Wreck the Halls (24 page)

Sam wasn't home; Wade, either. Grimly, I found another length of aluminum gutter and a glass piece in the cellar. The glass cutter and rivet gun were in the hall cabinet.

“And she's right, I can't prove she's done anything wrong here, or that Ben has,” I fumed as I laid the piece of glass on the kitchen table and prepared to deal with it; otherwise, the skunk that had exited voluntarily would be back, too.

Cellar windows break so often around here—blown branches, stray softballs, a stone caught up and thrown randomly by a lawnmower—that I have made a cardboard template for cutting out new glass pieces for them. Now I positioned the template on the glass and etched a line along it with the glass cutter, then used a metal straightedge to make the cut. Tapping the glass broke the piece away cleanly.

“When's she coming?” I asked, examining the rivet gun.

What I wanted was a wrecking ball. “When's who coming?” Ellie asked, glancing through the envelopes from the mailbox.

A rivet gun is among the simplest tools to load and operate, but I don't do it every day. I squeezed the handle. A flattened rivet should have popped out.

The handle jammed. “Peter's cleaning lady, when's she coming?”

Because something hooked everything together: Merle's murder, his blackmail of Mickey Jean, the attack on Bob Arnold, and the fact that it had happened out at Melinda's place. And Melinda, who'd tried to give Ben an alibi, was not only Ben's sister, she was also Peter Christie's new
girlfriend. It was at once too much information, and not enough.

I squeezed the handle on the rivet gun again, to no avail. “Because when she does come she might tell us something that—”

Ellie tossed a brown manila envelope on the table, not taking her eyes from the pages she had removed from it. “She's been here.”

“What?” I waved the crippled tool. “Why didn't you say so?”

Suddenly that mental hardware store list of mine looked so long, I could've looped it into a hangman's noose and slung it over a rafter, and… But just then Sam came in, looking preoccupied, took the rivet gun from my hand. “Sam,” I began impatiently, “why don't you let me—”

“Be right back,” he replied, putting down a small cardboard box.

“Ellie, what did she—”

“Wow,” she said, turning another page as Sam returned with a tiny screwdriver. The rivet gun fell apart, into two halves. From its innards, a small piece of shiny metal dropped.

“I think a piece of rivet got stuck in there,” my son diagnosed as he put the tool back together and handed it to me.

“Thank you. Ellie, please tell me what's got you so—”

Riveted, I was about to say, but of course I didn't. I wasn't even sure how she'd gotten Peter's cleaning woman to cooperate, and so fast.

But she had. And as it turned out, Peter Christie—computer and copying machine repairman extraordinaire—was even more ego-bound than Victor. He didn't only keep phone numbers of his conquests. He kept…

“Paydirt,” Ellie said.

• • •

“I can't believe
this.”

In two hours we'd gone through five years of Peter's romantic life, boiled down to a scrapbook so detailed that you could've turned it into an X-rated movie just by flipping the pages.

“Seems like our boy isn't exactly a master of the gentle breakup,” I said. “Funny, he's had plenty of practice.” I washed my hands at the kitchen sink.

“That's because Peter was never the one doing the breaking,” Ellie said. “They all dumped him, every one of them. And did he ever get mad or what!”

The photocopied pages weren't as clear as the originals must have been but they were clear enough. And their contents were what had kept the cleaning lady working at that copier, I realized. It had started as a favor for Ellie, reluctantly done. But you could practically smell the outrage that had kept our secret-agent household worker going strong.

Snapshots, obviously taken surreptitiously: through windows. Some with a grainy, telephoto quality to them. Records of intimate trophies stolen from the laundry rooms of women's apartment houses. Transcripts of phone conversations, pieces of filched mail.

Our Peter had been busy, victimizing women who'd had the nerve to reject his attentions. Not that he'd always gotten away with it but he apparently regarded that as worth remembering, too:

Three typed records of criminal complaints had scrap-book pages of their own. All in southern California, by women whom he'd dated, for stalking-related offenses. And all dropped by the complainants. “Three women,” Ellie said as she turned the photocopied pages again. “And Faye Anne said—”

“Right, she was dropping him, too. I’m surprised there aren't pages here about her.”

