Nail Biter (3 page)

Down in the cellar my father went on hacking away at another part of the massive old stone foundation, which he was replacing section by section. The rhythmic
chunk! chunk!
of his mason's axe rang metallically as it ate its way through the antique mortar.

“. . . is always just ducky,” Victor concluded in disgust, and made another attempt to shove Monday's head out of his lap.

Ellie hauled the bags full of quinces she carried across the kitchen and deposited them on the counter where they promptly fell over. The quince bushes grew in her yard and we'd been waiting for them to ripen enough to pick.

“You know, you just wouldn't believe what they put on kids' TV ads,” she announced, speaking over the sound of Victor's voice.

We were used to speaking over the sound of his voice. “The sheer mind-bending audacity of them,” Ellie went on indignantly.

Her own daughter, Leonora, was now nearly a year old. “I mean, it's almost as bad as all those dreadful political ads I've been seeing lately.”

It was an election year and the candidates were busy trying to convince us they were saints, while their opponents had horns and forked tails. “Look, Victor,” Ellie said. “Quinces.”

Victor eyed the round greenish fruits spilling out of the bags. “Oh,” he said, sounding pleased. “That means quince jam.”

The thought of which was enough to sweeten even his prickly nature for the moment. Then he apparently heard the rest of what Ellie had said and switched into lecture mode; this was one of his favorite subjects.

“Ellie, TV advertisers can't sell goodness, you know that. No one would buy. TV sells fun, toys, things that taste sweet and so on.”

He took a breath, warming to his topic. “So the politicians, knowing people feel guilty about glutting themselves and their kids on what the TV ads sell, offer to let people off the hook in their own ads.”

He waved an expressive hand. “That way you can buy, say, an expensive gas-guzzler or bucket of chicken wings, and just
vote
for a good energy policy, healthy food, or whatever.”

Enjoying himself, he went on. “By which I mean, and I'm sorry to have to tell you this . . .”

He wasn't. “. . . but it's worse than you think.
They're all in it together
.”

I'd come to Maine after a career of managing money for Wall Street honchos so corrupt that the Devil probably sold his soul to them. Thus I shared Victor's opinion, but you can't go around saying it or people will start thinking you're nuts.

Which we already knew Victor was; this time, though, his words resonated strongly with Ellie, fresh from watching her baby daughter's eyes widen at the sight of an ad for a toy makeup kit in a glittery pink plastic pouch.

“Jake,” she said, angling her head at Victor, “sometimes I actually understand why you married this man.”

He smiled self-importantly, missing the dig. “And when I pick Leonora up in a little while, I'm going to tell the day-care lady to keep her away from the TV from now on,” Ellie added.

Leonora saw no television at home but went to the day-care place for four hours each morning without fail. If she didn't she got cranky, refusing to take her naps and howling inconsolably to communicate her craving for infant society.

Pleased with her decision not to let the baby become a TV addict, Ellie shoved the quinces back into the bags, then set the bags upright again.

“Have our tenants called yet?” She peeked into the cabinet under the sink to see if I had enough jelly jars, tops, and jar rings for about a dozen pints.

“Twice,” I said, sighing while mentally counting the jars myself. Owing to Wade's habit of appropriating them for use in storing small gun-parts, we were probably a few short. “Once for an electrical problem, once for a leaky faucet,” I added.

Victor pushed his chair back and got up, since if we weren't going to make the quince jam right that minute and he had already eaten the pie, he saw no reason to stick around.

“I thought I'd wait for the third call,” I went on to Ellie when he had gone. The dogs returned from following him to the door. “It'll probably be coming any minute now and I thought I'd go out there after lunch and get all the chores done up at once.”

Two months earlier Ellie and I had bought a small house on the waterfront in Quoddy Village, which was the nearest thing to a suburb that the tiny island city of Eastport had. We'd planned to fix the place up and rent it long-term or maybe even sell it.

But while we were still working on it, a set of temporary tenants had descended, referred by a local real estate agency. And an actual income from the beat-up little bungalow had been the height of good luck.

