Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) (8 page)

Maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt to ask. As we walked toward the front counter to pay and pick up our food, I changed the subject. “Have you finished decorating for the Christmas Tour?”

“That’s what I’m doing today. This is my reward.” She nodded to the lobster roll.

“I haven’t started yet,” I confessed.

“Oh, dear.” She clicked her tongue. “You’ll have a busy few days. Would you like some help?”

“I’ll let you know. Thanks.” I pulled out my wallet to pay.

We walked up the hill together, and parted ways on the corner of North Street and Fulton. Waterfield Village was small enough that I didn’t always bother to take the car to go anywhere, at least when the weather was good. It was gray and gloomy that day, cold with the scent of snow in the air. Or so Cora told me; I hadn’t been in Maine long enough to develop the ability to smell snow. We got snow in Manhattan, too, plenty of it, but Manhattan smelled overpoweringly of other things.

By the time I got back to the Green sisters’ house, Brandon was gone. Derek’s truck stood alone at the curb. I let myself in and called up to the second floor. “Food’s here!”

“About time!” floated back to me. A minute later he came clattering down the stairs.

There was no furniture left in the house, so we sat on the built-in window seat in the dining room and ate, the lobster rolls on their waxed wrapping paper spread out between us.

“It’s almost like a picnic.” I smiled at him.

He smiled back. “Not as good as the real thing. Remember the last picnic we had?”

I did. We’d packed a basket and borrowed Jill and Peter Cortino’s speedboat—Jill’s an old girlfriend of Derek’s from high school—and gone out to the house on Rowanberry Island, where Derek had proposed marriage. The ring had been stuck in a whoopie pie, and I’d come within an inch of eating it.

“I love you,” he told me, just as he’d done then.

“I love you, too,” I answered. “Did Brandon find anything upstairs?”

Derek shrugged, his mouth full of lobster. After he’d swallowed, he said, “If he did, he didn’t tell me. I don’t think he expected to find anything, to be honest. It’s been too long. It was just something he had to do.”

Probably. “Would you like to hear what I found out?”

“Sure,” Derek said.

So I went over the information one more time, with as much detail as I could remember, and ended with, “It must be Arthur Green, don’t you think?”

“Probably,” Derek said.

It wasn’t much of a probability in my mind—it was a virtual certainty—but I asked anyway. “Who else could it be?”

“Don’t know,” Derek said with a shrug. “Maybe one of the Green sisters got pregnant at some point, out of wedlock, and didn’t want the world to know.”

“I suppose.” It was a halfway likely story anyway, as stories go. Although in my opinion, it was much more likely that the baby skeleton we’d found belonged to the missing baby we knew about.

“Of course,” Derek agreed when I said so. “All I’m saying is that there could be other explanations. But Wayne will figure it out.”

“How?”

He leaned back against the cold plaster wall. “I imagine he’ll run a DNA test on the skeleton and match whatever he finds to the Green sisters. If they’re full siblings—have the same mother and father—the DNA will show that conclusively.”

I nodded. And lowered my voice. I wasn’t sure why, only that I didn’t want to talk too loudly about it. “What do you think happened? To the baby?”

“Could have been anything,” Derek said. “Maybe he died of SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome; they called it crib death back then—and they were afraid they’d get blamed, so they made up a story about him being kidnapped.”

“Natural causes?”

Derek nodded. “Nobody knows what causes SIDS, but it happens to male babies more than female, and back then they didn’t know not to put them to sleep on their stomachs. That can be a contributing factor. So can cigarette smoke.”

“You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “Or he could have suffocated. Gotten buried in the blankets or pillows, unable to free himself. It’s sad, but nobody’s fault. And it happens all the time. Or it might have been some other sort of accident. Someone picked him up and dropped him accidentally. One of the girls maybe. And the parents made up the story about the kidnapping because they didn’t want anyone to take the girls away, too.”

I nodded. It made sense and wasn’t too deeply disturbing. Disturbing enough, of course, since nobody wants anything bad to happen to a baby, but not as disturbing as some of the scenarios that had crossed my mind—and probably Derek’s and Wayne’s, too. And while honesty is the best policy, I could imagine parents, in shock after the death of one child, not wanting to risk losing another.

“Or,” Derek said.

“Yes?”

“Someone did it on purpose, or accidentally on purpose. The baby wouldn’t be quiet so they shook it. Not to kill it but to shut it up. That happens all the time, too.”

