Wreck the Halls (4 page)

“You know, Victor, I think I hear your mother calling you,” Wade said evenly. Because tolerating Victor was one thing—he was, after all, Sam's father—but putting up with his bushwa was entirely another, in Wade's opinion.

Victor thumped his coffee cup down on the table, from which I would pick it up later and wash it, and put it away. The first thing he did when he moved here to Eastport was hire a cleaning woman, and when he found out she didn’t wear housedresses and aprons to work he went out and bought some for her.

“So long, then,” he said, readying to vamoose.

“Wait a minute.” I stopped him at the door.

Wade had already gotten out an electric sander and gone down to the cellar with it, bringing along an extension cord. “What did you want from me?” I asked Victor.

Because when it comes to knowing what it is that Victor's little heart pines for, later isn’t better. Over the years I have found to my sorrow that if no one is helping it, tending it and encouraging it and just sort of generally paving its way, Victor's little heart goes after whatever it wants regardless, with disastrous results.

“Spill it, Victor.”

In the cellar, the sander went on. I grabbed a dust mask
from the cabinet and tossed it down. If the paint dates from before 1978, it's lead-based, and this paint met the criteria by a century or so.

“Thanks,” Wade's muffled voice came from the shadows at the bottom of the stairwell.

My ex-husband shifted uncomfortably. “Well. Actually, I was hoping you’d invite me over for dinner tonight. With a guest of mine. Joy Abrams.”

The light dawned: news around town was that Victor had acquired a new girlfriend. And while this for Victor was like saying he habitually breathed oxygen—during our marriage he’d kept two little black books, one local and one longdistance—I hadn’t known who she was.

Until now. “I see. Giving you trouble, is she? And you think that a dinner here might just possibly open her eyes to the pleasures of domestic life?”

Right; in his dreams. Joy was a buxom beauty whose wild youth was the stuff of local legend; lately she’d returned home to run a beauty parlor out of a mobile home in nearby Quoddy Village. That neighborhood was the closest thing Eastport had to anything like a suburb.

And Joy, whose lush curves made the Maine coastline look straight as a boardwalk, was the closest it had to a bombshell. With her gold ankle bracelet, complicated hairdo, and the fouled anchor prominently tattooed on her left shoulder, Joy was not the sweet, pliantly adoring type Victor usually went for.

“That was the idea,” Victor admitted. “So, can I? Come for dinner?”

I didn’t know Joy, but on her reputation alone I figured that when she got through with Victor there’d be nothing left of him but a little pile of bones and hair.

Which to tell you the truth I thought was not a half-bad idea; while I considered it, Wade returned from the cellar.

“If you hit them with the sander first—real coarse
sandpaper, not the fine stuff—you’ll jolt the old paint up out of the cracks so it scrapes easier.”

He came into the hall, saw Victor still there but didn’t comment. “It's backwards, but it’ll speed the job, you want to do it that way,” he added. “Why not just pour a coat of chemical stripper on them?”

“Because the fumes have the charming habit of flowing downhill. Toward,” I added, “the electric starter on the furnace. So, ka-boom.”

“Right. Ka-boom,” he repeated pleasantly to Victor, who seemed to feel opening the back door in some haste was a prudent move, all of a sudden.

Wade went on out to the parlor where, before his freighter job, he’d been finishing up his plans for decorating the harbor tugboat for tonight's winter holiday festival. During the event, tubby fishing vessels and barges would tootle around Passamaquoddy Bay, twinkling and hooting, their crews taking a break from the hard, dangerous work they’d be out doing again tomorrow morning.

“Fine, you can come,” I told Victor. “Bring Joy, too, if you want.”

I took no pleasure in his childlike faith that I wouldn’t queer his pitch: by, for instance, telling Joy about the little black books. He was right, though; I wouldn’t. After a divorce you think it's all going to be so clear and simple. But it isn’t.

It just isn’t. “Sam will be home, too.”

“Oh,” he said, wincing as the outdoor cold hit him. Despite the sunshine bouncing whitely from every snowy surface, the air was bone-frigid and the sky was the dangerous pale blue of thin ice.

In the yard, chickadees quarreled around the bird feeder. A single cardinal perched silently on a branch above, bright as a drop of blood. “Okay, thanks,” Victor said.

