Repair to Her Grave (20 page)

“Who you think is involved?” Wade wound bubble-wrap around the shotgun parts, in preparation for shipping the weapon back to its owner.

“Well, how could he not be?” I asked impatiently. “Bob would think so, too, if he knew how much money might be at stake. That is, he does know. But that kind of money just isn’t real to him. He feels fat and happy on thirty-four grand a year, plus the money Clarissa earns.”

Bob's wife is a defense attorney. But around here, that job's no ticket to the higher tax brackets, either, since for big-time white-collar criminal cases that produce big attorney's fees, first of all you need some white collars.

Wade sealed the box up, slapped the label on it. “He's no slouch in the character assessment department, you know. Tends to pick out bad apples.”

“I know. Another reason I’m so confused.”

“Well. You could just let it all go by.” His tone, and the amused crinkles around his eyes, expressed just how likely he thought that was.

He put the box in the bin with the others he’d readied for FedEx. “What strikes me, though, is what people from away know that you don’t.”

He pulled up another milk crate, sat beside me. Being up in the workshop with Wade always made me feel I’d been invited into his tree house.

“Because, look: Mapes and Raines already had something going. And obviously Charmian Cartwright knew about it, too. Enough, I mean, to know where he lives, and that she should talk to him.”

“Uh-huh.” Outside the high windows the clouds faded abruptly from rose-red to lavender as the sun dropped below the horizon, and fog moved in.

“But she didn’t tell you,” he went on. “Which means she was in on what was going on all along, or—”

“Or whatever it was, maybe she wants in on it now.”

Wade nodded. “Or maybe she just doesn’t know who to trust. The problem is, you don’t know how much of any of their stories is true. You don’t
know
she's on the outs with the old uncle. For all you know, they could be in on it together, and Mapes could just be a fall guy. Maybe she stuck those boots out there herself.”

Brr. That was a bad thought. And she was an awfully capable young woman. “Mapes saw them afterwards, got scared, got rid of them,” I tried it out aloud.

Wade stood up. “It could happen. The other thing, though, is still the whole idea that Raines was murdered at all.”

I’d told Wade my theory of how it could be done: someone under the dock, waiting. Cast up a big hook, pull Raines off, cut the line.

“Well, maybe that's not so far-fetched, either.” He was pulling his jacket on. “And I can see that it's eating at you. So why don’t we just get it settled? What say we go down there and have ourselves a look?”

I smacked a hand to the side of my head. “Why didn’t I—”

“Think of that?” he finished for me, giving me a hand up. “Because climbing out under that dock is slippery and scary, not to mention legitimately dangerous. Your mind didn’t want to raise the possibility because then you would have to do it. Right?”

“Um, right.” I followed him down the stairs. That's the thing about Wade: when
his
mind raises the possibility of doing something legitimately dangerous, his body is generally already full speed ahead.

Twenty minutes later, we both were. “It's not going to prove anything on the positive side, mind you,” he said, pulling the rope on the little outboard. “But it could rule out something.”

It was dead calm and about an hour away from high tide, just about as it had been when Jonathan Raines went off the dock; the rowboat putted smoothly out of the boat basin, around the stern of the tugboat tied at the fish pier.

Wade tossed a line, snugged it, and cut the engine. We were floating alongside the treelike pilings of the dock, dark and dripping with watery vegetation.

“Seaweed's been there a long time,” he said, pointing to the long, leathery-looking fronds of it. “Anyone climbing in there, they’ll have knocked down chunks of it with their boots, maybe marred the soft wood with a rope. And they’d have to be up high, ’cause the tide's the same as it was then.”

He grinned at me in the darkness. He was wearing leather boots and work gloves, carrying a coil of line. “Sit tight.”

“Wade …”

Maybe we should rethink this,
I added mentally. But he was gone, swinging over the side into the dark looming structure of pilings and timbers. And then silence except for the creaking of the dock under the pressure of millions of gallons of cold salt water.

The neon lights of La Sardina on Water Street gleamed through the thick grey fog a hundred yards away; it could have been miles. A bat whuffed by, brushing my cheek, and a fish jumped with a watery smack.

“Wade?” No answer. A foghorn sounded distantly, and the ocean smell was briny, so sharp it was almost acidic.

