Unhinged (4 page)

Something
ping
ed in my memory. The Top Cat crew backed away from the truck. The net was good. I understood the net. But . . .

“I say, let ’em come,” said Purlie, who had been in charge of blasting at the gravel pit. “Make the durn video, spend their money, give us all a boost and may the devil take the . . .”

Down the street, a Top Cat crew member produced a handheld radio controller. With a flourish he pressed a button on the device. And as he did so, my memory produced the following information:

The button closed a circuit inside the radio controller, and sent a signal to a receiver in the crate in the cargo compartment. The receiver closed its own circuit, whereupon a battery in the crate began producing electrical current. The current jumped a gap, creating a spark that fired a blasting cap lodged in a larger amount of less volatile, more powerful material. This sequence of events is called “lighting the candle.”

With a bright white flash and a concussive
boom!
the truck’s cargo compartment exploded. The net over it billowed briefly as if inflated, then collapsed.

“. . . hindmost,” ex-gravel-pit-blasting boss Purlie Wadsworth finished, not turning a hair.

Me, either.

“How could you
just sit there?” Ellie demanded moments after the blast. “You didn’t even flinch.”

Kids raised in mining towns think explosions are the sound of food falling onto the table and school clothes showing up in their closets.

“Ellie, when they weren’t digging coal my uncles blew up stumps with black powder and fertilizer from the feed store. One of my cousins set off a charge in the privy behind the parsonage. When the smoke cleared he’d demolished the whole church.”

Actually I had even more history with explosives than that: the fact was, my mother’s family romance with anything that could be made to explode was what got my father interested in her in the first place.

But now wasn’t the time to talk about it. Instead we drove to Harriet’s past the redbrick Frontier Bank building, the Happy Landings Café with its colored umbrellas out on the deck, and the Motel East perched on a bluff overlooking the water. Beyond the motel you could see all the way down the bay, to the bridge over the channel to Canada. Out past the span the fog lay on the water like a strip of grey wool, the first sign of changing weather.

“Well, I don’t care how used to it you are,” Ellie complained, which was unlike her. But it
had
been a big explosion; my ears were jangly again. “That thing nearly scared my heart out of my throat.”

Actually, no time was the time to talk about it. We drove up Shackford Street between front lawns studded with snowdrops and grape hyacinth. The lilac leaves were out but their blooms were still purple-grey nubbins as tight as tiny fists.

“They netted it to keep stuff from flying around and hurting someone,” I told her. “Reinforced the cargo box, too, by the looks of it afterwards.” Remarkably, the truck had appeared undamaged.

“All they want from a blast like that is the flash. It was a fine job,” I concluded, “of keeping everything contained.”

The music video was called
Shake It Till You Break It,
and even before witnessing the blast I’d worried that’s what it might do to us. But these guys were good: their competence—I thought at the time—a favorable sign.

Ellie harrumphed as she pulled the car over and we climbed out. Harriet Hollingsworth’s house looked even sadder and shabbier in close-up than it had at a distance. And there was something new about it, something different I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“And they did it right away because they wanted to get it done,” I added, “get the worst over right off the bat so there’d be nothing else for anyone to complain about.”

This I’d gleaned from talking to the fellow who’d held the radio controller. After running around forewarning the Water Street shop owners, all the crew wanted was to get the deed done before word spread any further. A crowd of onlookers would have spoiled their shot, and they hadn’t noticed Ellie and me when they were putting up the sawhorses or they’d have shooed us out of the area, too.

“I wish Harriet
were
still here,” Ellie fretted. “She’d have plenty to say about setting off a bomb downtown.”

“Harriet never minced words,” I agreed distractedly. Then: “Ellie, what’s so different about this house?”

The porch leaned drunkenly, one end on concrete blocks and the other on a tree stump. The steps were a death trap promising a broken ankle or worse. The windows sagged, the walls bowed, and the roof resembled the aftermath of a major hurricane.

All that, though, was normal, as were the heaps of rusting scrap metal, old plastic toys, and boxes of magazines poking from the tangled weeds. What puzzled me was what was missing. There’d been something else in the yard and it was gone now. But I couldn’t quite remember . . .

