Repair to Her Grave (17 page)

I didn’t talk, either. For one thing, my teeth were clamped together too tight until we got back to the paved road. A dust cloud had been swirling up behind us, so I couldn’t tell whether Mapes was still chasing us or not. But once we reached the pavement I saw that he wasn’t; I slowed on the macadam, catching my breath and getting control of my urge to wring this girl's neck.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?”

She didn’t look at me. “You saw them,” she uttered. “You saw Jon's boots just as well as I did. Out with all the junk.”

“That's not an answer to my question. You shouldn’t have gone out there alone. What made you—”

Think of it,
I would have said, but she was already answering. “He's a junk man. Mapes is, or that's what he wants people to think. I asked around, people in town. Who buys fine old things? Who's on the lookout for them? And they told me.”

With Raines gone, people sympathized with Charmian. Heck, I did, too, when I wasn’t trying hard not to swat her.

Like now. “And everyone mentioned the same names,” she said. “Wilbur Mapes and Lillian Frey.”

She said nothing more but I knew we were both following the same line of thought: that the fishing vest was one thing. Raines could’ve struggled out of that.

The boots, though. In my experience, it took both hands to pull a Wellington boot off your foot. Or someone else's.

The fog had lifted. Antique homesteads on either side of the road crumbled quietly, surrounded by gnarled remnants of apple orchards and staggering fence posts. Soft clouds of moisture rose from the damp earth.

But I was late, so I didn’t slow to appreciate the view. And with home now almost within striking distance I began to realize:

I would still have time to shower. Ellie had promised to be at my house again by early afternoon; she could put the finishing touch on the refreshments, we would throw a fast supper together, and she could leave before any early arrivals appeared.

And—wonder of wonders—even the little bathroom worked, with the recent addition of a bigger paper clip. It could all still turn out okay, but only if I got back quickly.

Thinking this, I stepped on the gas pedal, glanced in the rearview mirror, and got an unwelcome eyeful of the green Passamaquoddy police van right behind me, its lights flashing. I pulled over.

“License and registration.”

I handed them to him. The land under Route 190 had been taken by eminent domain from the Passamaquoddy tribe when the road was built; ordinarily, I wouldn’t dream of speeding here. It was rude and disrespectful; also dangerous.

But I’d forgotten. “Sorry, Officer.” He gave me a flat look and the warning card that promised dreadful consequences should I be caught speeding here again.

“Have a good day,” he advised expressionlessly in parting.

But I wasn’t going to. Pulling up in front of my house ten minutes later, I saw to my horror that cars were parked three-deep in the driveway and lined up on both sides of the street.

An awful thought struck me. Surely I would have remembered if the Eastport Ladies’ Reading Circle had scheduled an
afternoon
meeting, instead of an evening one?

They had. In the kitchen, the coffee urn burbled and the teakettle whistled. Wearing my apron and a look that said doom was being held off by inches, Ellie was frosting petit-fours with one hand and cutting the crusts from little sandwiches with the other.

“They’re here,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything about the wall, so I improvised.”

“The wall,” I managed, hearing the murmur of women's voices from the dining room. What had happened to the wall?

“Better get in there,” Ellie added, filling the sugar bowl. The faster she works, the less she talks, and right now I needed her speed-demon qualities very badly. So I did what she told me to do, which was how I discovered that Krazy Glue is not a good wallboard adhesive. The patch I’d set in had fallen out, bringing along with it the new wallpaper, the plaster patching, the lath, and an important-looking chunk of the tin ceiling.

Now it all lay on the dining room floor by the door to the butler's pantry. But that wasn’t the worst part.

Tacked over the hole was a large, rectangular piece of black velvet. Painted on it—daubed—was a life-sized portrait of the young Elvis Presley, clad in one of the spangled pink jumpsuits he wore during his Las Vegas period and holding a guitar.

DON
’
T BE CRUEL,
read the words in gold glitter across the bottom edge of the velvet. Ellie looked in from the kitchen. “It was the best I could do on such short notice.”

“It's … striking,” said Charmian.

“The highlights in his pompadour are especially effective,” I agreed. “That Day-Glo blue.”

