Triple Witch Read online

  Praise for the

  Home Repair Is Homicide

  mysteries of

  Sarah Graves

  “Just the right prescription for a post-repair rest.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Everything’s Jake—until she starts snooping.”

  —New York Daily News

  “With an intricate plot, amusing characters and a wry sense of humor, Sarah Graves spins a fun, charming mystery that is sure to make you smile and keep you guessing right up until the end.”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “Charming.”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “A winning addition … A sleuth as tough as the nails she drives into the walls of her 1823 Federal home enhances a clever plot.… Many will relish the vividly described Down East setting, but for anyone who’s ever enjoyed making a home repair it’s the accurate details of the restoration of Jake’s old house that will appeal the most.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Graves gives us a lively look at small-town life in charming down-east Maine. Her characters, as always, are captivating examples of Americana and their relationships with each other are inspired.”

  —The Old Book Barn Gazette

  “Author Graves has a tart wit and an eagle-eyed perspective … producing a handy-dandy mystery with a handsome cast of local color.”

  —The State (Columbia, S.C.)

  “Atmospheric appeal … [Graves] captures the charming eccentricity and outdoorsy flavor of life in a town full of seagulls and bed-and-breakfasts … with zingy dialogue and a brisk pace.”

  —The Santa Fe New Mexican

  “The ride is fun and Sarah Graves seems to be having a blast.”

  —Maine Sunday Telegram

  “A reading pleasure.”

  —The Snooper

  “Working around the house can definitely be murder. Sarah Graves’s Home Repair Is Homicide series is a much more pleasant way to kill time!”

  —Bangor Daily News

  “What distinguishes the novel are its likable, no-nonsense protagonist-narrator, her references to home repair that the author cleverly fits tongue-and-groove into the story and, especially, the detailed descriptions of the town.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Eloquently depicts the beauties and hardships of life on an island in Maine.… Filled with believable and engaging characters, exquisite scenery and extravagant action.”

  —News and Record (Greensboro, N.C.)

  “One cool caper.”

  —MLB 2001 Gift Guide

  “The town of Eastport and its warmly wondrous citizens continue to enchant!”

  —Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

  “The prose is brisk and the jokes are funny.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Appealing.”

  —USA Today

  “Ms. Graves has created a bright and personable new detective who has been welcomed into the Eastport community with warmth and affection.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Graves affectionately creates believable characters … who lend depth and warm humor to the story.… The cozy details of small-town life and home repair make for an enjoyable read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Jacobia has a witty and ironic voice, and the book resonates with good humor, quirky characters, and a keen sense of place.”

  —Down East magazine

  “Sarah Graves’s novel is a laudable whodunnit, but it’s also a love letter to Eastport, celebrating the cultural contrasts between the town and some misguided souls from the Big Apple.… The funky, low-key fishing community wins every time.”

  —Kennebec Valley Tribune and Morning Sentinel

  BOOKS BY SARAH GRAVES

  Triple Witch

  The Dead Cat Bounce

  Wicked Fix

  Repair to Her Grave

  Wreck the Halls

  Unhinged

  Mallets Aforethought

  Tool & Die

  Nail Biter

  Trap Door

  The Book of Old Houses

  A Face at the Window

  Crawlspace

  TRIPLE WITCH

  A Bantam Dell Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam mass market edition / June 1999

  Bantam reissue / March 2004

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1999 by Sarah Graves

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-57079-6

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all who have helped by word, deed, and example, including: Paul Pulk, Judy McGarvey, Steve Koenig, Sandi Shelton, Kay Kudlinski, Brenda Booker of Fountain Books in Eastport, Maine, David and Kathy Chicoine and Bullet ’n’ Press, Dan Rabes, Don Sutherland, Amanda Powers, Kate Miciak, Christine Brooks, Al Zuckerman, and as always and especially, John Squibb.

  1 Kenny Mumford’s wide, sightless eyes gazed up out of his shroud of wet, green rockweed, on the beach at Prince’s Cove. The rockweed covered much of the rest of his face, but we knew right away that it was Kenny. His left hand, flung out loosely behind him as if he were doing the backstroke, had the peculiar, purplish round scar in its palm that anyone in Eastport would recognize.

  Kenny always told people he’d gotten the scar when a biker chick, high on methamphetamines, hammered his hand to the shiny metal ri
m of a barstool after a night of drinking. Others said the drinking part was right but that the nail came from a nail gun, one time when Kenny had had a job.

