Unhinged (28 page)

But the battle didn’t come.

“It’s BPV,” he said. “Benign positional vertigo. You jolted your inner ear the other day when you fell.” He picked my chart up again, glanced through it, and tucked it under his arm.

“You can get it from a sinus infection, too, but yours is traumatic. It’ll go away if you don’t coddle it. Don’t drive till it’s been gone for two weeks, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” I repeated. Relief surged through me. When you are being examined by a brain surgeon, you can’t help knowing he could flap up the top of your skull if he wanted to.

Or if you needed him to. But: “Uh-huh. Let’s just get a last set of vitals—”

Vital signs: pulse, temperature, and blood pressure.

“—and then you can go home.”

For a moment I thought the hangover from the Benadryl he’d pumped into me had me hearing things. “Huh? You mean . . . I can just leave? Just like that?”

He turned from the door and I could tell from his eyes that his thoughts were already miles away.

“Jake, you had a bad allergic reaction. But we’ve reversed it—you didn’t require resuscitation, that was just a precaution—and I expect no further trouble. The dizziness . . . as I’ve told you before, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. In your case I’m sure of it. Go home.”

That phrase, again:
simple
. Victor went on as he noted my expression, misinterpreted it.

“Call me if the nausea from the dizziness gets worse, I’ll write you for something stronger than the Benadryl I’m sending along. But I warn you, the hangover’ll be worse, too.”

Phooey. I already felt as if I’d drunk half a gallon of Old Peculiar. Not nearly as peculiar, though, as when I’d come in.

“Victor,” I said. My attitude was less combative, suddenly. Much less. It would be a shame, I thought, if the clinic lost Victor.

But he was gone before I could even thank him.

Riding home, I
felt shaky and uncertain, which I guessed was normal considering that I had just missed being fitted either for a pair of wings or a little pitchfork.

“Darn it, I’d actually started getting used to myself with green eyes.”

Ellie whizzed us down Route 1 through Robbinston and Red Beach, in and out of pine groves. “Never mind,” she said. “Victor may be a twit but his advice on that particular topic is right on.”

He’d forbidden them, said that with my immune system revved from the allergy attack I might react badly to contact lenses.

“Don’t even dream of putting them in until you’re completely better,” Ellie decreed.

“I guess,” I sighed reluctantly. “I really wanted to help Maggie somehow, though. The poor thing, all the word games she’s played with Sam, waiting for him to really notice her. But she’s not getting through to him. Not the way she wants to, at least.”

It had been that way with Sam’s father, also: You can want all you want but you just can’t get there from here. “And now my
blue
eyes look . . . I don’t know. Strange. Unfamiliar. But I guess that’s probably normal, too.”

A wave of tiredness washed over me, and I was cold. Ellie switched the heater on and I huddled shivering in the passenger seat as we made the turn onto Route 190.

“You didn’t call Wade, did you?”

“No, of course not.” Off the causeway to our left spread the pastel-blue expanse of Passamaquoddy Bay, a big black-and-orange container ship plowing massively in toward the freight terminal. Beyond, Deer Island lay between blue water and sky like the sweep of a green paintbrush.

“I figured I’d only tell him something if I needed to,” she added.

So Wade hadn’t been scared unnecessarily. Like I said, Ellie didn’t panic. “Thanks.”

We passed the City of Eastport sign, daffodils massed around it. “Wyatt’s not our problem either, is he?” Ellie asked.

“No. I wish he were.” The houses and church spires of town spread before us. “It’s just too big a stretch, him hurting Samantha to cover killing Harriet and that tourist. It’s like Wilma, you could
make
it fit, but . . .”

“But you’d be forcing it,” Ellie agreed. “And when we found him he didn’t look as if he was doing any evidence cleanup, did he? Just sitting there.”

“Making plans for his next move, I’ll bet, now that Tim’s sniffing around. But that isn’t a crime. Or for him no more criminal than usual.”

We turned onto Water Street. The bustling business district with its old redbrick and wood-frame buildings, the shops with their snapping banners and the swept-clean sidewalks shone watercolor bright in the afternoon sun.

