Trap Door (20 page)

A bridge led through a tollbooth and over the St. John River, a waterway whose massive flow ran upstream twice a day on account of high tides in the Bay of Fundy. Nova Scotia was a mere two hours east by ferry. Beyond that lay the vastness of the open Atlantic. “Now what?” Ellie asked.

In 1877 a fire in a hay barn had ended up consuming most of the city because in a cost-saving measure the fire-engine horses were out with a road-repair crew that day. Now brick commercial buildings lined the central streets; urban blight had taken a nibble here but not a big bite.

“Damn.” I dug around in my satchel one-handed. “Forgot the phone book.”

Ellie shook her head at me but came up with a backup plan. “Trish was going to pawn jewelry. So let’s go to pawnshops, and while we’re in one we’ll ask to use theirs.”

“Great. Trouble is, we’ll need one to find the pawnshops.”

A man went by pushing a shopping cart with what looked like all of his belongings in it. St. John had a fabulous harborside shopping district, I recalled, but this wasn’t it.

An Indian takeout joint crouched between a discount store and an outlet for hair salon supplies. Stenciled signs advertised the businesses of tenants upstairs: AAA-1 Accounting, The Beauty Part Hair Weaving and Straightening, and Dr. Bontatibus.

His area of expertise was Painless Dentistry. “Jake?” Ellie said. “We don’t need… ”

At the moment, my own stupidity was giving me a toothache. How could I be so dumb as to forget the…

“What?” I snapped. But I followed Ellie’s gaze, and sure enough there it was right in front of me: a pawnshop.

A bell over
the door jingled merrily as we entered. Inside, the shop was jammed full of furniture, ice skates, silverware, paintings, and just about anything else a human being could sell for money—except guns. Canadians were funny about those, preferring their citizens not to be armed like the Seventh Cavalry Division.

The jewelry was under the counter in a glass case. Watches, eyeglasses, a clutter of old wedding rings and costume items spread out in tarnished splendor, none worth much.

“Help you?” the proprietor inquired, not quite rubbing his hands together at the sight of potential customers. He had on a fraying cardigan over a dress shirt whose collar had seen better days. Ellie was already in a far corner examining a box of books.

“Just a question,” I began, and his smile dimmed. I had a feeling more stuff came in here than went out. But he was nice about it. “I wonder if… ”

“
Psst!
” I glanced sideways. The sound came from somewhere near a tangle of musical instruments: banjos, guitars, fiddles, mandolins, each with at least one broken tuning peg and a snapped string. A tuba topped the shelf.

“
Psst!
” A guy peeked out from behind the display: maybe five feet tall, bald and delicately featured, with a long waxed mustache.

A
familiar
mustache. It was the guy who’d been staring at me in the Bayside when I’d met there with Ann Radham.

Ellie turned curiously from a bin full of women’s gloves, their yellowish softened shapes creepily recalling the outlines of the original owners’ hands. She’d already taken possession of the book box.

The guy jerked his head in summons:
Over here!
Today he wore a crisp white shirt with some kind of an official emblem on the pocket, navy uniform pants with matching jacket, and shiny black shoes. A red tie knotted with military precision held his collar tight.

“
Psst!
” he repeated urgently, waving his small, fussy-looking hands for additional emphasis.

“Excuse me, please,” I said to the pawnshop man, who didn’t look happy. Another minute, he likely thought, and he could have sold me one of those mandolins or maybe even the tuba.

Impatiently I approached the fellow. “Okay, what do you… ”

Want,
I would’ve said.
And who the hell are you and what’ve you got to do with… ?
But Ellie interrupted.

“Fascinating,” she exclaimed, meaning his outfit and his perfect grooming, right down to his clear-polished nails. Except for the mustache his shave was so close it looked as if he’d gone over his skin with emery paper.

The shoes were patent leather. “Why were you in Eastport?” I demanded. “Were you following me in St. Stephen, too?”

