Wreck the Halls (22 page)

“That was pretty
sobering. What Clarissa said.” Wade nodded, crouching by the wire contraption George had set up in the cellar to trap our skunk. He'd pushed insulation material into the broken window frame, too, and puttied in a new glass pane. It was too cold to do the job right without preparation, since putty and cold weather aren't exactly bosom buddies. Still, it would do for now.

Nothing in the trap, yet. The bait—a peanut-butter-and-cheese lump smeared with grape jelly—didn't look attractive to me. But then I wasn't a skunk intent on setting up housekeeping.

Wade straightened. “S’pose you could put a sign in your car window. I mean, seeing as you think somebody's watching.”

I took his point and laughed, but it was weak-sounding even to me. “Yeah. ‘No Snooping—Closed for Repairs.’ ” “Trouble is,” he added ruefully, “it wouldn't work.” I put my cheek against his shoulder. “No. Probably not.” All Kenty'd done was see something accidentally. Ellie and I had actually gone out looking for trouble.

“Sam and Tommy are pretty involved in his project,” I commented.

“Uh-huh. I lent Sam a few bucks so they could buy some stuff for this display he's planning.”

“Not the Roswell eyeball, I hope.”

His weathered face crinkled in amusement. “Make a hell of an item for the show-and-tell portion of the program.”

“You don't think he's run into any trouble? At the table, he and Tommy seemed kind of… secretive.”

Wade looked unworried. “I doubt they can get into real difficulty just buying a couple of things on eBay. Tomorrow, they'll have figured out how to solve whatever it is, you'll see.”

I wasn't so sure. Sam had seemed antsy, the way he had after he broke a deck window in the Coast Guard boat with a baseball he had hit on a dare off the fish pier.

“Mmm. Well, I guess it's all right if he pays you the money back. Or gives you the eyeball.”

Wade pulled an IOU from his pocket. “Got it covered.” Then: “Jacobia. I’m not going to tell you what to do.”

Of course not. He never did. “But?”

“But Ben Devine's a loose cannon. He keeps his head down and you don't see him drunk in the bars, any of that sort of nonsense.”

Teddy Armstrong had said so, too. “But on the docks, and out on the water,” Wade went on, “all the guys know about him. If you say the wrong thing to him…”

“He'll go off on you?” Teddy had said that, as well.

“Ayuh. Couple of months ago he put Lonny Altvater in the hospital. Lon told me it was like trying to fight off a wild animal. All he'd said was, Melinda looked hot in her Fourth of July outfit.”

“Oh, gosh.” The outfit in question had been a red-white-and-blue jumpsuit, cut up to here and down two inches past there, with strategically placed stars. They'd let her ride in it
on the parade float but she'd had to sit behind a flag made of geraniums when the float passed the nursing home, for fear of the effect the patriotic costume might have on residents’ health.

Wade finished tinkering with the live trap, kissed me hard, and followed me up to the hall where he handed me my jacket, and grabbed a leash.

“You have more questions for Ben?” he asked.

He knew I did. I wasn't sure which piqued my curiosity more, Joy Abrams’ dinner-table report about the woman who'd vanished from Ben's life or Melinda's lies about his whereabouts the night of Merle's murder.

“I think maybe he's got some answers, too,” I replied. “But as for getting him to tell them,” I added, “after the day I’ve had, I’d rather face the skunk.”

Wade grabbed his own coat. As he'd said, he wouldn't dream of telling me what to do. But he's not above adding himself to the mix, when it's appropriate. “Let's go try to find Ben, see if we can talk to him one more time about all this. You think?”

Let's see, now: with or without backup?

“Gangway,” I said.

Monday hurled herself
ahead of us out the storm door to get away from whatever was still bugging her in the house, and we set off in Wade's pickup with the dog perched on the bench seat between us.

Minutes later we pulled up quietly on the empty road at the north end of the island, not far from Melinda's. Against the moon-bright sky the enormous maple tree stood sentry, its branches stretched up as if to ward off an onslaught of stars.

“Wade, why are you doing this?”

He set the brake. “Don't know. You haven't told me why you are, yet.”

I looked down at my hands. “Yes, I did. To help Ellie.” And Faye Anne. And because nobody helped my mother.

A silly reason, that last one. Or not; it depended on how you looked at it.

