Mortar and Murder (36 page)

She threw herself at Calvin from the door of the cabin, coming in low, so she hit him at the back of the knees. Calvin buckled and went down. The gun went off.

The sound of the shot was deafening, especially in such a tiny space. My ears were ringing, and I admit it, I thought I might have been hit. From reading books and watching TV, I know that there’s sometimes a moment or two between getting shot and realizing it, before the pain kicks in.

I didn’t have time to stand still and take stock, though. I turned and flung myself on top of Calvin before he could get up. Irina got it together, too, and scrambled onto him as well. The gun had gone flying, and I saw it over in the corner. Calvin’s hand was questing for it, fumbling like a giant spider across the floor. Until Svetlana, Olga in tow, stomped on it. Hard. Calvin howled.

“Check his pockets,” I told Svetlana breathlessly as I clung to his other arm.

She stared at me until Irina prompted her. I guess maybe she didn’t want to touch him, and who could blame her? But she bent to slide her hand into the pockets of Calvin’s jeans, one after the other. The key chain was in the front right-hand pocket, and one of the keys fit the handcuffs. Svetlana unchained herself from Olga, and then used the cuffs to fasten Calvin’s wrists together. Behind him, just in case he was some kind of champion swimmer who could get himself to shore with his hands cuffed together. To be safe, we trussed his feet, too, with a length of rope Irina found in the cabinet below the steering wheel.

I gave Svetlana the gun before starting the boat again, and we crept forward. While I concentrated on navigating, Irina opened my cell phone to call Derek, now that we were close enough to land to have cell coverage back. Only to find a voice mail message there from—of all people—Ricky Swanson. It had come in several hours ago, just after I’d arrived on Rowanberry Island. When I listened to it, I couldn’t help but laugh. Talk about too little, too late.

“Avery, hey. It’s Ricky. Look, I’ve tracked down the owner of that Russian-bride website for you. You know, the one that’s based here in Maine. And you’re not gonna believe this, but it’s registered to Calvin Harris. You know, that guy you met at Guido’s that night you were there? From Barnham? The one who said he’d heard people on the ferry dock talking about Russian women? He’s been running it right from his dorm room at the college. Best I can figure out, he really was talking about it when I overheard him, and that story about the people on the ferry dock was just a story he came up with to explain it away. Man, do I feel stupid. I’m gonna try to call Josh now, see if I can get in touch with his dad. I’ll call you later. And don’t go near this guy, Avery, OK?”

He disconnected. I sighed, shaking my head.

“I’m never doing this again,” Derek said.

It was the end of June, and we were sitting on the porch outside our house on Rowanberry Island, watching the sun rise while sipping high-octane coffee and petting Mischa the cat. We had just come off another all-nighter; the last in a long line of them lately. There had been times, many—and most of them wholly unrelated to that nightmare afternoon with Calvin and his uncle Hal and the Ukrainian women—when I’d been sure Rowanberry Island would be the death of me.

We’d made it into Boothbay Harbor without any problems that day, Irina, Svetlana, Olga, and I. Oh, and Calvin. By the time we got there, Irina had used my phone to call Derek, who had told Wayne, who had gotten hold of Reece Tolliver with the state police in Augusta, who had called the chief of police of Boothbay Harbor, who had been on the dock to meet us. He had already snagged the two buyers of Calvin’s “merchandise”: a pudgy fifty-something with moist hands and chapped lips, who was eagerly awaiting his nubile twenty-something mail-order bride, and a sleek and dangerous East European, who was there to pick up his latest CSW—commercial sex worker. I never found out which girl was supposed to be going with which man, and I was quite happy not to know.

Olga had long since gone back to the Ukraine. She’d accompanied Katya’s coffin, in fact, just about a week after the ordeal, when Wayne and company released the body and sent it back to Kiev for burial. Any dreams Olga had had of starting a new life in the golden land of opportunity had been beaten out of her by the time Irina and I found her, and she just wanted to go home where she’d be safe. Wayne had asked his new contact in the Kiev police to keep an eye on her for a while, since she was clearly pretty traumatized by what had happened, and Wayne was worried that she might develop some issues as a result.

