Bunker 01 - Slipknot (7 page)

[
5 4
]

L i n d a G r e e n l a w

I understood that small-town proprietors demanded loyal patronage from locals. For business to survive, they absolutely needed a solid customer base among the year-round residents. I had been warned by Cal that the Old Maids took this demand for loyalty to the extreme. I would eventually frequent this staple of the community, but not today. With my right hand, I blindly searched my bag for the directions to Granite Bluff while steering with the left. Keeping my eyes deliberately on the road ahead, I was unable to discern whether the two figures in the passing peripheral storefront had actually waved a friendly hello or beckoned me to come in.

“Hi, gals. Bye, gals. Three bucks a gallon? Not today, gals.” I spoke loudly, with the confidence of anyone enclosed in a speeding car with the windows rolled up tight. My fingers found the envelope on the back of which Cal had drawn a primitive map of the area, with arrows leading to a boldly printed g.b. I held the map in the center of the Duster’s steering wheel while navigating the route through a maze of tiny shops lining the narrow Main Street, and headed out of town the “western way.”

The road twisted and turned up and down small rolling hills strewn with granite boulders, sun-dappled blueberry fields, and patches of spruce trees grown so thick that as I cruised through their shade cast over the road and back into splotches of bright sunshine, I was intermittently cooled and warmed. Entry into each black shadow was saluted by sun-glasses pushed from nose to forehead and back to nose at exit.

Up and down the glasses went until I was convinced that I had missed the Hamiltons’ driveway. I wondered why people of s l i p k n o t

[
5 5
]

their stature would choose to live so far from civilization.

Then I recalled something I had read in researching Maine prior to my move. New money desired addresses such as Bar Harbor or Kennebunkport. Old money stayed where it was born. If Audrey had her history straight, the Hamilton fortune had been born in Green Haven. I had already noticed that Green Haveners referred to the more touristy Maine towns with the same derogatory adjectives used in Miami about South Beach.

Slowing the Duster to a crawl and looking for a place to turn around, I calculated how much time and gasoline I had wasted in getting lost. I completed a seemingly endless series of steep turns that bent sharply one way, then the other. A straightaway and large clearing on the left, divided by a private drive marked on either side by granite pillars of intimidating size, elicited a sigh of relief. It was precisely as Cal had described. A sizable brass plate framed by intricate masonry on the right-side pillar read, granite bluff—1879. Quite formal, I thought, and stopped between the pillars. Perhaps I would announce my arrival with a quick, courteous phone call. The Hamiltons were not expecting me for another two hours.

Pulling a cell phone from one of the many caverns of my bag, I was surprised to see a strong signal but not so surprised to read “low battery” on the phone’s display. Yet another reason to travel to Ellsworth, I surmised. My landlords had warned me of the cost of electricity and cautioned me to use it sparingly. Given my tendency toward frugality, I’d heeded this advice. I simply must invest in a twelve-volt charger to be

[
5 6
]

L i n d a G r e e n l a w

used in the Duster, I thought. But this would require running the car’s engine at three dollars per gallon. Electricity was thirty-two cents per kilowatt-hour. Outrageous! Perhaps the Old Maids carried car chargers. There was a Wal-Mart in Ellsworth. Forty miles round-trip . . . The path of my daily existence was scattered with what I had come to call my

“Scottish dilemmas.” I tossed the phone back in the bag. I would arrive unannounced and ridiculously early. Oh well, I thought, it might serve my ulterior motive to catch the clients off guard.

One quarter of the way into the mile-long drive to the Hamilton estate, I was taken with the swells and gentle grades of earth and shallow grassy troughs connecting perfectly sculpted mounds on either side of me. I felt as though I had been magically transported to the Old Course at St. Andrews. This was exactly how I had imagined it on my many total submersions into every written work on the subject. A raised plateau overgrown with a distinctly different hue of green and distinguishing texture easily could have been a tee box anywhere in Scotland. Not that I’d ever been there; I just knew. Rolling down a window, I took a deep breath, confirming that the ocean was near.