“Hello.” A man’s voice came from behind me; I jumped about a foot just as I realized what the absent element was.

The “for sale” sign was gone.

“Sorry if I startled you.” Then he saw my face, more of a shambles than the house. “Are you okay? Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

He was mid-fiftyish or a little older, attractive in an ordinary-guy way, with crinkled brown eyes and greying hair clipped short. He held a box brimming with old kitchen stuff in both work-gloved hands.

“I’m fine,” I replied, ignoring Ellie’s glance, so full of unspoken Maine twang it could practically have tied itself in a knot. “Had a little accident earlier, that’s all.”

“Sorry to hear that. Well, I’m Harry Markle. From New York. I just bought this old place from the bank.”

He grinned, showing white, well-kept teeth. “Guess I’ve got my hands full. Getting it back in shape’ll keep me busy a while.”

I smiled in return; this guy had no idea how busy he was about to be. Just not drowning in his bed when it rained would be a project, by the looks of that roof.

I got my wits together, or what was left of them after a concussion and a bomb blast. “I’m Jacobia Tiptree,” I recited, “I live over there in that big old white house. This is my friend Ellie White. Welcome to Eastport.”

“Thanks.” His handshake was papery-dry despite the glove he pulled off. And minutes earlier he’d heard a blast that must’ve suggested nuclear attack.

But no comment came from Harry Markle. A cool newcomer, I diagnosed. He went on enthusiastically.

“Wonderful town. I’d been moving around all over the country for a year or so. But when I got here I just fell in love with it as soon as I saw it. And with the house.”

I understood; it had happened that way to me. You may cross the long causeway that leads here from the mainland meaning only to spend a few hours sight-seeing, but unless you hightail it back before Eastport captures you, you can end up here for life.

“So what’ll you do here, Mr. Markle?” I asked.

Besides keeping his house from falling in on him, I meant. He shrugged. “Make it Harry. I’ve got a feeling folks don’t stand on ceremony, this far downeast.”

“You’ve got that right.” But he hadn’t answered my question.

So I said nothing, which is a little-known but tremendously effective method of getting other people to say things, instead. Seeing that I was still waiting, Harry continued, “I guess first I’ll clear out more living space, set up some sort of work area, a place I could get a few things done from.”

Again, not exactly an answer. He wore a navy T-shirt, jeans, and a very nice, newish-looking pair of rubber-soled boots. “Want to come in, see what I’ve done so far?”

City accent; Brooklyn with the softening that came from time away from the old neighborhood, talking to lots of people.

“Harry,” Ellie began, “it’s very nice to meet you. And we’d like to see the house, but right now I think we ought to . . .”

Lie down,
she was telegraphing sternly at me.
Fall onto the sofa and stay there until I say you can get up.

That plan still seemed prudent to me. But I wanted to go inside even more now that I saw Harry was getting rid of things.

“Please?” He looked from one to the other of us. “I do need someone to say I wasn’t crazy to buy this old wreck.”

“You’re on,” I replied heartily as we picked our way up the steps and over the death-trap porch.

“Phewie.” Ellie wrinkled her nose when we got inside. “Dust. And what’s the other smell?”

“Forty years of eating out of cans, and keeping the cans,” Harry replied somberly. “Rinsing them wasn’t a specialty, either. This,” he waved around, “is an improvement over when I got here.”

Cracked linoleum curled up from the slanting floor; on it rested an old white-metal sink unit with most of the porcelain chipped off. Loops of once-bright wallpaper festooned in greasy ringlets over the stove, a crusted horror. The ancient plaster ceiling was disintegrating; gritty bits of it crunched under our feet.

“I gather the previous owner was . . . unusual,” Harry said carefully.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We knew she was off the deep end. I guess you’re living in there?”

I pointed at the dining room. Its formal character and the fact that it’s used least makes it the last room to get seriously ravaged in many old houses.

“Yep,” he replied. “I think she did, too. Live in it, at the end. I’ve cleaned it up a little better.”

We followed him down a hall between stacks of, apparently, every issue of every newspaper ever published: tabloids, special editions, even the
Sporting News,
many with bits clipped out.

