"Poisoned ... My God, we've been poisoned!"
"We don't know what was in the glasses,"
Arnold said. "Let's not be jumping to conclusions."
His face, though, said otherwise. Reuben
Tate's death or even Weasel's was one thing; spiking
a preacher's lemonade with a dose of poison at the
town picnic was something else again.
"Bob, we should try to get Victor's attorneys informed.
If this is all part of a pattern, it's obvious that
Victor couldn't have--"
"Nothing's obvious," he replied flatly. "Except
maybe that getting lawyers to call back on a Sunday
night is impossible. And even if you did, getting the
state people to call them back, even later on a Sunday
night, is about as likely as walking on water."
"Well, I'm going to try. Who knows, maybe a miracle
actually will happen and they'll be in the office."
But of course they weren't. In the telephone alcove,
I ran the gauntlet of the attorneys' voice-mail while
sheets of rain cascaded against the darkened dining
room windows. Finally I got a human being, the an
swering-service operator.
Five minutes later I hung up, having been (1) assured
by her words that one of the partners would call
me back very soon, and (2) informed by her tone that I
shouldn't hold my breath. Urgent calls from the ex
wives of imprisoned murder suspects, she seemed to
feel, were not exactly tops on her list of items needing
the full, focused attention of her employers right that
very minute.
Another huge gust of wind rattled the windowpanes,
which now looked as if someone were out there
hurling big buckets of water against them. That siding,
I thought dismally, imagining the rain positively gushing
in through the rotten clapboards.
"Whatever it was," Arnold was saying when I got
back to the kitchen, "it was in Willow's glass, too."
"Arnold," I said, "you know what it was, just as
well as I do. It smelled just exactly like the bait Howard
Waldrop put out last summer when the rabid
skunk showed up."
It had been a real scare. Other than red ants,
skunks were the most numerous pests on the island;
bold and half-tame, they would saunter insolently right
up to you before turning to spray you with dead-on
accuracy. We'd had to keep our dogs and cats in, and
children were supervised scrupulously, after a skunk
staggered down Water Street snapping and foaming.
"Yeah," Arnold admitted. "I know. Smelled like
varmint bait. You can buy forty kinds of stuff smells
like that, any hardware store. But I'm not saying it's
anything till after the tests."
In the living room, Sam and Tommy were watching
a ball game; George and Wade were still at the park,
loading the tables into a truck and taking down the
tents.
Arnold frowned. "I got all the names, who was
there. Which doesn't mean someone couldn't have put
it in the glasses earlier, then took off. Christ, what a
mess."
The coffeemaker finished burbling so I got out the
cups and the cream and some sandwiches I'd put onto
a plate. Outside, the storm battered and hammered.
"At least with all this rain, I doubt many people
will be leaving the island tonight," I said as we sat
down. "You can talk to them while they're still here,
instead of having to find them at wherever they've gone
home to."
Bob nodded, biting into a chicken salad sandwich.
One of the drawbacks to working at any Eastport food
event is that you're unlikely to get any of the food
yourself.
"Unless some idiot tries driving over a flooded
causeway," he agreed darkly. "Which I have no doubt
some idiot is going to do. But we've got barriers set up
at our end, police at Pleasant Point've got barriers at
theirs, flashing lights and so on. High tide, all this
wind, decent storm surge--going over that causeway,
next couple hours, you better have pontoons."
A muffled pounding came from the back door;
Monday leaped and began barking. A moment later,
Marcus Sondergard came in, drenched to the skin.
"I ... I'm sorry," he managed, looking around
wildly. "I have to ..."
Monday stopped barking and started wagging;
once an intruder is actually inside the house, she feels,
the whole guard-dog act is pretty much beside the
point. Marcus's dark hair clung in sodden ringlets to
his head, his white shirt plastered to his skin, and he
was shivering hard.
"Come in here," I ordered. "We'll get you into
some dry clothes and get some hot coffee into you,
before you catch--"
"Your death, I'd been about to say, noting that the
rain had washed the makeup stuff off his hand. But I
couldn't see the mark on it without making too big a
point of it. Just then Sam stuck his head in from the
living room.
"Sam," I said, "take Marcus upstairs and find him
some of Wade's dry clothes to get into, please. And a
towel for his hair, and so on, all right?"
