Triple Witch Read online

  “All right,” Arnold relented. “I guess I can ride along when the time comes, so the boogieman doesn’t get Henahan.”

  Ellie put her hand on his arm. “Tim will be grateful.”

  Arnold’s round pink cheeks grew pinker than usual. “No, he won’t,” he answered gruffly. “He’ll just moan and complain like always, and threaten to walk off the dock. If I had a nickel for every time he has told me that he is planning to end it all,” Arnold went on, “I would be lying on a beach in Tahiti right now, and some other poor bastard would be police chief.”

  Ellie twinkled at him. “Oh, you would not. If anybody tried to make you live anywhere but Eastport, you would wither away.”

  “Yeah, well,” he allowed. “Anyway, you take care on that boat of yours with the tide running.”

  “We will,” Ellie assured him, turning to me.

  “Me?” I said, shaking my head in a way that I hoped was the final word on the topic.

  It wasn’t.

  4 Back at my house, I busied myself with a task that obviously needed doing that minute: on the hardwood kitchen floor was a spot of old carpet adhesive that had only been stuck there twenty years or so. Getting it off required boiling water, a paint scraper, and infinite patience, all of which I was prepared to apply forever if it kept me from having to go out on Ellie’s boat.

  She, by contrast, enjoys narrow channels, swift currents, and all the other hazards with which the cold waters off the Maine coast are furnished. Possibly this is because her forebears were pirates, people whose idea of fun was to wait for a winter midnight so cold that chunks of sea smoke froze solid and calved off like icebergs into the frigid water. Then on a creaking, disreputable boat they skulked out into Passamaquoddy Bay, flying the skull and crossbones and singing dark, ominous sea-chanties, awaiting some hapless vessel—lost in the fog, her crew praying aloud for salvation—to blunder into their clutches.

  Too late, the master of the victim ship would glimpse the pirates’ dark eyes, torch-lit and glittering with cruelty; too late, the doomed crew would understand the chanty drifting dirgelike over the water at them, and the deck would fall silent for the moment it took to sink into them: that they were dead men.

  I dripped more hot water onto the carpet adhesive. In a year or so, I could remove it completely. But Ellie was not about to let me escape into the pleasures of old-house fix-up.

  “Let’s,” she said in a voice that was bright as a knife-edge, “take a picnic.” She was not a happy camper, I could tell from the brisk, furious way she bustled around the kitchen, making sardine sandwiches.

  Eating food while bobbing up and down on the waves is for me a pointless exercise. I find it simpler and more pleasant just to hurl the sandwiches overboard while they are still wrapped in wax paper. Still, I thought humoring Ellie might be wise; murdered friends bring out the cutthroat ancestor in her.

  So we compromised: lemonade and those horrid little oily creatures in flat tins for Ellie, pilot crackers for me. Then Monday started romping and agitating to go, too, so we took her Day-glo orange doggy life vest which she regards as sissified, but she tolerates it.

  There was of course no real likelihood of my falling from Elbe’s boat and drowning. Still, I gave the kitchen a fond, last look, which was when I noticed a pool of rusty water spreading slyly from beneath the cast-iron radiator.

  “Wow,” Ellie commented. “Better call George.”

  She meant her husband, George Valentine. In Eastport, he was the man you called for bats in the attic, frozen pipes, strange bones in the garden, or a plague of red ants.

  And for imminent floods. Have I mentioned that the house is haunted? From the front parlor came the sharp whap-whapping of a window shade, snapping up by itself.

  I turned the round wooden handle atop the old radiator, cutting off its water supply. “Probably,” I said, “George is at the beach, helping to get Ken’s body. So if I stayed here, I’d just be waiting around for him. I might as well come along.”

  Out in the dining room, an old silver spoon that I have put onto the mantelpiece a hundred times dropped to the tiled hearth with a familiar, communicative little clink!

  Ellie looked assessingly at me. Her campaign to turn me from landlubber to sea dog was ongoing, but it had not escaped her that, under most circumstances, I would rather be anywhere but out on the water in her tiny wooden boat.