Ellie returned to the kitchen while I studied Elvis, wishing I could get into the painting with him and drive away in the gold Cadillac artfully depicted in the portrait's background.

“I’m so sorry I’ve ruined your plans,” Charmian said.

“That's all right,” I said, reminding myself with an effort that this wasn’t (a) green water over the helm or (b) a fire in the engine room. “But if you could just”—I gestured inarticulately—“get rid of some of the wilder lies. The evil uncle, for instance. I know Winston Cartwright does exists, and probably you are related to him.”

“But—”

I’d been thinking about this. “But to expect me to believe he killed Jonathan or had him killed, that he takes any interest at all in what happens in Eastport, Maine, is—”

Ridiculous,
I was about to say. Then I heard a man's voice from the parlor. Sam, I thought, but the voice was deeper.

Not Wade; not George Valentine or Victor. It was…

“Uncle Winston,” Charmian said, aghast, and hurried into the parlor; I followed, dreading further disasters but fairly certain that they were imminent.

“Charmian, my dear,” the bass voice boomed, “I am delighted to see you looking so well. I was concerned about you.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Charmian replied, twisting her opal ring in surprised distress. “What are you doing here? Come to gloat over Jonathan's murder? Well, you’re not going to get away with it. I should call the police right now and have you arrested.”

While this charming family reunion played out, I surveyed the room. In it were twenty-five or so well-dressed women, each with her hair done, her makeup on, and her good jewelry donned for the occasion.

I was wearing a pair of old jeans and there were still bits of wallboard material stuck in my hair, and my hands were gritty with dried wallpaper adhesive. But it was too late to worry about that; besides, they weren’t looking at me. Instead they gazed at the person in the parlor chair: a large man in a disreputable-looking slouch felt hat, wearing a voluminous trench coat.

In one huge hand he gripped an ornate carved walking stick; in the other he held a glass of something red and syrupy-looking. On the table beside him sat a small electronic device: a camera, I realized. But an odd one.

“How do you do?” he intoned gravely, noticing me. “Pardon my not getting up, won’t you? At my age, I must save my energy.”

He didn’t look energy-deprived; sharp eyes, pink cheeks, an alert expression under wildly bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Charmian's sigh at his words only reinforced my opinion: here was a fellow, past middle age but by no means elderly, who let people think he was fragile, the better to surprise them later.

“Charmed,” he murmured, taking my hand and fixing me in a glance so penetrating that I felt as if my bone marrow were being biopsied.

He was so naturally attention-getting, it wasn’t until I’d stepped right up to him that I saw Sam seated on the floor beside him, an object cradled reverently in his lap.

“Hey, Mom. Look what we found.”

It was a human skull, minus lower jawbone, with what looked irresistibly like a broken arrowhead lodged in its cranium.

“Isn’t that interesting?” I managed faintly.

The ladies looked fascinated, except for the one I thought must be the meeting's speaker, the mystery writer.

She fainted, two ladies crouching swiftly next to her. I thought of helping; after all, I was the hostess here.

Instead I reached wordlessly for the glass Winston Cartwright was holding, and he gave it to me. Draining it, I noticed that its contents were at least a hundred proof.

“Thank you,” I gasped, handing the glass back to him, and he nodded, refilling it promptly from a silver flask he produced from among the folds of the trench coat.

“Blackberry cordial,” he said. “Anyone?” he offered.

When my eyes stopped watering I saw that Maggie Altvater was here, too, hanging back behind the ladies. While they lined up to accept Cartwright's offer, she moved toward me.

“We found it diving,” she said, meaning the skull. “At Pirate's Cove. We’d given up on looking for Raines for the day and gone out to hunt for another batch of old bottles to sell. It was packed in sort of vegetabley stuff with a funny smell to it when we got it up to the surface, like wet peat moss.”

At my inquiring glance, she explained. “Not like packed by hand, or anything. Just in the stuff. Like it rolled there and got covered up and just… stayed there. Until we dug it out.”

Stained brown, obviously ancient. “Peat moss. Isn’t it what they find prehistoric skeletons in? Peat bogs, over in Europe?”

It had been on a public television program one night. And if old submerged bottles remained in backwaters the currents and tides didn’t reach, then I guessed a skull might, too.

