Unhinged (22 page)

“Yes. How did you know . . . oh.” Ellie looked over my shoulder, spotted the woman in question.

“Wade was there while I was talking to Bob Arnold,” she explained. “He heard Bob telling me Fran was at Wilma’s.”

So Wade had gone and gotten Wilma for us.

“I swear, Jake, if that husband of yours could follow a train of thought any better, he’d be a caboose.”

From the parlor Sam and Maggie sang together with the TV’s theme:
“They’re creepy and they’re kooky . . .”

How appropriate.
“. . . mysterious and ooky!”

That, too. “Wilma
despised
Harriet,” Ellie said. The TV’s volume went down as Wade and Wilma mounted the back porch. “Wilma thought Harriet had something to do with Wilma’s cat disappearing. Or so I heard.”

“Right.” I remembered, now; the story had gone around a couple of weeks before Harriet had vanished, herself.

“I hope it’s not Wilma Bounce behind all this trouble.” Ellie slid the cake pan into the oven. “I won’t be able to stand it if the whole thing boils down to a dead cat.”

Wilma came in, glanced around with a dismissive snort. The parrot smock seemed even brighter in close-up than it had been at a distance. “Huh. Can’t say the place looks any different. I heard you were
workin’
on it. Guess I heard wrong.”

Without the money I’d put into reinforcing that old floor, she’d have been in the cellar by now. But I bit my tongue and didn’t say so as she looked around for refreshments.

Silent, I poured her a cup of coffee and put some oatmeal cookies on a plate. Wade winked, then vanished up to his workshop.

“Aww, ’oosa widdle puddy tat, hm?” Wilma crooned, catching sight of Cat Dancing.

“Yowrowl,”
Cat replied sensibly, and fled.

“We’re so sorry about Munchkin,” Ellie told Wilma.

Munchkin being Wilma’s missing feline. Word around town was, Wilma screamed blue murder if a dog so much as looked at her yard, but felt her cats digging in others’ gardens was natural.

“We were,” I lied, “devastated.” Harriet, the story went, had kept a tin of rat poison on her window with the label facing out; thus her reputation for being a cat-killer.

But as I say, this was all just rumor; I hadn’t confirmed it myself, any more than I had witnessed any blood-pool on Harriet’s porch. And Wilma wasn’t commenting, reaching instead for another cookie. The smock was so bright I had to look away and when I did I kept seeing it anyway.

Wilma slurped coffee, clattered the cup down. Her thin brown hair was slicked back into a rubber band, the top of her head gleaming as if each strand had been pulled through a block of lard.

“Anyhow, your man said your boy might be lookin’ for work.” She chewed energetically. “Ast me to come up here, pass along a few tips. M’ niece is doin’ housework mornings over t’ the motel, an’ m’ nephew, he’s workin’ fer Terry Gibson, learnin’ electric. Both places’re hiring.”

I glanced at Ellie; this wasn’t just a train, it was a high-speed express. Wilma had just reported someone who could get into rooms at the motel, and someone else who could rig a wire, and both were from a family headed by the woman who in all of Eastport was the person widely reported to despise Harriet most: Wilma, herself.

“So,” I began very carefully when Wilma had devoured a few more cookies. Ellie’s face remained sphinxlike. “What do you think of the new guy in town, Harry Markle?”

It was too much to hope for. But when Wilma’s mouth popped smackingly open again, more than crumbs flew out. “Oh, I know
all
about
him
,” she bragged.

Wow
, Ellie’s eyes said, and I’m sure mine did, too. Wilma scanned the tablecloth, spotted a stray raisin, and consumed it. “
Knew
all about him, anyway. Bank had the house up for sale an’ he was goin’ to buy it,” she added. “Ex-cop. Got a fat pension after he messed his own nest down in the city.”

As the matriarch of an extended Bounce family, Wilma had a spy web so complex it should have belonged to the CIA. And it wasn’t only felines that Wilma let run wild in the streets of Eastport.

When one of Bob Arnold’s sparrows fell, one of Wilma’s kids had probably shot it; between her army of cats and her BB-gun-toting children, Wilma was responsible for more dead birds than the institution of Thanksgiving.

“Aunt o’ mine works up at the bank,” she went on, “they sent him a list of foreclosed properties before Markle ever got here. An’ she thought she’d seen his name before, in the newspapers. So she looked ’im up on the computer, and found out his whole story.”

