Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (6 page)

Baked haddock for Ellie and Bella, a T-bone for Sam, duck in orange sauce for Wade, for Jake’s dad, and for George Valentine, plus pizza for Jake: specifically, artisan pizza with barbecued chicken, caramelized onion, and enough blue cheese to sink a barge.

Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, ate a bite of duck breast and sighed happily. Compactly built, with the jutting jaw and milk-white
skin that ran in many of the old families in downeast Maine, he had the banty-rooster bearing of a fellow who talked with his fists.

Which he often did. Besides being the man you called for a bat in your attic, skunks in your trash cans, or a massive old tree limb balanced atop your roof beam after a storm, George had been known to throw a first punch just to get the fight started, so he could get it over with.

Now, though, a guitar duo played jazz standards at one end of the room, a grill man tossed pizza at the other, and in the middle, George ate duck à l’orange and liked it.

But then Wade started in on the nasty emails again, and this time the food didn’t keep him from wanting an answer, pronto. So Jake supplied one as best she could:

“Youngish guy. Clean-cut, riding a bike.”

There was no point in mentioning how familiar he’d looked and sounded. She still didn’t know why, or even if the sense she had that she knew her visitor from somewhere was accurate.

She glanced uneasily out the window once more and spied no one looking in. But the street was still jammed with people, and among that many faces, who could be sure of picking out just one?

“He seemed to have a grievance against me,” she went on. “I got the feeling that taunting me was why he was here.”

Her dad’s bushy eyebrows knit with concern. “And then the emails started?”

“Yes. But there’s no way of knowing if they’re connected.”

The jazz guitar duo reached the final notes of “Take the ‘A’ Train” and began playing “Stardust.” Jake’s father patted Bella’s left hand as with her right she finished her appletini.

George winked at Ellie. Wade got his wallet out. Sam filched the last slice of pizza from Jake’s plate and devoured it.
I am
, Jake thought with sudden clarity,
the luckiest woman in the world
.

“The guy on the bike and those emails coming right after, it could’ve all just been a—”

“Coinky-dink,” Sam supplied, taking a swig of root beer, and the rest nodded in agreement.

But none of them really believed it; she knew from the looks on their faces.

And unfortunately, neither did she.

ONCE IT GOT DARK, STEVEN FELT SAFER ABOUT LEAVING THE
vacant house. One more stranger in a town that was full of them at night on a holiday weekend … Who would notice?

But just to be sure, he propped a hand mirror on one of the sagging shelves in the ancient pantry. Switching on his battery lantern, he got to work with a tube of surgical glue.

His nose wrinkled, partly from the pungent glue smell but mostly at the sight of himself in the cheap little mirror. Those big ears of his belonged on a cartoon character, the way they stuck nearly straight out from his head.

But now a firm squeeze of the glue tube here, a dab and a push there, and one ear was firmly secured flat to his head. Next he did the same on the other side, and presto: perfectly normal.

On the outside, anyway. He frowned, wondering if the ears might’ve given Jacobia Tiptree a clue to his identity earlier. Probably not, though. The one time she’d seen him before, he’d been only a kid and his father had been her focus.

His father, and what she’d refused to do for him. Such a small thing, really, that she
could
have done so easily. And if she had helped, everything would have been different.

But no sense crying over spilled milk, as his mother used to say, although she’d never said it when Steven spilled it. Then, somehow there’d been plenty of sense in making him cry.

But done was done, and what he needed to think about now was what he
meant
to do. Soon …

Now, in fact, because all this was part of it, his mission already well
under way. Tease her, torment her … these thoughts calmed his nerves, slowed his angrily pounding heartbeat. He left the mirror on the dusty shelf and returned to the old kitchen.

The smell here was of wood rotting and rodents multiplying. Stealthy flapping sounds from somewhere upstairs said that bats made their homes here, as well. His flesh crawled at the idea of the creatures swarming over him if he should fall asleep.

But that wasn’t likely, or at any rate not soon, for he had things to do, didn’t he? And his eagerness would keep him awake.

He shut off the lantern. But he would need it when he came back to the house later. Climbing onto a shaky chair, he began pulling shades made of big black trash bags down over the kitchen windows.

He’d taped them together earlier that day, and thumbtacked them to the tops of the window frames back when it was still daylight. Once the bags were lowered and secured with more tape, he turned the lantern on again, then crept outside to check his work.

From the yard, not a gleam of light showed from inside the house. And during the day, all anyone would be able to see were sagging, yellowed venetian blinds, like always.

Satisfied, he went back inside, pulling the broken door shut behind him as quietly as possible, though the music and laughter of the holiday revels going on a few blocks away likely covered any sound.

Spread out on the tarp-covered floor were more of his equipment: plastic handcuffs, the gag and blindfold. Scissors, adhesive tape, his laptop, and a digital camera, too, of course.

Steven turned his attention to the laptop. Luckily, there were lots of unencrypted Wi-Fi networks around, so he could get onto the Internet without trouble.

The laptop itself ran on special batteries. Buying enough of those had been the greatest expense of the project. The weight of them in his pack had been a pain, too.

But there was no help for it; he couldn’t be sure he’d have a chance to recharge any of them secretly. And secrecy was key.

Powering the laptop up, he accessed the account he’d set up weeks earlier with the anonymous mail-drop service. The service, which allowed him to send messages with no fear of being tracked down and identified, was expensive.

But the cost had been worth it, as had the work of setting the messages up to be sent out automatically. More opportunity for confusion, for misdirection …

Bottom line, more chance for the kind of fear he meant to inspire before he
really
got down to business.

