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

by Bentley, Jennie

  “It’s beautiful.”

  It was. I nodded.

  “Are you ready, Avery?” Cora asked me. I took a breath.

  “I’m getting more and more worried the more houses we see. They’ve all been lovely so far. I’m afraid mine won’t measure up.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kate said. “People will be coming just as much to see the inside of Inga Morton’s house as to see your Christmas decorations. Nobody but her lawyer and that professor from Barnham College was inside that house for years before she passed. They’re all curious now.”

  Probably so. And it did make me feel a little better about the whole thing. The house itself was beautiful. Derek had renovated it, after all, and he knows what he’s doing. I smiled.

  “That’s better,” Cora said approvingly, and changed the subject. “So where have the two of you been so far?”

  I told her we had started at my house, and had stopped by the Fraser House Museum and the Silva house before coming here.

  “I might leave Ben in charge of the open house for a bit tomorrow and run down to the Silvas myself,” Cora confessed. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of that place. Ben’s been there, of course, and Derek, but I haven’t. Is it fabulous?”

  “It’s . . .” I couldn’t even find the words really. “Yes. It’s fabulous.”

  Kate nodded. “If you have the chance to get away, Cora, you should. It’s really something.”

  Just at that point my father-in-law stuck his head out of the room he uses for his painting studio, accompanied by the sound of Bing Crosby. “What’s going on?”

  “Just talking about the Silvas’ house,” Cora told him with a fond look. “How is it coming?”

  “It’s coming.” He turned. “Kate. And Avery.”

  We both chirped back at him. “Are you painting?” I asked, although the answer was pretty self-evident, both from the stains on his fingers and the fact that he’d been in his painting cave.

  Dr. Ben paints little watercolors. They were hanging all over the house, including the parlor, where we were standing. He especially likes to paint buildings and landscapes, and depictions of several Waterfield landmarks, including Kate’s B&B, hung on the wall beside me.

  “Trying to finish a few Christmas presents,” he told me. “Not much time left.”

  No, indeed. Christmas was only a few weeks away. And that reminded me I hadn’t finished my own Christmas shopping and crafting. I still had Alice and Lon’s kids to shop for, and Alice and Lon themselves, and Steve . . .

  “How are things over at the Silvas’?” Dr. Ben asked, and pulled me out of my mounting panic.

  “They’re ready for the home tour, but Henrietta seemed more subdued than usual.”

  “I should give her a call to make sure she’s all right. These shocks, one after the other, aren’t good for her heart.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “she didn’t seem ill. Just out of sorts. Distracted maybe.”

  “It isn’t always easy to tell,” Dr. Ben said, “what’s physical and what’s mental. And better safe than sorry.”

  Of course. “You didn’t notice anything the other night, did you?”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything . . . unusual?”

  “The whole thing was unusual,” Dr. Ben said.

  True. “I was just thinking about that door that wouldn’t open. Whether someone could have locked it deliberately.”

  “With Mamie inside?”

  “Who would want to murder Miss Mamie?” Cora said. “Of all the people in Waterfield, surely she was one of the most harmless.”

  It was hard to imagine Mamie being a threat to anyone. She had no money, and a crime passionnel was surely out of the question.

  “No,” Dr. Ben said, “other than the door being stuck, I didn’t notice anything unusual at all. She’d obviously gone there to have a tea party with her doll. As it got later and colder, the lock froze shut. Maybe she tried to open it, maybe she didn’t. Eventually she gave up and went to sleep. At least that’s my interpretation.”

  “She was on her way to have dinner with Henrietta. Why would she suddenly change her mind and decide on a tea party in the playhouse instead?”

  “How do you know that?” Cora asked, and I told her what Wayne had told me.

  “She probably got confused,” Dr. Ben said, “and slipped back into childhood. She knew she was going to meet Henrietta, but in her mind, she and Henrietta were children, so she went to the playhouse.”

  Maybe so. It made sense anyway. In a way that might have made sense to Mamie.

