Unhinged (12 page)

Yet.

In the chilly
darkness Ellie and I turned toward downtown and La Sardina, Eastport’s Mexican restaurant. Its cheery lights and music plus a funky decor of huge potted plants, hanging pinatas, and candles jammed into Kahlúa bottles were just what I needed.

Something else I needed was there, too: information, in the prodigious brain of
Quoddy Tides
reporter Timothy Rutherford. Not that it came free, mind you. But I was prepared to trade.

“Drinking alone again, I see.” I slid onto a stool at the bar beside the one Tim regularly occupied right up till closing.

He glanced at me in the mirror behind the bar, taking in my fading bruises. “Hey, just the woman I wanted to see. Hi, Ellie.”

“Hi, Tim.” Ellie ordered beer for both of us, and another orange soda for Tim. An Eastport native, word had it that in the early ’90s he’d drunk himself off one big-city news desk after another, boom-boom-boom like falling downstairs. Then about a year ago he’d come home to Eastport, sober but with his tail between his legs.

“Little excitement around the old town, hey?” he observed with a nod of thanks as I paid for the drinks. Nowadays Tim could’ve had any of his old jobs back. His memory alone—the closest to being truly photographic that I’d ever seen—was a treasure.

But as he said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Five feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, he lived in an apartment over the dime store, belonged to every social and civic group in Eastport, and spent most evenings here at La Sardina gathering information, storing it for future use in that amazingly absorbent brain of his.

“Seems like you two are right in the thick of it as usual.” Tim stroked his small ginger beard thoughtfully. “I see you’ve been up on a ladder again. But is Wade okay? And Sam?”

Tim’s number was one of those on my caller ID at home; he wanted details. But now that he had me in his sights he knew better than to push hard immediately. In Eastport, pushing for a story was an almost guaranteed method of not getting it.

Or not getting it right. “Yeah,” I said. “Wade’s good. Sam, too. And I’ll tell you all about it . . .” I drank some of my beer. “Later. If you’ll tell me a couple things right now.”

Tim nodded agreeably. Behind him the jukebox blared into a cover of “Here Comes the Sun,” rendered by someone who should’ve let that number alone. I saw Tim’s lips move. “Shoot.”

“Harriet Hollingsworth.” The music was convenient. I didn’t want what I was about to say all over town in the morning.

“Those letters she wrote to the
Tides,
” I went on.

Tim nodded. “Any of ’em interesting?” I asked. By now what
would
be all over town was the news that her body had been found.

Tim made the connection, shook his head in regret. “C’mere.” I bent my head nearer to his.

“I thought of that myself,” he shouted into my ear. “Went to the office, see if anyone kept ’em. Like for a joke, anything. I didn’t find any, not that I really needed to.”

Because he would remember. Word for word, probably. I looked a question at him. “Nah,” he answered, “we didn’t keep ’em around routinely. Had a Harriet Hollingsworth ceremonial ashtray.”

Darn. “Burned them?”

He nodded.

“Well, but do you
remember
anything that . . .”

Because I was already pretty sure, now: Harriet’s letters didn’t have anything to do with her death. But I needed to be
sure
sure.

“Nope,” Tim confirmed. “I know what you’re thinking. Could be, someone wanted to stop that little leak at its source.”

My turn to nod. The noise in here was astonishing, clatter of plates and din of conversation competing with the jukebox.

“But I read her letters when they came,” Tim said. “People talked at first like they were full of hot secrets.” It was a notion that Harriet herself had made sure got all over town. “Adultery!” he said. “Thieving out of the church collection!”

He sipped orange soda. The jukebox went off. Timmy modulated his volume to an unoverhearable murmur without missing a beat.

“But they were all about who didn’t rake leaves off a lawn, whose garbage cans sat on the curb till the next day,” he said.

Tame stuff. “And this became common knowledge, did it?”

Ellie looked vindicated. She’d said all along no one took Harriet seriously. But that was before her corpse was found sealed up in a wall.

“Yeah,” Tim confirmed sadly. “Too bad. I’d’ve loved finding a story there. But as a motive for murder, they’re just not on.” Then he brightened. “You mentioned a trade?”

