Death by Chocolate Snickerdoodle, page 13
The smells of dust, old stones, and fallen leaves mingled with the sharp, damp tang of freshly dug earth, suddenly. Then, in the next instant, my right foot came down, expecting to land on the solid path just like last time, and kept going instead.
Going down, that is. Sliding roughly against the loose earth and small stones, I fell with a little shriek, grabbing blindly at roots, clumps of grass, anything.... Because what I’d done was I’d stepped into an open grave. Someone’s funeral must be scheduled soon, so the cemetery crew had opened a resting place in expectation of filling it.
Filling it with Alvin, probably, I realized; I hadn’t heard of anyone else around here dying lately. Not that this understanding did me much good. I’d seized an exposed tree root with my left hand, and all my other parts were still busy trying not to fall the rest of the way into the hole.
But even from where I was, I couldn’t haul myself back up. If I shifted my grip on the tree root at all, I risked losing it altogether, and then my goose really would be cooked. Because once I fell all the way down there, I’d never get out by myself. Not until somebody cut through the graveyard on their own way somewhere would anybody find me. Unless . . .
All right now. Damn it. The scant drizzle of earlier had made the tree root slippery. Also, and much more importantly, as far as I was concerned, I was in an old graveyard at night, in the dark, and a killer was on the loose.
So get your act together, I told myself. But the hole’s crumbling side slid away from me when I braced my foot against it, and the sound approaching from somewhere in the darkness was . . .
Footsteps. Coming closer . . . I peered sideways just as two white sneakers appeared out of the gloom. Suddenly, the bottom of the hole I was falling into seemed like the safest place on earth.
But I couldn’t quite force my left hand to unclench from around that tree root, because if it happened not to be safe down there in the hole—say, if someone peered down into it at me—I’d have no way to escape.
So I hung motionless, shivering and cursing silently. The shoes kept still, too; their owner was listening for me.
Then: “Jake?”
Relief flooded me so suddenly that my whole body relaxed, and the next thing I knew, I was at the bottom of the grave hole. The wet, muddy, cold . . .
My hands felt around for something to push myself up with and splashed mud the consistency of icy pudding instead. Given the recent dry weather, the cemetery workers must have soaked the hole to keep the dust down, I realized.
“Wade?” I called weakly, barely managing not to blubber, I was so miserable. And relieved. It was my husband up there. “Oh, I’m so glad it’s you!” I breathed.
And not some awful graveyard-wandering killer, I added silently, bent on adding a small-town snoop to his list of victims.. . .
“Hey. You okay?” Wade’s face appeared over the edge of the hole, his brush-cut blond hair, blue-gray eyes, and craggy jaw all now illuminated by a battery lantern. He must’ve turned it on once he realized it was me down here, and not some awful graveyard-wandering whatever.
“Can you get me out?” I implored. Because a freshly dug grave may not seem so awfully deep when seen from above. But when you’re in it, it’s . . . Well, six feet really seems like plenty, is my considered opinion about it.
“Reach up,” Wade said. He had taken off his jacket and was now lowering one heavy denim sleeve of it down to me like a rope. “Grab the sleeve. Use both hands,” he told me, and now I noticed he did not sound at all like he was in a good mood.
But I did as he said, and sure enough, the rough denim gave my hands plenty to grasp, even though by now they were so cold, I almost couldn’t feel my fingers.
Also, I was shivering so hard that I had to clamp my mouth shut to avoid biting my tongue, but finally, my shoes scrambled up over the edge, and Wade hauled me away from the hole and let me down before my knees buckled.
He crouched beside me. “Okay?”
I nodded, working on getting my breath back. When I had, I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “Yes, okay. Thanks.”
After clambering to my feet, I let him guide me between the gravestones looming white by his lantern’s light until at last we reached the street I’d walked on earlier with Perry, and we turned toward home.
