Spackled and Spooked (24 page)

We agreed that he would fix the problem, as well as replace the headlight that had shattered and the fender that had been dented when I hit the ditch, not to mention the airbags that hadn’t deployed, and then he’d call Derek to let him know when the truck was ready to be picked up. I thanked them both and set out for Aunt Inga’s house on foot. The last thing I saw before I closed the office door was Peter kissing his wife.

I started the walk by contemplating the two of them and their relationship, and from there I went on to trying to remember where I might have seen Jill before. Recently. We hadn’t been introduced—I’d have remembered that—but I’d seen her before. At the store? On the street? In some restaurant or other where Derek and I had shared a meal? She’d have been alone, if so, because if I’d ever seen her husband before, I would have recognized him for sure. He wasn’t the kind of guy you forgot meeting.

Pretty soon more important things claimed my attention, though, and I saw Venetia’s body again, her gray hair matted with blood, the back of her head caved in.
Just like the skeleton
, a little voice in my head whispered.

I examined the thought. Clinically. Or as clinically as I could. Yes, there were similarities. Both victims had been hit over the head. Both were women. Both lived in Waterfield, one right next door to where the other’s body was found. That was pretty much the extent of it, though. The woman in the crawlspace had been young; Venetia was old. The murders had happened years apart; at least two, maybe as many as six . We didn’t know the reasons behind either, the motive the killer—or killers—might have had. There wasn’t enough left of the skeleton to determine whether she’d been assaulted, maybe sexually, before or after she died. Venetia hadn’t been. The only damage seemed to have been to her skull.

But surely a connection between the two was inevitable. Venetia had lived right next door to the Murphy house. She had seen people coming and going over the years. She had seen the squatters, seen the teenagers coming to make out, seen the handymen and repairmen and lawyers and looky-loos. She had probably seen the victim and the murderer, and just hadn’t realized it. Had Venetia known, I wondered, when the murderer came knocking on the door yesterday, the kind of trouble she was in? Or hadn’t she guessed, even when the floral arrangement hit the back of her head, why she had to die?

14

The first order of business, it seemed, was to figure out who the dead woman from the crawlspace was. Finding her bones had been the catalyst for everything else; up until that happened, the murderer must have felt pretty secure. The Murphy house was empty, and nobody ever did any work around the place except for cleaning the gutters, nailing down loose roof shingles, and repairing broken windows. The utilities had been turned off for years; we’d had them reconnected when we took over. Unless the crawlspace flooded or the pipes burst or something, there was no reason to think that anyone would ever find the bones. The squatters may have given him or her a turn—unless the squatters were the murderers—but they moved on after a couple of days, and who knew, the murderer may even have had something to do with that. But beyond that small issue, and that short period in time, all the murderer had to do was keep an eye on the place to make sure nobody took too much of an interest. Stop by once in a while, in the guise of a handyman, or concerned neighbor, or nosy citizen, and everything would be A-OK. Until we bought the house and started messing around, that is. . . .

I realized I hadn’t asked Peter Cortino just how long we could have driven the truck with damaged brake lines. Would the nick in the brake lines turn into a hole and an accident pretty much right away, I wondered, or might the damage have been done earlier in the week, before we even found the bones? If so, maybe whoever had tampered with the truck had done it to prevent us from finding the bones. Just as he or she might have rigged the ghostly footsteps we’d heard inside the house, to freak us out. I had no proof that the footsteps were rigged, but unlike Kate, I wasn’t ready to welcome the idea of supernatural forces. I was more comfortable with the idea of a murderer trying to chase us out of the house to prevent us from finding his victim than I was with the idea that Brian Murphy was still walking around after all these years.

Speaking of Kate . . . Unless I could find another ride, I was stuck in town until Peter Cortino finished fixing Derek’s truck and until Derek finished helping Brandon Thomas dig through the dump. If I wanted to know who the bones belonged to, Barnham College seemed like a good place to start. It was where the bones had been taken, and also where Josh and his forensic approximation computer program resided. But if I wanted to get to Barnham, I needed a ride. Luckily, Kate was always up for an adventure, at least during midweek, when her lovely B and B wasn’t filled to the brim with guests.

I changed direction and headed for the B and B, but before I got that far, I had to pass Nickerson’s Antiques. The Fredericia dresser was still on display in the window, and I stopped for a second to gaze lovingly at it. It would look fabulous in the master bath, if we could just figure out the logistics of plumbing and a vessel sink and get it all attached without messing up the teak finish.

John Nickerson must have seen me through the window, because before I’d set myself into motion again, he had opened the door. “Miss Baker!”

“Hi, Mr. Nickerson,” I said politely. “I’m sorry. With everything that’s been going on, I haven’t had a chance to talk to Derek about the dresser yet.”

He waved my explanation aside. “What is going on out at Peggy’s house? I’ve been hearing things on the news.”

“Oh.” My brain jumped tracks as I wandered a few steps closer. No sense in broadcasting our conversation to any passersby. Just in case there were people in Waterfield who hadn’t heard the news. “It started yesterday, when Derek found a human bone in the crawlspace. The police started digging and found a skeleton. Then this morning, they called in a cadaver dog to make sure there weren’t any more remains buried on the property, and the dog discovered one of the neighbors dead.”

“Dear me,” John Nickerson said. I nodded.

“Her name was Venetia Rudolph. If you know everyone in town, you probably knew her, too.”

“I knew of her, yes. Nice lady, if a little meddlesome. What happened to her?”

I hesitated, but again, there didn’t seem to be any reason not to tell him the truth. The details would be all over the airwaves shortly, if they weren’t already. “She was hit on the back of the head with a vase.”

