Dead Level (10 page)

I
f he hadn’t been a brain surgeon, my ex-husband, Victor, could’ve been a top-notch salesman. Never mind ice at the North Pole; Victor could sell you on the idea that he had warm blood in his veins, instead of embalming fluid so cold it was practically turning to slush.

Back when he was alive, I mean, before he really did have embalming fluid in them.

Ellie shot me a look. “You don’t have to hide it from me, Jake, I know you’re thinking about him. And why shouldn’t you be? It’s his deathiversary, for heaven’s sake, and that’s probably why you thought you heard his voice, too. So why not admit it?”

Lunch had been delayed; in the cool breeze off the lake, our little gas grill was taking its time heating up. Meanwhile, I was making the daybed, using the flannel sheets I’d brought from the linen closet at home.

And I didn’t think I’d imagined hearing him. But: “After all,” she went on, “he was your husband, and Sam’s dad. It’s not wrong or disloyal to remember him, especially now.”

I made a hospital corner, folding the flannel tightly under the mattress as if I were packaging it for airmailing. We had no mice here, thanks to Bella; all summer she’d been obsessive about setting mousetraps, so that whenever we stayed overnight we’d be woken by the
whap! whap!
of tiny necks being snapped.

But at last they’d wised up about big, murderous mammals bearing treats. It got so just opening the cottage door alerted them; the last time I was here, I’d walked in, set my bag down on the floor, and immediately spotted a mother mouse streaking for the exit with a pink, hairless baby the size of a lima bean in her mouth.

Still, I didn’t want even a chance of one burrowing under the covers with me tonight; I gave the sheet an extra tug before spreading the down comforter over it, then turned to Ellie.

“You’re right.” About one thing, anyway. She’d always been able to see past my stiff upper lip. “I am thinking of him.”

On the morning he died, the only phrase I’d been able to summon was
Thank God
. For my sake and his; even with a team of hospice nurses who had, I still firmly believe, floated straight down from heaven, plus enough morphine to stun a horse (but none for me, unfortunately), those last few days had been horrible.

“Right now, mostly I’m thinking about the time he hit me.”

Ellie looked up from where she crouched before the old woodstove, feeding it small lengths of split birch. From her face, you’d think I’d said he’d poisoned me with strychnine. “He what?”

I mumbled something into the pillow I was fluffing. She must have heard it as “Never mind,” because she tactfully went back to working on the fire; she was good that way, never prying, always ready to listen if I wanted to talk. But what I’d really said was “I went blind.”

Which I had, right after it happened. I don’t even recall now what Victor and I had been arguing over, but it was probably a woman; there’d been so many of them by then that the nurses at the hospital where he worked nicknamed him “Vlad the Impaler.”

Anyway, I’d been screaming something profane at him when his fist shot out and slammed the side of my head. Immediately, my vision had blurred, but I could see well enough to watch him look down at his hand as if it had just done something utterly outside his control, like the disembodied hand of the murdered pianist in one of the old horror movies my son, Sam, still likes so much.

Only instead of walking crabwise and lopped-off-at-the-wrist onto the keys of a grand piano, it had hauled off and slugged me. Then my vision darkened, and I passed out.

In the ambulance when I woke, I could see again, and Victor was with me as we screamed in and out of city traffic. After a moment I closed my eyes; he hadn’t known I was watching him.

A few hours later, after I got my head examined at the hospital, they released me. He’d told them I’d slipped on a throw rug, a story that was apparently believable—especially coming from him—and one I never bothered correcting.

As for why I didn’t leave him, I would have, except for what I’d seen in the ambulance. He’d been weeping with his face in his hands and his shoulders heaving.

“Please be okay,” he’d been whispering. “I’m so very sorry, please let her be okay.”

And that was the scene I just couldn’t get out of my mind on this gorgeous October afternoon more than two decades later. Like I said: a salesman. Or maybe not; even now I wasn’t sure what I’d decided about it.

“Time for lunch at last,” Ellie announced as I finished making up the bed by folding the red plaid wool lap robe over it, on top of the flannel sheets and down comforter. Fall days at the lake were chilly enough, but once evening arrived it was going to get downright nippy.

