Wicked Fix (10 page)

from Sam's feelings and Victor's innocence, if there

was anything I could do to avoid losing that money, I

was going to.

"And the only way for me not to lose it," I said, "is

for Victor to get back to his project. Otherwise the

whole idea goes off the rails and my investment goes

with it, because without a surgeon a trauma center is

pretty pointless, wouldn't you say?"

Wade took another meditative sip of his ale. "You

can't just find another surgeon, maybe advertise in the

city papers? Hire on someone else to fill in for Victor?"

It was a good thought, but not practical. "Downeast

Maine is too remote. Victor wants to be up here;

the rest follows from that. To anyone else this area

would look like a career dead end, but he's willing to

let it develop."

With Victor heading it, a local trauma center could

attract whatever it needed, given time and patience:

more money, a rising reputation, other staff.

But without him, its chances were zippo.

"Uh-huh," Wade said quietly when I'd finished,

which for him was unusual; ordinarily, his energy

could charge a truck battery.

"Sam all right?"

I peered at him. "Hanging in there. What about

you?'

"Oh, fine." He frowned at the ale bottle. "I guess.

But this just makes me realize again that I shouldn't

have left Victor in the bar last night. I knew Reuben

was after him but I walked away. So in a way this is--"

All my fault, he was about to say, and I just stared

at him. Self-flagellation was not exactly his usual habit.

"Wade, there was nothing you could have--"

He got up, his face severe. "Done? Yes, there was.

A long time ago. But I didn't do it."

He rubbed a big hand over his wiry hair. "I could

have, but I didn't. Just like last night. And now ...

look, one thing I know from working on the water is,

no one's going to do it for you. If you want something

a certain way, you've got to make it that way. And

when push came to shove last night, I did nothing."

Looking around the kitchen, he shook his head angrily.

"Ah, hell. Got a nice old Remington shotgun in

the truck, a guy wants me to work on for him. But in

the mood I'm in, if I put a hand to it I'll just screw it

up. I'll see you later."

With a grimace of self-disgust he pulled his jacket

back on and went out, not even stopping to pat Monday,

who watched him go with a look of hurt puzzlement

in her eyes.

I felt the same. Like many Maine men, Wade

guards a core of privacy; he tells his secrets in his own

time, when he is ready. And mostly, that worked fine

for both of us.

But at the moment I wasn't in favor of secrets.

Not at all.

My lovely old white clapboard Federal was

charming and historical, but its state of repair

lent new meaning to the term fixer

upper. Calling it drafty, for instance, would

have been putting it mildly. The way the wind blew

through that old place in winter, I might as well have

told the oil man to pump heating oil into the street, and

burned it there without bothering to run it through the

furnace.

And winter, despite the brilliant autumn afternoon,

was not far off. So, after Wade had gone, I

trudged upstairs to start the weatherstripping project.

With me I brought the clawhammer and the pry bar

from my cellar workbench, a tack hammer and nails,

the enormous heavy roll of copper weatherstripping I'd

lugged uphill from Wadsworth's Hardware, and a tape

measure.

Hauling them all into the big, bright front room

overlooking the street, I began removing sashes from

the room's four tall double-hung windows, prying the

exterior stops off the frames and lifting the heavy

sashes--they are the things that actually have the glass

panes in them--out of their channels.

The trick is to avoid cracking the wooden pieces

while prying them up, because you will need to use

them again when you put the sashes back in; that, or

pay a lot to have all new ones custom-made for you. So

I proceeded carefully with a type of pry bar called a

cat's-paw, its blade wide and thin so as to slide deeply

in and distribute the prying pressure.

And it worked beautifully. Easing off the wooden

strips, I lined the old square-cut nails up on the windowsill

as I removed them. Nowadays, nails are

manufactured from miles-long lengths of wire, thousands per

minute, but these had been made one at a time by hand

and I wanted to save them, though I wouldn't be reusing

them. They belonged to the house.

From the window I could see all the way down Key

Street to the harbor. Cars had already begun flooding

into town, a whole week before the official beginning

of the Salmon Festival, which Ellie said was going to go

on come hell or high water and never mind the little

matter of a couple of murders.

