Wreck the Halls (25 page)

“A heating pad,” he replied, zipping his jacket. “If you leave it there a while it'll warm up the metal frame, and the glass. Safer than the blowtorch,” he added with an anxious glance at his father.

Then they went out, and when they were gone I stalked into the parlor. There stood the chair the dog seemed so afraid of, harmless as always, with a bit of stuffing-fluff on the carpet near it.

Ellie followed me. “So either these women are so forgiving, they don't want to tarnish his reputation here in his new home or—”

“They didn't know he had a new home until you told them,” I said distractedly. When had the chair started
shedding those stuffing bits? And how? No visible tear or worn place accounted for them.

“Right,” Ellie said. “ Which means…”

“Help me tip this chair over, will you?”

Outside the front window Monday romped cheerfully, pink tongue lolling. Meanwhile, here inside we had leaks of chair innards, a dog who went around looking as if she'd seen a ghost, and…

“Oof.” We got the chair over.

“Look at that,” Ellie said. A ragged hole in the chair's underside showed a loop of spring. Beyond that more stuffing had been pulled and packed as if by tiny hands, to form the lining of what looked like some small animal's nest.

As if to confirm this, the animal in question poked his head out, whiskers quivering: a mouse.

“Yeeks!” Ellie said, letting go of the chair.

Me, too. Baring his teeth, the mouse let out an irritated squeak and launched himself, streaking for the hall.

The chair hit the floor. I sank into it. Ellie sat down on the carpet in one smooth, graceful motion; she is as flexible as a Slinky toy and mostly intrepid about animals. But she dislikes mice. A lot.

Probably at the moment our mouse was already having a restorative snack from the bait in that trap down cellar. Next he would start chewing on the edges of the wooden spoons in the kitchen drawer. What would come after that doesn't really bear describing. But it wouldn't be sanitary.

“So,” I said when I’d caught my breath. “You were saying?”

“They're scared of Peter.” Ellie waved the photocopied complaint sheets. “I think each of these women in California, after she filed a complaint against him, found out what happens when you call the cops to complain about Peter Christie.”

The back door opened; moments later Monday padded
cautiously in. Not sensing mouse vibes, she sat beside Ellie with no hesitation.

“And none of them plans to let it ever happen again,” I said with a nod toward the papers Ellie held. “I wish I’d asked Bob Arnold if Faye Anne had complained to him.”

Ellie shook her head. “She didn't. Wouldn't have. You know her. I got the sense she felt it was her fault, somehow.”

“Yeah, right.” A burst of annoyance at the passive Faye Anne hit me, no matter what anyone had done to make her that way. “If she'd stuck up for herself even a little bit…”

None of this would be happening, I’d nearly said. Only that wasn't true. It's so easy to blame the victim, but it's not that simple.

It just isn't. “If Peter's got some pathology that makes him need to be obsessing about someone, it would account for him being with Melinda the minute they arrested Faye Anne, right away, and for Melinda having Bob's number on the speed dial. And her comment about him being too serious.”

“That's a quick switch to a new target, though, even for a creep like Peter. Faye Anne had barely been gone for a day when I found Bob's number at Melinda's. So unless he was bothering both of them at the same time…”

She thought about it. “And I had the idea Melinda had been with Peter, when Bob was attacked. She was dressed up, you said.”

“As if she'd been out on a date, right. But we don't know she was with him.”

Something was bothering me. Two things, actually. What Victor had said about Willetta Abrams. And…

The mouse had been inside the chair.

“Ellie. Why'd Kenty say she was in the Carmody house that night?”

Victor appeared in the doorway. “You should look at this.”

Ellie rose up from the floor in the same graceful, no-hands way she'd sunk down onto it. “People like Kenty do tend to…”

Victor looked astonished, which was unusual. He likes people to think he is so worldly and sophisticated, nothing can astonish him.

“… embroider,” Ellie finished, as I followed Victor out to the kitchen. “When they're spreading any gossip it might as well be good gossip, you know?”

But she didn't sound certain. Me, either. “I don't know. She made a big point of wanting me to know it. But she didn't want to talk to newspeople, because…”

Ellie looked at me. “They'd check her story, wouldn't they? Or at least pick out shaky spots, not just accept it as gospel. And someone like Kenty who'd been in the business herself might be more aware than most: that if she did talk to them they might manage to trip her up.”

