Wreck the Halls (33 page)

Wade considered. “Kenty was a talker. Always had something to say. And usually what she said got said a few more times all over town,” he recalled.

“Exactly. So what if I’m right and she didn't see anything or go anywhere. What if she said it all only because she was hoping that I would repeat it. Told me she'd actually been at Faye Anne's, trying to make it all the more convincing. Hoping that it would get around, so somebody…”

“… wouldn't figure Kenty for a threat?”

“Right.” I shot up in bed. “It didn't work, of course. Only an inveterate gossip like poor Kenty could dream that it would. She didn't see anything, couldn't have, because of her bad eyes. And I never even told that silly story to anyone but Ellie. But someone didn't know all that. Besides, the important thing was, they'd seen her.”
⁷

Wade smoothed Monday's ears, his newspaper forgotten. “Or why kill her?”

“Yes. Someone believed Kenty was a witness. But then why did that someone go on to kill Merle at all? Because if
you were seen going in, would you proceed to commit murder?”

“No. That wouldn't make sense.”

“So it must've been someone coming out.” By now my head was starting to ache, but I couldn't quit. “So maybe Peter lied. He didn't just drop Faye Anne off that night. He went into the house with her, came out alone, and that's when he saw Kenty. If he didn't know her, he wouldn't have known she couldn't see him.”

“To set Faye Anne up, Peter used drugs?” Wade theorized. “Bought them on the Internet, just the way Sam and Tommy did, maybe? Or at Duddy's? Although I guess it doesn't matter where he got them, only that he had them.”

I thought some more. “And he planted the wine bottles to cover the drugs part. Locked the inside doors because he thought it was what Faye Anne would do. To make it look as if she'd been the only one there. That left him no other way out but the front door. Which put him in line with Kenty's front windows.”

“Later he followed you and Ellie,” Wade took up the theory again, “spied on you to keep up on what you might know, meanwhile stalking Willetta all the time. Bob catches him doing the same to Melinda, sneaking around her place. Surprises him, and Peter attacks him.”

“Then Melinda tries to dump him, again he loses what little control he's got left, and he tries to kill her, too.”

Wade frowned. “I guess it fits. If you're a wacko.”

“Peter is,” I said. “But there's still one more thing: it was late. So what made Kenty go to the window in the first place?”

Then I remembered something else. “Wade. Has anybody said whose it was? That thing Bob got hit with? The small hatchet…”

“Nope. Figured it was Melinda's. Though it was kind of
rough for a gardening tool, specially one of hers. She goes in more for fancy, high-end catalog merchandise.”

“You're right. No crummy tools in her garden shed.” That little hand axe with its shabby plastic handle and nicked blade would've gone to the trashman.

Wade picked up his newspaper again. “A night's sleep might do a lot to clear up all these…”

Questions. Suddenly they were swarming around me. If the hatchet wasn't Melinda's, that meant someone had brought it with them. Brought it for a reason. But…

Monday jerked up, hopped off the bed, and scurried down the stairs. Wuff, she said, and I heard the cat speak in reply.

Which was when I knew what had drawn Kenty Dalrymple to her window.

“
Ellie, Kenty didn't
see anything. She heard.”
⁷

If a pin dropped in Eastport…

“That's what came first, made her look out her window?”

And what doomed her. “Right. Which was when she saw…”

As usual, Ellie was right with me. Or one step ahead.

“… Someone leaving. Someone who'd been waiting, who knew or guessed Peter Christie would be with Faye Anne. But who didn't know Kenty couldn't see well enough to recognize him. Or her.”

“Had to be,” I agreed. “And that hand axe. Ellie, it's a firewood tool. Splitting kindling, that kind of thing. For a stove.”

“I’m putting my clothes on,” she said, “as we speak. Have you called the hospital yet?”

“Oh, Lord. No. I’ll do it, now. Pick me up?”

“Ten minutes.” She hung up.

“What's going on?” Sam appeared, rubbing his eyes. Wade was right behind him, already dressed.

“No time,” I said, hurriedly dialing the hospital number.

In the ICU, I got the night-shift nurse. Melinda, he said, had been heavily sedated; no change in her condition anticipated until at least morning. Ben had gone home to get some sleep, leaving Mickey Jean to sit with Melinda until the onset of the day shift when things could be expected to start happening.

I had a strong feeling things might start happening before then. But I didn't want Mickey Jean getting the same notion. If she did, she might do something to make them happen even sooner. So I said nothing to the nurse.

