Mallets Aforethought (2 page)

That is unless they wanted to unload parcels of real estate at fire-sale prices. But . . .

“No,” I replied grudgingly. “We can’t take the chance. If we hadn’t wrecked the door getting it open, we could say we’d never
gotten
it open and never seen him. But people will know we’ve been working in here. So now if anyone else ever
does
find him, we’ll have an awfully hard time explaining ourselves.”

Oh, it would have been lovely just to walk away and forget him. Poison was too good for Hector, and as for a decent burial, any hallowed soil you tried putting him in would only spit him right back out again the way you would a bad clam.

“We had better just let Bob get the process in motion,” I told Ellie. State police, medical examiner, crime lab van from Augusta: the whole, as Chief Arnold tended to call it, dog-and-pony show.

“All right.” Ellie sighed. “We should find George, too, let him know what’s going on.”

Give him a heads-up, she meant, before some state cop began surprising him with pointed questions. Not that he wouldn’t have all the answers sooner or later, but George always mulled things over a while before supplying any and hesitation would make him into an even better suspect.

Of course he would be cleared eventually; maybe even soon. But until then I thought he could be in for an uncertain time.

“He’s at the marine tech center this morning,” Ellie added, “helping drop in new pilings for the dock, and the granite slabs for the boat ramp . . . mmph!”

An odd look came over her face. “A Volkswagen,” she gasped wincingly, putting her hand on the fireplace mantel and leaning against it, “that kicks like a
mule
.”

As we stepped from under its portico, the windows of Harlequin House peered dourly down at us through a mess of fallen gutters and sagging trim, its mansard roof rotten and the breaks in its wooden gutters home to generations of pigeons. Hunched arm-in-arm we dashed together under wind-whipped maples, unkindly shoved along by gusts bearing rain in overflowing buckets.

Power lines swung wildly overhead as we rushed through the storm-lashed streets. “I guess,” Ellie gasped, “they won’t be putting that dock in today after all.”

“If this keeps up they won’t even have to demolish the old one. Yeeks,” I finished, nearly blown off my feet. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she replied grimly.

For a woman who was carrying the equivalent of a compact car she was moving right along; when I was waiting for my own son, I was lucky if I could move from a chair to the couch. But she just kept putting one foot in front of the other, and much as I dislike the damage they cause I adore these storms. They’re the closest I’ll ever get to being on the ocean in heavy weather.

So I risked a glance back toward the bay where rows of white shingled cottages faced bravely into the gale, shutters rattling and weather vanes aimed stiffly northeast. The sign over the Happy Landings Café swung on its chains as the wind rose to a banshee howl. Gouts of heavy spray burst massively upward, racing waves battered the breakwater, and the stinging rain tasted of sea salt, as trudging forward again we at last caught sight of home.

My home: the big white 1823 Federal house loomed suddenly out of the storm at us, its many-paned windows gleaming a golden welcome from between green shutters. Water gushed from its downspouts, streamed down its brick chimneys, and sheeted along its clapboard sides as if someone had opened a spillway above it. But thus far it didn’t look as if the sump pump had gone on. No water, I saw with relief, poured from the pipe leading from the cellar window.

So one thing was going right, anyway. In the driveway a heap of old truck parts hunkered atop mismatched tires.

“He’s here,” Ellie managed breathlessly, seeing the vehicle.

George, she meant. We staggered up the porch steps and into the back hall, shedding our wet jackets and sodden hats as my black Labrador, Monday, danced and wagged her tail in joyful greeting.

“Hi, girl.” I patted her silky head, then reached to bestow equal attention on our red Doberman, Prill, who demanded nothing, adored everything, and received her petting with solemn gravity.

George was at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and listening to the radio’s report of the storm’s unexpected power. Wearing a green flannel shirt, faded overalls, and battered work boots, he got up quickly when he saw Ellie.

“Hey, hey,” he said, frowning a sharp question at me as he took charge, guiding her toward a chair. “You look all in.”

He was the one who appeared exhausted, his chin stubbled and his eyes deeply shadowed with fatigue. He’d been working harder than usual lately to buy things the baby needed and to pay doctor bills, and the strain was beginning to show.

