Fatal Fixer-Upper (24 page)

'Someone gave it to me. I'll tell you about it when you come to pick it up, OK?'

'This had better be good,' Wayne said. 'Don't move. I'm on my way.' He hung up. I used the time while I waited to call Paige to let her know what I'd done.

'Any news about Philippe—I mean, Phil Albertson?' I asked ten minutes later, as I let Wayne into Aunt Inga's house. Philippe still hadn't returned my phone call. Wayne shook his head.

'I'm afraid not. I've had law enforcement in five states keeping an eye out for him all day, and so far, no one has reported a thing.'

'Have you tried calling his office?'

Wayne said he had. 'I spoke to the receptionist, Miss Hamilton, and to the attorney, Miss Lee. Neither of them has heard from him since yesterday.'

'Tara must be upset,' I said happily.

'That the new girlfriend?'

'That's her. She's twenty-two and looks like Melissa James. Or like Melissa must have looked back in college, when she swept Derek off his feet. And speaking of Melissa James . . .'

'She said they parted ways around six,' Wayne said.

'She went home to her condo, alone. She assumed Mr. Albertson went to look for you, since you were all he talked about. You and that couch, of course.'

'Of course.' The fainting couch was the only reason for his rekindled interest in me, and I was well aware of it. 'So the last time anyone saw him was last night around six, when he left Melissa? Where did he spend the night? Did he have reservations anywhere?'

'None I've been able to find,' Wayne said. 'Miss Lee said he didn't ask her to make any. Miss Hamilton assumed he planned to spend the night with you.'

'Hah!' I said. If Philippe thought I would welcome him back into my bed after he cheated on me with Tara, he was even more self-absorbed than I had suspected. Although I won't deny it cheered me to imagine Tara's chagrin at the thought. 'Did you think to ask Mr. Rodgers? He showed Philippe the way to my house—Aunt Inga's house— yesterday.'

'You told me,' Wayne nodded. 'And I tried to call, but he didn't answer. Went out of town, most likely. He has relatives in Thomaston that he goes to visit occasionally.'

'What about B and Bs? Hotels? Motels?'

'I've checked all the hotels, motels, and B and Bs as far away as Portland. The police and the highway patrol in every state between us and New York have kept an eye out for the Rover since last night. I had the NYPD knock on his door this afternoon. I even called Christie's and tracked down the girl he said he knew. Nobody's seen or heard from him. At this point, there's nothing more I can do. Just wait.'

'Just like Professor Wentworth,' I muttered. 'Into thin air.'

Wayne didn't answer. 'So about this day planner . . .' he said. I indicated the kitchen table, and he ambled over and began turning pages. 'I see he had plans to meet with your aunt the day he disappeared,' he remarked after a moment. I nodded.

'Probably got here, too, if his bike in the shed is any indication.'

'Probably so,' I agreed. 'He left home on it that morning, didn't he?'

'So I've been told. Nice, sunny day, warm. An easy ride from the condo, level terrain except for the last half mile or so, up the hill from downtown. He left home just before eighty thirty, probably got here right at nine o'clock. Put the bicycle in the shed, so no one would see it. Could mean he didn't want anyone to know he was here.'

'Or just that he didn't want anyone to steal it while he was busy doing whatever it was he had to do,' I answered.

'If you look back through the pages, you'll see that he'd been visiting my aunt every week for a while. His . . . um . . . the person who gave me the day planner said they were working on some sort of project together. Something to do with Marie Antoinette and Samuel Clough and the
Sally
.'

Wayne's gaze sharpened when I mentioned the person who had given me the planner, but he didn't push. Not yet.

'What do you think this means?' he asked instead, pointing to the entry for the Wednesday one week before the day Aunt Inga died. Next to : IM@h, it said SOL with three question marks following it.

I hadn't noticed it earlier, and now I squinted at it for a moment, running acronyms over in my head. 'Standard of living? Society for Organized Learning? Latin word for the sun? He was big on abbreviations. The appointment book is full of them. Derek and I had a lot of fun figuring out what some of them meant, earlier.'

'In my line of work,' Wayne said, 'SOL would be statute of limitations.' I blinked, and he added, 'This person who gave you the planner . . . Who would that be?'

