Mallets Aforethought (17 page)

“Actually that’s what we wanted to ask you about,” Ellie put in. “Hector Gosling being dead.”

Another look, this time a little less friendly. A yellow cat jumped onto Ginger’s lap and settled there.

“Yeah, I didn’t think you two were selling Avon,” she said.
And especially not you,
her look added to me.

Hey, not everyone can resemble a Viking goddess. It was cold on the porch so my lips were probably pale blue against my ghost-white skin. Any tan I get during the summer fades promptly, any makeup I try stands out like paint on the side of a barn, and my hair probably looked as if it had been styled with an egg beater.

“Poor kitty,” Ginger told the cat. “But you’re staying out while I’m gone or you’ll claw the furniture.”

The cat meowed as if in grudging acceptance of this dictum.

“Anyway,” Ellie said, “we heard Hector wasn’t very nice to you.”

From the screened porch you could look downhill fifty feet through the birches and some huckleberry shrubbery to the water. A pebble path led to a rickety dock.

“No. He wasn’t,” Ginger agreed placidly.

The place was so backwoods-beautiful, it wasn’t obvious at first how desperately poor it was. There was a burn-barrel for the trash, a fraying clothesline with a few rusty pins clipped to it for laundry. Thick sheets of plastic had been affixed with nails and cardboard furring strips to the trailer windows to save on heat.

“Hector broke up a romance?” I probed. “Because that’s what we heard. It’s what people are saying. Siss Moore, for one.”

Ginger turned to me, her astonishing blue eyes suddenly full of angry tears. “Well then, it must be true.”

She got up. A cane leaned by her chair but she either didn’t see it or wouldn’t use it in front of us. “When I was in school Mrs. Moore wanted to take me under her wing. She picks someone every year, a deserving candidate.”

She gave the last words a bitter twist. “Starts sticking her nose in their business. ‘You’re smart, you should do so-and-so.’ ”

Staring at the water lapping the dock pilings, she went on. “But if you didn’t take her advice she turned on you. I’ve heard that later she wised up, figured out why some kids avoided her.”

The way Tommy was avoiding Siss Moore now, I remembered. “Anyway,” Ginger added, “she got it right about what Mr. Gosling did to me. As if he hadn’t done enough.”

I wanted to ask about the “enough” part. Enough what? But she hurried on. “His name was Mark Timberlake. We were going to be married. He’s in the merchant marine.”

Head high, voice steady. Ginger wasn’t the type who enjoyed letting you in on her private troubles. On the table beside her chair were a stack of chess books and a little chess computer, a wooden flute and a leaflet that promised it could teach you to play, and a big tapestry knitting bag.

It was the gear of a self-sufficient and intensely private person. “Then what happened?” I asked.

“And then Mr. Gosling got to him. He said Mark wasn’t good enough for me, kept at me to change my mind, do what he said and end the engagement. All he really wanted was to keep me working for him. He could tell Mark didn’t like him, wouldn’t have wanted me to stay in the job.”

“But you wouldn’t break the engagement. And you didn’t quit before you got married because . . .”

Another laugh, harsher this time. “Because what if it ended up turning out I didn’t get married? Jobs don’t grow on trees around here, in case you haven’t noticed it. And for me it’s always twice as hard because people don’t think I can work.”

She waved the ruined hand. “Or if it’s a company they can’t afford me on their insurance. It’s not what they say, of course. They’re not allowed to discriminate against me. But they do it anyway. They just tell me some other reason. Everyone does what they have to do to survive, right?”

Interesting comment. “Including you?”

Sam was considering a stint in the merchant marine. For the right type of person, working aboard the big freighters offered a solid career and a harsh but not impossible existence. You could climb the promotion and pay scale, and the job offered excellent benefits. The downside was that you were away most of the time, your loved ones just snapshots in your wallet. For newlyweds in love it would be terribly difficult.

But Ginger hadn’t said she loved him, had she?

She hadn’t said that. “How did Hector ‘get to him’?” I asked.

She frowned down at her shoes: one ordinary sneaker, one big complicated piece of machinery. “I don’t know. I got a call from Mark, all worried. First he wanted me to marry him right away and when I wouldn’t do that he did a sudden turnaround, said maybe we’d better call it all off. I hung up on him before he could say anything even worse. Like maybe he never really wanted to. Or at least not enough.”

