Trap Door (17 page)

Time to step in. “She’s not telling rumors. I wanted to know more about Cory Trow, that’s all.”

Jennifer ignored me. “I thought you were my friend,” she told Ann, her voice rising. “So I include you in everything I do, I pay your way everywhere, this is how you pay me back? Gossiping about me with nosy strangers?”

Her tone attracted glances from the laptop-using patrons at other tables, discomforted at the sight of human conflict not yet sanitized by translation into pixels. This, their expressions said uneasily, was Not Nice.

“What’re you all looking at?” Jen snapped in a voice like a whip-crack. Faces turned hastily back to screens except for one weird little guy in the corner, nursing a coffee.

He was short and bald with a strange mustache, the long, wiry kind with waxed curls on the ends, and he ducked his shiny head when he saw me noticing him. Jen went on berating Ann, not quite stomping her widdle footsie to punctuate her tirade.

“If I’d known you were going to cause this much trouble, I’d never have… ” A red flush crept up Ann’s neck. Walter Henderson wasn’t the only one with a temper, it seemed. Jen had inherited it and was taking it out on Ann big-time, for what seemed to me a minor offense.

But the spiky-haired girl kept her cool better than I could have, displaying calm assertiveness. I would’ve probably had a fist raised by now.

“Come on,” she told the young woman towering furiously over her. “You need to get out of here, you’re making a scene.”

Angry resentment still flamed in Jennifer’s eyes but she backed off as if even through her rage she knew Ann was right. The two of them went out together without another glance at me, and the car sped off.

When I looked again the weird guy had departed, too. His cup was still steaming on the table where he’d been sitting. I thought his avid interest had seemed somehow more than idle curiosity; paying the check, I hurried out but he wasn’t on Dyer Street, or in the park behind the library.

I crossed to look behind the gazebo where in summer there were band concerts, but he wasn’t there either. Someone else staggered across the library lawn at me, though.

“Mom!” Sam called.

At the sight of him my heart sank. He wore the same gray sweatshirt he’d had on two nights ago, over a turtleneck that had originally been white, and wrinkled corduroy pants. Untied sneakers were on his feet, laces flopping.

“Mom!” he bellowed delightedly. “I found you!”

He hadn’t been asleep. He’d been drinking all this time, I realized; in there alone with the shades pulled and a glass in his hand, applying the stuff like salve.

“Mom!” Plunging toward me, he lost his precarious balance and steadied himself with a hand clapped too hard on my shoulder. It hurt; I backed away reflexively.

But it wasn’t what hurt most. “Oops. ’Scuse me. I gotta talk to you.”

Oh, good Christ. “Sam.” I tried steering him but he wouldn’t let me, veering away from me like a little kid who doesn’t want to be captured and is trying to make a game of it.

“I remembered,” he said proudly, “what I wanted to tell you.”

He smelled like a distillery. Anyone else would’ve been comatose. “What is it, Sam?”

I wanted to weep. But I managed a smile; it was my best hope of getting Sam out of the public eye without any more of a scene than we were already putting on. At least, I thought with a burst of resentment at him, Jen Henderson hadn’t been drunk.

His expression grew sly. “I know something you don’t know,” he chanted.

“What?” I asked for the final time, and by my tone I made sure Sam knew that it was final.

“The girl,” he said, owlishly resentful all at once.

“What girl?” By now I’d abandoned all thought of warning him to be careful in the car, of telling him that somebody had tried running me down and that his own “accident” might not really have been one, either.

Because he wouldn’t have remembered, and anyway he wouldn’t be driving until further notice. The moment I could, I was going to his house for the car keys he still had, and taking them.

The car too, just in case he had a spare set. From now on, he could walk if he wanted to go somewhere.

“The girl, the one that dead kid’s s’posed to be married to,” he slurred. “Name’s Trish.”

His giggle ended in a hiccup. “Trish, wish, fish.”

