Spackled and Spooked (16 page)

“Arthur Mattson. I live at number fifty-three.” He pointed down the street.

“Irina Rozhdestvensky,” the immaculately turned out businesswoman said, with a faint Russian accent. I didn’t ask her to repeat the surname, but she must have seen my reaction anyway, because she added, with a smile, “You may call me Irina.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, smiling back. “Please call me Avery.” Her teeth were crooked, but the smile was genuine and friendly.

“My name’s Denise,” the younger woman said, “and this is Trevor.” She jiggled the baby, who grinned, showing toothless gums. Babies are really not my thing, but I tickled him anyway and told her what a cutie he was. Denise beamed.

“And I’m Linda,” the lady with the hair rollers said, pulling the fuzzy bathrobe a little tighter around her body. “I live down on the corner, in number fifty.”

I peered down the block to the house on the corner. Like all the rest of them, it was built of brick, and like Linda herself, it looked like it could use a little TLC. She was a blowsy fifty-something, with vivid chestnut hair, obviously color-treated, and with bright coral lipstick leaking into the tiny lines around her mouth. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her breath smelled of day-old liquor. I moved back fractionally before I smiled around the circle.

“Nice to meet all of you. Sorry about the hoopla. Police and all.”

“I’m sure it’s not your fault,” Arthur Mattson murmured, while Irina said, “What is going on? Lionel told us there is a body buried under the house, but that is all we know.”

I shrugged. “That’s all I know, too, right now.” Not exactly all I knew, but it was probably better not to say too much. “My boyfriend was working down there this morning, footing supports, when he found a bone. So of course we had to call the police.”

Arthur Mattson nodded. “Human remains, however old, have to be reported. Probably find out it’s an old Indian burial ground or something.” He looked disgusted.

“Gosh,” I said, diverted, “if it is, will they have to dig up everybody’s basements?”

The rest of them looked at each other. “They’d better not be touching
my
house,” Linda said belligerently. Denise shook her head.

“The baby won’t be able to sleep if there are people going in and out, making noise.” From the looks of her, she desperately needed little Trevor to take a nap so she could take a shower and get a little rest herself, too.

“They can’t touch private property,” Lionel said in his surprisingly deep voice. “You have to give them permission to do that. All you have to do is say no.”

“Except then they’d come back with a search warrant because they think you’re hiding something,” Linda answered. Lionel shrugged and turned to me.

“What’s up with Miss Rudolph?”

He glanced at Venetia’s curtains, which were still fluttering.

“As far as I know,” I said, “nothing. She’s sitting in there, keeping an eye on things. Just like she has done for the past twenty years. I asked her about anyone she might have seen around the house, and she gave me a list of people.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “The mailman, the handyman, the newspaper boy, the realtor . . .”

“The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?” Irina suggested, in her accented voice. I grinned.

“Pretty much. The squatters, the teenagers, the suit with the clipboard. And now Derek and I. All manner of people seem to have been coming and going. Quite a lot of activity for an empty house. I don’t suppose any of you have noticed anyone suspicious hanging around?”

Irina smiled apologetically. “I’ve lived here for less than a year.”

“I’m all the way down at the end of the street,” Linda said.

“I’ve been busy with Trevor,” Denise added.

“I work a lot,” Lionel said.

“And we try to mind our own business,” Arthur Mattson finished. “Don’t we, Stella?” He smiled at the growling canine, in flagrant disregard for the fact that he and Stella—that they all—were standing here in the middle of the afternoon, with nothing better to do than to gawk at two parked police cars and someone else’s mostly empty house.

9

Derek lives in an updated loft above the hardware store on Main Street. It’s a great location, very convenient to everything Waterfield has to offer, as well as to where I was eventually going, i.e., Aunt Inga’s house. All I had to do was drive the car from Becklea into town and park it in Derek’s usual spot, leaving the key under the mat. Grand theft auto isn’t a big problem in Waterfield, so I wasn’t worried that it wouldn’t be there when he got home tonight. And then I had a simple four-block walk up the hill to Aunt Inga’s house. Before I started walking, though, I popped into the hardware store to grab some paint swatches for the walls at Becklea, as well as some inspiration, if there was any to be had.

Five minutes later, totally free of inspiration—but with a couple of do-it-yourself and home-renovation magazines in a bag with the handful of paint swatches—I headed up Main Street toward Aunt Inga’s house, gazing into store windows as I went.

In addition to the two newspapers and the hardware store, Main Street comprises most of Waterfield’s shopping district. There are restaurants and supermarkets on the outskirts of town, but most of the little mom-and-pop places are right in downtown—hole-in-the-wall restaurants and delis, bookstores, offices, as well as antique shops and galleries. I had passed the Grantham Gallery, with its gray-tone painting of cumulus clouds on hard-board in the window, and was on my way past Waterfield Realty when someone called my name.

“Yoo-hoo! Avery!”

It was Kate, laden down with shopping bags and on her way across the street toward me at a fast clip. “Shannon called,” she said breathlessly when she caught up to me. “What’s going on?”

“If Shannon called, didn’t she tell you?”

“She said that Josh said that there’s a dead body in your house.”

I rolled my eyes. “Josh and his police band radio, right? They must have called you before they had all the information.”

She looked disappointed. “So there isn’t a dead body in your house?”

I shook my head. And then she looked so crestfallen that I added, “There’s a dead body under my house. In the crawlspace. Or more accurately, a skeleton.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I wish I were. Derek found it when he started digging this morning. So we called Wayne, and he radioed Brandon Thomas—that’s probably when Josh picked it up—and the three of them have been down there all afternoon.”

