Repair to Her Grave (35 page)

Because she was a twisted little brat, all right, but she was also a scared kid; even Victor's stolen wristwatch was only a bid for attention, a plea for help.

As I spoke she looked straight at me, and I’d like to think it made a difference, what I’d said. I like to think she already had let go of the railing with her other hand.

It would be nice, thinking that.

Wicked nice. But wishing won’t make it so.

She let go with her other hand. I rushed at her, screaming something, I don’t even know what—

—as Bob Arnold hurled himself at her from behind, from the darkness at the other end of the deck.

“No,” she sobbed, heartbroken as he hauled her back up. “You should’ve let me go, you don’t
understand …

But I did. Bob Arnold, too.

And so did Lillian. When we got Jill to the ground, Lillian was standing there, looking as if all the blood had been let out of her and replaced with embalming fluid.

Her scar was dead white in the moonlight, like a lightning bolt down the side of her face. In her hand were a man's wallet and some car keys. Stolen with the car, I supposed.

“Here,” she said, dropping them.

“Lillian,” I said. “It's going to be …”

Okay.
Yeah, sure it was. She wasn’t listening, anyway.

She looked at Jill with … what? Regret? Apology? I couldn’t tell. “I’m so tired,” she whispered.

Then I saw what was in her other hand, close by her side.

Too late. “I’m sorry,” she told Jill. And then, before we could do anything to stop her, she shot herself with that old Colt pistol she kept. That cannon, I’d called it. She was dead by the time we got to her.

12

It was midnight, but the lights were still on in the kitchen and parlors when I pulled into the driveway. Wade came out to the yard to meet me, and threw an arm around my shoulders.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I’d called him from the hospital, told him the nuts and bolts of what had gone on.

Basically, Bob Arnold had signed a petition for Jill Frey's involuntary temporary commitment, and a judge had gotten out of bed to grant it. But after the ninety-six hours specified in it were up, I had no idea what would happen to her.

Even if no charges were brought, I doubted Wilbur Mapes would be judged a fit guardian when she was released, and I felt like somebody who’d just dropped an unwanted dog off at the pound.

“Wade, I couldn’t just bring her home.”

“No. Don’t beat yourself up. Some jobs need professionals.”

Still, I couldn’t get her face out of my head: through the window of the van that had come to take her. She’d put her fist to the glass as if to pound on it, then let it fall. I couldn’t hear her, but her lips were moving:
Tell Sam I’m sorry.

We went up the porch steps. “Bob went through

Lillian's desk while we waited for the ambulance,” I said. “It was all going to crash down on her: her ex had gotten the custody order appealed.”

He didn’t want Jill and probably couldn’t get her, but he wasn’t going to let Lillian have her without a big fight, either. “And she had money troubles, more than we knew. It costs way more than she was making to live the way she lived.”

Then she’d killed someone, and while Bob and I were trying to save Jill, Lillian had realized that I had the camera. “Love and money and the end of her rope,” I said. “Like Jane Whitelaw.”

Same old song. And much as I knew it was probably not a good idea, I knew, too, that whenever Jill got out of that clinic, I was going to be there. Counseling, therapy: possibly something could still save her, and I was going to try to find it. I was going to make Victor help, too, whether he liked it or not.

Because maybe it was the same old song, but somebody's got to write a new verse, now and then.

Somebody's just got to.

“You know, I keep thinking,” Wade said slowly, “about all those years ago. When Jared Hayes was alive and none of us had even been born yet. Then it was his turn to live. And now …”

Now it was ours. “Let's do it, Jacobia. Let's just go ahead and get married. As soon as we can.” He opened the door.

“All right,” I said calmly, amazed that in the end it was as easy as that. We went into the house together.

In the phone alcove, the little red light on the answering machine was blinking. I pressed the button and it was the cousins from New York, the federal fellows, wanting to know if they could visit again this summer: two weeks in August.

