Do-It-Yourself - Spackled And Spooked Part 18

I shook my head. "Nothing at all. We just had to deliver some bad news."

"What's that?"

I hesitated, but ultimately there seemed to be no reason not to tell him. We'd told Denise, and by all accounts, Lionel had grown up with Holly, too, and been friendly with her. Maybe he'd even have something useful to add to what we already knew. "Those bones in the crawls.p.a.ce up the street? They've been identified."

Lionel blinked but didn't say anything.

"It was Holly. Holly White."

"d.a.m.n," Lionel said. I nodded.

"I'm sorry. You two grew up together, right? Denise said you were friends."

Lionel nodded. "Neighbors. Took the school bus together in the mornings, that sort of thing."

"It's strange that no one realized she was missing for four years."

"We weren't that close," Lionel said with a shrug of his scrawny shoulders. "Especially after she started dating Brandon Thomas. Thought she was too good for the rest of us once she had a rich boyfriend."

"Rich?" Brandon was a cop, one who had joined the police force pretty much straight out of high school; how could he be rich?

"He was going to go to college and become a lawyer or something," Lionel said, "but then he changed his mind and joined the police instead."

"Really? That's interesting."

Lionel shrugged. Apparently it wasn't that interesting to him. I let it go for now and returned to the question of Holly White and her disappearance.

"You never suspected that Holly hadn't left of her own free will? That something was wrong?"

"Didn't see her much," Lionel said with another shrug. "She was always with Brandon. And then she just disappeared one day. I thought she'd gone to LA. She always said she was going to. Get out, be somebody. Leave us all in the dust."

"Denise said Holly left a note for her mom," I said.

"Don't know nothing about that," Lionel answered and put the van in gear. "I gotta go."

"Sure." I stepped back, and he drove away up the street.

"What was that all about?" Kate asked when I climbed into the Volvo next to her.

"I'm not really sure," I answered. "I guess he just wanted to know what we'd been talking to Denise about, and then things kind of developed from there."

I repeated what Lionel had said, and when I got to the part about Brandon and law school, Kate nodded. "He's from the Village. His family owns a Victorian a block or two away from your house. To a kid from the suburbs, that might sound like Brandon's rich, although I don't think they've got much money. They've owned the house for several generations, and it hasn't been updated in donkey's years. Still, he might have made it to law school if he'd wanted to. I guess he must have decided he'd rather be a detective."

"Guess so," I said.

17.

Dinner at Kate's that night turned out to be a lively affair, in spite of the circ.u.mstances. Since it was late afternoon by the time we finished talking to Denise, I went along with Kate to Shaw's Supermarket to pick up the ingredients for Irish stew, mashed potatoes, and soda bread, and then helped her mix and chop and prepare. Between Kate and Cora, I might learn to cook yet, I reflected as I creamed potatoes and b.u.t.ter and a dollop of sour cream in a lovely, turquoise Fiesta dinnerware bowl that would work wonderfully as a vessel sink for the main bathroom in the house on Becklea.

We had called Derek to let him know what was going on. He was still at Cortino's, hanging out with Jill while Peter was finishing the work on the truck, and he promised to come to Kate's when he was done there. Kate tried to call Wayne, too, to tell him about our conversation with Denise, but his phone was busy all afternoon. Poor guy, he was probably scrambling to get everything done without Brandon's help. At five o'clock, after Josh had dropped Shannon off, he drove out to Becklea to kidnap his father. Ricky seemed to feel that going back to Becklea was preferable to being stuck in Kate's house with us three women, so they took off together.

"Where's Paige tonight?" I asked Shannon as the two of us got busy setting the table in the dining room. She shrugged.

"She has a project due tomorrow that she has to work on. Ricky offered to help her, but she told him to go with us instead."

"How long have you known him?"

"Just a couple of weeks. He transferred in from Carnegie Mellon the beginning of the semester. Why?"

It was my turn to shrug. "No reason. I just wondered how long he's been in town. That kind of thing."

"Not long enough to have killed Holly White," Shannon said.

"I wasn't really thinking that." Or maybe I was. He was the right age to have known her. Same age as Brandon Thomas, more or less: a couple of years older than the others. Same age as Lionel Kenefick and Denise. "Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure," Shannon said. "This is my second year at Barnham. It's a small school. He didn't attend last year, or I'd have seen him."

