Nail Biter (21 page)

Even Hetty appeared taken aback by Marge's reaction, but of course didn't blame herself. “If Greg wasn't such a wimp we could at least get out of here,” she said. “And go home.”

“Marge.” Ellie spoke sharply past me at the weeping woman. “This wasn't your fault. You were only trying to do the right thing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked Hetty, intrigued. “What's stopping you?”

“The police investigators asked Greg to stick around a few days,” she explained. “Greg's afraid if he doesn't cooperate they'll take it wrong. So he agreed to.”

“Anyone talking fraud?” I asked. Eugene Dibble's murder wasn't the only problem on Greg's plate, I reminded myself.

Hetty shook her head. “Somebody would have to press charges for that.”

And at the moment of course it was the last thing on Marge's mind; she just wanted her daughter back.

“I don't know,” Hetty finished, “what's going to happen. I just want to get out of here, that's all.”

Across the table Ellie went on trying to console Marge. “And it sounds to me as if Greg Brand's a very accomplished liar,” she said. “He's fooled more sophisticated people than you, people who should have known better.”

“That's right,” Jenna put in flatly.

“Oh, how would
you
know?” Marge wailed wretchedly, but at the expression on Jenna's face she broke off her retort.

“Because,” Jenna answered slowly, “I know another very smart woman that it happened to. In Massachusetts on Nantucket Island.”

She bit her lip, then went on. “Like Hetty just said, he had a routine of conning lonely women who'd never in their lives had to deal with anything so mundane as maintenance problems.

“I was thirteen and my dad had been dead a year when Greg Brand broke my mother's heart, cleaned out her bank accounts, and ruined her.
And
me,” she added. “Part of the money was meant to be my college fund, that my dad left for me.”

“But then why hasn't Greg recognized you?” Ellie asked.

Jenna made a face. “Why should he? He barely ever saw me. He made it very clear to my mother when he married her,” she added, “that he didn't like kids.”

She took a deep breath. “Oh, I could live in the house, eat their food, sleep in a bed. But he wasn't to know I was there. It was a condition of their agreement, and my mother . . . well. She was terribly lonely.”

Brief silence until Marge broke it. “Jenna, it's kind of you to see it that way.”

Wry laugh from Jenna. “Yeah, maybe. Whatever. Anyway, for a couple of years I made sure I was out of the house in the morning before he got up. Didn't come back until they were both in bed.”

Twirling the stem of her empty glass, she concluded, “Like a thief in the night until finally I left for good. He took off, too, eventually. Turned out he didn't like sick people either, and by then my mother was dying and all the money was gone.”

She looked up. “And that was the end of that.”

“So there was
a reason why Jenna decided to investigate Greg Brand for her latest writing project,” I told Ellie later in the kitchen.

“Sure. Why make a target of some other crook when you can track the one who victimized you and your mother?” Ellie agreed, depositing a dustpanful of Marge's wineglass pieces into the trash.

“And by coming clean to everyone now, Jenna might've thought she could get Marge and maybe even Hetty to open up to her,” she added. “Maybe give her even more ammunition against Brand.”

“Yep. Scam's over. No point sticking with her cover story anymore.”

Greg had taken the van, so Wade had driven Jenna, Hetty, and Marge back to Quoddy Village, Marge at first insisting she wouldn't be able to stay there. Instead she'd take a room at the Motel East, she said, so she wouldn't have to tolerate Greg and Hetty. But in the end she'd decided that if Wanda returned, it would almost surely be to the Quoddy Village house. And she wanted to be there when it happened.

Tiredly I poured what was left of the last bottle of wine into jelly glasses for Ellie and me. “The baby okay?”

“Mm-hmm.” She sank into a kitchen chair. “Asleep on a blanket on the floor. George is on the couch.”

She pantomimed a snore. Between the workday George had put in and the amount of wine he'd drunk, it was a good bet he'd be there until she shook him awake.

“You know, though . . .” she began unhappily.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It didn't exactly come out in an organized way, did it? But there was a lot of information in what those women said. And none of it makes things any easier.”