“Maybe he just didn't have time. Or maybe—”

I was thinking the same: maybe we'd been on the wrong track with Ben and Mickey Jean. Maybe they had nothing to do with any of this; instead, maybe this time Peter had upped the ante in the how-dare-you-reject-me department:

“This kind of thing fits right in with somebody following us and peeking in your window,” Ellie said.

Sam had gone upstairs, taking a grateful Monday with him, leaving the cardboard box he'd brought home on the kitchen table. I squeezed the rivet gun handle and a properly mashed rivet popped out.

“But Mickey Jean Bunting complaining to the cops that she was stalked, too,” I told Ellie, “ doesn't really fit in.” From the pages, there was no evidence Peter had ever been in Lewiston. “Also, Mickey Jean doesn't fit the sweet-young-thing profile. The others were young?”

Ellie nodded. “Their birth dates are on the complaint sheets.”

I tried the rivet gun again: mash, pop.

Another perfect rivet. Satisfied, I began searching for the tin of glazing compound, which is goo that you use to stick a window pane into a window sash, and located it in one of the kitchen drawers under the shoe polish.

“Also, leaving aside the question of how he'd have set Faye Anne up, he's not a butcher,” I said. “Ben Devine is. You don't just whack the pieces of a carcass apart, you know. It takes knowledge of anatomy to cut something up without just mangling everything.”

Or to cut someone up. The instructions on the glazing compound tin said don't use it outdoors in freezing weather. But since coming to Eastport I’d developed a damn-the-torpedoes attitude toward instructions, or at least toward those that didn't mention any explosions.

These didn't. From the hall cabinet, I got out the final tool for my cellar window repair project: a blowtorch. “Oh, Lord,” Ellie said, seeing it.

Sam returned, spied the box he'd forgotten, then spied me. “Mom,” he said firmly, attempting to take the torch.

I didn't let him. “I’ll warm the metal window frame with the glass already in it. That'll warm the glass. Add glazing compound, and—”

“Right,” Sam said. “But before you do that, I’ll call the fire department and the insurance company. Don't you remember what's around that window frame on the inside?”

He put the blowtorch back in the cabinet and shut the door hard. “Wood. Old, dry, extremely flammable,” he emphasized, “wood.”

“Hmph. You never let me have any fun. How am I going to—”

“Jake,” Ellie interrupted. “I think we should call these women.”

“Fine. If they still live there, if they're home, if they'll talk to you…”

But she was already in the phone alcove, pushing the phone buttons for the number listed on the first complaint sheet. Suddenly I noticed again the box Sam had left on the table. “What's in there?”

He turned from the open refrigerator, a cloud passing over his face. “Uh, just something I want to show Dad.”

I waited, but he didn't say what. “A guy thing, huh?”

Sam looked guiltily apologetic, but said no more.

Just what I needed, half the men in the family conspiring against me, and Ellie wasn't listening to me, either. Grumpily I took the rivet gun out to work on the gutter: freezing my feet, pinching my fingers twice and wasting a dozen rivets before I got it right.

“There, damn it,” I told the repaired downspout, whose lowest length now curved out neatly over the snow. Which was when I noticed that the snow beneath it was at least a foot deep. When it melted, the new downspout would be dangling in thin air, a foot off the ground.

“Guess that's why God invented hacksaws,” said Victor.

I jumped. “Criminy, can't you wear a bell around your neck, or something?”

Then I saw the look on his face. “What's wrong? Is he…”

No news had been good news: Bob Arnold was hanging on, or someone would have called. But now…

Victor shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

I looked once more at my botched downspout repair, turned my back on it. Maybe in spring I would put a tiny rain barrel underneath it.

“Is that what you came over here to tell me? ‘Nothing yet’?”

“No.” He nudged snow with the toe of one shoe. “Jacobia, I really need help. I want you to talk to Joy for me. Tell her I’ve got marriage potential.”

I nearly laughed out loud. “Right. Potential for disaster.”

The pink insulation material George had stuffed around the earlier cellar-window repair fell backwards out of it; Sam's face showed down there briefly. Doing something; I couldn't see what.

“Where are they in the surgery?”

Bob Arnold's, I meant. I didn't want to talk about Victor's love life anymore. Reprising his romantic history was like rehashing a bad car accident; discussing his future was even worse, like planning a head-on collision.