I knew it did. I’d heard about it. It was still horrible to contemplate. “And then they didn’t want to own up to it, and they hid the baby and said it had been kidnapped?”

Derek nodded. “I think it would have to be something like that. Something more or less accidental. It’s hard to imagine anyone deliberately killing a baby, you know? They’re so tiny and helpless. They can’t do anything. They can’t talk. They can’t move. Even if the baby saw something he shouldn’t have seen, he couldn’t tell anyone, and by the time he got old enough to talk, he’d have forgotten whatever he saw anyway.”

Derek was right. There was no logical reason to kill a baby. So it had to have been an accident, with the hiding of the body an afterthought. I said as much.

“I hope it was,” Derek said. “I don’t like the alternative.”

I nodded. “Do you think Mamie and Ruth knew he was up there?”

“Hard to say,” Derek said, crumpling up the paper that had been wrapped around his lobster roll. “Hard to imagine they didn’t, but the crate was out of the way up there. And they were old ladies, probably not likely to climb the wall up to the attic. Especially since there was nothing worth getting up there.”

“They weren’t always old ladies, though. When Arthur went missing—or died—they were little girls.”

He conceded my point. And added, “Although their parents could have told them they weren’t allowed in the attic. They may not have questioned it.”

“Maybe not.”

“My mother told me I wasn’t allowed in the attic,” Derek said.

I glanced at him. “Really?”

He nodded. “She used to hide Christmas gifts up there.”

“Did you go up there anyway?”

He grinned. “Of course. But our attic had a permanent staircase, not planks nailed to the wall. And I was a boy anyway. I probably would have climbed the wall just for the hell of it, and just because I was told not to. And because I wanted to try to get a look at the presents. But two girls might not have.”

Maybe not. I wasn’t sure I would have. Although in my childhood it had been moot. No attic. I’d grown up in a New York apartment, and my mother hid my Christmas presents in her bottom bureau drawer.

I changed the subject. Sort of. “I met Cora at the deli. She said she’d ask your dad whether he knew anything about Arthur Green.”

“I thought Wayne told you not to tell anyone.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean family,” I said. “She’s decorating her house today. For the Christmas Home Tour.”

“When are we doing that?”

“When we have time.” Sometime in the next—I gulped—four days.

He got to his feet. “Go home, Avery. Get busy. I don’t need you for the rest of the day.”

I peered up at him. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Derek said. “You’ve caused enough trouble for one day. Go home and decorate. When I finish here tonight, we’ll buy a tree.”

“Cool.” I got to my feet, too, and gathered the trash. “And by tomorrow we can start on some of the renovating, right?”

“Changing out the plumbing
is
renovating,” Derek said.

Speaking of attics, Aunt Inga’s had more junk than any one place I’ve ever seen in my life. There was stuff up there that I hadn’t the slightest idea what was. I’d found her old—unused—wedding veil up there just after I’d taken over the house, and used it to update the kitchen cabinets. I’d also found a few of Marie Antoinette’s things from court in Versailles—no, I’m not kidding, but it’s a long story—although those had been donated to a museum, and were no longer around. Derek and I had talked about it and decided they’d be too much of a temptation for thieves.

But even without the very valuable stuff, the attic was a treasure trove. Morton heirlooms from a century back, and all of Aunt Inga’s things from almost a hundred years of life. My second cousin a few times removed had been close to ninety-nine when she passed on. It took me a long time to find the boxes with the Christmas decorations. I kept getting sidetracked by interesting items: a pretty little music box that played “Some Enchanted Evening,” a stack of fashion magazines from the 1950s, a basket of yarn in different colors that I could imagine turning into a blanket or maybe a few pairs of warm socks. It was cold up there.

I finally tracked the Christmas stuff down to a stack of boxes on the far side of the chimney and, in the process of dragging them over to the staircase and down, narrowly managed to avoid killing myself. Aunt Inga’s Victorian has steep attic stairs, although at least there
are
stairs: The “ladder” at the Green house this morning had been a real eye-opener for me.

I hadn’t done a whole lot to decorate the house last year. I still wasn’t entirely sure I had settled for good in Waterfield back then. I adored Derek, and I liked the town just fine when it was warm, but the cold season had taken me aback. New York City gets plenty cold in the winter, but living in a hundred-and-thirty-year-old Victorian house on the coast of Maine was colder than I had ever anticipated. Colder than I could have imagined. I had grown up in a brick apartment building in Manhattan, with central heating and the insulation of other apartments on both sides of ours. Here I was exposed, in a wooden Victorian house with original windows and doors. They didn’t insulate well back then, and Derek and I didn’t rip the plaster walls out and take the house down to the studs to insulate when we redid the place, so everything was original. There weren’t even storm windows and storm doors on the house, because Derek—the purist—said it would be sacrilege to deface a Second Empire Victorian with aluminum storm windows.

