Wicked Fix (24 page)

with ostrich feathers in them, men raced horses hell

for-leather along the Shore Road, and they all gathered

formally to attend. .. concerts, including one at the Eastport Hotel on

the Friday night previous to the newspaper's ancient

issue. The fragile old sheet detailed a fine performance,

well attended and marvelously entertaining, by

a local musician: one Jared Hayes, resident of 20 Key

Street.

As I read, a faint thread of the old music Sam had

hummed to me played in my head: a goblin tune,

haunting and sweet.

Wade looked up puzzledly. "Did you hear something?"

"No." I put aside the newspaper. "No, I don't

think so." My mouth felt dry. The house seemed filled

with an expectant silence.

And then nothing, as if a mist off the water had

gathered up suddenly and evaporated.

"Kids all liked Sondergard," Wade said, turning

back to the window. "Ones of us who were in his

church youth group. Pastor Sondergard, that is. What

we called him then."

"You didn't like Marcus?" I tried to recapture the

sense I'd had a moment ago, as of someone about to

whisper urgently to me.

But it was gone. Wade held up the tape measure.

"Oh, he was kind of a geek. Filled out some, I'll say

that much for him."

He laid the one-by-eight across the sawhorses,

marked it, and picked up the circular saw. Since his

unburdening of the night before, he seemed easier in

his skin: talkative, not so worried. After he cut the

board, he marked it once more and cut it again.

Had I been doing it, I'd have used a handsaw and

taken half an hour. "Can I see that?"

The circular saw was heavy. "Like this?" I laid a

piece of waste board on the sawhorses.

Wade nodded, steadied the wood. "Press the trigger

and cut."

Brrr-anngg! It was done. Two pieces clattered to

the floor.

"Good," he said, and picked up the clawhammer

again.

Cheered--I have never been much good with

power tools, but when you are trying to do things

swiftly there is nothing like an electric motor--I resolved

to get some scrap boards and practice with that

circular saw again, sometime. This was, however, the

only cheery thing about the task at hand, because it

turned out there was a lot more wrong with the window

frame than the damage I had done to it.

"Rot back here," Wade muttered, pulling crumbling

wood out of the crevice. "Can't leave that."

Well, I could have, but he couldn't. Half an hour

later, the bedroom wall looked as if a small missile had

blasted through it.

"Sometime soon, better find out where the leak is,"

he said, dampening--no pun intended--my spirits further.

If there was rot, there was water coming in somewhere,

and I dreaded finding out more about it.

The repairs, though, went pretty swiftly: measuring,

fitting, and nailing. And this time I set the weather

stripping pieces in their places the right way, so the

sashes slid snugly and easily on them.

"Marcus's mother was a great big formidable

woman," Wade said after a while. "She had some heart

trouble, but you sure couldn't tell it by looking at her.

Hilda, I think her name was."

"Marcus said she was vulnerable to fright."

Wade nodded, fit a sash back into its channel.

"Yep. Marcus played piano back then. Fancied himself

a little prodigy."

He set a molding strip back on, gave the gimlet a

twist, put a nail in. "And anybody who thought they

were good at anything, naturally that attracted old

Reuben's attention. So what happened, one day Hilda

caught Reuben trying to break Marcus's ring finger, get

his allowance money out of him."

"Uh-oh." I was starting to see what was coming.

"Yeah. And heart condition or not, she wasn't the

type to take a lot of backchat out of a kid, even Reuben.

She grabbed him, dragged him into Washington

Street, and shook him till he got away and ran home,

her shouting after him, waving a big stick."

"Yikes. But she didn't catch him? Sounds like Reuben

got off easy."

Wade tipped his head ambivalently. "Depends. No,

she didn't catch him, but a week later they found Hilda

Sondergard out in her garden. She'd had a heart attack.

No one noticed for a couple of hours. Gone."

I slid the sash up and down, enjoying its new,

draft-free condition and the absence of sticking or

wobbling. Only forty-six more to go ... "But what'd

Reuben have to do with that? How would anyone

know he'd done anything to her? If he did."

"Like I say, everyone knew she had heart trouble."

Wade put the nails in the bag, unplugged the circular

saw. "The theory is, Reuben hid out there. Jumped out

at her. Scared her to death."

