salt spray. A breeze had come up suddenly, the
weather feeling changeable and the clouds still hanging
on the western horizon; they had been there for
days.
Paddy spoke regretfully, but not about Terence,
and at the private, fiercely protective look in his eyes I
decided not to ask. Instead, he talked about the past.
"I've often wondered why we let it go on," he
mused. "All of us guys who went around together back
then. We knew, but somehow we didn't believe. How
bad Reuben could be. How evil."
I felt that he was trying to direct me away from the
topic of his most recent meeting with Tate. For now, I
let him.
"Did Wade know? Or George Valentine? Were
they also in the group that hung around together?"
Paddy nodded, his eyes fixed on the bright points
of light that were Eastport, gleaming in the dusk.
"Yes. But Reuben wouldn't bother them, Wade especially,
and George, I think, because he was Wade's
friend. Something happened between those two, Wade
and Reuben. I'm not sure what."
He turned suddenly to me. "It wasn't the first time,
you know. That necktie thing. It was Reuben's doing,
I'm sure of it. He'd done it that way before. Or anyway,"
he added, "everyone in town said he did. It
wasn't," he gave the words a bitter twist, "anything
that could be proved."
Of course not. This was Reuben Tate we were talking
about. From the sound of it, he could have gotten
away with kidnaping the Lindbergh baby.
It was nearly full dark but in the deck lamps of the
ferry Paddy's eyes shone unhappily. "What bothers
me," he said, "is why we tolerated him, even after we
knew the things he'd done. It was as if ..." He broke
off, sounding mystified.
"That's the trouble with evil," Terence said suddenly
from behind us. His voice was tired but it had
regained the amused, faintly ironic tone it usually carried;
at the sound of it I saw Paddy's shoulders sag with
relief.
"The banality of evil," Terence said. "After a
while, it comes to seem so ... normal. You get used
to it. Like," he finished mildly with a glance at Paddy,
"almost everything."
Paddy flinched; something, I thought again, going
on between them. The ferry nosed in toward the dock.
Once ashore Paddy offered to drive me home, but I
refused in favor of the privacy of my thoughts, riding
along only as far as the design studio. Terence didn't
speak again at all, except to say goodbye with his usual
politeness. But by then he didn't have to say any more,
or Paddy either:
They'd told me--not meaning to, but it was in
their faces and voices--that more had gone on between
Paddy and Reuben than Reuben's threat and Paddy's
rejection of it.
The mood between them remained uncomfortable
too, despite Paddy's newfound solicitude; whatever
was happening to them in their personal lives, it wasn't
a pleasant development.
And something else: Terence had articulated an intuition
I hadn't known I had.
A message: if I could find out what it meant and
whom it was intended for--
--or so Terence seemed to believe, and at the moment
I was taking his opinion seriously; he had fought
through a lot of pain in order to finish telling it to me--
--I might have a line that led to the killer, or at any
rate to enough reasonable doubt to begin taking the
heat off Victor.
It was Terence's idea about the message having
more parts, though, that bothered me the most. There
had, after all, been two murders: one with a tie, the
other with Victor's antique scalpel.
Maybe Reuben had done the first one, as Paddy
thought.
But maybe not. Maybe Paddy was lying, or simply
wrong, and someone else had committed both crimes.
And if they were linked, and intended to mean
something, if they'd been done to communicate something,
somehow ...
Then it seemed to me that a clear, unambiguous
translation was needed.
Soon.
Before the next bloody syllable got transmitted.
It was past dinnertime, and I was thinking
tiredly of just ordering pizza. But by the time
I got home, Ellie had taken over my kitchen
and prepared a feast of local delicacies: bay
scallops en casserole with buttered bread crumbs, fresh
tomatoes drizzled in basil vinaigrette, tiny potatoes
steamed in their crisp, dark-red jackets, and blueberry
cobbler.
"Oh, thank you," I said, taking in the air of calm,
domestic competence that had descended on my household
like a blessing, as she handed me a glass of wine.
"How did you know I would be ..."
So late, I was about to say, but of course she had
known; no doubt somebody downtown had seen me
boarding the ferry. The wine was very cold, scouring
away the bad taste the afternoon had left in my mouth.
And fresh whipped cream, I noted happily, had been
made for the cobbler. All I had to do was sit down at
the table and eat it, which is the part of Maine cuisine I
am best at.
