Bunker 01 - Slipknot (9 page)

L i n d a G r e e n l a w

dash in its hand-crocheted American-flag coat was another reminder to me that good taste is not universal. Alice had promised a similar cover for the tiny bathroom in the apartment I rented from them. So far it had not been produced, and I hoped that Betsy Ross might renege.

Strangely enough, I liked my landlords very much but was careful to keep them at arm’s length, as they would, I thought, gladly take over my life if given the opportunity.

The rental apartment over the Vickersons’ business space and next door to their residence of fifty years was affordable and clean, the only two adjectives requisite in my short search for quarters in Green Haven. Henry and Alice were a bonus, in a way, since they were a wealth of information as well as a source of food and entertainment. Their business, the Lobster Trappe, was what could best be described as a self-contained flea market. Nautical fleas, that is.

Although it was just approaching five-thirty, I felt like a teenager sneaking in after curfew as I tiptoed through the maze of inventory for sale in the yard. I was looking forward to spreading out all the notes and reports I had gathered, and hoped to tie up some loose ends. After my official duties were out of the way, I planned to spend some time on my extracurricular project. Some time alone might help me connect the fragments. The death of Nick Dow, pending fishing regulations, the wind farm proposal, Ginny Turner and her plant, Lucy Hamilton’s strange behavior, and the town meeting in such a small community must be linked.

Ducking under lobster buoy birdhouses and wind chimes and around tables displaying dory window boxes and codfish s l i p k n o t

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weathervanes, I weaved my way to the entrance. A large sign over the front door that read the lobster trappe was another testimonial to Alice’s taste and Henry’s handiwork. It was shaped like a crusher claw, and the bold black lettering stood out sharply against the obligatory red background. The lobster is to Maine’s tourism economy what the alligator is to Florida’s, I thought. Somewhere in the middle of this country are households whose windowsills are full of pure junk mem-orabilia carted home from East Coast vacations. I thought it might be prudent for the boards of tourism in various states to regulate the crap sold that is supposed to represent something worthy of a midwestern family’s annual one-week road trip.

Does there exist a happy couple in Kansas actually wearing T-shirts stating that maine is for lovers and i got crabs in maine? Or is there a man in Utah sporting a shirt that says i got scrod in bar harbor? How could this possibly contribute in a positive way to the local economy?

Digging a key from the bottom of my bag, I chuckled and wondered why the landlords bothered with a lock. Was there any possibility that someone might trespass and steal something that had probably washed up on the beach? Closing the door behind me, I laughed again at the list of store hours, with the new addition of or by appointment—367-2216. Did there exist a potential customer who might call for an exclusive showing of this assortment of junk? Driftwood and beach glass, knickknacks, sand-dollar and starfish Christmas ornaments, used bait bags, miniature lobster-buoy key chains, and T-shirts silk-screened ayuh! lined the corridor to the back of the showroom, where I climbed the stairs to my place.

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After gently closing the door behind me, I dropped my bag on the wooden crate that served as a coffee table and hung my jacket on a peg beside the door. I removed the clips that had held my effort to grow out bangs tight to my scalp all day. I sighed as my body relaxed, with my hair free to dangle.

I hung on the refrigerator door and searched the cool space for anything that might resemble dinner. Emerging empty-handed, I promised myself a trip to the grocery store in the morning. I missed the daily three-dollar lunch specials of more rice and beans than I could eat at my favorite Cuban spot in the old neighborhood. I wasn’t much of a cook. In fact, the rare occasions upon which I made the effort to produce anything more elaborate than a sandwich or bowl of cereal had been during my very few weeks of blissful live-in relationships so sporadically scattered over the last twenty years.

I was not one to recall certain dates in my personal history; rather, I marked the passage of eras with the evacuation or eviction of myself from some corresponding, once wonderful, albeit brief tryst. I hadn’t made the grade of detective in 1989; I’d made the grade of detective after Vincent and prior to David. I hadn’t taken all of my mother’s advice, but what she had told me about men seemed to stick. In her opinion, men should be treated as library books. They should be borrowed and, when nothing more could be learned from them, returned. I had certainly avoided late fees. Now, in my usual

“between men” status, I threw a handful of Orville Reden-bacher into a pot and onto the stove.

