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

by Bentley, Jennie

  That was something I could do actually. Tear up the vinyl in the kitchen. Except I didn’t want to.

  I headed upstairs and stuck my head into the bathroom. “Can I leave and go do something else?”

  Derek turned to look at me. “What do you want to do, Avery?”

  “Decorate for Christmas,” I said. “Go to the crafts store and buy Chinese lanterns and paint and glitter and make my ornaments. That way I won’t have to spend all evening doing it tonight.”

  “Are you sure that’s all you want to do? Wayne’s not going to be happy if he finds you snooping around the Silvas’ house.”

  “I won’t go near the Silvas’ house.”

  He squinted at me.

  “I swear. I’ll just go to the crafts store and home.” With maybe a short detour in between. Not to the Silvas’ house, though.

  “I suppose,” Derek said. “Though I’m starting to take it personally, Avery. Used to be, you wanted to spend all your time with me. Now we’ve been married six weeks, and you’re already trying to get away?”

  “Of course I’m not trying to get away.” I went to drop a kiss on his cheek. It turned into something else. When I surfaced again, I added a bit breathlessly, “I’m just bored. There’s nothing to do.”

  “You could start taking up the vinyl floor in the kitchen,” Derek said as if he’d read my mind.

  “I’ll need a spade for that. We don’t have one.” Believe it or not, a spade is often the best tool for taking up glued-on vinyl. Sometimes you have to chip it away, bit by tiny bit, but other times, if the glue is old, it comes up very nicely, in big flakes, with a spade.

  “You could go get one and come back,” Derek said. He had a trace of lipstick at the corner of his mouth, and I reached out and wiped it off with my thumb.

  “I could do that. Or I could wait until tomorrow.”

  “You could go buy your lanterns and stuff, and get some lunch and the spade, and then come back.”

  It was better than nothing. Just meant I had to move faster than I’d thought I’d have to. “I could do that. What kind of lunch do you want?”

  “Pizza,” Derek said, which suited me fine.

  “Guido’s?”

  “Sure.”

  Guido’s Pizzeria was in the direction I was going anyway. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.” I ducked out the door and into Mamie’s room, where I gathered up the boxes of toys, and into Ruth’s room, where I picked up the box with the pictures of The Pelvis and put it on top of the others. And then I stepped back onto the landing, only to stop in my tracks when I saw Derek waiting there, one shoulder against the doorjamb and his hands folded across his chest.

  Nice arms. Nice chest.

  Speculative expression on his face.

  “On second thought,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’ll come with you. I’d rather eat pizza at a table.”

  The dismay must have shown plainly on my face, because he chuckled. “What are you up to, Tinkerbell?”

  When I didn’t answer right away, because I didn’t want to admit what I was planning to do, he added, “What’s in the boxes? Is that the stuff you told me about yesterday?”

  I nodded.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I thought I might take them out to the nursing home,” I said reluctantly. “And give them to Mamie and Ruth.”

  “And see if you can’t turn the conversation ever so gently to their baby brother while you’re there reminiscing.” It wasn’t a question, and his voice was resigned.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t deny it, and there was no need to admit it, since he already knew. “I wasn’t going to mention the skeleton.”

  “Sure.” He pushed off from the doorjamb. “I’m coming with you.”

  “You are?”

  “I’m not sending you out there on your own to get in trouble.”

  “You’re going to get in trouble with me?”

  “With any luck,” Derek said, “maybe I can keep you from getting in trouble.”

  He took the boxes out of my hands and headed down the stairs. “Besides,” he added halfway down, “I’m hungry. If I have to wait for you to buy Chinese lanterns as well as make nice with Mamie and Ruth, I won’t get fed until three o’clock.”

  There was a very real chance of that.

  “We can stop for food first,” I told him.

  “Don’t mind if we do,” Derek answered, and made for the front door.

  • • •

  The first stop was at the hobby store on Main Street, a tiny little place that specialized in wooden models of sailing ships and such. They did have some packages of Chinese lanterns, though, white and colored.

  “What do you think?” I asked Derek, who watched me with his hands in his pockets. He was wearing the kind of coat with a lamb’s wool collar and lining, and the shoulders were wet from the snow. It was snowing heavier now than it had been just about an hour ago, when Wayne had visited.

  He looked from the lanterns to me and back. “You want them to be colored, right? To look like Christmas balls?”

  Of course. However—“I can spend a little more for the colored ones, and buy white paint and glitter to decorate them. But they won’t be hard and shiny. If I want them to look like glass balls, it might be better to get the white ones, and paint them with high-gloss paint first, and then decorate them.”

  “OK,” Derek said.

  “They’ll be a little heavier that way. And they’ll cost more. And it’ll be a lot more work. While if I buy the colored ones, they’ll be lighter. But they won’t be glossy.” I gnawed my lip, while the possibilities danced like sugarplums in my head, making me dizzy.

  “Avery,” Derek said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a nonissue.”

  “No, it isn’t! People are going to come over and see them. I want them to be perfect. I don’t want Kate to regret asking us to be part of the tour.”

