Mortar and Murder (2 page)

For those who held on, there was a little ferry that docked in the tiny harbor a few times a day. Our house was clear across the island from the village, and Derek and I didn’t want to be dependent upon the whims of the ferry, so we’d arranged with Peter and Jill to use their boat. It was too early in the year for them to use it themselves; the Maine coast in April isn’t conducive to pleasure-boating.

April first was a perfect example. The air was crisp, the sky was a lovely, clear blue, and the wind was strong enough to make me wish I’d put on my down-filled winter jacket instead of a padded vest and the knit sweater with reindeer and snowflakes I had spent a couple of months slaving over. The life jacket Derek had insisted I wear helped a little, but not enough. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my ears, my Mello Yello-colored hair was stinging my face where it blew in the brisk wind, and my lips were turning blue under my lip gloss.

“How much farther?” I squeaked over the sound of the motor. And had to repeat it, louder, when Derek couldn’t hear me. “Derek! How much farther?”

“Not far,” Derek answered bracingly. He was upright, steering the boat, while I was huddled in a miserable, shivering bundle on one of the seats in the back. And, of course, he didn’t look at all cold, even though he was wearing less than me. A pair of faded jeans hugged his posterior, and a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater was covered by an orange life vest. The wind whipped his hair, which looked more brown than blond now, after being covered by a hat most of the winter. In the summer, the sun lightened it in streaks through the front and crown. His cheeks were flushed, and he looked happy. “See that?” He pointed to a low, green shape rising from the water in front of us. “That’s it. It’ll take another ten minutes, tops, to get to it.”

“Great.” I huddled deeper into the life vest, shivering.

“You’ll be OK once we get there,” Derek promised. “It’ll take me a while to hook up the generator, but then we’ll have heat.”

“The little bit of it that won’t escape through the holes in the walls.”

“There are no holes in the walls,” Derek said.

“Fine. The cracks, then. The cracks between the planks that are wide enough for me to put my fingers through.”

He didn’t answer that. Couldn’t, when he knew I was right.

“A week from now we’ll have it insulated and all the rotten wood replaced,” he said instead. “After that, heat loss won’t be a problem.”

I grimaced. And then I took a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m being grumpy.”

He flashed me a grin over his shoulder, which after ten months together still gave me a thrill. “You really are a city girl, aren’t you, Tink? The ocean and the wind and the wide-open spaces freak you out.”

I shrugged, pouting. That pout, coupled with the yellow hair I often pile in a knot on top of my head, and the fact that I’m a measly five foot two, is what had originally earned me the nickname. Tinkerbell. Now I was stuck with it. My mother thought it was adorable, Kate thought it was hilarious, and Melissa James, Derek’s ex-wife, thought it was cute. She didn’t mean it as a compliment. But then Derek’s nickname for Melissa had been Miss Melly, so I don’t know that she had a whole lot of room to talk.

Melissa and Derek had gotten divorced almost six years ago, and Melissa had been shacked up with my distant cousin Ray Stenham ever since. Until just before Christmas, when something happened to change that, and now Melissa was back on the market and looking for someone to replace Ray. My big fear was that she had realized what she’d lost when she let Derek go, and now she wanted him back. I felt like she’d been coming around rather a lot lately, like I was stumbling over her every time I turned around, although I suppose it could have been my imagination. It’s just that she’s so damned
perfect
....

“There it is,” Derek said. I looked up.

The island was closer now: close enough that I could see the craggy coast, with its big boulders and rocky coves with grainy, grayish yellow sand. Most of the interior seemed taken up with pine trees, tall and dark, outlined against the china blue bowl of the sky.

I squinted; we were heading northeast, it was fairly early, and the sun was shining. “That’s not our house, is it?”

“Can’t be,” Derek said, “our house is on the other side of the island. Where?”

“I can’t see it anymore. But there was a building of some sort in the trees. Big and white. Look, there it is again. Are you sure that isn’t our house? It looks exactly like it.”

“Not exactly like it,” Derek said, squinting into the sun, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “That house looks like our house will look three months from now. When it isn’t falling down anymore.”

