Triple Witch (12 page)

Still, underneath all the aching and blisters lurked Victor, sharing a ZIP code with me. In fact, there was a house for sale down the street from mine, and he would probably choose it just to be irritating.

Also, it did not cheer me to find that where I’d thought I had forty-eight sets of shutters, I really had only forty-seven.

Irritated, I went out to the yard and scanned for them, stopping for a moment to gaze at the last light of
day; this, in an Eastport summer, is the rich, ripe pink of a raspberry soda floated with blueberry sherbert.

Then I checked the root cellar, the primitive corner of the basement where the coal bin used to be, and even the crawlspace under the storeroom, finally spying them sticking out of the trash barrel. Or what was left of them: hinges and splintered louvers. In there with them, stuffed at the bottom, was a belt from my belt sander.

“Hey, Mom?” Sam peered down the cellar stairs at me.

“What?” I yanked the light-switch cord hanging over the workbench where my tools lived. The sander lay out on the bench, not neatly put away as I had left it.

“Who’s been messing around down here?” I snarled.

“Uh, Dad was.” Sam came all the way down the steps. “I tried to talk him out of it. But he wanted to help.”

“He didn’t clamp it, did he? That shutter—he just smacked the belt sander down on it.”

“Actually, it was kind of funny. The shutter just—”

Sam waved his arms to indicate a shutter in the process of exploding. “I tried to explain to him, but no deal. He changed his mind when he got a load of the belt sander, though. I mean, after he turned it on.”

I could imagine. That sander would take the hide off a rhinoceros. But I swallowed my fury; it wasn’t Sam’s fault. “So, what’s he doing now?”

I got two pipe clamps down from the rack and unscrewed them, positioning one of the intact shutters on the workbench.

“Taking a walk. I wanted to get him out on the dock, maybe show him the difference between a yawl and a ketch.”

I smiled in spite of myself, remembering how Sam finally taught me this important distinction: when you
yawn
on a
yawl
, you can lean back against the mast,
because it is behind you, but on a
ketch
there is no mast to
catch
you, as it is up front.

“But he wanted,” Sam added cautiously, “to go look at houses. He’s already got his eye on that one down the street.”

“Fine,” I replied, screwing a pipe clamp tight. With one of these turned down securely at each side, the shutter wouldn’t vibrate, so it wouldn’t self-destruct when the sander touched it.

I hoped. “Wade told me your dad’s plan. So you don’t have to worry about that. Have you broken your news to him, yet?”

He shook his head unhappily. For Sam to finish school here would be bad enough in his father’s eyes. But the implications of Sam attending the boat school would be—in Victor’s opinion—disastrous. He wanted Sam to go to an Ivy League college; not only that, but Victor intended to get Sam admitted a year early.

Which I’d thought couldn’t happen, so I’d postponed worrying about it. Ordinarily, students have to wait for their junior year grades to come in before they can apply to college. But Victor had pull at many prestigious institutions and had gotten special treatment for Sam. As a result, during the past school year Sam had—with Victor’s help—filled the forms out, and gone to the interviews at six high-powered, very competitive universities.

“No,” Sam said. “I haven’t told him, yet. I chickened out.”

On account of the handicap imposed by his dyslexia, Sam wasn’t expecting anything to come out of his college applications. He’d just gone through the process to humor his father, he’d said.

But now the day of reckoning was arriving.

“I can understand that,” I said. “Chickening out, I mean. I do it myself when he’s around, don’t I? Although in your case I’d call it choosing the moment carefully.”

Sam’s glance was wary. “Yeah, well. He’s a forceful guy. He, like, wants what he wants, you know?”

Clearly, Sam wasn’t comfortable with this topic. My remark about my own behavior seemed to make him especially uneasy.

“Well, you might as well wait, now,” I said, “until he gets a place here. He’ll take the news better, once that happens. And maybe your boat school plans will go down easier with him, too.”

I put a belt in the sander and pulled on my dust respirator and high-impact goggles. These make me look like an insect from an alien planet, but they are essential equipment; I have no desire to start learning Braille or have a lung transplant.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Sam agreed. “But it wasn’t my idea,” he hastened to add. “I mean, I didn’t suggest him moving here just so he’d go along with my coming back, and everything.”