  “She won’t regret asking us to be part of the tour,” Derek said. “Get the colored ones. Decorate them. If you don’t like the result, we’ll paint them and you can try again.”

  Oh.

  I smiled. “I can do that.”

  “I thought you could,” Derek said, and helped me carry three packages of lanterns, white spray paint, and glitter to the register. “Do you need a stencil?”

  “I’ll make my own.” I’d done it before. Back in the spring, when we’d been working on the center-chimney Colonial on Rowanberry Island, I had discovered sailcloth rugs, and decided to try my hand at making one. Stencils played a big part. I’d ended up making several rugs, so there’d been a lot of stenciling, and I’d learned to make not only my own sailcloth rugs, but my own stencils, as well.

  “Food?” Derek asked hopefully when we had checked out and put the purchases in the truck. He’d worked hard this morning, and he had a high metabolism anyway. He was pretty much always hungry.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  We headed down the road toward Barnham College, and pulled into the parking lot at Guido’s Pizzeria before we got there.

  It was a small cinderblock building with a neon sign flashing HOT-HOT-HOT, sort of like a strip club. Derek had taken me here for the first time when we were renovating the midcentury ranch on Becklea Drive last fall—Primrose Acres, the 1950s subdivision, was just down the road—and we’d been regulars ever since.

  It could get pretty busy at night, with the college students, but in the middle of the day like this, it wasn’t bad at all. It was no problem getting a table. The waitress, most likely a student herself, had long, black hair in a ponytail and piercings in her eyebrow and lip. Tattoos of leaves and flowers wound up both her arms and disappeared under the sleeves of the black T-shirt.

  “I miss Candy,” I told Derek when she’d departed with our drink and pizza orders.

  A shadow crossed his face, and he nodded.

  Candy used to work at Guido’
s. She’d been our waitress the very first time Derek had taken me here, and almost every time since. She lived in Josh Rasmussen’s condo building, and she passed away a few months ago. Derek had tried hard to save her, and had thought for a while he had. She’d made it to the hospital still breathing. But then something went wrong. It hadn’t been his fault, not at all, but he still took it personally.

  That made me feel bad for inadvertently bringing it up and reminding him, so I hurried to change the subject. “At least she isn’t flirting with you.”

  “Probably noticed the ring,” Derek said and twisted his hand so the wide gold band on his finger caught the light. “I didn’t use to wear one.”

  True. I smiled at my own: a little slimmer, encircling my own finger. “Are you sure you want to come to the nursing home with me?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Because you could just go back to work and I could go on my own.”

  “No. I want to come.”

  I peered at him across the table. “You’re curious, too. Aren’t you? Go on, admit it!”

  “I may be a little curious,” Derek said.

  “Just a little?”

  “Not as curious as you.”

  “How do you know how curious I am?”

  “I know you,” Derek said. “I know you’re absolutely eaten up inside right now because there’s something you don’t know. You’re incurably nosy.”

  I pouted, and he grinned at me, and then transferred the smile onto the waitress when she put the drinks on the table. “Thank you.”

  “Food will be right out.” She stomped off in some sort of military boots laced up her calf, over black stockings. She couldn’t have looked any more different from the previous waitress, Candy, with her bouncy blond ponytail and pink cropped top and bubble gum.

  “I wonder if David Rossini still manages the place,” I said.

  “Last I heard,” Derek answered, “Francesca kicked him out and filed for divorce.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “For cheating? You better believe it. So don’t even think about it.”

  “It wouldn’t cross my mind,” Derek said sincerely. “But to get back to what we were talking about . . . yes, I am a bit curious. It’s an interesting story. Sad, but interesting.”

  Definitely. Sad and a bit disturbing. I wondered whether it might be better not to know exactly what had happened—in case what had happened was something I didn’t want to know—but wasn’t it always better to know the truth?

  Not that I planned to ask Ruth Green whether she thought her mother was an adulteress or her father a murderer, of course. I might be curious, but there were limits to the kinds of questions you could ask. Especially of a fragile seventy-five-year-old in a hospital bed.

  No, I was just going to give her the box of Elvis clippings and tell her where I found it, and see if she felt inclined to reminisce. If she didn’t, we’d get out of there and look for Mamie. Give her the tea set and see if she’d be more obliging with information than her sister.

  I might ask a few leading questions if the occasion seemed to call for it. But I wouldn’t turn it into an interrogation. I knew my place. And if it ever got back to Wayne that I’d sprung the news of the skeleton on the Green sisters, he’d probably lock me up for interfering in his investigation. And that was the last thing I needed, with the Christmas Home Tour coming up. I didn’t want to be stuck in jail while Derek had to deal with the visitors and while both he and Kate were cursing me.

  “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this, Avery?” Derek asked me on the way back to the truck after we’d eaten and paid.

  I squinted up at him. “Would you rather I didn’t?”

  “I would rather not upset Wayne,” Derek said, ducking the question.

  “He won’t be upset. There’s nothing for him to be upset about. We’re just returning some of the Green sisters’ things that were left at the house. Whoever packed up—and I’m sure it wasn’t them, if Ruth has a broken hip—didn’t realize the boxes were there. We’re not doing anything wrong.”

