Wreck the Halls (34 page)

Joy, whose job required her to meet people, unlike Willetta who worked at night in a hospital, where almost everyone she saw was asleep. So Joy had to be unrecognizable, because hers was the greater risk of being seen by the wrong person.

“… more security,” the ICU nurse snapped into the phone, “stat.”

Willetta couldn't meet Mickey Jean, either, of course. But for her it was much easier, making sure she didn't.

Until now. “You never went out to Duddy's at all, did you?” Ellie asked her. “Joy went, brought you the match-book from the bar where the bad guys congregated. It was always Joy who'd done things like that.”

Risky things, even dangerous ones. Willetta nodded brokenly. “I couldn't turn her in to the police, I just couldn't. Back when we were kids, she always took care of me.”

So Willetta had stayed in the background, scuttled around in darkness trying to protect her flamboyant sister, to save her from herself. But admiring her secretly, too, probably.

The way we all secretly admire people doing dangerous things, living on the precipice. “Merle deserved it,” Willetta added bitterly.

Until somewhere along the way they go over the edge and we get pulled over with them if we're not careful. If we're foolish or unlucky.

Or just very young. I opened my mouth to say something to Willetta, then stopped, struck by the realization that the blood smell that had haunted me since I’d found Merle Carmody was gone.

Vanished as if it had never been there at all. “But Joy got worse, kept doing more, I couldn't stop her,” Willetta insisted pathetically.

“You let her in, though,” I replied, brutally. “The hospital doors are locked at night.” We'd had to be buzzed in. And in a small hospital like this one you didn't just stroll in through the emergency room, unnoticed. “You must have opened one, told her where Melinda was.”

Yet in the end she hadn't been able to let Joy do it. Until this, it had all been things that Willetta had heard of, not ones she had been obliged to witness herself.

But Joy in the act of murder: that, even Willetta had had
to do something about. The ICU nurse looked up from where she knelt trying to stanch Joy's shoulder wound with a wad of dressings. “I think,” she said, “you might have stopped her, now.”

The medical team swarmed over Melinda, some barking orders, others following them. The monitor numbers rose as another crew surged in, lifted Joy, sped a gurney from the cubicle, and raced away down the corridor.

Later, the Calais police showed up and took Willetta.

And then it was over.

Sort of.

Chapter 12

J
oy went to Lewiston because Willetta was there in
school,” I said two hours later to the group assembled in my parlor.

Tim Rutherford had arrived, looking as if he felt he'd chosen the wrong profession. I disagreed and made a mental note to say so to him, sometime soon. Meanwhile under the influence of friends and fresh coffee, he was rallying.

“We know that,” Victor said impatiently to me. “But then what?”

His shock was being replaced by indignation, as he began to realize he'd been used merely as a source of news: it wasn't until Ellie and I started looking into the matter of Merle's death that Victor had actually become a serious item on Joy's social calendar.

“Then Willetta flunked out of Mickey Jean's freshman econ class,” Sam said, repeating what Mickey Jean had told us at the hospital and sounding as if it were an event that he could well understand.

Me, too. Economics is a demanding subject. It requires, among other things, a certain amount of bonehead stubbornness. This, I must humbly assume, is why I ended up being halfway decent at it.

Willetta hadn't been. And she'd complained to Joy: Mickey Jean was tough. Not only on Willetta. But that wasn't the way Joy had taken it.

“So Joy went to see Mickey Jean at the college,” Ellie said.

Wade put his hand on my shoulder, steadyingly. I’d never seen a person shot at close range before. “And when that didn't work—”

Mickey Jean hadn't been a bit swayed by Joy's special brand of persuasion: promises of harm. “Push came to shove,” George said simply.

George wore bibbed overalls, a tattered red sweatshirt, and work boots. Ellie took his hand. “Then Mickey Jean vanished and Joy came here, not knowing that of all possible places, Ben and Mickey Jean had chosen to come here, also.”

“Because Melinda was here,” I agreed. “Willetta followed Joy to try keeping Joy under some control, worrying about what new obsession Joy might develop. She even moved in with Joy, finally.” But none of it had worked.

The phone rang. It was past two in the morning. We looked at one another. There was no reason for a phone to be ringing unless it was about Bob Arnold.

