Mortar and Murder (14 page)

“How did it go at her place earlier? Did you get the drywall done? Was she hanging over your shoulder then, too?”

He shook his head. “She was getting ready for her date with Tony Micelli. Pulling out all the stops. I hardly saw her at all.”

This was excellent news. Maybe Melissa had her eye on Tony the Tiger instead of Derek. What a relief that would be. And really, I couldn’t think of two people who deserved one another more. I sat back and smiled, watching the streetlights go by outside.

Once we got to Aunt Inga’s house on Bayberry Lane, Derek turned to me. “See you tomorrow, right?”

“Absolutely. Bright and early. On the dock by seven.”

“Good girl,” Derek said.

I looked at the house over my shoulder. It’s a Second Empire Victorian, with tall, arched windows and a square tower with a mansard roof. In bright sunshine, it looks like a fairy-tale cottage. Now, with none of the lights on and no moon in the sky, it was dark and a little forbidding. And quite empty. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

He smiled. “I’d love to come in. Just not tonight. It’s been a long couple of days.”

“Right.” I couldn’t exactly argue with that.

“I’ll wait until you’re safely inside.”

“I don’t think you have to worry,” I said. “Nobody’s out to get me these days. I haven’t had anyone sneaking around my house for six months, at least.”

“Just about time for someone to start again, don’t you think?”

“Surely not,” I said. If I was bothering anyone, or I was a threat to someone, that’d be different. Like, when a certain someone wanted me out of Aunt Inga’s house so he could have it, he’d broken in and sabotaged the basement stairs. Or when we’d just found the skeleton in the crawlspace of the house on Becklea Drive, and I was trying to figure out who it was, the killer had snuck around my house as well as tampered with the brakes on Derek’s truck to try to get rid of me. But at the moment I wasn’t a threat or a bother to anyone. Except . . . “You don’t think Melissa would want to get me out of the way so she could have you back, do you?”

Derek put his head back and laughed. “I doubt it, Tink. Seriously, she’s no more interested in getting back together than I am.”

“And you’re not?”

His eyes were warm. “Why would I want Melissa when I have you?”

“About a million reasons I can think of,” I said. Beginning with that beautiful face and gorgeous body and ending with the happy times they must have spent together before things turned sour between them. Including that weekend in bed on Monhegan.

“You must have a more vivid imagination than me.” His voice was warm, too. “I love you, Avery. I may not be ready to remarry right now, but when I am, you’ll be the first to know.” He put the truck in gear. “Go to sleep. Sweet dreams.”

“You, too.” I wandered up to the door and let myself in. He didn’t pull away from the curb until I had turned on the hall light and had waved the all clear.

I share my house with Jemmy and Inky, two Maine coon cats I inherited from my aunt Inga along with the house itself. The house has turned out to be an easier inheritance than the cats. Once Derek and I went through it last summer and replaced all the old knob-and-tube wiring and galvanized plumbing, and got rid of Aunt Inga’s hideous wallpaper and ugly 1970s teak furniture—and once I decided to stay in Waterfield instead of going back to New York and my textile design career—the house itself became my home. Jemmy and Inky were not so easy to win over. They were grown cats, settled in their ways, and used to my ninety-eight-year-old aunt and her quiet life. They’d loved her, and they clearly felt I was an inferior substitute.

It wasn’t that we didn’t get along. They were intelligent creatures, who realized I was the one putting kibble in their bowls and keeping the cat flap open in the back door. They knew they had to stay on my good side. And they did; they were polite and well mannered, but not friendly. After almost a year together, they didn’t let me pet them for more than a second or two, they didn’t seek me out unless I’d forgotten to feed and water them, and as long as they had what they needed, they didn’t seem to care much whether I was there or not. When I walked through the door, Jemmy—striped in shades of brown and tan, with tufted ears and that distinctive bushy, ringed tail—opened a yellow eye to look at me, before closing it again. Inky, black as her name, was curled up next to him on Aunt Inga’s love seat in the parlor and merely twitched her ears and whiskers. She had heard me come in, but I didn’t merit so much as a look. And this from the cat that had once helped me fend off a murderer.

My mother raised me right, though, so I ignored the snub to greet them properly. “Good evening, Jemmy. Good evening, Inky. I hope you’re well?”

Inky opened her eyes to look at me. They’re a pale green, startling in her dark face. Jemmy yawned, his little pink tongue showing, and meowed. I don’t speak cat, so I’m not sure exactly what he tried to say, but it was clearly a complaint. Maybe he objected to my disturbing his nap.

“Sorry,” I said. “You stay right where you are, OK? I’m just going to turn on the computer”—it was on the desk in front of the gray velvet love seat the cats considered “their” spot—“and look for something.”

Inky stretched, curled up the other way, and closed her eyes again. Jemmy sighed. I sat down at the desk and prepared to get to work.

Ricky had mentioned Russian-bride websites. Calvin hadn’t, and I hadn’t wanted to push too much—I was cautious that he not get his back up so Wayne or Brandon might be able to get a little more information out of him—but I thought the idea was worth following up on. Just in case the girl from the water was a Russian bride—someone who had developed an online relationship with an American man, and who had come to the United States to get married. Maybe the relationship hadn’t worked out, maybe the guy was abusive, or ancient, or had no plans of marrying her, and she had run away, and that was how she had ended up in the water. If the guy lived on one of the islands, for instance. Maybe she’d thought she could swim to shore and get help to get back home to Russia.