"Why did he choose to come here? From Carnegie Mellon? Had he been to Waterfield before? Does he have family here?"

"Not as far as I know," Shannon said, folding cloth napkins into precise triangles and setting them upright on every plate. "If he does, he hasn't mentioned it. I don't know why he chose to come here. Maybe someone told him about Barnham."

"Have you asked?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, I haven't. Why would I? I don't care why he chose to come here. We have students from all over the country, and some from abroad, too. I just a.s.sumed he had heard about it at some point and decided he'd like to go to school in a small town in Maine. Pittsburgh's a big city, right?"

"I guess."

"If you're so interested," Shannon said, folding another napkin, "why don't you ask him?"

I shrugged. Maybe I would.

Josh and Ricky came back a little before six, trailed by Wayne in the police car. A couple of minutes later, Derek pulled to the curb outside. I excused myself from the hubbub and went out to greet him. I hadn't seen him since that morning, and then only for a few minutes; so much had happened today that it felt like an eternity ago.

Derek looked as tired as I felt, with lines bracketing his mouth. "Hi, Tink." His voice was hoa.r.s.e, and there were shadows in his eyes. He held out his arms, and I stepped in. For a minute, we just stood intertwined without talking, his nose buried in my hair and my cheek against his chest. I hadn't realized how tense I was until I felt the tightness seep out of my muscles. Then Derek stepped back and dropped his hands to my arms, blue eyes searching my face. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine." I smiled bravely. "I'm still sore, and I'll probably have bruises for a week, but considering how much worse off I could be, I won't complain."

He put an arm around my shoulders to lead me up the garden path to the front of the inn. "Did Peter tell you he thought someone had tampered with the brakes?"

I nodded. "Have you told Wayne? He's inside."

"Oh, I'll tell him," Derek said grimly. "I know he's got his hands full with the two dead bodies he's already found, but if whoever did this tries again, you and I could turn into two more, and I'd like to avoid that if I can."

"You and me both." I snuggled a little closer to his side as we walked up to the wraparound porch. His arm tightened, although he didn't speak.

Everyone else was already seated at the table when we came in, pa.s.sing bowls of stew and mashed potatoes around. Wayne looked up. "Derek. Have a seat. What did the Cortinos say?"

Derek held my chair while he repeated what Peter had told me earlier, with some additional technical details that went right over my head, but which all the men seemed to understand. A lively conversation ensued between bites of Irish stew as they debated what had happened, how it could have happened, and what might have happened if I hadn't driven the truck into the ditch. I lifted the napkin that hid the basket of soda bread while I listened, and I fished out a fragrant, moist slice.

Ricky wasn't as active in the conversation as the rest of the men, I noticed. Maybe Pittsburgh, like New York, was a big enough city that he hadn't needed to drive before he came to Waterfield. Maybe he, like me, was less knowledgeable about cars and what made them tick than the native Mainers, who had been driving since they were fifteen or sixteen. Or maybe he was just shy and preferred listening to talking. I smiled at him across the table.

"I've never been to Pittsburgh. Is it like New York, where you don't need a car? Or is it more like Los Angeles, where you can't get around without one?"

I added, in an aside to Kate and Shannon, "My mom's always lived in New York, too-well, she grew up in Portland, actually, but she moved to New York when she married my dad-and now she's remarried and living in California. She says it's very different."

Kate nodded. Shannon opened her mouth to say something then glanced at Ricky and closed it again.

"Never been to California," Ricky said. "Pittsburgh's a big city. There are buses and inclines and the T."

"The T?"

"Trolley. Light-rail. Subway."

"Sounds like New York," I said. "Without the inclines, of course. And the trolleys. But we have a ferry to Staten Island."

Ricky shook his head. "No ferries in Pittsburgh. The rivers are small. There are bridges and tunnels instead."

Enticed out of his sh.e.l.l, Ricky turned out to be almost eloquent, at least on the subject of his hometown. It sounded like a nice place, not at all like its rather unfortunate name, and Ricky sounded like he had enjoyed his life there.

"What made you come here?" I asked. "There are colleges in Pittsburgh, aren't there?"

