Even that wouldn't have worked, though, I saw as
I examined it more closely, except for one thing. The
pry-bar attack had been done energetically, but the
lock was designed precisely for that sort of criminal
assault. Paddy was no slouch at any security; he didn't
confine himself only to fire precautions.
His locks would have held. I didn't touch them but
I didn't need to. The door stood ajar, so the bolts of
both the cylinder lock and the deadbolt were clearly
visible.
Unless someone had unlocked it after it was jimmied,
the door hadn't been locked in the first place.
"Jesus H. Christ," Bob Arnold exhaled angrily.
"Is there some kind of drug has gotten
into the water around here? Making people
crazy?"
It was late, but Teddy kept the bar at La Sardina
open for us; we were all too wired up to go home. The
tail end of the storm had snapped around with a last
vicious twist, splattering the windows with bursts of
rain; huge swells rolled into the boat basin, the small
craft bobbing and straining uneasily at their mooring
lines.
"Did Paddy have anything to say?" Ellie asked.
Bob shrugged. "Thinks maybe Terence heard
someone breaking in, went to the stairs, yelled to
Paddy, someone caught him there."
"Weapon?" I inquired.
"Nah. Run outside, toss it over the seawall, end of
story. Time anyone finds it, it's all washed off. If anyone
does."
"Good trick, readin' with the lights out," George
Valentine observed neutrally. He'd heard the ambulance
siren and come down to see what might be the
matter.
"Yeah," Bob Arnold agreed. "Asked Paddy.
Changed his story a little. Now he says the two of
'em'd had a set-to, earlier. When that happened, sometimes
Terence'd just sleep downstairs."
He sighed, ate a pretzel from the bowl of them on
the shiny wooden bar surface. "But then he started
feelin' bad about it. Paddy did, I mean. Called downstairs,
no answer, got a flashlight and went down
lookin' for his buddy."
Wade's big arm rested on my shoulder and I was
glad to have it there; even with all that had happened
recently, the sight of Terence lying there helpless had
really thrown me.
"It could have been," Ellie said, "that someone
mistook him for Paddy, in the dark."
Wade and George glanced at each other. "Paddy,"
George said, and Wade nodded at him.
"What?" Bob Arnold demanded.
"We were all in what was left of Heywood Sondergard's
youth group," Wade said uncomfortably, "at
the end of it, just before Marcus and Heywood left
town. Mike, Willow, Paddy, and us." His hand took in
George and Ellie. "Little Boxy Thorogood hung
around too, for a while. Junior member. Till," Wade
added, "Boxy died."
"Yeah, so what?" Arnold said. "I know that." He
spied a pot of hours-old coffee on the hot plate, got up,
and poured a mug of it. He held the pot out to us,
noted our refusals, sampled some, and shuddered.
"You trying to tell me someone's knockin' off old
members of a church club? What, maybe they didn't
like any of the hymns you guys sang?"
He hoisted himself back onto the barstool. "Besides,
what about the other members? Why single you
out? For that matter, it ain't even all of you--unless
you three have been suffering from problems you
haven't reported."
They shook their heads. "And," he finished, taking
another handful of pretzels, "why now?"
George examined his fingernails. "Point is, Terence
wasn't part of it. He wasn't hooked up to Reuben in
any way."
Wesley Bodine wasn't, either, I thought, but Paddy
was. I kept quiet, though, so George would talk more.
"And I've been thinking," he went on. "We all gab
about how if you stood up to him, Reuben would back
off. Even Paddy, though he really didn't. But that
wasn't the whole story, only half."
He looked up. "The other half was, if you showed
you were scared of him, he would never quit. And even
after you stood up to him once, he would try again.
Just one more time."
"That's right," Ellie recalled. "He cornered me in
the back of Leighton's store after I'd beat him up."
George frowned. "You never told me that. What
did you do?"
Her smile was beatific. "I kneed him in the groin
just as hard as ever I could. Then I paid for my Popsicle,
stood outside eating it until he came out limping.
He didn't even look at me."
"Great," Arnold said flatly. "I'm impressed. You
three faced him down, he don't bother you anymore.
But Reuben, you might just want to remember, is dead.
He is not running around bothering anybody, anymore,
so what's going on now, this ain't Reuben's one
more time. Even though," he conceded reluctantly, "it
sure as hell does feel as if it is, doesn't it?"
