"A note of his own."
Molly's face reappeared at the upstairs window.
"Is that her room?" I asked. "With the roses, and the
view?"
He smiled. "Yes. At night she can see the stars. She
loves her room. She feels so safe there. I know people
think I'm too strict with her," he added, walking with
me toward the house. "But I want her to have a real
childhood, not be smearing on makeup and wearing
sexy clothes at eleven or twelve years old. There's
plenty of time for her to be a grown-up later."
The little girl emerged cautiously onto the back
step of the cottage. "Dad? Can I go play with Barney?"
At the sound of his name, the pony in the railed enclosure
looked up hopefully.
"All right," Mike allowed. "But stay away from
those feed sacks. Something's got into them again; I'm
going to have to clean them up. And don't get too
dirty, please. We need to go to town, and we don't
want to look like little ragamuffins."
Molly scrambled happily down the porch steps and
ran to her pet, an apple for his snack clutched in her
small fist. Ellie looked up from where she had perched
on a rock overlooking the bay, came to say goodbye.
"Mike, did Reuben say anything else the last time
you saw him? Anything at all that might help me?"
He shook his head. "Only that we were all going
to remember him. That he was going to make a big
splash."
Well, he'd gotten that much right, although not, I
guessed, in the way that he intended or could have
foreseen. As we were leaving I noticed again the pretty
well-house, its stone cistern and peaked roof surrounding
a red-painted hand pump.
"It must be a project in winter," I remarked.
"Doesn't it freeze up?"
Mike laughed. "Oh, you can keep it running okay
if you know how," he replied. "No one had running
water in the old days, and they didn't die of thirst."
Yes, but what's past is past, I was about to tease
him, then decided not to. Mike Carpentier had taken
what he wanted from the past and made a paradise
of it.
The rest he'd put firmly behind him, with an effort
of will and an amount of hard labor that I could only
imagine. It didn't seem right to make fun of it.
So I didn't. Making my way downhill behind Ellie
to where the Jeep was parked, I thought that if grit and
a willingness to work could be bottled and sold, Mike
would be a millionaire by now, except of course that
money wasn't what he wanted.
"Peace of mind," I said, breathing in the fresh, salt
air at the foot of the path. "If more people went after
it, they might find out that things aren't important.
Even," I added, glancing back up, "running water and
electricity."
"Personally, I like my peace of mind to be
equipped with modern plumbing," Ellie retorted, "and
central heating. It's lots easier to give up things when
you know you can have them back anytime you want
them. Like," she added, "Mike Carpentier can."
I glanced in surprise at her as she swung the vehicle
around and gunned it toward town. "Molly's mom,"
she reminded me, "is in the merchant marine, after all.
They make good money."
Which put a faint new gloss on things: that Mike
had income would have been common knowledge to
people in Eastport. Maybe including Reuben, who
might have wanted a piece of it. That could have been
why he had bothered hotfooting it up that hill. But I
believed Mike, that he hadn't felt threatened by Reuben
anymore.
Still, I felt a little disappointed. "So he's not exactly
subsistence-farming that acre," I said. Somehow it tarnished
the fantasy. On the other hand, the fantasy had
been unrealistic; making a living for yourself and a
child off a Maine acre would take more than a hard
worker.
More like a miracle worker. Meanwhile, I'd
thought we were heading home, but at Route 190 and
Washington Street Ellie didn't turn left as I'd expected.
Instead she shot straight forward.
I peered at Ellie's gas gauge; she likes to let the Jeep
run on fumes periodically, and after my empty-tank
episode of a couple of days earlier, I was still gun shy.
"It'll get to Perry and back," she said, and glanced
in the rearview. "Huh. Didn't Mike say they were going
to Eastport?"
"That's what I thought. Why?"
"He's behind us. Molly with him."
"So he changed his mind. Going to Calais,
maybe."
"I guess." She drove in silence awhile.
"So why are we going to Perry?" I asked finally.
"Is there someone we should talk to there, too?"
Spruce trees, cedar posts, fields, glints of water
went by. "No," Ellie said, pulling up to the corner at
the end of 190.
