01 - The Dead Cat Bounce

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  The Dead Cat Bounce

  by

  Sarah Graves

  THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE

  By SARAH GRAVES

  THE DEAD CAT BOUNCE

  A Bantam Crime Line Book / September 1998

  Copyright 1998 by Sarah Graves.

  ISBN 0-553-57857-X

  This book is for John Ellerson Squibb.

  dead cat bounce n. Stock market jargon for a small,

  temporary rise in a stock's trading price, after a sharp drop

  Thanks to all who helped: John Squibb, David and

  Kathy Chicoine and Bullet 'n' Press, Bob and Ravin

  Gustafson, Rebecca Robinson, John Foster, Charlie

  Graham, Judy McGarvey, Sandi Shelton, David Orrell,

  Kay Kudlinski, Amanda Clay Powers, Kate Miciak,

  Al Zuckerman, and the friendly folks at the Kissing Fish

  dive shop in Calais, Maine.

  the dead cat bounce

  1

  My house is old, and rambling, and in some disrepair,

  and I think that it is faintly haunted: a cold spot forming

  inexplicably on the stairway, a scuttling in the hall. Then

  of course there is the matter of the enigmatic portrait,

  whose mystery I had not yet managed to resolve on that

  bright April morning when, after living cheerfully and

  peacefully in the house for over a year, I found a body in

  the storeroom.

  Coming upon a body is an experience, like childbirth

  or a head-on collision, that takes the breath out of a

  person. I went back through the passageway between the

  kitchen and the small, unheated room where in spring I

  kept dog food and dahlia bulbs, and where apparently I

  now stored corpses.

  "Ellie," I said, "there's a dead man out there on the

  floor."

  Ellie White looked up from the kitchen workbench

  where she was planting pepper seeds, sprinkling a few

  into each little soil-filled peat pot, to be set out later in

  the cold frame. Ellie has coppery hair cut short around a

  thin, serious face lightly dusted with freckles; her pale

  blue eyes are so intense that even through her glasses, her

  gaze makes you feel your X-ray is being taken.

  Her index finger paused in the act of tamping soil onto

  a pepper seed. "Who?" she asked.

  Sometimes I think Ellie has formaldehyde in her veins.

  For instance, when I moved to Maine I thought sill work

  meant painting them, and if you have ever restored an

  elderly house you will understand the depths of my innocence;

  sill work is slightly less radical than tearing the

  house down and starting over entirely, and almost as

  expensive, and if you don't do it the old house ends up at

  the bottom of the cellar-hole.

  Ellie, upon hearing that this was what my old house

  needed, merely remarked how lucky I was that I could

  pay for it, because she knew of another woman whose

  house had needed sill work, too, and that woman was

  now living in the cellar-hole. Ellie's comment shut me up

  pretty quickly, as she had intended, and I resigned myself

  to getting the job done in spring, but along about March

  I'd discovered that sill work was only the beginning.

  There was also the poignant little problem of the rot-raddled

  floor joists, and of the support beams holding up

  the floor joists.

  Or rather, not holding them up. "I don't know who.

  He's lying face-down in the corner where everything sags.

  I should have had that floor jacked up last autumn."

  Ellie was wearing denim coveralls, a bright yellow

  turtleneck with jade-green turtles satin-stitched onto it,

  and shiny green gardening clogs over thick, yellow socks.

  On anyone else the outfit would have been hilarious, but

  Ellie is so tall and slender that she could wear a painter's

  drop cloth, possibly with a couple of frayed dishrags

  belted around it, and still look just like a Paris runway

  model.

  "I don't think the floor is the issue here," she said.

  "That's because it's not your floor. The only thing

  holding that floor up now is habit, and when the homicide

  detectives and the medical examiner and I don't

  know who all else start tramping in and out of there,

  then that floor is going to ..."

  She was looking at me as if I'd just arrived from Mars.

  "Jacobia," she said, "I don't know what kind of law

  enforcement you got used to, back in the big city where

  you come from."

  She picked up the telephone, dialed George Valentine's

  number, and let it ring. "But in case you haven't

  noticed, you're not in New York anymore. You're in

  Eastport, Maine, three hours from Bangor and a heck of

  a lot farther from anywhere else, and the only person

  tramping in and out of that storeroom is going to be

  George. That is, if he ever answers his phone. He was

  over at my house earlier, but I don't know where he is

  now."

