Mallets Aforethought (27 page)

Now he made a sad, helpless gesture with his glass. “She deserved better,” he said, and his eyes said more. It was one of those rare shining moments of Victor as he could’ve been, honest and kind.

But the moments never lasted and they didn’t now, either. “Anyway, that’s all I know about her.” His tone turned pettish as if I’d interrupted him during major surgery. “She didn’t confide in anyone that I know of. It was a big part of her trouble. So was there something else? Because . . .”

He waved at the stack of medical journals on a table by his chair. “Because I have some catching up to do.”

I suspected the martini glass would get more of a workout than his reading glasses tonight. But that wasn’t my business anymore. “Don’t give yourself a headache,” I said.

He eyed me defensively but softened when he saw I meant it. “Anyway, Ellie can go up tonight and visit,” he told me. “I believe George might even recognize her.”

My heart lifted again. “Oh, that’s great. You’ll call her?”

He hesitated. “Do me a favor? I was going to, but . . . you tell her. She can call me if she has questions, but . . .” He glanced over at the martini shaker. “But to tell you the truth, I don’t feel much like having a conversation right now.”

Poor Victor, he was such a strange ranger. I watched as he poured the rest of the liquid from the martini shaker. No one to talk to, indeed; I wondered if he ever looked in a mirror.

“Sure, Victor. I’ll do it,” I said, and let myself out.

By the time Wade drove us up to the hospital an hour later, Ellie’s eyes were so bright Wade’s truck hardly needed its headlights.

“I told you,” she kept saying. “I told you he’d get better. And he is. He’ll tell us where he was, now. He’ll tell, and all of this will be over.”

She sat beside Wade; I hunched on the half seat behind them in the extended cab. “Victor said that George was improving,” I reminded her. “Not that he was all better. Don’t expect a whole lot from him right off the bat.”

But she didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t even bother to say the other thing I was thinking: that if George got too much better they’d send him back to jail. Because Tommy had been right about that, too; the county paid for every day an inmate spent in the hospital. They’d have him back in a prisoner-orange jumpsuit the instant he was up to it.

“Thanks, Jake,” Ellie said. “For all you’ve done. From both of us. I mean, all three of us.”

Wade’s eyes met mine in the rearview; she’s going to be disappointed, his look said, and I feared so too.

But at first everything was fine. As we crossed the parking lot to the hospital’s glass doors, I could see into the warmly lit lobby with groupings of tables and chairs, the information desk, and the nursing desk beyond. Inside, we found George sitting up, looking a little dazed but in possession of all his faculties.

He hugged Ellie, patted her belly fondly, and tried to make light of the injury he’d suffered. “Hard head.” He grinned.

His tubes and wires were gone and they’d transferred him to a room in a less critical area of the nursing ward. “How’d it happen, anyway?” he asked. “Did I have an accident working?”

Ellie glanced at me, alarmed. “George, you were in jail and another inmate . . . Do you mean to say you don’t remember?”

“Nope.” He shrugged happily. “And I can’t say I mind much. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, right?”

He appeared much better than I had expected, freshly shaven and with nothing left of his hospital dinner but the tray on his bedside table. Out by the nursing desk, the guard the county had posted stood listening, no doubt noting also how healthy-looking the prisoner was.

I felt like telling George to fake a seizure or something. At this rate the county would wise up so fast he’d be behind bars again by tomorrow morning.

“But I’d like to know,” he went on. “What’d I do, fall off a ladder or something? And what’s all this about jail?”

“George.” Ellie sat down on his bed, took his hands in hers. “George, I want you to try very hard to remember. What’s the last thing you recall before you woke up here? Think hard, now.”

He squinted, thinking. “Um, painting the baby’s room. Yellow paint.”

The baby’s room had been painted weeks earlier. I gestured at Wade, who was in the corridor by the nursing desk talking to the guard on duty. Maybe Wade could jog George’s memory more effectively.

But my hand stopped in midair as, looking past Wade, I saw something odd happening out by the main entrance. The glass doors were opening by themselves.

