Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery)

by Bentley, Jennie

  A staircase in the back of the house led to the second floor, or half story really, since the ceiling sloped in both the upstairs bedrooms. There was a bath up here, too, tucked into the dormer in the front. It was no bigger than the bathroom downstairs.

  I had suggested turning the entire top floor into one big master suite with a walk-in closet—keep one bedroom as a bedroom, turn the other bedroom into a bathroom, turn the bathroom into a dressing room/closet—but Derek had informed me there was a trend toward master suites on the main floor, so he wanted to keep the setup the way it was. It was fine with me. All that stuff is his department. Mine’s the finishes—the tile, the paint, the wallpaper, if any—while he does all the heavy lifting: the plumbing and electrical and framing and drywall. I bow to his expertise with carpentry and construction, while he bows to mine with design.

  I’m a textile designer by trade. Educated at Parsons School of Design in New York City. When I’d inherited Aunt Inga’s house, I was working for a small furniture company, creating upholstery for my then-boyfriend’s handcrafted replicas. But I did go through all the requisite interior design classes at Parsons, so I do know a little about that aspect of things, too. And I have, as the saying goes, a good eye for color and texture.

  As I walked through the mostly empty rooms, I let my imagination go: not to the past, and what it must have been like to live here when Ruth and Mamie were small, but to the future and what the house would look like two months from now, when we were done with it.

  God willing. As Derek never tired of saying, home renovation always took longer and cost more than you thought it would.

  This was our seventh project. But as I looked around, I could feel excitement bubble up inside me again at the thought of taking on something big. This house reminded me of Aunt Inga’s when I’d first inherited it: old and tired and neglected, but full of potential and promise. It could be gorgeous. All the bones were there; they just needed cleaning and polishing.

  And the first step was to get rid of all the junk. I filled my arms with old newspapers and circulars, and headed for the front of the house. A metallic thump from the driveway told me that the Dumpster had been—for lack of a better word—dumped, and was ready for its first deposit of junk.

  • • •

  It took all of the first day and much of the second to clear the house of accumulated junk. By the time we were finally done, it was past midafternoon on Tuesday, and my back hurt from bending and scooping. But at least the house was clean, or clean enough to start working on.

  Or so I thought, until Derek looked around the empty living room and dining room with his hands on his hips and a satisfied look on his face, and said, “Only the basement left.”

  “Basement?” I yelped.

  He turned to me. “Did I forget to tell you about the basement?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oops.” His voice was perfectly calm. “It’s no big deal. Just another hour or two of work.”

  Just another hour or two?

  “Show me,” I said.

  “You haven’t been down there?”

  He asked the question over his shoulder on his way to the back of the house, obviously expecting me to follow.

  “No,” I said, trotting after him. “Before yesterday, I’d only been here twice. First, when we looked at the place before we decided to buy it, and then once with John. We didn’t go into the basement either time.”

  “I went into the basement before I decided to buy the place,” Derek said, opening a door in the kitchen and exposing what looked like a rickety old staircase leading down into stygian darkness. A draft of dank air curled around my ankles, and I fought back a chill.

  “Why didn’t I go into the basement while we were here?”

  “I told you to keep Darren company while I looked around, remember? I didn’t want him following me around looking over my shoulder.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  He had done just that, since Darren Silva had been driving him crazy, dogging his every footstep. So in a quiet moment, he’d whispered to me to get Darren off his back for a while. I had complied by asking Darren to show me the second floor, leaving Derek downstairs to look around on his own. Darren had been torn, clearly, but he fancied himself a ladies’ man, so he came upstairs with me. And dogged my footsteps instead, breathing down my neck. Literally.

  “You might have mentioned it was there,” I told Derek now, peering down into the dank darkness.

  “I forgot you didn’t know. Didn’t you notice the door?” He reached out and flipped a switch, and the light came on. A pale light, illuminating a rough plank staircase, tilting crazily, and a dirt floor.

  I took a step back. “Dirt?” And to answer the question, no. I hadn’t noticed the door. Or rather, I’d seen it, but hadn’t thought to open it. I thought it was a pantry, to be honest. Tucked under the stairs to the floor above. Because he hadn’t said a word about a basement and I’d figured, if there was one, he’d have mentioned it.

  He glanced at me. “Sorry, Tink. They didn’t finish basements in the 1920s. That came later.” He started down. The staircase groaned in protest, and shimmied like a flapper girl.

  “Is it safe?” I asked.

  “Wait until I get all the way down,” Derek answered. “That way, if you fall, I can catch you.”

  Great.

  Derek watched me with a frown as I picked my way down. “You OK, Tink?”

  “Just remembering Aunt Inga’s house,” I said through gritted teeth. I’d fallen down the basement stairs there shortly after moving in, owing to one of the steps being purposely sabotaged.

  “Ah.” His face cleared. “I don’t think anyone’s messed with this staircase. If anyone had, it would have broken when I came down. I’m a lot heavier than you.”

  He was. However, his weight might just have broken it almost all the way, and mine might finish the job. Or so I reasoned.

