Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) (5 page)

Right. Um . . . “I probably would have gone inside,” I admitted, “if I’d had the key, and if Cora had been willing to go with me. But she insisted that she’d made a mistake and she wanted me to take her home, so I did. I’d rather go sleuthing with you anyway.”

“Flattered,” Derek said and opened the glove box. “Is there a flashlight in here?”

“Should be.” I risked a glance in that direction as he rummaged, but I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road any longer than I had to.

“Got it.” He pulled it out and flicked it on. Nothing happened. “Out of batteries,” Derek said, disgusted.

“We can use my cell phone instead. I have a flashlight app.”

“That’ll work.” He returned the useless flashlight to the glove box and leaned back in the seat, folding his arms across his chest. “Remind me to get you new batteries. I don’t want my wife driving around with a nonfunctioning flashlight.”

“Flashlight app,” I reminded him.

“Not the same thing.”

Maybe not, but we had reached the house now, and the time to argue was over. I pulled up to the curb and cut the engine. Derek peered out the window. “I don’t see anything.”

“I didn’t, either. There probably wasn’t anything there. But Cora said she saw a light, and it couldn’t have been a reflection from the house across the street.”

Derek glanced at it. “No.”

“I’m sure there’s no one there at all. But just in case she wasn’t wrong . . .”

“May as well take a look.” Derek nodded and unlocked his door. Before he swung his legs out, he opened the glove box again and palmed the flashlight.

“I thought it didn’t work.”

“It’s not for lighting our way,” Derek said. “We have your cell phone for that. This is for protection.”

Wonderful. Yet another reason to hope we’d find no one in the house. Or my husband would be hauled off to jail for assault with a deadly flashlight.

• • • 

The front door opened with that long, drawn-out shriek of rusty hinges familiar from scary movies. I hadn’t really noticed it during the day—possibly because the door had been standing open most of the time—but now it sent a chill down my spine.

We stepped through and stopped to listen. Nothing moved within the living room. Nothing moved anywhere, as far as I could hear. All I could hear was Derek’s steady breathing and my own heartbeat thundering in my ears.

“So far, so good.” His voice was more breath than actual words, and tickled the flyaway hair near my temple. I jumped. He chuckled. “C’mon.”

He moved farther into the room, old floorboards creaking under his feet. I followed, tiptoeing and holding my breath.

It was amazing that this was the same house we’d spent most of the past two days in. Other than a few exceptions—like scaring myself half to death finding the doll, and Brandon scaring us both half to death wandering around over our heads—I hadn’t been aware of a sense of discomfort. It was just an old house with no particular vibe to it. Not particularly happy, but not particularly sad, either. Now, however, with the darkness bearing down on us, only able to see as far as the weak light from the cell phone illuminated, it felt like a different house. Silent, sinister, full of secrets.

There was nobody on the first floor, and no sign that anyone had been here, either. There were footprints and scuffmarks all across the floors, of course, and tracks from where Derek had pushed the baby carriage, but with as much coming and going as we’d done today and yesterday, there was no way to tell whether any of the footsteps belonged to anyone else. Certainly not in the dark.

And anyway, the light Cora had claimed to have seen—and then claimed not to have seen—had been upstairs.

I crept up the stairs in Derek’s wake, keeping to the outside of the steps, where it was less likely that the wood would creak.

Craftsman bungalows could be one story, but more often they were one and a half: a first floor that looked just like any other house, and a second floor tucked under the eaves with sloping ceilings and dormers in front and back.

We went into the bathroom first, since the door stood open. There was no one in there. I hadn’t expected anyone, but it was still a relief.

Derek pushed open the door on the right next, and shone the dim light of the phone into one of the bedrooms the Green girls must have used when they were small. Ten by ten or so, with heart of pine floors—not as upscale as the oak floors downstairs—and with sloping ceilings and knee walls.

“Empty,” he said, flashing the right around.

“What about the closet?”

“I don’t think anyone’s hiding in the closet,” Derek said, but he crossed the floor and yanked open the door anyway. When he jumped back, my heart jumped, too, and my voice reached up into the soprano register.

