Repair to Her Grave (33 page)

“The ladies of the Eastport Reading Circle have asked me to speak at their annual summer picnic,” he announced.

“How delightful. And have you accepted?”

“I have,” he intoned gravely. “However, to do them justice I must move considerable of my research materials. Therefore I have engaged lodgings in town.”

So he was staying. It happens; some urban person who thinks life begins and ends on the island of Manhattan or in Cambridge comes to our little island and is captured, and decides to stay. It had happened to me.

“Jonathan,” I said, finding him a little while later in the butler's pantry; he was putting away unused paper plates. “Tell me the truth. I know you called, but
did
I really invite you?”

He shook his head ruefully. “No. I knew of your sleuthing reputation from the cousins. Yours and Ellie's reputations, that is. But I couldn’t risk actually trying to wangle an invitation. You might refuse, or talk to the cousins before I got here.”

“Whereupon your scheme to actually stay here in the house so you could put the book in it, thus getting Ellie and me curious and involved, might fall apart.”

He nodded. “Exactly. When I showed up, I needed you to have spoken to me before, so I’d be at least a little familiar,
and
I needed a connection you’d trust as a reference. But not one you’d actually go to the trouble of checking with care.”

He looked a little shamefaced. “And,” he admitted, “I made sure I came when the cousins were tied up in projects that meant you wouldn’t be able to reach them, anyway. I didn’t expect you to check me out any further than that.”

“Meanwhile, you didn’t tell me the truth about yourself and what you wanted in the
first
place because …”

He nodded again; that much was obvious. Of course I would’ve said no. And he’d known that, too, not just suspected it, because …

“That Australian guy,” I said. “Who called before you did. I told
him
no, although he was very persuasive, so you knew …”

“Roight,” Jonathan replied, sounding for all the world as if he’d been throwing shrimps on the barbie all of his life. “Also, it was a last-minute check to make sure you’d be here, yourself.”

Oh, boy. “Jonathan, with the kind of nerve you’ve got, it's a good thing you
didn’t
have evil intentions.”

A shadow touched his face; the notion, apparently, was not a new one to him. “Yes,” he said quietly, pressing his fingertips together. “I suppose it is.”

Then in the parlor fiddling began, along with a sound that meant George Valentine had found my old banjo and was remembering how to play it. Jonathan went to join them.

“Five minutes,” I said to Bob Arnold. Nodding, he went to drive Clarissa and Thomas home before coming back for me, and I walked through the dining room to the front parlor, expecting to find a happy throng, Sam included.

Instead I found Sam sitting alone at the dining room table with Jared Hayes's skull in front of him, staring disconsolately at it. “He died for love, didn’t he?” Sam said.

By
he,
Sam meant Hayes. “Because he loved a woman.”

“Because he loved the wrong woman,” I said. “Wrong for him.”

He sighed hugely. It wasn’t just Jill. For the first time in his life, Sam had come up against the sad fact that wishing won’t make it so. “People don’t change much, do they?”

I hadn’t said anything to him about Victor and Jill. But it was there between us, like the skull on the table, and I thought that was what he meant.

“I guess Jane Whitelaw didn’t go around pretending she was some kind of a Girl Scout, either,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, understanding my mistake. “You mean people changing over time. From one era to another.”

“Uh-huh. Poor old Jared, he was crazy in love with Jane, and never mind he must’ve known she was bad news. You idiot,” he told the brown-stained relic on the table.

A few teeth were missing, the arrow-point in it jutted up roughly, and the hole in the cranium was jagged-edged, beginning to crumble. Altogether, it looked as if it ought to have a black candle burning inside it.

“No,” I agreed finally. “Neither one of them, Jared Hayes nor Jane Whitelaw, was much different from any of us, at heart.”

Love and money, pride and ambition. And lust. The same old song. In the parlor Maggie's fiddle danced with brisk confidence into “Pirate's Revenge.”

And nailed it, negotiating the weird intervals, syncopated rhythms, and sad, minor-key melody flawlessly.

“How
did
I know that tune?” I heard Jonathan say. “As far as I can see, it's the only mystery left to be solved.”

But it wasn’t; not quite. Bob Arnold returned. “You’re sure about this, are you?”

