Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 22

Wade waited outside, then drove her home. It was nine in the morning, and up and down the Eastport streets the daily routines were well under way: in and out of the post office, the hardware store, and the IGA, normal people and their ordinary ch.o.r.es.

All present and accounted for; all but Sam. At home, Jake's father was in the kitchen cooking oatmeal.

He wore denim coveralls, a plaid flannel s.h.i.+rt, and beat-up work boots. He'd been dressed since five that morning, when he'd woken to find Bella's side of the bed empty.

No stranger to disaster, he'd gotten up immediately to start making phone calls. But first he'd shaved and dressed, since at that point he still didn't know who he might end up talking to: a ransom demander?

Or maybe a coroner's deputy. All this she'd learned from Wade; her dad still wasn't talking much.

"He'll settle down," Wade told Jake when they got inside, putting a gentle hand up to push her damp hair off her forehead.

"I hope so," Jake replied guiltily. She still felt ashamed, as if she and Bella had chickened out instead of getting out of the water because it-or Randy-had been about to kill them.

An impulse seized her, to skip the shower she'd planned and instead crawl into Sam's bed and stay there. But: "You can't try again if you're dead," Wade said, pulling a set of fresh towels out of the linen closet for her.

And in the end it was this remark that got her through the shower, the rewrapping of her ankle, and the putting on of clean clothes, even the application of a little makeup.

When Sam came home, she would want to look decent. Back downstairs, she found her father still in the kitchen stirring steel-cut oats.

"Don't you dare blame her," Bella said.

Jake's dad's gaze remained on the oatmeal.

"I made her take me," Bella said. "I was the one who decided to go."

The oatmeal spoon stopped moving. "You might have both said something to me."

Bella got a coffee cup from the cabinet and filled it for Jake. "Why, so you could make a fuss? Try talking me out of it? Forbid it?"

Before he could answer, she went on. "I'm too far along in my life to start letting you tell me what to do, old man." Her big green eyes flashed with anger. "So if you were thinking that, you can stow it." She pa.s.sed Jake the cream. "We're sorry we worried you. But I married you, and I can unmarry you."

His lips pursed. But there was no hiding the smile twitching at their corners. Seeing it, Jake knew why he'd married Bella.

Exactly why. "Eat," he said, putting two bowls of steaming mush on the table.

The women looked at the bowls, and at each other. Neither of them felt anything like eating.

"Unless," he added, "you both want to lie around all day on fainting couches, sighing and weeping. 'Cause that's what you'll both be doing if you don't get some food into you."

So they dug in, mostly just to placate him. But it turned out that bowls of hot mush slathered with cream and maple sugar were just what the doctor ordered.

Jake was working on a second bowl and Bella was drinking another gla.s.s of orange juice when Bob Arnold came in and laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table.

"I just had a talk with Roger Dodd," he said. "Turns out he bought a lot of electronic equipment not long ago. Copier, and a scanner."

Just then Wade came in with the dogs. Behind him came Ellie White and George Valentine. They'd all heard what the chief said.

"Why?" asked Ellie. "I mean, why would he buy ..."

But Jake understood. "He copied it, didn't he? The money, he faked it up."

It was, she realized, the thing that had been bothering her all along. "He faked Randy out with it."

Bob turned to her. "Somebody wants a million from you, and you don't want to give it, it stands to reason you might try and fool 'em."

She got up. Cooked steel-cut oats, her father had once told her, put hair on your chest. She thought that if it ever came to a choice between the way she felt now and low-cut blouses, she'd take the oats.

Thank you, she mouthed at him, and he nodded in reply, not unkindly.

"Why?" said Ellie suddenly again.

She'd dressed in a white blouse, black wool slacks, and a red sweater, plus stockings and loafers. Even her hair was pinned up in a neat, reddish gold braid.

"I mean," Ellie said, "why would Roger try to pa.s.s phony cash off on his brother?"

No sequins, no glitter were anywhere on her. Wade and George were cleaned up, too: George in clean, pressed jeans and a blue chambray work s.h.i.+rt with pearl b.u.t.tons, Wade in corduroys, a good collar s.h.i.+rt, and a navy crew-neck sweater with the words Maine Fish & Game embroidered on it in crimson.

