Spackled and Spooked

14

The first order of business, it seemed, was to figure out who the dead woman from the crawlspace 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 nobody 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 crawlspace 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 nobody 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 pass 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 passersby. 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 crawlspace. 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 hit 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 assumed, 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 passed 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 passed 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 basement. 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 crawlspace 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 grass.”

Grass 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 pass. 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?”

“I was on my way home,” I said, explaining that I’d come from Cortino’s auto shop, “and I thought maybe you’d be up for taking a drive down to Barnham with me. You’d get to see Shannon, and maybe we’d discover whether they’ve made any headway in identifying the skeleton. She seems to be the center of it all, poor thing.”

“Sure,” Kate said readily. “Just let me put away the aerator.”

She wandered off across the lawn, taking the opportunity to get in a few more digs on the way. Two minutes later she was back, minus the spiky shoes, and behind the wheel of her tan Volvo station wagon. I clambered into the passenger seat, and off we went, back the same way I’d driven earlier. As the road started climbing toward Devon Highlands, I felt my stomach lurch.

“This is where my brakes gave out,” I said when we crested the hill. The development was spread out on our right, the sound of hammering muted through the car windows. Kate pressed her own brakes, which responded beautifully. “See”-I pointed to the impression the front of the truck had made in the soil-“that’s where I steered the truck into the ditch.”

“Good thing you managed to get off the road,” Kate answered. “You could easily have been up to sixty or seventy by the time you got to the bottom of the hill, and that would have made it tough to turn the car. You might have smashed right into the gates down at the bottom.”

“Or Melissa’s face on that ostentatious billboard.” That might have had a certain kind of poetic justice, actually. Almost satisfying, if I hadn’t been dead by then. “She was here, you know. Along with Ray Stenham and some of the workers. They were actually pretty nice. Ray had the truck towed to Cortino’s while Melissa drove me out to Becklea. Of course she took the opportunity to tell me how happy she is that Derek and I are together, since he was just devastated after she dumped him.”

“Right,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. I glanced at her.

“It did take him rather a long time to get involved with someone else-me-after Melissa.”

“Well, can you blame him? If I’d spent five years with her, I’d want some peace and quiet, too. Wouldn’t you?”

She steered the car around the curve at the bottom of the hill, easily skirting the gates and the billboard of Melissa.

“I guess,” I said. Kate shot me a look.

“You have nothing to worry about, Avery. Derek is over Melissa. He was over Melissa long before they divorced. If you don’t believe me, ask Jill.”

“Jill who? Cortino? Peter’s wife?”

She nodded.

“How would she know?”

The Volvo whizzed past Primrose Drive on the way to Barnham. “Derek and Jill were high school sweet-hearts,” Kate said. “Until he left for medical school and met Melissa.”

The invisible lightbulb above my head flickered on. “So that’s where I’ve seen her before.”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought she looked familiar. I saw her picture in the newspaper archives yesterday. With Derek. Prom picture.”

Kate nodded. “While Derek went away and hooked up with Melissa, Jill studied bookkeeping at Barnham. She never did marry anyone, and I guess everyone thought she was still carrying a torch for him. Until Peter Cortino came to town.”

“When was that?”

Kate thought back. “Must be about five years ago now. Or six. Right before Melissa and Derek split up.”

“About the same time you and Shannon moved here?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know any of them at the time, except for Melissa, but Derek told me what happened later. He and Jill used to hang out sometimes while Melissa was busy showing properties. She didn’t seem to see Jill as any kind of threat, so she didn’t mind the two of them spending time together.”

“Does Melissa see anyone as a threat?”

Kate grinned. “Now that you mention it, probably not. She didn’t mind Derek hanging out with Jill, anyway. Not that anything happened between them; Jill’s too nice to try to seduce someone else’s husband, even when the marriage is as rocky as Derek’s and Melissa’s was. Although people were whispering, of course. Derek and Melissa were on the skids, and Jill was getting into position, biding her time until he was free.”

“Of course.” People are always whispering, aren’t they? “Then what?”

“Then Peter Cortino moved to town and opened Cortino’s Auto Repair.”

“And Jill took one look at him and fell?”

Kate smiled. “You’ve seen him, right? Of course she did. Along with all the other single women in town. And a few of the married ones, as well.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Melissa?”

“She wasn’t above flirting a bit. But Peter’s too decent to poach on someone else’s turf, and Melissa was working her magic on Ray Stenham by then, anyway. Peter’s just an auto mechanic, after all. Nobody important. Melissa wanted money and status. That’s why she married Derek in the first place.”

“And why she divorced him when he decided he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor,” I nodded. “I know. So what happened?”

“Melissa kicked Derek out and started seeing Ray instead. Peter could have his pick of women and surprised everyone when he chose Jill. Not that she isn’t wonderful; she’s just not…”

“Pretty,” I said when she hesitated.

Kate shrugged. “Well, yes. She’s nice, intelligent, very capable, and did I mention nice?”

“Twice. And you’re right, she seems nice. And if she’s a friend of Derek’s, that’s saying a lot right there. So Jill and Peter got married and Derek and Melissa got divorced?”