Accessing his mail-drop account, he saw the check mark beside each message he’d uploaded before beginning this trip. The marks said the messages had been delivered.
Excellent …

Next he visited the local public library’s website, found from the information on it that as he’d expected, he could indeed use their printer for a small fee.

Also, he could upload files to the printer, either on-site or remotely, the printout itself to be collected later. As he’d also hoped, it was a color printer.…

Fabulous
. Everything was as he’d planned. So a walk downtown to where the celebration was going on was a reward he deserved.

And perhaps, if he felt daring, even farther than downtown. After all, he too was celebrating independence. Free from grief, from guilt …

Free at last from his obligation to do something, someday, about his father’s real killer, Jacobia Tiptree. Because maybe he was a mama’s boy, spoiled and petted. Bullied, too; her prisoner, right up until the end.

To the last gasp. But at the heart of the matter …

Down deep, he was his own man. And now …

Now it was time to prove it.

Time for her, too, he thought. To understand, to regret. To apologize, even.

Yes, he decided, giving his glued-back ears a last satisfied pat. Among other things, he would most certainly extract from her that most useless of declarations: the heartfelt apology.

L
ATE THAT NIGHT, UPSTAIRS IN BED, JAKE LOOKED OVER AT
Wade and found him asleep with his book on his chest.

“The Muzzle-Loader’s Handbook.”
She read the title softly aloud. The dogs looked up alertly.

“Not that kind of muzzle,” she told them.

They looked disappointed; muzzle-loading was their favorite activity, if the load was kibble. Plucking the book from Wade’s hands, she switched off his lamp.

At least somebody was getting some shut-eye around here. But she could already tell that for her, it wasn’t in the cards.

Careful not to step on any squeaky floorboards—even the most dedicated old-house repairer couldn’t fix them all—she padded downstairs.

Under a tin ceiling whose ornately molded surface had begun shedding flakes of antique paint—
wire brush, stepladder, tack cloth, Rust-Oleum
, she thought—the dogs pranced with her to the kitchen.

After dispensing a biscuit to each of them, she made tea. She carried it to the front parlor, where the Victorian-era furniture, heavy velvet hangings, and Oriental rugs made a cozy refuge.

Turning a lamp on low, she drew the silk quilt from where it draped over one corner of the settee. She would curl up, she decided, and in the dim lamplight manage to doze, or at any rate to rest.

But in the next instant a shadow moved swiftly across the front window shade. The dogs leapt up, stiffened, Prill wuffing warningly, and even Monday growling deep in her chest.

Holding her breath, Jake moved the shade aside a scant half-inch. Outside, the night was still and clear; the newly risen full moon hung balloon-like in an indigo sky, turning the narrow patch of the bay she could see from here into a sheet of silver.

Nothing moved. All the neighboring houses were silent. The Doberman stood beside her briefly, then strode from the room, the measured click of the dog’s toenails sounding distantly from the rest of the house as she made her inspection.

Finally she returned, teeth bared in a dog grin.
All clear
, the big animal’s face and body communicated plainly.

“Everything okay?”

The voice from the hall startled her. But it was only her father, in striped pajamas and a nightcap like a character out of a Dickens novel.

Jake waved at the window, feeling foolish. “I thought I saw something.”

Yawning hugely, Prill lay down again as Jacob Tiptree came into the room. Jake let herself lie down, too, pulling the silk quilt up.
Silly
, she thought.

“I could go out looking,” he offered. “Or call Bob Arnold.”

She smiled at the thought of her father in his nightcap, chasing a prowler. “No, thanks.”

A leaf, a plastic bag blowing by the window … anything might have made that shadow. “I guess I’m still spooked from this morning.”

“Been to the cellar?” To the weapons lockbox, he meant.

“No. Not yet. I guess maybe I don’t quite want to admit how nervous the guy is making me.”

There’d been no more emails. “And anyway, I don’t haul out a gun for just anything,” she added. “You know that.”

Her father, on the other hand, was the kind of fellow who, if he heard a strange sound in the house at night, came down with a pistol loaded and ready or he didn’t come down at all.

Now the shape of the weapon showed in the robe pocket. It was a .380 ACP semi-auto, she happened to know: tiny, effective.

“I’m not even certain the emails were from him,” she said.

Amusement crinkled the skin around her dad’s eyes.
Of course they were
, his look seemed to say gently. Only a fool would think anything else, under the circumstances.

“So you’ve got an enemy,” he said, ignoring her attempt to evade this truth. “Maybe you should think about why.”

She nodded reluctantly. Her present life, spent fixing up an old house, wasn’t malice-worthy. Her few civic duties—serving as ballot clerk, cooking for Meals on Wheels now and then, attending town meetings—weren’t likely to make her a target, either.

Once upon a time, though, after she’d fled Manhattan, some of the biggest crooks in the city had been out for her blood. She’d known their secrets, and if she ever revealed them, they’d be deprived of a lot of money and personal freedom.

But: “It’s been a long time since any guys from the old days were interested in me,” she said. “Those fences are mended.”

Besides, the statute of limitations had passed. “He did have a New York accent. But he was too young, mid-twenties, maybe. He couldn’t have been anyone from way back then.”

Her dad nodded silently.

“Sam looked at the computer when we got home,” she went on. “He says whoever sent those emails knew just how to do it.”

Routed them, Sam had said, through anonymous mail servers so he or she couldn’t be traced back and identified. Or not with the skills Sam had, anyway.

Her dad got up. “Better get some rest,” he said as he headed upstairs, and when he’d gone she found the weapon he’d had in his pocket on the table by the settee.

And although she was not usually a fan of guns lying around the parlor, this time she didn’t mind. With it in hand, she took one last tour around the silent house.