Wreck the Halls (3 page)

Winter sunlight slanted in through the high, bare windows, making the maple wainscoting glow with the dark-orange leaf color it had captured over decades of Maine autumns. This winter I was planning to rehabilitate all those windows, a project that meant taking off the side trim and pulling out the sashes.

Thus I’d also purchased a hollow screw extractor, since taking off the side trim otherwise would mean prying it, which was guaranteed to break it. But with the hollow screw extractor you can core out a fastener—a nail, say, or a stubborn wood screw—along with the wood around it. Then you simply coat the hole with white glue, tap in the right-sized, similarly glue-coated wooden dowel, and voilà!

Or viola, as my son Sam insists on pronouncing it; he's dyslexic and has decided to believe that letter-transposition is hilarious. Also as used here the term simply is subject to interpretation; depending upon how deeply and inextricably I have gotten myself into a project, muffled shrieking might actually translate it rather nicely.

The last thing out of the box was a shavehook, which is a handle to which you can attach a variety of odd-shaped blades. I won’t go into the whole hideous process of window
repair, now; suffice it to say that even with new tools, by the time I finished I’d be looking around hopefully for a blade shaped like my wrists.

What with the price of heating oil, though, it was fix the windows or just start burning the furniture in the fireplace. And the tools did make me feel very cheerful and optimistic, as they always do right up until the moment when I begin using them.

As a test run I meant to redo the cellar steps with them; chilly as it was, the kitchen had a spare, New England-ish charm I didn’t want to ruin. But I couldn’t make the cellar steps look worse. Or the hall, now littered with packing material and the box the tools had come in.

While I dealt with that, my black Labrador, Monday, wandered in and began nosing the stuff unhappily; lately she’d been acting as if anything new in the house was worrisome. “Hey, what's the matter, girl?”

I bent to smooth her ears and she leaned against me, sighing gustily and letting her glossy head rest in my hands as if the weight of the world lay on her shoulders. “Poor baby. Sam's coming home.”

Sam was due any minute, in fact, for winter break from his first year in college. Hearing this, Monday brightened and followed me back to the kitchen where to welcome him home I began fixing Sam's favorite meal: New England boiled dinner.

As I worked, I tried erasing Merle Carmody from my mind, though the sight of a whole head of cabbage was unhelpful in this regard. And as for the big, red chunk of brine-dripping corned beef, I would as soon not discuss it. But I’d gotten it simmering—slipping tidbits to a still-oddly subdued Monday while averting my eyes from the awful spectacle of a pile of beet peelings, trickling red—by around noon.

Which was when I heard my ex-husband's footsteps on the porch. This as an omen was like Typhoid Mary phoning
to say she’d be stopping by for a cup of tea, only instead of a disease he usually brought junk he’d decided he wanted to get rid of, then dumped on me. Moments later he came in without even a courtesy knock, carrying an old blanket, a tea kettle (no spout), and some ancient venetian blinds.

Well, Monday could use the blanket. Quickly I put away the last piece of broccoli quiche, which I had taken out of the refrigerator for my own lunch. My ex-husband (his name, appropriately enough, is Victor) believes I am barely capable of constructing peanut-butter sandwiches, and anytime a culinary creation of mine suggests otherwise he wants to eat the evidence. Once he has done so he pretends it was never there in the first place, confirming his original impression.

This—confirming his original impressions, I mean—is Victor's design for living.

“What's all this I hear about you finding a body?” he demanded as he opened my refrigerator, located the quiche, and devoured it in a few bites. Next he looked hopefully around for coffee, apparently in the belief that his eager hand-rubbing was somehow attractive.

I filled the coffeemaker, since although I am perfectly capable of having (and winning) a knock-down, drag-out fight with Victor anytime you care to name, I like to pick my moments.

“Why were you visiting a murderess, anyway?” he wanted to know as he accepted a fresh cup minutes later.

I’d given him the short version, leaving out the inflammatory parts such as my decision to investigate the meat-counter contents. Victor likes to think he controls my behavior as if I were a sock puppet: anything he wouldn’t do, I shouldn’t, either. But when I got to the part about visiting the wife of a known wife beater, he went all huffy on me anyway.

