Wreck the Halls Read online

  In the side yard my boots creaked in the frozen white stuff, plowed and shoveled from streets and sidewalks but lying pristine everywhere else. It blanketed the roofs of two-hundred-year-old clapboard houses and surrounded brick chimneys, drew thick white lines on slats of green shutters and atop picket fences, capped red fire hydrants and clung like white moss to the north sides of the fir trees.

  I let it all dazzle me, feeling cleansed by the whiteness and cold. A few blocks downhill—past Town Hall, the old grammar school, and the soaring white clock spire of the Congregational Church—the blue, unbelievably cold water of Passamaquoddy Bay showed glitteringly between the redbrick commercial buildings on Water Street.

  An evergreen wreath with a fat red bow hung on the Carmodys’ front door; two weeks till Christmas. I stood looking at it, taking deep breaths and thinking about how murder divides everything into before and after. Then I followed the shoveled path along the side of the house out to the shop Merle ran in the ell and found the key under the doormat.

  Everyone in Eastport, if they bought their holiday hams or turkeys from Merle Carmody, knew about that key, because on most holidays Merle started drinking two days beforehand. So if you wanted a suckling pig—or your venison, which you’d shot in the autumn and Merle would have butchered and kept frozen for you, for a fee—you had to get into the shop and retrieve it without his help. And Faye Anne of course would be busy with holiday cooking, herself, since heaven forbid Merle shouldn’t get a good dinner to wash down with his bourbon.

  Thus Faye Anne had taken to leaving the key. The meat, wrapped in butcher paper, would have your name on it along with the price; you left your money in the cash box, made change if you needed to, and tucked the key back under the mat when you were finished.

  The locked door being only a signal, in other words, that Merle was absent, not a way of preventing entry. I let myself in.

  Everything was clean and as silent as death in the shop, the knives and cleavers gleaming in their racks and the air smelling faintly of Clorox. Nervously, I glanced around in case Merle really was lurking here somewhere, waiting wild-eyed with one of his butcher tools, ready to strike.

  But I knew he wasn’t. I took a slow step toward the walk-in freezer but stopped when I noticed something unusual in the glass-fronted display counter. After the shop closed each evening, Merle cleaned the display case thoroughly. Anything left over he ground into sausage meat, or if it was fish he chopped it into chowder pieces and sold it cheaply. You never saw anything left sitting in that display case overnight.

  Except this time. I took another step. There were a dozen or so biggish packages wrapped in butcher paper in there now, each sealed with a strip of tape upon which ordinarily a price would have been marked in Merle's black grease pencil.

  Not on these. From the case I removed the largest one and—holding my breath, my hands shaking—forced myself to open it.

  Whereupon its contents, even only half-unwrapped because that was where I had to stop, told me what must be in the remaining ones:

  Merle Carmody, there in his own butcher shop, resting in pieces.

  Chapter 2

  When I first came to Maine I was familiar with one kind of tool: the capitalist tool. At the time, I was a New York financial manager specializing in the blue-chip portfolios and slick tax-shelters of the fabulously wealthy. And at caretaking the fortunes of the fortunate I was the cat's silk pajamas: when they came to me with dotcoms they wanted to invest in I raised the gypsy hex sign, uttered imprecations, and shooed them into underwriting the dot-com companies’ big initial public offerings, which was the real moneymaker.

  But I was helpless in any other department. If I happened upon a TV program meant to explain how to repair a loose doorknob, I thought it was the Sci-Fi Channel. I owned a small screwdriver for prying the battery out of my cell phone; otherwise I went through life secure in the belief that if something got broken, somebody else would fix it.

  The idea was reasonable for a person like me, with a neurosurgeon husband who couldn’t change a lightbulb and an infant son, Sam, who obviously couldn’t change one either, living in a luxury Manhattan co-op with a doorman, a porter, a housekeeper, and a maintenance specialist whose number was on my speed dialer. And it might have gone on being reasonable if over the course of the next dozen years my husband hadn’t turned into a philanderer so promiscuous, the nurses at the hospital where he worked took to calling him Vlad the Impaler.

