Trap Door (18 page)

Soon Ellie returned, leading Lee in short, toddlerish steps. “Bye!” Lee shouted, turning to wave. “Bye-bye!”

“So what’s the news?” I asked when we’d all gotten into the truck again.

Lee didn’t like her safety seat and said so in klaxon howls like the ones you might hear on a torpedoed submarine just before all the water starts gushing in.

“She lived there,” Ellie shouted. “Trish Bogan, those girls said her name was. They live in some of the houses around here.”

“They knew she was married to Cory?” I started the truck, hoping the engine vibration might calm Leonora.

It didn’t. That was the other thing I remembered about my young-mother years: the noise, as if someone were always beating a gong right next to my head.

“They knew,” Ellie hollered. “Said she kept her name.”

Not that I wouldn’t have given my right arm to go back, do it all over. Better, maybe. Once George took him home, Sam had passed out again on his couch.

Ellie rummaged through her bag. “They recognized Cory from my description,” she added at the top of her lungs. “Said he’d come around a little more often since the baby.”

“So what’s happened to her?” We headed back downtown. “Was she… .?” Bad pictures danced in my head: flames, glass shattering.

“No, she’s okay. The moms said she moved out yesterday all of a sudden, in a big hurry from what they saw. Didn’t take any furniture or housewares, nothing like that. Just packed up her clothes and the baby’s stuff and…
here
it is,” Ellie breathed in relief as from her bag she produced a small plastic bottle with an eyedropper screwed into the top of it. “Told one of the girls she was going back to St. John, where she’s from. Seems she had jewelry she could pawn, so she planned to do that for money to live on.”

“What’re you doing with that bottle?” I asked. We were both still shouting.

“Magic. Or something. All I know is… ” Ellie leaned into the backseat. “Presto, chango,” she uttered, waving the bottle.

Lee’s howling mouth clapped shut; her plump hands reached out eagerly. “Wow,” I said into the sudden silence. “How does that work?”

“I have no idea,” said Ellie. “And I’m afraid if I try to find out, it might
stop
working. So… ”

“Bah,” Lee whispered confidingly to the eyedropper bottle. “Bahbah.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t mess with success.” The light changed and I made the turn onto Market Street, headed back to the border. “Now, as for Trish… Bogan’s her maiden name, is it? And did her friends mention how to find her in St. John?”

Unlike St. Stephen, so small that you could locate somebody just by asking around if you kept at it long enough, St. John was a biggish city.

One she could hide in if she wanted to. “And… did any of them say
why
she was moving?”

“They said she was scared but she wouldn’t say of what, only that she and the baby weren’t safe here.”

“I guess not,” I said. But how had Trish known? A car pulled out from the curb behind us, one of those anonymous small white rentals you can get at most any airport and lots of other places, too. It bore a Maine license plate but I couldn’t quite see the driver.

“I asked if Trish ever left the baby with any of them,” Ellie said. “Or with anyone else.”

I took my eyes off the car in the rearview long enough to grin at her. “You genius. Like maybe the night Cory died?”

Because I was sure now that if he’d been murdered, Henderson had done it. Call me crazy, but the combination of a dead guy and a known killer with a grudge against the victim was just too much of a coincidence for my taste.

But that didn’t mean I’d ignore other theories. To nail Walt Henderson the way I needed to do it, they all had to be ruled out.

“Yup,” said Ellie. “But Trish was home that night, they said. Most other nights, too.”

The white car stayed behind us. “It was their one negative comment,” Ellie went on. “That she was picky about taking care of the baby. They said she made them feel she didn’t think they were good enough.”

It was past midafternoon and the sun’s glare kept me from seeing into our tail-car’s passenger compartment. I couldn’t tell if it was the one that had nearly run me over the night before, either. I put my signal on, swung a fast U-turn in the middle of St. Stephen’s downtown traffic; no cop around, luckily.

Or unluckily, depending on how this turned out. “There was one other thing,” Ellie said, taking a cue from my body language and glancing in the mirror herself. “They said the police were there for a long time at the fire. Everybody got out safe,” she added, “but it was close.”

“And?” Once we left the downtown area the city thinned to a couple of shopping malls, fast-food joints, some car dealerships, and a garden center. After that it was an hour and a half or so through the hinterlands until the city of St. John.