“Wayne, Derek, and Brandon?”

I nodded. “Josh showed up, too. With Shannon, of course, and Paige and a young man named Ricky Swanson.”

“Shannon has mentioned him,” Kate nodded. “He’s new at Barnham this year. Transferred in from somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think. Paige seems to be developing a thing for him. What were the four of them doing?”

“Just gawking. The girls were looking at the house and listening to me going on about what I want to do to the bathroom. Wayne wouldn’t let Josh down into the crawlspace, so he had to content himself with eating half a pizza and asking a ton of questions. I thought he was studying computer science. Why is he so interested in criminology?”

“I think he has plans of becoming Waterfield’s first cyber-detective,” Kate said. “He’s definitely interested in crime and police work, but he wants the excitement of the chase, not the plodding of the patrol.”

“But won’t he have to do both? Even Wayne goes on patrol, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he does,” Kate said. “Everyone goes on patrol here, including the chief of police. Josh would have to, as well. Just like Brandon Thomas, who’d much rather be tinkering with his fingerprints and dust particles than driving a patrol car. That’s just life in a small town.” She shrugged.

I nodded. “Yeah, Brandon seems to be in his element. He’s down there in the crawlspace, wielding paint brushes and teaspoons, just like in an archeological excavation, while Derek is cheering him on. They found a button, and when Brandon handed it to me, he picked it up with a pair of tweezers and put it into a little box first, so I wouldn’t touch it and mess up his forensic evidence.”

“What kind of button?” Kate wanted to know. I told her. “So this isn’t an old skeleton, then?”

“Doesn’t seem to be. Originally, we thought maybe we’d stumbled over an old Indian burial or something. There were Indians around here in the old days, right?”

“Still are,” Kate nodded. “Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Micmac, and Penobscot, mostly.”

“Well, we were wrong. This is someone more recent. She was wearing clothes from Target.”

“Target?” Kate repeated, hazel eyes big. “She?”

I explained about the button and what it signified, and also what Derek had said about the length of the femur, tibia, and fibula.

“If Derek says so, then I’m sure it’s right,” Kate said loyally.

“No doubt.” Her faith in Derek was touching, and I was about to comment on it when another voice interrupted me.

“Afternoon, Avery. Kate.”

It was a lovely voice, a soft and feminine purr with a hint of sheathed claws underneath, and it fit its owner perfectly. Melissa James was gorgeous, from the top of her razor-edged cap of glossy hair to the pointy toes of her shiny, red, patent-leather Mary Janes. Manolo Blah nik, of course, with four-inch heels. Her killer body, all five feet eight inches of it, was dressed in an Yves Saint Laurent pencil skirt and matching blouse, and she smiled down at me with her blindingly white, preternaturally even teeth. Melissa invariably made me feel like a dirty-faced urchin, even when I had made an effort to look good, and most of the time she seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense when I looked my worst and zero in on me in those moments. Like now, when I was dressed in worn jeans and sneakers, with my hair twisted up in a tie, and a minimum of makeup on my face.

“Hi, Melissa,” Kate answered, with her own big, fake smile. Kate is Melissa’s height, and between the two of them, I feel positively dainty. I also felt like lightning bolts—or more accurately, lighted barbs—were crossing above my head. Kate dislikes Melissa on a whole lot of levels, and the fact that Kate adores Derek, and that Melissa dumped him, is only one of them. She—Melissa—is also doing her best to turn Waterfield into the kind of town Kate left Massachusetts to get away from, and then there’s the fact that every time Melissa refers someone to Kate’s B and B, she seems to feel that Kate owes her a referral fee. Somehow, the reverse isn’t true: Whenever Kate refers someone to Melissa, it doesn’t seem to cross Melissa’s mind to give Kate a referral fee or so much as a handful of flowers for her trouble. Melissa usually manages a thank you, but even that seems to be a bit of an effort.

I guess I don’t have to say that I don’t like Melissa, either. In addition to her delight in making me feel small and insignificant, she dumped Derek and hurt his pride and his feelings, even if she didn’t break his heart. More than that, she was married to Derek for a few years before she dumped him, and that means there are things about him she knows that I haven’t discovered yet. And then there’s the fact that she’s dating my cousin Ray, who’s a jerk. Mostly, though, I just chafe at her perfection. I dredged up a smile from somewhere and plastered it on my face. “Nice to see you.” Not.

Melissa looked from me to Kate and back, all her lovely teeth on display and her amazing eyes—deep violet, her own—gleaming with interest. “What are you talking about?”

Kate glanced at me. I shrugged. Word would get all over Waterfield sooner or later, so we might as well tell her now. “There are bones buried under the house that Derek and I are renovating.”

“Oooooh!” Melissa patted my arm with a sympathetic hand ending in long, bloodred talons, a perfect match to the shoes. “That’s no fun, is it? I remember last year, when Ray and Randy were starting development on that little subdivision north of town—not Devon Highlands; the other one, Clovercroft—anyway, when they started digging, they turned up bones. So we called the police, and they came out and had a look, and then they called in someone from the college, the anthropology department, and it turned out to be an old Indian burial ground, and now the whole thing is a nightmare, with the various tribes and nations refusing to let the bones be moved, and until they are, Ray and Randy can’t go forward with the development, and everything is just a big mess!”

“Gee,” Kate said with a grin, “that’s too bad.”