“You haven’t said yet why you came,” I said when I could speak again without my teeth chattering. That he’d been looking for me was obvious, but why? And how’d he known to look here?
Under the high school’s parking lot lights, he stopped. “Bella said you’d gone out with Perry, so I figured you might have taken this shortcut back from his place.”
That answered my second question. Wade knew me well. But I knew him well, too, and now I didn’t like the look on his face.
“What is it?” I asked, because it had just occurred to me that Wade hadn’t known I was in trouble, and he wouldn’t have come out here for no reason. So something must be . . .
His lips tightened. “Jake, we can’t find your dad.”
Seven
By the time we got home, every light in the place was on, the windows all glowing smearily through the cold mist that had begun falling again, as if to taunt us with its skimpiness.
“It just won’t quite rain,” Wade said as we climbed the porch steps. “And the stuff evaporates before it lands.”
The dampish air smelled even more strongly of smoke than before. Wondering uneasily about this, I trudged into the house, all drenched and filthy, only to find the whole family—except for my dad, of course—gathered in the kitchen.
“Oh!” cried Bella at the sight of me. “What did that awful young man do to you? I knew something was strange about—”
“Nothing,” I told her gently, trying to calm her. “I’m fine. Perry didn’t do anything to me.”
Which was true. I’d fallen into that open grave all by myself. But that wasn’t what really worried her, of course; she was distraught about my missing father.
“How far have you gotten?” I asked, pulling off my wet shoes and socks. He could be anywhere, but he did have usual haunts, and I imagined they’d have started with those.
“Pretty far down the list,” Sam answered from the dining room, where he was working the phone. “I was about to go out.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, going in to peer over his shoulder. On a yellow pad Sam had crossed off half a dozen possibilities: the firehouse, the snack bar at the gas station, the clubhouse at the ball field, where a barrel stove and some cast-off wooden deck chairs gave some of the old guys a place to hang out.
So I knew where not to look, anyway, and I had a couple of other places up my sleeve, too, ones I’d found him in before and, at his stern instruction, had never told anyone else about.
“You’re sure you don’t want company?” Wade asked when I paused at the back door.
I’d changed into dry clothes and equipped myself with a flashlight. “Thanks. But maybe you should try walking around the nearby neighborhood again, just in case.”
If my dad had fallen or had had an attack of some kind, he might just be lying somewhere near home, unable to speak.
The thought made my heart thump and my legs feel liquid with fright. “I won’t be gone long. And this time I won’t be falling into any muddy holes.”
Wade nodded in reply, all business. He was a good man to have around in an emergency. Or any other time, actually.
The pavement on Key Street gleamed slickly, reflecting my flashlight’s glow, as I hurried downhill to Water Street and turned hopefully toward the breakwater. But no small figure was there on the dock or at the end of the fish pier.
Mist pooled in the lights around the boat basin, in it the shapes of men busily rigging up scalloping gear. No one else was there, either, though, or at the wooden picnic table in the shadows behind the hot dog stand.
But from the gloom came a familiar voice. “Hey.”
I jumped at the sound, then spun around to glimpse him on the bench in the little cedar glade above the boat ramp.
“Dad, what’re you doing here?” I hurried to him. “Are you all right? Why’d you take off so . . . ?”
He shifted to make room for me on the bench, patted my knee once I’d sat. “I’m fine. Just thinking, that’s all.”
From below us, men called companionably to one another while they worked on their rigs. The drizzle had stopped again.
“Gets a bit noisy back at home,” he added gently. “For, you know, coherent thought.”
“Yeah. It does.” We sat in silence a little while. “But I should call and let them know you’re okay,” I said finally.
His earring glinted red in the dock lights. “Fine. I imagine your stepmother’s tearing her hair. You’d think by now she’d be used to my evening stroll habit, wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t have the heart to reply that when a man is nearly ninety, no one gets used to him wandering off without saying where he’s going, never mind how fit he is. Instead, I pulled out my phone and started punching in our number.