Beyond, wooden boats bobbed in the harbor, the tide moving slowly up the dark-brown pilings of the fish pier. “And have you noticed how calm things have been, lately? Except for just now, of course,” Ellie added. “But that
was
an accident.”

When my house came into view I gazed at it with gratitude through a swim of ridiculous tears, just happy to be alive. My romp through the emergency room, along with the drugs and fluids that had been pumped into me, had roiled my emotions up. Nobody home, thank god.

“I should come in with you.” Ellie pulled into the driveway.

“Uh-uh.” I got out, closed the door firmly. Mr. Ash’s truck wasn’t here, either, nor any vehicles of the guys on his crew. “I’ll be fine.”

A sigh escaped me. “But Ellie, our suspects are evaporating. Roy, Wyatt, Wilma, even Fran . . . she’s a tough little hustler, but you know darned well she didn’t commit murder. Just the idea of being caught on a probation violation scared her to death . . . she tries to be a hard case, but she’s too much like Roy. She doesn’t have the nerve to be a killer. And right now, I just want to get some sleep. We can talk about it later. Okay?”

Wade would be back soon; he wouldn’t have gone far until he heard the results of my medical visit.

“Okay,” she gave in. “But I’m going to call you in a little while. And you’d better answer the phone or the next thing I’ll be calling is an ambulance.”

She put the car into reverse, checked the rearview mirror. I stood a moment, watching her go, feeling the chilly breeze shift with the storm yet to come, riffling the spring-green leaves. Then I dug my keys out, took a deep breath of the fresh salt air, and let myself into the house.

Inside, late afternoon sunlight lay in gold bars on the old kitchen floor. Monday’s nails clicked in the hall, alarming me for a moment until I realized the polyurethane must be dry now. Curled atop the refrigerator, Cat Dancing eyed me with her usual mixture of mischief and scorn.

I pulled off the jacket Wade had pressed on me before I left and replaced it with my cardigan, still on the radiator. I’d already decided to put the Bisley back in the pocket and leave it there, but at the moment I couldn’t summon up enough energy even to open the compartment behind the mantel, much less lift the big weapon, load it, or—god forbid—fire the thing.

Then I saw the three notes on the kitchen table: one from Sam. He and Maggie were out on the sailboat for a final spin before the storm put them in port for a while. One from Wade: he was at the Federal Marine office, would be back soon.

And one from Mr. Ash. I looked out the kitchen window. The door leading from the cellar to the yard stood open; I made a mental note—if this kept up, I was going to have to get some sort of Rolodex for my brain—to hook the hall door leading to the cellar. Monday padded over to me, her tail wagging anxiously.

“That’s okay, girl,” I whispered. “Everything’s fine. Go on and lie down. We’ll go out later.”

Uncertainly she obeyed, circling in her dog bed, while Cat yawned expressively as if to say human affairs were a terrific bore and by the way, where’s dinner?

Then I read Mr. Ash’s note again:
I left you something.

Another home-repair gift, I supposed; more insulation or a gravity-defying ladder. But just now I didn’t care: too tired, too discouraged. I put the kettle on for tea, walked past the hall door before I remembered to go back and hook it, then trudged upstairs to wash.

The shock-sweat clinging to me was noxious, bitter as old grease. The spot on my arm where the IV had been ached, and the way I felt inside was worse; jangled and debilitated in the extreme.

The notes also reminded me unhappily of Jemmy Wechsler; I’d sent an e-mail thanking him for his help. He should have replied, letting me know the e-mail address I had for him was still good. But he hadn’t.

And on top of it all I felt like such a fool. Whoever thinks money experts must be smart doesn’t know me very well, I thought. Running around chasing down harebrained notions and hitting dead ends . . .

But Ellie always swears most problems can be helped by applying enough good hot soap and water, so I applied them and as promised did feel somewhat improved afterwards. A shower would have been better but I didn’t have the ambition for that.

Besides, I couldn’t take the Bisley into the shower, and now that I was awake I intended to head right back downstairs for it.

Later,
I promised the shampoo bottle, splashing water onto my face. Then, glancing into the mirror over the sink, I was hit with a realization so shattering it made me stagger:

Blue eyes
.