Dark, too, like somebody shutting off a switch. While Ellie prepped buns for toasting and started the hot dogs cooking on the grill, I went around testing propane lamps. Their harsh overhead glare cast no shadow, and everyone lit by them looked dead; even Sam, never a connoisseur of atmospheric lighting effects, said those gas lamps made him feel as if we all might start shambling around any minute, hungry for brai-ai-ains.

But I did want them working in case the solar power failed somehow, so just to make sure at least one of them did, I held a lighter to the small sack of white netting covering its gas jet. Turning the gas-flow lever, I heard the soft pop of ignition and after an initial greenish flare watched the mantle heat swiftly, from dark red to blinding yellowish white.

Satisfied, I blinked the intense light-blast from my retinas just in time to see Ellie come in with a platter of sizzling hot dogs, each resting in a perfectly toasted hot dog bun.

On the table already were condiments, napkins, and glasses of sweet, minty iced tea; we feasted like queens while the radio played the third of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
and the woodstove took the last of the cottage’s closed-up chilliness away.

“He never did it again, though,” I said after I’d eaten my first hot dog. “Victor never hit me after that one single time.”

It was the other reason I hadn’t left him, or not over that, anyway. In the end, the medical secretary I discovered in our bed one day accomplished what his clenched fist hadn’t been able to.

“Right,” said Ellie, fishing a dill pickle out of the jar. “Somehow I didn’t think he could’ve.”

She ate the pickle. “Of course, that’s what everybody says, that they won’t. That’s what she said, Dewey Hooper’s wife.”

“How do you know that?” Ellie had never mentioned knowing anyone connected with the case, at the time or since.

She got up to feed our paper plates to the stove. “I never met her myself, or Dewey, either. But George is cousins with one of their neighbors.”

Her husband, George Valentine, she meant, and since he was related to almost everyone in downeast Maine, I wasn’t surprised.

“After it was all over, the neighbor said Marianne used to come over crying a couple of times a month. Black eye, split lip—you name it.”

“Same with me. Coming over, I mean. Did George’s cousin give Marianne the same advice I did?” That she should leave, I meant. Get out, while the getting was good.

Ellie nodded solemnly.

“But she never did,” I mused aloud. “Or called the cops.”

Even as I said it, though, I understood why. Once I got home from the hospital after Victor punched me, I’d been okay except for the lump on my head; that took a week to flatten.

Emotionally, though, I’d felt winded, as if I were on my knees and couldn’t quite summon the strength to stand up again, or even figure out how. What would I have done, I wondered—what would I have been able to do—if there’d been a second time, and after that a third one and a fourth?

Plenty, you’d think, with all the resources I’d had. Back then I was a successful money manager with clients so well-to-do, they bought new shoes when the soles of the old ones got scuffed. I’d had an Upper East Side apartment in a building so exclusive that getting into Fort Knox was easier, not to mention a husband who was such a dog, I could have had Howdy Doody for a divorce lawyer and still walked away richer than half my customers.

Still, it was humiliating to admit that your husband smacked you around. Marianne had felt that, also, I knew; it’s why she’d begged me not to tell anyone.

So I hadn’t, and I’d regretted it ever since. Now Ellie took the lemonade glasses into the kitchenette, behind an L-shaped counter dividing it from the rest of the room. A pump brought up lake water; we boiled it on the gas stove to kill germs but even then we used it only for cleaning and doing dishes.

Drinking water we hauled from home in plastic jugs, six of which
now stood lined up on the counter. “So, no showers on this trip?” asked Ellie, seeing me eyeing the jugs.

“Nope.” Ordinarily we hauled water for bathing, too, but the outdoor shower setup had sprung a leak. “I’ll take a soap swim,” I said.

This late in the year, about the only other visitors this far out in the woods were bird hunters, more interested in bagging their limit of pah-tritch than in me, dog-paddling around nude with a bar of soap.

“Good luck with that,” Ellie said; the lake was already so chilly you could cool nuclear reactor rods in it. “If I were you, I think I might just decide to stay grimy.”

“Moi?”
I asked in mock astonishment. In reply she tossed me a small gingham bag tied with a ribbon, which turned out to be full of miniature toiletries: fancy lotions, cleansing towelettes, and tiny scented soaps, perfect for a sponge bath with a basin of hot water and a terry washcloth.

