Spackled and Spooked (29 page)

“If you’re so interested,” Shannon said, folding another napkin, “why don’t you ask him?”

I shrugged. Maybe I would.

Josh and Ricky came back a little before six, trailed by Wayne in the police car. A couple of minutes later, Derek pulled to the curb outside. I excused myself from the hubbub and went out to greet him. I hadn’t seen him since that morning, and then only for a few minutes; so much had happened today that it felt like an eternity ago.

Derek looked as tired as I felt, with lines bracketing his mouth. “Hi, Tink.” His voice was hoarse, and there were shadows in his eyes. He held out his arms, and I stepped in. For a minute, we just stood intertwined without talking, his nose buried in my hair and my cheek against his chest. I hadn’t realized how tense I was until I felt the tightness seep out of my muscles. Then Derek stepped back and dropped his hands to my arms, blue eyes searching my face. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” I smiled bravely. “I’m still sore, and I’ll probably have bruises for a week, but considering how much worse off I could be, I won’t complain.”

He put an arm around my shoulders to lead me up the garden path to the front of the inn. “Did Peter tell you he thought someone had tampered with the brakes?”

I nodded. “Have you told Wayne? He’s inside.”

“Oh, I’ll tell him,” Derek said grimly. “I know he’s got his hands full with the two dead bodies he’s already found, but if whoever did this tries again, you and I could turn into two more, and I’d like to avoid that if I can.”

“You and me both.” I snuggled a little closer to his side as we walked up to the wraparound porch. His arm tightened, although he didn’t speak.

Everyone else was already seated at the table when we came in, passing bowls of stew and mashed potatoes around. Wayne looked up. “Derek. Have a seat. What did the Cortinos say?”

Derek held my chair while he repeated what Peter had told me earlier, with some additional technical details that went right over my head, but which all the men seemed to understand. A lively conversation ensued between bites of Irish stew as they debated what had happened, how it could have happened, and what might have happened if I hadn’t driven the truck into the ditch. I lifted the napkin that hid the basket of soda bread while I listened, and I fished out a fragrant, moist slice.

Ricky wasn’t as active in the conversation as the rest of the men, I noticed. Maybe Pittsburgh, like New York, was a big enough city that he hadn’t needed to drive before he came to Waterfield. Maybe he, like me, was less knowledgeable about cars and what made them tick than the native Mainers, who had been driving since they were fifteen or sixteen. Or maybe he was just shy and preferred listening to talking. I smiled at him across the table.

“I’ve never been to Pittsburgh. Is it like New York, where you don’t need a car? Or is it more like Los Angeles, where you can’t get around without one?”

I added, in an aside to Kate and Shannon, “My mom’s always lived in New York, too—well, she grew up in Portland, actually, but she moved to New York when she married my dad—and now she’s remarried and living in California. She says it’s very different.”

Kate nodded. Shannon opened her mouth to say something then glanced at Ricky and closed it again.

“Never been to California,” Ricky said. “Pittsburgh’s a big city. There are buses and inclines and the T.”

“The T?”

“Trolley. Light-rail. Subway.”

“Sounds like New York,” I said. “Without the inclines, of course. And the trolleys. But we have a ferry to Staten Island.”

Ricky shook his head. “No ferries in Pittsburgh. The rivers are small. There are bridges and tunnels instead.”

Enticed out of his shell, Ricky turned out to be almost eloquent, at least on the subject of his hometown. It sounded like a nice place, not at all like its rather unfortunate name, and Ricky sounded like he had enjoyed his life there.

“What made you come here?” I asked. “There are colleges in Pittsburgh, aren’t there?”

Ricky’s face seemed to shut down, and he ducked his head. “Lots. I went to Carnegie Mellon last year. Guess I wanted a change of pace.”

“How come? Have you always lived there?”

For a second, I wasn’t sure he would answer, and I waited for him to challenge my right to question him. “Pretty much,” he said eventually. “Since before I started elementary school.”

