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

by Bentley, Jennie

“Was Darren rude to you?” I asked Derek, who shrugged.

  “He wasn’t warm. But then he had a lot on his mind. And we’ve never been close.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a snob,” Derek said. “His family had money, so he’d only associate with certain of the kids. I was all right, because Dad was a doctor. And Zach was all right, because his dad worked for the bank. But Alex wasn’t, because Alex’s dad worked for the Silvas. And of course, Darren wouldn’t have anything to do with Barry . . .”

  I nodded. “I don’t like him.”

  “I don’t dislike him,” Derek said.

  I did, sort of. “I’d love for him to be guilty of something.”

  Derek’s lips twitched. “Like what? He’s my age. Born thirty years after whatever happened to Baby Arthur. And there isn’t anything else he could be guilty of.”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything related to this. Just something. Shoplifting maybe.”

  “He doesn’t have to shoplift,” Derek said. “He has money.”

  “I don’t think people who shoplift do it because they can’t afford to pay. I think they do it because it’s fun. Like a game. Seeing if they can get away with it.”

  Derek shrugged. “I don’t think he’d do anything like that, Tink. He gets his self-worth from his money—or I guess I should say his father’s money, since Darren hasn’t worked for any of it. Not that Henry has; he got it from Henry Senior. But I don’t think Darren would risk the reputation of the wealthy and well-respected Silvas by doing something stupid like that.”

  Probably not. “I was just dreaming,” I said.

  Derek grinned and pushed back his chair. “How about we stop by Cora’s house on the way home? Maybe Dad’s called with an update on Henrietta.”

  A man after my own heart. “Let’s.”

  “After you,” my husband said, and gestured to the door.

  • • •

  I hadn’t expected Dr. Ben to be there when we pulled up in front of the house on Cabot, but his car was back in the driveway, where it hadn’t been when we drove by earlier. When we walked in, he was sitting at the table, indulging in food he had probably had to leave earlier, and which had been kept warm for him by Cora.

  He looked up and waved when he saw us, but didn’t stop eating. Cora turned from the sink, smiling. “Derek. And Avery. Good to see you.”

  Unlike Aunt Inga’s house, which was still an unholy mess, the Folk Victorian was pristine. Cora was just finishing putting the dinner plates and pots and pans in the dishwasher and wiping down the counter. The floors were clean, the place was neat, and she didn’t look like she’d been through hell earlier in the day.

  “How many people came through here on the tour?” I asked suspiciously. Because I’d lost count at two hundred fourteen, and if she’d only had fifty or so, maybe that explained how her place looked so together while mine was such a mess.

  “A few hundred,” Cora said. “Brownie?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” My husband took a seat across from his father at the table. “Dad.”

  Dr. Ben nodded, still in the process of eating.

  “You had time to make brownies?” I watched Cora pull a tray out of the oven. They were still warm, and when she put a scoop of ice cream on top, and drizzled caramel sauce over that, the ice cream started melting. My mouth watered.

  She glanced at me. “They’ve been gone for several hours by now.”

  True. But . . . “I don’t have the energy to do anything. Derek had to take me out for sandwiches, because I couldn’t face cooking anything after baking eight dozen cookies.”

  “We did have enough energy for something,” Derek reminded me, fork already halfway to his mouth. I blushed. Dr. Ben grinned, and so did Cora.

  Derek turned to his dad. “We were on our way down the hill when we saw the lights outside the Silvas’ house. How’s Henrietta?”

  Dr. Ben’s face darkened. “She didn’t make it.”

  Oh, no. My heart sank. “She died?”

  He nodded. “DOA. Dead on arrival at the hospital. They tried to revive her, but there was nothing anyone could do. Her heart had stopped and refused to start again.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s hard,” Dr. Ben said. “But at least it wasn’t unexpected. I knew she had heart problems. So did she. So did her family.”

  “Was it the stress, do you think?”