Too far to go today. “
And
,” Ellie replied, “the women said the fire in Trish’s building was definitely arson.”

I frowned, peeking at the rearview again. “Oh, come on. How would they know? It would take days for an investigation, and… ”

Ellie shook her head as I put on my signal, waited for a chance in the oncoming traffic, and turned left into the parking lot of a veterinarian’s office. A lady with a Great Dane in the passenger seat of her VW bug gave me a dirty look, then pulled out.

“That’s what I thought. But one of those moms lives right next door to the burned building,” Ellie replied. “She heard all the sirens and went outside to see what was going on.”

Leonora slept. Ellie reached back for the eyedropper bottle just as the car that had been behind us shot by, too fast for me to glimpse the driver.

“
And
her husband’s a Boy Scout troop leader,” Ellie said. “And you know how when they go on camping trips, they’re supposed to start the fire by rubbing two sticks together?”

I highly doubted that this particular blaze had been started by rubbing two sticks together. “Ellie, just where are you going with this?”

“But it’s not easy,” she went on. “Half the time the scouts can’t do it. So troop leaders always bring along these tablets.”

“To write on? But why would… ” Then the light dawned. “Oh. You mean trioxane tablets.”

Used for starting campfires quickly, the tablets were small, easily obtainable—from hunting-supply catalogs, for instance—and they burned hot. I knew about them because in the old days Jemmy’s pals used them on nightclubs they’d muscled in on, after they’d ruined them by laundering money through them and running through the original owner’s line of credit.

Then when the clubs were so bad off that they couldn’t even run hookers out of them anymore, they burned them. “Some of the tablets were lying around on the ground,” Ellie confirmed. “The girl I talked to recognized them.”

I turned back, toward St. Stephen and the border crossing. “So maybe Trish was right to hightail it to St. John when she did.”

The white car that had been tailing us pulled over onto the highway’s shoulder, waited for its chance to merge, then swerved in a fish-tailing U-turn of its own.

Still following. Lee’s eyes snapped open again. I guessed she’d noticed the eyedropper bottle was gone.

“Give it back,” I told Ellie, returning my attention to the road. “Give it back to her
now
.”

“Wah,” Lee uttered experimentally, her breath beginning to come in gasps. “Wah!”

What happened next drove just about everything out of my head, other than the strong desire to encase it in styrofoam or maybe even concrete to protect the fragile structures inside.

“Wah!” Leonora cried. “Wah! WAH!” The noise was stunning, an onslaught of outraged, not-to-be-comforted distress. Through the barrage it was all I could do to keep my concentration focused enough to drive without crashing into something.

Because this time the magic eyedropper bottle didn’t work and neither did anything else. Wrapping what was left of my mind around the idea of just getting home fast, I gripped the steering wheel and let the sound wash over me. It was a tactic I’d learned long ago while driving Sam places in downtown Manhattan traffic; he’d hated his car seat, too.

So it wasn’t until we got on Route 1 headed south past the turnoff to the cottage that it hit me:

Barbecue
. Wade’s barbecue at the lake, set for today.

That’s what I’d forgotten.

Being stalked
is possibly my least favorite way of getting attention, and it didn’t help my mood any that when Ellie and I finally got to the lake, we found my husband, Wade, her husband, George, and my old pal Jemmy all sitting around the table inside the cottage plotting murder.

Sam was outside, looking like death warmed over. “Sorry,” my sobered-up son moaned miserably as I approached.

“No kidding,” I said, stepping around where he sat on the cottage steps with his face in his hands.

If my tone was crisp it was only because I was so angry with him I could’ve spit. Also my nerves were still ragged from having been tailed by a strange car.

Come to think of it, the rest of the situation was pretty nerve-racking as well: a dead kid, a burned building, and a girl and her baby missing. Oh, and have I mentioned my friend Jemmy Wechsler and a notorious hit man, locked in mortal combat?

At least the car hadn’t followed us across the border, or anyway I hoped it hadn’t.

Sam was dripping wet. That plus his expression and a fresh pattern of damp footprints told me that someone—probably Wade—had wrestled him down to the edge of the water and pushed him in.

