Unhinged (20 page)

“I don’t have any pull,” I retorted, “with—”

“Don’t give me that,” Wyatt snapped. “I’m not stupid, I see how things work around here.”

He jerked his head to where Forrest was confiding something to Ellie. “You and her,” Wyatt sneered. “Nothing but a couple of busybodies, but people here listen to you. So I want you to
tell
that idiot . . .”

Apparently he thought bad temper would help get his message across. “Jake,” Ellie said urgently, coming up the gangway.

“. . . my article explaining why
all this area
ought to be set aside,” Wyatt declaimed angrily, waving his arms to include Water Street, the boat basin, and apparently the whole known world.

Or all of Maine, anyway. “It’s a precious environment, you people are ruining it with logging and lumber mills and scallop dragging and fish farms,” he fulminated. “It’s got to be stopped.”

Men getting out of their pickup trucks on the breakwater had turned to look at him. They carried toolboxes, boat parts, lunch bags, and plenty of warm clothing for the work which would go on all day and into the evening.

“Hey!” Wyatt yelled, but they only stared at him, eyes haggard. Men getting to the pier this late in the day always looked exhausted, but around here they were regarded as lucky: besides their boats, they also had work somewhere else.

“It belongs to everyone!” Wyatt yelled. Funny, you could have fooled the families who’d lived here for decades, getting along on salt fish and potatoes to stake their claim. Or the native tribes before that.

“It should all be a national park,” Wyatt shouted. He was on a roll now. “This whole town, it should be for the
people
. . .”

What did he think these guys on the dock were, hand puppets? But he was getting to that.

“It can’t all just be left to all you . . .”

Forrest Pryne mounted the gang behind Ellie, his pale hair sticking out from beneath a ragged watch cap he’d pulled on.

“. . . rednecks!” A pearl of spittle formed at the corner of Wyatt Evert’s angrily flapping lip.

Wordlessly Forrest grabbed Wyatt by the shoulders, marched him down the ramp and out the finger pier.

“Listen to me!”
Wyatt expostulated as they reached the end of it.

“Sure,” Forrest replied mildly, and pushed him off.

Wyatt Evert’s thin arms pinwheeled. Then came a splash, his shouts muffled by cheers from the men on the breakwater.

“Yikes,” Ellie said. “We’d better go get him, Jake. I don’t think Wyatt’s love of nature extends quite that far.”

No one’s did; in that icy water, he’d be lucky if his heart didn’t seize like an old engine, his blood turned to instant sludge.

But one of the men working on a lobster boat was ahead of us, tossing Wyatt an orange life ring. Shrieking and sputtering, Wyatt flailed for the boat hook the guy extended to him.

“Freakin’ idjut,” was Forrest’s comment as he came back up the gang. “Nature’s our daily bread too, not just his.” He pulled out another cigarette. Wyatt was now safely aboard the lobster boat.

“Guy shows up here,” Forrest said, “from the city where they
use
all the paper, build stuff with the wood, eat the fish. Spend more money in a month than most a’ those guys see in a year. But Wyatt looks at the way some guys are livin’ here, barely gettin’ along, doin’ their best. And you know what he thinks? I’ll tell you what he thinks. He thinks it ain’t
photo-genic
.” He gave the word a sardonic twist. “Some of ’em got their hearts in the right place, I know that. Want to save things, that’s fine. But not Wyatt. He’s just mad ’cause it ain’t all been set aside for
him
.”

And because, I was beginning to suspect, a reputation for being a hothead environmental savior fattened his pocketbook.

Forrest turned to us. “Anyway, so happens I
was
here, night b’fore Harriet went missing. Guy owns this boat called me, would I come down, check ’er over.”

He blew a plume of smoke. “And you c’n spy the window of her house from here, y’know,” he added reluctantly. “Not always, but back then you could.”

Actually I hadn’t known that. The pleasure of shoving Wyatt Evert off the finger pier had apparently loosened Forrest’s lips: good luck for us.

“And,” I guessed, “Harriet wasn’t the only one with binoculars?” It was the only answer that fit, especially given Forrest’s clear embarrassment about what he was telling us.

He looked shamefaced. “Yeah, there was a pair on the boat. Took a peek through ’em. Just that once. I don’t make no habit of it like she did.”

“And saw . . . ?”

