began marking off a
perimeter, using yellow tape weighed down with small
stones to form a circle about twenty feet in diameter.
"Tell me it wasn't," I said to George, who had
been at the restaurant with us. Who had seen ...
Victor, tossing back that final martini. And afterwards
...
George nodded, looking unhappy. "Pried open the
guy's mouth, see what was in there, that's when we
found it."
One of the state officers went back to his car and
got on the radio, while the other began marking off a
second perimeter a few yards out from the first. At the
center of it all, Reuben hung there like some ghastly
flag.
"And to judge by how far down his windpipe it
was," Arnold went on, "I doubt that fellow just happened
to mistake it for a cheeseburger. I don't care," he
finished, "how rip-roaring drunk he'd got, couple
three hours earlier."
My mind's eye showed Victor readying himself for
impromptu surgery, in the course of which there might
be blood. So that Victor, always a poster boy for the
compulsively fastidious ...
"Mistook what?" Ellie demanded.
Monday stopped nosing around and sat down beside
me, wanting to go home. Me, too.
"Victor's tie," George said. "What the guy strangled
on."
He must have taken it off. Tucked it into his shirtfront,
first, but that hadn't been enough for him; it
might get dirty. So he'd taken it off.
"Part in his mouth, and the rest," Arnold supplied,
"damned near down into his lung. Have to wait for the
medical examiner, of course. And the way his dance
card's filling up already today, it could take a while.
But I'd agree the guy suffocated on it."
Somebody touched my shoulder and I jumped:
Sam.
"Mom? I think you better come. Dad's at the
house, and he's pretty upset." Sam kept his eyes
averted from Reuben.
"Oh, brother. He knows about the tie?" I asked
Arnold.
"Yeah. Teddy Armstrong remembered who he'd
seen wearing it. I talked to your ex-husband about it a
little while ago. Told him I'd see him at your house,
and I was on my way over there. But then," he gestured
in disgust at Reuben, "I got diverted."
I got up. To Victor, everything was always about
him. But this was going to put the frosting on it.
"Did Reuben have relatives?" Bob Arnold asked,
squinting at the body. Thinking, I supposed, about a
funeral.
Ellie shook her head. "His parents were from
away. Both gone now. Buried away, too, I've forgotten
quite where. They both had," she added, "that same
white-blond hair. And those white eyelashes--to look
at them, you'd think they must be brother and sister.
But," she came back to the practical present, "he didn't
have any brothers or sisters, himself."
Trust her to know; Ellie's memory contained a veritable
orchard of Eastport family trees. "Come on,
kiddo," I told Sam. "Let's go settle your father down. I
guess he must have left that tie in the bar last night.
He'd forget his head, you know, you feed him enough
martinis."
"Uh-huh," Sam agreed, not sounding convinced,
but I just laid it to general upset. When Victor gets
going, he can generate emotional shock waves that
would shatter the Rock of Gibraltar.
Ellie came too, looking grimly gratified now that
the first surprise of our discovery had worn off. She is
ordinarily the mildest of souls but her gentleness conceals
some icy attitudes, partly I think because her ancestors
were cold-water pirates, men who cut their
eyeteeth on barbecues of long pig and rum until a hurricane
blew them out of the Caribbean, eventually to
downeast Maine, back in the 1700s.
Since then her family had flourished in Eastport
and the surrounding towns, as tenacious as barnacles
and when necessary as coldly pragmatic. I got the impression
she felt some rough justice had been served
there in the cemetery.
George stayed behind with Arnold, calling on Arnold's
radio for sawhorses to hold more perimeter
C. J. Fallowfield, Book Cover By Design, Karen J
Michael Bracken, Elizabeth Coldwell, Sommer Marsden