Wreck the Halls (23 page)

“That's the one to his lungs?” Ellie asked.

Her voice on the telephone, taut with artificial calm, made me want to scream and break things. But at the moment everything made me feel that way.

“Yes.” Victor had no hands-on chest surgery experience, but as he'd said he had no choice: on a wing and a prayer he had improvised a graft out of plastic tubing, tied it in with a couple of surgical sutures, and kept his fingers on it, Bob's
chest still surgically opened, for the helicopter trip. Victor said the surgery in Portland would take about fourteen hours.

Or until Bob died. That, in a nutshell, is Victor with medical information: straight, no chaser.

“Timmy Rutherford says there're lots of footprints all over that field,” Ellie went on tightly. “Kids ride snowboards. People walk their dogs. No way of knowing whose are whose.”

Like my backyard, and Melinda's. “The axe?”

“Gone to the state lab. But Jake…”

“Yeah. No one else thinks this is connected to—”

I did, though. And I’d been up all night thinking: love and money, money and love. And about what Bob Arnold had said.

They covered the story in the Portland papers.

So I’d started calling Portland at six A.M., leaving messages on the newsroom voice mail. At eight-thirty, my own phone had rung. “Somebody was at Melinda's,” I told Ellie now. “When Bob showed up, whoever it was grabbed the nearest handy weapon and attacked him. Why?”

“Because he saw—”

“That's what I think, too. To keep Bob from telling something he either saw or figured out from what he saw. And Bob said that the woman Ben Devine was suspected of murdering was a model, or had something to do with modeling.”

“I don't get the connection between—”

“But Clarissa said she thought the woman was connected to the school, somehow. And they were both right.”

“I don't see—”

Love and money. “Statistical modeling,” I interrupted. “The high-powered math they do in college economics departments.” And on Wall Street.

“Oh. But what's that got to do with Melinda?”

“Well, it's a little complicated. But the reporter who
covered the story at the Portland Press Herald says the woman who vanished from Lewiston was a professor at Bates.”

I’d asked for a faxed photo and it had come through. But it was a splotched, unrecognizable blob on the fax sheet; luckily I had a backup plan. The rest of the story had arrived clearly enough, though:

“And get this: the woman who vanished had complained to the cops in the weeks before she disappeared. She was being stalked.”

“Like Faye Anne.”

“Right. And unless I’m mistaken, like Melinda Devine. And what do those two have in common?” I answered myself. “Peter Christie. Whose business card I just happened to notice, by the way, at Mickey Jean Bunting's place.”

“But Jacobia, he's from California. He wouldn't have been in Lewiston—”

“Do we know that for sure?”

“No.” Ellie thought it over. “This won't be easy.”

“Probably not. Not for us to do, anyway. But we could do it if we had Peter Christie's little black book. Phone numbers.”

Back in the city when a client got in trouble by doing something he hadn't bothered clearing with me first, I went into research mode. Because for the client, money was always all tied up in feelings: do I look smart? Do I feel smart?

But for me it was just the facts, ma'am.

And it had worked. I felt certain that Peter would have one, too: a little black book. Like Victor.

“So we can call…” Ellie began.

“Yup. Old girlfriends. Old buddies.” Maybe even some old enemies. I didn't have a clue how any of this hooked together yet, but it was a cinch more facts couldn't hurt.

“We'll call them all, get the scoop on him. Andfind out all about just exactly where he was, when.”

First Peter; then Mickey Jean, about whom I was beginning
to have a very strong suspicion: all that investing stuff, The Wall Street Journal and stock screens on the computer. But I didn't want to say anything about that to Ellie, yet; not until I was certain.

Before I was done I planned to know all about both of them. The trouble was, I had no idea how to get hold of Peter's book.

But Ellie did. “You know, I’m the one who put Victor in touch with the woman who cleans for him,” she said thoughtfully. “Lucky for him he doesn't have a wood-stove; she won't work for anyone who does. Too grimy, she says.”

“You're kidding,” I said, not meaning the stove. It was too good to be true. But if a sparrow falls in Eastport, Ellie sees it and tries to help it, and a lifetime of that had knitted a lot of strands into her personal one-hand-washes-the-other network.

