Wreck the Halls (7 page)

“Everything's lovely. I just adore boiled dinner and nobody makes it, anymore. Baked apples, too. And real cream, wasn’t it? You whipped it for us from scratch?”

By then I’d have told her that the moon was made of green cheese, if she’d wanted me to. Because the thing about Joy, I was starting to think, was that she was real. Not faking anything; genuinely herself. It was that more than anything else that made her so beautiful, I thought.

Willetta got up as if linked to Joy by an invisible cord. “Thank you,” she said colorlessly, and followed her sister.

Accompanying them to the hall, I glanced into the front parlor where Monday was circling the best chair nervously, her ears flat and the hairs on her neck-ruff prickling defensively. Seeing me emboldened her to put a paw up onto it-Monday is allowed on any furniture that will hold her,
except for the guest beds—but at the last minute she lost courage again and turned tail, whining.

“Oh, Monday,” I said sadly, and she skulked out to the kitchen as if embarrassed by her own cowardice.

Meanwhile George had retreated to the back parlor for football on TV, carrying a cup of ice to soak his sore thumb in. Tomorrow he would get plenty of cold on it; scalloping season had opened and with the church pipes thawed, the generator repaired, and the materials for his own house repairs undelivered, he was going out on one of the boats.

George worked, Ellie said, the way other people breathed; now the rest of the men got up to join him, hungry for scores.

“Joy,” I began slowly while Victor was in the hall retrieving their coats; it was none of my business. But I already liked her a great deal.

“Don’t,” I heard Victor say distinctly to Willetta from down the hall, “be such a baby.”

“Victor has a way of making you feel…” I hesitated.

“Special,” she finished my sentence accurately. Her cologne was L’Air du Temps. “Like you’re the one, after all the others, that he's been looking for.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And I don’t want to be the one who…”

“Puts a hitch in his git-along?” Her laugh made me like her more.

“Yes,” I admitted, “exactly that.”

She patted my arm. “Don’t worry, dear. I’ve been paddling my own canoe for a good while, now.”

I’d been right about her age, I saw; much younger than her hair and elaborate makeup made her appear. But her eyes were intelligent and there was a kind of seasoned hardness in them, so I believed her when she went on:

“It's going to take lots more than Victor Tiptree to capsize
me.” She glanced down the hall. “Listen, about those state guys—”

“What about them?”

Joy looked uncomfortable. “A friend of mine was having a few drinks in Duddy's Bar out on Route 214 last night. You know the place halfway to Meddybemps?”

I knew. Duddy's was a dive; thick smoke, loud music, a pool table full of cigarette burns in the back room. A place for people who were banned from other bars; bikers, hookers, and drug dealers: oxycontin, methamphetamines.

Thinking of it reminded me that my view of downeast Maine was a privileged one: that of a person safe inside a warm house after a good dinner. But not everyone around here was so lucky and the unluckiest salved their wounds with booze or pills.

I also knew that Victor had been tied up in surgery the night before, working on a logger who’d been hit with a whole tree over at the lumber mill's debarking machine, on the mainland.

So Joy had been on her own. “Your, um, friend,” I prodded gently. “What's she got to do with those state guys?”

“She saw them there. Both of them. Stuck out like sore thumbs, even though they weren’t wearing suits at the time.”

I could imagine. The dress code at Duddy's ran to jeans so greasy you couldn’t see what color they were, boots that looked as if they’d been used to stomp rival gang members, and T-shirts bearing slogans so foul, you wouldn’t clean the bathroom with them. People said it wasn’t a matter of if Duddy's would get raided, but when.

“I don’t think,” Joy added carefully, “they saw her.”

“Wait a minute,” Ellie said, coming up behind us. “We didn’t find Merle till this morning. And it's six hours to get here from Augusta. I did think they made it pretty fast. But what were those two doing around here last night?”

“Who?” Victor wanted to know, appearing with the
coats. Willetta came along with him, sulkily. I had a flash of just what a burr under his saddle she must be, grumpy and seemingly ever-present.

“No one you know, dear,” Joy told him sweetly. “Why don’t you go out and get the car started, warm it up a little?”

“All right,” he agreed, and went.

“What kind of drugs are you feeding him?” I asked. “The change is miraculous.”

“We’ll see,” Joy responded, which was when I knew she understood what I’d been saying earlier: that Victor in the first, fine flush of infatuation was one thing. Long term, though, he was something else.

