Repair to Her Grave (21 page)

At night, in the dark, the house seems to breathe in and out very slowly, as if animated by the myriad lives that have been lived in it, all the sleeping and waking. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Dad. It's me. Don’t be afraid.’ ”

“And he said? Was he drunk?”

Another silence. Then:

“I don’t think so. And he said, ‘I love you, Junior.’ Nobody ever called me that, see. Even he didn’t, unless he really wanted me to listen up. I still don’t know why I didn’t get up, give him his bed. But somehow I figured he didn’t want it, so I didn’t. I just went back to sleep.”

“That's nice.” I wondered what the point of this was.

“Next morning, there was a cop car outside our house.”

Oh.

“Dad,” Wade said, “had been killed the night before. Beat up out in front of that bar in Derry.”

A longer silence.

“Course, I guess I could have dreamed the whole thing, and him dying just that night could’ve been a coincidence. It's not like I’ve got proof of anything.”

Right. Me neither.

“So you ask me if I believe in ghosts, and I don’t know what to say,” Wade went on quietly.

He will do this, too: tell you a story suddenly, like a boy shyly offering you some small found treasure, a robin's egg or a bit of beach glass, after a long time during which you had begun thinking he might never tell you anything more of himself at all.

“I guess sometimes we make too much of old stories,” Wade finished. “Or of feelings. But sometimes …”

His shoulders moved in the dark.

Yeah. Sometimes we don’t.

Much later, in the small hours of the morning, I heard rain begin gurgling in the gutters, muttering in the downspouts. From the window I saw it slanting thickly through the cones of yellow light under the streetlamps, the pale spray gleaming.

I decided to pay a visit to Lillian Frey.

She lived on an old apple farm on the mainland, overlooking Clamshell Cove. The place had been a haven for swarms of young, mostly well-educated but disaffected back-to-the-land enthusiasts of the 1970s, when kids with physics degrees and fancy Manhattan upbringings decided to grow vegetables, haul water, and keep pigs on places that even native Mainers had abandoned as too stony and harsh to provide decent livings.

Some of those kids were so determined to give their wealthy parents the middle finger, they actually succeeded in becoming real farmers. But Lillian hadn’t been one of them. She’d bought the place from a communal religious group that abandoned it to move to Belgium to await the millennium, and at just about the moment when the apocalypse disappointed them by not arriving, Lillian had been razing the old farmhouse which by then had nearly crumbled to sawdust.

In its place, she had built a trilevel cedar structure with windows and decks overlooking the water, planter tubs full of evergreens on the railings, perennial beds all around it. As Bob Arnold said, it looked more like California than Maine.

The rain, so promising the night before, had ended quickly and the fields around the house looked as dry and flammable as ever. A small sign said simply,
FREY

VIOLINS.

As I climbed the cedar stairs to the entrance level, I heard a band saw whining. Another sign by the door told me to
RING BELL
so I did, and the saw's whine cut off a moment later.

“Hi.” Lillian was wearing jeans, a purple, paint-stained T-shirt, and canvas sneakers. Her blond hair was tied with a scrunchy, a few wisps escaping down over her face. Viewed close up, the long scar on the side of her cheek made me wince inwardly.

But not, I hoped, visibly. “I guess you must’ve come about Jill,” she said before I could explain the real reason for my visit. I’d made a few stops in town before coming out here, and Teddy Armstrong down at La Sardina had confirmed what he’d told Bob: that Jonathan Raines had been in the place just before he went off the dock.

And as if Bob's comments hadn’t been impetus enough for me, Teddy had also said—in answer to my direct question, or he’d never have mentioned it—that Lillian had been in there, too.

“I want to apologize for whatever behavior she's been up to,” Lillian said as she led me into the bright, spare kitchen. It was furnished with the bare minimum of appliances, no clutter on the granite-topped counters, no dishes in the brushed-aluminum sink. A wall of windows looked out onto a field of gnarled apple trees and from there to a vast expanse of blue water.

Lillian put a blue-glazed teakettle on the gas stove and lit a match. A Siamese cat stalked in, stared imperiously at me for an instant, and stalked out again. Lillian's hand trembled the faintest bit, lighting the gas burner.

