Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) (2 page)

“In the house on North Street?”

He nodded.

“No wonder having Ruth taken away upset Mamie. After seventy-plus years together, I can imagine it would upset me, too.”

“Darren stopped by a couple weeks ago and asked whether we’d be interested in taking the house off his hands. Gave us a good price, too. Better than I would have expected from him.”

“Does he like money?”

Derek nodded.

“Maybe he just wanted a quick sale,” Kate suggested. “Maybe he needs the money to pay for Ruth and Mamie’s care.”

“I think he just wanted to get rid of it quickly,” Derek answered. “He’s not hurting for cash. All the Silvas are rich. They have been for generations.”

“I guess maybe he was just doing it to be nice, then. Since he doesn’t need the money.”

“Or maybe Ruth and Mamie didn’t want to accept charity,” I suggested. “Even from family. Maybe they wanted to sell the house so they could use their own money to pay the assisted living place, instead of letting the Silvas pay for it. Ruth signed the paperwork, didn’t she?”

Derek nodded. “All legal and aboveboard. There’s nothing wrong with her mind. I can’t imagine it was easy for her to give up her childhood home, but I guess she realized she and Mamie would be better off where they are now.”

He turned back to Kate. “So what can we do for you? You said you needed a favor.”

“Right,” Kate said. “That.”

Uh-oh.

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.

“No, no.” Kate shook her head. Flickers of light from the fireplace lit up her hair, making it look like her head was on fire. “It’s no big deal. Really.”

“You sure?”

“I’m positive,” Kate said. “It has to do with Melissa.”

I arched my brows. It had to do with Melissa, but it was no big deal? How was that even possible?

Melissa James was Derek’s ex-wife. They’d met while he was in medical school and she was waiting tables at an IHOP nearby. They’d fallen in love—or maybe she had decided she wanted to be married to a doctor. Either way, she’d turned his head and wrangled a proposal out of him, and by the time he returned to Waterfield to join his dad’s medical practice, he’d had a wife along for the ride.

The marriage lasted five years. As soon as Derek decided he didn’t want to be a doctor anymore, Melissa found someone else. My cousin Ray Stenham, as it happened. Big-shot local contractor. And then she left Derek and started shacking up with Ray instead.

It was a long story. Ray was out of the picture now, along with his twin brother, Randy, and Melissa had moved on to Tony “the Tiger” Micelli, ace on-air reporter for Portland’s Channel Eight News—until Tony passed away unexpectedly last summer.

She’d been my nemesis for as long as I’d lived in Waterfield. She had descended on me approximately ten minutes after I arrived in town—and no, that’s not an exaggeration; it really was no more than that—to try to get me to sell Aunt Inga’s house to Ray and Randy, who wanted to tear it down and build a small subdivision of townhomes on the lot.

That didn’t endear me to her, or vice versa, once I refused. When I learned she was Derek’s ex, I liked her even less.

“I thought she left,” I said.

At least that’s what she’d told me at my wedding just over a month ago. That she was leaving Waterfield and moving to Portland. A bigger pond for her to conquer. No bad memories. And—I suspected—no chance of ever getting Derek back, because he was married.

Kate nodded. “She did.”

“So?” If she was gone, why did we have to talk about her?

“She has a way of lingering,” Derek informed me, his lips twitching.

I squinted at him. “Like a bad smell, you mean?”

“Something like that.” He gave my shoulders a squeeze and turned back to Kate. “What about Melissa?”

“She’s been in charge of the Waterfield Village Christmas Tour of Homes for the past eight years,” Kate said.

Derek nodded. “So?”

“Now that she’s gone, someone else has to do it.”

He shook his head. “Not me. And not Avery. We’re busy.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to be in charge of it,” Kate said. “I’m in charge of it.”

“Oh.” Derek’s face cleared. “You are? Good for you.”

“Congratulations,” I added.

Kate shrugged. “It’s more a curse than a blessing, really.”

“So what do you need from us?” Derek asked.