“But it is a center-chimney Colonial, isn’t it? It looks like one.”

“I’m sure it is,” Derek said, navigating the boat around the south end of the island, away from the other house. The one that looked just like ours, no matter what he said. “There are two of them. Twins. The man who built them had two daughters, and he built them each a house.”

“Those were the days.”

“Apparently the girls couldn’t get along, so he built one house on one side of the island, and one on the other, facing in opposite directions. That way, the girls never had to look at one another again if they didn’t want to.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“Irina told me. The first time she showed me the house. You didn’t want to come with us, remember; you and John Nickerson were busy picking out furniture to stage the house on Becklea Drive, and I went on my own.”

“With Irina.” I nodded. “I remember.”

Irina Rozhdestvensky is our Realtor, a Russian transplant who lives just down the street from the house on Becklea Drive that we renovated in the fall.

I had met John Nickerson, the owner of an antique store on Main Street, around that same time, and he had let me pick some things out of his store to stage the house for showing. That’s what we’d been doing when Irina first drew Derek’s attention to the house on Rowanberry Island.

“Did Irina know anything else about them?”

“Nothing she mentioned.” Derek aimed the boat toward a small cove and rocky beach and cut the engine. “There’s our house. See it?”

I nodded. It was big and square, positioned with its rear against a backdrop of dark pine trees and bare birches and oaks, getting closer every second as we drifted toward shore. The chimney had fallen in, there was a hole in the roof, more than half the windows were broken, and there wasn’t a speck of paint left on the entire front of the house, the old planks faded to a silvery gray from the constant onslaught of wind, sun, and salt. I shuddered.

“Isn’t she a beauty?” Derek said, and meant it. His entire attention was focused on the house, his eyes soft and dreamy, and his mouth curved in an adoring smile. Another woman might have felt a twinge of jealousy—I don’t think Melissa had ever understood why he’d look at a run-down wreck of a house with more emotion than he ever showed her—but I’ve gotten used to it. It’s no reflection of how he feels about me, it’s just how he feels about old houses. It seemed a pity to disturb his no doubt beautiful dreams; however, I didn’t have a choice.

“Derek? Look out. You’re about to hit the dock.” Literally.

“Oops.” His eyes came back into focus, and he made the necessary adjustments to bring the boat up alongside the decrepit-looking dock leaning into the water at a precarious angle. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem. Is the dock safe, do you suppose?”

“I’m sure it is,” Derek said, looping a rope around a pylon and bringing the boat to a rocking stop. He bounced out and onto the dock, which looked to me as if it could break into pieces under his booted feet at any moment. Miraculously, it held. “C’mon.”

He reached down. I grabbed his hand and used the support to get to my feet, unsteadily. Growing up on the coast of Maine, Derek had been in and out of boats his entire life. I was born and raised in Manhattan, and the closest I’d ever gotten to a boat was the occasional trip on the Circle Line ferry when friends from away came to visit.

“Upsy-daisy.” He lifted me onto the dock. Sometimes it’s nice to be petite. Especially when your boyfriend is a strapping six feet or so and used to hauling lumber and other heavy objects. I tottered—just slightly on purpose; the dock was slippery and about as wobbly as it looked—and he put an arm around me to steady me. I leaned in. The puffy orange life vest made cuddling less fun than usual, but his arm was nice and warm and solid through the wool sweater, and the brisk wind hadn’t managed to eradicate his particular aroma: Ivory soap and shampoo mixed with paint thinner and sawdust. Mmmm!

All too soon he let me go, though, and turned to survey the house again. I sighed. “You’re more comfortable in the boat than I am. Why don’t you hand the stuff up to me, and then we’ll carry it to the house together.”

“Sure.” He tore his gaze away and went back into the boat. We unloaded for a few minutes, and then we picked up what we could carry and started across the meadow toward the house.

