Sketcher in the Rye: (20 page)

Chapter 25

The days were growing darker and colder as November marched on toward December. Rory would have preferred to be snug in her house by dinnertime, but she knew it was the best time to canvas an area. Parents would be home from work, their children done with after-school activities. Unfortunately it was also one of the busiest times for families, and her present job simply didn't carry the respect or clout of a detective's badge. People, who hung up in anger when solicitors called, would have no compunction about slamming their doors in her face, if they even bothered to open them at all. Being a private investigator required growing a tough hide.

After living in an apartment for six years, Matthew had bought a cottage on Eaton's Neck, an island connected to the rest of Long Island by a narrow thread of land called Asharoken. The Neck was as far north as you could go within the town of Huntington unless you had a boat. According to his mother, Matthew had always had an affinity for the water, and as soon as he was financially able, he'd purchased the cottage a block from Northport Bay. It had fallen on hard times, along with its previous owner, but Matthew had seen the potential in it. He'd spent every weekend for the better part of a year refurbishing it and making it his own. Anya said it was his pride and joy.

As Rory drove along Asharoken Avenue, she was glad there was no rain in the forecast. Northport Bay on her left and the Long Island Sound on her right were lapping at the berms on either side of the roadway as it was. Any decent-sized storm could swamp the road entirely. She'd been up there a few times before, but always on a clear day when the water was glittering in the sunlight and floods were the farthest thing from her mind. The night was a very different story though. Street lamps carved out circles of light along the narrow road, but beyond it the water stretched away in an unrelieved darkness that conjured up the sort of chilling images Dean Koontz and Stephen King painted so well in their novels. Rory turned up the heat against the cold that was shimmying up her spine and started singing along to “We Are Young” on the radio.

“Stop that awful caterwaulin'!” Zeke's disembodied voice erupted from the ether, making her jump in her seat.

“Startling a driver isn't smart,” she snapped, once her heart had subsided from her throat. “It's not like I'm driving a horse and buggy here. I could have lost control of the wheel and gone straight into the water. What happened to blinking the lights to warn me?”

“I didn't have time,” he said, filtering into the passenger seat more slowly than usual. “Your screechin' just about shattered me. And would you please turn off that contraption,” he added, pointing to the radio. “Whoever that is you're listenin' to doesn't have much more talent than you do. It's a wonderment to me why folks these days seem to need constant noise. They even plug it straight into their ears.”

“Have you finished with today's lecture?” Rory asked, switching off the radio. After the initial shock he'd given her, she was actually happy to have his company.

He crossed his arms. “I've said my piece.”

“So what happened? I thought you were going to meet me out there.”

“I was, until I got a gander at this godforsaken stretch of land.” Rory noted that he hadn't come right out and said she needed a man to protect her. And although she didn't like the thought of being “handled,” she was just fine with his efforts to respect her feelings. Every long-term relationship required adjustments by both parties. She'd read that in a women's magazine at the dentist's office. Although it was doubtful the author had human-ghost relationships in mind when she wrote the article, Rory didn't see why the same advice couldn't also be applied in their case.

“Will you be changing your clothes or coming as the invisible man?” she asked, since he was wearing his marshal getup.

“I didn't feel like creatin' another set of clothes. Invisible will suit me just fine for tonight.”

Ten minutes later, they were parked at the curb in front of Matthew's cottage. The only house on the street without lights, it seemed bereft, in mourning for its most recent owner, who had tended to it so lovingly. Since there was nothing to be gained by letting emotions cloud her thoughts, Rory turned her attention to the other homes on the block. There were ten in total, five on each side. From what she could make out, they were all modest frame buildings. Matthew's was easily the smallest one. They weren't on large lots, but neither were they sitting cheek by jowl. If there had been an argument or scuffle in his house, the neighbors might have heard something had the windows been open. Unfortunately it had been an uncomfortably cold autumn.

“Let's start with the houses next door to his and work outward from there,” Rory said.

Zeke's voice piped up from somewhere behind her. “Will you look at that—we're actually startin' to think alike.”

