Blessed Is the Busybody (4 page)

I wasn’t sure how things had gotten to this point. Wasn’t this a job for the police? On the other hand, what kind of lead did they have? I’d seen an SUV in the driveway. Roussos hadn’t been impressed. How long would it take before someone got around to checking inside the house?

How about forever?

Lucy didn’t wait for my reply. “Well, I think I’ll just check it out before I take my clients. They’re not much of a bet, so don’t get your hopes up.” She listened, said her good-byes, and hung up. “She’ll be so-o-o-o pissed when she finds out what happened over here. She’ll know I was lying.” She didn’t sound concerned.

“Lucy, we can’t march through the front yard and across the street. Someone will notice.”

“I’m parked in the church lot. We’ll get the car and drive to the house. It’s perfectly legitimate, Aggie. I’m a realtor. The house is for sale. There’s a lockbox. If the police want to come, too, let them.”

Curiosity has always been my downfall. As a young child I was the fearless middle sister who climbed the forbidden backyard maple to spy on neighbor children. And later that same day as I waited for my X-ray, I was the one who followed suspicious noises and found my doctor and nurse conducting a private anatomy class. The other occasions when I’ve let my curiosity get out of hand are too numerous to mention. Rarely have they turned out well.

“Is this one of those minister’s wife hang-ups?” Lucy said. “Are you afraid someone might think bad things about you?”

“If value judgments are being made, they have to do with a certain body on our porch.”

“So?”

I was sure we weren’t in danger. Whoever had dumped poor Jennifer Marina was probably in Pennsylvania or West Virginia by now. But it would be wonderful just to peek at the house, to see if there was any reason to summon the police and not wait for them to get around to a visit on their own.

I got to my feet. “Let’s go.”

I don’t remember sneaking out of my own yard since I was a teenager. It was heady. I felt sixteen again, with all of life’s decisions just ahead of me and Johnny Vincuzzo, the class bad boy, waiting on the corner.

Lucy drives American. This year it’s a cherry red Chrysler Concorde with sandstone leather trim. According to Lucy she trades up as soon as the new car smell begins to disappear. No one eats chocolate chip cookies or peanut butter in Lucy’s car. No one drips ice cream cones or picks up stray dogs. When she takes my girls on shopping trips or shows houses to clients with children, Lucy borrows her mother’s Chevy or my minivan.

I gave the Concorde the sniff test, and it passed. This car would be around for months. I was glad. It was a pretty thing that cheerfully screamed Lucy’s arrival, so I always had a moment to take a breath and prepare.

“Just what are we going to be looking for?” I asked. “Because I don’t want more of what I found this morning.”

“I’m sure that was awful.” She paused. “Nothing like that ever happens to me.”

I knew Lucy was genuinely sorry a woman had died. But if someone had to die, she was sorry it hadn’t been on her watch. She was an adrenaline junky. A murder was fuel enough to drive her for weeks.

“Well, I wish it hadn’t happened to
me
.” I peeked at my house as we turned the corner. The body was gone now, but yellow crime scene tape fluttered from the railing of my porch. Clumps of police officers still chatted in the yard. “I wish it hadn’t happened to
her
.”

“And you never met her?”

I hadn’t told Lucy about Ed’s relationship with Jennifer Marina, or Teddy’s version of the argument in the church parking lot. “A total stranger.”

Lucy pulled into the driveway of the house and cut the engine before she reached for her listings book. “Okay, we’ll just wander through. I was here last week. I think I’ll notice if anything is really out of place.”

“Out of place? It’s furnished?”

“The owners rented it out for a few months, and they left the renters all the junk they didn’t want in their new house. That’s one of the reasons it hasn’t sold. It’s not a bad old place, but it takes imagination with all that stuff lying around.”

We got out. I didn’t look at my house, but I wondered if Detective Roussos was one of the men lingering on my lawn.

The house was standard issue in Emerald Springs. Built sometime in the first half of the twentieth century with a porch that had been enclosed sometime in the second, the house had dull green aluminum siding, trim that needed paint, a narrow front yard with overgrown rhododendrons, and an oak that menaced Church Street.

