Trap Door (6 page)

As lonely, too, probably. But I’d learned long ago that Jemmy would tell me the truth when he was ready, or as much of it as he ever did. Now he opened his mouth to spin more of his goofball story, got a glimpse of my face, and decided against.

We pulled out of the woods and into the hilly headlands of the St. Croix River tidal basin. Below the cliffs edging Route 1 on our right, the crisscrossed nets of herring seines hung from long, slender poles, their reflections forming wavery X’s on the moving water. A trio of seals gorged themselves on the catch in one of the seines, getting in their morning meal before the net owner showed up with his rifle.

Across the bay the red-tiled gabled roof of the hotel at St. Andrews spread grandly, the cream brick building at this distance like a castle in a fairy tale. We zoomed through Robbinston, a bayside settlement consisting of a Grange hall, a boat landing, several churches, two motels, and a cluster of houses pulled up tightly to the road as if eager to observe whoever went by. A pickup hauling a boat trailer backed expertly toward the water as we passed, the driver casually turning the wheel with one hand.

“What’s Walter Henderson got to do with it?” I asked. Jemmy was not, I noticed, carrying any kind of bag, which meant he’d gotten out of wherever he’d been last with just the clothes he was wearing; ye gods.

He examined his fingernails. Ahead the road widened and improved, acquiring decent pavement and a discernible shoulder as we approached Calais, the nearest market town to Eastport.

“Well,” he said at last, “Henderson’s got the contract. On me, that is. So I figured… ”

To kill him, Jemmy meant. As punishment for stealing the money. “Walter Henderson?” I repeated, letting a surprise I didn’t feel creep into my tone.

Jemmy didn’t know the identities of all my old clients back in the city. He nodded again as Ellie glanced significantly at me: so Henderson was a hit man. This to her would ordinarily have been big news all by itself. But…

“Wait a minute.” I was still unsure I understood all of what Jemmy was telling me. “Just one contract? I thought whole squads of guys were after you.”

“They were. Only the rest have all given up and gone on to other things. I have,” he added, “managed to collect pretty good info on that.” He grimaced. “Henderson, though. He’s a whole different breed of cat. He’s had subcontractors, bad guys in a whole bunch of different cities, beating the bushes.”

Which was, I recalled, a technique for driving an animal into a trap. Jemmy saw me thinking this, smiled wanly at me with his surgically altered face.

“So anyway, now you’re here.” Ellie’s tone conveyed just how welcome he was in her opinion; i.e., not very.

“Yeah. And if you want to know the truth, I’m in kind of a fix.”

“The mind,” she agreed acidly, “boggles.”

Mine certainly did. It had been a long time since I’d had to take seriously any similar situation, up close and personal. Back in the city sometimes a guy would visit my office wanting to put all his possessions in his family’s name, and by the way could I sign him up for a brand-new, hideously expensive life insurance policy, too?

Not worried about the size of the premiums, usually paying the first one right across my desk in cash. That’s when I’d know I wasn’t going to see the guy again, and pretty soon nobody else would either.

And that the guy knew it, too. I stared at Jemmy, who made a silent “what can you do?” shrug but didn’t elaborate.

After a few more miles, Ellie took the unmarked turn onto the lake road, which devolved in a hundred yards to rutted gravel and finally to dirt. While we bumped between trees barely budded into pale springtime nubbins, I found my voice.

“But he’s expecting you here, Jemmy. He must be.” Because I was here. And wherever I was, Jemmy always showed up sooner or later.

“Yep,” he agreed. “Laying back in the tall grass waiting for me, no doubt.”

Ellie kept driving over rocks and through the potholes with which the lake road was so plentifully furnished. The trees on either side were young hardwood—poplar, maple, and white birch with its papery bark curling off in strips. We passed a turnout where the local kids came to fool around, beer cans littering the tire ruts in the soft earth.

Without being asked, Ellie stopped; I hopped out, grabbed the cans and other trash—fast-food wrappers, mostly—and tossed them in the bed of the truck for later disposal at home. Once upon a time I got angry when I did this; now I just thought they’d learn someday.

After all, if I had, anyone could.

“That’s why this is the only place I finally can take care of the situation,” Jemmy went on when I got back in. “’Cause this is where
he
is. For now, though, I just need a spot to lie low.”