“They got him off the bypass an hour ago. He's not good right now. But that doesn't mean much. It's the next twenty-four hours…” Victor spread his hands apart. “I won't lie to you. Anything can still happen.”

Yes, you will, I thought. You'll lie to me. Just not now when it might make me feel a little better. He was always doing this: bopping in with his needs or his junk.

He looked out across the yard where the snow of days
earlier was melting, slushy and grey. “I know what you think of me, you know,” he said.

Wow, there was an insight. I’d done everything but put it up on billboards.

“But has it ever occurred to you that I might change?”

“Nope.” I gathered the glass pieces from the broken cellar window and turned toward the house with them.

“Just not with you.”

“What?” I swung around at him. The sky was the pale, watery blue of a skim of ice, clouds scudding across it dark as bruises. Warmth in the air off the water made the afternoon smell falsely of spring.

A line of red blood crossed my palm; I’d cut myself. “What are you saying, Victor? That I wasn't woman enough for you?”

“No, damn it. That's not what I said. You always do that, make it about yourself.”

“Oh, you're one to talk. Jesus, you're so goddamned selfcentered you could suck yourself inside out.” I stalked toward the house.

“Wait.”

Something in his voice made me do it. But I kept my back turned. “Say what you've got to say and beat it, okay? I’m in no mood.”

“What I meant was, I’m sorry.”

A pulse in my fingertip pumped red drops onto the snow.

“I can't change the way I acted,” Victor said, “when we were married. But I’m sorry. And you're happy with Wade, now. So maybe it was for the best. Please, Jacobia. Joy's perfect for me. She doesn't take an ounce of—”

“Crap,” I finished harshly.

“Right.” A small, self-aware laugh. Sam came out onto the porch.

“It's not what you think,” Victor went on, “I didn't do anything to make her angry. It's Willetta, she's so furious at
men. All men. Like Joy said, she's had a bad breakup with somebody around here. I don't know who.”

Really, I thought suddenly, and wasn't that interesting? I wondered why it hadn't occurred to me before, as Victor went on:

“And now that she's around all the time, living there…”

“She's got Joy in a bad mood, too,” I concluded.

I knew the scene: bitterness like poison gas making everyone feel sickened. Making everyone's errors and missteps look like fatal flaws.

The way I was doing now. Oh, what the hell. “Did you really say I know how to kick butt in an emergency?”

Victor hesitated. Then: “Yeah. I did. Bob was lucky you were around. Not many victims survive CPR outside the hospital setting.”

Sam was still out there, waiting. “Hey, Dad,” he began.

“All right,” I told Victor. “I’ll try. I’m not promising anything.”

Sam went inside, having given up on waiting for his father. “Come in a minute,” I told Victor, “your son needs to talk to you about something.”

Ellie was just getting off the phone; meanwhile a yelp from the front parlor, followed by dog toenails on the hall stairs, told me that something had scared the dog all the way up them. “Sam, get Monday down here again, will you, please?” I called.

“The women,” Ellie said to me. “In California, the ones Peter had been dating.”

Sam looked at his father, at me, and at the box still on the kitchen table. “Look in there,” he told his father, then went to fetch Monday who was probably cowering in the attic.

“What about them?” I asked Ellie. “And what are they all doing at home in the middle of the day?” Three hours earlier, in California.

“One works nights. One's an aspiring actress. One's a secretary with a regular day job, but she has a bad cold.”

Victor pulled a chair out, sat and began examining the contents of the cardboard box.

“So? What's so amazing about these women?”

Ellie looked over her glasses at me, then pushed them back up on her nose with a little frown. “Each one says the complaint she made against Peter was a mistake. He's a fine man, wouldn't hurt a fly.”

“Uh-huh. And when you mentioned that this paragon of virtue was now living an entire continent away, what was their reaction?”

“Two sounded relieved. One started to cry. All three said they'd prefer not to be contacted again.”

Victor was pulling things out of the box: smaller boxes, mostly, and a few small items swathed in bubble wrap. Sam, I gathered, had already looked at all of them, then wrapped them again.

I heard Sam luring Monday down the stairs, inveigling her with biscuits and promises of safe passage past the dreaded parlor. “What did you put in the cellar window?” I asked as he snapped the dog's leash on.