Repair to Her Grave (19 page)

“I don’t know.” I flung my towel down. Not wanting to jinx matters, I hadn’t said anything to her about how peaceful the house was lately. Now I thought about it, decided again not to.

Besides, I had another subject entirely on my mind. “Ellie, if you were new in Eastport, how long d’you think it would take you to locate Wilbur Mapes?”

She blew out a breath. “Oh, I guess about twenty years.”

“But Raines
and
Charmian both found him right away. Raines even got a ride from him, which probably means Mapes knew he was coming.”

She nodded. “And Charmian found that trailer of his,” I went on, “way out on the dirt road, drove there with no hesitation.”

“You don’t suppose it
wasn’t
those boots that upset her so much? I mean, what if she already knew they were there? What if she just didn’t like
you
seeing them, so she put on an act?”

“Then I’m not sure why she called me in the first place,” I answered, feeling more confused. “Unless she and Mapes are in something together and they wanted to make it look to me as if they aren’t.”

I thought some more. “He was angry that I went around back. Maybe he didn’t want either of us to see them? Me or Charmian? I mean, maybe he’d kept them for himself, and …”

Ellie shuddered. “A dead man's boots. Still, it
is
Wilbur.”

People in Eastport liked to say Wilbur would sell his own kidneys if he could get at them, a thought that made me feel a bit shivery about the absence of Raines's body. Whatever he was up to, though, the boots hadn’t walked out there by themselves.

“You know what I wonder about most of all?” Ellie said. “I wonder why Hayes wrote in English, in all the other manuscripts and so on that we’ve got of his. But in that one …” She waved at the antique volume we’d found in the wall. “In that one, he wrote in Latin
and
used invisible ink.”

“Pretty secretive,” I agreed. And how had his head ended up in the bay? And then there was the fact that, nearly two hundred years later, Jonathan Raines had come to Eastport and immediately shared Jared Hayes's watery fate.

… damn Jared Hayes and all who would deal with him …

Did trying to find his violin count as dealing with him?

I don’t believe in curses, but right about then, with purple twilight gathering stealthily in around the old house, I couldn’t help wondering.

Maybe Jane Whitelaw's curse was finally coming true.

6

Early the next morning, Wilbur Mapes glowered from the rickety back porch built of scrap wood at the rear of his awful dwelling.
.
The dog barked inside, its body thumping against the door of the trailer.

“Now, Wilbur,” Bob Arnold said calmly, “you know I have got to follow up on things, might have to do with that young fellow.”

Mapes uttered a profanity.

“I’ll take that as permission,” Bob said. Mapes slammed back inside. I hoped he wasn’t in there loading one of the shotguns.

“All right, Jacobia,” Bob said. “Let's have a look.”

“They were right over here somewhere… .”

We picked our way between rusty bedsprings, wringer-style washing machines, rot-bottomed coal scuttles. The sheer volume of junk was overwhelming; where had I been when I saw the boots?

“You’re sure, now? The boots you saw were the same ones… .”

“I’m sure,” I said. But I was getting a sinking feeling.

I’d snagged Bob Arnold just as he was getting to his office and persuaded him to come out here with me, luring him with a bag of pastries from the IGA and a thermos of coffee.

On the ride we’d been silent, me because what could I tell him? That (a) the poltergeist or whatever it was in my old house was gone—or anyway, it had quit bothering me—but now (b) an old curse had got linked up somehow with Eastport's busiest junk collector, and the result killed Jonathan Raines?

I didn’t say anything about keeping Charmian in residence with me, either. It probably wasn’t the most sensible course of action on my part. But I knew how it felt to be a young woman in love and in difficulties, with no one to turn to; if I forgot, I had my memories of my years with Victor to fall back on. Maybe she was a pain in the neck, but I felt sorry for her, and with each passing day I was also feeling more stiff-necked stubborn about it, like the ladies of the Reading Circle who just hung in there come hell or (more often, in downeast Maine) high water.

Bottom line, I wasn’t going to dump her, but I didn’t think I needed to invite any arguments from Bob Arnold by saying so; at this point, he was so exasperated by her insistence that the search for Raines's body be continued, he was about ready to send her off the end of the dock, too.

