Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery (9 page)

And—pessimism flooded her suddenly—her old house was
enormous
. Hundreds of square feet of antique clapboards needed scraping, sanding, setting-in of the old nails so they wouldn’t rust, and even caulking in some of the more disreputable spots.

Just the porch alone, with its elaborately turned wooden rails, posts, and pilasters that all required careful brushing and re-brushing, was a gargantuan project. Abruptly her earlier vision of a pristine white entryway complete with big clay pots of red geraniums seemed overambitious.

To put it mildly. But she did already have the paint can open and the brush wet. Also, it was unlikely that she would be interrupted for at least a couple of hours.

And finally, she’d already bought those big clay geranium pots, each of which cost the earth even though that was pretty much all they were made of. So, starting at the left-hand corner of the deck near the screen door, she began brushing primer into every nook, cranny, nail hole, and crevice, inch by patient inch.

Whereupon all at once the whole job suddenly seemed possible again. As did everything else: the centuries-old house, the remaking of her whole life.

This
, she thought, watching the white-paint expanse widen.
This is why I do it
. Before she knew it, she’d covered a few more decking planks, then more still, and a whole rail-and-post unit.

By the time the sun rose high enough to flood the streets with golden light, joggers and dog walkers were out. Even a few bicyclists pedaled by, their faces bright with the pleasure of the sweet, fresh air and the absence of car traffic.

None of them paid her any attention or looked the least bit familiar, and soon she stopped bothering to look up each time she heard a derailleur’s whir. When the creak in her back and a cramp in her brush hand—as well as the need for more coffee—got her off her knees, to her own surprise she had nearly emptied the paint can, and a fresh coat of white primer covered the whole porch.

And the second coat couldn’t go on until the first dried, so it was break time. After finding and brushing smooth the drips of excess paint on the vertical surfaces of the job, she scraped the brush on the rim of the open can.

Next she wrapped the brush in layers of plastic wrap to preserve it for the few hours it would take the primer to dry. Finally she tapped the paint can’s top back on with little raps of the brush handle and set the can on some sheets of newspaper.

Inside, she expected to find the coffee stewed to black syrup and the house still hushed. But instead Bella was up, already busy damp-mopping the floors.

The smell of kitchen cleanser floated in the air along with the
aroma of fresh coffee. The windows stood open wide, the white lace curtains fluttering in puffs of cool, salt-freshened air.

“Is Sam up, too?” Jake asked. The coffee was delicious, much better than the dregs she’d left cooking in the pot. Across the back lawn an army of robins marched, cocking their bright eyes skyward while breakfasting on worms.

“Up and gone,” said Bella. The muscles in her long, ropy arms flexed visibly as she rubbed the mop over a stubborn patch of imaginary dirt.

“Wade, too, and your father. Slipped out the back way; they didn’t want to interrupt you while you had a good head of steam up.”

All three men were on the fireworks committee, charged with handling everything but the explosives themselves. Later that day a professional team from the suppliers would board a barge and get towed out onto the water, where they—the fireworks, not the men—would be detonated in about—Jake checked the kitchen clock—twelve hours from now.

“And Ellie stopped by,” said Bella.

The dogs danced around; Jake gave each one a biscuit. Prill wolfed hers and looked up eagerly for another; Monday nibbled delicately but finished it.

“Good pup,” Jake told the old Labrador, whose clouded eyes seemed to brighten minutely at the sound.

“She says do you want to meet her for breakfast?” said Bella as she ran hot water over her mop. “Ellie, I mean.”

Jake watched Monday walk slowly to her bed and sink into it. “Oh?” she said distractedly. “She say why?”

All the restaurants downtown would be jammed, what with the crowds in town. And anyway, Ellie would have already eaten her breakfast with George, hours earlier.

Wringing the mop out, Bella shook her head, her big green eyes scanning the kitchen alertly for further grit, grime, or corruption. “Just said she had news.”

Jake would’ve tried to keep Bella from spending her every waking minute housecleaning, but attacking dirt banished whatever demons the stiff-necked, ungainly woman needed to keep at bay.

