Nail Biter (7 page)

“Nice,” I said of her game contribution. We'd used up the easy ones: the Monroe Doctrine, the invention of Santa Claus, and the patenting of roller skates, for instance.

So we'd gotten a little loose on the rules for what made an acceptable entry; later I would learn that 1823 was the death-year of Edward Jenner, developer of the smallpox vaccine.

But I didn't know it yet. So when Ellie made a challenging little “your turn” gesture at me, I was about to offer the start of construction on the British Museum in London.

Just then, though, Eastport police chief Bob Arnold's squad car pulled up to the curb across the street.

I'd talked to him already, too, and I wasn't particularly eager to do it again; the whole episode was like a nightmare I just wanted to shake free of as soon as possible.

But now here he was. “Morning, ladies,” he said, getting out of the car.

A stout, round-faced fellow with a ruddy complexion, pale thinning hair, and small rosebud lips that didn't look as if they belonged on a police officer, Bob wore a gray cop-uniform shirt, blue serge slacks, and black utility shoes.

His belt was loaded with many items of professional policing gear: sidearm, baton, radio, pair of handcuffs, and so on. “Got yourself quite a project,” he added to me with a glance at the front steps.

Which was an understatement. Then he said what he'd come to say and I just stood there wondering if I'd heard him right.

“Oh, you've got to be kidding,” Ellie said finally, but Bob just shook his head.

The storm had blown through with the speed of a freight train, leaving behind a washed-clean morning sky bright with sunshine and crisp with the threat of early snow.

“You're saying Wanda Cathcart is
missing
?” Ellie demanded.

“Ayuh,” Bob allowed unhappily. “'Fraid so.”

The trees in the yard were stripped, their branches turned skeletal overnight and the lawn beneath them an autumn patchwork of orange and red. For a moment I thought about raking up a pile of the leaves, then just burrowing under it and staying there.

Instead I dragged my attention unwillingly back to Bob, who pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and spoke around it.

“Girl's mother called in a panic about an hour ago, said the kid's gone,” he said.

I put down my sledgehammer. Around me lay more wreckage of the old porch, broken planks and rusty remnants of the cast-iron railings. A few yards distant, out of the way of possible flying debris, Ellie's baby daughter Leonora slept in her stroller.

“Wanda wouldn't just happen to be around here by any chance, would she?” Bob asked, chewing on the toothpick.

“Huh?” I replied intelligently.

With the coming of day the stealthy sounds of the night before had simplified in memory, the mystery draining out of them until they were no more than a bit of loose wallpaper rustling in the drafty hall.

“Around
here
?” I repeated, still not getting it, and Ellie looked puzzledly at him, too.

Down the street a big orange town truck moved slowly along in front of the other old houses, its grinder roaring as the men alongside it shoved fallen tree limbs and other storm debris into its hopper. From its rear spewed a thick gout of yellowish wood chips, which the workers shoveled into enormous piles for later collection.

“So I guess she's
not
here, then?” Bob yelled over the sound of the truck.

“No,” I shouted, my voice too loud as the racket faded all at once. “Why would you even think that?” I added in more normal tones.

“Her mom said she must've gone sometime during the night,” he replied. “And since you also went missing from those very same premises, at about the same time . . .”

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” I said when I finally understood, or believed I did. “Marge thinks I
took
Wanda?”

I'd called Bob when I got home and found the phones
were
working here. So he knew all about Wade coming to get me.

“I can see why Marge Cathcart might jump to conclusions if she's worried,” I added, “but . . .”

Bob shook his head. “No, she doesn't think you took the girl. I was just hoping for a nice, simple coincidence, that's all. Like maybe Wanda knows where you live and showed up here.”

But his face said there was more to it than that. Sighing, he gazed down Key Street toward the old redbrick Peavy Library building on the corner, and Passamaquoddy Bay beyond.

In 1823 Eastport's harbor was so busy, people said you could walk across the bay on the decks of ships waiting to come in. Now a single scallop-dragger motored on it toward the Canadian shore.

Bob turned to me again. “Crews cleared the jackknifed truck about two this morning, I met the state cops in Quoddy Village 'bout an hour later.”

