Better Homes and Corpses (3 page)

I waited for Doc on a concrete bench near a huge pond that emptied into the Atlantic. I considered texting him but knew he wasn’t tech-savvy when it came to cell phones and other newfangled gadgets.
Damn.
Doc would be pissed I never turned on the tape recorder.

Lilies of the valley and crocuses were trying to break through the frozen soil. Spring, a time of new beginnings.

For Jillian’s sake, I sure as hell hoped so.

*   *   *

On the ride back to Montauk, I said, “Isn’t amnesia pretty rare? The only time I’ve seen it is in soap operas or Lifetime movies.”

“From what you’ve told me, Dr. Greene seems to know what he’s talking about. Many veterans from the Iraq War suffer from PTSD. It’s a real condition, but fortunately, or unfortunately, the memory loss is usually temporary.”

Doc drove his early model Buick Park Avenue twenty miles below the speed limit on the two-lane highway. In the side-view mirror a mile-long trail of cars snaked behind us.

“Why would someone murder Caroline Spenser and leave Jillian with just a bump on the head? Maybe the killer heard my car and didn’t have time to finish her off?”

“I got some info from my fishing buddy, who just happens to be on the case. The murder weapon seems to be something unusual. Long, double-edged, and rusty. Caroline Spenser also had a hematoma on the back of her head.”

“Did Jillian have any other injuries?”

Cars were passing us, ignoring the double yellow line. A few flipped Doc the bird. Doc didn’t notice. “No, and there wasn’t any sign of forced entry. I guess you know that, seeing the door was open. The alarm system, including the surveillance cameras, was turned off, and the keypad is on the inside. You need a remote to access it from the outside.”

I turned to look at him. “Any kitchen knives missing?”

“No. All accounted for. Plus, like I said, the blade was double-edged and rusty.”

“Right.” I shivered at the thought of such a gruesome murder weapon.

*   *   *

My ’98 Jeep Wrangler was parked behind the East Hampton Town police station, keys in the ignition. I guess they figured no one in their right mind would want to steal it. Forensics had left black fingerprint dust on every surface.

I arrived home and slapped together a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I added a few leaves of chocolate mint from my windowsill. I may not be a gourmet cook, like my father, but I know how to elevate the ordinary with herbs. I brought the sandwich to my desk and reviewed the decorating plans for my current project. The George III writing desk had a drop-leaf front and numerous cubbyholes. The desk’s delicate cabriole legs were fitted with brass casters
that made it easy to wheel around to face whatever ocean view I desired. Today it faced east.

I propped a large corkboard against the wall and tacked diagrams of my client’s seven rooms, along with a few fabric choices for the Kittinger family’s former summer cottage, soon-to-be year-round home. Decorating was a conundrum. I fanned the contents of the file in front of me. The order in which they lay seemed haphazard, but everything had a rhythm. I grabbed whatever broke the flow and threw it to the floor. Once, when working on the cottage of my only cranky client, Jason Freid, I realized everything on the floor was better than what was on the corkboard. His personality was on the floor: bold colors and sharp corners. Who was I to question the fates? He ended up loving what I did and even mentioned me in
Dave’s Hamptons
, the local “who’s who” newspaper. Caroline Spenser had plenty of sharp corners too, but what could she have possibly done for someone to murder her so brutally?

I worked till well past dinnertime. My great room looked like the scene of a printing press explosion. Open files scattered the floor, overflowing with torn pages from home and garden magazines. By the time I finished tidying, I decided to reward myself with a stroll on the beach, hoping my neighbor, Patrick Seaton had left his mark.

I stopped in front of his cottage. The moon was a caricature of itself, belonging on the cover of a ’50s nursery rhyme book—chubby-cheeked with a winsome smile. The waves threatened to wash away the words from Emerson he had left:

Sorrow makes us all children again,

Destroys all differences of intellect.

FOUR

Tuesday I followed Highway 114 into Sag Harbor, an old whaling port seven miles due north of East Hampton. White clapboard storefronts lined Main Street, housing artsy shops. The weather had taken a turn for the better and I could almost believe the winter doldrums were behind me. I turned right onto Sage Street until I came to a captain’s house with gingerbread trim and a widow’s walk that offered a full view of the harbor. At the side of the house was a wooden sign that read,
MABEL AND ELLE’S
CURIOSITIES
.

Elle’s antique shop was on the first floor of the house. She lived on the second floor and her bedroom was the garret room that opened to the widow’s walk. When I pulled up, Elle’s part-time employee, Maurice, was placing cushions on the furniture under the covered porch. Even though Maurice had lived in Sag Harbor for almost twenty years, the same amount of time he’d worked at Mabel and Elle’s, he still kept his posh Londoner accent. He was in
his midforties, tall and elegant with graying temples. He reminded me of Rex Harrison’s Professor Henry Higgins in the movie
My Fair Lady
.