“I need to get a recycling truck over here,” Harry said with a wave at them. “She seems to have been quite the news junkie.”

“And a junk junkie.” Pails filled with ancient, mummified chicken bones gave me a start. In the gloom they looked like tiny human skeletons. Everything was covered with a thick, feltlike coating of dust, glued down I imagined by decades of Harriet’s sour, increasingly suspicious exhalations.

Then I peered into the dining room, caught my breath in surprise. “Oh, Harry! This is . . . This is fabulous.”

As if someone had waved a magic wand, the old hardwood floor shone, smelling of lemon wax. The hearth gleamed, brass andirons polished and laden with birch logs. An elegant little chandelier twinkled prettily, its crystal pendants ammonia-fresh.

“Not too shabby?” Harry beamed with justifiable pride. He’d set up a bedstead, a table and chair, and a bench on which he had laid out some books and a lamp. A radio stood on the newly wiped sill of one glittering-clean window.

Something else stood there, too.

From Harriet’s window you could see straight into many other houses in town. When she wasn’t reading newspapers she’d probably sat right in this room writing letters about what she’d observed. And although I’d expected to find her most treasured possession sooner or later, coming upon it now made my heart lurch.

“Oh,” Ellie pronounced comprehendingly, seeing it with me:

The one thing Harriet wouldn’t have abandoned. Because even if she ran off and started a new life, somehow—

Well, what could life possibly be to Harriet Hollingsworth without her binoculars?

When I first
came to Maine and bought an old house I learned the most important part of do-it-yourself fix-up: knowing when not to. Unfortunately I learned this by falling through a floor I’d been trying to reinforce; even more unfortunately, what lay beneath it was a whole civilization of spiders, silverfish, and a particularly nasty species of centipede: big, smart ones.

I swear they had roads, aqueducts, even little schools going on down there in the darkness, and if I hadn’t fallen in on them they probably would’ve developed nuclear weapons. In the end, the only thing that got reinforced that day was my dread of anything having so many more legs than I do.

But as my old New York friend and mentor Jemmy Wechsler said when he discovered the Mob had a contract out on him just because he stole several million of their favorite dollars: Live and learn.

Not that I went right out and found out how to fix old floors; that came later when the centipedes decided that life
under
the floorboards might not be all that they had wished for, and I woke up one night to tiny eyes gleaming balefully at me from the foot of my bed. Instead what I got from that unhappy episode was the ability to delegate the really big jobs, born of my resolve that the next time somebody fell into a squirming mass of insects, it wouldn’t be me.

So when the ell needed a new roof I hired a local mother-and-daughter team who called themselves the Shingle Belles. Fast, fearless, and efficient, those two didn’t fall into masses of insects or anywhere else as they scrambled over the roof tossing tools to one another, cursing cheerfully.

Likewise, discovering that the foundation of my old house was crumbling, I balanced the cost of hired help against the cost of the back surgery I would need after hauling the big old stones out of the cellar myself. Then I engaged another expert.

And when Ellie and I got home from Harry Markle’s that day, the expert was standing in the side yard gazing pensively at my ladder. From the way it was lying on the lawn you could figure out what had happened, especially if you factored in the little drops of blood sprinkled artfully across the sidewalk. Wade was absent, drawn downtown, I guessed, by the lure of the explosion.

“Hello, Mr. Ash,” I said, making my way across the lawn to the helper I’d hired. “Don’t worry about that ladder, I’ll put it away.”

He straightened, his pale-blue eyes softening as he saw that I wasn’t badly injured. But he frowned at the mess of my face.

“Ice on the lip,” he suggested gravely, putting out a bony finger. Somehow his touch didn’t make me flinch the way Victor’s had. “Beefsteak on the eye,” he added.

His work-roughened hand sketched the suggestion of a caress in the air alongside my head, drew back chastely. “Yeah,” I said, “but you should see the other guy.”

At that he chuckled, a lean man in his late fifties, wearing blue coveralls, a faded red flannel shirt, and old leather boots. For a guy who worked on basements and crawl spaces he was very clean, smelling sweetly of concrete dust and something else I couldn’t identify, sharp as an old penny.