“What about her?” It didn’t surprise me that he might know something about Cory; you hear a lot of things when you hang out in bars for hours. Sam was just barely of legal drinking age now, and he made the most of it.

“Gone,” he pronounced morosely, swaying. His eyelids drooped and he struggled to control them. “Gone, gone, gone, gone… ”

“Sam, what do you mean?” Just then Ellie appeared, coming down Key Street toward us with Leonora riding piggyback.

“Hi!” Leonora shouted as Sam’s knees buckled. Luckily, Ellie had seen Sam this way before.

“I’ll call George,” she said, and took Lee into the Bayside to do so, then returned to sit on the lawn with me.

“Jake, I’ve just heard something awful.”

Me too: Sam’s drink-sodden voice. “In the Bayside?” By now George would be on his way.

“No, just before I came down here. I was on my way to try and find you. Bella heard it a little while ago from one of her friends over in St. Stephen. The friend called Bella, and she called me, and… ”

That got my attention. St. Stephen, the Canadian town where Cory Trow’s rumored wife and baby were supposed to be living…

Sprawled at our feet, Sam snored. “There’s been a bad fire,” Ellie said. “In St. Stephen. A house fire, the entire place went up.”

“Night-night,” Lee cooed to Sam as I stared at Ellie, trying to figure out what she’d told me might mean.

But knowing, really:

Gone, gone, gone.

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subj: Eastport book analysis results
Horace
I’m attaching a file of the final results on the ink, paper, glue, binding, etc. Also a nice computerized comparison analysis of the handwriting’s likely historical period. Early 19th century, without much doubt.
Note the mass spectrometer results on the ink. Ever seen a better profile of hemoglobin breakdown by-products?
Dave

“Goose chase,” Ellie muttered under her breath at the border
crossing between Calais, Maine, and New Brunswick, Canada. Fortunately, I was driving this time, so the uniformed guard in the booth didn’t hear her.

“Shopping,” I told him, this being the correct description of your errand at any border not decorated with rolls of barbed wire and supervised by men carrying machine guns.

This one consisted of the tollbooth-style enclosures that the crossing guards sat in, a two-story brick administration building, and a truckers’ byway with its own buildings and area for cargo inspection.

“Ellie, if that girl’s hurt or killed, it was no accident,” I said as the guard scrutinized all our identifications, even the baby’s, and ran our vehicle’s license plate.

“I mean does somebody have to draw us a picture about that, or what?” I added.

The guard scowled down at his computerized database. Regular commuters across the border lived in terror of the day one digit would be accidentally transposed, and they would be mistaken for terrorists. I waited with interest to see if I was on any lists, and whether or not Wade’s truck was.

I’d snagged the keys and the Fiat from Sam, but carrying Leonora around in the little vehicle was inconvenient; she’d outgrown the car seat I’d had installed in it soon after she was born. But there was plenty of room in the oversized cab of Wade’s pickup.

“Maybe so, but I doubt we can learn much from the burned-out scene of the crime,” Ellie retorted. “I’m as anxious about this girl as you are, but we’d be better off—”

“Snooping in our own territory. You always say that.” And usually she was right. Ellie’s familiarity with Eastport and its citizens was our ace in the hole.

“But I can’t help it,” I added. “I have to
see
.”

Besides, I needed to get out of Eastport. George had come and loaded Sam into his own truck and gotten him home. But in my current mood I was in serious danger of grabbing that boy and shaking him until his teeth rattled out of his head like a set of cheap dentures.

“Fine, right, have it your way,” Ellie gave in, unfooled as to my real motive. At last the guard waved us on through into St. Stephen, a small city just over the St. Croix River from Calais.

Taking the turn out of the border facilities past the duty-free shop, I felt as usual that if not for the formalities of the crossing we might as well still have been in Calais. The pair of cities had always been linked by blood and convenience; they cooperated on fire protection, their citizens had been marrying one another for decades, and in 1812, St. Stephen donated enough gunpowder for Calais to celebrate the Fourth of July, although their parent countries were already at war with one another.

