Madness in Brewster Square

by Narielle Living

  All the houses in the new Stony River Farms development where Ethel had lived looked exactly alike. Not a little bit alike, but exactly alike, right down to the same trees and shrubs in the same spots in each yard. Each door was painted Colonial blue and had matching shutters, and the houses were finished with deep taupe-colored siding. Small oak trees had been planted in each front yard, slightly right of the front door. Presumably, when the trees grew taller, they could provide shade for the front of the house.

  I wondered if sometimes people walked into the wrong house at the end of their day, confused at the general state of sameness that pervaded the neighborhood.

  I pulled into the driveway and was pleased to note that I had only one tire on the lawn. Grabbing the plate of cookies, I marched to the front door, wondering why there were no other cars in the driveway. I knew Ethel had relatives, some nieces and nephews, and wondered if maybe they were all gathered at a different house.

  Maybe they’d gone to the wrong house, too.

  Ringing the bell, I waited, not expecting to hear footsteps. The house felt empty. Turning from the door, I started thinking about my next step when another car pulled into the driveway.

  I knew the woman who climbed out of the Lexus immediately and had a moment’s hesitation before I spoke to her. I liked Ethel’s niece Carla, and I wondered how she was handling her aunt’s death.

  “Did you ring the bell?” Carla asked. “Aunt Ethel said she’d be here this afternoon, so I don’t know if I’m too early or not.”

  More like too late, but I wasn’t sure how to tell her that. I’d never had to break the news of anyone’s death before, and I wasn’t sure what to do.

  Hugging me lightly, Carla kept talking. “Ava, how have you been? I’ve been meaning to come down to the store and see you and your brother, but time keeps getting away from me. The kids are getting ready for spring break in April, and we’re hoping to go someplace warm.”

  I still didn’t know what to say. “That would be nice. To go someplace warm, I mean.” I could probably cross grief counselor off my list of potential careers. I couldn’t even open my mouth to talk about her aunt’s death, much less tell the woman what had happened.

  To my relief another car pulled into the driveway and parked behind Carla. At least now I wouldn’t have to shoulder this alone, and hopefully whoever this was would be better at breaking the news to her.

  Of course, of all the dead women’s houses in all of Connecticut, he had to come to this one. Detective Oliver Rialto marched up the sidewalk toward us, with a scowl on his face meant only for me.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said. Carla looked a little confused, so I introduced them.

  “Carla, this is Oliver.” I tried not to glare at him. Despite what my sister-in-law had said, every time I saw him the detective got under my skin—and not in a good way.

  “Can I talk to you for a moment?” he asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “Would you excuse us, Carla?” I said.

  “Sure,” Carla said, “I’m just going to go inside and see if Aunt Ethel is there.”

  “Wait right here ma’am, I’ll be with you shortly,” Detective Rialto said.

  Carla looked perplexed, but she’s nothing if not polite. She stood on the front steps, waiting for Oliver to finish talking to me.

  “Did you say anything?” he asked.

  “Good morning to you, too. I thought you weren’t working this morning.”

  “Just because I’m not at the station doesn’t mean I’m not working. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to pay my respects,” I said, lifting the tray of cookies, “and for your information, I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say once I realized she didn’t know.”

  Oliver nodded. “Fine. Let me handle this.”

  As he walked over to Carla, I could see him assemble his face into a mask of sincerity. Leaning toward her, he mumbled a few words while he quietly held her elbow.

  Even though I was standing about six feet away from them, I could hear Carla’s sigh. Her eyes filled with tears as she looked over at me, and I felt that usual helpless sense I get when I’m powerless to make things better.

  “You probably didn’t know what to say to me,” she said through a watery smile. I could only nod at the truth of that, because if Oliver hadn’t come along when he did, we’d still be standing out here talking about the weather or something equally mundane.

  “Let’s go inside so I can get the details and pass them along to the rest of the family,” Carla said, turning toward the front door, “although I have to tell you, I always figured something like this would happen.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I knew Detective Rialto was annoyed with me for accepting Carla’s invitation to come inside her aunt’s house, but I had come to bring cookies, and I wasn’t about to drop them off and leave. As Carla was unlocking the front door with her spare key, he shot me a dirty look and shook his head. I lifted my tray of cookies in answer, trying to look like I was only there to provide comfort and solace.

  “It certainly is very nice of Ms. O’Dell to bring food,” he said, “but I’m sure she’s got things she needs to do. Why don’t I take that tray for you and bring it inside?”

  “No, please stay,” Carla said. “I haven’t seen you in a while, Ava, and I’d really like it if you could be here for this.” As she pushed open the front door with her forearm, she turned her head and slid her eyes over the detective. I couldn’t help but wonder if he made her nervous. He was big and just a little intimidating, but I didn’t think she had anything to worry about. Unless she had something to hide, of course, which I seriously doubted. Carla was more of a soccer mom than a killer mom.

  Now that Detective Rialto was here, too, I wouldn’t be able to ask the same types of questions without clueing him in to what I was doing, but at least I could listen in on whatever he asked Carla, which was almost as good.

