Do-It-Yourself - Spackled And Spooked Part 14

"I'll look into it," Wayne said. "As soon as you push off and let me get back to work."

"Yessah!" Josh dashed off a salute and a c.o.c.ky grin before putting the car back into gear and rolling sedately down the road away from the house.

"Where's Paige today?" I asked after we had turned the corner and all the hoopla on Becklea was behind us. "And Ricky?" Every time I'd seen them lately, Ricky Swanson had been with them, so it was almost strange not to see him today.

"They're at school," Josh said. "I asked them if they wanted to come, but they said no."

"Are they going out?"

Paige had been recovering from a rather unfortunate love affair last winter, one that had ended tragically, but I thought I had noticed signs that she might be developing an interest in Ricky. It would explain why he was always hanging out with the three of them, anyway, when they didn't seem to have a whole lot in common, personality-wise. Then again, Paige had never seemed to have much in common with Josh and Shannon, either; it was more a matter of a life-long friendship between her and Josh, which had grown to include Shannon when the latter moved to Waterfield six years ago.

"Who knows?" Shannon said with a shrug.

"Hard to know what Ricky's thinking," Josh added, "though Paige seems to like him."

"Do you like him?" I looked from one to the other of them.

Josh shrugged. "Don't know him very well yet."

"I'm reserving judgment," Shannon said. "So far, so good. Just as long as he doesn't hurt her. She's been through enough lately."

I nodded. Couldn't argue with that.

"What's wrong with Derek's car?" Josh changed the subject.

"The brakes gave out." I gave them an abbreviated version of what had happened this morning and listened to their exclamations.

"Who would want to hurt Derek? Or you?" Shannon wanted to know.

I shrugged. "No idea. Someone who thinks one of us knows more than we do? Although it was probably just an accident. And even if it wasn't, I don't think it was directed at me. It's Derek's car, and there's no way anyone could have known that I'd be driving it today."

"But it's not like anyone has a reason to want to get rid of Derek, either," Shannon pointed out, "and they might know that you're usually with him. And that you don't have a car of your own. Anyone who knows you two, knows that. You're usually together."

"True. And most people seem to like Derek."

"Absolutely," Shannon agreed with a grin. "Except for Ray Stenham, maybe. I don't think he'd kill him, though."

"Probably not," I said with real regret. The Stenham twins had tortured me mercilessly the one time I'd met them when I was little, and had made Derek's formative years a nightmare as well, and I'd love to make them pay someday. Still, Ray had been decent to me this morning. "Ray was actually pretty nice today. He was the one who had Derek's truck towed to Cortino's while Melissa drove me to the house. The accident happened right outside their construction site."

"That's a big hill right there," Josh remarked. "Good thing nothing worse happened."

I nodded.

Broad Street intersects with Main right in downtown Waterfield, and Cortino's auto repair shop turned out to be on the other side by a few blocks. It was a blue-painted cinderblock building with three bays, and through the middle one, I could see Derek's truck up on a lift while a couple of people in blue overalls stood underneath, conferring.

"You want us to wait for you?" Josh asked as I crawled out of the back seat. I shook my head.

"No need. I'm just a few blocks from Aunt Inga's house. Go back to work on your forensic facial approximation software. See if you can't figure out who that poor woman was. If she wasn't local, the dental records may not do any good."

Josh nodded. "See you, Avery." He pulled away while Shannon waved. I waved back before I headed for the door to the office.

The counter was manned-or womanned-by a plump blonde a couple of years older than me. She had a round face with a snub nose and slightly protruding, pale blue eyes, and she looked familiar, like maybe I'd pa.s.sed her on the street or nodded to her at Shaw's Supermarket sometime. She wasn't anyone I knew or had ever been introduced to, but I knew I'd seen her before.

"Hi," I said politely. "I'm Avery Baker."

"Jill Cortino." She looked me up and down a few times, a.s.sessing me. "So you're Derek's new girlfriend. And business partner."

"That'd be me." Girlfriend and business partner. Also the person who had driven Derek's beloved Ford F-150 into a ditch this morning. "I came to check on the truck."

"Peter's been looking at it. I'll get him for you." She got up and walked over to a door in the back wall. A few moments later, one of the overalls-clad mechanics came jogging toward us.

"What's up, babe?" He grinned down at her. She indicated me.

"This is Avery Baker. Derek's girlfriend. She came to find out about the truck."

