Wreck the Halls (6 page)

Still Eastport thrived, bolstered by Prohibition—for a while, Canadian whiskey and the molasses to make it were both liquid gold if you happened to have a boat and a little gumption—and enough good fat codfish to match the miraculous loaves a thousand times. But then came the fishing collapse.

It was bad enough that the herring got fished out, or if you accept the other tale, just decided to go elsewhere in the collective belief that those big, air-breathing creatures upstairs were bad for their health. Worse, suddenly enormous factory boats were vacuuming cod by the metric ton out from under the smaller vessels, processing and freezing them aboard, too, faster than even a species that produces its offspring by spawning could match.

When the fish were gone, the factory boats departed, leaving behind wreckage which consisted principally of the absence of codfish. That was twenty years ago and today the fishing industry is regulated by the same geniuses who
couldn’t (or wouldn’t; this being the commonest theory, in Maine) prevent it from being ruined in the first place.

And I mention this here because it is a part of the reason why:

in Eastport, money is so scarce that as a motive for murder, love has actually managed to replace it in almost all cases, and

with few exceptions any government representative not born and bred right here in Eastport is in danger of receiving a welcome about as warm and penetrable as dry ice.

Both of which facts lurked at the back of my mind that evening as I served a corned beef dinner with baking-powder biscuits, a fresh endive salad with butler's-pantry tomatoes, and a white pear wine from the local winery, Bartlett's, to a group including two thoroughly non-Eastport-born-nor-bred government representatives.

Although on account of their manner I was having trouble believing they were born at all. From the cold-fish attitude they’d both exhibited since they got here, I’d just about come to the conclusion that they’d been spawned, like those cod. But suddenly the pear wine kicked in as I’d been praying it would, and things took a turn for the better.

Sort of. “So,” Cold Fish Number One said with a smile that looked as if he’d practiced it that morning in a mirror, not very skillfully. “Tell us about Merle Carmody.”

Big, blond, and blockily built, with squarish blue eyes like two miniature ice cubes set in his chunky face, he was an investigator for the Maine State District Attorney's office. His lip curling with distaste, he’d already described his drive here from Augusta; through Ellsworth and Dennysville, Cherryfield and Pembroke, past the little houses with their nonstandard windows, jutting stovepipes, and massive woodpiles. I’d done the drive myself, many times:

Out on the porches of those houses in winter would be hung the day's laundry, frozen-stiff sheets, towels, and underwear
on a sagging line strung upwind, if possible, from those stovepipes. Two cars—one up on blocks, one still operable, plus maybe a pickup truck—would be in the driveways. And in the side yards would be parked one or more brand-new snowmobiles, blue-tarp-tented.

It wasn’t the only kind of house he’d have passed on his way here, but it was the kind he’d have noticed. And I could just hear Mr. Cold Fish thinking what he wasn’t quite saying: that people with nonstandard windows and bent stovepipes didn’t deserve new snowmobiles. As if someday on their deathbeds, after a life of hard work, regular church-going, and good citizenship, people should be saying: Well, I might not have had much fun but I sure did balance the living hell out of that checkbook, didn’t I?

So I didn’t like him. But I tried not to show this. “Merle wasn’t a nice man,” I began slowly. I didn’t want to say anything ill-considered or get anywhere near the topic of Faye Anne's own character, either. The object of the evening was to learn if there was a chance of getting Faye Anne off the hook.

Manslaughter, say, instead of murder. And although Merle Carmody had been a brute who couldn’t find a civilized thought with both hands and a road map, from there it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the fact that Faye Anne had married him, hadn’t she, so what did that make her?

Someone who could be made to look bad in front of a jury, that's what. A person who had, as Victor would probably say, bad judgment. It was the first dark color a prosecutor could use to start painting a damning portrait.

Of, as Victor would say, a murderess.

“That doesn’t mean he deserved it,” said Cold Fish Number Two. “Getting”—he cut a chunk of corned beef— “dismembered.”

I take it back about those wives and children: spawners, definitely. This one was the primary investigator's assistant
and compared to his boss he was Fish On Ice: dark, wavy hair, pitted skin, and very dark eyes without any discernable pupil, like a shark's.

