Repair to Her Grave Read Free

making the unease I felt sound manageable, even trivial. Slender and pretty, with pale green eyes, red hair, and freckles like a sprinkling of gold dust, Ellie had been my friend since almost the moment I got to Eastport three years earlier.
    “Drat, look at that,” she said. “I’ve lost the tiny hinge screw out of my glasses.” She took off the tortoiseshell pair she was wearing, frowned at the separation, and tucked the pieces into her sweater pocket. “Anyway, where is he now?”
    “Walking around town. He had a glass of water while he was spinning me a few more moonbeams about himself, and then he went out.”
    I took a deep breath. “It's Jared Hayes he's researching, Ellie. For his dissertation. Or he says that's what it's for, anyway.”
    “Oh,” Ellie said. “Now I get it.”
    When Jared Hayes, the Eastport musician and composer, looked out his bedroom window on an early nineteenth-century morning, he saw ships: great, many-sailed trading vessels gathered so thickly into port, the harbor seemed fairly bristling with their masts. The town swarmed with commerce: shipbuilders, chandlers, riggers and sailmakers, dealers in oakum, hemp, and galley provisions, not to mention the goods those ships brought in and out: rum and cotton, lumber and nails, peat from Canada, and of course the fish that swam so plentifully in the ocean.
    There was work for everyone; recently released from the loathsome four-year occupation by the British army in the War of 1812—when the news came that the Treaty of Ghent was signed, local people dug out horns and fiddles and played “Yankee Doodle” up and down Water Street to pipe the hated redcoats on their way— Eastport boomed.
    And when an economy booms, artists and musicians do well, too: parties and so on. People celebrating their comfortable circumstances. Only not usually quite as well as Jared Hayes had done.
    Ellie gave the room a final look-over and dusted her hands together, indicating that we were finished. “But you think—”
    “Of course I do,” I said, pulling the door shut. “What else would it be? He's searching for that damned violin.”
    We went downstairs to the kitchen, where Ellie fixed coffee and I put out a plate of cupcakes I’d made earlier, in a burst of suspecting that I might be needing them: chocolate with bits of chopped sweet cherries in the batter and dark chocolate frosting.
    “There's no violin,” she said as we applied ourselves to the cupcakes. They were pure wickedness, nearly as restorative as I’d hoped. I took another.
    “No, there isn’t,” I replied, chewing. “ We know that. Or,” I temporized, because after all you can’t prove a negative, “we’re pretty sure.”
    A hefty dose of chocolate had smoothed down my hackles and settled my nerves. To balance the effect, I took another sip of the hot, strong coffee that Ellie produces like a magical elixir from ordinary Maxwell House; eat your heart out, Starbucks.
    “How many people,” I asked, “do you suppose have been through the house searching for it?”
    During the decades when the house had stood empty, I meant. Before I came to Eastport on a whim and spotted the huge white structure looming at the top of Key Street like a ghost from a distant era and got the people from the real estate office to let me in. I’d spent hours wandering the vacant rooms, filled with a shimmering sense of having been in them before; by the next day, the house had belonged to me.
    Now, through the bright, bare windows of the big old barnlike kitchen, yellow sunlight fell in pale rectangles on the hardwood floor. Outside, a breeze shifted the branches of the cherry tree I had planted the previous summer, sending white petals swirling to the green grass like a shower of snow.
    “Half the town,” Ellie replied dreamily. “Looking for Jared Hayes's famous lost Stradivarius. But they never found it. The only treasures ever found here were those dining room curtains, stuffed in a cubbyhole