Wreck the Halls (16 page)

I did. “Ellie,” I said quietly, and she came up.

“Stand here, please, and look in the direction she'd have been looking as she came out of the bedroom.”

Ellie silently obeyed. Kenty was wearing the same print
housedress I’d seen her in the day before. Maybe she'd gone into the bedroom after I’d left her, for a nap.

But then she'd come out again. “The hall closet,” Ellie said, looking at its partially open door. “And…”

She pointed at the soft chenille belt of a bathrobe on the floor. “But she isn't wearing any bathrobe,” Ellie added in the tone of mild interest she uses when her mind is busily putting things together.

I moved to the hall window. From it you could see into the Carmody house; Faye Anne's white lace panels covered only the lower sashes. You could see the garden, its raised beds covered now by a foot of snow, the compost heap in the corner a white, rounded lump, the picket fence broken by a pair of gates: one for the driveway and one for the front walk.

And you could see the street, and the front door. A row of low cedars, neatly trimmed long ago to form a dark-green privacy fence, blocked all other aspects. So that was all you could see from Kenty Dalrymple's windows.

But it had been enough.

“If someone came in while she napped…” Ellie said.

I nodded. “And hid in that closet.”

“Waiting. With that belt, to strangle her when she came out into the hall. She was so frail, it wouldn't have taken much. And the belt is chenille, soft enough so it might not leave a mark if someone was lucky and quick.”

“But they didn't have to be, maybe.” I peered into the closet, pulled the string that switched on a bulb.

Its harsh yellow glow showed where items on hangers had been pushed aside. A shelf at the back of the closet had served as a low bench. A few sweaters on it were shoved over untidily. The small enclosure held a mingled fragrance of lavender and scented talc.

“Wouldn't have to be quick, I mean.” Visualizing it all in my mind's eye made me back hastily out of the closet. “The
shock of seeing someone bursting out here at her unexpectedly…”

Ellie looked down at the dead woman, nodding. “Her heart could've just stopped.”

We got a bedspread from one of the spare rooms—white sheer curtains, dressers with doilies, neat narrow twin beds no guest had slept in for many years—and put it over her, and I called Bob Arnold, not mentioning what we thought might have happened. To look at her, you would think she had simply suffered a heart attack.

Except for her face, the expression of horror etched deeply into the soft, white flesh, and I already knew what would likely be said about that. Down in the parlor while we waited for Bob, I examined the pill bottles again without touching them.

One was nitroglycerin: “for chest pain.” The second vial held tablets of a digitalis compound. Ellie peered at the third one, frowned at the blue-printed pharmacy label.

“ ‘Methylphenidate,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Take BID.’ That's not very enlightening.”

But it was enlightening to me. Once upon a time I’d been a veritable human Physician s Desk Reference when it came to the pharmaceutical substances that might be used to assist learning-disabled kids.

“Methylphenidate is the generic name for Ritalin. So Sam was right.” I went to the bookshelf, and sure enough, there were two volumes on ADD, attention deficit disorder, both fairly new hardcovers with gold stickers from Bay Books affixed to their bright jackets, slid in among the garden encyclopedias and the how-to plant books.

Ellie looked perplexed. “I don't get how this stuff works, though. If you're already too flighty, too agitated or whatever, and you take a drug like this, sort of an amphetamine-type thing, doesn't it just speed you up more?”

“It speeds you up only if you don't have the disorder it's
prescribed for,” I replied, shivering. It was so cold in the house. But there was no sense turning any heat on.

Not anymore. “But look at it this way, Ellie: what if you're too active, too impulsive, because you don't have the brain chemical you need to turn off the impulses. That's the deficit they mean when they talk about attention deficit, see? So the impulses you have just stay in control, and you have no choice but to go along with them, whatever they are. You can't control your self. Like some hyperactive kids.”

I remembered Kenty's inability to stick to any topic, her seemingly random veering from one emotional state to another. And then, as if a magic switch had been flipped in her mind, she'd been able to focus.

Because her medication had kicked in. “This,” I pointed at the small orange vial, “is the chemical. If you think of the act of quelling an impulse as an act, not as the absence of one, you'll get the picture.”

