Wall-To-Wall Dead (25 page)

With the gossip settled, the article went on to detail Amelia Easton’s accomplishments after Nanette’s death. Instead of returning to the commune, the way one might expect that she would, she had changed her major from home economics to history—in honor of Nan, who had wanted to study history—and had settled in to become a scholar. From Southern Mennonite University, she’d gone on to postgraduate work elsewhere, had become a professor, and had eventually ended up at Barnham, taking over as history professor when Martin Wentworth died. If she’d ever gone back to the commune, even to visit, the article didn’t say anything about it.

“I can’t imagine why Miss Shaw would be interested in this,” I told Josh when he came back into the lab, coffee in hand but without the manila envelope. “It seems pretty cut-and-dried.”

He nodded. “I can’t understand why Miss Shaw would be interested in any of it. It’s none of her business that Robin’s been married twice, or that Gregg and Mariano are gay, or that Jamie’s a stripper. Or that Candy’s sleeping with her boss.”

His face sobered as he remembered Candy and what had happened. Mine did the same.

“What did you do with the envelope?” I asked after a minute.

“Put it in my locker,” Josh answered. “Shannon won’t find it there.”

“Why don’t you just get rid of it?”

He shot me a look as if he suspected I’d lost my mind. “I stole it. Took it out of someone else’s condo. Someone who just died. I can’t do that.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. More than a year ago, when I’d first moved to Waterfield, Josh, Shannon, and their friend Paige had been withholding evidence then, too. Specifically, they’d been hiding Professor Martin
Wentworth’s daytimer, with all his appointments in it. They hadn’t been able to bring themselves to destroy it then, either. Thankfully, since the information it had contained had helped the police—and me—figure out what had happened to Professor Wentworth.

“Couldn’t you give it to your dad? And explain? Wayne would understand about Jamie not wanting her parents to find out, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe,” Josh said. “I’m not sure he’d understand about Mariano, though. Or about me taking the stuff out of Miss Shaw’s condo.”

I opened my mouth to continue arguing, but he shook his head. “I’m gonna hold on to it for now. If I think there’s anything in it that Dad might need to know, I’ll give it to him.”

I nodded. “I should go. Derek’s expecting me. Thanks for sharing what you know.”

“My pleasure,” Josh said politely, although I hadn’t given him much of a choice in the matter. He glanced at the computer screen. “I’m gonna stay here, get some work done.”

I nodded. “I’ll see you later.”

By the time I made it to the small green Folk Victorian on Chandler Street, dinner was but a distant memory. The table was cleared and everyone had settled into the family room to play Chinese checkers.

Everyone except Derek, who seemed to be watching the door and the game alternately. When I walked into the room, apology on my lips, he jumped up. “Are you OK?”

“Of course I’m OK,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You know how he worries,” Cora said with a smile. “There’s a plate for you on the counter, Avery. It should still be warm, but if not, you can put it in the microwave for thirty seconds.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. Thank you.” I headed in the direction of the kitchen with Derek on my heels, my stomach rumbling. I hadn’t felt all that hungry while I’d been talking to Josh and driving back here, but now that I was inside the house, still redolent of tomato sauce and Italian spices, I found I was ravenous.

The plate was right where Cora said it would be, covered with aluminum foil. I removed the foil and stared greedily
at a generous piece of lasagna, dripping with tomato sauce and cheese. My stomach signaled approval, and Derek grinned as he reached past me to the silverware drawer for a fork. “Here.”

“Thank you.” I plunged the fork into the lasagna, which was still plenty warm enough.

“Breadstick?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I said around the first bite of lasagna. It tasted even better than it looked and smelled.

“Coming right up.” He slipped on an oven mitt, yellow with orange stripes, and pulled a tray out of the cooling oven. “Careful. They’re still hot.”

I waved the warning away as I reached for a breadstick, and burned my fingers as a reward for being careless. “Ow!”

“Told you,” Derek said, and put the tray back in the oven. He slipped the oven mitt off and continued, “You said you’d be here in thirty minutes. What took so long?”

