Nail Biter (14 page)

Putting a light, ironic gloss on it, but at his words I felt myself growing more alert on several levels. Did he know he was beginning to trespass on one of my personal danger zones?

Not consciously. I'd never revealed much to anyone about my childhood-from-hell, and if I had confided in someone it wouldn't have been Mr. Smoothie here. But a good scammer's instincts, I knew, were as sensitive as an insect's feelers.

“Dad thought I didn't understand, but I did. Even before it happened I knew he married Hetty's mom to get at Hetty,” he said.

We reached Route 190. Across Passamaquoddy Bay the rolling hills of New Brunswick loomed greenish-brown in the foreground, fading to heather cloudlike shapes in the distance.

“Hell, I was a fourteen-year-old boy,” he went on. “If there was anything like that going on within a mile, you bet I knew it was happening.”

“And about this you did . . . ?”

“Nothing,” he replied quietly. “Dad sent me off to an elite boarding school the minute he twigged to the idea that I knew.”

Having had an adolescent boy around the house myself, I thought Greg's account of his teenaged awareness of sexual matters sounded authentic. Not that I believed it, necessarily, because another thing my money days had taught me was that guys like Greg could make up plausible stories at a moment's notice, never mind with as much time as he'd had to think about it.

“But later,” he went on, “when we were grown up, I hooked up with her again and tried to watch out for her a little. As much as I could. Hetty doesn't,” he added with a wry smile, “always make it easy.”

“So Hetty's just playing along, pretending to be one of your students of the occult?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Makes people relax a little more if they think they're not the only ones drinking the Kool-Aid,” he agreed, and of course I didn't deck him right there on the gravel shoulder of Route 190.

But I wanted to. Then as we made our way along the side of the road the cab of an eighteen-wheeler blew by, spinning dust and sand; I blinked grit from my eyes.

Another truck roared past. “Let's get away from the road,” I said, leading him down a trail between stands of long grass, whippy chokecherry saplings, and elderberry bushes. Here the road noise faded and the remaining few leaves were dusty crimson and purple, lending a pinkish glow to the light filtering in through silvery branches. Chickadees called sharply, fluttering from twig to twig in the underbrush, always just out of sight.

I steered the talk back to recent events. “And Marge Cathcart's the intended victim of your scam this time? How'd you pick her, a computer-dating thing?”

In my opinion, meeting up with some stranger you found on the Internet is equivalent to drawing a dotted line on your throat, with a little legend alongside it that reads “cut here.”

But people do it all the time. “No, I advertised in a local shopping news,” Greg replied matter-of-factly. “You get a lot of replies from those, and you can pick and choose better than if you have to do it by e-mail.”

He pushed through a tangle of wild raspberry canes, keeping his hands high to avoid being scratched. “Marge,” he added, “had both of the qualities I was looking for: gullible and rich.”

At my expression he added, “Not filthy rich. Too much money, people tend to have professional advisors.”

Correct; advisors like I'd been. If any of my clients had come in with a story about someone like Greg, I'd have popped the top on my industrial-sized spray can of Raid Financial-Parasite Killer.

“But her husband left her plenty comfortable enough when he died,” Brand finished. “I figured I'd check her out some more at this seminar, see if she's marriage material. After all, Wanda's not going to be around home forever. Pretty soon she'll go off to school, or . . .”

He eyed me, I supposed to see how I was taking this; I kept my face carefully blank and my fists, both of which still wanted badly to pummel him, stuffed in my pockets.

“And if not marriage,” he went on when I didn't explode, “then maybe just special friends. It's surprising how much money you can get out of someone like that once she really trusts you.”

Not to me it wasn't. A new thought struck me. “How'd Jenna Durrell get involved?”

He made a rude noise. “I wish she weren't.
Especially
now, the nosy . . .”

Shorebirds patrolled the beach stones, their heads cocking this way and that as they scanned the crannies for tasty morsels at the edge of the advancing water.

“Because she's an ex-cop?” I asked as our feet hit sand. The outgoing tide had left parallel lines of foam, now dried to faint white tracery.

