The Roberts’ house was in the heart of suburban Rock Ridge just east of Main Street where the blocks made up a perfectly symmetrical grid and the houses looked nearly identical to one another—each a modest, two-story Colonial with a shallow front yard and white picket fence. While Kate was glad she didn’t live in this part of town—as far as she was concerned, the houses were much too close together, and she preferred her cozy cabin on the rural end of town—she certainly enjoyed the aesthetic. This area was darn cute.
The Roberts’ house, however, was not. Situated in the very center of the block, the house was a dilapidated, three-story monstrosity that reminded her of the witches of Salem. In its heyday, the house was a storybook Victorian replete with gabled roofs, angled bay windows, and turrets that speared at their tops.
But it hadn’t been lived in for the last thirty years. The windows were boarded up, the front door was chained shut, and every entrance had a thick ‘Condemned’ sign nailed into its wooden surface.
The new owners, Amy and Jack, had bought the house a few months back with the intention of fixing the place up so that they could flip it for a profit. But the house required a heck of a lot more work than mere cosmetic fixes, a fact Kate had communicated to them over the phone. Amy and Jack lived in Vermont and had bought the property sight-unseen. And, in Kate’s opinion, they’d had delusions of grandeur because of it. She would need to gut it and renovate it top to bottom. To accomplish that much in a few short months would be a feat, if not a downright miracle, the latter having been how she put it to them during their brief, argumentative phone call.
They were paying her handsomely, however. She had told them she’d do her best. And when Kate Flaherty declared as much, it was a promise that she knew she’d live up to.
She pulled up the driveway, rolling her truck to a stop and giving the neighbor, Mrs. Hyatt, a wave. The elderly woman was tending to her flowerbed, which was set in planters that wrapped her house.
Climbing out of her truck, Kate called out, “You’re not working in this heat, are you?”
Mrs. Hyatt, whose eighty years couldn’t stop her from living an active life, even with a walker and poor eyesight, straightened up from her peonies. She ran her hands down her lavender moo-moo and grabbed her walker. As she inched over to the white picket fence separating her property from the Roberts’, she said, “Oh, at my age, I have a constant chill in my bones. Heat like this perks me up. I probably should’ve moved down to Florida decades ago, but I’m too darn stubborn.”
When she reached the fence, Kate gave her a little squeeze on her arm, saying, “Well, be sure to drink plenty of fluids. Dehydration can sneak up on a person. It’s nearly 100 degrees out here.”
“Don’t you worry about me, now,” she chided with a sly smile, her bright green eyes flaring.
Despite her age, Mrs. Hyatt had a youthful expression, though her face was deeply creased. Kate hoped that she might live so long and have even half as much energy as the elderly woman.
Mrs. Hyatt glanced up at the Roberts’ house and sighed. “I haven’t had neighbors on this side of my house in thirty years. I like the quiet, you know. My bedroom is right up there,” she said, indicating the second floor window that faced the Roberts’ house. “Let’s hope a noisy couple doesn’t move in.”
“You’re a good three months away from dealing with them if they do,” said Kate, meaning to assure her.
“At my age, three months will lapse in the blink of an eye. It’s one of the perks of getting old, I guess,” she commented with a sarcastic air. “You know, the last family who lived in that house was noisy as sin.”
“You don’t say?” Kate had come to enjoy Mrs. Hyatt’s anecdotes. Though she had only been working on the Roberts’ house for a week, she had grown close with the woman during these brief chats.
“As sin,” she repeated and a dark mood clouded the woman’s expression. Mrs. Hyatt shook her head as if warding off a disturbing memory. “If I didn’t know better, I would think the place was haunted, not that I’ve ever set foot in there.”
Kate chuckled, but soon realized Mrs. Hyatt wasn’t making a joke.
“Keep your wits about you.”
“I certainly will,” said Kate, who gave her another squeeze to conclude the conversation. “You take care.”