"I don't see," I began, "how you could prove--"

"You couldn't," Wade said flatly. "But when they

rolled her over, they found money beneath her. Nickels

and dimes. The exact amount of Marcus's allowance."

I took the sawhorses apart, put the pieces under

my arms, and started downstairs with them, Wade following

with the other tools.

"It was the big story in town for a while," he said.

"Then Reuben took off, turned into a drifter. Ran

different scams here and there. Came back sometimes, left

again. Mostly he moved from town to town. Kept his

forwarding address current with the post office here,

though, to get those checks from that trust his mom

had set up for him."

He reached past me to open the cellar door. "Then

the two Sondergards left. And I've often wondered," he

added, flipping the light switch in the cellar landing, "if

it was coincidence."

"If what was?" I set the sawhorse parts on the

floor.

"That every time Reuben moved on to greener pastures,"

Wade replied, putting the circular saw on its

shelf in the corner, "a certain pair of itinerant musical

ministers showed up there too?"

I turned to face him. "Come on. How would you

know that?"

He spread his hands. "Jacobia. I couldn't forget

him. Boxy. Or Reuben either. It's always preyed on me,

just kind of eaten at me. So," he confessed, "I kept

track of him. Where he showed up. Kind of hoping,

you know."

"That you would hear about something else? Hear

about it--"

"And be able to stop it." He frowned. "And then

there's that flyer the Sondergards put out, about their

musical dates."

I'd seen one in the parlor of Heddlepenny House.

"They've been sending it for years, and I'm on their

mailing list because I was in the youth group, I guess,"

Waded added.

"So you knew where they were, too."

"Yeah. And like I say, I suppose it could be a coincidence,"

Wade said, coming out of the cellar stairwell

behind me.

Tommy and Sam were at the kitchen table, drilling

each other in Morse code and high-fiving each other

when they translated the patterns correctly.

"Reuben and the Sondergards," Wade said, getting

himself a beer out of the refrigerator. "Same towns,

same time, so often. It could be," he finished, "meaningless."

But I could tell from his voice that he didn't think

so.

Me, either.

Later that afternoon, Wade went down to

the dock to check on his freighter-piloting

schedule for the coming week, and I went

out into the yard and dragged out the aluminum

extension ladder. Encouraged by my triumph with

the electric saw, and reminded of leaks in general by

the rot Wade had found behind the plaster, I thought I

might fix a small leak that I had already located over

the kitchen window.

About this leak, I thought, there was no mystery

whatsoever: Every time it rained, water poured into the

space between the sash and the aluminum storm window

with which--for what reason, I had no idea--that

one window had at some time been fitted.

This, by the way, is a constant feature of old

house fix-up: wondering why someone has done

something idiotic that you have to undo, redo, or otherwise

somehow finagle. Probably someday, a thoroughly

annoyed person will wonder the same thing

about many of my amateur repairs; in an old house,

necessity is often the mother of some pretty funny

looking inventions.

Fortunately, however, this particular fix looked

relatively straightforward. So I took Monday, the ladder,

and the caulking gun filled with polyurethane

caulking material--

--silicone caulk is indeed indestructible, as advertised,

but it has a bad habit of letting go of porous old

wood, which is of course what my old house was

mostly made of--and prepared to do minor battle.

While I worked, I thought about Reuben Tate following

the Sondergards, or vice versa. Surely the state

police investigators would be interested in that idea.

The trouble was, in order to tell them about it I

would have to get Wade involved, and I didn't want to.

The less interest the better if it was focused on my

family, I decided, at least for now. And since Ellie was

still busy stitching children's costumes for the festival, I

decided to wait before trying to interview Willow Prettymore,

too; I'd been lucky with the Sondergards, but

history suggested that a familiar face like Ellie's might

ease my way considerably, in the snoopy-questions department.

In the backyard, I put up the ladder, cursing mildly

as I struggled to find a level place for it. Meanwhile,

Monday ran circles around herself, rejoicing in the

fresh air and in the fact that she was not on a leash;

Sam had actually managed to teach her to stay in the

yard, which for a Labrador retriever is like teaching it

to do algebra.

But finally I got up there, and as I'd suspected, a

strip of old wood on the framing above the window

was loose. My plan was to nail it, slather it with caulk,

and pray that my fix stopped water from pouring

through it: handy-dandy, I thought, reaching confidently