  And if partly as a result I hadn’t just chucked it all and moved to a Maine island. The house in Eastport was a white, 1823 Federal clapboard with three full floors, eight fireplaces, forty-eight heavy old double-hung windows with green wooden shutters, and a two-story ell that was dangerously close to tumbling into the cellar. I loved the house on sight, but I no more comprehended the demands of old-house maintenance than I understood chaos theory—which, by the way, I have since found that old-house fix-up work strongly resembles.

  For instance, the first night I slept in the house I was awakened by pitter-pattering. Mice, I decided. I would buy mousetraps. But the next morning I discovered that the sound was of plaster crumbs raining down onto the sheets. The ceiling was collapsing.

  Which was how I found out that plastering is a pain, but it isn’t difficult. You just stand on a ladder, trowel in the patching compound, and sand the result until little drops of blood begin popping out of your forehead.

  Or until the new plaster is smooth, whichever comes first.

  Anyway, soon after Sam and I moved here (he was fourteen by then, in a period of his life involving rage, hormones, and a laundry list of illicit substances; also his father and I had divorced, in a period of my life involving rage, hormones, and a laundry list of expensive lawyers), I set up an account at Wadsworth's hardware store on Water Street in Eastport.

  The owners of the store have assured me repeatedly that when they saw me coming they did not go out immediately and buy a boat. But they got a dinghy and I’m sure I’ll see it any day now, trailing behind a yacht. The amount of stuff I bought just in that first week must have financed the teak deck chairs, none of which I’m going to be reclining in any time soon; four years later, I’m on the mailing list of every tool catalog printed in English, meanwhile struggling to maintain the land-locked equivalent of the Titanic.

  Because the patter of falling ceiling pieces turned out to be a signal from the house: SOS! Just try imagining one of those many-armed Hindu goddesses, each graceful hand firmly grasping a hammer, a saw, or a forty-pound sack of plaster mix, and you will get an idea of what my life has become nowadays, pretty much on a daily basis.

  Which brings me to what was waiting on my back porch that morning when I returned from discovering Merle Carmody's disassembled remains:

  A package.

  Well, as you can imagine, I was in no mood for a package. For me any pleasure I might feel about opening any packages whatsoever had gone kaput about forty-seven minutes earlier. This one, however, did not appear to contain body parts, bearing as it did the return address of one of those tool catalogs.

  So after I got inside and scrubbed my hands twice, I did open it, and what I found in it instantly wiped all Merle Carmody's parceled-out anatomy portions from my consciousness.

  It was a Fein “Multimaster” combination spot-sander, polisher, and cutter complete with sanding fingers (single-and double-sided), two scraper attachments (rigid and flexible), grit pads in every possible grade from gravel to diamond dust, and more sharp cutting accessories than Jack the Ripper.

  I’d wanted one badly, since besides falling plaster my old house came equipped with door frames, moldings, window trim, sashes, chimney pieces, balusters, bannisters, mantels, chair rails, pillars, posts, pilasters, and numerous other intricately hand-carved wooden geegaws, all thickly encrusted in old paint.

  So after experimenting with a variety of chemical paint-stripping substances—I especially liked the one whose instructions listed a number of indoor appli
cations, then warned me to USE ONLY OUTDOORS or to TURN OFF ALL POWER WHEN APPLYING because the stuff was EXPLOSIVE!— I’d ordered the Multimaster as an early Christmas present to myself. Now I began examining it, laying it with the box's other contents on the table in my big old barnlike kitchen.

  Winter sunlight slanted in through the high, bare windows, making the maple wainscoting glow with the dark-orange leaf color it had captured over decades of Maine autumns. This winter I was planning to rehabilitate all those windows, a project that meant taking off the side trim and pulling out the sashes.

  Thus I’d also purchased a hollow screw extractor, since taking off the side trim otherwise would mean prying it, which was guaranteed to break it. But with the hollow screw extractor you can core out a fastener—a nail, say, or a stubborn wood screw—along with the wood around it. Then you simply coat the hole with white glue, tap in the right-sized, similarly glue-coated wooden dowel, and voilà!