Great, just what she needed. Although the marshal was intelligent, even insightful at times, his thought processes were often strangely off-kilter. She didn't know if it was a side effect of being dead or if he'd always been that way. In either case, she wasn't thrilled. One of them had to remain sound of mind and body.

She walked up to the house that was to the right of Matthew's, passing the black mailbox with the name “Desmond” painted boldly in white. She'd flirted briefly with the idea of having the marshal pop into each of the homes to determine who was inside and what kind of reception she might expect from them. But it would be an unforgiveable breach of their privacy.
She'd
at least been able to choose whether to live with a ghost or walk away from the issue.

She rang the doorbell and heard it chime inside. Although she could pick out muted voices from what sounded like a television, no one came to the door. She rang the bell again. “Would you like me to scare them out of the house?” Zeke whispered, sounding far too partial to the idea.

“Don't you dare,” Rory warned him, just as the front door finally opened. A woman wearing a gray sweat suit and a harried expression scowled at her from behind a glass storm door. In the background, Rory could see two children fighting over the TV remote.

The woman yelled at them over her shoulder, threatening to take away their TV privileges unless they behaved. As far as Rory could tell, her threat went unheeded.

The woman turned her attention back to Rory. “What do you want?” she asked warily.

Rory managed to come up with a smile. “Hello, Mrs. Desmond. I'm a private investigator.” She held up one of her business cards. “I was hoping you could spare a few minutes to talk to me about your neighbor Matthew Dmitriev.”

The woman squinted at the card, her curiosity clearly warring with her better judgment. “Yeah, I suppose,” she said, looking right then left, as if to make sure Rory was alone. Satisfied, she opened the storm door to let her in. Rory was immediately struck by the smell of frying fish. Back in her early teens, she'd suffered a terrible bout of food poisoning from eating bad fish sticks at a friend's house. Even all these years later, her stomach started roiling the second she walked inside. To her dismay, the woman led her into the kitchen and offered her a seat at the table—ground zero of the offending odor.

The boy and girl stopped fighting over the remote and came to stand in the kitchen doorway. “This doesn't concern you,” their mother said, shooing them back toward the living room. She stopped at the stove to turn the sizzling fish, which only served to intensify the smell. Then she sat down across from Rory, who was trying to breathe through her mouth instead of her nose. She wished the woman would turn on the fan in the range hood but decided it would be rude to mention the awful odor, given that it was no doubt the family's dinner.

“Do they have a suspect in Matthew's death yet?” Mrs. Desmond asked. “Do they have a motive? This block was crawling with cops when it happened, but we haven't heard anything since then. There's not even much in the newspapers.” The woman was good; Rory had to give her that. She'd managed to grab the upper hand, making Rory feel like the interviewee.

“We'll get to that in a minute,” she said, reclaiming control. “First I need to get some information from you, starting with your name, please.”

“Carla Desmond,” the woman responded, not bothering to hide her annoyance at being preempted. “Spells like it sounds.”

Rory jotted the name on her pad. “Thank you—did you know Matthew well?” she asked without pausing, leery of giving Carla time to launch another coup.

Carla shrugged. “We weren't BFFs, if that's what you mean. He only lived here, what . . . a year? I have a family, and he was a single guy. We had very different schedules. I don't think we ever talked for more than two minutes at a time. But he seemed nice enough. “Did you happen to notice if he had a lot of visitors?” In the next room, the kids were shouting at each other again. Carla didn't seem to care.

“Look, I'm no busybody,” she said. “I don't have time for that. Matthew's mother was the only one I ever saw there on a regular basis. Nice lady.”

Rory smelled something acrid on top of the fishy odor. “I think your dinner's burning,” she said, looking toward the stove, where smoke was rising from the skillet. Did Carla's sense of smell work at all?

She jumped up and ran to the stove, where she pushed the pan onto a cold back burner and turned off the hot one. “The oil just cooked out,” she said, waving her hand over the smoke as if to disperse it.