“Hail to the popcorn,” I muttered as I absentmindedly s l i p k n o t

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emptied the contents of my sailcloth bag onto the top of the round cable spool serving as the kitchen table. Fresh flowers stood erect in a vase that just fitted in the hole in the center of the table—the thoughtful yet disturbing touch of Alice Vickerson, who apparently wandered in and out at will. Setting my laptop computer on the table between the bouquet and me, I plugged the end of a cord into the side of my camera and began to download all of my photos to date. Once the download was complete, I organized groups of shots into separate files, the most interesting to me being the file I labeled “Dow,” which consisted of a series of pictures of his corpse on the beach.

Clicking through the photos slide-show fashion, I paused on a full-length shot of the body. Something looked amiss.

Zooming in, I blew up Dow’s midsection and focused on the knot that secured his rope belt. Strange choice of knots, I thought. Having spent most of my summer vacations at sea, I was somewhat of a knot know-it-all. The slipped sheet bend appeared to have been tied backward. I wondered if Dow might have been left-handed. Dismissing this as inconsequential, I shut down the computer and tackled the mountain of paperwork required by my employer. As I shuffled a stack of insurance forms, the phone rang, causing me to drop the pages and lunge for the telephone. “Hello,” I answered.

“Hi, Miss Bunker. This is Cal. Sorry to bother you, dear, but I have a cousin who works at the county lab in Ellsworth, where the autopsies and toxicology stuff are done. She just called, and of course, this is on the QT, but I thought you might like to know the results of the tests on Nick Dow.”

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I was both surprised and pleased that Cal had phoned. As I tried to pry the results of the tests from him, his end of the conversation became abrupt. Cal shed light only on the phrase

“clammed up.” The harder I pushed, the tighter his shell squeezed together. I imagined him nervously fingering a cigarette. As with clams, the water runs from the closed shell as through a sieve. But the meat remains concealed until the mussel hinging the shell relaxes.

I swore an oath of secrecy and listened patiently as Cal explained how his cousin could lose her job if word got out that she had shared confidential information. All water, no meat.

As Cal told the cousin’s life history and why this job was so important to her, I was distracted by Alice Vickerson, who was waving at me through two panes of glass. I waved back, wishing I could escape full exposure to my landlords while on the phone, but the curly cord kept me tethered to the wall and directly in front of windows facing the Vickersons’. Alice held up an index finger, indicating that I should wait for something, and disappeared.

I listened as Cal continued pissing the watery, irrelevant information on and on about his cousin and this bit of classi-fied information that he would like to deliver in person. I assumed that Cal had learned from his cousin what I already suspected. Dow had not fallen onto a rock or drowned but in fact had been struck from behind with a large, heavy instrument. Cal’s hesitancy to deliver this news over the phone was understandable. Accidental death was now murder, and murder was not commonplace here. Cal again went on to explain s l i p k n o t

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what kind of trouble this would be for his cousin if the leak were to be detected.

I was mentally forming a list of suspects in what had just been confirmed, to me at least, as the murder of Nick Dow.

“Will you take me to Dow’s house?” I asked. “We can discuss the lab results on the way.”

“Oh, geez, I don’t know, Miss Bunker. That might be dangerous.” Cal sounded apologetic.

“I’ll go alone, but I’ll need directions.” As I waited for Cal’s reply, Alice reappeared in the window below and held up a large strip of cardboard on which was printed dinner? I flashed a thumbs-up and immediately regretted doing so, but my regrets were fleeting, as my focus was on getting to Dow’s for a snooping expedition.

Cal had resumed his nervous economy of word. “Going alone. Bad idea.”

“Then take me! You can wait outside in your truck.”

“No. No good.”

“I’m a big girl. All I need are directions. Please, Cal?” I nearly inadvertently called him Clam.

“The wife goes to church tonight.” Cal’s tone had softened to contemplation.

“What time can you be here?”

“Oh, geez. Eight.”

The distinct stench of burning popcorn spun me from the window, which wound the phone cord around my shoulders.

