The Book of Old Houses (15 page)

“Did it strike you as odd, though, that Merrie didn't even ask why we wanted to know about Jason?” I asked Ellie. “I mean, talk about your loaded question . . .” But Merrie hadn't flinched.

“Mmm,” Ellie agreed. “As if she's just been waiting for someone to come along and ask. Which doesn't fit with wanting to cover it up, either, does it? The way she spilled the beans so fast.”

The hill wasn't a shortcut to my house, distance-wise, and it certainly wasn't an easier way to get there, exertion-wise. But this route at least avoided downtown Water Street, where we would be delayed by enough casual conversation to fill up Merrie Fargeorge's archeology dig.

I thought a minute. “Maybe she's been wanting to unburden herself, too, like her student. D'you suppose Bob Arnold knows?”

It was hard to imagine otherwise. But if he did, why hadn't he done anything about it?

Meanwhile there was still something else going on in Ellie's mind, I could tell by the furrows between the gold-dust freckles on her forehead. “So?” I prompted.

She blurted it out suddenly. “Jake, I'm pretty sure Merrie wasn't telling us everything. Because I never realized it before, but I think my father was in the search party that day.”

Ellie's folks were dead now, buried side-by-side in Hillside Cemetery. Eastport old-timers joked it was the only time in fifty years that the two ever lined up in the same direction; Ellie's mother would've spun in her grave, they said, to turn her back on Ellie's dad.

“Really,” I commented, and waited for more. Clearly whatever memory Ellie was tiptoeing around wasn't a happy one.

Few in her childhood were. “You know,” she asked, “how when a beaver gnaws down a tree, it leaves the stump chewed to a point?”

She was still striding ahead of me. Gasping, I paused to catch my breath at the entrance path to the old Fort Sullivan site. A nice white-pine bench seemed to beckon conveniently to me from alongside the path.

Ellie didn't stop. “Yes, I do know, actually,” I said.

Whippy maple and ash saplings had been chopped down around the bench to make a clearing. Personally I thought there should be public oxygen tanks there, too, for people who tried climbing the Adams Street hill behind Ellie.

“But d'you by any chance want to tell me what in the world pointy beaver stumps have to do with anything?” I managed.

A small wooden sign marked the path to the spot from which you could see down the bay to the Narrows, where ships from the south entered our waters. It had been the lookout place back in the old days, too, when Fort Sullivan's establishment had signaled the American desire to hang on to the region.

A desire that got squelched as decisively as a candle's flame being pinched out; now the fort was only a memory, all its keen youthful vigor lying under the saplings and matted grass. Still, I could never pass without thinking about how awful it must have been, that first sight of the British warships in 1814.

“That
is
the point,” Ellie said finally. “What I overheard my father telling my mother that night . . . I didn't understand it. Hey,” she added defensively, “I had my own problems.”

That was for sure. She sighed, remembering. “And anyway, when I heard it I was half-asleep. But now after what Merrie told us, I think I do.”

She paused, half-turning to me. “Understand, that is. What my dad said, down in the kitchen.”

Near the top the hill grew even steeper, past the ruin of an old Carpenter Gothic–style house with no windows and hardly any roof left on it. Through the empty front door-hole you could see straight into the parlor to the sodden wallpaper and shredded window-lace, once some Eastport woman's pride and joy.

Somebody had stacked old lumber in there recently. Ahead of me, Ellie resumed walking uphill steadily; I swear that woman had the lungs of a Tibetan sherpa.

“And here's the detail Merrie didn't want to describe but my dad did,” she went on again after a while. “When they found Mr. Riverton out there in the woods, he'd fallen face-forward.”

I forced my aching legs into brisker action, to keep up. “Face
down,
” Ellie elaborated, “right onto the pointed end of a gnawed birch sapling. Impaled, actually. His head . . .” She faltered.

“Yuck,” I said as we crested the hill at last. No wonder the medical examiner had been uncertain. Perspiration dripped stickily down my back and my lungs felt seared with exertion.