I gripped the porcelain. The face in the mirror was not the
lean, angular one I usually saw there. It was plumpish and puffy with fatigue, eyes made round by anxiety and remnants of shock. It was a child’s face staring from the mirror.

A child with blue eyes, as they had been long ago on the day when a young cop pulled her from the smoking ruins of a town house explosion. Lifted her, carried her from the blasted wreckage of bricks and boards, gazing earnestly into her face and talking all the way, telling that child the big lie, the one all children are told: that everything would be fine.

Gazing into her eyes, which had been blue. Not green. Harry Markle had remembered everything about that day, more than I had. He’d been an adult, or nearly so; very young, then.

Yet when we’d remembered it together, I’d been wearing green contact lenses. Thin, invisible, not brilliant green but a nice, normal, everyday shade of eye color. To look at them, you’d have thought I was born with those green eyes.

But I hadn’t been. I turned off the faucet without looking at it, keeping my gaze fixed on the mirror and the upstairs hall behind me. From where I stood I could see the newel post of the stairway balustrade, and some of the balusters. Sam had taken his sling off, replacing it with the red bandanna, and tossed the gauze one onto the newel post. Beyond, the oblong panes of the upstairs hall window shone golden with afternoon.

Nothing moved. The house was silent. Wade was at the terminal, Sam was out on the water and Ellie was at home. All quiet on the downeast front.

I decided I could still get downstairs, to the Bisley in its hiding place in the kitchen mantel. As I reached the upstairs landing, the kettle I’d put on began to whistle piercingly.

And stopped. Someone had taken it off the flame.

Wade?
I wanted to call, but the word choked in my throat. No toenail-clickety dance of joy from Monday, no grudging meow from Cat.

Just footsteps padding slowly over the fresh polyurethane in the hall, soles squeaking on the new surface. He was already looking up the stairs as he came into view, his face divided into moving rectangles by the white-painted balusters.

“Hey,” he began. “Hope you don’t mind. I heard the kettle, thought you’d forgotten it, so I came through the cellar door and turned the burner off.”

But the cellar door had been hooked shut. “Harry,” I said, amazed I was able to make any sound at all. “Or . . . not.” He’d already seen it in my expression, that I knew.

He smiled, a little shamefaced.
You got me
. “Yeah. Not.”

He put a foot on the bottom step. All the possible actions I might take sped through my mind, all useless.

“All those accidents,” I said. “You engineered them.” The emergency fire-escape ladder in the bedroom closet, I thought desperately . . . but he’d be on me before I could get it deployed.

“They were to reinforce the notion that
you
were a victim. To keep the ‘someone’s after Harry and his friends’ idea alive.”

The attic . . . maybe I could make it there ahead of him but I couldn’t keep him out. I’d just be a sitting duck higher up off the ground than before.

“Victims,” Harry said, “are so unlikely to be villains. But I was amazed, myself, that being a victim worked so
well
.”

Yeah, just dandy. “Memory,” I said, trying to buy time, but for what? “Memory is a funny thing. I guess I should have known when you remembered so
much
.”

He grinned lazily. “And I should have known you’d figure it out sooner or later.” He shifted his weight confidently.

“Sooner, now, though,” he said. “Those print checks on me’ll come back any minute. I had it fixed so I’d get a heads-up if someone ran me. I made sure Harry’s forwarding address and phone were always mine, just in case of something like that.”

“Harry’s dead?” But the NYPD didn’t know it; probably no one did. And at the NYPD, Harry Markle was still one of their own. So they’d alerted the old cop, as a courtesy, that someone was running his fingerprints. And whoever this guy at the foot of my stairs was, once Bob began checking on him he’d known his time here was running out fast.

“What happened to the real Harry?” I asked.

He hadn’t forgotten that child’s blue eyes. He’d never seen them. And who else would know so much about Harry Markle
and
the killer Harry had been tracking except . . .

A shudder went through me as I understood the rest of it and how thoroughly I had been fooled.

How fatally. “When,” I asked, “did you kill Harry?”

Small shrug: “Just before I left New York. No one missed him, believe me. Living in a room full of old clippings and notes, all his old cases. Going over and over them, that’s all he did. And going through a fifth a day. By then, Harry wasn’t the kind of guy anyone would miss.”