Triple Witch (6 page)

“Cosmo, heel!”

The only heel this monster wanted was mine, and
with my leg attached. I couldn’t see Ellie, but I hadn’t heard screaming; it was the only good thing I could think of about the situation.

The girl’s voice, again; this time the dog paid attention. With its regal head lofty, bones as big as sledgehammers, and a coat as heavily underfluffed as fox fur, the dog was—now that it wasn’t trying to kill me—magnificent.

“Jacobia, I’m so sorry,” Ellie managed shakily, rising from where she’d been crouched. “I didn’t know it was a
wild
dog.”

“It’s not.” I watched it depart. “It’s a
Schutzhund
dog.”

“I don’t care what it is. Bob Arnold can just come out here and take it to the shelter, before it hurts someone.”

“Wait.” I caught up with Ellie. “Whoever called it, the dog obeys her. Sort of,” I added.

Ellie looked doubtful. “What if she tells it to attack us?”

“Well, then probably we’re dead. But she won’t, or why would she have called it off in the first place?”

The girl hadn’t called
heel
, I realized. She’d given the dog a command in German, the language in which the dogs were trained.

“Ellie, those dogs are amazing. The training costs a mint, but when they’re done, you’ve got the best bodyguard
and
the best companion dog in the world.”

Ellie eyed me. “I thought you were scared of strange dogs.” But she was pushing with me through the bramble again.

“Not of strange dogs. Just mean dogs. And I like to get it clear which kind I’m dealing with. But this dog …”

The path broke through to a clearing. At the back of it stood an old Airstream trailer, the round-shouldered, silver-skinned kind. Somebody had built a deck for it, with steps leading up to the door. Through a stand of
trees at the back of the lot, blue water sparkled like sequins on a fancy cocktail dress.

“Dogs like that,” I said, “won’t hurt you unless they’re told to. They won’t even eat their own food until you tell them to.” It’s to keep them from being poisoned; trained for tracking, obedience, and protection, the animals make excellent guards for big estates.

“So why’d he charge us?” Ellie wanted to know.

“Handler error,” I guessed. “That’s mostly why a guard dog’s an insurance liability. And the girl didn’t sound very confident.”

Lying on the deck, the dog raised its head but didn’t move. “We can go,” I told Ellie, “right to the foot of the steps.” After that, I wouldn’t give a pin for our chances. Someone, probably the girl, had told the dog where the line was now.

“You,” Ellie said, “seem to know an awful lot about this.”

“I worked for a while with a fellow who had them,” I said, scanning the trailer again.

There was something wrong with the windows: they were clean, hung with curtains of eyelet lace.

“And,” I went on, frowning at this incongruity, “this fellow asked me to keep one for a while. When I was in New York.”

Actually, the fellow hadn’t asked me to keep the dog. He’d ordered me to do so, emphasizing that the arrangement was for my own safety. My client, it seemed, had made some interesting enemies, and so by association had I.

Clamped to Ken’s trailer near the deck was a pulley like the one old Tim used to operate his shed windows, only smaller. Looped through it was a length of clothesline with towels hanging from it. A pang of unease struck me: what had bothered me about Tim’s pulley? But the thought faded in light of a new insight about Ken.

“He had a girlfriend. That’s Ken’s girlfriend, in there.”

Ellie looked dismayed. “Oh, I hope someone’s called her. I don’t want to have to tell her that he’s—”

The trailer’s door opened suddenly and the girl appeared.

“Get out of here. I’ll sic Cosmo on you, if you don’t.”

She was a small, slender person in her late teens, with a cap of short, white-blonde hair, wearing cutoffs and a halter top. A large, silver-glinting medallion hung from a chain around her frail neck.

“Do you know,” I called, “what will happen if you do? The dog will tear us apart, and it will end up being shot.”

I took a step. The dog got calmly to its feet. “Look, we only want a few of Ken’s personal things for his dad.”

The girl glared, but spoke to the dog, who lay down again.

“We’re not here to bother you. Although,” I added, unable to help myself, she looked so woebegone, “if you want to come back with us, maybe talk about it …”

“No. I know who sent you. My father. I’m not going back.”

Ellie stepped quickly in front of me. “Hallie, we only want things that mean something to Timothy, to remember Ken by.”

“Oh, sure.” The girl’s mouth twisted. “What about me? What am I supposed to remember him by?”

