Mallets Aforethought (4 page)

Out in my driveway, George’s truck sat stubbornly refusing to start. No surprise; the old vehicle was so unreliable that none of the rest of us would drive it at all if we didn’t have to. This time I poured a thin stream of gasoline from a Big Gulp cup straight into the carburetor while he turned the key—kids, don’t try this at home—and he got it going.

“Meet me?” he called to Will Bonnet through a cloud of blue exhaust and a rumble of rotting muffler.

At the Mobil station, he meant. The truck spent more time on their repair lot lately than it did on the road. But he couldn’t afford to replace it so he kept it going with rebuilt parts.

Will waved agreement and headed for his aunt’s house to get her car, itself only recently returned to running condition. In a muddled try at maintenance (and a sad one; not long ago she’d been the sort of person who rotated her own tires), Agnes had put melted bacon grease into the crankcase instead of motor oil.

Once they’d departed I got on the phone. Soon I was telling a Maine State Trooper what Ellie and I had found, and where.

“People aren’t in there gawking at it, poking at it with a stick or anything, are they?” he wanted to know.

From which I deduced Trooper Hollis Colgate’s opinion of the general public. But I held my tongue, merely saying that I didn’t think anyone else would be visiting Harlequin House today; the other volunteers in the fix-up project were too sensible to brave the weather. Then I let the other shoe drop.

“Listen, there are actually two bodies in there. Gosling’s, and another one from a long time ago.”

A silence. Then, “How long?”

I told him, adding what I knew about the deceased’s probable identity but not mentioning anything else about it.

Such as the fact that it had a small hole in its head, above its right eyebrow. Ellie hadn’t noticed.

“So maybe this Gosling guy might’ve found it first and the shock got to him?” Colgate said. “You happen to know if he had a condition, might account for his passing away so suddenly?”

No, I felt like retorting, and I especially didn’t know of any that would’ve enabled him to walk through a wall, then end up stiff as a board and wearing a grin out of your darkest nightmares.

“You would,” I told the policeman mildly, “have to check into Hector’s medical history for that.”

“Yeah.” Still hoping he didn’t really have to rush up here, sixty miles on winding two-lane Route 1 in a storm. I could hear it in his voice so I described Hector’s body in further detail.

His tone turning crisp, he asked only a few more questions before promising to arrive within the hour; by the time I hung up I was convinced at least that Trooper Hollis Colgate was nobody’s fool.

But whether that turned out to be good news or bad news only time would tell. Sitting in the phone alcove I watched the panes of the big old double-hung windows in the dining room get battered by the rain. The caulk beads I’d run atop the storm windows were holding, so the window wells weren’t filling with water.

Not yet, anyway. Next summer, I mused, I would remove all the aluminum storm-window frames and grind the trim down to bright unweathered wood. After that maybe it would hold paint, which it hadn’t the last time, peeling away in thick strips almost before I finished applying it. But back then I hadn’t yet discovered the Johnnie Cochran rule of preparing old houses for painting: “If the wood is grey, the paint won’t stay.”

Finally, I intended to caulk
under
the frames, squeezing the seal tight to form something more durable than the current temporary fix. For a while I’d considered also packing the screw holes with plastic wood, since removing the screws would strip the holes smooth, rendering them useless. But the best plan was to drill them a little bigger and tap in dowel pins; that way there would be at least some good wood in those old windows.

And you never know, I thought as I sat there watching the torrential rain. That little bit of good wood might end up being what held the house up, if push came to shove.

There was plenty I could do while I waited for Colgate but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a bad idea to leave those bodies alone until he’d seen them. So finally when he didn’t show up I left a note on my back door and went over.

No one was there, but the rain had slowed down to a drizzle. I went in and grabbed some tools. The front steps were broken and if teams of investigators were going to be tramping in and out of here, it seemed only charitable to make it safe for them.

Fortunately I’d been eyeing those steps for a while, with special attention to the old black cast-iron railing. I’d soaked the bolts holding it on with WD-40 every day for a week. So now when I dropped a hex wrench on them they unscrewed cooperatively.