Too bad; right then I’d had poor-Sam-and-his-drinking-problem up to the eyeballs. “Go get some dry clothes on,” I told him, “or we’ll be nursing you for pneumonia, too.”

“What can I say?” Ellie apologized, coming up behind me and looking just as shell-shocked as I felt. “The eyedropper bottle trick doesn’t always work.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her, thinking that if all my own kid did was scream, I’d be a happy camper. Carrying Lee, who’d fallen silent as she was lifted from the truck, she went inside and I followed.

“… shotgun,” Jemmy was saying. “I could do it with a… ”

Noting my expression, Wade frowned questioningly; I nodded at him, signaling
I’m all right
. Next Sam came in, regarded us all in hung-over silence, and climbed to the loft for dry apparel.

“Too messy,” George Valentine objected to Jemmy. “And too obvious. You need something more accidental looking. A drowning, maybe.”

They were talking about Walt Henderson. Killing him, I mean. Or at any rate they were humoring Jemmy about it. Wade rolled his eyes at me so I’d know he and George weren’t really serious.

But I thought Jemmy was. “Hmm,” he said of George’s drowning suggestion. “Yeah.”

He’d traded his city garb of shirt and gray slacks for a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers, and looked fairly convincing in them. Once his hundred-dollar haircut grew out, he’d be all set.

“He could fall off a boat, couldn’t he? Into that cold water in the bay,” Jemmy went on.

“Which means all you need is a boat, a way to get him on it, a way to get him off it, and a way to get back with him
not
on it anymore without the whole town noticing,” I said, not bothering to conceal my sarcasm.

The groceries for the barbecue were already spread out on the cabin’s galley counter. Grilled steaks, baked potatoes, and salad, plus a store-bought chocolate cake, I saw with relief; in my absence someone else had taken care of it all.

Wade, again, I guessed. “Hey,” Jemmy replied, snapping his fingers. “Easy-peasy.”

“Yeah, well, don’t be too sure. Eastporters are funny that way, they notice murder,” I said.

“Especially some of them,” my father commented from his chair in the corner. Wearing clean overalls, a red flannel shirt, and a vest with slots for shotgun shells sewn into the front of it, he fit right into the cabin’s rustic decor.

When Sam came down we were all drinking sodas. He looked around, shook his head in heavily put-upon dismay, and stuck his hand out for some car keys; any car keys. “I’ve told you guys before, you can drink in front of me,” he said.

Had to, actually. He was rigid about our feeling free to enjoy a cocktail whether he had one or not. The trouble was, sooner or later he always did.

“Come on,” he added. “If you’re going to treat me like some poor boozer who has to have his glass just ’cause you are… ”

Then I’m leaving,
he meant to finish. But Wade didn’t let him. And he didn’t offer keys. “Sit down and shut up,” Wade told Sam conversationally, smiling.

But under the smile was a sharp glint of something we didn’t often see from Wade, whose capacity for sympathy had finally been exceeded just as mine had, I gathered. Sam was so astonished, he dropped like a marionette with its strings cut, his butt hitting the chair George shoved behind him with a soft, vulnerable-sounding thump.

Then Bella came in carrying a scrub brush and what remained of a steaming kettle of water. “Them fish-cleaning tools somebody left in the shed was mighty powerful in the stink department,” she announced, leaving no doubt as to what she had been up to.

Wade must’ve brought her along, too, and I shot him another look of gratitude; I may joke about her but the truth is that everything always looked better, smelled better, and even tasted better when Bella was around.

Our steaks, for instance; she’d scoured the grill clean of burnt drippings and afterwards insisted on doing the dishes so the others could socialize—my father, I noticed, jumped right in to help her—and so Jemmy and I could go out in the kayaks.

Floating on the silent lake with a lavender sky fading over our heads, Jemmy spoke. “Kid’s got a problem.”

But Sam wasn’t what I needed to discuss with him. “Listen, Jemmy, I can’t have you out here planning… ”

Murder
. “If I don’t, he’s going to,” he said bluntly, leaning back in the kayak with the paddle on his knees.

I ignored the remark. “It’s not that I don’t care about you. But I’m not going to be an accessory before the fact. I’m sorry, but I’m just not.”