Wreck the Halls (19 page)

Later I got up to peer past the shade at the sleet angling sharply through the cones of light under the streetlamps. Cold wind from Canada rattled the storm windows and set the iced tree branches clattering together like frozen bones; tomorrow, people would be hunting for Christmas wreaths that had blown off their front doors.

But inside, everything was warm and secure. Even when I was alone in the house it always felt well-inhabited, as if its very fibers were permeated by the lives that had been lived in it, over the years. As if, in some way I couldn't fathom but which felt both comfortable and comforting, they were all still here. I slid back into bed where Monday snored softly, safe for the moment against whatever had been terrorizing her.

Me, too.

For now.

Chapter 7

O
h,” said a familiar voice from the back hallway,
early the next morning. “I’ve never been in this house before.”

It was Melinda, and if I’d had my way she wouldn't have been in it, now. She came into the kitchen. “This is all so homey” she gushed. Which from Melinda was like being informed that your sheet-metal walls and dirt floor were comfy, another term she used when what she clearly wanted to say was oh, dear God.

Turning, she batted her lashes so hard at Wade that it was a wonder she didn't rise right up off the old hardwood floor. “And I see she's got you smacked into line, doing the cooking. Marriage so civilizes a man, don't you think?” she added to me.

I could think of some smacking I’d have liked to do. Wearing a cream fisherman-knit sweater, ski pants, and shiny black boots, she sniffed exaggeratedly. “Mmm, that smells… authentic!”

What it smelled like, actually, was the bottom of a bait bucket. Wade put his thumb-knuckle to his front teeth to keep from laughing. Then, replacing the lid on the fish kettle, he fled the room.

Which was good; he can take Melinda in small doses but if you push him, Wade can come up with the conversational equivalent of a flame-thrower. And for the present, I wanted her uncharred.

Uninvited, she sat down. “Jacobia, we need to clear the air.”

As she was wearing one of those perfumes that gets slopped onto the ad cards in glossy magazines, I agreed. For a personal fragrance, low tide might possibly have been a worse choice; on the other hand, it went well with the fish.

She eyed me loftily. “I understand that you and Ellie have been harassing my brother. I called yesterday to say I want you to stop.”

For a woman who tipped the scales at ninety pounds soaking wet, she thought her word carried plenty of weight. “I wouldn't call it harassment,” I said. “He agreed to meet us.”

She sighed impatiently. “Ben has a good heart.”

I’d already spoken with Victor that morning, so I’d had my fill of manipulative silliness for the day. “Right. And I’ve got a spare head. Get to it, Melinda, will you? What's got you so hot and bothered you had to rush straight over here?”

She bridled at my tone. “I think you think, and Ellie too, that I really did have something to do with that Carmody business. Or that Peter and I did. Although how you believe we could have fixed it to look as if Faye Anne did it, and didn't remember…”

“It's not just how you could have, it's how anyone could have.” Or why. “You'll admit, you had a great motive.”

Her lips tightened. “I’ll admit that you're right about the land deal part of it. I lent Merle the money, and I did make him sign a note for it, with a lien, and he didn't read it. Now that he's gone I’ll end up with that property, sooner or later.

And if I could've gotten away with it I’d also have put a bullet through that man's brain. Ghastly creature.”

“How much money?”

“Just the bid amount.”

“You're sure? No other money, ever?” That driveway paving and the new storm windows hadn't come cheap.

She looked straight at me. “Never. And I didn't kill him, or have Ben do it. I’m here to put that foolish notion to rest.”

So thatwas her real worry: that we suspected Ben.

“Ben was with me all evening.” Her brunette head lifted nobly. “He helped with the garden-club meeting preparations, and stayed for the lecture. It was a talk by a very well-known woman from Bangor, contradicted all Kenty Dalrymple's silly theories about African violet culture.”

Sure; Kenty having been only an international authority. Kenty's whole trouble in dealing with Melinda, according to Ellie, was that Kenty had said what she thought: that, for instance, the twisted-leaf habits of Melinda's houseplants were due to spider mite, not the appearance of a new cultivar that Melinda had developed and aspired to have named for herself.

