Triple Witch (2 page)

I handed her a tissue, and she gave it the sort of long, honking blow that I had come to expect from her; fair-skinned and slender, with green eyes and freckles like a scattering of gold dust, Ellie looks as delicately lovely as an Arthur Rackham fairy princess, and is as tough as an old boot.

We made our way up the embankment through the indigo spikes of wild lupine, back to where I had left the car. There were a few small dwellings widely spaced along the Cove Road, each with a satellite dish and the plundered remains of last winter’s woodpile out in the side yard, but I thought it would be best just to drive down to Water Street, to police headquarters, and speak to Eastport’s Chief of Police Bob Arnold directly.

To tell him, I mean, that there had been a murder.

2
My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and back in Manhattan I was an expert on the care and feeding of vast sums of other people’s money, neat slices of which I lopped off in commissions. As a result, by age thirty I possessed more assets than your average small publicly-traded corporation, along with fewer illusions than your average city homicide detective, up to his ankles in blood and accustomed to hearing, pretty much on a daily basis, numerous lies.

Not that I had much contact with homicide detectives. As a class, my clients leaned more toward swift,
bloodless acts of financial disembowelment. Meanwhile, I turned out to be good at transforming large fortunes into even larger ones, and talented also at the tasks of (1) getting married and (2) having a baby. Sadly, I was not so adept at (3) realizing that my neurosurgeon husband was a cold-blooded, methane-breathing, sludge-dwelling slime toad whose ability to tell the truth ranked right up there with my own ability to jump off a building and fly.

Finding a medical secretary in my bed did tend to clarify my thinking on the matter, however. And as if that were not enough, once the divorce battle was over my by-then young teenaged son, Sam, began failing in school, smoking marijuana—

—at least, I hoped it was only marijuana—

—and running with a crowd of sullen, secretive little streetwise hooligans.

Fortunately, this was also about the time I found Eastport. The move—from a pristine townhouse in Manhattan to a rambling, dilapidated 1823 Federal clapboard in a tiny fishing village in remotest downeast Maine—

—the house came complete with antique plumbing, ceramic-post electrical wiring so scary it could star in its own horror movie, and weatherproofing that consisted entirely of forty-eight heavy wooden storm windows, each of which had to be fastened up every autumn and hauled back down again in spring—

—was impetuous, impractical, and absurd for a woman of my experience and situation.

And I do believe that it saved my son’s life.

3
“Is that so?” said police chief Bob Arnold when Ellie and I told him of our discovery.

Arnold leaned against the squad car parked in front of the wood-frame storefront housing the Eastport police station. “Sure it was Kenny?”

From the way he said it, lazy and slow, a person who didn’t know Arnold might think he might just decide not to do anything about the situation.

But that would have been a mistake. Arnold is a plump, pink-cheeked man with a calm, deliberate way of moving, but he gets from here to there as fast as he needs to.

A few months earlier, for instance, Arnold had arrested a Calais woman whose husband had just died facedown in the main dish at a baked-bean supper. She’d been on her way home to fetch the biscuits she’d forgotten—or that, anyway, was her story—when Arnold spotted her speeding by after hearing the ambulance call on his radio, and put two and two together.

The woman, as it turned out, never got charged with murder, the well-known fact that her husband beat her regularly—

—this, Arnold said, was how he came up with four—

—not being sufficient evidence, and the toxicologists not finding any poison they could identify. So they had to release her almost as fast as Arnold caught her. But nobody ate her dishes at public suppers anymore, which in these parts is still harsh punishment.

“It was Kenny,” Ellie told Arnold now. “And,” she added to his inevitable next question, “we’re sure he’s dead.”

Arnold frowned, squinting at the water sparkling in the bay. Out on the waves, a couple of speedboats zipped flashily, while up and down Water Street clusters of tourists strolled, eating ice cream, peering into shop windows, and buying bumpah stickahs.

“Well. That’s a hell of a thing,” Arnold said. “All right. Guess I’d better get cracking.”

He glanced across Water Street at the pilings of the boat basin, great towering forty-foot logs set deep into the seabed, supporting the dock. It was dead low tide.

“Better fetch him ’fore the tide is flowing, or Kenny might float away. And someone’s got to find old Timothy Mumford, too, and deliver the bad news.”

