Triple Witch (20 page)

Because you told her so about a million times
, I thought but did not say.
Because you followed her, and spied on her
.

Ellie walked on down the breakwater ahead of us, carrying the letters Peter had written in her shoulder bag.

“And this just proves it,” he went on. “That she should have listened, and done what I told her. If she had, she’d be alive.”

He leaned on the rail overlooking the water, staring down to where the waves slopped against the weed-coated rocks.

“Did she say where she was getting the drugs?”

“No. She wouldn’t talk to me. I wasn’t wasting my time on that stuff she got into. I,” he asserted loftily, “am too intelligent for that.”

But not quite smart enough to realize that a girl might not like being stalked.

“Anyway,” he went on, glancing around as if fearful of being overheard, “it’s all my fault. I heard her the other night on the seawall. With some guy. They were arguing.”

I stared at him. No one else had mentioned seeing
Hallie after I did. “Peter, have you told Bob Arnold? Or your parents?”

He shrugged, ashamed. “I can’t. If I do, everyone will know I didn’t go down there, and stop it. But he must be the one who killed her, and if I had gone—”

His shoulders shook, under the polo shirt. I put my hand on his arm, but he flinched roughly away.

“But she should have listened,” he insisted. “The way she acted to me, she made me afraid to go down and butt in. I bet it was that other guy she’d been seeing. I’d tried, but I could never catch them together. And now she’s dead.”

I thought about the beating Arnold said Hallie had endured. “Peter, if you had, whoever did it might have killed you, too.”

He scrubbed at his eyes. “Do I have to talk to Bob Arnold?”

He was sixteen or so, but his imploring look was like a ten-year-old’s, pleading not to have to go to school. In his heart he was just a pathetically lonely, mixed-up kid.

“Don’t you want to help catch who killed her?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” His look hardened. “And killed those other two guys, I bet, the Mumfords. Don’t you think?”

The expression of superior scorn returned to his face, mingled with something twisted, off-kilter. “Although,” he confided, “if somebody was going around here killing people, he missed the one I’d like to knock off.”

Sensing that the interview was ending, Ellie strolled back toward us, stopping along the way to speak to people she knew. Ellie knew almost everybody in town.

“Really?” I inquired of Peter. “And who is that?” I was thinking about the letters he’d written, the obsessiveness they betrayed. That, combined with the look in his eye, made me feel uneasy about the welfare of Peter’s enemy, whoever it was.

“Somebody’s selling dope,” he snarled, “not just pot but heroin, and
that’s
who should have gotten killed. It’s only a couple kids hooked on it, now. Maybe half a dozen. But it’ll be more, and they’re too
stupid
to see.”

Just for an instant, his face was a mask of adolescent fury: a child’s rage, the strength of an adult, and no self-control.

“And I
hate
it,” he went on. “It took Hallie away from me. I don’t know who’s doing it, but if I find out, I’ll—”

I wondered if he had any idea who it was he really hated: some faceless drug dealer? The boys who scorned him, picked on him and made fun of him? Or perhaps himself?

“Peter, you said the killer missed the one who really ought to have been killed. Does that mean it wasn’t Ken Mumford selling the heroin? I mean, do you know for a fact it wasn’t?”

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t know it for a fact. But I never thought it was him. He was just too … I don’t know. Harmless, or something. Why, do you think it was?”

I sighed; oh, for a shred of actual, solid information. “I don’t know either, Peter. Listen, can you talk to your folks about this? Or a guidance counselor, somebody at school?”

He made a rude noise. “None of them,” he said, “are on my mental level. My IQ is in the genius range. So I have,” he confided unnecessarily, “a hard time communicating my concerns.”

Maybe, I wanted to say, you could write them some letters. But that would have been too cruel.

“Thank you,” he said, nodding to Ellie as she joined us, “for giving me a chance to ventilate my emotions. I’m feeling a lot of stress. I’ll go and confer with Chief Arnold.”

“You do that, Peter,” I said, and he strode off: head high, practically whistling now that he’d ventilated his
feelings. Personally, I was glad it was me carrying a weapon and not Peter, or I’d be worried about him ventilating something else.

Or someone. Then I got a look at Ellie’s face.