  Or viola, as my son Sam insists on pronouncing it; he's dyslexic and has decided to believe that letter-transposition is hilarious. Also as used here the term simply is subject to interpretation; depending upon how deeply and inextricably I have gotten myself into a project, muffled shrieking might actually translate it rather nicely.

  The last thing out of the box was a shavehook, which is a handle to which you can attach a variety of odd-shaped blades. I won’t go into the whole hideous process of window repair, now; suffice it to say that even with new tools, by the time I finished I’d be looking around hopefully for a blade shaped like my wrists.

  What with the price of heating oil, though, it was fix the windows or just start burning the furniture in the fireplace. And the tools did make me feel very cheerful and optimistic, as they always do right up until the moment when I begin using them.

  As a test run I meant to redo the cellar steps with them; chilly as it was, the kitchen had a spare, New England-ish charm I didn’t want to ruin. But I couldn’t make the cellar steps look worse. Or the hall, now littered with packing material and the box the tools had come in.

  While I dealt with that, my black Labrador, Monday, wandered in and began nosing the stuff unhappily; lately she’d been acting as if anything new in the house was worrisome. “Hey, what's the matter, girl?”

  I bent to smooth her ears and she leaned against me, sighing gustily and letting her glossy head rest in my hands as if the weight of the world lay on her shoulders. “Poor baby. Sam's coming home.”

  Sam was due any minute, in fact, for winter break from his first year in college. Hearing this, Monday brightened and followed me back to the kitchen where to welcome him home I began fixing Sam's favorite meal: New England boiled dinner.

  As I worked, I tried erasing Merle Carmody from my mind, though the sight of a whole head of cabbage was unhelpful in this regard. And as for the big, red chunk of brine-dripping corned beef, I would as soon not discuss it. But I’d gotten it simmering—slipping tidbits to a still-oddly subdued Monday while averting my eyes from the awful spectacle of a pile of beet peelings, trickling red—by around noon.

  Which was when I heard my ex-husband's footsteps on the porch. This as an omen was like Typhoid Mary phoning to say she’d be stopping by for a cup of tea, only instead of a disease he usually brought junk he’d decided he wanted to get rid of, then dumped on me. Moments later he came in without even a courtesy knock, carrying an old blanket, a tea kettle (no spout), and some ancient venetian blinds.

  Well, Monday could use the blanket. Quickly I put away the last piece of broccoli quiche, which I had taken out of the refrigerator for my own lunch. My ex-husband (his name, appropriately enough, is Victor) believes I am barely capable of constructing peanut-butter sandwiches, and anytime a culinary creation of mine suggests otherwise he wants to eat the evidence. Once he has done so he pretends it was never there in the first place, confirming his original impression.

  This—confirming his original impressions, I mean—is Victor's design for living.

  “What's all this I hear about you finding a body?” he demanded as he opened my refrigerator, located the quiche, and devoured it in a few bites. Next he looked hopefully around for coffee, apparently in the belief that his eager hand-rubbing was somehow attractive.

  I filled the coffeemaker, since although I am perfectly capable of having (and winning) a knock-down, drag-out fight with Victor anytime you care to name, I like to pick my moments.

  “Why were you visiting a murderess, anyway?” he wanted to know as he accepted a fresh cup minutes later.

  I’d given him the short version, leaving out the inflammatory parts such as my decision to investigate the meat-counter contents. Victor likes to think he controls my behavior as if I were a sock puppet: anything he wouldn’t do, I shouldn’t, either. But when I got to the part about visiting the wife of a known wife beater, he went all huffy on me anyway.

  “Why, that could be extremely unsafe, Jacobia. Don’t you know that?”

  He frowned, wagging an admonishing finger at me, and of course I did not chop the offending digit off with the shavehook. Back when he was married to me, worrying about my safety was not exactly a daily point on Victor's to-do list. But now that it had become absolutely no business of his, he was rabid about it.

  “Not that I’d expect you to realize the danger,” he continued. “You have to admit, Jacobia, that you don’t always use very good judgment.”