  “I spoke to Dr. Lawrence,” Ben added, and I turned my attention back to him.

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to. Mamie was my patient on and off. I wanted to know cause of death.”

  “And?”

  “Hypothermia,” Dr. Ben said. “The toxicology screen showed no evidence of drugs or alcohol in her system. There were no external or internal injuries save for a bump on her forehead.”

  “What kind of bump?”

  “You’d call it a goose egg,” Dr. Ben said. “The kind of thing that might happen if she fell and hit her head, or ran into something. Maybe the lintel of the playhouse door. She is—she was a lot taller than when she was a child.”

  True. We’d both had to duck our heads to get through the door. Mamie may not have had the presence of mind to do so. “So nothing sinister.”

  “It wasn’t what killed her,” Dr. Ben said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. At worst, it might have made her dizzy and a bit woozy, given her age and frailty. If it had happened to you or me, we would have gotten a headache and kept going.”

  “So it was an accident.”

  “It certainly seems to have been.”

  Fine. “So there was no autopsy.”

  “Dr. Lawrence did an autopsy,” Dr. Ben said. “There was nothing of interest.”

  “I don’t suppose she happened to mention whether Mamie had ever had a child?”

  This came from Kate, and Dr. Ben turned to her with his eyebrows hiked halfway up his forehead. “I’m sorry?”

  “We thought,” Kate said with a glance at me, “that maybe the skeleton in the attic wasn’t Arthur Green. That it was left there years after Arthur disappeared. Maybe Mamie—or Ruth—had a baby out of wedlock, and maybe the baby was stillborn, and because they was afraid of the judgment of the town, they hid it.”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “If either of the Green sisters was ever pregnant, I never noticed,” Dr. Ben said. “Of course, it could have been before I started practicing. Most likely it was. They’re ten or twelve years older than I am. But my father was the GP back then. I still have his old casebooks.”

  “Can I look at them?” I asked.

  “No,” Dr. Ben said. “Doctor-patient confidentiality, remember?”

  Bummer.

  “But I can check if there’s any mention of it. And if not, I can call my father and ask.”

  Dr. Ben’s predecessor and Derek’s grandfather, Pawpaw Willie, was alive and well and living in a Florida retirement community. He’d been up to Waterfield just a few months ago, for our wedding, looking tan and healthy and in possession of all his faculties in his late eighties.

  “Would you do that?”

  “Not for you,” Dr. Ben said. “That would be totally unethical.”

  “But . . .”

  “But I’ll check. And tell Wayne what I discover. We all want to figure out what happened to that baby.”

  I pouted, although really, it was better than nothing. And I could probably get Wayne to tell me what, if anything, Dr. Ben learned.

  He added, “You have to realize, though, Avery, that if what you’re thinking is true, it’s much more likely no one knew anything about it at all. Including my father. If it wasn’t Baby Arthur’s skeleton you found, but a stillborn child of Mamie’s or Ruth’s, if my father had known either of them was pregnant, he would have
wondered what was wrong when no baby was born. And it’s not like he would have condoned hiding it in the attic.”

  That was true, and something I hadn’t truly considered until now, although I should have. “Can you check anyway?”

  He promised he would, and we took our leave, up the road toward Kerri’s Brady Bunch house.

  —15—

  We walked past the house on North Street on our way to Kerri’s house, and at Kate’s suggestion, we detoured into the backyard for a look at the scene of the crime, as it were.

  “You don’t really think anyone killed her, do you?” Kate asked as we stomped down the now hard-packed trail between the two thin grooves of the baby carriage’s wheels. In the light, they were easy to see, and I couldn’t believe I’d missed them yesterday. “Are you sure you don’t just have murder on the brain, Avery?”

  I’d come up against more than my fair share of murderers in my time here in Waterfield, so she might have a point actually. Maybe I’d gotten to where I saw murder where none existed. Wishful thinking or paranoia, take your pick.

