Wall-To-Wall Dead (24 page)

Candy had been worried about his wife finding out. Naturally. “Did Jamie know about Candy and Mr. Rossini?”

“Before we found the pictures?” Josh said. “I don’t think so. She seemed pretty surprised.”

“Really?”

Josh nodded. “She kept saying she couldn’t believe Candy would be so stupid. And that Francesca was going to hit the ceiling.”

“What about the rest of the neighbors?”

“What about them?”

“Did Miss Shaw blackmail anyone else?”

“I don’t think so,” Josh said. “None of us have any money. Besides, what does it matter?”

I sighed, exasperated. “It matters because I’m trying to figure out why someone would go to the trouble of killing her.”

“Someone killed her?” Josh said. “I thought Dad said it was an accident.”

“He could be wrong. I’m sure it happens.”

“Not often,” Josh said.

“Well, what about David Rossini? If Miss Shaw had
been blackmailing him—he does have money, quite a lot of it, plus a wife who probably wouldn’t be very happy to find out he’s cheating—then maybe he would kill Miss Shaw to shut her up.”

“She did have pictures,” Josh said slowly. “Of Candy and Rossini. Fairly explicit pictures.”

He blushed, the sweet thing.

“Those are in the envelope?” I glanced at it.

Josh nodded and took a tighter grip on his prize. “We looked everywhere we could think of for the stuff. It was Jamie who found it, behind the books in the living room.”

“Why didn’t you put the books back on the shelves? If you had, maybe Brandon wouldn’t have noticed that someone had been there.”

“No time,” Josh said. “By then it was morning, and Brandon was already on his way. He called and told me to meet him with the key. We got out of there as fast as we could.”

Understandable. Brandon would realize that someone had been there, but he wouldn’t know who or why.

Something struck me. “You didn’t take her EpiPen, did you?”

“Of course not,” Josh said. “We took the envelope, that’s all. Just the information she’d gathered on all the residents.”

“Did you say that Miss Shaw had information about me and Derek?”

Josh nodded.

“Show me.” I held out my hand.

Josh hesitated, clutching the envelope close to his chest. “Not here.”

“Where, then?” Because if Miss Shaw had dug into my life, and Derek’s, I wanted to know what she’d found. Not because I had anything to hide—my life is an open book—but because it’s hard to resist something like that.

“Lab,” Josh said with a quick glance around.

Fine with me. I followed him across the parking lot and the grass into the building that held the computer lab, and
up the stairs to the second floor. When we were seated—him in front of his computer, me on another rolling chair I’d pulled up beside it—I held out my hand again. “Let me see.”

Josh blew out a breath, but he dug into the envelope and brought out a couple of snapshots. Digital photos, computer-printed. I fanned them out in my hand and caught my breath harshly when I got a better look. “That nasty old witch!”

Miss Shaw must have shot the pictures through her kitchen window with a telephoto lens. And although they certainly weren’t indecent or in any way criminal, they were personal. The first showed me and Derek outside the condo building, next to the Beetle, and we were wearing the clothes we’d worn the very first time we’d come there to see the Antoninis’ condo. I remembered telling Derek she’d been watching us, and he’d grinned and asked if I’d be up for giving her a thrill. Apparently we had. In later photos, she’d caught Derek with his hand on my butt—a fact I’d forgotten until now—and also a close-up where I had my hands fisted in his hair. I blushed looking at it.

“They’re not so bad,” Josh said as he watched my expression. “You should see the ones of Candy and Mr. Rossini.”

“I’ll pass, thanks.” I’d already seen all I cared to of David Rossini. I especially had no need to see him and Candy naked, which was what I assumed Josh was intimating. “What else is in there?”

“About you and Derek?”

That wasn’t exactly what I’d meant, but when he started dragging out pieces of paper, my jaw dropped and I reached for them. “What the…what is all this?”

“I’m gonna say everything she could dig up on the two of you on short notice,” Derek said. “Obviously, there was a lot more information available on Derek than on you.”

