Nail Biter (24 page)

“All right, then,” he said finally. “You'll be okay alone here for a minute?”

And when I said I would be, he padded downstairs; I lay there listening to my husband moving quietly around the big old house.

Appliances off, check; door locked, check. Dogs in their beds sound asleep and Cat Dancing atop the refrigerator, double check.

Later, safe in the darkness with him, I noticed every one of the differences between this and the cold water I'd struggled in. I was aware too of him lying there awake beside me.

“Jacobia,” he said after a while.

The word made a warm burst of breath on my neck. Every inch of his skin where it pressed on mine radiated like fire.

“You can tell me. Whatever it is, if you ever want to, you can.”

“I know,” I said. But the truth was that I still couldn't. Instead I turned into his arms, heedless of the pain in my shoulder and hands, heedless of everything but having been returned to the land of the living.

He kissed me very carefully but with wonderful effectiveness considering the night's circumstances.

Or any circumstances, actually.

He was an effective man.

Ellie arrived at my house the next morning at a quarter to
seven; Wade had already called her.

“He says you need your head screwed back on straight,” she told me frankly. “But he didn't say why.”

I was out in the front yard gazing at the place where the old porch had stood. Around dawn I'd wakened to the rumble of enormous gears grinding; looking out, I'd been treated to the sight of a big truck backing from the street onto the lawn.

“So?” Ellie went on, squinting at me with a cup of coffee in her hand. Sam had already come by to take the dogs out. “You look awful, by the way,” she added.

Yeah, no doubt. Now the Dumpster I'd filled was gone, along with the pieces of the old porch I'd demolished; time marches on and all that, but at such moments I always felt sorrowful, as if its parade route led over my heart.

“Well,” I began. Also, time's marching always left a trail of destruction for me to clean up. Unhappily I noted the trenches that the garbage truck's wide tires had dug into the lawn.

Topsoil, grass seed . . .
But not until after the porch was rebuilt. The lumber still lay under the blue tarp, ready for me to begin measuring, sawing, and hammering.

Instead I felt like crawling under the tarp myself. “I did a kind of a careless thing,” I admitted.

Right. Stepping off a twenty-story building could be called careless, too. Oh, I felt like the world's worst fool.

Ellie wore a cream knit turtleneck, denim coveralls with red hearts appliquéd to the bodice and pockets, and tan suede clogs. For her it was a remarkably color-coordinated getup except for the orange and green ribbon she'd braided into her red hair.

“Anyway, you're coming with me,” she said, not waiting for me to explain any more. “I've got our day all planned.”

She didn't mention my hands, I noticed, though they were a disaster, too. Apparently Wade's conversation with her had been quite detailed; yet another wave of humiliation washed over me.

In the kitchen I hesitated; down in the cellar my father was getting ready to plug the broken water pipe for good. With him was Toby Sullivan, head of Eastport's public works department. And when I stepped out the back door to see what else might be involved, I saw that Toby had brought along—
shudder
—a backhoe.

“But Ellie . . .” How could I leave when they were planning to assault my home with a digging machine?

“You're coming if I have to put you in a sack and drag you,” Ellie repeated firmly.

Just then Sam and Victor arrived, apparently in hopes that I would fix breakfast. Fortunately Bella chose that moment to show up too, though, and so did Ellie's husband George.

“Thought I'd keep an eye on the proceedings,” he said. Which meant he would supervise the pipe work, thank goodness.

“And what about you?” I turned to Sam, whose day was supposed to be spent at the boat school. What I really wanted was to get Victor alone for a minute, but he avoided eye contact.

“I'm hangin' out with Dad,” Sam said. “What with him taking off tomorrow and all. He just told me he's going.”

“Seminar,” Victor explained. His eyes still didn't meet mine. Cat Dancing watched him skeptically.

Me too. “In Denver, on surgical techniques,” he added. “One of their presenters canceled, they asked me to fill in. Couple of days. A week, tops.”

Uh-huh.
We'll talk more later,
I telegraphed to Victor, who this morning seemed fine. Sam must've misunderstood his father last night, I thought, annoyed.

