Spackled and Spooked

12

Heart sinking-Gacy, here we come!-I kept watching. I expected the dog to sit down, like an X marking the spot, or maybe start clawing the turf, to show where something was buried, but it didn’t. Instead it strained forward, like a pointer after a fallen duck. Ears flat against its head, it pulled its handler forward-across the invisible property line, across Venetia ’s yard, directly to my neighbor’s house.

I stood up and started forward, too, in time to see the small wave of humanity gathered at the front of the property turn as one. Tony and his cameraman forgot all about Derek as they focused in on the excitement. I hurried across the lawn, my aching body protesting every step, and slipped my hand into Derek’s. “What’s happening?”

“Looks like the dog’s scented something on Venetia ’s property,” Derek said. “Maybe this joker has been burying bodies all up and down Becklea.”

A couple of the neighbors looked appalled at this idea, and who could blame them?

The camera tracked the K-9 team, but the rest of us managed to stay at a respectful distance as the dog made its way toward Venetia ’s house, stopping every so often to sniff the air and get its bearings. I expected at any moment to see it stop, sit, scratch the ground; mark somehow where the body was buried. It didn’t. It just kept going, across the yard, up the stairs to the deck, over to the back door. Daphne peered in, knocked, then wrapped-of all things-the end of her navy tie around the doorknob to try the door. When it didn’t open, she turned and raised her voice. “Chief Rasmussen? I think we may need a lock-smith here.”

Wayne separated himself from the crowd and walked up onto the deck, camera tracking his every move. The two of them put their heads together in low-voiced conversation. Derek and I exchanged a look as whispers broke out all around us.

“Something buried in the basement?” Derek muttered.

“ Venetia as Gacy?” I murmured. His lips compressed, but he didn’t answer. On the deck, Wayne was knocking on the door and calling Venetia ’s name, peering through the window between knocks. He put his hand to his mouth-had he seen something inside? He took a step back. The camera zoomed in as he lifted a booted foot and put it to the lock. The door crashed open with a splintering sound, and an impressed, “Ooooh!” spread through the crowd.

Wayne disappeared inside. After a few seconds, he came back and beckoned. “Derek?”

The dog settled on its haunches, quivering. Derek squeezed my hand reassuringly.

“Looks like maybe you’d better go get Brandon,” he said, before walking away. For once I didn’t take the time to enjoy the view as he walked off; I swung on my heel and headed for the back door to our house instead, aches and pains momentarily forgotten.

By the time I got back outside, Brandon Thomas in tow, speculation was rampant among the gathering throng. As Brandon hotfooted it toward Venetia ’s house, I joined the neighbors. Linda had appeared now, in a flowered housecoat and the same fuzzy slippers as yesterday, and was clustered with Arthur Mattson, Irina, and Denise. Trevor was in a baby carriage today, sound asleep, while Stella was nosing the ground between the wheels.

“… kept to herself,” Arthur was saying when I arrived. “Never associated with anyone, never invited anyone in.”

Denise and Linda nodded; Irina looked less sure.

“She invited me in yesterday,” I said, assuming that “she” was Venetia Rudolph. They all turned to me.

“What was it like in there?” Denise asked avidly, while Arthur Mattson wondered if I’d noticed anything. He didn’t qualify what that something might be, but I guessed he meant anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. I shook my head.

“It looked just like anyplace else. Probably just like any of your houses.” If any of the others were rabid Gone with the Wind fans, at least. “I just saw the living room and dining room, although if the rest of the house looked like those two, it was just an average, normal house.”

I’d seen no strange torture devices and smelled no scent of decomposing flesh. The only shrine I’d noticed had been to Scarlett and Rhett, and Venetia couldn’t have struck me any less like a person who murders other people and buries them in her neighbor’s crawlspace. She did, however, strike me as too intelligent to stash a body on her own property. If the cadaver dog had scented another corpse, I didn’t think Venetia would turn out to be its killer.

Arthur Mattson looked disappointed, but before he had a chance to speak, Tony the TV guy came over. “Whose house?” he asked, gesturing with a manicured thumb.

I hesitated, but the camera was still pointed the other way, and besides, all he’d have to do was read the name on the mailbox. “It belongs to a lady named Venetia Rudolph. Single, lives alone.”

“Thanks.” He turned away and pulled out his cell phone. He was probably calling someone at the television station to ask them to do some digging into Venetia ’s background, just in case he got the chance to ask questions later.