  This time, though, I was beginning to have a funny feeling, amplified by that spoon and that window shade, something like the intuition that makes you decide to buy a lottery ticket, and you end up winning fifty dollars.

  But my sense now that something was brewing didn’t feel a bit lucky. I’d have paid fifty dollars to get rid of it, in fact.

  And as it turned out, eliminating it cost more than that.

  A lot more, starting on Crow Island.

  5 At the dock, Ellie stepped easily from the pier to the foredeck of her boat, loading our supplies and a gas can, taking off lines and making sure the oars were properly shipped. Finally, checking that the flares and life cushions were stowed under the seats, she started the Evinrude engine.

  The decks of the bigger boats loomed like tall buildings as we motored between them: me in the middle, Ellie at the rudder, and Monday perched up in the prow, her pink tongue lolling and her eyes bright with adventure. The red bandanna tied around her neck looked dashing, and her joyfulness made me glad I had brought her.

  It was a glorious day, the cool breeze tangy with fish and pine tar and the water very clean so you could see right down to the bottom where sea urchins clung in clusters. Yellow sunshine poured from the azure sky and bounced from the waves, so that the air seemed to vibrate with an excess of light and energy.

  Turning back to Ellie, I found she was smiling at me with a look both knowing and mischievous. Getting me out on the water was like pulling teeth, but being out on it was dandy—until she hit the throttle and we shot from the mouth of the boat basin like something being rocketed out of a cannon. I gripped the gunwales, Monday gulped a faceful of spray, and Ellie laughed wickedly, like one of her rascal ancestors.

  Crow Island lay between the lighthouse point at Deer Island and Head Harbor on Campobello. From where I sat it was just a dot on the horizon, a rock and a clump of fir trees.

  “Want to shoot the narrows?” Ellie waved a freckled arm at Head Harbor, about half a mile off on our right. (Or starboard, as these boating types insist on calling it. If you want to remember which is which, the trick is this: the words left and port mean the same thing and have the same number of letters.)

  The lighthouse at Head Harbor was white and octagonal in the Canadian maritime tradition, with tall gabled windows and a red cross facing the Bay of Fundy. At low tide you could scramble to it by making your way across a great many slippery rocks, down a ladder, and across the tide flats.

  “No!” I called back to Ellie. “Just head straight out!”

  At high tide, it is possible to zoom between the island and the promontory upon which the lighthouse stands—possible, that is, if you go very fast so your keel stays high on the water, and your aim is very true; otherwise the last thing you hear will be a loud noise, a sort of mingling of kablooie and sayonara.

  “Ellie,” I said quietly. I was not shrieking, I was very carefully not shrieking as the lighthouse loomed larger.

  Ordinarily, Ellie would not scare me this way, but she was angry about Kenny. The boat sat up smartly atop the waves, skipping over them with the heedless momentum of a hurled stone.

  Then suddenly she cranked the throttle down, the boat nearly swamping in the sudden backwash. I waited until the forward roll settled, listening to the rumble of the Evinrude churning in low.

  “I’m sorry,” Ellie said quietly.

  “That’s all right. Think of it as medical screening. I mean, if I didn’t have a heart attack just now, I probably never will.”

  Monday looked from Ellie’s face to mine, figuring out the emotional subtext, which to
a dog is really the only thing that matters. People, too; dogs are just better at admitting it.

  “You dated Kenny Mumford a few times, didn’t you?” I asked. “When you were in high school?”

  Ellie steered us back out into deep water, increasing the throttle just enough to buck the swirling currents and keep us from wallowing in the waves.

  “More than a few times. My sophomore year. He had a car, and all he wanted to do was drive.”

  I waited.

  “He was always a perfect gentleman,” she added, a bit too defensively, I thought. On the other hand, in my time I have drunk enough Southern Comfort in the back seats of enough convertibles to know when I really ought not to pursue a subject, so I didn’t.

  “And then you started seeing George.”

  George Valentine, who if Ellie were in trouble on the other side of a mile of burning coals, he would hotfoot it over in a heartbeat.

  “And then George,” she agreed. “I’d broken off with Kenny a few months earlier, so there was no trouble about that.”

  “But still.” Monday stood unsteadily in the boat’s bow, her nose twitching in anticipation of land.

