just haven't figured out yet. And you know, I'll bet
someone thinks that also makes them villains."
He thought about that. "Like if a woman goes to a
bar, she ends up having to fight off some drunk, people
say she shouldn't have been there in the first place."
"Right. Or a guy ends up living in his car and eating
out of a soup kitchen. Nobody ever says, Hey, that
could be me. They say the guy's a loser, he should try
harder. He gets blamed, and so does she. The victim
gets turned into the villain 'cause it makes somebody
feel, Hey, that couldn't be me. Or something," I trailed
off unhappily.
"Huh." I could see him turning it over in his head.
But then he frowned.
"Close, but no cigar. For one thing, you'd have to
kill off the whole darn town. Everybody got victimized
by Reuben, or almost everybody, at one time or another.
And," he put the nail in the coffin of my theory,
"it still doesn't account for Weasel. If he had been
hooked up to our group in any way, Jacobia, I'd remember
it."
"Oh." The energy went out of me again. He was
right.
"Sorry." He shrugged helplessly.
"That's okay." But it was something about being
a victim, I was sure, combined with some threat or
actual behavior of Reuben's that had gotten it all going
again.
And something more, a third thing I kept almost
realizing. But every time I tried to get my mind
around it, it fluttered away, as wispy and elusive as
gossamer.
The lights were on in the dining room but there
wasn't a sound from in there. I got up to look, found
Sam hunched over the dratted Ouija board.
I wished he weren't. I'd managed to rationalize my
creepy experience with k; just my subconscious, I'd decided,
spitting out the gist of my current preoccupation
again and again.
But I couldn't get over my uneasiness about it.
Around me, the old house was as silent as a held
breath. A pair of earphones were on Sam's head; he
glanced up and saw me.
"Hey," he said, pulling the earphones off.
"Hi. What are you doing?"
He shrugged. "Just fooling with this. The radio
gets shortwave. If I listen enough, maybe I'll be able to
translate Morse in my head. You know, like if you live
in France pretty soon you can speak French?"
From the earphones came the distant, tinny sound
of dots and dashes. Something about Morse code had
always sounded urgent to me, even when it probably
wasn't.
"Dad called earlier, kind of upset," Sam went on.
"He says the diet in jail is not nutritionally balanced,
it's a violation of his rights. Also the reading material is
inadequate."
I could imagine. "You settle him down?"
"Yeah." Sam managed a grin: his game face. I was
glad to see it, didn't like thinking about how long he
might have to wear it.
Now I needed my own. "Did he ask about the interview?
With the DA, I mean?"
On the table, the Ouija board lay silent and motionless,
its black letters and numerals sharp against its
polished surface.
"Yeah. He told me again," Sam recited, imitating
Victor uncannily, "that it's out of my hands, I had no
choice, and if I beat myself up about it anymore, he's
going to kick my butt."
It's one of the very most annoying things about
Victor, that once in a while he will blindside you with
bighearted behavior. It would be so much easier just to
hate him up one side and down the other.
"Don't stay up late. Work tomorrow," I reminded
Sam, but he had the earphones back on already and
couldn't hear me.
In the hall I spotted a fluff of dog hair, like a
shadow in the corner. But when I bent to reach for it,
there was nothing. As I straightened, my glance fell
onto the hall shelf.
The package Terence had shoved into my hands
that afternoon was still there, wrapped in brown paper,
marked private & confidential. It was addressed
to a firm of attorneys in Bangor, Maine.
Hefting it, I discovered that it felt like spiral notebooks
stacked one on top of another; you could feel
the wire bindings along the side of the parcel. Half a
dozen of them, maybe.
No stamps on it, though, and the string was starting
to come undone. Tape, actually, would be better
for it. I could rewrap it, and perhaps just glance at the
contents as I did so.
"Guess I'll go on up to bed," Sam said. He
snapped the radio off, interrupting a sputter of dot
and-dash. Then he paused, squinting at the Ouija
board in puzzlement.
"Something funny about that thing," he said.
I feel that falling out of the sky can be prevented
by not going up into it. Ellie, however,
does not share this opinion, as I was
reminded very early the next morning when
she showed up at a ghastly hour, full of what I regarded
as a ghastly plan.
