Dead Level (3 page)

Which under the sad circumstances of course I denied, but he was right. Cross a good-looking, smart-as-a-whip slime toad with a pit viper and presto, you’d have Victor; by the time the brain tumor showed up on his head scans, the only personal-relationship bridges he hadn’t burned were the ones he’d dynamited.

Still, he was my son Sam’s father, so we took care of him.

And then we buried him, which at least solved the getting-rid-of-him problem … or so I believed then.

Fast-forward once more, though, to just recently, and to me in that very same big old house. It was a bright, breezy morning in mid-October, six years to the day since Victor had died; his death-iversary, Sam always called it. Busy trying to prepare for a trip, I was getting a few towels out of the linen closet in the upstairs hall when someone spoke to me, the familiar voice saying my name faintly but distinctly.

Instantly the hairs rose on my arms. “Victor?” I whispered. Which was ridiculous. And yet …

Glancing nervously around, I even scanned the hall’s pressed-tin ceiling and crown moldings, two of the many antique features—a fireplace in every room, hardwood floors aged to the glowing amber of good whiskey—that had attracted me when I’d first seen the two-hundred-year-old dwelling.

But of course no one was there. The hall window looked out toward Passamaquoddy Bay, a long, narrow body of water that separates Moose Island—the two-by-seven-mile chunk of granite where Eastport, population 1,545, is located—from the Canadian island of Campobello.

Directly across, I could see the huge shoreline estate where the Roosevelts spent summers back in the 1940s. From the rambling shingled mansion with its wide swath of grass sloping down to the beach, they swam and sailed, played croquet, and walked the windswept shore as if they were any other vacationing family.

Nowadays the estate is a park; thousands of people visit it. But the voice I’d heard couldn’t have come from over there, either. A storm had washed every hint of haze out to sea just the night before, and
even though the razor-bright fall air made the island look near enough to step practically out my front hall window onto, it was really almost two miles distant.

“Jake.” Again, more insistently this time. Telling myself it must be what Sam would’ve called a Fig Newton of my imagination, I tried to ignore it, instead letting my gaze wander down to Key Street, where a double row of maple trees lining the thoroughfare glowed reddish gold in the morning sun.

Behind them, antique clapboard houses like my own presided over autumn lawns; in the gardens, the last straggling asters and chrysanthemums flung their bright heads this way and that in the breeze. Beyond, a jumble of downtown roofs jutted at angles, soft charcoal scribbles of woodsmoke blowing horizontally out of their chimneys.

Then came the bay itself, still choppy after the chaotic squalls of the night before. A little red scallop dragger bobbed energetically on the flowing tide.

“Jake.” The window was open, gauzy white curtains billowing, but the only sound coming from there was the growl of a nearby leaf blower. Frowning, I glanced up the stairs to the third floor, where a framed-in hatch led higher still, to the attic.

But that area couldn’t possibly be occupied. Days earlier, I’d taken the stepladder from its usual place propped against the hatch, hauling it downstairs to patch the trim around the leaded-glass fanlight over the front door.

And so far I’d neglected to haul it back up again. Besides, I knew that voice, and its owner couldn’t be talking: not to me, not to anyone.

Not even on his deathiversary. But there was no denying that I
thought
I’d heard him, and when the phone rang I jumped a foot.

Answering distractedly, I was still busy trying to convince myself that what just happened couldn’t have. Because first of all, there was the whole thing about him being dead, a condition that I firmly believed impeded even the most determined attempts at communication. And anyway, what would Victor have to say after six whole years?

He’d said it all—the good, the bad, the deeply, hideously atrocious—back
when he was alive. That, however, didn’t seem to matter to the hairs on my neck, which had taken a cue from the ones still bristling on my arms.

Meanwhile, on the telephone, Dan Weatherston—the editor of our local newspaper, the
Quoddy Tides
—was trying to persuade me of something. “Sure, Dan,” I heard myself replying. “No problem.”

Ordinarily I’d have cheerfully agreed to get my thumbnails yanked out rather than tell anyone that I would write five thousand words about anything, and before I’d have said I would do it by the following Friday I’d have pulled them out myself with pliers. But at the time, I barely heard what the
Tides
editor was saying, still too preoccupied by what had—or hadn’t—just occurred, so I answered him without thinking.