Still, it all left me at liberty just as Ellie had hoped, so that half an hour after dropping the baby off at day care—George intended to spend the afternoon with Lee, I'd been informed—we were on our way out of town.

“Wow,” was all Ellie said at first when I'd told her what had happened. “So he's really got her. Have you told Bob Arnold?”

No lecture;
thank you,
I thought at her. “Tried,” I said. “Wade said there wasn't much point waking him up in the middle of the night. So this morning I left a message for him but he hasn't called back.”

In Eastport, if Bob wasn't at a phone, your call got routed to a county dispatcher, which wouldn't be helpful either. “Wade said he'd keep trying,” I added. “But hell, what I did was so nuts I'd be surprised if Bob even believes me.”

Along Route 190 the bronze needles of the hackmatack trees glowed against the hard blue sky, while in the old orchards along the road leafless apple trees drooped, still heavy with fruit.

“Anyway, what good'll it do talking to Bob?” I went on in frustration. “The state cops are already looking for Rickert and I don't know where he is. What more
do
I know, other than that he is really capable of murder?”

Ellie took the long curve past the airfield and shot uphill toward the Quoddy Village turnoff. There a girl walked backwards along the shoulder, her thumb stuck out. Wearing a black jacket, heeled boots, and a miniskirt, she jerked her hand down when we got close enough for her to see our faces.

And realize that we weren't potential customers. “That was Luanne Moretti,” I said as we went by, craning my neck around.

A pickup slowed and pulled over to let Luanne in.

Ellie watched in the rearview mirror. “Mm-hmm. I've seen her out here a few times before. I'd be scared to just get in a car with some guy, wouldn't you?”

The pickup pulled back onto the road. “Yeah. Probably she is, too. But I guess everybody's got expenses to cover.”

Ellie slowed for the speed trap at Pleasant Point, the cop behind the wheel of the parked squad car gazing motionless from behind his dark glasses. A couple of minutes later she stopped at the corner of Route 1 to wait for a log truck, then turned left.

“Anyway, I guess I could also call the state cops,” I went on, “but if I do it's going to come out why I was out there with Rickert and then
Bob's
going to be in trouble. Which if I thought it would help, that would be one thing. But . . .”

“But it doesn't give them any better places to look than they had before.” Ellie finished my sentence. “I'm not so sure your little adventure last night was completely useless, though,” she said, pressing the accelerator again.

We began by heading for Machias, the next town to our south. But soon she turned onto a side road, narrow blacktop winding along a river where mallards floated among the cattails.

“Oh, yeah?” I retorted, swallowing hard. With Ellie at the wheel, we might as well have been at the Indy 500. “Name me one helpful thing I learned,” I demanded as she steered expertly through a trio of hilly S-turns. Between her speed and a lingering chloroform hangover, the curves set my bruised head spinning.

“That maybe he's not a murderer.” She noticed my discomfort, popped open the glove box. Inside lay a pint bottle of Scotch.

Meanwhile she went on driving very fast. I couldn't decide whether to stare at the bottle or at the truck headed suddenly at us, straddling the yellow line as it rounded the next curve.

“Ellie!” I exhaled as her left hand hit the horn, her right hand downshifted, and her feet did a complicated maneuver on the clutch, brake pedal, and accelerator.

“Hang on,” she advised. Instants later we had bumped through a ditch luckily cushioned by barberry and bittersweet and were back on the road, Ellie flipping a middle finger out the window.

Thoughtfully, I opened the pint bottle and took a swallow, considered putting it back in the glove box, then tucked it between my knees instead.

“As I was saying,” Ellie said as we zoomed onto an uphill straightaway, “it strikes me that this life jacket you fastened onto was just a little too convenient.”

Surrounded on both sides now by stone wall–fenced pastures, the road just went on climbing. “What do you mean?” I demanded. “I told you, if it
hadn't
been there, I'd have . . .”

Then I stopped as the road crested the hilltop. Ahead and below spread hundreds of square miles of trees, lakes, and hills, the blueberry barrens wine-colored with the autumn leaves of the fruit bushes and the farthest mountaintops already snow-covered.

“Oh,” I finished in a small voice. “You think . . .”

