Read Online Unhinged by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online Page A

the cannon must have looked sufficient to the soldiers at Fort Sullivan on the hill over the harbor. That is, until they spotted the British flotilla sailing up the bay and knew they were outnumbered hundreds to one.
    Which went to prove something, I supposed, but I didn’t know what and at the moment, I didn’t care. Twenty-four hours earlier my only worry had been fixing a gutter.
    Now I had an injured son who might not have gotten that way by accident, a missing woman who surely hadn’t, and a new chapter in my own thoroughly lousy history, starring a father who instead of dying in a bomb blast might instead have callously abandoned me.
    On Water Street the shops gleamed with freshly washed plate glass, new paint, and tubs of red geraniums; sidewalks bustled as the shops’ proprietors readied for the coming tourist season. I passed the Quoddy Crafts store, its front window filled with the gorgeous stuff people around here kept busy making all winter: finely worked earrings of silver-wrapped beach glass, sweetgrass wreaths intricately braided with colored silks, white ash walking sticks incised with Native American glyphs, stained glass panels glowing with jewel colors.
    And much more, but I didn’t stop to admire it. Down on the dock, past the massive grey granite building that housed the Customs office and the Coast Guard, a wooden hut called Rosie’s sold hot dogs and onion rings. Near Rosie’s stood the pay phone from which a dock worker had called 911 after Sam’s crash. I ignored that, too, as I entered the wooden storefront that housed the Eastport Police Department.
    “Thanks,” I told Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, as Monday flopped down on the floor by Bob’s grey metal desk. I’d called him hours before, and he’d agreed to make some inquiries for me.
    “Early retirement,” Bob confirmed now. On his desk lay fresh copies of the Ellsworth
Union-Leader,
the Portland
Gazette,
and the
Examiner,
plus several more I wasn’t familiar with.
    You never saw him reading one, but by the end of the day Bob would have absorbed the contents of them all. According to Bob, there was nothing a crook liked better than a cop who hadn’t yet cottoned on to the capers the crook had been pulling elsewhere.
    “Under a cloud, like he said,” Bob went on, meaning Harry. “Union got him his pension, hadda fight for that. And they never caught the creep he’d been after, either. Once Harry Markle was out of the picture, this bad guy he’d been chasing stopped doing bad deeds like someone shut off a switch.”
    Bob was pink-cheeked and balding, with big blue eyes that looked innocent until you peered more deeply into them. “Like maybe it was what the guy’d had in mind in the first place, hurting Markle,” Bob observed thoughtfully.
    “An old enemy of Harry’s?” That hadn’t occurred to me. “But all those deaths, isn’t that an awful lot of . . .” I faltered.
    “Overkill,” Bob agreed dourly, gazing out the window. “That’s why I don’t buy the idea, myself.”
    Ellie and I could research a lot, but some questions you had to be a cop yourself to ask effectively. And I wanted them asked, never mind if some of the answers knocked me for a loop. I didn’t enjoy being blindsided by the past.
    Or anything else. “But it’s not just Harry’s facts that are accurate?” I pressed Bob. “His spin on it is true? Someone in the city really was victimizing cops, by killing their loved ones?”
    Out on the water a little black-and-red scallop dragger was puttering into the harbor. But most of the town’s boats were in the boat basin getting extra bumpers thrown on for what locals predicted would be a gullywhumper.
    “Yeah. Nobody in the series not connected to the job.”
    The string of deaths Harry had been investigating had begun about five years earlier. They were bad ones, the killings ritualistic. The papers hadn’t printed the gory details but you didn’t have to work too hard to imagine