With him at the table was another local guy, Will Bonnet; he and George had grown up together. Will took in Ellie’s drenched condition silently, then went back to the newspaper he was reading.

“I’m fine.” She leaned affectionately against George but didn’t sit. “I just need to get these wet clothes changed, that’s all.”

Wisely, George backed off. Ellie was the oxygen in his air, the stars in his sky, his own personal moon over Miami. But he knew better than to try making her do what she didn’t want to.

“Hop in a warm bath, though, why don’t you?” I said, putting the kettle on. “Seriously. You’re giving the kid a chill.”

Which was the secret: most of the time you couldn’t get her to do anything strictly for herself. For the baby, though . . .

“Dry clothes of yours are in my dresser,” I called after her as she went up the stairs. Over the years I’d known her, our two houses had intermingled until they had become virtual annexes of one another. “Clean towels in the linen closet.”

Then I turned to George, who was still eyeing me narrowly. He was a small man with dark hair, grease-stained knuckles, and the milky-pale skin that runs in some downeast Maine families. But his size was made up for by an alert, banty-rooster bearing and thrust-out chin; most folks didn’t give him any backchat.

“George, she wouldn’t let me get the car,” I began before he could reproach me. “It was either stand in the cold rain arguing with her or make a dash for it. It wasn’t raining when we started out earlier.”

He relented. “She is hard-headed, isn’t she?”
Hahd
—the downeast Maine pronunciation. The radio started in on a fiddle-and-banjo version of “Beaumont Rag,” a tune that always makes me feel like dancing.

But not now. I glanced around the big old barnlike kitchen with its tall bare windows, pine wainscoting, and bright braided rugs on the hardwood floor. It seemed a haven against any storm.

Still, I had a feeling the sensation of safety wouldn’t last much longer. There was a window sash standing in the corner by the washing machine; I’d removed it earlier and now just to keep my hands busy I began tinkering with it.

“George. We found two bodies in that house.” A length of metal weatherstripping lay atop the washing machine, along with a sharp chisel, a hammer, and some small nails. “And one of the bodies is Hector Gosling’s.”

He’d returned to his chair to wait for Ellie so he could take her home. Now he peered blankly at me, his look unreadable.

Will looked up too. By contrast he appeared delighted. “Ain’t that,” he pronounced succinctly, “a goddamned shame.”

“We haven’t told anyone,” I went on. “We need to inform Bob Arnold.”

I’d already nailed weatherstripping into the sash channels. Now I turned the window sash so the bottom edge faced up. “And George, the police will want to speak with you.”

But George shook his head. “Bob’s mom took ill last night in Kennebunk. State boys’ll be covering us till he gets back.”

Which was not welcome news. Something Bob Arnold might’ve given instantly—such as for instance an ironclad character reference for George—wouldn’t be available at all from a cop whose usual task was patrolling the interstate, 200 miles away.

“Anyway, why would they want to talk to me? And who’s the other one?” he inquired mildly. George had a way of not getting too exercised over anything not relevant to him.

A dead body, for example. If it wasn’t his or Ellie’s, and it wasn’t someone from my household—my son Sam, my husband Wade Sorenson, my ex-husband Victor, who lived down the street, or any of our animals—then to George it was an item to be read in the newspaper and that was the end of it.

But Will, a big, handsome fellow with jet-black hair, blue eyes, and a deeply cleft chin—in red plaid shirt, narrow jeans, and polished boots, he was the Hollywood version of Paul Bunyan—had begun looking even more interested. “Yeah? Whose was it?”

“The other one’s too old to make any difference to us,” I said. Let Ellie tell the rest of that story, I decided, sometime when we didn’t need George awakened to his own personal peril.

A bomb might do it. Or an air-raid siren. George’s feisty nature was controlled by a routine of daily habits; in his youth he’d been a terror, racketing around with Will Bonnet and getting into all kinds of mischief. But with time—and after an incident that he didn’t like talking about, nowadays—he’d learned to behave.

“They’ll want to speak with you,” I told George, “because you are the one who hated his guts the most.”

If your window locks with a top clasp that holds the bottom sash down tightly, you can make it draft-free by installing some weatherstripping on the bottom edge of the window.

“And,” I added to George, “everyone knows it.”

