Unhinged (2 page)

“Did you lose this?” Maggie was a big red-cheeked girl with clear olive skin, liquid brown eyes, and dark, wavy hair that she wore in a thick, glossy braid down her plaid-shirted back.

“I spotted it on the sidewalk,” she added. It was Maggie who’d bought Sam the military wristwatch, shopping for it on-line via her computer.

Then she saw me. “Jacobia, what
happened
?”

Well, at least the lens wasn’t halfway to my brain. “I was testing Newton’s law. The demonstration got away from me.” I popped the other lens out. Suddenly I was blue-eyed again. Both eyes. “I’m okay, though, thanks.”

Actually parts of me were hurting quite intensely but if I said so, Ellie would insist on taking me to the clinic where Victor was on duty. And rather than submit to my ex-husband’s critical speculations on how my injuries had happened, I’d have gone outside and fallen off that ladder all over again.

“I guess I can’t be in your eye-color experiment, though,” I said. Like Sam, in the fall Maggie would be a sophomore at the University of Maine. “I don’t think I should put the lens back in right away,” I explained.

The experiment, for a psychology-class project, was to see how long it takes a person to get used to a new eye color. If my own reaction was any indication, the answer was
never
. It was astonishing how jarring the past week had been, seeing a green-eyed alien with my face looking out of the mirror at blue-eyed me.

Disappointment flashed in Maggie’s glance, at once replaced by concern. “Oh, I don’t care about that silly experiment,” she declared.

But she did. She had designed it, proposed it, and with some difficulty gotten it approved, to get credits while staying in Eastport—where Sam was, not coincidentally—for the whole summer. It wasn’t easy getting people with normal sight to wear the lenses, either. I was among the six she’d persuaded, the minimum for the project. “It’s you I’m worried about,” she added.

The girl was going to make someone a wonderful daughter-in-law someday. But it wouldn’t be me if Sam didn’t hurry up and get his act together. Other mothers fret if their kids get romantically involved too fast, but my son’s idea of a proper courtship verged on the glacial.

Luckily in addition to her other sterling qualities Maggie was patient. “You should put something on it,” she said. “A cold cloth or some ice.”

“That,” Ellie interjected acidly, “would mean she’d have to sit still. And you’re allergic to that, aren’t you, dear?”

Dee-yah
. Catching the renewed threat of a clinic visit, I sat down and accepted the ministrations she offered: aspirin, a cloth with cracked ice in it. If I didn’t, she might hog-tie me and
haul
me to Victor’s clinic. She could do it, too; Ellie looks as delicate as a fairy-tale princess but her spine is of tempered steel.

Also, I’d begun noticing that something about Newton’s law had hit me in a major way. Sunshine slanting through the tall bare windows of the big old barnlike kitchen wavered at me, and the maple wainscoting’s orangey glow was shimmering weirdly.

“Oh,” I heard myself say. “Psychedelic.”

“Jake?” Ellie said in alarm, reaching for me.

Then I was on the floor, Prill’s cold nose snuffling in my ear while Monday nudged my shoulder insistently. Faces peered: Sam, Maggie. And Ellie, her red hair a backlit halo, green eyes gazing frightenedly at me and even the freckles on her nose gone pale.

“Okay, now,” I began firmly, but it came out a croak.

“. . . call the hospital?” Sam asked urgently.

“Lift your feet up,” Maggie advised.

So I did, and felt much better as blood rushed back downhill to my brain again. Newton’s law apparently had advantages, although if my brain planned depending on gravity for all of its blood supply, I was still in serious trouble.

Which was how things stood when my husband, Wade Sorenson, walked in. Tall and square-jawed, built like a stevedore, with brush-cut blond hair and grey eyes, he surveyed the scene with an air of calm competence that I found hugely refreshing under the circumstances. And while Sam asked again if he should phone the hospital and Maggie insisted I put my feet up higher and Ellie was all for summoning an ambulance right that instant, Wade said:

“Hey. How’re you doing?”

He doesn’t freak out, he doesn’t screw up; he’s the only man in the world into whose arms I would trustingly fall backwards.

