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

by Bentley, Jennie

  “He only wants to talk to her,” I said again. “Just to get the story straight. He said that as long as nobody committed a crime—nothing worse than we know about—he isn’t interested in putting anyone in prison.”

  There was another pause.

  “This is a first,” Derek said at last. “Three dead bodies and not a single one of them murdered.”

  I shrugged. “It was bound to happen sometime.”

  He grinned. “Will you be able to handle the disappointment, Tink?”

  I kept my own voice light. “You’ll have to take extra special care of me tonight.”

  And I wasn’t joking. Not entirely. The scene with Ruth had been difficult. Putting myself in her position, in the head of a frightened ten-year-old girl dealing with the loss of her brother and the potential loss of her sister, and doing the best she could in impossible circumstances, had left me feeling shaken. The fact that there’d been no murders wasn’t the problem, not when what had actually happened had been so gut-wrenching.

  Derek must have seen it on my face, because he got to his feet. “We should go.”

  “What about the game?” I gestured to the Scrabble board.

  “I was winning anyway.” He took the plate from me and carried it to the counter before coming back and extending a hand. “C’mon, Tink. Let me take you home.”

  I nodded and took it. “Don’t mind if you do.”

  —20—

  With everything that had been going on, part of me had been afraid I’d get out to the nursing home the next morning and find that Ruth had passed away overnight.

  I was happy to see I’d worried for nothing. When I walked in, she was sitting in the same chair as the day before, in a housedress, slippers, and a cardigan, talking to Henry Silva. He was on the ottoman, facing her, and they were deep in conversation. Deep enough that they didn’t notice me at first.

  I stood in the open doorway, hesitating. I didn’t want to interrupt what looked like a serious exchange, but I also didn’t want it to look like I was standing there eavesdropping. And if I moved away again, that could be awkward, too.

  They were nose to nose, with their heads close together, and it struck me just how similar they looked. Mirror images almost, allowing for the fact that Henry was ten years younger and a man. But the nose was the same, and the jaw. The shape of the skull and the ear. Henry’s was bigger naturally—he was bigger overall, while Ruth wasn’t more than an inch or two taller than me. But then their mothers had been identical twins, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that they should look alike.

  They noticed me then, and both turned to look at me. Two identical pairs of blue eyes.

  I blinked.

  “Hello,” Henry said and got to his feet. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Henry Silva.”

  He extended a hand. I took it. “Avery Baker . . . Ellis. My husband and I bought Miss Ruth’s house.”

  He nodded and let go. “Darren told me. He and Derek went to school together. He says you’re doing a good job of renovating.”

  “Thank you.” I hadn’t noticed Darren coming through the house, but maybe he’d stopped by sometime when Derek had been alone. I’d been gone a bit lately, after all, and it made sense that he’d be curious. “It’s a beautiful house. We’re thrilled to be able to work on it.”

  I glanced at Ruth, who didn’t seem quite as thrilled. And no wonder, now that her only home was this room.

  “You’re the one who found my cousin,” Henry said, and I turned my attention back to him.

  “Yes. I did.”

  Both of them. But since I didn’t want to bring up the matter of the bones until I had to, I went on the assumption that he was talking about Mamie.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he didn’t have to apologize, since he hadn’t had anything to do with it, but I bit it back. “Thank you.”

  “And the”—he hesitated—“bones. You found them, too?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s good that we know what happened,” Henry said. “Closure is important.”

  I guess it was. And it was good that he could take that view.

  On that note, Wayne appeared behind me, and we got down to business. And closure.

  Since Henry was here as Ruth’s representative, I guessed I didn’t really have to stay. She didn’t need me. But I had promised her I’d be here, and besides, I was curious to hear how Wayne planned to handle the situation. So I did my best to fade into the woodwork while Wayne got down to interrogating Ruth—in the nicest manner possible—and Henry lent moral support.

