Mallets Aforethought (30 page)

“He did, too,” Will went on. “The bad boy went away and once he was gone the good boy got everything. Even the girl.”

Ellie, he meant. “It wasn’t fair, you know. I tried. I did. But somehow I just always ended up in trouble again.”

He sounded truly puzzled. “So what the hell,” he finished. “I figured, try to make something of it. Being in trouble, in a weird way it seemed to be my strong point. So in the end I guess I just decided to go with that.”

His voice turned vicious suddenly. “I mean, think about it, for God’s sake. ‘Take responsibility. Step up to the plate. Here, you’re getting another chance, take advantage,’” he mimicked.

“Have you,” he demanded, “got any idea how friggin’ tiresome that crap gets after a while? I mean when you just
can’t do it
?”

Another chance . . .
Of course, I realized.

It was why George had remained silent. Sitting in jail, George had been giving Will one more chance to step up to the plate, take responsibility, and tell the truth.

Or what George believed was the truth. But Will had taken advantage in another way; his own way.

“He never was too bright, George. He always believed things turn out all right in the end,” Will went on meanly.

More scraping. “Anyway, I’ve put up some thin lath. Not much so it won’t show through, especially once the wallpaper’s up. But good enough.”

It was just what Ellie and I had planned to do. And once that plaster on the new lath dried, you’d need a battering ram to break out of it. I looked around frantically; no battering rams.

“You’ve probably figured out that Aunt Agnes wasn’t being victimized by Hector Gosling or Jan Jesperson,” Will said.

I hadn’t, actually. I’d been too busy trying to avoid being victimized myself. And a fabulous job I’d done of it, too.

“But what a great story it was,” he went on. “That the poor old dear needed me to take care of her. Perfect wedge for me to get into her house, set up a base of operations.”

Thwack.
He was generous with the plaster, I had to give him that. And it was dry in here; the stuff might not cure fully for a couple of days but it would be solid enough to imprison me nearly at once.

And the other walls of the room were made of thick boards. So I pinned my last hopes on the trapdoor. Spiked them to it in fact, because if it didn’t save me I was going to end up like Eva, a shriveled corpse for future old-house fixers to find.

Would they ever know what happened? I thought of Wade and Sam looking for me. Not finding me until too late. Tears pricked my eyes; furiously I blinked them away.

“And Jan Jesperson
had
been squirreling away drug samples,” he continued. “Using them on people, get hold of their property.”

Another wallop of fear blindsided me, disorienting as a kick to the head. A desperate, gagging protest gargled past the tape pressed thickly to my mouth.

A scraping sound came from the plaster bucket. “Once I figured that out,” Will went on, “I knew just what to do. Take her stash and use her for window dressing, like George got so mad he killed her, also.”

Thwack.
“George set his part up for me so well. Him and his righteous anger. What a motive he gave himself. Worked great.”

A
thunk
as he dropped his trowel into the plaster bucket. “Anyway, it won’t be long now,” he finished.

Because Ronny would take up where Perry Daigle left off, if he hadn’t already. Stay calm, I ordered myself. But my breath came in short, sharp gasps and my heart slammed painfully against my chest.

“Too bad about you,” Will added. “You weren’t in the plan. I’m sorry, Jacobia. Honestly I am. It’s just one of those things that happens, unfortunately.”

But he didn’t sound sorry. I heard no trace of the mingled self-doubt and reflection he’d been tiptoeing around, earlier. Whatever story he’d had to tell himself to get through this part of his plan, that’s the one he’d told.

The sad part was, probably a lot of the story was true. But it wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that he’d gone all the way over from planning to doing. And for the life of me—literally—I didn’t know anymore how I was going to stop him.

There was the sound of newspapers crumpling, being stuffed into—I guessed—a plastic trash bag. Probably he’d set it up so there wouldn’t be any evidence of a fresh plaster job.

Now he was disposing of the newspapers he’d used to cover the floor. “I think if I just apply the paste to the wet plaster, press the paper on, it’ll dry pretty neatly, don’t you?”

He was right, it would. And even if it didn’t, people would just think Ellie and I had hung the paper that way, a quick and dirty solution.

