Unhinged (25 page)

She eyed me mistrustfully as Sam appeared on the breakwater, once again pushing Maggie in the wheelchair, full of news. “Hey, Mom, you’re not gonna believe it.”

“Sam,” I began firmly; when it comes to manners a boy’s best friend is still his mother. “This is—”

I turned to Fran, intending to reintroduce her so he could shake hands, say it was nice to see her again, and hope that she was enjoying her stay in Eastport.

But he didn’t wait. “Wyatt Evert,” he told me excitedly, “just punched Tim Rutherford in the nose. There’s blood all over the sidewalk!”

From her seat in the wheelchair, Maggie peered closely at me while Fran reacted to Sam’s report.

“Oh, god.
Why
did he punch him?” Fran asked.

“Dunno,” Sam replied, “but—”

“Your eye looks better,” Maggie told me. “The bruising is going down. The contact lens isn’t bothering you?”

I was still wearing the lenses and surprisingly, I’d begun getting used to the green. It gave me a jolt of “who in heck is that?” in the morning right after I first put them in, but that was all.

“They’re fine,” I said, turning to Sam again.

“—asking something about nonprofit,” he was saying. “And then, whammo.”

“What else did you hear?” Fran questioned him intently. “I mean, before Wyatt punched the reporter.”

Sam frowned. “I wasn’t really paying attention.”

But Tim must’ve asked Wyatt
something
fairly pertinent, which to me just reinforced the notion that maybe there’d really been something to the nonprofit angle Tim talked about, on our trip to Machias.

“Seems our friend Wyatt’s a tad sensitive on the subject of his business dealings,” I said when Sam and Maggie had gone on, Sam’s curly head bent charmingly to hear what Maggie was saying.

He’d traded the gauze arm-sling for a red bandanna that made him look dashing, as if he’d been injured in a sword fight; also, the last time I had seen my son so fascinated by a conversation, Bert was confiding a secret to Ernie on Sesame Street.

Sam was in
close
mode. Later:
push away
. I had no illusions my little pep talk about Maggie had altered anything.

Fran tried to change the subject: “Wyatt’s feeling nervous. He says you think he might’ve killed the old battle-axe. And Roy McCall says you think maybe
he
had something to do with that dancer who died, Samantha.”

She colored at my inquisitive glance. “Roy and I have had a few drinks since we met at your house,” she explained grudgingly.

And more, her face said clearly, not that I cared. But she was trying to divert me so she went on, piling one messy detail upon the next.

“I’ve been sneaking away with him, actually,” she confessed with sly defiance. “There’s plenty of empty rooms in Eastport. A crew member’s room at the motel or in a B&B during the day. Roy can borrow one when he wants. They all borrow each other’s rooms, no one cares.”

Which was way more sociology than I wanted to learn. “But you’ve got
him
wrong too,” she added. “Roy’s in
more
trouble than before. The replacement for Samantha, the dancer who’s coming in? Tonya somebody?
Well
.”

Happily, she prepared to deliver news that might take the spotlight off her. “Tonya, it turns out, has stood around in some shoots in front of cameras. But that’s all.”

Commercials, Roy McCall had said. A toothpaste ad. But now I realized: the days of dancing toothpaste tubes were long gone.

“She’d never actually
danced
in a production. She’s
awful
.” Fran’s eyes shone at the memory of trouble that wasn’t her own. “So now the guys footing the bills are mad at him for letting the
first
one get killed.”

She was on a roll, thinking her ploy was working. “That’s very interesting,” I replied, trying not to react to the fact that all the motives I’d thought up—lovely, bloody-minded motives like vengeance in Wilma’s case or defense against ticked-off Mob guys, in Roy’s—were crashing and burning.

“Now, about Wyatt and his supposed nonprofit organization,” I said. Whereupon she sensibly realized she’d run out of subjects to divert me, and gave in.

“I just found out, myself.” She was suddenly defensive. “I knew Wyatt was bent but he swore up and down this time he was on the level, that there was money enough in playing it straight not to need any stealing.”

Sure, and pretty soon zebras would be wearing polka dots. “What’s the crooked part? And how did you find out at this late date?”

She rolled her eyes. “I was cleaning out the van. I found a ledger stuffed way down in the upholstery, under a seat.”

“And?” Fran didn’t only look defensive; she looked scared. So considering her history, I suspected what must be coming next.