  Then again, everyone had told me the same thing when Hilda Shaw died of anaphylactic shock in September, and it had been murder then. Maybe it was murder now, too.

  “But who would kill Miss Mamie?” Kate objected when I said so. “Everyone wanted to kill Hilda Shaw, but Miss Mamie never did anything to anyone.”

  “Nor did my aunt Inga, as far as anyone knew. Except the one person who wanted her dead.”

  Kate conceded my point. “It’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to kill Miss Mamie, though, Avery. I mean, half the time she didn’t even live in the present.”

  “So maybe the motive is in the past.” I brushed at the branches hanging low over the playhouse, and got a pint of snow down the back of my neck for my trouble. I wiggled as the snow melted and trickled down my back in little icy rivulets. “Maybe it has something to do with the skeleton. It had to be one of the Greens who put it in the attic. Maybe Mamie knew what happened. Maybe that’s what ruined her mind. She saw her mother or father—or sister—kill her baby brother, and her sanity snapped.”

  The door was closed, but not locked. The busted latch dangled drunkenly from a bent nail, and the snow in front of the door was still dusted with little pieces of broken glass and fragments of metal. The late afternoon sun sent streaks of light through the branches of the trees to sparkle off the shards.

  “The baby carriage is still here,” Kate said, peering at it. “I didn’t realize how old it was.”

  I nodded. “Baby Arthur’s probably. Late 1940s.”

  “Maybe she thought the doll was her missing brother. How sad is that?”

  Incredibly sad. “You’re taller than me,” I said, getting up on my toes to peer at the lintel above the door. “Do you see any blood? Or skin cells or anything?”

  “Skin cells?” Kate arched her brows but came to stand next to me. “No,” she said after a moment. “No blood. And no skin cells, not that I’m sure I’d recognize skin cells if I saw them. Or that I’d be able to see them without a microscope.”

  “You know what I mean. I want to know whether Miss Mamie hit her head on the door or whether something else happened.”

  “Like what?” Kate asked, reaching for the door. “You heard Dr. Ben. It wasn’t what killed her. At most, she’d have a headache.”

  At most Kate or I would have a headache. Miss Mamie might have been quite woozy, according to Dr. Ben. Maybe woozy enough that she wouldn’t notice someone jimmying the lock so the latch wouldn’t open.

  Kate ducked her head to cross the threshold into the playhouse, and I followed.

  It looked just as it had the night before, best as I could tell. It had been dark then, and I’d been upset and worried about Miss Mamie. But there was the empty chair where the doll had sat, and the bench where Mamie had lain, and the tea set, arranged on the table, with the teapot and sugar and milk in the middle of the table, and three cups and saucers neatly arranged on three edges of the table. One for Mamie, one for her doll, and a third, where no one had been sitting.

  I wandered over—it took all of three steps—and peered down at the tiny cup and saucer. “Who do you suppose this was for?”

  “Henrietta?” Kate said in the process of looking around.

  “Maybe.”

  “We should go,” Kate said, turning for the door. “We still have to stop by Kerri’s place and the rectory.”

  I nodded and followed her out, carefully ducking my head again. The floor was full of dried footprints: the heavily grooved boot prints probably from Dr. Ben and/or the paramedics, and the smooth soles from Darren’s dress shoes. Strange that he wouldn’t have taken the time to change into something more suited for walking around the Village before joining us for the canvass, but maybe he’d been too preoccupied to think of it.

  “Do you think maybe it was Mamie who killed Arthur?” Kate suggested when we were back on the road and headed up North Street toward Kerri’s house. “She was small when he died, right?”

  “Eight or nine, I think. Ruth is a couple years older.”

  “Maybe she tried to pick him up and couldn’t hold him. Maybe he slipped out of her arms and hit his head and died.”

  “Or maybe she tried to set him on a chair expecting him to stay, like one of her dolls would. But of course, he couldn’t. Maybe he fell off and hurt himself. And then she tried to stop him from crying, and she ended up smothering him.”