  But it turned out to be misplaced worry and residual memory, because I made it all the way down into the basement without mishap, and stopped next to Derek to look around.

  The area was smaller than the first floor, but it followed the footprint of the house roughly. And if that didn’t make much sense, it was because there were low walls all around the front and sides of the basement, creating a sort of shelf. Imagine this: a roughly ten-by-fifteen-foot hollow in the ground, with five-and-a-half-foot-tall dirt walls, the tops of which extended another four or five feet toward the foundation of the house. There were grimy windows back there, which let in a little bit of light, although since there was a sprinkling of snow on the ground—just an inch or two—visibility was limited. And because of the dirt shelves, the windows were too far away to be cleaned; not that I saw any need.

  At the back of the house, the basement ended in a flat dirt wall, and didn’t extend all the way under the utility room. I could see the pipes to the kitchen sink cross the insulated ceiling and disappear through the planks into the kitchen floor.

  “Looks like you’ll be spending some time down here,” I told Derek.

  He shot me a distracted look, and I added, pointing to the pipes, “Galvanized iron. You’ll have to swap them out where they’re visible, at least.”

  “And everywhere else. The water pressure is nonexistent.”

  I’d take his word for it, since that was something else he’d checked that I hadn’t paid attention to.

  I turned my focus back to my current surroundings again.

  The basement wasn’t as scarily full of junk as I had been afraid of, from Derek’s estimation that it would take us another two hours to clear it. Maybe I should have guessed, since he’d seriously overestimated the time it would take to clear the rest of the house.

  I mean, there was junk in the basement, and lots of it. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There were plenty of boxes and crates, full of things like old Christmas decorations and chipped china. An old bicycle with flat tires leaned up against one
wall, while a rusty baby carriage stood parked nose-in over in the corner. A fake pine tree still sporting a few sad-looking icicles lay sideways on top of the dirt. A pair of snowshoes and two pairs of child skis were tucked up under the rafters, out of the way. They looked ancient. There were a couple of spades and rakes and other garden implements in a corner, along with a coiled hose, probably stored for the winter. A few buckets and other things lay around: the stainless steel variety instead of colorful plastic.

  Something white and skeletal gleaming faintly over in a corner caught my eye, and caused my heart to jump.

  “What’s that?” I asked Derek, my voice shaky, and my finger equally so.

  He walked a few steps for a closer inspection. “Looks like half a moose rack.”

  “Moose rack?”

  “Antlers,” Derek said. “Maybe someone shot a moose. Or maybe not. More likely they found it lying around, since there’s only one side.”

  “How would a moose lose only one side of his rack?”

  “Fighting,” Derek said. “This isn’t a full half, I don’t think, so chances are he got into a fight with another moose, a bigger one, and the bigger moose broke part of his rack off. It was left lying around somewhere, until someone found it, and then it ended up here.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  He must have heard the relief in my voice, because he smiled. “I don’t think we’ll be digging up any skeletons this time around, Tink. Once was enough.”

  “More than enough.” I still hadn’t quite gotten over the skeleton we’d found buried in the crawlspace under the house we’d renovated on Becklea Drive more than a year ago, hence my initial reaction to the innocent moose rack.

  “It doesn’t look too bad down here,” Derek added, looking around. “I’ll get the skis and snowshoes down. Why don’t you grab the spades and rakes and drag them upstairs?”

  “No problem.” I took what I could and stomped upstairs with it. By the time I got back down to the basement, a little faster this time, since the rickety-looking staircase had proved to be sound, he had taken everything down that had been hanging on or behind the ceiling beams.

  We busied ourselves carrying, crossing paths in the living room or dining room on each trip: one of us coming upstairs with junk, the other returning empty-handed. Outside in the driveway, the Dumpster filled up. The sun set, and gray twilight began to descend. The streetlights flickered on, and Derek turned on the interior lights, too.

  “Not much more now,” he told me bracingly after an hour or so as he passed me with the decrepit fake Christmas tree. It looked like mice had gnawed on the branches to survive the winter. “Another thirty minutes and we’ll be out of here.”

  “Tonight is Kate’s meeting for the home tour,” I reminded him. “Are you planning to come with me?”

  He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and grimaced. “I love you, Avery, but if it’s OK, I think I’ll pass. I’ll help you do whatever decorating you have to do, but I don’t want to sit around all night and discuss it.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Maybe I’ll go hang out with Dad. Since he’s going to be single tonight, too.”

  “Cora agreed to be part of the home tour?”

  He nodded.

  “Have a good time,” I said.

  “We always do,” Derek answered and started climbing. “You, too,” he added over his shoulder.

  No problem. I adored Kate, and Derek’s stepmother, Cora, who it seemed would be there. “I’m sure we will.”

  We worked in silence awhile longer, until the basement was as close to empty as we could get it. “I’ll take the bike upstairs,” Derek said, rolling it—on flat tires—over to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Do you need help?”

  He shook his head. “Easier for one person to carry a bike than for two. Why don’t you go grab the baby carriage and pull it over here, and when I get back, we’ll carry it up together. That’s going to take both of us.”