“Don't tell me she works for Peter, too?” Meaning the woman Victor called a domestic technician, even as he enforced a dress code that smacked of the 1950s.

Hoping against hope, but already knowing, really:

Good old Ellie.

I left it
to Ellie to persuade the cleaning lady that truth, justice, and the American way required her to look straight at Peter Christie and lie like a rug, should the occasion arise. I didn't care what she said to him as long as she got into his house, found his phone book, and brought it to us. We could figure out later how to get it back to him without him noticing.

If we ended up caring. Next I called Clarissa, told her what else I needed.

She was waiting for her mother-in-law to arrive to care for Thomas so she could leave for Portland. But she would
make the calls, pull a favor or two from old buddies in Augusta, and have the result faxed to me. I got the sense she was grateful for the favor I was asking: it was something for her to do.

“Jacobia, Victor told me what you and Wade… thank you.”

The CPR, she meant. “You're welcome. I only hope it did some good.”

“Victor said it did. He said that without it…”

She stopped, began again. “Victor said that you really know how to kick butt in an emergency.”

“Really.” It was clearly a direct quote and yet so unexpected, I decided she was mistaken. But this was no time to quiz her. We hung up and an hour later the result of my request came out of my fax machine.

I tore the first page off, waiting for the next sheet. Instead, the paper stopped and the machine emitted three beeps, signaling that it was finished.

Which, actually, was what I’d already begun suspecting. But I still looked at the fax paper again, staring as if I expected more words to appear on it.

They didn't. I’d given Mickey Jean's name to Clarissa and asked her to do what she could on finding information about her, apologizing for the lack of other data to narrow the search.

“Jake, she isn't a missing person,” Clarissa had replied. “This is easy. They'll just locate her here and backtrack.”

But the result of a comprehensive, professional electronic search of Mickey Jean's background—

—or that of any current Maine resident, last name Bunting, white female, f. initial M., m. initial J. (also M. only, J. only, neither, reverse, and for good measure, Last Name Only)—

—consisted of two words:

Not Found.

• • •

I drove this
time, Ellie riding shotgun. Turning at the snow-choked rut leading up to the cabin, I hit the horn. I kept leaning on it all the way in.

Ellie didn't comment on my conversion to Indy 500 driver, or the way the car horn ravaged the immaculate silence.

I was mad. Scared, too. And I wanted this woman, whoever she was, to know I was coming.

At the house, Skip and Rascal did their ferocious-guard-dogs act with snarling enthusiasm; I brushed them aside, hammered on the cabin door. The dogs subsided as they saw I wasn't intimidated by their empty threats. She opened it.

“Who are you?” Behind her in the room the printer to her computer was humming out some pages of something; I couldn't see what.

“Get out.” She said it calmly. “I have nothing to say to you or anyone.”

“Mickey Jean Bunting sure doesn't. She doesn't exist. No driver's license, no credit history, no bank account. No electronic footprint whatsoever. And that, in this day and age, is a sheer impossibility.”

She didn't flinch. “It's none of your business. Get out of here, now, or I’ll—”

“What? You'll shoot us?” I leaned in toward her. “There was no loan to Merle Carmody. Merle was blackmailing you. You only told us that in case he kept some record, something you'd have to explain.”

Behind her: two cups on the table. Two chairs by the stove. Ellie came onto the porch. “Old blue pickup truck out behind the cabin,” she reported mildly.

“Ben didn't kill the math teacher, did he?” I asked the woman standing before me. This time, she did flinch. “He just
wanted it to look that way. And so did she. Enough, I mean, so everyone would believe she was dead.”

Mad as I was, I couldn't help admiring the gall it had taken. The nerve, for Ben especially; he'd risked being accused of her murder. They must have set it up very carefully: moving the money, building her a new identity.

Rather, not building one. The money was the obstacle. People can vanish if they're strong enough to leave everything behind. But money—

I glanced around at the snowy clearing. Across it were the prints of every foot that had stepped here since the storm of a few days ago.

And money is like boots in the snow: it leaves tracks.