Obviously. She had a copy of the newspaper announcement that ran when he came back to Waterfield to join his dad’s medical practice some eleven years ago now, plus a
couple of clippings of him with Melissa on his arm during the time they were still married. Then there was Melissa on Ray Stenham’s arm, and Melissa when she received her award as Maine Realtor of the Year a couple years ago. There was the announcement the paper had run when Derek opened Waterfield R&R, and so on and so forth. She also had copies of the property records for both Derek and Melissa, and although there were no notations on them, I wondered if she’d realized the fact that they were directly across the street from one another and that if Derek didn’t keep his curtains closed, Melissa could look straight into his loft.

And vice versa, of course, but I knew Derek wouldn’t be looking to sneak a peek at Melissa. She, I wasn’t so sure about.

As Josh had pointed out, there was less dirt about me, probably because I’d only been in Waterfield for a year. There was a copy of the announcement that had run in the
Waterfield Clarion
just a few weeks ago, after Derek and I had gotten engaged, as well as a newspaper clipping from the spring, after we helped the police in Boothbay Harbor, up the coast a bit, break up a human trafficking ring. There was the newspaper coverage from last fall, when we were renovating the house on Becklea Drive, when we found the skeleton in the crawl space, and from even longer ago, there was a small news article about my aunt Inga, who had been Waterfield’s oldest resident—almost ninety-nine—when she died. That article also included the information that her second cousin a few times removed, Avery Marie Baker, textile designer from New York, had inherited her house. Miss Shaw had scribbled the words “Murder?” and “Inheritance?” in the margin.

She’d been right about the first, but not about the second. Aunt Inga had indeed been murdered, but it certainly hadn’t been me pushing her down the stairs. I’d been in New York when she fell, and at that time I’d had no idea she was planning to leave me her house. I hadn’t seen her since I was five.

I sniffed, insulted, and lowered the clipping to my lap. “I can’t believe it. Why would she do something like that?”

“Believe it,” Josh said. “There’s more like it in here.” He tapped the envelope with a fingernail.

“Does the rest of it have as much basis in fact?”

Josh shrugged. “Some of it has more. Miss Shaw had computer pictures of Jamie at work; people take them sometimes, and upload them to their social networking profiles. I have a Google alert on her name, and I take ’em down whenever I come across them, but I don’t catch everything. They say her name’s Jamaica Lee, but anyone who knows her can tell it’s Jamie. Good thing her family thinks the Internet is evil and they stay away from it.”

Guess so. We were sitting in front of a computer, and my fingers itched to do a Google search on Jamaica Lee, but I contained myself.

“She also had Jamie’s parents’ address in Mississippi,” Josh added, “so I don’t think Jamie was exaggerating when she was afraid that Miss Shaw would contact her parents. It looked like Miss Shaw had thought about it. Or at least she was prepared.”

So it seemed.

“A lot of what’s here is stuff that’s more or less commonly known,” Josh added. “No huge secrets. Even Jamie’s job is a secret only from her parents, really. Gregg and Mariano are gay, and Mariano is an illegal alien working without a permit. I’m sure everyone at the hotel knows it, and probably everyone in the building, too. Bruce has a police record from when he was a juvenile. Underage drinking and joy-riding. Half of Waterfield remembers that. Robin’s been married before, and Benjamin isn’t Bruce’s kid. Big surprise there; he doesn’t look anything like Bruce, and Robin had him when she moved in here last year. I can’t imagine why Miss Shaw thought any of that was newsworthy.”

I couldn’t, either. “Who was Robin married to? Anyone interesting?”

Josh shook his head. “Someone named Guy Quinn. In
Alabama. I’ve never heard of him. And if he was somebody, I’m sure Miss Shaw would have had a newspaper article about him.”

I nodded. “Hard to see how that’s anyone’s business but Robin’s. Obviously she left him and married Bruce instead. And I’m sure he told Robin about his misspent youth. If
you
know about it, there’s no reason why he wouldn’t share it with her. As for Gregg and Mariano, it’s not like they’re trying to hide, is it?”

Josh shook his head. “She even had a picture of a picture—or I should say a copy of a painting—that William Maurits’s insurance company paid out on a few years back. Here.”

He dove into the envelope; obviously the picture of the picture—or copy of the painting—was something he felt he could share with me.

I took the computer printout he handed me and stared at it. An off-white oval with a slash of red across it, crowned by a half circle in orange and gold on a purplish-black background. There was something compelling about it, although I couldn’t have told you why. I tilted my head. “What is it?”