Mrs. Hyatt grunted, which Kate took as agreement before she grabbed her tool kit from the bed of her truck and walked toward the giant house.
Because she had yet to install a new front door—Kate had decided to restore the house from the foundation up, and a new front door would be one of her final touches—the giant oak entryway was still locked up with a massive steel chain. The Roberts couple seemed comfortable with using the chain to keep the property secure, and Kate didn’t have a problem with it either. She unlocked the door and struggled to pull the chain across the doorway.
The house was dark and dusty when she stepped inside, so she left the front door wide open and walked through the grand foyer and into the kitchen where she had left her coffee maker and a few snacks.
Though the house didn’t have any air conditioning units, it had been boarded up for so long that it was as cool as a cucumber inside, a saving grace, she figured, since the natural light of day hadn’t penetrated these walls for decades.
As she made coffee, she wiped her sweaty brow several times. It might be cool in here, but she felt overheated. She hoped a fresh cup of coffee would help, but deep down she knew it wouldn’t. She had been growing increasingly tired for the past month. Though Scott had been pushing for her to see a doctor, Kate had an idea of what was causing her lethargy, and if she was correct, she didn’t see the sense in getting the diagnosis in writing.
It had to be menopause.
She sighed at the thought.
She had been debating telling Scott, but the fact of the matter was that she felt embarrassed. Scott, bless his heart, hadn’t lost an ounce of attraction for her. In the past few years, he’d actually become remarkably friskier with her. Crime being at an all-time low was some kind of aphrodisiac, apparently. And she wasn’t complaining. So, the thought of sitting her husband down to explain that her mojo was beginning to shrivel up filled her with dread. If he knew, he would only be disappointed.
Once the coffee had brewed, she filled her mug, a gift from her twins the last time they had visited. It was a blue mug with the Mrs. Fix It logo—Kate in silhouette wielding a hammer. She drank a few sips, praying the caffeine would have a noticeable effect on her energy. Then she grasped her tool kit by the handle and headed off toward the cellar door.
Though it was barely perceptible from the outside, the house was actually pitched ever so slightly to the east thanks to a rift in the foundation. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Rock Ridge had suffered a moderate earthquake. Kate could remember the day, in fact. It had been a warm autumn day. She and the boys had been playing catch in the front yard in the late afternoon. They had been young at the time and needed a ton of attention. Greg, her husband at the time, had been in the house making sandwiches when Kate felt the earth rumble beneath her feet. All told, the earthquake had resulted in five broken shelves and a massive crack in one of the walls of their house, but the center of Rock Ridge hadn’t been so lucky. A few houses had caved in, telephone poles had fallen on parked vehicles, there had been sink holes and injuries and a number of families had to move into the local church because their homes had been rendered unlivable.
For the Roberts’ house, the foundation had shifted and since there were no owners at the time, no one had repaired the damage.
Kate eased down the rickety stairs into the basement. The overhead light she had flipped on at the top of the stairs barely illuminated the way. When she reached the landing, she set her tool kit down, took a quick sip of coffee, and searched the walls for another light switch.
She hadn’t before ventured into the basement. The majority of her efforts this week had centered on getting the electrical up and running so that sh
e would be able to use her power tools as the months progressed. Earlier that day, Larry—the owner of Grayson’s Hardware—had helped to haul a jackhammer down here, but neither had lingered to survey the damage from the long-ago earthquake.
She found a light switch on the dusty wall perpendicular to the stairs so she flipped it on. It took the overheads so long to flicker to life, that for an anxious moment, she thought she would have to work in the dark. She sighed with relief to find that the lights were not only working but also quite bright as she stepped slowly into the basement.
The room was roughly 1,000 square feet. The walls were brick, the ceiling low, and there were only a few stout windows lining the south wall, which she knew faced the back of the property. The windows themselves were less than a foot tall, and because they were positioned at the top of the wall, she could see grass sprouting just outside. The basement was deep in the earth for the most part, and smelled like it—musty and dank with a hint of mildew.
