Wicked Fix (14 page)

salt spray. A breeze had come up suddenly, the

weather feeling changeable and the clouds still hanging

on the western horizon; they had been there for

days.

Paddy spoke regretfully, but not about Terence,

and at the private, fiercely protective look in his eyes I

decided not to ask. Instead, he talked about the past.

"I've often wondered why we let it go on," he

mused. "All of us guys who went around together back

then. We knew, but somehow we didn't believe. How

bad Reuben could be. How evil."

I felt that he was trying to direct me away from the

topic of his most recent meeting with Tate. For now, I

let him.

"Did Wade know? Or George Valentine? Were

they also in the group that hung around together?"

Paddy nodded, his eyes fixed on the bright points

of light that were Eastport, gleaming in the dusk.

"Yes. But Reuben wouldn't bother them, Wade especially,

and George, I think, because he was Wade's

friend. Something happened between those two, Wade

and Reuben. I'm not sure what."

He turned suddenly to me. "It wasn't the first time,

you know. That necktie thing. It was Reuben's doing,

I'm sure of it. He'd done it that way before. Or anyway,"

he added, "everyone in town said he did. It

wasn't," he gave the words a bitter twist, "anything

that could be proved."

Of course not. This was Reuben Tate we were talking

about. From the sound of it, he could have gotten

away with kidnaping the Lindbergh baby.

It was nearly full dark but in the deck lamps of the

ferry Paddy's eyes shone unhappily. "What bothers

me," he said, "is why we tolerated him, even after we

knew the things he'd done. It was as if ..." He broke

off, sounding mystified.

"That's the trouble with evil," Terence said suddenly

from behind us. His voice was tired but it had

regained the amused, faintly ironic tone it usually carried;

at the sound of it I saw Paddy's shoulders sag with

relief.

"The banality of evil," Terence said. "After a

while, it comes to seem so ... normal. You get used

to it. Like," he finished mildly with a glance at Paddy,

"almost everything."

Paddy flinched; something, I thought again, going

on between them. The ferry nosed in toward the dock.

Once ashore Paddy offered to drive me home, but I

refused in favor of the privacy of my thoughts, riding

along only as far as the design studio. Terence didn't

speak again at all, except to say goodbye with his usual

politeness. But by then he didn't have to say any more,

or Paddy either:

They'd told me--not meaning to, but it was in

their faces and voices--that more had gone on between

Paddy and Reuben than Reuben's threat and Paddy's

rejection of it.

The mood between them remained uncomfortable

too, despite Paddy's newfound solicitude; whatever

was happening to them in their personal lives, it wasn't

a pleasant development.

And something else: Terence had articulated an intuition

I hadn't known I had.

A message: if I could find out what it meant and

whom it was intended for--

--or so Terence seemed to believe, and at the moment

I was taking his opinion seriously; he had fought

through a lot of pain in order to finish telling it to me--

--I might have a line that led to the killer, or at any

rate to enough reasonable doubt to begin taking the

heat off Victor.

It was Terence's idea about the message having

more parts, though, that bothered me the most. There

had, after all, been two murders: one with a tie, the

other with Victor's antique scalpel.

Maybe Reuben had done the first one, as Paddy

thought.

But maybe not. Maybe Paddy was lying, or simply

wrong, and someone else had committed both crimes.

And if they were linked, and intended to mean

something, if they'd been done to communicate something,

somehow ...

Then it seemed to me that a clear, unambiguous

translation was needed.

Soon.

Before the next bloody syllable got transmitted.

It was past dinnertime, and I was thinking

tiredly of just ordering pizza. But by the time

I got home, Ellie had taken over my kitchen

and prepared a feast of local delicacies: bay

scallops en casserole with buttered bread crumbs, fresh

tomatoes drizzled in basil vinaigrette, tiny potatoes

steamed in their crisp, dark-red jackets, and blueberry

cobbler.

"Oh, thank you," I said, taking in the air of calm,

domestic competence that had descended on my household

like a blessing, as she handed me a glass of wine.

"How did you know I would be ..."

So late, I was about to say, but of course she had

known; no doubt somebody downtown had seen me

boarding the ferry. The wine was very cold, scouring

away the bad taste the afternoon had left in my mouth.