Ellie sipped wine, grimaced, then dumped the rest down the sink. She'd never been much of a drinker.

“Jenna must hate Greg. It's why she wanted to take him down publicly, detail his scams for everyone to read,” she mused aloud.

“Assuming that's all she's really doing.” After seeing Jenna's face while she told her story, I wasn't so sure.

“Crucifying him in print might be satisfying,” I said, “but maybe not quite bloody enough.”

Ellie got out the milk, waved the carton inquiringly at me, then poured two glasses and sat again.

“What if Jenna wanted to get Greg into even more trouble than she could by writing about him?” I mused. “Kill Gene Dibble, then somehow manage to put the blame on Greg? If Greg hadn't decided to do it himself, she could've worked it so
she
was the one who told the cops about the connection between Greg and Dibble.”

“It would sound bad for Greg, that he'd lied about whether or not he knew the victim,” Ellie agreed. “But then why not tell the cops right away? Instead, Jenna kept her mouth shut.”

She thought a moment. “And what about Hetty Bonham? She's obviously not crazy about Greg either.”

“Still mad at him, maybe, for not rescuing her out of that situation with Greg's father. If
that's
even true,” I added.

“I don't know,” Ellie replied doubtfully. “He seems to be the one with the money, and she strikes me as smart enough not to cut her nose off to spite her face.”

I drank some milk as Wade came in from where he'd been buttoning down his workshop for the night. He bent to kiss me, then headed upstairs.

“And then there's Marge,” I said when he'd gone. “But I can't think what her motive would be. She wouldn't have involved Wanda deliberately. And I can't see her firing a gun, or even knowing how to use one, can you?”

With a shop full of firearms attached to my house and a husband who'd made a point of getting me at least competent with guns, I sometimes forgot that not everyone enjoyed similar opportunities for high-caliber enrichment.

But Marge was the kind of person who'd probably cringe at pulling the trigger on a cap pistol. “Unless she found out Greg was putting one over on her sooner than we think,
and
she's a lot more vengeful than she seems . . .”

“No,” Ellie said firmly. “Too complicated. For one thing, you're right about Wanda. Marge wouldn't endanger her. And the person she'd have had a motive to shoot is Greg, not Gene Dibble.”

She finished her milk. “But the big problem is the timing. Greg could've wanted to kill Dibble, too. We don't
know
he wasn't aware Dibble lived here. But they're all each other's alibi.”

“Except for Jenna, and she was out in the boat,” I said. “Which if she
hadn't
been, the boat wouldn't have gotten lost, and . . .”

And then I wouldn't have nearly drowned in it.
“Wanda was the only one we know of in the house when it happened. Ellie, you don't suppose she . . .”

But before I could finish this thought Sam came in with the dogs. “Mom,” he began worriedly, releasing them.

Ellie got up. “I've got to go,” she said. “Or start. It'll take half an hour just to get George awake and up off the couch.”

She hesitated, and from her face I could tell there was more she wanted to say to me. Something like
Hey, take it easy, okay?

Or
Don't do anything stupid
. Because she hadn't forgotten me weeping and bashing at those porch boards.

But she wouldn't mention it in front of Sam. “What'd you do with the old gold piece?” she asked instead.

“Got it right here.” Changing my clothes for dinner, I'd transferred it into my skirt pocket.

“Cool,” Sam said when I produced it. But he still sounded worried.

“Hang onto it,” Ellie advised me a little while later on her way out the door with George and Leonora. “Maybe it's lucky.”

Which was what I thought: a golden amulet, arriving as if by magic. But as I waited for their car to depart before I shut the yard lights off, I shivered and decided it might just be fool's gold.

About an hour
later the phone rang. I grabbed the receiver at the first hint of a jangle, before it could wake Wade.

It was just after midnight. “Hello?”

I'd been sitting alone in the dining room staring at the red embers in the fireplace, thinking about what Sam told me after Ellie went home. And waiting, because if that telephone
was
going to ring, it could do it tonight.

“I hear you want a deal,” a man's deep voice said.

I said nothing. This wasn't about me talking.

“I've got the girl,” the voice taunted. “How come you didn't tell the cops about the barrette? And never mind,” he added, “how I know you didn't.”