Or it seemed that way, anyway, so Jake had shut up about it, and since then they had gotten along just fine. “News? But we saw her just last night.”

Still sipping her coffee, she wandered into the dining room and powered up her laptop in case Ellie had sent an email about it. Outside the wavery, antique panes of the old windows, shafts of sunlight drew gauzy puffs of evaporation from the damp grass.

No reply from Bella. Probably she was already on to a new task: scalding out the wastebaskets with boiling water, maybe, or sterilizing the stove knobs.

Jake clicked on “Mail,” then waited as what appeared to be a rather large file began downloading into her mailbox.

Just for you!
read the item’s header. Impatiently she waited with her finger poised over the delete button; emails with titles like that were usually spam.

By the time it occurred to her that it might be another nasty message like yesterday’s, a photograph had begun appearing scroll-wise on the screen, unreeling from top to bottom.

A color photograph …

At the halfway point, she pulled a chair out from the dining table. When it finished, she sat down hard in it.

The photograph was of someone sitting in a chair, too, taken from behind. But the person in the picture was tied to the chair with what appeared to be clothesline.

Harsh flash illumination whitened some parts of the scene and blackened other parts. The figure’s head slumped forward, so that at first glance it seemed not to be there at all.

But it was. Sort of. “Bella,” she whispered to her stepmother but got no answer. Monday came stiffly into the dining room, shoved her grizzled old head into Jake’s lap, and whined.

“It’s okay, girl,” said Jake, smoothing the dog’s ears as the last section of the photograph appeared on the screen.

The last, worst part. “Everything’s fine,” she murmured, and felt the sweet old animal relax against her.

But it wasn’t fine, was it? She stared at the photograph.

Not at all. Not even a little bit. Because she recognized it.

Remembered it, rather. From the bad old days …

Closing the laptop so Bella wouldn’t come in and get a glimpse of the screen accidentally, she pressed the print button on the computer, checked the wireless icon to make sure the file was transmitting to the printer in Wade’s office, and went upstairs to get dressed.

Correction: ran up the stairs. As if the hounds of hell were behind her.

Which, in a way, they were.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, JAKE MET ELLIE WHITE DOWNTOWN
at a table in the Blue Iris, a small combination café and gift shop overlooking the water.

On the table between them, a manila folder shielded the printed-out photo from casual eyes. If anyone else in the restaurant had spied it, it would’ve ruined their breakfasts and their sleep that night, too.

Probably for many nights.

“Good heavens,” Ellie said faintly as she peered at it, then gestured at Jake to close the folder. “And you’re telling me you know who this is?”

Jake nodded grimly. “A long time ago, a fellow I knew very slightly got in gambling-debt trouble, big-time. This—”

She gestured at the folder. “This was the result. The photo got sent around; not to me, but somebody I knew got one.”

Because after all, what good was making an example of Steven Garner if no one knew about it? She shuddered, remembering.

“But why …?” Ellie began.

“I’m not sure,” Jake replied, although she was, now. And she knew who the bike guy must be, too.

She just didn’t want to confront it yet, or at any rate not out loud.

“And your news is?” she asked Ellie, not expecting it to be good.

Because things like this didn’t happen all by themselves, did they? They came in groups, like invading armies or the clouds of germs Bella always thought were descending on everything.

The restaurant’s window table overlooked the half-submerged old pilings of what had long ago been a steamboat wharf. From it, travelers had embarked upon journeys that might end in Boston or the West Indies, or even the Far East.

Now waves sparkled between the pilings. “The news is, they found a body this morning,” Ellie answered. “Some tourists taking an early stroll found it.”

Her red hair glinted in the sun. “Down there on Sea Street.” She gestured past the rotted wood pilings to where an unpaved track curved along the steep bank of a tidal inlet.

“I didn’t tell Bella because I didn’t want to upset her,” Ellie added.

With a sheer drop to the water on one side and a granite cliff rising on the other, Sea Street was a busy, scenic walking path in the daytime. But only locals traveled the dark, out-of-the-way route at night.

“Do they know who?” Jake asked. “Or how? And how’d you find out about it, anyway?”