His small pink mouth opened but no sound came out. “Jake, you’re scaring him,” Ellie admonished.

“That’s not all I’ll do if he doesn’t speak up,” I said as the feeling of nearly being run down by a speeding car came over me again. I seized his shoulder; as he jerked away, a sound came from one of his pockets.

It was the clink of jewelry. Good jewelry, maybe, the kind someone might pawn if she needed money.

“Come on,” I told the little man brusquely, hustling him along. The bell over the shop’s door jingled again as we went out.

“So what have we here?” I demanded as soon as we reached the sidewalk. Plunging a hand into his jacket pocket, I extracted a pair of bracelets, one set with red stones and the other with green. Last to emerge was a ring with a diamond as big as a Ritz cracker in it.

Well, maybe not that big. But back in my glory days of money handling in the city, I’d gotten familiar with the things rich people liked to transform into cash: coins, furs, diamonds, and gold bars, plus sealed packets of cocaine as fat and white as the ones you find in grocery-store boxes of powdered sugar.

Even so, I couldn’t tell paste from the real thing without a jeweler’s loupe. But I knew nobody put worthless stones into platinum Tiffany settings, and those I did recognize.

“They b-belong to Trish,” the little guy managed. He’d gone completely white.

I let go of him. “What’re you doing with them, then, and how do you know her?” I demanded. “And… did Cory know about them?”

As the guy reeled away from me it occurred to me again that maybe Trish Bogan didn’t even know Cory was dead; she could’ve been running from
him
.

The mustached guy interrupted the near-fainting process to shoot me a look of scorn. “Cory,” he uttered. “As if.”

Scorn and something else. At my mention of Cory a surge of visceral hatred radiated from him, powerful as a slap. Ellie was still inside; through the store window I saw her buying the books.

Sighing at the very thought of putting even more old objects into my house—with baby gear practically falling out the windows, Ellie’s certainly had no room for them—I decided that maybe Bella would like the volumes. Besides her incessant puzzle solving she read everything, so fast that Wade said it was a wonder wisps of smoke didn’t rise from the pages.

Meanwhile out here on the street, pedestrians glanced at me and the quivering mustached guy, no doubt wondering whether to call a cop. “Come on,” I told the fellow as Ellie emerged with the box in her arms. “You’re coming with us.”

I shoved him toward our car. “
And
you’re taking us to talk to Trish.”

“N-no!” He squirmed from my grasp. Frowning, a woman clad in business garb—suit, heels, briefcase—drew a cell phone from a bag. And at the moment we did
not
need the Canadian Mounties.

“I… I drove here. You can follow me,” he said. He reached into his breast pocket—for an instant I thought
Gun!
—and drew out a small white card.

Puppets in Motion, Fred Mudge, Puppeteer,
it read; address and phone below. “You’re Fred Mudge?”

I looked from the card to his face, which had regained some of its color. He nodded energetically. “I’m a friend of Trish’s. She sent me to pawn these things for her.”

He reached out his small manicured hand for the jewelry. I dropped the items into my bag instead. “Uh-uh. Not so fast, bud. First you take us to Trish and we’ll hear what she has to say.”

Surprisingly, he accepted this. “Okay. That’s my car.” His wave indicated a midsize sedan, medium green.

Not a white rental. And what the heck; it sure seemed like he
wanted
us to find Trish. So we followed him to the industrial side of the harbor: tank farms, warehouses, and truck terminals.

“Are you sure we ought to be doing this?” Ellie asked as we drove. “I mean, without letting anyone else know where we are?”

Mudge signaled a turn well in advance so we could get into the proper lane behind him. Along the working harbor’s edge were streets full of three-story brick row houses, now divided into three-family dwellings with iron-railed steps leading up from the basement apartments.

Moms in blue jeans and sweatshirts sat out on the stoops chatting and smoking cigarettes as they watched the kids playing on the sidewalks. Down the block a guy worked on an old car, its hood up, radio blaring. Two mutts sniffed a fire hydrant.

