Wreck the Halls (9 page)

No sound from Ellie, somewhere in the dark house. I turned, wanting to call out to her, but Peter was still talking. “And I don’t know, if you had a… a psychotic break, or something, maybe you’d do more things.”

Like, for instance, dissecting your victim. A chill touched me, only partly to do with the cold draft now coming from
the front of the house. Such a neat theory, and so very like what Victor's comment had suggested: insanity.

Almost as if it were planned to seem that way. And the silence… “Ellie?”

No answer. Had she gone out? Then it hit me: that greenhouse of Faye Anne's. If I were a hidden diary that was definitely one place where I might be, and Ellie had no doubt realized it.

But now she hadn’t returned. Meanwhile I didn’t like the sound of Peter's recitation one little bit. Either he had a very vivid imagination or he wasn’t just theorizing.

“Faye Anne was almost as experienced a meat cutter as Merle was,” he went on. “Because sometimes he was just too drunk to be allowed near the knives, but it was their living so she’d had to learn.”

“Ellie?” I called again.

“The thing is,” Peter hurried on, “if you broke down, if you just went crazy…”

“Ellie! You there?”

The front door slammed. The icy draft cut off abruptly. Footsteps approached. It struck me suddenly that it was also possible for Merle's killer, whoever it was, to have had another accomplice.

And for that accomplice to be coming down the hall at me, this very minute.

“… what I want to know is, why put on the apron? Or the gloves? Why dress up in protective clothes,” Peter demanded of the silence in the dark kitchen, “if you don’t know you’re going to do it?”

“Interesting questions,” said Eastport police chief Bob Arnold from the doorway.

I put down the iron skillet I’d snatched from the stove top. “Criminy, Bob! I just about brained you.”

“We’ll talk about brains, later,” Bob said. From his tone I didn’t think he intended to tell me I had a lot.

“First, though, I’ve got a question of my own for Mr. Peter Christie.”

Uh-oh. Bob was pretty hot about us being here. Worse, Ellie was now standing behind him and she looked ill, the way she had the previous summer when she’d accidentally eaten a bad clam.

So something else was wrong, too. “How’d you know Faye Anne was wearing the apron and gloves?” Bob asked Peter Christie.

“Well, I…” His hands dropped to his sides and for a moment I thought Faye Anne was rescued, somehow. But:

“I was watching the house when they brought her out,” Peter blurted. “From my car. I had a view of the front door. With,” he admitted, “binoculars.”

“You were the stalker, then, I’ll bet,” Ellie said accusingly. “You followed her and watched her, you probably even peeked in her windows, you terrifiedher…”

“I didn’t mean to,” he burst out. “I never meant to scare her, but I was worried about her, I was out of my mindwith worry about her. But she wouldn’t let me near her, wouldn’t talk to me, and you know what that bastard was like, he might have killed her and I knew I had to do something…”

He stopped, hearing what he’d said. Because somebody had, hadn’t they? Done something.

About that bastard.

“It was in the greenhouse,” Ellie said. “The book you’re worried about,” she added, turning to Peter. “I found it.”

And then of course Bob Arnold had found Ellie. Bob didn’t look all that sharp when you first met him: round face, thinning hair, a little belly pooching out over his shiny Maine Police Association belt buckle.

But Bob was plenty smart enough so that when he noticed people looking for something, he didn’t interrupt them until they’d finished. Now he had a little green spiral-bound book in his hand.

“Faye Anne's diary?” I asked, and he nodded. “Did you read any of it?”

He’d seen us, of course. Since the squad car went by when we were still out in the alley, he’d known we were here.

“Ayuh. With my trusty flashlight.” He tapped it where it hung on his belt with his other cop gear.

“Seems Faye Anne had a plan all worked out, get rid of her old man and take off with our friend Peter, here. Kill old Merle with one o’ them exotic bow-tannicals she grew. Poison plants.” He practically spat the words. “Hellebore. Foxglove. Plenty more just like ’em.”

“Fast reader,” I remarked.

“When I want to be,” he replied. “Found the good parts quick. But you’re the ones who found the diary itself, where she wrote it all down, which if you hadn’t found it maybe none of it ever would’ve been known.”