No one else seemed to have anything to say, so we just stood there in a small, huddled group and waited. Nothing too exciting seemed to be happening inside the house. There were no screams, no loud explosions, no aging woman bursting through the door screaming, “You’ll never take me alive!” Brandon had long-since disappeared inside. Daphne the trooper led her canine companion past us toward their state police vehicle. The dog was just walking now, scenting neither ground nor air. “Great job, Hans,” I heard Daphne say as they walked by. “Good boy.”

Stella the shih tzu looked longingly at the regal Hans, but he didn’t dignify her presence with as much as a flick of his tail. In the baby carriage, Trevor whimpered, made a quarter turn, and slept on.

After a few minutes, the back door opened again, and Derek came out. He stood for a second on the deck, looking out at us all, before he crossed the deck and started down the stairs. His steps were heavy, and my heart sank. What had they found inside? More bones? Body parts?

Excusing myself to the neighbors, I hurried forward and caught up with him at the foot of Venetia ’s stairs. “What is it? What did you find?”

He shook his head, lips tightly pressed together. “She’s dead.”

“ Venetia? But…” It took a second for the news to sink in, and then I felt the color leach out of my face. I must have wobbled, because Derek’s arm shot out and caught my elbow. “How?” I managed. “What happened?”

“Wayne and Brandon will figure that out,” Derek said, keeping his voice low. “They just wanted me to make absolutely sure that she was beyond any lifesaving measures, and they did the rest. I couldn’t even pronounce, since I’m not actually an MD anymore. They’ll have to get dad to do that, or the ME from Portland.” He looked upset.

“But you could tell what happened?”

He nodded, lowering his voice. “She was hit over the head with something. Last night.”

“Hit? With what? Why?”

He shrugged. “Flower arrangement in a vase. It was on the floor next to her. In a couple of pieces.”

I did my best to think straight. “The one from the dining room table? With the magnolias and leaves? I saw it yesterday, when she invited me in.”

“You were inside her house yesterday? You should talk to Wayne, see if he’ll let you look around. Just in case you notice something.” He turned me around and escorted me up the stairs to the back door again, an arm around my shoulders hustling me along. I turned my face away from the TV camera.

Yesterday, I’d come through the front door, and all I’d seen of the house was the L-shaped living room-dining room combination. As in our house, Venetia ’s back door led into the den. Hers was paneled in a greenish color, with the same brick fireplace on the back wall. It had a swag of magnolias draped over the mantel and a picture of Tara hanging above. (That would be Scarlett’s Tara, not my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Tara Hamilton.) The carpet was green and the furniture upholstered in floral chintz.

“In here,” Derek said, gesturing to the doorway to the living room. I took a breath and plunged through.

Venetia was lying on her stomach in the middle of the floor, and there wasn’t as much blood as I’d feared. Her gray hair was matted, and a smallish puddle had soaked into the rose-colored carpet by her head, but that was all. And she looked pretty peaceful, all in all. Her eyes were closed, and her teeth weren’t bared or anything weird. She looked like she was sleeping, except for the fact that she was clearly not present anymore. Her soul, for lack of a word less fraught with controversy, had left her body.

Until we bought the house next door to Venetia ’s, I’d always thought ghosts were a bunch of hooey. People died and were buried, and that was that. But now, with unexplained footsteps walking down the hallway next door, I wasn’t quite so sure. Maybe the soul really does survive the death of the body and goes somewhere else. Or stays where it is, hanging out, as the case may be. In certain circumstances, anyway; maybe when death comes unexpectedly. Maybe Venetia ’s soul was still hanging around, too. I looked around nervously, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Avery was here yesterday,” Derek explained to Wayne and Brandon, who were busy looking around. “I thought maybe she’d notice if anything was missing or looked wrong. Avery?”

He turned to me. I shook my head. “It looks just like it did yesterday. Except that she’s changed her clothes since I saw her. Yesterday afternoon she was wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. This looks like pajamas.”

Venetia ’s compact body was encased in a plain, white T-shirt and a pair of flannel lounge pants in shades of blue, green, and red plaid.

“ Maine tartan,” Derek said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s the official Maine tartan. Designed in the 1960s by a guy named Sol Gillis. The light blue is for the sky, the dark blue for the water, the green for the pine forests, and the red for the bloodline, or the people, of Maine.”

“Huh,” I said.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Derek answered with a shrug.

“Well, whatever it is, she wasn’t wearing it when I saw her. She must have put it on later. So she must have been killed late at night, after she got ready for bed.”