We cut through a swamp where ancient black stumps hunkered among the yellowed stalks of last year’s cattails, then followed a narrow track through the trees. Past tall pines and charcoal-gray mounds of enormous granite boulders jutting along the lake’s shore, the trail cut between a pair of pin oaks.

It continued through an old iron gate I had to unlock, then past a pair of hunter’s huts each with its woodpile, outhouse, and spark-guarded metal chimney.
Trail’s End,
said the rough sign on one. Jemmy smiled as we took the final turn into the last clearing.

“Perfect,” he breathed. We got out into the silence broken only by the occasional
chuk-chuk-chuk!
of a kingfisher on a branch somewhere over the water, waiting for an unwary perch. The air smelled sharply of last autumn’s fallen leaves soaked by recently melted snow, and of the ice-cold, intensely mineral-laden lake.

Jemmy turned in a slow circle to take in the pristine forest scene. Trees, water, sky… directly ahead stood the cedar-shingled cottage with blue-checked gingham curtains tied back at its windows, dwarfed by the big old trees.

The curtains were made of cloth that had been sold off for pennies when the local weaving mill went out of business years ago. A scarred chopping block made out of a chunk of rock maple stood nearby, wood chips scattered thickly around it. Stepping past Jemmy, I unlocked the door and we went in.

“Nice,” he observed, looking around. The whole downstairs was a single pine-paneled room with a woodstove, plus a small kitchen area equipped with a gas stove, a primitive icebox, and a hand pump over the sink. “This is excellent.”

Furnished with mismatched chairs brightly painted in primary colors, sofas covered with crocheted throws we’d bought at thrift shops, and bentwood tables each bearing an oil lamp and a book of matches, the cottage was so authentically Maine-woodsy you half expected a moose to be standing outside the window looking in.

Which many mornings there was. “I’ll get a fire started,” said Ellie, taking my newspaper and gathering sticks of kindling from the wicker basket under the stairs.

Her voice sounded odd, as if something unpleasant had occurred to her. I waited for more but she merely crouched by the stove with her back turned, crumpling up news stories.

Jemmy stepped out onto the deck, a rustic affair of graying lumber bolted together atop concrete footings. Silently he gazed at the nearby lake’s edge. A look of puzzlement spread on his face.

“Didn’t there used to be a pier right down there?” he asked. I’d brought him here once. “And is it just me, or is the water a little… ?”

“Higher, yes,” I replied, stepping out to stand on the deck beside him. After the spring melt of the record snow we’d endured over the previous winter, the lake was a good deal higher even than it had been last fall.

“Three feet since you saw it last, as a matter of fact,” I told him. “We’ve had a lot of rain.”

Better than drought, which had turned last summer’s grass yellow-crisp and dried up people’s wells. But in autumn the skies had opened, and they’d stayed that way right on through February. The rocks that had once lined the water’s edge, serving us as diving platforms and sunbathing perches, were now completely submerged.

“It’s why Ellie and I are here, to build a new dock. Because the other one floated away.”

As I spoke I watched him carefully. He never did tell me everything right off the bat, preferring to ease into things. But it was clear already that he meant to confront Walter Henderson somehow.

“How come he’s still after you?” I asked.

Jemmy blinked, as if the thought of the pickle he was in was the furthest thing from his mind. “You mean when all the rest have quit?”

Yep, that’s the part I meant. Ordinarily those guys were so single-minded, you practically had to drive a stake through their hearts. But when one stopped they all did, usually.

He smiled, crinkling the smooth, taut skin on his new face. “Because Henderson’s the best. And the best gets paid up front, see? The whole enchilada. So even though there’s no one else still around to care anymore… ”

The real old-guard Mob fellows, I knew, had almost all died by now, either murdered or from natural causes. If you thought breathing your last behind the walls of a maximum-security prison counted as natural, that is.

I didn’t. “Got his money, means to finish the job,” Jemmy concluded. “Matter of pride, that kind of thing. So I’ve got to do something about him.”

He turned earnestly to me. “Because, Jake, he’s not gonna quit. Those subcontractors of his won’t come after me here—this’s his own private territory, you see, and nobody fools with him. He doesn’t want any big dogs but him runnin’ around in it.”

