Wreck the Halls (32 page)

“She was under a long time?” George asked quietly.

“We don't know. Last we saw her was a couple of hours ago,” I said.

“But that nylon line is long.” Ellie pointed at the pilings. “If you climbed, you could stay above water a while. And the way the wharf's built, there are air pockets up under there.”

Her hope infected me: those birds’ nests, and the feral cats… “She's right. And as the water rose, maybe you could push your face up into…”

Wade's voice broke in flatly. “It would work till you passed out from the cold, and fell in anyway.”

Ben and Peter kept on: chest compressions and respirations. “You getting a pulse with that?” Ben managed.

With the chest compressions, he meant; he knew what he was doing. I did, too. So I knew neither one could have faked the effort without the other noticing. Peter had looked legitimately frantic when he arrived, and Melinda was Ben's sister; he owed his life to her. Yet one of them, I thought, must have been lying.

Lying to us all along. “Yeah,” Peter replied, pausing to place his fingers on Melinda's neck. They resumed.

But with no result, and as I watched I remembered also what Victor had said about CPR administered outside of a hospital: how few people survive it.

The ambulance screamed up. “Bring a tank,” Wade called to the two fellows getting out. Of oxygen, he meant, and they did, scrambling down with a small green cylinder and a mask to go with it.

Wade and George went to get the stretcher for them, for the transport to the hospital. But I had a bad feeling. “It's been too long.” My eyes prickled with tears. The whole long night, all the frights and surprises, all come to this:

A motionless woman, cold on the beach, with a half-dozen people now working urgently—and, I believed, uselessly—to save her life.

“He did it,” Willetta repeated bitterly, coming up to me. “He drugged her. That's how he got her there in the first place.”

“One… two… three,” the ambulance fellows said, lifting Melinda onto the stretcher.

“You wait,” Willetta went on. “There'll be drugs in her system, and if they search his house—let's see if he lets them do that—I bet they'll find them there, too. I know they will. You just wait.”

I was still wearing wet clothes and my legs felt as if tiny teeth were biting into them. The guys with the stretcher had gotten nearly to the ambulance doors.

“I’ve got to get dry stuff on,” I began, and then it happened: from the stretcher came a banshee shriek as Melinda's body jerked half-upright.

The motion surprised the paramedics, throwing them off-balance; the wheeled gurney teetered and bounced back down to the rocky beach, miraculously not overturning. But that wasn't the real miracle.

Melinda's eyes opened. “You!” she wailed, her arm moving unsteadily as she tried to point. But she was shaking too hard from the cold and all that she had been through.

“You,” she repeated, her voice gargly with inhaled water and with the effects of who knew what else: a botched drug overdose?

Well, Melinda knew, actually, and for a moment it seemed she would say. Her finger aimed uncertainly at one and then another of us, frozen on the beach.

Meanwhile the frazzled ambulance guys were trying to untangle and refasten the stretcher's fallen chest strap. To do so, they were having to cut the half-frozen sweater off Melinda's body and suddenly they succeeded, exposing what lay beneath the sodden fabric.

Whereupon one mystery, at least, was solved:

The mystery of how Melinda had survived, not just now
but all this winter, prancing around as if it were the middle of May. From beneath the sweater shone a slick, bright-orange skin with a glinting metal zip front.

No one had known her secret; not us, and certainly not her attempted killer. But now…

It was an orange neoprene bodysuit.

Her voice trilled in memory: I just adore the cold…

“You!” Melinda cried, pointing around wildly. “You… you ruined my scarf!”

Chapter 11

W
e looked at each other. Which one of us was she
accusing?

“Melinda,” I began. But it was too late.

Her hands clenched convulsively; her eyes rolled up.

“Go!” Ben snarled at the ambulance fellows.

They went.

“
Fine,” Peter Christie
said tightly half an hour later.

It was not what I, had I been an attorney would have advised. But Willetta kept nagging at him, accusing him, and finally he turned to Timmy Rutherford.

“Go look right now. I give you permission. Here's the key.”

To his own house, he meant. Ben and Mickey Jean had gone home to get Ben some dry clothes, and then to the hospital; the rest of us were in my kitchen: drinking hot coffee and trying to get ourselves back to normal.