Maggie shrugged unhappily. “I just wonder who it was. And I wish we hadn’t kept it. It half scared the pants off me, seeing those two eye sockets staring at me underwater.”

Just then Ellie came to the door and announced that since the writer wasn’t feeling well enough to give her presentation, the meeting would proceed to the refreshments.

Great: no speaker, an uninvited guest—two, if you counted the skull—and now we would have little cakes and sandwiches in a room that looked as if the wrecking ball hadn’t quite finished with it. Trying to distract myself from the social debacle about to ensue, I sidled closer to Cartwright and the gadget lying on the table by him.

“It's a digital camera. I sometimes take photos of objects I find and send them to other people,” Cartwright explained. “It's simpler and quicker to send them via the Internet from wherever I may be. And since I never know when I might run across such an object, I keep a camera handy.”

“I understand.” I’d never seen one close up before, though; unlike Sam and Maggie, since moving to Maine I’d left the high-tech revolution behind.

“You know, I’ve never really quite understood how it works,” I said. I didn’t see any film advance mechanism, or in fact any place to put film at all.

“I mean, does the picture stay inside the camera, too? For you to keep after you’ve sent it? Or …”

Cartwright looked at me. From his expression, I supposed he was about to embark on a difficult-to-understand explanation that would leave me gasping. He picked the device up, turned it over in his hands, readying to expound on it.

“The music goes ’round and ’round,” he began gravely. “And it comes out”—he pressed a button and a small square plastic wafer popped from a slot with a little
click!
—“here.”

“Ah.” I nodded slowly. You put the wafer into the camera like film.

“I wonder how long it would’ve taken me, figuring that out.”

It certainly wasn’t obvious from looking at the thing, although I supposed if you bought one and read the instructions it would be clear.

“Oh, you’d have gotten there eventually,” Cartwright said, eyeing me acutely, and seemed about to say more.

But just then one of the ladies approached: Nan Fairbrother, a bright-eyed little person with the whitest hair, the cleanest house, and the sharpest tongue in town. I had no doubt that Mrs. Fairbrother would be telling the story of my disastrous meeting to anyone who would listen, for weeks to come. But, as Eastport people so often do, she surprised me completely.

“Never mind, dear,” she said.
Dee-yah.
“The first time I had a meeting at my house, I got so nervous I forgot what day it was entirely. I was in a housecoat and pin curls when they arrived.”

They were in the dining room now: fallen plaster and Elvis. “What did you do?”

“I ordered pizza,” she replied, “and jugs of Gallo wine, and had them delivered chop-chop. It was,” she confided with her bird-claw hand wrapped around my arm, “a smashing success. Now go on like a good girl, and have a good time at your party.”

The kindness of downeast people is like a rose, blooming with sudden, unexpected sweetness in a rocky place. I swallowed hard to get rid of the lump in my throat, which was lucky, since moments later I had a teacup in one hand, a lobster-paste sandwich with the crusts cut off in the other, and the party was going wonderfully.

Also, informatively: “Do you know,” Winston Cartwright asked portentously of Maggie, “whose that skull almost certainly is?”

Charmian's threat to call the police, I gathered, had not intimidated him. Nor had she acted upon it. Meanwhile, the ladies were all agog.

“No, whose?” asked Rita Farnham, the tips of her manicured fingers pressed together. She ran the Clip & Curl on High Street.

“Yes, do tell,” said Wanda Perrone, who looked as if she’d stepped straight out of
Vogue
magazine; this, I thought, was half the value of the Reading Circle, all these women way out here at the back of beyond bravely keeping the side up, armed with plenty of Camay soap.

“This skull,” Cartwright intoned, “belonged to Jared Hayes.”

Well, even I gasped at that. “How do you know?”

He glowered wisely at me. “Isn’t it often the way that a man may be little-known at home, yet famous in the greater world?”

“Indeed it is,” said Hester Sawtelle, who had been a great beauty in her day and was still knockout gorgeous at ninety. “You all remember Dr. Honigsberger.”

Murmurs of agreement: Honigsberger had retired in Eastport to raise, we thought, garden-variety dahlias. Not until after he died did we learn he’d been one of the greatest plant geneticists of all time, much published and world-respected.