Flipped Out (33 page)

When Derek pulled the truck up to the stairs where she stood, she minced over to the cab and pulled the door open. “Hi, Avery.” She gave me a big, fake smile as she stowed the overnight bag at my feet. I scooted closer to Derek. She slid onto the seat next to me, and then spoke across me. “Hi, Derek. Thanks for coming to get me.”

“Nice of Wayne to let you go,” I said.

Melissa smiled back, insincerely. “I think he realized I couldn’t possibly have done this horrible thing, Avery. Tony and I were getting married. I adored him.”

“Right,” I said. “I don’t suppose you know who inherits, do you? Seeing as he died before you guys tied the knot, and he had no other family.”

Derek glanced at me.

“I imagine I do,” Melissa said.

“No kidding.”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “He made a will. As soon as we decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, we each made one in the other’s favor. Of course, I don’t have much to leave. The money from the sale of the house I shared with Ray went to buy the loft, and when Derek and I separated, I was making more money than he was.” She smiled at him in a way that did its best to exclude me.

“So you inherit everything? The house on Cabot Street? The condo in Portland? The car? Whatever is in his bank accounts?”

“I imagine so,” Melissa said.

“And Wayne let you go anyway?”

Derek shook his head, resigned, eyes on the road. We were entering downtown Waterfield, with its cars and thousands of tourists clogging every sidewalk. In another minute or two, we’d be on Main Street. And none too soon for me.

“I was under the impression he had arrested someone else,” Melissa said, a tiny wrinkle between her perfect brows.

“What gave you that idea?”

She looked politely puzzled. “When I was told I could go, young Brandon Thomas said they were exploring other avenues. And when I questioned why Wayne couldn’t be bothered to release me himself, Brandon said Wayne was interviewing another suspect.”

“I’m not sure they’re really suspects. . . .” I said, partly because I didn’t really want them to be, but more because I didn’t want to give up on the idea that Melissa might be guilty. Sure, killing Tony for the house on Cabot Street and the condo in Portland and whatever was in his bank account didn’t sound like something Melissa would do—not when she could just marry him and get it all anyway—but I was upset with her, and for that matter with Derek, and although I realized I was being somewhat ridiculous, I just couldn’t seem to let it go.

“I’m just repeating what Brandon Thomas told me,” Melissa said sweetly.

“Well, maybe Brandon shouldn’t have told you that! And just because they let you go now doesn’t mean they can’t come after you later, if things change, you know. Just because Wayne isn’t willing to press charges right now, since there are other people involved who look like they may have had motive and opportunity, too, doesn’t mean you’re not still a suspect!”

“Avery,” Derek said.

I ignored him. “You still could have killed Tony. The screwdriver has your fingerprints all over it, and if you inherit everything, that’s motive and means, and we both know you had opportunity, because you were there that night!”

“Avery,” Derek said again.

“So I wouldn’t feel too confident if I were you. Just because you’re out of jail right now doesn’t mean you won’t be back there tomorrow, or the next day.”

“Avery!” Derek said.

I turned to him. “What?”

“Give it a rest.”

I blinked.

He added, “She didn’t kill Tony. I was married to her for five years, and if she didn’t kill me, she wouldn’t have killed him. OK?”

I nodded, speechless. Melissa smiled, very much like a cat with a big bowl of cream. Derek drove on, seemingly unaware that he’d just taken his ex-wife’s side against me and that I wasn’t happy at all about that.

As soon as he pulled the truck to a stop in the parking lot behind the hardware store and Melissa slid off the seat and grabbed her bag; I jumped out, too, without waiting for Derek to catch me.

“I’m going home.”

“Avery . . .”

I shook my head. “Not in the mood.”

“The mood for what?” Melissa inquired, sweetly.

I rounded on her. “Stay out of this. It’s none of your business.”

“Avery . . .” Derek tried again.

I shook my head again. “Just leave me alone. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“But, Tink . . .”