Peter Cortino turned to me and flashed another smile. I staggered.

Don't get me wrong: I adore Derek, and I certainly have no complaints about his physical characteristics. He's a good-looking guy: a lean six feet or so, with sun-streaked hair and melting blue eyes, not to mention a killer smile and a dimple. And that's just the exterior. But although I'm attached, and happy to be so, I'm neither stupid nor blind. Peter Cortino was easily the best-looking man I had ever seen, with the possible exception of a soap opera actor I spied in a bar in Greenwich Village one night a few years ago. He was so handsome he looked unreal, especially in the dirt and dust of this untidy auto shop in back-beyond Maine.

An inch or two shorter than Derek, Peter Cortino was as dark as Derek was fair. Black, curly hair covered his head, while his face-a masterpiece of exquisite bone structure and smooth, olive skin-boasted long, thick, curling eyelashes surrounding a pair of eyes as dark and melting as those on a c.o.c.ker spaniel. It was like Michelangelo's David had stepped off the pedestal and traded the fig leaf for a pair of dirty overalls.

"Nice to meet you," I managed. Jill chuckled, and I blushed. It's bad form to stare at someone else's husband, even if Jill acted like she was used to it. I wondered if she was also used to people looking from him to her, wondering how she had landed such a catch. Did whispers of, "What's he doing with her?" follow them around?

"Likewise." He extended a hand, briefly. And although my mental visions were of dusty Italian vistas, Peter Cortino's accent was Boston, all the way. And not upper-crust Boston, either. "Where's Derek?"

I explained that Derek had gone to the dump with someone. Peter nodded, as if this was par for the course.

"Tell me what happened this morning." He stuffed one hand back in the pocket of the oil-spotted overalls and put the other around his wife's waist. She leaned into him. "The guy who towed the truck in said the driver had lost control and driven into a ditch."

"There was a little more to it than that," I answered. "I only drove the truck into the ditch because the brakes didn't respond, and I didn't want to cause a worse accident."

Peter nodded, as if this confirmed his findings. "I had a look at it. The good news is, the problem's easy to fix. I don't know how much you know about automobiles . . . ?"

He waited for me to speak. When I said I'd never owned a car and knew next to nothing about them, he grinned. "In layman's terms, then: You had a hole in the brake lines, which turned into no response from the brakes. It's a simple thing to repair. Installing new brake lines won't take long at all."

So far, so good. "What's the bad news?"

"It didn't happen accidentally. Someone nicked the lines, and while you drove, the tear became bigger and bigger, until the brake lines broke completely. Likely the same person jiggled with the mechanism for the airbag so that when you did have an accident-and you would have one, eventually-the airbag wouldn't work."

Something seemed to have gone wrong with my breathing. "So someone was trying to hurt me?" Or kill me?

"Not necessarily," Peter said. "The brakes could have given out at any moment, while you were driving ten miles an hour through downtown, or while you were doing sixty on the highway. Depending on the situation, you could have eased the car to a stop at the nearest curb with no harm done to anyone, or caused a six-car pileup on I-295."

"Or driven off the road and into the water if I'd been heading up the ocean road?"

He nodded. "That, too. If Derek had been driving, you might have avoided the accident altogether. He's more experienced than you."

"That doesn't take much," I agreed. "So maybe it was more of a warning? Or is it possible that it was just an accident and n.o.body messed with the brakes? Maybe they just broke?"

Peter shrugged. "I wouldn't think so," he said, "although anything's possible, I guess."

We agreed that he would fix the problem, as well as replace the headlight that had shattered and the fender that had been dented when I hit the ditch, not to mention the airbags that hadn't deployed, and then he'd call Derek to let him know when the truck was ready to be picked up. I thanked them both and set out for Aunt Inga's house on foot. The last thing I saw before I closed the office door was Peter kissing his wife.

I started the walk by contemplating the two of them and their relationship, and from there I went on to trying to remember where I might have seen Jill before. Recently. We hadn't been introduced-I'd have remembered that-but I'd seen her before. At the store? On the street? In some restaurant or other where Derek and I had shared a meal? She'd have been alone, if so, because if I'd ever seen her husband before, I would have recognized him for sure. He wasn't the kind of guy you forgot meeting.

Pretty soon more important things claimed my attention, though, and I saw Venetia's body again, her gray hair matted with blood, the back of her head caved in. Just like the skeleton, a little voice in my head whispered.

