Triple Witch (11 page)

“That’s all right, Ned,” Ellie assured him. “I know you’ve got your hands full.”

At the other table, Ned’s wife began spooning tiny amounts of melting ice cream into the thin little girl’s mouth, while the plump child sighed with exaggerated impatience.

“It’s all taken care of,” Ellie said with as much kindness as she could muster.

She liked Ned all right as far as it went, but she knew he was a milquetoast. Ned didn’t like getting his hands dirty; he turned down good jobs that involved going out on the water, or even onto the dock. The only useful thing he owned was a big old truck with a cargo box that he took out on day jobs, small hauls that ended quickly and paid poorly. So the Montagues were always short of money, and Ellie drew a line between the sort of fellow who couldn’t support a family, and the kind who wouldn’t.

Ned ducked his head awkwardly. “The thing is, though—”

“Why don’t you just come out with it, Ned?” George asked, applying himself to his lemon square.

Ned blinked, startled at the novelty of being addressed by George, then blurted, “I wonder, do you
think they’ll be able to get Forepaugh? I mean, was there any evidence? That you saw?”

He sucked in a breath. “Because,” he added, “it doesn’t seem like enough to get anywhere with. Some jailhouse story doesn’t prove much.”

Wade looked at Ned as if Ned were a small, pesky insect.

“So I was wondering,” Ned went on to Ellie, “if you saw anything. Proof. To make sure that guy gets what’s coming to him. On,” he finished, “the bodies. Or near where the bodies were.”

George did not look pleased to have Ellie reminded of the bodies. All the cool, calm industry she had exhibited, getting things arranged: that was her way of handling it. But old Tim was still in her mind’s eye, at the end of a rope.

“I don’t think there was,” she said, turning to me.

“No,” I agreed slowly. “You mean, something that belonged to Ike Forepaugh. Something to show that he’d been there.”

Ned nodded. “Right. So the murdering bastard—oops, excuse my French—gets what’s coming to him.”

“I think,” George said consideringly, “the cops’ll find any evidence there might be. Way I heard it, they’re going over Crow Island pretty carefully, and watching to see if anybody shows up, too, looking for all that money.”

Wade took out his wallet and examined the two checks on the table. “Guess I’ll take care of these,” he said, and went up to the cash register. Passing the table where Ned’s wife and little girls sat, he picked their check up too, smiling at the children.

Ned didn’t notice. “Right. Well, I guess that’s all right.” His eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. “They were just a couple of bums, Tim and Kenny. Not the sort you really want to be related to. But I was. Those two were my blood relatives—in fact, I was the only living kin that they had.”

His lower lip thrust out injuredly. “I’d even been visiting Kenny some, lately.”

George looked blandly at Ned. If he had looked at me that way, I’d have simply dissolved in mortification; his blandness, like that of many downeast Mainers, can be very communicative.

But Ned didn’t seem to notice. “I’d been going out to his trailer every week or so,” he went on. “Make sure old Ken was okay. He was no-account, but he was a good old boy. And I just want to make sure whoever killed them doesn’t get away with it.”

Ned hesitated. “About those dogs of Tim’s. I hear you two,” he included me in his glance, “are watching out for them.”

I waited for him to say that he would take over this task, but of course he didn’t.

“I can’t be taking on that mongrel pack, right now.” He angled his head back at his own table. “My little girl—”

The word in town was that the child had kidney disease, something that required specialists, but no one knew for sure. Shunned by the Eastport men on account of Ned’s uselessness and isolated by the pity of Eastport women, the Montagues kept to themselves; thus their child’s health was one of the few topics so far unprocessed by the town gossip mill.

“So I wondered,” Ned said, wringing his pawlike hands.

“Ned, don’t worry about it,” Ellie said. “I’ll make sure the dogs are taken care of until we get another arrangement.”

“Poor bastard,” Wade said when Ned was gone.

“Ayuh,” George Valentine said, sounding unimpressed. “Guess he forgot to leave the tip,” he added, dropping a couple of bills beside the mess around the little girl’s ice-cream dish.

Ellie looked at me, and made a shrugging face: What
can you do? Ned was … well, Ned was a dishrag, that was all.

At the other tables, talk had turned to the latest obstacle in Eastport’s race to historical correctness: the big white luxury yacht, parked down at the dock.

