Nail Biter (15 page)

“So have you done any research on the rest of them?” I asked her, hefting the toolbox onto the counter. “I mean besides Gregory Brand?”

She shot a knowing look at me. “So he made me for a snoop, huh?”

“Before you even got here.” The faucet dripped steadily; opening the toolbox, I hoped this job wouldn't require the washer I'd already used at Luanne Moretti's.

“Figures,” Jenna said darkly. “Clever little shit, our Mr. Brand.” She pulled the kitchen's swinging door closed.

Even with the electricity back on, the little house was as gloomy and chilly as ever, made even less inviting by the clutter of loose-leaf folders and cheaply reproduced booklets all over every flat surface.

Your Hidden Powers
, one cover read;
Behold Your Magic,
read another. I glanced around for the one called
Stick Your Finger Down Your Throat,
but couldn't find it.

“I guess the housework doesn't get done by magic, either,” I observed as the coffeemaker began burbling.

Neatened up, the place was at least a shelter. But now with dishes in the sink, emptied food packages overflowing the trash, and dirty cups littering the counters, it was becoming a hovel.

I moved some of the dishes aside, turned the water off under the sink, and started on the repair.

“Marge was in a hurry to get going this morning,” Jenna explained, but not with a lot of concern. “And I'm sorry but I'm not doing maid duty for this bunch.”

She took the last two clean cups from the cabinet, offered me one. I shook my head, busy with the faucet handle screws. At least they weren't rusted.

“You didn't answer my question,” I pointed out. Another day, another faucet, but it is a rule of old-house fix-up that no two jobs are ever quite the same. Even if they seem that way at the start, they won't be when you finish.

For instance, this time
both
handles were leaking. Jenna poured coffee for herself. “Did I check up on all of them? Yeah, sure I did,” she said. Then, “Have you seen the paper yet?”

She pushed the morning's issue of the
Bangor Daily News
across the counter at me.
Missing Girl Search Continues,
read one headline.
Downeast Death Investigated,
read another.

“It says they got a .38 slug out of Dibble's head,” Jenna said, waving at the second story. “But that they won't be able to do much with it.”

I turned inquiringly to her. “It's not like on TV, you know,” she explained, “where the coroner gets a pristine bullet out with a forceps, ten minutes later they know the gun and who it's registered to.”

I did know, actually. In the operating room, Victor had evicted lots of bullets from the unfortunate skulls in which they'd been lodged. Half the time he'd had to dig them out in pieces; many of the others were so badly misshapen someone might as well have taken a hammer to them.

“Anyway, Hetty's a piece of work, too,” Jenna continued. “Plenty of convictions, for fraud, mostly. What d'you want to bet they were really Greg's idea but he let her carry the load?”

I nodded, pushing the paper away. The headline story about the missing girl said a group of local mothers were putting flyers together for store windows and bulletin boards, and that an Amber Alert had been issued.

But there was nothing else in there I didn't already know. I fished around in the packet of faucet washers; two of them fit, but one of the screws I'd removed was stripped. I searched the toolbox, hoping there was a matching one in it.

“Any drug problems, either one of them?” I asked Jenna.

“Not that I could find out, which means probably not.”

She drank some coffee. “Hetty was in California for a while, acting in movies. X-rated ones, Greg's listed as the producer. Which I figure must mean the bankroll.”

I glanced queryingly at her. “He's this black-sheep kind of guy,” she explained, “rich family. In real estate development out West.”

So much for good old Greg looking out for his abuse-scarred stepsister. Or whatever she really was; I'd had a feeling there was more to that story, too. Then a puzzle piece clicked into place in my head, just as the toolbox yielded up a pair of possibles in the faucet-screw department.

I held the screws up alongside the stripped one. “
That
Brand family, huh?” The smaller screw looked better for the job. “Interesting. I hadn't made the connection.”

But now I did. In the old days when I'd navigated big money the way Greg Brand had just piloted my rowboat through wild water, Brands International's head money guy was in the news for raiding the Brand family trust funds, with special emphasis on some that were really just overgrown piggy banks.