“Get rid of Merle,” I told Ellie fifteen minutes later as she drove us all up Route 1 as fast as she could. “Eliminate Kenty. And do in her rival for Ben's affections? Because Ben is devoted to Melinda, with good reason. More devoted, maybe, than Mickey Jean could stand. She just didn't count on Bob Arnold. But she adapted,” I added. “She turned the axe she'd brought to use on Melinda on Bob, when he showed up unexpectedly.”

“If he hadn't, she'd have killed Melinda right then?” Sam asked, jammed into the backseat with George and me.

“Possibly.” Ellie slowed for a big tree branch downed by the storm. “And Peter Christie, with his habit of stalking women, was the perfect fall guy.”

George harrumphed. “Pretty desperate measures, though. What makes you so sure it's her, anyway?”

I leaned past Sam to look at him. “The hand axe. It wasn't one of Melinda's tools, which means the killer brought it to use. And of everyone involved—who hasn't been attacked themselves, anyway—only Mickey Jean burns wood for heat. But we've been so focused on Ben, and then on Peter, that…”

Ellie pulled into the hospital driveway, its black macadam
slick and gleaming under the widely spaced sodium lights. At this hour a few cars stood near the employees’ door of the low yellow-brick structure. I spotted Willetta's little white Toyota among them, and Mickey Jean's old Honda, mud-and-sand-streaked like the rest.

A passing orderly saw us and came to the glass front doors to let us in. The lobby desk was deserted, presided over by an artificial tabletop Christmas tree hung with miniature Santas. We hurried to the ICU waiting area.

No Mickey Jean. “Excuse me—”

The ICU was a large, dimly lit ward room with six cur-tained-off beds. At the far end of it, another door to the corridor outside was topped by a glowing EXIT sign. The curtains around the occupied beds were mostly drawn, the volume on the beeping of the cardiac monitors muted. The nurse at the desk looked up at us, a small frown creasing her brow. It was definitely not visiting hours.

“Sorry about this, but we need to see Mickey Jean Bunting. She's with Melinda Devine?”

The nurse's face cleared. “Oh, yes. Melinda is doing much better. Mickey Jean's in there now, I think.”

“What're you doing here?” Mickey Jean's rough voice fractured the hush.

“Shh, keep it down.” I glanced at the nurse, whose glance was a warning: Quiet!

“What you're doing is my big question. Or maybe what you're going to do the first chance you get to try it,” I told Mickey Jean.

Her look flattened. “What are you—”

“Talking about?” I finished impatiently for her. From the corner of my eye I could see Wade and George out in the visitors’ waiting area, magazines and other light reading material on the low table between them.

“You wanted Merle dead,” I continued. “Maybe you
framed Faye Anne for his murder, but now that it looks as if Peter is a better target for the blame, that's all right, isn't it?”

She gaped at me as I led her away from Melinda's cubicle. If by some chance Melinda could hear anything, she didn't need to hear this. The nurse was on the telephone, one eye on us.

“You've been out to Duddy's,” I went on. “You might know some of the men who also used to go there. Some of them are pretty tough characters. You could have bought the drugs that gave Faye Anne amnesia, later planted them in Peter's house to incriminate him, while Ben and the rest of us were at Melinda's earlier.”

“You,” Ellie chimed in, “could have sneaked in and scared Kenty Dalrymple to death, because you thought she saw you coming out of the Carmodys’ after you and Ben were there the first time. She probably heard Ben's truck backfiring, or your old Honda.”

I took over. “A hand axe was used on Bob Arnold. Like the one you would use for your woodstove.”

She waved the glossy magazine she was holding, opened her mouth to speak. But I got in before her. “You tied Melinda to the piling. Maybe she'd figured out who really killed Merle Carmody: not her brother, Ben, as she'd first feared, but you. And you got back to your place just before we arrived, earlier tonight. Where were you?”

Again she tried to answer. “I was looking for Ben. He was so mad over what I’ve been planning, I didn't know what he might—”

“What plan?” I interrupted. Then I saw what the magazine she held really was: not a magazine at all.

It was a glossy brochure extolling the benefits of plastic surgery. Sam had said Tommy Pockets got one, too, and now I recalled the shiny pages Ben Devine had thrown into the woodstove out at Mickey Jean's cabin.

Once upon a time, doctors and lawyers didn't advertise.

