Unhinged (3 page)

Everything was about money. Fallen in love? Break out the prenuptial agreements. Somebody died? The family is frantic not with grief for the dearly departed but because the old skinflint stashed his loot in an unbreakable charitable remainder trust.

Loot being the operative term; most of my clients were so crooked their limousines should’ve flown the Jolly Roger. But I didn’t care, mostly on account of having started out with no loot whatsoever, myself. Until I was a teenager my idea of the lush life was glass in the windows, shoes that fit, and not too much wood smoke from the cracks in the stove chimney, so I could read.

At fifteen I ran from the relatives who were raising me, trusting in my wits and a benevolent universe to pave my path, which is why it was lucky I turned out to
have
a few wits about me. Getting through Penn Station I had the sense I’d have been safer in a war zone; men sidled up to me, crooking their fingers, weaving and crooning. With my pale shiny face and hick clothes, lugging a cheap suitcase and in possession of the enormous sum of twenty dollars, I must’ve looked just like all the other fresh young chickens, ready for plucking.

Fortunately, however, all my cousins had been boys. Something about me must have said I knew precisely where to aim my kneecap, and the nasty men skedaddled. Before I knew it (well, a couple of weeks after I hopped off the Greyhound, actually) I was living in a tenement near Times Square where I’d found the best job a girl from my background could imagine: waitress in a Greek diner.

My feet were swollen, my hair stank of fryer grease, and in the first couple of days I learned thirty new ways to buzz off a lurking creep-o. Meager wages and no tips; Ari’s Dineraunt wasn’t a tipping kind of place, except on the horses. But it was all-you-could-eat and most of the other girls didn’t enjoy the food. Too foreign, they said, turning up their well-nourished noses.

Which left more for me. Short ribs and stuffed grape leaves, moussaka and lamb stew; ordinarily the owner was tighter with a dime than a wino with a pint of Night Train, but for some reason Ari Kazantzakis thought it was funny to watch me shoving baklava into my mouth.

Maybe it was because he had enough family memories of real hunger to know it when he saw it. Ari had a photo of Ellis Island behind the counter, and one of the Statue of Liberty in his fake-wood-paneled office. The tenement where I lived was just like the one his parents had moved into when they got here. Or exactly the one.

Whatever. Anyway, one day Ari’s accountant didn’t show up and the next day they found him floating in the East River, full of bullet holes. Suddenly it wasn’t all sweetmeats and balalaikas at the Dineraunt anymore. More like hand-wringing and sobbing violins until I said I was good at math and that when I wasn’t slinging hash I was taking accounting courses. By then I’d gotten a high school equivalency and talked my way into night school.

I’d figured it was the only way I would ever get near real money, which was true but not in the way I’d expected. Two days later I was carrying a black bag, the one the accountant had been expected to pick up and deliver. That was how I got to know the men at the social club, several of whom later became my clients.

They thought it was hilarious, a skinny-legged girl with big eyes and a down-home accent running numbers money. But they didn’t think it was so funny a few weeks later, when every other runner in the city got nabbed in an organized crime crackdown.

All but me. Like I said, I’d had boy cousins, and if there was anything I was good at besides math, it was evasive action. A few years later when I’d finished school, gotten married, begun solo money management, and had a baby, one of the guys from the social club came to my office.

He wore an Armani suit, a Bahamas tan, and Peruggi shoes. The diamond in his pinky ring was so big you could have used it to anchor a yacht. His expression was troubled; they always were on people with money woes. And this guy’s familiar hound-dog face was the saddest that I had ever encountered. But when he saw me behind my big oak desk, he started to laugh.

Me, too. All the way to the bank.

And there you have it: my own personal journey from rags to riches. Victor’s another story, not such a pleasant one; first came the hideous coincidence of our having the same uncommon last name. At the time, I regarded this happenstance as serendipity. And I’ll admit I was still full of bliss when our son Sam appeared. But soon enough began the late-night calls from lovelorn student nurses whom I informed, at first gently and later I suppose rather cruelly, that the object of their affections was married and had a child. And in the end I got fed up with the city, too.