Which meant that if the trapdoor didn’t let me out of here—assuming I could first get the tape off my wrists and get the circulation going in my hands again, so I could lift it—no one was ever going to see the wall and realize I was in here.

But if I thought I at least knew the grimmest element of the situation, I was all wrong. He had been saving the real chiller, the part that set me yanking at the tape on my wrists again.

“The kid, though,” Will Bonnet said. “That stumped me for quite a while, the idea of Ellie having a baby. I wasn’t counting on any little rug rat to screw up the picture. Especially not any of George’s.”

A needle of horror pierced my heart at this new depth, what this piece of damaged goods was actually contemplating.

“But hey,” he went on, “accidents do happen. Kids can die in their sleep. She’ll forget George and his offspring. And then . . .”

His aunt’s house, his friend’s wife, a sizable inheritance; I was seeing it all, now.

Too late. A choked noise came from my throat: fear, rage, and disgust, all in one tape-muffled outburst. But Will was too busy congratulating himself to hear it.

Meanwhile part of me was still arguing with him, trying to find the reason for his behavior. If I’d had his life, his biology, his upbringing, I might have turned out just like him, I thought. An outsider looking in, conscience-free and in the end perhaps simply unable to figure out how to be human.

Most of me didn’t think so, though. Not really. Because Will might not have
had
a choice about who he’d turned out to be.

But he’d
made
the choice to stop fighting it.

And now his voice was moving away. With a thud of anguish I realized I hadn’t heard any sounds of plastering or cleaning up for quite some time.

The job was finished.

A door slammed as he left the house.

Back in the days when I was a surgeon’s wife I used to pick up lots of little hospital tips and tricks, none of which I ever expected to be able to use.

For instance, you can only tear adhesive tape if you don’t let it see you coming. Approach it tentatively, it will beat you every time. But with a fast right-angle snap to the edge, it will rip straight across as easily as if you had cut it with scissors.

Unfortunately I’d already struggled with my bonds so much, the tape was blood-moistened and rolled at the edges. No hope of tearing it, so I didn’t waste time trying; instead I rubbed my chin over its surface, trying to peel it off.

That didn’t work either. It was too mushed together for a loose end to exist. And the candle was burning down . . .

Think. Something sharp. I scanned the tiny room, noticed something that hadn’t been there the last time I was in it. Over in the corner where Hector Gosling had lain a few days earlier stood a pair of wooden crates, one with its top slightly ajar.

I inched myself over to them on my butt, bumped the top off the crate. Inside, the crate was completely filled with jars.

Caviar jars, and where the hell had
those
come from? But I didn’t have time to wonder about it and they were packed in so tightly that with my wrists bound, I couldn’t prize one of them out.

Then I remembered that maybe I didn’t need to. The lids on these jars were like the lid on the jar I’d taken from the kitchen cabinet at Will’s, then dropped into my bag . . . I rolled and felt the bag’s lumpy presence inside my jacket.

Even better, I could smell fish, which was wonderful because it meant the jar had broken. I spent the next ten minutes working the bag up inside my jacket with my arms, all the while telling myself that if I could only keep my head and work methodically I still had a chance. That “methodically” had never been an adverb that applied to me was a thought I decided to avoid confronting, just at the moment.

And eventually the bag popped out. Then of course I had to get some broken jar pieces out of the bag; fortunately I hadn’t had time to zip it back at Will’s house. And it is astonishing what a person can do to avoid having her life flash terminally before her eyes; I finally got hold of a piece. But there was now only a quarter-inch of candle left and the flame fluttered dangerously.

An eternity passed before I managed to position a biggish shard of the broken jar between my sneakers, sharp edge up. Then, working with care so as not to add a severed artery to my list of difficulties, I sawed at the soggy tape till it fell off.

Which freed me to dig in the bag again. It didn’t contain what I really needed: a rocket launcher, say, or one of those handy combination ratchet-tool-and-help!-flare gadgets they sell in the TV ads around Christmas.