  Of course it was George's number. In Eastport,

  George was it: if you had a fire, or a flood, or a skunk in

  the crawl-space, George was the man you wanted, which

  was lucky since the rest were out on fishing boats: dragging

  for scallops, hauling lobster pots, or collecting sea

  urchins, depending upon the season.

  "I'm going out there," Ellie said, after George had

  picked up at last and promised to be right over.

  People in Eastport do not think the telephone grows

  naturally out of the tympanic membrane, and some of

  them will actually decide whether to answer it or not

  based on what sort of news they are expecting. But

  George always answered his telephone sooner or later on

  account of being the clam warden, on call to make sure

  diggers had valid clam licenses, chase poachers out of

  forbidden clam areas, and spot-check the clams themselves

  with his two-inch metal clam ring, through which

  a legally harvestable bivalve must not be able to pass.

  "I think," Ellie added, "we should make sure the man

  is really dead."

  This struck me as pointless, since an ice pick in the

  cranium promised little in the way of future prospects.

  But Ellie was determined; it was part of her downeast

  Maine heritage, like being able to navigate in the fog or

  knowing how to dress out a deer.

  "It might be he's only wounded," Ellie said. "It might

  be we can still do something for him."

  Right, and it might be that next we could multiply

  some loaves and fishes. When she had gone I ran a glass

  of water and stood there by the sink, pondering whether

  to drink it or not. Just breathing in and out suddenly

  seemed to require a series of massive, separately considered

  decisions, as if each small action of mine had

  abruptly become huge compared to all the ones the dead

  man was not taking.

  Outside my kitchen window a flock of cedar waxwings

  descended on the crab apple tree and began devouring

  frozen fruit, their short, metallic cries creating a

  happy clamor. A shower of snow as fine as salt fell

  around them, whitening the snow already lying on the

  ground, so their lime-green feathers and candy-corn beaks

  stood out as brightly as paint drops.

  Down at the breakwater, the big ship Star Verlanger

  sounded her massive horn and cast off, loaded with

  paper pulp, and the dockworkers jumped in their pickup

  trucks and headed for a well-earned bottle of Narragansett

  beer, no bottle of which the dead man would be

  enjoying. I wondered if his absence would be noticed, or

  if he was from away. Whichever; by tonight, news of his

  death would be all over town.

  That was what I thought when the whole thing began.

  But back then, I didn't know the half of it.

  2

  My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and my ex-husband says

  I am insane. I have proved this, he says, by giving up a

  perfectly charming little townhouse on the upper east

  side of Manhattan--complete with doorman, elevator,

  and building superintendent--for a huge antique structure

  eve
ry centimeter of which needs paint, plaster, or the

  underpinnings required to hold up both. The roof leaks,

  the gutters dangle, and the bricks in the chimneys are

  quietly turning to sand; when the wind blows hard,

  which it does very often here, the windows rattle as if

  they are trying to jump out of their frames, and if you

  put a marble down on the kitchen floor it will probably

  roll forever.

  I found the place on a warm August day when the

  garden was clotted with raspberries and zinnias, poppies

  and Michaelmas daisies whose blooms were wide as

  saucers. I was coming back from Halifax and the kind of

  contentious stockholders' meeting that sets one to wondering

  how early man ever found his way out of the cave,

  and why, considering his natural tendencies, he didn't

  stay there, when on impulse I drove over the long,

  curving causeway connecting Moose Island with the U.S.

  mainland.

  I bought my lunch of a sandwich and coffee at the

  IGA, and walked all over town before sitting down on

  the green-painted front steps of a big old white house

  whose bare windows showed a shimmeringly vacant

  interior. In front of the house I stood on tiptoe and

  peered in, watching a patch of sunshine move slowly

  across a pale maple floor that was badly in need of refinishing.

  Someone had torn the carpeting down from the

  stairs; the risers looked wormy with old nail holes.

  I noted with surprise how certain I felt, how calm.

  Later I found my way to a tiny storefront real-estate

  office on Water Street, overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay,

  and that evening when I drove back to the mainland, the

  house belonged to me.

  What were you thinking of? my ex-husband asked,

  and so did my relatives and friends. Even my son

  Sam looked doubtful, although at sixteen he had begun

  looking doubtful about everything. With a brain surgeon

  for a father and a money expert for a mother, he was

  unhappily aware of the problem of living up to all the

  brilliant genes he had supposedly inherited.