“The backyard is lovely.” Lucy was in realtor mode. “It extends all the way back to the park. The inside trim is oak, and so are the floors. They redid the bathrooms not long ago. Nicely, too. Real tile. A double sink upstairs.”

I followed her up to the porch and inside to the main door. “You don’t have to convince me. I have a house. I live in the barn across the street, remember?”

“One of the prettiest houses in Emerald Springs.”

I guess at times the parsonage does have a certain charm. Maybe I’m just afraid to fall in love with it. If Gelsey has her way, our occupancy will be limited.

I watched Lucy fiddle with the lockbox. “Let’s get inside quickly, okay? I have a feeling we won’t be alone for long.”

Lucy was frowning at the box. “This is relatively new to me. Be patient. We’ve just gone to this system.”

The lockbox was a new one, more mini-computer than padlock. Lucy inserted what looked like a credit card into the bottom, punched a series of buttons a second time, squinting as she did, then tried once more, cursing under her breath. This time the key storage compartment at the top opened. She retrieved the key and inserted it in the locks. There were two that looked brand new and no-nonsense, a doorknob and a dead bolt. Neither went quietly. After a lot of jiggling, the door swung open. She left it unlocked so getting out would be easier than getting in.

“I can pick a lot of locks if I have to,” Lucy said. “You’d be amazed what being a realtor has taught me. But these two would be next to impossible. The lock on the knob’s an expensive one with a deadlocking latch, which means no one can get in with a pocket or putty knife. They’d have to kick the door or pry it open. Then there’s the deadlock. See, it has a steel shank here.” She pointed. “And it automatically double latches.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know just how she had learned all this. I suspect a lot of locks had been picked on this quest for knowledge. I followed her inside, glancing behind me as I did to see if we’d attracted the attention of the men in front of my house. No one was sprinting across Church Street. That seemed promising.

We stopped in the entryway and gazed around. The living room was to my right, the kitchen straight ahead, just past a stairwell curving to the left. Lucy had been right about the lovely woodwork and the mess. The house smelled like mildew and looked like the final day of Tri-C’s annual rummage sale.

“Don’t say it,” Lucy said. “Every realtor in town has tried to get the owners to clean it out. We’ve even found people to do it for them, but they’re odd ducks. They think it’s a bargain just the way it is.”

“It’s such a mess how can you tell if anything’s been moved?” I wandered forward. A window table with a dying fern sat beside the stairwell. I’d already passed a piano with most of the ivory missing.

Lucy followed me into the kitchen. Mismatched wooden chairs sat around a tile-top table with all of the grout worn away. “Nothing’s different so far,” Lucy said. “Except the smell is worse. Let’s open a window.” She opened one beside the table. “The basement needs waterproofing or a new sump pump. That’s where the smell’s coming from.”

I could see possibilities here. Lots of them. With new countertops and new hardware on the cabinet doors, the kitchen would be improved drastically. A little paint, a little paper . . .

“You have a gleam in your eye,” Lucy said.

“A little window dressing and this would be habitable.”

Lucy leaned against a counter. “What would you do?”

I told her and added a few touches for good measure. “The floors aren’t bad. I bet they could be scrubbed clean with Spic And Span and sealed. A couple of cheerful throw rugs, and this would be welcoming. Even homey. I grew up in rental houses. One right after another, and Junie, my mother, was a pro at making them come to life without spending much money.” Ed and I have lived in enough old apartments to assure me I’ve inherited Junie’s abilities.

We wandered through the rest of the downstairs. I told Lucy what I would do if the house were mine. I was making conversation simply to keep my mind off our real purpose. But as I talked, I searched, looking for something to place the murderers here this morning.

“Nothing different?” I asked after we’d made a circle and ended up at the stairs again.

“I don’t think so.” Lucy was peering up the stairwell. “Upstairs next? Or the basement?”

I prefer to take my chances in rooms with windows. I climbed out of dozens in my misspent youth; I was confident I could make a quick escape from the second floor. I pointed toward heaven. “Who goes first?”

