Unhinged (8 page)

“They’ll be fine,” I said again, mostly to reassure myself. I’d wanted to stay but Sam was clearly mortified at the thought of being watched over by his mother. When I’d left, Maggie had been urging him to concentrate on homonyms: “quail” and “quail,” et cetera.

“Victor’s there with them, and so is George.”

“Good. Listen, Jacobia,” Bob said uncomfortably as a breeze through the open door riffled his sparse hair.

With his slow, face-saving way of handling trouble, people joked Bob ought to have his motto, “All in good time,” stenciled on the cop car. Bob gave a guy room to consider his options, have an apology ready when the moment of truth finally arrived and Bob stood toe-to-toe with him, radiating moral authority. “This story Harry Markle is telling now, about this guy following him,” Bob went on doubtfully.

We went outside. At one end of Water Street the Top Cat crew was loading big equipment onto a pickup truck: lights, cameras, I don’t know what all else, only that there was a lot of it.

At the other, in front of the Motel East, people in safari garb climbed into Wyatt Evert’s van. They carried cameras, backpacks, all the gear they would need for a day out observing nature, plus lunches Wyatt had had packed for them.

“Hope they’ve got plenty of bug dope,” Bob observed.

Wyatt, looking rocky after his evening of appreciating fine wine at my house, got behind the van’s wheel and peered into its oversized rearview mirror. His assistant Fran Hanson was in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.

“Blackflies out at the Moosehorn are so big right now, they could stand flat-footed and look right over the barn at you,” Bob added wryly, watching the van pull out.

Then he turned back to me. “Thing is, Jacobia, Markle seems okay. Got his work cut out for him with Harriet’s house.”

I hadn’t said anything about what I thought really happened to Harriet. An abandoned pair of binoculars, however convincing to me, wasn’t going to cut much ice with Bob; I needed more. So I just listened as the breeze blew in, smelling of sea salt and the storm that was out there, past where we could see.

“But back in New York, Markle’s got a reputation as a loose cannon,” Bob said, getting down to brass tacks.

“Fellow I talked to,” he went on, “said Markle was the kind of guy, wouldn’t let go. Thing’d go cold, Harry wouldn’t give up on it. He would work on his own time and put other people in danger, plus himself.”

“That’s not good.” But it fit, actually; going up on that roof before a backup team was in position, trying to be a hero. “Thinking it was personal, all about him. He still thinks so.”

Bob looked at me, and I got the message:
don’t make the same mistake
. But at the moment, it
felt
personal.

A big old blue work truck, its muffler belching and its bed piled high with lobster traps, trundled past on its way to the boat basin. The men liked to be on their boats, even just tied up at the piers, puttering and trading gossip. And there was work to do before the boats got blown, as George would have put it, nine ways from Sunday.

“Did your friend say anything more about the last case Harry was on, specifically?” The ghastly one: targeting cops.

“Ayuh.” Bob eyed me unhappily. “Says before Markle finally took his retirement he already had the idea the bad guy was stalking him, had it so he couldn’t think about anything else. He got counseling but that didn’t help him.”

The psychiatrist Harry had mentioned. “And there was some other thing he was working on, some old case he couldn’t seem to accept a closing to, that it was over and done with,” Bob said.

I had an idea maybe I knew what that one was. But it wasn’t important now. “So, Bob, you think Sam’s accident really
was
an accident?”

Bob eyed the length of the street again, taking it all in with practiced casualness. He could spot a guy with a baggie full of illegal pills so fast, the guy would be off the breakwater and into the lockup before the first startled flurry of denials and excuses finished escaping his lips.

And to that kind of guy Bob gave no leeway for apologies. “I don’t want to swear to it. But Sam’s car was a clunker. Rust gets started over the winters, salt and so on. Year after year. Eats through.”

“Can’t someone tell for sure if it was rust?”

I hadn’t examined the car; I’m no mechanic and I didn’t want to look at it, anyway. Seeing the scraped and broken barrier was bad enough.

Bob shook his head, following my gaze. “That’s not what Sam hit, Jacobia. The barrier’s just what he scraped by, going fast.”

He pointed. “
That’s
what he hit.”

