Mallets Aforethought (8 page)

Will was in the kitchen when I came back inside. “Hey, good job on those steps at Harlequin House,” he said. “I was driving by and saw them.”

“Thanks. But how’d you know it was me?”

“Well,” he smiled, tipping his head, “the rest of the volunteers are a little shy with the hammer-and-nails stuff. You seem like the only one willing to bash something apart to fix it. I wish there were a few more like you.”

“Oh,” I said, pleased. Hardly anyone ever compliments me for bashing things apart.

“Actually, there are some other things that could use your attention,” he went on. “I made up a list.”

He pulled it from his pocket. “There’s a window on the first floor that won’t come out. The side trim needs a crowbar. And on the second floor, the ladies want to wallpaper over a hole. Could you maybe plaster it first? You know, just fill it so you can’t put a fist through the wallpaper.”

I felt taken aback. This hardly seemed the time or place for going over fix-up plans. But Will continued.

“. . . washstand in the kitchen lavatory. I hate to say it but someone’s going to have to take a sledgehammer to that.”

He grinned winningly at me. “Seems right up your alley.”

It was. But . . .

“Will, don’t you think we should postpone the repair plans? Maybe until tomorrow? After all, with George being accused of a murder, I don’t think . . .”

He was shaking his head. “No. Absolutely not. Everything can go on just as it has been, and in fact it should. Because look,” he added as my face must have shown the doubt I was feeling, “George didn’t do it,” he said earnestly. “You know it, I know it, and pretty soon the police are going to know it, too. That they’ve made a mistake.”

His shoulders straightened. “Tonight of course Ellie’s upset and she needs us here, for support. But starting tomorrow, we all have to hold our heads up, and show by our behavior that we know how this is going to come out for George. That he’s innocent, and that’s all there is to that.”

I have to admit his ringing endorsement went a long way toward making me feel better. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Okay, you give me the list and I’ll see what I can do about it.”

“Great. Maybe George will even be back in time to bash that washstand apart,” he finished encouragingly, and went on into the parlor while I stood thinking about what he had said.

That George was innocent, and the cops would realize it. Of course, about the former part of the statement I was sure. I just wished I had as much confidence as Will did in the latter part.

Distantly I heard Will gently persuading Ellie into conversation, which I thought was probably a good thing. He had located Clarissa Arnold somehow, too. Now he was easing this waiting time for Ellie until Clarissa called back.

Alone in the kitchen, I looked around. The woodstove burned steadily with a sound like tinfoil being crumpled. On the freshly waxed floor lay not a speck of ash or other mess. The fixtures gleamed, the windows glittered behind crisp lace-trimmed gingham tiebacks, and the appliances, counters, and cooking surfaces were so clean that Victor could have done surgery on them.

All George’s work. Ellie said the only thing she wanted him cleaning was his plate but lately he hadn’t been letting her lift a finger. Between that and his own jobs, dawn to midnight in his effort to earn enough to take care of the baby, I didn’t see how he’d have had the time to do any bad deeds.

So why wouldn’t he clear himself by revealing where he had been when Hector Gosling was murdered? As I joined the others waiting in the parlor for Clarissa Arnold’s promised call, I had an unhappy suspicion that I already knew.

“Once upon a time,” Ellie said slowly, in the age-old way that people have always begun telling stories: to quiet children, or to entertain the company.

Or to pass a terrible time. The lamps were dimmed in the small, low-ceilinged room with its worn Oriental rugs, polished brass andirons, and drawn curtains. Ellie sat in the big old overstuffed armchair with her feet on a hassock; someone—Will Bonnet, I supposed—had draped a shawl over her shoulders.

“Once upon a time, Harlequin House belonged to my great-uncle, Chester Harlequin, who after Benedict Arnold was probably the most disgraced man ever to live in Maine.”

Her voice was weary. The telephone sat on a table by her chair. I willed it to ring.

It didn’t. “In those days, Eastport was smugglers’ heaven,” she continued. “Whiskey or the ingredients to make it came over the border so fast, people joked they should call the St. John River the Mash-issippi. For sour mash,” she explained with a wan smile.

Wade sat beside me on the loveseat before the fireplace. The room was warm but I shivered even with the fire blazing. Wade put his arm around me and I leaned gratefully against him.