Meanwhile, he was bone-tired after another night of trying—and failing—to catch the firebug. Happy just not to be driving, he’d ridden along contentedly enough, eating pastries and sipping coffee in a blur of fatigue. But now in the pale grey morning behind Wilbur Mapes's trailer, he wasn’t happy anymore.

Me either. No yellow boots. Mapes slammed out again, thumped down the steps. “You want to say what you's are lookin’ for, I might be able to set you on the track,” he allowed sullenly.

“Pair of boots,” Bob said. “Yellow, expensive ones. You got anything like that around here, Wilbur?”

The grassy path I’d noticed the day before led from the shed back into the fields, old pasture land bounded in the distance by windbreak cedars. Wilbur's face didn’t change.

“Nuh-uh. Pair o’ galoshes, you want them.” He eased between a car engine and a row of bald truck tires, pulled the galoshes down.

Bob looked at me. “No,” I said, wondering if the confusion of worthless things gathered here was really random, as it seemed to me, or if it mimicked some bizarre pattern in Mapes's head.

“We go in?” Bob asked, and Mapes nodded grudgingly.

“Suit yourself. Watch the dog.”

Inside, the dog was doing enough watching for all of us as we made our way through the clutter. I saw again the many valuable items, several that hadn’t been here the day before, among the hunting trophies: a Queen Anne wing chair, a pewter tankard, two long-stemmed clay tobacco pipes.

“You know the fellow?” Bob asked Mapes. “One supposed to’ve fallen off the fish pier the other night?” He didn’t mention the guns lying around; in Maine, if Mapes wasn’t carrying a weapon concealed, he didn’t need a permit.

“Ayuh,” Mapes replied, startling me. “I sold him some stuff now an’ again. Old stuff, like he ’us always lookin’ for.”

Bob ignored my urgent glance; so there was a
connection.
“Sold him anything lately?”

“Nuh-uh. I’d call him, I got anything I thought he wanted. Old music stuff a while back. Ain’t had nothin’ like that lately. Damn fool.”

My impatience got the better of me. “If you haven’t sold him anything lately, how is it that you’re the one who gave him the ride into town
and
took him up to Calais to get that replacement light fixture he’d broken? And how did you get his boots?”

Mapes turned, his eyes without expression. “Saw him on the road. Gave him a ride. Ain’t no law against it.”
And you can’t prove otherwise,
his empty look added mockingly.

“Don’t know about boots,” he finished. “I’m a junk man.”

But his treasures said he was more. The plain wooden table in the corner, for instance, had never been refinished; on closer inspection, it showed the rare mottling of old bird's-eye maple.

He saw me looking at it. “Folks want to get rid of stuff, they’re gettin’ new. Take it off their hands, couple of bucks.”

Right, and because Mapes was just a junk man, no one thought about the stuff maybe being worth larger sums, the way they might if a city boy like Raines came around trying to buy it from them.

“You’re a front man, aren’t you?” I asked sharply. “A rep for the antique buyers. To the local people around here, you’re the guy.”

It was a good arrangement, profitable for Mapes and for his buyer in the city. And it could be how Mapes and Raines had come into contact in the first place. But I couldn’t help thinking about the people whose houses that good stuff in Mapes's trailer had come out of: houses that needed reroofing, new furnaces, and insulation. People, mostly elderly, could badly use the cash the old stuff would bring at the Sotheby's auction.

Mapes just shrugged. “Wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, if I was, it wouldn’t do me no good to get rid of Raines. Ain’t that what you’re sniffin’ around about? Think you saw them boot's o’ his’n an’ I had somethin’ to do with what happened to ’im?

“Anyway,” he went on, turning away, “you done? Morning's wastin’, I got things to work at, man's got to make a living.”

“Yeah, we’re done, Wilbur,” Bob said. “You hear anything in your travels, might shed some light on a certain subject, I want to know that I am going to hear from you.”

“Ayuh,” Mapes replied dully and unconvincingly. “Get on with you, now, I got to let the dog out.”

We went, backing down the rutted drive past the big sign in red letters, whose message despite all Wilbur's guns I now found somewhat less convincing: NOTHING HERE IS WORTH YOUR LIFE.

Maybe so, but back in the city many of my wealthier clients had been collectors of old things, and while none would exactly have given their lives for that pewter tankard, I knew some who would have used the idea as a starting point in the bargaining process.

