Triple Witch (23 page)

I glanced questioningly at her, but Berenice only smiled, as if medicating women who’ve been rebuilding shutters, carousing with indestructible boyfriends, and facing down demon-possessed ex-husbands were for Berenice all part of a good day’s work.

The liquid in the cup was yellow, and it smelled very bitter. Hesitantly, I looked at Ellie.

“Ginseng,” she informed me. “Try it.” Her green eyes flashed mischievously.

Oh, well, I thought, that couldn’t hurt me. I’d had ginseng in soft drinks, for heaven’s sake. The flavor was like that of an aspirin tablet, after the tablet has been sitting around for fifty years. I took a swallow.

Whereupon every nerve ending in my body woke up. My eyes snapped open, my sinuses cleared, and long-buried memories burst from the depths of my brain like suddenly-activated newsreels.

Berenice eyed me benevolently. “Try some more. It works much better,” she added, “when it’s fresh like this.”

Her smile was enigmatic, and I understood suddenly that her flower-child days had begun in the sixties, and that she had probably picked up plenty in the way of pharmaceutical knowledge.

That garden, I realized; those plants. Whatever I’d thought I knew about ginseng was gone, swept away in a wash of alertness.

“Thank you,” I said, noticing that the colors in the glass-bead curtain seemed much brighter and wondering whether Einstein had felt like this when he was coming up with his theory.

Something mechanical rattled to life over in the corner, sounding like a cross between a nail gun and a threshing machine.

“Ah,” Berenice breathed, satisfied. “There it is. I e-mailed a friend in Australia this morning to ask her if she would make me a new spinning wheel.”

Which reminded me: Yarn. Llamas.

“I wonder,” I began, “if you know anything about—”

“Baxter Willoughby,” Berenice supplied, tearing her message off the old daisy-wheel printer. Noting my puzzlement but not the reason for it, she explained:

“I fixed the computer to print out all my e-mails when they arrive. You see, I like to save all my letters, and if I don’t do it right away, I know that I never will.”

“Admirable. But how did you know I was going to ask you about Willoughby? Did Ellie tell you?”

“No, dear.” Berenice took out a hand-rolled clove cigarette and lit it, suddenly looking nowhere near so benevolent. “Everyone who comes to visit has been asking about him lately, it seems. Dear mysterious Baxter is a puzzle in the llama world.”

“Llama world? What’s that, another new Disney theme park?” The ginseng was making me feel witty.

“I mean the little community of people,” Berenice clarified patiently, “who raise them, keep them for pets or as pack animals, or utilize their wool. There aren’t very many of us, and we keep in touch. Well,” she amended, “there are lots of us all over the world, but in Maine, just a handful.”

“I see,” I said. Trust Ellie to know who in all of Washington County could give you the lowdown on anything, even llamas.

And give it, apparently, with some relish. “Willoughby,” Berenice said, “tells people he’s selling those llamas for pets. But nobody is buying them. I would know, if they were.”

She poured us all more tea. “Would you,” she queried acutely, “buy an expensive, exotic animal from some newly arrived fly-by-night, someone who offers no pedigree, no assurances, no proof of anything resembling a well-thought-out breeding program? No,” she finished indignantly, “veterinary certificates?”

“Well, no,” I admitted. “Actually, probably I wouldn’t.”

Probably, I wouldn’t buy one at all. But I didn’t think it would be polite to say so, so I didn’t.

“Indeed,” she pronounced crisply. “Furthermore, if he isn’t supplying himself with new animals—which, if no one is buying the old ones, naturally he isn’t—what is he doing with them?”

“I’m not quite sure I follow.”

Berenice looked severe. “If he’s not trucking new animals in every couple of weeks, then he is trucking the same animals out, and then trucking them back. And I’m sure he is doing that—I’ve been to his place twice, trying to get straight answers out of him. Once I saw them being loaded off.”

She sipped her tea. “I was also there to check on the animals’ welfare, of course, which to my surprise was
not bad. He’s doing the minimum necessary, in my opinion, just to keep meddling old women like me from causing him trouble.”

“But why? I mean,” I added, “why truck them around at all?”

“My question precisely.” She shook her head in disapproval. “Loading them onto a truck every week or ten days—maybe it’s a wool-production experiment, but if it is I don’t see the point of it. Stress only makes their coats ragged, and makes them spit.”