“What is it?”

He turned to me and grinned, the light from the flashlight shining up into his face giving him a sort of demonic look. “Nothing.”

“That’s mean.”

“Maybe I was hoping for you to throw yourself into my arms,” Derek said with a waggle of eyebrows. “All we need is a few thunderclaps to complete the scary-movie feel.”

“I can do without the thunderclaps,” I told him, but I threw myself into his arms anyway. Or not threw exactly, but I walked over to him and let him put an arm around me. When that was done, I peered into the closet. It was empty, save for a row of skeletal wire hangers on a rod.

“Let’s get outta here,” Derek said and pulled me toward the door. “Get home and to bed.”

Fine with me. “Just one room to go.” I preceded him out onto the landing and stopped. “Have you been up here today?”

“No,” Derek said.

“Do you remember closing the door?”

He shook his head. “But Brandon was wandering around. He may have done it.”

“I don’t think he went upstairs, did he?” I eyed the door apprehensively.

The thing about closed doors is you never know what might be behind them. Not so with open ones.

But I wanted to get home and to bed, too, so I followed Derek across the landing and waited while he turned the knob and pushed the door open. And when he jumped, I told him, “Very funny.”

“No,” Derek said.

No?

I peered over his shoulder and jumped, too.

For a moment, I lost my breath, and not in a good the-Waterfield-Inn-is-gorgeous sort of way.

I’m not particularly superstitious, but for a moment I could swear I was looking at a ghost: a little girl curled up on the floor, her blouse gleaming blue-white in the light from the cell phone, with two long braids wound like ropes around her throat and a doll clutched to her chest.

Then I realized what I was looking at.

“It’s Mamie Green.”

Derek nodded. “Brandon was right. She did come back here.”

“He must be frantic.” It had been four or five hours since he’d been here looking for her. If she’d been missing this whole time, Brandon—and her sister, not to mention the staff at the nursing home; the staff that had lost her—must be going out of their minds with worry.

“Call him,” Derek said, handing me my phone. “I’ll get her.”

I took the phone, but didn’t dial. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”

Derek glanced at me. “I hope so.”

He approached carefully. Maybe he was feeling a bit spooked by the whole thing, too, even if he didn’t show it.

I waited, phone in my hand, while he squatted next to Mamie and put out a hand. He was careful not to startle her, just held it in front of her face without touching. “Still breathing.”

“Good.” I started dialing.

“Not warm enough, though.” He wrenched out of his coat. “We can’t wait for him here. She’ll freeze to death.” He tucked it around her while I listened to the phone ring on the other end of the line.

When Brandon came on, I told him we’d found Mamie Green, asleep or unconscious, in her old house, and that we would take her back to the nursing home where she lived. “Derek says we shouldn’t wait for you. She’s too cold and needs to get warm quickly.”

“I’ll meet you at the nursing home,” Brandon said. “Do you know where it is?”

I didn’t, and he gave me directions. Meanwhile, Derek gathered Mamie into his arms. She didn’t weigh much, she was pretty much just skin and bones from what I could see, nor did she wake up, which couldn’t be a good sign. I hung up with Brandon and lighted Derek’s way down the stairs and out through the front door over to the car.

“How are we going to do this?”

“I’ll drive,” Derek said, stopping beside the car so I could open the passenger door for him. “You’ll go in the back, if you don’t mind. That’s easier than trying to fit Mamie in there.”

“Shouldn’t she be lying down?”

“We’ll lower the seat once I get her strapped in.” He suited action to words, and loaded Mamie carefully—and awkwardly—into the front seat of the Beetle. It was a bit like maneuvering a life-sized mannequin, one that was still clutching the doll to her chest. Now that I got a good look at it in the car’s interior lights, I recognized it from this afternoon: It was the same doll that had given me such a scare in the basement. She must have found it in the carriage and taken it inside with her.

“I guess we’ll have to replace the locks,” I said with a glance toward the house, “if people still have keys.”