Anyway, I’d been too busy huddling in front of the fire to decorate the place. I was thinking of burning it down. Maybe then I’d finally be warm.

But with the home tour to look forward to, it was fun opening Aunt Inga’s boxes and seeing how my aunt had liked to decorate her house.

There were a lot of balls, of course, some of them very old and quite fragile. Blown glass, sprinkled with glitter. Most of it had rubbed off over the years, but there were remnants here and there. There was a box full of miniature ornaments: a tiny little Christmas ornament tea set, with a cup, a pitcher, a sugar bowl, and a teapot. It reminded me of the toy set I’d found in the cubby in Mamie’s room . . . Lord, was it only this morning? What with the baby skeleton and all, it felt a lot longer ago.

The full-sized Christmas balls were beautiful, too. Some had flowers painted on them. Some had snowflakes. A few had camels and a star: the three wise men on their way to Bethlehem to greet the Christ Child.

And speaking of the Christ Child, there were entirely too many babies in the scenario of the last few days. The missing Baby Jesus from the nativity outside the church, the baby doll that had scared the living daylights out of me in the basement yesterday, and now the missing—or not missing—Arthur Green.

Being a textile designer by trade, I don’t know much about psychology. Only what I’ve observed myself through the years. But purely from a layman’s point of view, I wondered whether the loss of her brother at such a young age might be the reason why Mamie Green still liked dolls at the tender age of seventy-plus.

I also wondered whether there was a connection between the missing baby and the missing Baby Jesus. Whether Mamie in her confusion had stolen the Baby Jesus out of the manger every year, thinking it was her baby brother.

Or was that too big of a leap?

Derek would probably know, after going through medical school. I resolved to ask him about it later.

In addition to the pretty old Christmas ornaments, there were a lot of fake fir swags and greenery in Aunt Inga’s boxes. There was a long, long string of it I thought must be intended for use on the banister to the second floor. So I shook it out the best I could and went to work with a box of dental floss, stringing greenery through the spokes in the banister and over the railing all the way up the stairs. Mischa the Russian Blue contemplated me from the doormat just inside the front door, while Jemmy and Inky, the two Maine Coons I’d inherited from Aunt Inga along with the house, couldn’t really be bothered. They stayed curled up on the love seat in the parlor. Inky had twitched her tail at me when I first came in, but since then, they’d ignored me. As was par for the course really. Mischa, on the other hand, had had to be dissuaded from following me up to the attic. He was a mama’s boy, my rescue cat.

By the time Derek walked through the door, I had decorated the staircase with greenery and silver bows, and the mantel in the foyer with more greenery and pinecones. Aunt Inga had owned some of the stuffed birds that Kate had also had—they weren’t real, by the way; they just looked that way—but I couldn’t bring myself to put them out. Not only did they look too much like real birds for comfort, but Mischa was eyeing them with great interest. If I put them along the mantel, I could imagine it wouldn’t be long before he was up there, traipsing through my greenery and kicking it all to hell in an effort to get at the birds.

And besides, Kate had birds. I didn’t want to decorate my house the way Kate had decorated hers. I wanted mine to be unique. Like me.

And that heavy, overwrought Victorian stuff wasn’t me. We had renovated Aunt Inga’s house to within an inch of its life, with the old wide-plank floors and the old dark wood fireplace mantels with mirrors above them and gorgeous old tiles on the hearth, with transoms above the doors and the old brass hardware, and traditional Victorian jewel colors on the walls . . . but I still didn’t want to decorate the place in the traditional Victorian way. I had hung blue velvet curtains with silver stars in the dining room, and my living room sofa, which I had brought with me from New York the second time I moved, was oyster white with cross sections of kiwis on it. Three-foot-wide sections of kiwis. The house might be traditional, but the decor wasn’t.

When Derek walked in, I was standing in the middle of the foyer—right about where the Christmas tree would go—with my hands on my hips, contemplating my handiwork. The staircase looked all right, in green and silver, but the mantel was a little bare. Or not bare exactly, since there was plenty of greenery. But I needed something more than the fir and the cones. Not birds. Nor the fat gold cherubs Kate had had.

Something silver and sparkly and nontraditional.

