Trap Door (3 page)

And I wasn’t feeling so good myself. Until coming to Eastport, we’d lived in Manhattan in a building so exclusive, it took genetic testing to get approved to move in. Afterwards, though, the standards of behavior in the place were so trashy—fights, screaming, howled threats to actually
cut up the goddamned charge cards
—I thought they should have parked junk cars out front and set up a broken washing machine in the lobby beside the potted palm.

But never mind, it was a roof over our heads and it’s not as if I didn’t have plenty of trashy troubles of my own. Victor’s girlfriends, for instance, had gotten the idea that I was their pal, a sort of comrade-in-arms in the sordid little romantic tragicomedy they shared with my husband, instead of a person who badly wanted to bash all their heads together.

Victor liked girls who were dewy-eyed and innocent, ignoring the fact that by the time he got through with them they’d be such bitter harpies, the only way to get near them was with a diamond bracelet dangling at the end of a long, sharp stick.

Often they called me weeping, two or three of them at a time—one of the girls, I gathered, had sounded out the words in the phone book where it gave instructions on how to make a conference call, and she’d taught all the others—complaining about what an awful son of a bitch Victor was.

Like maybe I didn’t know that. I felt like asking them, since he made no secret of the fact that he was married, who the hell they had been expecting, the Dalai Lama? That maybe by some miracle he wouldn’t leave them twisting in the wind the way he’d left me?

I mean unless he needed something: his good shirts sent to the laundry, say, or a button sewn on. Then he’d stay home just long enough for me to start believing that this time, everything might somehow miraculously manage to turn out hunky-dory.

After a while I started sabotaging those buttons, getting up in the wee hours to hide in the utility closet with a flashlight and cuticle scissors, snipping half the threads on each one from behind where it wouldn’t show. That’s how desperate I’d become: hotshot money manager by day, button snipper by night.

Oh yes, I had a career, too, mostly based on the same variety of freakish inborn talent that produces perfect pitch, double-jointedness, and the ability to win at poker by memorizing all the cards and the odds. In short, at the time I was the kind of money management magician who could make a nickel walk smoothly across the tops of my knuckles, and by the time it got to my little finger it would be a silver dollar.

Too bad the folks for whom I made fortunes were the kind I’d have preferred not to spend much time around; not unless I’d drenched myself with holy water and equipped myself with a mallet and wooden stake. Because let’s face it, my clients were the kind of individuals for whom the term “ill-gotten gains” was invented.

Say, for instance, that you were a person who just happened to be skimming the profits off a chain of specialty clothing stores. Before I came along, you could invest your loot in strip clubs or in other shady establishments known primarily for their habit of burning down regularly. Alternatively, you could pack the cash in a satchel and bribe or threaten some poor fool to carry the bag to Puerto Rico for you.

You can’t do that anymore; the security noses at airports have gotten better at sniffing cash. Instead you can…

But on second thought I’m not going to give details. I don’t want to screw it up for whoever’s doing my old job now; honor among thieves, and all that. To make a long story short, though, back then I helped introduce what’s commonly known as the underworld to the concept of investing on Wall Street.

Legitimately, I mean, as opposed to their usual way, which was called the pump-and-dump. And no, I’m not going to tell you how to do that either. The point is that on a referral from a friend I took on a few shady clients; next thing you know, I was money manager to the Mob.

In the end, however, I chucked it all, dumped Victor, and moved out of Manhattan in a sad, last-ditch effort to salvage my pathetic life. And to save Sam, who by then was very little more than a walking sickness. Extracting my son from the city was like pulling a rotten tooth: no matter how bloody, painful, or disgusting the process may be, you’ve got to maintain your grip.

Which I had. So fast-forward a few years to me and Sam still living in Eastport, a city of about two thousand on Moose Island, seven miles off the coast of Maine. The house I’d bought wasn’t all fixed up yet, but it hadn’t fallen down either; over time I had come to regard this as a glass-half-full situation since if I thought of it any other way I would spend every minute weeping.