“Why, that could be extremely unsafe, Jacobia. Don’t you know that?”

He frowned, wagging an admonishing finger at me, and of course I did not chop the offending digit off with the shavehook. Back when he was married to me, worrying about my safety was not exactly a daily point on Victor's to-do list. But now that it had become absolutely no business of his, he was rabid about it.

“Not that I’d expect you to realize the danger,” he continued. “You have to admit, Jacobia, that you don’t always use very good judgment.”

Which was a valid criticism. Proof positive: I’d married him. “First of all, the term murderess is so last century, Victor. Murder is getting to be a gender-neutral activity these days. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

I edged back into the hallway where my tools were; handling them, knowing that I was able to use them, felt calming to me. “Anyway, what did you want?”

Crouching, I began scraping paint off the top cellar step, since keeping my hands busy stopped them from moving toward Victor's throat. Next I would sand the risers down to the bare wood, a tedious chore. But next spring that cellar would be damp again due to its nifty, nineteenth-century flood-preventing feature: French drains.

“Oh, nothing,” Victor said unconvincingly.

Don’t get me started on French drains, which are constantly open to let any possible flooding out of the cellar but are also effective at letting humidity back in, and have I mentioned that Eastport is on an island? So if I didn’t sand now to get the damp-rotted wood right down to a new surface, the paint job I had planned would start peeling off like dime-store fingernail polish twenty minutes after I applied it.

“I don’t see the point of your doing that yourself,” Victor commented as I rubbed at the step. “Why not get a man?”

Nobly, I refrained from pointing out to him that there was a man sitting just about three feet from me, right that
very minute. Instead I muttered something about him walking east until his hat floated, but he didn’t hear me.

Actually, I enjoy painting. It's the prep work I can do without, but the house can’t. Old Maine houses suck up prep work almost as fast as the other thing they most like consuming, which is money.

“We visited Faye Anne,” I said—if I didn’t talk, Victor was going to, which could lead to another murder—“because it's Christmastime.”

“So?” He sipped coffee, giving me a view of his jawline; over the past few years it had been getting just the tiniest bit less taut. His dark, curly hair had a few threads of grey in it, too, and he wore glasses, peering owlishly through them with thick-lashed hazel eyes. He was, it occurred to me suddenly, nearly forty years old.

“So,” I replied, buoyed by the surge of mean glee this realization produced, “people visit each other around this time. Eat cookies, sing carols, exchange little gifts. You know—holiday cheer.”

“Oh.” He looked puzzled. Victor's idea of holiday cheer is the French Riviera. But to be fair, his job as a neurosurgeon probably accounts for this; people's brain ailments occur with so little regard for the calendar that for years, the only way he knew it was Christmas was by the slices of processed turkey floating in yellow gravy in the hospital cafeteria.

Now he had abandoned his big-city medical career and followed me to Eastport, where he had started a trauma clinic. He claimed it was to be near Sam but I was sure what he really wanted was to drive me crazy, so crazy that in the end my own brain would become damaged and I would develop one of those ailments.

“There was another reason we visited Faye Anne,” I added. “A few days ago, she told Ellie she thought someone was stalking her.”

I hesitated saying this, not wanting to provoke more critical comment. Still, it troubled me: such an unlikely coincidence. And Victor, although I hated admitting it, could be perceptive; years of picking legitimate symptoms from masses of trivial, poorly organized complaints had made him uncannily sensitive to the alarm bells in people's stories.

And to the false notes. I dug the shavehook into a paint blob and was rewarded by the removal of half a dozen more old paint molecules. This wasn’t working the way I’d hoped.

“Which was silly,” I went on. “Who’d stalk Faye Anne? Especially here, where just about everyone knows where you are and what you’re doing.”

In Eastport the back-fence telegraph is so effective that if you cut your finger at one end of town, someone will get out the Band-Aids and Mercurochrome for you at the other. “I mean, why follow someone if you already know where they’re going?”

No answer. I scraped some more. From his expression I half expected Victor to begin scolding again. But then as I’d hoped he clicked into diagnostic mode, instead.