"Ellie, these notebooks," I said, waving at them
spread out on the kitchen table. "They're ..."
"We'll be back by lunchtime," she interrupted
firmly in the tone her pirate ancestors might have used
while persuading people to walk the plank. "Or probably
before. Grand Manan's only half an hour, as the
crow flies."
I did not point out that crows fly with wings that
are attached by muscles and tendons, and that if God
had meant me to do it too, He'd have attached some to
me.
"But," I protested uselessly, "the notebooks
are ..."
"I got a phone call while I was out last night. Message
from George's cousin, on the machine."
Which didn't help much. Half of downeast Maine
consists of George Valentine's cousins, the other half
his aunts and uncles.
"So?"
"So Harriet Thorogood wants to talk to us."
I stared. "Harriet ... Boxy's mother? I thought
she was ..."
"Dead, I know. But she isn't. She's in a nursing
home."
"Lovely. Why didn't you mention this to me? Anyway,
I'm very happy for her, that she's alive. Still, I fail
to see how flying over to see her there will advance our
understanding of anything. In fact, after flying at all I
will be in no shape to ..."
But Ellie had already turned off the coffeemaker,
filled up Monday's water bowl, checked the stove
knobs to make sure they were off, and scribbled a note.
"I'll explain on the way," she promised, hustling
me out.
But she didn't, or at least not immediately, because
Ellie had been up and going strong since her usual rising
time of five in the morning--in Maine, late sleeping
is seen as a sure sign of deficient moral character--and
had been to the Waco Diner with George for breakfast.
So she had plenty of news:
Terence had indeed been transferred to Portland
and Paddy Farrell had driven down there to be with
him. Paddy would come back this evening, Ellie went
on, to close up the studio; after that he would return to
the medical center in Portland for the duration of Terence's
stay there.
"No word on Terence's actual condition," she
added, "other than that he's still unconscious and in
intensive care."
So he wouldn't be letting on who had clobbered
him anytime soon. I'd brought along the notebooks,
which now lay in my lap. They were Terence's diaries,
and what they contained was still spinning in my head
like the glass bits in a kaleidoscope.
"Ellie," I began, picking up a notebook, "we
need ..."
Instead of listening, she set the parking brake on
the Jeep in the visitor's lot at the airfield and got out.
Set in a pasture overlooking blue water, the airstrip
looked too short to land more than a helicopter but
was actually long enough to accommodate a good
sized Gulfstream, a fact that was of little comfort to me
since I didn't want to go up in any of those either.
Reluctantly, I got out of the Jeep. The air was crisp
and washed clean by the storm of the night before,
smelling of sea salt and evergreens, and the light had
the fragile clarity of a Maine island in the early morning,
unspoiled and full of bright innocent promise.
On the other hand, waiting on the tarmac was an
aircraft that looked as if it had been glued together out
of balsa wood and construction paper. Eyeing it, I
opened my mouth to object.
But that was useless too. "We," said Ellie, "are
going. In that. Now." She marched toward the plane.
The low metal Quonset building of Quoddy Air,
Inc., looked like something that leather-helmeted
cropdusters flew biplanes out of, back in the 1930s.
The whole idea of my going up into the sky was ridiculous
anyway, I thought wildly.
And then I was going up in it. Strapped in, shaking,
and in imminent danger of supplying my breakfast
for examination by my flying companions, I saw the
end of the runway vanish under the nose of the toy
plane. Another moment and Passamaquoddy Bay fell
abruptly away beneath us; under the circumstances, I
guessed it was better than seeing it rise abruptly toward
us, but not much better.
The plane banked right. The pilot was cheerful. I
took this as a good sign. Until he turned off the engine.
"You know," I said faintly, in what I imagined was
a nice, conversational tone, "I believe that when the
airplane is actually in the air, hundreds and hundreds
of feet off the ground or in this case, actually, the ice
cold water ..."
"You don't have to scream," Ellie said. "I can hear
you."
"Beautiful, isn't it?" the pilot asked. "Nothing but
wind noise. Hey, look down there--it's a whale."
It was a big, dark shape moving along very slowly
in the indigo bay, and I had no doubt that I would be
getting much more closely acquainted with it in the
immediate future.
"Better fire it up again," Ellie suggested kindly.
"Jake's getting pale."