I understood; if you don’t want a fight, don’t mix with critters who’re inclined to. And don’t let them come around where they might be tempted to start one with you.

“He’s got no organization behind him anymore; nowadays he flies solo,” Jemmy continued. “That just makes him worse, you see, ’cause he takes it all so personally. Thing is, he’s not a have-gun-will-travel kind of guy anymore either.”

Oh, I don’t know. I’d thought Walter Henderson looked like he could still move pretty fast when he wanted to. And my guess was that he probably still did want to; just glancing at him this morning as we passed him on the street, I’d gotten the impression of a snake striking.

Potentially striking. Jemmy went on, “So it’s just him and me. And I can’t go on this way,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Sure,” I said. I understood that, too; spending all his time staying one step ahead of a hired killer couldn’t be much of a life. And Jemmy was no spring chicken anymore, not for that kind of thing.

But being that it
was
him—brilliant, feckless, given to wild schemes that might or might not work out as he hoped—what he was saying now didn’t only spell trouble, as Ellie had already intuited.

Instead it could spell disaster, like a few other situations that were already fairly high on my bad-stuff list. A ghost in the kitchen, a leaky roof, a son with a booze problem, Bella’s cleaning binge, and now…

Jemmy, arrived to confront an old enemy and resolve an old conflict for good. That most of all made me want to shoo everyone else away and stay here alone at the lake myself.

Still, Jemmy was my oldest friend and long ago he’d saved my life. I mean literally saved it: off the street, into a job and then into school…

“You can bunk here for a while,” I said. “For as long as you need to.”

“Great. I’ll help you with the dock,” he offered cheerfully. “Least I can do, lend a hand.”

The only nails he knew anything about were at the ends of his fingers: clean, manicured. As for running any power tools…

“No,” I told him. “After lunch you’re going to Calais, to the stores there. Buy yourself some supplies. Boots and warmer clothes, for instance, sweaters and a hat and a down jacket.”

“I imagine it still gets plenty cold at night out here,” he agreed.

I eyed his thin shirt and slacks. “Yes, it certainly does.”

He had no idea. “Get ready to keep that woodstove stoked,” I advised. “Also you’ll need food, drinks, reading material, and so on. Assuming you like reading by lamplight. Or flashlight.”

The summer before, Wade had decided the primitive conditions here weren’t as charming as he’d originally thought. So he’d set up a solar generating system for the cottage: collecting panels, a charge controller, a deep-cycle marine battery, and an inverter to transform the direct current to AC. He’d spent a weekend just figuring out the schematics, then putting it all together.

And it had worked like a charm. Eureka! I’d thought, turning on an electric light after dinner instead of stinking the place up with lamp oil smoke. But now after the long winter the storage battery was uncharged and the solar panels were safely wrapped up in the toolshed, waiting to be remounted on the roof.

Another thought hit me. “You have any money?” I asked Jemmy. One way and another what he’d stolen hadn’t lasted long. “Because if you need some, I… ”

His smile of appreciation cut me off. Even through all the face work he’d had done, you could still see the old Jemmy shining through; amused, calm even in the face of catastrophe.

Which this wasn’t; not yet. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he told me.

He pulled a cigarette out and lit it without offering me one. He remembered how I took my coffee, too, I was willing to bet, and that I liked yellow mustard better than gray, loved the smell of new Cray-olas, and couldn’t abide anchovies or most horror films but loved
Blair Witch
.

He changed the subject suddenly. “Remember that day in the diner right after I first met you? We pretended we were boyfriend and girlfriend? You were a skinny, tough-talking little thing and you were wearing a plaid skirt. You looked like you were about eleven.”

“Yeah.” Despite my misgivings about his presence here, I had to laugh; we’d had fun. “All the mushy stuff we faked, and the waitress glaring at us until we ended up having to get out of there before she called the cops.”

I’d never been his real girlfriend, though. Not even close; yet another reason I’d trusted him. And still did, sort of.

His tone turned apologetic. “I know it’s a surprise, me showing up here. And I’ll understand if you—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I cut him off swiftly, and went back inside, where by now Ellie had gotten the woodstove radiating, its waves of warmth nearly visible in the room, and was unwrapping the ham salad sandwiches at the kitchen counter.