“Just a minute.” Most of the beer had vanished from my tall glass and the unaccustomed sudden rush of alcohol had relaxed the trap- doors on my brain cells, letting another question escape.

“Lian Ash,” I said slowly.

Tim grinned. “Keep free-associating like that, I’ll have to switch you over to orange soda, too. But okay, what about Ash?”

Ellie checked her wristwatch. “Listen, I’d better go home. George said he’d call. He’s not bringing Sam until they kick him out of Maggie’s room. But if I’m not there to answer, he’s going to be worried.”

I looked down; my beer was gone and I definitely didn’t want another one. But I didn’t want to go home to that big, empty house, either. Meanwhile, Tim sat there waiting for two things:

First, to find out what I would tell him about the recent run of accidents around my place. I had offered to trade, after all, and I could see he intended to hold me to the promise.

And second, to learn why I was curious about the old mason who was working on my house, in case there was a story in it. I followed Ellie outside and Tim followed me. His newshound’s nose was practically twitching.

“I’ll be over later, after I talk to George,” she called to me over her shoulder.

“Okay.” I turned back to Tim.

All I wanted was to confirm what Mr. Ash had said: that he was a fairly recent arrival to the area, one with no interesting history that Tim in his chronically curious way might’ve learned and remembered. Because . . .

The question floated up startlingly: How
had
Mr. Ash known I hated heights? Probably there was a perfectly simple, harmless answer. But until I knew it, and
knew
it to be the truth, I couldn’t have him in the house anymore.

Not with all that was going on around here. Then Tim startled me again, recalling even more than I had expected. “Yeah, I roomed with him in Machias,” he said. “Two years back.”

Surprise must have shown on my face; Tim misinterpreted it. “Well, not in the
same
room,” he added. “Same house, though.”

“Go on in if I’m not home,” I called to Ellie. She shot me a look but made no comment as she strode away.

“So you knew him?” I questioned Tim. This didn’t jibe with what Mr. Ash had told me.

“Nope. Not really. But I recognized him when he showed up here. Knew his face, he knew mine.”

“Tim,” I said, waving at his car parked at the curb, a tiny, shiny-new red Volkswagen bug. The twinkling strings of Christmas lights that La Sardina kept on in its windows all year reflected on its grille. “Do you feel like taking a ride?”

Tim looked at me, at the car, and at my face again. My own tumble from the ladder was no big news; as I may have mentioned, I’m not the surest-footed person on the planet. But he badly wanted the inside story on Wade and Sam. And if there was anything interesting to learn about Lian Ash, or anyone else in town, he wanted that too.

And Sam wouldn’t be home for at least another couple of hours. Tim stepped to the VW and opened the passenger door with a flourish.

“Madam, your chariot awaits.”

Probably it was
a goose chase. Probably I had no earthly business heading forty miles away to Machias with the express purpose of hauling some poor landlady from a well-earned evening of TV and knitting, to quiz her about an old tenant. But something about Lian Ash just wasn’t sitting right with me.

“I was still pretty shaky,” Tim said about his own time at the rooming house. “Wanted to get my legs solidly under me, so I stayed away a little while longer. Like circling the airport a few times before landing, you know? If I was going to crash again I didn’t want to do it in Eastport,” he explained. “Then, when people assumed I’d come home straight from New York, I let them. No harm, no foul.”

Maybe Lian Ash had done much the same. But if so, why? He hadn’t just let me assume something, either; he had flat out said he’d come to Eastport from Portland, not from Machias. And—how
had
he known anything about me?

Tim downshifted smoothly into the speed zone at Pleasant Point, keeping the speedometer carefully under thirty-five until the houses thinned to trees and fields again.

“So, do you want to unburden yourself in return?” he asked. “Put me in the picture a little? Or am I supposed to put the cab fare on your tab, too?”

I gave myself a hard mental shake. That beer had been a bad idea. “Okay, the thing is this. I don’t know what’s going on, and if I tell you all I
don’t
understand, it’ll take a year.”

He waited as an eighteen-wheeler highballed past us at the intersection of Route 1, then turned left onto the highway.

“So I’ll fill you in later, when I do. Meanwhile, why don’t you tell
me:
What
do
you know about Lian Ash?”