Next I pulled the railing off and went to work on the wooden treads, which despite their rot didn’t come off as cooperatively at all. Eventually I bashed them up enough so that I could get at the nail shafts holding them on with a coping saw:
zip, zop.

Last came the hard part. Usually when you replace stair treads you’ve prepared yourself by measuring and cutting the new ones. I by contrast had prepared by noticing some old boards and figuring I could jury-rig something.

This plan, it turned out, might have been too optimistic, especially since I only had the coping saw, no tape measure or pencil, and nowhere to prop the boards while I cut them.

On the plus side, the boards did turn out to be wide enough. So I just laid them on the risers, nailed them down, and cut the ends off. The coping saw was most emphatically not the proper tool for the job. Fortunately, however, I am naturally equipped with the one tool that is most essential for old-house fix-up.

That is, bonehead stubbornness. I even had a strategy for getting the railing back on without a drill, using a nail to make the pilot holes for the wood screws.

The trouble was, I couldn’t keep the railing straight and turn the screws back in at the same time. If I held the railing up I couldn’t reach the screw holes, and when I could reach the screw holes the railing overbalanced itself and fell over, pulling the screws out.

So after several attempts I abandoned this portion of the step-repair program. Still I considered it reasonably successful, since even without a railing no eager-beaver homicide detective was going to hustle up those steps on his way to a nice juicy murder case, and end up instead in the hospital with a broken ankle.

And in a bad mood. The last thing we needed around here was a cop of any kind in a bad mood.

We didn’t get one, either.

At first.

“State or federal?” my father asked two hours later. I was still waiting for Trooper Colgate and after hanging around at Harlequin House for a while longer I’d decided to come back home.

“State.” The crime, I meant, that George had been in trouble over, back when he wasn’t very much older than Sam was now.

It was the event George didn’t like talking about. “Trial or plea?” He was a lawbreaker from way back himself, my old man, and he knew the ropes.

“Pled,” I replied. “Took it for someone else. Drugs belonged to his friend, who had a sheet already, would’ve gone to prison. So George stepped up. But that won’t be in the record, of course. And it’ll take two minutes for it to come up on their computers, that old conviction.”

My father was a lean, clean man with pale blue eyes, strong hands with knobby knuckles, and thinning white hair pulled back in a straggly ponytail that he fastened with a leather string.

“Well. There are convictions,” he said consideringly. “And then there are convictions.”

We were in my cellar inspecting the leaking part of the foundation. These days he was a magician at tricking stones and mortar into stable configurations. But years earlier, before he changed his name and became a famous fugitive, he’d been what passed in those quasi-innocent days as an urban terrorist.

He gestured at the part of the cellar wall he hadn’t already replaced. “All this here has got to go,” he decreed. “Leaks now, and the water between the stones’ll freeze later. Every year, worse.”

He kicked pebbles into the gutter at the foot of the wall. Called a french drain, it was meant to carry water back outside.

It didn’t. “Nonviolent crime,” he said. “Took his medicine, been a good boy since. I doubt one old pop’ll hurt him much. An actual threat, though. Malice aforethought. That’ll hurt him.”

“Maybe the police won’t hear about that.” But I was grasping at straws. My father looked up at me from where he was examining the sump pump, the old trace of a feral twinkle still in his eye.

“How long did it take you to hear about it?”

I let a breath out, defeated. “Twelve hours.” People liked Ellie too much to have gone to her with the Duddy’s Tap story, or she’d know, too.

“Okay,” I conceded, “I get your point. They’re going to look hard at George. He had a motive and odds are he also had access to the method.”

On that big ring of his, George had a key to nearly every garage, barn, storage hut, and garden shed on the island, as well as to many houses. And he’d been rat-killing for Cory Williams.

With I didn’t know what, yet, but the way things were going I could hazard a guess. “As for opportunity, we don’t know when Gosling died. But George doesn’t punch a clock. Nobody keeps tabs on him. He sets his own schedule and mostly he works alone.”