“That’s what we’re thinking,” Wayne nodded. “Her bed’s been turned down, but not slept in, and there’s a book on the sofa and a mug of cold tea on the table.”

“I notice you didn’t disagree with the idea that she was killed.”

He shook his head. “Not much doubt about that. She’s in the middle of the floor, there’s nothing she could have hit her head on accidentally, and she couldn’t have reached back and knocked herself out, either. Especially not with this big thing.” He toed one of the pieces of the large fake magnolia arrangement.

“I guess not,” I agreed. So someone must have gotten in somehow after all the hoopla died down last night, and had conked Venetia on the head. But why?

I looked around. “It doesn’t look like anything’s missing. All the collectibles are still here,” and Venetia had had enough Gone with the Wind paraphernalia to make a fortune on eBay, “and so are the TV and the silverware on the table and the antiques, what few she owned. Most of this is reproduction furniture.”

“You’d know,” Derek said, making a sly reference to the fact that my ex-boyfriend and former boss, Philippe, had been a furniture maker.

“Unless we find a hidden safe somewhere,” Wayne said, “and it’s been cleaned out, it doesn’t appear as if robbery was the motive.”

I had to agree. “Do you think it has something to do with what happened in our house? Finding the bones?”

Wayne looked like he might have hesitated for just a second. “Likely there’s a connection, yeah. Somewhere. When two unusual things happen back-to-back like this, usually they’re connected somehow. When you saw her yesterday afternoon, how did she seem?”

I shrugged. “Just like always. Tart. Full of questions about what was going on next door. We talked a little about the people she’d seen around the house, because I was trying to figure out whether Venetia might know who the skeleton was, or who might have put her there. Without realizing she knew it, of course.” I went through the list of individuals Venetia had mentioned, who had been seen in or around the house over the past few years. “That reminds me,” I added, digging in my pocket for the earring, “I found this in the kitchen next door a couple of days ago. We thought it might have belonged to one of the Murphy women, but Mr. Nickerson, at Nickerson’s Antiques downtown, says it’s not old enough. And Shannon McGillicutty has a similar pair, which she says Josh gave her for Christmas a few years ago.”

Wayne nodded to Brandon, who pulled a little Ziploc bag out of his pocket. I dropped the sparkly drop into it, and he sealed it and, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at his boss, put it down on the gleaming surface of the coffee table. I opened my mouth to ask if he recognized it, but before I had the chance, Wayne continued.

“It was in the kitchen?”

I nodded. “In the dust where the fridge used to be. See, Derek ditched the old fridge and stove the day we started work because…” I stopped, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Because of what?” Wayne prodded. I swallowed.

“Because there was a spill of something down the side of the stove. From the corner. We thought it was tomato sauce or ketchup…” I trailed off, fully aware of how lame the excuse sounded. We’d talked about tomato sauce and ketchup, yes, but what had caused us to hustle the appliances out of the house in a hurry, was the thought that the spill was blood. I’d assumed the blood to be from one of the Murphys, but now…

“Where are the appliances now?” Wayne asked. Derek gestured with his thumb.

“The dump. They were more than twenty years old, so I doubted even the reuse center would want them. I loaded them in the truck and drove them out to the landfill. Didn’t want them sitting around, even in the Dumpster.” He grimaced.

Wayne nodded to Brandon, who left, without a word being exchanged.

“They were red,” Derek called after him. He added, for our benefit, “No sense in him wasting time looking at every white and almond and stainless steel stove he sees.”

“Maybe we should go with him,” I suggested. “We’re cluttering up Wayne ’s crime scene as it is. Is Brandon finished next door, so we can go back to work, or does he still have things to do?”

“There are no more bodies in the crawlspace,” Wayne answered, walking with us toward the back door of Venetia ’s house, “and none on the rest of the property, either. Just the one we’ve already got out. With this new victim, and figuring out who the old one was, and processing the stove and fridge when we find them, not to mention the work you two have already done tearing everything useful outta there, I’m gonna say that Brandon’s probably finished. But it might be a good idea to wait until tomorrow anyway, just to get rid of the crowds and the reporters before you go back in.”

I nodded. Made sense.

“If you’d wanna ride with him out to the dump to see if maybe you can expedite things, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“I’ll do that,” Derek said. “Maybe he can drop me off at Cortino’s on the way back into town.” He jogged after Brandon, who was in the process of getting into his cruiser.