But Brand kids got lawyers pretty much the way other kids got driver's licenses, the minute they turned sixteen. The lawyers let it be known that the kids didn't want to own ranch land in Utah or silver mines in Colorado; they wanted the cash.

Got it, too, via some tactics that would've done their old man proud if the fallout from the scandal—it turned out that the trust-fund raider wasn't exactly working alone—hadn't ended up giving him the stroke that killed him.

Talk about your basic evil empire. “To be a black sheep in the Brand family,” I remarked, “you'd need to be Jack the Ripper at least. Anything less, they'd figure it's just business as usual.”

I dropped the screw in, tightened it; so far, so fine. “Don't you want to know,” Jenna asked, “why the rich kid turned into a rip-off artist?”

What the heck, she'd done all that research work. “Sure.”

“Greg and old man Brand had a falling-out. Join the business or get cut off. It's all been written about, anyone can find it,” she added. “I guess Greg didn't like wearing a three-piece suit, or something.”

Yeah, or something. Then a different thought hit me. “Listen, Jenna, about the boat.”

As I explained what had happened she bit her lip, looking embarrassed. “I'm so sorry, I had no idea that rope wasn't—”

I cut her off. “No, that's okay, the line was my problem. I got it back, anyway.”

“You did?” Relief brightened her face. “Oh, that's—”

“But I need you to be sure you wear the life vest if you take it out again, okay? Because really, the water is very . . .”

That much Greg Brand had been right about. Jenna was already nodding agreement.

“You're right,” she admitted. “I should've worn it. And you know, I think I won't be taking your boat out anymore anyway. They've got some rentals down at Quoddy Marine, I saw when we were in town. I might just try paddling around in the boat basin. Get my sea legs,” she added a little shamefacedly.

“That's a fine plan,” I said, remembering Greg's comment about her seamanship. Besides, I liked the idea of her being on someone else's conscience if she went overboard.

Turning the water on again, I discovered my screw choice had been correct.
One down, one to go;
I closed the toolbox, turned my attention reluctantly to the electrical problem.

The first step in fixing it was going into the crawl space under the house, to the fuse box. That meant hauling the toolbox and a flashlight through a trapdoor and then down a ladder, over a dirt floor to the far wall where the fuse box hung, while trying not to crack my skull open—there was hardly any headroom down there—
and
not running into anything in the near darkness.

Just as I put a foot through the trapdoor in the back hall, however, Marge reappeared. She'd combed her hair and pressed a cold cloth to her face; dents from the washcloth's nubs had left shallow troughs in the reddened skin of her eyelids.

And she'd put on a different cardigan; seeing me, she straightened her shoulders under it.

“Come on, then,” she said. She led me to Wanda's room and stepped aside to wave me ahead of her.

In the doorway, embarrassment made me pause. Scant daylight filtering through a pair of too-small windows revealed where the fake-wood paneling and scarred wallboard met up with the uneven floors and cheap, poorly installed orange shag carpet.

“What a dump,” I said, stricken. Ellie and I had meant to tear it all out, but now as I noted the new water stains on the ceiling—oh, goody, a roof leak—it hit me that maybe we ought to have the house torn down instead.

“I'm ashamed that we rented this place to you,” I blurted. The bed had only one thin blanket; I wondered if Wanda had been cold. The linens and furniture had come with the house, and though we'd done our best to clean the place, it was still awfully shabby and depressing.

“Anything different about it?” I asked her. Suddenly the crawl space looked positively attractive; all I wanted was to flee this grim little chamber. And Marge's presence was about as energizing as a dose of poison gas.

“And Wanda's things, are any missing?”

She frowned. “She had a little backpack that I don't see anywhere. And she used to read by flashlight, I'd see it glowing in here at night but I don't see it now.”

The only light was a bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, controlled by a switch near the door.

“And . . . boots,” Marge murmured, her forehead wrinkling. “She had a pair of hiking boots but they're not here. And her jacket's gone.”

“But not her pills.”

“What?” Marge seemed startled for a moment, as if she'd been thinking about something else. A wince of pain crossed her features fleetingly, then vanished. “Yes, her diabetes pills. Here.” She produced a small orange bottle from her cardigan pocket.