“Yes.” Suddenly I didn’t want to go where we were going; not at all. But there was no help for it: murder had been done. And—

—so I thought in my innocence at the time—

—murder must out.

11

It was nearly eight-thirty and the last deep pink shreds of the dying evening lay on the western horizon, the smell of low tide floating in from the calm flats as we went over the causeway to Lillian Frey's place on the mainland.

A few cars still lingered in the parking lot at the New Friendly Restaurant on Route 1, but the Farmer's Exchange Market was closed and shuttered for the night; behind them, cattails bristled against the dark gleam of the tide marshes.

At the turnoff, an eighteen-wheeler roared by in a sudden boom of sound and headlights, its turbulence buffeting our car briefly. Then it was only a set of cherry-red taillights in the rearview, and we were alone.

“Nice kid,” Bob Arnold said from the passenger seat. The road here was narrow and curving, fields and scrub trees drawing right up to the edge of the pavement.

We had thought it would seem less threatening if we arrived in my car. And this wasn’t an official visit.

Yet. “Raines,” he added. “A little crazy, but okay.”

“Uh-huh.” I took the left fork onto the Shore Road, past the little white church with the scattering of graves in a fenced plot behind it.

“He caused us a lot of trouble,” I said. “I can’t say I’m entirely pleased about all of it.”

“But all's well that ends well?”

“Maybe.” I wished I shared his confidence. The road led through a stand of pine, past a rail-fenced corral, a dozen white-faced cattle standing at the far corner of it, waiting to be let into the gambrel-roofed barn.

“Right here's where the old school burned,” Bob said, his head angling toward the roadside. A whiff of charcoal smell came on the damp night air, through the open car window.

“It was Raines,” Bob said, “that called in the anonymous tip.”

On the arsonist, he meant. “You’re kidding. How d’you know?”

Bob shrugged. “Thought I recognized the voice, meeting him on the cliffs. Asked him about it, he just looked clever. Said he thought anonymous tips ought to stay that way, wouldn’t say more. Did a lot of walking, saw things, out to Mapes's place, I guess.”

Walking down those country roads. “I guess.”

“He saw a guy toss a match. Took down the plate number.”

There was, we both knew, a reward. But if Raines accepted it, considering the way firebugs tended to hold grudges, my house might be the next target for the arsonist's friends.

And Raines had understood this.

Bob sighed; we were approaching Lillian's long, down-sloping driveway. No streetlights here; I squinted so as not to miss the entrance to it.

“Tell me again what I’m going to find?” Bob said.

A thump of misery struck me. Now that we were arriving, it all seemed more real. I hoped I was wrong.

“Wallet. Identification, probably. And car keys. They were not in the vehicle when it was towed, were they?”

The stolen one, that the guy had been driving who went off the bluffs. Bob shook his head as we pulled up to the house.

“No. And if you can’t ID a fellow, it's hard to figure out who might’ve offed him. If someone did.”

With all its lights on, blazing in the darkness against the water, the house resembled some ghostly ship asail on an ocean of midnight, the false blue dawn of moon-rise brightening behind it.

I shut off the ignition. Part of me wanted to just let it all go by. But if I did, sooner or later someone else would get in the way, present an obstacle or trigger a murderous rage.

And then that someone would die; maybe someone like Sam.

Or even like Victor. “She didn’t push him,” I said.

Meaning Jill's father. Because when you came right down to it, who else would it have been? “He knew her, he wouldn’t have let her get close enough, right there by the edge of the bluffs.”

Because she was her father's daughter: he would know.

“And she didn’t shoot him; Lillian's gun was here when I came out here. And it hadn’t been fired recently.”

You could smell it, if it had, and all I’d smelled was gun oil. I doubted Jill was clear-headed or knowledgeable enough to clean the weapon, to kill the burnt-powder reek.

As we approached the house, a shape moved in one of the big windows; they knew we were here.

“So?” Bob asked.

“Nail gun,” I said. “If you find him, he’ll have a nail in him. Probably it killed him, but it didn’t need to. Just…”

“Send him over the edge. Lillian Frey's ex-husband. Jill's dad.”