“And,” Wade added, unfooled, “you don't have to tell me. Not now, not ever. If it's important to you, it's good enough for me, Jacobia.”

Back in the city, nobody ever just took me on faith. I felt selfish, suddenly, for even thinking about diamonds. We got out, Wade handing me a flashlight from the truck's glove box and taking one, himself.

No lights burned ahead as we made our way in on the shrub-lined avenue toward Melinda's, snow crunching under our boots. Monday romped happily.

“She's okay away from the house,” I said. The dog, I meant.

“Uh-huh.” Wade peered into the gloom.

No light blue pickup truck in the driveway, or any other vehicles. We went around back where the drapes at the windows were open: no movement within. A propane tank was neatly hidden by a screen of wooden lattice; no mess of a wood fire for Melinda when she could have almost the same thing by pushing a button.

In the garden, straw mulch on perennial beds resembled huge nests blanketed in snow; I flashed momentarily on that bit of chair stuffing at home in the parlor. Then I moved on, admiring Melinda's handiwork in spite of myself.

Big stone urns stood at either side of a flagstone path; in a nice touch, Melinda had filled the urns with evergreens and rose canes, the red rose hips like blood-colored Bing cherries frozen to the foliage. Touches of snow frosted the greens and the urn rims artfully.

“Here,” Wade called quietly as Monday nosed beside me.

The footprints Ellie had seen earlier were obliterated now by back-and-forth tracks: Melinda, no doubt, doing little outdoor chores. As Ellie said, the woman could work like a horse when she wanted to.

The dog vanished ahead of us. I switched my flashlight on, followed its beam past a snow-topped grape arbor to the door of a low shed. A scattering of what looked like cigarette ash lay in the snow by the corner of the shed, whose wooden door stood open an inch.

I pushed the shed door wide, aimed the flash at the threshold to keep from tripping over it. Scents of cedar mulch, top-soil, and fertilizer came from within. The light picked out a patch of something dark glistening on the floor.

Blood. “What the hell?” a voice muttered thickly.

I swung the flashlight.

Wincing at the glare, Bob Arnold sat up unsteadily among a heap of broken clay pots. Some bags of potting soil, vermiculite, and peat moss had fallen around him. He put his hand to his head; it came away red.

“Wade!” The overhead lights snapped on, dazzling me. But I could still see the big purple split in Bob's scalp.

A car started smoothly, far down the road. The sound of the engine faded as I just stood there, struggling to understand.

But then I got it. “Sit there,” I told Bob. “Just sit there, and we'll get you some help.”

“Don't need…” He tried to get up, sat down hard again. “Jesus.”

“Hey.” Wade appeared, crouched briefly. A small hand axe of the type used to split kindling lay by Bob's feet, its sharp edge bloody.

A car pulled up out front; an instant later Melinda appeared, dressed to the nines: black pants suit, sequined bag, impractical shoes. No coat, of course. “What is going on?”
she demanded, flinging her scarf back. “I come home, find you tramping around my…”

Then she saw Bob. “I’ll call an ambulance,” she said.

“Thought I’d drive around once more,” Bob muttered, touching his head again. Blood slicked his fingers. “Give it a last once-over for the night, before I…”

That was Bob: his town, his duty. “Saw a light back here, moving around. Parked down the road a ways, not to spook someone, burglar or something.”

He shook his head to try to clear it. Then he coughed, a thickly bubbling sound that should have alerted me. Melinda came back. “They're coming. I told them to get Victor, too.”

Bob coughed again, working at it. Which didn't make sense. The head wound looked ugly, but—

“I’ll go wave them in,” Wade said. “Hang in there, buddy.”

Bob's face was ashen and he couldn't keep still. “Just wait, okay?” I told him. “You need to get checked out before you…”

An anxious expression appeared in his eyes as he tried struggling up again. A sudden gout of red appeared on his jacket front. His look went gently thoughtful, as if something interesting had occurred to him and he needed to ponder it.

I ripped his jacket open. The head wound wasn't the problem. Bunching my gloves into a ball I pressed them to the slit pulsing steadily beside his breastbone.

The gloves soaked through. His eyelids fluttered. “How's it going?”

“Fine. It's going fine,” I lied. “You're going to be okay, Bob.”

But he wasn't fooled. Me either, really. This was the bad thing, right here and now, and it was going so fast.