A thump of fright hit Jake as she realized why they looked so respectable, all of them: Like her dad, they didn't know who they might be talking to. A police detective, a reporter ...

An undertaker. "He knew," Bella said. "He knew Randy killed both those women-his own wife, Cordelia, and Roger's wife, Anne. And he knew that Randy would be coming back for the money."

Bob nodded in agreement. "Turns out that two days after Anne died was when Roger went online and bought all that equipment." He scowled communicatively. "Hadn't even had Anne's funeral yet. So you're right, he knew the score. Or he was an awful good guesser. But he says it was all for menus and place mats, for the bar."

A likely story, Bob's face said.

"Where is he now?" George Valentine wanted to know. "I'll go ask him a couple of pointed questions of my own."

Ellie looked warningly at him. Small and compact, with hard, work-toughened hands that clenched readily into fists, George was the type of fellow who, if he asked a guy a few questions and the guy didn't answer fast enough, would speed the responses pretty effectively.

"Okay, okay," he relented. "I just wanted to help."

"He's in custody now, though, right?" Jake asked Bob. "Roger is?"

But Bob shook his head. "For what? Getting threatened and blackmailed by his brother, who by the way we also haven't proved anything against?"

His tone said that, left to his own devices, Bob would have locked Roger Dodd up permanently just on general principles. But: "No. He's got a date with the state cops later today. And I guess someone'll be wanting to talk about that fake money with him."

Bob moved toward the door. "But as of now I've got nothing. I wouldn't have even known about the copying equipment if Roger hadn't been trying to fast-talk me about the cash. First he said he went to Bangor and got it, then that a courier delivered it... . I guess he never thought anyone would ask. So he had no story."

He looked at Bella and Jake. "That got me thinking, and the fancy copier and so on are right there in his office."

With the result that, as usual, small-town cop Bob Arnold had put two and two together, then pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Jake felt a burst of grat.i.tude for him.

But it didn't last. "Anyway, I just came up here to make sure you two were okay," he went on, "and tell you the Canadian Coasties're on the way to where you think you had a sighting."

She stared in disbelief. "We think?"

Wade stepped in front of her. "Okay, Jake," he said. "Bob, has Roger said anything more about where he thinks Randy went?"

Bob frowned. "No. I went back down to the Artful Dodger and asked him again just now. But since this morning he's hooked up with an attorney and now he says he won't be making any more comments about Randy or anything else."

Bob pulled the back door open. "Also, he says as far as he's concerned the statements he's already made were under duress."

"Fine," Jake managed to reply when she found her voice again; the nerve of the guy. "Let's leave it like that, then."

She stepped up to Bob. "But tell him this from me."

Because maybe she wasn't a money person anymore, and maybe her days of cash clients so crooked that just talking to them was a prosecutable felony were over. But she remembered the important parts of that old life, where what you really needed was a cool head, a keen eye, and the ability to make good on your threats.

All of which she'd also had. And Roger Dodd wasn't the first barefaced liar she'd ever dealt with.

Not by a long shot. "Tell him I know he's mixed up in this," she whispered. "And if Sam doesn't come home-"

A sob blocked her throat. She swallowed it angrily and went on, feeling the bad old days pulling her back. And not caring.

Like in the old days. "Tell Roger that if that happens, his lawyers won't save him. Nothing will. You tell him from me."

Startled, Bob hesitated. Then, "You got it," he said.

Then he went out. But when he was gone, she sank into a chair again, because if vengeance for Sam was the only thing left to her, she could get it. She hadn't been bluffing about it.

But she wouldn't want it; not that, or anything else.

Ever.

"HOW'S THE ANKLE?" WADE ASKED HALF AN HOUR LATER when she'd retreated to her third-floor workroom and the insulation project.

"Fine." It hurt like h.e.l.l, actually. They'd given her pills for it at the clinic.

But she didn't want to take any. "Wade, I was this close. I could practically touch him. But I gave up."

Furious, Jake flung old floorboards toward the holes they'd been pried out of. Her father had been keeping his hands occupied while he awaited word that morning, and had gotten a helper to run the insulation blower, too.