“No,” he replied vehemently. “Because she's an ex-cop who's decided to become an
investigative reporter,
for God's sake, and she's got a little
notebook
.”

We stepped out to the rocks, gleaming wet now. “When she answered the ad I knew right away there was something wrong about her,” he told me.

Too bad Marge hadn't known the same about him. Ahead, thick green ribbons of seaweed stretched, studded with the picked-over shells of crabs that the seabirds had made meals of.

“Stay out of the weeds,” I advised him, stepping carefully through the slippery stuff onto a strip of glistening, pea-sized pebbles, then glancing back over my shoulder at him.

He just stood there studying the water. A few small islands were already in the process of being swallowed by the tide. “Wow, it really does rise fast, doesn't it?”

“Billions and billions of gallons,” I intoned, thinking that what he'd revealed about Jenna solved one mystery, anyway. Join a group, receive secret knowledge, go on a mystical retreat . . . none of that fit the brisk, competent image I'd formed of her.

“You checked background on Jenna?” I asked.

“Yeah. Ex-cop, worked undercover, drug stuff and so on. When she started writing she put up a Web site with a bio.”

He slipped, then caught himself before he could fall. “Even before she quit being a cop she had a few little things published and they were all exposés—crooked car repair, pyramid schemes, all stuff like that.”

And he hadn't wanted to turn her away in case rejection made her feel even nosier, probably.

“So tell me,” he finished, “if I'd worked at it, could I have gotten any more unlucky?”

Nope. “And you're letting me in on all this because . . . ?” I knew what I thought; I wanted to hear what he had to say about it.

“Because any minute now the cops are going to connect me and Eugene Dibble,” Brand answered grimly. “It's only a matter of time, and when that happens . . .”

Right again. He knew as well as I did that dead guys and the live guys who used to be their crime colleagues go together like cookies and cream in the whodunnit department.

And as I'd suspected, he was telling me about it in hopes he could use me somehow. “You ever do any time together?” I asked. “You and Dibble?”

Pushed up onto a mound of seaweed by the last high water, the boat sat a couple of hundred feet away. I hoped the oars and life vests were still in her.

“Yeah.” He clambered ahead of me toward the vessel. “Went up on fraud charges, did the bit in Springfield, Massachusetts. Six months.”

Which meant that they could be linked in the computers as known associates. “Well, Greg, I'd have to say you've got yourself a serious problem.”

It wasn't even high tide yet and the boat's keel was already beginning to float. We'd gotten here just in time.

And the vests and oars
were
still in her. “Here,” I said, reaching in and tossing him the larger vest. “You tighten it by yanking on the straps across your . . .”

But he'd already pulled it on. “I've done a lot of this,” he said assuredly, sliding the boat toward deeper water.

He swung a long leg over the side to put one foot amidships, then used both hands to steady the little vessel. “Hop in,” he invited.

So I did, as he pushed smoothly off with the other leg and swung it in, too, all in one practiced motion and without scraping the boat's bottom. Next he chucked the oars into the oarlocks while I sat facing him in the bow; moments later we were away.

“I didn't mean to make you do all the work,” I called as he hauled on the oars again.

“Don't worry about it,” he responded. “Once we get out in the current it'll be a piece of cake. Sail us home, won't even have to . . . Whoa!”

Which was when those smiling waves showed their sharp teeth. At the center of the channel the water churned with the force of the tide pouring in full bore; he struggled for control, then got it and grinned happily.

“I used to do this all the time with an old lady in Rhode Island,” he shouted over the wind. “Rich as sin. I was trying to get her to give me power of . . .”

Attorney,
he meant to finish, but instead the boat's bow hit the current again a hair sooner than he'd expected and swerved whip-crackingly into it.

“Urk,” I said, unnerved. The sudden change of course flung me half over the gunwale even though I was clinging to it with both hands, struggling to stay upright.

“Hang on!” Brand called out unnecessarily, spray hurling into his face as he pulled hard first on one oar and then on the other. Then as water slammed the side of the boat lurchingly, “Lean!” he shouted. “Lean the other way!”

