Wreck the Halls (21 page)

Then: “Someone was following us back there,” Ellie added.

“Really.” Her daredevil driving took on a new meaning to me. “Could you see who it was?”

She shook her head. “I noticed them just before we got to Route 1. They fell back whenever I slowed down. Little light-colored car, I didn't see much else about it. So I decided, if I couldn't find out about them, they weren't going to find out about us, either. Where we were headed, I mean. And I guess they didn't. Whoever it was, they weren't waiting when we got back to the main road.”

“Nice going,” I said lightly, slamming the car door. Snow squeaked frozenly under my feet.

Ellie put the car in reverse. “Just one thing, though.”

“What?” As I spoke, a shadow darted from the granite foundation of the house and scuttled across the snowy back lawn. Peering into the gloom where it came from, I saw that a pane in a cellar window was broken. And on the edge of it hung a tuft of long black hair.

Coarse, musky smelling: skunk hair. “Like you said, there aren't lots of people living out there,” Ellie said. “Not in winter.” With that she backed the car out, drove away.

I stood holding the tuft of hair, feeling like a scientist who has just found a dandy little nest of plague germs, because one skunk exiting did not mean no more were inside. Skunks
enjoy cuddling up together in a warm place, such as for instance behind the mop bucket or under the paint tarps in my cellar.

Grimly, I went over my indoor-skunk-equipment list: live trap, blanket to put over it, gloves, and a long stick with which to urge a skunk firmly out again, once I’d gotten it far away. Also if possible a gas mask; skunks do not tend to be in good moods while they are being evicted. Maybe once I’d evicted this one, Monday would return to her usual calm self.

All the while, though, I kept thinking about what Ellie had said: that considering how few places we could reasonably have been going on South Meadow Road in winter, maybe whoever was behind us hadn't needed to follow all the way to Mickey Jean's, to learn our destination.

Just far enough to think suspicions confirmed.

“Whoever else is
or isn't involved,” Clarissa Arnold pointed out that evening, “the question remains: how would anyone cause Faye Anne's claimed amnesia for the event?”

We were having corned beef hash, which follows New England boiled dinner as night follows day, and the company was a near-reprise of the one we'd assembled two evenings before, minus the government guys but plus Bob Arnold, his wife, Clarissa, and their toddler son, Thomas.

“That's the trouble,” I agreed. “Unless she's lying about it. Remembers, and just won't say, the same way she won't admit that Merle was the hitting type.”

In the parlor young Thomas was coaxing Monday from under the coffee table by offering her a teething biscuit. Ordinarily I do not encourage the dog to eat anything except dog food. But she'd been so glum and skittish, I’d have sat her up at the table and fed her corned beef hash if I’d thought it would help.

“Checked out the cellar for that varmint,” George Valentine said. I’d piled the skunk equipment in the hall and from it he'd drawn the correct conclusion. “No live ones that I could spot, but there's a little heap of shavings and such in the corner. A start of a nest, seems like. I set the trap just in case.”

It was his birthday so we had a cake with candles waiting for him in the kitchen, and Sam had taken all our pictures with his digital camera. But the mood wasn't very celebratory: For one thing, George's injured thumb had turned out to be broken and he was wearing a splint on it. For another, at the end of the table sat Victor, Joy Abrams, and Joy's sister Willetta; suffice it to say they were not a gleesome threesome.

“What reason would Faye Anne have not to say what happened?” Willetta asked sourly. “Going to jail instead of somebody else? It just doesn't make sense.”

Victor said Willetta had decided she didn't like staying alone at night, so she'd moved in with Joy. This continued to crimp the progress of his hoped-for romance; what Willetta needed, he had opined to me out in the kitchen—meanwhile depositing a stack of old paperbacks, a broken hammer, and a cracked cream pitcher on the kitchen table—was a new boyfriend, and couldn't I please find someone for her?

But looking at Willetta, whose pallid little face reminded me of a glass of buttermilk—splotched with yellowish freckles and made even less delightful by a peevish expression—I thought hooking her up was going to require more matchmaking horsepower than I possessed.

“She makes a point of running into me whenever I’m there at the hospital,” Victor had complained. “Like she's got radar. Then she drenches me in her hatred.”

