Trap Door (29 page)

“Jake, do you really think he’d hurt a little… ” Ellie’s voice trailed off.
Baby,
she’d meant to finish.

“I think it’s a mistake to underestimate what he’d do,” I replied grimly. She was right, the idea was ghastly. But…

“So what’s the plan?” Ellie eyed the stack of blank cards and envelopes on the kitchen table. I hesitated to tell her; it sounded more rinky-dink even than the drugstore remedies.

But at this point it was all I had.

“We’re going to invite him. And bamboozle him,” Bella said with quiet ferocity; I’d told her my idea already.

“Henderson,” I explained. “I think maybe if we get everyone together, Henderson too, and explain everything that’s happened right in front of him with Bob Arnold there listening to all of it, he’ll—”

“Talk?” Ellie asked disbelievingly. “Jake, are you nuts?”

“Oh, he’ll talk, all right.” Bella addressed another envelope and plopped it down on top of the pile. “Because we’ll poke his weak spot. That’s what villains in books always have. An ah-shilly’s heel.”

Achilles, she meant; probably Miss Marple had mentioned it. “Hmm. His fatal flaw,” Ellie said thoughtfully. “But… why won’t he just deny it all? Since after all you don’t have any… ”

Proof
. Yup, that was
my
ahshilly’s heel. Which meant I could either give up or go on.

Try again. Even in the face of almost sure failure, because it was a chance if not to stop Walter Henderson—probably, I realized again with a pang, it was too late for that—then at least to get him caught and punished.

“Why,” Ellie inquired reasonably, “would he agree to be present for this at all?”

“Good question. Especially since he’s not only going to be present, he’s the host. I want to gather everyone right there in his barn, which he’ll have to give permission for or I can’t even do this thing in the first place.”

“We,” Bella corrected me firmly, “can’t do it in the first place. Only we can, because—”

“Because I’m a pain in the neck,” I finished for her.

Ellie gave me a look. “To Henderson,” I added. “But most of all I’m a danger to his daughter. Or I’m going to make him think I am. And Jen is
his
Achilles’ heel.”

Bella addressed another envelope. We weren’t putting stamps on them; we didn’t have time for postal delivery because we were doing this tonight. Bella was going to hand all the invitations to people or put them in their mailboxes.

“I see,” Ellie replied. “Accuse Jen of killing Cory, make it look as if she might even end up being suspected officially… But Jake, if she didn’t do it—”

“That doesn’t matter. We only need to trump up a good enough story so it’s reasonable for Bob Arnold to think she might’ve. It shouldn’t be difficult, after all. She’s strong enough, she could have lured him over there with that cell phone she gave to him, and most of all she’s got no decent alibi.”

I breathed in deeply, trying to ease my aching head. “So Henderson could be made to think an official investigation
might
be opened, you see. But we need to do it fast, because Ann Radham told me Jen leaves town tomorrow.”

And once his daughter was gone, any threat I posed to her would seem a lot less worrisome to Henderson. Bella sealed the envelopes.

“Good thing he didn’t know birch logs rot practically the minute they touch the ground,” I added, touching my stitches gingerly. “Or he’d have hit me with oak.”

Ellie frowned. “What if they don’t get their invitations? Maybe you won’t be able to deliver all of them personally. And if you just put them in mailboxes, you won’t know for sure whether or not—”

“Yes, we will,” I assured her. “We’ll know.”

Because Bella had devised a plan for that, too. As methodical in preparing the invitations as she was in pot scrubbing or window washing, she’d begun each card by inscribing the thing they all had in common at the bottom of each:
RSVP.

While Bella delivered
the cards—I told her I’d take Walt Henderson’s to him myself but she wanted to get a look at him—all I had to do was think some more about how to make the plan work. But the way my head felt, doing that was like peeling my scalp off with a paring knife.

So to distract myself from the pain I’d gone over to Sam’s house to unplug a sink drain, an outcome I can usually achieve by plunging the daylights out of it with a plumber’s helper.

“Mom?” Sam asked.

But not this time. The only result was a low
glug-glug
from under the bathtub.

“What?” I snapped back impatiently. “And what do you use to brush your teeth with—concrete mix?” That was what it seemed he had been putting down the drain, to judge by the clog.