I examined the thought. Clinically. Or as clinically as I could. Yes, there were similarities. Both victims had been hit over the head. Both were women. Both lived in Waterfield, one right next door to where the other's body was found. That was pretty much the extent of it, though. The woman in the crawls.p.a.ce had been young; Venetia was old. The murders had happened years apart; at least two, maybe as many as six . We didn't know the reasons behind either, the motive the killer-or killers-might have had. There wasn't enough left of the skeleton to determine whether she'd been a.s.saulted, maybe s.e.xually, before or after she died. Venetia hadn't been. The only damage seemed to have been to her skull.

But surely a connection between the two was inevitable. Venetia had lived right next door to the Murphy house. She had seen people coming and going over the years. She had seen the squatters, seen the teenagers coming to make out, seen the handymen and repairmen and lawyers and looky-loos. She had probably seen the victim and the murderer, and just hadn't realized it. Had Venetia known, I wondered, when the murderer came knocking on the door yesterday, the kind of trouble she was in? Or hadn't she guessed, even when the floral arrangement hit the back of her head, why she had to die?

14.

The first order of business, it seemed, was to figure out who the dead woman from the crawls.p.a.ce was. Finding her bones had been the catalyst for everything else; up until that happened, the murderer must have felt pretty secure. The Murphy house was empty, and n.o.body ever did any work around the place except for cleaning the gutters, nailing down loose roof shingles, and repairing broken windows. The utilities had been turned off for years; we'd had them reconnected when we took over. Unless the crawls.p.a.ce flooded or the pipes burst or something, there was no reason to think that anyone would ever find the bones. The squatters may have given him or her a turn-unless the squatters were the murderers-but they moved on after a couple of days, and who knew, the murderer may even have had something to do with that. But beyond that small issue, and that short period in time, all the murderer had to do was keep an eye on the place to make sure n.o.body took too much of an interest. Stop by once in a while, in the guise of a handyman, or concerned neighbor, or nosy citizen, and everything would be A-OK. Until we bought the house and started messing around, that is. . . .

I realized I hadn't asked Peter Cortino just how long we could have driven the truck with damaged brake lines. Would the nick in the brake lines turn into a hole and an accident pretty much right away, I wondered, or might the damage have been done earlier in the week, before we even found the bones? If so, maybe whoever had tampered with the truck had done it to prevent us from finding the bones. Just as he or she might have rigged the ghostly footsteps we'd heard inside the house, to freak us out. I had no proof that the footsteps were rigged, but unlike Kate, I wasn't ready to welcome the idea of supernatural forces. I was more comfortable with the idea of a murderer trying to chase us out of the house to prevent us from finding his victim than I was with the idea that Brian Murphy was still walking around after all these years.

Speaking of Kate . . . Unless I could find another ride, I was stuck in town until Peter Cortino finished fixing Derek's truck and until Derek finished helping Brandon Thomas dig through the dump. If I wanted to know who the bones belonged to, Barnham College seemed like a good place to start. It was where the bones had been taken, and also where Josh and his forensic approximation computer program resided. But if I wanted to get to Barnham, I needed a ride. Luckily, Kate was always up for an adventure, at least during midweek, when her lovely B and B wasn't filled to the brim with guests.

I changed direction and headed for the B and B, but before I got that far, I had to pa.s.s Nickerson's Antiques. The Fredericia dresser was still on display in the window, and I stopped for a second to gaze lovingly at it. It would look fabulous in the master bath, if we could just figure out the logistics of plumbing and a vessel sink and get it all attached without messing up the teak finish.

John Nickerson must have seen me through the window, because before I'd set myself into motion again, he had opened the door. "Miss Baker!"

"Hi, Mr. Nickerson," I said politely. "I'm sorry. With everything that's been going on, I haven't had a chance to talk to Derek about the dresser yet."

He waved my explanation aside. "What is going on out at Peggy's house? I've been hearing things on the news."

"Oh." My brain jumped tracks as I wandered a few steps closer. No sense in broadcasting our conversation to any pa.s.sersby. Just in case there were people in Waterfield who hadn't heard the news. "It started yesterday, when Derek found a human bone in the crawls.p.a.ce. The police started digging and found a skeleton. Then this morning, they called in a cadaver dog to make sure there weren't any more remains buried on the property, and the dog discovered one of the neighbors dead."

