Wall-To-Wall Dead (10 page)

“The house is great,” Kate said. “Why?”

“No reason. I’m just thinking about the condo.” Another fairly compact space I needed to spruce up.

She tilted her head. “You had a small apartment in New York, didn’t you? What did you do there?”

I thought back. It had been a rental, like most apartments in New York. Two bedrooms, like the condo, but on a much smaller scale. No dining room, nor any eating area in the living room. Just a small space for a small table and two chairs in the kitchen.

“We couldn’t do much to the space itself. We didn’t own it, even if we lived in it my whole life. Until my mom married Noel and moved to California three years ago.”

“And then you lived there alone?”

I nodded. “Until Aunt Inga died and I came here. A friend of a friend sublet it, and then ended up taking over the lease when I stayed in Waterfield. We made sure the furniture was small—both Mom and I are little people; small scale furniture was fine for both of us—and we used a lot of mirrors to open the space up visually. And Mom liked landscapes, since she thought they made up for not having a lot of windows.”

“Bringing the outside in?” Kate suggested.

“That, plus visually extending the space. Pictures of landscapes give the perception of depth. And there’s not a lot of green space in New York, so the landscapes made up for some of the concrete, too.”

Kate nodded. “So what do you plan to do about the condo? You won’t be decorating it, after all. No pictures, no mirrors, no furniture.”

“Not sure,” I admitted. She was right about that; furnishings and decorations have a lot to do with making a place look bigger or smaller, and without them, I’d have to come up with other ways to do the job. “Play with paint colors, maybe. Horizontal lines make a room look bigger. We talked about going with the warehouse look for some architectural interest; Derek thinks the space is too bland and boring—”

“Why am I not surprised?” Kate grinned. “I suppose vertical lines makes the space look smaller?”

“Taller, anyway,” I said. “Smaller…that depends on the width of the stripes. Wide stripes make the wall look longer than skinny stripes. It’s all about tricking the eye.” I thought for a second. “It’s possible I could talk John Nickerson into letting me borrow some furniture from his store to decorate the place. He lent me a few things I used to stage the house on Becklea Drive.”

John Nickerson owns an antique store on Main Street, down the street from Derek’s loft, and the house on Becklea
Drive was a midcentury ranch we’d renovated last fall. The previous owner had worked for John some years before, so he’d felt a certain proprietary interest in the place, and since his store specializes in midcentury furnishings and art, all of his merchandise looked great in the house. The sleek midcentury lines would probably look equally good in the condo.

“Can’t hurt to ask,” Kate said, and got up to put her plate in the extra narrow dishwasher we’d squeezed into the pint-sized kitchen. I’d fitted one into the design plans for the condo’s kitchen as well. “Do you have to run, or can you stay and visit?”

“I can stay for a while.” I brought my plate and utensils over to the counter.

“Not going crazy with the wedding prep yet?”

“The church is booked, the minister is hired, and the hall is rented, but that was no big deal. There was never a question about it. Derek and I both want Barry Norton to marry us, and we’ll have the reception in the church hall. It was just a question of picking the date. I finally got the invitations out.”

“I got mine in the mail.” Kate nodded, pointing to the front of the stainless steel refrigerator where the invitation hung, fastened with a magnet in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. “How’s everything else going?”

“The only two things left to decide on now are the food and the clothes.”

“I’ll do the food.”

“You can’t do the food. You’re the matron of honor.”

“Shannon will help,” Kate said. “And if I ask Cora and Beatrice, I’m sure they’ll help as well. And Jill, if she’s up and about again after the baby. And your mom will be in town by then, too. Between us we’ll get it done.”

“You don’t have to cater my wedding. I can hire a caterer.”

“I want to,” Kate said. “Except the wedding cake. I don’t do cakes.”

“I’ll get one of the bakeries to do the cake.” Wonder if
there was such a thing as a whoopie pie wedding cake to be had? If it existed anywhere, it would exist here in Maine.

“Let’s turn on the TV,” Kate said, “and watch the Cooking Channel. Start making a list of what you want.”

“Works for me.” I snagged a pen and notepad off the counter and settled into the sofa in the living room while Kate reached for the television remote.

Wayne came home after another hour, with Derek in tow.

“Saw the truck,” my boyfriend said when I raised an inquiring brow. “I was gonna walk home”—everything in downtown Waterfield is just a few minutes from everything else—“but then I realized you were still here.”

“Hungry?” Kate asked. “There’s plenty of sauce left. I’ll make more spaghetti.”

“I could eat,” Derek said, while Wayne nodded.

“I’ll go take a shower while the pasta cooks.”

“If you want to wash up,” Kate said to Derek as she got up from the sofa to start boiling water for more angel hair pasta, “you know where the bathroom is.”

He nodded, and disappeared in the direction of the first-floor half bath, while Wayne headed upstairs to the master bath and shower.

“How did it go?” I asked a few minutes later, when Derek came back out to the living room with water stains on his T-shirt and wet strands of hair around his face.

He blew out a breath as he sat down next to me on the
sofa and put an arm along the back of it, and behind my shoulders. “About as could be expected. She’s still dead.”

“I didn’t think she wouldn’t be. Any idea what happened?”

He shook his head. “Not until the medical examiner has had a go. But if I’m guessing, and if Amelia Easton is right and Miss Shaw had food allergies, I’m gonna say she died of anaphylactic shock, from eating something she was allergic to.”