  “I imagine it was.” He pushed his plate away, and nodded thanks to Cora when she swooped in and removed it to the sink. “There’ve been a lot of shocks in her life this week. The home tour on top of it may have been too much.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat down next to Derek, who was happily digging into his brownie à la mode. “Does that happen a lot? That stress brings on a heart attack?”

  “Hard to say,” Dr. Ben said judiciously. “Stress is a contributing factor to heart disease, we do know that much. Once the heart disease is present, a heart attack can come at any time. Stress won’t always trigger one, but I wouldn’t rule out that it could.”

  “There’s no question that it was her heart, right?”

  He shook his head, and smiled at Cora as she put a brownie in front of him. “No, no question at all.”

  Cora sat down beside Dr. Ben with her own brownie, and I lifted my fork and devoted myself to mine. We’d had enough sadness for one evening, and besides, my suspicions about Henry and Kerri were just that—suspicions—since I hadn’t been able to convince even myself that if they were carrying on a clandestine affair, it was anything like a motive for wanting Henrietta out of the way.

  —17—

  Mamie’s funeral turned into a double header when the Silvas decided to bury Henrietta at the same time. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, whether they got the two-for-one discount on the church, or whether it just made sense for the backhoe to dig both graves at the same time, since it was there pecking at the frozen ground anyway. Or maybe it was because Henrietta and Mamie were cousins, and contemporaries, and had the same friends and acquaintances. Maybe the family just didn’t want to go through the sadness twice.

  Whatever the reason, it was a double funeral. It wasn’t until we got to the church on Tuesday morning that we realized they were also doing the honors for Baby Arthur. Between the two full-sized coffins at the front of the church sat a tiny one: white and with a spray of yellow roses on top, just like the others.

  It was a full house, too. Half of Waterfield was there, or so it seemed. Derek and I sat with Dr. Ben and Cora. Kate was there, and so was Wayne. Josh and Shannon weren’t; I figured they probably had classes. Kerri was there, and when we walked in, she was in earnest conversation with Henry Silva. Hand on his sleeve, gazing up at him adoringly. Or maybe the adoration was in my head. They did have their heads together, though, talking softly. Until John Nickerson walked in the door and made a beeline for Henry. Kerri withdrew then, and went to sit down, and then it was John who spent a few minutes talking to Henry. Like Dr. Ben, John and Henry were about the same age, and had probably grown up together.

  John came and sat down next to me after he was finished, and I gave him a smile. A subdued one, given the occasion. “Hi, John.”

  “Avery.” He smiled back, and reached across me to shake hands with Derek and to greet Cora and Dr. Ben. Then he sat back and shook his head. “Sad day.”

  I nodded. “I saw you talking to Henry Silva. Are you friends?”

  He glanced at me. “We’re cousins of a sort, but my mother was the black sheep of the family. Ran off to marry beneath her. So we didn’t associate with the Silvas. Or they didn’t associate with us.”

  “Goodness.” I hadn’t realized there was any other family, besides the Silvas and the Green sisters.

  He nodded. “She’s gone now, rest her soul. So is her brother. And the old man.”

  “The old man?”

  “My grandfather,” John said. “He never spoke to her again after she married my father.”

&nbs
p; “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged. “My parents were happy. And we did well enough. And I don’t think it was the old man’s fault so much as my uncle’s anyway. My grandfather would have come around, I think. It was old Henry who refused to talk to her again. Or let young Henry talk to me.”

  “Old Henry being Henry Senior, Henrietta and Henry’s father?”

  John nodded. “Nasty old bugger.”

  Quite so. “But you and Henry are talking again now.”

  “We lost touch for a while,” John said. “I was caught in the draft, he wasn’t.”

  John had gone to Vietnam in the late 1960s, and still had a limp to show for it. Henry had spent the Vietnam War here, it seemed. It crossed my mind to wonder whether his money had had something to do with that. Or maybe it didn’t work that way.

  John continued, “But after the old man died sometime in the 1980s, we got back in touch. We don’t spend much time together—nothing in common really—but we’re on speaking terms again.”

  “What about Henrietta? Did you know her?”

