Triple Witch (28 page)

His gaze was amused. “Something,” he repeated softly.

Which was when I knew he knew.

41
“I don’t understand it,” Ellie said an hour or so later when we were back to my kitchen. “Why would he chase us, and even hold a gun on us, just to let us go?”

I put my hands around a mug of hot tea dosed with
whiskey. “He didn’t let us go. Wade showed up, that’s all, and heard me make that noise.”

At, I might add, the last possible civilized moment; things had been promising to get ugly. But when you have to stop by the side of the road at night, to fix a truck—

—that balkiness I’d noticed turned out to be a quart of transmission fluid in the process of signaling its absence—

—it’s difficult, riding to the rescue in timely fashion. On the other hand, we’d only been a hundred feet from the road, so at least Wade had been able to find us.

“Willoughby knows we aren’t going anywhere,” I said. “More to the point—”

I swallowed another gulp of the hot toddy. It had taken a belt of the straight stuff to get my teeth to stop chattering, and not only because I’d ridden home in the back of the truck.

“More to the point, he knows who we are. Who I am. And that was what he wanted. For now.”

Ellie put her face over her cup and breathed in the vapors. “I thought that awful British man was going to shoot us both, even when Willoughby said not to. His finger was absolutely trembling on the trigger.”

But not trembling nervously. More like he could barely restrain himself from experiencing the pleasure of it. In the end, Willoughby had been forced to take the gun, to avoid an accident.

And then there was the way Willoughby’s eyes changed, once he recognized me, becoming so cold and reptilian I’d nearly expected a snake’s tongue to come flickering from between his thin lips.

Wade poked his head out from the refrigerator, where he had been rummaging. “What do you mean, knows who you are? Why would he care? Why would you be of any special interest to Willoughby?”

“Well. It’s never been something I’ve liked talking about.”

For one thing, who would believe me? Nowadays, I hardly believe it, myself, that once upon a time I controlled so many of other people’s dollars, whisking them off to be invested in pesos or pounds sterling, yanking them into yen or depositing them in drachmas when a flicker on a computer screen signaled a shift in the exchange rates, halfway around the world.

That being before I became the SEC’s favorite dirt-digger-upper.

“I sent Baxter Willoughby to jail,” I said. “I ruined him. Because of me, his name is mud in financial communities all over the world, not to mention the fact that he’s legally barred from trading even if anyone would knowingly do business with him.”

“Yeah? How’d he find out?” Wade took a bite of the sandwich he’d constructed. He couldn’t have looked calmer if I’d confessed to bringing a lost pussycat back to its owner.

But then, Wade has been out in twenty-foot seas, rescuing day-trippers who think the phrase “mariner’s warning” does not apply to pleasure boats. So he has a sense of proportion.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “It was supposed to be a secret. Nobody was supposed to know. But Hargood has been asking around about him. Maybe Hargood asked the wrong person, and word made it up here.”

“Which means?” Wade washed down his bite of sandwich with a swallow from a bottle of ale.

“Which means he’s got it in for me big-time.
And
he knows I’m snooping around in his business again.”

“You think he’ll come after you?” Wade’s tone was serious.

“No. If he’d wanted to kill me, he could have, before you arrived.”

“What if we told Arnold what we do know,” Ellie mused aloud, “and the police stopped Ned. Did a thorough search of that truck.”

“First of all,” I objected, “they won’t do it without cause, and we still can’t give them any. But more to the point, even if he was going to pick up something, he won’t do it now. You can be sure Willoughby will be on the telephone to Ned. Probably already has been.”

I let a breath out, in exasperation and exhaustion. “No, I’m afraid all we’ve done is tip him off. He knows his little game is blown. What the
hell
is he shipping to New York, anyway?”

Just then Sam stuck his head in. “Anybody seen Dad?”

“No, I thought he was upstairs, asleep.”

He shook his head puzzledly. “He was. I’d looked at him, and he was sleeping like the dead. But then he came down again, after you guys left. I asked him if he wanted to come out with me. But he said he’d rather stay ashore while I went with Harpwell on the
Eric
.”