“So Waterfield must be quite a change. What made you decide this was where you wanted to be?” As far as I knew, Barnham College didn’t have any courses he couldn’t have found somewhere else. Especially a school like Carnegie Mellon.

Ricky hesitated. “Someone told me about it,” he said eventually. When I didn’t speak, he added, “My aunt Laurie.”

“Did she go to Barnham?”

He shook his head. “No, but her sister did. Excuse me.” He nodded to Kate and Shannon and got up from the table.

“Third door on the left down the hall,” Kate called after him. Ricky vanished.

As soon as he was out of sight, Shannon turned accu satory eyes on me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Guess I upset him.”

“I guess you did. Why were you being so pushy?”

“I didn’t realize I was being pushy. It’s not unreasonable to wonder why someone from Pittsburgh would move to Maine to go to school. Or why someone would leave Carnegie Mellon to attend Barnham College. There’s no reason why he’d have a problem telling me. Is there?”

The rest of the table had fallen silent now, too, and everyone was looking at me.

“He’s kind of private,” Josh said. “Never talks much about his family or what made him decide to come to Maine. Mostly, when he talks, it’s about computers. I’ve never heard him talk as much about himself as he just did.”

“He talks to Paige, though,” Shannon added. “I think.”

“He’d have to,” I said, with a smile. Paige isn’t exactly what I’d call loquacious, either. Shannon smiled back.

“Paige talks. You just have to get to know her. And I guess Ricky does, too, when it’s about something he cares about.”

Like his hometown. “I wonder why he stopped. Maybe it was something I said.”

I thought back, but couldn’t really put my finger on anything that might have upset Ricky.

“Avery and I spoke to Denise Robertson this afternoon,” Kate changed the subject. “She lives on Becklea and was Holly’s best friend growing up.”

This was directed at Wayne, who asked, “You told her about Holly? Did she say anything I need to know about?”

Kate went over the conversation, while Wayne took notes with one hand and ate with the other. Multitasking. “And she didn’t suspect that Holly hadn’t just up and left?” he said when she was finished. Kate shook her head.

“Apparently not.”

“None of them did,” I added. “We spoke to Lionel Kenefick, too—he was on his way home and stopped to ask what was going on—and he said she always talked about going to Hollywood. Everyone just thought she had.”

Wayne nodded. “I’ll have Brandon . . .” He stopped, clenched his hand into a frustrated fist, and started over. “I’ll talk to Linda White tomorrow morning. She’s at work. Brandon broke the news to her, but apparently they’re shorthanded or something at the Shamrock, and she had to stay. Or maybe she chose to. Maybe she wanted the distraction. Or maybe it’s not that much of a shock. After four years without a word, she might have expected something like this.”

We nodded.

“If she suspected something,” Derek said, “you’d think she’d have filed a report, though. Or at least talked about it to someone.”

“Denise said Holly had left a note,” I reminded him. “And packed a bag, too. You may want to look into that, Wayne. When everyone thought she left, that made perfect sense, but now that we know she never did, it seems like someone else may have written the note and packed the bag. It wasn’t with her, was it?”

“Not that we found,” Wayne said. “I don’t know if the dog would have marked for it, but Brandon went over the crawlspace with a metal detector, too. We found some change and an old spoon and some other junk like that, but if there had been a bag or suitcase with a zipper or clasps buried down there, I’m sure we would have found it.”

“So even if Holly wrote the note and packed the bag herself, someone else has it now.”

“Or else it’s at the bottom of the sea,” Wayne said. “That’s what I’d do with it. I’ll go talk to Linda White tomorrow, see if I can learn anything more.”

He took another mouthful of stew, signaling that the subject was closed.

“Ricky sure is taking a long time,” Shannon said, with a glance at the door to the hallway.

“He spent a long time in the bathroom on Becklea the other day, too,” I answered. “Maybe he’s got a sensitive stomach.”