The result was that the floor up here had been insulated, although at the moment she wouldn't have cared if the whole place froze solid, maybe even forever.

Wade stood by the door watching. "I gave up and ran away," she fumed, seizing a claw hammer and some nails.

"Jake, you didn't. Where you were, you had maybe another minute. After that, the tide would've washed you off your feet."

She fit one of the boards back into the floor, realized she had it upside down and backward, flipped it angrily, and slammed it down again.

"You don't know that. We might've made it. I just got too scared, that's all."

Refitting floorboards was about the last thing she felt like doing. But she had to do something or her feet would find their way downtown, straight to the Artful Dodger, and then without any delay her hands would find their way around Roger Dodd's neck.

"So, what if we'd had to swim a little?" she went on. "We were both already wet. Maybe we could've ..."

"Drowned," Wade said flatly. "And we'd be searching for the two of you now, too. For," he added quietly, "your bodies, yours and Bella's."

Silence. Then: "Yeah. I'm just mad, that's all. And scared." She looked up. "Wade, what the h.e.l.l is Randy Dodd doing out there? Why didn't he just take the money and run? He doesn't know it's fake."

Wade shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe there's something else he wants. Something he didn't know he wanted, until-"

Which was when it hit her. She put the hammer down. "That's it, isn't it? There's something else now, there must be. Randy must have thought he'd just show up, get his cash from Roger, and vanish again. But then Chip Hahn and Carolyn Rathbone stuck their oar in, and he had to do something about that. Because Carolyn suspected that Randy was still alive, and if she said so publicly she might be listened to. And Randy couldn't have that."

"And then," Wade agreed, "Sam showed up unexpectedly on the breakwater and maybe recognized him. Talk about bad luck."

Right, she thought. For both of them, Randy and Sam.

Wade continued, "Which still doesn't explain why Randy didn't ..."

Kill them all right off the bat, he would have finished, but instead he stopped short, not wanting to voice the thought.

He'd changed his clothes, she noticed suddenly; now he was dressed for boating, in heavy cargo pants and layers of s.h.i.+rts. An oilskin slicker topped the bright red sweats.h.i.+rt she'd given him for his birthday.

"Right." She said what he hadn't wanted to: "Grab Carolyn, kill her, get rid of the body. Simple, right? But when he grabbed her, he must not have realized Chip Hahn was with her, that he's her partner. So, why not?"

She put a nail into one of the repositioned floorboard's old nail holes, grabbed another one, and slammed it home with the hammer. Hitting something felt good. She placed two more nails, positioning them carefully.

Wade crouched by her, put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't hit your thumb."

She managed a smile. "Right. But seriously, Wade, he should be out of the country by now."

She placed another board, hammered it down. "But maybe he's onto the fact that the money is no good? Or maybe-"

He's got a taste for it, Roger Dodd had said of his brother. And ... missing girls, Chip had reported of Randy's time in another state.

Jake voiced her worst thought. "Maybe he just wants to kill them his way. His own time and place. Maybe it's worth the risk to him, waiting until he can-"

But this time she was the one who stopped before finis.h.i.+ng the thought, because the end of this one was so unacceptable, just absolutely unthinkable.

Wade crossed to the doorway. It struck her that he wasn't just going out on the water; he was going now.

"George and I are taking his boat out to have a look," he answered her questioning glance. "A lot of the guys from around town are going; we're just going to stay out there until-"

She stood. The bad ankle protested strenuously; she told it to shut up. Stupid body parts, she thought angrily.

"Now that Randy knows someone might've spotted him on the New Brunswick side, he might decide to go in the other direction," Wade said.

"Through the Lubec Channel. He could make it out to Grand Manan," she mused aloud. "I hadn't thought of that."

The large island between Maine and Nova Scotia was thinly settled and even more thinly policed, especially off-season. "He could lay low there," she said.

Or he could circle on back to the coast of New Brunswick and disappear into the warren of brick rowhouses and narrow alleys of the industrial city of St. John.

She crouched once more, slotted the final loose floorboard into its place, and nailed it down.

"He's making it all up as he goes along now, and that makes him harder to predict."