Sarah Graves - Triple Witch (Home Repair Is Homicide Series #2)  

Z:\ebooks\S\Sarah Graves - 02 - Triple Witch.pdb PDB Name: Sarah Graves - 02 - Triple Witc Creator ID: REAd PDB Type: TEXt Version: Unique ID Seed: Creation Date: 5/17/2008 Modification Date: 5/17/2008 Last Backup Date: 1/1/1970 Modification Number: Triple Witch by Sarah Graves TRIPLE WITCH Sarah Graves BANTAM BOOKS Copyright 1999 by Sarah Graves ISBN 0-553-57858-8 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. 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 rim 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 down east Maine in late June is practically a tropical heat wave. "No. "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 blot to 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. 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 down east 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. "Is that so?" said police chief Bob Arnold when Ellie and I told him of our discovery. "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 bum pah stick ahs "Well.