He went on, chewing the toothpick. “They got photographs, asked the tenants some questions, transported Dibble's body out of there, and took a walk through the house,” he finished.

“Was Wanda there then?” Ellie asked reasonably.

Bob scratched his head. “It isn't real clear. I guess this kid's a little, um . . . unusual?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him, and went on to describe shy, speechless Wanda.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” he said when I'd finished. “She wasn't in the house but Marge told the state police she probably got scared, decided to hide when she saw all the flashing lights show up in the middle of the night. Wind had gone down a lot by that time and the rain had quit,” he added.

I already knew when the storm had passed. “So?” I demanded, beginning to be impatient. “Then what?”

I was sorry about Wanda but it was none of my business and anyway, I wanted to get the porch torn down and the wreckage cleared while the sun was still shining.

“So the staties figured they'd talk to Wanda when she showed up,” Bob went on, “which Marge kept insisting she would do sooner or later. That's when they took their walk-through.”

Bob removed the toothpick and tucked it back into his shirt pocket. “That,” he added, “is when they found a paper bag full of pills. Oxycontins, big stash in a bag in the utility shed.”

Oh, brother. Oxycontins, or “oxies” as they were called by illicit users, were the latest and most horrendously addictive drug of choice in two areas of the United States: rural poverty-stricken Appalachia, and here.

“They're sure?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Pharmaceutical stuff,” he confirmed. “But you didn't see anything like that?”

I shook my head. “No, but it was dark, and . . .”

And anyway, why would I? I'd had the little matter of a dead guy distracting me.

Leonora had slept through the din of the town truck but now she woke and began bouncing energetically in her stroller, her small arms and legs waving as if being pulled up and down on strings.

“I put a word in for you two, by the way,” Bob added, “so no DEA guy'll start thinking maybe one of you hid 'em there.”

“Thanks,” I said sincerely. Paunchy and faintly comical-appearing draped in all that cop paraphernalia, Bob didn't resemble a fellow who could vouch for you with anyone much higher than dogcatcher.

But over the years, he'd been quietly involved in some law enforcement matters whose reach extended far beyond Eastport, Maine. So his character reference was golden; right away I felt a little better about the situation.

“I'll bet the body and the pills are connected,” Ellie said, crossing the lawn to retrieve one of Leonora's kicked-off pink booties.

That was a reasonable idea, too; Eugene Dibble was just the kind of loser to whom a stash of oxies would look like a winning hand.

“I still don't get what that's got to do with Wanda Cathcart being missing, though,” she went on, replacing the bootie.

The baby grinned, showing nubbins of new front teeth, then let out a squall they must've heard across the bay. Ellie picked her up and began walking around with her, as Bob went on to me.

“Maybe nothing,” he said, pushing some wet leaves around with the toe of his own boot. “Trouble is that when the cops left, Wanda didn't come back. Marge is pretty scared, which is why she decided to confide in me at all, I guess.”

That was the plus side of Bob Arnold's unthreatening looks: people talked to him. Once they did they often found out mild appearances aren't everything, but that's another story.

“And,” I thought aloud, “she's also afraid if Wanda doesn't show up soon they'll think maybe she
is
involved somehow with the drugs?”

“Yeah. Or even the murder. Or both. Hey, they don't know the girl,” he said as Ellie returned with the baby, “so why shouldn't they think that? Anyway, the long and short of it is, Marge asked me to ask you two to help try finding her daughter,” he finished.

“Preferably before the state boys come around again wanting to complete their interviews?” I suggested.

“Wouldn't hurt,” he agreed amiably. “They're all over this thing like fleas on a yard dog. They find out the girl's gone, they're going to draw some conclusions.”

Just the thought of the state cops trying to make heads or tails out of Wanda Cathcart made me feel like taking that sledgehammer to my own head. But so did what Bob Arnold was asking Ellie and me to do.

“Criminy,” I said helplessly. “How did Marge even find out we might be any good at it, anyway?”

“Yeah, Bob,” Ellie said, stepping forward with the baby in her arms. “How did she?”

Surprised, Bob took a hasty half-step back. “Now, Ellie,” he began placatingly.