Kate looked around, at my front parlor, with Aunt Inga’s gray velvet love seat, the roaring fire in the restored tiled Victorian fireplace, and the floor-to-ceiling arched windows. Through the door, in the foyer, was a staircase going up to the second floor and, in the middle, room for the ginormous Christmas tree we hadn’t gotten around to buying yet.

She turned back to me. “I thought maybe you’d like to be part of the tour this year.”

“Really?” I think my voice may have squeaked, I was so surprised. And flattered.

Kate smiled. “Sure. I was actually surprised Melissa didn’t ask you last year.”

I wasn’t. She was Melissa, and I was Derek’s new girlfriend; it was obvious she wouldn’t ask me to be on the home tour. “Did she ask
you
last year?”

“She asks me every year,” Kate said. “The inn is one of the nicest historical homes in the Village, thanks to your husband. She couldn’t very well exclude it.”

True.

“But,” Kate added, “people can see my house anytime they want, just by walking in. Your house isn’t open to the public. And your aunt was a bit of a loner. I know a lot of people are curious to the see the inside of this place. They’d go on the tour just for that.”

“Are you sure it’s nice enough?” I looked around. My somewhat quirky interior designs suddenly looked rather unique, and not in a good way.

“The guy who did the renovations is pretty good,” my husband informed me.

I snuggled into his side. “I didn’t mean that. The house is beautiful. We both worked really hard on it. I was just wondering whether the decorations are good enough.”

“You’ll need a tree,” Kate said.

I nodded. “We were going to put one up. Right in the foyer, like last year. I guess we can do it a little early. When’s the tour?”

“Sunday,” Kate said.

Whoa. Not a lot of time to get ready, then, especially since we were starting to work on the Green sisters’ Craftsman bungalow tomorrow.

“You’re sort of throwing this together at the last minute, aren’t you?” Derek said.

“It’s not my fault,” Kate answered, a little defensively. “Everyone thought Melissa was handling it. Turns out she wasn’t. When she left, nothing had been done.”

Huh. “Portland’s only forty-five minutes away,” I said. “Maybe she’s still planning to take care of it.”

Kate shook her head. “She’s not. I tracked her down in Portland, and she told me to do it myself, if I wanted it done.” She shrugged. “Not like I could say no, was it?”

Not really, no. “I suppose we could do without a home tour this year . . .”

“People have come to expect it,” Kate said. “And I’ll not have it said that there wasn’t one this year because
I
dropped the ball.”

Right.

“Was everything all right?” Derek asked, a wrinkle between his brows. “When you talked to Melissa?”

Kate turned to him. “Oh, sure. She’s just being herself. Now that she’s brushed the dust of Waterfield off her shoes, she can’t be bothered to be nice to us anymore. Not that she was ever that nice, really.”

“She wasn’t that bad,” Derek said.

“Sure she was. To Avery. And to me. And Jill and Shannon and every other woman in town. She was only nice to you because you’re a man.”

“She wasn’t always that nice to me, either,” Derek said.

Kate shrugged and turned to me. “So you’ll do it? The Christmas Tour?”

I yanked my thoughts away from bad things happening to Melissa. Living well is the best revenge, and I had Derek, while she didn’t. Now I also had a home on the Christmas Home Tour. “We’d be honored.”

“Excellent.” Kate got to her feet. “Wish I could stay, but I have a lot of other people to talk to. There’ll be a meeting at the bed and breakfast on Tuesday night, to decide all the details. We have a lot to do by next weekend.”

No kidding. “I’ll be there,” I said. “Derek may have to work.”

“No problem. I’ll see you then. Seven o’clock.” She headed for the door, snagging her coat from the back of the chair on the way.

“I’ll walk you out,” Derek said, leaving the sofa. “And lock the door behind you.”

Kate shot him a jaundiced look as she shrugged into her coat. “I’m not coming back in. I have too many other people to talk to tonight.”