“I swear I didn’t do it on purpose. I was on my way back, just coming out of Wellhaven, when—”

I stopped, narrowly escaping choking to death on a piece of pasta when I realized what I’d said. Derek’s eyes narrowed. “You went back there?”

I blinked as I looked for a rational explanation, something that wouldn’t make me sound like I was a weird stalker. “Someone had to tell him his girlfriend was in the hospital. I didn’t think Jamie would remember to call.”

I did my best to sound virtuous, for all the good that it did me.

“One of these days, Avery…” Derek said, and stopped. He shook his head in exasperation, and that hank of hair that tends to fall into his eyes whenever he moves, fell into his eyes. My hands were full, so I resisted the temptation to reach out and brush it away. Didn’t want to risk gouging his eye out with either fork or breadstick.

“I know. But I’m fine. And when I was leaving Wellhaven, I saw Josh driving in the opposite direction, like a bat out of hell. So I followed.”

“Let me guess,” Derek said. “Barnham College was burning.”

“Of course not.” I popped another bite of lasagna in my mouth and chewed. “He was going to Barnham, but not because anything was burning.”

“So you spent the past hour with Josh?”

I nodded as I dug the fork back into the lasagna. “Remember the other morning, after Miss Shaw died, when Brandon swore up and down that someone had been in her condo during the night?”

Derek nodded. “Josh said he’d locked up.”

“He did. What he neglected to mention was that he unlocked the place again, too, at four o’clock in the morning. And that he and Jamie Livingston tore it apart looking for pictures Miss Shaw had of Jamie.”

Derek’s eyebrows disappeared behind his hair. “Josh and Jamie?”

“Just so. Apparently they had a one-night stand sometime last fall. Jamie threatened to tell Shannon about it unless Josh let her into Miss Shaw’s condo.”

“That wasn’t very nice of Jamie,” Derek said judiciously.

I shook my head. “In justice to her, she was pretty freaked out. Miss Shaw had figured out about the Pompeii Gentleman’s Club—it
was
Jamie you saw on Friday—and she was threatening to tell Jamie’s parents. Jamie’s under twenty-one, so by Mississippi law she’s still a minor, and she’s afraid her folks are going to come and drag her back home.”

“If she has left home and is supporting herself, her age doesn’t matter,” Derek said. “She’d be considered an independent minor. And anyway, she’s in Maine now. Legal age here is eighteen.”

“I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that. But when Miss Shaw died, Jamie was afraid the police were going to find the information Miss Shaw had, and that they would call her parents. So she made Josh help her search for it.”

“Did they find it?”

“Behind the books in the living room, Josh said. But by then it was morning, and they didn’t have time to clean up. Anyway, the pictures of Jamie weren’t all they found. Miss Shaw had dug up little tidbits of information about everyone in the building. Even you and me.”

“You and me?” Derek echoed.

I nodded. I’d finished the lasagna now—inhaled it more than chewed and swallowed, or so it felt—and I was rinsing the plate in the sink preparatory to putting it in the dishwasher. As soon as I was done, I dug the stuff out of my bag. Josh hadn’t asked for it back, and I hadn’t offered it. As I spread it out across the counter, I detailed what it all was. “Newspaper articles about you, all the way back to when you came back to Waterfield after medical school and residency. Articles about Melissa. Pictures of you and me, kissing in the parking lot that day when we first went out to see the condo.”

“She took pictures of that?”

“Sure did.” I handed them to him.

Derek fanned them out in his hand like a deck of cards, and winced. “I feel violated.”

I tilted my head. “You’re not serious, are you?”

He glanced up at me, his eyes a stormy blue. “A little.”

“I didn’t think you were a prude.”

“I’m not. It was in the middle of the day, in broad daylight, so it wasn’t like I expected no one to see us. Hell, Josh and Shannon were hanging out the window cheering! But Miss Shaw had no right to take pictures of us. It was a private moment.”

Since that same thought had crossed my own mind when I’d seen the pictures, I didn’t argue.