Also while I was digging in it my keys fell out and vanished with a jingle and clank through the iron grate over the old heating duct. But . . .
there
. I dug the miniature flashlight out and turned it on just as the candle died.

All right, now, dammit, I thought furiously, encouraged by the flashlight’s beam. Ripping tape from my mouth I tore the old carpet from over the trapdoor, pushed my fingers into the crack. Let’s see how our buddy Will likes having the nasty story he told thrown right back in his . . .

Damn.
The trapdoor was nailed shut from below. He could get the nails out when he wanted to when he came back through the cellar to get his boxes of caviar.

I couldn’t.

Don’t panic,
I instructed myself firmly again. There was still the door he’d covered with plaster. And since I was free sooner than he’d expected, there was a slim chance that the plaster had not yet hardened enough to keep me from bashing through it. The lath would be thin, little more than popsicle-stick width; he’d said as much. I need only get the door open and . . .

That was when I noticed that the door lacked a doorknob. Of course; you couldn’t plaster
over
a doorknob stem. Now the square hole for it was a small, darkly staring evil eye. I stared back, thinking of Ronny arriving at the county jail.

Ronny, whom Will had threatened with something dreadful if he didn’t kill George, and afterwards endured in silence the prison term that would result. Not that poor Ronny was going to survive long enough to do otherwise. I had no doubt that Will would find a way of shutting that particular mouth forever, too.

But I was still staring at the door, and it still wasn’t open. Unless I could
get
it open, it wasn’t going to be until someone opened it and found my body.

Someday.
Poor Sam,
I thought as self-pity washed over me. I wished he were here right now. Oh, did I ever.

Then it struck me that if Sam
were
here, he’d probably have this problem solved already. To do it he would use
things,
ones he found here, jury-rigged to suit his purpose. All I needed to do was identify them and use them, too.

This I thought shouldn’t take long. But the way my day was going it should’ve come as no surprise that I was wrong again.

Once I started looking, I found several more items I hadn’t known were there. The gun, for instance.

And the suicide note.

I don’t know why I hadn’t understood it all earlier. Maybe because once you start thinking of someone as a victim, it’s hard to envision them as the villain.

The heating grate pulled up easily; its bolt-holes had been stripped long ago by repeated removal and resetting. Once upon a time the house had suffered heating trouble, it seemed. The grate itself was a lovely, heavy old cast-iron object, its openwork the shape of a fleur-de-lis, substantial enough that I figured I could use it to bash through the plaster. But when I’d lifted it I spotted something lying barely visible in the duct below.

Not my keys. They’d apparently slid on down. Instead I found the sweetest little antique derringer you ever saw, small enough to fit in a lady’s purse, and a crumpled piece of deckle-edged notepaper.

The cops, I realized, hadn’t opened the grate. I plucked the gun and the note up out of the duct. Covered with writing, the note was signed “Eva”; in it, the woman whose body Ellie and I had found here confessed to murdering three Eastport girls in the 1920s.

But she couldn’t stand seeing Chester Harlequin blamed and didn’t have the courage to tell the truth while she was alive, the note explained. An especially clever bit was how she’d removed the doorknobs and doorknob stem, then pulled the door of the tiny room shut till it latched. She’d known workmen were coming the next day to plaster over the door and hang wallpaper. They wouldn’t realize she was inside, dead.

Or as Eva had put it, that she’d gone on to meet her Maker. What a little hysteric she must have been, I thought. She’d surely known the impression she would make when she was found; nothing like time to turn a tawdry soap opera into a tragedy.

And by doing things the way she had, she’d arranged a double triumph for herself.
Saying
she wanted Chester cleared. But since neither she nor the note would be found soon, making sure that in fact he remained a suspect. Let’s see, now, how slowly can you spell m-a-l-i-c-e?

Sure, Eva, I thought bitterly. Now that it’s too late you spill your guts. And naturally even after almost a hundred years it’s still all about you. How about a few hints from the grave on how I’m going to get out of here?

But on this topic the murderous flapper was unhelpfully silent. Why she’d crumpled the note and dropped it down the grate instead of just leaving it on the table I supposed I would never know either; just another quirk of bad-girl mischief, probably.