old wounds belonged to your friends.
I wasn't asking permission, exactly. But I needed to
know.
"Least said, soonest mended, in my view," George
commented. "Bury him and be done with it, my best
advice ordinarily. Mess with Reuben or anything to do
with him, get messed up yourself."
He spoke easily. "But then there's Victor. Don't
guess you can just let him keep swinging in the breeze."
Ellie tapped her wineglass thoughtfully. "Ordinarily,
I'd agree: We're well rid of Reuben and the less
said about him the better. But this is different. And he
never hung any skeletons in my closet, I'm glad to
say."
Wade nodded, but not as decisively as George or
Ellie. "You just do what you have to," he allowed, "let
the chips fall."
Not an especially reassuring reply on his part, but
at the moment it was all I would get; Wade wasn't the
type to unburden himself at the dinner table.
Later, I looked wordlessly at him, and he nodded.
Afterward in the kitchen, helping to dry the dishes,
Tommy Daigle informed me that he and Sam were
combining the mystery of otherworldly spirit communications
with the technological genius of Samuel
Morse, by asking the Ouija board to spell its messages
out to them in Morse code.
Tommy had a round, freckled face that reminded
me of Howdy Doody's, topped with a thick shock of
hair so red it made Ellie's look strawberry blond. He'd
stuck with Sam pretty much all day, except when he
was at home doing the Saturday chores arranged for
him by his mother, and I felt grateful to him for it.
"Why do you want messages from spirits, anyway?"
I asked, resisting the impulse to brush Tommy's
hair out of his eyes. In the city, Sam hadn't had friends
like this: simple, steadfast.
"Maybe," Sam said, putting away silverware, "it'll
say who killed Reuben."
Tommy brushed his hair back for himself, revealing
the dent in his forehead, over his right eye. It
was deep and square, a white brand mark without any
freckles in it, as if somebody had hit him with a tack
hammer a long time ago. I didn't know how he'd really
gotten it.
"And who killed the other guy, too," he enthused
to Sam. "I mean, hey, it ought to know."
Which I supposed was logical but would be unhelpful
even in the (I hoped) very unlikely event that it
happened; Ouija-board testimony, I felt sure, cut no ice
with district attorneys. What we needed was some
shred of actual proof.
But I didn't say this, not wanting to quash their
optimism; Sam had eaten all of his dinner and no
longer looked so depressed. When they'd finished in
the kitchen, they hurried off to tune in the pregame
show and question George about his knowledge of
Morse code; I heard him tapping dot-and-dash patterns
for them on the living room coffee table, while I wiped
off the counters a final time and Ellie hung the dish
towels on their hooks.
"Terence thinks one of the visitors for the Salmon
Festival may have had it in for Reuben," I said.
"That's possible." Wearing yellow rubber gloves,
she rinsed the dish sponge with scalding water, which
is what the plumbing in my old house delivers when it
is not delivering ice-cold. "But the problem with Reuben
is, there are so many likely candidates for his murder."
"So I gather. Too bad none of them were in possession
of the weapon. But I was hoping you could narrow
the field for me. You knowing just about everyone,
I mean."
She squeezed the sponge out and stripped off the
gloves. "We can't focus on all his enemies, that's a
given."
Like everyone, she seemed to assume that Reuben's
death was the important one, the other just a sort of
tag-along. Probably it hadn't seemed that way to the
guy with the tie in his throat; still, in terms of starting
to sort this whole mess out, it was very likely true.
She said as much. "Reuben was the one who
would have inspired the big-time motive, enough to
commit murder about. I really haven't heard anything
about the other guy, and I would have if he was in the
habit of doing anything even mildly interesting. So it
does make some sense to focus on Reuben."
She snapped off the kitchen light. "The trouble is,
there are hundreds of people in town now, not counting
the ones who live here, who knew Reuben and
didn't like him. To put it," she added, "mildly."
She spread her hands in a this-is-obvious gesture.
"We can't question them all about their history with
him, learn what they were doing before--and during--
the time he was being murdered."
"Right." I was getting impatient.
"But," she pointed out acutely, "there was only
one, thank goodness, of Reuben. We could focus on
him."
I noted that she'd begun using the first-person plural.
"We? Are you sure you want to be involved in this?
