Free Repair to Her Grave by Sarah Graves Page A

it, and on the table, as if he had only taken them off for a moment, lay Jonathan Raines's pair of thick-lensed, wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
    Raines himself, though, was nowhere to be found; luckily for him, since if he had been there I’d have throttled him.
    But I looked everywhere, Monday padding along behind me in the silent rooms.
    And he was gone.

3
    Furiously I pulled a sweater on and strode downtown, past the old mansard-roofed Bainbridge mansion at the corner of Key Street. Of late a sad relic with boarded-up windows and rotting trim, in its heyday a ballroom had occupied the mansion's third floor; now whenever I glimpsed it I thought of the music played there all those years ago, and of the people gorgeously dressed in ball gowns and tuxedos. Lately I found myself wondering, too, if they were all still up there somehow, dancing in the dark.
    I shook off a chill, though the night was not very cold. Funny, Raines had said when he arrived, how an item can seem to be one thing and turn out to be another.
    Yeah, I thought at him; the way you seemed at first to be a minor annoyance, and instead you’re a major pain in the tail.
    I headed downhill on Key Street toward the bay; next came a row of clapboard cottages from the 1800s, gleaming by moonlight, their window boxes brimming with flowers. At Water Street I passed the red-brick Peavey Library, its front-lawn cannon aimed at the waterfront as if to ward off any redcoats who might be returning. Across the street, the Happy Landings Café stood dark and silent, its deck umbrellas folded like the wings of sleeping birds.
    At the breakwater, Wade's boat had already arrived. Under the dock lamps, the men on the Ahoski worked to make her fast to the massive dock pilings, with lines as thick as their arms tied around the cleats on the tugboat's rail. Beyond, the moonlight sketched the wave tops with thin lines of silver; below, the dark water heaved sluggishly with the tide, reminding me again of the fellow floating somewhere out there, drowned and alone.
    The dampness made me shiver again. But then Wade appeared, ascending the old ladder up the dock's side as easily as climbing a flight of stairs. His wiry hair gleaming in the lights and his grin visible even at a distance, he hurried across the breakwater and caught me in a bear hug.
    “Hey.” Smelling of lime shaving soap and cold salt water, he pressed his cheek to my hair.
    “Hey, yourself.” I put my face into his down vest. “Trip go okay?”
    “Piece of cake.” He glanced back at the tubby old vessel, waved to the guy still at the helm behind the big wheel, shutting down the electricals. The bridge lights went out, the radium glow of the navigation and communications equipment on the consoles like sparks of green fire in the sudden darkness.
    “Everything good at home?” Wade slung an arm and we started back uphill. “Sam okay? And did I get a package?”
    “You got a package. I brought it in.” A new Lyman shotgun-shell reloading press, I happened to know, and it weighed a ton.
    “And Sam's fine. Well, not perfectly fine; he's got a huge crush on an unsuitable girl. I’m hoping it will fade. But…”
    I told him about the day. “So when I see him again I’m going to kill him,” I said, meaning Raines, “and that will be that.”
    I didn’t really mean it. Probably cutting his thumbs off and feeding them to the seagulls would be punishment enough.
    “But the way things are going around here, I’m going to have to host the Ladies’ Reading Circle meeting in a tent out in the backyard.”
    Wade laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that made me feel much better. “Do them good,” he said. “Fresh air.”
    By which he meant he thought Reading Circle meetings were excessively refined. “Tell you the truth, I’m a little surprised at you,” he said.
    I’d wondered about it, myself; china teacups tend to make my little finger rise in parody, and just thinking about the elastic waistband on a pair of