Trap Door (33 page)

I made the face he deserved at him. “Oh, don’t give me that, either. You’ve never killed anyone in your life.”

Jemmy was a money man; it would’ve been dumb for the guys he’d worked for to let him kill anyone. If he got caught for it, he was in a position to betray too much.

Just like me. I leaned across the table at him. “You knew there was a very good chance she’d kill that kid if he threatened her,” I said. “So you made him do it, you practically forced him into it.”

I grabbed his Rolling Rock bottle, swallowed some. “You told Cory Trow that Ann Radham was an FBI undercover cop,” I repeated my accusation.

“Next step was, he threatened her with the information just like you knew he would. He told her she’d better help him out of his jam or he’d tell Walter Henderson what he knew about her.”

Still nothing. “After that Ann Radham did what you figured
she’d
probably do, based on what you knew about
her:
she tried to go it alone.”

He listened with mild interest. “Instead of reporting what had happened with Cory to her higher-ups, risk being called off an assignment that could really help her career-wise, she decided to keep silent and take care of it herself.”

And now came the heart of the matter. “So she made her own plan, prepared the equipment, the rope and so on. She had access to the place, of course, and she knew the alarms were off because that was her job, keeping an eye on Henderson and his doings.”

Jemmy nodded, added a little background for me. “Henderson was actually planning on killing the kid already,” he confided. “He didn’t know Jennifer had broken up with him for real. She’d been sneaking out to the Bayside at night just to get out from under the old man’s thumb, but he thought it was to meet the boy in the barn, like she had been.

“He found the body,” Jemmy said. “Had no idea who did it. But the trap door was shut, he figured the kid hadn’t reached up there and closed it himself.”

No kidding. “That must’ve been a shock.”

“Yeah. For once in his life he didn’t know what
he
should do next.”

“Really,” I said, taken aback. The idea of Henderson being unsure about anything was a new one on me. But so was what I now knew about Jemmy.

That he was the kind of guy, I mean, who if somebody had to die to save him or a friend, somebody did. Even if the somebody was an innocent bystander.

Like Cory Trow. “So Ann picked a night when she’d have half an alibi and called him on the cell phone Jen had given him,” I went on with my own recital.

The phone hadn’t been there when we found him; Henderson must have recognized it and taken it along with the scarf, after opening the trap door and faking the note.

“She lured him there by telling him Jen wanted to see him,” I said. “Then she waited, had the rope all nice and knotted ahead of time. Wore Jen’s perfume, probably, kept it dark in the barn, put that scarf over his eyes for good measure.”

The one that had left a tiny blue fabric scrap hooked on his fingernail. The beer tasted bitter.

“Timed it all so she could bike out from the Bayside and back during the break between sets,” I went on. “Anybody saw her, so what? She did it all the time, there was no reason for anyone to mention it.”

As for handing me the Bayside flyer for that night… had it been a mistake? Or had she been so sure of herself, so certain I’d never catch on, that she could afford the taunt?

I might never know. But now Bob Arnold’s phone message about the autopsy came back to me and suddenly it too made sense. “She got him up to the loft, dropped the rope over him fast. The final shove she gave him was probably with a drumstick, of all things. Made a tiny bruise on his back, no one thought anything of it.”

Closing the trap door had definitely been a mistake. But as it turned out, that hadn’t mattered. “Once she’d killed him,” I said, “you knew I’d think Henderson did it, start poking around the way Ellie and I always have.”

I took a breath. “You got lucky when Bella turned out to be Henny Trow’s friend; if you got a little luckier, I’d stumble onto the truth. And you meant to be around for that. Participate in it so you’d come out the hero in Henderson’s eyes.”

As Jemmy had. The result: he was free without having to kill Henderson, which he no more knew how to do than I understood how to jump off the roof of my old house and fly.

He took a sip of beer. “She’d done it before, you know. Got in a situation, shot her way out.”