“In the park at Shackford Head this afternoon,” she burst out, “two tourists were mugged and robbed. One of the people on the pier just told me, some guy
menaced
these tourists and ran away with their wallets.”

I looked around: blue sky, sparkling water, salt-fresh air. That kind of thing didn’t happen here, and certainly not at the state park at Shackford Head, a wild, remote area where the most menacing event in recent history was the sighting of a black bear urging a cub up the hill toward a raspberry thicket.

“Has Arnold heard?”

“Yes, he’s up at the Happy Landings with the tourists, now, trying to get them calmed down enough to get information out of them. I understand he’s fit to be tied.”

He was, too. By the time we got home, Arnold’s squad car was parked outside my house, where he had gone looking for George.

“This is it,” Arnold said explosively. “I have had it.”

George was there, too, tinkering with the valve stem on the new radiator. “I don’t suppose,” George asked me, “that you have any chewed-up chewing gum?”

Once upon a time, a cast-iron radiator cost a few dollars and required no attention whatsoever, other than being painted gold or silver if you wanted it cooler, and white if you wanted it hotter. Nowadays, a radiator costs hundreds of dollars, and needs more maintenance than a zoo animal. At the moment, this one was behaving like a zoo animal, too: hissing and spitting.

“Because,” George went on, “I think I’d better repack that valve stem, and I used up my packing over at the grade school.”

“I’ll go,” Sam offered, looking up from the table
where he was working on the sketch of the square-rigger, complete with miles of hemp lines and acres of canvas sheets.

“Hey, Arnold,” George remarked. “I hear you found some more of that illegal trash, out South End way.”

George understood the seriousness of the situation. But he thought going along normally was a good approach to most things, until positively shown otherwise.

“Yeah,” Arnold replied disgustedly. “Household trash. Some cheapskate can’t put it out for the truck like civilized people. Al Rollins is going through it now.”

He took an outraged breath. “But that is the least of my concerns, right this minute. I have had it to the eyes, damnit. There are not going to be any more murders. Or muggings. Or
escapes
,” Arnold said thunderously, glaring around at us. “I am here to
guarantee
you of that.”

We all nodded obediently, because it was what he wanted: for all of us to agree with him. After that, he would go back out and do his job, but right now he needed—as Peter Mulligan had put it—to ventilate.

“Do you,” Sam asked George, “want valve-stem packing? Or chewing gum?” He put his sketches into their folder and removed them from the table, planning ahead for dinner.

George looked at the radiator, thinking about what it said in his plumbing manual versus what he knew from fixing radiators all over town for fifteen years.

“I’m not going to tolerate any more of this nonsense,” Bob Arnold declared. “I am going to put a stop to it here and now.”

George took his gimme cap off and examined it, still thinking about his decision.

“There is not going to be more upset in Eastport,” Arnold predicted forcefully, “or any more crime wave. Not at
all
.”

“Chewing gum,” George said. “It’ll work a lot better, is my professional prediction.”

So Sam went out to buy a pack of Wrigley’s, all of which he promised to chew to the proper consistency on the way home. And although I felt doubtful, wondering if a roll of packing from Wadsworth’s might not be the better choice, in the end George’s prediction turned out to be right.

Unlike—unfortunately—Bob Arnold’s.

31
The way to a man’s heart is supposed to be through his stomach, and since I had never found any other route I decided to try it with Victor; maybe I could soften him up before I lowered the boom on him. So for dinner we had avocado-nut loaf, a tofu-based herb sauce, baby carrots, and whole-wheat oven rolls, all of which turned out to be a satisfying meal that even he ate without any complaint.

“Soapstone sinks,” he enthused over dessert, a compote of strawberries and blackberries.

In the house he was thinking of buying, he meant; in which he would become my neighbor.

“Butler’s pantries, and fireplaces—lots of fireplaces, one in every room!”

For what it would cost to bring those old chimneys up to code, you could heat the house by burning bricks of money and still end up considerably ahead. But Victor for once in his life was in a wonderful mood, and no one wanted to spoil it.

Or anyway not right this minute.

“So, George,” Victor asked, “what do you think it would take to get a Jacuzzi into that house? With,” he
added, “separate tub and shower stall, maybe a steam cabinet, twin lavatories. That’s all, nothing fancy.”

