Part 4 (1/2)

For a while, anyway. ”No more snooping,” Jake said as they pa.s.sed through the vestibule and then a second set of gla.s.s doors. Finally: ”There he is.”

Inside, Chip Hahn sat nervously on a wooden bench, across from the high marble counter where once thrifty Eastport ladies had waited to deposit their savings into the Christmas club. The counter now held a display box of neighborhood-watch brochures.

Chip looked up when he heard the door. He wore a thin polished-cotton jacket over a tired-looking white s.h.i.+rt, no tie, and dark brown slacks. A pair of black wing tips were on his feet.

He'd lost some of his baby fat since the last time Jake had seen him, but his hands still made the anxious, automatic was.h.i.+ng motions she remembered from a dozen years ago, and his round face looked guilty as h.e.l.l about something.

Uh-oh, Jake thought as she spotted this. Chip jumped up when he saw her, his expression changing swiftly to one of relief.

”Hi. Thanks for coming,” he began, sticking his hand out as he smiled uncertainly, looking from Jake to Ellie and back again. But Eastport's police chief, Bob Arnold, interrupted this greeting impatiently.

”Is everyone taking stupid pills around here today, or what?” Bob demanded from behind his desk.

He was pink, plump, and balding, with pale blue eyes, a few thin strands of blond hair combed over his s.h.i.+ning forehead, and small rosebud lips that did not look at all as if they belonged on a police officer.

A child beauty-pageant contestant, maybe. ”Because first I got a guy,” he went on abrasively, ”who said his car was stolen, and I drove around half last night looking for it.”

He eyed Chip suspiciously, as if the young man now standing across from him might be responsible for the missing vehicle. ”But then a couple hours later he calls again, he says the car's right back where he left it.”

He took a breath. ”So that's a mystery. Next, I got a bunch of middle-school kids hanging out on the breakwater, also last night, screamin' about a guy in a scary mask from a horror movie. They're sayin' he yelled at 'em and chased 'em.”

Jake knew better than to interrupt. ”Then,” Bob went on, ”I get this guy, first d.a.m.n thing in the a.m. before I even finish my coffee.”

He waved at Chip, then at his big green-and-white paper cup, still nearly full. The local grocery store's delicatessen did a mean hazelnut-mocha lately, and Bob was hooked on the stuff.

”And,” Bob finished, ”the guy whose car got stolen? He says there's a scary mask in the trunk; he never saw it before.”

Chip opened his mouth to speak, which Jake could've told him was a bad idea. She motioned for him to shut up. Wisely, he did.

But she had a feeling that this sort of wisdom was not one of Chip's strong points. Or Charles, as he apparently wanted to be called now. She looked back at Bob.

”So now your friend here says his lady friend's run off to somewhere, he can't find her, and how come I don't hop right to it, bring in the FBI an' call out the National Guard?”

In Eastport, when lady friends ran off, their boyfriends did not often call the cops. More often, they felt lucky the cops had not been called on them. Not all the time, but still.

”She's not my lady friend,” Chip protested tiredly and with the air, frustrated and beginning to be annoyed, of a person who has said this a number of times already.

”I told you, she's my boss, and she didn't run off. She's been missing since last night; she just disappeared right off the street. I'm afraid someone took her.”

He turned to Jake in appeal. ”We were coming out of a bar. The one at the end of the street overlooking the harbor, called The Artful Dodger? I was outside, a little ways down the street, waiting for her, but she didn't catch up, and when I went back to look for her-”

That there was more to this story Jake couldn't help seeing in Chip's expression, and Bob Arnold was even more familiar with the looks on liars' faces than Jake was.

It was one reason why he was not precisely leaping to Chip's aid, Jake realized. But she could get to the bottom of that later, she decided.

”Poof,” Bob said, eyeing Chip skeptically. ”Gone, like a fart in a hurricane.”

