Mallets Aforethought (23 page)

I laughed aloud for the first time that morning. But I stopped when we pulled into the driveway and my father’s truck was there, reminding me that George wasn’t the only problem on my plate.

“You decided what you’re going to do yet?” Wade asked. He turned the ignition off but didn’t get out.

I shook my head. “I thought I did. Every time I go over it, I know what I should do. But I can’t seem to face telling him he has got to go on the run again, that he’s not safe around me.” It was what it boiled down to. “I keep thinking it’s a bad dream, or something. Jemmy must’ve given them my name, but why? Aside from the awful trouble it causes me, why arrange for me to testify
against
him?”

“No one else could have told them about you?”

“No one else would have,” I corrected. “Plenty of big shots got introduced to me through Jemmy. People in government or high up in business who needed money help. But believe me, Wade, none of them will ever admit to knowing
him
.”

I laughed once more, sadly, just thinking of it all again. “A mob banker? Even a whisper of a connection would ruin them.”

“And Jemmy knows. About your dad, I mean. That he’s here.”

“Uh-huh,” I confirmed miserably.

“So why’d he do it?”

I opened the truck door. “I don’t know. Somehow I feel like he must’ve
had
a reason, and if I could just figure
that
out . . .”

But the mystery of why Jemmy Wechsler had betrayed me seemed about as solvable as the puzzle of George’s behavior.

That is,
not
.

“You know what else would make George mad?” Ellie said as we drove up to Calais later that morning.

“No, what?” The bright morning had developed into a cool, brilliant late fall day. I was driving her to her regular checkup appointment at the hospital.

“That we don’t trust him.” Beside me in the passenger seat of George’s old, unbelievably ramshackle pickup truck—

Wade had needed his truck and Sam was in his car on the way to a school thing in Machias, while Tommy’s wasn’t fixed yet and mine was still only a gleam in my eye—

—she gazed sadly out at the pristine landscape whizzing by. A log truck thundered past us, heading south.

“Ellie, it’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of knowing the facts.”

I hadn’t told her what Wade had reported to me about the
Witchcraft
. She was worried enough already. Now a pang of guilt struck me as I decided to go on keeping it to myself.

“We don’t know what George’s been doing,” I told her instead. “You know he’s been taking on extra work. Lots of different jobs. And he’d probably rather we didn’t go off half-cocked until we do know, is all I’m saying.”

It was the nicest way I could think of to imply that George might have been up to something he didn’t want publicized, and that bringing it to light might just possibly not be our wisest course of action.

Even so, with anyone but me she would’ve flown swiftly to George’s defense. But it was just us chickens, now, and Ellie knew as well as I did that he was a proud man.

“It’s a crunch just to pay the doctor bills,” she conceded sorrowfully. “When it was only us two, we got along. But . . .”

We slowed through the S-curves along the water’s edge in the little town of Robbinston. Across the bay to our right, the hotel in St. Andrews resembled a European castle: cream brickwork, red tiled roof.

“I even went looking for a job myself,” she confessed.

I glanced at her. “You never told me.”

She shrugged. “I figured I’d tell you if I found one. It was before I got so pregnant. But it turned out there wasn’t anything, anyway.”

We pulled out of the sharp turn at Redclyffe and onto the long wide straightaway, the truck accelerating without too much protest past the Robbinston Post Office.

“Well, telemarketing jobs in Calais,” she amended, “but I’d need a car, which would put us up against it again. And don’t mention borrowing any more than I already have,” she added. “From you or anyone; we’d never be able to pay it back.”

Which brought us around to George and his pride once more. As we entered Calais, passing the elaborate gingerbreaded cottages lining the mouth of the St. Croix River, I came to a decision.

“When George is better,” I said, “I need him to paint the house.” I took the left turn uphill toward the hospital. “To make sure he’s available when I need him, I’ll want to put something on deposit. Half up front.”

It was about five grand that I hadn’t planned on, because until that moment I hadn’t planned on having the house painted at all. But it wasn’t a loan and a deposit was standard practice, just not this early in the process. Ellie thought it over, then nodded slowly.

“All right. As soon as he’s well enough I’ll be sure to let him know so he can start planning the job. Thank you.”