The dock lamps didn’t reach out here, and at first it was so dark, it was like sitting in a puddle of ink. But as my eyes adjusted I began to see into the forest of dock pilings. No Wade.

A splash, and a muffled oath.
“Wade?”
Damn, I was going to be made a widow before I’d even managed to get remarried.

I grabbed a float cushion, untied the boat, and was just about to give that motor cord a pull when a white face appeared out of the dripping gloom.

Wade. “Hey. Where you going?”

“Oh, criminy.” I tossed him the line. “I was getting ready to come in under there and rescue you.”

He chuckled. “Why, thank you, ma’am. That's right neighborly of you.” He stepped from a dock timber to the boat's rail, from there into the boat, so deftly that the boat barely bobbled.

“The annoying thing is, you make that look so easy,” I said, starting the outboard. I aimed us back out around the end of the dock.

“You wouldn’t have thought so, you’d seen me a minute ago.”

“Why, what happened?”

He motioned me amidships, sat in the stern, angled the boat back in toward the pilings and then between them, idling down.

“Look up there.” He aimed his flashlight up so the beam lit the green-shrouded works of the old dock structure. “See it?”

Suddenly we were surrounded on all sides by the massive old pilings, hemmed in by the support works of the timbers and rising steadily upward with the movement of the tide.

“Wade? I think …”

We should get out of there,
was what I thought. Another few minutes of rising tide and there wouldn’t be enough clearance to sit upright.

“Just look,” Wade said calmly. So I did, and there it was: a plywood platform.

“Like a hunting blind,” he said quietly. “Nobody scrambled out here. I was wrong about that, it's too slippery.”

It was raining steadily under here, the water from last high tide not all drained before it rose again. A dollop of wet seaweed touched my neck. Wade, busy doing something I couldn’t see, ignored the little shriek I made.

Another splash. At that moment, I wanted dry land more than anything in the world. “What was that?”

He turned to me, his face ghostly in the reflected light of the flash. Its glow, bouncing up from the moving water, cast wavery reflections on the enormous, creaking wooden structure all around us and made the seaweed seem to slither unnaturally.

“Casting rod. Lying up there, somebody left it. I dropped it when I tried to snag it. And the platform was already loose, part came down earlier. The rest of it just now.”

He peered into the forest of dock pilings. “Damn. Nice rod, too. A little too nice, actually… . You hear something else?”

“N-no. But I really think that…”

He swung the rowboat around, powered the engine up a little, and aimed us—how he knew this, I have no idea—out from under the dock. “There.” He pointed.

A shape in the water, like a small, shiny rock, moving fast. A splash and a riffle of waves on the surface; then it was gone.

“Harbor seal?” I asked. Wade was motoring after it.

He shook his head. “Nope. Diver. God
bless
it.”

Which is Wade's way of uttering a profanity. He swung the boat back toward the boat basin, didn’t say any more until the boat was tied and we were making our way up the floating finger pier. “Well, so much for that.”

“I’m not sure I get it. What would a diver be doing … Oh.”

He slung the float cushions along with the rest of his gear into the bed of his pickup. “I guess somebody else saw the tide was right, just the way we did. Decided to come and collect a few things he’d left lying around. A platform, maybe. Tear it off the dock. And maybe a nice casting rod.”

He started the truck. “I’ll tell you, Jacobia, this idea of yours sounded like moonbeams to me. I mean, that somebody hooked Raines, pulled him off that dock.”

“You mean you brought me down here to show me it
couldn’t
have happened that way?”

Indignation struck me. I was cold, wet, and embarrassed at how scared I’d been minutes earlier; you wouldn’t think a little seaweed and pitch-darkness could be so unnerving. But it was.

“Yup,” he said. “Hey, there's no sense chasing a notion that couldn’t physically be done.”

Well, he had a point. “But now,” he went on, “I’m not sure.”

“Couldn’t we have just followed that diver?” Mapes, I now recalled, was an urchin diver in season, and I’d seen his diving equipment out at his place.

He shook his head. “Can’t spot him, not in this fog. Especially in the dark. He could go anywhere, and if he spots us, he's just not going to surface. Now he's probably got that casting rod I dropped, too, and by tomorrow that plywood’ll be floating halfway to Lubec. I gave it a smack, tried to grab it up, all I managed to do was knock it away, then the rod fell off. I’m sorry, Jacobia.”