“Dear god.” There wasn’t very much damage to it, so I hadn’t noticed. But about forty yards past the barrier, a granite boulder marked the far corner of the Neptune Fish Company parking lot. A
big
boulder.

“Whole front end of that car’s a shambles, no one’s ever going to know what happened for sure, there was just too much damage from the impact,” Bob said.

He turned to me. “Mechanical problem’s the simplest answer, though. And in my experience, simplest is correct.”

Which had been Victor’s comment, too, in another context. “I am just saying,” Bob went on, “you want to look at what Markle says from all angles, ’fore you go acceptin’ it as gospel. People who know him say his imagination’s his whadyacallit.”

“His Achilles’ heel.” The Top Cat Productions truck rumbled toward us.

“On the other hand,” Bob cautioned, “if Harry Markle
did
have an old enemy following him—”

“Not someone whose radar you want to be on,” I agreed. But with Bob not seeming to give the notion much credence, it seemed more remote to me, too; comfortingly so.

Too bad I couldn’t dismiss the rest of what Harry had said. “What else did you find out about him, anything?”

“Just that he’s got a girlfriend already. One of the dancers in that video they’re making, name of Samantha Greer. Not local,” he added.

People from away could behave like a hutch full of bunnies for all Bob cared; he didn’t have to attend town meetings with
their
parents. “Jake. About the binoculars.”

So he knew that Harriet hadn’t taken them with her. Around here, if a sparrow fell Bob knew it before the feathers quit fluttering.

Knew, and did something about it, too, if necessary.

All in good time.

I hoped.

My old house
stands on a granite foundation each block of which was quarried miles away on the mainland, dragged to the water, barged over the channel, and hauled by oxcart to the site where it was mortared in by someone who knew how. The house’s first owner, Captain Jeremiah Loundsworth, survived a long career of dangerous, extremely lucrative commercial voyages only to perish by shipwreck in a storm while carrying soldiers to the Civil War.

Sometimes in the house late at night I could almost hear the weeping when the word came: that the captain was lost. Or possibly it was cheering at the news that the old tyrant had finally drowned.

I’ll never know; the walls cannot speak. But they can fall down, and they were doing it very convincingly when I returned home.

“Sorry,” Wade said, throwing an arm around my shoulder as I gazed at the clapboards lying where they had fallen onto the back lawn. A row of them had smashed the pretty trellis Ellie and I had built the previous summer to support the Concord grapevines.

“Guess we bumped them too hard with that ladder,” Wade added ruefully. “Gutters and downspouts are all on straight, though.”

I managed a chuckle. The rotted clapboards were bad enough. But the real disaster was why they’d fallen; the framing beneath them was rotten, too. And that meant . . .

“Leak,” I diagnosed grimly. “Bad flashing, snow and ice on top, water ran inside.” I should have let the Shingle Belles do the whole roof, not just the actively leaking portion on the ell, as they had advised.

But it was too late now. The hole where the clapboards fell resembled a spreading patch of leprosy. And it would act like one if it didn’t get repaired, as Sam would’ve put it,
soot tweet
.

“I’ll order the materials today, by Friday I can have new clapboards painted,” I said, adding and subtracting in my head.

Mostly subtracting. The job would take hundreds of dollars’ worth of clapboards, as hideously expensive as skin grafts. And it would need oil-based paint, which is the very devil to work with. But here on the island in the damp salt air, latex exterior paint is about as durable as a dusting of powdered sugar.

“Turpentine,” I recited. “Sprayer nozzle—”

The way to paint clapboards is
before
you nail them up: two coats of primer, two of paint. I was certainly not going to paint them with a brush, and the paint-sprayer nozzle had a clog in it.

This being yet another do-it-yourself home-fix-up rule:
The paint-sprayer nozzle always has a clog in it.

“The storm will be past by then. And,” I went on recklessly, gazing at the bare spot which was a good ten feet higher than I’d ever climbed before, “maybe I can put the clapboards up myself. I could rent scaffolding, or borrow a longer extension ladder.”

Wade’s head moved against my hair in a way that I had learned meant he was trying hard to keep from laughing outright. “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

“You.” He wrapped me in a bear hug. We hadn’t yet discussed the previous night’s revelations about my father. Now I leaned on him, feeling the tight metal clamp around my heart ease momentarily.