“You could check with Dad,” Derek said, passing from the parlor into the foyer, so I couldn’t see him anymore, but only hear his voice. “The Christmas Tour was Melissa’s thing. I know she asked him and Cora if they’d be a part of it the first year, and they turned her down flat. We’d just separated then, and I guess they were feeling loyal. But now that she’s out of the picture and it’s you running it, you could ask. It’s a nice little house.”

Kate lit up. “I’ll do that, if you think it’s all right.”

“Fine by me,” Derek said. “I don’t know if they’ll say yes, but it can’t hurt to ask.”

“Especially if I tell him you two are doing it.” She smiled. “Good luck with the Green sisters’ house.”

I pulled the laptop back onto my lap just as Derek said, “Thanks. Stop by and take a look if you have time. It’s pretty cool.”

“I might do that,” Kate said and opened the front door, “but don’t hold your breath.”

She passed through into the outside and Derek closed the door behind her. I heard the deadbolt click, and then he came back into the parlor. “Ready for bed?”

“It’s nine o’clock,” I said with a glance at my watch.

“Big day tomorrow. I need my rest.”

“You can go on up. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” Or an hour. Whenever I had gotten the interior design program to cooperate and the new kitchen for the Green sisters’ house virtually laid out.

“A month of marriage,” Derek said, “and already I’m going to bed alone? I don’t think so.”

He took the laptop out of my hands and put it on the table before extending both hands to me. “C’mon, Tink.”

I took them and let him haul me to my feet. And then I squealed when he bent and tossed me over his shoulder. “Bottoms up,” he informed me, giving mine a pat, and headed out into the foyer and up the stairs. From the windowsill, our cat, Mischa the Russian Blue, watched us out of unblinking eyes.

“Would be nice if we could put this house on the home tour,” I told Derek the next morning, standing in the living room of the Green sisters’ house looking around.

The Arts and Crafts movement was the next big thing to happen to American architecture after Victoria. You have the antebellums, the Federals and Colonials built before the Civil War, and after that, you have the Victorian movement, starting with the Italianate Victorians as early as the 1840s, in some places. The Revival Gothics came on the scene in the 1870s and 1880s, along with the Second Empire Victorians, like my aunt Inga’s house. Kate’s Queen Anne was an 1890s style, like the stick- or shingle-style Victorians and the Eastlake, and after that, there were the Folk Victorians, the cottages, like Dr. Ben and Cora’s house on Cabot Street.

The Arts and Crafts movement started in Britain as early as the 1860s, and is credited to William Morris. In the United States, however, the style is more often called American Craftsman or Craftsman style, and is used to denote the architecture, interior design, and decorative arts that prevailed from roughly 1910 to roughly 1930: during the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods. World War I and the Roaring Twenties, pretty much. In the thirties, the houses retained some of the same styles, with the overhanging porches and pillars, along with the six-over-one or three-over-one windows. But the scale was vastly different. Craftsman bungalows tend to be sprawling, with big rooms and tall ceilings. During the Depression, houses became much smaller in all directions. Smaller rooms with lower ceilings, cheaper to build and easier—and cheaper—to heat and cool.

But I digress. The Green sisters’ house was a perfect specimen of Craftsman bungalow, with soaring ceilings—not quite as tall as the twelve-footers in Aunt Inga’s house, but a good ten feet—and a lovely open floor plan, not to mention all that original unpainted woodwork.

It would look stunning all decked out for Christmas.

“I wish we could,” Derek said. “But there’s no way, Avery. Not in a week. It’ll take that long just to clean the place out.”

Hopefully not. Although the Greens had left rather a lot of junk, junk Darren Silva and his hired minions hadn’t bothered to discard.

Mamie and Ruth’s clothes were gone, of course, along with any personal items they owned. Family heirlooms and silver had been removed, I was sure. There was nothing of real value left. Darren had even had an appraiser from Boston in to look at what was left, just to make sure, and the guy had extracted whatever he thought merited a second look before decreeing that everything left in the house was material for the dump, not even worth the time or effort to haul to a thrift store or reuse center.