  “You think Wayne will see it that way?”

  “It’s the truth,” I said, “so why not?”

  Derek shrugged and opened the door for me. I let him give me a boost up into the passenger seat, and then I watched him walk around the truck and open his own door.

  “You know,” I told him when he was sitting next to me, inserting the key in the ignition, “it’s OK if you don’t want to come. Really. You can drop me and the lanterns and the boxes off at Aunt Inga’s house and I can take the Beetle out to the nursing home on my own. I don’t mind. If you’re worried, you don’t have to be a part of it.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Derek said, his tone highly offended.

  “I didn’t say ‘afraid.’ I said ‘worried.’ If you’re worried, you don’t have to come.”

  “I’m not afraid. Or worried. I just think we should leave Wayne alone to do his job.”

  “I’m not interfering with Wayne’s job,” I said. “I’m not going to tell them about the skeleton. I’m just returning their toys.”

  “Sure.” Derek put the truck into reverse and backed out of the parking spot, then shifted and moved forward, out of the lot and onto the Augusta Highway. “I’m coming. That’s final.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and settled into the seat.

  It didn’t take long to get to the nursing home, even if Derek did stick to the speed limits today, as opposed to the other night. Nonetheless, it was no more than fifteen minutes later when we pulled up outside—in the adjacent parking lot this time, instead of under the portico—and got out. I grabbed the boxes, and we headed for the door.

  A nice lady manned the reception counter in the lobby, and like most ladies of a certain age—eight to eighty—she seemed predisposed to give Derek anything he wanted. She practically preened.

  As we stopped in front of the counter, she simpered up at him. “Good afternoon, Dr. Ellis.”

  “I’m not a doctor anymore, Wanda,” Derek reminded her with that patented, dimpled Derek-grin, “but good afternoon to you, too.”

  “And who’s this?” She turned bright eyes on me.

  “This is my wife.” There was a distinct note of pride in Derek’s voice, and it made me blush. The nurse flushed, too, from pleasure or the effect of Derek’s grin. He’s a handsome devil, my husband.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, putting the boxes down on the counter and extending a hand across. “I’m Avery.”

  Wanda took my hand and shook it. “How can I help the two of you?”

  I had my mouth open to answer, but Derek got in before me. “First, I wanted to know how Mary Green was doing. We found her the other night and brought her here, and I just wanted to know if everything turned out all right.”

  “Oh,” Wanda said brightly, “she fine. Right as rain again. If you hadn’t found her when you did, it could well have gone wrong, but as it is, no harm done.”

  “Wonderful. Is she here?”

  “She’s out of bed and moving around again,” Wanda said, “but if you want to see her, I’ll see if I can track her down.”

  “A little later. First I’d like to see her sister, Ruth. Avery has something for her.”

  Wanda turned her attention to me, and I explained. “We’re renovating the Green sisters’ house, and I found some of their old things that were missed in the cleanup. Some of Mamie’s toys and Ruth’s teenage stuff. I thought she might enjoy seeing it.”

  “Of course.” Wanda smiled. “She’s in room 202, down the hall. Just don’t tire her out. She’s been in physical therapy this morning, and she might be a little worn out from it.”

  I could imagine. “We won’t stay long,” I promised. “Do you think Mamie will be with her, too?”

  “She might be. But Mamie is more of a free spirit. She likes to wander.”

  No kidding.

  “If we don’t find her,” De
rek said, “we’ll be back so you can track her down for us.”

  “Happy to help,” Wanda said, and turned away as the phone rang. As we headed down the hall, we heard her trill into the phone, “Thank you for calling Sunset Acres. How may I direct your call?”

  “Sunset Acres?” I asked Derek out of the corner of my mouth.

  He shrugged. “Guess someone has a sense of humor.”

  Guess so.

  —10—

  We found Ruth Green in a room down the hall. Not knowing much about it, I halfway expected her to be in a hospital bed in one of those traction things, with her leg halfway up into the air, attached to a wire.

  She wasn’t. She was sitting in a chair with her leg on an ottoman. It was encased in a huge, puffy cast: dark blue with white Velcro straps. A four-footed walker stood next to her, and she was leaning back with her eyes closed, her face pale with papery skin.

  Ruth looked older than seventy-five, but maybe that was the pain.

  While I’d seen Mamie a few times in the year I’d been living in Waterfield—she was active and physically healthy, even if her mind had gone bye-bye a long time ago—this was the first time I’d met Ruth. She didn’t look much like her sister, other than that they both had white hair and that there was perhaps a similarity in facial features. But where Mamie looked girlish and frilly in her incongruous pinafore and braids, Ruth looked severe yet fragile, with her white hair cropped short, sticking to her head in wispy curls, and with lines and grooves on her face.

  “If she’s asleep, I’m not waking her,” Derek told me sotto voce.

  I shook my head. No, I wouldn’t expect him to. She looked like she could use the rest. The physical therapy must have been hard.

  But she must have heard us whispering, because she opened her eyes, blinked and then focused on us. After a second it must have dawned that we were there to see her. “Oh.”