Wicked Fix by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online

little chips of red enamel up off the
    floor before Monday decided that they were edible.
     
    Sam sighed, moving the steel-wool pad. "So I went
    looking for him. By then it was way after midnight."
     
    Coming in to find Bob Arnold in the process of
    arresting his father, Sam had been carrying some things
    he and Tommy had spent the previous afternoon fooling
    around with. Now they lay on the kitchen table,
    forgotten: a pocket-sized, U.S. Coast Guard-issue
    Morse code instruction book bound in blue imitation
    leather, and a flat, 1950s-era cardboard box, its
    brightly illustrated cover proclaiming that it contained
    a genuine Ouija.
    "Because you know Dad," Sam continued. "He
    wouldn't've tried going to Tommy's, if he wanted me,
    or called there. It would have been, like, too obvious."
     
    The Ouija board gave me an uneasy feeling. But I
     
    figured that with all that was going on now, Sam might
    forget about the dratted thing.
     
    "Anyway, I got my bike, rode downtown, out to
    South End, and back again on County Road. But no
    Dad. So then I started getting worried about him. I
    went back and sat around awhile waiting for him."
     
    "Nothing on his answering machine, or anything
    like that?"
     
    He shook his head, working his way along the side
    of the old radiator a final time with the pad of steel
    wool.
     
    "Nope. I thought of that. You know, that maybe
    he went out for some other reason, somebody'd called
    him. Then I went through the house to see whether I
    could figure out what he'd been doing before he left."
     
    "And?" I ran my hand over the now-smooth antique
    heating fixture. Before there were furnaces, my
    old house had been heated with stoves, and originally
    with open fireplaces; the chimneys remain, and when
    the wind blows hard they howl like a chorus of demented
    banshees, one in each room.
    "And it turned out that while I'd been out hunting
    for him, he must have been back. Because when I first
    came home--"
     
    Sam glanced at me; there had been, since Victor's
    arrival in town, a problem in the definition of just what
    constituted Sam's home: my house, or Victor's? In the
    end, Sam had decided on both, but he tried not to rub
    my nose in it.
     
    "When I first went in," he rephrased smoothly, "I
    looked in his study. Everything in there was neat and
    normal like always."
     
    A few feet away, Ellie had been gazing out the
    kitchen window while she listened, watching the purple
    grackles moving en masse across the lawn, a glossy
    regiment. Now she looked over alertly.
     
    "And the second time?"
     
    "He'd been there, in a hurry," Sam said. "Or I
     
    thought he had. His desk drawer was open, and the
    cabinet where he keeps the old instruments, the antique
    things from his history collection. That was open, too,
    and it didn't look so perfect to me, lined up all careful
    the way he always keeps his stuff."
     
    Victor had bone saws, trephines, gadgets that
    looked like nutpicks, all of it once the absolute height
    of high-tech medical equipment; he had collected such
    things since he was a medical student, buying them at
    auctions or from private estate sales.
     
    "Like somebody," Sam finished, "had been in
    there, looking for something. But I just assumed it must
    have been Dad. Because who else?"
     
    Deliberately, Ellie took a mixing bowl out of the
    cabinet and got out the ingredients she needed for baking
    cream scones. She thinks best, she always says,
    when she is cooking.
    "Were the doors locked? Of his house, I mean?"
    She knew Sam had keys.
     
    "Nah." Sam shook his head. "He does it like everybody
    else around here does now, locks when he
    goes to bed. Otherwise--"
    He made a frittering gesture with his hands, indicating
    the general daytime attitude to locking up in
    Eastport. People walk in and leave things on hall tables
    all the time: baked goods, jars of homemade marmalade,
    borrowed Tupperware.
     
    "It's mostly," Sam summed up, "wide open."
     
    Which, with a valuable historical