From the phone I could see into the dining room where a lamp burned, illuminating the Elvis painting. In it he was still young and handsome, a touch of pale blue putting a glint in his hair and his grin rakish. Painted on velvet, frozen forever in Day-Glo acrylics, he was not yet the sad, sick old man his life had made of him at the end.

Spread out on the table like jewels at his feet lay Ellie's finished quilt, all bright geometry and careful handiwork in red and marine blue. I thought a minute and then I erased the message on the answering machine: sorry, guys. Maybe next year.

In the kitchen, Sam looked up. Wade had filled him in on the evening's events. Now Wade went upstairs to his workshop.

I sat in silence as Sam put the kettle on and made cups of tea. Finally: “If I hadn’t gone out there tonight …” I began.

“If I’d never gotten involved with Jill …”

“If I hadn’t been so stubborn, so worried you were turning out like your father …”

“If only I’d listened.” Monday padded in, settled in her dog bed.

“You planning to say anything more to him?” I asked.

To Victor, I meant, about Jill Frey. Sam understood.

“Nah.” He shook his head. “Besides, he already knows I know. He didn’t mention it to me, but you know Dad. What he's got of a conscience is written all over his face.”

I thought about leaving Victor there, wriggling on the hook. It would’ve been poetic justice. But in the end I couldn’t. There was enough grief and guilt in Eastport tonight.

Enough to go around. Besides, something about the decision I’d just come to with Wade made hitting out at Victor pointless.

Even more so, I mean, than before. “Sam. Things didn’t get as far as Jill wanted you to think. Between her and your father.”

He glanced at me, unable to keep the relief out of his face. “Yeah, huh? You know that?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

He considered. “It's complicated, isn’t it?”

The house felt… empty. It was gone, that
occupied
feeling as if any moment the doors would bang open and the windows slam up and down. Whatever had wafted in and out of the old rooms—

I just wanted someone to know.
The sense of many lives lived within the old walls still remained. But that unhappy
particular
presence, wanting and waiting …

Gone.
“Sam, your father is a very complicated and screwed-up guy,” I began. “But…”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “But that's my dad, huh?”

He was silent a moment. Then: “Heck. Maybe Maggie and I will go over to his place tomorrow, help him move some of those books of his out to the clinic. Probably he could use a hand with some of the heavy lifting.”

Couldn’t we all. And some of us were lucky enough to get it, weren’t we? Some of us, like me.

“This other thing, though …” Sam said, meaning the trouble between his father and himself, and in his voice I could hear him letting go of it.

Just letting go. A breeze drifted in, smelling of the sea at night: cold salt water and the place, invisible from shore, where the sky begins.

You can’t see it until you get there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels featuring Jacobia Tiptree are set.

If you enjoyed Sarah Graves’
REPAIR TO HER GRAVE, you won’t
want to miss any of the exciting books
in her
Home Repair Is Homicide
mystery series. Look for
THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE,
TRIPLE WITCH, WICKED FIX,
WRECK THE HALLS, MALLETS
AFORETHOUGHT, TOOL & DIE,
NAIL BITER, TRAP DOOR, and
THE BOOK OF OLD HOUSES
at your favorite bookseller's.

And turn the page for a tantalizing
preview of the
Home Repair Is
Homicide
mystery, UNHINGED,
available from Bantam Books.

UNHINGED

A
Home Repair Is Homicide
mystery by
SARAH GRAVES

Chapter 1

H
arriet Hollingsworth was the kind of person
who called 911 the minute she spotted a teenager ambling down the street, since as she said there was no sense waiting for them to get up to their nasty tricks. Each week Harriet wrote to the
Quoddy Tides,
Eastport's local newspaper, a list of the sordid misdeeds she suspected all the rest of us of committing, and when she wasn’t doing that she was at her window with binoculars, spying out more.

Snoopy, spiteful, and a suspected poisoner of neighborhood cats, Harriet was confidently believed by her neighbors to be too mean to die, until the morning one of them spotted her boot buckle glinting up out of his compost heap like the wink of an evil eye.