”Wait a minute,” Jake told Chip. Or Charles. They could get reacquainted later, too.

For now it just seemed clear that a young woman was missing. ”Start over, Chip; tell me the whole thing right from the start. Why are you here in the first place, and just exactly what were you and this-”

”Carolyn Rathbone,” he supplied. ”That's her name. She's a very popular true-crime writer, two bestsellers, you must have heard of her. She wrote Young Blood, which is-”

”I know what it is,” Jake said. She'd have had to be dead not to. Even here in Maine, the ads for the book had resembled an artillery barrage: TV, radio, Internet, the works.

”But that doesn't answer my question,” she added. ”What were you two doing here in Eastport?”

He flushed uncomfortably. ”We're writing a new book-Carolyn is, I mean-on the Dodd family crimes. And the ... the weird events that happened here.”

Oh, brother, Jake thought. As far as Bob was concerned, Chip might as well have said they were planning to do a tell-all book on the Appalachia of the Northeast, which was what many people who didn't live in downeast Maine thought of the place.

Wrongly, smugly, and utterly unfairly, boyfriends and their lady friends' habits notwithstanding, and Bob resented it keenly. Now he leaned back and clasped his hands over his ample front.

”Weird events, huh?” He made a sour face. ”Well, whoop-de-do. Now I can die happy.”

Even without comparisons to Appalachia, Bob thought most media stories about Eastport ranked right up there with Charmin, in the what-are-they-good-for department. But he saved his deepest scorn for the ones created by persons from away-by which he meant anyone who wasn't actually born right here on the island-and that went double for stories about local tragedies.

Which the Dodd family misfortune certainly was. Jake and Ellie glanced resignedly at each other while Chip rushed on.

”You see, a couple of years ago, these two Eastport brothers married two sisters, also from Eastport. Rich girls, the last two descendants in some big local industrialist family.”

”Yes,” Jake said. The whole town knew the sad tale. Joseph Paducah Lang, the great-great-grandfather of the ”rich girls” in question, had been a prosperous sardine can manufacturer back in the days when the sardine was king around here, in the late 1800s.

If you could call what they did back then ”manufacturing.” Putting things together one by one with your hands, however fast, didn't seem to quite fit the word's definition. Chip went on.

”Next thing you know, one of the Dodd brothers falls off his boat, body never found,” he said. ”Randy Dodd, his name was.”

This wasn't news, either; the opposite, actually. The story had made the Bangor papers.

”And after that, both women got murdered,” said Chip. ”Or,” he added hastily as Bob made to object, ”one did, for sure. Anne Lang Dodd, Roger Dodd's wife, was stabbed in her own kitchen.”

Yes, just six weeks ago. By a person unknown, and it's too soon to be here trying to make money on it, Jake thought. Writing a book about it, or whatever.

But perhaps the timing hadn't been all Chip's idea. He had, after all, said the missing woman was his employer, and it was her name on the books' covers.

”The other one,” Chip said, ”Randy Dodd's wife-”

Cordelia Dodd, he meant. She'd been the pretty one; sweet-natured, too, by all accounts, if not terribly bright.

”Fell down stairs,” Jake put in. ”Yes, we know that, too. But I still don't see what that's got to do with-”

”Carolyn disappearing?” Chip frowned. ”I'm not sure. But I think ... I've just got a funny feeling maybe someone has lured us here.”

At this Bob Arnold's white-blond eyebrows rose skeptically. Chip's next words came out in a hurry.

”Lured Carolyn and me, I mean. Someone who knew that she had taken an interest in the Dodd boys and their dead wives. And,” he added, ”someone who didn't like it.”

Bob Arnold rested his chin on his s.h.i.+rtfront and gazed with interest at Chip. ”Do tell,” he said.

Chip either missed the sarcasm or ignored it. ”See, I put out a few requests for information while I was first checking out the whole Dodd case just in general. I mean, to see if it really was anything Carolyn would want to pursue.”