Olive and Let Die (17 page)

SIXTEEN

Dolly offered to supervise the cleanup after the luncheon was over the next day. I let her do it. The stresses of the last few days were starting to wear on me, and all I wanted to do was haul my butt up the spiral staircase to my bedroom and take a good long nap. Unfortunately, there were other things that had to be done. Namely, confront my mother and her assistant.

The two of them were sitting at a table near the back. Melanie sipped a mineral water with lemon, and Caitlyn had a cola in front of her. I parked myself next to her. “All right. Everybody's gone. So now you start from the beginning and tell me what's going on. Why are you here?”

“Why do you assume I have an ulterior motive?” Melanie countered, then relented. “Fine. But I don't want to talk here.” She glanced around. “It's personal family business.”

“Whose family are you talking about? Because my
family lives here in this house.” Sort of. Everybody was leaving or had already left now that winter was coming.

“Ouch, Georgie. Why don't you tell me how you really feel?” She sipped at the water. Despite her typically snarky attitude, she was pale and twitchy.

“It can't have escaped your notice that the day you two got into town—or the day you
said
you got into town—was the same day your cousin's body was found. And now the reporter who's been hounding you since you got here is also dead. Does that seem like a coincidence? Because something smells like a broken refrigerator on a hot day.”

Caitlyn wouldn't meet my eyes. Melanie blew out a breath. “Fine.”

“Fine? What does that mean?”

She put the cap back on the bottle of mineral water, gave it a twist, and put it into her oversized designer handbag. “It means . . . it's time to go out to the farm. We'll take your car. I need Caitlyn to run some errands for me and she needs the rental. I don't want to have to pay for extra miles.”

I would gladly pay for gas if it meant getting some answers.

Fifteen minutes later we were on our way out to Route 12. According to Lieutenant Hawthorne, the police were finished with their investigation of Doreen's house and we could go in anytime to close up her affairs. I turned off on the road to the Rainbow Acres Farm Collective, where I bought fresh produce and dairy for the restaurant. Just past the long barns and greenhouses and living quarters was a farmhouse.

“Pull in here,” Melanie said. “This is it. The house I grew up in.” Her voice was strangely flat, without a hint of nostalgia.

I realized I'd driven past this house many times, but of course hadn't known its significance to my own life. It was a two-story rectangular building covered in clapboards. The roof had the steep pitch typical of older North Country houses, and had been re-covered in bright red corrugated metal material. This type of roofing was becoming more popular in this area, because it could easily withstand the harsh North Country winters and their heavy snowload. Doreen had painted the front door a slightly darker red, and mums were planted along each side of the front steps and in a flower bed a little farther out into the lawn. A garden gnome wearing a New York Giants football jersey stood guard over the flowers. Paint peeled from the white siding material. On her limited income, Doreen had probably had to pick and choose what home maintenance projects she could take on.

Melanie pulled a key out of her purse and stuck it into the lock.

“Where did you get a key?” I demanded.

She regarded me over her giant sunglasses. “Doreen told me where to find it.”

“And when was this?” Had Melanie gone to see Doreen before she came to see me? And how long before Doreen's death had Melanie been in town?

“She's my cousin. We've . . . been in touch recently.” The front door swung open with a creak.

Wow. Just wow. She'd cut me off twenty years ago but she was still in touch with her cousin? The stab of anger and pain was like a knife to my gut.

“Come on in,” she said. “I'll show you the house.”

There was no sense questioning her. She was clearly
going to take her own sweet time. Not that I trusted myself to keep a civil tongue.

The door opened directly into a moderately sized room that apparently served as a mudroom, coat closet, and sitting room, based on the furnishings. To my left I could see a living room, with comfy-looking slipcovered furniture situated around a 1990s-era television set in a heavy wooden entertainment center. She apparently liked ducks because there were a lot of them in various forms scattered about the room—decoys, photos, china figurines.

“This is the front room,” Melanie said, indicating the all-purpose space we stood in. “That's the living room, obviously. There's a bathroom here”—she swept her hand to another door to our left—“and Doreen's bedroom is beyond that. Here's the kitchen.”

We walked into a kitchen that spanned the whole back of the house. A Formica-topped table with chrome trim and legs took up one side, along with an antique painted Hoosier cabinet. The other end of the room held the appliances and white beadboard cabinets. The decorating theme was continued here, with a cheerful if outdated border of light blue ducks adjacent to the ceiling. There were a couple of coffee cups in the sink, and the counters were cluttered with small appliances—two coffeemakers, a tabletop electric grill, a new candy apple red stand mixer that I kind of coveted, a can opener. She'd liked her gadgets, apparently.

“What's upstairs?” I asked.

“More bedrooms. I imagine Doreen didn't need the extra space so she closed it off to conserve fuel oil.”

“The place is yours again. What are you planning to do
with it?” I expected her to say, “Sell it immediately.” But she surprised me.

“I don't know, quite honestly. My first instinct was to sell it, of course, not that I could probably get much for it. But now I'm not so sure. Do you want it? Now that you're getting divorced, you're going to need a place to live.”