“See if you still thank me after you see how I . . .”

Work him to death,
I’d been about to say, but decided not to. We pulled up in front of the hospital entrance.

“I’ve got errands,” I told her. “So I’m not coming in.”

Just one errand, actually; Therese Chamberlain had said to call her but I thought a face-to-face meeting might be more productive.

“How about I meet you back here in an hour or so? You’ll be okay?”

She managed a smile, still rigid with the burden of having agreed to accept money from me; standard practice or not, George would’ve pitched a fit.

“Yes, all right,” she said. She’d talked to the nurses that morning by phone: no change in his condition.

“Give him a hug from me,” I called, and she promised to. The lump in my throat felt as big as a bowling ball as I watched her go in through the glass doors, the sun putting yellow glints in her red-gold hair.

But the lump went down, as they always do.

Sooner or later.

I’d gotten Therese’s address by simply looking her up in the phone book. It turned out to be at the outer end of Bunn Street, a down-at-the-heels part of Calais a few blocks off the main drag where the business district dribbled away to small dwellings and vacant lots.

The street dead-ended at a cliff overlooking the river and the Bangor & Aroostook train tracks. The house looked vacant too, lowered blinds and a yard all gone to tall weeds. But a car sat in the drive and an animal had been at the garbage bin recently, strewing trash.

I left George’s truck running in case I couldn’t get it to start again and made my way up to the front steps. There was no answer to my knock. An old car rumbled by in the street, rap music blaring out of it. I knocked again, then went around to the side of the house.

It was nowhere near the time past which Therese had warned me she would be asleep. So I raised my knuckles to the old wood-framed door someone had inexpertly fitted.

And stopped. The door was open an inch and music was playing inside, a radio tuned to the local station. “Hello?”

The radio announcer said it was 9:43 Eastern time, 10:23 Atlantic, and that the next high tide would occur at 5:17 this evening. “Therese?”

I stepped into the kitchen: dirty dishes, gritty floor. A can of Campbell’s chicken and stars soup had been poured into a saucepan, the burner left on low. The liquid had sizzled away and the empty can stood unrinsed on the grimy drainboard.

“Anyone here?” I turned the stove off. The air smelled of burned soup. A philodendron in a plastic cup was eking out a slow death atop the refrigerator. A calendar with pictures of big-eyed kittens was marked with her work schedule: N for dates she was scheduled to work the night shift, I guessed, and check marks for shifts already worked.

The S’s, maybe, were for ones she’d called in sick. There were quite a few of those. For the weekend Hector Gosling had died, the calendar was marked with B’s.

What that meant I didn’t know. But . . .

“I have,” I said aloud into the shimmering silence, “a bad feeling about this.”

The sunny day and the lowered venetian blinds combined to suffuse the place in dim ochre light. As I entered the living room a black cat leapt off the sofa, which was draped with an afghan inexpertly crocheted in too many bright colors.

Yowrl,
the cat said, and streaked for the door. But I paid it no attention because Therese Chamberlain was under the afghan.

Her head lolled back, her eyes gazing mildly at the cracked plaster ceiling over her head. On the coffee table beside her lay a small plastic bag and a cigarette lighter.

No more chicken and stars for Therese. I’d have known she was dead even without the tourniquet tied around her left arm, the stained, filthy-looking glass syringe screwed onto the needle still hanging from the vein tied off in her left forearm. Her forehead was blue, and a thin, dull film was beginning to form on her wide-open eyes.

Out in the kitchen the cat tipped over the Campbell’s soup can. It hit the floor with a tinny clatter, startling me.

“Scat,” I told the cat, chasing it out into the barren yard where it began immediately perusing the strewn garbage. As it did so I peered around.

The nearest house was a hundred yards away, its view of my truck blocked by its combination garage-and-toolshed. In the other directions were the burnt-out shell of an abandoned mobile home and the blank brick back wall of an auto-supply store.

So I thought it over for about a millisecond and then I went back inside Therese Chamberlain’s sad little dwelling, locking the door behind me. It was clear there was nothing an ambulance or rescue crew could do for her. Not even Victor could bring her back from an hours-old accidental overdose of whatever Therese’s narcotic of choice had been.