And how,
her triumphant look added,
did I like that?
“Fran was over here for dinner the other night,” I said. A smooth segue would’ve been wasted on Wilma, or maybe missed altogether. “And I’d really like to talk with her again about . . .”

Criminy, what could I want to talk to Fran about? “. . . hair coloring,” I improvised hastily. “Hers is so attractive and I’ve been thinking about doing my own.”

A snort that might have been a smothered guffaw came from my pal Ellie, but Wilma didn’t notice. You’d have to hit Wilma over the head with an anvil before she would notice.

But:
Never base your plans on the other guy’s brains,
Jemmy Wechsler counseled suddenly in my head.
He don’t have to be smart to shoot you in the back
.

Wilma’s blank gaze was as empty-seeming as the eyeglasses in a Little Orphan Annie cartoon, but she had relatives with skills. And she was said to have a recent motive for harming Harriet, one that if true probably hadn’t felt far-fetched to her.

“Fran’s outta town,” she replied curtly. “Back tomorrow, mebbe. Come over then, ya might find her and ya might not.”

Stolidly, she applied herself to the task of chewing and swallowing, making no move to go.

“Well, thanks for stopping by,” I said, hinting. But the aroma of apple cake kept the wretched woman glued to the chair until I had the bright idea of calling Monday out to keep us company.

Noticing a person who disliked dogs, Monday plopped her head immediately into Wilma’s lap. Instantly Wilma heaved herself upright.

“Tell your boy about them jobs,” she said. “He’s old enough, quit wastin’ time with silly book-learnin’, do some real work.”

Like I said: a spy network. “That guy sure did,” she wheezed darkly on her way out, “want that old house.”

“But banks don’t need you to be dead before foreclosure on your property,” I told Ellie when Wilma Bounce had at last thumped down the porch steps. “Harry had no motive, no matter what Wilma seems to want to suggest.”

“So what if instead
she
killed Harriet, already knew about Harry’s past, and used him to cover her own tracks? Make it seem as if
he’s
the one people ought to focus on?”

“Niece steals the boots from the motel where she works and sabotages them, puts them back,” I theorized.

The oven timer ding!ed and I took the cake out of the oven: dark-gold and bubbling, a rich glaze of butter and sugar crusting its edges. I put it on a wire rack to cool.

“Later the electrical-apprentice nephew rigs the wire in the Danvers’ cellar, so it’s hot when it shouldn’t be.” Every tradesperson in town including the local electricians had gotten work out of Top Cat Productions.

“Of course, it’s not just motel rooms and booby traps. One of them would have to murder Harriet, and then hide her,” Ellie said. “And get hold of the newspaper page somehow, too. But otherwise . . .”

“A weird sense of humor is a built-in Bounce accessory,” I pointed out. “Remember when that girl-gang of Bounces found a drunk out cold on the fish pier, and stapled his clothes to the dock?” When the guy had woken up from his stupor and couldn’t move, he’d thought he was paralyzed from the rotgut he’d been swilling. “And there are enough Bounces to pull a prank every hour of the day. Tampered brakes, rigged shotgun reloader, odd notes and calls. Even spiders, I imagine, if they put their minds to it.”

“You can buy live spiders on the Internet. I checked.”

Trust Ellie to sweat the details. “You couldn’t find a clan likelier to do mayhem if you cloned the Addams Family,” I said.

“True.” Ellie was inspecting the cake. Then she opened the freezer and came out with the ice cream.

“See, this is what I meant about ignoring things that maybe we shouldn’t,” she told me a few minutes later when fresh coffee had finished brewing. “Not that we should rule anyone
else
out, at this point.”

I hadn’t; not even Roy. Not for sure. And we hadn’t talked to Wyatt Evert yet, either. Still:

“We’ve been assuming it’s some outsider who came here when Harry did.” Ellie poured coffee for us both. “Mostly because that’s what
he
thinks. But Wilma could’ve done it. Or at least planned and supervised it.”

“Are we going to tell Harry any of this?”

“What, that maybe he’s the one on the goose chase? That he should pay a little more attention to what actually happened, and a little less to how it might—or might not—be connected to him?”

Ellie ate some ice cream, then shook her head. “No. Let’s not tell him anything yet. It keeps Harry out of our hair to have him concentrating on other angles.”

