Mallets Aforethought (12 page)

A recently retired high school teacher, Siss was a black-haired woman with big teeth and an authoritative manner. “I knew her in school, she was a man-chaser then,” Siss went on. “And I wouldn’t put it a bit past her.”

Dumping an armload of peeled-off wallpaper into my trash bag, I turned to Siss. “You don’t mean she was after Hector?”

Siss made a face. “No. Of course not. It was some fellow Hector found out about, started coming by the house. Sweet on Ginger, or so he said. Until Hector noticed it and put a stop to it. Some sailor off a ship,” she sniffed disapprovingly.

“How’d he do that?” I asked. “Stop it, I mean. And why?”

But Siss didn’t know. Evidently if Ginger wanted something, that was more than enough reason why it should have a stop put to it, in Siss’s opinion.

“That girl never had any use for the advice of her elders,” Siss finished, “and look what she’s come to.”

I didn’t know what she’d come to and was about to ask. But Siss went on talking. “At any rate, Ellie, I’m sorry for your trouble, but I must tell you, you belong home in bed. In my day, women didn’t go out in your condition.”

In your day they didn’t vote or own property either,
I was on the verge of retorting. But before I could, Siss bustled off to position her rain cloud over somebody else.

A few minutes later, though, she was back, and this time she cornered me. “How is my young friend Tommy Pockets?” she wanted to know.

“The same,” I told her. “Working, trying to make money.”

Siss looked regretful. “I’m afraid I pushed him too hard in school. When I go by the gas station Tommy’s never the one who pumps. I think,” she confessed, “he’s trying to avoid me.”

According to Sam, that was the situation with half the students in Eastport. “Tommy has responsibilities, you know.” Something about the urgency of her interest made me want to defend him.

“That’s a cop-out,” Siss replied tartly. “A reason not to try.” But then her face softened. “Although not in Tommy’s case, perhaps. Well, tell him I said hello.”

Her gentle tone reminded me: nobody’s all bad. But then as if deliberately to dilute the effect, Siss added a postscript.

“Don’t forget,” she snapped, “what I’ve told you about that Tolliver girl.”

“So, was I right?” Ellie murmured a little later as we stood six newly removed window sashes against the wall. From there they would be worked on by whoever was in charge of reglazing them; not, thank goodness,
moi
.

But Harry Leonard, a local WWII veteran who lived on the mainland in a brand-new manufactured home that required no maintenance at all, wasn’t burned out on window glazing. He bustled in, spied the windows, and whipped out his cordless putty-removing tool, and if I had one I wouldn’t be so burned out, either, I thought.

He set the tip of the tool along one pane, pushed a button, and
whirr!
A whole strip of old putty turned to powder and fell out onto the floor.

Bzzt!
Another strip went. Harry was like a kid with a new toy. A
great
new toy; in less than a minute he’d removed one pane and was starting on the next.

I resolved to purchase one of these gadgets for myself, as I took Ellie aside.

“One suspect, coming up,” I replied cheerfully to her question. Because I had to admit she
was
right; the Ginger Tolliver story was worth pursuing. Maybe it wasn’t as good as what I’d discovered about Jan Jesperson, but there was no such thing as too many other people with good motives.

I propped up the final window and after that we wiped down all the parlor’s other surfaces with a dust mop and a second time with a tack cloth, dumped the rags and cloths into the trash bags, and tied the bags’ tops.

“Okay,” I said, pleased in spite of myself. “Now we’re ready to make an even bigger mess.”

Because much as I didn’t enjoy being in Harlequin House, now—the little room where we’d found the bodies yawned darkly at me, its repaired door ajar—I do like the part of a job when the prep work is done and the debris all cleared. The labor of priming and finishing is still to come, with its trials and missteps. I once painted an entire wall before I realized I was doing it out of the wrong paint bucket; to this day that bedroom has three satin-finish surfaces and a glossy one. But for a glorious instant the old Harlequin House parlor seemed cleansed of its past.

“Jake, look.” Ellie’s voice came from the little chamber I’d begun calling, in my own mind, the dead room.

“Ellie, what the heck are you doing in . . . Oh.”