“I’ll get it,” Victor said, and went.

“Joy got the drugs out at Duddy's,” Tim Rutherford said, wanting, I supposed, to break the silence. “That's why the state fellows were in town early. Not for murder, but to get ready for the raid on the bar.”

“She probably phoned in the tip, too, right after that,” I agreed. “Hoped whoever sold her the contraband would be arrested, not be around here to talk about a certain customer: herself.”

I was still seeing the look in Joy's eyes as she realized who had shot her. “She told us about the government guys being here a day early just to put us off balance. A little joke on us, among the others she played.”

But not a funny one. Victor's voice came from the phone alcove. All I could see now was Clarissa's face, and little Thomas’. And Bob's: full of good will, despite all the bad things he'd seen in his career as a Maine cop.

“Yeah, Joy gave it all up in the recovery room,” Tim said. Her wound, it turned out, had looked awful but had been fairly superficial.

“I didn't ask her anything,” he added hastily. “She was full of sedatives. But she told them she wanted to see me and when I walked in, she just started talking. On account of being doped up, I guess. Told me the whole bit, right from the git-go.” He sighed.

“She'd drugged Merle, gave him a story about how they were both on the same side, then she put it in his booze. Once he was looped: wham.”

“And later she drugged Faye Anne and arranged the scene to make it look as if Faye Anne killed him?” I asked.

Tim nodded. “Merle was already dead when Faye Anne got home. She walked in, Joy grabbed her and told her she'd slit her throat if she didn't drink what was in the glass.”

He shook his head unhappily. “See, Joy had spotted Ben in town when she first got here, realized where he and Mickey Jean must've vanished to: Eastport. The coincidence convinced Joy that her campaign against Mickey Jean was still righteous.”

Ellie leaned forward. “But just as Joy was about to resume her campaign, she learned that Merle knew about Mickey Jean, too, and was blackmailing her over it? Because there had to be a reason for killing Merle in the first place.”

Tim agreed: “Yep. Joy was keeping tabs on who went in and out of Mickey Jean's place in the woods. And that's where she made her mistake: she guessed the reason for Merle's visits, then she went to Merle and suggested maybe they should join forces.”

Sam frowned. “So what?”

“So,” Ellie explained patiently, “Merle was not exactly a team player. By then he had Mickey Jean figured for his private gravy train. He didn't want anybody else along for the ride.”

Mickey Jean had been taking a chance, going into Duddy's. Lots of people there; she couldn't be sure no one would know her. I go out just that once…

But she couldn't have known how disastrous it would be. “Mickey Jean never saw Willetta or Joy, before? I mean since they came to Eastport?” Wade objected.

Ellie just shrugged. “No one ever saw Mickey Jean except for Merle, other than that once in the bar. Why should she see anyone else? Besides, Willetta was careful, and Joy wouldn't be recognized; even I wouldn't have. But then Merle threatened to tellBen and Mickey Jean that Joy had found them, didn't he? It'd be just like him.”

“You got it,” Tim confirmed. “I guess old Merle finally just chose the wrong woman to try to bully.”

We all pondered that in silence for a moment.

“Joy called here,” I said, “to try to put suspicion on Ben, once she realized Ellie and I might clear Faye Anne, her first choice for a scapegoat. It was Joy's face at my window, too.”

That was why the eyes and mouth had stood out so distinctly: her makeup. “Partly to spy on us but the plastic sheets prevented that. Partly to intimidate me. Which worked pretty well.”

“Not well at all,” Ellie contradicted loyally.

I turned to her. “You suspected one or both of them early on, didn't you? It was why you didn't want to use their phone to call and inquire about Bob, out at Quoddy Village.”

She nodded. “I didn't want to give those two any more information than they already had about anything, was all. I mean, I do like cleanliness but their place… and no Christmas decorations? None?”

Her face said what she thought of that. “Besides,” she added, “you tell me: who wears false eyelashes at home? And that new van of hers just put the frosting on it.”

“Huh? What about the van?” It had been in the hospital lot with the other visitors’ cars, of course, but in a fresh coating of road slush from the storm, it had looked like all the others, too.