George smiled, visions of full employment until sometime in the next millennium dancing in his head. “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied, spooning up strawberries. “Shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Compared, say, to building the Egyptian pyramids by the original labor-intensive methods, with maybe a few of the hanging towers of Babylon added on. Just getting a Jacuzzi unit up the staircase would be an interesting project, and at the idea of hooking it to the jerry-rigged network of old pipes that must be the house’s plumbing, I nearly inhaled a berry.

“The question is,” Ellie put in, “and only if you don’t mind my asking: what are you going to
do
here?”

Victor looked surprised. “Do? Why, I’m going to do surgery. Because back in the city there’s a neurosurgeon every half-block, but here, it’s special. It’ll probably take a little time to get my credentials transferred, but after that—”

“Victor,” Wade put in. “Have you visited the hospital yet?”

Wade had taken to behaving as if he were Victor’s uncle, mostly on account of wanting things to go well for Sam and me.

“Well, no,” Victor harrumphed, irritated. “But I’m sure it’s a fine, perfectly modern—”

“Dad?” Sam put his hand on Victor’s shoulder. “Listen. It is a good hospital, for where it is, out here so far away from everything. But, Dad, they transfer compound fractures.”

The implication being that it didn’t matter how good a surgeon Victor was. To do his job, he needed a very high-tech support system: special instruments, teams of technical staff, cutting-edge therapeutic techniques, not to mention an intensive care unit wired like the control room at NASA. The hospital in Calais is excellent, but it’s not set up for that stuff.

Which meant that Victor, so spoiled by the big city that he imagined all ninety-bed regional care facilities possessed the same sophisticated diagnostic imaging systems he used in New York, might not be staying in Eastport after all.

Not that it was going to save him from the conversation I had planned for him. Still, it was a pleasant prospect.

“All,” Victor asked Sam intensely, “compound fractures?”

“Well, no,” Sam admitted. He’d done volunteer work there. “Not all of them. But the terrible ones, the trauma-center ones where big bone ends are actually all mangled and sticking out, they put you in Hank Henahan’s ambulance to Bangor. And the bad head cases go on a helicopter from Quoddy Airfield.”

Personally, while I am eating my dinner, I do not want to hear about bone ends sticking out. But it was worth it if it got rid of Victor.

“They stabilize you,” Sam continued. “Then they ship you. Somewhere bigger where they have, you know, a lot more technology.”

Delighted as we all were to think that we might soon be seeing the back of Victor—his good humor was a freak thing, believe me, like a rain of frogs—it was sad to see his dream busted.

Or I assumed it was, anyway, for one brief, shining moment.

“Well, then,” Victor asserted, lifting his head and gazing imperiously at all of us. “I’ll have to change my plan.”

Tra-la. But then his tone alerted me.

“I’ll have to give up being a neurosurgeon. After all,” he went on, smiling at me as if he had not just trashed my own dream, which was to say goodbye to him, “you changed your life, Jacobia. Why shouldn’t I change mine?”

Because
, I thought nastily,
there is no backhoe big enough for all your bad karma
.

“Work,” Ellie ventured, “is scarce around here. I mean, for a man of your specialized talents.”

Lying, cheating, bullying, tyrannizing … the list just went on and on. The only other thing my ex-husband was qualified to be was Attila the Hun.

“Then maybe,” Victor said, “I’ll retire. Enjoy,” he went on, absent visible irony, “the simple life.”

With, of course, the assistance of that Jacuzzi.

“I might write some poetry,” he said. “You know, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at poetry. Never had time.”

This, naturally, being the only obstacle between himself and a Pulitzer. Victor thinks old Burma-Shave signs are the height of linguistic cleverness.

“But the important thing I’ll do,” he said, “is get to know Jacobia again. Heal,” he added tenderly, “our estrangement.”

Wade turned slowly, with a look in his eyes that should have incinerated Victor right on the spot.

Whereupon I thought: There once was a jerk from the city, whose plans for my life were not pretty, and lest you think I was waxing excessively bitter may I just tell you right here and now that my ex-husband Victor no more wanted to heal our estrangement than I wanted multiple stab wounds.