In the park behind the old red-brick Peavey Library,

men were busy setting up the striped awnings

under which we would eat the salmon supper: steamed

new potatoes and boiled corn and blueberry pie, and of

course the grilled salmon. A group of town women

were slapping a fresh coat of white paint onto the

bandshell, where there would be live music. Ellie was

among them, her coppery hair shining in the sun, and

all over town I could see bright posters, placards, and

banners announcing the upcoming festivities.

A nail pierced the tip of my thumb. Staring at the

droplet of blood, I heard Ellie's words suddenly in my

mind:

Why did Reuben have to come back wow/?

The idea niggled at me as I brushed out the channels

where the window sashes had been: dust and old

paint chips, bits of the past undisturbed for years,

much like the recollections of people returning to East

port for the festival. Many had grown up here, and

now they were coming back to dust off old friendships,

regale themselves with old memories, and generally indulge

in a little harmless nostalgia for the good old

days.

Maybe Reuben had come back for the festival,

also. From what I'd heard of him, he hadn't had many

friends. But I gathered he'd had victims. So maybe that

was why he'd come back now: to prey upon them

again.

Thinking this, I unrolled some copper weather

stripping and clipped a length of it. One thing an old

house teaches you right away is the value of a good

tool; instead of tin snips, I had a cuts-all gadget that

was sharp enough to amputate fingers. Using it and the

tack hammer, I fastened the copper strip to the top of

one of the upper sashes and trimmed it neatly to fit.

Killing Reuben was one thing; having victims led

logically to having enemies. But displaying his body,

hanging it up like some bloody flag: that was something

else. There was also the question of the other

victim, the one with Victor's dratted tie in his throat.

How had he hooked into all this bad business--if he

had? And then there was a final problem, one my mind

kept skittering away from.

I clipped another piece of weatherstripping, nailed

it into the groove of the window channel. As I did so, a

breeze moved stealthily, lifting the hairs on my neck.

But it was only a cold draft coming in through the open

window.

Replacing the sash in the channel, I checked its fit

to make sure it was tight but also free to slide easily up

and down. Then I got out the real prize from my window-restoration

toolkit: the gimlet. This is a device like

a small, needle-sharp-tipped wood screw, but in place

of the screwhead it has a wire-loop handle.

Because the thing is this: once the exterior stop was

lined up against the sash, there wasn't room to use a

power drill. But hammering a nail in was almost certain

to split the old wood, and the old nail holes were

too chewed up to use a second time.

So, placing the window in its channel and snugging

the exterior stop up in front of it, I pressed the sharp

tip of the gimlet into the wooden strip, grasped the

gimlet handle between my thumb and forefinger, and

gave it a twist.

Presto: a new hole, called a pilot hole, just smaller

than the nail I intended to drive, so the nail would hold

snug. And the hole was already made for it so the old

wood could not become damaged. Pleased, I surveyed

the bright window again, the wavery old glass turning

the view to an impressionistic smear.

Without warning, the remembered sight of Reuben

rose in it like a nightmare, his flaxen hair bloodstained,

his eyes gazing from behind a red shroud. His hands

had been scrabbling in his last moments, but in death

they dangled, his unkempt nails maroon crescents.

In other words, they hadn't been tied. Yet he had

been alive when somebody hung him on the cemetery

gate. Alive and kicking ...

I blinked the memory away, gazing determinedly at

the boats in the harbor, the white clapboard houses

etched sharp as ink sketches in the sunshine. But I

couldn't so easily get rid of the questions lining up one

after another, like the old nails on the windowsill.

Reuben was a fighter. Even Teddy Armstrong, who

tossed guys out of La Sardina with monotonous regularity,

had hesitated to eject Eastport's bad boy. And

though he was a very small man, Reuben still must

have weighed 130 pounds or so.

Which would have made getting him up on that

gate alive an interesting project. Almost, perhaps, as

interesting as finding out who'd done it and why.

But first, I had a decision to make.

Well, two decisions, actually.

I

Wade Sorenson is not a protective man in the

usual sense. His idea of looking out for a

woman, for instance, is to take her to the

firing range and teach her to put six shots

into a two-inch target circle at fifty yards. As he'd done

with me, and when he was finished I could handle a

wide variety of weapons.

And then I'd killed a man with one of them. That

the fellow had been trying to kill Sam at the time was