“But then,” Ellie was saying, “Ben Devine started looking so suspicious to us. And after that, Peter.”

“Right, he was the further complication,” I said, forgetting the new van for the moment. “Our old pal Peter, who had the poor judgment to victimize Willetta, incurring the wrath of the most protective big sister in history.”

The hand axe, of course, hadn't belonged to Mickey Jean. It was from the kit of survival gear in Willetta's Toyota.

“Joy put drugs in Peter's house to incriminate him,” Tim told us. “Willetta might've made up that story about photographs and being drugged, to back Joy up. Or,” he added, “maybe not. Even if Peter wasn't our killer, he's still a nasty piece of work.”

“And that—planting the drugs—put Melinda in the bull's-eye,” Ellie concluded. “She went to Peter's to break their date on account of the changing weather, caught Joy in his house or coming out.”

No picnic, then. But she had decided to break up with him. So she went to break the date in person and break the bad news: two birds with one stone.

Tim nodded, confirming what Ellie had said. “And the other night, Joy was at Melinda's—not for the first time, I guess—casing the place to see what mischief she could get up to because of Melinda's connection to Ben. Then Bob turned up there. That's why Bob's phone number was on Melinda's speed dial—because she'd told Bob she'd had a
prowler. And Joy couldn't have Bob catching her at Melinda's, because she had no business being there.”

“I still don't get why Faye Anne didn't remember Joy doing it,” Sam offered troubledly.

Victor replied from the doorway. He hadn't been at the hospital for the main event, but he'd been there for the aftermath, checking on the man who'd run afoul of the debarking machine. “She will, eventually. But I gather she'd had a couple of drinks that night with Peter Christie. That, plus a big dose of the drug and the shock of the event itself, probably gave her some retroactive short-term memory deficit.”

“But Joy couldn't have known that,” I objected.

“No. So I think she was also counting on something else.”

He pressed his fingertips together, still absorbing his own disappointment. “I suspect that when Joy talks about that evening again, she'll add one more detail: that she wasn't groomed in her usual careful, elaborate manner. And…”

He looked at me. “Without the hairdo, Joy looks an awful lot like her sister, don't you think? Not in size or general build, but at first glance. If you only,” he finished, “got a brief glimpse.”

And even more so, probably, without the makeup. The awful implication was all too clear. “… she always took care of me…”

But not if push came to shove. Willetta didn't know that Joy's dark obsession had gone far beyond its original purpose: punishing a teacher for Willetta's bad grade. I wondered if Joy even recalled now, what that original purpose had been. Because if her plan didn't work, if Faye Anne Carmody did remember what happened that night, Joy had added a last, madly self-preserving twist.

Faye Anne would have described Willetta.

“Wow!” Sam said. “That Joy, she thought of everything.”

Or almost everything. And it all would have worked,
except for a few things that didn't fall her way. Suddenly I felt a warm burst of affection for that orange survival suit. But my mood of upbeat optimism didn't last long.

“Who was on the phone?” I asked Victor, torn between wanting more bad news held off and wanting it over with. But for once…

“Bob Arnold went back to surgery,” he answered. “They found a bleeder and tied it off, looks like that's turned things around. He's awake and off the ventilator, grousing about everything.”

A noisy cheer went up. “So I think he might be out of the woods,” Victor added, as we all hugged one another. “Melinda, too. I called, they say she's stabilized, looks good. No long-term effects from the stuff Joy shot into her.”

He puffed himself up a bit, readying to deliver a medical lecture. “One good thing about drowning in cold salt water: it's not over till it's over. Chills all the body systems,” he added to George. “Keeps your gears from chewing themselves up.”

He seemed to believe that if he described the human body in this elementary way, even a simple downeast rustic like George might understand.

“Right,” said George, who as a volunteer fireman had been on rescues so hair-raising, they'd have curled Victor's toes. “And the salt water doesn't screw up the electrolyte balance as much as fresh water does.”

Victor blinked. “Ah, correct,” he mumbled, and busied himself with getting more coffee.

Ellie came to stand by my chair. “Everyone around here knew Joy and Willetta from the old days. Or thought they did. What they didn't know was that Willetta must have been busy even back then, desperate to keep her big sister out of trouble.”