He put his hand on my arm. “Not yet.” He was gazing at me intently. “Before we go home, are you up for more of a walk?”
My fatigue, not to mention all the aches and pains I was feeling after falling into an open grave, vanished as if by magic at his words. Not only did I badly want to know what my father was so thoughtful about, but I also knew just where I wanted to be while I learned it.
Five minutes later we were back on Cape Avenue, outside Perry’s house. “The thing is,” my dad said, “your stepmother is getting . . .”
“Tired,” I finished his sentence for him.
The lamp still burned behind the curtains in Perry’s picture window. The porch light now beamed a sickly yellow glow into the drifting mist.
“Yes.” Neither one of us had wanted to say old. “And we need to find a way to tell her . . .”
“Right. She’s a hard one to reason with sometimes.”
His eyes twinkled, reflecting the streetlamp’s glow. “I do believe you’re correct. But . . .”
I sighed heavily. “We’re working on it. Ellie and I, and Mika, too. But if Mika takes that job, Bella’s going to want to take care of—”
“She can’t.” He said it flatly.
I glanced over at him, surprised.
“She’ll never admit it. But it’s going to be too much for her. I want to keep her around for as long as I can, you see, and if she . . .” His voice didn’t break. Of course it didn’t.
But I got the idea. My father didn’t quite think that Bella walked on water, but he loved her so much that he fully expected she’d take two or three steps before she went down. And he was concerned about her.
“Anyway,” he said to change the subject, having made it clear what he expected of me. To stop my housekeeper-slash-stepmother from exhausting herself. “Anyway, what’s up here?” He waved across the street at Perry Wilson’s house.
On our way here, I’d told him whose place it was, and about my little cemetery adventure while on my way home earlier.
“I don’t know,” I said now, “if he’s just an unusual guy or he’s got a guilty conscience.”
“Hard to see what motive he’d have had,” my dad said. I’d told him about Perry working for Alvin Carter, too. “It was too long ago, you’d think, for him to still be . . .”
“Holding a grudge about anything,” I concluded his thought. “But there sure is something funny about him.” And that body under the porch had been put there quite a while ago, too, maybe while Perry worked there.
A car turned onto Cape Avenue and came up the hill toward us. Together we stepped out of the glow of the streetlamp.
My dad watched the car. “Not ha-ha funny,” he said as the car slowed.
A corner of one curtain in Perry’s front window lifted, then fell down again.
“Nope,” I said while the car pulled up to the curb across the street from where we stood and its headlights went off.
It was an old green Ford Galaxy that looked as if someone wiped it off with a chamois cloth every night. It was now parked near enough for me to see that it had good tires, working lights all the way around, and a recent inspection sticker.
“Somebody keeps it nice,” murmured my dad a bit wistfully. Months earlier he’d given up driving entirely.
“Right,” I replied softly. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said that the vehicle’s upholstery was immaculate, too, and that the carpet was clean. I could practically smell the vinyl cleaner from here.
Because I knew whose vehicle this was . . .
“Wow,” I breathed as the engine pinged, cooling in the night’s damp chill.
Perry’s front door opened, and he stepped out, then made a visor of his hand to peer at the new arrival. The cat I’d seen earlier dashed out past him and streaked off into the night.
Then a cap of white hair gleamed under the streetlamp as the driver made her way up to Perry’s house and inside.
It was Prunia Devereaux.
* * *
“So much for him not wanting people in his house,” I told Ellie in her car the next morning. Meaning Perry, of course.
“He just didn’t want you in it,” she noted, not taking her eyes off the road ahead.
After I’d finally gotten my dad home the night before, I’d asked Sam if he could fix our shop’s display-case cooler, and he’d agreed, breaking off work on the old pickup truck he’d been rehabilitating for months out in our driveway.
Now, after his diagnostic visit to the Moose, we were on our way down to a salvage yard in Milbridge to pick up a part for the display-case cooler’s compressor.
