Wicked Fix (46 page)

passed on," she continued briskly. "And anything else I

could salt away when the opportunity arose. So," she

concluded, "when Sam needs school money or whatever,

you send him to me."

I opened my mouth to protest.

"Shut up," she explained. "You're not leaving. It's

a stupid idea. I swear, Jake, you're smart all right, but

sometimes your big-city brains don't have enough

powder to blow your own bottom out of a bathtub,

common-sense-wise."

"Oh," I heard myself say faintly. "But you ..."

Of course she had. In this whole wide world there

is nothing more practical--or close-mouthed about it,

especially when it comes to money--than a downeast

Mainer.

"I will charge you," she said, "enough interest to

keep you from feeling too guilty. Assuming you end up

really needing it."

The girl on the Greyhound hadn't had a hope of

any help. She'd forgotten, even, how to ask for it. Ellie

waited to see if I understood how to accept it.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that if you need a

big cushion, you must be expecting a hard landing.

And I wasn't; not anymore. My friends would help me.

Whatever happened. A weight like a ballast stone

lifted off my shoulders. "I'll come to you if I need to," I

said gratefully.

"Well, of course you will," Ellie replied. "You're

not that foolish. As for Victor ..."

She was about to tell me again that it was too early

to quit. But it wasn't. We had pieces of the pattern, but

they just kept on whirling and they might go on doing

it forever.

So I braced for Ellie's argument and prepared to

resist it, an old Wall Street adage echoing in my head:

Don't chase your losses.

It was excellent advice. But I did not get the chance

to insist that I was going to take it.

She glanced past me, her face changing. "Don't

look now, but it appears to me that someone didn't

quite manage to make it out through the departure

gate."

I let my glance stray casually to the mirror behind

the lunch counter, just as the man in the doorway

looked into it, meeting my gaze:

Marcus Sondergard.

"The Winnebago was giving him trouble," I

said, repeating Marcus's grudging explanation

for his presence, as we pulled out of the

restaurant parking lot. "So what?"

"He must have been nearly to Ellsworth when he

noticed it," Ellie retorted. "He's been gone a couple of

hours."

She took the left onto Route 190, back toward

Eastport. "So why didn't he have it fixed there? He's

got engine trouble, that means it's not running well.

Why drive it all the way back here?"

"Ellie," I said, seeing where all this was going. "I

said I was finished."

She stared stubbornly ahead as I went on: "I've got

a roll of weatherstripping the size of a wagon wheel in

my house. And if I don't get the carpenters over for the

back wall soon, the phrase winter kitchen is going to

be a literal description. And ..."

And besides getting my house ready for cold

weather--a task that even without carpentry was as

lengthy and detailed as the one the NASA people undertook,

getting the space shuttle set for lift off--there

was now Victor's place to get ready for the winter, too.

Two mints in one, if by that you meant what it was

going to cost me: window caulking and insulation rolls

do not come cheap, and neither does a tankful of heating

oil every other half-hour.

"Furthermore, I still have a money situation to

confront," I said. "Your help is a safety net for me but

it is not a windfall. And all Sam's school arrangements,

paperwork and so on; Victor would have done all of

that, but now of course he can't."

In short, compared to all I had to accomplish in the

coming weeks, the Augean stables needed only a little

light vacuuming and dusting, and I hadn't even

thought about the difficulties posed by Victor himself,

locked up in the Washington County Jail.

I doubted his noble attitude was going to last long.

For Sam's sake, there would have to be a visiting

schedule. Care and upkeep: fresh fruit, toiletry items,

psychiatry for me so I could tolerate it. That sort of

thing.

"So I mean it," I said, then chanced to look out the

Jeep window. While I'd been stewing, Ellie had been

driving: over the causeway, into town, and ...

"Ellie, would you mind telling me where we are?"

Tumbledown vacant wooden bungalows, tiny

yards overgrown and trash-blown, the fences not much

more than heaps of kindling. I'd walked all over East

port but I'd never been on this dismal, dead-end alley

before; somehow I'd missed knowing it even existed.

Which was not, from the looks of it, any great loss:

broken windows, toppling chimneys, falling gutters.

The house at the end of the short row of broken-roofed

structures was so covered with old vines that it was

hard to tell there was even a building under there at all.