Or anyway that was how it had been explained to me, back in the days when I’d have dosed Sam with eye of newt and toe of frog if only it could have helped him. But Sam hadn't had ADD or any other chemical disorder. In addition to his dyslexia, which had not been vulnerable to drug therapy, he'd just been messed up royally, principally by me and his father.

Another memory niggled at me; searching for it, I went to Kenty's kitchen. It was a big, old-fashioned room with a round-shouldered Frigidaire and a gas stove that had a wood-burning section on one side. A basket of newspaper spills stood by the soapstone sink.

I opened the cabinet doors. No baking supplies. “But she said she'd baked cookies, that she went to Faye Anne's house to borrow—”

I opened the refrigerator. Skim milk; no butter, no eggs. In the trash, no egg carton or butter wrapper.

Bob Arnold's car pulled up outside. “She lied about baking,”
I told Ellie. “And she did it after she'd started seeming sane and in control, as if…”

As if it had been deliberate, even planned. Kenty had let me in as if she'd been waiting for me, or for someone she could talk to.

Someone she could tell. “Ellie, I think maybe the night of Merle's death Kenty could have seen something she wasn't supposed to see, and someone knew it.”

“But if that's true, it means she really was…”

Murdered, she would have finished. But she didn't want to. Instead, we went to meet Bob as he came in, and what with waiting for the ambulance so Kenty wouldn't have to get into it alone, and afterwards making sure the house was locked up and the furnace set high enough so the pipes wouldn't freeze, Ellie never did get a chance to make herself draw the conclusion aloud.

But she didn't need to because we both knew what we thought. Walking home with Monday, we kept our eyes peeled; inside, we locked up and checked every room in the house, like kids coming home from a scary movie. Because no matter what the medical examiner said—and he did, too, the very next day, calling it heart failure and explaining her facial expression as involuntary muscular contraction—Ellie and I were convinced another kind of death had been planned for Kenty. Her unstable heart had merely made the planned action unnecessary.

And that to us meant: (a) there'd been two killers running around Eastport this holiday season, which was about as likely as two meteors striking us simultaneously.

Or (b) there was one.

Still running around, I mean. Not in jail.

Ergo: not Faye Anne Carmody.

But when a lady of advanced years drops dead among her pill bottles and her African violets, a bathrobe belt and
an unhappy expression are unlikely to be seen as convincing evidence of her murder.

So we knew, or thought we did.

But we were the only ones thinking about it that way.

Other, I mean, than the one who'd done it.

“None of your
business,” Ben Devine told Ellie and me a little later that morning. We were sitting at a table at the rear of La Sardina, Eastport's sort-of Mexican restaurant.

Not much on the menu would be recognized as Mexican food, by a native; the meat in one taco would feed a Mexican family for a week, and the house specialty—fresh scallop tortilla, in season—was an especially downeast twist on the cuisine.

But what the place lacked in culinary authenticity, it made up in decor; twinkling lights, candle-jammed Kahlúa bottles, serape curtains, bright checked tablecloths, and oversized houseplants all combined somehow to give the impression that a large, colorful piñata had exploded somewhere nearby.

Ben had pulled up in a standard Eastport work vehicle: an aged Ford pickup, light blue, lots of Bondo. Now he glared at us across the table.

“Taught math. Quit. Came here. That's all you need to know.”

He took another drag of a cigarette, crushed it out. You can still smoke in a bar in Maine, if the bar owner pays a higher license fee and prohibits unaccompanied youngsters. Personally I’d rather eat dinner with a chain-smoker than a health-nazi; at least the smoker isn't pretending to be interested in my welfare, instead of in his own superior political correctness. But anyway:

“So, you're staying with Melinda?” Ellie inquired brightly. She thinks there aren't many barriers that can't be
broken by a dose of her own pure, unadulterated friendliness, and usually she is right.

But not this time. “Yeah,” Ben Devine said. He was a big man, rawboned and fiftyish, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, his thick, greying hair tied back with a leather thong. One of his huge boots would've swallowed both my feet, with plenty of room to spare.

Then out of the blue the math thing rang a bell. “You wouldn't happen to be the B. J. Devine who wrote the Devine candlestick formula?” I blurted, not thinking it could be true.

Candlesticking is one of the trickier methods of charting stock market activity; the graphing patterns, with colorful names like Three White Soldiers, Advancing Blocks, and Bearish Counterattack, are used to predict what a stock may do in the future—i.e., go up or down—based on what the patterns have presaged in the past.