But that wasn’t what had her attention. Now as she closely inspected the rift in the cement floor, she realized that in fact someone must have been down here since the earthquake.
The cement floor looked how she had expected: the classic faded gray quality of a decades old foundation. The rift itself was a three-foot gap, jagged and roughly two feet deep. When she peered down it, she could see dark earth—compacted soil where a few mushrooms had sprouted. But that wasn’t what alluded to the fact someone had been down here.
At the far end of the basement, where one of the brick walls was leaning precariously into the room, she saw that the floor wasn’t cement. It was asphalt.
No contractor in their right mind would lay in asphalt where cement should be, she thought, strolling over to the bizarre rectangle. Sizing it up, she noted that the asphalt area was about six feet long by three and a half feet wide, and it was contributing to the fact that the brick wall was leaning into the room.
She planted her fist on her hip and drank her coffee, thinking hard about how she might tackle this. Ultimately, a strong house would have to be built on a strong foundation and that patch of asphalt just wasn’t helping.
She resolved to jackhammer the asphalt out, pour in cement, and lay in a wall of brick to secure the leaning wall. Truth be told, if she had her druthers and a proper budget, she would literally level the darn house, lay in a brand new foundation, and start from scratch. But Jack and Amy wanted to preserve the house; their argument was that they could sell the house as an historical landmark and make a virtual fortune. Kate had begged to differ, but at the end of the day, relented.
Sighing, she set her coffee down, plugged her jackhammer into the nearest outlet and pitted the tip of the chisel against the black asphalt.
She was sweating like a pig already and the jackhammer was heavy as hell, but she balanced it against her hip, pressed her earplugs into her ears after fishing the things out of her overalls, and got the jackhammer growling.
Oh, boy, she thought...well, she would certainly sleep well tonight!
Kate began hammering at the asphalt, her hands vibrating against the handles, which sent a jerking pulse through her entire body. Her teeth were chattering so she clenched her jaw, eyeing the asphalt as she pressed the chisel hard against the surface.
Suddenly a huge chunk popped out and she immediately killed the power, her eyes locking onto the fresh hole.
She gasped.
Were her eyes playing tricks on her?
Without taking her eyes off of it—oh God, is that what I think it is?—she set the jackhammer down, and then crouched beside the hole.
It was.
Her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.
Kate Flaherty was staring at a human hand.
Chapter Two
Though Kate was seated on the living room couch—a relic from thirty years ago that was covered with a sheet like the rest of the furniture in the Roberts’ house—and though police officers were swarming the estate, hurrying up and down the cellar stairs under Scott’s directive, Kate couldn’t focus on any of it. She didn’t see Officer Marco rushing through the foyer. She didn’t see the Medical Examiner speaking in scandalized staccato comments to the hotshot detective, Kilroy, who had just transferred from New York City last month. She didn’t see Scott running his big hands down his face to wipe the stunned grimace off his expression as he paced in the kitchen.
All she saw was the emerald gemstone burning at the forefront of her mind.
It had undoubtedly been a woman’s hand. The emerald ring had been on the index finger of her right hand. The nails had been manicured and painted red.
Someone had laid a body within the asphalt as it had dried.
But no one had lived in the house in thirty years.
No one had spoken with Kate yet. After she had called Scott at the precinct, it had taken less than ten minutes for the police to arrive. She had spent the time staring at the hand from where it protruded the jagged asphalt. She had thought about the earthquake damage—twenty-five years ago, that was the timeline.
The asphalt hadn’t been laid prior.
This meant that, while the house decayed and lay vacant in Rock Ridge, someone had thought to dispose of a body within its walls.
There was no way the woman had died of natural causes. If she had, she would’ve received a proper burial.
Who was the woman? Who had killed her? And why did they hide her body in an abandoned Victorian house?
Kate felt eyes on her and when she looked up, she found Scott staring at her from the kitchen where Detective Kilroy was chewing his ear off.
