Unhinged (11 page)

Relief ambushed me; I sank into one of the chairs lining the corridor outside the surgical area.

Nurses stared. “Jake,” Victor grated. “You’re making a scene.”

Inside my ex somewhere I suppose there’s some vestige of human beingness. But it’s so well defended you practically have to hold a gun to his head to get a glimpse of it. Or if you have a tumor as big as a rutabaga, he’ll be kind to you.

Otherwise he won’t. “Wade’s in recovery. He’ll wake up soon. He had a close call but he’s okay. And Sam’s fine,” he added thinly, letting me know how derelict it was of me not to have asked. Then he stalked away.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ellie comforted me when he was gone. “It’s just his way of blowing off steam.”

Right. But even after years of being divorced he still only blew it off at me, partly I guessed because mine were the buttons he knew how to push. Ellie sat beside me, handed me a tissue.

“Watch out for the contact lenses,” she said automatically.

“Thanks. Did you get to talk to Harry?”

On an end table the day’s issue of the Bangor paper lay open to the Downeast section. A photo of Sam’s demolished car featured prominently.

“No,” Ellie said. “Harry went in the ambulance with Samantha straight to Bangor. From there, they’re airlifting her down to Portland. We can talk to Harry later.”

“Okay.” I blew my nose hard. “Ellie. I’m not crazy, right? This really
isn’t
just a string of . . .”

“Coincidences?” she finished for me. “I don’t think so.”

The hall smelled of new paint, not quite covering the odors of fear and pain that no amount of disinfectant could ever eradicate. Victor dealt well with fear and pain as long as they belonged to other people, and as long as they were generated by a discernable physical cause that he could do something about.

It was the emotional stuff he had such trouble with. For approximately the millionth time, I put Victor away in the mental compartment I reserve for his psychopathology.

“This,” Ellie said, “goes beyond coincidence. And we should start assuming Sam’s car
was
tampered with, too.”

A nurse appeared. “You can see him now.”

In the recovery room Wade raised a hand weakly, let it fall. “How’re you doing?” he asked me.

Tears spilled through my lashes although I tried not to let them; partly for his sake, partly on account of the darn lenses.

“No crying in baseball,” he admonished me mock severely. He was half-drunk with anesthetic; a burn reddened his jaw.

The bad part, though, was the bandage on his neck. Clearly, something had just missed some very important anatomy. And Ellie was right: this all went way beyond coincidence.

“Wade, what happened?”

The good humor left his eyes, which were blessedly unharmed. “Shell. I brought the lever down—”

To compress the powder inside one of the shotgun shells he’d been reloading.
“Ka-boom,”
he finished simply.

The nurse came back in, suggested it was time for us to let him rest. “Wait. What’s going on?” Wade demanded.

He’d seen our expressions even through a haze of painkiller: Ellie’s especially, her gaze so penetrating they could have substituted it for one of the X-ray machines.

But now he was nodding, sandbagged by the drugs they’d given him. “Whoever did it,” he muttered blurrily. “Rigged a reloading press. Righ’ un’er my nose.”

So he thought so, too: that this was no accident. His eyes drifted shut. “Guy’s a real cowboy,” he murmured.

Then he was asleep. Ellie led me back out to the corridor. “A cowboy,” she repeated, her green eyes glinting. “Cowboys are daring, determined, imaginative—”

These were not qualities I wanted to find in my opponents. But Ellie seemed to relish the notion.

“Whoever this cowboy is,” she declared . . .
Whoevah
.

“. . . he just messed with the wrong Indians.”

We spent part
of the afternoon in the hospital with Sam and Maggie, who at her insistence were improving his time with the crossword puzzle from the
Quoddy Tides
. As the day waned we checked a sleeping Wade once more before going home, leaving George again in charge of guard duty; later, after feeding the animals and walking Monday, we confronted Harry Markle at his house.

Or we tried. But Harry had other ideas. He was packing, throwing clothes into a duffel bag and toiletries into a kit. “I’ll have to give the dog back, Jake. I don’t know where I’m going. You should take her tonight.”

Her stubby tail twitching uncertainly, Prill looked back and forth between me and Harry. She’d stationed herself between us as soon as I entered, as if protecting him.

“Harry, you can’t leave. What about Samantha? Don’t you want to be here when she gets out of the hospital?”