  Now Kenny’s eyes were bleached to a pale, milky blue, the result of being soaked in cold salt water. A day earlier, Kenny’s boat had been towed in minus Kenny by the Coast Guard, so it was no real surprise finding him there on the beach.

  The hole in his forehead, though; that was a surprise.

  “Not,” Ellie White said thoughtfully, “from a nail gun.”

  “Right,” I agreed, looking at Kenny again. “No nail.”

  Out on the water, two harbor seals’ heads glided smoothly through the waves toward the fish pens of the local aquaculture operation, where a barge was unloading bags of salmon food. Gulls swirled in drifts over the fish pens, waiting for a chance to swoop down and steal floating morsels, screaming impatience.

  Ellie crouched, pulling more rockweed from Kenny’s face.

  “Poor Kenny,” she said. “I went to school with him. Up until eighth grade.”

  Lying in its nest of rockweed, his head looked disembodied. “Is that when Kenny got sent away to reform school?”

  It was right around noon, and seventy degrees, which for downeast Maine in late June is practically a tropical heat wave. Ellie was wearing a green-and-white sleeveless gingham sundress with an apple embroidered on the bodice, thin white sandals, and some kind of sparkly purple gauzy stuff to tie back her red hair.

  “No. It was when he stopped going to school altogether. He turned sixteen that year, so they had to let him quit. Kenny,” she explained, “failed a few grades.”

  Rising, Ellie took off her sandals and strode into the icy water, gathering her skirt up, while I tried to reconcile Ken’s stillness with the rowdy fellow he had been. He was a terror around town, always into some dumb trouble, often drunk and disorderly. Saturday nights you could pretty well figure he’d be blotto, head back, howling at the moon, while the rest of the week he spent trying to parlay his talent for mischief into something besides another stretch of jail time.

  Mostly he failed, and it surprised me to realize how much I would miss him. In Eastport, Kenny was as much a fixture as the boats in the harbor, or the cannon on the library lawn.

  I called my little black Labrador retriever, Monday, and snapped her onto her lead, not wanting her to nose around the body. By then Ellie was on her way back up the beach, too, and I could see that she had been crying.

  I handed her a tissue, and she gave it the sort of long, honking blow that I had come to expect from her; fair-skinned and slender, with green eyes and freckles like a scattering of gold dust, Ellie looks as delicately lovely as an Arthur Rackham fairy princess, and is as tough as an old boot.

  We made our way up the embankment through the indigo spikes of wild lupine, back to where I had left the car. There were a few small dwellings widely spaced along the Cove Road, each with a satellite dish and the plundered remains of last winter’s woodpile out in the side yard, but I thought it would be best just to drive down to Water Street, to police headquarters, and speak to Eastport’s Chief of Police Bob Arnold directly.

  To tell him, I mean, that there had been a murder.

  2 My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and back in Manhattan I was an expert on the care and feeding of vast sums of other people’s money, neat slices of which I lopped off in commissions. As a result, by age thirty I possessed more assets than your average small publicly-traded corporation, along with fewer illusions than your average city homicide detective, up to his ankles in blood and accustomed to hearing, pretty much on a daily basis, numerous lies.

  Not that I had much contact with homicide detectives. As a class, my clients leaned more toward swift, bloodless acts of financial disembowelment. Meanwhile, I turned out to be good at transforming large fortunes into even larger ones, and talented also at the tasks of (1) getting married and (2) having a baby. Sadly, I was not so adept at (3) realizing that my neurosurgeon husband was a cold-blooded, methane-breathing, sludge-dwelling slime toad whose ability to tell the truth ranked right up there with my own ability to jump off a building and fly.

  Finding a medical secretary in my bed did tend to clarify my thinking on the matter, however. And as if that were not enough, once the divorce battle was over my by-then young teenaged son, Sam, began failing in school, smoking marijuana—

  —at least, I hoped it was only marijuana—

  —and running with a crowd of sullen, secretive little streetwise hooligans.

  Fortunately, this was also about the time I found Eastport. The move—from a pristine townhouse in Manhattan to a rambling, dilapidated 1823 Federal clapboard in a tiny fishing village in remotest downeast Maine—

  —the house came complete with antique plumbing, ceramic-post electrical wiring so scary it could star in its own horror movie, and weatherproofing that consisted entirely of forty-eight heavy wooden storm windows, each of which had to be fastened up every autumn and hauled back down again in spring—

  —was impetuous, impractical, and absurd for a woman of my experience and situation.