It always leaves tracks. “Ben helped you disappear. Helped you set up here. He's here now somewhere, isn't he? Waiting for us to go. Because he doesn't live in town with his sister, Melinda. Ben lives here, with you.”

While I’d glanced away, the rifle had appeared. She held it in an easy, one-handed grip. But her expression was anything but relaxed. It was the look of an animal hunted to its den. Now it would fight.

“Bet you didn't tell anyone you were coming,” she said. Her voice sounded tired, and I felt a moment of pity for her.

But only a moment, replaced by fear I tried not to show. “You had to disappear. Because of the stalking, probably. And you thought you had done it. I don't think anyone's ever even seen you in town, have they?” I sure hadn't. Ellie, either; if she had she'd have said so. “But Merle spotted you in Duddy's and recognized you somehow. Bad luck for you.”

“All I would have to do,” Mickey Jean went on thoughtfully, as if I hadn't spoken, “all I’d have to do is get rid of your car. Push it,” she added, “into the lake.”

The stalking she'd complained about to the Lewiston police must have been terrible, I realized. You couldn't
look the way she did otherwise: haggard and grim. As if rather than go back to that, she'd have turned the rifle on herself.

“Now Merle's dead,” I persisted. “Kenty Dalrymple, too. But how did you set Faye Anne up? Make her forget, or say she did? That's what I can't figure out.”

“If you believe you can prove I’ve done anything, you should tell the police,” she said evenly. “But the fact is, you can't prove anything—”

She raised the rifle past me, fired it. The side mirror of my car exploded into shining fragments. “And you don't know anything,” she finished. “Nothing at all.”

“But Bob Arnold's alive,” I insisted, hoping to shake her. “Whatever he saw out there last night, you didn't stop Bob from telling everyone about it. When he gets out of surgery and wakes up, he's going to—”

“What are you talking about?”

Her tone stopped me. That, and the look on her face. Because just a minute ago I’d thought I did know: what and why, if not the details behind it all.

Now, suddenly, I was just a woman with a foolish theory, standing in a remote, silent clearing in the middle of a Maine winter, a gun in my face. Because Mickey Jean was the missing college math professor, all right, and Ben Devine lived here with her. But about last night her confusion was sincere: until I mentioned it she'd had no clue anything had happened to Bob Arnold.

And she was right about something else, I realized as I went back to the car. Something I should have remembered from my high-flying days in the city:

Facts are one thing. Truth is another. I’d gathered some of the former and surmised a whole lot more.

But of the latter I still had nothing.

• • •

“It doesn't mean
she didn't kill Merle, or that Ben didn't,” Ellie said as we reached town. “It just means she didn't know somebody attacked Bob. Ben could've done it without telling her.”

“Maybe.” But Ben Devine had trusted the woman called Mickey Jean Bunting enough to put his life in her hands; I had to assume the plan for her disappearance out of Lewiston had included her showing up again, if he had ended up charged with killing her. So why do anything without letting her in on it, now?

“Tim Rutherford told me the state cops are treating it like a simple break-and-enter that Bob interrupted,” Ellie said. “They think Bob surprised someone, and maybe made them panic.”

It was a reasonable assumption if you believed none of what had been going on was part of a pattern, which they did because Faye Anne was in custody and Kenty's death had looked natural. Not that we had a lot of crime-for-profit around here, but there'd been more since hard drugs invaded the county.

Which reminded me: “What happened at Duddy's? Tim say anything about that?” Bob had been headed there, before his detour around town last night to make sure all was quiet.

Ellie shook her head. “Don't know. I suppose everything went on as planned. I doubt they'd stop a drug raid just because one Eastport cop didn't show up.” She frowned. “How can she be trading stocks, or whatever she's doing for money on that computer of hers, if she has no identity?”

“Ben didn't lose his identity. If she's trading, she's probably doing it in his account. After all, no one was stalking him.”

Pulling into my driveway, I spotted the pieces of that newly repaired cellar window lying broken against the old stone foundation, gleaming on the snow. Nearby, a length of
aluminum downspout told the tale: gust of wind, blown-off downspout, smashed glass.

“Oh, blast.” Ellie grabbed the mail out of the box on the porch as we went in. Monday looked up from her dog bed in the kitchen, settled glumly again.