“Samantha’s not coming back. It’s touch-and-go, they had to resuscitate her on the trip, and they aren’t sure she’ll make it. If she does, they doubt she’ll dance again.”

He tugged on his leather jacket. “That’s what she gets for hanging around me. That’s what everyone gets. Wade, Sam . . . I’m leaving now, before anyone else gets hurt.”

He zipped the jacket. “Samantha was targeted because she was my friend. No other reason. I’m not going to stick around here so I can watch someone get killed.”

He’d hauled out Harriet’s old newspapers, stacking the bundles in the yard to await pickup. The chicken bones were gone, too. But there the effort ended, and now it seemed his nerves were getting to him, to judge by the cup lying on its side atop his formerly pristine table, coffee staining the book he’d been reading:
Practical Homicide Investigation
by Vernon J. Geberth.

A classic: Harry saw me looking at it, gave a bitter laugh. “Too bad old Vernon J. isn’t here, give me some pointers. Because I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know.”

“Harry,” Ellie protested. “You can’t just run.”

I wasn’t so sure. If he did go, trouble would go with him. But then my better angel kicked in. After all, Harry had pulled me out of some pretty bad wreckage, once.

“I don’t deserve this,” Harry said bitterly with a wave at the window. “This . . . peace.”

Outside, the pointed firs were purple cutouts on the orange sunset. The first stars poked through the deepening azure sky in the east. But dark streamers from the south pushed threateningly toward us; by tomorrow, we’d have thunderheads.

“People here don’t deserve my problems,” Harry added.

“But,” I said, still struggling with myself, “they’d want to help you, not send you away.”

You don’t dump people when they’re in trouble, said the good angel. You just don’t. “If they knew what happened to you, and what you did about it,” I persisted.

That he hadn’t got his man by shooting an innocent woman, I meant. If he had, he’d have ended up a hero instead of a scapegoat. It wasn’t the story that had been printed in all the newspapers, probably even in some of the ones Harriet had read, that he’d stacked outside. But it was, I thought, the real story.

“They won’t care that I didn’t shoot her,” he insisted. “No one here’s going to feel a bond, no one’ll identify with a sick, crack-smoking hooker.”

I didn’t contradict him; he hadn’t been here long enough to know otherwise. Beautiful, remote downeast Maine did seem immune to city woes. But it had pockets of poverty, deep and ineradicable as bone infections, and all the agony that went with them. The kid, for example, that I’d read about in the
Examiner:
he’d been muling Oxycontin, a painkiller with more abuse potential than heroin.

“Maybe not,” I temporized. “But people here do know about having trouble, and having nowhere to turn except to friends.”

And, I reminded myself firmly, so did I. “But Harry, we need to know more about why you’re so sure someone’s . . .”

“I just know,” he declared. “I know, and now you do, too. Or
do
you believe Wade screwed up with the shotgun-shell reloader?”

I’d already told him I didn’t. “Excuse me,” a voice cut in. It was Bob Arnold, looking severe as he walked in unannounced. “Harry, I’m very sorry. I just got word. Your friend didn’t make it. She passed away a little while ago.”

A silence, lengthening sadly. I broke it. “Harry,” I said impulsively, “come to our house. You shouldn’t be alone.”

He turned away, the black squares of windowpanes reflecting his stony face. “If I do stay, and we catch this guy,” he began, and I saw Bob Arnold open his mouth to put the kibosh on that idea.

But Harry saw it, too, catching sight of Bob’s reflection in the glass. “Yeah,” he gave in too quickly. “I’m not on the job, I should let the cops take care of cop business.”

He faced Bob, stuck his hand out. “Thanks for coming to tell me. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

Bob didn’t swallow it, of course. But he couldn’t very well order Harry not to interfere when Harry had just told him he wouldn’t. He did have one other thing to say, though:

“You’ll hear it later, you might as well hear it now.”

The dog stepped between me and Harry. “It’s okay, Prill,” I murmured to her, although of course it wasn’t.

“In the Danvers’ house,” Bob began. “Somebody rigged that hot wire so it looked like the dummy one. Strung it into that length of filament so it fell right on cue. Trouble was, it was run up through a little hole somebody drilled in the floor and covered with carpet. Plugged into the household current.”