“That’s pretty much the long and short of it, yes. Derek didn’t seem upset, if that’s what you’re worried about. I think he and Jill had realized long ago that whatever they had when they were teenagers was long gone. But they managed to stay friends through it all, and Peter and Jill were very supportive of Derek when Melissa kicked him out. In fact, when Peter and Jill got married, Derek bought Peter’s apartment.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “So they’ve been married for about as long as Derek’s been divorced. Five years or so?”

“About that, yes. Started having kids right away, too. There are three of them. Peter, Paul, and…”

“Mary?”

She shook her head. “Pamela. Peter’s four, Paul three, and Pammy just over a year old.”

“That’s a lot of kids,” I said.

“Depends on what you compare it to. My mother was one of seven and my father one of five. I’m one of four.”

“I’m an only child. Like Shannon. Did you ever think about having more?”

She laughed. “Lord, no. At the time-nineteen-I had more than enough trouble with the one I had, especially with Gerard being who he was. Raising a kid on your own is no picnic. And now I’m too old.”

“So you and Wayne don’t plan on having any together?”

Wayne and Kate were discussing marriage. He hadn’t officially proposed, but they were talking about it. Weighing the pros and cons, trying to decide whether they wanted to upset the status quo when the status quo worked quite well for them.

“Are you nuts?” Kate said. “I’m almost forty. Wayne ’s forty-six.”

“These days, women have children later in life. And Wayne ’s age doesn’t matter.”

“That’s true. But I’m old enough to be a grandmother. If Shannon had gotten pregnant when I did-and thank God she had more sense than I had at her age!-I’d have had a grandchild already. Could you imagine Shannon ’s and Josh’s faces if we came and told them they’re getting a little brother or sister?”

“It would almost be worth it just for that,” I said. Kate smiled and turned the station wagon into the parking lot at Barnham College.

Barnham looks like one of those picture-perfect colleges you see in the movies, especially at this time of year, surrounded by blushing trees and the clear blue autumn sky. The buildings are brick, with gothic arches above windows and doors, and brooding gargoyles squatting on the corners of the roof. They’re ranged around a central quad, and Kate, who was more familiar with the place than I, headed for a building on the far side.

“Labs,” she explained when I asked. “Science, anthropology, computer, even home ec. I figure we’ll find Josh first-I saw his car in the lot, so I’m sure he’s here-and then we’ll get him to take us to everyone else.”

She led the way to the computer lab, where we found Josh hunched over a desk. On the screen in front of him, a face was slowly taking shape. At the moment it was halfway between skeletal and finished: still very thin, but with olive skin covering the bones, and a nondescript nose and brown eyes.

“Why brown?” I asked. “Derek told me there was nothing left of the eyes.”

Josh glanced at me over his shoulder while his fingers continued to move on the keyboard. “More Americans have brown eyes than blue, green, or gray. And her hair was long and dark.”

His fingers flickered, and a two-dimensional wig appeared on the screen, cupping the skeletal face. Long, brown hair, similar in color to Josh’s own, but straight, without his clustering curls. “And she was young, so she probably had some fullness to her face, here and here…”

The cheeks plumped, and so did the lips, which he tinted pale pink. We all contemplated the result, our heads cocked. “There’s something there…” I said. Josh nodded. Kate looked from one to the other of us, rolling her eyes.

“Get real, you two. Whoever she is, this woman has been in the ground for years. There’s no way you could have seen her, Avery.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “She looks a little like someone I’ve seen, though. I don’t know where or when-or who-but she looks familiar.”

“It’s difficult when you don’t know much,” Josh said. “Her eyes could have been hazel, or gray, or blue, instead of brown.” As he spoke, the image changed eye color rapidly. “Just because brown is the most common, doesn’t mean everyone has brown eyes. Yours and Derek’s are blue, and so are Ricky’s and Paige’s. Her skin could have been lighter or darker. And she could have been overweight enough that it changed her face.” He added fifty pounds or so to the image, which bloated up to something unrecognizable before slimming down again. “And she could have had a hook nose, or a ski jump, or a flat nose, or a pointy chin, or a square chin with a dimple…”

While he spoke his fingers danced over the keyboard, and with every keystroke the image changed, flickering from green-eyed with a pointy chin and a Roman nose, to blue-eyed with a dimpled chin and a pert nose. It was amazing how different the face looked in its various permutations. “She could have had freckles, a mole, a dimple, heavy eyebrows, narrow eyebrows, no eyebrows…”

“ Wayne said this was unreliable,” I said sympathetically. Josh blew out an exasperated breath.

“He wasn’t kidding. I don’t even know how old she was, and let’s face it: There’s a big difference between what someone looks like at eighteen and twenty-eight. So what can I do for you two? You coming to check progress?”

I shrugged. “It’s something to do. I can’t go back to work at the house on Becklea, and although there are still things I need to do to Aunt Inga’s house-I want to paint the porch ceiling blue, and attach some stars, and I found a great porch swing at a flea market a couple of weeks ago, but that needs painting, too-anyway, I can’t seem to concentrate on it. I want to know who this woman is. Was.”

“Maybe some food’ll make you feel better,” Josh said, getting up. “ Shannon ’s at the cafeteria, working on her history project, and I’m not making much progress here. Let’s go.”

He headed for the door, with Kate and me trailing behind. I glanced over my shoulder once and met the brown eyes of the girl on the screen. It was probably just me, but they looked compelling.