And not only on account of the vast, yawning money pit… er, I mean lovely, historic dwelling I’d come to call home. For one thing, Sam had grown up into a handsome, strapping twenty-year-old but his substance-abuse woes hadn’t resolved quite as permanently as I’d hoped. And for another, about three months after we buried him, Victor began haunting the place.

The entire island, I mean, not just my little piece of it. Although on the pleasant morning in May when what we later called the Trap-Door Fiasco began, it was my house that my deceased ex-husband seemed happiest to have learned the trick of infesting.

“Hex screws,”
my friend Ellie White said, checking this item off our list. We were sitting in my big old kitchen with its tall bare windows, pine wainscoting, scuffed floor, and antiquated appliances, getting ready to start on a building project.

Behind me the refrigerator rattled and hummed as if the ice maker were running. But it didn’t have an ice maker; not unless you counted the way the inside of the freezer frosted up solidly every week or so.

“Lag bolts, nuts, and washers,” I said; Ellie checked the list again.

I’d spent the early part of the morning outdoors, trying to fix rust spots already bleeding through the nearly new paint on the house. Note to self: Next time you sand vast amounts of old paint
off
175-year-old clapboards, try to remember to rust-block the equally old iron nails in the boards before putting new paint
on
.

“And the battery-powered screwdriver,” I added, glancing over to make sure this indispensable item was plugged into its charger on the kitchen counter. It was, and with any luck the little green light on the device meant it really was charging, not just pretending to do so.

Victor stood—transparently; what a show-off—a foot or so to the left of the counter, his smile fading and reappearing like some especially obnoxious version of the Cheshire Cat’s.

I ignored him. “Chain saw,” said Ellie.

Or I tried. Turns out that a dead ex-husband is even harder to ignore than he was when he was alive. “Check. I already put it in the bed of the pickup truck.”

Ellie smiled. “Jake, you’re so efficient,” she said, marking it too off the list of essentials.

With pale green eyes, red hair, and tiny freckles like gold dust scattered delicately across her nose, my best friend, Ellie, resembled the kind of impossibly fragile fairy princess who flutters around laughing musically and granting people’s dearest wishes with a wave of her magic wand.

But appearances were deceiving; despite her looks, Ellie was about as fragile as a Mack truck. When a task needed the chain saw, she started it, ran it, and sharpened its chain when that turned out to be necessary, too; she was a downeast Maine girl born and bred and took no backchat from machinery.

“Foolishness,” my housekeeper, Bella Diamond, grumbled from her usual place at the soapstone sink. She stood at it so often that there would have been a pair of footprints on the braided rug in front of it if she had tolerated footprints.

Which she didn’t; now with her shirtsleeves rolled up past bony elbows she was washing in hot steaming soapsuds and rinsing with scalding water every plate and cup we owned, none of which had been dirty in the first place.

Letting Bella wash clean dishes was better than the alternative, though, because she was a clean freak and right now it was springtime, which around here meant a housecleaning so thorough even the skeletons in the closets got polished. So it was either boil salad plates or dip all the lamps in the house in sterilizing solution, to get rid of the many germs which Bella swore gave off toxic vapors when sizzled to death by lightbulb heat.

“You two girls up at the cottage all alone with all o’ them sharp tools and big, heavy lumber and who knows what-all, tryin’ to build a dock,” Bella said disapprovingly.

That was the project we were planning. And theoretically we could actually do it. Victor’s smile winked on and off like a flashing neon sign:
Hi! Hi! Hi!

“One o’ you,” Bella went on darkly, rinsing yet another cup in a torrent of steaming water, “ ’ll ampertate a hand.”

She’d turned up the thermostat on the water heater when she came to work for us. So nowadays before taking a shower we had to calibrate “hot” and “cold” with the delicacy of someone working the controls on a nuclear reactor.

“Band-Aids,” Ellie said, taking the words out of my mouth. She looked up from the list. “Okay, then, if the thermoses are full of coffee and the cooler is packed with sandwiches… ”

“Done,” I confirmed, already looking forward to these. I’d packed them but she’d made them: ham salad on fresh homemade bread with real mayonnaise, sweet pickles, and lettuce out of the cold frame she’d constructed from old storm windows in my backyard. Sometimes I thought I’d have tried building the Great Wall of China with Ellie, just for the lunch.