“Yuck is right,” she agreed. “I don't remember Jason's dad too well but he was a large man. His weight brought him down hard and the sapling pierced his skull, my father said, so—”

We turned left on High Street past the grade-school playground. Two hundred years earlier, this table-like area just short of the island's highest point had been home to Fort Sullivan's barracks, munitions storage, and parade areas.

“So the sharp stump went through-and-through,” Ellie said. “That's what I heard my father saying that night. Must've been.”

The mental picture her words summoned up was so grisly, I understood now why she'd repressed it. But it explained a lot.

“And that,” I said, “would've obliterated the bullet's entry and exit holes.” We started downhill.

“There'd be nothing to use against Jason even if they wanted to,” I went on. “So maybe it wasn't exactly a complete cover-up. More like a judgment call.”

Still . . . “But how'd they decide he even might've been shot in the back of the head, then? Did your dad talk about that?”

“Not directly. But from what I recall it was something about the bullet still being in there.”

So the medical examiner might've guessed from its position, but couldn't have known for sure; once a bullet gets in a skull, it tends to bounce around in there before coming to a halt. My ex-husband the brain surgeon used to talk about it.

“Gosh, isn't that strange?” Ellie's voice was a little dreamy-sounding. “I remember being in my bed, and my dad and mother talking downstairs. All the gory details . . . but when I woke up the next morning, it felt like a bad dream.”

She shook her head wonderingly. “So I just forgot it. And I haven't thought about it again. Not once in all those years.”

“And Jason himself?” I asked. “What'd he have to say about it all back then? Anything more?”

“I don't know. He was much younger than me, of course. So if he did say anything, I wouldn't have heard it. You know how kids are at that age, they think of the littler ones as babies.”

We continued downhill past Town Hall, the Methodist church, the bank on the corner, and the funeral home, where the masses of yellow roses climbing the old south wall glowed in the noonday sun. As we crossed Boynton Street, a small private plane powered up out of the Quoddy airfield, barely a mile distant.

It flew overhead, dipping its wings in a wigwag farewell, then soared on out over the ocean, hop-scotching the clouds to who knew where. “Anyway,” I told Ellie, “we've gotten what we wanted. Two new suspects to wave under DiMaio's nose.”

“Two?”

“Ann Talbert,” I reminded her. “You said yourself she was in Orono the night Horace died. And she has been pretty wacko about the book.
And
she knew he had it.”

“Oh. Right. I guess in my mind Jason's kind of replaced her. After what we've heard, I really
wouldn't
rule out his clobbering Horace and stealing the book for Merkle, if Merkle asked him to.”

Especially, she meant, now that we knew it might not've been the kid's first outing in the bloodletting department.

“Bert might be some kind of a father figure to him?” I theorized.

“Maybe,” Ellie said slowly. “Why
would
Bert want your old book, though? Or why would DiMaio think he did?”

As we approached the house, I spotted my own father going in the back door ahead of us, so probably by the time we got there Bella would be in rare form again, too.

I sighed at the thought of it. “Ellie,” I said, “I have no idea.”

At all the thoughts, actually: bathroom, Bella, book. Fear over Sam's fresh try at substance-abuse recovery; hope that this time he would make it.

Plus pure reluctance at the party plan, so unattractive and inescapable.

And so imminent. Merrie hadn't seemed to warm up to me during our visit to her, either.

To the contrary.

“I'll stop at the motel on my way home and talk to DiMaio, shall I?” Ellie paused at the end of the sidewalk. “We'll need to let him know enough of what we're thinking to keep him from doing anything hasty.”

Yeah, like killing Merkle. “And then I'll be back,” she promised.

“Really?” It was lunchtime, and when George was on morning duty with Leonora, Ellie took charge of the afternoons.

She beamed at me, the troubled memories vanishing from her face. “Of course. George and I traded times so I can be here for the party. You didn't think I'd make you do it alone, did you?”