“It’s just like the one I use for keeping Wyatt’s financial records. For the tour business
and
the—”

“Fran,” I interrupted, “have you ever filled out forms to register a nonprofit organization? Don’t try to tell me you don’t remember.”

As a project, registering a nonprofit is like writing
War and Peace
. By the end, you’re lucky if your writing arm’s not tied up in a sling like Sam’s.

“No. I haven’t. And Wyatt wouldn’t have. I do all that stuff,” she said. “Or I thought I did, but now it looks like he keeps records, too. Only the numbers are different. Bigger,” she emphasized, “numbers.”

Starting a nonprofit is simpler, of course, if you do no paperwork at all, just tell people you’re benefiting something and take their money. By the time anyone figures it out, you’re out of town with a new name and new racket somewhere else.

So maybe Tim Rutherford had been right. Maybe the tour operation was just a good way to identify the fattest pigeons.

“You don’t handle the money or make solicitations yourself, though?” I quizzed Fran. “Or deposit checks into any account that has your name on it anywhere?”

“No. I never even knew about any bigger money. All I see is my pay. And it’s not,” she added bitterly, “enough, if it turns out I go to jail. I was on the pier trying to figure out what to do when you two came along.”

“You’re going to do nothing. You’re going to sit tight until we see how this all shakes out,” I told her, getting up. “Maybe if you’re telling us the truth, you can be gotten out of this.”

A second set of account books: real numbers for a fake nonprofit, so Fran wouldn’t realize she was only getting crumbs from the table. If she was being honest about that it was possible she could be saved from the wreckage.

But as Fran headed forlornly up Water Street toward Wilma’s, I was already less sure than I’d been. “Ellie, what if the guy who drowned found out somehow what Wyatt’s up to? Fran might’ve figured she had as much to lose as Wyatt. She is on probation. Wyatt could’ve held that over her. Threatened her, so she’d help him get into the guy’s room.”

“So Fran gets her cousin the motel landscaper to steal a key, maybe. Wyatt wrecks the boots, makes sure the guy ends up in a deep part of the marsh,” Ellie mused. “But while Wyatt’s at it, Harriet sees something compromising from her window?”

“. . . and being Harriet, she confronts Wyatt. That’s what the argument with Wyatt could’ve been about. And . . .”

Across the street, Tim Rutherford headed for La Sardina, a red-stained handkerchief pressed to his nose and the desire for a good stiff orange soda clear on his face.

He hadn’t seen me. But at the sight of him, mental lightning struck: newspaper reporters. And . . . newspapers.

“Hang on a second,” Ellie said before I could tell her about my epiphany. She crossed the street, collared Timmy, and listened intently to him once she’d asked him a question.

When she returned, I was still hot on the trail of my own insight. “Ellie, what if Harriet already
knew
who Harry was? All the old newspapers she kept stacked in her hall. She took clippings from them. So maybe she actually
read
them.”

Ellie caught on nimbly. “So Harry walks up to the porch and introduces himself. The name rings a bell, Harriet digs out the old newspapers where she’s seen that name, to check? And she’s got them out, maybe right there in plain sight, when Wyatt shows up?”

“Which Wyatt
would
do, if Harriet had called him to say she saw him up to mischief in that tourist’s room. Forrest said he’d seen them arguing
at her house
.”

“Harry said he’d talked to Wyatt back when Harry first got to town. Wyatt would’ve recognized the name if he saw it again.”

“Newspapers with Harry’s name, the whole ghastly story, and maybe even Harry’s picture. That gives Wyatt a brainstorm.”

“Get rid of Harriet. But don’t just hide the body. Hide it with an old story about Harry. So if it
is
ever found . . .”

“Wyatt couldn’t have been sure, then, that the tourist guy’s drowning wouldn’t be investigated as murder even without Harriet raising the alarm. And George had mentioned those boots to him, too. So he was in a panic, wanting to direct suspicion in some other direction in case someone
else
got snoopy.”

“He couldn’t have known in advance that cellar wall would collapse,” Ellie said. “That would’ve been just good luck, for him. But he’d’ve intended all along that if the body
was
found . . .”

“It wouldn’t just fail to suggest some connection with Wyatt Evert. It would point straight at Harry,” I finished.