Which under the circumstances wasn't going to happen soon, but hope springs eternal. I swallowed more of the warming liquid, waiting for it to penetrate the cold, hard lump at the center of my chest.

But it wouldn't.

“What are you waiting for?” Willetta demanded. “I told you what happened. He drugged her and tried to kill her.”

Maybe so, but he wasn't acting as if he had. I wished desperately that Willetta would go home.

She wasn't going to, though: not until she got what she wanted. “So go look” she insisted. “You'll see.”

“You have my permission. I want this talk stopped,” Peter told Tim Rutherford for the third time. “Please do it now.”

Tim was tall, dark haired, and well over twenty years old, a good boy but hardly experienced at police work. Wearing his blue officer's uniform with cuffs, radio, and sidearm clipped to his utility belt, he looked like a kid who'd gotten the whole kit and kaboodle as an early Christmas present.

“Tim…” I began as he touched a fresh bruise on his cheek. Bob Arnold wouldn't like this, and I was sure Clarissa would disapprove even more strongly. “Tim, you should get advice. And a search warrant, just to keep it all on the up-and-up.” A young officer, verbal permission, emotional circumstances… “If only to cover yourself,” I finished, not adding the other part: anything wrong with a search could screw up evidence it uncovered.

“No!” Willetta objected. “That'll give him time to get rid of it, waiting for all that.”

“Come on.” Peter headed for the door. “Tim, you come with me. I’m going to stand there—doing nothing, saying nothing,” he added with a hard look at Willetta, “while you come and find all these deadly drugs I’m supposed to be hiding.”

Tim was in over his head and he knew it. This kind of thing was not his department when Bob was around.

But Bob wasn't around. He was on a respirator, fighting for his life. No one was yet saying aloud that it was over, but…

Tim sighed. “Okay, I’m going to go and check out his
place. For all I know,” he added disgustedly, “somebody's hidin’ over there, waitin’ for him.”

At this, Peter looked vindicated.

“Then I’ve got a whole slew of paperwork to do,” Tim went on. “A lot of people to talk to—state cops, district attorney, I don't know what-all. But I guess I will find out what-all, and I am going to do it, whatever it is, and when I am finished I expect all of you to be available, if I have any questions. Understand?”

We all nodded solemnly.

“All right, then,” Tim said: over his head, indeed, but he was swimming capably, and he would reach dry land if he had anything to do with it.

“So that's it,” Ellie said when Tim and Peter had gone. George poured another cup of coffee; Wade ate some fruitcake, wincing as he bit into a piece of candied citron. “All this, and still we don't know any more than we did when we started.”

On Monday's dog bed, the dog and cat lay curled together, asleep. But at some sound I couldn't hear Monday sat up suddenly and gazed around the kitchen suspiciously before settling again.

The cat didn't budge. So much for its mousing abilities. Being Victor's animal, it probably hired other cats to catch mice for it.

“And,” I added to Willetta, “I wouldn't get my hopes up for the results of this house-searching expedition Tim Rutherford has gone on. Guys holding contraband don't usually invite cops inside to search for it, in my admittedly limited experience.”

“You'll see,” Willetta repeated stubbornly. “It'll be there.”

Then we all just sort of stewed in our misery for a while. I called Portland to see how Bob was doing now, and he was still critical. Then I called the Calais hospital about Melinda, and she was critical, too.

One bout of consciousness, apparently, did not a recovery make. It would be touch and go for Melinda, the nurse in the ICU informed me gently, for at least a few hours, maybe more.

Which did not cheer me, or Ellie, either. All our choices, which had seemed so reasonable at the time, had gotten us here.

Maybe, I thought with a sinking heart, I should just go down in the basement with the mouse. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Ellie told me reluctantly, joining George in the hall.

But as I opened the door and switched on the porch light Tim Rutherford was getting out of his car. He came to the steps and looked up at us, framed in the light.

Holding a plastic bag. In it: small glass vials, glassine packets. A half-dozen syringes with needles capped in pastel plastic. Some bottles of capsules. Peering through the darkness I spotted Peter in the squad car's backseat. He was in custody.

“I told you so,” Willetta breathed, gratified. “Didn't I? Didn't I tell you?”

“Shut up, Willetta,” Wade said. “Tim, what's the story?”