He drank more terrible coffee, grimaced. "Just like
the bad old days."
It was an unpleasant echo of what Paddy Farrell
had said in La Sardina. "Who else was in the group?" I
asked. "In that last year, when all the worst things
happened? Paddy's dad, Boxy Thorogood and Deckie
Cobb, Mrs. Sondergard ..."
Silence. I waited for them to remember. But after a
moment I realized: the silence was my answer.
"No one," Ellie said finally. "The other kids just
kind of dropped away. We would have too, eventually.
And then Marcus and Heywood left town, of course.
But even before that, it wasn't fun anymore."
She looked into the mirror behind the bar. "In a
way, Reuben killed that, too. And there wasn't even
anything to bury."
George got up decisively. "Come on, kiddo. Long
day. I want to be shut of it."
Wade left some money on the bar, called to Ted in
the kitchen as we went out, to let him know he could
lock up. "Paddy going to be all right, up in Calais?" he
asked Bob Arnold.
At the hospital, he meant. Paddy had gone in the
ambulance with Terence.
"Yeah," Arnold said, heading across the street to
where his squad car was parked. The rain had stopped,
and puddles stood gleamingly under the yellow streetlights.
A few stars had shown up, poking tentatively
between the streaming clouds.
Bob straightened tiredly. "They didn't know, Terence,
if he is going to make it or not. I think they're
going to LifeStar him out of there. Said they'd keep me
posted. Paddy wouldn't leave."
A thump of regret hit me: If Victor's trauma center
were operating now, they wouldn't have to LifeStar
Terence anywhere. Whoever was doing all this wasn't
only killing people right this minute; next year some
little kid would fall off a skateboard, or a logger would
get creamed by a shifting load, or the boom would
swing suddenly on a sailboat.
And instead of prompt surgery within the first
hour--the golden hour, as Victor always called it--the
victim would get a helicopter ride to Portland or wherever.
Better than nothing, of course.
But a long way from ideal. That was the gap my
goofball ex-husband had wanted to close. And crazy as
he was in every other way but that one, he could have
done it.
George and Ellie got into the Jeep together; I rode
home in the pickup with Wade. "Arnold asks good
questions," I said as he downshifted for the Key Street
hill.
"Yeah. How come others from the group, and not
the three of us. And why now? Although the answer to
that last one's pretty clear," he added, turning into the
driveway. "It's someone from away who's doing it,
someone who's in town for the festival."
"Or," I suggested, "someone who wants it to look
that way."
His shoulders slumped. "Huh. Yeah, that too,
maybe."
Half a block away, Victor's house looked dark and
forlorn. A branch had blown down onto the porch
roof, crumpling a section of gutter, and wet leaves were
plastered to the pristine white siding like dirty handprints.
"And that door was open," I said. "It couldn't
have been broken in, those locks were good ones, and
there was no need for it to be. Unless someone already
inside wanted it to look that way too."
"In that case, why not lock it after you broke it?"
Wade inquired reasonably.
I put my hands to my head. "I don't know."
"My question doesn't have anything to do with
any of that, though," Wade went on, shutting off the
engine. Sometime during the day, he'd found time to
haul in all those storm windows.
"What I want to know," he demanded of the dripping
darkness, "is why? What Reuben started should
have died with him. But it's not." We got out, crossed
the sodden grass to the back porch. In the hallway,
Monday's toenails clicked welcomingly.
"Because," Wade went on, "whoever did for Reuben,
that's one thing. I'm not condoning it, but I understand
it."
He unlocked the back door, and I realized with a
sad little thump of startlement that he must have
locked it, even though Sam was home: another evidence
of Reuben's legacy of fear.
"So?" In the kitchen, a wave of tiredness washed
over me and I sank into a chair.
"So you'd think if someone wanted to go on doing
bad deeds, they'd do them to other bad guys like Reuben.
If," he added, "you could find any. Instead, someone's
targeting his victims. Almost as if they are
finishing the business he can't finish himself."
I looked at him. "You're brilliant."
"But not brilliant enough." He peered into the refrigerator,
closed it again. "What's the good of that?"
I got up. "It's the link. What they all have in common
--not only that they were in Sondergard's group.
They were victims in the group--even Heywood, if you
think being blackmailed and having your wife murdered
makes you a victim, which I do. Maybe even
Weasel, if he's connected to the group in some way we