I spotted a line of scabs on her arm as she fingered the medallion. Then she slammed into the trailer again, emerging a few seconds later with a bulging canvas satchel.

“I hate you! You’re all alike. You all just want … want …”

Fists clenched, she shrieked out a howl of grief. The dog looked up, alarmed, but did not move.

“Cosmo!” She uttered a command, then scrambled off the deck, darted across the clearing, and vanished into the scrubby woods.

After an uncertain moment—I thought again that she didn’t know how to handle the animal, that the command she’d given was somehow wrong, or inappropriate—the dog gave up and followed, sailing in among the trees behind her in long, athletic bounds.

Ellie sighed. “Well, so much for social work. Come on, let’s get whatever Tim might want and get out of here.”

“Who’s that girl?” I asked as we went in. Then I stopped, unable for a moment to credit my perceptions.

“Hallie Quinn,” Ellie replied. “I should have figured she’d be out here, it’s perfect for giving her father a heart attack.”

She frowned. “Do you see what I see?”

The trailer was immaculate. “Strange but true. Looks like someone has turned into Holly Homemaker.”

“Hallie,” my friend corrected distractedly, leafing through some papers on a countertop. “Hey, look at this.”

It was a stack of bills: fuel, electricity, and so on. Each was marked “paid” and initialled with a circled HQ, in a childish hand that I figured was Hallie’s.

The curtains were certainly her work, also; peeking between them I spotted a big Trans Am with an open hood, an empty engine compartment, and a bad frame twist. Patches of Bondo smeared the body, and the headlights were empty sockets.

“There’s the Ken we all know and love,” I said. “Tim’s full of beans. Kenny didn’t have any deal going, or he’d have fixed up the car. He just found a girl willing to clean up after him.”

Ellie shook her head. “Takes more than Windex to pay bills.”

“Huh. You’re right,” I conceded. “He must have had money coming in. See any ledger or checkbook? I could get an idea of his cash flow.”

She gave a little snort. “I don’t think so.”

I opened drawers and peered into them: old tide tables, fishing lures, balls of twine. No financial records.

“I guess you’re right about that, too. Ken probably didn’t even file income taxes.”

“He filed,” she corrected me quietly, “a 1040-EZ. I’ve been doing them for him, for years.”

I turned in surprise and found her eyes brimming with tears.
“Damn
it. Timothy was right—he shouldn’t have died that way.”

“Hey, Ellie. I mean, if it’s any comfort to you—”

“I know. A bullet in the head—it’s the way you’d put down a good old horse. Quick and painless, and I can’t do anything about it now. But I wish,” she finished earnestly, “that I’d been kinder to him at the end. I was so busy with my life, and being married to George, and all …”

Through the window a flash of something metallic caught my eye; the medallion, I realized. Then I saw Hallie standing at the edge of the clearing, gazing wistfully back at the trailer.

“Look,” I murmured, and Ellie stepped up beside me.

“Oh,” she exhaled. “Let’s go, so she can come back.”

“She’s not coming back.” The girl slipped into the brush and was gone. “I thought so too at first, but that bag she took? It’s got her things in it. There’s nothing of hers left, here.”

Ellie frowned. “I said we wouldn’t take anything except …”

“It’s not what we’re taking. It’s that we’re here at all, and even worse, that the police have been. She might
have put up with one visit, even from cops. But not two. Did you notice the marks on her arm? Those are needle tracks.”

Ellie stared at me, but after a moment she accepted it, aware that I knew what I was talking about.

Back in the city, Sam always insisted he wasn’t using any hard drugs. But his friends were, and I got to know the signs. I had hoped I would not see them again, and around him I never did.

“But—” Ellie peered at the cleanliness of the place.

“Junkies can function,” I said. “For a while.”

I stifled the urge to stride out after the girl. It wouldn’t do any good. “Let’s just do what we need to, and go home.”

So we did: I found a Boy Scout manual and Ellie snagged Ken’s fishing rod. In the living area, next to a sofa with a sheet and a blanket neatly folded at one end—the pillowslip on the pillow bore the blue initials HQ, embroidered in a delicate chain-stitch—I picked up a framed snapshot of Tim and Kenny. In the sleeping alcove was a Swiss Army knife. There was a book on the bedside table: Stephen King’s
Christine
.