He sounded so anxious, the poor kid: his father on one side, me on the other. I put down the sander.

“Listen. What you do is your business, what your dad does is his, and if it turns out I have to move to a mountaintop in Peru to get away from him, well …”

Sam laughed; I’d threatened the Peru trip often enough for him to know that I was joking. And the normal, lighthearted expression coming onto his face was all the reward I needed for the enormous amount of self-restraint I was practicing.

Just don’t be surprised
, I wanted to say,
if when you tell your father, he starts clutching his chest
 …

But I’d decided to be tougher on Victor, not on Sam. Which was why when I had the chance, I didn’t say it. I didn’t tell Sam, right then and there, the truth about his father.

I just let it go.

“Hey, how about that cruiser at the dock?” he remarked, fiddling aimlessly with some pieces of wood on
the workbench. He was, I realized happily, hanging around just to be with me.

“Man, would I ever like to get a closer look at that boat. You think they might let me aboard?”

“Maybe. All they can do is say no. That won’t kill you.”

“Yeah,” he responded. “You,” he added, heading up the cellar steps, “look like a bug in that respirator.”

Right, I thought as I heard the refrigerator door opening up there, underlining Sam’s return to his usual good humor.

Then I settled down to those shutters, and for a wonder, things started going right for a change. I figured I could belt-sand the sides and bottoms, scrape the louvers by hand, glue-and-screw any really shaky sections. After that I could paint them and put the hinges back on. It was a quick-and-dirty fix, but I was out to hang shutters, not preserve them for posterity.

And as I worked I found my mood lightening. There was not after all much structural repair needed; the wood had been good quality, and the old-time craftsmen really knew their joinery. A couple of buzzes of the drill, some white glue and a flat-headed screwdriver took care of the fractured pieces; even the one shutter half that Victor had demolished required no truly major surgery.

The other half still needed replacing, but I decided what the hell: If worse came to worst, I could paint a green rectangle beside one window, and hope Felicity Abbot-Jones was nearsighted.

Once the reconstruction was done I started on the belt-sanding, and I didn’t look up from my work until a creak from the cellar steps told me that Sam had come back for me, to offer me a soda or possibly to say he was going out with Tommy Daigle.

But it wasn’t Sam. It was Hallie Quinn.

I pulled the bug mask and goggles off. “Oh,” she breathed, relaxing a little. “It is you. I thought—”

“Come on,” I invited. “I’m not going to bite you.”

Tentatively, she took another step down the stairs, the silver medallion she wore flashing in the wash of white light from the fluorescent workshop overheads. In her ears were a pair of little costume-jewelry stud earrings, each shaped like an H.

“I knocked on the screen door. But I guess—” she gestured at the sander—“you couldn’t hear me.”

The chain on her medallion was like the one I wore: heavyweight, so it wouldn’t break. The clasp on mine was the devil to open, but that added to the security; you didn’t go taking it off carelessly and leaving it lying around.

Considering that I wore the key to a lockbox containing two guns and a whole lot of ammunition on mine, security was an issue for me. I gathered Hallie felt similarly about her medallion, even though it was nowhere near as likely to go off and kill people. But my appreciation for her jewelry faded as I heard what she said next.

“Listen, you better not go out to Crow Island anymore. You don’t know what you’re getting into. You and that other lady—”

“Ellie White,” I supplied.

“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, people know about you two. That you found the bodies, and that you’re—”

“Snoops.” Hey, it may not be flattering, but it’s accurate.

And, I thought, it was why Hallie Quinn had come to me. She wanted help.

“This isn’t funny,” she frowned. “You don’t know the kind of people you are—”

“Getting involved with. Right. So, Hallie, how much are you using? Your drug habit, I mean.”

The question stopped her cold. “None of your business. And anyway, I can—”

“—stop anytime I want to. But never mind that. What do you say we cut to the chase?”

I dusted paint dust off my hands, feeling annoyed. Dealing with Victor, finding a body, and losing a shutter had all played havoc with my stock of patience.