  He started by going over the same things I’d told him yesterday, and got all the same answers I’d gotten. Mr. Green had been at work and Mrs. Green had had an appointment at the beauty parlor. It was the baby’s nap time, so she left him in the carriage on the front porch and told Ruth and Mamie to keep an eye on him while she walked down to Main Street. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and if something hadn’t gone wrong on this particular day, it probably wouldn’t have been the last.

  “Everyone did it,” Ruth said. “Things were different back then.”

  Wayne nodded. “What happened after your mother left?”

  “Henrietta came,” Ruth said. “She asked if we wanted to play.”

  “In the playhouse?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “So the three of you went back there?”

  “And played,” Ruth said. “Until we heard Aunt Sonya call Henrietta.”

  “Where was Aunt Sonya?”

  She’d been on the road. With Baby Henry in his own baby carriage. Henrietta had gone to join her, and they had walked off. Arthur wasn’t squalling, so Ruth and Mamie went back to the playhouse to clean up. Some of the toys had been left outside, and they wanted to put all the dolls and bears back inside before they left.

  Very responsible, I thought.

  Then Mamie went to check on Arthur and said he wasn’t awake, and Ruth went to check on Arthur and found him dead.

  “Where did the crate come from?” Wayne asked, scratching notes in his little pad.

  “Shaw’s Supermarket,” Ruth said.

  “You went to the supermarket for it?”

  Of course not. “It was in the playhouse. We used it to keep toys in. But it came from Shaw’s originally.”

  “So you put the baby into it and took it up to the attic.”

  Ruth nodded. I could see her throat move when she swallowed. She was so thin, her neck was barely bigger around than my forearm.

  “That couldn’t have been easy, on your own.”

  It hadn’t been, and Ruth clearly had a hard time describing it. But eventually she’d made it up there with both baby and crate.

  “And then you left him there?”

  “I put the crate in the corner by the fireplace,” Ruth said. “It was dark over there, and I thought even if someone climbed up, they might not notice it.”

  As indeed I almost hadn’t. The rough wood of the crate matched the rough planks of the wall very well, and I hadn’t noticed the crate until I was almost on top of it.

  “Mamie didn’t realize what you had done?”

  “Mamie got . . . confused easily,” Ruth said.

  “Did you think she’d done something to the baby?”

  “She said she didn’t.” Wayne didn’t answer, and after a second Ruth added, “If she did, it was an accident. She loved Arthur. She’d never hurt him on purpose.”

  “Of course.” Wayne made another note on his pad. “Were you afraid Mamie would get blamed?”

  “They didn’t know her the way we did,” Ruth said with a pleading glance at Henry. “She was different, so they thought she might be dangerous. They thought Mother and Father should send her away.”

  “To an institution?”

  Ruth nodded.

  “Did your parents think about doing that?”

  “She wasn’t any trouble,” Ruth s
aid. “She wasn’t hard to take care of. She just didn’t think as fast as some people.”

  So no, probably not. The Greens hadn’t considered sending Mamie away. Not even with Sonya Silva telling them they should.

  Or if they had, they’d decided against it. But if Arthur had turned up dead instead of missing, and they worried that Mamie might have had something to do with it, who knows what they might have done.

  Difficult as it was to admit, even to myself, I thought maybe Ruth had made the right choice. I could certainly sympathize with her and grasp the difficulty of the situation she’d found herself in.

  “Then what happened?” Wayne asked.

  Ruth took a breath. “I went back to the playhouse and stayed with Mamie until Mother came home. She saw that the carriage was empty and came looking for the baby. I told her he’d been in the carriage when Mamie went to check on him. She called the police and then everyone started searching.”

  “And you never told anyone that you knew what had happened to him.”

  “I didn’t know what had happened to him,” Ruth said, her voice steady. “I just knew what I did. He was dead and I hid him in the attic so they wouldn’t take my sister away.”

  Wayne nodded and closed his notebook. There was a moment’s pause.

