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

by Bentley, Jennie

  Sure. But that didn’t mean they’d object. Or think anything of it. “It’s amazing what you can get away with when you do it with enough confidence. If I saw two people in the process of transferring a Christmas tree from the back of a truck to the roof of a car, I’d probably just think they were supposed to be doing it.”

  “Huh,” Derek said.

  I shrugged. “People see what they’re supposed to see. And nobody expects someone to be bold enough to take a Christmas tree off someone else’s truck bed in a restaurant parking lot, and drive away with it.”

  “Except you,” Derek said.

  Well, yeah. Except me.

  Nonetheless, we continued on our merry way to the Waymouth Tavern, which was located on the cliffs above the Atlantic Ocean a few miles outside Waterfield proper, and parked in the lot. But at least Derek consented to parking in the middle of the lot, in plain view of the windows, and with the tree facing the restaurant.

  I loved the place. The view was incredible—even if it was impaired a little by the full winter dark at the moment. In the summer, when the days were long and the nights were light, it was lovely. The interior of the tavern was dark and cozy, with romantic booths lining the walls, looking out over the ocean, topped by reproduction Tiffany lamps in warm colors.

  “We should put a Tiffany lamp or two into the house,” I told Derek when we were seated in a booth overlooking the . . . not water: the parking lot. With our truck and our tree.

  “Our house?” Derek said.

  “No, of course not. The Green sisters’ house. The style isn’t right for a Victorian.”

  For a Craftsman bungalow, on the other hand, it was perfect. Tiffany lamps were Art Nouveau, the first few created in the late 1890s, toward the end of the Victorian era, and then more into the teens and twenties. All handmade, all gorgeous; each one a work of art.

  “If you want,” Derek said.

  “A pendant for the dining room maybe. The Tiffany Company made mostly table lamps, but there are lots of reproduction pendant lamps to be found. Just look around.”

  “One that says Coca-Cola might look nice. Like the ones above the bar.”

  I looked at the bar. Indeed, the “Tiffany” lamps there spelled out Coca-Cola in leaded glass.

  “Maybe not.”

  Derek grinned. “I’m sure we can find something tasteful, Avery. And if not, I know someone who makes stained glass windows. Maybe she could craft you your own custom lamp.”

  Tempting, but . . . “That may be too cost-prohibitive. Whoever buys the house when we’re done with it may not like Tiffany as much as I do. It’s probably safer to go with a generic—tasteful—Tiffany lamp from a warehouse somewhere. Cheaper and easier that way.”

  “Whatever you say,” Derek said and turned to the waitress to order a bottle of beer for himself and a soda for me. Since we’d been there enough to know what was on the menu, we took care of ordering the food at the same time.

  When she left, Derek leaned back against the seat and nudged my foot under the table. “So tell me how I can help you get ready for this Christmas Tour thing, Tink.”

  Ah, yes. That was something else we had to do. “You can help me set up and decorate the Christmas tree. It’s huge.” Almost twice my size.

  “Sure,” Derek said.

  “I can probably manage the rest of the decorating myself, as long as I have time to do it.” The rest was much lower to the ground. Except for the Chinese lantern Christmas ball ornaments, but those weren’t even made yet. There was plenty of time to get those hung.

  He nodded.

  “We’ll have to figure out what we’re going to serve on Sunday.”

  “Serve?” He nodded his thanks to the waitress for putting his bottle on the table, and continued to talk to me. “We’re feeding people?”

  “Just some sort of snack,” I said. “Cookies, or something. Nibbly things. Not a meal.”

  “How many people?”

  “Um . . .”

  He arched his brows, and I said reluctantly, “A couple hundred. But I’m sure they won’t all want a cookie.”

  “Oh,” Derek said darkly, “I’m sure they will. If we don’t have enough cookies for them all, trust me, they’ll all want one.”

  Maybe so. “We can buy them. The cookies.”

  “We’ll have to,” Derek said, “because I’m not baking twenty dozen cookies. I have better things to do.”