So the circuit breakers for the basement had been off, but not the whole house. The power had still been on upstairs. “Somebody had to get in, in advance,” I said. “Substitute the hot wire for the dummy, get everything all ready so plugging it in would be the only thing left to do.”

In the confusion in and around the Danvers’ house just before the filming began, that would’ve been fairly easy without the culprit being noticed. Everyone there had been focused on a task, not worrying about what someone else was doing.

Ellie and I, for instance, had walked right in. “And that’s not all.” Bob spoke very slowly, which meant he was furious; the madder he was, the slower he got.

Slower and more thorough. “After everyone else was gone, that cellar wall collapsed, all the water leaked in there, soaked that new mortar through, it let go. Any ideas about what we found behind the wall?”

I took a wild, awful guess. “Harriet Hollingsworth.”

“Yup. Her and a couple bags of lime. And in her hand . . .”

He held up a plastic bag. Inside, the torn-off front page of an old
New York Post
with a blaring headline:
TOP COP FLOPS
!

“Oh, Christ,” Harry muttered. Two photos: one a long shot of a city rooftop, black arrows where the action occurred. The other was a mug shot of a scowling, disreputable-looking woman with a nose ring, tattoos, and a missing tooth: Harry’s murdered hostage.

“So if you
were
thinking of leaving,” Bob said, “put it off. I’m going to want to talk with you. State cops, too.”

I turned away for only an instant; when I turned back, Bob was on his way out the door and the cup lying atop Harry’s book wasn’t there anymore. Which told me that Bob was planning to run Harry’s fingerprints. Like I said: thorough. But Harry didn’t seem to notice the cup was gone.

“Any thoughts?” Ellie asked him when Bob had departed. “’Cause if you are going to stay around, now’d be a good time to share.”

“Someone’s got a line on me,” he answered bleakly. “Knows what I’m doing almost before I decide to do it.”

I could think of another explanation. Harry seemed to see it in my face, and faced me frankly.

“The bank owned the house, not Harriet. They’d already had the redemption period.”

Before the foreclosure auction, he meant. Once that period had been advertised in the papers and was ended you couldn’t just make your back payments and get your house back. That ball game was over.

“They weren’t going to let her stay in it again. Alive or not, she couldn’t have stopped me from buying it. And even if that weren’t so, why would I kill an old woman for a house, then hide a body with the equivalent of a big red arrow pointing straight at me?”

Good questions. “You met her, though? Harriet, before she vanished?”

He shook his head. “Few minutes, out on the porch. Next time I came back, a day later, she was gone.” He wasn’t sure when that had been, but: “It was when the tourist drowned.” From Wyatt Evert’s group, he meant. “Down at the diner everyone was talking about it, and it was in the
Tides
. Roy McCall was here then, too, scouting the location. I met him, and Wyatt Evert as well.”

He took a step. Prill got up protectively. “So what if I do stay, try to corner this guy myself?” Harry asked.

My turn to object. But: “Not get in Bob Arnold’s way,” Harry hastened to add, “just keep my own eyes peeled. And maybe you two could, too? I know this creep’s thinking pattern. I ate, breathed, and slept it.”

Yeah, maybe too much. Harry looked from one to the other of us. “And you both know what’s normal here, you’d spot anything out of the ordinary.”

“Or
someone
out of the ordinary,” Ellie agreed.

“Now, wait just a minute—” I began.

Harry didn’t know our reputations. Only local people did. We didn’t advertise that we were known around town as the Snoop Sisters; like the Shingle Belles, but with longer noses. Or that Ellie and I had spotted some things so emphatically not-normal they’d have curled even Harry’s close-clipped grey hair.

All he wanted was two harmless Eastport busybodies to be his eyes and ears, ones with a growing personal stake in helping him finish an unfinished mission: catching the bad guy. Turning the tables, righting an old wrong.

“But if I catch him,” Harry added, “whoever it is, he’s mine. Not Bob’s or the state cops’. I get an hour with him. That’s all I need. Agreed?”

I opened my mouth again but Ellie spoke first: “Agreed.”

It all sounded pretty crackpot; in particular I was doubtful about the idea of keeping secrets from Bob Arnold: the wisdom, or the possibility.

But Harry had saved me out of some bad wreckage, years ago. The least I could do was try returning a favor, especially since this particular wreckage wasn’t even flaming.