“Oh,” said Ellie, freshly stricken. “I forgot about that.”

In the entrance to the boat basin, a forty-foot yacht was making its careful way to the dock. The gleaming white pleasure craft’s engines rumbled and fell silent, while fellows on deck hauled lines around cleats to secure her against the bumpers.

“Hope they know how high she’ll be riding,” Arnold said, his eyes narrowing at the yacht crew’s spotless white uniforms.

It is a fairly common event here, in summer, when pleasure boaters from away tie up without thought for the tides: the water rises but the boat is held down by the line, with (glub, glub) predictable results.

“I guess,” said Ellie, “that I am going to have to go out there. To Crow Island. Maybe if he gets the news from someone he knows, it won’t go down quite so hard for him.”

“Maybe,” Arnold agreed. He thought a minute. “Don’t guess it’s Tim who decided to pop Kenny, do you?”

She gave him an oh-for-Pete’s-sake look; he nodded in reply.

“Yeah. Not much point treating him like a suspect, is there? So you go,” he said. “Tell Timothy I’ll be out, too, let him know any of the details he might be worrying about. And,” he added, “see if he knows who might have had a mad on for Kenny.”

“Should I tell him the body will be going to Bangor?” she asked. “Because the church will want to do a
service, and if there isn’t a body there won’t be any graveside ceremony. But we’ll still want to take up a collection.”

For later, she meant, for getting Kenny into the earth: for a grave at Hillside, and a casket and some flowers, and a decent dark blue suit to bury him in, because maybe he was just a rowdy, uncouth, small-town layabout, but he was our small-town layabout.

“Yeah,” said Arnold, “Bangor for the autopsy. Be simpler, they just cremated him, there. All the booze Ken’s poured into himself, he’d go like a torch, and Timothy could have the ashes.”

Ellie fixed Arnold with a gaze that communicated perfectly what she thought of this idea. “I’ll tell Timothy that Kenny will be coming back here.”

“Now, Ellie,” Arnold began in an attempt to placate her.

“In the ambulance. At town expense,” she went on inexorably. “Hank Henahan drives that ambulance to Bangor all the time, to pick up supplies. So this time, he can just pick up Kenny.”

Arnold sighed, knowing what Eastport’s emergency medical technician would say about driving three hours with a dead man. Hank Henahan was well known for peeking through his fingers at the nervous-making parts in animated Walt Disney movies; he would be glancing in the ambulance’s rear-view every half mile, waiting for Kenny to lurch up at him.

“All right,” Arnold relented. “I guess I can ride along when the time comes, so the boogieman doesn’t get Henahan.”

Ellie put her hand on his arm. “Tim will be grateful.”

Arnold’s round pink cheeks grew pinker than usual. “No, he won’t,” he answered gruffly. “He’ll just moan and complain like always, and threaten to walk off the dock. If I had a nickel for every time he has told me that he is planning to end it all,” Arnold went on, “I would
be lying on a beach in Tahiti right now, and some other poor bastard would be police chief.”

Ellie twinkled at him. “Oh, you would not. If anybody tried to make you live anywhere but Eastport, you would wither away.”

“Yeah, well,” he allowed. “Anyway, you take care on that boat of yours with the tide running.”

“We will,” Ellie assured him, turning to me.

“Me?” I said, shaking my head in a way that I hoped was the final word on the topic.

It wasn’t.

4
Back at my house, I busied myself with a task that obviously needed doing that minute: on the hardwood kitchen floor was a spot of old carpet adhesive that had only been stuck there twenty years or so. Getting it off required boiling water, a paint scraper, and infinite patience, all of which I was prepared to apply forever if it kept me from having to go out on Ellie’s boat.

She, by contrast, enjoys narrow channels, swift currents, and all the other hazards with which the cold waters off the Maine coast are furnished. Possibly this is because her forebears were pirates, people whose idea of fun was to wait for a winter midnight so cold that chunks of sea smoke froze solid and calved off like icebergs into the frigid water. Then on a creaking, disreputable boat they skulked out into Passamaquoddy Bay, flying the skull and crossbones and singing dark, ominous sea-chanties, awaiting some hapless vessel—lost in the fog, her crew praying aloud for salvation—to blunder into their clutches.