There was another more specific reason, too, but I didn’t want to mention it yet. Maybe I wouldn’t have to at all. I positioned the length of weatherstripping in the window well, cut it to fit by tapping the chisel on it with the hammer, and lay the cut-to-fit strip on the bottom edge of the sash.

“Join the club,” George said, perusing a section of the newspaper he’d picked up. “Can’t think of many who didn’t hate him. Can you?”

“No.” I began nailing the weatherstripping to the sash with little taps of the hammer. “But they weren’t talking it around that if they could find a good way to do something to Hector, they’d do something to him.”

He looked unimpressed. “So you think I should get my ducks in a row? Trump myself up a good old-fashioned alibi?”

Tap, tap. “That’s just what I think you should do, but a real one, not trumped up.” I didn’t think he was taking this seriously enough.

“And the more wide-ranging and comprehensive the better,” I went on, “because . . .”

Because we didn’t know yet just when Gosling had died. But a week earlier while Ellie was at a baby shower, Will and George had gone out on the town together. They’d ended up in Duddy’s Tap, drinking beer and regaling the crowd with hilarious schemes.

And what all those schemes had in common, I’d been told the next day by one of Duddy’s regulars who’d been there too, was the sudden, violent, and unsolvable murder of Hector Gosling.

“I just think you ought to,” I finished, lifting the sash and placing it back into the window opening. The sash trim went up in a twinkling; I hadn’t even bothered taking the nails out. Now I slid the sash experimentally up and down, then locked it.

It worked, the weatherstripping pressed tight by the locked window. “Nice,” Will Bonnet observed.

“Thanks.” A little burst of pleasure flooded my heart. “And it will be even nicer this winter.”

“Hey, there.” George’s face brightened as Ellie returned, a towel around her head and the rest of her swathed in an enormous hot-pink sweater. With it she wore fuchsia leggings with crimson flowers printed on them, and a lime-green crocheted vest. Purple legwarmers, plaid socks, and sandals completed her costume.

“Oh, I feel
so
much better,” she beamed.

Will Bonnet grinned at her and I suppose I must have, also. You couldn’t help it; combined with the outfit, her smile made her look like an explosion at the happiness factory.

“George, did Jake tell you what we found?”

“Ayuh. She seems to think folks’ll b’lieve I did it.”

“Well.” The smile dimmed a few watts. “Bob Arnold
is
going to want to talk to you. So you’d better be ready.”

But she didn’t sound nearly as concerned as before. I hadn’t mentioned the Duddy’s Tap stuff to her, feeling it was not a part of my duty as a friend to tattle on George. Now I guessed she must have thought things over again and decided that we were just worrying too much, earlier.

Which left me for the role of Chicken Little. “Bob isn’t around,” I started to tell her as I began clearing up tools and scraps of weatherstripping. But she’d begun rubbing the towel over her hair and wasn’t listening. On the other hand, the sky wasn’t falling, either . . . so far.

“Hector was a crook,” George declared. “Whoever’s done for ’im should’ve done it sooner. Before”—he emphasized this with a shake of the sports pages—“Gosling and his quack pal Jan Jesperson got near my Aunt Paula. Rest,” he added sadly, “her poor addled soul.”

This was the crux of the matter and the reason for George’s dislike of—black hatred for, actually—Hector the Objector.

That Hector
didn’t
object to swindling town ladies out of their money. Or anyway, that was the rumor: that over the years he and his partner in crime Jan Jesperson had conspired to identify women who were alone in the world, and befriend them.

Next, people said, Jan wielded a pill-bottle and Gosling worked the social angle. Hector wooed the ladies with old-fashioned courtliness while Jan turned them into doped zombies from whom it was child’s play to extract shaky power-of-attorney signatures.

And after
that,
it was Katie-bar-the-door: estates looted in the name of investment opportunities, ladies dumped into distant “assisted living” facilities that later turned out to be little more than grim boarding-houses and sometimes much less.

“She’s not a quack, though,” Will corrected George. “Not a doctor at all. She’s what they used to call a detail man. Or,” he added, “in her case, detail woman.”

I turned curiously to him. “How do you know?” Jan Jesperson was in her late sixties or so, I estimated: single, retired, and tight as a tick about her private life.