Going for the nickname was a super-low blow. Still, I walked away. I halfway expected him to follow me, but only halfway, so it didn’t come as a huge surprise when he didn’t. When I glanced back just as I rounded the corner onto Main Street, he was standing there watching me, a puzzled look on his face, as if he had no idea what he had said that bothered me.

21

I worked up quite a head of steam climbing the hill from downtown. Some of it was exertion—Waterfield is a steep little town, and it was the end of July and hot as Hades—but a lot of it was annoyance, too. How dare he take Melissa’s side? And in front of her, too! He had no right to treat me like that. And not only because he was my boyfriend and he was supposed to stick by me, especially in front of his ex-wife, but because I was right, dammit.

All right, so maybe she hadn’t killed Tony. I didn’t really think she had, to be honest. Derek knew her better than me—the bastard—and he didn’t think she had, either. But she’d been there at around the time Tony was killed. She’d had reason to kill him—both for the money and because he might have been thinking of dumping her for Nina—and the bloody murder weapon had her fingerprints all over it. I wasn’t out of line for thinking—or even suggesting—that she wasn’t out of the woods yet. Fae and Wilson had less reason for killing Tony than Melissa did. Nina was right: She and Tony hadn’t been responsible for Aurora Jamison’s decision to drive under the influence. They weren’t the cause of her death. Sure, they probably felt culpable, and morally, maybe they were, at least partly, but it was her own choice. She chose to drink, to go home with Tony, and to try to drive to work in the middle of the night, tanked on whatever he had served her. And besides, it was twenty-plus years ago. If Fae and her uncle were harboring murderous intentions and were determined to kill the people responsible, why choose Tony instead of Nina, and why wait so long? Wilson had had access to Nina for years, and getting Aurora drunk and unable to work had been her idea in the first place. Fae had had access to Nina for at least a month or two. Yes, the two of them had probably been sending the letters, but letters are passiveaggressive. I’m sure they’d wanted Nina to suffer and to feel horrible about what she did, but they didn’t necessarily want her dead. Stabbing Tony with a screwdriver was active aggression: Someone wanted him out of the way and that someone had made sure he’d been dispatched. And I couldn’t get that someone to match up with Fae and Wilson.

By the time I’d huffed down to the end of Bayberry Lane, where Aunt Inga’s house was, the T-shirt was sticking to my back, and the hair on my neck and around my face was damp and frizzy. Sticking the key in the lock, anticipating the coolness of the air-conditioning, Murphy’s Law kicked in and I had to twist the key back and forth several times before it would let me open the door and tumble into the foyer. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have wondered if we’d forgotten to lock up this morning. We had been in a bit of hurry, so it wouldn’t have been surprising.

A lot of people in Waterfield leave their doors unlocked all the time. In New York City, such a thing wouldn’t have crossed my mind, but here, where everyone pretty much knew everyone else, it didn’t seem like that big a deal. I’d gotten into the habit of keeping everything locked up tight early on, though, back when I’d just moved to town, when someone desperately wanted me gone and wasn’t above sabotaging my house and trying to kill me to do it. I admit it, I did grab a heavy candlestick from the sideboard in the dining room and carried it around with me as I walked from room to room, making sure that I was alone and that nothing seemed to be missing or rigged to kill me.

After five minutes of creeping around my house, from basement to attic and everywhere in between, I decided that everything seemed to be in order. Nothing was out of place, and there was no sign that anyone had been inside. Either we had forgotten to lock up this morning, or I’d temporarily lost my mind in the upset over Derek and Melissa, and I’d thought I’d had a problem with the front door when I had, in fact, just been twisting the key back and forth for no reason other than that my hands were shaking with anger. There was nothing wrong here. My laptop was on the desk in the parlor, my jewelry box was on the bureau in the bedroom, all my designer clothes—the ones I’d made myself—and my designer shoes—that I hadn’t—were in the closet where they belonged. The TV and DVD player were in the living room. There was no sea of broken dishes on the kitchen floor, the way it had been the time I walked in here and someone had broken all of Aunt Inga’s china in an effort to scare me off. All my replacement dishes were neatly stacked on the shelves behind the doors trimmed with Aunt Inga’s never-used wedding veil. Even the basement stairs were safe and sound. Everything seemed normal. I went to the fridge, removed some cold cuts and a roll, and began to put together a sandwich.