“I’m sure if I were Sam's mother I wouldn’t appreciate Jill's ways,” she went on. “I don’t appreciate them myself. But she's angry. I just won a custody battle with her father, much against her wishes. I’m hoping she's going to settle down.”

Her voice was taut; despite her effort at hospitality, I sensed the strain she was under. It couldn’t be easy, having a daughter who fought with you right in the middle of the street with everyone watching. The scene of a few mornings earlier when Jill had confronted her at the crafts fair—with, to make things worse, a photographer around, for heaven's sake—was still fresh in my mind, as I was sure it was in Lillian's.

Also, there was a pile of what looked like bills in the cubby of a desk by the window, and it struck me that keeping this place running probably piled up a sizable nut each month. I wondered how she managed.

Meanwhile, though, I thought I’d better hear the rest of what she had to say. You never knew; Jill might end up being—perish the thought—my daughter-in-law.

“Custody battle,” I repeated, puzzled. “Isn’t Jill a little old for that?”

Lillian eyed me knowingly. “She's sixteen. She just thinks she's ten years older. And smarter than everyone else, of course. Thinks she knows it all.”

She’d had me fooled, all right. In fact, I was stunned. “So she doesn’t want to be here?”

Lillian shook her head. “To put it mildly.”

Close up, she was even more fit and tanned than she looked from a distance, with cheekbones that were to die for. Even with the deep scar running angrily from the end of her eyebrow to her jawline, you could see how Jill got the good looks she traded so shamelessly on.

The scar itself, though was deep and seriously disfiguring. Once you got talking to her, you kind of forgot about it.

But if I’d been her, I’d have been shy of having my picture taken, too. She put mugs on the table and filled a teapot from the kettle. The spicy fragrance of Constant Comment tea floated into the air.

“She was living in Boston with her dad, not going to school. Not doing anything but hanging out. That's his lifestyle, you see.”

She pronounced the word with an ironic twist. The tea was strong and delicious. “You didn’t approve,” I said. “That's why the custody fight.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me until now that Jill was young enough to be fought over that way. Her self-possessed manner was indeed that of a twenty-year-old, going on forty-something. “Even so,” I went on, “she's got a car. Why doesn’t she just leave?”

Lillian sighed. “Jill's dad is a loser.” She glanced up at me. “And not just because he's my ex. I was nuts about him, and I would have stayed that way. But it's hard to stay romantic about a guy who keeps going back to jail for the same dumb stunts over and over. Fraud, mostly. Arts-type fraud. And theft.”

She got up. “He's completely irresponsible and unpredictable and she can’t stay with him if he won’t have her. Which,” she added, “he won’t, now that he knows what it's like. It cramps his style. He never really wanted custody, just a fight with me. And Jill has no money, no other friends to go to.”

“So she's stuck.”

Lillian nodded tiredly. “She stayed with my brother for a while, but that didn’t work out, either.”

I felt again that she was putting up a good front, but the circles under her eyes, her stiff posture, and the harsh control in her voice all said she was a woman on the ragged edge.

She rubbed her neck, trying to get the tension out of it, then rallied with an effort. “Want to see my workshop? I’ve got some wood cooking up there, I want to check on it.”

What I wanted was to go, quickly; despite the sweet scent of the tea, the air here was thick with anxiety and anger. But I wasn’t finished with her.

“Sure.” Carrying my mug, I followed her out a sliding door onto the deck, where the breeze whipped my hair wildly, then up a flight of open stairs to another doorway.

“Wow,” I said when I got inside. The studio was a single open room, high-ceilinged and, like the rest of the place, almost fully walled with triple-glazed, enormous windows. It was like being in a fire tower, high above the treetops and the cove.

But in this tower, every bit of space was cunningly designed for a woodworker who despised clutter. There was a drill press, a planer, the band saw I’d heard running, and the nail gun I’d seen her using on Water Street at the crafts fair.

“Lots of tools.” There was a device for heating, softening, and bending sheets of wood into shape for the violins’ sides, molds and templates for the tops and sound holes. Racks of chisels, awls, knives, and wood shavers, plus dozens of other tools whose names and uses I had no idea of, were neatly arranged.

What there wasn’t was any mess whatsoever. Sawdust had been swept into a single pile so tiny and neat, you got the feeling it didn’t dare go anywhere. And I noticed no computers or other automated stuff; nothing to draw or cut shapes out of the wood except knives and pencils. Everything here was done the old way, by hand and by heart.