  “I may want to talk to you in private,” Detective Rialto said as he followed us into the front entryway.

  Carla pulled herself up straight and turned. “Whatever you want to say you can say in front of Ava. We’ve known each other our whole lives. I have nothing to hide from her.” Pausing for effect, she added, “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  Detective Rialto nodded, ignoring the dig. “Fine, then we’ll get started. There are some things I’d like to go over with you.”

  Carla led the way to the kitchen, and we all sat at the round kitchen table. The house was fairly new, and everything was immaculate. No crumbs littered the granite counter tops, and the windows sparkled in the early morning sunlight. I noticed there were no dishes left in the sink, no shoes by the front door and no mail lying around anywhere. Ethel’s house looked like a model home, the kind that people walk through when they’re deciding if they want to buy in a development.

  I started taking the plastic wrap off my tray of cookies, listening as Detective Rialto filled Carla in on the details of last night. Hearing him tell the story as if it had happened to someone else was strange. I couldn’t help but feel a little awkward when Carla looked at me from the kitchen, coffee pot in mid-air as Detective Rialto told her that I had been the one who found her aunt.

  She regained her composure quickly, though, and continued making coffee as if she were just having a friendly chat with the next door neighbors. I don’t know how she kept her poise in the face of this kind of news, but Carla remained calm and composed through the entire story.

  “We were always afraid something would happen to her,” Carla said.

  “Something violent?” Detective Rialto asked.

  Carla was silent for a moment, and I wondered if she was trying to figure out how to explain her aunt to the detective. I’d known Ethel for a while, and I knew firsthand her reputation for being a pain in the neck to so many people. Describing Ethel would be difficult, since underneath the woman’s prickly demeanor she had a reason for everything she d
id. Not everyone agreed with her reasoning, that’s all. I wondered how Carla would explain this.

  “My aunt was known to be a difficult woman,” Carla said. “She’s always been very rigid and unwilling to listen to the opinions of others. As the president of the neighborhood association, she’s had run-ins with almost every homeowner in this development.”

  Points for discretion, I thought, remembering Ethel’s screaming tirade at a town council public meeting a few months ago.

  “Do you think anyone was mad enough to kill her?” Detective Rialto said.

  Yes.

  Carla shook her head. “No, murder is the last thing I expected.”

  I looked at Carla, wondering why she would say a thing like that. Everyone I knew had wanted to murder Ethel at some point or other, and the fact that someone actually did it was not a surprise to me. Maybe people had trouble seeing family members for who they really were. An image of Giuseppe floated through my mind.

  Carla continued. “Frankly, I thought she would suffer some vandalism to her house or car, maybe a few threatening notes, that sort of thing.”

  Okay, she had a point. Murder was a bit extreme.

  “Did any of that happen?” he asked.

  Carla sighed, and this time tears came to her eyes. “Aunt Ethel was very independent, you know, but she was a fascinating woman, too. Most people don’t know how much she travelled or the amazing things she managed to do in her lifetime. She meant well, she really did, and everything she ever did was out of a sense of misplaced morality or a skewed view of her role as a leader in this community.”

  “Was your aunt the victim of vandalism?” Detective Rialto asked again.

  Carla hesitated, then shook her head. “She never told me about anything like that.”

  “Why would anyone murder your aunt?” Detective Rialto asked.

  Carla’s tears flowed down her face. “Why wouldn’t they? She was pushy and abrasive, and she made lots of people mad.”

  “But why? What did she do?” Detective Rialto pressed.

  “Well, you know she was president of the homeowners association here, right?” Without waiting for an answer, Carla kept talking. “She was big on following the rules, and the rules say that a certain look has to be maintained in the neighborhood. People have to use only certain colors on the doors and homes and can’t plant things in the yard without getting permission first.”

  I thought of the Stepford wives but kept my mouth shut. What business was it of mine if people wanted to live in a community of uniformity? Variation is not for everyone.

  “One day she got a phone call from the Tylers, who live over on the other side of the development. They were complaining to Aunt Ethel that their neighbors were putting in one of those inflatable, above-ground pools, and wasn’t that against the rules, blah blah blah.”

  “Was it against the rules?” Detective Rialto asked. I didn’t say a word, since I’d already heard the story from many different people. Surprisingly, this incident had been a hot topic for months in Brewster Square. Half the town was on the side of the folks who wanted a cheap swimming pool, because who doesn’t want to be able to go swimming in the summer; the other half was on Ethel’s side, because rules were rules. Seemingly everyone in town disagreed with how she’d handled the situation.

  “Yes. Aunt Ethel got a legal injunction to force them to take down the pool. Lots of people thought she had carried it a bit too far, since it was only a pool.”

  “Was that the only time your aunt angered people in the neighborhood?” Detective Rialto asked. I had to stop the great big “Hah!” that wanted to come out of my mouth. Of course it wasn’t the only time she’d pissed someone off. It was just the most talked about time in recent history.

  “No, of course not. Where are you from?” Carla asked.

  The land of know-it-alls.

  Detective Rialto ignored her question. “I’ll need a list of the people your aunt had any kind of feud with, as well as information on what those disagreements were about.”