Suddenly I knew why he was so angry. He didn’t think Faye Anne had killed Merle, either. Or more likely, if he did think so, he considered it rough justice.

“Only now,” he went on, “it will be known.” He turned and stalked to the front of the house. His whole posture radiated disgust at what we had been up to.

“Maybe we had manslaughter,” he said. “Or a half decent shot at diminished capacity.” He opened the front door.

“But now, with the Miss Marple Society on the case—”

Mah-ple.

“Now what we’ve got, damn it all, is capital murder.”

The following morning
I sat in a lawyer's office, thinking about how people who do remember history are doomed to repeat it, too:

The idea of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing was never so fully proved as in the person of my father, who
killed himself with a combination of haste, arrogance, and criminal carelessness in 1969.

A self-styled sixties anarchist, he thought putting a bomb under a Brinks truck was the best, most direct way to attack the evil capitalist-industrialist state, and maybe to grab up a bit of cash in the ensuing confusion, besides.

Instead he touched the wrong wires together and took out a Greenwich Village town house, his accomplices, and my mother. The firemen found me sitting in my bed in the backyard where the explosion had blown me. A section of the roof had come down over me at an angle like a lean-to, sheltering me from flying bricks.

So I’ve been told. That was a long time ago. But now in a poorly planned attempt to help someone who reminded me of my own past—

If only someone had told my mother that the sky wouldn’t fall if she walked out on him, or that if it did, at least she wouldn’t be at ground zero when the pieces came down.

—I’d done the same damn-fool thing that my father had done: I’d made everything worse.

The voice droned on at me: “Unlawful entry. Tampering with evidence. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. Shall I go on?”

Clarissa Arnold looked severely over her gold-rimmed half-glasses at me, from behind the big oak desk in her law office over the old candy store on Water Street, in downtown Eastport. Clarissa was Bob Arnold's wife, and at the moment she was also my attorney.

But only at the moment. She’d already made it clear she was up to her eyes in work, way too much to take on any more, and the folders piled on her desk underlined this.

“Bob gave the state fellows the diary you and Ellie found at Faye Anne's house last night,” she said. “He had to hand it over to them, of course.”

Of course. “And he had to tell them who found it and how,” she added.

People in Eastport hadn’t taken kindly at first to the idea of a lawyer “from away” setting up in town. Four years earlier when Clarissa had come here from Portland, about the only work she could get was representing drivers who’d failed their field sobriety tests. And there's not much you can say in court for a drunk driver other than “Yes, Your Honor.”

Pretty soon, though, people cottoned on to the idea of a lawyer who didn’t know their whole life histories and those of their families. They appreciated having an attorney whose great-grandfather hadn’t been cheated in a card game, snookered in a land swap, or had a mule stolen by one of their ancestors, thus tainting the family name for lo these many generations unto the present. They felt Clarissa's newness to the area allowed her to view their own characters from a novel perspective.

Rightly or wrongly. “So how much trouble am I in?”

Personally I thought there was not very much novel about Clarissa's perspective. Rather it was biblical, with special emphasis on the story of Cain and Abel. Most of the time, she said, her job was just to make sure Cain didn’t get screwed.

“None, if no one presses charges against you.”

My spirits rose minimally.

“And since your meddling has turned up a nifty piece of evidence the prosecution might not otherwise have gotten,” she added pointedly, “they probably won’t.”

Clarissa's big windows looked out over Passamaquoddy Bay: blue, cold, and dotted with scallop boats. It was low tide, the tree-trunk pilings of the fish pier rising thirty feet or more over the water's surface near the shore.

But out in the middle I saw a nice, deep spot I could sink myself in.

Clarissa tipped her head, upon which every short, dark
strand was in place. Tiny diamonds sparkled in her earlobes and her short, neat fingernails gleamed with clear polish.

“On the other hand, Jake, if you had something else they wanted, they could threaten to prosecute unless you gave it to them.”

She looked like a million bucks, smelled like Camay, and was, if you can believe it, the mother of an almost-two-year-old. When Sam was almost two years old you couldn’t even see if I had fingernails at all, because he was driving me so nuts, my hands were too busy pulling my hair out.

“Whether or not you really had it,” she added meaningfully. “Whatever.”