Ellie had been silent. She spoke up now. “What makes you think that Hector had anything to do with it? Couldn’t it be that this guy just . . . chickened out?” Her shoulders moved helplessly as Ginger and I looked at her. “Hey, it happens,” she said.

But Ginger’s face denied this. “You’d have to know Mark. He wasn’t . . .”

She turned back to me. “I know what you were thinking. I saw it in your face. You think I didn’t love him. But it’s not true. I did. I just wasn’t brave enough to give up the job in advance, because I couldn’t believe it.”

Her inability to credit such good fortune remained in her eyes; that and the new pain of realizing she’d been correct to proceed with caution. “I mean, I couldn’t believe he loved me. And,” she finished briskly, “it turns out he didn’t. He caved in to Hector, and if he would do that he’s no good to me.”

A car pulled in. The driver, a woman, remained behind the wheel. “That’s my ride,” Ginger told us as it arrived. “To the new job interview. I have to go.”

She pulled on a battered old sheepskin jacket. I’d seen it in the thrift shop in Eastport a few weeks earlier.

“The jacket looks great on you.” It did, too; some people redeem their clothes, and Ginger was one of them. The messed-up hand and leg were just things she carried around; in every other way she seemed one of the healthier and more resilient women I’d ever met.

And among the best at facing hard truths. She beamed briefly at the compliment. “Yeah, huh? And it’s warm. Okay, I’m coming,” she called toward the waiting car when its horn tooted gently in summons.

“How exactly did Hector scare your boyfriend off?” I asked as she moved away from us. Because I thought she did know. Two young lovers, telling one another everything as lovers tended to do . . . it didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t.

Her gait, the kick-forward-and-lock stride of the practiced prosthetic-wearer, was painful to see. Not for esthetic reasons; the woman was too damned gorgeous for her looks to be spoiled by that. But it hurt. You could see it in her face: every step shot a zing of anguish through her.

“What’d Hector have on him?” I persisted.

She stopped, her back still turned to me. Her torso shifted under the reindeer sweater, to ease itself in the brace I suddenly realized she must be wearing.

“I don’t know,” she repeated stubbornly. “I just know it was something. And Mr. Gosling must have known that it would work, because the day after Mark broke off our engagement Mr. Gosling didn’t try to make
me
break it off anymore. He just didn’t talk about it, so I knew he knew already. And . . . he had the look on his face.”

She didn’t have to explain. I’d heard somebody say once that Hector Gosling’s
gotcha
look was like the face of an evil tomcat after it had just finished eating up all the canaries. He looked especially satisfied, the person had gone on to say, if they were your
favorite
canaries.

The person being George. “Anyway, I have to go,” Ginger said. She made her way to the passenger side of the car, a white sedan with the name of a local health agency on the door.

“How’d Siss Moore know about it?” I asked.

“Mr. Gosling probably bragged about it,” Ginger replied at once.

Bingo; that was Hector, all right. “Mark hasn’t been back? You haven’t seen him or heard from him since the phone call?”

By now I was convinced of one thing, anyway. Ginger hadn’t hauled Hector from where he’d been killed, up a ladder and into a hidden room. She had enough trouble just hauling herself around.

“No. I haven’t heard from him and don’t want to. I won’t put myself in the position of being let down again.”

She got herself into the car and slammed the door hard as if to punctuate her final statement. It backed out the drive and was gone, leaving us standing outside Ginger’s beat-up trailer.

Which turned out to be her mistake. For all her I’ll-do-it-myself-dammit demeanor, the grit and solitariness that must have been at times terribly lonely, even her caution in love . . .

For all of that, she was too trusting.

She had believed that once she left, we’d go too.

Wrong.

“Listen, you got me out here,” I told a reluctant Ellie as I fiddled with the lock on Ginger’s door. “And now that I am here, there’s something I want to know.”

It was the kind of setup that if you turned the knob from inside, it unlocked: a safety feature unless you were a burglar.

But if you were one, it was a convenience feature. I pulled the oblong plastic tab that held my movie-rental bar code from my wallet and weaseled it in between the door and the doorjamb.

