Crime & Punctuation

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  That was the first time I truly understood the meaning of “be careful what you wish for.” While I watched, the teacher and his wife walked into their bedroom. A moment later, they were locked in a passionate embrace. This wasn’t just necking in a hammock. This was hard-core. They tumbled onto the bed and started tugging at each other’s clothes. My cheeks were burning, but I couldn’t look away. I was both disappointed and relieved when they broke apart long enough for him to turn off the light, plunging the room into darkness and putting an abrupt end to the peep show.

  It’s a good thing I wasn’t musical. I didn’t have to see that teacher in class or chorus or even work with him on the school-wide musical. The one time his wife asked my mother if I was available to babysit for them, I came up with an excuse to get out of it. I could no longer remember what I’d said, but my reason must have been a doozy. Mom was never one to let me shirk responsibility, and she was a firm believer in the theory that young people should earn their spending money.

  Even back then, I mused, I hadn’t been particularly fond of taking care of little kids, no matter how well their parents paid me. It hadn’t been much of a stretch to decide I didn’t want any of my own.

  I started to turn away from the window when a new thought struck me. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me before, but I suddenly realized that if I had found it so easy to spy on the neighbors, then they must have had an equally good view of what went on inside our house. When I took another look out the window, it seemed to me that the house next door was even closer than I remembered. I suspected that the same was true of the distance between my house and the one on the other side. No wonder one of my mother’s most frequent warnings when we argued was: “Keep your voice down. Do you want the neighbors to hear?”

  “We were spoiled living where we did in Maine,” I said to the cat.

  Our nearest neighbor had been on the opposite side of busy U.S. Route 2, and his house was set well back on his lot. No other houses were close to our place. It was surrounded by open fields and a forested hillside.

  You wanted to come back to Lenape Hollow, I reminded myself. This is the compromise.

  I felt certain I’d get used to the lack of privacy, just as I’d grow accustomed to living on one acre instead of twenty-five. At least the present-day crop of neighbors seemed to be pleasant people. The house I’d just been staring at had been converted back into a one-family dwelling. The folks living there were a family of four, the O’Days. The parents, Tom and Marie, both worked and their teenage children appeared to participate in every extracurricular activity known to man.

  The house on the other side of me also housed a single family, the Frys. The adults were quiet and kept to themselves, but their three kids had the run of the neighborhood. They were loud, boisterous, and prone to cutting across my backyard to get to a friend’s house at the other end of the block. I’d done the same thing in reverse when I was their age and never understood at the time why that had made old Mrs. Mintz so livid. She used to stand just outside her back door and yell at me to get off her property. Naturally, I ignored her. She died when I was seven or eight and the Rosens—the ones with the nephew—moved in.

  Calpurnia stropped herself against my leg. I scooped her up and carried her out of the room. Then I did an about-face to shut off the faucet. It was getting late, and it had been a long day. The next week was scheduled to begin as early and as noisily as the last. Sleep beckoned.

  “Remind me to close the curtains before I turn on the light in the bedroom,” I instructed the cat. “Kids are terrible snoops.”

  I was smiling as I carried her across the hall. I had not entirely outgrown that tendency myself, but I was fairly certain that I’d no longer be embarrassed by anything I saw.

  Chapter 15

  Ten o’clock Monday morning found me back in my makeshift downstairs office with the pocket doors closed. Above my head the carpenter, Charlie Katz, was installing built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the real office. It was going to be an ideal place to work when it was finished, but in the meantime all that pounding was distracting.

  Not only was there activity upstairs, but Matt Adams, the plumber, was hard at work on the downstairs bath that shared part of a wall with the dining room. He was a gruff, no-nonsense individual who hadn’t said more than three words to me since the first day of renovations, but his thumping and clanging was loud enough to wake the dead. It was not good background music for someone struggling to find a politic way to tell a client that he needed to throw out the first three chapters of the novel he’d been slaving over for the past six years.

  I jumped when someone knocked on the opaque panes in the pocket doors and slid one side open far enough to poke his head into the room. It was George Finkel, the electrician, a man on the lean side but with a compact build. His plain, square face was dotted with old acne scars and topped with wispy brown hair that was slowly giving way to baldness. I couldn’t begin to guess his age, other than to say he was long past being a teenager and not yet close to retirement.

  “Hello, George,” I greeted him, proud of myself for finally putting names and faces together. “Is there a problem with the wiring?”

  “Not anymore, but it’s a good thing you decided to upgrade. Mice sure made a mess of the old wires.”

  “Mice!”

  I managed not to add “Eek!” or jump up on my chair, but I have to admit that I’ve never been fond of rodents. Calpurnia, of course, enjoys a tasty mouse now and again, and regularly went on hunting expeditions in the cellar of our house in Maine. She was always generous when she caught one. I can’t begin to count the number of times I found parts of a mouse she’d left for me, usually by stepping on them in my bare feet first thing in the morning on my way to the coffeepot.

  “The outlets in this house hadn’t been checked for at least forty years.” George’s gaze strayed to the old-fashioned radiator in one corner of the room. “I guess none of the owners were much for changing things.”