Dan Harpwell’s boat, he meant: a 32-foot wooden sailing vessel modeled after the old Norwegian patrol boats that used to haunt the most treacherous coasts in the worst weather, looking for mariners in trouble and helping them out of it.

“Harpwell wants me to start getting a feel for it at night,” Sam added. “He says I need to be able to, that sometimes you have to move at night under power.”

Built in 1925 and equipped with her original Buffalo 12-horse engine, the
Eric
was Sam’s ideal cruiser, and in the rare instances when Harpwell had the opportunity he was teaching Sam to sail it single-handed.

“Maybe,” I offered, “your dad’s gone back upstairs?”

“Nope. I looked up there again.”

“Car’s not outside,” Wade said. “Maybe he went for a ride. Although it is past midnight,” he added doubtfully.

“Probably he’s somewhere on the island,” Ellie offered. “There’s not much sightseeing to do on the mainland, after dark.”

“And he couldn’t be down at the Baywatch, or in a bar. On a weeknight, they’re all closed up by now.”

Sam’s tone was intensely concerned, which I thought was odd. But at the time, I didn’t give it much thought. I just went along with what he obviously wanted: to find Victor.

“Maybe we could take a look for him,” Sam said to Wade, “just on the island.”

I thought that probably, feeling suddenly at liberty without Sam, Victor had found some pretty tourist girl to listen to his lies. He could be parked out at Harris Point with her right now, just the two of them and a bottle of wine cooler.

“We’ll find him,” Sam said as they were leaving, sounding as if he were trying to convince himself.

Sounding worried, and strangely guilty, too.

It wasn’t until later, when it was too late to do anything about it—other than the one thing I should have been doing all along—that I found out why.

42
“So,” Ellie said when they had gone, “let’s go downstairs and paint a couple of shutters. I’m too keyed up to sleep, and George is at a bachelor party for one of the guys down at the fire station. He won’t be home for hours.”

“Okay.” I cleared the table, fed the scraps to Monday, and followed Ellie to the cellar where the shutters awaited us.

“I cannot believe,” I said as I turned on the work-lights and tuned the radio to the AM all-news station—late at night we can get some pretty distant signals, including CBS—

“I cannot
believe
,” I repeated, meaning Victor, “he didn’t stop to think that hardware positioning through
more clearly. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if he did things backwards inside people’s brains?”

Ellie looked up from the workbench where she was securing one of the shutters in the bench-mounted vise, cushioning it first with a piece of chamois so that the vise jaws would not bite into the soft old wood.

“Huh,” she said thoughtfully. “I wonder. You don’t suppose that’s what happened, do you? I mean—”

She paused, thinking it over, “Do you think maybe Victor made a mistake? In surgery? Something,” she added, frowning, “harmful, or even fatal?”

I laid my own shutter flat out on the workbench, then took a paintbrush for Ellie and one for myself from the rack at the back of the bench.

“Not,” I pronounced, “bloody likely. You know Victor. He’s Mister Drive-You-Nuts Perfectionist. He’s so focused in the operating room, he once worked through a fire alarm that turned out to be an actual fire. They evacuated most of the hospital, and he never even knew anything about it.”

“Hmm.” Ellie smoothed paint onto the shutter, working with her usual deftness. “It would explain why he’s been even more nuts than usual, though. I’ve seen him wild before, but I’ve never seen him … ditzy.”

She thought a minute. “First health food, then no health food. First a neurosurgeon, then not a neurosurgeon. Goes to bed, gets up again and goes out. As if he’s trying things out one after another. As if,” she concluded, “he is unsure of everything.”

I’d been so focused on the Sam problem, I hadn’t thought much about the bigger picture, but now I considered it.

“You’re right. The whole wine-is-bad-for-you, I’ll-drink-two-bottles-of-it act was very strange, even for Victor. And this idea of his moving here: taking him out of Manhattan would be like taking the clam out of the chowder. It’s just—”

I gestured with the paintbrush. “There’s nowhere
here where he could work. And he’s not going to take up poetry no matter what he says.”

I thought further. “No matter how much he wants to punish or torture me,
or
blackmail Sam with the idea that he
will
punish or torture me …”

“He wouldn’t screw up his whole life to do it. Even Victor’s not that messed up and self-destructive.”

