Wicked Fix by Sarah Graves Page A

that didn't feature
    a father confined to prison.
     
    What we needed, I decided, was one of those other
    suspects Tommy Daigle talked about, preferably one
    who was (a) not in any sense a member of my family,
    and (b) the real perpetrator.
     
    "How come you're not down at the boatyard?" I
    asked Sam.
     
    He shrugged. "Day off. I got twenty hours in,
    Harpwell says that's enough for this week."
     
    And Sam did, too, his expression telegraphed with
    perfect clarity. Work on the local guys' boats was all
    right, as far as it went. Sam enjoyed it, but it didn't
    offer him much variety.
     
    "Well, it won't be forever. You'll be at school next
    year."
     
    I hoped. He'd been accepted at Yale, into a special
     
    program, then had discovered Yale wasn't among the
    top training grounds for marine architects, which was
    what he planned on being. In the end he'd turned them
    down, deciding to put off college altogether for a year,
    which I personally thought was a fine idea.
     
    But now ... "I don't know, Mom. I'm just not
    sure that stuff is for me."
     
    I stifled impatience. Dan Harpwell, owner of East
    port Boat Yard, was holding out a promise of a partnership
    for Sam: better money, more interesting work.
    Without advanced schooling, though, in computer
    aided design, modern methods and materials, even
    some business accounting, Sam's future at the boat establishment
    --and in his chosen career--was limited.
     
    "Did you hear," he asked wryly, "about the dyslexic
    devil worshiper who sold his soul to Santa?"
     
    Well, at least he could joke about it. We'd found
    out about his dyslexia a few years earlier; it had turned
    out to be an odd, refractory form of the disability.
    He'd gotten through high school by dint of taped texts,
    special therapy, and tutoring. But now with a year off
    from school he was getting a taste of not having to
    struggle so hard all the time, and was--temporarily, I
    hoped--shying at the gate of any further education at
    all.
     
    "Sam," I began gently, but his shoulders stiffened.
    Time for a change of subject.
    "I think," I offered carefully, for Sam could be
    touchy if you tried cheering him up too blatantly,
    "George Valentine knows Morse code. He's a ham
    radio enthusiast."
     
    He brightened a little. "Yeah? Hey, maybe I'll ask
    him about it. You think spirits could learn to send messages
    in Morse?"
     
    "I don't know," I said, again feeling obscurely
    troubled. On the other hand, none of the odd events
    we'd experienced in the house had been malicious. And
     
    just at that moment I'd have rented a room to the headless
    horseman, if it made Sam feel better.
     
    "I think," he said in a wan attempt to make a little
    joke, "it would depend on whether a spirit knew any
    Morse code before."
     
    He took his hands off the Ouija board and looked
    up sideways at me, his grin the pale ghost of the one he
    usually wore.
     
    Whereupon I swear that dratted planchette
    twitched.
     
    That afternoon, Arnold drove Victor to the
    courthouse in Machias, thirty miles to our
    south. The prisoner's behavior was calm and
    cooperative, Arnold reported; Victor allowed
    himself to be fingerprinted, photographed, and
    placed in a cell; he was given a phone call, which, as
    promised, he had made to an attorney in Manhattan.
    "And that," Arnold finished, "is that." Victor
    would remain in jail to await arraignment, hearings,
    and trial.
     
    I gripped the telephone, not yet quite able to believe
    that it was all so cut-and-dried, or in fact that any
    of it was real. But of course it was.
     
    "State guys'll be around," Arnold went on, "talk
    to you and Ellie about finding the body. About what
    you saw and heard at La Sardina, too. And," he added
    reluctantly, "they'll want to have a word with Sam."
    Which was the part that I was most emphatically
    not looking forward to. But it was coming; the state's
    mobile crime lab was in town and the bodies were on
    their way to the police forensic unit in Augusta;