She glanced left, scooted onto Route 1, avoiding a
big old Chrysler making a signal-free left turn into the
Farmer's Union Market and after that a green panel
truck backing out of the Perry Post Office. Then she
turned into the gravel parking lot of the New Friendly
Restaurant.
Mike Carpentier's Ford Escort went on up Route 1
in the direction of Calais, which didn't surprise me;
even someone as back-to-basics as Mike needed the
Rite-Aid or the Wal-Mart once in a while, not to mention
McDonald's or Taco Bell.
The New Friendly was the opposite of all those: a
low, red wooden structure with big white-framed windows
and no hint of mass-produced anything, backed
up against a salt marsh. Cattails waved their chocolate
heads over the tide-filled inlets, small waves making
zigzags of their reflections on the water.
Inside, the eatery was crowded with groups of men
in denims and gimme caps, families ranging from babies
to grandmothers. The special, the board behind
the counter said, was clam pie.
Ellie slid in across from me at the only vacant
booth and opened her menu. "I have to admit it looks
a little bleak," she said. "We've talked to everyone who
might have anything useful to say to us. We've
snooped, and pried, and read diaries that didn't belong
to us. You've gone up in an airplane, for heaven's
sake."
The waitress came, took our orders, went away
again. Ellie resumed: "And now everybody's leaving
town except Mike. And his life, never mind what Reuben
did twenty years ago, is just ducky."
We sat in discouraged silence until the waitress returned;
Ellie bit into her haddock sandwich. My coleslaw
was crisp and peppery.
"It's over, Ellie. Somebody's gotten away with it,
at least for now."
She nodded without quite agreeing. "And what
about your own problems? The money you're losing, I
mean."
Misery over the topic made me sigh. "Well, I'm
going to take a major hit over the trauma-center project,"
I admitted. "Seed money, pretty much by definition,
is money you don't get back if things go wrong."
"And since you can't get Victor out, it's going to."
"Right. We gave it a last shot, but we've done all
we can."
My hands made helpless sawing motions over the
table. "I've got to face it, all the practical stuff that
needs doing. Instead of running around chasing Reuben
Tate's old, evil moonbeams."
"What are you going to do about the money?"
I didn't want to tell her. But I would have to,
sooner or later. "Well. It might take a little while, but I
think I can get things back on track."
Precisely how I would have to do that, though--
that was the hard part. "The big project is to get Sam's
living and tuition money together, now that he's decided
to go to school. If not for that, I guess I could
build a portfolio from here, from Eastport, just on my
own investing. But ..."
But that wasn't all of it. What I didn't say was that
aside from money for expenses I needed a big cash
cushion just to feel decent. Otherwise, I was a poor girl
again.
"I can get a cash flow going if I move back to New
York, set up in practice again. Investment counseling,
financial plans, tax structuring ... all the stuff I used
to do when I lived there."
No more early-morning walks with Monday on
the breakwater, in the salt-fresh dawn. No coffee frappes
at Bay Books, with the new best-sellers and the
latest gossip. No more knowing and being known by
everyone in town; in Manhattan, life had been fast
paced and exciting, and I'd been one of a million busy
strangers.
No Wade. Not for a while, anyway. "I can come
back here," I managed weakly, "often."
She was looking at me as if I'd just arrived from
the planet Mars. "Can I ask you a question?" she inquired
seriously.
Without waiting, she went on. "What do you think
I've been doing with all the investing tips you've been
handing me for two years, wallpapering the bathroom?"
Actually, that was what I had thought, or something
like it. She'd never said any more about them.
"All those ideas you kept on giving me? You think I
wasted them?"
She eyed me incredulously. "Is that what you think
I think of your ideas, Jacobia? All the knowledge and
experience that you worked so hard to get, even
though you don't brag on it now?"
She sounded quite affronted, so it took a moment
before the import of her words hit me. "Beg pardon?
You mean you've been ..."
Crisply, she reeled off the names of a dozen publicly
traded companies, all of which had appreciated
smartly over the previous two years, just as I had predicted
they would. Then, knocking my socks off, she
told me exactly how much each had appreciated, as
well as where it had closed at the end of trading on the
preceding Friday.
Finally, she confided how much money she'd
made, and it was a good thing I didn't happen to be
wearing full dentures when she told me, or I'd have
been searching the floor for them.
"I put in everything my folks left me when they