  The trouble was, Sam's brains were not of the quick,

  flashy variety so popular with Ivy League admissions

  committees. He was the type who could take one look

  at a broken washing machine, come back from the

  appliance store with a part that cost five dollars, and

  a little while later the washing machine would be fixed.

  He could do the same with an ailing cat, or the gizmo

  that makes (or doesn't make) a doorbell ring. What he

  couldn't do was explain how to fix the washing machine,

  or what sort of attention to give the cat; his perceptions

  were visceral and immediate, not filtered by words and

  numbers. They weren't particularly quantifiable, either,

  unless you happened to have a broken washing machine.

  Which is to say that despite every effort of mine, he

  was flunking out of school, and so angry about it that he

  had turned to a group of similarly estranged young outlaws,

  each with a bad attitude and a ready supply of marijuana,

  and I was worried about him.

  "Just come and look at the place," I said. "Will you do

  that? And if you don't want to, you don't have to stay."

  "Yeah, right," he muttered. "Like I can go and live

  with Dr. Doom."

  That was what he had taken to calling his father, on

  account of the dismal prognosis of most of his father's

  patients; my ex-husband's operating room is a sort of

  last-chance hotel for the neurologically demolished.

  "Dr. Doom," I told my son, "would be delighted to

  have you." Over my dead body, I thought but did not say.

  Sam's father is a charming fellow when he wants to be,

  but too many years inside other people's heads have convinced

  him that he is an authority on all that goes on there.

  Which he is not. When it comes to the sport of human

  beingness, my ex-husband knows the rules but not the

  game, and it is never his blood on the playing field. After

  six months in the presence of his super-achieving father,

  nothing would be left of Sam but a little pile of bones

  and hair.

  "But that won't be necessary," I told Sam, "because if

  you don't like Eastport, I'm not going there, either."

  Then I held my breath for three days: one while we

  drove up Route 1 through Bucksport and Bar Harbor

  and 1A through Milbridge toward Machias, and two

  more while Sam auditioned Eastport. He explored

  Wadsworth's hardware store, and pronounced its nuts-

  and-bolts selection adequate. He stood on the wharves

  where the cargo ships come in, the massive vessels looking

  as incongruous as twenty-story buildings plunked

  down in the midst of the tiny fishing village. He sat

  on the bluffs overlooking the whirlpool, Old Sow--

  the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere--and

  watched the diurnal tide rise its customary twenty-eight

  feet, which is nine-point-two inches every ten minutes.

  During this time I did not smell marijuana, nor did

  I see the unhappy look I had grown accustomed to back

  in the city: the look of a boy with a dozen extraordinary

  talents, none of them valued or even recognized on

  Madison Avenue, and by extension not in the rest of the

  world either, because their possessor was unlikely to earn

  enough money to buy a lot of expensive products.

  On the fourth morning I found him sitting at the

  oilcloth-covered table, in the big old barnlike kitchen

  with the tall maple wainscoting and the high, brilliant

  windows. He was drinking a cup of coffee and looking at

  a set of papers, registration forms for the upcoming year

  at Shead High School. Carefully, in the labored but rigorously

  correct block printing that, at age ten, he had

  finally managed to master, Sam had filled in all the

  spaces except one.

  Parent's signature, the line read. "I think," Sam said,

  "that you should sign this." So I did.

  And that, as they say, has made all the difference.

  3

  George Valentine came up the back steps, wearing a black

  cap with Guptill's Excavating lettered on it in orange:

  script. Dark-haired and with the milky-pale skin that

  downeast Maine people have been passing on for generations,

  George had the stubborn jaw, diminutive build,

  and sharp, banty-rooster bearing of a man who, if he did

  not always have a lot of other people's problems to solve,

  would chronically be creating a lot of them for himself.

  As it was, I had been depending on George since practically

  the day I moved here, and while I was not convinced

  that he could walk on water, I thought he would

  probably take two or three steps before he went down.

  "Miz Tiptree," George said, slapping his cap against

  his leg and stomping snow off his boots. Outside the sky

  had gone grey; to the west, past Carryingplace Cove and

  the Moosehorn Refuge, loomed a wall of clouds as blue

  and heavy as lead.

  "George," I began, "I can't explain this. I don't even

  know who that man is. I just found him a few minutes

  ago and Ellie went out there to make sure he's really