Tim shrugged. “Well, he let me in. I looked around. Didn't find anything. ’Course I couldn't do a real search, every nook and cranny.”

Yet here the stuff was…. “So I asked myself where would I hide something,” Tim went on, “not particularly thinking anyone was going to look? But still wanting it out of sight?” He lifted the bag. “In the freezer. Down at the bottom of a bowl of ice cubes.” In the squad car, Peter Christie gazed straight ahead. “Miss Abrams,” Tim told us, “was right.”

“Did you find any photographs of me?” Willetta demanded.

The ones she claimed Peter had taken of her, drugged. “No, ma'am,” Tim replied. “Nothing like that.”

The photographs hadn't been among the things Peter's cleaning lady had turned over to us, either. Maybe he hid his current activities better than evidence of his historical ones. Willetta seemed to think so:

“You will,” she predicted grimly. “And I’d better not hear about anyone else seeing them, you got that?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he gulped startledly.

She glanced at her wristwatch. “Hell, it's nearly time for the night shift. I’ve got to get to work or I’ll be out of a job on top of everything else.” She stalked to her own car, got in, and roared away, the little vehicle backfiring down the street.

I took Tim aside as her taillights vanished around the corner. “Listen, did the Duddy's raid ever happen? And if it did… why now, particularly? Any reason?”

He looked surprised. “Oh, yeah. Some woman phoned in an anonymous tip on the state hotline. How'd you think I got this?” He touched his cheek. “I got there late on account of what happened to Bob, but they saved some for me. Gave us a battle, some of those guys. Should've seen the stuff they had there. But it happened, all right. And now him,” Tim added in disgust, glancing back at his squad car. “Never rains but it pours.”

“That's that, then,” George said when Tim had gone. Victim saved, culprit nabbed, back to our regular programming. But:

“I don't think so,” Ellie said. She took George's arm, went down the steps with him. “Real peace might be a ways off, yet.”

“Not for me,” I retorted. “I’m going to sleep. And I plan to stay that way for at least twelve hours.”

Which was a lovely plan, and worked out about as well as all such plans do.

• • •

“All right, now,”
I began very soon after I finally got upstairs. I was going over my mental list. My other mental list.

Flannel nightgown, chenille bed jacket, thick cotton socks, cup of hot milk: check.

Husband no longer quite so rippingly angry: check.

Scraped knees bandaged, brandy in the hot milk—plenty of brandy, actually: double check.

Wade shoved a pillow behind him and opened his copy of Working Waterfront, patting my leg absently. “Warm enough?”

“After what I’ve been through I may never be warm enough again,” I told him. All my bones still felt like iced steel rods; I had the socks on not so much because they helped, but so my feet wouldn't freeze poor Wade to death. “C’mere, dog.”

Monday hopped gratefully onto the bed and settled between us, taking up way too much room as usual but radiating toasty heat. I wondered fleetingly where the cat was as I edged toward Wade, with the dog in what would have been my lap and my head on Wade's shoulder. “Mmm.”

“There you go,” Wade agreed, and turned a page. Sam was in bed, too, and the cat had probably chosen the top of the refrigerator for a perch. Monday began snoring. God rest ye merry gentlemen. And women.

Only I couldn't. “Wade. Remember how Monday got so upset about that mouse, when we didn't even know it was there?”

“Mm-hmm. Smelled it, probably.”

“That's what I thought, too. It must still smell like mouse to her, though, in that parlor. Wouldn't you expect?”

He curved his big arm around my shoulders, still reading. “Guess so.”

“But she's not freaked out anymore. I think…”

From the kitchen came the thump! of the cat's feet hitting the floor. Monday's ears pricked up, even in her sleep.

“And have you ever known a dog to be scared of a smell?” I went on. “I haven't. I’m wondering if what bothered her was that she heard it.”

Wade put his newspaper down patiently and turned to me. “So?”

“So what I still can't figure out is Kenty Dalrymple. She said she went over to the Carmody house after Faye Anne got home and that everything was fine.”

“And that is important because… ?”

“Because she was lying. I don't think she went over to Faye Anne's at all, so why say she did? And she never mentioned seeing me and Ellie with Peter, the night we found the diary at Faye Anne's. Or Ben and Mickey Jean, though they've admitted they were at the Carmody house, the night of Merle's murder.”