Actually, I had.

“How about we invite Dave out for dinner tonight, too? They're having fireworks offshore, we can watch them from the dock at the Lime Tree,” she added. “After all the party stuff Bella won't want to cook. And it'll give us another chance to find out what he's up to.”

“Good idea,” I replied distractedly. The Lime Tree restaurant overlooked the bay and the food was excellent. From inside the house came the voices of Bella and my father.

Not shouting, exactly. But it didn't sound friendly. “Only what if Dave's not at the motel?” I asked.

Ellie was already striding away. “I'll find him,” she called over her shoulder as, inside, a door slammed and a plate shattered.

I knew the sounds well from back when my first husband was around. So at the foot of the porch steps I reminded myself:
This is my place. I set the rules here. And if people think they can run around smashing plates in it, they are about to learn differently.

Then, straightening myself into the same sort of bravely ridiculous posture that I imagined Napoleon must've hoped would do him any good at Waterloo, I marched inside.

Chapter
11

I
could tell from the stiffness of my dad's flannel-shirted
shoulders as he stomped off down the hall that he didn't want to talk about what had just happened between him and Bella.

And when he didn't want to talk, his jaw might as well have been wired shut. So I really had no choice but to begin torturing Bella about it, instead.

“Oh, yes, you are,” I told her in the kitchen about five minutes later. She'd used up most of those minutes insisting she wouldn't discuss it, either.

But Bella never aired anything personal unless I dragged it out of her. And maybe I was wrong, but I suspected that right now she desperately wanted me to.

“You most certainly are going to talk,” I said. “To me, immediately. Because if you don't, I've got big news for you: you're fired.”

The minute the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to cram them back in again. But too late; Bella's big, green eyes stared at me in horror.

“You wouldn't,” she breathed.

“I said it, I meant it, I'm here to represent it,” I shot back rashly. Because that was the other thing about her; from somewhere or another she'd gotten the goofy idea that I was smart, determined, and fearless.

That I would stick to my guns. And if I didn't have to fire her, I
wanted
her thinking so, or she would lose all respect for me. After that, the next time I asked her not to scrub out the insides of an old fireplace flue with toothpaste she would do it anyway, with minty-fresh but old-brick-destroying results.

And my father's recent remarks about support beams notwithstanding, I strongly believed the chimneys held up my old house in several important places. The roof, for instance. And all four of the sides.

Bella hesitated, in case I might take the threat back. Meanwhile I calculated the size of the raise I'd be forced to offer if I did.

“Oh, all right,” she exhaled at last, bending to pick up pieces of broken plate.

Sorrowfully, she traced the gold rim of a shard with her callused fingertip. “We could glue it back together.” Her voice was uncharacteristically soft. “Or I could.”

Even if we found all the pieces, I doubted anyone could reassemble them. It was one of the set that had been in the house when Sam and I moved in here, bone china with a scalloped edge and a delicate, hand-painted floral design.

“No. Never mind, just put them in the trash, all right?” I said. “It doesn't matter. Because you know what, Bella?”

Her shoulders sagged. Cautiously, I stepped nearer, slipped a tentative arm around her waist.

To my surprise, she didn't resist. “Things break,” I told her simply. “You know, sometimes, they just . . .”

Her fingers opened; the china shard dropped to the floor and broke into four more pieces, two slowly spinning clockwise and two of them counterclockwise.

We stared down at them in silence together as a door slammed angrily upstairs, followed by a curse.

And then Bella Diamond, the toughest, funniest, most damn-the-torpedoes-and-full-speed-ahead downeast Maine housekeeper you could ever want to meet. . . .

Bella wept.

Right up until
nearly modern times, some children in Eastport were sardine-cannery workers as soon as they grew tall enough to stand at a cutting table, whacking the heads and tails off the shiny creatures with knives that often took along a small thumb or finger.