  I nodded and watched him wrestle the heavy bike up the stairs. It looked like it might be from the 1950s or ’60s, maybe, and they built well in those days. No fiberglass frames back then. “Don’t put it in the Dumpster,” I called after him.

  He peered back down at me. “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure John saw it. He might be interested. It’s his time period.”

  “I’ll put it in the back of the truck,” Derek said. “If he doesn’t want it, we’ll just take it back over here and put it in the Dumpster.”

  “He’ll want it.”

  Derek shrugged. “Get the carriage.”

  He wheeled the bike out of sight. As I headed into the gloom to where the baby carriage was tucked into the corner of the basement, I could hear his footsteps and the scraping of the bike’s wheels up above my head.

  The baby carriage looked to be even older than the bike. From the 1940s, maybe even 1930s. Big and—from what I could make out—gray, although admittedly, it was a little hard to see down here in the corner. Besides, the thing was festooned with so many cobwebs the color could have been anything. Gray, faded black, maybe even blue. Or speckled.

  It had a heavy metal frame anyway and four big, solid wheels. The metal was cold against my hands when I grabbed the handlebar and pulled, to get it out of the corner before turning around and heading toward the bottom of the stairs.

  The carriage responded sluggishly, the wheels not turning at all. I tried again, but nothing happened.

  Maybe there was a brake somewhere?

  I inspected the handlebar, but couldn’t find one. Next I bent to look at the wheels, and there it was. A little metal contraption with a pedal that either lay flat beside, or poked between the spokes of, the wheel.

  I fiddled with it, and after some experimentation, figured out how to move it. Once I saw how, it wasn’t complicated.

  The carriage rolled back, and I tilted it up on two wheels to change direction toward the bottom of the stairs. As I did it, the sunshade flopped down. I guess the mechanism created to keep it aloft had gotten soft with time.

  It hit my thighs, and I squealed. But not because it hurt; because there was a baby lying in the carriage, gleaming palely in the low light.

  —3—

  By the time Derek had rattled down the stairs to my rescue, his face worried, I was bent over, gasping for breath.

  “Avery?” He put a hand on my back and bent, too. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I managed, laughing so hard I could barely speak, in mingled relief and hysteria.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I waved him away and straightened with a little difficulty. “Scared myself half to death.”

  “Why?” He dropped his hand from my back and looked around.

  I gestured. “Baby. Thought it was real.”

  He peered into the carriage and got a funny look on his face. “Whoa.”

  I nodded, wiping tears from my eyes. “I know. The sunshade fell back, and I looked down on the top of its head, and for a second I thought, ‘Baby!’” I wiped the backs of my hands against my jeans to dry them. “It was only a second or two before I saw that it was just a doll, but by then I’d already yelled.”

  “You scared me half to death,” my husband informed me. “I thought something was wrong.”

  “I’m sorry.” I took a step closer to him, and he put an arm around my shoulders and tugged me close to his body. I leaned my cheek against his chest and felt the warmth of his skin through the wool sweater he had on and listened to the steady beat of his heart against my ear until I’d gotten my breath back and could step away again.

  He looked down at me, his eyes bright blue even in the gloom. “You OK now?”

  I nodded. “Fine. Let’s just get this done and get out of here.”

  “Sure.” But he didn’t move, and his eyes took on a faraway look.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  He put a finger to my lips. I listened, and after a second I heard i
t, too. The creak of the front door upstairs, and footsteps on the floor.

  I waited for someone to call out. Waterfield was a small town, where a lot of doors stayed open a lot of the time—ours certainly did right now, since we’d been going in and out with junk—and it wasn’t unlikely that someone we knew should stop by to see how we were getting along. He or she would normally have called our names when we weren’t readily visible, though.

  No one called out. The footsteps walked around, slowly and deliberately, into what sounded like the bedroom and bath, before coming back around to the dining room and kitchen.

  Derek made to move away from me, toward the bottom of the stairs. I held on. When he glanced at me, I shook my head vigorously.

  “I wanna go upstairs.”

  “Could be dangerous,” I whispered.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my husband informed me, but he stayed where he was.

  Eventually, a head appeared in the doorway. “Hello?”

  “Brandon,” I said, and had to take a breath before I could continue, “dammit. You scared me.”

  Derek chuckled.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Brandon said apologetically.

  Brandon Thomas was one of Wayne’s deputies, and also the Waterfield PD’s forensic expert when one was needed. He and I had gotten to know each other quite well during my first few weeks in Waterfield last year, since someone was bound and determined to chase me out of town. He was in his early twenties with a blond buzz cut, bright blue eyes, and all-American good looks. He’d been a quarterback in high school, and that was still obvious. After school he’d wanted to go away to law school, but then he’d found out his mother, Phoebe, had multiple sclerosis, so he’d chosen to stay in Waterfield and take a job with the police instead. He was a nice young man, and a good cop. And because he was dating a canine handler who worked for the state police in Augusta, Wayne lived in fear that someone would steal him away.