“Maybe not,” Derek said, leaning across the body—Mamie’s body—to fasten the seat belt. “I’d rather have her inside than out. She came close enough to freezing to death as it is. If she hadn’t been able to get in—if she’d decided to sleep on the porch—she’d be dead by now.”

In that case, maybe we’d better not do anything about it, at least not yet. We’d have to change the locks before we sold the place, though. We couldn’t expect the new owners to be as sanguine as we were about uninvited visitors. But that wouldn’t be for a few months yet, so maybe by then Mamie would have gotten used to the fact that it wasn’t her house anymore.

“I’ll go lock up.” For all the good that it would do, when there were keys floating around.

Derek nodded, fumbling for the mechanism to lower the seat. “Hurry. I want to get the car started and the heat going.”

I hurried, and then scrambled into the backseat so he could drive. The Beetle took off from the curb like a rocket.

The nursing home didn’t turn out to be far away at all. And Derek knew where he was going, so he didn’t need my directions. Ten minutes later, we pulled in under the portico in front, behind Brandon’s police cruiser. By then, the interior of the Beetle was like a sauna, minus the wet branches. Derek had kept the heat cranked to ninety degrees the whole time, as high as the car would allow.

Mamie was still out cold, or asleep, but her skin wasn’t as cold and flaccid to the touch. Her death grip on the doll had loosened. When one of the nurses tried to remove it after they’d loaded her onto a gurney, she held on, though.

“Let her keep it,” the other nurse advised. “We can always get it away from her later.”

They wheeled the gurney into the nursing home. Derek watched as he absently shrugged into his jacket.

“How did you find her?” Brandon asked. “This time of night?”

I told him about driving past the house on my way home from Kate’s meeting, and how Cora had thought she’d seen a light. “I brought Derek back to investigate. Good thing, too, because she might have been dead by morning.”

Derek nodded. “If we hadn’t found her tonight, she probably would be. Maybe we need to start heating the house overnight.”

Maybe so. We hadn’t planned to start doing that until we were ready to begin the actual renovations, but if there was a chance that Mamie would be back, it would be safer.

“She’ll be all right, won’t she?” I asked.

He glanced at me. “She’ll be fine. As long as there’s nothing else wrong with her. If she just got confused and cold, and wandered in and went to sleep and then went into deeper hypothermia, she’ll be fine once they thaw her out. If there’s something wrong beyond that, then I’m not sure.”

“Can you let us know how it goes?” I asked Brandon.

He nodded. “Of course. I’ll stick around awhile, to make sure everything’s OK. If anything changes, I’ll give you a call.”

“Do you want us to stay with you?”

He smiled but shook his head. “That’s not necessary. I’ll let you know what happens.”

“C’mon, Tink,” Derek said and put his arm around my shoulder. “See you around, Brandon.”

Brandon nodded, and headed over to the seating area in the lobby while Derek and I walked toward the door to the outside.

He didn’t call. Not until late the next morning, when we were back at the house, making inroads on filling up the Dumpster. Over the past two days, we’d dragged out all the debris: everything not nailed down. Now it was time to start on the stuff that
was
nailed down, like the unsalvageable kitchen cabinets and the chipped and rusty bathroom sink we were replacing, along with the yards and yards of rusted galvanized plumbing.

When the phone rang, I was balanced on top of the kitchen counter, holding a kitchen cabinet door steady while Derek applied the battery-driven screwdriver to the hinges. That way he could have both hands free and not have to worry about the door hitting him in the head when he was finished.

When my pocket started vibrating, he put the drill down and fished for my phone. “I got it.”

“So I see,” I said, hanging on to the cabinet door.

“It’s Brandon.” He put it on speaker so I could hear.

“I’m just checking in,” Brandon’s voice told us, tinny through the connection. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night, but I just spoke to the nursing home. Ms. Green is alive and well. Still in bed for the rest of the day, but probably well enough to get up again tomorrow. And no worse for wear.”

Good to know.

“They’ll keep a better eye on her after this, won’t they?” If she could get up tomorrow, what were the chances that she’d be back here tomorrow night?