  “So what happens now?” Henry wanted to know. He hadn’t said a word through the whole ordeal, had just sat there and listened, looking strong and sober. He was a handsome man, and I could see why Kerri liked him, even with the age difference between them. Always assuming I hadn’t lost my mind and it really was him I’d seen in her house the other night, of course.

  Wayne hesitated, but only for a second. “Nothing. I write up a report and close out the case. The skeleton has already been processed through the system, released, and buried. There’s nothing more to do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just doing my job,” Wayne said, getting to his feet. “Thank you for being here.” His eyes glanced off me for a second, too, including me in the statement. “And thank you for telling me the truth, Miss Green. I’m sure it can’t have been easy.”

  Ruth inclined her head. “Thank you, Chief Rasmussen.”

  Wayne took his leave, and I waited for him to be gone down the hall before I pushed off from the wall. “I guess I should go, too.”

  Ruth nodded. “Thank you for being here, Mrs. Ellis.”

  “Call me Avery. Please.” Being Mrs. Ellis’ed by someone more than twice my age was weird. “And I didn’t do anything. Just listened.”

  “Sometimes that’s as much as anyone can do,” Ruth said.

  “Would it be OK if I came and visited you again?” I felt bad for her, being here all by herself. Henry would leave, and Darren probably wouldn’t bother coming, and both Mamie and Henrietta were gone. Ruth would be lonely.

  “Of course,” she said.

  I turned to Henry. “It was nice to meet you. I’m sorry for the loss of your sister. I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the funeral yesterday.”

  He inclined his head, in a gesture eerily similar to Ruth’s. “Thank you.”

  His eyes, when he looked up at me again, were the exact shape and color of hers.

  I tilted my head. “Did Henrietta have blue eyes, too?”

  Henry looked nonplussed for a second before shaking his head. “She had the Silva eyes. Brown.”

  That’s what I’d thought. “Your mother was the blue-eyed one. The twins.”

  He nodded, glancing at Ruth, who said, “My mother had blue eyes. And Aunt Sonya. And Mamie.”

  And Henry and Darren. But not Henrietta.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad everything worked out all right.”

  They both were, too, and on that note I made my escape into the hallway and from there through the lobby and outside. I waved to Wanda in passing, and stopped outside the doors to look for Wayne’s cruiser. But he must have been in a hurry to leave, because I didn’t see it anywhere.

  Oh, well. I could always talk to him later. After I’d spoken to Derek.

  • • •

  He was busy grouting today. Yesterday, before he’d left, he’d hung all the subway tile, and now he was busy grouting it. Once that was done, and dry, he’d cap it off with a thin strip of black tiles at the top, to pick up the black in the ribbon tile, and then grout that. That’d be later today, I figured.

  “How did it go?” he asked me when I came up to linger in the doorway.

  “Fine.” I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jeans and watched as he slathered grout over the tiles with a big trowel, pushing it into the grooves. “About as I expected.”

  “Learn anything new?”

  I shook my head. “Same story as yesterday.”

  He shot me a glance over his shoulder, a flash of blue eyes. “Did you think it would be different?”

  Not really. Although you never knew. “Your eyes are blue.”

  “You’re only now noticing that?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “It was one of the first things I noticed about you. You have very pretty eyes.”

  He waggled his eyebrows. “The better to see you with, my dear.”

  I smiled. “Your dad has blue eyes, too.” A little darker, closer to slate than cornflower.

  Derek nodded.

  “Did your mother, as well?”

  “Recessive gene,” Derek said. “So yes. Your parents were both blue-eyed, too, weren’t they?”

  They were. Or had been. My mother was blue-eyed. My father died when I was thirteen. I couldn’t remember his eye color anymore. But if my eyes were blue, his would have had to have been as well, at least as far as I could remember from middle school biology.