After I hung up, though, it hit me: what I’d promised, and what I would have to do to fulfill that promise. Downstairs in the kitchen, in a full-on bout of knuckles-to-the-front-teeth horror more chilling than anything my ghastly—and now possibly also ghostly—ex-husband could inspire, I considered calling the editor back to say I’d developed a case of dyslexia. Or maybe a brain tumor; after all, Sam suffered from the former ailment and Victor had died of the latter one, so I could plausibly pretend to have either.

Not that I’d have tempted fate that way … I think. But why,
why
had I agreed to write a newspaper column?

“Jake?” The voice came suddenly from behind me and this time it definitely didn’t belong to my dead ex-husband.

Well, of course it didn’t, I told myself sternly; it hadn’t been his the first time, either. Also, it hadn’t been his face in the bathroom mirror that morning, in the steam from the shower I had taken. And once the face was gone, dissolved all at once like a magic trick, the droplets trickling on the mirror’s still-foggy surface absolutely had
not
been trying to form words.…

“Jake?” Again, but now instead of being scared speechless, I was too stunned by the pickle I’d gotten myself into to reply.

All Dan Weatherston wanted was an article about old-house fix-up
tips and tricks, which was what I’d been doing pretty much nonstop since I came here from New York. But while many of the tasks I’d done were standard—window salvage, falling-plaster rejuvenation, doorknob rejiggering, and the ever-popular old-plumbing rescue maneuver (consisting of [a] know where the water main is and [b] shut it off), my methods usually weren’t.

Standard, I mean. Just for starters, I almost always broke something while trying to repair some other thing, and no home-repair book that I’ve ever read recommends this. Then there was the parts problem; modern plumbing, for example, is done with space-age glue, PVC pipe, and hard plastic connectors, whereas in 1823, when my house was built, the plumbing consisted entirely of a cast-iron hand pump, plus buckets.

Later upgrades—pipes, faucets, a drainage system that didn’t rely heavily on one of those buckets—hadn’t been exactly space-age, either, unless you count
Sputnik
. The most recent refit of anything mechanical in the whole place, in fact, was back in the sixties when they reluctantly got rid of the coal furnace.

As a result, trying to get replacement parts for my old house was nearly impossible, or if they were available they were wildly expensive. I could tell you what an early-nineteenth-century brass window latch costs at a salvage warehouse, for instance, but if I did I’d have to start taking blood-pressure pills.

So—and perhaps also, as my son Sam has suggested, because I enjoy a battle—I’d gotten into the habit of improvising. A strip of Teflon tape applied to the threads of an antique screw, for example, can make it seat securely in an old threaded fitting that is otherwise too stripped to be of any further use. Or a piece of a rubber glove, say, wrapped tightly around a leaking pipe and then C-clamped above and below the leaky place, can ward off a flood if despite my advice of earlier you (a) don’t know where the main valve is or (b) it breaks off when you try turning it. (Don’t ask me how I know that last part; see
pills
, above.)

But none of that is my point: not my methods, or even that I’d learned them mostly by doing. It’s that in the process, I’d found that keeping an antique dwelling in even halfway decent shape had more to do with Rube Goldberg and the less-mentally-well-balanced characters from Looney Tunes than with anything in any how- to book, other than maybe the one about how to drive yourself … well, loony.

Which was how I felt, just thinking about trying to write anything about any of it.

“Jake.”
Looking impatient and a little worried, my friend Ellie White touched my shoulder, then shook it gently. “Earth to Jake. Is everything all right?”

“What? Oh. Fine,” I managed at last. “Just distracted, is all.” Which was putting it mildly: an impossible voice, an even more impossible project …

Turning, I focused on her striking presence: red hair, pale skin with a scattering of gold freckles across a face that belonged on an old-fashioned storybook princess, plus a flair for the dramatic—also to put it mildly—in matters of costume. For our planned outing today, she wore a canary-yellow peasant blouse with red rickrack around the neckline, a turquoise skirt with patch pockets in vivid orange and green, and purple leggings plus leather sandals with bright brass buckles.