  “Personally, I’m glad no one ripped those out to put in baseboard units. They make it next to impossible to arrange furniture because you always have to be careful not to block the heat.”

  “Good thing someone decided to replace the old oil burner,” George said. “I’d have hated to see an old clunker blow up on you after all the work you’ve had done on this place.”

  “Well, aren’t you a little ray of sunshine today. As it happens, I remember when that old clunker was brand-new. My father had it installed when I was nine or ten years old. Before that we had a coal-burning furnace. We used to get deliveries. The coal came down a chute and landed in one corner of the basement.” After we switched to oil heat, Daddy built himself a darkroom in that space so he could develop his own photographs.

  George was shaking his head. “Now if it was up to me, I’d have gone to electric heat, but I could be biased.”

  I smiled, but I was growing impatient to get back to work. I couldn’t figure out why George was still hovering in the doorway.

  “Was there something else you need to tell me?” I asked. “Other than about the mice?”

  He shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking indecisive. “Mind if I come in for a minute, Ms. Lincoln?”

  “Only if you make that Mikki.” I waved him toward the only empty dining room chair. The others held stacks of reference books and piles of printouts. Although I usually edit on electronic copies, I like to have a printout, too. Sometimes it’s easier to spot errors when I do a read-through on paper.

  George closed the pocket doors before perching on the edge of the seat, his hands clasped together in front of him. His expression had turned ominously grim.

  “This is probably none of my business,” he began, “but I can’t help thinking, what with you living here all alone and everything, that somebody ought to warn you.”

  “Warn me about what, exactly?”

  I was touched by his evident concern for my well-being but bewilde
red, too. As all the workmen had reason to know, since I had to let them in every morning, installing good locks on all the doors and windows had been one of my first priorities when I began renovating the house.

  “Not about what. About who.”

  I bit back my instinctive urge to correct him by saying whom. Instead I fixed an encouraging look on my face.

  “You got to understand that I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I was checking an outlet in the living room, and I overheard part of what that guy said to you last week.”

  “That guy?” For a moment I was puzzled. “Do you mean Alan Van Heusen?”

  “That’s the one. Smarmy son of a . . . gun. I just want you to know that you shouldn’t hesitate to ask any of us working here for help if he shows up again.”

  “I don’t expect he will, but I appreciate the offer.” When George started to rise, I gestured for him to stay put. “What I don’t understand is what prompted you to make it.”

  George avoided meeting my eyes. “Just take my word for it, okay?”

  In the ordinary way of things, I didn’t suppose an electrician had much direct contact with the people he worked for. George was the quiet type, if not as silent as Matt Adams. All his focus seemed to go into doing his job well. That made it all the more extraordinary that he’d decided to speak up. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to suspect that he might bolt at any moment. I throttled back the impulse to reach across the distance between us and place a hand on his forearm. If I was reading him correctly, the slightest touch would have made him take off like a scalded cat. I studied him in silence for a moment longer, putting two and two together before I spoke.

  “Let me guess. You did a job for Mongaup Valley Ventures, and while you were working there you witnessed something to make you dislike and distrust Van Heusen. Am I right?”

  “Something like that,” he muttered. “I don’t like the way he treats women.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Sexual harassment in the workplace?”

  As anyone who reads a newspaper knows, disrespecting women is still much more common than it should be. That said, I didn’t see how anything George might have witnessed in a business setting could apply to my situation. Van Heusen certainly hadn’t been making a pass at me. I felt my lips quirk into a tiny smile at the absurdity of that idea.

  “No, ma’am. Mikki.” George stammered a little getting my first name out. “I mean the man’s a bully, and so is his boss. It was criminal the way Onslow treated his wife, may she rest in peace.”

  “Are you telling me that Greg Onslow physically abused Tiffany?”

  Abruptly, he stood. “I’ve said too much. You just watch out for yourself, okay?”

  “Wait a minute, George. You can’t just—”

  But he was already gone. I thought about following him but decided against it. If he was unwilling to provide additional details in private, he wasn’t likely to be more forthcoming in front of the other workmen.

  Greg Onslow had a lot of influence in Lenape Hollow, and his plans included construction projects. If George had a family to support, he couldn’t risk word of his warning to me getting back to Mongaup Valley Ventures. I could fully appreciate his need to earn a living.

  At the same time, his criticism of Onslow and Van Heusen brought all my questions about Tiffany’s death back to the surface. Instead of returning to my laptop and the editing job that awaited me there, I retrieved two business cards. Alan Van Heusen had given me his the morning he invaded my temporary office. The other had been handed over by Detective Hazlett on the day he came to the house to find out why Tiffany Scott had been in possession of yet another business card—mine—when she died.

  That third business card, the one I’d given Tiffany, remained at the forefront of my thoughts. Its bedraggled appearance had nagged at me from the beginning. Had it been on Tiffany’s body when she drowned? If so, how could anyone believe that her death was an accident?

