Triple Witch Read Free

grateful.”
    Arnold’s round pink cheeks grew pinker than usual. “No, he won’t,” he answered gruffly. “He’ll just moan and complain like always, and threaten to walk off the dock. If I had a nickel for every time he has told me that he is planning to end it all,” Arnold went on, “I wouldbe lying on a beach in Tahiti right now, and some other poor bastard would be police chief.”
    Ellie twinkled at him. “Oh, you would not. If anybody tried to make you live anywhere but Eastport, you would wither away.”
    “Yeah, well,” he allowed. “Anyway, you take care on that boat of yours with the tide running.”
    “We will,” Ellie assured him, turning to me.
    “Me?” I said, shaking my head in a way that I hoped was the final word on the topic.
    It wasn’t.

 
    4 Back at my house, I busied myself with a task that obviously needed doing that minute: on the hardwood kitchen floor was a spot of old carpet adhesive that had only been stuck there twenty years or so. Getting it off required boiling water, a paint scraper, and infinite patience, all of which I was prepared to apply forever if it kept me from having to go out on Ellie’s boat.
    She, by contrast, enjoys narrow channels, swift currents, and all the other hazards with which the cold waters off the Maine coast are furnished. Possibly this is because her forebears were pirates, people whose idea of fun was to wait for a winter midnight so cold that chunks of sea smoke froze solid and calved off like icebergs into the frigid water. Then on a creaking, disreputable boat they skulked out into Passamaquoddy Bay, flying the skull and crossbones and singing dark, ominous sea-chanties, awaiting some hapless vessel—lost in the fog, her crew praying aloud for salvation—to blunder into their clutches.
    Too late, the master of the victim ship would glimpse the pirates’ dark eyes, torch-lit and glittering with cruelty;too late, the doomed crew would understand the chanty drifting dirgelike over the water at them, and the deck would fall silent for the moment it took to sink into them: that they were dead men.
    I dripped more hot water onto the carpet adhesive. In a year or so, I could remove it completely. But Ellie was not about to let me escape into the pleasures of old-house fix-up.
    “Let’s,” she said in a voice that was bright as a knife-edge, “take a picnic.” She was not a happy camper, I could tell from the brisk, furious way she bustled around the kitchen, making sardine sandwiches.
    Eating food while bobbing up and down on the waves is for me a pointless exercise. I find it simpler and more pleasant just to hurl the sandwiches overboard while they are still wrapped in wax paper. Still, I thought humoring Ellie might be wise; murdered friends bring out the cutthroat ancestor in her.
    So we compromised: lemonade and those horrid little oily creatures in flat tins for Ellie, pilot crackers for me. Then Monday started romping and agitating to go, too, so we took her Day-glo orange doggy life vest which she regards as sissified, but she tolerates it.
    There was of course no real likelihood of my falling from Elbe’s boat and drowning. Still, I gave the kitchen a fond, last look, which was when I noticed a pool of rusty water spreading slyly from beneath the cast-iron radiator.
    “Wow,” Ellie commented. “Better call George.”
    She meant her husband, George Valentine. In Eastport, he was the man you called for bats in the attic, frozen pipes, strange bones in the garden, or a plague of red ants.
    And for imminent floods. Have I mentioned that the house is haunted? From the front parlor came the sharp whap-whapping of a window shade, snapping up by itself.
    I turned the round wooden handle atop the old radiator,cutting off its water supply. “Probably,” I said, “George is at the beach, helping to get Ken’s body. So if I stayed here, I’d just be waiting around for him. I might as well come along.”
    Out in the dining room, an old