Mallets Aforethought (13 page)

The police could have stood the ladder against the trapdoor themselves, when they were in here. But they hadn’t; at the top I found two big nails toenailing it in place. And the last time I looked, cops weren’t carrying claw hammers on their utility belts.

Someone else had wanted to make very sure that ladder stayed there; wanted it so that one way or another somebody working on the well-publicized rehab of Harlequin House would be likely to find Hector dead.

All of which was still theory. But I had a bad feeling as I clambered crabwise from the ladder’s top into the little room.

The feeling got worse as, getting up, I found myself staring into the face of a person who would actually rather be found dead than clambering anywhere. It was the patronizing face of Sally Crusoe.

“Intrepid,” she murmured. Her ultrarefined tone always made me want to stick my thumbs in my ears and waggle my fingers at her.

“I came to let you both know that we have a small luncheon prepared for everyone here today,” Sally continued, “in case either of you wish to partake.”

Her look registered my disheveled condition; I’d managed a shower before the CPR class, but on essentially no sleep I still felt like the bottom of a birdcage.

“Jacobia, dear,” she began once Ellie had gone to inspect the food. Warm aromas were drifting in; they smelled delicious.

“It’s probably not important,” Sally went on, touching a manicured hand to the back of her hair. The gesture was meant to let me know she was uncomfortable with what she was about to say.

Which was nonsense; due to her entire nervous system having been replaced by the Social Register, Sally wouldn’t have been made a bit uncomfortable if she were drawn and quartered, a plan I heartily approved.

Also, she thought everything she said was important. “Spill it, Sally,” I told her. “I’m busy.”

That she was speaking to me at all indicated that she wanted something, and I was constitutionally inclined not to give Sally anything she wanted.

“Well.” She steeled herself prettily. “I don’t know if you know this. Or if Ellie does.”

I waited.

“But Jimmy Condon, who used to work for me until he stole all that firewood . . .”

Whereupon I nearly shut her down right then and there. Jimmy Condon was a well-liked local man whose business was cutting big woodlots for other people, selling the wood, and paying himself from the profit. The terms of the deal were spelled out: what got cut, what was to be left, and what the owner received.

“Care to get to the point?” I suggested.

People around here operated on margins so thin you could read the newspaper through them, and Jimmy was no exception. His mistake had been taking the trash wood from Sally’s woodlot. It was stuff so small no one else would want it or so full of pitch it would turn your chimney into a tar pit, so she’d have had to pay to get it hauled away otherwise.

She bridled faintly. “That wood wasn’t in the contract,” she insisted, sensing whose side of the argument I was on.

Right, it hadn’t been. Still, she’d been fine with it until she found out Jimmy used it to boil maple syrup at his little farm, where he also sold vegetables, eggs, goat’s milk, and pumpkins.

Then she’d raised hell. It wasn’t, she’d protested, for his personal use, as she had believed; it was for a
business,
and a pretty successful little business at that. There was, as she had told anyone who would listen, a
principle
involved.

The principle being that she could no longer imagine Jimmy’s family huddled around the fire she had so charitably provided, a picture I was sure she’d summoned up on a regular basis, with herself as the benevolent lady of the manor, gooey with
noblesse oblige
.

Anyway, Jimmy had ended up buying the wood to stop her bad-mouthing him—a woodman with a crooked reputation might as well go pound sand—and that along with the next year’s poor sap yield had put him out of the maple syrup business.

Which was another reason I so disliked her. “He was about to be ruined by Hector Gosling,” Sally said. “Jimmy, I mean.”

“Really. What makes you think that?”

My first reaction was that Sally just wanted to finish Jimmy off. Everyone knew what she’d done to him, and no one appreciated it; suggesting he might’ve had a bone to pick with Hector would make him look worse and her somehow better, she probably imagined.

But then I thought again, because Sally’s patrician nose was exceptionally good at sniffing out news. “How could Hector’ve done anything to Jimmy Condon?” I prompted her. Because Jimmy could be as innocent as the day was long and still deliver a heaping helping of reasonable doubt over to George’s side of the table.