“A longer ladder,” he marveled at last. His hands smelled like gun oil; when not piloting big cargo ships in and out of Eastport’s shipping dock, he was a well-known gunsmith with a workshop upstairs in the ell of the old house. “Don’t you think you should give that face of yours a break from slamming it into stuff?” he added, eyeing my bruises.

“Maybe you’ve got a point.” Wondering what else could go wrong, I followed him inside with Monday trotting behind me. The day’s only bright spot was that I’d been able to put the contact lenses in again that morning, adding yet another unnatural color to the ghastly panorama that was my face.

“I called the hospital,” Wade went on, pouring me a cup of coffee. “Talked to Victor. Sam’s coming home after another set of X rays.”

The coffee was fresh. Maybe Victor would set up a catheter so I could infuse some into my brain. “How’d he sound?”

Wade grinned. “Like Victor. Trying to figure out some way it could be your fault, but he couldn’t because it isn’t.”

A clatter hammered up from the cellar but I was so tired I barely flinched, just raised a querying eyebrow at Wade. “What’s going on?”

“That’s Mr. Ash,” he replied as if this explained enough noise to raise the dead.

But Lian Ash had said he would be over to discuss the work, not to begin it. We hadn’t even talked about costs or materials, and now he was ripping 200-year-old stones out of my walls with, it sounded like, a jackhammer.

Wade rinsed his cup, tied a red bandanna around his head to keep sweat from dripping while he worked on a Harpers Ferry rifle he was restoring for a client.

“George’ll bring Sam home,” he added. When he finished the rifle he planned to reload some shotgun shells, a chore that always made me nervous because it involves compressing explosive powder. But Wade said it was safe and that it was a waste of a good shotgun shell not to reload it.

A muffled oath rose from the cellar. “Son of a bore,” it sounded like. Moments later a puff of mortar dust preceded Lian Ash into the kitchen.

“There,” he uttered, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Now I see which way the wind blows. Next I’ll get jacks up, keep the house from fallin’ down while I pull out the bad areas.”

Dust ringed the outline of the respirator he’d been wearing; his blue eyes gleamed out from a coating of 200-year-old grit.

“Won’t you need some help?” Wade asked. “Big operation.”

“Yes, sir, I will. But not,” Lian Ash added, “with taking old stuff out. Too many men on that, ’fore you know it one of ’em’s pullin’ out somethin’ you haven’t braced yet. Somethin’ you have not entered into your calculations.
Then
you’ve got problems.”

He turned a serious gaze on me. “Speakin’ o’ problems, I’m sorry about that young feller of yours. Heard he took a weave and a bobble, last night. Glad he came out of it all right.”

Somehow just having the old man around made me feel better. “But Mr. Ash,” I added when I’d reassured him again about Sam’s welfare, “I need an idea of what you are going to charge for the foundation project, before you begin. An estimate, so I don’t get in too deep.”

“Ah, yes. Getting in too deep. A situation to be avoided if possible. Though sometimes it isn’t,” Lian Ash finished wisely.

He ran himself a glass of water and stood drinking it at the sink. “Chlorinated water. Wonderful invention. Quenches thirst, replenishes the cells, and kills germs on contact. Ahh,” he said appreciatively, setting the glass down.

Wade shot me a wink, vanishing back upstairs to work on the rifle and reload the shells, and when I turned again Mr. Ash was scribbling numbers on a pad of paper.

“This is the materials. This other number,” he poked at the pad with the stubby end of his pencil, “is the labor. Add it all up,” he poked at a third number, “you’ve got your estimate. Ten percent over or under.”

I looked at Mr. Ash and then at the number again, lower by half than what I had feared would be the result.

“This seems very reasonable,” I managed, expecting him to add some caveat: that when he got into the job things might change or that he might need more help, or more equipment.

He didn’t. But: “Mr. Ash, I don’t mean to be intrusive here. There is one other thing I need to talk to you about, though.”

His pale blue-eyed glance flickered alertly at me. “Where’ve I been all your life?”

“Well, yes.” I’d liked him so much, I hadn’t asked him for references when I’d hired him, and now I was sorry. “You see . . .”

He nodded slowly. “Man does his work, minds his business, no one cares where he comes from till there’s trouble. Like last night.”