Or they seemed to. The dark glittering panes swung inward to reveal a woman and two children materializing out of nowhere as they stepped into the lighted lobby. They stopped at the desk, then went off in another direction, as the glass doors swung open yet again to admit another group of visitors.

“Excuse me,” I told George and Ellie. In the lobby I passed between the waiting area and the information desk. Noting that I still wasn’t able to see out through them, I approached the double doors. Then, as they swung open at my touch, I exited to the front-entrance drop-off area marked with No Parking signs.

A pair of wheelchairs stood empty on the sidewalk. Near them were an honor box for the
Bangor Daily News,
a large concrete urn filled with sand and cigarette butts, and a mailbox.

A dark blue mailbox. Ellie and Will had been standing near it a few evenings earlier. I’d seen them there very briefly while I was speaking with Therese Chamberlain.

And they could have seen us, I realized. From her furtive look and anxious behavior it must have been obvious that Therese was imparting something confidential, something she didn’t want anyone else to know she was saying.

But someone had, without either of us realizing it, because at night you couldn’t see into the parking lot from the interior of the hospital. From there, those doors were glittering black. From out here, though, the nursing desk was clearly visible.

Which was how I discovered that no one had overheard Therese talking to me. She hadn’t told anyone about her plan to confide further in me, either. Someone had
seen
her, first in Boston and then here at the hospital as she was telling me something she didn’t want anyone else to know.

Not to mention a final time, of course, on the morning when she was murdered.

“He doesn’t remember
anything,
” Ellie agonized as we drove home. “Not since weeks ago. He won’t be
able
to tell us where he was when—”

“He won’t have to.” Crammed into the truck’s tiny backseat, I felt so full of knowledge that I feared I might explode. One bright burst of understanding had illuminated everything.

Someone had seen Therese talking to me and known the threat she represented, known that she could ruin everything by giving George an alibi for the night Hector Gosling was murdered. For she’d been in the garage in Boston when George was there, and had seen
him
.

“He won’t have to remember anything,” I said again. “We’re going to clear him.” I put my hand on Ellie’s shoulder.

I could feel the tension in her neck muscles as she fought for composure. “But Jake, if they send him back to that jail . . .”

Wade interrupted. “The guard told me Perry Daigle’s been sent to Thomaston. George won’t have trouble with him again.”

Thomaston, the state prison. “I think old Perry’s going to have his world view adjusted real sharply,” Wade continued. “He’s tough when everyone else is smaller or more civilized.” Small chuckle from Wade. “But down there, he’s going to find out what it’s like to be at the low end of the food chain.”

Ellie laid her cheek on my hand. “Thanks, you guys. That does make me feel a little better, knowing that at least he won’t be at Perry’s mercy. But Jake,
how
will we clear George?”

I didn’t want to burden her with more uncertainty by telling her I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t even say what I suspected, not to Ellie or to anyone else, in case someone’s body language or face communicated something sooner than I wanted.

Botox, where are you when I need you? All I could give her was a heartfelt promise.

“Trust me, Ellie. We’re going to do it.”

Or I am, I added silently. Because whether she liked it or not, in the snooping department she was out of action. No matter what she said, I knew the baby could show up any time. I couldn’t risk her going into labor at an inconvenient, possibly even a dangerous moment.

Such as for instance during the unmasking of a killer.

Just as I’d expected, George was sent back to the county jail in Machias first thing the next morning.

“Neanderthals,” Victor fumed as Sam and I arrived for the CPR class at the firehouse. “You’d think
they
all had traumatic brain injury.”

Fright stabbed me. “Does George?” It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have long-term problems.

“No,” Victor conceded grumpily. “He will likely regain his memory a little at a time. Eventually.” But not immediately; not in time to do him any good.

“Listen,” Victor said, “before we start can you help me out a little?” He walked me over to a window. “This won’t stay open by itself and with all these people in here, it gets so hot,” he complained.

He waved dismissively at the project. “It shouldn’t take too long, should it?”

This was standard for Victor; if even his ex-wife can do it, he believes, any fool can. I considered just breaking the glass. That would keep the freaking window open, wouldn’t it?

But that might be perceived as petty. And anyway, after I’d fiddled with the window a minute I saw that I couldn’t fix it.