“Wyatt,” he confirmed. “And Harriet. Fussin’ at each other. That’s all. Put them spyglasses away, haven’t touched ’em again. Don’t want to get no reputation like
she
had.”

“But it’s
not
all,” Ellie put in excitedly to me. “Her window! If Forrest could see it from here, then
she
could see . . .”

I got it: not now, with leaves on the trees, as Forrest said. But the sky wasn’t the only thing that had changed since Harriet vanished; back then, the branches had been bare. “So Harriet,” I theorized, “could’ve seen all the way downtown.”

“Yup. She’d ’a seen a lot, too. Roy McCall was stayin’ at the Motel East,” Forrest said. “Scoutin’ out the territory ’fore he moved up t’your place so’s his crew could have them rooms. Evert was there,” he added as if mentally ticking on his fingers, “with that little girl he runs with, one who looks like Peter Pan with makeup.”

Fran Hanson. “And so was that drowned fella,” Forrest went on. “Such an outdoorsman, he accidentally inhaled half the water in the Moosehorn Refuge. Happened the very next day after I saw Evert with Harriet. Come to think about it . . .”

He turned his mild, impassive gaze slowly on me. “I saw that old mason o’ your’n that evening, too. What’s his name, again? Somethin’ like mine, seems to me. Let’s see, now; forest, tree . . .”

“Uh-oh.” Ellie looked stricken. “Jake, I’m so sorry. That reminds me. Lian Ash is up at the house waiting for you. Not working. I was so excited about what Forrest’s been saying that I forgot to tell you.”

I’d dropped Wade off but hadn’t gone inside; George had been out on the porch and said Ellie wasn’t there.

That she was here. “Not working at
all
?”

“No. He told me he needed to talk with you, first.”

“Let me guess, he found buried treasure in the cellar foundation.”

After all, it
could
be good news, couldn’t it?

Wrong
.

I found Lian
Ash in my kitchen with some notes in his hand. The foundation work was definitely halted.

“This here,” he pointed at a diagram of my cellar, “is the section I thought I’d have to bring down.”

He pointed to another spot on it. “But the break you found under the ell, when I got the stones out I found a second section ready to fall in, all along here.”

Of course he had. That’s another thing about old houses: each part is inextricably connected to the next part, which itself is only slightly less ready to collapse than the part you were working on in the first place. In my house, you can start out by changing a lightbulb and end up replacing the plumbing.

“Show me,” I told Ash, and when he did I wanted to weep: half of the old mortar in the old foundation was turning to sand. You could crumble it out with your fingernail, years of water damage from a time when the house didn’t even have any gutters. “It’s a wonder the kitchen isn’t
in
the cellar already,” I moaned.

“Well,” Mr. Ash said. “It’s not as bad as that. Not,” he added optimistically, “the
whole
kitchen.”

We went back upstairs. “Thing is,” he continued, “I
was
going to replace the old stones, original to the house, just like the craftsmen first built it.”

All that time ago: hauling them. Setting them. Even without water damage, most mortar won’t last more than a couple of centuries.

“Now,” he broke the news gently, “this much reconstruction, it’d be cheaper to use concrete block. More materials, but less in labor. Your choice.”

“It’ll look,” Ellie remarked tartly from the hall where she was hand-sanding some remaining varnish off the floor, “like a little old lady with tin wheels where house slippers should be.”

Mr. Ash nodded. “Unless you put a foundation planting in front of it. Nice little row of bushes? Maybe box hedge?”

Box hedge is beautiful when it’s a hundred years old. Newly planted, it resembles a row of Chia Pets.

“Right,” I retorted, “and I’ll put up aluminum siding so the clapboards can rot faster, plastic shutters in place of wood, and hey, how about a satellite dish on a corner pillar? Make it look like I’m tracking flying objects for NORAD.”

I swallowed coffee grumpily. The choice was between new and hideously unauthentic concrete blocks, versus a zillion bucks for the original stones that had been there in the first place.

“I can work with you on the labor cost,” he said, “but it’ll still be more expensive. Practical choice is concrete block, but it all depends on how much you want to stay hooked to the past. For that you pay a price. For cost efficiency, you gotta let the old stuff go.”

He paused, then added the kicker. “Don’t try stayin’ betwixt an’ between, though,” he warned. “That won’t work.”