We climbed side by side. On the landing we peered into the second-floor hallway. Floors that needed finishing. Walls that needed painting. Nothing sinister.

Four bedrooms lined the hallway and a large bathroom sat at the end. We started on our right. The bedrooms were small and mercifully clear of most furniture. Overhead light fixtures illuminated the corners that sunlight didn’t. The rooms were unkempt but undisturbed.

Except for the final one. This was the largest of the four with the closest access to the bathroom. There was another smaller room off of it with no hallway entry, which might well have been intended as a nursery or, perhaps, a study. The smaller room was lined with windows overlooking the spacious backyard. When the larger room revealed nothing extraordinary, I strolled into the smaller one.

The windows were filmed by grime, except for one which looked as if it had been recently washed. Very recently. The room smelled like Windex. “Lucy?”

Lucy was testing the plumbing in the bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. I strolled closer to the window, searching every inch of floor as I moved. The floor slanted just enough that an office chair would not be a good idea here. Gravity would always win.

The floor seemed cleaner beneath the window. I stooped and ran my finger along floorboards. My fingertip came up clean. Not so a few feet away where a fine dust coated it immediately.

I backed away, trying to judge how large an area had been washed. The wall might be cleaner under the windows, too, although I wasn’t sure. The institutional green paint was old and faded.

“Lucy?”

This time she joined me. “Find something?”

I showed her. She frowned, studying the area. “What, maybe four feet by four feet of the floor? A window. And I think you’re right about the wall under the window, too.”

“Why would anybody clean this one area only, unless they were trying to erase signs of something?”

I knelt, then carefully and thoroughly I began to sweep my palms over the floor. Inch by inch. I saved fingertips for the cracks between boards. One crack that was larger than the others was still damp where water had pooled and hadn’t yet evaporated. We hadn’t been wrong.

“And the listing agent claimed that no one was here this morning?” I said.

“Aggie, Sarah would have an orgasm if she could get a cleaning crew in here. She’d still be bragging about her powers of persuasion.”

I scooted back on my haunches and felt the next section. “Well, someone cleaned up for free. It’s still damp.” I continued my search, moving slowly toward the window. I could feel the slant of the floor as I moved closer. I pitched forward slightly. Another sweep and I was nearly at the wall.

I’m not sure I would have seen the glint of gold if I hadn’t been so close. I know I wouldn’t have felt anything out of the ordinary. But summer sunshine flooded the floor just in front of me, and caught the object wedged low between the wall and floorboards. It was so tiny I could see why our mysterious Mr. Clean had missed it.

“Look.” I knelt and leaned forward. “Do you have a tissue?”

Lucy rummaged through the purse of all purses and handed me one that was still neatly folded.

I used it to dig for the object. When I was finished, I held it out to her.

“An earring?” I was disappointed. I had hoped for something more exciting. The object was shaped like a crescent moon, with a large gold ball on one end. The other end appeared to be threaded and the wire was thicker than I’d expected.

Lucy leaned closer. “That never saw an earlobe. Haven’t you ever thought about piercing some more interesting part of your anatomy?”

I looked up. “Like?”

“Nipples? Belly button? Something only Ed would see?”

I had witnessed the hole in Jennifer Marina’s nose and the multiple holes in the cartilage of her ear. I had missed the tattoo and body piercing craze by a number of years, and for this I have always been grateful. We had been about the same age, the poor dead woman and I, but Jennifer hadn’t let age stop her from pursuit of fashion.

“It’s called a barbell,” Lucy explained. “My little sister has one in her right nostril, only hers is straight. This is the kind that goes in other places. Maybe just an eyebrow if the wearer isn’t too daring, or maybe genitals. They pierce things now that our mothers didn’t even have names for.”

I got to my feet, still holding the barbell on Lucy’s tissue. “We ought to tell the police. I noticed holes in the victim’s ear and nose. This could be hers.”

“You’re a perceptive woman,” said a voice behind us. A male voice. “Unfortunately, something tells me you’re also too nosy for your own good. And maybe for mine.”