And now here she and Ben were, alibiing one another: cozy. “What about afterwards? When the meeting was over?”

“He was with me until at least four in the morning. To settle down after the meeting, we watched old movies.” She smiled: sweetly, triumphantly.

And… falsely? Somewhere under all that superficiality there was a real person, I felt sure: hidden by makeup, mannerisms, and quirks of costume. I had no idea what part—if any—of her story was true.

But something sounded wrong about it. “I can even tell you which movies we watched,” she finished, rising from her chair in a jangle of bracelets that made Monday jump.

I peered at her: was she being deliberately obtuse? Did
she think being able to read an old TV Guide was proof of anything? She barged right on, ignoring my look of skepticism.

“While I’m here, I also want to correct any mistaken idea you may have on the subject of Peter.”

“You mean the idea that with Merle dead and Faye Anne locked up for it, things are pretty hunky-dory for you in the Peter department, also?”

She glared at me for an instant, then softened so calculat-ingly, you'd have thought she was taking directions from stage left. “Kill to get Peter? Oh, please,” she drawled, putting on her confidential, one-female-to-another face.

It might have worked if I’d been a female wolverine. “Peter is charming, but let's be realistic. I like puppy dogs, too,” she said.

Sure, if someone else fed and walked them. But she had a point: town talk was, a long-term commitment wasn't her style any more than it was Peter's.

“The truth is, I’m going to have to do something about Peter.” She sighed. “It happens so often to a woman like me, that the man gets too attached.” She tossed her silk scarf tragically.

It was the scarf that did it, finally, like the red cloth in a bullring. That and a flash of something in her eyes when she said it: do something about Peter. Just for an instant I saw again the face at my kitchen window, a smear of white in the darkness, there and gone. It had frightened me. The way Faye Anne had been frightened, I supposed. She'd told Ellie that she thought someone was stalking her; later, Peter Christie had confessed that he was behind those episodes.

And now Melinda was frightened. It was in her face, in her voice, and even in the urgency of this visit. “Peter's the reason you've got Bob Arnold's phone number on your speed dialer, isn't it?” I guessed.

Bright pink spots appeared on her cheeks; I’d happened upon some tender nerve. “That's my business.”

“But if Peter's bothering you, you may need help.”

Although of course it depended on why he was bothering her. Did he know about something she'd done? Or the other way around?

Or… both? “You're humoring Peter. Seeing him socially. Letting him hang around, fiddle with your computer and so on. You wanted him as a trophy when you couldn't have him, but now you're a little scared of him, too. Maybe you're not confronting him for fear of what he'd do? And as for your brother…”

My next thought didn't make much sense, but I decided to have a whack at it, anyway, see if it stimulated anything.

“Melinda, what do you know about Mickey Jean Bunting?” Which as it turned out was like seeing if matches would stimulate dynamite.

“Oh! Jacobia, you breathe a word of that to anyone, and I’ll…”

A word of what? “Too late,” I said, improvising madly. If she realized I didn't know whatever she thought I did, she would clam up.

“Faye Anne knew about Mickey Jean. So does her attorney. I think you'd better tell me the whole story, and I will try to help you with whatever…”

Nothing doing. “Leave him alone,” she ordered. “Leave them both alone. They aren't hurting anyone. They've had enough interference from snoops and busybodies. After what they've been through they deserve some peace.”

Now I was really confused. “Melinda, are you sure we're talking about the same people, here?”

But I’d pushed her too far. She was mad, she was scared, and she blamed me, which made no sense but was absolutely typical of Melinda. Also, maybe she wasn't the sharpest hook in the tackle box, but where her own
interests were concerned Melinda was perceptive. She knew I’d sussed something screwy in her story about the night of Merle's murder.

As she went out she was actually weeping into a hankie she'd produced theatrically out of her bag, and I felt a little bad about it. For once, Melinda's distress seemed genuine.

Just not bad enough to refrain from calling Ellie and reporting the whole episode, along with the events of the previous afternoon. And although I had no idea what to do next, Ellie seemed to.

Twenty minutes later as I got into Ellie's car and we pulled away from the snow-crusted curb, I wondered what Melinda was going to do now. Throw a party? Redecorate her house? Switch from sweaters to cotton T-shirts whenever it snowed?