“Victor, it’s the kind with a sash cord and counterweights inside. It’ll need a new cord, we don’t have one, and besides, I don’t know how.”

He looked at once incredulous and vindicated. “What do you mean? It’s a window, isn’t it? I thought you were the
expert
on household repairs.”

Whereupon, having neatly disposed of
that
little notion, he accepted my verdict and we propped the window open with a Bangor phone book.

By now Sam was across the room kneeling by his Resusci-Annie doll and the other students were doing the same. That included my new partner, a big cop from the Machias police department standing by our own exercise mat. He sent a beckoning look my way. We were going to go through the whole resuscitation procedure today and he’d already made clear that he wanted to get it done with and vamoose.

“About Therese,” I began to Victor. “You know it wasn’t your fault that . . .”

But he shut me down. “Forget it,” he said brusquely. “I can’t save the world.”

Which in a way was reassuring; if he ever turned into a fully functioning human being for more than a few minutes at a time, I’d have to start watching for other apocalyptic events, too.

“Got it,” I muttered, and went to join my new CPR buddy.

“Hey,” the cop said, positioning himself at the doll’s head. Not friendly; like most of the students he was only here because he had to be, to re-up his professional certification.

“Let’s do it,” I replied, not chummily either. If anything, I wanted to be here even less than he did. But I had no choice; everything had to look perfectly normal if what I planned was to work out.

The cop responded to the briskness in my tone better than if I’d made some bogus try at being a pal. “Yeah,” he replied. “Not that I got any big treat to look forward to.”

Like Therese, he already knew CPR techniques, and he inflated the doll’s lungs expertly while I pressed its breastbone down.

“What’s that?” I asked as we switched positions. “I mean, what are you not looking forward to?” Remembering what Therese had showed me about extending the doll’s jaw, I yanked firmly on it and pressed my lips firmly to its rubbing-alcohol-tasting mouth.

“Gotta transport a guy when I get done here.” The cop pushed the doll’s breastbone down energetically. The breath I’d blown in rushed back out of its lungs:
whoosh
.

“Guy named Ronny Ronaldson,” he went on. “Local guy, I’ll be getting him out of your hair for a while.”

“Yeah, actually I know him. Friend of a friend.”

Ronny, the not-too-brilliant helper that Will had taken out fishing two days earlier along with the blond-ponytailed fellow, Weasel Bodine, whom Tommy had disliked so much.

The cop’s verbal assessment of Ronny was less charitable than my mental one. “Guy’s dumber’n a box of rocks,” he commented.

Across the room, Sam and his partner were being singled out for praise; once again Sam had shown his handiness with the real world, absorbing the nuts and bolts of resuscitation in a gulp.

“How come? What’d he do that makes him so dumb, I mean?”

“Guy walks down Water Street,” the cop told me, “puts a rock through a store window and runs. Broad daylight, what’s he think, nobody’s gonna see him?”

“Who picked him up?” Eastport was still being policed by the state cops, who last time I looked weren’t doing foot patrols.

“Store owner ID’d him, I went to his house and grabbed him, he’s locked in my squad outside right now.”

The cop sat back on his heels. “Good news for Eastport,” he went on, “bad news for me, I gotta do the paperwork before I can go home. I was supposed to be off this afternoon,” he added injuredly.

“Who was the store owner?” I asked, suspecting the answer and trying to adjust mentally to this new, unexpected development. I’d thought I would have more time.

The cop shrugged. “Well, not a store, actually. Going to be a new restaurant downtown. Guy renting the space was there when it happened, made the complaint.”

He shook his head. “That’s what’s so dopy, guy was standing right there watching him when he did it. Name of Will Bonnet?”

Victor strolled by. He’d been observing our performance from afar, which was the distance I preferred him to keep.

Especially now since he’d gone back to his usual, non-warm-and-fuzzy
persona
. “All right, you two. That’ll be fine,” Victor pronounced.

He handed us each a sheet of take-home exam questions and a date when we would all return, do the hands-on portion of the CPR test, and receive our certifications. Whereupon the Machias cop left before I could even try to talk him into hanging onto Ronny for a while.