Wall-To-Wall Dead (2 page)

Derek glanced around, too. “Nice place. Although after what happened to you back in April…”

During a particularly nasty spring fog, I’d been stuck on this island with a killer. The ferries had stopped running, and I’d been responsible for the lives of a handful of other people as well as my own. I’d made it out alive—just like I did from the burning shed—but if there’d been a fog creeping
in right at this moment, I think I might have been less happy about being here.

“It turned out all right,” I said, turning back to him. “Just like this time.”

“Sure,” Derek said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. “Where do you want to sit? On the porch, as usual?”

During the months we’d spent out here working, we’d often eaten lunch on the porch. If the weather was bad, we’d stayed inside the house, but we rarely brought a blanket to spread on the grass. The porch was easier.

“That’s fine.”

“C’mon.” He hefted the picnic basket in one hand and put the other against my back as he guided me across the meadow toward the house.

Once we reached the porch, he put the basket down and dug into his pocket. “Since we’re here, we should probably make sure everything’s all right inside.”

I nodded as I watched him pull his keychain out of his pocket and sort through the keys before he found the one that fit the lock. “Any reason to think it won’t be?”

He glanced at me as he twisted the key. “None at all. But people have been coming and going for a few weeks, looking at the place. Melissa told me we’ve had a handful of showings since she put the place on the market.”

Melissa James was our Realtor—who also happened to be Derek’s ex-wife. I wasn’t thrilled about having to work with her—indeed, I’d spent the past year doing my best not to have to work with her—but after our regular Realtor got married and left Maine for Miami, we didn’t have much choice.

“At least they’ve made sure to keep the door locked,” I remarked as Derek struggled with the key.

He nodded, and finally got the door unlocked and the key extracted. “Sticky lock. I’ll have to bring some oil next time I come out here.” He pocketed the key and pushed the door open. It swung smoothly, without the squeal of hinges it had on our first day here.

“Looks the same,” I said, glancing around at the tight run-around staircase and the edge of the old-fashioned
sailcloth rug—painted by yours truly—I could see through the door into the living room on the right.

Derek nodded. “Let’s walk through, just in case.”

“Sure.” I went in one direction, he went in the other. When we ended up in the kitchen at the back of the house, I said, “Nothing wrong that I could see.”

Derek shook his head. “Let’s go eat.”

Sure. We headed back out onto the porch, where Derek unpacked the picnic basket.

He’d packed it as well, without help from me—or to be more accurate, he had thrown himself on the mercy of Kate McGillicutty-Rasmussen, our friend who ran the Waterfield Inn B&B, and begged for help. Kate’s hand in the basket was obvious. For one thing, I’m pretty sure it would never have occurred to Derek to bring genuine cloth napkins or real crystal glasses. Or a tiny bud vase, into which he shoved a couple of stems of tiny blue flowers that grew along the side of the house.

“What’s the occasion?” I wanted to know.

He glanced up from the basket, a flash of blue eyes the same color as the flowers—and the sky. “Do we need an occasion?”

“I guess not. It’s just…” I trailed off when the bottle of champagne appeared. “Derek?”

“Fine. I’m celebrating the fact that the TV crew has left and we survived the week.” He pulled out two wrapped sandwiches and put one on my plate and one on his. Lobster rolls, from the deli in downtown Waterfield. In Derek’s opinion, the best lobster rolls in Maine.

“Lobster rolls and champagne?” I said.

He grinned. “Why not? And whoopie pies for dessert.” He brandished them. “Do I know how to plan a date, or not?”

Definitely. I watched as he popped the champagne cork and filled my glass and then his own. “Cheers.”

I raised my glass. “Cheers. To a better week than the last one.” I’d had my fill of dead bodies and complications for a while; I was ready for life to settle back down.

“I’ll drink to that,” Derek said, and did.