Typing the search term “Russian women” into Google brought up a slew of other suggestions, some of them quite disturbing. “Russian women for marriage” was one of them. So was “Russian women for sale.” Along with “Russian women personals.” And then there was “Russian brides for sale,” and “Russian brides for free.” As well as “Russian girls for marriage” and “for sale.”

One of the terms was “Russian brides photos,” and I decided to start there. Maybe I’d luck out and find our dead girl’s face among the offerings.

I spent the next hour surfing and scrolling through hundreds of images. The experience left me feeling dirty, disgusted, appalled, and angry, as well as a lot of other emotions. Pity was high on the list; sympathy both for those among the women who seemed to be genuinely looking for love—as opposed to the airbrushed ones who were probably models hired to make the site look good—as well as embarrassment for the poor suckers who believed the glossy model types were really available and who put their hard-earned money into paying for introductions and e-mails.

All in all, the whole thing may not have been much worse than the personals on any American dating or classified site. Once upon a time, I had occasionally visited those. They—the sites—all made it clear that in spite of the website addresses and search terms I had used to get there, the women were not actually for sale; they were looking for their one true love. I wished them luck with that. And I meant it sincerely. True love is hard to find. Whether such a thing is likely to be found through an Internet dating site, I’m not sure, but I suppose stranger things have happened. Several of the websites had “success stories” listed, anyway: Russian women who were now safely settled in the United States, Australia, and Western Europe with bald, paunchy men they wouldn’t have looked twice at had they seen them on the street at home. If that’s true love, then I guess they did find it.

Yes, I sound cynical. It’s hard to spend a long time looking at this stuff and not be affected by it.

The faces started to blur after a while, and too many of the women had long, straight, blond hair. None of them jumped out at me specifically as being the girl from the water, but several of them might have been. I bookmarked a few to draw Brandon’s attention to, to see if he could pinpoint any of these women as being our girl.

It was getting late and I was getting tired. I was just about to close out the webpage and turn in for the night when a face jumped out at me.

No, it wasn’t a small blonde with blue eyes. This was a brunette, with long, straight hair and heavy bangs highlighting steady eyes, straight brows, and those high, Slavic cheekbones. She looked a little like Paulina Porizkova in her modeling heyday, fifteen or twenty years ago. Her name and age were listed under the photo: Svetlana, twenty-six.

“Look,” I told Wayne the next morning, waving the page I had printed out under his nose. “Look at her. She looks exactly like Irina, doesn’t she?”

Wayne squinted at the paper moving in front of him and then grabbed my wrist to hold my hand steady. “Let me see that. Hmmm.”

I bounced on my toes next to him. “Doesn’t it? Look like Irina? It’s her sister, don’t you think?”

Wayne didn’t answer, just inspected the paper.

It was early—just after seven—and I had knocked on his and Kate’s front door on my way down to the harbor to meet Derek. Kate was already up and inside the B&B kitchen feeding her guests, but Wayne was still getting ready for the day, bleary-eyed and half dressed. His uniform shirt was hanging out, and he was unshaven, a shadow of salt and pepper outlining his jaw.

“Sorry,” I added, “looks like I dragged you out of bed.”

“Not quite. But I spent a late night. Josh called to tell me about this friend of his, Calvin, who had overheard someone talking about Russian women.”

I nodded. “That’s what made me look up Russian brides on the Internet.”

“I also spent some time on the phone with the local director of ICE to see if I could convince them to assign a field agent to look into things.”

“And?”

He grimaced. “They’re sending someone. Some hotshot rookie with less than two years’ experience.”

“It’s better than nothing. And maybe he or she will have a fresh eye.”

“One can hope,” Wayne said, but without sounding like he meant it. “Then, in the middle of the night, I got a call from my contact in the Kiev police—there’s a time difference I guess he forgot—to tell me that they can’t find Svetlana Rozhdes . . . um . . . Irina’s sister anywhere.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I were. Apparently, she didn’t return to the . . . um . . . Kiev University for the semester that started in January. Her apartment is occupied by someone else, and so far, no one seems to know where she is. Not her brothers, nor her professors, nor her fellow students.”

“That’s a little creepy.”

Wayne nodded. He looked down at the paper in his hand. “What makes you think this is her?”

“They look alike. Same dark hair, same eyes, same face shape.”

Wayne nodded. “I have to go see Irina anyway. Tell her what the Kiev police said. See if she has any suggestions for where else her sister might be. I’ll show her this picture at the same time. But even if it is Irina’s sister, I’m not sure what it proves, Avery. Other than that she’s looking for Mr. Right and is willing to advertise herself to find him.”

“I’m not sure it proves anything beyond that, either,” I admitted. “It just seems very coincidental. We find a dead girl in the ocean, with Irina’s contact info in her pocket, written in Russian. Or Cyrillic or whatever. Then Ricky mentions that someone has been talking about Russian brides. And now we’ve found a girl who looks like Irina’s sister on a Russian-bride website. There has to be a connection.”

“You’d think,” Wayne said. “The dead girl isn’t Svetlana, though. And these bride websites aren’t illegal, you know. Unless they’re fraudulent, of course. Which some of them may very well be, but that’s out of my jurisdiction. There are organizations who deal with that sort of thing. But for two people to meet on the Internet, and then meet in person and decide to get married, isn’t illegal. Even if one of them is American and the other Russian. And that’s all this seems to be. An introduction service.”