I’d thrived in it but when Sam hit twelve it began devouring him: drugs. Bad companions. And our divorce half killed him. So I chucked it all and bought an old house that needed everything, on Moose Island seven miles off the coast of downeast Maine.

It’s quiet: church socials and baked-bean suppers, concerts in the band shell on the library lawn when the weather is warm. There’s the Fourth of July in summer, a Salmon Festival in fall, and high school basketball during the school year, of course.

But that’s it. Not much out of the ordinary happens in Eastport.

Unless you count the occasional mysterious bloody murder.

Outside the clinic, Ellie assessed me. “Death
warmed over,” she pronounced. “How do you feel?”

“Oh, great,” I replied, wincing. “If Victor hadn’t X-rayed my neck and shoulder I’d think they were broken, too. But at least I’m not dead. And trust me on this, Ellie: Harriet is.” My ears were still ringing. “And not by her choice, if that is what you’re going to say next. Suicides don’t hide. They
want
people to find them.”

Across the street, a seagull stood like a living weather vane atop the painted brick chimney of Weston House, one of Eastport’s many charming bed-and-breakfasts; 150 years earlier, John James Audubon had stayed there on his way to Newfoundland. Beyond it across the water I could just pick out Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer place on Campobello Island, its emerald lawn sloping down to the rocky shore of the bay. So my eyes still worked, anyway.

“But I still don’t get why you’re so sure,” Ellie said as we crossed the parking lot. Behind a cedar fence, the white shingled spire of the Congregational Church soared loftily to a massive old clock, its face overlooking the grammar school and town hall.

The tower clock chimed twelve as we got into Ellie’s car. I pulled the visor mirror down, very carefully inserted both of the contact lenses, and blinked experimentally.

“Harriet had,” I repeated, “no family to go to. Or anyone to help her that we know of. And we would know, wouldn’t we?”

“Definitely.” Ellie started the car. In Eastport, half your neighbors know who your next of kin is, and if you were born here the other half
are
your next of kin. And since Ellie had been my friend since practically the moment I’d arrived here five years earlier, I knew, too.

Although in Eastport there’s always more to learn, even for Ellie. “But Harriet did have enemies,” I went on, startled again at the change the green lenses made, like the special effects in a horror movie when the vampire’s eyes glow. “The letters she wrote to the paper describing what she saw people doing when she watched through her binoculars,” I added.

Ellie looked unconvinced. “The
Tides
never printed most of her letters.”

“Doesn’t matter.” In Eastport, if a pin drops at one end of town you hear it at the other. “Everyone
knew
about them.”

“No one took her seriously,” Ellie persisted.

But I still thought someone had. “Let’s go to Harriet’s,” I suggested. “Have a look around. First, though, how about a drive downtown? I need a dose of scenery before I become a shut-in.”

She glanced at me. “You’re following Victor’s advice?”

Horrid thought. But crossing the parking lot had taken every ounce of my concentration due to the ripple the ground kept developing under my feet, and the contents of my head were still shifting around inside my skull like wrecking-ball rubble. Back in the bad old days when Sam and his pals couldn’t find other drugs to ingest, they’d huffed paint thinner; now the gongs in my ears rang as if I’d sucked up a whole tin of the varnish remover that was waiting for me back at the house.

“Ellie, I’m not sure I’ve got a choice.”

She nodded silently, turning toward Water Street which is Eastport’s main drag, running parallel to the waterfront, and when we got there she pulled into the parking lot overlooking the fish pier and Passamaquoddy Bay.

When people come to Eastport it’s the first thing they see, that paint-box blue water stretching pristinely from the harbor, dotted with boats. I feasted my eyes on it, breathed in the tart mingled smells of salt, seaweed, and creosote.

Ellie switched off the ignition. “Okay, let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You’re going to lie down, which means you’re an inch or so from falling down.”

“Yup.” Across the water Campobello Island wiggled and glowed like a radium-green snake until I closed my eyes, whereupon it kept doing the very same thing on the backs of my eyelids. I felt sure Victor wouldn’t have regarded this as a good sign. And I was equally sure I wouldn’t tell him.

“I’ll just give it a couple more hours,” I told Ellie. “I only had the wind knocked out of me.”

