Wicked Fix (15 page)

old wounds belonged to your friends.

I wasn't asking permission, exactly. But I needed to

know.

"Least said, soonest mended, in my view," George

commented. "Bury him and be done with it, my best

advice ordinarily. Mess with Reuben or anything to do

with him, get messed up yourself."

He spoke easily. "But then there's Victor. Don't

guess you can just let him keep swinging in the breeze."

Ellie tapped her wineglass thoughtfully. "Ordinarily,

I'd agree: We're well rid of Reuben and the less

said about him the better. But this is different. And he

never hung any skeletons in my closet, I'm glad to

say."

Wade nodded, but not as decisively as George or

Ellie. "You just do what you have to," he allowed, "let

the chips fall."

Not an especially reassuring reply on his part, but

at the moment it was all I would get; Wade wasn't the

type to unburden himself at the dinner table.

Later, I looked wordlessly at him, and he nodded.

Afterward in the kitchen, helping to dry the dishes,

Tommy Daigle informed me that he and Sam were

combining the mystery of otherworldly spirit communications

with the technological genius of Samuel

Morse, by asking the Ouija board to spell its messages

out to them in Morse code.

Tommy had a round, freckled face that reminded

me of Howdy Doody's, topped with a thick shock of

hair so red it made Ellie's look strawberry blond. He'd

stuck with Sam pretty much all day, except when he

was at home doing the Saturday chores arranged for

him by his mother, and I felt grateful to him for it.

"Why do you want messages from spirits, anyway?"

I asked, resisting the impulse to brush Tommy's

hair out of his eyes. In the city, Sam hadn't had friends

like this: simple, steadfast.

"Maybe," Sam said, putting away silverware, "it'll

say who killed Reuben."

Tommy brushed his hair back for himself, revealing

the dent in his forehead, over his right eye. It

was deep and square, a white brand mark without any

freckles in it, as if somebody had hit him with a tack

hammer a long time ago. I didn't know how he'd really

gotten it.

"And who killed the other guy, too," he enthused

to Sam. "I mean, hey, it ought to know."

Which I supposed was logical but would be unhelpful

even in the (I hoped) very unlikely event that it

happened; Ouija-board testimony, I felt sure, cut no ice

with district attorneys. What we needed was some

shred of actual proof.

But I didn't say this, not wanting to quash their

optimism; Sam had eaten all of his dinner and no

longer looked so depressed. When they'd finished in

the kitchen, they hurried off to tune in the pregame

show and question George about his knowledge of

Morse code; I heard him tapping dot-and-dash patterns

for them on the living room coffee table, while I wiped

off the counters a final time and Ellie hung the dish

towels on their hooks.

"Terence thinks one of the visitors for the Salmon

Festival may have had it in for Reuben," I said.

"That's possible." Wearing yellow rubber gloves,

she rinsed the dish sponge with scalding water, which

is what the plumbing in my old house delivers when it

is not delivering ice-cold. "But the problem with Reuben

is, there are so many likely candidates for his murder."

"So I gather. Too bad none of them were in possession

of the weapon. But I was hoping you could narrow

the field for me. You knowing just about everyone,

I mean."

She squeezed the sponge out and stripped off the

gloves. "We can't focus on all his enemies, that's a

given."

Like everyone, she seemed to assume that Reuben's

death was the important one, the other just a sort of

tag-along. Probably it hadn't seemed that way to the

guy with the tie in his throat; still, in terms of starting

to sort this whole mess out, it was very likely true.

She said as much. "Reuben was the one who

would have inspired the big-time motive, enough to

commit murder about. I really haven't heard anything

about the other guy, and I would have if he was in the

habit of doing anything even mildly interesting. So it

does make some sense to focus on Reuben."

She snapped off the kitchen light. "The trouble is,

there are hundreds of people in town now, not counting

the ones who live here, who knew Reuben and

didn't like him. To put it," she added, "mildly."

She spread her hands in a this-is-obvious gesture.

"We can't question them all about their history with

him, learn what they were doing before--and during--

the time he was being murdered."

"Right." I was getting impatient.

"But," she pointed out acutely, "there was only

one, thank goodness, of Reuben. We could focus on

him."

I noted that she'd begun using the first-person plural.