On anyone else it would’ve looked as if the color wheel from the paint store had collided with a truck hauling fireworks, but Ellie’s outfit matched her outlook perfectly. “So, are you ready?” she wanted to know. “Because by now I thought you’d be—”

Yeah, ready. I looked around a little wildly. Nearly noon; how had it gotten so late?

“Almost,” I lied unashamedly, waving at the stuff I’d piled up on the kitchen table. When other people went to a lake for a week, they took swimsuits and suntan oil, fishing gear and light reading material.

“See? We’re practically on our way,” I said, indicating what I was bringing instead: sacks of galvanized nails, work gloves and safety
glasses, a T square, a carpenter’s level, and a box of carriage bolts big enough to use for fixing the Brooklyn Bridge. The gasoline-powered chain saw and cordless drill, which, as its name suggested, ran on a battery, were already in the pickup truck, along with three huge coolers loaded with food, drinks, and ice; I’d been making progress before the phone interrupted me.

And before that damned voice. “Hmm,” Ellie said skeptically, noting the absence of suntan oil, etc. “No frivolity for you, I gather.” But the cottage we were going to belonged to my current husband, Wade Sorenson—it had been in his family for decades—and this was supposed to be a
working
trip.

During it I intended to finish the deck we’d been building all summer, yet another thing I’d said I would accomplish that I was beginning to regret. But there was no help for it; a few days earlier, I’d foolishly bet Wade a hundred bucks that I could complete the project this week: the steps, the railings, and most of all, the decking boards, dozens of narrow planks that had to be nailed down, one by one, to form the deck’s floor.

And time, as Ellie had so pointedly reminded me, was a-wasting. “Just let me make sure I’ve got everything,” I said.

Once we were there, a trip back to the hardware store could take up the entire morning. “Chisel, claw hammer …”

While I examined the heaps of stuff I’d already assembled, Ellie picked up the
Bangor Daily News
lying on the table by the carpentry supplies.
Escaped Killer Avoids Capture
, the headline blared.

Ellie scanned the article. “Wow,” she said, and then began reading aloud about a convict who’d sneaked out of the Maine State Prison by the astonishing method of (1) removing the body of a newly deceased prisoner from a body bag, (2) placing himself in it, and (3) hopping out once the body bag got to the hospital morgue.

Then came the kicker; they’d put the “who” at the beginning of the second sentence. “Dewey Hooper,” Ellie said, looking up.

She rarely read the paper at home, too busy with a house, two gardens,
a coop full of hens, enough anonymous good deeds to win the Nobel Peace Prize if they ever became known, and a five-year-old daughter, Lee, so active and energetic that even when she was a tiny infant, we’d had to tie a badminton net over her crib.

Ellie frowned at the
BDN
’s front page again. “He’s the one who …”

I zipped a canvas carryall open. “I remember.” How could I forget? “Seven years ago. Strangled his wife, over in Perry.”

It was a small rural town on the mainland, about ten miles distant. “Said she deserved it,” I went on, stuffing the bag of galvanized nails, the carriage bolts, and carpenter’s level into the carryall, “because she couldn’t make good coffee.”

Of course, the fact that, according to the coroner, Marianne Hooper had been regularly kept chained to a post in the cellar of the shack they had lived in might’ve had something to do with that. The filthy bandanna her husband had kept tied over her eyes could have been partly behind her inability to brew decent java, too.

There was also the possibility that he wouldn’t have known a good cup of coffee if it bit him in the elbow, but never mind.

“He put her body outside in the middle of a blizzard; guess he figured it would keep until spring, when he could bury her,” I recalled, sorting through more tools on the table.

Unfortunately for Dewey Hooper, though, a January thaw had coincided with a visit from some leaflet-distributing Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even with their attention mostly focused on their list of local heathens in need of salvation, they noticed that one of the logs peeking through the melting snow on the woodpile was wearing a blue housedress.

“Hooper,” I continued, “was a nutball with a mean streak a mile wide. And I’m betting he still is.”

I dropped the T square, a retractable tape measure, some pencils, and a pencil sharpener into the carryall. “But at least he’s not headed this way.”