Free Unhinged by Sarah Graves

passenger seat, staring straight ahead.
    “Blackflies out at the Moosehorn are so big right now, they could stand flat-footed and look right over the barn at you,” Bob added wryly, watching the van pull out.
    Then he turned back to me. “Thing is, Jacobia, Markle seems okay. Got his work cut out for him with Harriet’s house.”
    I hadn’t said anything about what I thought really happened to Harriet. An abandoned pair of binoculars, however convincing to me, wasn’t going to cut much ice with Bob; I needed more. So I just listened as the breeze blew in, smelling of sea salt and the storm that was out there, past where we could see.
    “But back in New York, Markle’s got a reputation as a loose cannon,” Bob said, getting down to brass tacks.
    “Fellow I talked to,” he went on, “said Markle was the kind of guy, wouldn’t let go. Thing’d go cold, Harry wouldn’t give up on it. He would work on his own time and put other people in danger, plus himself.”
    “That’s not good.” But it fit, actually; going up on that roof before a backup team was in position, trying to be a hero. “Thinking it was personal, all about him. He still thinks so.”
    Bob looked at me, and I got the message:
don’t make the same mistake
. But at the moment, it
felt
personal.
    A big old blue work truck, its muffler belching and its bed piled high with lobster traps, trundled past on its way to the boat basin. The men liked to be on their boats, even just tied up at the piers, puttering and trading gossip. And there was work to do before the boats got blown, as George would have put it, nine ways from Sunday.
    “Did your friend say anything more about the last case Harry was on, specifically?” The ghastly one: targeting cops.
    “Ayuh.” Bob eyed me unhappily. “Says before Markle finally took his retirement he already had the idea the bad guy was stalking him, had it so he couldn’t think about anything else. He got counseling but that didn’t help him.”
    The psychiatrist Harry had mentioned. “And there was some other thing he was working on, some old case he couldn’t seem to accept a closing to, that it was over and done with,” Bob said.
    I had an idea maybe I knew what that one was. But it wasn’t important now. “So, Bob, you think Sam’s accident really
was
an accident?”
    Bob eyed the length of the street again, taking it all in with practiced casualness. He could spot a guy with a baggie full of illegal pills so fast, the guy would be off the breakwater and into the lockup before the first startled flurry of denials and excuses finished escaping his lips.
    And to that kind of guy Bob gave no leeway for apologies. “I don’t want to swear to it. But Sam’s car was a clunker. Rust gets started over the winters, salt and so on. Year after year. Eats through.”
    “Can’t someone tell for sure if it was rust?”
    I hadn’t examined the car; I’m no mechanic and I didn’t want to look at it, anyway. Seeing the scraped and broken barrier was bad enough.
    Bob shook his head, following my gaze. “That’s not what Sam hit, Jacobia. The barrier’s just what he scraped by, going fast.”
    He pointed. “
That’s
what he hit.”
    “Dear god.” There wasn’t very much damage to it, so I hadn’t noticed. But about forty yards past the barrier, a granite boulder marked the far corner of the Neptune Fish Company parking lot. A
big
boulder.
    “Whole front end of that car’s a shambles, no one’s ever going to know what happened for sure, there was just too much damage from the impact,” Bob said.
    He turned to me. “Mechanical problem’s the simplest answer, though. And in my experience, simplest is correct.”
    Which had been Victor’s comment, too, in another context. “I am just saying,” Bob went on, “you want to look at what Markle says from all angles, ’fore you go acceptin’ it as gospel. People who know him say his imagination’s his whadyacallit.”
    “His Achilles’ heel.” The