Wicked Fix (9 page)

months, and I wished it would stay that way.

"I know," he replied. "I'm just playing around

with it."

He'd finished stripping the radiator, put a coat of

primer on it, and cleaned up, then spent some time on

the phone and afterward just picked at his lunch. Behind

him, early-afternoon sunlight slanted brilliantly

through the dining-room windows.

"Are you worried about your dad?"

Sam frowned, moving the planchette a fraction

toward the Yes corner of the board. "Daigle says lots

of people wanted to kill Reuben Tate. He says there

are, like, other possible suspects."

Which wouldn't stop a prosecutor from doing his

best to pin the deed on Victor. And until recently I'd

have been happy to see Victor impaled on a pin the size

of a railroad spike. But now that he was in trouble I

had to admit that, over the months since he'd moved

here, Victor had done the one thing I'd never expected

of him: he had behaved.

Oh, he was still about as easy to have around as a

sprained ankle, and all the emotional baggage I had

with him could have filled a boxcar. Still, he hadn't

engaged in any scandalous dalliances with Eastport

girls, or gotten into feuds with any of the town's leading

citizens. He hadn't, as I had been so much fearing,

made a public spectacle of himself.

And then there was Sam, whose personal transformation

over the past couple of years had been nearly

miraculous. Now all he wanted was some semblance of

a normal home life, or at any rate one that didn't feature

a father confined to prison.

What we needed, I decided, was one of those other

suspects Tommy Daigle talked about, preferably one

who was (a) not in any sense a member of my family,

and (b) the real perpetrator.

"How come you're not down at the boatyard?" I

asked Sam.

He shrugged. "Day off. I got twenty hours in,

Harpwell says that's enough for this week."

And Sam did, too, his expression telegraphed with

perfect clarity. Work on the local guys' boats was all

right, as far as it went. Sam enjoyed it, but it didn't

offer him much variety.

"Well, it won't be forever. You'll be at school next

year."

I hoped. He'd been accepted at Yale, into a special

program, then had discovered Yale wasn't among the

top training grounds for marine architects, which was

what he planned on being. In the end he'd turned them

down, deciding to put off college altogether for a year,

which I personally thought was a fine idea.

But now ... "I don't know, Mom. I'm just not

sure that stuff is for me."

I stifled impatience. Dan Harpwell, owner of East

port Boat Yard, was holding out a promise of a partnership

for Sam: better money, more interesting work.

Without advanced schooling, though, in computer

aided design, modern methods and materials, even

some business accounting, Sam's future at the boat establishment

--and in his chosen career--was limited.

"Did you hear," he asked wryly, "about the dyslexic

devil worshiper who sold his soul to Santa?"

Well, at least he could joke about it. We'd found

out about his dyslexia a few years earlier; it had turned

out to be an odd, refractory form of the disability.

He'd gotten through high school by dint of taped texts,

special therapy, and tutoring. But now with a year off

from school he was getting a taste of not having to

struggle so hard all the time, and was--temporarily, I

hoped--shying at the gate of any further education at

all.

"Sam," I began gently, but his shoulders stiffened.

Time for a change of subject.

"I think," I offered carefully, for Sam could be

touchy if you tried cheering him up too blatantly,

"George Valentine knows Morse code. He's a ham

radio enthusiast."

He brightened a little. "Yeah? Hey, maybe I'll ask

him about it. You think spirits could learn to send messages

in Morse?"

"I don't know," I said, again feeling obscurely

troubled. On the other hand, none of the odd events

we'd experienced in the house had been malicious. And

just at that moment I'd have rented a room to the headless

horseman, if it made Sam feel better.

"I think," he said in a wan attempt to make a little

joke, "it would depend on whether a spirit knew any

Morse code before."

He took his hands off the Ouija board and looked

up sideways at me, his grin the pale ghost of the one he

usually wore.

Whereupon I swear that dratted planchette

twitched.

That afternoon, Arnold drove Victor to the

courthouse in Machias, thirty miles to our

south. The prisoner's behavior was calm and

cooperative, Arnold reported; Victor allowed

himself to be fingerprinted, photographed, and

placed in a cell; he was given a phone call, which, as

promised, he had made to an attorney in Manhattan.

"And that," Arnold finished, "is that." Victor

would remain in jail to await arraignment, hearings,

and trial.