“You'll get rid of the smoke faster if you put on the fan,” Rory said. Considering the new circumstances, the suggestion was more helpful than rude. Carla followed her advice. The fan proved very noisy, which had the added benefit of drowning out the children's screeching.

“I hope your dinner isn't ruined,” Rory added, once Carla resumed her seat.

She laughed. “It'll be fine. I'll tell them blackened fish sticks are the latest thing. As long as they get to have cake for dessert, they'll eat pretty much anything.”

Rory forced a smile, hoping it didn't look as phony as it felt. When Carla opened her mouth to continue, she beat her to the punch. “Do you remember hearing anything, maybe an argument, coming from Matthew's house in the days before he was murdered? It would probably have been in the evening, since he was at work during the day.”

“No, I don't recall anything out of the ordinary. Of course my husband and I watch TV at night. A lot of cop shows. With all the shooting and shouting, it's hard to hear anything else. No—wait,” she corrected herself. “I did hear someone slam a car door really hard back around then. I'd come into the kitchen to get some ice cream, and I remember thinking, boy oh boy, somebody's mad.”

Rory's heart did a hopeful little jig. “Do you recall the time?”

Carla reflected for a minute. “I'd have to say about 8:30. I generally wait for the half hour commercial break to get my dessert.”

“Did you look outside to see who was slamming the car door or where the car was parked?”

Carla shook her head. “I didn't have time—I wanted to get back to my program. But it sounded like it was close by.”

Rory thanked her for the help and promised to let her know when the police had the guilty party in custody. As she walked back down to the curb, she breathed deeply of the fresh salty air until she'd purged the smell of burnt fish from her nostrils. “Zeke,” she called in a loud whisper. “Where are you?” Why hadn't he said anything now that they were outside? His response was barely audible, a staccato jumble of sounds as if he was on a cell phone with poor service. She'd reached the house to the left of the cottage by the time she figured out he was trying to say the word “cold.”

She'd forgotten that the cold drained his energy. Since he'd apparently forgotten about it himself, she didn't feel too badly about her lapse. She hurried back to the Audi, turned on the engine and blasted the heat, which felt wonderful on her mortal flesh too. After a few minutes, the marshal appeared in the seat beside her. “That was frustratin' as all get-out,” he said, looking chagrined.

“I can imagine,” she said to be sympathetic.

“I doubt it, but we can't waste time debatin' that now. Here's what we'll have to do,” he barreled on. “I'll arrive once you're inside a house and then I'll meet you in the car after each visit so we can figure out our next move. You'll have to leave the car runnin' so it stays warm.”

Even though she thought it would be a huge waste of time to meet between each house, she kept that opinion to herself. The marshal wasn't in the best of moods, and though she'd never admit it, she wanted his company on the drive home.

No one answered the doorbell at the next house or at the one beyond that. Rory drove to the last house on that side of the street, because the distance was too far to keep walking back to the car. Lights were blazing inside the house, and after one ring of the bell, a man in his forties opened the door. She held up her card again, and before she could even explain why she was there, he invited her inside. “I didn't want to leave you freezing outside,” he said, taking the card from her and glancing at it. “Well, Ms. McCain, it's a pleasure to meet you. I'm Tony Valenti.” He held out his hand and Rory shook it, a little surprised by the uncommonly warm welcome. “I'm sorry to say I can't be of any help to you, though,” he went on. “I just moved in last week, so I never met Matthew. Maybe I can interest you in a cup of coffee or cocoa before you go back out to brave the cold?”

“Thanks, that's a very kind offer,” she said, thinking she probably shouldn't have been so quick to enter a stranger's house, even with a Walther PPK in her purse and a no-nonsense ghost hovering nearby. “But I don't really have time right now.” She thanked him again and was out the door before he had a chance to insist, and before Zeke felt compelled to teach him any lessons. Since nothing had been gained by the visit, she made an executive decision to skip the car talk. She crossed the street, hoping for better results than she'd had so far, although neighbors this far from Matthew's house weren't likely to have heard anything either.