And then he did vamoose, probably convinced that if I had time to think it over, I might change my mind.

But part of Joy's legend was that when she’d been away from here attending beautician school, she had supported herself with a strip club act featuring a live snake: perfect training, I thought, for any woman who dated Victor.

I wouldn’t have missed meeting her for the world.

Besides, I hadn’t told him whom else I’d invited.

The poor sap.

Chapter 3

H
is
head
?” my son Sam repeated happily, his eyes
shining.

It was five-thirty in the evening, a perfect night for Eastport's winter festival: the stars glittering like ice chips in the clear black sky, snowflakes condensing from the humidity rising from the harbor into the frigid air. Barrel-fires along the breakwater sent up orange flares around which people huddled, stomping booted feet and cupping paper containers of hot spiced cider in mittened hands.

“ You, ”Sam said again, “found his…”

Sam's the kind of kid who likes the goriest parts of the scariest movies, which I’d always thought was strange because in real life he is the gentlest creature. So a few years earlier, I’d sat him down and asked him why.

Gravely he’d explained that he knew what he was supposed to be feeling, and was able to, at such spectacles. He was twelve, then, and his father and I had been fighting forever; the next day I’d gone out and hired an attorney.

“Sssh,” I told him now. People were turning curiously. Everyone knew what had happened at Faye Anne's. But no one had approached to ask me for the details yet, and I hoped they wouldn’t. “I’ll tell you all about it at home.”

“Okay, but…” For the festival, the storefronts on Water Street were garlanded in strings of colored bulbs. In the park behind the library, kids from the middle school were having a snowball skirmish, taking turns firing down on one another from the bandstand.

“… but I want to hear all about it.”

Four men in tailcoats and top hats strolled the sidewalk, singing “Silent Night.” Which this wasn’t: we were waiting for the boat parade but one of the vessels had blown her electrical system, and the crowd was getting restive. Running the bilge pump and lighting a Christmas tree at the same time hadn’t been on the agenda, apparently, and now a deck seam was spurting.

At last a loud cheer went up as a thirty-foot wooden Eastporter, the classic little fishing boat so emblematic of Maine lobster, popped on bright as a flashbulb in the dark waters off the far end of the dock. Buddy Teachout had papered the abovedecks of his vessel in aluminum foil, tied a red ribbon around the operator's shack, and aimed floodlights at it.

“Wow,” Sam said, looking handsome in his red quilted vest and a stocking cap. Taller than me, with dark hair and hazel eyes like his father, he was fit and muscular from scuba diving in Passamaquoddy Bay—when he wasn’t at school he had a small business finding antique bottles underwater and selling them on eBay—and from working out in the college weight room. And he carried himself well; living away, I saw somewhat reluctantly—but with relief, too—had been good for him.

The rest of the boats lit up all at once, their colored lights spreading out on the waves like spilled paint. A sigh of pleasure went through the crowd as the parade left the dock in a rumble of diesel engines, each boat doing its jauntily nautical bit for Christmas tradition: there was a sled with eight lobsters pulling it, a Nativity scene with actors costumed
to resemble sardines, and a Christmoose with buoys, mackerel jigs, and safety reflectors dangling from its antlers.

Sam looked around, scanning the gathering, probably hoping to see old high school buddies. “Hey, who’re those guys?”

A pair of strangers in dark overcoats, polished wingtips, and fresh haircuts stood at the edge of the crowd by one of the bonfire barrels, now dying down. I spotted Ellie across the street; she’d seen them, too.

“Two of our dinner guests,” I told Sam, more lightly than I felt. Out on the fish pier, an impromptu local band—fiddles, guitar, two accordions, and a banjo—swung into a rousing rendition of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which was not particularly Christmasy but got a lot of toes tapping on the breakwater, nonetheless.

So between the candy canes tossed to the children from the town fire truck, the raffle for the battery-operated table-top tree that played one of half a dozen tinny-sounding Christmas carols when you pressed a button, and the small brown bottles whose contents vastly augmented the firepower of those hot cider drinks, it was another successful Eastport winter festival.

