Free Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Page B

command and eventually to the top.”
    A fireplace ember exploded with a sudden
pop!
I gasped, and Wade turned his pale-grey gaze slowly to me.
Steady, girl.
    But my mind couldn’t stop racing with the implications of George’s silence and the possible reasons for it, not to mention the conclusions that would be drawn from his aunt’s bequest.
    “Pretty soon Chester’s big mansion—he’d never married, and for a while every girl in town hoped she’d be the one to get the chance to live in it—pretty soon his big house was turned into a hideout,” Ellie told us. “And a hospital for gunshot gangsters who got brought here from the city. It was a place they could recuperate and Chester could treat them without anyone knowing.”
    She paused. “And sometimes the house was a morgue. They say Chester took the bodies on the night ferry over to the mainland, paid the ferrymen ten dollars to keep quiet about it. And to help bury them.”
    I thought of my old friend Jemmy Wechsler, sitting somewhere in Federal custody. He knew where bodies were buried, too; some financial, others that had been living and breathing till someone decided they were a liability and had to go.
    “The house got to be a social club,” Ellie said. “Off the beaten track, and pretty in summer. Like a resort, they could relax. And at Chester’s, it was parties ’round the clock. So the men brought girls there. You can imagine what local people thought of
that
.”
    Indeed; bobbed hair, bright makeup, and bare legs bouncing scandalously to the newest dance craze, the Charleston. But the images didn’t replace my other thought: that someone had gone to a lot of trouble hiding those two bodies. Once eighty years ago, and again much more recently. So why put a note in Hector Gosling’s pocket, then hide him where no one would ever read it?
    “The town,” Ellie said, “was all agog.”
    Nor could I duck another memory Ellie’s tale triggered. I’d asked Jemmy once, unwisely, if it mustn’t be just an awful job getting rid of the bodies. I’d been teasing him, knowing that he handled mob money but not what that really meant. I’d felt sure he had nothing to do with any actual murders.
    Or rubouts, as the tabloids called them. Jemmy was eating a Philly cheese steak when I asked, and he didn’t miss a bite.
    “From what I hear,” he said, chewing, “they put the body in somebody’s bathtub. Somebody, he hasn’t got any wife or kids to get too nosy. Run the shower, drain all the blood out before they chop it into pieces. Makes it neater. Easier all around.
    “Not,” he’d added, dipping his sandwich in ketchup, “that I would really know.” Which was when I’d understood for the first time just who Jemmy’s associates were.
    Jemmy, who had no wife or kids to get inquisitive.
    Now the Feds wanted to know, too, and if he told them (or if he didn’t; his take on the witness protection program was dead-on in my opinion) Jemmy was mincemeat.
    Ellie went on. “And sometime around then, Eva Thane dropped out of the picture. Just vanished. The woman,” she added for Will and Wade’s benefit, “that Jake and I found today. Her body.”
    She met my gaze and I knew what she was thinking: that we should have just done it. Walled them both up again and let the chips fall. She spoke again.
    “She was a lost girl, Eva. A runaway from some little town, I suppose. Chester’s girl for a while. Too wild for her own good was what people said then about a girl like that.”
    More recently too. My mom’s folks, for instance, had said it about me.
    “So when she disappeared people knew she wasn’t around, but you couldn’t say they missed her,” Ellie continued. “No one was looking for Eva anywhere, probably. Not anymore.”
    I knew that tune as well, because I’d sung it myself, and if it hadn’t been for Jemmy it probably would’ve been my swan song.
    “So she was gone,” Ellie said, “and who cared? But then . . .”
    Her story drew