Exactly what I’d been innocently contemplating; original stones now, in the parts that were desperately crumbling. More work later on a gradual schedule, maybe? But Mr. Ash put paid to that thought.

“Halfway measures won’t take the weight,” he admonished. He sounded like Moses delivering the Eleventh Commandment.

Just once, I’d like to hear about a job that costs more to do wrong than right, I thought as he returned to the cellar.

“You want to maintain the house’s character, keep it looking hooked to its history. But doing it that way feels so extravagant,” Ellie summed up.

“Uh-huh.” I knelt beside her. The old wood coming out from under her sandpaper was white maple, grain tight as granite and as beautifully figured as the long-ago day when it was milled.

Ellie kept sanding; it was time for the machine sanding but she wanted to see more of the wood. Fragile-looking as a sprig of lavender, that woman had the stubborn stamina of your average pack mule.

“Maybe we should’ve only taken half this varnish off,” she said. “The top half.”

“Ellie, what in the
world
are you—oh.”

I knew what she meant: halfway measures didn’t work. She sat up and folded her arms. “Jake, how long have we known each other? Almost five years,” she answered herself, “so I know
you
.”

My fingers worried a scrap of sandpaper. Ellie never pried but she was awesomely effective at winkling the secrets out of a dour downeast native like Forrest Pryne.

Or out of me. “Dancing around the past, the damage that was done. It’s not your fault but you’re still stuck with it, aren’t you? And you don’t want to face it for fear of what it might cost. But it isn’t going to cost
less
later, is it? And sure, concrete block will work.”

Right. If you kept your eyes closed. “The question is,” she persisted, “what do you really want holding things up? Something you can’t stand to look at, or the right stuff? And if I know you, I know the answer,” she finished.

I got up. A patch of the old hardwood was nearly clean now. And it was beautiful. “Mr. Ash,” I called down the cellar steps.

His face, clean-shaven with his blue eyes shining alertly in it, appeared in the gloom.

“Don’t order any concrete block for the foundation, please,” I said. “I want you to rebuild it with the old, original stones.”

Ellie was smiling up at me. I said, “Because around here . . .”

I paused. How would I ever pay for the work? My old house wasn’t a money pit; it was a crevasse. “Around here,” I repeated firmly, “we hang on to all the past we can stand.”

Mr. Ash nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, looking pleased; more so when Sam appeared in the hall asking if he could help.

“You come on down here, young feller,” Mr. Ash said, “but no heavy lifting. Even your young bones don’t heal that quick.”

He waved at a crate. “Set yourself here,” he instructed Sam. “We’ll list you on the work roster as supervisor. That,” he added with a wink at me, “means all you exercise is your gift of gab.”

“They get along well,” Ellie observed as we cleared out the hall to ready it for the sanding machine.

“Mmm,” I replied distantly. I was thinking about Wyatt Evert, the drowned eco-tourist, Harry Markle, and Roy McCall all being in Eastport when Harriet Hollingsworth vanished. About Harriet seeing so much from her window, and about the newspaper page in her dead hand.

“Ellie, Harriet knew something. Or saw something.”

“Uh-huh. And she was
first
.”

“That, too. Almost the same time as Wyatt’s tourist.”

I was thinking about the fish I’d seen hiding in plain sight and about the look on Wyatt’s face as he’d sat in his van outside the Danvers’ house: angry, expectant.

All that, and the sound of his van speeding away, like the sound I’d heard years ago: of someone
going
when almost anyone’s impulse would’ve been
stay
. It was a pretty good bet Wyatt wasn’t going to explain it, especially after his recent saltwater swim.

But the more I thought about his rudeness, drunkenness, and general ill-temper, the misery it must be having to work for him, the more I thought somebody else might explain Wyatt Evert to me.

His assistant, Fran Hanson.

“Odd,” Ellie said
in surprise, putting down the phone a few minutes later. “I can’t find her.”

Fran wasn’t at any of the bed-and-breakfasts; she wasn’t in a cabin at Sunrise Camp Grounds, or at the Motel East. A pang of unease struck me. “You don’t suppose he makes her sleep in the van, do you?”

Ellie shook her head. “I doubt even she’d put up with that. I’m going downtown to ask around. Maybe I’ll get lucky and I can ask Wyatt himself.”