  Which was a valid criticism. Proof positive: I’d married him. “First of all, the term murderess is so last century, Victor. Murder is getting to be a gender-neutral activity these days. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  I edged back into the hallway where my tools were; handling them, knowing that I was able to use them, felt calming to me. “Anyway, what did you want?”

  Crouching, I began scraping paint off the top cellar step, since keeping my hands busy stopped them from moving toward Victor's throat. Next I would sand the risers down to the bare wood, a tedious chore. But next spring that cellar would be damp again due to its nifty, nineteenth-century flood-preventing feature: French drains.

  “Oh, nothing,” Victor said unconvincingly.

  Don’t get me started on French drains, which are constantly open to let any possible flooding out of the cellar but are also effective at letting humidity back in, and have I mentioned that Eastport is on an island? So if I didn’t sand now to get the damp-rotted wood right down to a new surface, the paint job I had planned would start peeling off like dime-store fingernail polish twenty minutes after I applied it.

  “I don’t see the point of your doing that yourself,” Victor commented as I rubbed at the step. “Why not get a man?”

  Nobly, I refrained from pointing out to him that there was a man sitting just about three feet from me, right that very minute. Instead I muttered something about him walking east until his hat floated, but he didn’t hear me.

  Actually, I enjoy painting. It's the prep work I can do without, but the house can’t. Old Maine houses suck up prep work almost as fast as the other thing they most like consuming, which is money.

  “We visited Faye Anne,” I said—if I didn’t talk, Victor was going to, which could lead to another murder—“because it's Christmastime.”

  “So?” He sipped coffee, giving me a view of his jawline; over the past few years it had been getting just the tiniest bit less taut. His dark, curly hair had a few threads of grey in it, too, and he wore glasses, peering owlishly through them with thick-lashed hazel eyes. He was, it occurred to me suddenly, nearly forty years old.

  “So,” I replied, buoyed by the surge of mean glee this realization produced, “people visit each other around this time. Eat cookies, sing carols, exchange little gifts. You know—holiday cheer.”

  “Oh.” He looked puzzled. Victor's idea of holiday cheer is the French Riviera. But to be fair, his job as a neurosurgeon probably accounts for this; people's brain ailments occur with so little regard for the calendar that for years, the only way he knew it was Chris
tmas was by the slices of processed turkey floating in yellow gravy in the hospital cafeteria.

  Now he had abandoned his big-city medical career and followed me to Eastport, where he had started a trauma clinic. He claimed it was to be near Sam but I was sure what he really wanted was to drive me crazy, so crazy that in the end my own brain would become damaged and I would develop one of those ailments.

  “There was another reason we visited Faye Anne,” I added. “A few days ago, she told Ellie she thought someone was stalking her.”

  I hesitated saying this, not wanting to provoke more critical comment. Still, it troubled me: such an unlikely coincidence. And Victor, although I hated admitting it, could be perceptive; years of picking legitimate symptoms from masses of trivial, poorly organized complaints had made him uncannily sensitive to the alarm bells in people's stories.

  And to the false notes. I dug the shavehook into a paint blob and was rewarded by the removal of half a dozen more old paint molecules. This wasn’t working the way I’d hoped.

  “Which was silly,” I went on. “Who’d stalk Faye Anne? Especially here, where just about everyone knows where you are and what you’re doing.”

  In Eastport the back-fence telegraph is so effective that if you cut your finger at one end of town, someone will get out the Band-Aids and Mercurochrome for you at the other. “I mean, why follow someone if you already know where they’re going?”

  No answer. I scraped some more. From his expression I half expected Victor to begin scolding again. But then as I’d hoped he clicked into diagnostic mode, instead.

  “People don’t usually think they’re being stalked when they’re not,” he pronounced. “Unless it's a symptom of something. A paranoid delusion, maybe.”

  And there it was, the connection I’d been groping for, the thing that made Faye Anne's funny feeling of being watched and Merle's murder seem like parts of a single event. I was about to ask Victor if paranoia could get worse so suddenly that a person could become violent, possibly without warning, and attack someone. But before I could, something else I’d said reminded him of something about him.