I poured more wine, tried gathering my thoughts before replying. But before I could complete this ambitious-some say hopeless—task, a voice from the end of the table spoke up:

“Truth is, anybody here would’ve been right tickled to wrap old Merle Carmody's head up in butcher paper. Difference is, we’d of stuck it on a pike, first, set it outside of Town Hall for a week or three, let the seagulls fight over it.”

It was this sort of pronouncement—swift, accurate, and bloody-minded in the good-old-fashioned, scram-if-you-don’t-like-it downeast Maine way—that made me proud to have married the man who was sitting there making it. Wade had proposed six months earlier, but we’d gotten around to tying the knot (or, as he so nautically put it, lowering the boom) only the previous week.

Still, it wasn’t the way I wanted the table-talk heading. “This old house,” I began, trying to change the subject, “was built in 1823, the very same year that the poem ‘T was the Night Before Christmas’ first appeared in a small-town newspaper in upstate New York.”

“Isn’t that fascinating?” Ellie commented brightly, catching my drift.

But too late: George had interrupted his stolid chewing to agree with Wade. “Fella was bad business. Faye Anne used to come down where I was working, back when we were putting the furnace in the medical clinic. Beg me to steal them butterfly bandages from the storeroom down cellar. The ones they use to close cuts, instead of stitches.”

“Because she couldn’t afford to get medical care?” This, I could see, fit right in with the DA man's idea of local household economics: all those snowmobiles.

George had dark hair and the pale, milky complexion
that runs in some downeast Maine families, and a bluish five o’clock shadow on his small, stubborn jaw. His knuckles were permanently grease-stained; in Eastport, George was the man you called if you couldn’t get hold of that duct tape fast enough.

Now he looked patiently at his questioner. “No. She was ashamed. Old man hit her, she didn’t want folks to know about it. So I got the bandages for her.”

Then he returned to eating his dinner, while the DA's fellows pondered what they’d heard. “So somebody might say she was justified? Even that it was self-defense, or could have been?” the assistant asked.

“Absolutely,” I began enthusiastically, trying again to get the conversation back on track. But this time, Sam interrupted.

“That's not what she's saying. She's saying she didn’t do it. Or doesn’t remember it. Anyway, what happened to presumed innocent?”

I shot him a glance. We wanted them to feel sorry for Faye Anne, not angry at what they might perceive as deceptiveness, or defiance; not only the facts but the tone these guys presented them in would be important. But the damage was done:

“She is, isn’t she?” Cold Fish Number One said complacently. “First statement was that she couldn’t imagine where all the blood had come from.”

“And she did have a boyfriend,” Gill-Boy Number Two put in. “This guy she was seeing,” he added with a glance at his colleague, “Peter Christie.”

He spoke as if women possessing boyfriends also had the number “666” tattooed in hidden places on their bodies. Or at least that juries could be brought around to believing that they did. Peter Christie was just about the last person I’d have wanted these two to run into.

But: “Wait a minute,” Sam protested. “Peter isn’t a
boyfriend. Not what you mean by a boyfriend. Besides, Faye Anne is—”

Married, he’d been about to say, stopping only when he realized that was the point in the first place: marrying a bum like Merle was blameworthy enough, in some eyes. But cheating on a bum…

Well, that was a hanging offense, or it could be if you presented it to that jury properly. Because when you came right down to it, this was all about perceptions. And about winning and losing.

Mostly the latter. “Peter Christie is a computer repair guy,” Sam said, trying to end what he’d started and becoming indignant in the process. “He's not hooking up with any married women. Why should he? He's from California” Which to my son was like being the Dalai Lama, but with sun! And fun!

“Sam,” I said, and at my tone the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. A boyfriend was bad; a promiscuous one could be even more damaging. But as they explained over coffee and baked apples with maple syrup and cream, our guests already knew all about Peter Christie.

A recent Silicon Valley transplant who’d moved here to Eastport and set up, just as Sam had said, in computer repair—as a sideline he also fixed copiers, fax machines, and mobile phones—Peter hadn’t waited for the DA's men to find him and ask their questions. Instead I gathered that he’d sought them out and insisted on spilling his guts, incriminating Faye Anne more than ever, so as to clear himself of any possible suspicion.