"We? Are you sure you want to be involved in this?

You don't even like Victor, and he's the one who's

really in trouble."

Besides, she already had a big project on her plate,

getting ready for the festival. And I hadn't missed her

visceral little shiver of distaste whenever the subject of

Reuben came up.

What I kept forgetting, though, were her bloodlines

full of seagoing rogues and rascals. Unlike their

tropical brethren, the old cold-water outlaws of the

downeast Maine coast were notorious not so much for

their savagery to outsiders as for their loyalty to one

another. Cross ways with them and they might only

relieve you of your valuables; injure one, and the rest

would grind your bones to make their bread.

"What else," she inquired, "are friends for?"

Later that evening Wade and I went over to

check on Victor's house; the state police,

Bob Arnold had let Wade know, were done

I with it for now, so we could lock it up.

The black arrowhead daggers of the old, ornate

cast-iron fence around the front yard seemed to bristle

at us as we opened the creaking gate. Six tall white

pillars formed a long, graceful colonnade along the

house front, dropping bars of deeper shadow onto the

porch. We passed the green-shuttered windows of the

front parlor to a side door that led into a small sitting

room.

Inside, the air was still and faintly stale-smelling,

even though Victor's cleaning help kept the house sparkling

enough to do surgery in. It certainly did not have

the air of inhabitedness that mine did, the sense of welcome.

Without Victor in it, I felt immediately the dark

vacancy of the rooms.

Quickly, I went around turning on lights. The investigators

had not made a mess of things, or at least

not the awful one I had expected. There were smudges

of what I supposed must be fingerprint powder. Papers

had been riffled through, not left in the order that

Victor would have. Drawers had been emptied, their

contents scattered, and manila folders lay out on the

desk.

But there was no sign of the callous ransacking

that I had feared. Victor's fastidiousness was elemental

to him, and even after all that had happened between

us, I did not, I realized as I noted my own relief, want

him utterly destroyed even by proxy.

"There's too much I don't understand," I complained

as Wade pulled the drapes and checked the

lock on the back door. "All of you seem to think that

what happened to Reuben Tate was justice. As if he, or

anyone, could have deserved that ... that atrocity."

On a low table, the day's heap of letters and journals

lay where the detectives had left them, after bringing

them in and going through them. Wade squared up

the pile and set it on a bookcase in which Victor's medical

books were grouped by category.

"But I just don't believe in that kind of justice," I

said. "Maybe there are exceptions to the rules we've

come up with to deal with renegades, but I wouldn't

know how to pick them. And it worries me," I finished,

"to find out that maybe you do."

I could see him thinking about how to reply as we

went into the rest of the downstairs rooms, then to the

cellar. Wade checked the pilot light on the furnace, rattled

the cellar door, peered into the fuse box. Everything

seemed shipshape.

But it was like going through a house after somebody

in it had died. Back on the main floor in the front

hall stood Victor's antique instrument case, its glass

doors open, its contents taken away. Evidence, I supposed,

though I didn't see of what.

"That collection was the only thing he brought

with him from New York," I said, hoping someone had

at least made a list of it. "That and his clothes. Back in

the city, he kept souvenirs of his girlfriends: photographs,

letters. He had a little black book the size of

the Manhattan telephone directory."

Or so it had seemed to me when I'd come upon it

one day when I was still married to Victor, while I was

cleaning closets.

"But Sam says he got rid of it all," I said. "Took

the black book and tore the pages out of it, tore those

up, and flushed them down the toilet. Sold his little

sports car, stereo, all that kind of thing. All his city

toys."

We went up to check the second floor, and Wade

climbed the third-floor stairs to make sure the attic

door was closed,

"Don't want squirrels moving from there into the

house," he explained, coming back down again. "So

Victor was really turning over a new leaf."

"Right," I said. A bitter little laugh bubbled up in

me at the idea of Victor having squirrels in his attic.

Real squirrels, I mean. "He was never going to be

what you might call personally well adjusted," I went

on. "But he was trying. For once, he was trying hard.

Which is another reason why what's happening to him

now isn't ..."

We went back downstairs. The investigators had

left a light on in the display case. Wade reached in and

switched it off, its fluorescent hum leaving a louder

silence where it had been.

"Justice," he finished my sentence for me. "You're