Steadily, Ellie applied paint to the shutter. “And not only that, instead of taking the first opportunity to throw a hissy fit …”

“He keeps avoiding it. As if secretly all he really wants is for me to be nice to him.”

“As if,” Ellie said quietly, “he
needs
you to be nice to him right now, and doesn’t know any other way of making it happen.”

I put my brush down. What could possibly make Victor feel needy? “You know, there’s somebody I can call about this. And at this hour she’ll probably be just getting home from work.”

I went upstairs and made the call, looking up the number in the old address book I had kept back when I lived in New York. The phone was answered on the second ring, and my party sounded bright and alert, so I knew I hadn’t woken her.

I asked her my question, told her why I wanted to know, and listened. Then I thanked her, promised to keep in touch—which I wouldn’t, and she knew that, but it was okay—and went back down to the cellar.

“You nailed it,” I told Ellie, still feeling stunned by what I’d heard. “I just spoke to the head nurse in Victor’s operating room. I used to know her, back when I lived in the city. While I was married to Victor.”

Last time I’d called her, it was to say that if she had to have an affair with my husband, that was one thing—wrongheaded as I might feel she was being—but leaving her nightie under my pillow was beyond the pale, and she should stop it immediately.

And she had, and we’d even met for coffee a few
times, after she’d wised up and Victor had left her for an X-ray technician.

“Anyway, she says what happened was not Victor’s fault, but the kid’s mother—the kid had a huge head injury with internal bleeding, and he died—thinks Victor must have made a mistake. And so, she says, does Victor.”

“Wow,” Ellie said softly. “So that’s what’s put the hitch in his git-along.”

“Knocked him for a loop,” I agreed. “The next morning he took a leave of absence, starting right away, said he didn’t know if he was coming back. So that,” I finished, “is Victor’s tale of woe.”

“No wonder he didn’t have his mind on these shutters,” Ellie said. “Having a young patient die …”

I shook my head, picking up the paintbrush again. “Every surgeon loses a patient, sometimes. It’s the nature of the job. They’ve got to accept it in order to be able to go on working.”

“But it never happened to him before?”

“Actually, it has. Victor takes the worst cases. It’s true he only loses ones nobody else could save, though. And it’s never happened like this, with people accusing him of things. And even worse, him accusing himself.”

Then in a corner under the workbench I spied a shutter I had missed, one with Victor’s hinges still in it.

“Drat.” I hauled it out and noticed something about it, still thinking of Victor: so inappropriate. So infuriating, and such an unhappy little duck. There was only one thing he did well, and as if to compensate for his other failings, he did it brilliantly.

His spatial sense was perfect; it was why he always knew where he was, inside people’s heads. So the way he’d put the hinges on told me he’d been seriously distracted; obsessing, most likely, over whatever had happened in that surgical suite.

And it told me something else: the thing that I had been missing.

I took the shutter to Ellie. “Check me on something. Look at this, and think about Victor, what he did to it. And while you’re doing that, remind yourself of what we were saying a little while ago, about Baxter Willoughby and his truck runs.”

Ellie took the shutter and examined it. Then a look of sudden understanding appeared on her face.

“Backwards. We had it backwards.”

43
The next morning, Victor’s bed had not been slept in. Arnold promised to be on the lookout for him but didn’t sound especially worried; Victor, as everyone kept saying, was a grown man.

“I don’t suppose,” Ellie suggested when Wade and Sam had gone out to look for Victor some more, “he left a note anywhere?”

“No.” Irritably, I poured coffee for both of us. “That would qualify as ordinary consideration. They drum you out of the club he belongs to, for that.”

“Anyway, let’s review,” Ellie said, biting into a doughnut. “Willoughby’s not smuggling anything to New York. What he’s doing is using the trips with the llamas to smuggle something back. And that something is money.”

The doughnut vanished. My theory is that Ellie burns more calories in the act of eating than are contained in the food, thus maintaining a level of slenderness that some would describe as elegant and others would call evidence of witchcraft.

“Fine,” I replied. Anything was better than thinking about all the trouble my ex-husband could have gotten himself into, and the grief that could come of it. “The question is, why?”