She’d shoved the old red rug aside and lifted the trapdoor that Trooper Colgate had told me about. I could just glimpse the top rung of a ladder leading down. She put a foot on it.

“Ellie, don’t you dare! We don’t know what’s down there. Or if,” I added, eyeing her shape, “you can get back up again.”

She’d taken off the goggles and respirator again. “All right.” She stood back a little. “You go.”

Sheesh. If there’s anything any higher on my hit parade of hideousness than an old wooden ladder, it’s one leading down into an area I know nothing about, other than that it’s
very
dark.

“Ellie, there’s a door to that cellar in the back hall. With nice safe steps leading down. And a handrail.”

“I know that. But there’s also a dozen people out there. I’m sure they’d all like to follow us down, mill around and ask lots of questions, maybe mess up items of interest we might discover.”

I sighed, tried again. That ladder looked awfully rickety. “The cops must’ve looked at the cellar already.”

She made a face. “Sure, and all we have to do is say please, they’ll tell us everything we want to know about it, is that it? I,” she pronounced caustically, “don’t think so.”

The ladder vanished into the velvety blackness about three rungs down. Furthermore, unless you happen to be an agile person it’s not easy stepping onto a ladder from above.

I am not an agile person. But I felt very guilty not telling Ellie about Jan or Therese. And I
was
curious.

“Oh, all right. Just give me your hand.” I positioned myself beside the ladder and stepped down sideways onto it.

Nervously at first, and then a little more confidently; old it might have been, but that ladder
felt
solid enough. Also the cops had likely used it too, and it hadn’t collapsed under them.

Turning my mind from the possibility that they’d weakened it just enough to set
me
up for the big fall, I continued down.

“Maybe this was an escape route for the criminals when Uncle Chester was here,” Ellie theorized from above.

“Or even earlier,” I said. Because another human cargo that got transported through this part of the world, years before some genius realized that the way to make money on booze was to forbid it, had been slaves.

Escaped slaves headed for the freedom of Canada. “Hand me a flashlight, will you?”

Gripping it, I aimed it first at a dirt floor and a granite foundation like the one in my house. Hand-adzed beams, massive old cistern, lots of unpainted shelves along the walls, and . . .

“Gah!”

“What is it?” Ellie’s face appeared worriedly in the square of light above me.

“Nothing.” A moose’s head, stuffed and mounted, hung on a wooden post, its glass eyes reflecting the flashlight’s glow.

“You think George is hiding something, don’t you?” she said in a different tone, after a moment.

“Ellie, I’m starting to think he’s being set up just like you said. The strychnine, the note on Gosling’s body, the paperwork from his aunt’s attorney . . .”

“I’d never seen . . .” she began insistently.

“I know. I believe you about not knowing about the will. I also know you’re not in the habit of locking your doors. Anyone could’ve put those papers in your house. But my point is that if George would say where
he
was, none of it would matter.”

I peered around some more. “The only way George could be set up like this is if someone knows he’s got something
else
he needs to keep secret, so he won’t say what he
was
doing. And
that’s
what I’m worried about.”

I stepped off the ladder. “So yes, I do think he’s hiding something but at this point I have no idea what. You’re sure
he
had no idea about any inheritance from his aunt?”

“I’m sure. Believe me, I would know.
And
I’d remember.”

“Yeah.” From upstairs came voices, purposeful footsteps, and the
whap!whap!whap!
of someone using a nail gun.

“Yeah, I’m sure you would. Do you think he’ll call you?”

The plan
had
been to visit him and impress upon him that in this case silence wasn’t golden. Instead it was fool’s gold.

“Sure,” Ellie replied. “He’ll just sit for a while waiting. But when it dawns on him that he’s really stuck there . . .”

That he wasn’t in Eastport anymore, where everyone liked and trusted him. George might not have been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but the light he shed was warm and steady. Her voice trailed off sadly. “Then he’ll call.”

The flashlight picked out an ancient coal furnace, a few shiny black cinders lying around its door. Behind it was the old coal bin. Into it deliveries of the fuel had made their entry via the coal chute.

“Jake?”