I hesitated. 'Do I have to tell you?'

'Unless you want me to arrest you for obstruction of justice, yes.'

'You wouldn't do that, would you?'

'Probably not,' Wayne admitted. 'Although I might. Then again, spending the night in jail probably wouldn't be enough to convince you to talk, seeing as you live with the bare minimum as it is. Just let me ask you one thing. When I saw you this morning, you and Derek were on your way to Barnham College. That's what you said, wasn't it?'

I made a face. 'Yes.'

'So did you get this from someone at Barnham? A student? It wasn't Shannon, was it?' I shook my head, and he looked relieved. 'At least I don't have to worry about keeping secrets from Kate. Josh probably wouldn't have been happy, either.'

'He likes her, doesn't he?' It was a futile attempt to change the subject.

'Josh? Likes Shannon? Worships the ground she walks on. But if she'd gotten mixed up with her professor, I think he would have told me.' He looked at me in silence for a second, and then he added, 'They're all over eighteen, you know. And although getting involved with a teacher may not be smart, it isn't illegal. Whoever the girl is, I can't tell her parents or arrest her.'

'How about obstruction of justice?' I wanted to know.

'And removing evidence?' The things he had threatened me with, in other words.

'Oh, well.' He shrugged.

I did the same. 'Her name is all over the planner, so I guess it doesn't matter. Abbreviated, of course, like everything else, but it wouldn't take you long to figure it out. Her name is Paige Thompson.'

Wayne rolled his eyes. 'That figures. She never did have the sense God gave a flea. I'll talk to her.'

'Be nice,' I said, as I walked him down the hall toward the front door again. 'She seems pretty broken up.'

'Always been delicate,' the chief of police agreed. 'Lost her mom when she was a kid. Suicide. And her dad's not the easiest person in the world to live with.'

'I wondered why she had a dorm room at the college when she's from Waterfield originally. I guess that's why.' I opened the door and let Wayne pass through. He kept a tight grip on the day planner, as if he was afraid I would change my mind at the last minute and snatch it back from him.

'Thanks for this.' He lifted it. 'I'll put young Brandon on it, see what he can come up with. And I'll talk to Paige, in case she knows something she didn't tell you.'

'Let me know how it goes,' I said. Wayne promised he would and took his leave. I wandered slowly back inside, gnawing my lip.

The chief's suggestion for what SOL might mean made a lot of sense, unfortunately, especially with what I knew and he didn't. A statute of limitations is the legal precedent that decides for how long after the fact someone can be charged with a crime. In order to prosecute for theft, for instance, the theft has to have taken place within just a few years. On the other hand, if I remembered correctly from watching crime shows on TV, there is no statute of limitations at all on certain crimes. Like murder. What if Professor Wentworth had been researching the statute of limitations to see if he could have my aunt arrested and charged with killing that security guard in Thomaston in ?

But no. That would give my aunt a good reason for killing Professor Wentworth, but why would he kill her? Unless it really was an accident. If he told her what he planned to do, and she got upset, and they fought, and she fell down the stairs, and then he snatched the tapestry from the wall and ran. But wouldn't it have made more sense for him to leave it there, and then call Wayne? The tapestry—and the chaise longue in the attic—were proof that he was telling the truth, at least about the thefts and the dead watchman. If he had no prior history of violence, why run? Without the tapestry—and now, without the chaise longue—I wasn't sure how one could prove any of it.

Dammit, what had happened to the chaise longue? And where the hell was Philippe? If he had left Melissa at six p.m. last night, he'd had time to drive to New York and back twice by now. That Range Rover could probably burn up the road, and Philippe had a lead foot. He might have gone somewhere else—back to Tennessee, maybe, or across the border into Canada—but why? The fainting couch was valuable, but I doubted it was valuable enough to entice him to discard the business and identity he'd spent ten years building.

But if he wasn't in New York, and he hadn't gone anywhere else, where was he? Not with Melissa, or so she said. Not with me. He had no acquaintances in town who might put him up for the night. He hadn't rented a room. Unless he had driven his car off the road into the ocean, where might he be?