Oh, it was lovely, thoroughly wacko just like Wyatt Evert himself, and even the fact that it still had miles of loose ends—we did not, for instance, even know how Harriet had died—didn’t spoil it, at first.

But there was one thing wrong with it. It wasn’t simple. And I’d already had one complex theory do the house-of-cards act on me that morning. As a result, I couldn’t get Bob Arnold’s words—Victor’s, too—out of my head:
The
simplest explanation is usually the truth.

So my happiness began collapsing swiftly, and what came next didn’t help. “What were you talking with Tim about?” I asked as we jaywalked past the art gallery and the dime store. The big windows previewed summer: in the art gallery, bright watercolors and whimsical sculpture, in the dime store, squirt guns and American flags.

“Something I just wondered. Tim’s from here, too, and he’s about the right age. So I thought maybe he’d been in Fran’s high school class.”

“So what if he was?”

She’d learned something, I could tell, but she didn’t look any happier than I felt. “I thought when we were at her place that Wilma must be watching some of those kids for other people,” she said. “But not in day care, or foster care.”

Eastport did have its own day care center, run by a pleasant, efficient woman who I thought must take atomic vitamins. Faces washed and noses wiped: when she brought those kids into the IGA they followed her up and down the aisles quietly and obediently, like well-behaved ducklings. None of them looked as if, behind their smiles, their teeth had been filed to sharp points.

By contrast: “One glance at Wilma’s house and the state would be chartering a fleet of vans to take those kids away,” I said.

“Uh-huh. The thing is, though, if you add a lot of kids to the fact that Fran comes back to Eastport often, even though she doesn’t like it, here.
And
sends money. Well, you wonder . . .”

“Why.” Fran’s behavior
was
curious, and her feelings for her sister didn’t quite explain it.

“And the answer is, they are
all
Bounce kids,” Ellie went on, “but they’re
not
all Wilma’s. Nieces, nephews, all kinds of relations. Tim says some of the parents are away working, haven’t got the wherewithal to take care of the kids. Or they’re in the military, or whatever. Wilma just takes ’em all, no questions, overnight or long-term.”

Drat; there went the rest of my disdain for Wilma. “And Tim knows this because . . .”

“Because he was going to do a story for the
Tides
about how great it was of Wilma to do that. Until she pointed out what you said, that the next thing you know she’d have inspectors on her doorstep. So Tim decided it’d be better to let Wilma go on flying under the radar, and he killed the story.”

Good old Tim. BB guns or not he’d thought foster care wasn’t necessarily better for those kids than Wilma. And having been in the equivalent of foster care myself, I had to agree; I was well aware that there exist many dedicated, devoted foster parents.

But I also knew every kid wasn’t guaranteed a foster family from heaven, and that you upset people’s applecarts—even the creaky, one-wheeled variety—at your peril.

Tim Rutherford had apparently learned that somehow, too. My regard for him rose another notch. “And the bottom line is?”

Ellie sighed. “One of those kids is Fran’s.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake, of course. I mentally smacked my own forehead as Ellie went on. “Tim said Fran dropped out of their class as a junior, six months pregnant. No one knew the father. I doubt that matters now, who he was.”

Suddenly getting Fran off the hook looked even less like a cakewalk, and more like a fire walk. “You know what this means, though. If Fran knew all along Wyatt Evert was a crook . . .”

“And it’s one thing to support your sister but it’s a bigger ball game to support your own child.
And
stay out of jail, so you can keep seeing your kid.”

“So if someone else, like maybe Harriet, found out about Wyatt’s scheme—
if
he had one—Fran had just as good a motive as Wyatt to get rid of that person,” Ellie said. “Maybe better.”

We headed uphill; me walking, Ellie striding. “Slow down, will you?” But she didn’t.

“Probably most people here didn’t recognize Fran, and she changed her name to keep the Florida probation people off her trail.” Ellie was thinking aloud. “That’s why I didn’t tumble sooner to who she is. But there’s another thing bothering me.”

Oh, terrific. “What?”

“You told me you’d locked all the doors the other night.”

“Yes.”

“So let’s say Roy really was in Portland. If he was, he wouldn’t have wanted it, would he?” She turned to face me. “The key, I mean. Your house key, that you told me Roy had. He wouldn’t need it, wouldn’t even notice if it was gone probably. So who might’ve stolen it, used it, sneaked it back onto his key ring?”