Old photographs from the turn of the century show the boys in short pants and suspenders, boots, and caps. The girls wore dresses, buttoned shoes, and black stockings. Their small hands were often already scarred or freshly missing a digit.

By the time I found Eastport, most of those children had lived long lives and were in their graves. But sitting with Bella always made me think of them, somehow.

“He won't give it up,” she told me. “He wants to get married, and he wants to get married
now.
And there's,” she finished bleakly, “an end to it. He wants what he wants.”

We were stealing a moment on the front steps of her house, a tiny wooden cottage that had once been a cannery-worker's shack a few streets uphill from the ferry landing. Each of us was eating a jelly doughnut from Bella's cupboard and drinking coffee that we had bought on our way over here.

I coughed a doughnut crumb. “You're kidding,” I said. Then, realizing this wasn't very tactful, “I mean, not that he wouldn't want to . . . that is, I don't see
why
he shouldn't . . .”

“I do,” she said, without the slightest bit of rancor.

Because when it came to self-pity, her attitude was the same as that of those children at the cutting table: it didn't stop the bleeding and you had to keep working anyway.

So you might as well get on with it. She bit half the jelly out of the doughnut, washed it down with some coffee, then set the cup on the step.

“I ain't no oil painting,” she pronounced. “Man'd have to be blind not to see that.”

But oil paintings don't move, and breathe, and exert their special, individual will upon the world. They don't laugh.

Or weep. Upon reflection I understood exactly why my father wanted to marry Bella Diamond.

But behind us her tiny house sat snugly self-contained, full of her mystery novels and puzzle books, her
TV Guide
marked with the programs she liked, her robe and slippers in their accustomed places and her clean, white teacup on the drainboard.

Once she stopped weeping, I'd invited her out to dinner with us tonight and she'd accepted, but didn't want to go in what she was wearing. She'd offered to let me use her shower, while she changed too, so I'd brought my bath bag and fresh clothes of my own.

Okay, I thought, so when the ladies arrived maybe I wouldn't be Princess Diana. But at least I wouldn't reek.

Too bad that when we arrived, we found that today the water company was flushing the mains on
this
side of town, so that what came out of Bella's tap turned out to be even dirtier than I was.

Which by now was really saying something. “Why,” Bella asked plaintively, “ain't things good enough the way they are? Whyever does your father want to try changing what's already workin'?”

Sun poured through the blackish leaves of the copper beeches. A breeze sprang up, laden with the tantalizing fragrance of meat grilling at Rosie's hot dog stand on the breakwater.

“I live alone and like it,” she declared. “I ain't too old, but I am way too selfish an' set in my ways to go turning my life into a social-studies experiment.”

As I listened, a wave of impatience at my dad washed over me. You'd think a person who knew how to build a stone wall would know better than to hurl himself headfirst into one.

But apparently not. “Missus,” Bella said, “if he don't let up, you won't need to fire me. I'll have to go on my own. I ain't had such good work in I don't know when, but—”

“Bella, think, now. Are you sure it's only because you're used to living alone that you don't want to do it?”

She glared at me. “Now don't
you
start in. I'm just telling you that I ain't . . .”

Her tone was fierce and her look implacable. But I refused to back down because doing without Bella was one thing.

But being without her . . . “I'm not starting in,” I said. “Obviously you don't have to marry him if you don't want to.”

Seeing it again only reinforced my earlier certainty that two adults couldn't live in her house comfortably, and my dad's was not just small; it was also downright primitive. And my place always seemed to be so full of people she would end up with no privacy at all if she married him.

And that was the heart of her objection, I decided, watching a little red sports car whiz by. It was the same red Mazda Miata I'd seen on Key Street around the time DiMaio arrived, I realized distantly, with the same attractive blonde woman driving it.

Bella reached out a bony hand to help me up, and maybe it was my imagination but I thought she gripped mine a bit longer than necessary befsore she let go.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You're welcome,” she replied, and after that we went back together to my house and went on with our day.