“Murder?”

“Looks that way.”

“And the other body? The skeleton?”

“Same thing,” I said. “A woman, hit on the back of the head and buried under the Murphy house. Sometime in the past five or six years, we think.”

“Dear me.” He shook his head sadly. I peered at him for a second.

“Have you ever gone out to the Murphy house? Since Peggy Murphy died, I mean?”

“I don’t recall telling you I went there before Peggy died,” Mr. Nickerson said. His voice was soft but with an undertone of steel. I managed a smile.

“I guess you didn’t. I just assumed, since you were friends . . .” I waited to see if he’d deny that, too. When he didn’t, I continued, “It doesn’t matter. I just wondered if you might have passed by once in a while, you know, if maybe you had noticed something. Or someone.”

“I see.” His voice was still cool, and his eyes—pale blue—more so. “I may have passed by once or twice in the past seventeen years. I won’t say it hasn’t happened. But I’ve never seen anyone, or anything, suspicious. Isn’t it more likely that Miss Rudolph would have noticed something like that? Being right next door?”

“Of course it is,” I said. “As a matter of fact, that’s probably why she’s dead. Don’t you think?”

I took advantage of the silence to leave. He didn’t worry me, exactly, although his behavior was a little thought-provoking. Was it possible that John Nickerson might have had something to do with the murders? He knew about the Murphy house, whether he’d been there before Peggy Murphy died or not. He knew it sat empty and that it would be relatively safe to bury a body in the basement. He was familiar with Venetia Rudolph, and she probably wouldn’t suspect him of planning to kill her if he showed up unannounced. He knew who I was and where I lived, and he knew who Derek was and where Derek lived. He could have tampered with the truck. No reason to believe he had, of course, any more than to suspect anyone else in particular. Everyone in Waterfield knew that the Murphy house sat empty, and most people knew where Derek lived. It really would help to know who the skeleton in the crawlspace had been when she was alive to try to get a handle on who would have wanted to get rid of her.

I found Kate outside in her yard, getting ready for fall. Most of the leaves were still on the trees, changing from green to yellow to faint shades of orange now at the beginning of autumn. She wasn’t raking but was doing something to the lawn, something that involved a strange contraption that looked a little like a very old, manual lawn mower, except it had long spikes instead of blades on the revolving part. The spikes dug into the ground as she walked around. When I looked at her feet, I saw that she was wearing shoes with similar spikes on them.

“What are you doing?” I inquired, with the clueless-ness of a born New Yorker who had never in my life had to do anything to a lawn before.

She glanced at me. “Aerating. The soil is compacted, so I’m loosening it up. Then I’m going to seed and fertilize before the lawn goes dormant for the winter. Come spring, I’ll have nice, green grass.”

Grass hibernated? Who knew?

“Do I have to do this, too?” I said. “To Aunt Inga’s lawn?”

She shook her head. “David Todd will do it for you, if you ask him. For a fee, of course.”

“Of course.” I leaned my arms on the picket fence, watching her walk back and forth a couple of more times. It was mind-numbing and peaceful, like watching clothes revolve in a washing machine.

“What’s going on?” Kate asked on her next pass. I shook myself out of my dream world and back to reality.

“What isn’t? Wayne and Brandon have moved the skeleton to Barnham College. Josh is going to try a forensic approximation computer program. I drove Derek’s truck into a ditch when the brakes broke, and Peter Cortino says someone tampered with them. The cadaver dog has been all over the yard on Becklea and declared it corpse free, except now Venetia Rudolph is dead.”

“What?”

I repeated myself.

“How?” Kate demanded.

“Hit over the head with a flower arrangement. Sometime last night.”

“Why? By who?”

“No idea. Wayne thinks it has something to do with the skeleton, so I guess ‘who’ would be the same person who killed the woman who was buried under the house, and ‘why’ is because Venetia knew, or suspected, or might have known, who that person was. But that’s just a guess.”

Kate nodded. “Did you come by to tell me the news?”

“I was on my way home,” I said, explaining that I’d come from Cortino’s auto shop, “and I thought maybe you’d be up for taking a drive down to Barnham with me. You’d get to see Shannon, and maybe we’d discover whether they’ve made any headway in identifying the skeleton. She seems to be the center of it all, poor thing.”

“Sure,” Kate said readily. “Just let me put away the aerator.”

She wandered off across the lawn, taking the opportunity to get in a few more digs on the way. Two minutes later she was back, minus the spiky shoes, and behind the wheel of her tan Volvo station wagon. I clambered into the passenger seat, and off we went, back the same way I’d driven earlier. As the road started climbing toward Devon Highlands, I felt my stomach lurch.

“This is where my brakes gave out,” I said when we crested the hill. The development was spread out on our right, the sound of hammering muted through the car windows. Kate pressed her own brakes, which responded beautifully. “See”—I pointed to the impression the front of the truck had made in the soil—“that’s where I steered the truck into the ditch.”

“Good thing you managed to get off the road,” Kate answered. “You could easily have been up to sixty or seventy by the time you got to the bottom of the hill, and that would have made it tough to turn the car. You might have smashed right into the gates down at the bottom.”

“Or Melissa’s face on that ostentatious billboard.” That might have had a certain kind of poetic justice, actually. Almost satisfying, if I hadn’t been dead by then. “She was here, you know. Along with Ray Stenham and some of the workers. They were actually pretty nice. Ray had the truck towed to Cortino’s while Melissa drove me out to Becklea. Of course she took the opportunity to tell me how happy she is that Derek and I are together, since he was just devastated after she dumped him.”