The bow flew up; behind Brand's desperately rowing figure the transom fell low and to the left, dipping suddenly under the green water. I threw my weight to the right, feeling air time and the conflicting forces of tide and current melding murderously around me.

My only grip on the boat was through my hands, still fastened to the rail in the clench of imminent death. The water rose greenly toward me, smelling of whatever is kept way down at the very bottom in Davy Jones's locker; they'll have to cut my hands off this boat when they find me, I thought.

If they ever did. If our bodies didn't get tangled in all the seaweed and just hang there, feasted upon by marine life until our skeletons fell apart and drifted bone by bone to the rocks below. . . .

The boat fell suddenly as if dropped from the sky, its flat bottom slapping the water with a
smack!
My butt slammed the hard wooden seat with similar force as we finished coming around, the jolt hurtling up through my spine. Then aligning itself with the powerful current once more, the boat shot forward, nearly tumbling me back out over the bow again.

But not quite. The boat righted, settled itself.

“Hah!” Brand shouted out exultantly, his dark hair plastered to his forehead by the spray and his eyes alight.

“Oh, that was a close one!” he laughed, lifting the oars.

Which was when I understood why he was a con man. Like most of them, he was hooked on risk-taking behaviors. This being a condition with which I, having survived and thrived in the money business, was also reasonably familiar. “Yeah,” I gasped when I could breathe again. “Too close.”

But after listening to his story I'd gotten the feeling that this time, Greg Brand had grabbed a little more gusto than he could comfortably handle. And when we got back to the cove and pulled the boat up to high ground where the tide couldn't reach it, I said so.

“You should call the state cops, tell them what you told me, and then cooperate in any way possible,” I advised seriously.

The answering look on his face was that of a kid being urged to try broccoli just one more time. It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him.

Almost. “I know it's not an attractive prospect,” I conceded. “But d'you really want
them
to have to come to
you
?”

We walked up toward the rental house. “Yeah, I guess you're right,” he replied discouragedly. “I just thought . . .”

Sure; he just thought that he was going to become my new best friend and then I'd be able to put in a good word for him with Bob Arnold or even with the state guys, me being a local and all. But like they say, my mother didn't raise any stupid kids.

Actually, she didn't raise any kids at all. She died before she could, but that's another story.

“Where are they all, anyway?” I asked Greg, meaning the other tenants. The house still radiated emptiness and the white van hadn't returned.

“Out searching for Wanda.” His tone conveyed how useless he thought this was, and how little he cared. But even as he spoke the white van pulled into the driveway, and the three women of the ill-fated group—Jenna Durrell, Hetty Bonham, and Marge Cathcart—got out.

Wanda wasn't with them. Marge looked devastated, pale and shaky as if all the blood had been let out of her; it occurred to me that if this went on much longer she would need a doctor.

“Have you heard something, have you found her?” she babbled as soon as she saw me.

I shot Greg Brand a glare that should've shriveled him in his tracks; bottom line, this was all his fault. But he didn't seem to notice. “No,” I told Marge gently. “Not yet.”

Her hair was as messy as a tight, graying permanent wave can ever be, her housedress-and-cardigan costume hung disheveled from her slumped shoulders, and her eyes were red with weeping.

“And since it's been thirty-six hours or so now,” I began, “I think you ought to—”

“We talked to the state cops again when we were in town,” Jenna put in briskly. “They were at the Eastport police station.”

Heavying out on Bob Arnold, probably; I imagined the chief's delight at the visit.

“I told Marge it was about time we should check in with them again,” Jenna went on. “But there was no news about Wanda. That's how we got delayed,” she added, glancing at her wristwatch. “Sorry.”

“That's okay,” I said. “You're here now. I'm going to do a couple of the repairs you asked for the other night, but I also want to see Wanda's room. And,” I told Marge, “I've got a few questions for you.”

In response she nodded despairingly at me, waited while I got the toolbox, then tottered beside me up the front walk and into the house.

Inside, Marge excused
herself for a moment. I took the opportunity to corner Jenna, who was in the kitchen making coffee.