“Anyway, they’re sure not telling you everything,” she finished, meaning the state guys. “Better watch out for them.”

Which I’d already figured out, too. Still: last night?

“… incredible stuff people are selling,” Sam was saying to Tommy. “You can buy the right to perform a hit song in public, or a snow globe with Charles Manson's face glowing inside, or cancer drugs.”

On the Internet, he meant, from which I gathered that his semester-break independent study project was moving along okay. Entitled “Weird or Wired? E-commerce in the 21st Century,” it was an examination of exactly what he was saying to Tommy: the stuff people bought and sold on-line. Only secondarily and perhaps subconsciously was it a joke on his own dyslexia. I wasn’t even sure he’d noticed the anagram—yet.

Then in a final flurry of thanks and farewells, Joy and Victor were gone, along with Willetta. The investigators left soon after, proffering chilly handshakes. So I was free for postdinner analysis in the kitchen with Ellie.

“How can they be done already?” she complained. “Aren’t they going to dust for fingerprints, or look for hair samples, or…”

“Why should they? It's not like on TV, where every crime scene gets gone over with tweezers and a microscope. They’ve already got a suspect, so it's a matter of resources. And of confidence, which they’ve got, too.”

“I guess so,” she conceded reluctantly. “But…”

“And ‘no trial,’ my aunt Fanny,” I said, drying a relish dish. “Expert testimony gets bought and paid for like anything else, along with the expenses of the expert: travel, lodging, and anything else they can think of, to fatten the expense sheet. You get it if you can pay for it, and you don’t if you can’t. And Faye Anne isn’t going to be able to afford anything remotely like that, and I’m sure they know it.”

And nothing else, I felt sure, would induce the offer of a deal. “They just thought if they told us a lot of stuff that didn’t matter,” I said, “or that probably wasn’t so; like that business of her maybe pleading to lesser charges, we might say something that did matter. Make her look worse, and make their lives even easier than they already are.”

“It's true. I don’t think they start out by offering deals to people who chop people up and put the pieces in a butcher shop counter,” Ellie agreed disconsolately. “Besides, I know her. She’ll never say she did it if she didn’t.”

I’d been thinking more that Faye Anne didn’t remember. But:

“Never, ever,” Ellie finished, soaping a coffee cup. “So what did you think of Joy Abrams? To look at her now, you’d never know she was the same girl who left Eastport. Her hair is so fancy, you can’t even see where it's connected to her head.”

“I thought,” I began, meaning to say that this time Victor's reach might possibly have exceeded his greedy little grasp. But I never got the chance to finish:

Outside, holiday carolers were fa-la-la-ing from the back of a pickup truck, up and down Eastport streets. The season was in high gear, though by the sound of it the pickup was
struggling mightily to get out of low. A series of loud backfires exploded in the night like a string of cherry bombs.

“Mom.” Sam put his head around the corner. “Sorry about my big mouth in the dining room.”

“That's okay,” I said. Outside, the truck backfired again. “No harm, no foul.” But then I focused on him; back in the city he’d been in a little trouble, but now he was healthy. Clear-eyed and energetic.

And he had good friends, here. Tommy was upstairs waiting for him; I gathered they were going to be a team on the Internet project. “Hey. I’m glad you’re home.”

“Me, too. Anything in the fridge?” Without waiting for an answer he bounded past me to forage for nutrition; it had, after all, been half an hour since we’d finished dinner.

Then: “Mom, do you think Tommy should have his ears fixed?”

I turned in surprise. “Is he thinking about it?”

Sam shrugged. “Sort of. He says they’re freaky looking, and there's a clinic in Bangor that sent out some sort of bulk-mail brochure, gave him the idea.”

I’d seen the brochure, too, tossed it out without reading it. “I think Tommy's ears are fine,” I said, only crossing my fingers a little bit. Tommy worked the fish pens for an hourly wage and few benefits, and was helping to support his mother. “I’m sure your father would be happy to talk to him about it, if he wanted. But that surgery is expensive.”

Sam grinned. “Yeah. I hope he doesn’t do it. I told him they make him lots easier to find in a crowd.”

Which I wasn’t sure was quite the variety of reassurance Tommy had wanted, but before I could say so Sam had taken his supplies—sodas, a box of cookies, apples, and a bag of potato chips—back upstairs to share with his friend.