  And I do believe that it saved my son’s life.

  3 “Is that so?” said police chief Bob Arnold when Ellie and I told him of our discovery.

  Arnold leaned against the squad car parked in front of the wood-frame storefront housing the Eastport police station. “Sure it was Kenny?”

  From the way he said it, lazy and slow, a person who didn’t know Arnold might think he might just decide not to do anything about the situation.

  But that would have been a mistake. Arnold is a plump, pink-cheeked man with a calm, deliberate way of moving, but he gets from here to there as fast as he needs to.

  A few months earlier, for instance, Arnold had arrested a Calais woman whose husband had just died facedown in the main dish at a baked-bean supper. She’d been on her way home to fetch the biscuits she’d forgotten—or that, anyway, was her story—when Arnold spotted her speeding by after hearing the ambulance call on his radio, and put two and two together.

  The woman, as it turned out, never got charged with murder, the well-known fact that her husband beat her regularly—

  —this, Arnold said, was how he came up with four—

  —not being sufficient evidence, and the toxicologists not finding any poison they could identify. So they had to release her almost as fast as Arnold caught her. But nobody ate her dishes at public suppers anymore, which in these parts is still harsh punishment.

  “It was Kenny,” Ellie told Arnold now. “And,” she added to his inevitable next question, “we’re sure he’s dead.”

  Arnold frowned, squinting at the water sparkling in the bay. Out on the waves, a couple of speedboats zipped flashily, while up and down Water Street clusters of tourists strolled, eating ice cream, peering into shop windows, and buying bumpah stickahs.

  “Well. That’s a hell of a thing,” Arnold said. “All right. Guess I’d better get cracking.”

  He glanced across Water Street at the pilings of the boat basin, great towering forty-foot logs set deep into the seabed, supporting the dock. It was dead low tide.

  “Better fetch him ’fore the tide is flowing, or Kenny might float away. And someone’s got to find old Timothy Mumford, too, and deliver the bad news.”

  “Oh,” said Ellie, freshly stricken. “I forgot about that.”

  In the entrance to the boat basin, a forty-foot yacht was making its careful way to the dock. The gleaming white pleasure craft’s engines rumbled and fell silent, while fellows on deck hauled lines around cleats to secure her against the bumpers.

  “Hope they know how high she’ll be riding,” Arnold said, his eyes narrowing at the yacht crew’s spotless white uniforms.

  It is a fairly common event here, in summer, when pleasure boaters from away tie up without thought for the tides: the water rises but the boat is held down by the line, with (glub, glub) predictable results.

  “I guess,” said Ellie, “t
hat I am going to have to go out there. To Crow Island. Maybe if he gets the news from someone he knows, it won’t go down quite so hard for him.”

  “Maybe,” Arnold agreed. He thought a minute. “Don’t guess it’s Tim who decided to pop Kenny, do you?”

  She gave him an oh-for-Pete’s-sake look; he nodded in reply.

  “Yeah. Not much point treating him like a suspect, is there? So you go,” he said. “Tell Timothy I’ll be out, too, let him know any of the details he might be worrying about. And,” he added, “see if he knows who might have had a mad on for Kenny.”

  “Should I tell him the body will be going to Bangor?” she asked. “Because the church will want to do a service, and if there isn’t a body there won’t be any graveside ceremony. But we’ll still want to take up a collection.”

  For later, she meant, for getting Kenny into the earth: for a grave at Hillside, and a casket and some flowers, and a decent dark blue suit to bury him in, because maybe he was just a rowdy, uncouth, small-town layabout, but he was our small-town layabout.

  “Yeah,” said Arnold, “Bangor for the autopsy. Be simpler, they just cremated him, there. All the booze Ken’s poured into himself, he’d go like a torch, and Timothy could have the ashes.”

  Ellie fixed Arnold with a gaze that communicated perfectly what she thought of this idea. “I’ll tell Timothy that Kenny will be coming back here.”

  “Now, Ellie,” Arnold began in an attempt to placate her.

  “In the ambulance. At town expense,” she went on inexorably. “Hank Henahan drives that ambulance to Bangor all the time, to pick up supplies. So this time, he can just pick up Kenny.”

  Arnold sighed, knowing what Eastport’s emergency medical technician would say about driving three hours with a dead man. Hank Henahan was well known for peeking through his fingers at the nervous-making parts in animated Walt Disney movies; he would be glancing in the ambulance’s rear-view every half mile, waiting for Kenny to lurch up at him.