  “Right. Kenny was important to me.”

  The boat scraped bottom. Ellie cut engine and hauled up the Evinrude, hopping out as the boat’s motion sent it onto the small stones. Monday leapt out, too, paddling around a few times in an excess of doggy happiness before scrambling onto the stony beach, shaking off a halo of sparkling droplets.

  I put a foot in the water, cringed, and dropped overboard. The icy wavelets came up only to about my ankles, but froze me to my hipbones, with the deep, aching, wedgelike agony of water that is cold to the point of being truly dangerous; survival time without a drysuit in Passamaquoddy Bay, even in summer and with your head above water, runs about fifteen minutes.

  Ellie and I dragged the boat up above the high-water line while Monday had a puppy blowout, which even in her canine middle age still consists of: (1) dashing away full tilt, (2) skidding to a frantic, backpedaling halt like a cartoon character, (3) chasing her tail in a half-dozen mad circles, and (4) repeating the above until a switch flips in her brain and she saunters calmly back to you, the look on her face asking clearly what the hell you think is so funny.

  “Hey,” said Timothy Mumford. We hadn’t heard him coming.

  “Hello, Timothy,” said Ellie. “This is my friend, Jacobia.”

  He stood on a grassy rise above the beach, gazing down at us in surprise and alarm. Flanking him were a pair of evil-looking hounds, one a shepherd mix with pale yellow eyes and a snaggletoothed grin that did not look at all welcoming, the other a tan, hulking brute with a missing ear, some god-forbid cross between a mastiff and, apparently, a Rhodesian Ridge-back.

  “Monday,” I said quietly, and she trotted over; she is a knuckleheaded little Labrador retriever, but no fool.

  The mastiff picked his way deliberately down the embankment, placing his enormous feet with the delicacy of a deer.

  “Nice doggy,” I said inadequately.

  The mastiff sat, offering his paw and looking grateful when I took it. Umph, he remarked from somewhere deep in his big chest.

  At this the shepherd gave a little yip of relief and danced into a play bow in front of Monday; moments later all three dogs were chasing in and out of the water, having a high old time.

  Timothy hadn’t said anything. He was a small, wiry man with thin, silky white hair, skin tanned the color of moose hide, and anxious blue eyes, wearing a flannel shirt and overalls.

  “Timothy,” said Ellie, “I’m afraid we’ve got bad news.”

  His face did not change expression, as if after many sorrows another one would not come as a surprise.

  “Ayuh,” he said, leaning on a stick. That was when I noticed his clubbed foot. “Coast Guard fellers came yesterday, said Ken’s boat come up a drifter.”

  Timothy turned and hurried as best he could, away from us up the path through the blueberry shrub, then halted as if in pain.

  Overhead, a pair of brown ospreys circled, scanning the island for some helpless prey animal to target, to seize on and pluck out its liver, while out on the water the ferry to Deer Island plied the channel prettily, trailing a banner of foam.

  “All right,” the old man said, bracing himself desperately on his stick. “I’m ready.”

  So then Ellie told him.

  6 “It’s not right.” Timothy’s voice was a reedy tenor note of complaint. “Poor Ken being done that way, it’s not right at all.”

  His house on Crow Island was a tumbledown scrapwood frame structure, braced and patched over almost every ramshackle inch. Outside, it looked like a movie scene set in a ghost town; inside, the little old shack smelled of bacon grease and dogs.

  Lots of dogs: Timothy was a hopeless collector of strays. By the time we reached the house, some twenty of them had joined us; inside, half a dozen more looked up alertly at the creak of the rusting hinges on the screen door.

  “He didn’t deserve it,” Timothy complained again. In the light filtering in through the grimy window, his wrinkled face resembled a mask of tragedy carved from a nutshell. “Maybe he wasn’t no straight arrow, like some o’ those high mucky-mucks as live in town, but he’ud begun t’ change.”

  Ellie glanced around, mentally cataloguing the old man’s needs: blankets, a half-dozen replacement windowpanes, another roll of tarpaper for the roof and perhaps a good cleaning of the stove flue, for while it was summer now, in Maine another winter is always lurking frigidly around the corner.