Cresting a long, slow climb to the highest peak in the vicinity, I eased the Duster to a stop and reveled in the rare sensation of the moment—comfortable in loneliness and not totally understanding the happiness that I equated with the sensation of being home. I had come to know that home was a feeling, not a physical location. Down below the acres of lavender meadow, lush with lupine in full bloom, water and s l i p k n o t

[
5 7
]

land melded in a most un-Mainelike fashion. It was an easy union of green and blue and not at all the usual contentious juxtaposing of jagged ledge and frigid sea that the estate’s name conjured. Although my mother never admitted to missing anything about Maine, she had on occasion described its raw, natural beauty in terms quite dear. I now had a real picture to enhance her verbal illustrations.

I released the brake and rolled from wild, intrinsic beauty to the more manicured area surrounding the Hamilton complex. The main house was a large, stately shingle-style cot-tage. With neither window boxes nor balconies, the estate was handsome, with its masculine trappings of stone walls, a detached barn, and various outbuildings. As I parked and climbed out of the car, I visually followed a boardwalk to a granite pier from which hung an aluminum ramp connecting a square floating dock. Tethered to the float lolled an eggshell-type dinghy that was, I assumed, the means of transport to the sailboat moored peacefully in the center of this se-cluded cove.

Like all coastal communities with which I had become familiar, there was an obvious segregation of work boats from pleasure craft in the Green Haven area. There was the working harbor, where the lobster boats swung on moorings and bigger commercial vessels chafed against worn pilings of old piers. And there was the basin, with its fancy full-service marina, where most of the sail- and power-driven yachts were pampered. My mentor had always bristled at the distinction of boats between commercial and non as “pleasure” and

“work.” He maintained, and I had come to agree, that reality

[
5 8
]

L i n d a G r e e n l a w

suggests more homogeneity: Boats are boats.
All
boats are work, and no vessel is strictly pleasurable. However, even without the distinction, boats live in different neighborhoods defined by income.
Fairways
was in a class all her own, I thought as I made my way around the front bumper of the Duster.

The path from the parking area to the front door was covered with seasoned mussel shells, the color of which recalled the lupine along the drive. The brittle shells crunched under-foot and warned those on the opposite side of the screen door of arrivals. Before I was able to knock, the woman of the house pushed open the door, invited me to come in, admon-ished me for being early, and introduced herself as Lucy Hamilton. I had previously seen her from across the high school gymnasium and on the plant’s dock. Now my impression was that Lucy looked like Cher. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hamilton. I wanted to call, but my cell phone is dead. Shall I leave and come back later?” I asked politely.

“No. He’s not doing anything. I’ll get him.” Lucy rolled her large dark eyes and pulled her long, silky hair from where it rested on breasts that rose like biscuits from her red dress.

She whipped her dark locks behind her head and let them cascade onto well-tanned shoulder blades. She turned on a spiked heel of a strappy shoe, took two steps toward an arched doorway, cupped her hands around fully glossed lips, and shrieked, “Sweetheart! The insurance lady is here—

earrrrrrrrr-ly!” She turned and retraced the two steps, flashed a “say cheese” smile, and said, “He’ll be right down. Let me s l i p k n o t

[
5 9
]

take your bag.” Lucy grabbed my messenger bag with both hands, lifting its bulk from where it rested on my opposite hip.

“Oh. No, thank you. I’ll need my bag,” I said, and calmly removed it from Lucy’s heavily jeweled fingers. With the quickness of a spoiled girl whose mother had taken away the last bonbon, Lucy snatched the bag again, this time pulling the strap hard into my neck.

“It’s lovely. It’s a Seabag, right? I have to get some of these for my boutique.” Lucy’s fingers were turning white as she tightened her grip. I leaned away from her in an attempt to rip the bag from her grasp again. Lucy was bracing herself so as not to slide along the hardwood. “I
need
some of these
bags,
”

Lucy continued through clenched teeth. “They’re made from recycled sails, right? Very chic now—recycling. And so nautical! Was this one sewn by ladies in prison?”

“No.” I lurched with my full weight into the strap that I always wore across my chest, unwilling to lose a tug-of-war with the prim Madonna. I could, I assumed, twist Lucy’s spindly arms off at the shoulders, but I found it more amus-ing to watch her struggle.