“He sure seemed to be expecting Prunia, though,” I said. “I wonder what they were putting their heads together about.”
“You and me both,” said Ellie as we sped along the stretch of new blacktop on Route 1 south of Machias. “I mean, really. Talk about a pair of unlikely conspirators.”
“That’s for sure.” Outside, the blueberry barrens spread out over the rolling hills on either side like a wine-colored blanket. “But so far she’s the only one with even a theoretically decent motive,” I said.
Framing Billy for Alvin’s murder and then somehow getting control of Billy’s inheritance herself, I meant.
“And if she was behind Alvin’s murder somehow, she’d have needed help,” I added. “But why pick Perry for her helper?”
Once we descended from the barrens, the narrow two-lane road ran between factory-built houses with lobster traps piled in the yards and through tiny settlements—store, post office, cemetery—with rushing streams dammed into millponds running through them, though the mills were all long gone.
Now that summer was nearly over, there was hardly any traffic. We took the turnoff through Cherryfield, where massive old mansions stood empty, on sale for pennies. Any money that had ever been around here was pretty much long gone, too.
“And Perry,” Ellie said, “knew the layout of the place, not just inside but outside, too, like where the orchard was and probably where the tools were kept and so on.”
Like, for instance, the hatchet . . .
On Cherryfield’s Main Street, a two-story wooden general-store building; an old barbershop, with the red-and-white pole still outside; and a feed-and-grain emporium, whose elderly red-checked Purina poster remained tacked up to the front of the building, had all been turned into antique stores, none open at the moment.
“So maybe the two of them planned it together? But that still doesn’t tell us why,” Ellie mused aloud.
Correct. And I didn’t see how Mary Sipp would have had any reason to hit Alvin in the head with a hatchet, either.
I told Ellie as much as we sped down the long Route 1A straightaway flanking the old railroad bed, now missing rails and ties and transformed into a recreational trail.
“I mean, seriously, motive is a real problem, because it’s not as if Prunia was set to inherit even if—” I stopped, struck by a new thought, as around us the land now sloped greenly down to a river, where geese floated, resting and eating before the next leg of their winter journey south.
Peering ahead, Ellie spotted the sign she was looking for, then slowed and turned in between two huge, ancient rosebushes heavily loaded with shiny red rose hips the size of plums.
“Ellie,” I said as we bumped up the grassy track. Stones rattled against the car’s underside, and more rosebushes loomed on either side, their thorns dragging ear-piercingly along our fenders like fingernails on a blackboard. “Ellie, do you remember the date on that document? That will of Alvin’s that named Billy as heir, when was it dated?”
She hit the brakes, but not on account of my question. Stretched across the road ahead of us was a chain-link gate with a stamped metal sign wired onto it.
KEEP OUT, the sign read, and after that came the usual hooey about trespassers being shot and survivors being shot again, et cetera. But numerous rusty bullet holes peppered the sign, as if to emphasize its sincerity.
“I thought you said he was expecting us?”
Ellie frowned at the chain link, while the thick, thorny rose branches crowded up to the car like something out of a horror film featuring plant monsters.
“He is. I called.” She laid on the horn. I held my ears. Pretty rapidly, the racket brought somebody.
Some things, rather, and boy, wasn’t I just having a bad run of canine luck lately? Bursting from the bushes, two dogs who looked just like wolves came flying up to the other side of the fence and flung themselves bodily at it, eyes crazed with—
“Skippy! Honey!” A young man of perhaps thirty, shaven-headed, sweating, and built like a refrigerator, appeared. His blue plaid shirt looked big as a picnic blanket, and his faded jeans, held up by red suspenders, were behemoth sized.
But when he swung open the gate and waved us in at last, I saw that there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, just muscle on arms like tree trunks and across his back.
His jaw was swollen, as if someone had punched him in it recently, but he seemed cheerful enough. “Sorry! Lost track of time . . . Go on up!” he called.