A complicated system of pipes and valves connected an old boiler to the heat and hot water systems. Brick arches spread the weight of the chimneys that, before central heating, vented the stoves and fireplaces.

“I’m here.” Small rooms as far as possible from the furnace would’ve held hung meats, fruit and vegetables canned and stored up against the winter, and root vegetables, carrots and potatoes and parsnips, laid away in sand.

I took a few more steps. Nothing but another old cellar like mine. In fact I was willing to bet there was a . . .

Yep. I found a switch string and pulled it; a bulb snapped on. My heebie-jeebies nearly vanished as the darkness went away.

But they didn’t vanish
completely
. Ellie’s voice came down through the trapdoor hole.

“This wasn’t always a secret room,” she reasoned. “You could go through the door in the parlor before it got plastered over.”

“Uh-huh. But what was it for?” Then it hit me.

“Ellie, are there
marks
on the floor up there? Out in the parlor, in front of the mantel where a stove would stand, if there’d ever been one? Can you see where maybe its feet were?”

She went away, came back swiftly. “Yes,” she confirmed. “And there are char marks on the floor, too, from embers. And screw holes in the wall here, big ones. A pulley, maybe, to haul up a coal scuttle?”

She’d followed my thought. Why bring coal all the way around up the cellar steps when you could haul it up through the floor?

“Maybe that’s why the trapdoor’s here. And when Chester redid the house he got rid of the stoves, put in the furnace.”

“He had an art collection,” she remembered aloud. “Gone now, of course. But once he didn’t need coal upstairs maybe he had the door plastered over just to get more wall space?”

Good enough. Even without an art collection I’d been sorely tempted to jettison my old cast-iron radiators; between them and all the fireplaces, there was barely enough clear space for furniture.

“Fine. So the next puzzle is, how did anyone know this room existed? Someone, I mean, who put Hector in it not long ago?”

“Well, if you were in the cellar just snooping around and you saw that ladder standing there, wouldn’t you figure it must go somewhere?”

I’d already thought of that. “Which means the ladder wasn’t there. If it had been, Eva’s body would have been discovered sooner. By, for instance, whoever redid the electrical work.”

I aimed the flash at the ceiling and the wiring snaking over it. Contrary to my earlier belief, it
was
modern insulated stuff. “This is new. The historical society must have had it redone when they bought the house,” I said.

Which suggested another question. Why had there been a fire? For a while after we’d arrived today an electrician had been here examining the place, but nothing dangerous had been found.

“If the ladder had been there when the wiring was installed, someone would’ve been curious enough to climb it,” Ellie said.

“Uh-huh. That’s what I mean. It suggests that the ladder’s placement here is more recent. Close the trapdoor, will you?”

She complied. The cellar ceiling was a jumble of old boards and beams. Even with the light on, without the ladder to clue you to it the trapdoor was practically invisible.

“Darn,” I grumbled as Ellie opened the door again. I was getting a clearer picture, now, and it wasn’t pretty.

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to find that room,” I told her. “Someone who was looking for a good place to put Hector’s body. Whoever it was, once they found that trapdoor, they placed the ladder and hauled Hector’s body up. And then . . .”

“Left the ladder on purpose.” She finished my sentence.

“Uh-huh. They hid him, but they wanted him found. It makes sense of that note in Hector’s pocket, and it confirms the idea that someone’s setting George up. But . . .”

Dragging Hector in through the front door of Harlequin House still bothered me, though, even after my efforts at rationalizing it to myself. Too dicey, secrecy-wise. Could there be some other way, I wondered?

Standing on tiptoe I pulled on one of the boards nailed over the coal chute’s opening, at the top of the old wooden coal slide. The board came off easily, as if it had been removed before. “Ellie, I think Hector
slid
in.”

That accounted for the grime on his face and clothes. Then, somebody had hauled the body up the ladder into the room. All of which argued for a plan, especially the part about leaving the ladder like a big wooden arrow:
this way up.

But there was one other possibility. I climbed the ladder again, moving quickly. The less time I spend on one of them the less chance there is of my departing it in, shall we say, an unregulated manner.