In other words they could squeeze me for something I could not possibly give them because I didn’t have it, then prosecute me on account of my failure to cooperate, either because they thought I really did have it or for pure revenge: Our finding the diary when they hadn’t made them look dumb.

“So I’d better not give them an idea that I do. Have something, I mean.” By, for instance, snooping around anymore.

She nodded, as I remembered something else. “Clarissa, did they say anything to Bob about why they were here before Merle died?”

In the one creased snapshot I still have of my father you can see how handsome he was, the smile that attracted my mother. And the hint of danger in his eyes, the suggestion that if you dared hitch your star to his bright star, you might go far.

Or fall far. But this, to a girl who was barefoot and skinny-legged in Kentucky hill country, would not have seemed much of a risk. One of Clarissa's dark, wing-shaped eyebrows rose minutely.

“No, they didn’t say why they were here before Merle died,” she said, “and I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.” She looked hard at me: if she did know, it was confidential.

“I swear, Jacobia, you’re just like one of those dogs an old uncle of mine used to have, to hunt rabbits. Not geniuses, but when it comes to rabbits you can’t—”

“Beagle,” I interrupted; my uncles had had them, too. And I recalled what they had said of the breed: stubborn as a mule and twice as smart. But the part about me not being a genius had been proven too recently for me to argue it.

“Anyway,” I went on, “Joy Abrams said she saw them out at Duddy's in Meddybemps the night before last. I suppose she could be wrong, but she was very definite about it.”

Victor had already called me that morning to complain about Willetta. As I’d suspected, Joy's kid sister was quite the little splash of cold water in my ex's love life; he hadn’t even managed to be alone with Joy yet, he’d reported indignantly.

“And can you believe the nerve of that kid?” he’d demanded, “inviting herself along and then cross-examining me about who-all would be there? She always” he’d fumed indignantly, “does that.”

And, he added, Willetta worked at the hospital in Calais where he had medical privileges, so he had to see her there, too. But Victor's romantic trouble was the least of my concerns now.

“Joy also said that Peter Christie's a…”

Liar, I’d been about to finish. And I was starting to think that might not be even the half of it. Once again Peter couldn’t have gotten Faye Anne in more deeply if he’d been trying.

Maybe he had been. The difference was, this time I’d helped him. But the half hour I’d begged from Clarissa was up.

“Hearsay,” she pronounced crisply, and got to her feet.

White silk blouse and slim black skirt, wool tartan jacket with a holiday pattern of red and dark green; motherhood agreed with her. So did getting back to her law practice full
time. Furthermore she was that most fortunate of women, the one with the utterly lovely and lovable, baby-adoring local mother-in-law to take care of Thomas.

“Thanks, Clarissa,” I said at the doorway leading downstairs. “I guess there's no hope you’ll take on Faye Anne's case, either, then?”

“Not unless one of my other clients decides to plead out.”

In the end, the thing that had really turned the trick for Clarissa in Eastport was one of those routine DUIs: the guy was staggering and slurring his words when the cop asked him out of the car, couldn’t walk the line if his life had depended on it, and when he was asked to point at his nose he poked himself in the eye.

Meanwhile there had been a big fire that night in St. Stephen, just over the border in Canada, and the hospital in Calais had taken the overflow of firemen with exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and chest pains. So there’d been a delay on the blood alcohol test the guy insisted on.

And it came back under the limit. The cops, who had not been equipped with Breathalyzers that night, argued that the low result was on account of the delay, that the guy had metabolized some of the booze he’d guzzled, while waiting. Must have, they said; he was obviously loaded when they stopped him. And except for wanting the blood test, the guy's behavior had seemed to support that idea.

At least it did until Clarissa sent him to Bangor for some other tests. Comes time for the guy's trial, who does she call to the stand? A neurologist, who testified that the defendant had an undiagnosed seizure disorder. And what the defendant had done to make all this happen was, he’d sworn to Clarissa: only two beers. On his mother's grave, he’d said.

And she had believed him, paying for the medical expert herself. Because, as she liked to say, you could usually bet the farm on Eve tempting Adam, Cain killing Abel, and the Sabine women running into some very bad dudes.