Wicked Fix Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    and for a second body bag from the small stock of
    them kept over at the medical clinic.
    Which made two more body bags than our little
    town tended to use in a year. When we have bodies in
    Eastport they are generally the result of elderly people
    --and by that I mean very elderly; in Maine, if you
    should pass before the age of one hundred, your obituary
     
    will call it unexpected--signing off more or less on
    schedule.
     
    So I still felt reasonably sure that the sudden run
    on body bags was a statistical anomaly, not the beginning
    of a trend.
     
    Wrong.
     
    Before Wade went out on the water that
    morning, he'd brought all forty-eight of my
    old wooden storm windows up out of the
    cellar and lined them against the picnic table
    in the side yard. I'd bet him I could remove the upstairs
    window sashes and weatherstrip them before snow fell,
    and he'd said that if I did he would repair and hang the
    storm windows for me.
    But when Victor is in trouble, he thinks he is a
    swallow and my house is Capistrano, so I wasn't going
    to get to the weatherstripping anytime soon.
     
    "Sam," I said as we approached the back porch.
    "Why don't you go on over and hang out with Tommy
    Daigle awhile? Let your dad and me have a conversation."
     
    "You sure? He's pretty, um ... you know." Sam
    waved his hands in a pantomime of something flying to
    pieces.
    "I'm sure," I replied as reassuringly as I could, and
    to my relief he headed off. Tommy Daigle was a sensible,
    good-hearted boy, and his company would be an
    antidote to Sam's distress.
    Now all I needed was an antidote to my own, but I
    wasn't going to get that, either. Mounting the back
    steps with Ellie, I could hear Victor in there muttering
    to himself.
     
    "Well, it took you long enough," he snapped as he
    saw us.
     
    Scrubbed and freshly shaved as usual, he looked
    pink as a shrimp. But his eyes were narrowly anxious. I
    looked at the coffeepot, nearly full when I'd left--Sam
    had made the coffee, and since he believed it should
    compete with battery acid, I'd hardly drunk any--and
    empty now.
     
    Then Ellie and I swung into action: I filled the coffeepot
    and started it again while she got cups and saucers
    and sliced bread for toast. I cracked eggs into a
    bowl, adding milk and waiting for the butter in the pan
    to sizzle before I dumped them in; she washed the
    bowl, dried it, and put it away before the eggs had time
    to need stirring.
     
    Victor looked helpless and puzzled, as he always
    does when anything useful is happening that does not
    involve surgery.
     
    "Doesn't anybody want to know why I'm so upset?"
    he finally demanded.
     
    Ellie put a glass of orange juice on the oilcloth
    covered table in front of him. She had not wanted him
    to move to Eastport any more than I had, but there
    hadn't been much she could do about it, either. When
    he wants something, he is as relentless as the hurricane
    that had resettled her ancestors.
     
    "Maybe you're upset because you have high blood
    pressure?" she inquired. "That always puts you in a
    bad mood. Drink your juice. Here's some aspirin to go
    with it."
    She dropped tablets onto the table. "I don't suppose
    you've thought to take any, yet." Now that he
    was here, she'd adopted my standard procedure for
    dealing with him:
     
    First, get him out of his immediate physical discomfort.
    We would have skipped this, except that it so
    much simplified stage two: getting him out of my house
     
    and back into his own as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
     
    Which was the hard part. I could have just banished
    him as a general rule, I suppose, but that would
    have been hard on Sam. And this morning, something
    serious was up; how serious, I didn't know yet.
     
    "Well, no," he admitted about the aspirin and
    swallowed them grudgingly. He ate the eggs and toast
    we fixed for him, too, and drank more coffee.
     
    Ellie glanced meaningfully at me: Now he can vamoose.
     
    Not so fast, I signaled back at her, because I