Heroin, I guessed. The plastic bag had a stick-on label with a little unicorn rubber-stamped on it. The unkempt, harrowingly exhausted look she’d had while alive made more sense now that I knew she was hooked. When you’re high or jonesing all the time, hair washing and teeth cleaning drop low on your to-do list.

Way down there with eating and sleeping. I wondered how she had managed to keep together a regular work schedule. Thinking this I opened a cabinet under her kitchen sink, found an old pair of rubber gloves, and pulled them on.

Then, keenly aware that what I should’ve been doing was calling the police, I went through the house. Part of my mind automatically listed the many repairs the house needed. A stair tread was loose and would break someone’s neck someday if it didn’t get replaced. The tap in the ghastly bathroom was dripping, running up the water bill. And when I snapped on the light switch at the top of the stairs it made a
zzzt!
noise under my hand: yikes.

And that wasn’t all. The place was a home-repair dream. Or nightmare. But none of it was my problem or Therese’s anymore, so I walked past loose doorknobs and squeaky floorboards, the broken window and the stain shaped like Africa on the wallpaper below it, searching for anything that hinted of what Therese had intended to tell me.

That is, if she hadn’t been just jerking me around. Angrily I opened drawers and pawed through her coat closet, then peered under her furniture.

You sad little lonesome loser, I berated her as I shuffled through scads of unpaid bills and catalogued her medicine chest. Visine, Tylenol, No-Doz, and NyQuil; all the standards. I perused her liquor stash, which contained everything from an almond liqueur to something greenly poisonous-looking called Zowie Malted Mint.

You silly twit, I scolded Therese. I dug through her dresser drawers and cringed at her laundry hamper but explored it anyway, finding nothing.

But buried under some magazines on a table by a bed so unmade it looked as if my dogs had been sleeping in it, I uncovered some papers. They were copies of attendance forms for a nursing convention in Boston, including hotel registration, credit card receipt, and parking validation.

These I stuffed into my bag; B for Boston on that kitchen calendar, I figured, because the dates matched. More to the point, though, the last evening of the convention was also the time George wouldn’t account for to the police.

Not that I knew what that meant. Back downstairs, I took a final look at the grey, lost face of Therese Chamberlain, still staring with filmy eyes at the nothingness that had been her life, there at the end of it. Finally I returned the gloves to where I’d found them, glanced around once more for anything I might’ve missed, and then called the police.

An hour and a half later by some miracle the truck was still running and I was driving Ellie home.

“What did you tell them?” she wanted to know. “About why you were there in the first place?”

“I said I’d stopped by to see her and found her that way, which was close enough to the truth to be convincing. I didn’t say anything else.”

“I don’t understand,” Ellie said, shaking her head. “If Therese was a drug addict why was she attending a nursing meeting? And spending lots of money to do it if she stayed at a hotel and so on.”

“Denial. Protesting too much. I doubt she saw herself as some kind of degenerate dope fiend. No one ever does.”

Not until after we’d moved to Eastport did Sam stop viewing himself as a kid who just liked to have fun, even though by then he’d resembled Dracula’s midnight snack.

Once Ellie’s appointment was finished—all fine, pregnancy on track, the baby coming any minute according to the doctor but not for a couple of weeks yet, according to her—she’d gone in to be with George. I’d visited briefly too. And as the nurses had said, there was no change.

“Attending a convention might’ve been a way to tell herself that she was doing okay professionally,” I told Ellie. “Her job would’ve been all that stood between her and becoming a dealer.”

It was an activity I’d seen no evidence of in my search of her neglected home; no other proscribed drugs at all.

“Anyway,” I added as we took the turn toward Eastport, “we can stop at the bank, I’ll write a check for the painting work, and you’ll deposit it.”

Turning east onto Route 190 made me feel better despite the morning I’d had. That big pale-blue sky spread wide open over the choppy expanse of Passamaquoddy Bay on the left, the bright flat water of Carryingplace Cove on the right. Even the truck, which had developed a nervous-making carburetor stutter as I’d pulled away at last from Therese’s house, now settled into a low grumble that promised to get us home.