Devine's eyes flickered briefly with interest. “Yeah. That was me.” But his tone suggested that this had been in some other life, no longer relevant.

In my own money career, I’d gone straight for fundamentals: How much cash? How much debt? What's the burn rate? Do people want the product? And—the most important question, perhaps—is the CEO a solid, smart person or a power-mad looney-tune? A lot of people swore by can-dlesticking, though, and by the variation on it that B. J. Devine had invented, after I’d left the business.

“But”—he mashed another cigarette—“that's history. You want to know about Merle Carmody.”

Interesting segue: two things that were history. “Right. Somebody called me,” I said. “Someone who seemed to think you might know something about Merle's death. D’you have any idea who might want to implicate you in it?”

Because while Ellie and I were going around my house
making sure no one lurked in it—Monday following us approvingly as if to say it was about time someone did an actual search, for heaven's sake—something occurred to us. If the call about Ben was not mischief, might it have been meant as misdirection?

Devine drank black coffee with his cigarettes, and from the harsh sound of his laugh it was a habit he'd been pursuing for years. “Unfortunate. That's a good one. Like wiping out smallpox. Maybe someone thinks I’d be good to implicate ’cause I’m so glad he's dead.”

“Your frankness is refreshing.” Also a little worrisome, I thought. “May I ask why you disliked Merle Carmody so intensely?”

“Nope. But I’ll tell you how you know I didn't kill him.”

He leaned across the table at me, his eyes locking onto mine. “Because I’m a knife man, see? A meticulous knife man. And if I’d cut that son of a bitch up there wouldn't have been a head in one of those packages.”

Word of that had gotten out, of course. Ben Devine smiled down at his nicotine-stained fingers. “If I’d done it, I’d have started with his tongue. Skinned it, trimmed it, boiled it with an onion. I’d be at home now, having it in a sandwich.”

The knife on Devine's belt was a big Randall in a hand-sewn leather scabbard. Not the kind of item you would use to dress out a deer. This was a Vietnam infantry knife; Wade had one, up in his workshop. A killing knife.

“But I didn't,” Ben said. “I just mind my own business. And I expect other people to mind theirs. Any more questions?”

Not waiting for an answer he slapped money on the bar and went out; the blue pickup roared to life, its carburetor banging out a couple of smoky backfires like parting shots.

“Well,” Ellie said into the silence afterwards. Ben had blitzed in, laid his rap on us, and blitzed out, all in about ten
minutes. “Another happy member of Merle Carmody's fan club. Not.”

Ted Armstrong, La Sardina's daytime bar man, came over with fresh coffee and we drank it gratefully to get the bitter taste of Ben's remarks from our mouths. “What did he mean, Ted? Do you know why Ben hated Merle so much?”

Ted nodded, running a towel on the bar trim, straightening the backgammon and cribbage boards and the boxed chess set, all stacked at the end of the polished surface.

“Ayuh. Don't see Ben a whole lot. Not that I particularly want to. He is way too intense for me.”

He was that, all right. You ran into guys like Ben now and then in Eastport: with oversized personalities that had not fit comfortably into whatever mold they'd burst out of. They lived on the mainland, mostly, sometimes in desperately ramshackle little off-road cabins without electricity, plumbing, or central heat, and came to town a few times a year for medicine and supplies.

Mostly, they were perfectly fine people. But a few of them weren't: if you wanted it to be, Eastport was the perfect spot for vanishing right off the face of the earth, out of sight of any pursuing authorities. Even a murder only got the city news crews here for two days.

“I heard where he was some kind of math wizard back at the school he was at,” Teddy said, pouring pretzels into a bowl.

“Right. And Michael Jordan was a basketball player.”

“Uh-huh. The real deal, huh? But anyway, when he got to Eastport last summer he wasn't like that. Started doing odd jobs. And one of ’em was, when hunting season got here, he cut up deer for people.”

“Oh,” Ellie said, enlightenment spreading over her face. That was one of the things Merle Carmody had done for money, too. Professional woodsmen did their own
butchering but if you only went out once a year, got your deer and that was the end of it, it wasn't the kind of thing you got much practice at.