“You’ll have to ask Jimmy,” she replied primly. “Or you could talk to Maria. She’s out there now with Will Bonnet helping him prepare lunch. I shouldn’t,” she added, “be telling you this much.”

Which meant she’d probably extracted the information from her husband, a loan officer at the bank. Meanwhile I’d forgotten that Maria Condon was a historical society member; my, what an interesting connection, I thought, suddenly hopeful again.

“Jacobia.” Sally stopped me as I moved away from her.

I turned back to find her gazing at me, wearing as usual a skirt and sweater set, stockings, and low heels, her pearls and makeup flawless and her white hair beautifully combed into a style that had been
au courant
thirty years earlier.

Chin up and shoulders back. Tummy flat; I’d have bet any money she was wearing a girdle. She looked, I realized all at once, lonely as hell.

“I hope it turns out all right for George,” she said softly. “He’s a good man.”

I believed she meant it; even a stopped clock, and all that. But she’d been sealing her fate since moving here from Newport, Rhode Island, two years earlier, bringing along with her a down-the-nose gaze for anyone not meeting her standards. People just didn’t like, as George would’ve put it, the cut of her jib.

So I couldn’t help feeling a kind of sympathy for her. But I didn’t have time—and let’s face it, later I wouldn’t have the inclination—to begin trying to exhume Sally from the grave she’d dug herself into.

“Thanks,” I said, and left her alone in the ruined parlor.

In the next forty minutes I had jobs of my own to do, but I was also constantly being summoned to a remarkable variety of others. Intervening at the last instant before the power saw was applied, I saved an old panel door from being chopped off at the bottom; that lopped-off half-inch would’ve kept it from sticking, but would also have prevented the door from hanging straight ever again. Instead we rehung it on new hinges; afterwards it swung smoothly, unmutilated.

Next I wandered out to the kitchen where a very nice young man thought roofing nails would do for securing a loose corner of the kitchen linoleum, the venerable old kind that was actually made from canvas and linseed oil. Hastily I went to Wadsworth’s Hardware store for a bottle of white glue and pressed it into the young man’s hands, confiscating the roofing nails.

Finally I snatched a can of latex primer from a woman who, looking doubtful, was about to paint the insides of some first-floor window wells. Also, she hadn’t scraped them; apparently she hoped latex primer would hold down the old loose paint chips.

Unfortunately, latex primer won’t even hold itself down when painted onto anything but indoor locations. In a window, you might as well use a child’s tin of watercolors. So I put a chisel to the old paint chips, which practically fell off, vacuumed them up, and gave some oil-based primer to the woman.

“Here,” I told her, thinking I was being a little pushy. “You’ll like the result much better.”

But the gleam in her eye said she didn’t think I was pushy at all. “Thank you,” she said, wielding the paintbrush with new energy and beaming with the lovely zeal of the newly converted. It is remarkable, I have noticed, how the right tools can improve a person’s mood.

At last I got away for lunch, which in its own way turned out to be remarkable, too.

Visitors to Eastport think an unending supply of fresh fish must be among the culinary delights of the place. But fish come in seasons and are in addition very heavily regulated; cod, for instance, once a mainstay of the fishing fleet, is so strictly controlled that the men are obliged to throw back much of what they haul in.

Somehow, though, our newest culinary genius Will Bonnet had gotten some cod, and from it he’d made the most delicious codfish cakes I’d ever tasted; fresh, delicately seasoned, gently crispy, and wildly popular with the historical society members.

“You like?” He stood behind the steam table he’d set up to keep them hot, wearing a white apron and a tall white chef’s cap.

“Oh, indeed,” I assured him through a mouthful. In the wide hall of the old mansion where people stood refreshing themselves after their labors, approving comment about these delicacies had nearly managed to replace talk of Hector’s murder.

“You must be feeling sandbagged,” I told him as I selected asparagus from a dish positioned over a warming candle.

“You uproot your life to come home and save your Aunt Agnes, turns out someone steps in, does the job for you,” I continued.

Two perfectly good non-George suspects had just been handed to me on plates, neat as the ones set up here to present deviled eggs spiced with locally made mustard, sweet-pickled baby carrots stuffed with hot peppers, and tiny steamed potatoes with butter and parsley, still in their tender jackets.