She slowed between a dairy farm whose barbed-wire-and-cedar-post enclosures featured salt licks the size of concrete blocks, and an auto graveyard whose sign promised
Good Used Partz!

“I mean the last time you saw that life jacket, Mac Rickert was wearing it.” We started downhill. “And if he'd wanted to kill you . . .”

We passed a Grange hall, its front porch decorated with dry corn sheaves, a wreath of mountain ash berries and hydrangea blossoms, and a poster:
Jack-o'-Lantern Carving Party To-nite.

“Right,” I said. “By that time he had my gun. One shot, even if anyone heard it and decided to investigate—”

“Which is pretty unlikely, right there,” Ellie put in.

“—he'd be long gone by the time they got out there. And if I
hadn't
found the life preserver . . .”

“He could've come back to rescue you himself,” Ellie agreed. “You were likely too busy not drowning to notice how far away he actually went.”

True. And it put a whole new spin on the matter, didn't it? Having a near-death experience, that is, then finding out it was not much more than a fistfight followed by a cold bath.

That Mac Rickert might never have meant to harm me at all. “Hey, where're we going, anyway?” I asked.

Ellie had turned onto a tiny dirt lane; now she followed it between a double row of massive cedar trees to a gravel parking area and stopped the car.

I looked around. A hand-carved sign read
Elderberry Cottage
but there was no dwelling visible, just a curving white pebbled path leading off into what would have been a forest if it weren't so well groomed, not a fallen branch or rotten stump in sight.

Through the trees, water sparkled distantly as I got out of the car into a silence so complete that it made my ears ring. The air smelled richly of crushed apples, damp leaves, and the smoke of a hickory wood fire burning slowly somewhere nearby.

“Ellie, what are we doing here?” I asked as a little black spaniel danced welcomingly out of the woods toward us. “I really don't have time for . . .”

I wanted to call Bob again myself and confess the whole hideously embarrassing story of my escapade, plus the information it had yielded. Such as it was, but at least it might change the state cops' mind about Wanda being a crime victim.

Even if it wouldn't help find her. “Etta,” Ellie greeted the spaniel familiarly, smoothing its ears, and in response the dog danced joyously around some more.

And then to me: “Lunch,” she pronounced, though I saw no food unless you counted the acorns under the trees. “Trust me, lunch is
good
for screwing heads back on,” she declared.

I could agree with that, though I still didn't see where we were going to get any. Also, it was too early for lunch.

Etta pranced in delighted circles around my feet. “And while we eat it I'm going to explain a few things to you,” Ellie told me.

She took the Scotch bottle from my hand, put it back into the glove compartment. “But first I have activities planned.”

She guided me onto the pebbled path with the black dog still gamboling around us. I must've glanced back rather wistfully at the bottle.

“Don't worry,” she finished confidently. “Where we're going, you're not going to need
that
.”

Ellie was right;
I didn't need the Scotch. Instead I had the mineral baths, a mud soak, an herbal wrap, and special eyelid-soothing gauze pads soaked in something cool and puckery-feeling, as if all of my puffy skin cells were being shrunk into positions they'd last held when I was about eighteen.

And there was more: a pedicure. I'd never had one before. Plus acupuncture, which I wasn't sure I wanted until the pain in my shoulder suddenly gathered itself and fled, flapping its dark wings before magically exiting the top of my head.

After that, bliss. A little over three hours later, dressed in my own clothes, which had been washed, dried, and—oh, best of all,
ironed
—I sank into a cushioned wicker chair at a table in one of Elderberry Cottage's three small private dining rooms.

“Better?” Ellie inquired, beaming. She'd had a facial and a vitamin-enriched hair wash.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, sipping mineral water. “My whole body has been
replaced
.”

By, I might add, a newer model, one with features the old body never dreamed of possessing. A mind, for instance, that was running on all its cylinders.

Ellie smiled. In addition to all the other ministrations that had been applied to me, I'd had a massage so therapeutic it was as if my joints and major muscle groups had been disassembled and put together again, in vastly improved ways.

After that my hands were anointed with herbal oils, wrapped in cloth light and slippery as silk, and placed in a mysterious sandalwood box with a switch on it that, when turned on, emitted a warmish hum so deeply soothing I'd wanted to stick my head in there.