“And she'd have known that if they caught her at the wrong time, she might not be quite mentally johnny-on-the-spot. Not well medicated enough, I mean, or maybe too well.”

I thought some more. “What if Kenty never went to the Carmodys’, but she wanted me to think—and to tell people-that she did? Saying she'd been inside might make it more believable, she could have thought. One thing I do know, she was most emphatic on the part about not seeing anything unusual.”

“But really she had?” Ellie frowned pickily. It remained a good motive for Kenty's death, her being a witness to something a killer didn't want broadcast. But it still didn't quite wash; I kept remembering those superthick glasses.

Sam waved at the cardboard box on the kitchen table. “I can't keep this stuff. Dad says it's…”

Ellie saw that Sam wanted privacy, and instantly made herself scarce.

“… narcotics,” Victor finished Sam's sentence for him. “And amphetamines. Needles and syringes, a crude dilution chart, some bottles of sterile saline.”

The collection included alcohol wipes: a hilarious nod, if you weren't personally involved, to the preservation of the user's health.

“Just possession of some of these is a major felony. Opiate painkillers. Rohypnol… that's the date-rape drug.” Victor made a face. “You don't even want them in the house.”

“I ordered them,” Sam said to me. “Tommy and I did it together, for our Internet project. The Web site where we found it said it was an organic mood-moderation kit, herbs and whatnot. You know, holistic medicine.”

With the money Sam had borrowed from Wade… I just stared. “Sam,” I managed finally, “how much did you pay for this stuff?”

He named a ridiculously low figure, which was when I got it: the package was of nearly free samples.

Somebody was weirdly wired, all right; later, the price would go up. Sooner or later, whoever it was would get shut down, too—sooner, now that Victor knew about it—but not before doing a lot of damage. And of course there was no return address on the mailing carton.

Sam raised his digital camera, snapped a picture of the items for his project, since a live show-and-tell of this material could get him years in the slammer.

“Criminy,” I said, “is there any place you can't get stuff to screw your head up, nowadays?”

“No,” Sam replied authoritatively, “there isn't.”

“I’ll take it over to the clinic,” Victor said, “and call the Maine DEA. Don't worry,” he told Sam. “You won't be in difficulty over it.”

Victor can be very effective when he wants to be. And reassuring; this I suppose is because of his experience as a
neurosurgeon, talking to people so calmly just before he starts taking apart their heads.

I followed him to the door. “You're sure Sam will be okay?”

Because the thing is, I lied about him having been in a little trouble. Back in the city, Sam was the kind of kid who would sniff a vial of live Ebola virus if he thought it would get him high. He stole things; he shot up, snorted, and smoked things. And even though all that seemed a whole life and a world away, I didn't quite trust the notion that his juvenile record was sealed. And…

“I’ll tell them I ordered this stuff on Sam's computer,” Victor replied. “That I was curious about it. So yes, I’m sure.”

“Oh. Victor, that's…”

Good of you, I was about to say. But then of course he went on to spoil it. “Don't forget, you promised to talk to Joy for me.”

Quid pro quo, clearly. God forbid he might simply do a fatherly deed, no pay required. So I said nothing as he picked his way over the ice floe formerly known as my front sidewalk.

Ice-melting crystals, my mental list recited automatically; pickaxe, dynamite. Closing the door, I turned back to Sam.

“Listen. I’m sorry, Sam. But I need to ask.”

His face flattened. “What? If I shot up some of that stuff? Got up to my old tricks? Yeah, sure,” he went on, sounding disgusted. “I get high every morning, Mom. Sit there putting my head together with a few sticks of primo reefer, just like the old days.”

Which was exactly what I was scared of: the old days. But then he relented, coming over to drape an arm around me. “Mom. If it makes you feel any better, there's a meeting at the college on Wednesday nights. I’ve been going pretty regular, all semester.”

“What kind of… oh. You mean Narcotics Anonymous?”

He'd quit cold turkey without any meetings when we first came here. “No, it's AA,” he answered. “But it's a program. I figured, school and all, new pressures.”

Oh, terrific. But his face was now untroubled. “Hey, I’m not too proud for a safety net. Besides,” he added with a grin that was pure Sam, “it's a way to meet girls who won't throw up all over the car.”