“It’s called
Madonna
,” Josh said, “so I assume that’s what it is. Or was. Although I’m not sure whether it’s supposed to be the religious figure or the singer.”

I could see his point. The painting didn’t look like either of them. Nor did it look like anyone else, really. It certainly didn’t look like something I’d want to hang on my wall. However, the accompanying article said it was valued at a cool half-million dollars, and that it had perished when the gallery where it hung had burned to the ground. This was only one of the pieces that had gone up in smoke, and not even the most valuable. The article noted that since the cause of the fire was undetermined, the insurance company had tried to claim arson, probably so they wouldn’t have to pay out the six million dollars on the claim. However, there was no proof that the gallery owners had had anything to do with the fire, so eventually the insurance company had to bite the bullet.

“Maurits couldn’t have been happy,” I said.

Josh shook his head. “I have no idea why she’d focus on this painting. There were at least a dozen of them that were lost, some of them more valuable. But I guess she had a reason.”

“Probably.” I did a quick tally of neighbors in my head. Maurits and Miss Shaw herself on the first floor; Derek and I and Mariano and Gregg on the second; Josh and Candy and Jamie on the third; and Robin and Bruce along with Amelia Easton on the top floor. “What about Professor Easton? Did Miss Shaw dig up any dirt on her?”

“Not apart from that old story that everyone knows,” Josh said.

Old story that everyone knew? “What old story?”

“Haven’t you heard about that? It’s not a secret, either. All of Barnham was talking about it last year.”

“I was still trying to settle in last year,” I said. “Tell me.” So sue me, I’m as interested in good gossip as the next person. And if everyone at Barnham knew about it already, it wasn’t like it was private, was it?

Josh shifted on the chair, getting more comfortable now that we were far off the subject of him and Jamie. “It happened about twenty years ago or so, when Professor Easton was in college herself. Apparently her roommate died mysteriously.”

My ears pricked up. “How mysteriously?”

“Not as mysteriously as you’re thinking,” Josh said. “Suicide.”

“Why?”

“You should probably just read the newspaper articles.” He tapped the computer open and then keyed in a search for Amelia Easton and Southern Mennonite University. It took the computer only a few seconds to pull up thousands of matches.

“Knock yourself out,” he said, getting up from the chair. “I’m gonna go get a cup of coffee.”

I slipped into the chair he’d vacated, my eyes already scanning the available links.

“You want one?”

“No thanks.” I picked a link and clicked on it. “I’m on my way to Cora and Dr. Ben’s house for dinner after this.” And I should probably hurry. Derek would be waiting. But what I was reading was too interesting to leave quite yet.

“Suit yourself,” Josh said, and strolled out, taking the manila envelope with him. A part of me had hoped he might forget and leave it, since that part wanted to dig in and see what else was inside; but the other part was relieved, since I didn’t really want to turn out like Miss Shaw, too interested in other people’s business. All in all, just having Josh’s word for what the envelope contained was enough.

I turned back to the screen, to what turned out to be an official interview on the Barnham College website, most likely in response to the unrestrained gossip when Professor Easton was hired last year.

The article wasn’t long, and as Josh had said, the crime wasn’t all that mysterious, either. Twenty years ago or so, while Amelia Easton had attended Southern Mennonite University, her roommate, Nanette Barbour, had been found dead, hanging from the ceiling fan in the bathroom. It was no wonder Amelia had been so pale while she and I were standing outside the door that day when Miss Shaw died. It must have brought back memories of Nanette.

The two girls had come to SMU together, from what was essentially a closed religious community. It was their first experience with the outside world: Up until then they had spent their time entirely within the commune. College was a whole new world to them. Nanette was the one who had wanted to go, and Amelia had agreed to accompany her. But Nanette had gotten into trouble almost immediately. Amelia had caught her talking to a boy, alone. She had phoned the elders, who had made immediate plans to fetch both girls and bring them home. Amelia had told Nanette what was coming down, and the next morning, Nanette was dead.

It seemed pretty open and closed to me, and obviously it
had seemed equally simple to the local police, who had determined that Nanette self-terminated rather than allow herself to be brought home in disgrace.