And fresh whipped cream, I noted happily, had been

made for the cobbler. All I had to do was sit down at

the table and eat it, which is the part of Maine cuisine I

am best at.

"I don't understand half what I saw and heard today,"

I said when we were all gathered in the dining

room. Ellie had lit candles, and the tin ceilings, pressed

with the pattern of acorns and oak leaves, glowed

warmly with the flickering light. "But I'm sure Paddy

Farrell wasn't being straight with me."

I didn't mention Terence's illness or that his

relationship with Paddy seemed to have hit a snag; it didn't

seem pertinent.

"Paddy said Reuben wanted him to help blackmail

Victor," I went on, "but that doesn't strike me as particularly

likely. Why would Reuben think Paddy would

help him with anything?"

"You've got that right. He hated Tate like poison.

But Paddy Farrell," George Valentine said, applying

himself to his meal, "can be cagey when he wants to

be. He isn't what you'd call the gold standard for information

about Tate."

"You mean he lies? But why?"

Wade shook his head. "Wouldn't go that far,

necessarily. But Paddy will leave things out of most

anything, when it suits him. Which," he added, "plenty

often it does. Might go further, if he thought a fib

might make him look better."

It was true enough about his taxes, certainly. He'd

tried deducting Terence's vitamins and herbal potions,

for heaven's sake, under the heading of "miscellaneous

chemicals."

"And for a while there," Wade continued, "Paddy

was real scared of Reuben."

I remembered Paddy's angry defiance, which in retrospect

did seem like protesting too much. "The way

he went on," I said, "you would think Reuben was the

one afraid of him."

In the dining-room windows, the candles' reflections

flared like signal lights. "I hope the weather

holds," Ellie fretted, glancing up at them, "at least until

after the Salmon Festival."

"Ellie, you've been doing all you can about the

festival," George assured her. "Besides, the weekend is

still six days off. Not even you can control the weather

from that distance."

His tone turned serious. "You might," he said to

me, "want to talk to a few more people. Get a more

balanced view of things. If," he added, "you really

want to go on with this at all."

"Like who? Besides Paddy," it was dawning

unwelcomely on me as I said it, "I don't even know where

to start."

Wade met my gaze. "You could try Mike Carpen

tier," he offered slowly. "Knows just about everyone.

And he was hooked up with Reuben somehow, seems

like I heard."

Ellie frowned. "I never knew that. Mike's years

younger. What would he have been doing with Reuben?"

Wade shrugged. "What I heard. Not saying it's

gospel. I'll bet he's got some stories, though, even if

that one isn't true."

"But they'll be stories of ..." I began, and then it

hit me, as Wade nodded.

"Long ago," I finished. "Like Paddy's but maybe

not so many lies. Not embroidered or with things left

out. And you think ..."

"Reuben had only been back in town a few days,"

Ellie agreed.

"And the way he got killed, seems like somebody

was madder at him than even he could make somebody,

in that short amount of time," George said, following

her thought.

"But," Sam objected, "if it was revenge for something

that happened a while ago, why wait so long?"

"Right," Tommy Daigle chimed in; Sam had spent

the evening helping him haul the engine out of his jalopy.

I hadn't thought they could do it, but Sam had

rigged up a pulley device that he said lessened immensely

the amount of work required.

"Tate was back to town other times, my mom

said," Tommy informed us. "Raised a lot of--"

Hell, Tommy had meant to say, but caught himself.

His mother was an old-fashioned disciplinarian, and it

showed.

"Ruckus," he finished carefully. "So why now?"

Wade looked thoughtful. "Maybe revenge wasn't

all of it. You can put bad things in the past, if they

happened then and they're over and done with. But if

you thought that same thing was about to happen

again ..."

"Once burnt, twice shy," Ellie agreed, as one of the

candles began smoking and George pinched it out.

Their remarks made me think again about the past

and the present somehow coming together, connecting

the victims in some way I didn't yet understand. I took

a sip of the wine Ellie had refilled for me, and chose my

words carefully.

"Are any of you"--I didn't include the boys, of

course--"going to be sorry if I start really digging into

this? Because you're all part of this town's past, too,

you know."

I let the rest go unspoken: that Reuben Tate's

venom seemed to have touched almost everyone in

Eastport. That when you went poking into old secrets,

sometimes you also opened old wounds, ones you

hadn't even known were there. And sometimes those