Spackled and Spooked (31 page)

“I’ll go look for it.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said. “That way you won’t have to walk back up here.”

Derek arched his brows. “I’ll come, too,” he said.

“Did you know Venetia well?” I asked on the way down the street, after having ascertained that Lionel had heard about the latest murder. He shrugged.

“She’s been living here since before I was born.”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea who could have killed her?”

He shook his head. “What do the police think?”

“As far as I know,” I said, with a glance at Derek, “they’re working on the assumption that whoever killed Holly killed Venetia Rudolph. She lived right next door, and she’d kept an eye on the place, seeing who came and went. Maybe she knew something she didn’t realize she knew. Or maybe she saw Holly with someone before she died, or something.”

Lionel paled. “Someone she knew, then? Someone around here?”

I nodded sympathetically. The thought was unpleasant. Bad enough to be killed by someone just randomly passing through; worse somehow to have someone you trust turn on you like that. “Either someone she knew or someone she thought she could trust.” I explained my cop-or-preacher theory.

“Makes sense,” Derek admitted. Lionel agreed, still looking pale.

“Excuse me,” he added. “I’ll go look for the picture of Pat.” He ducked into the house.

“I don’t want you to be alone with that guy,” Derek said as soon as Lionel was gone.

“Lionel? Don’t be silly.”

“He knew Venetia. She’d probably let him in if he knocked on the door. And he knew Holly, too.”

“But look at him!” I objected. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“That’s what people said about Ted Bundy,” said Derek.

“Ted Bundy was good-looking and charming and a mass murderer. Lionel is none of those things. And why would he kill Holly? They were friends.”

“I don’t know why. But until this case is solved, I don’t want you to be alone with him. Or any other men. Except me.”

“Does that include Wayne?” I pointed down the street to where the chief of police was making his way toward us.

“Of course not,” Derek said. “If you can’t trust Wayne, who can you trust?”

“That may have been Venetia’s mistake,” I answered. “Not Wayne, of course. I’m not saying that Wayne killed her. But somebody she trusted did. So maybe we shouldn’t trust anybody.”

Derek nodded. “Point taken. Until this is over, I don’t want you to be alone with anyone. That includes Lionel, and Ricky Swanson, and Brandon, and even John Nickerson. But not Wayne.”

“What about Josh?”

He pretended to think about it. “I think Josh is safe.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Wayne said, from a distance. “Safe from what?”

“Derek’s being silly,” I answered. “He’s telling me not to be alone with anyone but him until you catch Venetia’s murderer.”

“And Josh?” Wayne stopped beside me and straightened his belt.

“I’m allowed to be alone with Josh. Derek doesn’t think there’s any chance he’s a murderer.”

Wayne measured Derek with a long, steady look but didn’t comment. “I’m sure Dr. Ellis is safe, too. And what makes you think it was a man who committed the murders, anyway? There was no evidence of sexual trauma. Impossible to tell on Holly, of course, but none on Venetia Rudolph. And it didn’t take special strength to commit either murder, so the killer might well be female.”

“Fine,” Derek said. “Until Wayne catches the murderer, Avery, I don’t want you to be alone with anyone but me, my dad, Cora, Wayne, Kate, Josh, or Shannon.”

I ignored him. “Do you really think it could be a woman, Wayne? Who?”

“This is speculation,” Wayne warned. “I have no proof or even a reason to suspect these people particularly. But according to Denise, Holly and her mom fought a lot. Linda has a drinking problem. And she’d be better able to forge a note with her daughter’s handwriting than anyone else.”

“Lord!” Holly’s own mother might have killed the girl?

“On the other hand, Linda said that Denise and Holly had had a falling out just before Holly disappeared. Something about a boy. Denise had known Holly all her life; she’d probably be able to forge Holly’s handwriting, too. Linda says she might even have had a key to the house. Not that Linda is particularly good about locking up. The door was open when I got there this morning, and she was fast asleep on the sofa. If it was the same thing four years ago, someone could have walked right in and taken some of Holly’s things and left the note. Unless Holly herself left the note and packed the bag, because she really was planning to leave, and then someone intercepted her.”

“Did Linda still have the note?” I asked. Wayne shook his head.

“It’s long gone. She said she expected to hear from her daughter within a couple of days—figured she’d come crawling back when she realized the world was a lot tougher than she thought—and there was no need to keep it. If she’d realized it would be the last letter she ever got from her daughter, she would have kept it, she said, but that doesn’t do me any good now. She did say she was sure it was Holly’s handwriting. And she made a list of the clothes she thought were missing from her daughter’s closet, but after all this time, there’s no telling how accurate it is. Or if she’s telling the truth.”

“How did Brandon handle being taken off the case yesterday?” I asked just as Lionel materialized next to me. I hadn’t heard him come out of his house again, and I wondered how much of our conversation he’d overheard.

“Brandon got taken off the case?” he blurted, eyes wide. Wayne nodded. “Why?”

“Because he knew Holly White. It wouldn’t look good to have him investigate her death.” Wayne turned to me. “He took it about as expected. He’s disappointed, of course, but he understands. Or says he does. He’s in Bar Harbor today, breaking the news to Miss Rudolph’s next of kin.”

“Who’s her next of kin?” Derek asked.

It turned out that Venetia had an older brother who lived in Bar Harbor, or Bah Habuh, as the Mainers say. “He’ll probably want to sell the house,” Wayne added, “if you two are interested.”

