Free Triple Witch by Sarah Graves

couldn’t delay any longer. At home, the
Bangor Daily News
stuck out of the letterbox, and when I got inside the welcome fragrance of the coffee I’d brewed earlier greeted me.
    “Man Found Dead on Downeast Beach,” announced the paper’s headline. I poured some more coffee and scanned the piece while I drank it, but it reported nothing that I didn’t already know.
    Except one thing: the reporter had apparently tried calling me. I was mentioned by name as one of the two Eastport women who had found Ken’s body, and was described as not wanting to comment—“according to a family spokesperson.”
    Just then Victor wandered into the kitchen, looking frowzy in a blue-striped bathrobe and slippers.
    “Coffee,” he muttered, squinting through reddened eyes, and made a beeline for it.
    I held the pot away from him, waving the newspaper. “Did you do this? Refuse comment on my behalf, without even telling me?”
    Not that I particularly wanted to be interviewed. Keeping my own and my clients’ names quiet had been second nature to me for too long, in New York. But the idea of Victor making the decision for me made me want to pop him one.
    Victor made a face that I am not even going to describe. “This family,” he intoned, “does not need that sort of attention.”
    He grabbed for the coffeepot, missed, and reachedfor the table to steady himself, then sank into a chair. “Head hurts,” he said froggily into his splayed hands.
    I just stood there holding the scalding-hot coffeepot, gazing at my ex-husband. Then I put the pot down and got out of the house, for two reasons:
    First, I really did need to find out about those shutters of Baxter Willoughby’s.
    And second, if I stayed in Victor’s presence for even a moment longer, there was going to be another murder.

 
    14 Wade had left his pickup parked in my driveway with the keys still dangling from the ignition, so I took that, figuring that if I did get the replacement shutters, I could haul them home.
    What I didn’t figure on was the transmission, lurching and grinding unpleasantly, but once I was out of town and cruising on the causeway with the water sparkling on both sides, the trouble went away by itself; the truck apparently liked fourth gear, and motored along happily in it.
    Approaching the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point, I slowed for the thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone, nodding at Joseph Lookabaugh stationed in his green squad car across from the tribe’s local community center. A few minutes later I was headed south on Route 1, with the gearbox grinding in protest again, though Wade hadn’t said anything about trouble with it. I put the clutch in and babied it, and eventually Tab A consented grudgingly to enter Slot B, and the engine regained power once more.
    Keeping an eye on the oil pressure, the engine temperature, and the rearview mirror, in case any truck parts began falling off and clattering down the highwaybehind me, I made my way between spruce trees and acres of purple lupine, the tall spikes moving in the breeze like waves.
    Crossing the bridge over the river at Dennysville, I glanced down at the water tumbling and foaming over the rocks, feeling the bridge deck thrumming beneath the truck’s tires and experiencing a sensation of vast good luck. This was mine: I was not a tourist or houseguest. I lived here.
    As if to prove this, Bill Martin’s panel truck went by in the opposite direction, the legend DOWN EAST ELECTRICAL CONTRACTING painted on the door. He flashed his headlights as he caught sight of Wade’s Toyota, and waved at me as he passed.
    I smiled, humming along with the country tune playing on the truck radio. Maybe I was from away, not a downeast native, but people knew me. They even gossiped about me, a situation I did not regard as ideal until Ellie mentioned the alternative: not caring about me. But now that I understood, I was happy for them to know the amount of my bank balance, the color of my bedroom