Sam sat on the side of the tub watching while I lay on the floor with my head under the sink. I squinted up at the underside of it, looking for the place where the drainpipe met the basin. After the plunger failed I’d tried loosening the trap, but when I twisted it with the pipe wrench it threatened to break off.

So I thought I might try removing the whole basin. But now it was clear that wouldn’t work either; the nut holding the basin atop the pipe was too big for even my largest pipe wrench. Also there was the problem of getting the basin detached from the wall without demolishing it.

The wall, I mean. “Maybe I’ll go into rehab,” Sam said.

I sat up so suddenly that if he hadn’t stuck his hand out I’d have smacked my head on the sink; as it was I just got dizzy for a moment.

“Because nothing else is helping,” he added.

“Well, if that’s your decision you know I’ll support you in it. We can… ”

But I stopped at the flash of panic in his eyes. “Not yet,” he stalled. “I’m still thinking about it.”

He avoided my gaze. And there was no sense pushing this, I knew from experience. With an effort I got to my feet and grabbed the plumber’s helper.

“Give me a hand here, will you?” The
glug-glug
under the tub was coming from
somewhere,
and if plunging the sink made it happen then the sink drain must be
connected
to the…

“Here.” I pulled a washcloth from the towel rack, soaked it under the tap, then twisted it nearly dry and gave it to him.

“Press this over the drain hole in the tub,” I said, “while I try plunging the sink once more.”

Because the thing is, the usefulness of a plumber’s helper depends on applying it to a closed system. Which this one wasn’t, I’d suddenly realized, on account of that open bathtub drain. I would have to block it somehow.

“Press hard,” I instructed, so he did while I ran water into the sink again and plunged it again, even harder than before.

“I can feel it sucking on my hand,” he marveled, sounding as pleased as a grade-school kid whose classroom science experiment is working.

“Yeah.” As I’d thought, the two drains led into a single pipe somewhere. I plunged some more, until suddenly…

Blonkglonkgloinkglugsluggleuggleuggle… slurrrrupp!
All the water swirled triumphantly down the drain with a final
glunk!
and a hollow-sounding
dunkdunkdunk
.

“Hey!” Sam exclaimed, slapping me a high five. Because we’d fixed the thing and we hadn’t even had to take the sink off the wall to do it. But once the first fine flush—you should excuse the expression—of happiness wore off, I felt ineffectual again.

“Listen, Sam,” I said when we got back to his kitchen. Like the rest of the place it was a shambles of dirty dishes and empty refreshment containers. “About what you were saying… ”

“Don’t rush me, okay, Mom? All I said was, someday maybe I might try it.”

It wasn’t what he had said. But I knew better than to argue, or to ask if just possibly he’d seen his father around anywhere lately either.

Because his father was dead and Sam was about the last person to need any reminding of it; still, that rehab idea had resurfaced from somewhere. “Good. I’ll be in your corner if you do,” I told him instead, ignoring the smelly can full of unemptied trash by the kitchen door.

His eyes said he wanted me to go now; I was making him feel uncomfortable. I mustered a smile. “Listen, I could use your help again tonight, if you’re free.”

I explained the scheme for the evening, and a ghost of his old, enthusiastic self enlivened his expression. But then his face fell.

“Maybe,” he muttered once more, meaning he’d probably be too loaded by evening. I told him I’d see him later if he felt up to it, and continued out into the thin, chilly sunshine.

Out on the bay a speedboat bounced fast across the sparkling waves. Watching, I wished hard that I were on it, racing away, and I wondered whether after tonight Sam would want me doing more home repairs, or trying to find him a rehab place. Or anything else.

Wade might not think I was so great anymore, either; maybe even Ellie wouldn’t. Because somewhere between the sink drain and Sam’s chronic troubles, the rest of my mind had continued working on my plan for the gathering this evening. And it had come to the sad conclusion that what I had so far wasn’t sufficient.

As a result, the rest of what I meant to do wasn’t in the clever endings of any of Bella’s books. I still intended to put Jennifer Henderson on the hot seat, since that part of the scheme was crucial to hitting her father where it really hurt.

But for it to work, my own credibility needed a kicker. So in the all-important who-did-what-when portion of this evening’s program, I mostly intended to accuse myself.