  When he put it like that, so did I. Although the odor of fresh-baked cookies would be wonderful, permeating the house and setting the mood. Then again, maybe we could buy a scented candle.

  The food came, and so, after a few minutes, did the fluttery Henrietta, from the Christmas Tour meeting last night. She was accompanied by a distinguished-looking man about the same age as Dr. Ben. I smiled at her, and she gave me a distracted look back, while the man nodded to Derek in passing.

  “Who’s that?” I whispered when they were out of earshot, getting settled at a table around the corner, overlooking the ocean.

  Derek shot them a glance to make sure they weren’t close enough to hear us talk. “Henry Silva. Darren’s father.”

  Ah. I had thought there was something familiar about him, but I’d been sure I hadn’t seen him before. That explained it.

  “And she is?”

  “His sister.”

  “Henry and Henrietta?”

  “I think the father’s name was Henry, too,” Derek said. “I guess their mother wanted to make him happy.”

  Guess so. “She’s on the home tour. She was at the meeting last night.”

  He smiled. “Oh, good. I’m glad she’s feeling well enough to take part in the tour.”

  “Hasn’t she been well?”

  “She’s in her seventies,” Derek said, “with a bad heart. Last spring she contracted pneumonia. She spent a couple weeks in the hospital. Even had a heart attack while she was there. Dad wasn’t sure she’d pull through.”

  “Your dad’s her doctor?”

  “He’s everyone’s doctor,” Derek said with a grin. “She has a heart specialist, of course. In Portland or Boston. But for the pneumonia, yeah. Dad was her doctor.”

  “She seems kind of nervous.”

  “She’s old,” Derek said. “And probably worried about dying.”

  Probably. “Where does her brother live?”

  “Same place as she does. Big house a few blocks down from Dad and Cora.”

  “They live together?”

  “Now,” Derek said. “She was married once, but he passed away. After the pneumonia scare, she moved back in with her brother. I guess he didn’t want her living on her own anymore. His wife is gone, too, twenty years ago, so it’s just the two of them. And Darren.”

  “She must have died young. The wife.” Henry Silva couldn’t be more than sixty-five: tall and distinguished.

  “Divorce,” Derek said. “She isn’t dead—not that I know about—she just moved away.”

  Ah. Yeah, I guess not every person who goes missing is dead. “Does he have a bad heart, too?”

  “Not that I know of,” Derek said.

  “So the house that’ll be on the tour is Mr. Silva’s house.”

  Derek nodded. “Big Arts and Crafts hall on Cabot. Makes the Green house look like a dinky cottage.”

  My jaw dropped. “That’s their house?”

  Derek grinned. “I figured you couldn’t have missed that.”

  No, indeed. The house I was thinking of—the one that must belong to the Silvas—was a rambling Arts and Crafts mansion of about six thousand square feet. Two stories tall over most of it, it was covered with cedar shingles in the traditional New England style, painted a pale grayish green, almost like the water on a cloudy day, or lichen-covered driftwood. It looked a lot better than it sounds, believe me. The place was gorgeous. There were windows everywhere, and lots of dark wood on several open porches along the front and—I assumed—the back. The house looked like it ought to perch on the cliffs overlooking t
he ocean, windblown and spectacular, but instead it sat on an acre or two of grass in the middle of Waterfield Village. It made an impression there, too, or at least it had on me.

  “That’s their house?” I said again.

  “Yup,” Derek confirmed. “That’s it.”

  “What does Mr. Silva do?”

  “He inherited it, along with the family business. Something to do with logging.”

  Lots of logging in Maine. Not so much down here on the coast, but inland. “Good for him.”

  Derek nodded. “The house has been in the family since it was built, I think.”

  The waitress arrived with the food then, and the conversation stalled out while she deposited plates on the table—burger and fries for Derek, chicken sandwich for me—and asked if we needed anything else. When she was gone, I picked up where we’d left off.

  “So what’s the Silvas’ relationship to the Green sisters? I thought Darren was their only surviving relative.”