Or forwards, for that matter. Crouching, he assessed me, smelling as always of fresh cold air, lime shaving soap, and lanolin hand cream. He’d already noticed that I was breathing and had a blood pressure. The dogs backed off and sat.

“Your pupils are equal,” he commented mildly. Meaning that I likely did not have the kind of brain damage that would kill me. Or not right now, anyway.

Victor would have scoffed at the notion of Wade assessing anything medically, but guys who work on boats learn how to eyeball injuries pretty accurately, reluctant to forfeit a day’s pay for anything but the probably-fatal. And as Eastport’s harbor pilot, guiding freighters safely through the watery maze of downeast Maine’s many treacherous navigation hazards, Wade works on boats pretty much the way mountain goats work on mountains.

Eager to lose my invalid status, I sat up. Not a good move. “Hey, hey,” Wade cautioned as the room whirled madly. “Take it slow.”

“Okay,” I said grudgingly. That Newton guy was beginning to be a real pain in my tailpipe. But I was
not
lying down again.

Ellie was just waiting to bushwhack me into the clinic, Sam resembled a six-year-old who wanted his mommy, and Maggie—

Well, Maggie looked solid and unruffled as usual, for which I was grateful since I had an idea I’d be needing her, later.

For one thing, I’d planned a special dinner in honor of the tenant who’d moved into my guest room that morning, an aspiring music-video producer filming his first effort here in Eastport.

For another, somewhere between the ladder and the ground I’d had an important epiphany. Harriet Hollingsworth wasn’t just missing.

She was dead. And she’d probably been murdered.

“She had no
car, no money. No family as far as anyone knows. So how did Harriet drop off the earth without a trace?” I asked a little while later, sitting on the edge of the examining table at the Eastport Health Clinic.

The clinic windows looked out over a tulip bed whose frilly blooms swayed together in the breeze like dancers in a chorus line. Across the street, a row of white cottages sported postage-stamp lawns, picket fences, and American flags. Beyond gleamed Passamaquoddy Bay, blue and tranquil in the spring sunshine, the distant hills of New Brunswick mounding hazily on the horizon.

“Well?” I persisted as Victor shone a penlight into my eye. “Where’d Harriet go? And how?”

The clinic smelled reassuringly of rubbing alcohol and floor wax. But years of marriage to a medical professional had given me a horror of being at the business end of the medical profession. Ellie had brought me here while Wade finished the gutters, knowing that otherwise I’d go right back up the ladder again; if you let any element of old-house fix-up beat you for an instant, the house will get the upper hand in everything. And although I wasn’t graceful or surefooted I was stubborn; so far, this had been enough to keep my old home from collapsing around me.

Victor snapped the penlight off. He’d tested all the things he could think of that might show I was
non compos mentis,
which was what he thought anyway. When I came here from New York and bought the house he’d had a world-class hissy fit, saying that it showed my personality was disintegrating and besides, if I moved so far from Manhattan, how would he see Sam?

I’d said that (a) at least I had a personality, (b) if mine was disintegrating it was under the hammer blows he had inflicted upon it while we were married, and (c) as it was, he hadn’t seen Sam for over a year.

That shut him up for a while. But not much later he’d moved to Eastport, too, and established his medical clinic.

“Normal,” he pronounced now, sounding disappointed.

“A person needs money to run,” I reminded Ellie, “even when money trouble is why they are running in the first place.”

“She scavenged, though,” Ellie countered. “Cans, returnable bottles. Over time, Harriet could have gotten bus fare to Bangor from that.”

“Then what?” I objected. “Start a new life? Harriet was barely managing to hang on to the old one. And what about all that blood at her house?”

“Nobody reliable ever saw any blood,” Ellie retorted.

After her boot was found, a story went around that a lot of blood had been seen on the top step of Harriet’s porch. By whom and when was a matter of wild speculation, and when I’d gone to see for myself it hadn’t been there, so I’d discounted the rumor. But now . . .

“Ahem,” Victor said pointedly. He had dark hair with a few threads of grey in it, hazel eyes, and a long jaw clenched in a grim expression. Partly this was his normal look while ferreting out illness and coming up with ways to knock its socks off.

Also, though, it meant I was not regarding him with sufficient awe. “Could you,” he requested irritably, “pay just a little more attention to the situation at hand?”

