Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (10 page)

“He has,” she told Bob, “an identifying feature.” Feeling obscurely foolish, she described Steven Garner Jr.’s protruding ears.

“The guy from yesterday has them, too,” she said. “I’d have probably recognized him just from that, if—”

If she’d had even the slightest idea that anything from the old days would come back to bite her this long afterwards.

“Okay,” Bob exhaled when she’d finished. The cops in the rear offices had put down their phones and were leaning back, drained. “Leave this with me. Anything else happens, you call.”

He hoisted his body from the chair. “One thing’s for sure, whoever sent you that picture went to some trouble to do it.”

She looked quizzically at him. “You ever try to track down somebody’s email address, you don’t know it already?” he asked.

“Oh. Right.”

But someone had learned hers. “Do you want me to bring the laptop down here?” she asked.

He stared out the old bank building’s big glass front door. On the heels of the menagerie, the Little Miss Eastport pageant had begun, frilly-dressed four- and five-year-olds scurrying by.

“Yeah,” he said. “This place is going to be crazy soon. Even crazier than it is now. Crime lab van, state major crimes guys, who knows who all.”

To investigate the death on Sea Street, he meant, because it probably had been an accident. But it wasn’t
officially
one until the medical examiner
said
it was one.

“Guess I’ll have to close my plant room,” he added. The bank vault was what he used for an evidence lockup. But in Eastport there was so little call for secure evidence storage that nowadays he had a grow light in there, with African violets blooming under it.

“Portland’s got a fancy new division for computer crime; we can ask them for help.”

The little girls outside wore white nylon anklets with lacy ruffles, and shiny patent leather shoes. She wondered suddenly whether the Sea Street victim had been in the pageant, once.

“What was her name?” She looked up at Bob’s grim face. “On the paperwork, I mean, that the Sea Street victim had.”

“I don’t want to say yet, Jake.” News like that, he didn’t want the next of kin finding it out from someone else.

Not that hearing it out of a cop’s mouth made it any better. “But I can tell you this much. We’re not going to confirm an ID by asking the relatives to view the body.”

Brr
, Jake thought, understanding what he must have meant. “And I don’t want anyone seeing her who doesn’t have to,” he added.

Ellie turned. “Why not? Isn’t that usually the way they—”

He shook his head. “Not this time. They’ll know her clothes and personal items, probably. Some jewelry, pretty much makes the case for who she is, seems to me.”

He sighed sorrowfully. “But that forty-foot drop broke every bone in her face and a whole lot of them in the rest of her body, too.”

He gazed out at the bright day. “If she hadn’t left a purse and a half-drunk bottle of beer at the top of the cliff, I wouldn’t be thinking now that she either fell or jumped off it.”

Outside, some kids chased one another with cans of Silly String. A red, white, and blue Model T juddered by, lurching and backfiring.

“Bashed up the way she was,” Bob finished somberly, “I’d be thinking someone must’ve beaten her to death.”

• • •

BELLA WAS AT THE DINING ROOM TABLE WITH THE LAPTOP
open when Jake and Ellie returned from seeing Bob Arnold. The awful picture was on the screen; she turned haggardly to them.

“Oh,” Jake said, realizing in horror what must’ve happened. “Bella, I’m so sorry, I should have warned you not to—”

Although it was Jake’s machine, as she’d been reminded only the night before, everyone in the house used it.

“I was hunting up a fish chowder recipe,” Bella whispered. “A while ago, I’d deleted the email that it came in, and—”

And when she’d opened the mail program to look in the trash folder for it, the photograph appeared. Jake put her arms around the older woman’s bony shoulders.

“You poor thing, to have that pop up at you.”

Bella was rugged, but no one was tough enough to see that without being affected. “Come on,” Jake said. “We’ll go out to the kitchen and I’ll make you a nice cup of—”

Tea
, she was about to finish, but before she could, Prill the Doberman came flying out from where she’d been lying half asleep under the dining room table. With a volley of ferocious barking, the big dog charged to the back hall.

By the time Jake caught up to her, with Ellie right behind, the back door was closing. A blur sped away from the back porch.

A
familiar
blur … “After him!” shouted Bella, and dashed out herself, across the back porch and down the steps into the street before Jake could do anything about it.

“Bella!” She grabbed at Prill’s stubby tail as the dog shot out, too, missed it, and watched the animal gallop after Bella and their unwelcome visitor, speeding away on his bike.

“Stop! Bella! Prill!” Jake shouted, but neither of them heard her. Bella was making way too much noise herself, squawking out a series of threats in language that Jake had never before heard from the bony old woman.

Meanwhile, Prill’s angry barking covered Bella’s use of curse
words—loud, varied, and surprisingly creative—in a way that Bella would probably find pretty convenient later, in the you-must’ve-misheard-me, I-never-said-that department.

The bike rider reached the corner and vanished around it, the bell still
brring!
-ing tauntingly. Prill and Bella followed, but moments later they returned, winded.

“Oh, if I could’ve got my hands on him,” Bella panted out, her big, work-reddened hands making wringing motions that for once had nothing to do with dishcloths.

Whining, the big red Doberman scrambled up the back porch and wriggled into Jake’s arms. “Okay, girl,” Jake whispered with her face buried in the dog’s smooth neck. She was so glad to see them both back unharmed, she had no energy for scolding.

Because if they’d caught him, she didn’t know what he might do. And nothing would be worth losing either one of them.…

“Everything’s okay now.” But it wasn’t, for just inside the back door lay a small box.

A cracker box, taped shut … Lifting it cautiously, Jake felt a small, soft weight shift inside.

I’ll bet that’s not anything good
, she thought clearly.

It wasn’t.