We ate in silence for a few minutes. Derek likes food—he has one of those metabolisms that’s always cranking, so he’s pretty much always hungry—and the fresh sea air and trip across the waves had given me an appetite, too. And to tell the truth, I was preoccupied, mulling things over in my mind. Something was going on; I could feel it. I just didn’t know what. But something was up. He was restless. Maybe even nervous. Or worried. Eating too fast, even for Derek.

“Ready for dessert?”

He polished off his lobster roll while I still had almost half of mine left, and then he handed me my whoopie pie and started unwrapping his own. I followed suit, since I figured I probably couldn’t finish the rest of the lobster roll as well as the whoopie pie anyway, and I certainly wasn’t about to turn down dessert.

The whoopie pie is the official state treat of Maine, not to be confused with the official state dessert, which is blueberry pie. It consists of two rounds of chocolate cake—or in some cases pumpkin or spice cake—with frosting between them, and commonly, it’s the size of an average hamburger. That said, the biggest whoopie pie ever created was made in South Portland in 2011, and weighed in at 1,062 pounds. But I digress.

I love whoopie pies, and Kate had made these, which made them even better. I had unwrapped the treat and was about to sink my teeth into it when something about it caught my eye.

“Something wrong?” Derek said innocently.

I ignored him. I had stopped with my mouth still open, the pie an inch from my lips, and now I squinted down my nose at the top of the chocolate cake, where something sparkled. Whoopie pie isn’t supposed to sparkle, FYI.

I moved my hands back a few inches and waited for my eyesight to adjust, heart beating faster. My mouth, however, stayed open, but for a different reason now.

Derek had stopped eating, and was watching me. I glanced at him, and back to the whoopie pie in my hands again.

“Derek?” My voice shook.

“Yes,” Derek said, and he sounded like he was farther away than just on the other side of the tablecloth.

“Is that…”

My heart was beating so hard it was difficult to get the words out.

“It isn’t a cherry,” Derek said.

No, it wasn’t. Wrong color.

Very carefully, I lowered the whoopie pie to the porch floor and stared at it, much the same way I might stare at a spider, or something else I was worried might jump up and bite me.

“Derek? What…is that?”

“Pick it up and see,” Derek said.

I reached out, with a hand that shook. And pulled out a ring.

“Derek?”

“I thought I’d lost you,” Derek said. “You went home alone and you almost died. I don’t want you to go home alone anymore. I don’t want anything to happen to you because I’m not there. I want to marry you, so your home will be my home and no one can come into it and hurt you again.”

I blinked.

“I called your mother,” Derek added. “She approves.”

Of course she did. My mother likes Derek. And besides, I was thirty-two. It wasn’t like I needed my mother’s approval to marry.

“I love you, Avery.” He looked at me across the tablecloth, those blue eyes beautifully sincere.

“Derek,” I sniffed. Somehow it was the only thing I could manage to say.

“Is that a yes?”

Of course it was a yes. I just couldn’t get the word out. So I nodded, and threw myself across the tablecloth so champagne and small blue flowers went flying. He caught me and pulled me in for a kiss.

“I love you, Avery.”

“I love you, too,” I sniffled, and let him rescue the ring from my grasp and slide it, whoopie pie crumbs and all, onto my finger. Where it fit perfectly and looked—as the saying goes—like it was where it belonged to be.

“This is a waste of time,” my fiancé grumbled. I glanced over at him as I slotted my spring green VW Beetle into a parking space outside the condominium building where Josh Rasmussen lived, and cut the engine. It was a few days later, and truth be told, I didn’t need the Beetle; I could have floated here on the invisible pretty pink clouds that still surrounded me from Derek’s proposal.

“We don’t know that. And even if it is, you owe it to Josh to be nice about it. He’s trying to help.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Derek said and opened his car door. “I’ll be nice. But I want it on record that I’m against this.”