The boot had a sock in it but the sock had no foot in it and despite a diligent search (one wag remarking that if Harriet was buried somewhere, the grass over her grave would die in the shape of a witch on a broomstick) she remained missing.

“Isn’t that just like Harriet?” my friend Ellie White demanded about three weeks later, squinting up into the spring sunshine.

We were outside my house in Eastport, on Moose Island, in downeast Maine. “Stir up as much fuss and bother as she could,” Ellie went on, “but not give an ounce of satisfaction in the end.”

Thinking at the time that it
was
the end, of course. We both did.

At the time. My house is a white clapboard 1823 Federal with three full floors plus an attic, forty-eight big old double-hung windows with forest-green wooden shutters, three chimneys (one for each pair of fireplaces), and a two-story ell.

From my perch on a ladder propped against the porch roof I looked down at Ellie, who wore a purple tank top like a vest over a yellow turtleneck with red frogs embroidered on it. Blue jeans faded to the color of cornflowers and rubber beach shoes trimmed with rubber daisies completed her outfit.

“Running out on her bills, not a word to anyone,” she added darkly.

In Maine, stiffing creditors is not only bad form. It's also a shortsighted way of trying to escape your money troubles, since anywhere you go in the whole state you are bound to run into your creditors’ cousins, hot to collect and burning to make an example out of you. That was why Ellie thought Harriet must’ve scarpered to Vermont or New Hampshire, leaving the boot as misdirection and her own old house already in foreclosure.

From my ladder-perch I glimpsed it peeking forlornly through the maples, two streets away: a huge Victorian shambles shedding chunks of rotted trim and peeled-off paint curls onto an unkempt lawn. Just the sight of its advancing decrepitude gave me a pang. I’d started the morning optimistically, but fixing a few gutters was shaping up to be more difficult than I’d expected.

“Harriet,” Ellie declared, “was never the sharpest tool in the toolbox, and this stunt of hers just proves it.”

“Mmm,” I said distractedly. “I wish this ladder was taller.”

Shakily I tried steadying myself, straining to reach a metal strap securing a gutter downspout. Over the winter the downspouts had blown loose so their upper ends aimed gaily off in nonwater-collecting directions. But the straps were still firmly fastened to the house with big aluminum roofing nails.

I couldn’t fix the gutters without taking the straps off and I couldn’t get the straps off. They were out of my reach even when, balancing precariously on tiptoe, I swatted at them with the claw hammer. Meanwhile down off the coast of the Carolinas a storm sat spinning over warmer water, sucking up energy.

“Ellie, run in and get me the crowbar, will you, please?”

Days from now, maybe a week, the storm would make its way here, sneakily gathering steam. When it arrived it would hit hard.

Ellie let go of the ladder's legs and went into the house. This I thought indicated a truly touching degree of confidence in me, because I am the kind of person who can trip while walking on a linoleum floor. I sometimes think it would simplify life if I got up every morning, climbed a ladder, and fell off, just to get it over with.

And sure enough, right on schedule as the screen door swung shut, the ladder's feet began slipping on the spring-green grass. I should mention it was also
wet
grass, since in Maine we really only have three seasons: mud time, Fourth of July, and pretty good snowmobiling.

“Ow,” I said a moment later when I’d landed hard and managed to spit out a mouthful of grass and the mud. Then I just lay there while my nervous system rebooted and ran damage checks. Arms and legs movable: okay. Not much blood: likewise reassuring. I could remember all the curse words I knew and proved it by reciting them aloud.

A robin cocked his bright eye suspiciously at me, apparently thinking I’d tried muscling in on his worm-harvesting operation. I probed between my molars with my tongue, hoping the robin was incorrect, and he was, and the molars were all there, too.

So I felt better, sort of. Then Ellie came back out with the crowbar and saw me on the ground.