  Kate nodded. “Something like that. And then she hid the body in the attic because she was afraid she’d get in trouble. Living with that secret all these years would certainly turn anyone’s mind a little weak.”

  Indeed. The Green sisters had lived in that house their entire lives. Had they—singularly or together—known that their brother was rotting above their heads?

  It was a deeply unpleasant thought, and I felt a shiver run down my spine.

  “Cold?” Kate asked, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. “We can walk a little faster if you want.”

  “Easy for you to say. Your legs are longer than mine.” But I picked up my speed, and a few minutes later we got to Kerri’s anomaly.

  On one side of it stood a two-story farmhouse Victorian, pale blue, and on the other, a small 1930s cottage covered with asbestos shingles. The grouping looked something like a crazy family portrait: on one side, the stern Victorian father, leaning in, and on the other, a small dumpling of a mother. In the middle, the Brady Bunch split-level looked like a teenager thumbing her nose at both parents.

  Not that the house in and of itself didn’t look great; it was just the setting that left something to be desired.

  No, Kerri’s house looked wonderful. Nice and clean and spic-and-span, with fresh paint on the sided parts of the house, and fresh power washing of the brick. She had rows of dark green bushes—some form of evergreen obviously—underneath the first level, or basement, windows, and they were draped with netting and Christmas lights, so the bushes twinkled. There was a green wreath with a big red bow on each window—two shorter on the basement level, two taller directly above, and then two on the other side of the door, up a half-story flight of stairs. Another wreath, similar but even bigger, hung on the door itself.

  “Very traditional,” I told Kate, who nodded.

  The inside was traditionally decorated, too. The Christmas tree was in the living room, topped by a star and draped with lights and strings of popcorn and American flags. A lot of the ornaments were made from stained glass: stars and angels and candy canes and reindeer.

  “Are those Dab’s work?” I asked Kerri, pointing.

  She nodded. “She made a few sets of ornaments a couple of years ago. I bought some.”

  “They’re beautiful. She’s very talented.”

  “Yes,” Kerri said, “she is.”

  “I was out at her studio this morning. She helped me make a lampshade.”

  She smiled. “Did you have fun?”

  “It was inte
resting. I’ve never tried working in stained glass before. It’s different from textile design.”

  “I imagine it is,” Kerri said, just as a loud thump came from down the hall where the bedrooms were. The living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the main level. The basement had a family room or rec room and—according to Kerri—another bedroom she used for a painting studio.

  Meanwhile, up a half flight from the main level was a hallway with two more bedrooms and a bath, and that’s where the noise had come from.

  I glanced in that direction and back at Kerri with a question in my eyes.

  She blushed, almost as red as her hair. “Dog.”

  “Sounds like a big one.” One upon a time, someone else had told me dogs were making noises in an upstairs bedroom. I had neglected to investigate, with consequences that could have been dire.

  “Akita,” Kerri said.

  “You can let him out if you want. I’m not afraid of dogs.”

  “He’s almost as big as you are,” Kerri said, and managed a grin that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It’s better if I just leave him where he is until you’re gone.”

  “I’d like to see him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Akita before.”

  She hesitated. Glanced from me to Kate and back before giving in. “Fine. Excuse me a minute.”

  She headed up the stairs to the second level while Kate and I stayed where we were.

  “What’s going on?” Kate whispered when Kerri was out of sight, inside a room down the hall.

  “I just want to make sure there’s really a dog. And that she doesn’t have someone tied to a bed down the hall.”

  She shot me a look.

  “Remember when Cora’s daughter Beatrice was missing?”

  Kate’s face cleared, and she grinned. “I don’t think anyone’s missing now, Avery. If Kerri has someone tied to her bed, I’m sure he wants to be there.”

  I shrugged. “I’m probably just being silly, and it really is just a dog, like she said. But I haven’t ever seen an Akita, so I wouldn’t mind.”