“All the little coves and inlets around Passamaquoddy Bay, hundreds of islands, there’s lots of places to hide things,” Will Bonnet said. Ellie smiled wearily, letting him take this part.

“George and I used to explore ’em when we were kids, in his little boat. We’d pretend we were smugglers and Hopley Yeaton’s men were chasing us in their cutters. When,” he added, “George wasn’t busy getting my tail out of some fool trouble or another.”

“Hopley Yeaton,” Ellie informed the rest of us, “was the founder of the Coast Guard. His house,” she added to me, “is older than yours. 1812, I think. That red one across from the gas station. All its windows are broken out now,” she added sadly. “Too bad.”

Then to Will: “Remember the broken windows on Water Street?”

Will took the topic up unashamedly. “Yeah. Broken by me. I was headed for juvenile hall after that, till George promised to be responsible for me. Said he’d make sure I didn’t get into any more trouble.”

He shook his head, recalling it. “Came down to the police station, George did, and swore to it, his right hand in the air. He wasn’t more’n what, thirteen years old? And the amazing thing was, that’s what he did. After that he was like my shadow.”

There was a silence, all of us thinking about where George was now, until Will spoke up again.

“Kept me out of fights, George did. He’d beat a guy up just so I didn’t have to, kids knew I had to stay out of trouble, they would do everything to try to make me mad.”

Which probably accounted for some of the trouble George had been in back then, I thought, and Will confirmed this. “One time he took a kid down the street, smacked him till he blubbered, then stuffed a note in his pocket when he wasn’t lookin’ so his mom’d find it, when he got home. Bully, it said. Big, fat . . .”

His voice trailed off as something in our faces must have alerted him. I’d told Ellie about the note in Gosling’s pocket and of course Wade knew, too.

“What’d I say?” Will asked, looking around helplessly.

“Nothing,” Ellie replied evenly. “It’s nothing, Will. I wish Clarissa would call.”

We’d have gone down to the jail in Machias and held a sit-in but the roads were still messy, and besides, Will said Clarissa had sent a message for us to sit tight, let her try to find out what the situation was and if she could do anything about it tonight.

I prayed she could. But the clock over the mantel ticked on relentlessly and no call came. “Does anyone know if the police’ve talked to Jan Jesperson yet?” I asked.

Will shook his head. “I’m pretty sure she’s out of town. My Aunt Agnes was raising a big fuss the other day, wanting to see her.”

He sighed. “Not that I like the idea, but she sees so few people. And if I’m there with them I doubt it could do any harm. Jan hasn’t been answering her phone, though, and her car’s gone.”

Which was interesting. “But you were saying, Ellie, about your uncle,” he turned the conversation back neatly.

“Right.” With an effort, she gathered herself. I’d never seen her so exhausted-looking, so pale and nearly defeated. But even at Victor’s suggestion she wouldn’t lie down, and none of us wanted to try making her.

“Uncle Chet enjoyed nice things,” she continued her story. “More than a big house, good furniture and so on, all of which he had. No, he wanted things he couldn’t get just by being a country doctor. Big fish in a small pond, which is what it was here then. Busy still, but the boomtown days were over.”

The days, she meant, of the early 1800s, when my old house and others as fine were built by men with so much money that they could hire architects and put up virtual palaces, homes as solid and beautifully proportioned as anything in Boston.

“And,” she added, “he liked his cocktails, too. Chester was a good doctor, but what he was famous for—so famous that even today the old Eastport folks still tell stories about him—was money and parties. So it was no miracle he knew some of the men doing the whiskey-smuggling.”

She paused, sipped from the cup Will had brought her. “Well, it wouldn’t have been a miracle anyway. Everyone knew everyone in Eastport then, just like they do today. And those men knew other men, the ones running the smuggling, and the word got around, up the chain of command and eventually to the top.”

A fireplace ember exploded with a sudden
pop!
I gasped, and Wade turned his pale-grey gaze slowly to me.
Steady, girl.

But my mind couldn’t stop racing with the implications of George’s silence and the possible reasons for it, not to mention the conclusions that would be drawn from his aunt’s bequest.