Good Lord, I thought, stopping dead halfway down the long hall, what if he
had
driven off the road? My face paled as I imagined the sleek Rover zooming down the ocean road away from town, Philippe behind the wheel and my chaise longue lovingly tucked in behind him. I pictured him glancing over his shoulder at it, gloatingly, just as the road turned, and the car not turning with it, but instead whizzing across the gravel and grass toward the guardrail, hitting it dead-on at ninety miles per hour. There's a lot of horsepower in a Range Rover; the guardrail would give, and both rail and car would go flying over the edge, hurtling down toward the cold water forty feet below. How deep was the sea just below the cliffs? If the smugglers had brought their boats in there in the old days, it would be more than deep enough to consume a Range Rover. Both Philippe and the fainting couch might be disintegrating in the frigid water of the Atlantic right now.

But surely someone would have noticed if the guardrail had been broken anywhere along the coast road. Wayne's squad had been up and down and all around all day, not just on the lookout for Philippe and the Rover, but also keeping an eye on anything else that might be going on in Waterfield. They'd have noticed if someone had driven off the road into the ocean. Right? And even if they hadn't, with no car, and no bike, it wasn't like I could do any searching myself. Derek might agree to drive me around, but it would be the utmost in insensitivity for me to ask him to help me search for my ex-boyfriend when he had just told me that he liked me himself. Or that he
would
like me, if I had any plans of sticking around. Which surely meant that he
did
like me, he just didn't want to.

So what was I going to do about Derek, I asked myself as I entered the kitchen to nuke another bowl of instant mac and cheese for dinner. I couldn't deny that I liked him back. We'd gotten along well the past few days. We worked well together, once he'd allowed that occasionally I might know what I was talking about. The joint productions of kitchen backsplash and kitchen cabinets were going to look great. He had bought me a knee brace, and picked flowers for Aunt Inga's grave, and held me while I cried. When I thought he was going to kiss me, my stomach had quivered, and my breath had stuttered in my chest. And—the dead giveaway—my hand twitched every time that damn hank of hair fell into his eyes.

So yes, the attraction was definitely there, and mutual. The problem was, of course, that he'd made it very clear that he didn't want to act on it unless I was planning to stay in Waterfield beyond the summer. And how could I do that? Selling Aunt Inga's house might net me a couple hundred grand, maybe, once Derek had gotten his share and once the Realtor had gotten his or her commission. But then I'd be homeless, and if Kate was right about Waterfield's real estate prices, I couldn't afford to buy another place to live.

And I had to have a job. Something fun and fulfilling. I hadn't gone to Parsons for all those years to ring up groceries at Shaw's Supermarket or wait tables at the Waymouth Tavern.

The microwave dinged, and I pulled my plastic bowl of gooey macaroni out and sat down at the kitchen table, digging in with a plastic fork. This probably wasn't the best time to think about it. I had more important—or at least more immediate—concerns. Like, where the hell were my erstwhile boss-slash-boyfriend and my antique chaise longue? Not to mention the missing professor who may or may not have killed my aunt?

Wait a second, though. I sat up straighter on the uncomfortable kitchen chair. What if I was looking at things the wrong way? What if Professor Wentworth had been researching the statute of limitations on the theft, but not on the murder? And not because he was trying to have my aunt arrested, but because—yes!—he was trying to help. My aunt was getting on in age, and knew she wasn't going to live forever. Maybe she wanted to come clean before she died, and she had asked Professor Wentworth to help her get the antiquities back where they belonged. That would explain why he had a list of them, and photographs, as well. It would also explain the letter I'd gotten, and Aunt Inga's statement about wrongs needing to be set right. She was getting old—more than old; ancient—and wanted to take care of things before she died. Martin Wentworth had been trying to figure out where the various items belonged so he could return them there. Maybe Aunt Inga had already given him the tapestry to return to the robbery victims' descendants in Wiscasset, and that was why it was no longer on the wall in the hallway. Maybe he had left his bicycle in the shed and taken a bus or a train to Wiscasset, where something had happened to him. Or maybe he had hitched a ride with someone who realized the value of the tapestry and who had knocked him over the head and tossed him in the ocean, and in a week or so, he'd float into Boston Harbor. Maybe Aunt Inga had simply stumbled and fallen, and it was all just a tragic accident.