“The amnesia doesn't make sense,” Ellie said quietly to Willetta. “Unless she's frightened of someone. If she thinks
telling the truth about what happened could make something else happen. To her.”

“What could be worse than getting blamed for something that's not your fault?” Willetta snapped now, but no one answered.

Meanwhile Wade sat calmly eating his corned beef hash. I’d told him all that had happened, including Mickey Jean Bunting's unorthodox way of greeting visitors and Ellie's belief that we'd been followed. In response, Wade had gone thoughtfully up to his workroom and opened the lockbox.

Now there was a.38 special police revolver in his bedside table, and another in the kitchen drawer. “Emergency equipment,” he'd said. I didn't know if he was carrying any firearm on his person, but if I’d found out he was, I wouldn't have tried talking him out of it. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when I’d have been carrying one, myself: a wonderful old Bisley.45 caliber revolver Wade had given me and taught me to use, a no-kidding weapon with a punch like a prizefighter and a kick like a Kentucky mule.

It did the job, all right. But none of the gun-related incidents of that time had turned out quite the way I’d planned. So in the end I’d decided to leave weapon power to the experts and concentrate instead on brainpower. I shot at clay pigeons and paper targets at the range on the mainland in Charlotte with Wade, who kept his certifications up religiously, but that was all. Instead of a handgun I carried a cell phone—if I remembered to—and so far, that had worked out just fine.

“There's a guy selling real vampire blood on the Internet,” Tommy Pockets announced cheerfully, digging into his hash.

Sam looked uncomfortable. I sent a thought-question at him but he avoided my gaze.

“And another one,” Tommy went on, “with an actual alien eyeball he found in the desert, from Roswell.”

Sam nudged Tommy hard. “Um,” Tommy said, his ears reddening, “but we aren't actually buying any of those things. Nothing to worry about, that's for sure. Nope, we sure aren't.”

Sam looked crucified, as Wade and Victor both glanced queryingly at him. But then George spoke up. “What's Ben Devine's connection to all this, anyway?”

Wade and Sam got up to clear the table, as Ellie replied with a summary of what we'd learned about Devine. “I wish we could find out more about the fellow who disappeared at his college,” she finished. “Just because he wasn't charged doesn't mean—”

“Wasn't a fellow,” Bob Arnold spoke up. “It was a woman. I don't know the details either, but I heard she was a model. Or had something to do with modeling. Some fool thing.”

“And she had money,” Joy Abrams put in unexpectedly. “The college was Bates. I lived in Lewiston when all that happened.”

Victor frowned, reminded, I supposed, of what else had gone on in Lewiston: the snake act. Though the Abrams sisters had moved back to Eastport only the previous summer, he much preferred pretending his ladies didn't have pasts, or anyway not ones they bothered recalling after they met him.

“So what was the deal?” George asked, turning to Joy.

“Well.” She glanced around the table. “She disappeared. Ben was supposed to be a friend of hers. A close friend.”

She paused, looking at Bob Arnold. “I’m not sure about that part about the modeling, though.”

“I thought I heard something about her being connected to the school,” Clarissa agreed.

Bob shrugged. “Could be. We got a flyer when it happened. But like I say, I didn't follow it close. Out of my
territory. Papers in Portland and so on, they covered the story.”

“So then what?” Ellie wanted to know.

“So, of course the police investigated, like Bob says,” Joy said. On anyone else her perfect makeup would have been way too much, but she was good at it.

“And”she added significantly, “her money had vanished. The woman who disappeared. A lot of money.”

“So the plot thickens,” I put in. “They checked to see if Ben had any of it?”

Joy nodded. “Uh-huh. But he didn't. Or if he did, he hid it somewhere that no one could find it. And they couldn't find any way to hook him up with her disappearance, either. So in the end, they had to drop it.”

“If people behaved better they wouldn't get into trouble.” Willetta's bitter tone produced an uncomfortable silence.

“She's sensitive right now,” Joy apologized for her sister. “She's just had a bad time with somebody, herself.”

“Oh, a bad time, is that what you call it?” Willetta shot a dark look at Victor, then got up, flung her napkin angrily onto the table, and left the room. Victor gazed after her and I could see in his eyes the desire to follow her, preferably while gripping a sturdy length of piano wire in both hands. And for once I didn't blame him; Willetta, I decided, was a pill.