For which I was later sorry. “Hallie, I’ve eaten lunch with a lot worse people than you are warning me against. So why don’t you tell me who those folks are, that you are so worried about, and I’ll just go out and wipe the floor with them, tonight.”

I didn’t say anything about the police wanting to talk to her. She was spooked enough. “Okay? Have we got a deal, here?”

You know, I think for an instant she almost believed me, or wanted to. But then her teenaged distrust of anyone who actually knew anything, or could do anything for her, kicked in.

“I just came to warn you,” she said stubbornly, clinging to the control she imagined she had. “Before I leave town.”

She reminded me so much of myself at her age, I wanted to throw a net over her, because I was not always confident, sane, and in command of a talent for making the most of other people’s money. I know what New York’s Port Authority bus terminal is like at night, alive with hustlers as smooth as predatory reptiles. At Hallie’s age I was fresh off a Greyhound myself, straight out of deepest coal country, bound and determined to put a world of difference between myself and where I’d come from.

I’d done it, too, but I hadn’t been addicted, then or later: lucky. It was the difference between me and Hallie.

“Where are you going?” I asked casually, busying myself at the workbench. “I’m sorry about Ken, by the way. Looked like you two had a decent thing working, the trailer and all. And the dog. What’s his name, Cosmo? What’s happened to him?”

I was trying for a sympathetic connection, but it
blew up in my face. Her expression clouded, her lips twisting bitterly.

Come on, Hallie, I thought, give it up; you don’t have to go through this. It’s too much for you, or anybody.

“Look,” I said, “wherever you’re going, I’ll drive you. Or you can stay the night here. Just don’t go out there by yourself again, okay? Because if you do, I’m going to worry about you.”

I took a step, reaching out. She flinched in response, and skittered halfway back up the steps. “I’m going to Portland, a rehab place, I’ve got friends there, I’m going to get straight.”

The words tumbled out, too fast to be the truth, sounding just like the things some of Sam’s friends had told me, back in Manhattan.

“I can’t,” she babbled, using phrases she’d heard from some counselor, “straighten out here, where I’m exposed to all the old situations, the same old people and temptations.”

“Sure.” She was as good as gone already.

“So,” I brushed non-existent sawdust off the bench, “if you are going, you won’t need those people and temptations anymore. So you could tell me who it is you’re getting the stuff from.”

Hallie’s eyes narrowed. They were blue, and her pale blonde hair was natural.

“Was it Ken? Because,” I went on smoothly, “I’d like to keep other kids in town from going through what you’re about to. The work of rehab and all. Wouldn’t you want to help?”

If she gave me a name and it wasn’t Ken’s, all Arnold would have to do was find the slimebag and slap him—selling to
kids
—into custody, so I could not rip his lungs out with my bare hands before he made it even as far as the county courthouse.

“Yeah,” Hallie spat scornfully at last, “it was Ken. Happy now? And since he’s dead, maybe you all can
decide he was Jack the Ripper, too. I,” she announced, “am getting out of here.”

She turned, then nearly fell back down the steps at the sight of Sam, standing silently behind her. Sucking in a breath, she shoved past him up to the landing.

“You’d better remember what I said,” she grated out. “Don’t be stupid, okay? Keep your noses
out
, you and your friend.”

Then she was gone; the screen door’s slam like a gunshot and her sandals thumping across the porch, out into the darkness.

“Wow,” Sam said. “What was that all about?”

I released a sigh. “That was me, being the biggest fool in the world. Damn it, I should have handled her better.”

Sam came down and began helping me put the tools away. I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was, having him around.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “With Hallie, it’s not exactly easy.”

“You know her?” I asked, surprised; it hadn’t occurred to me that he might. But of course they were nearly the same age.

He nodded. “Seen her. She travels with a different crowd.”

“What do you know about her?”

The screen door sounded again, and Victor’s confident step crossed above our heads.

“I know her old man whacks her around,” Sam said. “Acts like he’s concerned about her, a lot of big talk. But he’s an animal with his fists. Or so,” Sam finished cautiously, “I’ve heard.”

“And you would know all this how?”

“Daigle.” Thus the caution: teenaged boys dish the dirt as exuberantly as girls. They just don’t want anybody thinking so.