A few things, however, were different. On Market Street we passed a currency-exchange office, but since we lived so close to the Maritime Provinces we had loonies and toonies in our purses as usual. In place of paper, the Canadians had dollar and two-dollar coins, the first nicknamed for the loon on the back.

Also, and this I could never quite get over, the Canadians had a Queen. Looking around, I always thought about how different it must feel, bearing allegiance to royalty even if so much more distantly than in the past. Canada was now of course a fully independent nation, no longer a British colony.

But here in St. Stephen they had something that interested me even more: the Ganong chocolate factory, whose product Ellie insisted we ought to trade a few loonies and toonies to acquire. So we entered the factory shop where the five-cent chocolate bar and the red heart-shaped candy box were first invented, and went in.

“I keep feeling that I’ve forgotten something important,” I said. “Something I was supposed to do, or get ready for… ”

The smell of chocolate filled my head, a sweet intoxicating aroma that drew me along helplessly. “You’ll think of it,” Ellie reassured me. And then, “Jake, are we dead? Because I think I’m in… ”

Heaven
. Fifteen minutes later, equipped with a cellophane bag of what Ganong called chicken bones—cinnamon-flavored hard candy over a soft chocolate center, loved by Wade—and a paper bag of milk chocolate chunks for us to eat now, we followed directions given us by the candy-counter lady to the street west of the business district where the fire had happened.

“Any luck with Ann Radham?” Ellie asked.

“Nope.” I peered at the street signs. “She was just starting to open up with me when Jen showed up. That was the end of that.”

And upon reflection now, what little I had learned from the girl didn’t seem very useful.

The wide, well-kept avenues of St. Stephen devolved to smaller offshoots and at last to a neglected-looking row of wood-framed houses in various stages of decay.

“Here we are.” I waved at the street full of beat-up parked cars, rickety front porches, and paint-peeling buildings. Some of the roofs had blue tarps nailed over them and others should have. At the thought, something pinged in my memory: that’s what I’d forgotten, the tarps. But there was something else, too…

“Oh, my God,” Ellie said, staring as I pulled the car to the curb. A large multifamily structure had stood recently among the poor but studiously neat single-family dwellings. Nothing else could’ve made the blackened rubble-heap mounded there now.

A twisted metal fire escape lay atop charred wood, smashed glass, and soaked lumps of burned furniture, while a fellow in a red windbreaker and jeans stood photographing the mess.

We got out. Crime-scene tape surrounded the chaos. “Excuse me… ,” Ellie began to the picture-taking fellow.

He turned impatiently. By the amount of gear in his shoulder bag, I could tell he was no looky-loo. “What?” he snapped.

A name tag on his shirt read “Maritimes Sentinel.” I stepped up beside Ellie. “I just heard about the fire. A friend of mine lived here,” I lied. “Do you know if anyone was—”

“No idea, they just send me out for the pictures.” He began snapping more of them.

“Well, do you know… ?” I tried again as Ellie wandered off.

He lowered the camera. “Lady, they could all have gotten barbecued in there and I wouldn’t know a thing about it.”

Or care, apparently. Something else about what he’d said also resonated with me but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Hey, Jake,” Ellie called. “Over here.”

Across the street in a small neglected park a half dozen women and a bunch of children had gathered around broken benches and a clutter of playground equipment. The moms slumped on the benches chatting while the kids ran around yelling.

The moms all looked weary, irritated, and not up for a pair of nosy strangers; I sympathized. Back in my own young-mother days there were plenty of times when my own life seemed the color and consistency of strained peas, too.

Ellie had the credential that counted, here: a small child of her own. She set Lee down among the toddlers and strolled over to the benches while I scanned the burned building some more. But nothing useful caught my eye. The stench was a combination of doused campfire and rotting refrigerator contents; the chocolate in my stomach turned over.