He pulled into my driveway, mad at himself.

“Don’t be,” I said. “We’re no worse off than we were, and at least now we know that what I suspected really could’ve happened. In fact, I think that now we can be pretty sure it did. Because there wouldn’t have been a diver at all unless somebody wanted to get that stuff out of there. Would there?”

“Huh. I guess not. So now you can tell Bob Arnold that—”

“That we saw a harbor seal,” I finished firmly. It didn’t have to be Mapes in the water. With the amount of diving gear on our little island in Maine, you could equip the Navy SEALs.

“Let's just keep this all to ourselves awhile, shall we? Because maybe the diver doesn’t know we saw him. And anything we know that someone else doesn’t could be in our favor.”

Wade eyed me wryly. “If I’d known you were so devious, I’d have been afraid to get involved with you.”

“Too late.” I slid nearer to him. “It was awfully nice of you, going down there with me.”

“Yeah? How nice?” he asked mock-innocently.

Suddenly I wasn’t so sure at all about getting married. It would be a shame, I thought, to cast a pall of official sanction on our illicitness.

But I didn’t get to go any further with the thought, or for that matter with anything else, because just then Jill Frey's car pulled into the driveway at an angle that put us out of her line of sight, so she didn’t notice us. And in the truck's rearview mirror I could see that she and Sam had beaten us to it in the romance department. Two seconds after she turned the engine off, they looked like a couple of starfish that had gotten tangled in each other's arms. Or legs.

Or whatever. “Dammit. Now we’ve either got to get out and catch them necking or sit and pretend we’re not here.”

“No, we don’t.” Cheerfully, Wade leaned on the horn.

The doors on Jill's car popped open as if those two starfish had exploded inside there, and Sam and Jill hopped out looking startled.

Well, Sam looked startled, anyway. Jill looked furious. She slammed back into the car and roared out in reverse without another look at him.

“Jill,” Sam called helplessly after her, but nothing doing. Wade got out and strode toward him, hands spread apologetically.

“Oh, man, I am so sorry,” he said. “There was a spider on the dashboard, it was scaring your mother, and I gave a big swat at it and … man. Really, I am very sorry.”

I got out, too, amazed at what I was hearing. To get Wade to lie, you practically have to torture him with electric wires.

“Hey, that's okay,” Sam said, not very much to my surprise. It was what you would say if you were trying to be nice about it. And Sam was a nice guy, most of the time.

But then I got a look at his face, and what I saw there really did surprise me. Because it was. Okay with him, I mean.

Sam looked flustered: his hair messed and his lips puffy, as if he’d been kissing someone for a long, long time. But now that his surprise had evaporated, mostly he looked as if he’d just had a very narrow escape.

And … he looked relieved about it.

Wade and Sam went to bed while I took Monday outside, then sat alone in the darkened kitchen as she padded upstairs. Fog crept just outside the tall, bare windows, seeming to touch the old glass panes with insubstantial fingers.

It should have made me nervous, I guess, but it didn’t. Not anymore; the feeling in the house was peaceful, as if it were getting what it had wanted for so long and didn’t have to agitate for whatever it was any longer.

Or maybe it had only been my imagination all the while: the sense, so strong it was nearly a physical sensation, that someone or something in the house wanted—needed—something very badly. But now … nothing.

Later, upstairs with Wade in the dark: “Wade. Do you … do you believe in ghosts?”

A silence. He knew why I was asking. But he will do this: leave me alone to sort a thing out or get over it, not pestering me about it. It was why he wasn’t mentioning the getting-married idea, either; not pushing it.

“Well. I’ll tell you a story.” He settled his arm around me, leaned his head down against my own. “After the old man got laid off from the paper mill and he’d started drinking heavy, Mom made him move out into the shed.”

At the foot of the bed, Monday sighed and settled herself contentedly. “And some nights, if he didn’t come home at all, I’d go out there, sleep in his bed.”

I said nothing.

“So this one night I’m out there and I hear him come in. He didn’t know I was there and I was scared I might give him a heart attack, startling him in the dark. But for once, I knew just what to say to him.”