In the parlor, the dog had come out from under the coffee table and was seated gravely across from little Thomas, offering her paw. I was so glad to see her acting normally, I didn't even mind seeing the bits of stuffing the baby had apparently pulled from the upholstered chair. Maybe, I thought hopefully, there really had only been one skunk.

But the evening was over; George said he was sorry but he didn't want any cake. He thought he'd go home and take one of the pain pills he'd gotten at the health center—which
to me meant that sore thumb of his felt like it was being sawed off—and he and Ellie left soon thereafter.

Victor came up to me, carrying coats, while in the parlor Joy bent cooing over the Arnolds’ baby. “I’m going to kill her,” he fumed.

Willetta, he meant; she'd already gone out to the car. I made sympathetic noises while thinking about the poetic justice of him having somebody around all the time, driving him bonkers. In the old days, Victor could make me so crazy I feared I might swallow my tongue.

“You're so nice to him,” Clarissa observed when Victor and Joy had departed.

Sam and Tommy had vanished back upstairs, Bob was out warming the car up, and the dog was under the coffee table, again. Thomas had offered her one of the stuffing bits from the chair and she'd reeled back in doggy horror.

I shrugged. “Path of least resistance,” I said.

Clarissa pursed her lips. “Oh, not really. You know Victor's weak spots. I think you could get rid of him anytime you wanted and I think you know it. Just… destroy him, psychologically. But you don't.”

“Too chicken, maybe?” I said it lightly as Bob came in, stomped snow off his boots, and joined Wade in the kitchen.

Clarissa removed Thomas's grasping fist from her dark hair. He was already bundled into his red snowsuit, bright as a Christmas elf. “I doubt it,” she said. “I think it's that you'd have to remember doing it. Like the live trap—you won't kill something helpless when you don't have to.”

She wasn't only talking about Victor, I realized. Or the skunk.

“Kenty Dalrymple was a fragile old woman,” Clarissa went on. “I can go with the verdict of heart attack. Bob, too.”

“But?” Neither Ellie nor I had mentioned anything about our suspicions over Kenty's death. A stray bathrobe belt and
a bad feeling just weren't enough to get folks all het up over, as George would've put it.

But Clarissa didn't need anyone to mention it; she had seen more of life than the view from her Water Street office afforded. “But if by some chance it wasn't what it looked like…”

“Then,” I answered slowly, “maybe she saw something that she shouldn't have. Or someone was worried that she had.”

Clarissa nodded. “That's what I thought you thought.”

By now Thomas was asleep on her shoulder. She hefted him to a more comfortable position. “I’m not convinced,” she said. “Faye Anne might have killed Merle, and Kenty might've dropped dead of her own accord. But if that isn't what happened, then someone's out there.”

Hearing her say what I’d been thinking sent a chill over me. “And if you're expecting that person to feel any guilt, or have any mercy, or to care at all…” Clarissa added.

“I get it.” Nervousness made me laugh. “Murderers aren't like you and me.”

But she didn't smile. She was—it was easy to forget this, with Thomas around—an experienced criminal attorney. “But that's just it, Jacobia. That's the problem. Murderers are like us. On the outside.”

The baby awoke and whimpered; Bob came and took him from her, his eyes meeting hers in the sort of glance that always made me glad these two had found one another. “Don't suppose any friends of yours will be hangin’ out, out to Meddybemps, tonight,” he said.

At Duddy's; the bar with the pool table and rough clientele. “No,” I answered. “Not that I know of. Why would you think that?”

“No reason.” His eyes met mine and I remembered his comment: that the state police had surveillance on a place.

So I guessed they were doing something there this
evening and Bob was in on it. “Not a good time for girls’ night out?” I hazarded. It happened sometimes, a carful of young town women looking for a harmless thrill, a few drinks and some loud music. Something to break the monotony of husbands and kids, make the winter seem not so long.

Bob nodded, laying his cheek against the baby's soft hair while Clarissa pulled her coat on.

“It's the inside,” she said, “you need to worry about.”

Of killers, she meant. She stepped onto the porch. Overhead a disk of full moon shed light without heat, making the street into a black-and-white photograph.

“Like,” she said, “the dark side of the moon.”