Ricky's face seemed to shut down, and he ducked his head. "Lots. I went to Carnegie Mellon last year. Guess I wanted a change of pace."

"How come? Have you always lived there?"

For a second, I wasn't sure he would answer, and I waited for him to challenge my right to question him. "Pretty much," he said eventually. "Since before I started elementary school."

"So Waterfield must be quite a change. What made you decide this was where you wanted to be?" As far as I knew, Barnham College didn't have any courses he couldn't have found somewhere else. Especially a school like Carnegie Mellon.

Ricky hesitated. "Someone told me about it," he said eventually. When I didn't speak, he added, "My aunt Laurie."

"Did she go to Barnham?"

He shook his head. "No, but her sister did. Excuse me." He nodded to Kate and Shannon and got up from the table.

"Third door on the left down the hall," Kate called after him. Ricky vanished.

As soon as he was out of sight, Shannon turned accu satory eyes on me.

"Sorry," I said. "Guess I upset him."

"I guess you did. Why were you being so pushy?"

"I didn't realize I was being pushy. It's not unreasonable to wonder why someone from Pittsburgh would move to Maine to go to school. Or why someone would leave Carnegie Mellon to attend Barnham College. There's no reason why he'd have a problem telling me. Is there?"

The rest of the table had fallen silent now, too, and everyone was looking at me.

"He's kind of private," Josh said. "Never talks much about his family or what made him decide to come to Maine. Mostly, when he talks, it's about computers. I've never heard him talk as much about himself as he just did."

"He talks to Paige, though," Shannon added. "I think."

"He'd have to," I said, with a smile. Paige isn't exactly what I'd call loquacious, either. Shannon smiled back.

"Paige talks. You just have to get to know her. And I guess Ricky does, too, when it's about something he cares about."

Like his hometown. "I wonder why he stopped. Maybe it was something I said."

I thought back, but couldn't really put my finger on anything that might have upset Ricky.

"Avery and I spoke to Denise Robertson this afternoon," Kate changed the subject. "She lives on Becklea and was Holly's best friend growing up."

This was directed at Wayne, who asked, "You told her about Holly? Did she say anything I need to know about?"

Kate went over the conversation, while Wayne took notes with one hand and ate with the other. Mult.i.tasking. "And she didn't suspect that Holly hadn't just up and left?" he said when she was finished. Kate shook her head.

"Apparently not."

"None of them did," I added. "We spoke to Lionel Kenefick, too-he was on his way home and stopped to ask what was going on-and he said she always talked about going to Hollywood. Everyone just thought she had."

Wayne nodded. "I'll have Brandon . . ." He stopped, clenched his hand into a frustrated fist, and started over. "I'll talk to Linda White tomorrow morning. She's at work. Brandon broke the news to her, but apparently they're shorthanded or something at the Shamrock, and she had to stay. Or maybe she chose to. Maybe she wanted the distraction. Or maybe it's not that much of a shock. After four years without a word, she might have expected something like this."

We nodded.

"If she suspected something," Derek said, "you'd think she'd have filed a report, though. Or at least talked about it to someone."

"Denise said Holly had left a note," I reminded him. "And packed a bag, too. You may want to look into that, Wayne. When everyone thought she left, that made perfect sense, but now that we know she never did, it seems like someone else may have written the note and packed the bag. It wasn't with her, was it?"

"Not that we found," Wayne said. "I don't know if the dog would have marked for it, but Brandon went over the crawls.p.a.ce with a metal detector, too. We found some change and an old spoon and some other junk like that, but if there had been a bag or suitcase with a zipper or clasps buried down there, I'm sure we would have found it."

"So even if Holly wrote the note and packed the bag herself, someone else has it now."

"Or else it's at the bottom of the sea," Wayne said. "That's what I'd do with it. I'll go talk to Linda White tomorrow, see if I can learn anything more."

He took another mouthful of stew, signaling that the subject was closed.

"Ricky sure is taking a long time," Shannon said, with a glance at the door to the hallway.

"He spent a long time in the bathroom on Becklea the other day, too," I answered. "Maybe he's got a sensitive stomach."

"I doubt it. He seems healthy as a horse. Still, maybe one of us should go look for him." She looked at Josh, who got up. As Wayne had once said, when Shannon told him to jump, it didn't occur to Josh to ask anything but how high.