“I doubt it. He seems healthy as a horse. Still, maybe one of us should go look for him.” She looked at Josh, who got up. As Wayne had once said, when Shannon told him to jump, it didn’t occur to Josh to ask anything but how high.

I turned to Derek. “Everything’s been so crazy the past couple of days that we haven’t had much time to talk about the house.”

He nodded. “Is it OK for us to go back to work tomorrow, Wayne?”

“I don’t see why not,” Wayne said. “We’re pretty much done with your house, I think. You can start working upstairs, but stay out of the crawlspace for now, if you don’t mind.”

I suppressed a shudder. I didn’t mind at all.

“What about Venetia Rudolph’s house?” Kate wanted to know. Wayne turned to her.

“I’m going to seal it for a day or two, just in case I need to get back in. After that, we’ll release it, and the body, to next of kin. If she didn’t have any family, I guess the house will be auctioned off and the money will go to pay for funeral expenses.”

“Maybe you two should look into buying it,” Kate suggested to Derek and me. I grimaced.

“Another murder scene? I don’t think so. Having to get rid of one stigmatized property is bad enough.”

“Maybe Holly won’t turn out to have been killed in the house,” Shannon said, but Derek shook his head.

“Even so, there are still the Murphys.”

Josh and Ricky came back into the dining room in time to hear this remark, and Ricky’s steps faltered for a second before he continued forward and slid onto the chair across the table from me.

“What did you want to talk about, Avery?” Derek asked, and I turned back to him.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to get distracted.”

“That’s all right. It’s a distracting time.”

“You can say that again. OK.” I took a breath, trying to order my thoughts. “The bathroom.”

“Bathroom?”

“At the house. The master bath.” He peered at me across the table. “Am I right in thinking that you won’t let me get rid of the brown and blue tile? Or paint it?”

“Absolutely right,” Derek nodded. “It’s in perfect condition, a prime example of original detail.”

Kate, who had heard me explain exactly what Derek would say when asked this question, grinned.

“How would you feel about putting a teak dresser in there as a sink base?”

“I guess that would be fine,” Derek said after a moment’s pause. “You’d have to cut a hole in the top to drop the sink in and then close off the top couple of drawers to make room for the plumbing. Do you have a piece of furniture in mind?”

I nodded. “Kate and I saw it in an antique shop on Main Street yesterday. It was nice, wasn’t it, Kate?”

Kate nodded. “Low and kind of long. You may even have enough room for two sinks in the top. For a master bath, a double vanity is a nice touch. Although I thought you were talking about using a vessel sink, Avery?”

“I think I might do that for the other bathroom instead,” I explained. “The master bath is so dark, with the brown and blue tile, especially if I do the grocery-bag wall covering, that I think the fixtures need to be nice and white.”

“Grocery-bag wall covering?” Derek repeated. I explained the process, and how wonderful it would look once it was done. Then I held my breath, waiting for his reaction.

When we first started working together, renovating Aunt Inga’s house, we’d had a few run-ins over my renovation ideas, some of which were too unorthodox for Derek. He’s a restorer at heart, always trying to preserve as much of the original character of a house as possible. Over time, he’d loosened up a little, while I had realized that all my ideas weren’t always appropriate for every house. We’d figured out ways to compromise, and I hoped this would turn out to be one of the times when we’d manage that, because the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of the grocery-bag walls.

“Why don’t you make me a sample,” he said eventually. “On a piece of plywood, or something.”

I smiled. “I can do that. It’ll look great. You’ll see.”

Derek smiled back. “I’m sure it will. Your projects always look great. So tell me more about the teak dresser.”

“It’s in an antique store in downtown. Nickerson’s Antiques. In the window. Kate and I saw it on our way past the other day. I told the owner that I was interested in it, but that I’d have to talk to you about it first. Is it difficult to turn a dresser into a sink base?”

Derek shook his head. “Matter of a few hours work, at most. And a sharp saw. Teak is a hard wood.”