  Carla paled. “This might take a while. Can I go call my husband first? Nobody at the house knows what happened.”

  Detective Rialto nodded while mentally I tried to calculate how many months it would take Carla to put that list together. Many.

  Taking her cell phone out of her purse, Carla didn’t even glance at us as she walked out the French doors in the back of the kitchen that led onto a deck. I zeroed in on her hand shaking slightly as she scrolled through the data on her phone, probably looking for her husband’s number.

  “You need to mind your own business.”

  I pulled my mind back to the man sitting at the table with me, the one with no manners. “You’re not very friendly,” I said.

  “It’s not part of my job description to be friendly. What the hell are you doing here this morning?”

  I was insulted he’d asked that question. Did he think I was heartless enough that I would ignore a friend’s grief? “Bringing cookies, which is more than I can say for you.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The least you could have done was stopped and gotten some muffins or something. You don’t show up empty-handed to see the relatives of someone who just died.” What was with this guy, didn’t he know anything?

  Detective Rialto opened his mouth, then closed it again. He almost looked as if he didn’t know what to say.

  “Remember that for next time,” I said, “and it doesn’t have to be muffins or cookies. You can even stop and get a box of doughnuts or something.” Reaching over and patting his hand, I hoped I made him feel better. Maybe it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know these things.

  “I’m not going to bring doughnuts to a homicide investigation,” he snarled.

  I raised my eyebrows but didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to, because the whole cop and doughnut thing crossed his mind, too. I could tell by the flush that crept up his face.

  “Listen, I’m only going to say this one more time. Mind your own business. This isn’t like one of those books where you’re going to figure out what happened. This is real life, and in real life people get hurt. Sometimes they get more than hurt. You need to stay out of our way and let us do our job, or you’ll be the one who gets hurt.”

  His reaction puzzled me. I understood that he didn’t like me and probably didn’t want me underfoot, but that had almost sounded like a threat. I added one more item to my mental checklist for this investigation. Could Detective Rialto know more about this murder than he was saying?

  Maybe the good guy wasn’t so good, after all.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Since it was almost lunchtime, and I was sort of halfway there anyway, I decided to drive to my parents’ house for a visit. They loved it when I popped in on them, and like any good Irish-Italian-American household they always had good food. Besides, I was pretty sure I’d worn out my welcome with Detective Rialto, if I’d even had any sort of welcome in the first place. Sticking around to ask him more questions did not seem the prudent thing to do.

  My parents lived on the very outer edge of Brewster Square in an old farmhouse that dated back to the 1800s. It was a traditional house, white with red shutters and a big wrap-around porch, with acres of land, several outbuildings full of assorted farm equipment, goats, cats and one dog. It may have had scuff marks on the hardwood floors and doors that didn’t close all the way because the house was a little bit crooked on its foundation, but it was a warm home, full of sunlight, laughter and the scent of good food.

  They bought the house before I was born and have lived in it for almost thirty years. I grew up playing in every inch of the space, and every time I visited I felt the warm welcome of home wrap around me. My parents always had a genuine delight when people visited and had an open-door, open-kitchen policy. They loved their lives and loved each other.

  My mother was leaning over the kitchen sink when I walked in, scrubbing with a ferocity that dared dirt, smudges or stains t
o adhere to the surface. Her glass fronted cabinets sparkled, the counters were clear of junk and wiped clean, and I wondered not for the first time what my mother would do if I tried to eat off the floor. Frankly, not only was it clean enough, but somebody ought to do it just because they could.

  “Ava!” Her face lit up with a smile as she turned the faucet off and wiped her hands dry. Throwing her arms around me, she took a deep breath as if relieved I was finally home.

  “I heard what happened,” she said, releasing me and stepping back to look me up and down. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, but my eyes filled with tears. My mother, the woman who is and always has been a constant source of comfort in my life, was the one person I could always count on to withhold judgment and let me simply be myself.

  The sound of the back door slamming echoed through the kitchen. I heard my father’s footsteps in the mudroom and quickly tried to dry my eyes.

  “This is too much for you,” he announced as soon as he saw me. “Pack a bag, and come stay in your room until this all blows over.”

  “For God’s sake, Rourke, she’s a grown woman, she’s certainly capable of taking care of herself.” My mother was right. Even if I’d felt like I needed to run home, there was no way I was going to do it now.

  “She needs her parents at a time like this. My baby girl witnessed something horrific, and I want her to know she has a place to come home to, that’s all.”

  The old farmhouse still had my and Giuseppe’s old bedroom sets, and my parents made sure we always had a room to call our own. Everything was still in “our” rooms in the same way it had been when we were kids, so we wouldn’t feel excluded once we moved. Sometimes that gesture touched me, and sometimes it made me feel suffocated.

  Today I just felt tired. Of course, I had a good reason for that.

  As I opened my mouth to ask how they knew about last night, a long, piercing wail came from the other side of the house.

  “I’ll take care of that,” my mother said. “Rourke, dear, why don’t you grab a cup of coffee and fill Ava in on what we know? Maybe she’s got more information to share with us.”