“Big crimes for a little reason if it does turn out to be Wilma. But I guess it wouldn’t be the first time that happened, would it?” I said, scraping crumbs from my plate. That apple cake
rocked
.

“No,” Ellie said. “And it never seems like a little reason to the person who does the deed. That drowned tourist’s still a question mark, though, if it turns out his death
was
murder. And we
still
don’t understand the point of
hiding
Harriet’s body. If the point was to, well,
point
at Harry, why put the newspaper in her hand but then keep anyone from seeing it?”

“Maybe somehow Wilma knew it would be found?” I suggested.

Meanwhile: good old Wade. He’d overheard enough two and two to think that if Fran wasn’t available, Ellie and I might want to try making four out of Wilma. So he’d fetched her. Or . . . had he? A new thought began occurring to me.

“Maybe,” Ellie mused. “Or Wilma could’ve meant to make
sure
Harriet’s body was found, eventually. But Wilma’s not perfect, either,” she cautioned.

As a suspect, she meant. “It’s true she doesn’t seem like a person who could hatch a complex scheme or follow it through,” I agreed. But . . . “The thing is, she came over here so willingly.”

Ellie caught my drift at once. “As if that was just what she’d wanted to do, all along. Wade had a story ready for her but she might not’ve needed it, to get her here.”

Instead she could have fastened onto Wade like a barnacle when the opportunity arose: knowing via the ever-active Eastport grapevine that Ellie and I were poking around into Harriet’s death. Eager to keep the focus on Harry Markle while braying out her triumph in a sly way so no one could call her on it.

“A missing pet’s
not
much motive for murder,” I said. “And those Bounces are pretty bad, but I’ve never heard of one of them actually killing anybody. Not in cold blood.”

Still, if Wilma had murdered Harriet or had someone else do it, then drummed up enough violent confusion so her own interest in the matter would be obscured, then so far she—

—or somebody just like her, secretly smart and utterly ruthless—

—was getting away with it.

People weren’t quaint in 1823. Or at any rate they didn’t
seem quaint to themselves. They felt
fabulous,
darling:

The dogs of war had been shooed temporarily back into their kennels, Andrew Jackson was riding to the Presidency on the glory of having won the Battle of New Orleans, and Lewis and Clark had been back for some while with the news that if you thought New England was tasty, you should see what
they’d
found: California!

Which was why I felt no qualms at all about putting clear satin polyurethane finish on that hall floor instead of replacing the antique brown varnish with which it had been covered.

“You don’t think it’s a contradiction?” Ellie was eyeing the polyurethane cans doubtfully.

I shook my head firmly while readying the equipment for the next part of the floor job: her husband, George, plus an electric floor sander so heavy and powerful that if you didn’t keep it moving while it was running, it would grind all the way to China.

“Nope.” I’d had this argument with myself, and won it. “The poly’s what they’d’ve used if they had it. More durable, better-looking, and
modern
. People were mad for modern in 1823.”

“Especially,” George agreed, clamping fresh sandpaper into the sanding machine, “plumbing. This house would’ve had a hot tub with hydromassage if they could’ve rigged one.”

Which was probably true and a hot tub would’ve been fun. But George also wanted to replace all the plaster in the house with wallboard and the wavery-glassed old windows with thermopane, so I had to be careful about encouraging him on this topic.

Instead I sorted through my pile of tack cloths, wide sheets of cheesecloth impregnated with sticky stuff the consistency of softened beeswax, to make sure I had enough fresh ones. Because while George had the heavy work, which was sanding the floor—

—the sander outweighed me massively, which put my using it into the pulling-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps department—

—there remained the little matter of cleanup. I’d hung plastic sheets in the doorways and draped tarps, but the dust George raised would need elimination with tack cloth before I could apply the poly.

“Ready,” George announced, and we left him to it, closing the door behind us as the sander went on with a roar, sounding as if it were not just scouring the old floor, but devouring it.

“Whoa,” Sam said, looking up from his apple cake as the huge sound erupted. “What’s he doing in there, feeding the banisters through a wood chipper?”

Across from him sat Mr. Ash. Between them were yellow notebook pages scrawled with diagrams and mathematical equations. “Mr. Ash is helping with the theory problems for the seminar this weekend,” Sam explained.