I swung my legs out, too, and addressed him across the roof of the car. “Listen, you got your way when we bought the house on Rowanberry Island. We spent all spring and most of the summer renovating it, not to mention all the money in our account, and we’re still waiting for it to sell. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but if we have to lower our standards for a while, and renovate a two-bedroom condo in a 1970s building—a condo that has none of the architectural elements
that make your heart go pitter-patter—you’ll just have to suck it up and deal with the situation. If you want to get married in October, we need the money. Weddings aren’t cheap.”

The date we had picked was only six weeks away, but Derek didn’t want to wait, and neither did I. My mom had raised her eyebrows at the timeline, but it was an afternoon wedding, so I didn’t need a proper gown. We had booked the church and the minister, and had settled on the adjoining reception hall for the celebration, and everything was proceeding apace.

“I don’t want to get married in October,” Derek said. He waited until I was close enough so he could snag my wrist, and then he pulled me even closer so he could look deeply into my eyes. “I want to get married right now. Or at least pretend we are.”

I squirmed, as those cornflower blue eyes had their usual effect on my insides. “There’s a little old lady watching us.”

Derek straightened up. “Where?”

“First-floor apartment on the right. White lace curtains.”

“Oh yeah,” Derek said as the lace curtains fluttered. He smiled down at me, dimples and all. “Wanna give her a thrill?”

“You’re awful.” But I let him kiss me, and as usual, my stomach swooped.

“Break it up, you two!” a voice yelled, and when I turned my head, I saw Josh Rasmussen, along with his best friend and brand-new girlfriend, Shannon McGillicutty, hanging out of the window of Josh’s third-floor apartment. They were grinning. I grinned back and lifted a hand.

“We’ll be right up.”

Josh nodded. “I’ll buzz you in. Mr. Antonini’s apartment is on the second floor. Meet you there.”

They withdrew from the open window and closed it behind them. I looked up at Derek. “Remember, be nice.”

“I’ll be nice. And then afterwards, you can be nice to
me.” He gyrated his eyebrows exaggeratedly. I burst into laughter, and he grinned back. “C’mon, Tink. Let’s get this over with. Then we can take the honeymoon early.”

I smiled. “By all means.”

He flung an arm around my shoulders, and I snuggled into his side as we walked toward the front door.

My name is Avery Marie Baker. I met Derek Ellis some sixteen months ago, when I inherited my aunt Inga’s old Victorian house in the tiny hamlet of Waterfield, Maine. He was the renovator I hired to help me fix the place up, since my ninety-eight-year-old cousin a few times removed—the “aunt” was a courtesy title—hadn’t been in a position to maintain or update the house. My plan was to sell it, pocket the money, and go back to my perfectly blissful existence in Manhattan, with my textile design career, my rent-controlled apartment, and my boss-cum-boyfriend, Philippe. But over the course of the summer I fell in love not only with Maine but with Derek, and I ended up staying. We’ve been together, personally and professionally, ever since.

Josh, whom we were here to meet, is the son of the Waterfield chief of police, Wayne Rasmussen. Wayne married my best friend, Kate McGillicutty, last New Year’s Eve. Kate is Shannon’s mother. That makes Josh and Shannon sort of stepsiblings, which is a little weird when you consider that Josh has been in love with Shannon since she and Kate moved to Waterfield when Shannon was thirteen. The infatuation came long before the sibling relationship, though—in fact, I think it was Josh who introduced Kate and Wayne. And the romance is brand-new. It took Shannon quite a while to warm to the idea—she was afraid she’d lose her best friend if things didn’t work out—and it took them both plunging off the cliffs and into the Atlantic Ocean recently to make her realize how quickly it could all go away. (Sort of the same thing that made Derek finally pop the question, I guess.) It had been horribly scary and
we’d all been very worried, but they’d both been mostly OK, and the person responsible got caught, eventually. They’ve been working things out for the past week or so, and when they came to unlock the front door for us, we could see that things seemed to be going well. Josh had a trace of lipstick at the corner of his mouth, while Shannon’s long mane of black cherry hair was tangled, as if someone had had his hands in it quite recently.