Ellie pulled over to what had once been a neat,

straight sidewalk but was now a broken jumble of concrete

scrap. "This is the street Paddy Farrell, Willow

Prettymore, and Mike Carpentier all lived on," she

said, "back when we were kids."

Old wooden screen doors with hand-turned ornamental

corner brackets sagged brokenly onto the

remnants of wide front porches. Tall, graceful windows

were capped by lintels like bushy eyebrows, now rotted

and sagging; cracked front walks where the girls had

played hopscotch and boys bounced balls now

sprouted with weeds.

"The end one that's falling in under all that rose

vine was Mike's house, the middle one was Willow's,

and Paddy lived in this one," Ellie said, pointing at the

nearest wreckage. "Beyond the field," she waved generally,

"was Deckie Cobb's shack."

The whole street looked abandoned. Junk cars

lurked under shredded remnants of tarps. Here and

there a hopeless little hand-scrawled For Sale By

Owner sign peeked from behind a broken windowpane;

otherwise, these places had been forgotten.

"Oh," I said faintly. It was really heartbreaking; if

you squinted, you could see how lovely it all once had

been. And it was as good a demonstration of how lost

in history the motive for Reuben's murder might be as

anything I could think of, bolstering my decision to

quit searching for something I would never find.

Ellie seemed to be getting the idea, finally, too; she

gazed a moment longer, her forehead furrowing briefly,

at the sprawl of rose cane burying Mike Carpentier's

old homestead.

"I just wanted to see it once more," she said. "I

thought maybe ... But I guess not."

We headed back to inhabited territory, riding in

silence until we reached Water Street, where I thought I

saw a familiar blond glint. "Isn't that ... ?"

Couldn't be. But Ellie saw it too and pulled over in

front of Peavy Library: old red brick, dark and glowering,

against an interior of yellow light crosshatched by

the leaded panes of the arched windows.

Then I saw clearly the pale gold hair, sleek and

shining as she got out of a rental car in the parking lot

of the Motel East: Willow Prettymore. She took a key

from her bag and entered one of the motel rooms, closing

the door behind her.

Ellie made a U-turn and headed down Water Street

in the other direction. "Ride with me a little longer?"

I nodded resignedly, feeling the quicksand of

another wild-goose chase gathering around my feet:

Willow had come back for a pair of earrings she'd forgotten

and was searching the room for them. Or some

similarly silly and intensely irritating reason. But the

room Willow entered wasn't the one they had been in, I

realized. Then, parked in front of La Sardina, I saw

Paddy Farrell's Peugeot. "But he's in Portland. Unless

..."

A bad thought hit me. "You don't suppose Terence

died, and Paddy heard about it so he didn't go back?"

"No. Wouldn't you go? If nothing else, there

would be some arrangements to make. Besides ..."

At her gesture, I peered out the Jeep's rear window.

Paddy was just coming out of La Sardina, pausing to

speak with someone on the doorstep just out of sight.

Paddy looked reasonably normal. Grave-faced but

not a basket case, as he would be if Terence had passed

away.

"Someone called them," Ellie said quietly, "I'll bet.

It's just too much of a coincidence otherwise. Willow

was in Boston, or nearly. Something must have seemed

awfully urgent to get her to face down that thug of a

husband, rent a car or whatever, and drive back. Marcus

Sondergard has a telephone in that Winnebago?"

"Yes. And the whole town knew Paddy was in

Portland, at the medical center. They'd all be reachable

if you tried hard enough. Still ..."

It's an awful leap to assume that, I was about to

say, only Ellie wasn't having any.

"But which one of them was the caller and which

other ones were the recipients?" she pondered aloud.

Then she swung left onto Clark Street, uphill between

small wooden bungalows with shining yellow

windows and lace curtains, and left again into Hillside

Cemetery. From here it was only a few blocks to Key

Street, home sweet home.

A cup of coffee, I thought longingly, and silence;

my own thoughts. Later, Ellie and I would make dinner

together and the boys would help eat it, then take over

doing up the dishes. But for now I needed--

Without warning, Ellie pulled to the side of the

road and stopped.

"Ellie," I began, "I understand you're not ready to

quit, and I sympathize. Really I do. But I hardly think a

graveyard is any place to pull over and have a conversation

about it. Which," I went on, "I am prepared to

have at some point in the future, seeing as we now have

this new, curious information about ..."

Well, I didn't know what it was about, when you

came right down to it. But they were all back in town

for something, that much was obvious.