Mortar and Murder (23 page)

“The British were assembling an army at Quebec, and Benedict Arnold took a bunch of men up the Kennebec River in the fall of 1775 to stop them.”

“
The
Benedict Arnold?”

Derek nodded. “In the early days of the war, he was a patriot. It wasn’t until he was passed over for several promotions while other people took credit for his accomplishments that he became bitter and defected. That wasn’t until 1780. In 1775, he hoped that the Canadians would join the Americans and kick British butt. Unfortunately, winter came early, and they had to eat their dogs to survive. Some stories say they ate their moccasins, as well.”

“Yikes.”

He nodded. “One division returned home in October. Benedict Arnold and the rest made it to Quebec and hooked up with Generals Montgomery and Schuyler, who had led their armies north from Montreal. They attacked the British in the middle of the night on December thirty-first—because the enlistment term for many of the American soldiers ended on January first—and failed miserably. About a hundred men died and at least three hundred were captured. General Montgomery died. Benedict Arnold got shot. And because it was the middle of winter, and winter is cold up here—”

I nodded. Having just lived through my first Maine winter, I could attest to that.

“—what was left of the American army decided to wait it out instead of trying to get back home. So they camped near Quebec and probably ate the rest of their shoes to survive. In the spring, they marched south to Montreal and from there to Crown Point, with the British army on their heels. Barefoot, probably. Turns out the American leadership had totally misjudged anti-British sentiment in Canada. Instead of rising up against the British and kicking them out, Canada remained loyal to George. And that’s the story of the Canadian campaign.”

“Interesting.”

“Only if you like history,” Derek said with a grin.

“I like history.” Sort of. When it’s got something to do with fabrics. Or when it’s personal. Like when it applies to one of the houses we’re renovating. Or when my boyfriend is holding forth and I get lost in listening. While he’d been talking, we’d passed from sunshine and the meadow into the shade of the trees. In just the few days since I’d walked through these woods on my way from our house to Gert Heyerdahl’s—from Sunrise to Sunset and back—more patches of snow had melted, and here and there, small, sturdy flowers with bright yellow heads had pushed their way out of the ground and into the sun.

“Coltsfoot,” Derek said. “
Tussilago farfara
.”

“I’ve never seen them before.” I bent to pick one and hold it to my nose. It had a very distinctive smell. Strong. Spicy. Almost medical.

“They’re native to Europe. Probably brought here at some point by settlers as a medicinal item. They were used to treat coughs and lung ailments until someone discovered there are pyrrolizidine alkaloids in the plants, that cause liver failure.”

“Oops.” I let the flower drop from my hand down on the forest floor.

“Picking and sniffing it isn’t dangerous. Just don’t eat it.”

I promised I wouldn’t. Derek looked around.

“Do you think you could find your way back to that little saltbox you told me about last week? The one you found on your way back from Gert Heyerdahl’s house?”

“The one Mrs. Harris said used to belong to Mr. van Duren? I can try. It’s right around here somewhere. It’s locked up tight, though.”

“I just want to take a look at it,” Derek said easily. “But it’s no big deal. If we miss the path, I’ll just find it another time.”

Because we were looking for it, the path wasn’t hard to find, though, and about ten minutes later, we found ourselves standing outside the little saltbox again.

It looked exactly like it had last week: shuttered and still, like it was asleep. And between you and me, I didn’t find it to be all that impressive. It was small and unkempt, with peeling paint, and it seemed to tilt forward, like it was bracing itself against the stiff wind coming off the ocean. Derek, of course, was mesmerized. His eyes as dreamy blue as the sky overhead, he walked around the house, touching the wood, cooing about the craftsmanship and age.

“Nice location, too,” he said eventually, shading his eyes to look out to sea. “Just at the end of a quiet little cove with a narrow opening. None of the big ships could follow him in here. And it’s an easy walk from the beach up to the house with whatever he was bringing in.”

“Smuggled goods, you mean?”

He nodded. “The house is definitely old enough to be Mr. van Duren’s. Mid-seventeen hundreds, I’d say. Wonder if he built it himself?”

“No idea. Mrs. Harris might know.” I shifted from foot to foot. It was my turn to feel impatient. I’m as excited as the next girl about a decrepit house with potential, but it wasn’t like we could buy this one. We already had a project, and this house wasn’t even for sale. And after renovating Sunrise, I didn’t think I’d want to tackle another house on Rowanberry Island anytime soon. Next time, I wanted to find a nice, easy flip right in Waterfield. One that we could walk to, where I didn’t have to brave the cold and the ocean every morning, and one it wouldn’t take the best part of six months to finish renovating. Plus, I was concerned about my kitten. What if it was hungry? What if it missed me? What if something had happened to it in the time that we’d been gone?

“Don’t worry, Avery,” Derek said when I expressed this. “Cats always land on their feet. He took care of himself before you started feeding him.”

He started walking away from the saltbox, though. We hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps before we heard a loud bang behind us. I jumped. Derek turned around, scanning our surroundings.

“Must be a loose shutter on the back of the house,” he said eventually, moving off.

“If you say so.” I hurried to catch up. “Why did you call my kitten a he? Have you looked at him?”

“When would I have gotten a chance to look at him? He runs every time one of us steps on the porch. I have no idea whether it’s a he or not. We can try to catch him and take a look when we get there.”

“OK,” I said happily. “You know, Gert Heyerdahl’s house has a very nice little stoop made from big slabs of stone. Do you suppose there’s a stoop like that under our front porch, too? If the houses were identical . . .”

“Could be,” Derek said. “They may not be identical to quite that degree, though. I’ve never had a good look at Gert’s house, but I think it sits lower than ours. It’s probably built on rock. The west side of the island is a little higher than the east.”