Something, I figured, that would allow her to ignore the whole situation for a while; that was her standard operating procedure. But her problems weren't going away, because while I was waiting for Ellie I’d figured out what I knew that Melinda didn't.

“Ellie. Sunday night, when George was out working at the power station. Tell me again what he was doing?”

She glanced at me, puzzled, then returned her attention to the treacherous roadway. We were headed out of town on Route 190, on the long curving stretch past Quoddy Airfield with its newly plowed runway like a black X-marks-the-spot in the snow. Beyond, the water in the bay was mercury-colored.

“The transformer at the powerhouse needed replacing,” she recited obediently. “So George and the fellows from Murphy's Electric went over there, met the bunch from Bangor Hydro, and did the work.”

Ahead lay the causeway to the mainland, a low, curving concrete ribbon passing over the tidal channel. At nearly high tide, choppy waves were the only sign of the treacherous
currents rushing in beneath us; six hours from now, these would be exposed tide flats, but at present the serene-looking water on either side of us was thirty feet deep and fatally cold.

“The powerhouse being the little oil-fired plant that would give us electricity, if the main power went off.”

Which can happen. A truck hits a power pole in Cherryfield, we're out of service; in the big ice storm of ninety-seven, the electricity went out for a week and people really were burning furniture in the fireplace.

“Yes. Jake, why are you asking me this?”

We were almost to Route 1, driving between abandoned farms whose gnarled apple trees dropped frozen fruit into mushy drifts, making the air smell cidery and staining the snow red and yellow.

“We were asleep,” I said as we pulled up to the intersection. An eighteen-wheeler pulling a load of logs roared past. “It's why they did the work at night; best time to turn the power off.”

Ellie crossed the highway, took the first left turn onto South Meadow Road. “Oh,” she breathed comprehendingly.

I’d already told her about Melinda's alibi for the time of Merle's death: that she and Ben were at her house, watching movies on TV until at least four A.M. But I hadn't made the connection.

Or, more accurately, the disconnection. “So unless old Melinda's got a TV that runs on batteries, I’d say that movie-watching story's full of beans.”

Two minutes off the highway, winter closed in around us. The road surface was packed snow sprinkled with sand, the drifts at either side Swiss-Alp mountainous and frozen solid. Beyond them, long, white pastures dropped abruptly to stony streambeds edged with hardwood, then flattened to salt marshes where cattails poked up from the brackish open water like velvet fingers.

“Which means Melinda lied,” I said. A bald eagle sailed overhead, wings outspread, so close you could pick out the shaggy white feathers of his leggings, yellow talon-tipped. “I wonder why?”

Ellie frowned, peering into the winter landscape. “I know it's one of these places,” she said of the ruts leading off the paved road into snow-choked thickets.

“ What is one of these places?” To me, one snowy wilderness looks pretty much like another.

“The old Hardesty camp.” In Maine your camp is your summer place: anything from a primitive shack to an architect-designed million-dollar structure of glass and cedar. A few, though, had been updated to year-round dwellings. “I’ve been hearing that someone from away bought it and was…”

She slowed uncertainly, then came to a decision and swung the wheel hard. “… living in it,” she finished as the car's engine howled.

Alarm pierced me; if we got stuck here either someone was going to come along to help us, or that eagle was going to have himself a larger-than-average lunch.

“Ellie,” I began, but it was too late. Tires spun and gears ground as she muscled the car up a rutted snow track past firs and tamaracks, between sagging fence posts whose tops barely cleared the plow-packed drifts, finally onto a straightaway I thought would offer a little relief, but didn't. She hit the accelerator hard.

“Momentum,” she explained, gripping the wheel as the car's rear end slewed. “The key to getting through snow like this is sheer momentum.”

As the fence posts flew by I thought it was a lot more like sheer madness; any minute I would be impaled on one. If not, we'd end up in one of those salt marshes, miles from help, the car sunk to its wiper blades.

I outlined this last possibility fairly urgently to Ellie while
she continued bulling the car along. “And no one could possibly be living here now,” I finished, “could they?”