I swatted at him, quelling the impulse to fling my arms around him. No doubt by now the dratted mouse was snuggled up in the heating pad, chewing on its cord. “Sam, run down cellar and unplug that pad, will you? It's a good idea—”

His face brightened, reminding me to put praise on my mental list more often, too. That he wasn't using drugs was an achievement so huge that I tended not to see it; like a mountain viewed in extreme close-up.

But my son climbed it every day. “I’m not going to be working on the window this afternoon,” I finished, pulling my coat on. “I want to ask Melinda where she was before Bob was attacked,” I added to Ellie as she returned. “Ask her myself.”

Somehow Ellie always knows: when to go, when to come back. “Me, too,” she agreed. “And I want to see her face when she answers.”

Hat, boots, scarf. Outside, a breeze made the naked branches shiver, hinting at weather; a storm was forecast to come up out of the Gulf of Maine, narrowly missing us before veering off over Nova Scotia.

We traversed the front walk to the car; sand, ice pick, plaster leg cast, my mental list recited mercilessly. “You think she'll say? Melinda, I mean?” Ellie asked as we drove down Water Street.

Out on the bay a barge loaded with fish food trundled
through the grey waves toward the salmon pens. “Maybe. If she's got nothing to hide. She might also shed some new light on Peter Christie. Because it sounds to me like Mister Sensitive has got a real dark side.” A familiar profile caught my eye, as if summoned by my thought. “Look, it's him right now.”

He was on his way into the flower shop, carrying Melinda's string shopping bag. A wine bottle poked from the bag's top, and through its mesh I saw what looked like foil-wrapped cheese, French bread, and a box of fancy chocolate.

I slowed the car. He came back out, still too intent on his errand to notice us, a bunch of red carnations in his hand. “Looks like Peter's going courting,” Ellie observed.

“This must be the carrot side of his carrot-and-stick approach,” I agreed as he got into his car, not seeming to notice us.

Minutes later we passed the ferry landing, wooden row houses overlooking it, and the remains of what at the turn of the century was Eastport's gas plant. All that remained now was a massive brick chimney, swathes of round-shouldered red bricks all around it like pools of dark blood. Across the water the snowy hills of New Brunswick were thin white brushstrokes.

“If she's alone…” Ellie began. Then: “Hey. Why are you turning here?”

Melinda's lay straight ahead but I took the left up Clark Street instead. Along one side, a cluster of mobile homes strung with enough Christmas lights to illuminate Times Square huddled around a snowy yard crammed with work trucks, their beds full of toolboxes, ladders, and rubber weather garb. Lobster traps heaped on wooden pallets formed a ragged fence between each mobile home and the next.

“Detour,” I announced. We passed Hillside Cemetery
and came over the hill, looking south toward the inlet of Passamaquoddy Bay and the bridge that spanned it to Canada.

“Oh,” Ellie said comprehendingly. “If he's at Melinda's we can talk to them together.”

“And with a few slugs of that wine in them, to loosen them up,” I agreed. “Let's give them half an hour. Meanwhile, I have a favor to do for Victor.” I let my voice express how eager I felt, as I explained it.

No reply. Ellie believed Victor might make good bait if the fish were very hungry. Otherwise…

“I said I’d talk to Joy,” I told her. “So I will. I don't have to try to persuade her of anything.” Such as for instance that Victor was anything other than trouble. “Besides, she's a smart woman. You saw that. So it's not like it would work, anyway.”

The gold rays of early sunset angled from behind clouds mounting threateningly from the south and the west. A left off Route 190 took us out the old Toll Bridge Road, to a warren of short, interlocking streets: Quoddy Village.

Still no comment from Ellie. “Half an hour, tops, we'll be back in town,” I promised. In the gathering dusk we passed a rusting water tower, a barrackslike building that was once a Navy administration center, and a burnt-out house lot with plumbing pipes jutting up out of its concrete pad.

“Ellie?” I glanced sideways. She looked worried.

“Did you bring your cell phone?” she asked. “To find out if…”

I handed it to her. “To check in about Bob Arnold?”

“Uh-huh.” She tried it. “Jake, it's not working.”

Drat; dead battery, probably. But we weren't going very far. “Remind me to charge it when we get home, please. But we can call from Joy's and see if there's news, if you want.”