“Okay.” Tim passed the eighteen-wheeler expertly on the last straightaway before the road narrowed and curved into the trees, leaving the big rig’s headlights fading into the darkness behind us. “Like I said, I lived in the same house as him.”

He drove the little car fast and well, accelerating out of the curves but with no flashy, dangerous-feeling fanfare. “I said good morning to him a few times, that was about the extent of it. Year or so ago, I moved up to Eastport. Not long after that, he did, too,” Tim added.

“But not because
you
moved here, surely.” A truck blew by us in a rush of wind and a billow of road dust.

“Oh, no. Guys get on their feet, they go out on their own,” Tim replied. “Get their own place in Machias or come to Eastport or Calais. You stay in the area, there’s not many other choices.”

True. After Machias, the next biggish place was Ellsworth, another sixty miles south. “So it was like graduating. From the rooming house, I mean.”

He nodded. “I started seeing him in La Sardina. Not often. He shows up, has a coffee or soda, pays and leaves. He isn’t,” Tim added dryly, “a big socializer.”

So I’d gathered. “He told me he moved here just last winter.” Which was a few months ago, not a year: another small discrepancy.

Tim shrugged. “Yeah, well, I’m just reporting what I know. Although since we’re talking about him now I guess maybe you know more. Or think you do, you’re all anxious to check it out.” He glanced at me. “Or are you luring me somewhere for immoral purposes?”

From anyone else the comment might’ve made me nervous. I was not used to driving around at night with men other than Wade. But Tim’s Jimmy Olson grin took the worry out of being close.

“I realize this sounds nuts,” I answered. “But with all that’s happened . . . it’s small stuff, probably meaningless. Still, I want to check out the rooming house and talk to the landlady.”

Tim made
Twilight Zone
theme-song noises. He was a sarcastic little bugger, another reason I liked him.

“Yeah, yeah,” I conceded. “Bush-league snooping. And I really hope I
don’t
find out anything bad about him. He seems so decent.”

“But you asked him the equivalent of a straight question and he gave you a crooked answer and that makes you think maybe there’s more to the story, so you want to go after it.”

He braked smoothly. Deer stood in the road, unfazed by our appearance, a female and two fawns, mild-eyed.

“Come on, Mom, get ’em off the freeway,” Tim said. And when they’d moseyed calmly into the brush:

“People lie for all kinds of reasons, Jake. Doesn’t mean they’re bad, just that they think what they’re being asked is nobody else’s business.”

“Yeah. That’s possible, too. But in the context . . .” My ears were ringing hard from the too-fast beer and suddenly I realized just how ridiculous this idea was.

“Or maybe I’m just drunk,” I finished.

Tim didn’t comment, taking the turns south of Whiting as if we were on a track on the NASCAR circuit. Chilly darkness whizzed past, broken by glittering tidal inlets, pointed outlines of firs pasted on them as if cut from black paper with sharp scissors.

Then, just as I thought he’d decided he was humoring me but nothing more, he spoke again.

“The context being that Sam crashed the car, Wade nearly got his head blown off, that dancer’s dead, and a well-known missing Eastport crackpot has just been found walled up in a cellar.”

I let a breath out gratefully. Coming out of the hills, the road curved sharply across the long, low bridge leading into the county seat of Machias.

“Yeah,” I told Tim. “Thanks. That’s exactly it. And it’s making me nervous.”

Tim just nodded. His career rise had been meteoric, his fall just as fast, so the story went. Nowadays it seemed he wasn’t in a hurry about much of anything but this road. But he was quick on the uptake, and the fact that he wasn’t laughing at an eighty-mile round-trip spurred on by little more than a beer-fueled impulse made me feel a little better.

“So you’ll tell me about this once you’ve got it all worked out?” he asked.

He slowed over the causeway that spanned the Machias River, took the right-hand fork in the road past Helen’s Restaurant in Machias. Visions of Helen’s famous pie danced in my head but I was on a mission.

“If I get it all worked out,” I promised. We climbed a hill, shot past the county courthouse and the lockup adjacent. Lights glowed behind the barred windows. The hapless drug smuggler I’d read about in the
Examiner
was in there somewhere. “You’re sure it’s not too late?”

Maine people, especially the older ones, were early risers. Eight in the evening to them was like midnight to me.