Maurice and his partner owned a small Victorian cottage in town, decorated with the perfect mix of vintage and modern. He had a flair for everything he did and was also my go-to fashionista. He’d taken me under his wing on those rare occasions I was invited to an important Hamptons event. He was instrumental in coordinating my outfit for Caroline and Jillian Spenser’s cocktail party. I’d never tell him about the clinging-underwear faux pas.

I tooted the horn at Maurice and pulled into the driveway. Elle waved to me from window of the carriage house. She held a phone to her ear and looked excited about something.

I walked in and kissed a cheek smothered in freckles.

“One sec,” Elle mouthed.

I hung my jacket on one of Bullwinkle’s antlers and patted his head, seeing as that’s all that was left of him.

Elle and I used the carriage house as a work space for our refurbishing projects. On one side of the massive room there was a kitchen with a cast-iron sink and a working O’Keefe & Merritt stove. A high-backed kitchen stool was stationed at each end of the workbench. The center of the room housed our works in progress—assorted chairs, tables, weathered oil paintings, frames, light fixtures, and sections of ornate iron gates. In one corner, Elle had installed a 1930s steel bank vault she used to store rare antiquities sent to her for evaluation. Before she worked at
American Home and Garden
, she was an antique appraiser at Sotheby’s and still did freelance work for insurance companies and wealthy collectors in the Hamptons area.

Today I planned to complete three items that would eventually go into my current Cottages by the Sea project. The
first was a collection of English ironstone I’d feature in a built-in corner cupboard. The six plates, large serving platter, four milk pitchers, and soup tureen had come from a church thrift shop in Orient Point. I’d paid only twenty dollars. Naturally, at that price, there was a catch. All the pieces were stained like a rusty toilet bowl. I was following one of
American Home and Garden
’s do-it-yourself recipes. The ironstone had been soaking in thirty-percent liquid peroxide for two weeks. Wearing rubber gloves and feeling like a mad scientist, I removed the submerged pieces and placed them on aluminum foil in a warmed oven, which I’d turned off. Twenty minutes later, I opened the oven. Each piece was covered in a thick orange crust. After a few dunks in warm, sudsy water, I stood back to admire my handiwork. The pieces were now pearly white and the hairline cracks had all but disappeared. I knew the whole lot would sell for at least six hundred dollars at an antique show and twelve hundred or higher in a shop in Bridgehampton—a better return on my money than a winning stock portfolio.

“Wow! Great job!” Elle clapped her hands. Her face was dewy and recently scrubbed. Her dark hair was cropped short into a pixie style, making her look ten years younger. Elle never left the house without an eye-dazzling cluster of rhinestone brooches affixed somewhere on her clothing. Along with the antique shop, she’d inherited a huge nineteenth-century dental cabinet filled with stunning pieces of vintage costume jewelry.

“I was talking to First Fidelity Mutual when you walked in,” Elle said.

“New assignment?”

“They want me to do the Spenser estate,” she added, a little too nonchalantly. “What do you think?”

“Say what? You’re going to inventory the estate of a woman who was stabbed to death?”

“I know,” Elle said. “I have really bad vibes about working there. I told you something didn’t sit right after you told me about the cocktail party.”

Ever the dyslexic psychic—Elle always felt things
after
they happened.

“Hmm, I don’t remember you saying anything.”

“Well, I felt it. I just didn’t want to alarm you, and that’s why I won’t inventory the estate alone. Too spooky—I need Scooby You. A lot of Caroline Spenser’s treasures came from Sotheby’s—the absolute mother lode of fine eighteenth-century Americana.”

“Quite a coincidence they’d call you to inventory the estate.”

“Well, I might have mentioned to Bill Myers when I ran into him at The American Hotel that you went to college with Jillian. I also might have known the Spensers were insured through his company.”

“Not a good idea. At least not until they find Caroline Spenser’s killer.”

“You know the family, and I’ll split the retainer with you. I don’t know if it’s because of your hearing loss, but you seem to notice things other people don’t.”

“Ah, yes, my superpowers. A heightened sense of smell, an uncanny visual attention to detail, and the constant paranoia someone is talking about me behind my back, not to mention the fact my speech is off-kilter.”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve never noticed any problems with your speech. If anything, you sound like a world traveler with a slight accent. Oh, and they also want me to inventory the Spensers’ Manhattan town house.”

“I don’t think there’s an opening in my one-Zen-day-at-a-time planner, and there’s no way I’m going back to Manhattan. I never know who I’ll run into.”

“Okay. I’ll do the town house myself.” Elle took her place on her stool, put on a silver-polishing mitt and went to work on a sterling fish knife with a carved bone handle. Elle clicked her tongue. “Seriously, look at the fantastic job you did for Mr. Febretti.”