I had disagreed, and Derek had, too, so after closing on the house last week, we’d spent a few days letting people with beat-up pickup trucks and trailers into and out of the house to scavenge what they could. One of the first had been my buddy John Nickerson, who owned an antique store on Main Street. John specialized in midcentury modern—stuff from the fifties, sixties, and seventies—and he’d had a field day digging through Ruth and Mamie’s castoffs.

When he left, the house had already looked emptier, since he’d grabbed quite a lot of furniture—the Formica kitchen table and chrome-Naugahyde chairs, the teak television stand, the coffee table—along with several pictures of big-eyed children from Mamie’s room, most of the china from the kitchen, and a shag rug from the second bedroom upstairs.

Other people had picked over what was left, until we were looking at just the dregs: stuff of no interest or value to anyone. The only thing left to do was spend a day or two hauling it all out to the Dumpster.

No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than the squeal of hydraulics sounded from outside. Derek glanced out the window and dropped his arm from around my shoulders. “It’s the Dumpster delivery. I’ll go tell them where to put it.”

I nodded. “I’ll have a look around while I wait. Make sure there’s nothing we want to keep.”

“Knock yourself out,” Derek said and opened the door. Cold air seeped in and wound around my ankles, much as Mischa was wont to do. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I waited for him to close the front door behind him, and then I wandered farther into the house.

As mentioned, there was a living room in the front, followed by a dining room with a window seat and a breakfront, and a kitchen, with a tiny laundry room tacked onto the back as an afterthought. On the other side of the house, there was a bedroom and bath. The master bedroom was a good size, even by modern standards, although the master bath was pretty tight, and would require some fancy finagling to reach twenty-first-century standards. Derek had a plan, though.

A staircase in the back of the house led to the second floor, or half story really, since the ceiling sloped in both the upstairs bedrooms. There was a bath up here, too, tucked into the dormer in the front. It was no bigger than the bathroom downstairs.

I had suggested turning the entire top floor into one big master suite with a walk-in closet—keep one bedroom as a bedroom, turn the other bedroom into a bathroom, turn the bathroom into a dressing room/closet—but Derek had informed me there was a trend toward master suites on the main floor, so he wanted to keep the setup the way it was. It was fine with me. All that stuff is his department. Mine’s the finishes—the tile, the paint, the wallpaper, if any—while he does all the heavy lifting: the plumbing and electrical and framing and drywall. I bow to his expertise with carpentry and construction, while he bows to mine with design.

I’m a textile designer by trade. Educated at Parsons School of Design in New York City. When I’d inherited Aunt Inga’s house, I was working for a small furniture company, creating upholstery for my then-boyfriend’s handcrafted replicas. But I did go through all the requisite interior design classes at Parsons, so I do know a little about that aspect of things, too. And I have, as the saying goes, a good eye for color and texture.

As I walked through the mostly empty rooms, I let my imagination go: not to the past, and what it must have been like to live here when Ruth and Mamie were small, but to the future and what the house would look like two months from now, when we were done with it.

God willing. As Derek never tired of saying, home renovation always took longer and cost more than you thought it would.

This was our seventh project. But as I looked around, I could feel excitement bubble up inside me again at the thought of taking on something big. This house reminded me of Aunt Inga’s when I’d first inherited it: old and tired and neglected, but full of potential and promise. It could be gorgeous. All the bones were there; they just needed cleaning and polishing.

And the first step was to get rid of all the junk. I filled my arms with old newspapers and circulars, and headed for the front of the house. A metallic thump from the driveway told me that the Dumpster had been—for lack of a better word—dumped, and was ready for its first deposit of junk.

• • • 

It took all of the first day and much of the second to clear the house of accumulated junk. By the time we were finally done, it was past midafternoon on Tuesday, and my back hurt from bending and scooping. But at least the house was clean, or clean enough to start working on.

Or so I thought, until Derek looked around the empty living room and dining room with his hands on his hips and a satisfied look on his face, and said, “Only the basement left.”

“Basement?” I yelped.

He turned to me. “Did I forget to tell you about the basement?”

“Yes!”