I’m not sure what the reason was; whether it was that this was the first time I’d seen the place clearly, in bright sunshine, since early November—and the light hadn’t been that good then, with the fog and the rain—or whether it was because this was the first time I’d seen the house uncovered by snow while we owned it . . . but I was aware of a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach. Had it really always looked this bad? Or had the winter months and the snow done a number on the place so that it now needed another ten or twenty thousand dollars’ worth of work above and beyond what we had expected to put into it? Had the hole in the roof always been so big? Had there always been so many broken windows? And how was it possible that I hadn’t noticed how the whole thing tilted to the right like something out of a Dr. Seuss book?

“What?” Derek asked when I stopped dead in the middle of the grass, my eyes round. “You OK, Tink? You look like you’re gonna faint.”

“I feel like I’m going to faint,” I said. “Did it always look this bad?”

He stared at it. For a long time, before he turned back to me. “Pretty much, yeah.”

“Oh.” I bit my lip. “I didn’t realize . . . I mean, I knew it would need a lot of work, but I had no idea . . . This is, like, a hundred times worse than Aunt Inga’s house!”

Derek examined the house again. “Not quite,” he said judiciously. “I mean, yeah—it’s rough. It’s gonna need a lot of work. A
lot
of work. But it isn’t a hundred times worse than your aunt’s house.”

My voice reached an uncomfortable, hysterical pitch, even to my own ears. “The roof has a hole in it! Big enough for a helicopter to land in the attic! If there’s an unbroken window in the entire house, I can’t see it, and the whole thing is
leaning
! Like the freaking Tower of Pisa!”

“Maybe we can turn it into a tourist attraction?” Derek suggested, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“I can’t believe you’re laughing at me! It isn’t funny, dammit. We’re gonna sink every dime we own into this place, and it won’t even make a dent, and then we’ll have to rob a bank or something to keep going, and when we’re finished, assuming we aren’t caught and sent to jail, it’ll be years from now, and we’ll have spent so much money we’ll have to sell the house for a couple of million to get our money back, and no one’s gonna wanna pay that much for a house on an island in the middle of the ocean where it isn’t even warm!”

“You’d be surprised,” Derek said. He dropped a rolled-up tarp he’d been carrying across his shoulder on the grass. “C’mere, Avery.” He put his arm around my shoulders and began steering me in the direction of the house again, murmuring encouragement the whole way. The medical profession lost a great doctor when Derek retired his license; his bedside manner is excellent, both in and out of the bedroom. “It’ll be all right, you’ll see. It won’t cost as much as you think. And it won’t take as long, either. And you’d be surprised how much someone might pay for a place like this, all fixed up. That other Colonial we saw? It belongs to Gert Heyerdahl.”

“The author?” My feet were moving, independent of my brain.

Derek nodded, prodding me gently along. “The same. He’s only there for a few months in the summer. The rest of the time he divides between his penthouse in Miami and his villa in Tuscany.”

“What a life. Maybe
I
should become a thriller writer.”

“Or maybe you should just stay here with me,” Derek said. “There are a couple of other houses like that, too, here and on the other islands. All of them summer homes; the only people who live here full time are the ones in the villages. And I guess maybe some of the big houses have staff. Or maybe not; they may close them down for the winter and only open up again for the season.”

“M-hm.” We had reached the front steps now, and they appeared in no better shape than the leaning dock down by the water. “Think this’ll hold our weight?”

“It’s held mine every time I’ve been here. Along with Irina’s. And she’s a lot bigger than you.” He dropped his arm from around my shoulders and started up the wooden stairs. They creaked under his feet but didn’t break. Something that had been underneath must have shared my misgivings, though, because it streaked out from under the porch and disappeared in the brush. All I saw was a blur of fur going by at warp speed. I squealed.

“What?” Derek said, turning around.

“Animal. Furry.”

“Mouse?” Derek said.

I shook my head, knees knocking together. “Bigger. And blue. What kind of animal is about this big”—I held my shaking hands a little less than a foot apart—“and blue?”

Derek thought for a moment. “Cookie Monster?”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. Cookie Monster is much bigger. And it wasn’t that kind of blue. No animal in nature is Cookie Monster blue.”

“More of a blue gray? A squirrel, maybe? Or a rat?”