One of those was in the gift bag, too: a brand-new one with my name embroidered on it in blue. “Aw, you shouldn’t have.”

In general, the closest I get to a fancy lotion is Jergens, and if a bar of soap makes lather I’m good with it. But looking at these things made me feel all bubble-bath-y.

Briskly she wiped the countertop. “Sure I should. Grimy’s okay, but I refuse to let you be uncomfortable.”

Or unloved. And that in a nutshell was Ellie.

Later, we sat on a pair of lawn chairs set up in the narrow space between the truck and the shed. “So how’s Wade?” she asked.

Not that she needed an answer. She just wanted to distract me from the subject of Dewey Hooper’s dead wife, and even more so from what was really on my mind that day: memories of Victor.

“Wade’s fine,” I said, appreciating her effort. But then I got up, unable to avoid seeing the huge pile of fresh lumber at the edge of the clearing, waiting to get turned into a deck.

And guess who had been elected to do it? Or rather, had elected herself in a fit of what now felt like way, way too much self-confidence?

Correctamundo, as my son, Sam, would have answered. Sighing,
I rolled up my sweatshirt sleeves, settled my ball cap on my head, and pulled on the pair of thick elasticized work gloves that Sam had given me the previous Christmas.

At the same time, I gave up all hope of any non-aching muscles for the next week or so. But that was okay, or anyway it was only to be expected during a work trip. Maybe if I worked hard enough, I could get rid of something else, too: the memory of Victor in his last, terribly sad hours, a recollection that had been clinging to me all day.

As I thought this a tiny shiver went through me, and when I looked down at my bare arms above the cuffs of the work gloves, I saw that I had goose bumps.

“Wait!” Sam Tiptree sprinted after Richard Stedman’s sister, Carol, down the boat ramp toward where Richard’s twenty-four-foot sailboat
Courtesan
floated at the dock.

Or rather, didn’t float. Several hours had passed since Carol had arrived, and for most of them Richard had been fairly calm. He had asked Sam to hold off on the crane, deciding instead (and against Sam’s advice) to let the bilge pump attached to a new battery battle the seawater pouring into her.

But now with the tide rising higher and the wind shifting as afternoon came on, Richard had changed his mind, as it grew clear that the pump wouldn’t be enough. Gallons of water
out
weren’t keeping up with the number of gallons flowing
in
.

Result:
Courtesan
was still sinking, faster now with a big load of water weight still inside her, listing to port a little more each time one of the big, green waves still churning in from last night’s storm hit her like a fist. And instead of letting Sam put a second pump down there, Richard had ignored Sam’s urging again and then lost patience, jumping over the rail with his goggles and wet suit on into water so cold that it would chill you to your hipbones if you just stood ankle-deep in it.

“Wait,” Sam panted, catching up for the second time that day with the slim, dark-haired girl running toward her brother’s vessel. Now she was pulling her sneakers off, hopping first on one foot and then the other, the little pink bobbles on her socklets bouncing.

“I already called,” he told her. The second battery and pump were coming. Either they would save
Courtesan
or they wouldn’t; Sam still thought it was time for the crane.

But Carol wasn’t listening. Instead she was scouring the surface of the water with her eyes. “Do something, for God’s sake. He’s down there!”

Then, without waiting for his reply, and just as it suddenly occurred to Sam that in fact he hadn’t seen Richard in a while, she dove, kicking hard and disappearing under the waves.

Oh, holy criminy
, Sam thought, and was pulling his own dock shoes off when brother and sister surfaced together.

“Go!” Richard shouted at his sister, and without even looking at Sam, Carol scrambled up the dock ladder, yanked her sneakers back on, and ran uphill toward the boatyard’s parking lot. Not only was she beautiful, Sam thought, but he couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman so athletic before, at least not in real life.

“Back the trailer down here!” Richard yelled after her. “Do it now, Carol, I haven’t got much time!”

It was worse even than he’d thought, Sam realized; just as Richard finished shouting out instructions,
Courtesan
heeled over sharply, as if at any moment the vessel might capsize right onto Richard’s head.