“… then I think we’ve got everything,” she finished. The lumber and other miscellaneous dock-building items were already up at the cottage waiting for us.

“Hmph,” Bella snorted skeptically again, which was when I noticed that despite being dunked nearly to her armpits in water that was (a) hot enough to cook lobsters in and (b) soapy enough to clean the Augean stables, she didn’t appear to be in (c) very good spirits.

“Something wrong, Bella?” I asked.

She shoved a limp hank of henna-purple hair out of her face. With bulging green eyes, big bad teeth, skin the color of putty, and the rest of her hair pulled so tightly into a rubber band, it made her look as if she were walking into a wind tunnel… Well, let’s just say most of Bella’s many virtues were on the inside. “Yes,” she snapped miserably. “There is.”

Which gave me pause. I already knew from experience that when Bella was unhappy the house got so clean people couldn’t even live in it. Animals, either; from her place atop the refrigerator Cat Dancing meowed uneasily, tail twitching at the unwelcome notion of our housekeeper on a hygiene binge.

Cat hairs, for instance, might easily come under attack, even ones still attached to the cat. Uttering a feline oath, the big cross-eyed Siamese streaked from the room; Victor vanished simultaneously, the air around him twinkling mischievously in his wake.

“Everything okay?” Ellie asked, noting the look on my face.

“Yeah, fine,” I lied, trying to sound convincing. It wasn’t the first time Victor had been seen around town since his death the previous winter. I had it on good authority that he’d shown up in the IGA where he bought two tomatoes, paying the cashier with what appeared to be real money although the till was short $2.79 at the end of the day.

Soon after that he’d made an appearance at the Peavey Memorial Library on Water Street. There he stuck around for most of a lecture on Native American petroglyphs before departing, leaving in the air a brownish stain that lingered worrisomely.

But it was his first time here at my house. I should count myself lucky, I thought; twelve weeks was a lot longer than he’d ever let go by without annoying me, back when he was alive.

“What’s wrong, Bella? Come on, now. Out with it,” I said.

Because Victor was bad enough, but if I didn’t get to the bottom of this Bella difficulty I might come home later to find the whole inside of the house washed and waxed, including the pets. Looking around the kitchen for the possible source of the difficulty, I saw only Bella’s puzzle books—she was a demon for anagrams, acrostics, and crosswords—still in a canvas satchel.

Ordinarily by this time of day she’d have finished off two or three of them, with the devilishly difficult
Bangor Daily News
Sudoku thrown in as an afterthought. These she did in her head, glancing first at the grid with its few numerical clues, then filling in the rest as she went by with a scrub brush, a mop, or the sharp hooked dental tool she used to clean out the grooves in the stove knobs every morning and evening.

So whatever her worry was, it was already throwing her off her routine, I realized uneasily. Just then the dogs—Monday the Labrador retriever, and Prill, our big red Doberman, waltzed in from the parlor. Ellie got up to find biscuits for them; she was a sucker for animals.

Luckily the Doberman had a soft spot for her in return, as well as for any other human beings to whom she’d been properly introduced. But strangers Prill didn’t like so much; we’d saved her from life on the street where her trust had been eroded by the hardness of stray-dog experience, we guessed.

And she was getting worse. Not biting, nor any suggestion of it. But the more familiar and confident she became with us, the worse her barking and growling with visitors got.

“Bella,” I said. From behind me Victor’s gaze seemed to linger wistfully, but that was surely just my imagination.

I hoped. “No kidding,” I said to the housekeeper. “I mean it, now. What’s going on?”

She turned reluctantly. “Miz Tiptree,” she began, her tone implying that whatever the story turned out to be, I was dragging it from her.

I wasn’t. Bella had engineered this moment and we both knew it. She didn’t like asking me for favors, so she worked it around until I made her do it.

“Jake,” I corrected. Getting her to call me by my first name was an ongoing battle, too. But I kept trying, knowing that if I ever gave in she would be disappointed in me.

“I’ll put the rest of these things in the truck,” Ellie said diplomatically, gathering the screwdriver and its power pack from the counter and placing them in their carrying case.