He was going so fast.

“Bob, listen to me. Do you remember when I first came here? And you all thought I would last about six months?”

The corners of his mouth turned up. “Summer complaint…”

It's what downeast Mainers call people who stick around only in fine weather. I spoke hurriedly, as if the rush of my words could do what pressure to the wound had not. “But I made it a lot longer, and that's what you'll do, too.”

He regarded me mildly. “You're a good egg,” he whispered.

Then his lips moved with no sound at all: “Take care of them.”

“Bob?” I pressed harder on his chest. “Oh, please.”

A small red bubble appeared in his left nostril. Another.

Terror seized me. “Bob, don't. Please, you have to…”

Live, I was going to say. Be with us.

Breathe.

Stay.

Chapter 8

W
hen the ambulance had departed, its siren
screaming uselessly, I went out behind the shed and vomited, trembling with grief and fury. Wade held my head, wiped my mouth with clean snow, listened to me rage until I was only weeping with simple sorrow.

And then I couldn't even do that anymore. My eyes felt like hot stones, matching the larger one beating painfully in the center of my chest. Across the dark bay, the blur of lights on Campobello condensed into bright sharp points.

Wade held his hand out. After a moment I took it and stood up. Suddenly I remembered Monday, looked around in fright. “Where is she?”

“I put her in the truck. Come on, now. You're soaked through.”

“So what?” I asked bitterly, wanting to hurt someone.

But he only drew me against him, preventing me from sinking back down into the snow and just sitting there.

Sitting until I froze.

“I called George. Ellie's going over to Clarissa's,” he said as we drove back through town.

The Christmas lights were all still on in the shop windows, full of fake cheer: reindeer with hard, sharp hooves
poised ready to batter and smash, Santas with sly, evil grins on their garish plastic faces.

“Right,” I said dully. “I’ll call Victor later, ask him to let us know when…” My throat closed.

“… when they know something,” I finished.

Wade nodded, pulled up in front of the house. “I’m going to drop you off, okay? George and I are going to go back and get Bob's car. And Timmy Rutherford—”

Timmy, the other full-time cop in Eastport. Soon to be the only.

“—Timmy's going to meet us, have a look around. Get the weapon bagged up and so on. Talk to Melinda.”

The other houses on the street had their late-night lights on: one upstairs window or the glow of a television from a darkened room, as people got ready for bed. Innocent people who didn't know how a dying man's eyes looked, how his breath felt as it rushed out onto your lips.

Softly. Lips salty with tears and blood. “Jake,” Wade said.

I turned. “It's okay, you go.” Monday leaned hard against me, her heart beating strongly under her ribs, and I was crying again.

“Jake, what we did back there.”

There was blood under his fingernails, dried droplets in pockmarks on his cheek. I brushed at it and it fell away in crumbs.

“What we did, it'll make the difference,” Wade told me. “Or not.”

It wouldn't. How could it? We had done CPR until the ambulance arrived, then let the EMTs take over.

“But for you, it's one-foot-in-front-of-the-other time.”

Monday wriggled against me: alive, alive-o.

“And thinking time.”

I shook my head: not at him, because we'd both heard that car starting down the road from Melinda's. That was what Wade meant. But what I was thinking about it—the
other thing I was thinking, besides that Bob's attacker had almost certainly been in that car—couldn't be true.

“Wade,” I began softly, and then it washed over me:

Sitting in a lean-to built by an explosion of my father's greed and foolishness, watching flaming pieces of my life float down out of a clear, blue sky. And knowing, as much as a three-year-old child can know anything: that she was gone.

She was, too. My mother's body was found in the ruins. But: a car starting out in the street just after an explosion so strong it broke windows for blocks around.

Why would anyone, at that moment, be driving away?

I forced my mind back to the here and now. “You got an IOU from Sam for just that little bit of money you lent him.”

“Keeps a fellow from having to depend on memory, is all.”

“But if a guy came regularly for money, you gave it, never asked for an IOU. Or kept a record. What would you call that?”

His answer was swift: “Blackmail.”

Of course.

Of course it had been.

By seven the
next morning Bob Arnold had been stabilized in the hospital in Calais, then airlifted to the thoracic trauma center in Portland, where he was still in surgery for a torn pulmonary artery.