  If she had been murdered, the police were supposed to find justice for her. Had they? I doubted it. I didn’t know how homicides were investigated in New York State, but in Maine, unless a suspicious death occurred in the cities of Portland or Bangor, where there were special units to handle such cases, the state police automatically took over. Unlike smaller municipalities, they had the expertise and the facilities to solve major crimes.

  The investigation into what had happened to Tiffany Scott appeared to have been conducted entirely at the local level by a very small village police department. I had no idea how much experience or training Detective Hazlett had, but I hadn’t heard of any other recent homicides in my old hometown.

  As a law-abiding citizen, I was reluctant to think of the police as unqualified or incompetent, and I had no reason to suspect them of corruption, but Hazlett’s conclusion that Tiffany’s death was an accident did not make sense, not given the condition of my business card.

  There was also something off about the intense interest various parties had shown in my dealings with the dead woman, and I’d sensed a definite threat when Alan Van Heusen invaded my home. Receiving George’s warning reinforced the wariness I’d already been feeling.

  So where did that leave me? I fingered Hazlett’s card. It left me nowhere. I was less qualified to investigate a murder than the most poorly trained police officer. The only thing I could do was to continue going through the files on Tiffany’s thumb drive with a fine-tooth comb.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t need to hang on to the thumb drive to do that. Since I back up everything six ways to Sunday, one of the first things I’d done was upload Tiffany’s files to my laptop. Then I’d copied the material to off-site storage, a spare thumb drive, and what I call my security blanket—the thumb drive that lives in the glove compartment of my car. What can I say? I grew up in the era before there were such things as electronic files. I doubt I will ever entirely believe that written material exists unless I can see and touch it. That’s why I print copies of everything I don’t want to risk losing and file the pages in manila folders in an old-fashioned metal file cabinet.

  The only reason I hadn’t yet printed out Tiffany’s files had to do with my tight budget. It would require reams of paper and at least one new toner cartridge. Still, I had made all those other backups. That being the case, there was no reason not to turn the original thumb drive over to the proper authorities. I resolved to do so just as soon as an opportunity presented itself.

  In the meantime, I needed to get back to work. Like George, I had a living to earn.

  Chapter 16

  One of the not so great things about getting older is that many people, myself included, don’t always sleep as well as they once did. Since I have a strong aversion to taking any medication that isn’t absolutely necessary, I avoid sleeping pills. I do, occasionally, take naps during the afternoon when the previous night has been a restless one, but that solution was off the table so long as I had workmen in the house.

  A few years ago, I read an article about “first sleep” that put an end to any worries I might have had about not sleeping straight through the night. Apparently, hundreds of years ago, it was common practice to go to bed, sleep for a few hours, wake up for a while to talk, have sex, or whatever, and then fall back to sleep until it was time to get up. Ever since, when I’ve only slept a few hours and suddenly find myself wide awake, I’ve had no qualms about reaching for the book on my nightstand and reading for an hour or so. If I wake up hungry, I get up and make myself a light snack. Sometimes, against all the advice I’ve seen elsewhere, I even check my email and browse social media until I feel sleepy enough to crawl back into bed.

  The night following my conversation with George, I had trouble falling asleep. It had been a long day in addition to that encounter, and another full one loomed ahead. Matt the plumber had made great progress, but there had not been time for him to finish putting everything back together. The downstairs bath was still torn up and the kitchen sink could only be used with caution. I
didn’t fully understand the details, but the upshot was that until he got hold of a certain part and installed it, the faucet had to be turned on and off with great care. I managed the trick of it once, enough to get the water I needed to boil egg noodles to go with the baked pork chop and salad that constituted my supper, but after that I left it strictly alone.

  When I’d been tossing and turning for a considerable length of time, I decided that “first sleep” wasn’t on the menu for that night. My thoughts turned instead to the prospect of a glass of milk and a few crackers. I got up and retrieved the glasses I’d placed on top of the nightstand. I left my hearing aids behind, since I didn’t need to hear to find the refrigerator, but I grabbed a small flashlight. Why a flashlight? Force of habit. When I was married I never turned on overhead lights or lamps in the middle of the night because I didn’t want to disturb my husband’s sleep.

  Slightly groggy, my way illuminated by the narrowest of beams of light, I made my way downstairs and entered the kitchen. I hadn’t gone two paces before my bare foot landed in a wet spot on the tile floor.

  Drat, I thought, freezing in place. Calpurnia must have thrown up.

  She’s a pretty healthy cat, but once in a while something disagrees with her. And, of course, every time she leaves me a present like that, I find it the same way I find mouse parts, by stepping in the mess. At least feet are easier to clean than shoes or socks.

  Telling myself I should be grateful she’d hit bare floor rather than upchucking on one of the scatter rugs, I backed up until I could flick the wall switch beside the door. At once, the kitchen was flooded with light.

  Flood is the operative word.

  Cal had not thrown up. Since her favorite source of water was a faucet, she’d apparently tried to turn on the tap in the sink, the one for which Matt had been short a part. She’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, and because the plug was in the drain, the sink had overflowed. Water cascaded down the front of the cabinets, and Lake Kitchen grew ever larger as I watched.