“How do you know that’s how often he does it?” Ellie asked.

“And,” I remembered the strange stuff stuck to Ned’s sweater, “what do they spit, exactly?”

Berenice looked wise. “I know because Ned Montague’s truck goes into the gas station on Route 190 in Eastport every two weeks like clockwork. But,” she added significantly, “Willoughby pays the bills. One of the fellows who works there is a friend of mine, Adam Franklin. He says it’s for a trip check: tires, signals, fluid levels. That sort of thing. As if someone wanted to be sure not to break down.”

I could think of another reason, but I let her go on.

“That makes sense,” she continued, “especially in summer. Llamas are extremely sensitive to heat—you don’t want to stall on a hot day. And to answer your other question, llamas spit what they’re chewing. Saliva. Or saliva mixed with chow pellets. Like whistling with a mouthful of crackers.”

The daisy-wheel printer rattled to startling life again, and she glanced at it before going on.

“They do it when they’re feeling annoyed. Or if they’re very annoyed, they’ll spit their stomach contents, but you won’t have any trouble identifying that. It’s ghastly—even the animals don’t like it. You’ll see them curling their lips in distaste.”

She frowned consideringly. “Look, I’d like to know
what’s going on over there, too. If it’s something that’s bad for those creatures, I intend to put a stop to it.”

“I wonder,” Ellie put in thoughtfully, “if they mark down the mileage, every time that truck gets checked.”

“Ellie,” said Berenice. “What a brilliant girl you are.”

36
Bay City Mobil is the kind of small-town gas station that when you go there to get your car fixed, they don’t fix it if it doesn’t need fixing, and if it does, they give you a ride home. Pulling in, Ellie went to see if Adam Franklin was on duty.

When she returned, she said, “Bingo. They note the mileage. And it’s always the same, he says. Twelve hundred or so.”

“New York City,” I said immediately as we pulled out. When you live in a place as far in the hinterlands as Eastport, you always know how far away everything else is.

“So we can give Berenice her answer, anyway,” I added. A fresh wave of fatigue washed over me. “We still don’t know why the beasts are being shuttled, but at least we know where.”

“Jacobia,” Ellie said. “I think your ginseng has worn off. It isn’t the llamas we’re interested in. It’s the truck.”

Boink. I thumped my fist on my forehead. That’s the trouble with ginseng: it has the half-life of a subatomic particle, and when it wears off you feel like pond sludge.

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Um, did Adam happen to mention the next time it’s scheduled to come in?”

“Tomorrow night. What say you and I go back to Willoughby’s after it does, and see what all goes into it?
Because if you ask me, this Willoughby guy is sending more to New York than llamas.”

Me, too, now that she’d mentioned it. I yawned hugely. “Like, for instance, illegal drugs?”

“Possibly. It would make some sense. Let’s say the contraband comes in here, maybe on Ken’s boat, and a little of it leaks into the local market. But the majority of it would have to go somewhere else, where there are more people.”

“But if Ken’s not bringing it in anymore,” I objected, “why is Willoughby still making trips?” And there was something else, something I was too thick and muzzy to fasten onto.

“Don’t know,” Ellie said. “Maybe that’s what we’ll find out. So, have we got a plan?”

I was so tired, I’d have agreed to getting blasted from a cannon if I could close my eyes while doing it. “Tomorrow night,” I agreed. “We’ll go down there and snoop our brains out.”

Being very careful meanwhile not to get them shot out; the memory of that whizzing bullet remained vivid despite my fatigue. But Willoughby had been miles away when that happened, and anyway he wouldn’t be expecting us to be skulking around in his expensive underbrush nor would Ike if he was still nearby.

So Ellie dropped me off and I went into the house, intending to lie down for a year or so, but instead I discovered that Victor had made good on his threat to attempt a career switch. While I was out he’d tried plumbing, cooking, and, apparently, demolition.

As a result, the yellow plastic bucket that usually lived under the kitchen sink stood, disorientingly, on the hall floor. Ranged alongside it was every single plumbing tool I owned—George is a fine plumber but I can’t very well call him at two
A.M
., which is when the worst plumbing disasters in my house always occur—and a new roll of Teflon tape.