“I wouldn’t have figured Ken for a reader.”

Ellie looked over, her glance softening. “Ken liked reading. Took him a while to get the hang of it, but he did, finally.”

Moments later we were out of there. Leaving the clearing I looked back, still hoping I would see Hallie and persuade her to come with us. But all I saw was the dog; as soon as we’d come out, he’d returned to the deck.

More evidence, I thought, that the girl didn’t really know how to control him. Now he lay watching us with eyes that were calmly professional. I felt bad leaving him there, but I assumed he wouldn’t have come with us, anyway.

Driving home, we passed the barracks-like building that had housed the Quoddy Dam workers, back in the
1940s when the Navy’s never-completed project to produce electricity from the tides had been in its heyday. A two-storied frame structure with dozens of windows, a red-shingled peaked roof, and a porched entrance, the building now stood empty, its shutters hanging askew.

Ellie gazed at it as we went by. “Too big,” she remarked.

“What?” I replied, distracted. I’d been thinking of Hallie: how pretty she was. Some of Sam’s friends, both male and female, had been pretty, too. Once upon a time.

“Those shutters,” Ellie said, “on the barracks. But they’re too big for your house. Didn’t Felicity Abbot-Jones say last year that she thought all Eastport houses ought to have shutters? And I thought you meant to do something about it.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling a thud in the pit of my stomach as I remembered: murder or no murder, Felicity was coming—and soon.

Months earlier I had hired a crew to take down my old shutters, most of them irreparably damaged. But now without them my house resembled a woman who has, for some ungodly reason that probably seemed sensible at the time, shaved her eyebrows off.

The difference being that a woman’s eyebrows will grow back.

“Good heavens,” I whispered inadequately as we pulled into the drive. “I don’t even have an extension ladder.”

We tiptoed into the house, where the silence was absolute, as if someone had filled the place with anesthetic gas.

“But,” I said, peering around—the radiator was gone, and the spot underneath it had been swept, scrubbed, and coated with wax; good old George—“that’s not the real problem.”

The dining room was empty, and so was the parlor.
No sound came from Sam’s room, and Monday was asleep in her dog bed.

“The problem is, I have nothing to haul up there. No,” I finished, “shutters. Ellie, where is everyone?”

Ellie picked up a note from the roll-top desk that Sam had found, abandoned in a barn in Lubec. When he brought it home, it looked like a load of firewood, but now it gleamed with all the sanding, staining, and finish-rubbing that he had put into it; it was, he had informed me proudly, bird’s-eye maple.

“ ‘Gone to movies. Victor asleep. Look in refrigerator,’ ” the note said, and it was signed by Wade.

So I looked, and found a split of champagne, along with two rose crystal glasses that I had admired in a shop in Calais. The card tucked under the bottle read, ‘Do not open until midnight.’

“Too bad he didn’t put some shutters in there,” Ellie said.

“Probably he would have, if they’d fit and he’d had some. Do you suppose we should check on Victor?”

“Uh-uh. If he’s dying, I don’t want to resuscitate him.”

I shot a look at her.

“Oh, all right,” she relented. “I guess it wouldn’t be so good if Victor stopped breathing. Although,” she added, “it
would
mean that he would also stop talking …”

“Ssh.” I slipped along the upstairs hall ahead of her. A small lamp burned on the guest room’s bureau, so we could see his chest slowly rising and falling.

“Okay, he’s alive,” Ellie said. “Now let’s leave him here. Having him at my mercy like this is too tempting.”

“Wait,” I said. “Just … look at him.”

Asleep, Victor resembled one of those Botticelli angels that used to get painted on the ceilings of cathedrals. He could be funny, too, when he wanted to
be. When he wanted to, Victor could charm the birds out of the trees.

“Right, he looks harmless enough, now,” Ellie said. “So does a wasp’s nest if you don’t know what’s in it. Why you put up with him the way you do, I can’t understand.”

As if in reply, Victor snorted and sat up suddenly, his face twisting peevishly into an expression of anger tinctured with paranoia. Then the alcohol hit him, and you could practically see every blood vessel in his skull reacting to the blow.

“Oh,” he moaned, clutching his temples, and saw me standing there feeling sorry for him in spite of myself.

“Well,” he snapped, “what are you waiting for? Go get me two aspirin, and some bottled spring water. And hurry it up.”