“Don't ‘now, Ellie' me.” She advanced relentlessly on him. “Girl vanishes, cops are on the scene, but the mother wants
us
?”

She put a hand on her hip. “So, Bob,” she persisted, “would you care to explain to us how
that
little eventuality happened to happen?”

Here I should perhaps make clear that in the past Ellie and I had cleared up a number of fairly grisly Eastport crimes. Obsessed stalkers, murderous embezzlers, and in one truly horrid instance a corpse dangling upside down from a graveyard gate had helped form our unwanted reputation as . . .

Well, as snoops. Emphasis on
unwanted
reputation; what we
wanted
was normal life. But if wishes were horses, one of my dogs would be winning the Kentucky Derby right this minute.

Bob gave in at last. “Actually the reason Marge asked for you two is that I told her to.”

“And that would be because . . . ?” Ellie appeared stern, which on her was quite a trick.

He held out his hands. “First of all, the state cops've got a murder and felony drug weight to keep them occupied. I mean, you should've seen their eyes light up.”

I could imagine it. “So all by itself, if it's just a simple teenaged runaway case . . .”

Bob nodded briskly. “Yep. Oh, they'll do everything that's in the procedure book. Everything necessary,” he emphasized. “I'm not sayin' they'll sell it short. Put out the word, bulletins, the whole nine yards. But even after all that, in the end I figure there's two ways it could go.” He raised an index finger. “They'll decide maybe Wanda's got something to do with the felonies, and when they do find her, that'll be a mess.”

Another finger. “Or . . . hey, kids run off. The girl didn't know Dibble. How could she? Only fifteen years old and a
young
fifteen, from what the mother told me.”

I caught the drift. “So maybe Wanda won't show up
and
they won't find her. Because they
didn't
make a connection when maybe they should've.”

A connection that might help find her, he meant. Because despite my impression of her, I supposed it wasn't impossible for Wanda to have known about the illicit pills. After all, Sam was a lot younger than fifteen when he first learned how to skin-pop cocaine using the TB syringes he'd stolen from his father's medical bag.

And if such a link existed, recognizing it might be the key to finding her. But I could think of a third way things could go, too.

A worse way. “Wanda Cathcart,” I said slowly, “couldn't fend for herself in a roomful of kittens. Drugs or no drugs, if she ran off on her own—or worse, if someone took her—she could be in a lot of trouble.”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “There's that. Don't know why anyone would take her, though. She didn't see anything out there, did she?”

“You mean like who dunnit? Bob, she's timid and she's speech-impaired but she seems perfectly normal intelligence-wise. Seeing a murder . . . I think she'd have been trying to tell us about it.”

True, there had been her frightened expression. And even now that I'd dismissed them I supposed the sounds I'd heard last night
could
have been made by someone creeping stealthily to the door. But . . .

“Anyway, if she had seen something, why wouldn't she have tried telling her mother?” I asked.

I knew one thing for sure: When I opened that door on my way out of the little room, I'd found no one. And it was still none of my business. Stubbornly I hefted the sledgehammer.

“Maybe what happened,” I suggested, “is that Wanda just got tired of the witches of Eastport.”

I went on to describe the scene at the Quoddy Village house, a mixture of New Age mysticism, old-world superstition, and Gregory Brand's patronizing style, which he'd displayed both during and after the canned-goods dinner we'd all . . . well, “enjoyed” might not be exactly the right word for it.

“Greg's like one of those how-to-empower-yourself gurus that used to be giving thousand-dollar seminars all over the place,” I said, “before people with money got tired of mingling with the great unwashed in seedy hotel banquet halls and started hiring individual life coaches instead.”

I turned toward the remnants of the porch, readying the hammer. “And kids can spot a phony a mile away, you know that. Wanda might be trying to give her mother a scare, so when she does come back Marge will agree to take her home.”

“Yeah?” Bob said, interested. “So you think the witch stuff is fake, do you?”

I blew out a skeptical breath. “Bob, if they were real witches, why not just cast a spell to bring Wanda back? Anyway,” I added, “tell Marge the answer's no. They paid for rent, not human bloodhounds, which Ellie and I are out of the business of being, anyway.”