Lillian peered into a saucepan steaming on a small hot plate. In it were several thin sticks. “I’m boiling them so I can shape them,” she explained. “But they’re not done yet.”

“Look,” I said, refreshed by the sense of tradition up here, and by the change in atmosphere, “I didn’t come to talk about Jill. I’m not crazy about her and Sam's relationship, but…”

Now that I knew how young she really was, the idea of her victimizing my baby … Well. The whole thing didn’t seem so one-sided anymore.

Lillian looked curiously at me. “Really? I thought you’d come out here to demand I put my daughter in leg irons. Sam's always seemed so … I don’t know. Just so clean-cut.”

“Lillian, he's a big boy now.”
And he's his father's son,
I added silently. Which could turn out to be as troublesome as Jill being her father's daughter. But that wasn’t Lillian's problem.

Meanwhile, once I’d gotten used to the fresh smell of raw wood, I smelled something else: gun oil. It was so incongruous in these surroundings, I thought at first I was mistaken.

But nothing else smells quite like it, sweet and clean and a little oily. Then I spotted the familiar orange-and-red-striped box: Winchester.

It was tucked on a high shelf, above the chisels and router blades. I was so surprised, I reached up and grasped the rolled rag lying next to the box and brought it down before I realized how rude I was being.

When I turned, Lillian was watching me bemusedly. “Go ahead,” she said with a wry smile.

“Sorry.” I unwrapped the rag. “I just… it wasn’t what I was expecting to find here, that's all.”

The object in the rag wasn’t what I was expecting, either. But I’d been around Wade and his antique gun catalogs enough to recognize the thing: a 1905 Colt .45 automatic with blued steel and a checkered walnut grip, in what looked like mint condition.

“It came with some other stuff from an estate sale,” she said. “Go ahead, check it out.”

Well, you can’t live in a house with a gun professional and not learn a few things, including gun safety. Releasing the empty magazine, I removed it and pointed the muzzle safely, then pulled the slide back to check: no cartridge in the chamber. Markings stamped into the side of the slide read:
Automatic Colt/Calibre 45 rimless smokeless.

Meaning the ammunition in the Winchester box. I released the slide again, let the hammer down slowly, and snapped the magazine back into the weapon. “Jesus, Lillian, this thing's a cannon.”

And not locked up, either, I noticed.

She shrugged. “If I’d gone to buy one on purpose I’d have got something smaller, I suppose. But it's not that bad to fire.”

Yeah, if you were used to getting kicked by a mule. I guessed the ear-protection headpiece on a hook by the band saw was used for more than woodworking. I wrapped the weapon again, put it back up on the shelf. Like so much else I’d been running into in the past few days, it was none of my business.

“Jill doesn’t know it's here,” Lillian added, reading my thoughts.

In my experience, kids know everything. For one thing, they start out so helpless, they pretty much have to be supernaturally perceptive about what their parents are up to, just to feel like they can survive.

Or Sam had been that way, anyway. “If you say so,” I told Lillian. “You ever want a lockbox for it, Wade will sell you one at cost.”

Hell, he’d give her one if she asked, and so would I. But she didn’t. There was the tiniest awkward moment as she sensed my unease. I was thinking about the other thing that could make a fellow fall off the end of a dock: a gunshot wound.

But someone would have heard it. A sound from downstairs made Lillian flinch, but it was only a cat, its cross-eyed face appearing a moment later at the top of the stairway.

“Christ,” Lillian said, letting a breath out. “I’m so wired up, I jump at shadows. I still keep expecting he's going to show up and grab her, maybe clobber me to get at her. Jill's dad, I mean.”

Jumping at shadows is not a trait I like seeing in a person who has a weapon. But I said nothing.

She gazed out the big window. “Or maybe he would smack me around a little just because he feels like it. To show me who's boss, you know? It wouldn’t,” she added, “be the first time.”

She put her hand to her face. “He gave me this. Box-cutter. He was drunk.” A bitter laugh; I thought she was going to say more. But then she straightened abruptly.

“Let's get out of the poor-little-me groove,” she pronounced as if instructing herself, and from her wry look I could see she was not only talented; she was tough and smart, too. Maybe she was on the ragged edge right this minute, but the decision to survive was one she made every day.