It was then that I realized that something was indeed missing. The cats were gone. And whereas that wasn’t unusual for Jemmy and Inky—they came and went at will all day and night through the cat flap in the back door—Mischa hadn’t shown much inclination thus far to wander. After being on his own for a while before we found him, scrounging for food and warmth through the cold Maine winter, now that he had a place and a warm lap of his own, he tended to stick close to home. He certainly was diligent in protecting it, and his human, from intruders.

Every once in a while he’d go outside to do his business, however, having never gotten used to a litter box. As I sat down at the kitchen table, with my sandwich and a DIY magazine, I expected to hear the sound of the cat door slapping at any moment.

It didn’t, and after I had finished eating and had rinsed off the plate and glass and put them in the dishwasher, I decided that maybe I’d better go look for him. He’d only lived with me a few weeks, and he wasn’t used to Waterfield yet. On Rowanberry Island, he’d mostly hung out under the front porch and—as he got more comfortable with us—on the porch and sometimes inside the house while we worked. Here, he’d done the same. I hated the idea that he’d wandered off and couldn’t find his way home. Or that he’d gotten into something he couldn’t get out of. Like, he’d climbed a tree and couldn’t get down, or he’d wandered into Aunt Inga’s garden shed and couldn’t find his way out.

Derek had been in the shed the other day, first to get me the Adirondack chair that was currently sitting on the porch of the house on Cabot Street, and then to pick up the old door that had been turned into a porch swing. What if he’d forgotten to close the door all the way? He’d been carrying things. And what if Mischa had squeezed through the opening and into the shed, and the door had closed behind him, trapping him there? He wasn’t strong enough to push it open again, if it had.

Drying my hands on a dish towel—one I had designed myself, with giant bluebells all over it—I slipped on a pair of flip-flops and ventured back out into the evening.

Maine is far enough north that the sun stays up late in the summer. It was still up, but low in the sky, and the clouds to the west had taken on a peachy hue, fading to pale lavender behind the pine trees. The shadows were long and dark across the grass. There was no sign of Mischa or, for that matter, of Jemmy or Inky.

I wasn’t too worried about the two of them. They’d grown up here and knew their way around. Mischa was another story. He was still small, he couldn’t defend himself very well—his attacks on Derek notwithstanding, and right now, I was still angry enough with Derek to applaud those. He could have gotten lost, he could have treed himself, he could have been hit by a car, he could have gotten into trouble with a fox or a raccoon or a loose dog. . . .

I walked into the street but saw no sign of him. The Beetle was parked at the curb, and Mischa wasn’t inside it, nor was he crouched underneath. So I wandered around the house instead, into the yard, calling his name. Gooseberries and currants are prohibited in Maine, because they’re host plants for something called the white pine blister rust, which attacks pine trees, but down at the bottom of the yard, there were neat rows of raspberry bushes between stakes and strings. I spent a few minutes walking through each row, peering under the leaves and picking the occasional ripe raspberry and popping it in my mouth. I enjoyed the dessert, but Mischa wasn’t there. When I got out of the raspberry patch, I stopped, hands on my hips, and surveyed the yard.

The shed was left, down in the corner. It was a small clapboard building, painted the same robin’s egg blue as the main house, with the same ochre trim, and from where I stood, I could see that the door was closed. It wasn’t likely that Mischa was inside—he wouldn’t have been able to close the door behind him, and there was no wind tonight that could have pushed it shut—but I wandered in that direction anyway.