Finally the boat with the iffy bilge pump snapped its lights out and reversed course; the guys at the dock got the lines ready and a generator fired up, its gas engine roaring. This signaled the end of the festivities; the other boats puttered cheerily a bit longer, then came around, too, toward the finger piers inside the boat basin.

Leaving Sam, I made my way through a crowd headed eagerly for the Waco Diner, its neon Coors sign reflected in the thick tinsel garland around its windows. Ellie's cheeks were pink with cold and with the pleasure of the event; she’d been on the decorating committee, helped make the cider, and gone to school with many of the men who were out on the boats.

But her gaze was still following the two overcoats. They’d reached their car, a late-model GM product with official state plates.

“Ellie. Are you sure this is a good idea?” The car pulled slowly away from the curb in front of the Eastport Gallery, whose big gold-sprayed wreath of pomegranates and bay leaves gleamed under a garland of balsam tied with maroon ribbon.

It had been Ellie's idea to get the pomegranates and spray them. “I don’t care if it's a good idea or not,” she told me. “Faye Anne is my friend and I’m going to do whatever I need to do to help her. And I don’t care what Victor has to say about it, either,” she added firmly.

Which would be plenty, because the second thing Victor did on arriving in Eastport (after hiring the housekeeper and putting her in an apron, I mean) was to get involved in a fairly nasty case of murder, himself. Now just the sight of a pair of state guys was guaranteed to send his blood pressure rocketing and his rhetoric sputtering.

But Ellie had put her idea to Bob Arnold that morning before we’d even left the Carmody house, reminding him that with the festival going on tonight, the few eating places in town would be jammed. The next thing I knew it was decided: the state guys here to wrap up the paperwork on Merle's murder would be dining at my table.

It was, Ellie maintained, the only possible hospitable arrangement, her own house being under repair. The recent snowstorm had brought down an old fir tree and part of her kitchen with it. But I knew the real reason behind her plan, and it wasn’t hospitality.

“I just want to know,” she said now, “which tack they’ll follow. Are they going to be reasonable, or not?”

Not, was my best take on the matter. Back in the city I had met a few law-enforcement investigators. People with money (i.e., my clients) drew them like flies. And none of
those investigators had been looking to complicate his or her life with anything like reasonableness.

Not by a long shot. “Because look: there were wine bottles,” Ellie insisted. “Someone drank that wine. But the dishes were all done. And maybe Faye Anne was not a complete teetotaller, but I can tell you right now she's never swigged wine out of a bottle in her life. So who washed the glasses?”

We walked uphill past the dime store, the Quoddy Crafts shop, and Bay Books with its window full of lusciously attractive new hardcovers, toward the police station recently relocated to the old red-brick Frontier Bank building, solid as a bunker with its massive grey granite window lintels and door frame.

“Then,” she went on—obviously, she’d been thinking about this—“her canvas apron. Stuff soaks through those, you know. It's not as if they’re made of rubber like the aprons they wear at the fish plant.”

Just offshore, thousands and thousands of farm-raised salmon swam in underwater pens, eating nutritious meals upon which their pink flesh fattened marvelously. Later at the fish plant people made steaks and fillets of them; fish farming, along with lobstering, clamming, and the more traditional variety of open-water fishing, was a mainstay of the local economy.

“But that sweatshirt she had on underneath,” Ellie continued, “looked absolutely clean.”

She brushed snowflakes from her glasses with her mittens, green-and-white ones knitted in the traditional downeast Maine fox-and-geese pattern. Working at light-speed Ellie can toss off a pair in an evening—somehow with these she seems to have no trouble knowing when to stop-but when I try, I always end up with that other traditional pattern: snarls and tangles.

“And what's up with that locked door?” Ellie added decisively.

The one between Faye Anne's kitchen and Merle's butcher shop, she meant. “Right. It bothered me, too,” I admitted.

Because if Faye Anne had locked it, why hadn’t she also taken the key from beneath the doormat and locked the front door? We reached Peavey Library, its reading-lamps amber behind the tall leaded-glass panes set into its redbrick facade. A framed placard inside the front door instructed All Gentlemen to Remove Hats.

“But my biggest question is,” Ellie said as we turned the corner, “who cleaned the tools? Not just the wineglasses, but—”