“Oops.” His voice was perfectly calm. “It’s no big deal. Just another hour or two of work.”

Just
another hour or two?

“Show me,” I said.

“You haven’t been down there?”

He asked the question over his shoulder on his way to the back of the house, obviously expecting me to follow.

“No,” I said, trotting after him. “Before yesterday, I’d only been here twice. First, when we looked at the place before we decided to buy it, and then once with John. We didn’t go into the basement either time.”

“I went into the basement before I decided to buy the place,” Derek said, opening a door in the kitchen and exposing what looked like a rickety old staircase leading down into stygian darkness. A draft of dank air curled around my ankles, and I fought back a chill.

“Why didn’t I go into the basement while we were here?”

“I told you to keep Darren company while I looked around, remember? I didn’t want him following me around looking over my shoulder.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

He had done just that, since Darren Silva had been driving him crazy, dogging his every footstep. So in a quiet moment, he’d whispered to me to get Darren off his back for a while. I had complied by asking Darren to show me the second floor, leaving Derek downstairs to look around on his own. Darren had been torn, clearly, but he fancied himself a ladies’ man, so he came upstairs with me. And dogged my footsteps instead, breathing down my neck. Literally.

“You might have mentioned it was there,” I told Derek now, peering down into the dank darkness.

“I forgot you didn’t know. Didn’t you notice the door?” He reached out and flipped a switch, and the light came on. A pale light, illuminating a rough plank staircase, tilting crazily, and a dirt floor.

I took a step back. “Dirt?” And to answer the question, no. I hadn’t noticed the door. Or rather, I’d seen it, but hadn’t thought to open it. I thought it was a pantry, to be honest. Tucked under the stairs to the floor above. Because he hadn’t said a word about a basement and I’d figured, if there was one, he’d have mentioned it.

He glanced at me. “Sorry, Tink. They didn’t finish basements in the 1920s. That came later.” He started down. The staircase groaned in protest, and shimmied like a flapper girl.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“Wait until I get all the way down,” Derek answered. “That way, if you fall, I can catch you.”

Great.

Derek watched me with a frown as I picked my way down. “You OK, Tink?”

“Just remembering Aunt Inga’s house,” I said through gritted teeth. I’d fallen down the basement stairs there shortly after moving in, owing to one of the steps being purposely sabotaged.

“Ah.” His face cleared. “I don’t think anyone’s messed with this staircase. If anyone had, it would have broken when I came down. I’m a lot heavier than you.”

He was. However, his weight might just have broken it almost all the way, and mine might finish the job. Or so I reasoned.

But it turned out to be misplaced worry and residual memory, because I made it all the way down into the basement without mishap, and stopped next to Derek to look around.

The area was smaller than the first floor, but it followed the footprint of the house roughly. And if that didn’t make much sense, it was because there were low walls all around the front and sides of the basement, creating a sort of shelf. Imagine this: a roughly ten-by-fifteen-foot hollow in the ground, with five-and-a-half-foot-tall dirt walls, the tops of which extended another four or five feet toward the foundation of the house. There were grimy windows back there, which let in a little bit of light, although since there was a sprinkling of snow on the ground—just an inch or two—visibility was limited. And because of the dirt shelves, the windows were too far away to be cleaned; not that I saw any need.

At the back of the house, the basement ended in a flat dirt wall, and didn’t extend all the way under the utility room. I could see the pipes to the kitchen sink cross the insulated ceiling and disappear through the planks into the kitchen floor.

“Looks like you’ll be spending some time down here,” I told Derek.

He shot me a distracted look, and I added, pointing to the pipes, “Galvanized iron. You’ll have to swap them out where they’re visible, at least.”

“And everywhere else. The water pressure is nonexistent.”

I’d take his word for it, since that was something else he’d checked that I hadn’t paid attention to.

I turned my focus back to my current surroundings again.

The basement wasn’t as scarily full of junk as I had been afraid of, from Derek’s estimation that it would take us another two hours to clear it. Maybe I should have guessed, since he’d seriously overestimated the time it would take to clear the rest of the house.