“How critical is it that she take these?” I squinted at the writing on the label. Sulfa-gluca-something-or-other was the chemical name for whatever had been prescribed for Wanda, to be taken twice a day.

Marge bit her lip worriedly. “Very important. It's a new drug, not insulin like most kids with the disease have to take.”

“So she's not collapsed somewhere in a diabetic coma?” I didn't know much about that kind of problem—Victor's harangues, back when we were married, stuck strictly to surgery when they weren't focused on my child-rearing deficiencies—but I did know untreated diabetes could be fatal.

And although it was harsh to ask under the circumstances, I needed to know. “Talk to me, Marge. Is this a medical emergency on top of everything else?”

She shook her head. “I don't think so. Not yet. Her form of diabetes isn't the usual kind kids get. Most youngsters end up on insulin just about right away.” Wistful affection smoothed her features. “Trust Wanda not to do things the usual way. Under normal conditions her body makes enough insulin to get along, as long as she eats right and takes the pill every morning and night.”

The smile vanished. “But this isn't . . .”

Right, these weren't normal conditions. This time of year it got cold out at night just as soon as it got dark. And as I'd wondered before, who knew what—or even if—Wanda was eating?

“You have more of these?” I asked Marge, and when she said she did I dropped the bottle into my own pocket. “In case I run across her I can give her one of them right away,” I said.

“Yes,” she replied gratefully. “That would be—”

There was nothing to be grateful for yet. “The bottom line,” I interrupted, “is that Wanda could have left on her own and not brought her pills along. The jacket and boots argue that way, too, and so does the missing backpack. But I'm still not so sure that she did.”

Marge went on looking relieved until my point penetrated. Then her face crumpled once more. “You . . . you mean you think someone might have
taken
Wanda?”

“I'm wondering about it,” I admitted. “Where was Wanda that morning, on the day of the storm? Jenna said she thought she was with you, Hetty, and Greg Brand, out in the van somewhere.”

Marge put it together. “When that man was shot in the house, you mean. It . . . it could have happened while we were out.”

She took a shuddery breath. “But Wanda
wasn't
with us. She wanted to stay home and make a nest for that little bat. She was here, alone in her room . . .”

Which reminded me, where was the bat? I didn't see it, or a nest for it either. “Did you tell the police that?”

She shook her head, then persisted anxiously, “I never even realized . . . she never . . . you mean she might've
seen
. . . ?”

“It's not certain,” I said firmly, feeling a pang of guilt for adding to her worries. “Could she have gone home? I mean, back to—”

“No. I called the neighbors, they checked. And the parents of her friends. She does have friends,” Marge added wistfully.

“Of course she does,” I said, taking pity on her. “And if someone had grabbed her they wouldn't have been very likely to wait around for her to put a traveling kit together, would they?”

Or one for the bat. “No. No, I suppose they wouldn't,” Marge agreed.

So there we were. Some things argued one way, some another. “Marge, how
do
you and Wanda communicate? Because if she doesn't speak or write . . .”

I tried to think about a life without words, stopped trying as Marge answered almost cheerfully again.

“Oh, she has receptive language. That means she understands what you say,” she added at my blank look. “And she's very expressive when she wants to be. With her hands, her eyes . . . she gets her message across.”

As she had tried to the night of the storm, possibly? Again I saw Wanda gazing imploringly at me, recalled my decision to ignore the strange little girl with the bat peeping tranquilly from between her fingers.

But at the time, she'd had her mother there with her; she hadn't been my responsibility, I reminded myself with an effort as I left the girl's room.

Marge followed; turning back, I saw yet another repair job. All by itself the closet door had drifted open. Like the other doors in the place, it needed rehanging to make it level:
hammer, chisel, new wood screws . . .

“I just can't picture her taking off alone,” said Marge. “In a storm, when it's so awfully dark out—where would she even go?”

I had no idea. But by then I was only half listening anyway, because the closet had a shelf and on the shelf lay a baglike thing made of soft, shiny fabric, too small for a laundry bag but with the same kind of drawstring at the top.