“Looks good,” Derek said over my shoulder. He wrapped his arms around my waist and rested his chin on the top of my head as Mischa twined around our ankles.

“The mantel needs something more.”

He contemplated it above my head. “Candles?”

“I could get some of those.” Fat, silver ones. Kate had had candles on her mantel, too, but they’re sort of a given for the season, so it would be OK if I had them as well. And candle flames would look wonderful reflected in the mirror above the mantel on Sunday afternoon.

“Angels?”

“Maybe angels.”

“Cats?”

“Cats?” I tilted my head to look at him.

“We have cats,” Derek said, staggering as Mischa twined more enthusiastically.

We did, indeed.

I went back to contemplating the mantel. “Maybe cats. Cats are sort of Halloweenish, though, don’t you think?”

Derek shrugged. “Reindeer?”

Reindeer? “Maybe reindeer. If I could find reindeer. Silver reindeer.”

“Christmas ornaments?”

Christmas ornaments were an obvious solution. They would look nice, I supposed. Maybe if I kept them all in the same color scheme. Something unusual: maybe some blue and purple to go with the silver, instead of the usual red and green.

And speaking of Christmas ornaments . . .

“Is there somewhere around here I could buy Chinese paper lanterns, do you suppose?”

“Chinese paper lanterns?” Derek repeated, as if he’d never heard the words before.

“You know. Rice paper, round. Or sometimes other shapes. White or colored. Lots of wires to help them keep their shapes. You can outfit them with a light kit and make lamps out of them.”

“I know what they are,” Derek said, dropping his arms from around my waist. “I just don’t understand what you want with them. We have a light.”

We did. A rather attractive reproduction bowl pendant in white glass.

“I wasn’t going to put lights in them. I was going to turn them into Christmas ornaments. Big Christmas ornaments.” Stencil snowflakes and camels on them, like the antique Christmas balls of Aunt Inga’s. Maybe brush them with glue and then sprinkle glitter on the shapes, to sparkle in the candlelight.

Or maybe the foyer wouldn’t be the best place to hang them. Maybe they needed to go on the porch, to welcome guests when they came up the walk. A dozen enormous pseudo–Christmas ornaments in different colors, hanging from the porch ceiling. It would look wonderful.

“Sure,” Derek said when I described my vision. “Your ideas always turn out great, Avery.”

Is it any wonder I love him?

I was warming to my plans now. I wasn’t aware I’d made any really, but it seemed my subconscious had been busy while I’d been standing here. “I want a small Christmas tree, too. A big one for in here, a ten-footer at least, but a tiny one for somewhere else. Maybe the dining room table. Or maybe two tiny evergreens, one for each side of the mantel in the dining room. We can get them in pots and plant them outside when the ground thaws.”

“Why do we need so many Christmas trees?” Derek wanted to know. “Isn’t one enough?”

“It would be. But I found this box of teeny-tiny Christmas ornaments, only about an inch tall. They’d get lost on the big tree. But they’re beautiful, so I’d like to use them somewhere where they’ll fit.”

“Small evergreen it is,” Derek said. “Are you ready to go?”

“I should change first, don’t you think?”

Derek looked at me, in jeans and a ratty sweater, with my hair in a bun and dust on my face. “You look great.”

And again: Is it any wonder I love him?

“I’d like to change,” I said. “It won’t take long. And don’t take this the wrong way, but you could do with a shower and some clean clothes, too.”

“Are you saying I smell, Tink?” He lifted an arm and sniffed his armpit.

“Not at all.” I wasn’t. “Just that you’re dirty. We can spare fifteen minutes for you to get clean.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“Do you need more?”

“That depends,” Derek said.

“On?”

“On whether you’re planning to take a shower, too.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting clean, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting dirty,” Derek said, and grinned.

• • • 

An hour later, we arrived at the Christmas tree lot. It was a five-minute drive from the house. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we had to transport the tree back, we could have walked.

It didn’t take long to pick out a nice, tall Frasier fir and load it into the back of the truck, where it stuck out over the edge. Derek and the tree guy tied it down with string, and we were on our way. The two tiny trees for the dining room were next, and I picked two droopy evergreens in pots: some sort of weeping dwarf cedar, according to Derek. Not a Christmas tree per se, but nice and green and fragrant. And small. Barely two feet tall.

We loaded those into the truck as well, behind the seat with the kitty litter—in case of bad road conditions—and headed up the Ocean Road toward the Waymouth Tavern.

“Are you sure the tree will be safe while we’re inside?” I asked Derek.