"C'mon," Sam said agreeably, and Marcus allowed
himself to be led away. When he returned, his
hair was not dripping, and he was wearing dry socks
and a gray sweatsuit, and not shivering quite so violently.
His hand was covered smoothly with surgical
makeup again. So he carries the stuff with him, I
thought.
But he still looked as if he had been run over by a
truck. "It didn't hit me," he said, wrapping his hands
gratefully around a mug of coffee, "until I was about
to leave the hospital."
He gazed around at us, his eyes huge and dark
with emotion. "The fellow from the ambulance service
told me he would drive me home. And I realized: Dad
wasn't with me."
Marcus made a helpless little sound like a laugh,
only it wasn't. "Knowing it was coming for as long as I
have, I wouldn't have thought it'd hit me so hard.
But ..."
"Wait a minute. You knew this was going to happen?"
Arnold looked astonished.
Marcus nodded, staring at his mug, not realizing
what Arnold meant. "Five years I've known. We both
did. Doctors told him he could live a long time or go
any second. A stretched place in a big artery like a
weak spot in a tire, was how they explained it to me. If
they operated on it he probably wouldn't survive, they
said. So they didn't."
He glanced up, caught Arnold's expression. "Oh,
you thought I meant ... No. Not that someone
would try to hurt him. I meant my being prepared for
his going ... naturally. Not this way. Who would
want to hurt Dad?"
That was my big question, too. Marcus hadn't had
time to do a perfect job with the cosmetic; the edges of
the mark showed long and slender, with some odd
shaped crescents at the center of it, like the edges of
petals. "What are your plans now?"
I put it generally, but the answer I wanted was
specific: Had he known about the life insurance?
Because if he had, I couldn't help thinking that a
grown man with an impatient woman waiting in the
wings might tend to get a little impatient himself, waiting
for dear old Dad to pop off as he was predicted to.
Add to that a big life-insurance payoff, so his son
didn't have to worry about money, and ...
Well, the comfort of a clear conscience can compete
very effectively with the lure of cold cash, in my
experience.
"I'm going to move to Portland, sell the Winnebago,
and open a music store," he said, "with the proceeds
of Dad's insurance."
So much for the idea that he might not have
known about his coming windfall, or that his thought
processes might be unhinged by grief. Still, he looked
stung by my narrow-eyed glance at him.
"I've known for a long time that Dad wouldn't live
forever. And he told me he'd taken out a policy for me.
Is it so terrible that I tried to think about the rest of my
life?"
Okay, so maybe it wasn't. I apologized to Marcus,
and if he knew I still had mental reservations, he didn't
show it.
"Anyway, I just felt ... well, lost, when I got
back home. All his things ... it didn't seem real that
he was gone. So I went out. I didn't realize how bad it
was, the storm. But once I was out, I got disoriented,
and when I saw your lights ... Well. I'm grateful for
the dry things, and the coffee. I'll be okay now."
"You're sure?" I followed him to the door. Arnold
was on his way out too and offered Marcus a ride back
to Heddlepenny House.
"Yep." He nodded decisively. Like his father, he
was either for real or one of the more accomplished
liars I'd ever met.
"Come on, Sondergard," Arnold growled, tugging
on his yellow slicker and pulling his black sou'wester
onto his head.
When they were gone I shoved the door shut
against a rain-filled gust of wind. In the darkness the
branches of the trees in the side yard lashed wildly,
yellow leaves showering from them.
"What do you make of that?" Ellie asked.
"Not sure. But if I were going to knock somebody
off, I'd do it when a couple of other people had already
been knocked off, wouldn't you?"
"You think Marcus might have poisoned his dad?
But they were so close."
"Right. Peas in a pod. Maybe," I said as I took my
rain slicker off the hook, "it got a little snug in there.
Maybe ..."
On the hall shelf lay the package Terence Oscard
had shoved into my hands as he rushed to help Hey
wood.
"Maybe helping Heywood along with a swig of
poison was just hastening the inevitable, in Marcus's
mind. Ending," I finished, "the suspense." Leaving Terence's
package where it was, I grabbed a pair of flashlights
and my car keys.
"Meanwhile," I said, "when Marcus left the bandstand
this afternoon, there were three glasses of lemonade
on that table. I know because I was looking at
them, thinking about putting out some more."
I dropped the car keys into my slicker pocket.
"When he got back onto the bandstand, there were