Or maybe it
was
the lenses. But Maggie was depending on me, and I hated letting her down. I felt our family had let her down enough, one way and another; sometimes I thought witnessing the war between Victor and me had messed Sam up so badly, that rakish grin of his might always promise more than it could deliver.

Out past the pier three fellows on maintenance detail washed windows, swabbed decks, and polished the brightwork on the two biggest boats in Eastport’s working fleet. The
Pleon
and
Ahoskie
were tubby, unglamorous vessels, but Wade made sure the crew kept the tugboats shipshape.

“All right. But you won’t lie to me,” Ellie insisted. “You will tell me if you feel worse and you’ll tell me in time to
do
something about it. Deal?”

“Deal.” In Eastport it’s wise to plan medical emergencies in advance. Even Victor didn’t do major surgery here. If you needed a brain surgeon, you also needed a Life Star helicopter. Which I hoped not to; after Harriet’s house, I planned to get horizontal and stay that way for the rest of the afternoon.

But what somebody said about the best-laid plans went double for me that day. “Look,” Ellie said, pointing, and when I obeyed the world only spun a little bit.

Across Water Street, three young fellows with deep tans and aviator sunglasses were emerging from Wadsworth’s Hardware store. All three wore T-shirts, khaki hiking shorts, and blond hair tied in ponytails. They hustled purposefully up the sidewalk past the old redbrick and wood-frame storefronts comprising Eastport’s business section, their arms loaded with purchases.

“Music-video guys,” Ellie sized them up swiftly.

“What else?” Their boss Roy McCall had moved his stuff into my guest room at seven that morning—the town’s motel rooms and bed-and-breakfasts were all full—and dashed out again to begin work. A music video, I gathered, was a labor-intensive project.

McCall’s three minions strode down Water Street to their rented headquarters in the old Knights of Columbus building and went in, just as a truck with a big square cargo compartment began backing slowly around the corner. In red with black shadows the truck’s lettering read
Top Cat Productions
.

It stopped and a crew began unloading equipment: light bars, microphone booms, film cameras, musical instrument cases, massive amplifiers, and mountains of coiled cable and wires.

“Wow,” Ellie said, easing onto the street away from the truck whose crew was working so fast, the cargo compartment was nearly empty.

Only a wooden crate and some wires remained in it. I craned my neck, pleased to find my vision had cleared. The ringing in both my ears had dropped to a hum, too, though the left one still sounded static-fritzy.

Ellie slowed to speak to Purlie Wadsworth, who stood in the brick arched doorway of the hardware store watching the action. “So what do you think?” she called. “Is Eastport ready to be the command-and-control center of a major music production?”

Because that was what Top Cat had been promising us since back in February. In return for permission to block off streets, erect stage sets, replace public signage, and generally take over the place, Top Cat had promised jobs, paid-in-advance tenancy of several vacant downtown rental properties, local purchase of any and all needed supplies, and a bonanza for every lodging place in the area, this being one reason every one of them was now full.

Purlie nodded contemplatively. A tall, rawboned man with pale hair and a faraway look in his eyes, he didn’t play music in the store or blow it from the sound system of his pickup truck. Nor did you hear it coming from the windows of his house, should you be passing. Once, Purlie had worked in a gravel pit; now peace and quiet was just what the doctor ordered.

Unless something else brought good business into the hardware store. He bounced gently on the heels of his work boots as a pair of Top Cats emerged from the truck’s cargo box. Across the street two more technicians had already set up a big camera.

“What the heck are they doing?” Ellie wondered aloud as the crew threw what looked like a net over the entire truck, tying it at the bottom so that the vehicle was entirely, although loosely, enclosed. The net’s strands glittered metallically in the sun.

“Ready,” one of them called to the camera operators.

“Rolling,” the operator called back.

Which was when I noticed suddenly that except for us, no one was on the street. While we were parked, big yellow sawhorses had been put up at both ends, closing off access. The wooden crate still sat in the truck’s cargo compartment rear, looking oddly familiar; where had I seen one like it before? Also, the plate glass windows of the storefronts all had paper tape plastered across them, as if . . .