Really, I should have fixed that sink drainpipe
sooner, or asked George to do it, but the bucket had gotten so familiar, and best of all it worked.

Now, though, that unopened roll of tape was a bad sign. Doing your own plumbing without Teflon tape, which you wrap around the threads before screwing the pipe back into the fitting, is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute: possible, but the result may not be all that you had hoped for.

The suicidal plunge metaphor continued—somehow everything about Victor seemed to summon it, lately—into the kitchen, where the cabinets stood open and the counters were covered with utensils. In the sink, a pile of dirty dishes teetered crazily, and on the stove a pan sputtered, blackening a substance that once upon a time had been a pound of butter.

From the basement came an unfamiliar sound: Victor, singing. There was a brief silence as he heard my steps cross the floor. Then he bopped up the stairs and sauntered into the kitchen.

“Beautiful day.” He inhaled deeply and pressed his fists to his chest, radiating good humor. “Sam’s gone out again, to help some fellow rig a ketch. Whatever that is.”

He frowned briefly, then shrugged the thought off; since he didn’t know it, it couldn’t matter.

“Meanwhile, I thought I’d take care of a few chores around here,” he continued expansively.

The tap was dripping, and from under the kitchen sink came a trickle of greasy water, spreading out over the kitchen floor. I turned the stove off as calmly as possible, and faced him.

“Victor, we’re going to have our talk about your guest status a little early.”

It screwed up my plan, but if this sort of thing continued there would not be a house for him to be a guest in, or for me to live in, for that matter.

“Sorry about the mess,” he went on as if I had not spoken, “but I also decided to give you a hand downstairs.
Earn my keep, you know. Make myself useful around the place.”

In the middle of my thinking about how he could make himself useful (submitting himself to taxidermy would have been my first choice) it hit me what he must have been doing: those shutters.

“I put the hardware back on for you,” he continued.

When he got like this, it was like trying to talk to the Energizer Bunny.

“Now I’ll whip up the dishes, so you—oops.” Elaborately, he looked at his watch. “Oh, gosh, I’m really sorry, Jacobia. But I’ve got an appointment with a real estate agent in five minutes, to look at another house. I’m going to have to dash.”

Face him down, everyone said while I was married to him. Show some backbone. So I’d tried it and the result was always just like this: a barrage of passive-aggressive crap that made the effort seem not worth making. He grabbed his sweater from the hook in the hall and pulled it on speedily.

“Tell you what, I’ll make it up to you. I’m going to cook dinner, tonight. And no more health food. I’ve given that up. It doesn’t suit my new lifestyle.”

Thus the blackened pound of butter. “Victor, you don’t put the hardware back on until you—”

Paint, I was about to say, but he stopped me.

“By the way, I noticed that the screw holes were shabby. So,” he finished brightly, “I drilled new ones for you.”

It was a good thing I didn’t have the drill in my hand right that minute. He was always this way: just when you’d gotten to the point of cornering and confronting him, he weaseled out of it.

Also, something about what he’d just said sounded funny—not ha-ha funny—but I was much too disorganized by fatigue and fury to identify it.

“Thanks,” he said, his hand on the screen door, “for
being such a sport. It’s best for Sam, you know.” He grinned. “In the long run.”

Victor’s eyes, which were green flecked with hazel just like Sam’s, positively glittered with malice.

“Sam says you’ve really started coming around, about me. I mean, in your outlook toward me.”

Sam had made no such comment. For one thing, Sam knew the only reason Victor wasn’t lying drowned at the bottom of a well somewhere was that we had city water.

“Hey, you never know,” he finished slyly. “Maybe some day we will even get back together again.”

In my worst nightmare and after I fixed the damned plumbing. Oh, how I wanted to kill him.

“Damn it, Victor, you come back here this minute and—”

“Toodle-oo,” he sang out cheerfully, making sure all of my neighbors for blocks around could hear. “See you soon.”

The screen door slammed. Victor was whistling. He was like a rabid animal: you couldn’t get hold of him, and when it came right down to it, you didn’t want to.

But I had to. Somehow, I really had to.

Glumly, I gathered my wits together, putting the bucket back under the sink and doing up those greasy dishes, and discovering, as usual, that almost any mood can be cleared by enough soapsuds and hot water.