Unhinged by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online

wearing professional-looking makeup, her blond hair clipped short around her elfin features.
    Fran always looked as if she’d visited Elizabeth Arden about twenty minutes ago. But her manner didn’t match her aggressively stylish look; she wasn’t about to interrupt her boss.
    Roy McCall had no such hesitation, however. “A few guys on my video crew won’t have much to do for a few days,” my new houseguest told Harry. “You could hire them to start the scraping.”
    Roy was perhaps twenty-five, with curly black hair and the sweetly rounded face of a cathedral-ceiling cherub. Tonight he wore a green cashmere sweater, grey slacks, and Armani loafers. He drank some of the wine he had brought as his contribution to the dinner, a lovely California cabernet the color of rubies, and as expensive.
    “Just make sure they put down tarps,” Wyatt Evert instructed Harry sharply, wagging a finger at him. “To catch the paint chips.”
    George rolled his eyes. By all rights he should have hated Roy, who made the rough-hewn George look like a bumpkin. Despite his plain manner, George was sensitive to such things. But in the coming weeks Top Cat Productions would spend north of a million dollars in Eastport. So George was cutting Roy a
lot
of slack.
    “I’ll get the environment police on you if you don’t,” Wyatt went on meanly. “Get
canvas
tarps, not junk from around here.”
    “You can buy canvas tarps here if you want them,” I piped up. “In fact there’s an ad for them at Wadsworth’s right now, in this week’s
Quoddy Tides
.”
    Not listening, Wyatt guzzled Roy’s good wine without tasting it. Roy averted his gaze politely while the rest of us cringed, and when I got up to take plates to the kitchen, Roy joined me.
    “I’m so sorry,” he said, once we were out of earshot. “He started talking to me downtown and just followed me home.”
    I rinsed a platter. Two glasses of the excellent cabernet he had brought were suiting me admirably. Victor would have
plotzed,
I supposed, but Victor—tra-la—wasn’t here.
    “Never mind,” I told Roy as I rinsed another platter. I felt
much
better. “It’s not the first time Wyatt’s cadged a meal off me,
and
brought his little helper, Fran.”
    Wyatt’s idea of good environmental protection was
him
being protected from picking up a restaurant check or cooking his own dinner. I’d have sent him packing but his crack about calling in the cops was no idle threat.
    “Don’t run afoul of him,” I warned McCall. “Wyatt informed the state once on a fellow who let some apprentice carpenter students tear down his old shed for practice. Turned out there was asbestos in the shingles. The guy came close to paying a ten-thousand-dollar fine on account of his good deed.”
    Roy looked impressed, and even more contrite than before. “I wish I had cold-shouldered him, then,” he declared.
    “No. It’s smarter to keep tabs on what Wyatt’s up to. But his social skills verge on the nonexistent at the best of times, and he’s worse than usual, lately.”
    Roy tipped his head in a question. “A member of one of his nature groups had an accident a few weeks ago,” I explained. “He drowned. I guess Wyatt’s still upset about it.”
    “Really? How’d that happen?”
    I turned off the faucet. Back in the dining room, Maggie and Sam had turned the table talk to a happier topic: Prill’s rescue from a diet of mackerel heads.
    “Nobody’s sure,” I told Roy, who had cleverly opened a third bottle. He poured us each a glass. “They were at Moosehorn Refuge with cameras and binoculars. Wyatt brings a group a few times a year to go on elaborate nature walks. Charges them a bundle, but from what I gather he gives good value. And it’s not as if they can’t afford it.”
    Roy sipped wine delicately, pausing to savor it. I’d tried not to sound too judgmental in my description, but he’d caught my drift. “And?”
    “Well, we get quite a few ecology buffs around here