I gripped the telephone, not yet quite able to believe

that it was all so cut-and-dried, or in fact that any

of it was real. But of course it was.

"State guys'll be around," Arnold went on, "talk

to you and Ellie about finding the body. About what

you saw and heard at La Sardina, too. And," he added

reluctantly, "they'll want to have a word with Sam."

Which was the part that I was most emphatically

not looking forward to. But it was coming; the state's

mobile crime lab was in town and the bodies were on

their way to the police forensic unit in Augusta; the

physical-evidence-gathering part of the program, Arnold

felt, would be completed by nightfall.

"Cops're saving your interviews until last," he

said. "They know none of you are going anywhere.

That'll wrap it up."

"But," I protested, "won't there be further investigation?

Isn't there anyone who thinks someone besides

Victor is guilty?"

I took a deep breath. "I mean, Arnold, if Victor

ever wanted to kill somebody, he'd come up with some

goofy plan full of clever, unworkable details. Full," I

went on, "of self-glorifying intellectual flourishes and

literary-thriller stuff he'd read somewhere and wanted

to imitate. A victim," I was practically pleading now,

"would die of natural causes, before Victor ever even

got around to doing the actual murder."

Arnold harrumphed unhappily. "Well, if you say

so. But Jacobia, that's beside the point. State guys

heard what they heard, they got orders of their own,

and the orders said go get Victor. I had to twist some

arms, even to talk them into letting me do it."

His tone softened. "And listen, Victor threatened

the guy. A lot of people heard him. Now it turns out

Reuben was threatening Victor, he had information

that Victor didn't want getting around."

A vehicle pulled into the driveway; Monday got up

and padded to the hall vigilantly, in case it contained

any burglars she could lick or nuzzle to death.

"Later," Arnold went on, "the guy gets found with

his throat cut and the weapon is Victor's. And Victor's

got no alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the

crime. And you've got to admit he's done some guilty

looking activities: washing up, getting rid of clothes,

and so on. So I ask you," Arnold finished reasonably,

"what's left, besides a confession?"

It did look awful. "But what about all the others

who wanted Reuben out of their hair? Sounds to me

like he had a grab bag full of mortal enemies."

"Yeah, but Reuben, he wasn't blackmailing them."

In the back hall, Monday's wag-o-meter shot up to

redline as Wade came in, home from the harbor. But

his face didn't look right to me; it was even more troubled

than I'd expected.

Also, he wasn't carrying his soft canvas gun bag.

When he is not on a boat, Wade restores and repairs

firearms in a workshop he has built into the storeroom

ell of my house. Thus, in addition to a fragrance of

camellias that tends to appear for no reason like a calling

card from a time gone by, the house often smells of

gun oil, hot soldering compound, and the bright, sharp

reek of metal being machined to produce close tolerances

in the working parts of deadly weapons.

But this time no weapons were in evidence. Puzzled,

I turned back to the phone. "Thanks, Arnold, for

keeping me posted. How's Clarissa?"

In answer, I heard the latest details of Arnold's

impending fatherhood. Arnold's wife, a criminal attorney

who would have been defending Victor if she

hadn't been about to deliver a baby practically that

minute, was enormous, elated, and, according to Arnold,

so impatient to get it all over with that he

"dassn't even look cross-eyed at her."

Which reminded me that somewhere in the world,

someone was happy, an assurance I sorely needed. I

told Arnold to give her all our love and he promised to,

and we hung up.

Out in the kitchen, Wade sat at the table looking

thoughtful, a bottle of Sea Dog ale in front of him.

He'd gotten the news on our crime wave, I could see

from his expression, from the guys at dockside. I sat

down with him and told him the rest of it, still wondering

what else was eating at him.

"That's a lot of money," he said mildly when I had

explained what could happen if Victor remained in custody.

He'd known of my investment in the trauma-center

project; just not how much.

"You know that whatever you do about money,

it's all right with me. Don't you?" Wade added.

"Yes." It was part of our ongoing success in being

together, that neither of us meddled in the other's finances.

We just knew we'd have given each other the

world, no strings attached.

"Still," he went on, "I'll bet it galls you. Having it

a lot more at risk than you planned."

"Right. And that's an understatement."

Wade understood that I was a little crazy about my

financial security. Well, maybe a lot crazy: even aside