Daphne the state trooper was packing things up, too, letting Hans into his special compartment in the K-9 vehicle. I guessed their job here was done. Wayne excused himself to go talk to her, and I stood on the lawn for a second, at loose ends, before I trudged back to the neighbors. Word would be out in a few minutes anyway, and they’d already started speculating-wildly-so maybe it would be better just to tell them the truth instead of allowing them to perpetuate the myth that Venetia had murdered untold numbers of people and hidden them in her house.

“Well?” Arthur Mattson said when I was close enough to hear him. The rest of the group turned, eagerly.

I waited until I didn’t have to raise my voice. “I’m afraid Miss Rudolph has died.”

“Died?” Arthur repeated, as if the word didn’t quite compute. I nodded.

“Murdered?” Denise asked shrilly. Tony the TV guy’s head turned toward the sound. She lowered her voice. “By the same person who killed whoever was in your basement?” It was by no means certain that the same person had killed both our unknown skeleton and Venetia, although as Wayne had said, when two unusual things happen in close succession and right next door to one another, it would be a monstrous coincidence if they weren’t related.

“I don’t know about that,” I said as Tony started toward us.

“But she was murdered?”

“Well…”

“Oh, my God!” Denise glanced down at the sleeping Trevor and around as if she were afraid someone was getting ready to pounce on him.

“How?” Arthur demanded.

“Um… I think maybe it would be better to leave the telling of that to the police.”

Arthur looked like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. “An accident?” he suggested.

I shook my head. “Likely not.”

“Mercy.” He shook his head. Irina muttered a Russian word or two, and Denise squeaked. Linda crossed herself.

“She was an awful old battle-ax,” she said, with the air of one giving credit where credit was due. “Always carrying on about the kids today. No morals, no sense, no respect for their elders; and the girls, how they were dressed…! Remember, Denise?”

Denise nodded, a faint smile on her lips as she watched Trevor sleep. Linda continued, “But she surely didn’t deserve that. There wasn’t any harm in her. Just because she couldn’t seem to mind her own business…”

She pulled a miniature liquor bottle out of the pocket of her housecoat and tipped it in the direction of Venetia ’s silent house before taking a swig.

“Amen,” Arthur Mattson said. “She’d always stand behind those curtains whenever we’d walk by, making sure I kept Stella off her grass and didn’t let her do any of her business on Venetia’s lawn. Still, you wouldn’t wish something like this on your own worst enemy.”

The others shook their heads solemnly.

“I remember once,” Denise said with a giggle, “when Holly and I…” She stopped abruptly, blushing, and made herself busy adjusting the light blanket that covered the sleeping Trevor. Nobody spoke, and the silence lengthened, heavy.

“Who’s Holly?” I said eventually, looking from one to the other of them. Irina shrugged. Denise still had a betraying blush in her cheeks. I guessed that she and Holly, who must have been her friend, had done something mean or embarrassing to Venetia back in the day, which she wasn’t about to own up to now, when Venetia was due the respect usually accorded the newly deceased. “Holly White?”

Linda shot me a look, and Denise nodded. “We were friends growing up. How do you know about Holly?”

“I don’t,” I explained. “Just the name. Brandon Thomas mentioned her yesterday, when he was talking to Lionel Kenefick, and I happened to see her picture in the newspaper archives yesterday, too. Prom photo. Pretty girl.”

“Gorgeous,” Denise nodded.

“He said she went to Hollywood to become an actress?”

“That’s what she always said she wanted to do. Hollywood or Las Vegas. Or maybe Paris or Rome.”

Linda snorted and took another swig from her bottle. At this rate, it would be empty in another minute.

“She didn’t even stay for graduation,” Denise added. “Just up and left one day. Without even a good-bye. They had to mail her diploma, didn’t they, Mrs. White?”

She looked at Linda. I blinked, surprised. Whoa, not much family resemblance there between the lovely and svelte creature from the photograph, in her shimmery gown and tiara, and her mother, overweight and boozy, in a wrinkled house dress and with rollers in her hair.

“You’re Holly’s mother?” slipped out of my mouth.

“For my sins.”

“Surely she can’t have been that bad?”

Linda didn’t answer. “She wasn’t bad,” Denise said. “Just… different, I guess. Waterfield was too small for her. She was always talking about how she needed to get out, to see places and do things. Exciting things. Because nothing exciting ever happens here.” She shrugged.

I looked around at the hustle and bustle of police cruisers and K-9 vehicles, cops and TV cameras. There was nothing slow and sleepy about what was going on in their quiet subdivision these days.

“Looks like something exciting has happened now,” I said.