Svetlana was made of sterner stuff and was determined to stay in the United States. To help her sister, Irina made the ultimate sacrifice and found herself a rich American husband who was willing to sponsor both of them. She and her beard—a famous writer—tied the knot at the Boothbay Harbor courthouse just a week or so after that horrible Sunday on the island.

Yes, Gert Heyerdahl survived getting shot. He’d lost a bit of blood by the time the Boothbay Harbor police got to the general store to rescue him, but the bullet hadn’t nicked any arteries or hit any vital organs, so the doctors cleaned him up, poured a few pints of blood back into him to make up for what he’d lost, and declared him good to go. He proposed from his hospital bed: ostensibly to keep Irina from being deported back to the Ukraine, but we all knew the truth. Later in the week, when the courthouse clerk said, “You may kiss the bride,” it wasn’t a perfunctory peck on the lips that followed.

Calvin’s uncle Hal was not as lucky, unfortunately. And I mean that sincerely, since I’d really have liked for him to have survived so we could make him pay for his crimes. But when Gert attacked him in the general store and the rest of us ran for our lives, Uncle Hal had somehow managed to get hold of Gert’s gun. Gert had tackled him, and Uncle Hal had tumbled backward into the still-open basement storage room. He’d cracked his head on the edge of the floor going down, but not before he’d managed to squeeze off the shot that hit Gert in the gut. Gert hadn’t been sure whether Uncle Hal was dead or merely biding his time before rising out of the hole like a phoenix from the ashes, so before I even got back to the store that afternoon, Gert had slammed the trap door shut and lain on it to make sure Uncle Hal couldn’t get out.

And that was why Calvin hadn’t seen his uncle when he arrived at the general store, and why he thought that Uncle Hal might still be alive.

As it turned out, the crack on the back of the head had knocked Hal out, and he died the same way Agent Trent had, from a busted cranium. By the time the police got there, he was well and truly gone. Nobody threw him in the water afterward, so he got off pretty easy, in my opinion. A whole lot easier than if he had survived to stand trial. The Portland police found Agent Trent’s car in the parking lot in Portland, by the way, and determined that she’d gotten on the ferry there. When she got to Rowanberry Island and the general store, Uncle Hal had killed her, and then he and Calvin had dumped her in the Waterfield harbor that night.

Calvin claimed that the idea to smuggle East European women into the country had been his uncle’s from the beginning. He might even have been telling the truth. Hal Spencer, like his sister Glenda—who was in on the trafficking up to her neck—was descended from a long line of smugglers, starting with John van Duren back in the days before the American Revolution. It was in his blood, if you believe in that kind of thing. Of course, if you do, then it was in Calvin’s blood as well, and it wasn’t like Uncle Hal was around to tell anyone that the whole thing was Calvin’s idea, was it? The Russian-bride website was all Calvin’s doing, anyway, and with Ricky and Josh’s help, Wayne was able to prove it. The two guys the Boothbay Harbor police arrested on the dock were happy to implicate him, as well. Calvin and his mother pleaded guilty to a lot of things to avoid going to trial, and at the time Derek and I were sitting there enjoying the coffee and sunrise, both of them had been sentenced to quite a few years in a place where they hopefully wouldn’t get to enjoy either. Or if either of them had coffee, at least they didn’t get to drink it while watching the sun come up over the Atlantic.

Not that I was in a state to be appreciating the view. We’d been working through the night, and not for the first time. Hence Derek’s declaration of “never again.”

Renovating the house on Rowanberry Island had turned out to be a much bigger job than even Derek had anticipated. It was a huge undertaking, and it just seemed to go on and on. As soon as we fixed one thing, we realized that there was something else wrong that we hadn’t known about. It didn’t help, either, that we had to move all the tools and materials—everything we needed, including the granite counter for the kitchen, all two tons of it—from the mainland by boat.