But no more; this advertisement, I supposed, came from the stack of reading material in the ICU waiting area. And Tommy wasn't the only one who'd picked up ideas from its pages, I suspected. Suddenly I knew what she had done: gotten rid of Merle, then decided to change what he'd recognized, so no one else ever would: “You were going to change your face?”

“What else can I do?” she asked, looking helpless. “Ben was absolutely furious at the idea. But I go out in public one single time, and…”

The far door to the ICU clicked shut but I didn't bother to look. Instead I stared at Mickey Jean, realizing irrelevantly that although I’d read her old name in the reports the Portland Heraldwriter had sent me, I didn't remember it.

“Rose,” she said softly, as if hearing my thought. “My name was Rose.” A laugh, or a harsh sob: “Isn't that a hoot?”

“Mom?” Sam interrupted urgently.

“Just a second,” I replied, not turning.

The nurse went into a utility area adjacent to the desk and began setting doses of medication out onto labeled trays. “Do you mind if I sit while you sling accusations?” Mickey Jean asked me.

I waved her at a chair away from the cubicles. “But Ben doesn't know, does he? What you did, or how far you've gone. What you've already done to try to keep your secret.”

My voice rose as I thought of Clarissa sitting near Bob now. Waiting; praying, probably.

“Because of you…” I began angrily.

“Mom? You'd better come, there's someone…”

“Sam, just a minute, can't you see I’m very— Oh, God.”

He'd pulled the curtain back. In the cubicle, surrounded by wires and tubes, IV poles and monitor screens, a motionless form lay peacefully under a blanket.

Too motionless. Too peaceful. Unlike the look on the face of the person at the head of Melinda's hospital bed. Caught in the act. It was Joy Abrams.

As the curtain
around Melinda's hospital bed slid back all the way, Joy pulled a hypodermic needle from the IV bag hanging above. Melinda's heart rate, counted by glowing green numerals on the monitor screen, began dropping: 90, 80.

An alarm thweeped urgently. “Don't move,” Joy said. She held the hypodermic up. “Or I’ll put the rest of it straight into her heart.”

It wouldn't make much difference if those numbers kept on dropping. How much of it had she already gotten into the IV?

“Joy,” I began, as it finally all fell together: the outdoors-man's daughter, skilled at outdoor tasks: hunting, fishing. The gun and the knife. Later she and her sister had gone off to school, fulfilling their father's wish.

Far from the woods. But in all Joy's travels, I realized now—the bar where she had been a dancer was in Lewiston, near the school where Mickey Jean had acquired a persistent stalker—she hadn't lost one of the Maine hunter's primary skills: butchering the slain animal.

Her father would have known. And… he taught us everything, she'd said. What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion. Joy's fist came down, needle glinting.

Then a concussive bang and a bloom of red on Joy's shoulder. Her hand opening, eyes widening in shock and pain. The syringe clattering to the floor.

“Someone told her. Told Joy that Melinda was here,” I said through the ringing in my ears as Joy began falling.

Her hair caught in the mechanism used to raise and
lower the bed. She went on falling but the hair stayed, a glorious apricot-blond mass of curls perfectly arranged…

Too perfectly: a wig. Beneath it, straggly white-blond hair like her sister Willetta's. Those eyelashes, I realized, and all her many cosmetics: part of the plan. Even the bottle of hair color in her bathroom had been an element of it, placed there to make sure the impression she wanted to make remained consistent, even to a casual visitor.

You'd never know it was the same woman, Ellie had said when Joy and Willetta first came to dinner. Now that evening seemed so long ago.

“Oh, my God,” Mickey Jean breathed, at my shoulder. “It's her.”

Feeling, movement, sound all came back to me. Turning, I saw who Mickey Jean meant: not Joy but Willetta, seized by George and Wade as a security guard belatedly burst in.

The gun was in her hand. Gently, Wade took it from her. “I’m sorry,” Willetta said.

“But,” Mickey Jean squinted puzzledly at Joy, “she looks so different.”

“I tried,” Willetta said desperately. “Oh, I tried so hard.”
⁷

“You followed us. You thought we might have begun to suspect her,” I said. “You tried to get us away from the beach, and never let Mickey Jean get a look at you. Bob Arnold's not really expected to wake up, or you'd be in Portland, now, doing something to make sure he didn't. But you knew that if Melinda survived, she'd say who had attacked her: Joy.”