“Apparently the pictures she had of Candy and her boss, David Rossini, were worse,” I said instead. “I didn’t see those. Josh only showed me the things that had to do with us. Did you see this article about Aunt Inga? Looks like Miss Shaw suspected me of having done away with my aunt to inherit the house.”

“Shrew,” Derek said, and I don’t think he was referring to Aunt Inga. “So Josh didn’t show you anything else that was in the envelope? Stuff she’d dug up on other people?”

I shook my head. “He told me what it was, though. Said it was information most people knew about anyway. Not the kinds of deep, dark secrets someone would kill for.”

“I certainly wouldn’t kill over these,” Derek said, indicating the pictures.

I nodded. “Same thing with the rest of it. It was all pretty minor stuff, according to Josh. A lot of it from a long time in the past. Professor Easton’s roommate in college committed suicide, twenty-plus years ago. Robin’s been married once before, and Benjamin isn’t Bruce’s kid. Bruce was in trouble as a teenager; that must be at least ten or fifteen years ago now…”

“I could have told you that,” Derek said. “He’s a couple years younger than me. I remember he set the school trash cans on fire once. Most of Waterfield probably knows that.”

That’s what Josh had said, too.

“Jamie’s up on stage in front of hundreds of people every week; it’s not like she’s hiding. She just doesn’t want her parents to find out what she’s doing. And Candy…” I hesitated.

“What?” Derek said.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance that what happened to Candy was self-inflicted, was it? If she killed Miss Shaw and was afraid she’d get caught?”

“I don’t think Candy’s smart enough to get away with murder,” Derek said. “And so far, we may have suspicions, but there’s no proof that Miss Shaw’s death wasn’t an accident. Whoever did it, if someone did, would have to be a lot smarter than Candy. Besides, she almost died.”

All right, then. I switched gears.

“She and her boyfriend had an argument on Friday night. If he threatened to stop seeing her, could she have done it herself? To try to get his attention?”

“Not sure,” Derek admitted. “I still don’t know what happened to her. Something did, but the doctors hadn’t figured
out what it was by the time I left the hospital, and I haven’t had any revelations myself since I got here, either.”

“Do you think your dad might have some idea?”

“We could ask,” Derek said. “It’s probably time to go out there anyway. They’ll wonder what’s keeping us.”

“Just show them the pictures.”

I should have known better than to joke about it, of course. Derek isn’t someone who backs down from a challenge. Cora looked up at me and smiled, and opened her mouth—I’m sure to ask how the food had tasted—and Derek dropped his load right in the middle of the table.

There was a beat of silence, then—

“What on earth?” Dr. Ben said and reached out.

Derek’s dad is a little shorter than his son, with cropped gray hair and a set of eyes almost as pretty as Derek’s, but more gray. Derek inherited his from his mother, Eleanor, Dr. Ben’s first wife. Cora is his second, a short, pleasantly plump brunette who likes to cook and to garden. Dr. Ben’s hobby is watercolors. The family room was full of paintings of Cora’s flowers that he’d done.

Derek pulled me down next to him on one of the sofas. “Josh Rasmussen found them in Hilda Shaw’s condo a couple days ago.”

Beatrice looked up. She has her mother’s blue eyes and brown hair, but she’s taller and very thin, and her hair is straight and long instead of short and curly, like Cora’s. “Your neighbor had pictures of the two of you kissing? Why?”

I explained that it wasn’t just us, it was all the neighbors. “She was confined to home, I guess. So she lived vicariously through other people.”

“That’s sick,” Bea’s husband Steve said. He’s tall and lanky like his wife, with glasses and a beaky nose. “And probably illegal.” He’s also a lawyer.

“She’s dead,” Derek said. “It’s too late to sue.”

“Damn.” Steve picked up a newspaper clipping. He did it with the tips of two fingers, as if afraid it might contaminate
him. And I don’t think it was the newsprint that worried him.

I glanced at my future father-in-law. “Did you know Hilda Shaw, Dr. Ben?”