I thought a moment. “Still, it would’ve been pretty stupid. Saying you’d like to get rid of a person and then going out and doing it.”

But my father was already shaking his head. “Cops think all criminals
are
stupid,” he pointed out.

He reached over and tested the float mechanism on the sump pump. “They never seem to get the reason, though. Which is that the stupid ones are the only ones
they
ever meet.”

When water leaked into the cellar it flowed into a barrel I had set into the floor, its upper rim an inch or so below floor level. As water in the barrel rose, it lifted a float attached to a long rod, which in turn was hooked to the pump switch.

And—voilà. Or viola, as my son insisted on pronouncing it. Sam has dyslexia, tries to be good-humored about it.

Mostly. “All you can do now is see how things play out. Nice gadget,” my father added approvingly.

Then out of the blue: “Not so easy to go on the run with a wife and baby,” he said, still examining my flood-control arrangement.

You could buy sump pumps but I’d built mine out of toilet tank innards and an old bilge pump, for the economical fun of it and because George had bet me a dollar that I couldn’t. My father now fiddled with the float and set it so the pump switched on sooner.

“Don’t want to let the barrel get full,” he counseled. “Get a big run in, barrel’s full, pump might not be able to keep up.”

It hadn’t been easy for my dad when he ran, his own wife blown to smithereens, his toddler daughter ending up under a heap of rubble in the tiny yard of a Greenwich Village town house.

The daughter being me. He tinkered with the float angle, his knobby fingers working meticulously. “How’s that other situation of yours coming?”

George’s public hatred of a guy who’d turned up with a bad case of the deads wasn’t the only situation complicating my life just at the moment. “I don’t know. I’m waiting for a call.”

He got up from his crouched position by the sump pump under the hanging bare lightbulb and turned to the old foundation. The stones were granite chunks that had been quarried on the mainland and barged here, two centuries earlier.

He probed the old mortar with a finger. It sifted out like sand. Through some of the gaps you could see daylight, yet other parts were as solid as if the stuff had been laid in yesterday.

“You can’t tell by looking,” he said, “what’s salvageable. You can hit it with a mallet, even, some’ll fall out, some not. Put real stress on ’er, though, you find out what she’s made of.”

Uh-huh. “So when can you start fixing it?”

He stroked his chin. “After the frost is out of the ground.”

Which in Maine could mean anytime from April to the middle of August. Now it was October, after which came winter, and after that would be what we get here instead of spring: mud time.

And
that,
as Sam would’ve put it, would be the wrench in the monkey-works. “You know,” my father said gently, “you might want to put another pump down here. To take the excess.”

“Yeah.” I frowned at the earthen floor; maybe the dogs could help me dig the new hole. He started upstairs.

“As for George, what he tells them is this,” he said. “He tells them the name of his attorney, period. Nothing more without counsel.”

My heart thumped. “You think it could be as bad as that? I mean,
everybody
likes George. He couldn’t possibly have . . .”

He turned and looked down at me. “Jacobia, it doesn’t matter that he’s a good guy, even if he didn’t do it.”

If,
he’d said. I noticed it right away.

Not a slip. After his years on the run, you didn’t slide too many fast ones past him, and he never paid anyone the false compliment of thinking they were too good to be capable of something.

Thinking
that
was what had put him on the run in the first place. Because he hadn’t triggered the blast that killed my mom and as good as orphaned me, years ago.

His best friend had. In the kitchen he picked up his leather satchel. “Better make myself scarce before the
gendarmes
arrive,” he warned me. “I need to get back to Jody Jones’s place, anyway.”

He was building a new chimney for Jody, whose record in the bill-paying department was not exactly stellar.

“Okay,” I said. My father went along so normally most of the time, you’d never guess how many years in prison were waiting for him if he were ever captured. “How are you going to get Jody to pay? Hold a gun to his head?”

That had been tried but Jody had a habit of bursting into tears when he was threatened, to the point where he’d earned the nickname, “Old Blubber-Puss.”

“Nope. I’ve got a secret method. He’ll weep, all right, and he won’t quit till it’s cash on the barrelhead. Wade back soon?”