“And she’s not coming back soon, so stop worrying about it,” I said. “That girl wouldn’t miss a job interview if someone cut her other leg off.”

Ellie glanced nervously around the trailer’s clearing, gold leaves carpeting the raggedy grass areas and more floating down. The silence was amazing. Only the rippledy-slap of waves against the dock broke the autumn serenity.

“Jake, we’re breaking into her place, for heaven’s sake. We can’t just . . .”

“Baloney and cheese,” I reminded her, “on Wonder Bread. And it’s jail food so it’s
processed
cheese. With a packet of yellow mustard. Those potato chips are rubbery and the instant coffee is barely lukewarm, with that white powder floating on it.”

Ellie’s face hardened before I finished speaking. “Just get the damn door open,” she told me.

I wiggled the plastic bar-code tab again. There was a metal strip over the opening between door and frame but it had been pried at in the past, maybe before Ginger owned the trailer, so it offered the lock-set no protection.

The lock popped with a soft
chuck!
and the door swung wide.

“In like Flynn,” I announced. “Come on.”

Ellie followed and I shut the door behind us, noticing that the yellow cat had slipped in too. “Now, where is it?”

I looked around at the toy-sized sink and stove, the box refrigerator, a tiny seating area, and a bath hardly bigger than an airliner restroom plus a curtained sleeping bunk at the rear.

Where was the damned computer? Of course she would have one, I’d concluded after seeing the chess-dedicated one on the porch, and despite the cost I was willing to bet she was online. E-mail and chat rooms are the default social life of your standard Lonely Guy.

Or Girl. “There.” I located the very basic but serviceable machine in the corner of the small living area, fired it up, and clicked the dial-up icon. A minute later a list of recent e-mails scrolled down the screen.

“Okay.” There were a bunch from someone named Mark. I doubted there were two important men named Mark in Ginger’s life. Ellie watched over my shoulder as I moved the mouse across the pad and clicked on the most recent e-mail, dated the previous night.

Before I could read it, though, a noise came from outside. It could have been the wind rustling the few remaining leaves in the birch trees or someone on the gravel path leading down to the dock and the lake.

But it wasn’t. It was that damned little white sedan that I’d promised Ellie wouldn’t come back, turning into the driveway.

I stabbed the power switch on the computer, grabbed Ellie, and we booked out of there so fast that by the time the car made it to the clearing we were in my own car with the engine started.

“Forget something?” I asked as Ginger got out of the sedan. Hey, the best defense and all that.

She eyed us both questioningly. “My job application. I left it in a desk drawer. Did you want something else?”

Translation:
What the hell are you still doing here?
But I’d learned long ago from Jemmy Wechsler what to say when my hand got caught near the cookie jar.

Never apologize; never explain. “No. We were just leaving.”

Ginger stood watching as I backed around the sedan and out the drive. I was nearly to the paved road when she finally turned and went on into the trailer.

“Did we lock it on our way out?” Ellie asked me.

I headed back toward Eastport. “Uh-huh.”

“Okay, then. Maybe she won’t notice.”

“That we were in there? Oh, she’ll notice.”

I drove a little faster. Ginger said she hadn’t heard from this Mark guy she’d been engaged to. But she had, and though she couldn’t haul Hector’s body around, he probably could.

Now I needed to find out what Hector Gosling had held over Mark Timberlake, and when Mark’s ship had last visited Eastport.

“I don’t see why she should notice,” Ellie objected. “I know you didn’t shut the computer down. So it’ll go through its disk-checking routine when she starts it again. But maybe she’ll just think
she
—”

“Shut it down wrong last time? Maybe.”

I’d done it myself: snapped the switch off absentmindedly, not going through the steps the computer instructions prescribed. And I’d been surprised the next time I turned the computer on to realize I’d made this error.

“But that’s not how she’ll know. Think about it, Ellie. What’s the last thing you saw just now?”

“Oh,” she said. “We let . . .”

“Right. So we know she lied. But she also
knows
we know.”

Because the last thing we’d seen as we backed away from the trailer was the grin on the face of the cat that Ginger had left outdoors.

Sitting in the window, licking its paw, behaving for all the world as if it belonged there.
Inside.