  “Yes and no,” Derek told me when I said as much. “They’ve started rethinking that. Usually, two parents with blue eyes will have a child with blue eyes. But not always. If one of the parents has a latent brown gene hanging on, two blue-eyed parents could have a brown-eyed child. Just as it’s not impossible for two brown-eyed parents to have a blue-eyed child. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it can.”

  “So you and I would most likely have blue-eyed children because we both have blue eyes. All of Jill and Peter’s kids have dark hair and eyes because Peter’s coloring is dominant and Jill’s is recessive. But if Pepper ends up with blue eyes, it’s not because Jill had an affair with the milkman.”

  “Pretty much,” Derek said. “Sometimes a recessive gene can crop up after generations of being latent. It’s just the luck of the draw. And biology.”

  “Bummer.”

  He arched his brows. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I just thought I’d discovered something that it turns out I didn’t discover after all.”

  “What’s that?”

  I took a breath and marshaled my thoughts into what I hoped was coherence. “Henry Silva was there, at the nursing home, with Wayne. And I realized how much he and Ruth look alike. Same head shape, same nose, same ears. Same blue eyes.”

  “They’re first cousins,” Derek said, “so that’s not surprising. And their mothers weren’t just sisters, but identical twins. I’d say that isn’t noteworthy at all.”

  Probably not. Nonetheless he’d asked, so I figured I’d better carry my train of thought through to the end. “Henrietta had brown eyes. I noticed it when I spoke to her. Henry said she had the Silva eyes.”

  “So?” Derek said.

  “So Mr. and Mrs. Green both had blue eyes. And they had two blue-eyed daughters. And probably a blue-eyed son, although I didn’t think to ask Ruth what color Arthur’s eyes were. She probably wouldn’t have been able to remember.”

  “Infants’ eyes change color anyway,” Derek said. “They’re sometimes born with blue eyes that turn brown later.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. They say that all infants are born with blue eyes. That’s not true. Black and Asian children are usually born with brown eyes. So are a lot of Hispanics and for that matter white babies. B
ut some are born with blue eyes that change to brown or hazel later, too.”

  “So Henrietta might have been born with blue eyes that changed.”

  “Sure,” Derek said. “Especially since her mother had blue eyes. But Henrietta inherited the dominant gene if her eyes were brown. Why are you so interested in this?”

  “I told you. I noticed how similar Henry and Ruth looked.”

  “And it’s likely to be because their mothers were twins. Identical twins even have the same DNA profile.”

  The tingling spider senses turned into a steady buzz, and the thought that had streaked across my brain last night slunk back in, and stayed long enough for me to get a good look at it.

  “What if . . .”

  “Yes?” Derek said when I trailed off.

  “I’m still bothered by the fact that the baby’s DNA didn’t match Ruth and Mamie’s. She told me—Ruth did—that her parents were happy together. They stayed together after Arthur went missing. Or died, I should say, although they didn’t know that, I guess.”

  Derek nodded.

  “I didn’t ask her straight-out if she thought her mother might have had an affair, but I didn’t catch any whiff of that in anything she said.”

  “She might not have known,” Derek pointed out. “She was just a little girl.”

  It probably wasn’t something Lila would talk to her daughters about. Or that they’d notice, at least if she were being careful. But children can usually tell when their parents’ marriage is on the rocks, because of the arguing and such, and Ruth hadn’t said anything about it.

  “You may be right. But what if Mrs. Green didn’t have an affair?”

  “She had to have gotten pregnant somehow. She had a baby. And it wasn’t her husband’s.”

  “What if it wasn’t her baby?”

  “How could it not be—” He shook his head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Logically, maybe. But the rest of it . . .”

  “Just listen to me,” I said. “Sonya and Lila were identical twins, right? You said yourself they had the same DNA. And they both had blue eyes. Mr. Green’s eyes were also blue, so he and Lila had blue-eyed children, but Mr. Silva’s were brown, so Henrietta had brown eyes.”