“Ann Radham did?” I asked, and he nodded. I must’ve looked curious; he made a face of distaste.

“The details don’t matter. But they called it justifiable,” he said. “Even though it wasn’t.” Which gave Jemmy what
he
wanted: an Achilles’ heel, something about her he could use.

“She said her folks were government workers,” I mused aloud. “FBI, maybe? Got herself legacied into the Academy that way, then turned out to be a nut job?”

If in fact she was too well-connected to fire, this could’ve been a plot to get her to flame out. But Jemmy wasn’t telling. “Once I got here I kept my head down,” he said instead. “Listened to the talk in the bars and so on.”

Not getting in touch with me, though. Not yet. He must’ve been around for weeks; it was the only way he’d have known Sam was going to be in Cooper the night the Fiat went off the road.

“There turned out to be plenty,” he continued. “Once I knew the nuts and bolts of the story… ”

The Cory Trow
vs.
Walter Henderson feud, he meant. That part he hadn’t arranged, of course, just used it the way he found it. “You’re right, though,” he added, “I knew if the kid got killed you and Ellie would look hard at Henderson.”

Especially if Jemmy primed me to believe it, as he had. I’d cooperated in the whole thing, too, by keeping
him
in the know on every detail. As for getting the cooperation he needed from his enemy on the night I’d gathered everyone in the barn:

“I called Henderson, told him if what I had in mind for your party didn’t end up helping him out big-time, I’d stand there and let him put the bullet in my head.” Jemmy put his beer down. “And Henderson agreed. Honor among thieves, and all that.”

In a pig’s eye; by that time Henderson had wanted something also: someone to take care of Ann Radham permanently for him in a way that didn’t require him to commit the ultimate no-no: killing a federal cop.

Because don’t tell me Jemmy hadn’t passed Ann’s identity along in the course of the conversation. Whereupon Henderson had seen the benefits of doing a little adapting himself.

Jemmy looked around; it was late and the crowd in the Bayside had begun thinning.

“You traded Cory Trow’s life for your own,” I said.

And for mine. Just the way he’d planned. “Jemmy?”

Even then I wanted him to deny it but he didn’t seem to have heard me. Instead he gazed past me to the front of the room where a jazz quartet was playing the hell out of a tune I didn’t know.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “That’s it, the whole ball of wax. You’re wrong about one thing, though,” he added. “It wasn’t about you. It all was about me, start to finish.”

He turned back to me. “Now look me in the eye and tell me that in my place you wouldn’t have done the same thing yourself.”

I got up and walked out.

“You get everything
straight with Jemmy?” Wade asked.

He’d still been up when I got home from the Bayside, on his hands and knees in the back parlor with a steel-wool rubbing pad. Ellie and I had stripped the varnish off the floor over the past winter, using liquid stripping solution and scraping the old finish away one three-foot-square section at a time.

Underneath lay maple hardwood milled into flooring so fine-grained, it resembled the feathers on a bird’s wing. The stripper took off the varnish but not the stain it had imparted, a golden glow that seemed to radiate up through the floor instead of only from the surface of it.

“Hi,” I’d said, not answering his question. “That’s great what you’re doing there.”

Fine steel wool polished the surface. Next we meant to apply polyurethane; the result would be a floor so richly finished that it would look as if you could dive into it.

One look at my face, though, and Wade had put the steel-wool pads away, packed up the cooler, then started the truck and aimed us back toward the lakeside cottage, just the two of us.

Now we sat at the end of the dock in the midnight darkness, a blanket over our shoulders and his arm around me. Under a blue-black, star-filled sky the red beacon on the new tower across the lake winked steadily like an eye opening and closing.

“Jemmy set Cory up,” I said. At the edge of the water, frogs emitted rhythmic bass notes and treble trillings. “There’s a lot more to it, though.”

“I see,” said Wade when I’d told him all the rest.