When he was gone, Ellie got out two of Wade's bottles of ale and sank into a kitchen chair. “I let her down, Jake. I
should never have let Faye Anne stay with Merle. I should have gotten her out of there.”

“So should we all have. But it's too late to do anything about it, now.”

Ellie is ordinarily a sweet, kind person, but every so often she gives me a look that would etch glass. “No, it's not.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, backpedaling. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe if we spend all our free time on it, we can work up some kind of convincing argument for extenuating circumstances, enough to make even what's happened seem like-well, not so much what it is. But Ellie…” I tried a last time to escape doom. “I’ve got a son home from college, a house that needs attention, a dog acting spooky, a new husband…”

After marrying Victor, I spent most of what was supposed to have been our honeymoon in the waiting room of the neurosurgery suite at NYU Medical Center. Our nuptials were apparently the signal for every fool who thought he could drive a Harley to find out otherwise, with predictable results.

“… and besides, it's nearly Christmas. I wanted to get the tree, buy presents and wrap them, do some baking, and…”

Ellie just fixed me with that penetrating gaze of hers, so unfoolable that you could set her up at the CIA and use her to detect spies.

I gave in to her scrutiny. “And I need time to figure out how I can get a wedding ring and an engagement ring,” I finished. “Diamonds, in platinum settings.”

Ellie looked at me as if I’d admitted that I wanted one inserted through my nose. “Jacobia, I had no idea you were such a traditionalist.”

Charitably, she didn’t snicker. Usually, I’m more the type who would want a new tool belt. “Yeah, well. Make fun if you want to, but I notice you’re wearing one.”

She glanced at the plain gold circlet on her left hand. “But this is different. It was George's grandmother's, and his mother wore it, too, so it has…”

Then she looked at me, her gaze softening behind her thick glasses. “History,” she finished. “Oh, I see.”

After she died, my mother's wedding ring went to her family in Kentucky, where one of my uncles traded it for a winter's worth of firewood and kerosene. Well, they’d needed to keep warm; I’d put it out of my mind.

Mostly. “Anyway, I want them and I’ve been trying to figure where Wade and I can get the money for them. Because buying your own rings all by yourself isn’t a bit traditional, is it?”

Also, much of the money I’d had when I got to Eastport was spoken for now: Sam's college fund, an investment in Victor's trauma clinic, an emergency fund for the house, all untouchable. With what was left I could just about rub two nickels together. “Besides, Wade wouldn’t hear of it. So I wanted to think about rings, not about murder.”

“I do believe,” Ellie said thoughtfully, “that to make Wade feel less manly you’d have to hit him pretty strategically with one of those whole trees, over at the debarking machine.”

True. “You know he’d still want to be in on it, though. And I’d want that, too. But even if shipping stays strong so there's plenty of harbor piloting, and navigation repairs start bringing in more cash…”

In Eastport, the phrase spare money is an oxymoron for almost everyone, Wade included. Besides harbor piloting and equipment fixing, he also had a gun-repair shop in the ell of the house. But even the three jobs together just about kept him solvent.

“I thought I’d have time to come up with a plan,” I finished inadequately.

Ellie nodded and was probably about to say something
useful, as a knock came at the back door. Those carolers, I thought, looking around for something to offer them, because when people are out riding in the bed of a pickup truck, freezing their posteriors off to spread a little holiday cheer, I figure they deserve substantial refreshment.

But when I opened the door, I found no carolers standing there. In fact, it wasn’t anyone spreading any sort of cheer at all, Christmas or otherwise.

It was Peter Christie.

Chapter 4

I
f you don’t get a warm spell you can’t keep the
streets clear in Eastport, if by “clear” you mean a dry snow-free surface of the kind people in other cities are accustomed to enjoying. Because frozen condensed humidity (augmented by sleet, freezing rain, freezing fog, freezing drizzle, and the many other Maine meteorological delights whose common denominator is “freezing”) tends to accumulate.

Thus what you get here soon after the plows pass is a smooth, deceptively sand-streaked surface that offers about as much traction as a toboggan slide. But minutes after Peter Christie showed up on my porch I was careening along those icy surfaces in his old Ford Falcon, hanging on for dear life while remembering what George had once said about Peter and women: that the man had more spares than a bowling alley.