Derek and I locked eyes for a second. We’d talked about the possibility briefly in the car last night, after Kate had brought it up over dinner, but we hadn’t made any decisions. Under the circumstances, we figured we might be able to get the house cheaply, but the problem would be to sell it again, with the stigma of the murders, plural now, hanging over it. A lot would depend on how difficult it turned out to be to sell the house we already owned.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Wayne said. “The estate has to go through probate, and that can take months. By spring, things may look different.”

“That’s true.”

Lionel cleared his throat. “I should get to work,” he said, handing me an envelope.

“So should we,” Derek agreed and put an arm around my shoulders. “Come along, Avery.”

Wayne nodded. I thanked Lionel, and the three of us headed up the street toward the end of the cul-de-sac again. By the time we got to our own property, we heard Lionel’s van start up and drive away, backfiring as it slowed to a stop at the intersection with Primrose. Wayne was telling us about driving Ricky Swanson home last night, or rather, back to the dorm at Barnham, where he lived. “He took me up to the computer lab to show me the facial reconstruction he and Josh did of Holly. It’s a pretty good likeness, isn’t it?”

“Good enough that Brandon recognized her,” I said, fiddling with the envelope Lionel had given me. “Josh says Ricky is brilliant when it comes to computers. Did he explain why he acted so strangely at dinner last night?”

Wayne shook his head. “We talked mostly about Pittsburgh. I’ve been there a few times, for law enforcement conventions and the like. And it’s not like I could interrogate the poor kid, you know. He’s not a suspect in any of this. What’s that?” He indicated the envelope.

I turned it over. “Just an old photograph of Patrick Murphy. He and Lionel were friends when they were small. I’ve never seen a picture of Patrick, so I thought I’d ask Lionel if he had one.”

“Well, let’s see,” Derek said.

I ripped open the envelope and pulled out the photo, which showed two small boys grinning at the camera, from what I realized were the front steps behind me. One was small and scrawny, with Lionel’s reddish brown hair and pale eyes. The other was stockier, solid, with darker hair, electric blue eyes, and ruddy cheeks. He was dressed in a striped shirt and jeans, and even in comparison to the grainy newsprint of Peggy Murphy, I could see that he looked like his mother. I could also see that he looked like someone else.

“Speak of the devil,” Derek said softly. I nodded.

19

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Derek said, for at least the third or fourth time since Wayne had left. “Just because Ricky Swanson is really Patrick Murphy, it doesn’t prove anything. He probably took his aunt and uncle’s last name when he went to live with them. It makes sense that he’d want to forget about being a Murphy, after what his father did.”

I nodded. “Especially if he went to live with his mother’s sister. Remember what he said yesterday? His aunt didn’t go to Barnham, but her sister did? And his aunt’s sister is . . .”

“His mother. Or his other aunt. That doesn’t prove anything, either.”

“I guess not,” I admitted. “He has a connection to this house, though. What if he came back here four years ago, and Holly saw him, and he killed her? His father was a killer; maybe it runs in the family. Or maybe he just didn’t want anyone to know he was here. So he killed her and buried her under the house. Who’d know better than he how safe it was? He owned the place!”

“But then why sell it to us?” Derek objected. I bit my lip.

“I didn’t think about that. Maybe he thought the body would be gone by now? Rotted away?”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe he just changed his mind, and regretted selling the place to us, and wanted it back. Maybe he’s the one who rigged the footsteps and the screaming to scare us away. And maybe, when we found the bones, he figured he’d better get his ghost setup out of here before the police found it. So he came back that night to take down the speakers or wires or whatnot, and Venetia saw him. She lived here seventeen years ago; she’d probably recognize him.”

“And then he panicked and killed her?” Derek tilted his head to the side and considered. A lock of hair fell over his forehead, and my fingers itched to brush it away, but they were sticky with glue, so I refrained.

“I guess he might have,” he agreed after a moment. “If it runs in the family. And she might have felt safe inviting him in. He was little Patrick Murphy, after all.”

We were in the back bedroom, where Derek was preparing the teak dresser—removing the bottoms of the top two drawers and taking off the back panel—for plumbing. Meanwhile, I had appropriated one of the panels he had discarded and was busy adhering pieces of crumpled grocery bags to it to show him what the walls in the bathroom could look like if we could agree to brown paper bag them. Or more likely, craft paper them, since rolls of brown craft paper are a lot easier to work with than grocery bags.

“It explains what he was doing in here the other day, too,” I said, while I worked. “And why the papers were on the floor this morning. It wasn’t Brandon at all. Ricky heard me talk about the boxes and where they were. That’s why he made straight for the master bedroom when we got into the house. I thought he was looking for the second bathroom, but he was really looking for the boxes. He may not have anything to remember his parents or grandparents by. So he started looking through them. And of course he got emotional; who wouldn’t? So when Paige came to look for him, he stuffed the papers back into the box in a hurry and locked himself in the bathroom so she wouldn’t see him cry.”

Derek nodded, pensively. “That explains the other day. It also explains last night. If he didn’t know about his mother and Mr. Nickerson, it must have been a shock finding out like that.”

“Very much so. No wonder he looked like he’d seen a ghost.” I smoothed another crumpled piece of brown paper over the wallpaper paste.

“It still doesn’t prove anything, though,” Derek warned. “Just that he didn’t want anyone in Waterfield to know that he’s really Patrick Murphy. And I don’t know that I can blame him for that.”

I shook my head. Me, either. “Take a look at this.” I lifted the papered panel to an upright position, the better for him to see how it would look on the wall. “What do you think? Once it’s dry, we can paint it, and it’ll have a leather or suede look. Especially if we brush a lighter or darker color over the top.”