This was so far from what I'd been thinking, it threw me for a loop. Spiro was the one who moved out of the Bonaparte House, not me. Sophie had told me I could live there as long as I wanted. But did I want that? Sophie had said before that she eventually wanted to move back to Greece more or less permanently. And much as it pained me to say it, she wasn't getting any younger. But she had scads of money both in the United States and in Europe. If she'd wanted to move back, she could have done so long before now, and in style. Spiro didn't want the Bonaparte House. I looked around. Could I see myself living here? I'd never lived out in the country so I didn't know. Certainly not with the blue ducks.

“I don't want to talk about that now. We came here to talk about you, remember?”

She pursed her lips. “See if she's got any coffee or tea, will you? I'm going to go powder my nose. Then I'll tell you what I can.”

Well, fine. What was another few minutes to wait for answers? At least she'd look good when she came back, which was all that mattered. I opened the fridge and found a container of half-and-half. A sniff told me it was still drinkable. The metal canister of coffee—an uninspiring supermarket brand—was located in the cupboard over the coffeemaker next to a box of paper filters. While the machine worked, I
washed up the two coffee cups in the sink. From what I'd seen of the general clutter, the house was going to take weeks to clean out. Was Melanie planning to have a yard sale? Order a Dumpster? Take it all back to California with her?

I reached under the sink and pulled out some spray cleaner so I could wipe down the counters and the kitchen table. Under the sink I found a box made of plastic canvas on which someone had needlepointed a design. A duck, of course, and the word BINGO. I smiled and opened the box. Inside were some teabags, a Bingo card, and some pens with a tip about the size of a half dollar and marked “Dauber Delite.” There was a silver bell, as well as a small duck figurine—a good luck charm perhaps? I set the box on the counter. Paloma might want it as a memento.

Melanie finally came back and sat down. I set a mug in front of her, along with the container of cream and a spoon. There was an unopened package of Oreos in the cupboard, so I set those out too.

“All right, Melanie. Spill.”

She looked out the window to the overgrown field beyond. “This wasn't such a bad place to grow up, you know? I had a dog, a couple of cats, even a horse. There were plenty of kids at Rainbow Acres, so I'd ride my horse or my bike down there after school and we'd hang out.”

I twisted an Oreo apart and popped one of the chocolate discs into my mouth.

“But I came along late in my parents' lives. My mother was forty-two when I was born, my father forty-five. They thought they were infertile until I finally arrived. It was tough for them. This farm is a hundred acres or so, but most
of it isn't tillable. So we had dairy cows, which are a lot of work, especially when you suddenly have another mouth to feed and no money to hire help. My parents were exhausted all the time.”

Animal husbandry and North Country economics notwithstanding, this just felt like a stall tactic. Filler. I wished she'd get to the point.

“But my parents weren't just tired,” she continued. “They were angry. Bitter—”

A knock sounded at the front door and we both jumped. Melanie stuck her hand into her purse.

“Who could that be? I'll go see.”

Melanie got up, throwing the strap of her bag over her shoulder. She followed me to the front door. “Can I help you?”

“Hello, what is it you call yourself now? Melanie? I like it.”

The man was tall and rangy, with a green and yellow John Deere cap set over iron gray hair. He was handsome in a rough way. And I knew him. Hank, from the Rainbow Acres Farm.

I glanced at Melanie. Her mouth hung open, and for once she seemed speechless.

Hank locked eyes with Melanie. “I'm no vampire. Invite me in.”

I stood aside. “Of course. We're just having coffee. Come on out to the kitchen.”

We trooped in and sat down. Hank continued to stare at Melanie. “You two know each other,” I said. It was a statement, not a question.

Melanie recollected herself. “We grew up together,” she finally said. “What are you doing here, Hank?”

“I have a sick cow and didn't make it to the calling hours or the funeral.” He helped himself to a cookie. “But I saw the car here and thought I'd stop in. You're better looking now than you were forty years ago.”

Melanie smiled. “And you're a silver-tongued devil, same as you ever were.”

“Doreen was a good neighbor. I was sorry to hear about her death. They haven't caught the perp yet, have they?” His voice was casual, but his eyes were wary.

Interesting. From my last adventure, I knew Hank was not above bending or breaking the law if it suited him. Was he fishing for information? Could he somehow be involved?

“No,” Melanie said. “They arrested someone, but the evidence is circumstantial. And there's been another murder in town—Spencer Kane from the newspaper.”

His eyebrows rose. “A serial killer in the Bay? Doesn't seem likely.”

“Hank, was Doreen involved in anything . . . that might have made someone want to hurt her?” I wondered if the police had interviewed anyone at Rainbow Acres.

“You mean, like an organized Bingo ring or something? Or a school kid who thought the sloppy joes weren't up to par?” He snorted at his own stupid joke. “But seriously, no. I mean, it was easy to get her riled up, and she never hesitated to let you know exactly what she thought of you, in between cuss words. In the last few weeks she seemed happier than usual when she came in to buy her eggs.”

This jibed with what Inky and Paloma had told me. “Did she say why?”

Hank stroked his chin. “She was coming into some money. She didn't say from where.”

This conversation had netted me exactly nothing. It was all I could do not to throw up my hands in exasperation.