Chapter 1
It was a bright June afternoon in downeast Maine, and my friend Ellie White and I were on our way to visit a large angry man with a criminal history. His name was Jim Diamond and we just wanted to ask him a question.
But his answer—plus what he said after he answered—could put him behind bars again, and he would know that because I meant to tell him about it.
So I was nervous, a little.
As a rule I try to avoid angry persons with criminal pasts. For one thing I spend most of my time fixing up a big old house; thus my days are already fraught with potential injury. But Jim Diamond's ex-wife had been getting anonymous threats and I had an urgent personal reason for trying to have them stopped.
Job one was finding out for certain that Diamond was the culprit, as I suspected. Once he admitted it, I intended to assure him that if he didn't agree to cutting it out pronto, my next visit would be to his probation officer.
Hey, it might work, I told myself for the dozenth time. He could just lie about his guilt, but I didn't expect this. Small-time troublemakers generally don't, once they know somebody's got their number.
And even if he tried, I was confident that I could detect it. Back in the big city when I was a hotshot money manager I'd done business with fellows so corrupt, their code of conduct consisted almost entirely of the seven deadly sins.
As a result I was sure I could smell a rat if one presented itself—yet another reason I'd wanted to check out Jim Diamond in person: to get a good whiff.
But my second thoughts were mounting like the miles on the odometer as Ellie and I sped down Route 1 in the dandy little car I'd bought from a friend the previous autumn. It was an old Fiat 124 Sport Spyder with a black cloth top, apricot paint job, and five speeds forward, plus a professionally installed infant car seat.
The Fiat also had lots more engine than it required for its small size; that fifth speed could be very interesting. And now that we were on the road I hoped fervently that we wouldn't need every bit of power the little car possessed, to make our escape.
Ellie by contrast seemed entirely unworried, which for her was pretty much par for the course. Ellie would worry when pieces of sky actually began hitting the ground, and shattering there into tiny cloud-splotched pieces. Relaxing in the bucket seat beside me she let her head fall back onto the headrest, putting her face up into the sunshine dappled by summer leaves and by the ancient evergreens towering at either side of the road.
"Oh, that feels lovely," she murmured.
It did, too, and especially by comparison. Just a few weeks earlier we'd endured a three-day visitation of sleet, which to my mind is only a little less trying than a visitation of boils, but the weather was standard for what I thought must've been the most extended winter in Maine history.
"I hope Jim doesn't have a gun," I said, zipping through the S turns of the narrow two-lane road while mentally thumbing my nose at the massive recreational vehicles lumbering past us in the other direction. It was the first big week of Maine's tourist season.
Ellie turned, wrinkling her freckled nose at me in surprise. For a trip with the top down she had pinned her hair into a red-gold twist. Curly wisps escaped prettily all around her head.
"Jacobia, you know he won't," she told me. "We've been over that already. Besides, it's illegal for an ex-convict to have a gun," she finished blithely.
This I thought ignored an important fact about how Jim Diamond got to be a convict in the first place. But it was true, we'd researched the guy very carefully in the firearms department, not wanting to blunder unwittingly into any high-caliber developments. Between my husband Wade's friends and Ellie's husband George's, we'd been in touch with just about anyone who might have sold or given Jim Diamond a deadly weapon, and nobody had.
So unless he'd found one by the side of the road somewhere—I happened to know that he'd come out of jail owning little more than the clothes he was wearing when he was arrested—Jim would be unarmed.
And anyway, I wasn't about to turn back.
We sped over the Harmonyville Bridge, the wide mouth of the river below us tumbling and foaming with the force of the tide rushing into it. To our left the river opened into Passamaquoddy Bay, deep blue with a little red scallop dragger puttering out as we passed and gulls drawing white V shapes on the azure sky.
"Besides, we're not going to argue with him," Ellie added. "We're just going to blind him with science."
The science in this case being a simple equation: he talks to us = we don't talk to his probation officer. Assuming he owned up to being a bullying rascal, I mean, and promised to quit.
Still I couldn't seem to shake the notion that the whole thing might turn
out to be far more complicated than that. After all, Diamond hadn't been very susceptible to the "do it = go to jail" equation in the first place, had he?
Copyright © 2005 by Sarah Graves
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Jacobia "Jake" Tiptree traded her power-broker life for a run-down dream house in peaceful Eastport, Maine. But the do-it-yourself enthusiast is learning that no matter how carefully you build your home, murder has a way of slipping in through the cracks.... It's a bright June afternoon and old-house-fixer-upper Jake Tiptree is driving through downeast Maine on an unusual errand. She's getting ready to interview a large, angry man with a criminal history. Jim Diamond may or may not be harassing his ex-wife with life-threatening letters, but Jake promised her new housekeeper, Bella Diamond, she'd look into the matter. An ex-con and a deadbeat, Jim Diamond doesn't have a history of violence ... that is, not until Jake arrives at his apartment and discovers that a killer has been there first. Suddenly Jake and her best friend, Ellie White, find themselves at the center of a murder with too many suspects and too few clues. And as if that's not enough, Jake is now saddled with the manic Bella, whose certainty that she'll be the next victim is fueling a supercompulsive neatness--one that threatens to clean Jake and her long-suffering husband, Wade, out of house and home. Add to that a moose in her kitchen, a rebellious son with a habit of dumping Miss Right for Miss Wrong, and a troublesome ex of her own, and Jake is already at wit's end. Then she gets word that a horde of her dad's long-lost relatives mean to descend on Eastport, intending to be put up at her far-from-fixed-up fixer-upper. When the killer does strike again, it's not where Jake expects ... and the victim couldn't be more of a surprise. For this is a case bigger than the usual angry--ex-spouse variety, and now that Jake and Ellie have gotten themselves involved, they've each won a special place in a ruthless murderer's master plan of greed, deception, and death. And the prize? A pair of eternally private rooms--six feet under!