But I wanted more. Specifically I wanted Will’s own problems with Hector Gosling and Jan Jesperson given a thorough airing. Because if this all dragged on as long as I had begun fearing it might, I could imagine wanting Ellie to be able to depend on him.

And I couldn’t want that if I didn’t trust him completely. He got my message, though, and to my relief he stepped up to it promptly and frankly.

“Yeah, I guess that’s how it would look. City boy goes home, worried he’ll have to haul his inheritance out of the villain’s clutches. Or worse, that he won’t be able to.”

He slid cod cakes onto another plate, accepted compliments, handsome with that cleft chin and curly black hair. You could see him greeting guests in his own restaurant.

“Might make the guy mad,” Will admitted. “Truth is, though, those two did me a big favor.”

He looked past me to where Ellie stood chatting with Maria Condon. His eyes softened at the sight. “Man, is she a trooper or what? She doing okay?”

“Sure. Reasonably.” I hadn’t had the chance to tell Ellie what Sally had said about Jimmy Condon, and now seeing the two women together I thought Ellie should be running a psychic hotline.

But then I realized from their body language that the small dark-haired woman had buttonholed Ellie, not the reverse. Maria spoke urgently, moving her hands in the quick, intense way that was among her trademarks, the other two being a razor-sharp tongue and a grip on a dollar that could make the eagle scream.

I scanned the crowd for Jan Jesperson. Cozily, she was the historical society’s vice-president under Hector’s leadership. But she wasn’t here, and for that I was grateful. To get away with so much for so long I thought she’d have to be as sensitive as a cat’s whisker; I didn’t want her picking up any vibes from me.

“George,” Will said wistfully, still watching Ellie, “is one lucky guy.”

Yes, I thought sarcastically, except that he’s in jail. “You were saying Hector did you a favor?”

Across the room Will’s Aunt Agnes sat quietly on a folding chair, gazing wide-eyed at the people milling around her. She looked up confusedly each time another one stopped to greet her.

“Yeah.” Will watched as she accepted a glass of sherry, then busied himself with the serving implements again. “But what you’re really asking is something else,” he went on as he worked. “And to answer the gist of your question, I was in Boston the night before last.”

He waved at the cod cakes. “It’s where I got the makings of those, the fish and seasonings.” His eyes met mine calmly. “I can show you the receipt if you want.”

He was right; it had been precisely the gist of my question, and I liked his straight answer.

“Or,” he added without a hint of rancor, “you could talk to the people I saw there. Some business I had to take care of.”

I liked his not being offended by my curiosity even better. “That’s okay, Will,” I said. “I appreciate your candor. But what did you mean about Jan and Hector doing you a favor?”

He shrugged. “I came back here thinking they were about to make off with my inheritance,” he answered. “But that Agnes, she used to be a sharp cookie and even though she’s failing some now, she was way ahead of me. Way ahead of them, too, it turns out.”

He angled his head in her direction again. “Set up her will so she couldn’t change it without my input, insisted on giving me power of attorney. Lawyer said she told him she didn’t want to be made a fool of, if she ever got too far gone to notice.”

Which now it seemed she had. The people speaking with her wore the sad smiles of visitors who expect not to see you again, or not to be recognized if they do.

“I don’t get it,” I told Will. “That means you never had to come here at all. It was all a waste of . . .”

“No.” He waved his spatula at Agnes. “Just look at her. She raised me, you know, after my folks died. And she must have been going downhill to begin with or it was like George said about his aunt, she’d have never given Jan or Hector the time of day. So who’ll take care of her now if I don’t? Until I arrived I had no idea she was so fragile.”

Almost the first thing he’d had to do was put a wheelchair ramp on her house. Still, she was lovely in an old-lace way; somebody picked up her fallen napkin for her, and the smile she offered in return would’ve broken a tax-man’s heart.

“And now George,” Will finished grimly. “He’s going to need a pal, too. I mean even more pals than he’s already got.”

He raised the warming candle under the asparagus. “I owe him big-time after all he’s done for me. So anything he needs, I mean it, all Ellie has to do is ask.”