Because quite a lot had changed around here since Eastport children stood at the fish-cutting tables. But one thing hadn't:

Get on with it.

When we got
home the old tub still squatted at the top of the stairs. And it wouldn't do. Especially after the antique elegance of Merrie Fargeorge's place, it simply wouldn't do to have the tub there when the ladies came. So I was delighted when my dad came in behind me, lugging a coil of rope.

Enormous rope; the kind of stuff they tied the tugboats up with. I gazed happily at it.

“I kept thinking I needed a chain,” he said. “But getting the chain to slide smoothly over the edge of the roof turned out to be a problem.”

I followed him down the hall. “I can see you're making some progress. Do you want to clue me in on what you plan to . . .”

“But
then
I realized if I nail sheet metal to the edge of the roof,” he continued, “and use line instead of chain 'cause it's smoother . . .”

Nimbly he climbed the stairs. But near the landing he paused.

“Hmm,” he said, frowning. “You know, though, when I planned this all out I forgot one other thing.”

“You mean the part about it being stuck.”

He'd already taken the chain off, and in just the little while since then the heavy tub had dug a sizable dent into the plaster. It had also pushed the banister post out of line more than an inch.

“But that's what you're going to do first, right?” I said. “Haul it back up again, pull the bathroom window out, and—”

Lower it, somehow. Winch it out, or something. He scratched his jaw thoughtfully until a new idea occurred to him and he swung into action once more.

“Come on up here,” he instructed, limberly traversing the obstacle while waving at the rope coil. “Haul that into the bathroom. Put it under the window.”

I hopped in and out, too—bleaghhh—and did as he asked. Coiled up, the rope was heavy enough to sink a battleship; when I staggered back he'd passed its free end through the drain hole, then tied it in a neat bowline.

“Now what?” I asked, beginning to feel hopeful again.

Maybe I really would get the tub out of here before the party. Heck, there was still an hour to go before it began. And once the tub was out, there was a chance of starting in on the bathroom renewal, possibly by tonight.

Walls and floor, window, washstand, maybe even a baseboard heating pipe instead of a radiator . . . A little song began trilling in my heart.

But it trailed off sourly as I thought of all that had to come before: cups, glasses, cake, little sandwiches, and punch made with ginger ale and rainbow sherbet. The punch would be creamy, foamy, and as thirst-quenching as lukewarm sugar water usually is, but it was expected so we were having it.

“Next step, I tack the sheet metal to the porch roof,” my dad said. “But for now I'll just make the line fast to my truck. So if the banister breaks or the wall fractures—”

He waved at the tub again. “—I don't have to worry about it sliding downstairs and killing someone, today or tomorrow.”

Today or . . . oh, no. “But, Dad, you've got it all tied up now. Why not just haul it . . .”

Back into the bathroom, and out into the huge metal embrace of whatever enormous machine you plan to borrow or rent,
I would've finished. But he was already following the line into the bathroom. There he hoisted the coil, then threw it out the window.

A huge thud rose from the yard below. He hurried downstairs again with me following behind, sputtering like the little engine that couldn't.

In the driveway he looped the line around his trailer hitch. “There,” he said. “When I get back the day after tomorrow—”

“The day
after . . .
!” I yelped in dismay.

He ruffled my hair. “Patience, Grasshopper,” he intoned.

Phooey. I didn't know which I disliked more, that phrase or the gesture that went with it.

“Rome wasn't unbuilt in a day, you know,” he added.

Double phooey. But there was no sense arguing with him.

“Fine,” I gave in. “Wherever you're going I suggest you start going there. Much more of that thing on the stairs and I won't answer for the kind of mood I'll be in when you get back.” I caught the truck keys he tossed to me. “Where do you have to be that's so important, anyway?”

“Augusta. To get my ID papers straightened out.”

When he was on the run all those years after my mother died, he'd had plenty of IDs; just none that really belonged to him.

“I'm taking the bus,” he added. “So I can leave the bathtub tied.”