Or so we'd thought at the time. Income, it turned out, was only a small part of the overall landlady experience. “Better go soon,” Ellie said with a glance out the window.

The day's early fog and mist had cleared to reveal a bright blue sky. “Storm tonight,” she repeated.

Wade had said so, too, although I didn't believe it, nor did the weather report. So I paid no heed to Ellie's warning, sitting down instead with my own cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

Ellie had already poured some for herself. “You know, it's not that I'm sorry the place is rented,” she began.

Me either. We'd picked it up for pennies, mostly because it hadn't had any real maintenance in decades. The foundation under my house was as solid as the Rock of Ages when compared to the slurry of shifted earth, rotted sills, and gritty powder that we'd discovered under the Quoddy Village property.

“And they seem like okay people, even if they are a little weird,” Ellie went on.

“Weird,” I agreed, but the term did not cover the unusual nature of our tenants. It's not every day you rent a house to a coven of witches, five of them if you counted the teenaged girl who I guessed must probably still have training wheels on her broomstick. And especially with Halloween coming so soon, news of their unorthodox religious views was causing enough local comment to raise the dead.

Or anyway I supposed you could call it a religion. They'd been here only a week and responding to their repair requests had kept me so busy, I hadn't had time to bone up on the subject.

“Deke Meekins from down at the boatyard stopped me on my walk this morning,” Ellie went on. “He particularly wanted to know if they wear black pointy hats and sacrifice small animals at midnight.”

“Oh, dear. Did you set him straight, I hope?”

The part about the animals I knew for sure wasn't occurring, since even before I found out about the witch portion of the program, I'd put my foot down: no pets.

“Yes,” Ellie replied, “but I'm not sure he believed me.”

Gregory Brand, leader of the coven and the one who signed the rental agreement and wrote the deposit check, had looked at me as if I were the one with the funny hat on when I warned him against noisy, bad-smelling, or otherwise objectionable occult nonsense. But he'd made no comment, merely assuring me that his group fully intended to be clean, quiet, and responsible.

“And yesterday at the IGA, Esther Deedy was complaining that her neighborhood has been invaded by black cats. Two or three dozen of them, and she was staring right at me when she said it,” Ellie continued.

I happened to know that if Esther Deedy spotted a pair of grasshoppers in her backyard, she reported a plague of locusts.

“Ellie,” I said helplessly, “their check cleared. We asked top dollar and they're paying. And other than repair calls, there hasn't been a peep out of them. No complaints from the neighbors about loud parties . . .”

Which if they'd had any you could be sure someone would be calling the police to say it was a Black Mass. “And considering the shape it's in . . .”

Wade and my father had gone underneath the house and set up a dozen pump jacks to level it enough so the drains would run. Until then, the result of toilet-flushing had been unfortunate.

“. . . we're lucky to be renting it at all,” I finished. “And anyway they're only going to be here another week. We can handle the gossip until then. And the repairs,” I added resignedly.

Ellie brightened a bit. In the beginning she'd been the one who was most gung-ho about renting the place. But Ellie was born and had lived all her life in Eastport. She was more sensitive to local talk.

“I guess,” she conceded. “Just because they call themselves witches doesn't mean they really are. Or that Greg Brand is, at any rate, because for one thing I don't think any real witches sell their powers, or whatever it is they have. Do you?”

According to Brand, the little group was paying him for a seminar he was giving. “No idea,” I told Ellie. But it sounded right.

“And in a way they're doing us a favor, too, by finding all the things that need fixing,” Ellie remarked.

“Hmm,” I said, finishing my coffee. “Maybe.”

Before they'd moved in we'd made certain that the house was both safe and sanitary, all nuts-and-bolts plumbing and wiring situations up to code. But the number of problems the tenants had discovered, at the rate of two or three a day for the past seven days, had begun to make me feel I was being nibbled to death by ducks.

Just then my father came upstairs, covered in concrete dust. He was a tall, wiry old fellow with a graying ponytail tied back in a leather thong, wearing coveralls, a flannel work shirt, and battered boots.

“Phew,” he sighed, crossing to the sink for a drink of water. “I don't know what somebody thought he was doing, building that northeast corner of the foundation over by the cold room.”