A few months ago, Elle brought me along to inventory the aftermath of a burglary at Macchiano Febretti’s Amagansett beach house. The following weekend, when I attended the Bridgehampton Antiques & Design Fair, I spied a woman selling one of Febretti’s missing items. I was able to read her lips as she spoke into her cell phone. She told the person on the other end she’d found a sucker for her ex’s prized statue. Febretti’s former wife was trying to get even with him for dumping her. I liked her style, but I couldn’t let her sell an Erté bronze statue valued at ten thousand dollars for a thousand. Could I?

“When does the insurance company want you to start?”

“After the funeral.”

“Maybe they’ll catch Caroline Spenser’s killer by then. At least the insurance company initiated the inventory, not the Spensers. I hate to see boxes of family photos chucked in the trash at estate sales while the heirs walk around doing a mental accounting of how much Grandma’s flatware will bring in.”

“I know what you mean.” Elle nodded. “I agree with Oscar Wilde, ‘People know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’”

Elle went to crank up the volume on the old Edison gramophone in the corner. Jazz filled the room, inspiring me to move on to my next project, a pine wall table with a bottom
shelf and carved spindle legs. I tied on a vintage apron decorated with cherry pies sprouting legs and removed a trio of stain markers from the pocket. After a few strokes, the pine wall table, project number two, was complete. I’d use it in a guest bathroom to store rolled hand towels, leaving room on top for a piece of vintage pottery.

“Bravo,” Elle said. “Make sure you invite me for the final walkthrough of the Kittinger cottage. I can’t wait to see it.”

“Oh, don’t worry. You’re gonna be there,
and
you’re gonna help.”

I moved on to my third guinea pig, a wood sign from a 1970s Adirondack guest colony, which read:
TWIN PINES COTTAGES
. I wanted to make it look distressed, more ’40s than ’70s. Elle recently told me the refinisher’s golden rule: NEVER alter the appearance of an item unless it has no value in its current state. Most of the items we worked on fell under the little-or-no-value heading, but they were the most fun to play with.

An electric sander would have worked on the sign but instead, I used fine-gauged steel wool.
Do I want to hang out at the Spenser house of tragedy?
There was nothing better to take my troubles away than getting involved in someone else’s. Plus, Jillian needed me. If I helped Elle inventory Seacliff, I could keep my eye on Jillian and, at the same time, make some extra cash while I tried to build my reputation as an interior designer. Sounded like a win-win situation, notwithstanding the fact Caroline Spenser’s killer was still at large.

Elle knocked on the table to get my attention. I turned toward her.

“Stop. Decelerate.”

“Ugh. You’re right.” I let out a sneeze of cyclonic proportions.

“Bless you.”

“I just can’t concentrate. I keep thinking about the bloodbath at Seacliff.”

“I’ll understand if you don’t want to work at the Spensers’.”

“I am curious about the murder.”

“Having a father who’s a retired homicide detective means curiosity runs in the genes, but maybe it’s a mistake. You’re still dealing with a lot of bad stuff.”

“‘Bad stuff’ sums it up, but I’m over Michael the cheat.” I felt the heat rush up from my neck to my cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassing enough that Michael cheated on me with his ex-wife Paige, he cheated on me with the daughter of the Whitney publishing empire, the owner of
American Home and Garden
magazine, where I was managing editor.

“Sure you’re over Michael? Have you seen him or
her
around?”

“Why would I?”

“Because Paige’s family owns Windy Willows in Southampton and it’s almost ‘The Season.’”

“Ugh. Thanks for reminding me.” I changed the subject. “Jillian seems even more insecure than she was in college. Then there’s this cast of characters like something from
Murder, She Wrote
.” I got up and grabbed the vintage hankie peeking out from Elle’s back pocket.

Before the second sneeze hit, Elle said, “Bless you!”

*   *   *

A few hours later, we loaded my projects into the back of the Jeep. Elle said, “Don’t go crazy thinking about it, but let me know if you want to help. If you’re not going to do it, then I’m not.”

“Right. No pressure. I have to admit, helping Jillian determine the motive for her mother’s murder would be
great, but what if nothing’s missing? That means it’s personal.”

“First Fidelity promised a big retainer. I’ll split it down the middle, if that sways you.”

*   *   *

The floodlight clicked on as I pulled into my driveway. I got out and stood at the railing and looked at the beach. The night was still.

I climbed down the steps and went to the front of Patrick Seaton’s cottage.

The tide was about to claim the only three words I could make out with my flashlight:
Undying . . . regret . . . fools.

The written word was paramount to me. Maybe it had something to do with my hearing loss. I believed I heard things in words others took for granted.

When I came back up to my deck, someone had left a pile of kindling by my door.

Patrick Seaton?