“People don’t usually think they’re being stalked when they’re not,” he pronounced. “Unless it's a symptom of something. A paranoid delusion, maybe.”

And there it was, the connection I’d been groping for, the thing that made Faye Anne's funny feeling of being watched and Merle's murder seem like parts of a single event. I was about to ask Victor if paranoia could get worse so suddenly that a person could become violent, possibly without warning, and attack someone. But before I could, something else I’d said reminded him of something about him.

“You know, Jacobia, there was something I meant to ask you. I want…”

Well, of course he did. When he doesn’t want something it's time to put the paddles to his chest, give his heart a little
electrical wake-up call. Because if his heart is beating, Victor wants something, and the person he wants it from almost always turns out to be me.

“What?” I put the scraper down. At this rate I would be finished with the cellar steps and ready to start on the kitchen windows in fifty years.

Victor started to ask whatever favor he’d come angling for; this, I saw now, was why he had paid his visit in the first place. But just then my actual, current husband came in: Wade Sorenson.

“Hey, Victor,” Wade said genially, stomping snow from his boots. Tugging his wool cap off, he brushed a big hand over his wiry, blond hair. Only a faint darkening around his pale-grey eyes betrayed that Victor at that moment was about as welcome as a case of eczema.

But that was Wade: so decent, I wondered sometimes what planet the man had come from. Broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, he looked like a cross between a stunt pilot and a rocket scientist, with maybe a dash of rodeo cowboy thrown in for good measure: square jaw, leathered skin. Dropping his jacket, he drew me into his arms and kissed me thoroughly.

“Looks like whiskey, tastes like wine,” he remarked appreciatively. Whereupon I tottered to a kitchen chair and sat; he has this effect on me.

“Heard you and Ellie ran into some trouble,” he said, pulling a bottle of Sea Dog ale from the refrigerator. He’d been out for three days on a freighter that was having navigation problems off the coast of Nova Scotia. “In,” he added, tipping the bottle up, “Merle's shop?”

As Eastport's harbor pilot, Wade guided big vessels in through the tricky tides, ledges, and currents of Passamaquoddy Bay. People in town swore Wade could dock a battleship in a child's wading pool. But his skill at
troubleshooting the delicate equipment was becoming known, too, up and down the Maine coast.

“Yeah,” I answered. “It was a mess.”

More repair jobs spelled more paying work for Wade but they also meant he was away more nights. Now the clean smell of him—fresh air, lanolin hand balm for the cold weather, lime shaving soap—was making my knees weak.

Well, that and the kissing business. “They grabbed Faye Anne up?”

So the story was already spreading. “She's at the hospital,” I said, “getting checked out. After that I guess they’ll put her in a cell at the Machias courthouse while they get the lynching party together.”

Not that anyone was likely to get lynched for killing Merle. But black humor was all I could muster at the memory of Faye Anne being led brokenly out of her kitchen. Mercifully, they had put a coat over her shoulders and shoes on her feet.

“I’ve never seen anybody look so scared in my life,” I said.

“You all right?” Wade set his ale down and went to the cabinet where we kept the frequently used tools. His question about my welfare was seriously meant, but he wasn’t going to make a big deal of it in front of Victor. Also, like most Eastport men Wade tended to focus first on problems he could do something about. And he hadn’t missed my glance of despair at those cellar steps.

“I guess I’m okay,” I said. “Compared to Merle, anyway.” I got up and began washing my hands again, not quite knowing why.

Victor snorted as he peered past Wade into the crowded tool cabinet, jammed with items that were of no obvious immediate use: proof, to his mind, of my woefully deficient housekeeping habits. Never mind that if he’d quit dumping junk on me, they wouldn’t have been so woeful.

Besides, in an old house you never know when the only thing standing between you and disaster will be a ten-pound mallet, a massive pipe wrench, and a roll of duct tape. And in a real emergency—one having anything to do with any hot-water radiators, for example—mostly you will want that duct tape.

“I told her,” Victor piped up virtuously now. “I said she shouldn’t socialize with people who get themselves into bad situations, and…”

Wade turned slowly and fixed Victor in his mild, pale-grey gaze, at which Victor's mouth snapped shut so fast, it was a wonder all his fillings didn’t crack.