  “Not the only,” Derek said. “Just the last. At least until he gets married and produces offspring.” He picked up his burger and took a bite. After chewing and swallowing, he added, “I think Henrietta and Henry and the Green sisters are some sort of cousins. They shared the same grandmother, I think.”

  “So their mothers were siblings.” I nibbled daintily on my own sandwich. “Making them first cousins.”

  “I think,” Derek said. “Which would make Darren a first cousin once removed or something, yeah?”

  Something like that. “Do you think we’ll have a chance to sneak away on Sunday to see the inside of their house?” It wasn’t like I’d ever get the opportunity again probably. It wasn’t like they gave tours, and Henrietta and I hadn’t gotten off on that great of a foot, I felt.

  “I think you’ll probably be too busy with your own house,” Derek said.

  When I pouted, he relented. “You could ask Kate if you could tag along when she does her checkups on Saturday afternoon.”

  “Checkups?”

  “Stopping by all the houses on the tour to make sure they’re ready. Melissa used to do it.”

  Of course. Melissa was a perfectionist—or as Derek, more kindly disposed than I, might say it: a professional—and would have wanted to make sure that everything was tip-top and nothing would reflect poorly on her organizational abilities during the tour. I wasn’t sure Kate was quite that obsessive.

  Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Eat your food,” Derek said and devoted himself to his own.

  • • •

  We finished our meal before the Silvas finished theirs, and on our way out, I glanced in their direction. They had gotten their food—Henry was eating steak and his sister what looked like a salmon filet—but the food sat mostly forgotten as they spoke. Or maybe “argued” would be a more accurate term. Henry was pouting like a sulky five-year-old, sitting back in his seat with his arms folded across his chest, while Henrietta was leaning forward across the table, lecturing him in true older-sister fashion. She even stabbed the table a few times with her finger to get her point across.

  “Wonder what that was about,” I said as we pushed out through the door into the parking lot, and the crisp, cold air of the winter night.

  He shrugged. “Family matters? The Silvas have had plenty to deal with already this year, between Henrietta’s heart and Ruth’s hip and helping her and Mamie sell the house. And now there’s the baby skeleton. It’s not strange if things are boiling over a little.”

  “It looked like Henrietta was lecturing Henry, though. And he couldn’t have had anything to do with whatever happened to Baby Arthur. He was a baby, too.”

  “I don’t know, Avery,” Derek said as we made our way toward the truck. The tree was still there, sticking out over the back of the bed. “Maybe she’s unhappy that someone else didn’t find the baby skeleton before the house was sold. Or maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with that at all. Maybe Henry got home late last night and she was worried.”

  “He’s sixty-five!” Surely that was beyond the age where he had to worry about staying out late.

  “Sixty-four,” Derek said. “And she’s still his older sister.”

  He opened the car door for me and gave me a boost inside. “Don’t worry about it, Avery. It’s none of our business, whatever they were talking about.”

  He closed the door. I watched as he walked around the truck to get in on the driver’s side, and although I knew he was right, I couldn’t help but wish I knew what Henry and Henrietta had been talking about.

  —9—

  Wayne dropped by midmorning the next day. We were back to work at the house again. Derek had started to replace the old plumbing, while I spent some more time just sitting around enjoying the view and thinking.

  I probably shouldn’t have been there at all, to be honest. It would have been a better use of my time to be at home decorating for the home tour. There was still a lot to be done. But I felt guilty for leaving Derek to do all the work, even when all I could do was keep him company. And then, when Wayne showed up, I was glad I hadn’t gone anywhere.

  “I just wanted to give you an update,” he told me, stamping his feet and shaking the snow from his shoulders.

  Yes, it had finally started snowing. Pretty little floaty snowflakes drifting toward the ground from a leaden sky. About time, too, in December.

  “We appreciate that.” I closed the front door behind him. “Let me get Derek.”

  Wayne nodded, and shrugged out of his parka while I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and hollered up. “Derek! Wayne’s here.”