  He shook his head. “She was almost a decade older than Henry, and a full decade older than me. And more like her father than he is.” He nodded toward Henry, who was taking his seat in the front row beside Darren. “She’d nod when we met, but we didn’t really talk.”

  “So are you Ruth and Mamie Green’s cousin, too?”

  “No,” John said. When I must have looked confused, he added, “My mother was Henry Senior’s younger sister. Henry Senior married Sonya Wikstad. Her sister, Lila Wikstad, married George Green. So my mother was only related to the Greens through her brother’s wife. And since there was no contact between my mother and her brother, there was even less contact between my mother and the Greens.”

  I made a mental family tree in my head, with branches and twigs, and thought I understood. “So you didn’t know Mamie.”

  “Only to look at,” John said. “I mean, we’ve lived in the same small town for sixty-plus years. It’s inevitable that our paths should have crossed. But like Henrietta, Mamie was a decade older than me, so we didn’t have much in common.”

  Right.

  “What’s with the tiny coffin?” John added.

  I guess word hadn’t gotten around yet. “That’s Arthur Green. Mamie and Ruth’s little brother who disappeared when he was a baby. In 1949.”

  John arched his brows. He was a small, spare man with an Elvis cockscomb, who liked to dress in midcentury clothing, the same kind of thing he sold in his store. His funeral attire was a 1960s-style suit with narrow legs and an even narrower tie, paired with pointy-toed shoes. The pants had a knife’s edge pleat that could have cut bread. “What’s he doing here?”

  “We found him,” I said. “When we started renovating the Green sisters’ house last week. In a crate in the attic.”

  “He’d been there all that time?”

  “Must have been. It’s a small crawl space, only accessible by a ladder nailed to the wall, so I guess nobody went up there much.” Obviously the hiding place had worked exceedingly well, if no one had discovered the skeleton in more than sixty years.

  “Wow,” John said.

  “I guess they decided, since they were digging graves anyway, they may as well put him in the ground, too.”

  John nodded, but before he had time to respond, Barry got to his feet and made his way up to the pulpit and onto the box he stands on, owing to his lack of height. “Good morning,” he said, and as that wonderful, deep, warm baritone—the Voice of God—sounded through the room, all the rustling and whispers ended, and we settled in to listen.

  I didn’t actually pay attention to the words all that much, since I got caught up in listening to the cadences of Barry’s voice and because there’s only so much you can say about two old ladies in their seventies who die natural, or semi-natural, deaths. And as far as Baby Arthur went, the identification wasn’t even certain, so Barry refrained from saying much at all about the miniature coffin.

  It was hard to imagine who else it could be but Baby Arthur, though. Especially now that Dr. Ben and Pawpaw Willie had verified that to the best of their knowledge, neither of the Green sisters had ever been pregnant. I was back to my original theory, that Mrs. Green—Lila—had conceived Arthur with someone other than her husband, and when it became obvious—perhaps when the baby got old enough to start looking like someone other than his supposed father—one of them made up the story about the disappearance to account for the baby being gone.

  The one stumbling block as far as that theory went was that they’d stayed together afterward. So far, no one had said anything about the marriage being in trouble. Then again, things were different fifty or sixty years ago, and divorce was a lot less common than it is now, so maybe that just wasn’t an option for them.

  Unless the innocent party really hadn’t guessed that the guilty party was . . . well, guilty. If it looked like SIDS had killed the baby, maybe.

  But if it was an accident, why hide the body? Why make up the story about the disappearance? Why not just report it as a sad but natural occurrence and go on?

  With Mamie and Henrietta both gone, I wondered whether Ruth might be more inclined to talk about what had happened back then. She was the only one left who remembered, assuming she remembered, and she might be upset enough by her sister’s and cousin’s deaths to want to talk to someone. Perhaps I should make a trip out to the nursing home again soon. She was here—beside Henry in the front row—but now wasn’t the right time to approach her.