“George got beeped.” Which made sense; besides being on call to repair nearly anything municipal that got broken—a valve at the sewer plant, a leak at the city buildings, a fuel pump on a squad car—George was also a volunteer emergency medical technician.

“He didn’t want to talk about it,” Ellie added. “But I heard him and Bob Arnold down in the kitchen, afterwards.”

In the past, the Fourth had always passed without fatalities despite the raucousness of the celebration. But not this year, apparently. “I guess someone must’ve fallen,” Ellie said softly.

The cliff over the path was forty feet high, with nothing to grab on
to on the way down. “Landed on solid rock, got a broken neck. And bounced a few times, I gather, from what I overheard.”

Ellie shivered a little, then turned once more to the folder on the table between them. “The message said what, again?”

“That it was just for me,” Jake replied as their breakfasts came: a bowl of oatmeal for Ellie, an omelet for Jake. But neither had much appetite.

“So you’re thinking …”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure the guy on the bike sent it.”

Jake ate a bite of egg she didn’t want. She had no specific reason to think that the body on Sea Street was part of it all, too.

But she couldn’t shake the notion, and five minutes later, leaving their breakfasts unfinished, they crossed the street to Bob Arnold’s office in the Frontier Bank building.

A red-brick and granite confection from the early 1800s, the bank with its ornate moldings and widow’s walk resembled a wedding cake. But inside, everything was clean and utilitarian feeling; the bulletin boards where interest rates and Christmas club info had once been tacked were now plastered with public-service placards and wanted posters.

Bob Arnold sat at a gray metal desk behind what had been the bank’s customer service counter. “I don’t care,” he said flatly into the phone, and listened for a moment.

Then, “I don’t care,” he said again, and stood up.

“You just get me five deputies. I’ve got thousands of people here, more tonight, and we’ve had a fatality already. You send them, or I’ll deputize my own, whether I’m empowered to or not.”

He put a wry twist on the word
empowered
. Way out here in Eastport, Bob’s law-enforcement mandate was to keep things from going to hell in a handbasket; how was his own lookout.

“We’re going to have a bigger police presence here,” he finished, “and if you want those extra officers answering to you instead of me, you’ll send them.”

He slammed the phone down and glared at Jake and Ellie. “Now, what do you two want?”

In the small offices at the back, Eastport’s pair of part-time cops were on their phones, also.

“No,” said Joe Dahm, a tall, salt-and-pepper-haired black man whose voice carried a Jamaican lilt. “I don’t know any more. No, we don’t have a confirmed …”

“… identity,” Wad Hardesty said into the other phone. “We were hoping to maybe show you some personal items that you might be able to …”

Jake tossed the manila folder with the photograph in it over the counter, onto Bob’s desk. Scowling, he opened it, and then a change came over his face.

Not a pleasant change. “Jesus H. Key-rist,” he breathed, and opened the gateway to the area behind the counter.

“Siddown, both of you.” He pointed at the straight chairs facing his desk.

They sat. Outside, another day of holiday activities had begun; just now the pet parade was passing, with much barking and meowing plus a few ba-a-as, oinks, and whinnies.

There was even a moo; Jake and Ellie looked startledly at each other. But Bob wasn’t interested in the menagerie being led past his office. “Where the hell did that come from?”

The photograph, he meant. Behind him, one of the officers was trying to calm someone who’d just caught on to the reason for his call.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “We’re not sure she … It’s just there are some items to …”

Bob sighed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Items like a driver’s license, a movie-rental ID card, a Social Security card …”

“It came by email this morning,” answered Jake, gesturing at the horrid photo.

“I think I know who sent it,” she went on, and Ellie glanced at her in surprise. Swiftly, Jake summarized her history with the doomed gambling debtor, Steven Garner Sr.

Ancient history. But …

“But there was a guy hanging around my house yesterday, and I got some bad emails.”

Bob frowned. “So you think he sent ’em? The guy’s son?”

She nodded, reluctantly. Bob was an old-fashioned, nuts-and-bolts, don’t-waste-my-time kind of a small-town police chief, and right now he was busy as hell.

Holiday weekend, a town full of people, an accidental death—or she still hoped it was, anyway. And now this …