"I don't understand half what I saw and heard today,"
I said when we were all gathered in the dining
room. Ellie had lit candles, and the tin ceilings, pressed
with the pattern of acorns and oak leaves, glowed
warmly with the flickering light. "But I'm sure Paddy
Farrell wasn't being straight with me."
I didn't mention Terence's illness or that his
relationship with Paddy seemed to have hit a snag; it didn't
seem pertinent.
"Paddy said Reuben wanted him to help blackmail
Victor," I went on, "but that doesn't strike me as particularly
likely. Why would Reuben think Paddy would
help him with anything?"
"You've got that right. He hated Tate like poison.
But Paddy Farrell," George Valentine said, applying
himself to his meal, "can be cagey when he wants to
be. He isn't what you'd call the gold standard for information
about Tate."
"You mean he lies? But why?"
Wade shook his head. "Wouldn't go that far,
necessarily. But Paddy will leave things out of most
anything, when it suits him. Which," he added, "plenty
often it does. Might go further, if he thought a fib
might make him look better."
It was true enough about his taxes, certainly. He'd
tried deducting Terence's vitamins and herbal potions,
for heaven's sake, under the heading of "miscellaneous
chemicals."
"And for a while there," Wade continued, "Paddy
was real scared of Reuben."
I remembered Paddy's angry defiance, which in retrospect
did seem like protesting too much. "The way
he went on," I said, "you would think Reuben was the
one afraid of him."
In the dining-room windows, the candles' reflections
flared like signal lights. "I hope the weather
holds," Ellie fretted, glancing up at them, "at least until
after the Salmon Festival."
"Ellie, you've been doing all you can about the
festival," George assured her. "Besides, the weekend is
still six days off. Not even you can control the weather
from that distance."
His tone turned serious. "You might," he said to
me, "want to talk to a few more people. Get a more
balanced view of things. If," he added, "you really
want to go on with this at all."
"Like who? Besides Paddy," it was dawning
unwelcomely on me as I said it, "I don't even know where
to start."
Wade met my gaze. "You could try Mike Carpen
tier," he offered slowly. "Knows just about everyone.
And he was hooked up with Reuben somehow, seems
like I heard."
Ellie frowned. "I never knew that. Mike's years
younger. What would he have been doing with Reuben?"
Wade shrugged. "What I heard. Not saying it's
gospel. I'll bet he's got some stories, though, even if
that one isn't true."
"But they'll be stories of ..." I began, and then it
hit me, as Wade nodded.
"Long ago," I finished. "Like Paddy's but maybe
not so many lies. Not embroidered or with things left
out. And you think ..."
"Reuben had only been back in town a few days,"
Ellie agreed.
"And the way he got killed, seems like somebody
was madder at him than even he could make somebody,
in that short amount of time," George said, following
her thought.
"But," Sam objected, "if it was revenge for something
that happened a while ago, why wait so long?"
"Right," Tommy Daigle chimed in; Sam had spent
the evening helping him haul the engine out of his jalopy.
I hadn't thought they could do it, but Sam had
rigged up a pulley device that he said lessened immensely
the amount of work required.
"Tate was back to town other times, my mom
said," Tommy informed us. "Raised a lot of--"
Hell, Tommy had meant to say, but caught himself.
His mother was an old-fashioned disciplinarian, and it
showed.
"Ruckus," he finished carefully. "So why now?"
Wade looked thoughtful. "Maybe revenge wasn't
all of it. You can put bad things in the past, if they
happened then and they're over and done with. But if
you thought that same thing was about to happen
again ..."
"Once burnt, twice shy," Ellie agreed, as one of the
candles began smoking and George pinched it out.
Their remarks made me think again about the past
and the present somehow coming together, connecting
the victims in some way I didn't yet understand. I took
a sip of the wine Ellie had refilled for me, and chose my
words carefully.
"Are any of you"--I didn't include the boys, of
course--"going to be sorry if I start really digging into
this? Because you're all part of this town's past, too,
you know."
I let the rest go unspoken: that Reuben Tate's
venom seemed to have touched almost everyone in
Eastport. That when you went poking into old secrets,
sometimes you also opened old wounds, ones you
hadn't even known were there. And sometimes those