Not, of course, that Peter had put it quite that way. But due to his forthcomingness the DA's men now knew things we might have preferred that Peter had kept under his hat.

Such as, for instance, that Faye Anne didn’t believe in divorce. And that despite Sam's opinion, Peter had been in love with her, or so he’d maintained; that he had begged her
to leave Merle and marry him. But she’d refused, and in the end he’d told her that they would have to stop seeing each other. With Merle in the picture, Peter said he’d told Faye Anne, further contact between them would only go on hurting them both.

“So,” Ellie summed up unhappily. “The way Peter tells it, the only way she could be with him would be if Merle were to leave. Or die.”

Sam shot a contrite glance at me. But, I realized now, it didn’t matter; the government guys had known all that Sam or any of the rest of us might’ve clued them to, and more. Not that picking up personal facts was all they had accomplished:

They’d already taken photographs, bagged up the apron and gloves Faye Anne had been wearing, and sent Merle's remains down to the medical examiner in Augusta. They’d talked to the neighbors and taken all the cutting tools out of Merle's shop, too, they indicated, and they would go over Faye Anne's house one last time in the morning.

And that would be that. “Wrapping it up” was a perfect phrase for their day's activity; not information, but confirmation, was all these two wanted.

Of the obvious: that she had done it. “What a guy,” George said, meaning Peter Christie. “Real bail-out artist.”

My thought exactly. What I didn’t know was how come these fellows were telling us all this? It didn’t seem usual, so I asked them about it.

“It's not, I suppose. But it's no big secret, either. Christie's not bound to keep quiet about anything he told us. And if’ it came to trial, the defense attorneys get it all anyway. We have to tell what we’ve got,” the DA's primary investigator said.

“But you think there won’t be a trial because of…”

He gestured with his dessert spoon. “The battered-woman aspect. Juries don’t like chronic abusers, and
everyone in the county knew the victim was one, just from what we’ve heard already. So she's probably going to get offered some kind of a deal.”

“She’ll plead to a lesser charge and accept a sentence, no matter what she says now,” his second-in-command declared, scraping up the last morsel of baked apple.

But Ellie was shaking her head: no, she won’t. And these two guys worked well together, but to my ears that last comment had sounded rehearsed; I decided we were being played.

Then Joy Abrams spoke up unexpectedly. “Peter Christie might not exactly be the right one to believe, where Faye Anne Carmody is concerned.”

“Joy,” Victor said, “are you sure you want to discuss this? It's really not the sort of thing…”

Victor liked his women to confine their conversation to suitable topics: cooking, sewing, flower arranging. The evening wasn’t going as he’d planned, either, although the government men had given no sign of recognizing his name—contrary to his belief, people the world over didn’t spend all their time thinking about him—so he’d relaxed a little.

Joy touched his hand lightly, silencing him. Under other circumstances this alone would have been worth the whole evening; silencing Victor ordinarily requires a brickbat.

“Peter's a stone liar,” she said. “And a flatterer, sort of a… a serial romancer, but with a twist. He likes women, all right. Just not in a nice way.”

She swallowed some wine. “Don’t ask me how I know. I’m not going to tell you. It was told to me in confidence. But I will say, if Faye Anne turned Peter down she's smarter than I thought. He's trouble. You be careful of what he says, is all.” Then, to me:

“Dear…” Dee-yah: the downeast Maine pronunciation.

“I just can’t thank you enough for the truly wonderful dinner.” Dinnah.

Victor's little pinch-purse mouth kept opening and closing as Joy went on: “I keep telling him he was a fool to lose you, Jacobia.” She laid the accent firmly and properly on the second syllable; I do so enjoy people who know the difference between a woman's name and the seventeenth-century English historical period.

Although strictly speaking it is a man's: James, in Latin, though my mother wouldn’t have realized. She spent her girlhood in a Kentucky hill town, never learned much history except maybe for Russian history. But that was later and another story.

Joy looked around at the dining room's tiled hearth-apron behind which glowed a fire of cedar logs, at the red candles nested in balsam in the table's center piece, at the old brocade curtains gleaming richly before the windows. Mistletoe hung on the door to the butler's pantry, and she smiled a little at that.