Too late, the master of the victim ship would glimpse the pirates’ dark eyes, torch-lit and glittering with cruelty;
too late, the doomed crew would understand the chanty drifting dirgelike over the water at them, and the deck would fall silent for the moment it took to sink into them: that they were dead men.

I dripped more hot water onto the carpet adhesive. In a year or so, I could remove it completely. But Ellie was not about to let me escape into the pleasures of old-house fix-up.

“Let’s,” she said in a voice that was bright as a knife-edge, “take a picnic.” She was not a happy camper, I could tell from the brisk, furious way she bustled around the kitchen, making sardine sandwiches.

Eating food while bobbing up and down on the waves is for me a pointless exercise. I find it simpler and more pleasant just to hurl the sandwiches overboard while they are still wrapped in wax paper. Still, I thought humoring Ellie might be wise; murdered friends bring out the cutthroat ancestor in her.

So we compromised: lemonade and those horrid little oily creatures in flat tins for Ellie, pilot crackers for me. Then Monday started romping and agitating to go, too, so we took her Day-glo orange doggy life vest which she regards as sissified, but she tolerates it.

There was of course no real likelihood of my falling from Elbe’s boat and drowning. Still, I gave the kitchen a fond, last look, which was when I noticed a pool of rusty water spreading slyly from beneath the cast-iron radiator.

“Wow,” Ellie commented. “Better call George.”

She meant her husband, George Valentine. In Eastport, he was the man you called for bats in the attic, frozen pipes, strange bones in the garden, or a plague of red ants.

And for imminent floods. Have I mentioned that the house is haunted? From the front parlor came the sharp whap-whapping of a window shade, snapping up by itself.

I turned the round wooden handle atop the old radiator,
cutting off its water supply. “Probably,” I said, “George is at the beach, helping to get Ken’s body. So if I stayed here, I’d just be waiting around for him. I might as well come along.”

Out in the dining room, an old silver spoon that I have put onto the mantelpiece a hundred times dropped to the tiled hearth with a familiar, communicative little
clink!

Ellie looked assessingly at me. Her campaign to turn me from landlubber to sea dog was ongoing, but it had not escaped her that, under most circumstances, I would rather be anywhere but out on the water in her tiny wooden boat.

This time, though, I was beginning to have a funny feeling, amplified by that spoon and that window shade, something like the intuition that makes you decide to buy a lottery ticket, and you end up winning fifty dollars.

But my sense now that something was brewing didn’t feel a bit lucky. I’d have paid fifty dollars to get rid of it, in fact.

And as it turned out, eliminating it cost more than that.

A lot more, starting on Crow Island.

5
At the dock, Ellie stepped easily from the pier to the foredeck of her boat, loading our supplies and a gas can, taking off lines and making sure the oars were properly shipped. Finally, checking that the flares and life cushions were stowed under the seats, she started the Evinrude engine.

The decks of the bigger boats loomed like tall buildings as we motored between them: me in the middle, Ellie at the rudder, and Monday perched up in the
prow, her pink tongue lolling and her eyes bright with adventure. The red bandanna tied around her neck looked dashing, and her joyfulness made me glad I had brought her.

It was a glorious day, the cool breeze tangy with fish and pine tar and the water very clean so you could see right down to the bottom where sea urchins clung in clusters. Yellow sunshine poured from the azure sky and bounced from the waves, so that the air seemed to vibrate with an excess of light and energy.

Turning back to Ellie, I found she was smiling at me with a look both knowing and mischievous. Getting me out on the water was like pulling teeth, but being out on it was dandy—until she hit the throttle and we shot from the mouth of the boat basin like something being rocketed out of a cannon. I gripped the gunwales, Monday gulped a faceful of spray, and Ellie laughed wickedly, like one of her rascal ancestors.

Crow Island lay between the lighthouse point at Deer Island and Head Harbor on Campobello. From where I sat it was just a dot on the horizon, a rock and a clump of fir trees.

“Want to shoot the narrows?” Ellie waved a freckled arm at Head Harbor, about half a mile off on our right. (Or starboard, as these boating types insist on calling it. If you want to remember which is which, the trick is this: the words
left
and
port
mean the same thing and have the same number of letters.)