"Dear me," John Nickerson said. I nodded.

"Her name was Venetia Rudolph. If you know everyone in town, you probably knew her, too."

"I knew of her, yes. Nice lady, if a little meddlesome. What happened to her?"

I hesitated, but again, there didn't seem to be any reason not to tell him the truth. The details would be all over the airwaves shortly, if they weren't already. "She was. .h.i.t on the back of the head with a vase."

"Murder?"

"Looks that way."

"And the other body? The skeleton?"

"Same thing," I said. "A woman, hit on the back of the head and buried under the Murphy house. Sometime in the past five or six years, we think."

"Dear me." He shook his head sadly. I peered at him for a second.

"Have you ever gone out to the Murphy house? Since Peggy Murphy died, I mean?"

"I don't recall telling you I went there before Peggy died," Mr. Nickerson said. His voice was soft but with an undertone of steel. I managed a smile.

"I guess you didn't. I just a.s.sumed, since you were friends . . ." I waited to see if he'd deny that, too. When he didn't, I continued, "It doesn't matter. I just wondered if you might have pa.s.sed by once in a while, you know, if maybe you had noticed something. Or someone."

"I see." His voice was still cool, and his eyes-pale blue-more so. "I may have pa.s.sed by once or twice in the past seventeen years. I won't say it hasn't happened. But I've never seen anyone, or anything, suspicious. Isn't it more likely that Miss Rudolph would have noticed something like that? Being right next door?"

"Of course it is," I said. "As a matter of fact, that's probably why she's dead. Don't you think?"

I took advantage of the silence to leave. He didn't worry me, exactly, although his behavior was a little thought-provoking. Was it possible that John Nickerson might have had something to do with the murders? He knew about the Murphy house, whether he'd been there before Peggy Murphy died or not. He knew it sat empty and that it would be relatively safe to bury a body in the bas.e.m.e.nt. He was familiar with Venetia Rudolph, and she probably wouldn't suspect him of planning to kill her if he showed up unannounced. He knew who I was and where I lived, and he knew who Derek was and where Derek lived. He could have tampered with the truck. No reason to believe he had, of course, any more than to suspect anyone else in particular. Everyone in Waterfield knew that the Murphy house sat empty, and most people knew where Derek lived. It really would help to know who the skeleton in the crawls.p.a.ce had been when she was alive to try to get a handle on who would have wanted to get rid of her.

I found Kate outside in her yard, getting ready for fall. Most of the leaves were still on the trees, changing from green to yellow to faint shades of orange now at the beginning of autumn. She wasn't raking but was doing something to the lawn, something that involved a strange contraption that looked a little like a very old, manual lawn mower, except it had long spikes instead of blades on the revolving part. The spikes dug into the ground as she walked around. When I looked at her feet, I saw that she was wearing shoes with similar spikes on them.

"What are you doing?" I inquired, with the clueless-ness of a born New Yorker who had never in my life had to do anything to a lawn before.

She glanced at me. "Aerating. The soil is compacted, so I'm loosening it up. Then I'm going to seed and fertilize before the lawn goes dormant for the winter. Come spring, I'll have nice, green gra.s.s."

Gra.s.s hibernated? Who knew?

"Do I have to do this, too?" I said. "To Aunt Inga's lawn?"

She shook her head. "David Todd will do it for you, if you ask him. For a fee, of course."

"Of course." I leaned my arms on the picket fence, watching her walk back and forth a couple of more times. It was mind-numbing and peaceful, like watching clothes revolve in a washing machine.

"What's going on?" Kate asked on her next pa.s.s. I shook myself out of my dream world and back to reality.

"What isn't? Wayne and Brandon have moved the skeleton to Barnham College. Josh is going to try a forensic approximation computer program. I drove Derek's truck into a ditch when the brakes broke, and Peter Cortino says someone tampered with them. The cadaver dog has been all over the yard on Becklea and declared it corpse free, except now Venetia Rudolph is dead."

"What?"

I repeated myself.

"How?" Kate demanded.

"Hit over the head with a flower arrangement. Sometime last night."

"Why? By who?"

"No idea. Wayne thinks it has something to do with the skeleton, so I guess 'who' would be the same person who killed the woman who was buried under the house, and 'why' is because Venetia knew, or suspected, or might have known, who that person was. But that's just a guess."

Kate nodded. "Did you come by to tell me the news?"