LONG AGO IN MANHATTAN, JAKE HAD LEARNED A FEW THINGS
from her crooked clients, including what message a package with a dead rat in it was meant to convey: that you were a rat, too.

And that you were as good as dead.

“Okay, let me get this straight,” said Wade. “First, some strange guy rides by the house on a bike, saying hostile things to you.”

He and the other men had finished prepping the barge and the support boats for the professional team that would be detonating the fireworks tonight. Now he was driving her around town in his pickup truck, trying to calm her down.

“Yes, but Wade, they weren’t just any hostile things.”

On the sidewalk, little kids waved flags. Ahead, a flatbed truck sported a dozen folding chairs and a sign reading
WELCOME CLASS OF 1972!!!

“He was saying I’d done something, that murder will out. And now I know what that means.”

Wade waited for the flatbed to pull through the intersection onto Washington Street. As it began its sharp uphill course past the post office building, all the chairs fell over.

“Okay. So who is he?” Wade asked as they passed the white clapboard Baptist church building, now home to the Arts Center. Along the sidewalk on both sides of the street, people already had set blankets and lawn chairs out for the parade later.

“Someone from back in Manhattan,” she admitted reluctantly. “Because … listen, you know I was no angel back then, right?”

Wade steered the truck along Deep Cove Road. “Jake, whatever happened, the important thing is that it
was
back then. And this is
now
. And,” he added reassuringly, “I do know the difference.”

Relief flooded her. “And try to relax, will you?” he went on. “Because right now, at least, I’d say you’re fairly safe.”

For emphasis, he angled his head at the shotgun racked in the rear window. The ammo boxed under the seat was only birdshot, but an assailant would find it persuasive enough.

Wade himself, squarely built and with the kind of blocky fists that could double as wrecking balls, was pretty persuasive-looking, too. She let her head rest against his shoulder.

“Thanks.” Swiftly she summarized Steven Garner Jr.’s grievance against her, that he believed she was responsible for the death of his father.

There was, she decided, no need to go into the gory details. Or that she was convinced the dead girl down on Sea Street was somehow involved.

Because that really was just speculation.… “What I don’t get,
though, is why he’s decided to come after me now, after all this time. And … how’d he find me?” she asked Wade. “How did he get my email address?”

The truck sailed down a long hill and through an S curve. “That’s easy,” he replied. “The new town address book.”

“Oh,” she breathed. The Eastport Improvement Society had made a project out of collecting the email addresses of everyone in town.

“Of course. That must be it.” A town email directory would improve interpersonal networking, the Society group had said. But the net they had created was likely the one she’d been caught in.

Out Deep Cove Road, the water spread sapphire-blue and sparkling. A heron stalked the shallows, deliberately lifting first one long, sticklike leg and then the other.

Wade turned the truck into Shackford Head State Park. In the lot overlooking the cove, they got out into a silence broken only by the breeze in the old trees.

Wade slung his arm around her. “Come on, let’s stretch our legs. No one can find you out here, I guarantee it.”

They climbed a narrow path, crossed a plank boardwalk over a shallow bog teeming with life, and emerged into a forest where massive tree trunks held up an arching roof of evergreen boughs.

Shafts of sunlight slanted down, as solid appearing as gold bars. “So the big ears are the identifying feature,” Wade said.

She understood: he was talking about how to recognize Steven Garner Jr., so he could do something to him.

Nothing too terrible. Just enough to make him cut it out, which ordinarily Jake could’ve endorsed, no problem. But she had a bad feeling that this time Wade’s approach might backfire.

“If he gets beaten up, he might get madder at me.”

Wade himself wouldn’t even have to do the deed. A longtime downeast Maine native, her husband had friends and relatives all over the county, many of them as solidly put together and battle ready as he was, at least in the fisticuffs department. All Wade would have to do was pass the word, and Steven Jr. was toast. But:

“Jake, you know me. I won’t hurt the guy.”

Ha
, she thought, because she did know him. And what he meant was he wouldn’t hurt him
much
.

“But,” he went on reasonably, “it’s going to take a while to get any action out of the Portland police, don’t you think?”

Of course it would. Meanwhile, Garner was here now.

“And,” he added, “this business has captured my attention.”

Which was what he always said when he was provoked past all reason but didn’t want to alarm her. Because in Eastport, it was very well known that if you captured Wade Sorenson’s attention, he might react by capturing you.

And then
your
attention would get captured. “But, Wade,” she began again.

“All right, all right,” he gave in easily. “No clobbering. Word of honor. But don’t worry, we’ll figure a way to fix this.”

They emerged from among the evergreens onto a trail leading slantwise across a steep granite slope. Patches of scrubby grass and pale, greenish-gray lichens grew in the thin soil.

High over the water, the trail’s end was like the prow of a great ship. Jake stretched, letting the wind blow through her.

Wade stood beside her. “I won’t do anything,” he told her again, which reassured her so much that she forgot to make him promise also not to tell anyone else about Garner’s antics.

Such as, for instance, those friends and relatives all over the county.

T
HE EARLY ROMANS USED TO MAKE CONCRETE, DID YOU
know that?” said Ellie later that morning. They were out in the backyard of Jake’s house on Key Street, mixing concrete.

Jake attached the hose to the outdoor spigot. They could have used premixed concrete and saved themselves some trouble.

But she had some bags of sand to get rid of, left over from other projects, and opportunities to use fifty-pound bags of sand didn’t just happen along every day. Thank goodness.

“Nope,” she said. The morning had bloomed into a day of sparkling
sunshine. The warmed air was fruity with the perfume of blooming beach roses.

But a fog bank hung on the horizon. “I wish the early Romans were doing it right now, though, instead of me,” she added.