“Can we look?”

“Sure,” Derek said. “The porch does look like it was added after the house was built, so maybe there is something different underneath. I’ll tear up a couple of planks. Once we get the cat out.”

“Or you can tear up a couple of planks while I stand ready to catch the cat.” Once Derek started ripping up the porch floor, the cat would run for sure.

He glanced at me. “Just make sure you wear gloves, OK? I doubt the little guy’s been declawed.”

I nodded. “Maybe I’ll just put some food in a bowl and try to lure it out. Then one of us can crawl under the porch and see what’s there. That way we won’t have to worry about ripping anything out. Just in case there is no stone stoop underneath.”

“It’s gonna need repair anyway,” Derek said with a shrug.

Fifteen minutes later, we were ready to put the plan into action. We were at our own house and had made it across the porch without rousing the cat. I had opened a can of salmon cat food and mixed it with some crunchy bits in a bowl, and I was ready to try to lure the cat out from under the porch. I was wearing gloves, and I had a cardboard box lined with an old curtain that I planned to put the kitten into once I caught it.

“What about bathroom breaks?” Derek had asked, watching me make my preparations.

“For the cat, you mean? I didn’t think about that.” Jemmy and Inky do their business out of doors, so there’s no litter box at Aunt Inga’s house; the idea of kitty litter just hadn’t crossed my mind. This kitten must be used to doing its business in nature, as well, since nature was where it had lived so far. But it would need a way to get in and out of the box in order to do it. “Can you cut a door in the box?”

“Big enough for a cat?” He reached for an X-Acto knife. “Give it here.”

I did and watched him carve out a rectangle, exactly big enough for a young kitten to make its way through.

“Once we close the flaps on top,” Derek said, tucking the knife away, “it’ll be nice and warm in there. He’s been all right under the porch all this time; he’ll be fine inside the box with the curtains to sleep on. And when he needs to go, he can go. Ready?”

“Ready. Let’s do it.” I hoisted the box and followed him outside to put Operation Cat into motion.

Once again, we managed to make it across the porch without spooking the little creature, and Derek walked to the side of the porch, where the kitten came and went between the rotted boards. He squatted. “I’ll just get rid of some of these”—he ripped off a couple of pieces of wood and tossed them to the ground—“and then we’ll see what we’ve got. Flashlight?”

He held out a hand. I fumbled the bowl of food over into my other hand, fished the flashlight out of the box, and handed it to him. He stuck his head and shoulders under the porch floor and shone the light around. “Let’s see . . .”

“Is there a stone slab under there?” I wanted to know, leaning down. I remembered Gert Heyerdahl’s front steps, and our discussion about whether we had something similar hidden under our wooden porch.

“Sure is. And . . .” In the blackness deep under the porch, a pair of glowing red eyes stared back at us. “Whoa,” Derek said, the flashlight beam wavering for a second. “Devil cat.”

“Is it coming?”

He shook his head. “It’s disappeared. Probably hiding in the corner on the theory that if we can’t see it, we’ll forget that it’s there.”

“Maybe if you go to the other side of the porch and rattle the boards?”

“I’ll try,” Derek said, getting up. “Are you ready to catch it when it comes?”

I nodded. “Ready.”

Except I wasn’t, of course. The kitten shot out between the boards and ran right into me. I squealed and sat down with a thump. The kitten changed direction. Then it saw Derek and changed direction again. And instead of heading for open ground, down the meadow toward the water, it zipped up the porch steps and through the front door, which we had left open.

Derek muttered a curse and charged after it, flashlight in hand, the beam still waving. I picked myself up, leaving both the box and the cat food where I’d dropped them—the salmon and crunchy bits were mostly in the dirt—and followed.

Derek was standing in the hallway, his back stiff and his eyes narrowed, as he scanned the entry and what he could see of the dining room and living room through the open doors to the right and left. I closed the front door behind me and joined him.

“I don’t see it.”

He spared me a glance before going back to hunting pose. “It’s here somewhere.”

Well, duh. We’d both seen it run inside, so that kind of went without saying.

“I think it must have gone that way.” I pointed into the dining room. “Those are paw prints, aren’t they? In the dust?”

Derek squinted. “More like skid marks. Let’s go.”

He stalked toward the dining room, flashlight gripped in one hand, looking like he was preparing to face down a crew of burglars instead of one rather small kitten.

There were three rooms downstairs: a formal parlor or living room to the right of the entrance hall, a dining room to the left, and a cavernous eat-in kitchen stretching the width of the back of the house. Rather an unusual setup from what I knew about Colonial houses. Usually they’re very symmetrical, with matching rooms on either side of a central hallway. We did have the central hallway, but it ended in a blank wall enclosing the enormous chimney instead of going all the way through the house to the back door. I mentioned it.

“You’re right,” Derek said, head weaving from side to side as he scouted for the cat, “usually these places are pretty symmetrical. I’m surprised this isn’t. They must have converted a couple of other rooms into a kitchen at some point. In Colonial times, the kitchen was a separate building at a distance from the house. That way, if it caught fire, the whole thing wouldn’t go up in flames.”

“That fireplace is original, though, isn’t it?” I pointed to it.

It was massive, perfectly centered in the long room, and longer than I was tall. Longer than Derek was tall, too. A cavernous opening with a couple of smaller openings in the brick next to it. One was for baking bread, I thought—I’d seen similar holes before, with big wooden spatulas in them—while the other had a hinged iron cover. Two or three old brass and cast-iron pots hung from a rail in the main fireplace.

“The big fireplace was for heating water and soup and stew and things like that,” Derek said. “The two smaller holes were for baking bread and cooking other things. This does look original. Maybe Mr. van Duren knew that Daisy really liked to cook, and so he gave her an inside kitchen.”