The cold room, back in the early 1800s when my old house had been built, was where they stored meat: sides of beef and slaughtered half-pigs, whole deer and turkeys, bacon and hams, hung from big iron hooks fastened into the massive beams of the cellar ceiling.

Great chunks of ice cut from lakes on the mainland a dozen miles distant had been packed into sawdust and brought here on barges and trundled into the cellar for refrigeration in summer; in the winter, the northeast corner of the house was plenty cold enough all by itself.

“That one whole area's built like a brick sh—” my father began.

But then he caught himself, washing his throat clean of concrete dust with a gulp of water. “It is,” he amended judiciously as he went back downstairs to hack at it some more, “a very strong corner.”

Before being cleared of all charges against him, my father had for years been a federal fugitive suspected of, among other things, murdering my mother. So hour upon hour of demolishing a stone wall with a pickaxe was his idea of a peaceful morning, as long as he didn't have to wear a set of leg irons while doing it.

Ellie looked out the kitchen window, where a couple of newly appeared clouds on the horizon made the otherwise blue sky seem even bluer. “Going to blow a gale,” she remarked.

On second thought, even I decided the clouds looked ominous, long and white like the fingers on a skeletal hand. But their presence hardly marred the unusual perfection of the autumn day, warm and humid as if a last bit of August had been saved over for us until now, when we would really appreciate it.

“Ellie, why do you keep on insisting? It's like summer out there.” I leaned down to pat the two dogs who had romped back in from the parlor when my father came upstairs, and were now searching for him with canine determination.

“No storm is coming and I don't see why you and Wade keep on saying there is,” I said.

Monday butted her squarish head into the side of my leg. It was noon, which was when the gray-faced canine began anticipating an evening meal. Seeing that I was taken, Prill sniffed around for other sources of treats, fixing at last on Ellie.

“Okay,” Ellie said, patting the big red dog's smooth flank and smiling at me. “Have it your way, Jacobia. The weather's terrific.”

Green-eyed and even-tempered, Ellie was as fine-featured and delicate-appearing as an antique cameo, with small pale freckles like a dusting of gold flecks scattered across her nose.

She was also as tough as a steak carved from one of those old deer haunches in the cellar. “But,” she finished as she got up to depart, “if you do go to the rental house, bring your umbrella.”

With that she headed out to pick the baby up at the day-care place. Minutes later the phone rang and just as I'd expected it was our tenants again, calling for yet more help in the fix-it department.

Only this time the repair they wanted was a doozy.

Rain slashed the
windshield as I squinted past the flapping wipers into the gathering darkness, driving out of town toward the Quoddy Village place about four hours later.

Ellie had been right; the weather was deteriorating into a squall. Someone's trash can, propelled by the wind, tumbled from a driveway and bounced wildly through the gloom, directly across the rain-slick road in front of me.

I hit the brakes, feeling the tires make that awful weave-and-a-bobble slither that means they are losing traction. Then the can rolled away into the darkness and the tires caught again, my heart pounding as the truck straightened.

“Haunted,” I'd repeated disbelievingly into the phone when the tenants called. “You want me to come out there and make the house sound less . . .”

Yep, that was it: a low, mournful
woo
noise alternating with a high, overexcited
yow-wow!
It had started a little while ago and could I please do something about it, they'd wanted to know. Because it was driving them crazy.

Biting my tongue, I'd refrained from replying that in the week since they arrived I'd learned all about being driven crazy and as far as I was concerned, a
woo
noise was small potatoes.

Instead I said I'd be over shortly. But after hanging up the phone I'd taken a moment to stow the Bisley away in its lockbox in the cellar, then stepped out to inhale some sanity-restoring breaths of fresh air while gazing at my own house.

It was a massive 180-year-old white clapboard Federal with three full floors plus an attic, forty-eight old double-hung windows flanked by dark green wooden shutters, and a rotten front porch. In fact, that porch was so decrepit I feared that on Halloween night some trick-or-treater might crash through it under the added weight of even a single Snickers bar.