“Pretty soon Chester’s big mansion—he’d never married, and for a while every girl in town hoped she’d be the one to get the chance to live in it—pretty soon his big house was turned into a hideout,” Ellie told us. “And a hospital for gunshot gangsters who got brought here from the city. It was a place they could recuperate and Chester could treat them without anyone knowing.”

She paused. “And sometimes the house was a morgue. They say Chester took the bodies on the night ferry over to the mainland, paid the ferrymen ten dollars to keep quiet about it. And to help bury them.”

I thought of my old friend Jemmy Wechsler, sitting somewhere in Federal custody. He knew where bodies were buried, too; some financial, others that had been living and breathing till someone decided they were a liability and had to go.

“The house got to be a social club,” Ellie said. “Off the beaten track, and pretty in summer. Like a resort, they could relax. And at Chester’s, it was parties ’round the clock. So the men brought girls there. You can imagine what local people thought of
that
.”

Indeed; bobbed hair, bright makeup, and bare legs bouncing scandalously to the newest dance craze, the Charleston. But the images didn’t replace my other thought: that someone had gone to a lot of trouble hiding those two bodies. Once eighty years ago, and again much more recently. So why put a note in Hector Gosling’s pocket, then hide him where no one would ever read it?

“The town,” Ellie said, “was all agog.”

Nor could I duck another memory Ellie’s tale triggered. I’d asked Jemmy once, unwisely, if it mustn’t be just an awful job getting rid of the bodies. I’d been teasing him, knowing that he handled mob money but not what that really meant. I’d felt sure he had nothing to do with any actual murders.

Or rubouts, as the tabloids called them. Jemmy was eating a Philly cheese steak when I asked, and he didn’t miss a bite.

“From what I hear,” he said, chewing, “they put the body in somebody’s bathtub. Somebody, he hasn’t got any wife or kids to get too nosy. Run the shower, drain all the blood out before they chop it into pieces. Makes it neater. Easier all around.

“Not,” he’d added, dipping his sandwich in ketchup, “that I would really know.” Which was when I’d understood for the first time just who Jemmy’s associates were.

Jemmy, who had no wife or kids to get inquisitive.

Now the Feds wanted to know, too, and if he told them (or if he didn’t; his take on the witness protection program was dead-on in my opinion) Jemmy was mincemeat.

Ellie went on. “And sometime around then, Eva Thane dropped out of the picture. Just vanished. The woman,” she added for Will and Wade’s benefit, “that Jake and I found today. Her body.”

She met my gaze and I knew what she was thinking: that we should have just done it. Walled them both up again and let the chips fall. She spoke again.

“She was a lost girl, Eva. A runaway from some little town, I suppose. Chester’s girl for a while. Too wild for her own good was what people said then about a girl like that.”

More recently too. My mom’s folks, for instance, had said it about me.

“So when she disappeared people knew she wasn’t around, but you couldn’t say they missed her,” Ellie continued. “No one was looking for Eva anywhere, probably. Not anymore.”

I knew that tune as well, because I’d sung it myself, and if it hadn’t been for Jemmy it probably would’ve been my swan song.

“So she was gone,” Ellie said, “and who cared? But then . . .”

Her story drew me back to the cozy parlor where the fire was burning and the lamps were glowing and the phone wasn’t ringing.

“But then, Eastport girls began disappearing.”

Much later when it was nearly morning, Ellie’s voice came out of the darkness. “Jake, did you know about what George said the other evening at Duddy’s?”

I had decided to stay the night with her; that she’d agreed without argument let me know how truly frightened she was.

“Yes,” I replied. She’d overheard the police questioning George about the threats he had made against Gosling. Or anyway they’d have interpreted his remarks as threats.

“George doesn’t always tell me what he’s doing all day, you know. And if he’s out late I don’t ask where he was, necessarily. Why should I?”

We were in her kitchen, Ellie in the rocker pulled up to the stove with a blanket around her. I’d put myself in the daybed, not wanting to go upstairs when she wouldn’t.

“Of course not,” I replied. “I don’t ask Wade, either.”

Not always. For me it was a welcome sea change after having been married to Victor, whose whereabouts I used to obsess over. With Victor my suspicions had usually been inaccurate only in the sense that what he was really doing was worse.