Not that we weren’t having fun, of course. It was tons of fun. It was just a really big job for two people. But the house was turning out gorgeous. The floors were spit and polished, the wide planks shimmering with the pearly sheen of satin polyurethane. The walls were painted in traditional Colonial colors: ochre and dark red, blue and green. Derek had matched and patched the worm-eaten paneling around the fireplace in the living room, while I had had some fun creating fake paneling upstairs with the use of different kinds of decorative moldings. Strips and rosettes and dentil molds, the ones that look like rows of teeth. It’s a nice, easy way to get the look of hand-crafted paneling without the effort or expense. And it looked fantastic.

I’d painted a poor man’s runner up the stairs to the second floor, but I’d cheated a little; we’d sanded the stairs, and instead of painting them in two different colors—one for the thread and one for the “runner”—I’d kept the outsides of the steps natural wood, and had painted a white stripe in the middle. And then I had added frilly edges that could have come straight off a doily. It was, in fact, a stencil, one I’d drawn myself on a piece of plastic and cut out with a razor blade. It looked pretty good, if I do say so myself.

And talking about painting, I’d also done a couple of sailcloth rugs: one for the living room and one for the dining room. The one in the living room had black and ochre checkerboard squares, with a little red flower in about every third or fourth yellow square. The one in the dining room was similar, but was green and white inside a black border, and instead of flowers, I’d had some fun and had painted actual checkers in a few of the squares. Red was winning at the moment, but black might pull through in a pinch. And—quite a surprise—a couple of people who had seen them had commissioned sailcloth rugs of their own, so I was starting a little sideline business.

I knew exactly what Derek was talking about, though. We were both suffering from burnout.

I nodded. “Next time, I want to renovate a small house. One that won’t take forever. And one we won’t have to travel halfway across Maine to get to.”

“Waterfield to Rowanberry Island isn’t exactly halfway across Maine.”

“You know what I mean. I want a house right in Waterfield. Preferably in the Village. A house I can walk to.”

“That isn’t gonna be easy,” Derek said judiciously, stretching long legs out in front of him. Mischa the kitten latched onto a jean leg and started climbing. “Houses in Waterfield Village tend to be a little too rich for our blood.”

I looked at him, and he clarified, “Priced too high to make any profit from renovating. We’d have to get whatever it is at a fire-sale price. And when we get it that cheap, it’s usually something that needs gutting and starting over.”

Mischa reached a spot where his tiny claws were hitting not just fabric but flesh, and Derek winced and peeled him off. Mischa hung on, complaining, and I had to reach over and gently unhook each of his tiny, needle-sharp claws from Derek’s jeans.

“If you’re gonna keep this monster, you need to get him declawed,” Derek grumbled.

“He’ll be all right.” I put him down in my lap and started stroking him. He purred. “And I am keeping him. He’s coming home with me when we’re done here. When will that be?”

Derek glanced over his shoulder at the house. “Another few days. Just to make sure everything is ready.”

“And then?”

“Then we start thinking about our next project.”

“No rest for the weary.” I stretched my legs out. “Have you come up with a house we can flip for Noel’s TV show yet?”

Noel is my stepfather, and he’s a TV producer in California. When he was in Waterfield over Christmas, he had run the idea by us of taking part in an episode of a home-renovation show his network produces, and Derek and I had said yes. Now Noel was ready, or at least he would be in the next few weeks. The show was called
Flipping Out!
and the premise of it was quick-flipping: slapping lipstick on the project, adding surface-gloss and curb appeal, in and out in a week flat. Fresh paint, updated kitchen cabinet hardware, new kitchen counter, new bathroom floor, new light fixtures . . . nothing invasive or time-consuming, just small changes that make a big difference.