The top of the stove was on fire, and black smoke billowed to the ceiling, where it quickly engulfed the fire alarm, sending

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a shrill beeping to anyone within quite a radius. “See you at eight!” I moved quickly toward the blazing stovetop, ripping the phone’s base from the wall. I turned off the gas burner, but the flames had already climbed the wallpaper and were consuming an oil painting of the Gorton’s fisherman and its driftwood frame. In the seconds it took for me to decide to leave the apartment rather than attempt to reconnect the phone and call 911, Henry Vickerson flew through the door with an extinguisher blazing, his tiny wife following close behind. Although the fire was doused immediately, Henry continued to spray the extinguisher until its contents were totally exhausted. A yellow chemical dust settled and coated all hor-izontal surfaces in the kitchenette while the smoke slowly found the open door.

I wondered what was appropriate in this situation. What should one say first? “I’m sorry” or “thank you”? I stood with the dead receiver still pressed to my ear and the cord wrapped tightly around my chest, the rest of the phone and a small piece of plaster resting against a thigh. “I was going to call the fire department,” I said.

“Ha! Just as well you didn’t,” Henry said as he peered at me over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “The Green Haven Cellar Savers—that’s what everyone calls them. This would have become a controlled burn of the entire neighborhood!” Draping an arm around the shoulders of his petite redheaded sidekick, he added, “You should have been here when they were training volunteers up in Boyce’s blueberry fields.”

“Oh, it was just awful!” said Alice gleefully. “If firefighters s l i p k n o t

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from all over Maine hadn’t arrived, Green Haven would have looked like your popcorn!” The elderly couple shared a look and broke into laughter.

I extracted myself from the entwining cord and set the phone on the spool table. “I’m so sorry. How careless of me.

Look at this mess! Of course, I’ll be responsible for all repairs and cleaning. You won’t evict me, will you?”

“Evict? Are you kidding?” Henry peered at me over the top of his glasses again. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to us since the storm of seventy-eight! What a nightmare. Remember that, dear?” he asked Alice.

“Like it was yesterday,” Alice replied. “The kids were out of school for two weeks, helping clean up the shore. I’ve never made so many sandwiches in my life. Not to mention the loss of power. Try flushing toilets with buckets of ocean lugged up that hill! It was great!”

Somewhat amused with being compared to their local epic disaster, I smiled. “Am I still invited to dinner?”

“You bet! Come on, dear.” Alice pulled Henry toward the door. “He’ll get the shop vac and get the dust up while I get the food on. We’ll worry about the rest tomorrow, while you’re at work. You can set the table for us. We need to get you out of here by eight. And when you come home, we’ll expect a full report. We want the straight skinny on the lab results. I’ll bet that bum was high on drugs!”

How could the Vickersons know what Cal had told me in confidence? Could these innocent-looking elderly folks possibly have bugged the apartment?

Before I could either play dumb or confront the spies,

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Alice came clean. “We share a party phone line with you.

When you or we get a call, the phone rings in both places.

Didn’t we tell you that? You jumped on the phone before we could tell whether it was your ring or our ring. Because we were expecting a call, Henry picked up.” Now I realized why Cal had done the clam impersonation—party phone lines must be common in Green Haven.

“And listened?” I asked.

“Guilty. Both of us. Speakerphone.”

Bewildered by the total lack of privacy in my home, I swallowed hard. I now clearly recalled the Vickersons’ explanation of the party line, but I found it impossible not to pounce on a ringing phone. Was my ring two longs and a short? I decided it didn’t really matter much that they’d overheard my conversation. Cal hadn’t divulged anything to “us”

other than his cousin’s problems. I assumed that the news of a murder would travel quickly, so the Vickersons would be only a half-step ahead of the rest of Green Haven, and only if I chose to share Cal’s secret information. The Vickersons assumed that the info would include evidence of drug abuse, which would support a theory of accidental death. I did not have to tell them that Dow’s head had been brutally smashed from behind, as I knew Cal would confirm at eight. Obediently following Alice, I hustled to keep up with her short, rapid strides. In an attempt to leaven my thoughts and join my landlords in their amazingly lighthearted acceptance of the near-disaster, I said, “Whoa, Mrs. V. Where’s the fire?”