“Well, if we can’t find out who owns it, how’re we gonna get ’em to move it?” Matt Fairbrother, an Eastport town councilman, wanted to know.

Apparently the vessel had gotten tied up in the spot that the historical committee wanted for the pirate-fight tableau, the dramatic presentation in which my ketchup-and-wax bullets were intended to play an important part. But not, it seemed, if they couldn’t relocate the
Triple Witch
.

“Don’t worry,” Fairbrother’s companion said. He wore bib overalls, a T-shirt, and high boots turned down low. “I hear them yachts is fragile. Go bottoms-up, you look at ’em cross-eyed.”

Dark laughter greeted this statement, and I thought that the
Triple Witch
’s owner had better be found soon or a sinking party could be in the offing. Downeast seafarers can get pretty sniffy about mooring spaces, especially ones occupied by expensive toys.

“Listen, George,” I said, taking him aside as we went out. “How are you doing about all this? The murders, and Ellie feeling the way she does.”

George set his cap on his head and squinted. “Well,” he admitted, “I’ve been wondering about it myself.”

He took a deep, considering breath. “ ’Cause what she’s all het up about, basically, is an old boyfriend.”

“Yeah. And that’s why, I guess, I was wondering.”

When I was new in town, George came to my house to remove a bee’s nest from my attic vent. When the job was done, he was dripping with decades-old honey, the yard was littered with ancient honeycomb, and he’d been stung twenty-four times.

But he wouldn’t take a penny. He just said I could
do him a favor sometime, maybe, and not to fuss about it.

“Did you know,” he said now, “that she taught him to read?”

“No. I didn’t.” Those books, I realized, and the look in her eyes when she saw them at Ken’s trailer. She’d been proud of him.

“Well, she did,” George said. “And I guess she told you she broke up with Ken, couple months before she started seeing me.”

“She did say that.” Suddenly I knew what he was about to say.

“I’d asked her, though. A number of times. Turned me down. She had something to take care of, she said, before she could.”

Wade and Ellie were coming down the wooden deck steps toward us. George watched her, his eyes lighting up at the sight of her.

“She broke up with him,” I said, “so she could start seeing you. But she waited a decent interval so it wouldn’t be …”

George nodded. “A slap in the face to him. She’s like that. And I appreciate your concern, Miz Tiptree—”

No matter what, I could never get him to call me Jacobia—

“—but as for Ellie and me, anything she does, or anything she ever wants to do—”

She came up and took his arm confidingly.

“Well,” he finished, smiling down at her, “don’t worry about me in that regard.”

“What are you two talking so seriously about?” she asked, looking from my face to his.

“Old times,” he replied comfortably. “And about those dogs of Tim’s. I’ll do for them until the shelter can find ’em homes.”

Because, he meant, he didn’t want Ellie out there anytime soon, refreshing her memory of Tim’s death scene.

I looped my arm through Wade’s as we strolled downtown, while Ellie and George headed up to Calais to see a movie, George hoping it would take Ellie’s mind off things and her agreeing to it for his sake.

“Why’d you pay Ned’s check?” I asked.

Wade chuckled. “I didn’t. I paid his wife’s check. You know it’d come out of her household money.”

He shook his head. “Carla Montague. Pretty girl, once. Bet she wishes she’d married Kenny instead. She’d be shut of him.” Instead of doomed, he meant, to more years with Ned.

I glanced at him. “You’re not usually so cynical.”

“I don’t usually sit at a table with Ned Montague, either.”

“You guys sure don’t like him.”

He shrugged. “It’s that constant poor-faced act he puts on. Like he doesn’t have anything but feels entitled to everything.”

At the dock, Ken Mumford’s little vessel the
Drifter
sat at a mooring where the state cops had left it when they’d finished with it, a paint-peeling wooden boat with an operator’s shack amidships. “Like that,” Wade said, waving at it. “Belongs to Ned, now.”

“You don’t suppose Ned killed Ken for the boat, do you?”

Wade laughed. “That tub? No, you’d have to be dumber than he is to kill for the
Drifter
. And he won’t be any dab hand, fixing her up, either. Boat like that, it needs taking care of.”