I gripped the wheel while the washboard road beat hell out of the car's suspension. “Bob, those boots were there. And Mapes is not precisely the most upright local citizen. For Pete's sake, he goes around tricking people into selling him valuable things, probably not giving them anywhere near what they must be—”

“Wrong.” He said it mildly but definitely.

“What?” I glanced at him, then jerked my eyes back to the road as something white flashed across it: the flaglike tail of a twelve-point buck, bounding over the roadway and into the brush on the other side. “Did you see that deer?”

“Uh-huh. Big old fella, wasn’t he? Blackflies start drivin’ ’em out toward the roads this time o’ year.”

He watched it until it blended into the undergrowth. “Wilbur pays value. Him and his sister, only ones do, in my opinion.”

We reached the paved road. “Used to be a dope grower,” Bob went on. “Out on all that good land, the back of beyond.”

Those fields behind his house, I realized as Bob added:

“I broke him of that. Stove in his boat bottom three or four times before he got the idea maybe someone was trying to save him a whole lot worse trouble. Him and his pals.”

“Pals?”

“Ayuh. Hecky Wilmot and a guy named Howard Washburn, lives even farther out in the sticks than Wilbur.”

My eyebrows went up. “Hecky a dope smuggler? But he's …”

Way too old,
I was going to say, forgetting that the youth culture had not yet arrived in downeast Maine; in Eastport no man is too old for much of anything until he is permanently horizontal.

“Oh, ayuh,” Bob said. “Hecky was a hell-raiser till he got the literary bug. Still got a streak of it, you ask me. Eye for the main chance, what's good for Hecky, and hell with the rest.”

We passed the grange hall, got to Route 1. “But Wilbur's been pretty straight with me since that one little interlude we had,” Bob went on. “Maybe I’m too soft, but I don’t like to think he's involved with any really bad business.”

In front of the police station he turned to me. “I believe you about those boots, you know. But he could’ve found ’em on the beach.”

“Then why is he lying about them? Because he is, Bob, and that means he's involved somehow.”

A carful of kids went by, the driver snapping a lighter. Bob didn’t let his eyes follow them, but he noticed.

“I said that I didn’t like to think it, not that he couldn’t be. But I’ll tell you one thing, those boots aren’t on his place now. Mapes has some bad qualities, but bein’ a damn fool was never among ’em, that I’ve noticed.”

In other words, even if Bob got officially involved— beyond, I mean, looking for the body of an accidental drowning victim or possibly a suicide—at this point it wouldn’t do any good.

“Those boots,” he said, “are long gone.”

“Yeah. Okay. Thanks for riding with me.”

“Thanks for the doughnuts.” He got out, straightened his shoulders against the effects of a sleepless night, and strode toward the little storefront building that was Eastport's police department headquarters. Then I remembered.

“Hey, Bob. The other one you said pays right for people's things, Mapes's sister?” The idea of his having sprung from a human family at all seemed unlikely, but I guessed he must have.

Bob turned, a pen and a notebook already in his hand: noting the plate number of the car with the lighter-flicking kid in it.

“Oh, yeah. Lives up on Hart Road? Big old California-lookin’ house, used to be a lot of old back-to-the-land hippies there?”

The other shoe dropped. “Clamshell Cove.” I knew the place.

“Mapes's sister,” Bob said, tucking away his notebook, “she only dabbles in antiques, though. Mainly, she builds musical instruments. From around Boston, originally. Name's … Tarnation. What the heck is it, again?”

I knew that, too, drat the luck. Charmian had mentioned it.

That wasn’t why I recalled it so clearly, though. It’d been on my mind in another context entirely.

But I let Bob have the satisfaction of snapping his fingers, anyway. “Got it,” he said. “Lillian Frey.”

“Funny how his clothes keep showing up, but not him,” said Wade Sorenson. He was disassembling a Remington shotgun in his workshop in the upstairs ell. It was the only modern place in the house and I came here sometimes when I needed to see what a shipshape building looked like: square corners, level floors.

“Yeah.” I sat on a milk crate by the steps leading up to the storage area. Wade had installed overhead lighting, benches for the big tools that did the metal-grinding and stock-cutting procedures, and the new Lyman shotgun-shell reloading press.

“But the thing is this,” I said. “Bob Arnold hasn’t got a clue how cutthroat the antiques business can be. And he's got a soft spot, for some reason, for that pack rat Wilbur Mapes.”