“It is an authentic Seabag, isn’t it? Every bag is an original, right?” Lucy was almost groaning from the extent of physical output needed not to relinquish the bag to its owner. “I just
love
this one! How much did you pay for it?”

The strap was being tugged so hard into my throat that I could barely speak. “I made it myself,” I whispered.

“Ewwwww!” Lucy recoiled from the bag, releasing it as if she had discovered that it contained snakes. I fell backward

[
6 0
]

L i n d a G r e e n l a w

with the sudden release of counterweight and stumbled into a table, sending a very large and ornate vase to the floor, where it exploded into tiny fragments and dust. Before I could blink, Lucy had frantically pulled something that looked like a yellowed envelope from the mess and tucked it into a small drawer in the table. After she smoothed the front of her dress, her hands landed on her hips, where they remained as she joined me and stood speechless over the pile of rubble that I thought looked like kitty litter. Blaine Hamilton rushed into the room.

Blaine Hamilton had a presence that was friendly and familiar. Although his boat moccasins were well worn, his chinos sported a perfect crease, and his green flannel shirt appeared to have been starched. Except for his shoes, Blaine’s clothing was crisp and fresh, like what was worn by the male models in the L. L. Bean catalogs I had been given by my landlords, perhaps as a subtle suggestion that I upgrade my wardrobe to something less Miami.

“Oh, my! Are you all right?” Blaine approached me with his right hand extended. I took his hand and, before I could fully execute an apology for the vase, was interrupted by the impatient woman in the red dress.

“She tripped on the Oriental rug.
She’s
fine, but look at your poor parents!” Lucy turned and snapped at me, “It
was
an urn, not a vase.”

“Touché” was all I could manage.

“Oh, dear,” Blaine said. “Well, they always wanted their ashes scattered around the shore. Where’s the broom?”

“In the broom closet,” Lucy sniped sarcastically. It was s l i p k n o t

[
6 1
]

clear that she was not budging from what I suspected was sentry duty at her self-appointed post between the drawer where she had tucked away the envelope and anyone who might want to peek inside, like me. Blaine hustled out of the room, leaving Lucy and me glaring silently at each other over the remains of his father and mother.

“That urn was worth more than your annual salary,” Lucy hissed in a loud whisper.

“That’s not giving much value to the urn.” I smiled. “I’m sorry. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I’ll go survey the boat with your husband and be out of your hair.”

“
You!
Alone with
my
husband? Over my dead body! A lot of people want what I have. You can forget your scheme and go back to Florida with the rest of the reptiles that crawl around on their bellies.”

And there it was. The only drawback of being a woman in a place regarded by most as a man’s world is the insecure, jeal-ous female who thinks you’re after her husband. Blaine Hamilton wasn’t my type. He wasn’t at all like Lincoln Aldridge. Did everyone know I came here from Florida? I wondered. I quickly passed this off as the result of small-town gossip. I gracefully bowed out of the seething stare and attempted to portray disinterest in the drawer and in Lucy’s husband.

“Yeah. Whatever.” I detested the dangling “whatever” response and hoped Lucy did, too. Letting my eyes wander around the room, I finally focused on a series of portraits lined up like a perp walk along the far wall. The portraits, all men, were handsome and dignified and not at all like the last of their bloodline—Blaine Hamilton. As Blaine scurried back

[
6 2
]

L i n d a G r e e n l a w

with broom and dustpan and proceeded to sweep up his folks, chatting the entire time about nothing consequential, I grew fond of him. Blaine was soft and warm. His portrait would look like a caricature in the company of those it would join someday.

I began strategizing on how to get some time alone with Blaine to pump him for his account of what had gone down at the public meeting preceding the death that I was certain had not been an accident. How could I shake the suspicious wife?

I would think of something. I just needed to be patient. I also would have loved a few seconds alone with that drawer, but I doubted that would happen. Lucy caught me staring at the drawer and moved to block my view of it. Fidgeting uneasily with her charm bracelet, she said, “The remains of the most affluent and superior people reduced to a dustpan . . . I never thought I’d see the day. What a disgrace. Does your employer carry liability insurance on
you,
Ms. Bunker?”