  “Of course he didn’t deserve it,” she said, her voice full of honest sympathy, making him believe her in a way that I never could have. “Kenny just had bad luck.”

  “That’s right,” Timothy agreed stoutly. “But he had things workin’ for him, things as was goin’ to make him a bit o’ money. Ken had a deal goin’. He,” the old man protested vainly, as if it might somehow bring Ken back again, “had just hit a good patch.”

  The dogs watched the old man adoringly, and despite the disorder they seemed clean and well fed. Among them, Monday looked happy and at ease, and not a bit better cared for.

  “But I guess that’s all water under the bridge, now. What about the arrangements?” Timothy demanded. “I got a bit o’ burial insurance for m’self, but t’wont pay nothin’ for Ken.”

  He glanced angrily at me. “And who’re you, some snoop from the welfare? Don’t you worry, I don’t pay for them dogses’ grub with none a’ your’n.”

  I opened my mouth to make some inadequate reply, but Ellie got in before me. “No, Tim, I told you. Jacobia is my friend.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Mumford,” I said, and he accepted this, nodding curtly before turning to Ellie again.

  “A man ain’t meant to bury a son,” he said, his voice rising in grieving affront. “It ain’t fair, just when Ken had somethin’ going, that bastard come’n shot him.”

  “There, there,” Ellie said, patting his arm in a gesture which, had I tried it, its falsity would have been embarrassing. But coming from Ellie, whose sincerity is as shiningly genuine as a brand-new silver dollar, it looked comforting.

  Timothy pulled a kerchief from his overalls and mopped his reddened nose, while the dogs looked anxious at his distress. “I got no reason to live no more,” he uttered. “It’s all just got to be too much. I should just get my guts together and end it all.”

  Here we go, I thought, remembering Arnold’s prediction: that Timothy would threaten to walk off the dock. It was still pretty heartbreaking, though; he had, after all, just lost his son.

  “Only I don’t know as who’ud take care o’ the dogs,” Timothy mourned heavily. “Them as has money enough is awful hard-hearted, nowadays, not like in times before.”

  He shot a glance at me, to see if I might deny this, and possibly put my checkbook where my mouth was too.

  But instead I put my foot there. “What scheming bastard,” I asked him, “did y
ou mean? The one who you think shot Kenny.”

  At which Tim’s own mouth clamped shut, his shoulders hunched forward turtlelike, his liver-spotted hands clenched stubbornly in a gnarled hump in front of him on the kitchen table.

  “Jacobia,” Ellie said in that sweet tone she takes when she wants me to do something important, like shut up and get out of the way, “I think Monday needs some fresh air.”

  Timothy snorted, and muttered something unintelligible in a tone that could have stripped paint.

  “Why don’t you take a walk out to the shed,” she suggested, “and check on Timothy’s dog supplies? That way,” she went on smoothly, “the ladies from church can put together a package for the animals, too, when they make cakes and casseroles for Tim.”

  “Cakes,” Tim muttered less sourly, his wish for extinction apparently tempered by the promise of powdered-sugar frosting.

  I took Monday and went out, glad for the dazzle of sunshine and the scouring rush of salt air. Poor old Timothy was purely pitiful in his grief, and pitifulness brings out the worst in me.

  By contrast, the shed was a cheerful surprise: ramshackle on the outside, all sweet-smelling order within. Sacks of dog chow stood neatly stacked on wooden pallets beside fresh straw heaped to make dog beds. There was a pile of emptied food-bags, too, carefully folded and weighted with a stone from the beach so they wouldn’t get scattered around. The windows were tight, the old pine floor had been swept recently, and in a tin box I found a stock of basic animal remedies.

  The dog food, Ellie had said, was donated by a local animal-welfare group. But not vet care; he’d done without something for himself to buy this stuff. I wondered, if push came to shove for me as it had for him, whether I would be so humane.

  Some time later Ellie came and found me there sprawled on a hay bale, half-drunk on the sweet smells of straw and dog kibble. Dogs gathered around me, pushed against my sides, with Monday jealously holding pride of place under my right arm and a collie nuzzled under my left.