Reluctantly I focused on him. This took some doing, a fact I’d failed to mention when asked about symptoms; blurry vision, I understood, could mean Something Bad. But I was determined not to become a patient if I could help it, and I
had
just taken out the contact lenses . . .

“You might have a mild concussion,” he pronounced at last.

“That’s all?” Ellie questioned. “She seems quite shaken up.”

She was complicating my exit strategy: find the nearest door and scram through it, lickety-split. I rolled my eyes at her to get her to pipe down; the room lurched, spinning a quarter turn.

“The simplest possible explanation is usually correct,” Victor intoned. “‘Shaken up’ is as good a description as any.”

“So I can go?” I slid hastily off the examining table. If it meant getting out of here right now, I’d have hopped off a cliff.

Which, it turned out, was just exactly what getting off that table felt like. Somewhere were my shoes, making contact with the tiled floor. They seemed far away and not entirely reliable, as if connected to my body by long, loose rubber bands.

Feets don’t fail me now,
I thought earnestly. If I had to, I would take floor-contact on faith.

The way, once upon a time, I’d taken Victor. “Someone would remember if Harriet took the bus,” I told Ellie.

Victor frowned. He feels everyone should keep silent until he finishes giving
his
opinions. And as he will finish giving
his
opinions a day or so after his funeral, mostly I ignore him.

But now we were in the land of traumatic head injury, where Victor is king and all he surveys is his to command. He’d gotten reeducated for country doctoring, but back in the city Victor was the one you went to after all the other brain surgeons turned pale and began trembling at the very sight of you.

So this time I listened. “Twenty-four hours of bed rest,” he decreed. “Watch for headache, disorientation, and grogginess.”

Breathing the same air as Victor made me groggy. We’d had a peace treaty for a while, but now Sam was away at college most of the time and without him to run interference for us, Victor and I were about as compatible as flies and flyswatters. And guess what end of that charming analogy I tended to end up on.

“Great,” I said glumly. It wasn’t enough that I looked like I’d gone nine rounds with a prizefighter. My X rays were clear but my face was a disaster area, and the click in my shoulder had gone silent, probably on account of the swelling.

But I
couldn’t
lie down. I had
things
to do: dinner guests.

And Harriet’s murder. First, I had to convince Ellie that it had happened. I had a pretty clear idea of how to do that, too; Harriet hadn’t owned much, but she had possessed
one
thing . . .

“Well, maybe not actual bed rest,” Victor allowed. “But if you won’t take it easy,” he added sternly, “I’ll admit you to the hospital for forty-eight hours of observation.”

An odd look came into his eye, and I realized he could make good on this threat if he came up with dire enough reasons. Wade might believe Victor, if he sounded sincere; Ellie, too.

And Victor was good at sincere. “I will,” I vowed, “take it easy. Um, and is it okay to put the contact lenses back in?”

Because if I could, Maggie’s project might get saved. Victor looked put-upon.

“Oh, I suppose,” he replied waspishly. “It looks bad but the orbital processes were spared, the swelling’s minimal, not
in
the eye at all, and you have no signs of neurological dysfunction.”

Never mind if your face looks like roadkill; if you can follow his moving finger with your eyes and touch your nose with your own, you’re good to go. “But why in heaven’s name are you participating in amateur-hour science?” he wanted to know.

“Thank you, Victor,” I cut him off. It’s yet another of his talents, making me feel like a rebellious child.

Leaving Ellie to settle up at the business desk I made for the exit before he could decide to prescribe a clear liquid diet. Maybe I’d learn later that I’d knocked an essential screw loose and it needed replacing right away, before my brains fell out.

But I doubted it. And I doubted even more that the gleam in his eye had been benevolent, when he realized that if only for an instant there, he’d had me in his power.

Again.

So I was getting the hell out of Dodge.

My name is
Jacobia Tiptree and once upon a time I was a hotshot New York financial expert, a greenback-guru with offices so plush you could lose a small child in the depth of the broadloom on the floor of my consulting area. I was the one rich folks came to for help on the most (to them) important topics in the world:

(A) Getting wealthier, and

(B) Getting even wealthier than that.