After I left
Sam I walked on down Water Street toward the harbor, where the year’s first big bunch of spring tourists was piling off an excursion bus in the fish pier’s parking lot. Wearing thin jackets, they shivered in the onshore breeze, gazing at the fishing boats in the harbor and the old storefronts facing it while hanging on to their hats.

The green-painted park bench where I’d first seen Jemmy only a few days ago—it felt like years—was vacant. I turned away from it, feeling a punch of sorrow; wishing I could go back, do it over. But instead I walked on, pausing to gaze into the shops as if I too were a lighthearted visitor to Eastport.

A newish enterprise called Captain’s Cargo was crammed with attractive stuff, good soaps and specialty foods vying for space with Maine-authored books, leather-bound sketch pads, and quality sweatshirts of the kind those tourists would buy if they stayed around much past lunch.

I stopped next at The Commons, spotting the good silk hand-dyed garments Henny Trow had mentioned she was sewing: gorgeous in deep jewel tones with ferns and gingko leaves stenciled on them. At the Moose Island General Store, I went in for a coffee and a cruller, explaining the stitches in my head—unable to bear the tug of cloth on them any longer, I’d taken off the cap—by saying I’d bumped it.

“Oh, too bad,” the woman at the counter replied kindly, but when I offered no further details she didn’t question me. People in Eastport can be as silent as tombs when they want to be, and nobody takes offense; talking or not is regarded as a choice here, and if you don’t do it no one pesters you or thinks any the worse of you for it.

Carrying my snack, I went on past the post office, admiring the newly painted windows and freshly repointed granite blocks. A grant a year earlier had provided cash for this and several other downtown improvements, all more or less successful; the new sidewalks in particular were fine and the set of sculptures—abstract, fire-engine red, and made of metal, the pieces were locally known as “fruit roll-ups”—were admired by many.

Past the post office I dropped my cup and cruller wrapper in a trash bin, then went into the beauty salon called the Ship’s Snipper and begged the hairdresser there for twenty minutes of her time. If she couldn’t help me, I told her, I intended to buy a razor.

“Oh, my,” she replied, horrified. The way I looked, she probably thought I meant to cut my own throat. “I’m sure we can do better!”

I sat obediently in the swivel chair by the shampoo sink, letting her wash carefully and then comb out my remaining tresses with hands gentle as an angel’s. “There,” she said when she’d finished. “It looks,” she added hesitantly, turning me so I could see, “… streamlined.”

Um, sure. Like a bullet is streamlined, especially if the bullet has been sewn together haphazardly and has an orange stripe painted down the middle; she’d managed to avoid getting the stitches wet, so the Betadine cleanser remained.

What I resembled most was a refugee from a punk rock band, minus any possible musical talent. Stepping back outside, I felt the breeze touching portions of my neck that hadn’t seen daylight in twenty years; she’d buzz-cut it up the back and snipped the bangs off into tiny wisps. It was a boy’s haircut, really, and it made me feel unrecognizable.

But I still recognized myself. I wondered if, after what I planned to do and say tonight, anyone else would. Thinking this, I turned my steps toward Bert Merkle’s place in South End; maybe the old crackpot would be able to remember something more about Fred Mudge’s kidnapping, I thought.

Besides, I needed to fill the afternoon somehow. Ellie had taken Lee to her own pediatrician for a follow-up visit, and as for starting on any more home repairs, I’d as soon have taken a hammer to my head.

The rotting brown stubs of wharf pilings stuck up through the green water of the inlet at half-tide, below the foliage of early lupines massing along its banks. The fresh air helped my headache for a while; climbing the final hill between big new houses rich with custom windows and terraced gardens, I felt almost normal.

But the throbbing in my skull roared back with an awful vengeance as I knocked and waited for Bert Merkle to come to the door of his little trailer. It sat on a flat quarter-acre of land in a warren of narrow streets, surrounded by so much junk—cars, barrels, crates, and unidentifiable stuff—the place looked like a hazardous-waste facility; his neighbors, I decided, must be about ready to commit murder themselves.

“Who’s there?” his rough voice demanded from inside. The door creaked open and Bert peered narrowly out at me, the watery blue eyes in his craggy old face suspicious.