She needed some air so she got to her feet, but a wave of dizziness hit her and she grasped the armrest of the couch. Her blood sugar must be low, that’s all, she just needed a sugar boost. She sensed more than saw Scott take hold of her arm.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said, straightening her back. “I just need some air.”
As Scott escorted her through the foyer and out the front door, where the late afternoon sun was beating down with merciless heat, he clarified, “I mean emotionally. You must have been pretty terrified to jackhammer into a dead body.”
“You know I’ve seen worse,” she commented, brushing over her fright. The truth was that it had startled her. Mrs. Hyatt’s offhanded mention of the house perhaps being haunted rattled her nerves. “Any idea who the woman was?”
“We’re still working on excavating the body,” he explained, leading her to an old-fashioned swing beneath a large oak tree. After helping her to sit, which Kate did slowly, and carefully grasping the tattered ropes, he went on, “It looks like the asphalt preserved her body from decaying, but we’ll still need to consult with the local dentists’ offices to get a proper ID.”
Dental records from that long ago would be archived, which meant this case would not be cut and dry.
“She looked wealthy,” said Kate, breathing deeply. The oak tree provided just enough shade that the air was fresh and not stifling.
“You mean the ring she was wearing?” he said. “We can’t make any assumptions.”
“Have you contacted Amy and Jack Roberts?”
“I put a call in,” he explained. “But they have yet to get back to me.” After a few moments of Kate rocking herself on the tree swing as Scott stared down at her, he suggested, “Why don’t you go on home. You can’t do any more work here today since it’s officially a crime scene.”
She had to admit, the idea of going home sounded excellent. She felt wiped out, and a nap would do her good so she agreed, getting to her feet. “For what it’s worth,” she began, as Scott walked with her to her truck. “Whoever killed the woman and buried her in the basement would’ve had to have done it in the last twenty-five years. Remember the earthquake?”
It took him a moment to think back and Kate could see the moment he recalled the disaster. “I was working in Philadelphia and we barely felt it over there.”
“Well
, you’ll notice a rift in the cement in the basement. That was from the earthquake. The last owners left the house thirty years ago...”
“Which means that anyone could’ve snuck in within the last twenty-five years and done this,” he surmised, shaking his head at the uphill battle he was facing. “God, this is going to be one hell of a case.”
She gave him a hug, and though she soon loosened her grip, Scott lingered, holding her close. It made her smile until she realized where he was coming from. They had flourished these past two years without a single murder plaguing their beloved town. She knew he was praying this wasn’t the beginning of another slew of murders.
To set his mind at ease, she said, “Honey, this is an old crime, not the start of a conspiracy.”
“I know you’re right,” he said. “I just want to solve this case and get back to pushing paperwork. Mundane is a paradise compared to brutal crimes.”
She couldn’t agree more and gave him a kiss.
As he started back up the walkway, she popped open the driver’s side door of her truck, but Mrs. Hyatt caught her eye. The elderly woman was watching the commotion of cops rushing in and out of the house from where she stood with the support of her walker at the white picket fence.
Kate trekked over to her, saying, “I’m sure you’re wondering just what in the heck is going on over here.”
Mrs. Hyatt looked grim, her mouth pulling into a taut frown, her eyes fierce and her brow furrowed. “Wondering? No, I’m not wondering. I’m dreading.” She shook her head and asked, “Someone was murdered?” But it sounded more like a statement.
“Not recently,” Kate assured her. “Looks like an old crime.”
Her comment didn’t seem to put the elderly woman at ease. “Anyone who spends time in that house...” she trailed off, shaking her head and looking a bit ill in Kate’s estimation.
“What do you mean?”
“Families are happy when they go inside,” she explained mysteriously. “But when they come out, their eyes are wild and there’s often one less.”
Mrs. Fix It Mysteries: The Complete 15-Books Cozy Mystery Series Page 95