“Right.” I got out of the car. My old mobbed-up friend, Jemmy Wechsler, had a cell phone, and I was among the half-dozen people in the world with the number. And Jemmy knew everyone—that is, if they were crooked enough. “Jill's dad was a bad guy. Habitual wife-beater, stalker. Big criminal record in Massachusetts, too: fraud, theft. You know the type.”

I looked up at the house. “But then he made one big mistake, this tough guy. This guy no one ever dared to say no to.”

We started up the steps. “Which was?” Bob Arnold asked.

I knocked on the door. No answer. Knocked again.

“He said no,” I replied to Bob Arnold, knocking harder, “to his teenage daughter.”

The door opened. Lillian Frey stood in the entryway.

“Thank God you’ve come,” she said.

She took us into the big room overlooking the water. The moon had risen, sending a wash of silvery glitter onto the dark waves. Behind, the lights of the villages on Campobello sparkled. At such a distance, everything always looks so peaceful. A fire burned in the wood-stove, though the night was too warm for one.

“Jill's locked herself upstairs in her room and won’t come out,” Lillian said. “I don’t know what to do. She's so upset, I’m afraid she might…”

Around the room an eclectic collection of small objects stood on display: a metronome and a music stand in one corner, in the other a lectern with an antique dictionary open on it.

“The gun you showed me?” I asked. “Jill hasn’t…”

She hadn’t used it the first time, on her dad; the second time, though, to threaten Charmian, she must have. And even though I didn’t
think
Jill could have salvaged it—she’d had no place to hide it, coming back up the cliffs—I wanted to be sure before Bob or I went upstairs to talk to the girl.

And to my relief, Lillian shook her head no.

But what she said next confused me completely. “I just went to my studio and checked. It's still there.”

Curveball; so what
had Jill
used? To cover my confusion I turned from Lillian and examined the room. On a table were ranged small procelain items: a pair of red Chinese fighting dogs, a bowl marked with the insignia of the City of New York, showing the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Mrs. Frey, have you had any contact with your ex-husband in the past ten days or so?” Bob Arnold asked.

She looked startled. “No. Why?”

“We think Jill might have met with him. Here, I mean, not in Boston. We think he might have come here.”

She nodded slowly. “It would make sense. He's always saying he’ll do something. Follow me, the way he has before.”

“I don’t think that's why he came,” I told her. “Jill wanted more than anything to go back to Boston; if she called him, told him there was something valuable to find here, he might come and take her back with him, she’d have thought.”

Lillian said nothing. “I wonder, has Jill's attitude toward him changed?” I asked. “In the past few days? Because they might have quarreled. Over whether she could go back with him, maybe.”

When he rejected this idea—rejected her, even after she’d told him a potentially valuable secret—she’d have been angry.

Very angry. But Lillian only shook her head ruefully again. “He always manages to convince her I’m the villain,” she said. “I doubt he was here, though. His business”—she gave the word a bitterly ironic twist— “keeps him occupied in Massachusetts.”

Silence from upstairs. If Jill was having a tantrum, she was keeping it pretty quiet.

“What business would that be?” Bob Arnold asked.

I browsed on: books on a shelf behind the table. A stack of sheet music for violin. A fancy tool catalog. Books about wood, and instrument construction. Lots of antique knickknacks.

“Electronics,” Lillian replied a bit impatiently. “At the moment. He says he's a dealer. The truth is, he fences things after other people steal them: computers, cell phones, all that kind of thing.”

She got up. “Look, I don’t see why you want to know anything about him. I hoped you could talk to Jill. Straighten her out and make her see reason.”

“What was it you wanted us to say?” I turned from a group of crystal paperweights on a shelf, like a collection of glass eyes. And something behind them, something that was not an antique.

Lillian waved a hand. She seemed particularly to want to engage my attention. “Well. That she's got to behave. That she's lucky no one's pressed charges. That from now on—”

A bang from a room above. Bob turned and headed for the open stairway. “What's that?” he demanded as he went, and after a moment of hesitation Lillian ran toward the sound, too.

But I already knew what it was: a nail gun firing, loud and concussive. I’d seen it in Lillian's hands that day at the craft fair, when Jill and Lillian had been arguing.