So Wade had been right about Joey. “Good question,” I said.

But I had the answer ready. I'd examined my conscience from here to hell and back about it.

“Would it make it any easier for anyone to find you if they knew about the barrette?” I asked.

Bitter laugh. “No.”

As I'd thought. And Joey wouldn't tell the police any more than he'd told me. But if I could
find out
more . . .

My hand closed on the gold piece with its raised relief of Saint George. Touching it pinged a memory but for love or money I couldn't quite think of what.

Too tired, and too damned terrified all of a sudden.

That I would screw this up. “Rickert? You there?”

Silence.

“Rickert?” Had he hung up?

“Yeah.”

Sure he was there. I'd played my hole card by offering money and money always brings the vermin out of the woodwork.

“I'm here,” he went on calmly. Like there was no urgency in any of this, and maybe there wasn't. Wanda could already be dead. He could've dropped her by the side of a road somewhere.

Or maybe he'd never had her; you could buy pink barrettes in Wal-Mart. Some other woman might have ventured unwisely onto Joey Rickert's boat, just as Joey had insisted.

Dropped it there in her rush to get back off again, perhaps. But the rest of what I'd imagined could still be true. Nervously, I filled the silence.

“I meant what I told your brother. You need money and all I want is the girl back unharmed.”

While I spoke, my rising anxiety was creating the sensation of an out-of-body experience, as if my physical self had simply dissolved and the rest of me hung there, floating in thin air.

Only my fingertips on the old gold piece felt real. “Well, it's not quite that simple,” Rickert said.

“Why not?”

The words rushed out of me despite my resolve to seem calm. “Because if you don't tell anyone, and I don't tell anyone . . .”

“Shut up,” he cut in mildly. “I need her pills.”

So he had her alive.
Thank you,
I breathed silently.

Or maybe that was just what he wanted me to think. “How did you know she needs pills? Did she tell you? Is she all right?”

Brief silence. Then: “You want to do this or not?”

My turn to pause. I had cash in the house. But . . .

Sure, why not meet in the middle of the night with a drug dealer who was also possibly a kidnapper and maybe even a murderer?

Not to mention what else he might be. And it was
that
thought that made my decision for me.

“Of course I do,” I answered. “Where do you want to do it?” I could wake up Wade, get him to go with me. . . .

“Tell anyone or bring anyone and I'll kill her,” Rickert said, as if reading my thought. “I mean it.”

“I understand,” I replied, thinking
Damn,
and waiting for him to tell me where he wanted me to meet him.

Instead . . .
click!

He'd hung up.

I stared at the phone, wanting to reach through it and drag Mac Rickert back. He was
playing
with me, the son of a bitch—

But then in the silence of the big old house at night I heard footsteps on the back porch. Next came the unmistakable faint creak of the mailbox being opened.

The dogs didn't even wake up. I dashed for the porch but by the time I got there no one was around, only the fog drifting ghostly in the street under a silent streetlight.

A foghorn moaned in the distance. A skunk scuttled across the driveway, its white stripe waving like a danger flag.

Tucked into the mailbox was a sheet of lined notebook paper.

A map.

. . . risk-taking behavior . . .

A year or so later somebody built a house at the end of Toll Bridge Road, but that night the gravel turnaround overlooking the water was silent and deserted.

Leading downhill was a track made of broken chunks of old pavement interspersed with clumps of grass. Once this had been the only way to the mainland, via a wooden bridge and before that a ferry; now the causeway curved a couple of miles to the west, beyond a wide stretch of forest and another rocky beach.

In short, I was alone, in the middle of the woods and almost in the water.
One o'clock,
the scrawl on the hand-drawn map read.

I aimed my flashlight hesitantly ahead. It was twenty to one now. I'd figured I'd better arrive a little early, get the lay of the land if I could and at least not be taken by surprise.

Halfway down the grassy track the tip of my shoe caught on a chunk of the old pavement, sending me staggering. Once I managed to get my balance back, I thought I heard something to my left, in a thick stand of blackberry bushes backed by maple saplings.