You don't even like Victor, and he's the one who's
really in trouble."
Besides, she already had a big project on her plate,
getting ready for the festival. And I hadn't missed her
visceral little shiver of distaste whenever the subject of
Reuben came up.
What I kept forgetting, though, were her bloodlines
full of seagoing rogues and rascals. Unlike their
tropical brethren, the old cold-water outlaws of the
downeast Maine coast were notorious not so much for
their savagery to outsiders as for their loyalty to one
another. Cross ways with them and they might only
relieve you of your valuables; injure one, and the rest
would grind your bones to make their bread.
"What else," she inquired, "are friends for?"
Later that evening Wade and I went over to
check on Victor's house; the state police,
Bob Arnold had let Wade know, were done
I with it for now, so we could lock it up.
The black arrowhead daggers of the old, ornate
cast-iron fence around the front yard seemed to bristle
at us as we opened the creaking gate. Six tall white
pillars formed a long, graceful colonnade along the
house front, dropping bars of deeper shadow onto the
porch. We passed the green-shuttered windows of the
front parlor to a side door that led into a small sitting
room.
Inside, the air was still and faintly stale-smelling,
even though Victor's cleaning help kept the house sparkling
enough to do surgery in. It certainly did not have
the air of inhabitedness that mine did, the sense of welcome.
Without Victor in it, I felt immediately the dark
vacancy of the rooms.
Quickly, I went around turning on lights. The investigators
had not made a mess of things, or at least
not the awful one I had expected. There were smudges
of what I supposed must be fingerprint powder. Papers
had been riffled through, not left in the order that
Victor would have. Drawers had been emptied, their
contents scattered, and manila folders lay out on the
desk.
But there was no sign of the callous ransacking
that I had feared. Victor's fastidiousness was elemental
to him, and even after all that had happened between
us, I did not, I realized as I noted my own relief, want
him utterly destroyed even by proxy.
"There's too much I don't understand," I complained
as Wade pulled the drapes and checked the
lock on the back door. "All of you seem to think that
what happened to Reuben Tate was justice. As if he, or
anyone, could have deserved that ... that atrocity."
On a low table, the day's heap of letters and journals
lay where the detectives had left them, after bringing
them in and going through them. Wade squared up
the pile and set it on a bookcase in which Victor's medical
books were grouped by category.
"But I just don't believe in that kind of justice," I
said. "Maybe there are exceptions to the rules we've
come up with to deal with renegades, but I wouldn't
know how to pick them. And it worries me," I finished,
"to find out that maybe you do."
I could see him thinking about how to reply as we
went into the rest of the downstairs rooms, then to the
cellar. Wade checked the pilot light on the furnace, rattled
the cellar door, peered into the fuse box. Everything
seemed shipshape.
But it was like going through a house after somebody
in it had died. Back on the main floor in the front
hall stood Victor's antique instrument case, its glass
doors open, its contents taken away. Evidence, I supposed,
though I didn't see of what.
"That collection was the only thing he brought
with him from New York," I said, hoping someone had
at least made a list of it. "That and his clothes. Back in
the city, he kept souvenirs of his girlfriends: photographs,
letters. He had a little black book the size of
the Manhattan telephone directory."
Or so it had seemed to me when I'd come upon it
one day when I was still married to Victor, while I was
cleaning closets.
"But Sam says he got rid of it all," I said. "Took
the black book and tore the pages out of it, tore those
up, and flushed them down the toilet. Sold his little
sports car, stereo, all that kind of thing. All his city
toys."
We went up to check the second floor, and Wade
climbed the third-floor stairs to make sure the attic
door was closed,
"Don't want squirrels moving from there into the
house," he explained, coming back down again. "So
Victor was really turning over a new leaf."
"Right," I said. A bitter little laugh bubbled up in
me at the idea of Victor having squirrels in his attic.
Real squirrels, I mean. "He was never going to be
what you might call personally well adjusted," I went
on. "But he was trying. For once, he was trying hard.
Which is another reason why what's happening to him
now isn't ..."
We went back downstairs. The investigators had
left a light on in the display case. Wade reached in and
switched it off, its fluorescent hum leaving a louder
silence where it had been.
"Justice," he finished my sentence for me. "You're