He shook his head. “Heck, I used to go out after deer with old Ned, bunch of other fellows. He would never bring along the right stuff, end up borrowing from everybody, then act all hurt about it when the other guys got mad at him. Had a decent old deer gun he got from somewhere, he keeps saying he’ll bring it over for a cleaning. But I doubt he ever will.”

Then he reached out, grinning wickedly, and ruffled
my hair. “Want to go out on the dock and smooch? Give the folks a thrill?”

And me, too, probably. “Why not? I’m already a scarlet woman in this town, on account of you.”

“Hey, we aim to please.” He slung his arm around me as we made our way toward the waterfront. “So where d’you suppose that two million bucks came from?”

“No idea.” My first thought had been Baxter Willoughby. The size of the stash was in his financial ballpark.

But the way it was happening wasn’t how Willoughby worked. If he wanted to move money he could do it with all those computer hookups in his house, hopscotching huge sums across continents with a few keystrokes. Actually putting his hands on the cash, for Willoughby, was as likely as Ned Montague plunging his hands into a tub of fish guts; it had never been his style.

Across the water, the island of Campobello shone in the low sun. “Victor say anything to you about last night?” Wade asked.

“About getting so loaded? Nope. Did he to you?”

Wade peered into the water near the dock. “Sort of. Look, the mackerel are running.”

All at once, and for a hundred yards in all directions, fish
boiled
to the surface of the bay, hurling themselves from the water in gleaming arcs and landing with sharp slaps. Almost as instantly, men with fishing gear arrived, casting mackerel jigs.

We left the pier to the fishermen—the smooching, I resolved, would come later—and went on past Leighton’s Variety Store, where the tangy smell of chili dogs and onion rings drifted up from Rosie’s Hot Dog Stand, nearby on the dock.

Wade stopped, frowning; I followed his gaze.

Unaware of us, two young guys from the bunch of high school students we’d seen at the Happy Landings
strode purposefully down the street, looking as innocent as kids who are up to something always do. At the last minute they cut furtively around the corner and, they thought, out of sight.

Intent on their business, they didn’t notice us as one boy dug a small packet from his jeans and passed it to the other one. Then they hurried away in opposite directions.

“Huh,” Wade said. “Wonder what that was all about.”

“I hope it’s not what I think,” I said. “But I’ll bet it is.” Briefly, I related what Bob Arnold had said about hard drugs having found their way to Eastport, and about Hallie Quinn.

“Hell,” Wade said grimly. “That stuff gets started up around here, we’ll be in a pickle.”

“We have already had two murders,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. And maybe they are connected. To,” he added, “whoever is bringing the damn stuff in here in the first place. Or was.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, knowing he meant Ken.

Now that we’d found all that money, it made even more sense that Ken’s “big deal” might have been drug smuggling. Eastport, so handy to Canada and an easy run to international waters, was once a bootlegger’s haven so notorious, it had its own rail spur. And Ellie’s pirate forebears hadn’t gone out for nothing; they’d gone after ships whose cargo holds were loaded with contraband.

So maybe Ken had decided to bring new blood to an age-old, lucrative Eastport industry. And someone else, noticing this, had run up the Jolly Roger.

“But it can’t be that simple,” I told Wade as we walked back toward my house. “Two million of anything takes organization and management skills. And Ken didn’t have them.”

We paused at the corner of Key Street. To the south, the Lubec bridge was an ink sketch against the fading
sky, while to the north, Deer Island Light flashed an age-old warning: beware.

“So,” I said, “what did Victor tell you?”

Wade grimaced. “You’re not going to like it.”

“That’s all right. I’m used to that from him. Lay it on me.”

Wade took a deep breath. “Victor says he’s tired of being a brain surgeon. It’s not special enough. So he’s leaving New York.”

At this, my heart went into the sort of free-fall normally reserved for parachutists, after the ripcord has produced no activity whatsoever and the reserve chute has failed, also.

“So what’s the punch line? What’s he going to do to alleviate his discomfort, eliminate his boredom, and make himself feel—” I nearly choked on the word—“special?”

“He decided this afternoon, after his hangover wore off. He’s moving,” Wade said. “To Eastport.”

19
Carrying all the shutters down to the cellar, I could almost stop believing it. And soon, the pain of all that hauling sent me into such a blur of physical misery, I hardly cared.