“They’d better,” Brandon said grimly. He added, “Although it isn’t a prison, you know. The residents who are well enough to come and go, can. They’re not locked up.”

“I guess we’d better keep the heat on from now on,” I told Derek, “just in case.”

He nodded and addressed Brandon. “Thanks for letting us know. I’m glad nothing worse happened.”

“Me, too,” Brandon said and rang off.

• • • 

By the afternoon, the kitchen cabinets were down and out, along with the kitchen sink and counter. We had left the downstairs bathroom mostly intact apart from the sink—we needed a working toilet while we labored over the house—and moved on to the upstairs bath, the one shared by the two kid bedrooms. Derek busied himself unhooking the plumbing while I wandered around the upstairs trying to get a vision for the space.

It would remain as two bedrooms, it seemed. Derek had been adamant about the master suite being downstairs, and in some ways it made sense. If it were my house and I had kids, I wouldn’t want them sleeping downstairs while I was upstairs, either. What if someone tried to break in?

So master suite downstairs, with two kid bedrooms and a bath upstairs.

Or maybe not kid bedrooms exactly; could be guest bedrooms. Mother-in-law bedroom. Or even an office. There was no foyer or parlor in this house. If someone wanted an office, it would have to be up here, or possibly in the nook in the kitchen.

So master suite downstairs, two other rooms upstairs. The bath would have to be kid-friendly, because chances were the house would appeal to people with children, but not so kid-friendly that it would turn anyone else off. Plain white subway tile for the combination tub-shower probably—it goes with everything—and with maybe some accents of pretty glass tiles, just to jazz things up a bit. Nothing too outré, though. Shades of brown and tan probably, to pick up the golden hues of the floors and of the dark woodwork around windows and doors. The Arts and Crafts movement was very much about the use of natural materials like wood and stone.

The bedrooms themselves were plain to the point of being boring. Two square ten-by-ten boxes with heart of pine floors and sloped ceilings, and a set of two windows looking out at the neighbors. There was more ceiling than wall in each room, which meant I could have some fun with color. At the back of each room was a small door in the knee wall, barely big enough for a person to fit through. I’m not very big, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fit, to be honest.

Still, I was curious, so I got down on my hands and knees on the floor and pulled one of the doors open. Stuck my head through the opening and peered around. Daylight trickled through cracks in the ceiling, where the roof had deteriorated enough in places to let the sunshine in.

The pine floors continued in here, not all the way out to the edges of the eaves, but a few feet, enough to provide room to stack a few cardboard boxes. I dragged them into the room, stuck my head in to make sure I hadn’t missed any, and set to investigating.

I had high hopes for something interesting, of course—something secret tucked away in the eaves, out of sight—but it wasn’t anything special. One box contained a complete set of china decorated with small pink flowers: cups, saucers, sugar cup, cream pitcher, and teapot—all of it doll-sized, and all of it quite old and in mint condition.

The other box contained doll clothes, hand-knit unless my eyes deceived me: a pale blue romper, small jacket, and little cap suitable for a baby doll like the one that had scared three years off my life yesterday. The doll Mamie had been clutching last night. This was the room we had found her in, so logic dictated that this must have been her room growing up, and these were her doll’s clothes. Not her own clothes, I thought; back when Mamie was a girl, they probably didn’t dress little girls in blue.

If this was Mamie’s room, Ruth’s room must be the one across the hall.

Wonder if Ruth had tucked away small treasures behind her knee wall, too?

I wandered out onto the landing and peered into the bathroom. Derek was on his knees wrestling with the plumbing. I stood there for a moment admiring the fit of his jeans and the movement of his arms in the short-sleeved T-shirt . . . and then I tore myself away and headed into the room on the other side of the landing.

It was a mirror image of Mamie’s room, only painted a different color. Mamie’s room was a pale, fleshy peach; Ruth’s was dull green. They were both boring as dirt. When it was my turn to paint, I might go with some nice warm goldenrod or something, to bring out the beauty of the dark wood.

There was an access door in the wall here, too, leading into the same sort of narrow little space as on Mamie’s side of the staircase. I stuck my head in and peered around.