“Don’t people with food allergies usually keep medicines around that they can take in an emergency? You know, the same way someone with asthma keeps an inhaler?”

“It’s called an EpiPen,” Derek said, “and yes, they do. Usually.”

“Did you find one?”

“I didn’t look,” Derek said. “I waited for Wayne and Brandon to get there, then I showed them the body and told them what happened. They looked around while I reinstalled the lock on the front door. The van from the medical examiner’s office came and took the body away, and then Wayne and I left and came here.”

“Brandon’s putting in a couple of hours on the scene before calling it a night,” Wayne said, coming down the stairs toweling his hair dry. It’s dark and curly like his son’s, shot through with gray now that he’s in his late forties. He had changed out of uniform into a T-shirt and jeans, and his feet were bare. He dropped a kiss on Kate’s cheek on his way to leave the towel in the laundry room. When he came back out, he added, “I don’t think we’ll have any problems with this one. Just a simple, unattended death. But the boy enjoys doing his CSI thing, and he may as well get the practice in. If I don’t keep him happy, I’m afraid he’ll leave me.”

He took a seat in one of the armchairs.

“Is he talking about leaving?”

Brandon Thomas is a native Waterfielder, whose mother, Phoebe, suffers from multiple sclerosis; I’d be very surprised if Brandon moved away and left her.

Wayne shrugged. “He’s dating that girl from the state police now. And Augusta isn’t that far away.”

Augusta is the capital of Maine, situated about forty-five minutes north of Waterfield. It’s where the Maine state police headquarters are located, and where Daphne, the girl Brandon was dating, worked. She’s a canine handler, who had brought her partner Hans, a German shepherd cadaver dog, down to Waterfield last fall when Derek and I had found a skeleton buried underneath the house on Becklea Drive. Daphne and Brandon had hit it off, we’d seen her—and occasionally Hans—several times since then, and now I guess they’d made it official.

“Has he mentioned leaving?” Kate asked, a tiny wrinkle between her brows.

Wayne shook his head. “He hasn’t mentioned anything. I just know he’d rather be doing forensics and crime scene stuff all the time, and if the state police can offer him that, it’d be stupid to turn it down. I’m sure they’d be happy to have him.”

Anyone with sense would be happy to have Brandon, who’s a personable fellow, a hard worker, and a joy to be around. However, I could quite understand why Wayne was worried.

“You’ve had plenty of dead bodies here in Waterfield in the time I’ve been around. He’s been keeping busy.”

“He seemed happy when we left him,” Derek added. “Like a pig in slop. The way he snapped on those latex gloves reminded me of me, the first time I did an annual exam.” He winked at me.

I hid a grin, as the comparison was irresistibly funny. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere, Wayne. He chose to stay in Waterfield and join the police rather than go away to law school, just so he could be close to his mother if she needed him—I don’t think he’ll leave now.”

“Maybe not,” Wayne said. The words lacked conviction, but he looked a little happier, and when Kate announced that the food was served, he and Derek toddled over to the café-table-for-two in the eating alcove and got down to it. Kate and I went back to watching TV until they were done.

“Getting ideas for the wedding?” Derek asked as he sat himself back down next to me on the sofa with a replete sigh.

I nodded, patting his thigh as it came to rest next to mine. “Kate has volunteered to do the food.”

He shot her a look. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to,” Kate said. “I want to. Everything except the cake. I don’t do wedding cakes.”

Derek shrugged. “Far be it from me to try to talk you out of it. I’ve eaten your food. You’ll probably give us a break on the price, too, won’t you?”

“We’ll work something out,” Kate said serenely and snuggled into Wayne’s arm.

“There’s no reason we won’t be able to go back to work tomorrow, is there, Wayne?” I wanted to know. “Miss Shaw’s death has nothing to do with us, right?”

“Not unless there’s something you’re not telling me,” Wayne said.

“Like what? If she died of anaphylactic shock, that’s nobody’s fault. Is it? It’s an accident, right?”

I glanced at Derek, who nodded.

“I’m sure Brandon will finish up in her apartment by lunchtime tomorrow,” Wayne said, “but you’re welcome to go into your own apartment anytime you want. The investigation is limited to hers.”

“Will you be talking to the neighbors?”

He arched his brows. “Any reason I should?”

None I could think of, really. As Kate said, Miss Shaw probably wouldn’t be missed. Nobody had liked her much. But that’s no crime, and it wasn’t like she’d been murdered.

“If the medical examiner determines that cause of death was anaphylactic shock,” Wayne said, “and it seems to be leaning that way”—he glanced at Derek, who nodded—“then I don’t see any reason why I have to conduct interviews. She ate something that didn’t agree with her, and she died. It happens.”

It did. Nice and easy. About time we discovered a dead body that didn’t turn out to be murdered. I leaned back against Derek’s shoulder with a sigh of my own and
focused my attention on the television screen and the plans for the wedding that were bouncing around in my brain.

When we got to the condo building the next morning, Brandon was already there. The black-and-white patrol car was parked in the lot, and Miss Shaw’s kitchen window was open, with the lace curtains blowing in the breeze. When we got up the stairs, we saw that the apartment door stood open as well, with a piece of yellow crime scene tape strung from one side of the door to the other.

“Airing out,” Derek said.

The stench was a whole lot less noticeable today. I raised my voice. “Brandon? You here?”

“Bedroom,” Brandon’s voice came floating back.

“Can we come in?”

“May as well,” Brandon said, “everyone else has been through the place.” He sounded grumpy.