  “Just a minute,” floated back down. We waited, and a minute or two later he came clattering down the stairs, his hands grimy from the work.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I wanted to give you an update about the skeleton,” Wayne said. “I sent it to the ME’s office in Portland yesterday, and they looked it over and extracted DNA for a test. Those usually take a long time, but I was curious, and so was everyone else, so we called in a few favors and got it done.”

  “And?”

  “Things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would.”

  I blinked. “It isn’t Arthur Green?”

  Wayne blinked back. “How do you know about Arthur Green?”

  “I checked the newspaper archives,” I said.

  “I checked the old police records.” He glanced at Derek. “Arthur Green was the sisters’ little brother. He disappeared in September 1949.”

  “I know,” Derek said. “Avery told me. But the skeleton isn’t him?”

  “Not conclusively,” Wayne said. “Most likely it is. Hard to imagine who else it could be. There have been no other missing babies in Waterfield that we know about. But the skeleton’s DNA doesn’t match the Green sisters’ DNA.”

  “At all?”

  “Some of it matched. Not all. They didn’t have both parents in common.”

  “So it could still be Arthur Green. If his mother had an affair with someone else.”

  “It could,” Wayne admitted.

  This was a wrinkle. If it wasn’t Arthur Green, who was it?

  And if it was, why didn’t he match his sisters’ DNA?

  But it might explain why the baby had died, I realized with a shock. If Mr. Green had found out that his wife had cuckolded him, and that Arthur wasn’t his biological son, he could have hurt the baby in a fit of temper and accidentally—or deliberately—killed him. And hidden him in the attic so no one would know. The wife might have known and allowed it, out of guilt and because she didn’t want anyone to know that she’d cheated. Or she might not have known and thought the baby really did get stolen.

  “What was their relationship like after the baby disappeared? The Greens?”

  “I have no idea,” Wayne said. “But I can’t imagine it was good, whether they knew what had happened or not. Losing a child is the single most traumatic thing that can happ
en to parents.”

  I could well imagine.

  “So what’ll happen now?”

  “Not much,” Wayne said. “I’m certainly not going to tell the Green sisters that their brother’s skeleton has been found in the attic of the house they’ve lived in all their lives, and by the way . . . it seems he’s only their half brother.”

  No, that wouldn’t do anyone any good. The sisters were both fragile in their own ways: Ruth physically and Mamie psychologically. And it didn’t serve any purpose to involve them, that I could see. They were in no position to do anything about anything.

  “What’ll you do with the bones?” Derek asked.

  Wayne sighed and ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper curls. “I’ll have to talk to Mr. Silva, I guess. Senior or junior. Tell him the skeleton has been found and what we’ve discovered. And arrange to have the bones interred somewhere. The Silvas will have to make the decision on whether that’ll be in some sort of family plot, or just an unmarked hole somewhere.”

  “None of what happened was the baby’s fault,” I said, “whoever he was. He deserves a decent burial in consecrated ground.”

  “Of course. And I’m sure the Silvas will do the right thing.”

  Wayne grabbed his parka from the window seat and began shrugging into it again, preparatory to leaving.

  “Are you going there now?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I come?”

  Derek rolled his eyes.

  “No,” Wayne said. “Why do you want to?”

  “She just wants to see the inside of the Silvas’ house,” Derek said. “She won’t have a chance on Sunday.”

  “Oh.” Wayne smiled faintly. “Sorry, Avery. You’ll have to find some other kind of excuse for a peek. This is police business.”

  “I found the body!”

  “I’ll let them know. If they want to talk to you, they know where to find you.”

  He headed toward the door. “Better luck next time, Tink,” Derek said and started up the stairs.

  • • •

  So we were back where we started. He was plumbing and I was bored. I wandered around the downstairs for a bit, listening to the clanging from upstairs and trying to concentrate on imagining the house as a finished product. Dark wood cabinets in the kitchen, Shaker style probably. Espresso color. Brushed nickel hardware. Granite counter. Very Craftsman looking. Very natural. Wood floors, if the ugly old vinyl came up without leaving the floors too damaged.