  I shifted in the pew, and Derek glanced down and reached for my hand. I let him twine his fingers with mine and rub the pad of his thumb over my palm. He must have thought I was getting restless. I settled back and did my best to focus on Barry and not on the thoughts in my head.

  After Barry had finished speaking, Henry got up to say a few words. He got a little choked up over his sister’s death, understandably, and he said some nice things about Mamie, too, and then he touched very lightly on Baby Arthur. Ruth didn’t speak, maybe because it was hard for her to get around or maybe because she didn’t want to, and when Darren got up, he merely thanked everyone for coming and informed us that there would be refreshments in the church hall following the service.

  The church hall was the same place where Derek and I had had our wedding reception a month ago. That joyous occasion was the last time I’d been inside the big room. It was strange being there again now, for an occasion so much less happy.

  Not that the mood was subdued really. The few family members who existed had followed the hearses to the gravesite to see the coffins lowered, so those of us who were left were really just incidental strangers. Not that we were having a party exactly, but we weren’t grieving, either. None of us had known Mamie well enough for that, and it didn’t seem as if Henrietta had had a lot of friends, either. Most of the people here were younger, just showing support for the family, or perhaps attending out of general nosiness.

  The small coffin was a topic of conversation, of course. Most people had no idea who—or what—was inside. The craziest suggestion I overheard was a lady talking to Dab Holt, and explaining, very earnestly, that it was Henrietta’s beloved shih tzu inside the coffin: a shih tzu which had died of a broken heart after Henrietta’s passing.

  “That’s nothing,” Derek said when I cornered him to pass on the joke. “I just overheard someone say that it’s Mamie’s doll, that they’re burying it with her.”

  “In its own coffin?”

  He shrugged. “It makes just as much sense as the shih tzu.”

  “Did Henrietta even own a shih tzu?” I hadn’t seen one at the house on Saturday, when Kate and I were there.

  “I don’t really know,” Derek said. “Although I think maybe she did. I think I’ve seen her walk a small, fluffy dog around.”

  I lowered my voice. “We’re sure it isn’t the shih tzu, right? In the coffin?”

  “I’m pretty sure it isn’t the shih tzu,” Derek ans
wered softly, “but when Barry gets back, we can ask him. Just to make sure.”

  We both jumped when a voice said, “What are you two whispering about?”

  It was Wayne, closely followed by Kate, and he came close to giving me a heart attack of my own. When I’d caught my breath again, I told him what we’d overheard, and watched him grimace. “It isn’t the doll. That’s back in the manger outside the church. And it isn’t the shih tzu, either. It isn’t dead, that I know of. Mourning maybe. It was a very unhappy dog on Sunday night. But it was alive and well.”

  “So it’s the baby skeleton.”

  Wayne nodded. “They were burying family members anyway. It seemed a good time to put the baby skeleton in the ground without a lot of fanfare or attention.”

  “You don’t think a little bit of attention might have helped?” I said. “Maybe someone who knew something about what happened back then might have come forward if they’d realized that we found the bones.”

  Wayne shook his head. “I think anyone who knows what happened is dead by now, Avery.”

  “Henrietta and Mamie?” Surely not.

  “I was thinking more of Mr. or Mrs. Green,” Wayne said. “Although I don’t think we’ll ever know anything for sure, and I, for one, am OK with that. Whoever is responsible is probably dead by now, too, and he—or she—has become God’s responsibility, not mine.”

  • • •

  “I’d like to go see Ruth,” I told Derek when the reception was over and we were on our way home to change out of our finery and into jeans preparatory to going back to work.

  He glanced at me. “Now?”

  “She’s probably still with Henry and Darren now. Don’t you think?”

  He nodded. “Probably.”

  “Maybe after we’re done working tonight?”

  “We could swing by, I suppose,” Derek said. “What reason do we have for intruding on a grieving old lady on the day of her sister’s, and brother’s, and cousin’s, funeral?”

  Ouch.

  “I just wanted to offer my condolences. I didn’t get to talk to her in the church today, and she didn’t make it to the reception.”