Almost all. Good thing Jemmy wasn’t here now; Wade sounded ready to rearrange my old pal’s new face for him, and his way was a lot faster than plastic surgery.

To the moon, Alice
. The old situation comedy line echoed in my head along with the canned laughter that usually accompanied it. But this wasn’t funny. And a punch in the nose wouldn’t fix my buddy and savior Jemmy Wechsler.

Nothing would. “People change, I guess,” I said sadly. “My trouble is, I’m wondering now if maybe he didn’t.”

One of my troubles. “If maybe he was always that way and I just never caught on until recently.”

Or if I’d known all along and just wouldn’t look straight at it until I had my nose rubbed in it. After all, I’d agreed when Ellie said he was a sociopath, and what had I thought she meant?

Wade squeezed my shoulder. “All you did was take whatever help you could get back then. So if some of it was from a guy who wasn’t so decent in other ways? That’s no big crime.”

It wasn’t all I’d done. If it had been maybe none of this would’ve happened. “And if Jemmy’s not your idol anymore,” Wade added, “well, that’s what idols do, isn’t it? They break.”

We sat a while longer listening to the frogs. Bats swooped unseen in the darkness around our heads. Then:

“Anything else comes up, we’ll deal with it,” Wade said. “If it does.”

The weight of the world lifted suddenly off my shoulders, but I couldn’t quite let it go that fast. “Confession is good for the soul?” I hazarded, letting him hear the question in my voice.

Wade just laughed, bless his heart. “Only children believe the world works that way, Jake. And you know it.”

And that’s where we left it. He got up. “But listen, there’s something else you need to hear about. Sam’s gone.”

“What do you mean? Gone where?” A dozen possibilities raced through my mind, each worse than the one before.

“Rehab,” Wade said. “After you left here earlier, he came in off the lake and told us.”

“But how’d he get… ?” Anxiety seized me.

“He asked George to take him to the airport in Bangor,” Wade said. “George said he would, and they went.”

So that was what all that sitting on the lake in the kayak had been about: gathering his courage. “Do you think he might go through with it this time?”

Wade shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. But he had a funny look on his face when he told us what he had planned.”

A coyote yipped lonesomely in the darkness beyond the lake’s far shore, where people lived year-round and the pickings were better: chicken bones from trash cans, the last few french fries tossed out a car window, unlucky house pets.

“I think something’s made an impression on him; he’s heard or seen something that’s made him want to try again,” Wade said.

The lump in my throat felt as big as a fist. “He’ll call us?”

“George will. As soon as he gets there and he’s handed Sam over at the rehab place, he’ll leave a message for us at home.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “And there’s an envelope for you, came in today’s mail. From that fellow in Orono you sent the old book to, I forgot to mention it.”

Exhaustion swept over me. “I can look at it tomorrow.”

Or next month. I had no expectation whatsoever that Sam’s latest effort would work, and I could already feel myself starting to cling to that attitude, not wanting to jinx my son.

“I’m going in,” Wade said. “Don’t sit here too long, you’ll get a chill.”

“Right,” I agreed, making my voice sound okay. But as soon as the screen door finished closing, I put my face into my hands. So it wasn’t until I looked up again that I realized someone else was there with me.

“Hi, Victor,” I managed, but he didn’t answer, only smiled sympathetically before vanishing again… almost.

A brownish him-shaped print remained as if he’d burned his outlines in the air.

Then it too was gone, maybe even for good.

From the
Bangor Daily News:
ROBOTHAM, HORACE L. Suddenly at Orono, May 21, 2006. Mr. Robotham was founder and co-owner of Horace-Langley Rare Books & Papers in Orono. Born in Rhode Island and a graduate of Miskatonic University, he authored numerous scholarly papers on manuscript preservation. He is survived by his friend and business partner Langley B. Cabell. There will be no services.

SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels are set. She is currently working on her eleventh
Home Repair Is Homicide
novel,
Killer Driller
.