store, which meant that whatever he was doing, he wasn’t doing it full-time. Which interested me, too:

The major players can barely eat or sleep, so attached are they to the numbers constantly pouring in. A quiver in Hong Kong or a burp in Berlin must be noted instantly, or a year’s worth of strategy might go down the drain without hope of recovery.

All this, to me, meant that Baxter Willoughby wasn’t back in the big leagues. But he was in something, and as I drove away with forty-eight battered sets of shutters in the pickup bed, I couldn’t repress a further twinge of inquisitiveness. For a whole year, I ate, drank, and slept Baxter Willoughby and his criminal doings, watching his every move the way those robins on his lawn spotted worms, targeting and impaling them.

On the road home, I dug the cell phone out of my bag and speed-dialed Hargood Biddeford’s Manhattan law firm, and left a voice mail message for him to call me when he was free.

Hargood, way down in Manhattan, was hopeless at finance. But like so many of my neighbors here in Eastport, he was a wizard of gossip. If something was going on in the money world, Hargood wouldn’t have a clue as to how—if at all—he should react. But Hargood would know about it, or be able to find out.

And Hargood, bless his heart, loved to tell.

16
“Writing,” Sam explained patiently to his father, who peered over the boy’s shoulder, “isn’t drawing. Writing has words.”

“But if you can do
that
,” Victor objected for what, by the look on Sam’s face, must have been the umpteenth time, “why—”

While I was out, Victor had managed to pull clothes on and drive to the health food store in Calais, and to pile the results of his trip all over the kitchen counters: bags of buckwheat flour, wheat germ, and pine nuts, bottles of blackstrap molasses and ginseng syrup, sacks of mushrooms and organic vegetables, containers of tofu and cartons of free-range eggs, each so expensive that it ought to have had a dozen rubies glued to it.

Standing by the sink, I filled a glass with cold water and drank it. I’d hauled the shutters from the truck and stacked them outside the storeroom door. Paint chips and wood dust were glued to my body with sweat, my hair felt thick and stiffened with dirt, and my mouth tasted like someone had been stripping old varnish with it, using my tongue as a scrubber.

“What time,” Victor inquired, “is lunch?”

“Looks like you’ve got lots of choices,” I told him sweetly, waving at his purchases, and turned from his look of affronted surprise.

Owing to his father’s dive into a jelly glass, Sam hadn’t yet had the chance to reveal his boat school aspirations. Now, peeking at Sam’s work, I saw he was drawing an eighteenth-century square-rigger, complete with sails from flying jib through topgallant all the way down to spanker, which is the triangular one hanging out behind.

Or aft, as the seagoing types insist on saying. I was about to point out to Victor how beautifully Sam was drawing it, and how, just possibly, his talents in this area might be put to use.

But just then the phone rang: Hargood, returning my call. And before I could tell him what I wanted to
know, he began describing urgently some fabulous investment tips he had just found posted on, of all godawful places, the Internet.

Hargood read some of the tips aloud. As I’d expected, they included some colossal howlers, such as the idea that following your natural human instincts is a good way to make money in the stock market.

Now hear this: Making money in the market takes research, planning, discipline, and a ridiculous amount of patience, none of which were natural human instincts the last time I looked.

“So this guy,” I said, “who is posting these tips: you’ve got to figure he’s making money, himself. But he does not spend his time marlin fishing in Florida, or buying sports teams.”

I moved in for the kill. “No, what he does is sit in front of a computer, typing up free advice and sending it out to people he does not know.”

Hargood coughed uncomfortably.

“Because,” I continued, “he’s such a sport. Or possibly it is because he’s not really an investing expert. Maybe it’s just because he has nothing else to do.”

Hargood sighed. “You know,” he admitted, “you’ve got a point. So,” he shifted gears speedily, “what was it you wanted to know?”

You’ve got to love a guy who will drop an untenable position like that. Hargood might not see it all for himself, but he does if you show him. And in court, he is another person entirely, an
idiot savant
of legal beagles.

“What Baxter Willoughby’s been up to, lately,” I replied. “He seems to have moved up here to Maine, and I’m curious, is all.”

“Oh.”

When Hargood gets all one-syllabic that way, each word of his is like a pebble dropped into a pool: you can practically feel the ripples moving as his brain processes possible implications. Like I said: he’s a
savant
, just not about money.

“Why don’t I drop around to my club,” he said casually at last. “I haven’t been for a while, might be good to look up old chums, and I must admit our friend Baxter has rather dropped off my radar screen, lately, one way and another.”

I understood: After Willoughby got sent to prison for fraud, nobody from his old social haunts would touch him with tongs. And Hargood was social with a vengeance.

“Don’t go to a lot of trouble,” I told him. Nowadays, just mentioning Willoughby could get you dropped from some important guest lists. “I really am only curious.”

“Right,” Hargood drawled in reply, and I could almost see his nose twitching, sniffing out the reasons behind my request and the facts he might dig up to satisfy it, rich little nuggets of gossip that, to Hargood, were as delicious as truffles.

And nearly as much fun to root out, if like Hargood you were jealous of people who pulled things off, wanting to know every detail of how they did the deals that he, however talented he was at his own occupation, would never have the knack for.

But he could watch, and learn all the teams and their angles, the players and strategies, like the truly committed armchair fan he was. After a bit more chat he hung up sounding cheerful, and I went out onto the front porch to examine the new railings I had recently bought and installed onto the porch steps.

Against all odds, the wood screws I’d used to install the rail mounts seemed to be holding firm in the elderly, two-inch-thick porch planks. I’d have replaced the planks, which were developing some areas of rot, but for what it costs to replace custom-milled two-inch planks nowadays, I could have torn the porch down and rebuilt it out of the Elgin Marbles. And fixing up an old house simply by pouring money into it takes the fun out.

I seized the porch rail, noting with satisfaction that the rail mounts didn’t move, and congratulating myself on painting them before installing them instead of afterwards.

You can spray-paint them while they are in place, of course. But if you do, the paint rises up in a cloud and adheres to all nearby windows, providing you with another, much less satisfying project: getting the paint off.

Pleased, I went back to the kitchen to see what I could cook using Victor’s purchases that would not poison or gag us—

—by this time, I was getting hungry, too, and if I waited for him I would never get any lunch—

—and eventually I came up with an omelette that wasn’t half bad.

Outside, blue forget-me-nots peeped from the shady edges of the yard. The garden sported masses of lemon lilies, the tall, flaglike spikes of delphinium, and purple coneflowers, all punctuated by the crisp, white faces of the Shasta daisies Ellie and I had planted the previous autumn.

“Why,” Victor queried peevishly, finishing his omelette, “do you cling to this backwater? There isn’t a decent bookstore for miles, or a live theater.”

Victor’s attendance at live theater, to my knowledge, is limited to the kind that involves the snapping of Spandex and the twirling of gold tassels.

“Bay Books will order you anything you’d like,” I told him, picking up my lunch plate to rinse it but leaving his alone.

“Hmmph,” Victor responded predictably, while the poppies waved in a breeze that smelled like expensive perfume. “I’m telling you, Jacobia, modern life is passing you by.”

Biting my lip, I looked out the window and counted to ten very slowly, praying for strength. Just because I wasn’t going to be a plaster saint anymore didn’t mean I had to abandon the image for that of a shrieking
maniac: Also, I did not want to waste ammunition on a subject like this; it was Sam’s arrangements that Victor might try to put a monkey wrench into, not my own.