“I don’t know,” I said, pulling in behind Mudge to park in front of one of the buildings. He had driven very sedately, not at all like a wise guy. “Guess we’re going to find out.”

In front of one of the better-looking row house entries—no basement apartment, only one doorbell at the top of the steps—Fred Mudge waited, then led us inside.

“I sent Fred to pawn the jewelry,” Trish Bogan confirmed when
we’d entered the row house he led us to. “I thought he’d get a better deal.”

She was maybe eighteen and from the curl of her eyelashes, the angle of cheekbone still visible in her heart-shaped face, and her full, bitten-looking red lips, you could tell that not too long ago this girl had been what Sam would’ve called a fox.

Now jouncing a baby on her plump shoulder she stood frumpily barefoot in the gleaming kitchen of Fred Mudge’s place warming a bottle of formula on the gas stove.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she added plaintively, brushing back a strand of brown hair. “I came here because I had nowhere else to go, and now Fred wants me to stay.”

Her expression hardened. “But I still want my own place. And besides, he won’t like having a kid around once the novelty wears off. He thinks he will, but Fred likes things kept neat.”

Neat
wasn’t the word for it. Back in the city I’d seen fancy apartments; heck, I’d lived in one. But this place took the cake: high ceilings, plaster smooth as that baby’s bottom, and paint so fresh it made me look around for an open bucket.

And all that was just the beginning in Mudge’s unexpectedly plush digs. “The ring and bracelets belonged to your mother?” I asked Trish.

Mudge had stopped on the steps to tell us so before bringing us in here, as if now that we knew he hadn’t stolen the jewelry we might decide Trish had. After all, unwed young mothers didn’t often own the kind of bling that would have looked just right on Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Trish nodded agreement while in the next room Ellie kept Fred Mudge busy by letting him show her around some more. I’d already seen plenty; the oaken woodwork, maple floors, and cherry staircase banister all glowed with decades of polish, and the marble fireplace mantels shone mirror-bright.

“Yes,” Trish said sadly. “The bracelets and ring are all I have of my mom’s. But now I’m going to have to get rid of them.”

Soft rugs in a variety of neutral shades complemented the furniture upholstered in nubbly wheat, each sitting area with a brass lamp, velvet or needlepoint throw pillows, and an ottoman covered in tapestry or leather.

Trish tested the bottle on her arm, then cradled the baby, who took it eagerly. “See, as soon as I found out Cory was dead I knew I had to get out of St. Stephen… ”

Her voice broke, blue eyes filling with tears. So she had known. “Who told you?”

At least it hadn’t had to be me. “Fred,” she replied. “He’d go over there sometimes, to check up on what Cory was doing. Spy on him, really, so he could report all the bad stuff to me.”

Sure, smear his rival; that made sense. Trish went on: “And the next day of course it was all over Eastport. That’s how Fred heard about it.”

She bit back a sob, then stubbornly regained her composure. “I tried to tell Cory that girl he was seeing would only get him in trouble. He just thought I was jealous.”

“Were you? And how did you know about her, anyway? Did Fred tell you that, too?”

She shook her head. “Cory told me, after I smelled perfume on him. He would’ve gotten over her,” she added.

Yeah, maybe. “And after he got convicted of stalking her?” I asked. “What was his attitude then?”

She sat at the tile-topped kitchen island, her listless wave inviting me to do the same. “Typical Cory. It just made him mad. Nobody was going to tell
him
what to do, you know?”

“Ever meet her?” And when she shook her head no: “Trish. Think hard, now. Was there anything Cory knew about Jen or about her father that either of them might’ve wanted kept secret?”

Because with the fire in St. Stephen, things had changed. Getting rid of Cory was one thing but going after Trish implied considerably more of a motive than just eliminating a daughter-pestering punk.

And if Jen’s only link to Trish Bogan was via Cory
telling
Trish about her… “No,” Trish answered sadly. “I didn’t want to know about her.”