Spackled and Spooked

by Jennie Bentley

  “Nice to meet all of you. Sorry about the hoopla. Police and all.”

  “I’m sure it’s not your fault,” Arthur Mattson murmured, while Irina said, “What is going on? Lionel told us there is a body buried under the house, but that is all we know.”

  I shrugged. “That’s all I know, too, right now.” Not exactly all I knew, but it was probably better not to say too much. “My boyfriend was working down there this morning, footing supports, when he found a bone. So of course we had to call the police.”

  Arthur Mattson nodded. “Human remains, however old, have to be reported. Probably find out it’s an old Indian burial ground or something.” He looked disgusted.

  “Gosh,” I said, diverted, “if it is, will they have to dig up everybody’s basements?”

  The rest of them looked at each other. “They’d better not be touching my house,” Linda said belligerently. Denise shook her head.

  “The baby won’t be able to sleep if there are people going in and out, making noise.” From the looks of her, she desperately needed little Trevor to take a nap so she could take a shower and get a little rest herself, too.

  “They can’t touch private property,” Lionel said in his surprisingly deep voice. “You have to give them permission to do that. All you have to do is say no.”

  “Except then they’d come back with a search warrant because they think you’re hiding something,” Linda answered. Lionel shrugged and turned to me.

  “What’s up with Miss Rudolph?”

  He glanced at Venetia ’s curtains, which were still fluttering.

  “As far as I know,” I said, “nothing. She’s sitting in there, keeping an eye on things. Just like she has done for the past twenty years. I asked her about anyone she might have seen around the house, and she gave me a list of people.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded. “The mailman, the handyman, the newspaper boy, the realtor…”

  “The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?” Irina suggested, in her accented voice. I grinned.

  “Pretty much. The squatters, the teenagers, the suit with the clipboard. And now Derek and I. All manner of people seem to have been coming and going. Quite a lot of activity for an empty house. I don’t suppose any of you have noticed anyone suspicious hanging around?”

  Irina smiled apologetically. “I’ve lived here for less than a year.”

  “I’m all the way down at the end of the street,” Linda said.

  “I’ve been busy with Trevor,” Denise added.

  “I work a lot,” Lionel said.

  “And we try to mind our own business,” Arthur Mattson finished. “Don’t we, Stella?” He smiled at the growling canine, in flagrant disregard for the fact that he and Stella-that they all-were standing here in the middle of the afternoon, with nothing better to do than to gawk at two parked police cars and someone else’s mostly empty house.

  9

  Derek lives in an updated loft above the hardware store on Main Street. It’s a great location, very convenient to everything Waterfield has to offer, as well as to where I was eventually going, i.e., Aunt Inga’s house. All I had to do was drive the car from Becklea into town and park it in Derek’s usual spot, leaving the key under the mat. Grand theft auto isn’t a big problem in Waterfield, so I wasn’t worried that it wouldn’t be there when he got home tonight. And then I had a simple four-block walk up the hill to Aunt Inga’s house. Before I started walking, though, I popped into the hardware store to grab some paint swatches for the walls at Becklea, as well as some inspiration, if there was any to be had.

  Five minutes later, totally free of inspiration-but with a couple of do-it-yourself and home-renovation magazines in a bag with the handful of paint swatches-I headed up Main Street toward Aunt Inga’s house, gazing into store windows as I went.

  In addition to the two newspapers and the hardware store, Main Street comprises most of Waterfield’s shopping district. There are restaurants and supermarkets on the outskirts of town, but most of the little mom-and-pop places are right in downtown-hole-in-the-wall restaurants and delis, bookstores, offices, as well as antique shops and galleries. I had passed the Grantham Gallery, with its gray-tone painting of cumulus clouds on hard-board in the window, and was on my way past Waterfield Realty when someone called my name.

  “Yoo-hoo! Avery!”

  It was Kate, laden down with shopping bags and on her way across the street toward me at a fast clip. “ Shannon called,” she said breathlessly when she caught up to me. “What’s going on?”

  “If Shannon called, didn’t she tell you?”

  “She said that Josh said that there’s a dead body in your house.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Josh and his police band radio, right? They must have called you before they had all the information.”

  She looked disappointed. “So there isn’t a dead body in your house?”

  I shook my head. And then she looked so crestfallen that I added, “There’s a dead body under my house. In the crawlspace. Or more accurately, a skeleton.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I wish I were. Derek found it when he started digging this morning. So we called Wayne, and he radioed Brandon Thomas-that’s probably when Josh picked it up-and the three of them have been down there all afternoon.”

  “Wayne, Derek, and Brandon?”

  I nodded. “Josh showed up, too. With Shannon, of course, and Paige and a young man named Ricky Swanson.”

  “ Shannon has mentioned him,” Kate nodded. “He’s new at Barnham this year. Transferred in from somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think. Paige seems to be developing a thing for him. What were the four of them doing?”

  “Just gawking. The girls were looking at the house and listening to me going on about what I want to do to the bathroom. Wayne wouldn’t let Josh down into the crawlspace, so he had to content himself with eating half a pizza and asking a ton of questions. I thought he was studying computer science. Why is he so interested in criminology?”

  “I think he has plans of becoming Waterfield’s first cyber-detective,” Kate said. “He’s definitely interested in crime and police work, but he wants the excitement of the chase, not the plodding of the patrol.”

  “But won’t he have to do both? Even Wayne goes on patrol, doesn’t he?”

  “Of course he does,” Kate said. “Everyone goes on patrol here, including the chief of police. Josh would have to, as well. Just like Brandon Thomas, who’d much rather be tinkering with his fingerprints and dust particles than driving a patrol car. That’s just life in a small town.” She shrugged.

  I nodded. “Yeah, Brandon seems to be in his element. He’s down there in the crawlspace, wielding paint brushes and teaspoons, just like in an archeological excavation, while Derek is cheering him on. They found a button, and when Brandon handed it to me, he picked it up with a pair of tweezers and put it into a little box first, so I wouldn’t touch it and mess up his forensic evidence.”

  “What kind of button?” Kate wanted to know. I told her. “So this isn’t an old skeleton, then?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be. Originally, we thought maybe we’d stumbled over an old Indian burial or something. There were Indians around here in the old days, right?”

  “Still are,” Kate nodded. “Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Micmac, and Penobscot, mostly.”

  “Well, we were wrong. This is someone more recent. She was wearing clothes from Target.”

  “Target?” Kate repeated, hazel eyes big. “She?”

  I explained about the button and what it signified, and also what Derek had said about the length of the femur, tibia, and fibula.

  “If Derek says so, then I’m sure it’s right,” Kate said loyally.

  “No doubt.” Her faith in Derek was touching, and I was about to comment on it when another voice interrupted me.

  “Afternoon, Avery. Kate.”

  It was a lovely voice, a soft and feminine purr with a hint of sheathed claws underneath, and i
t fit its owner perfectly. Melissa James was gorgeous, from the top of her razor-edged cap of glossy hair to the pointy toes of her shiny, red, patent-leather Mary Janes. Manolo Blah nik, of course, with four-inch heels. Her killer body, all five feet eight inches of it, was dressed in an Yves Saint Laurent pencil skirt and matching blouse, and she smiled down at me with her blindingly white, preternaturally even teeth. Melissa invariably made me feel like a dirty-faced urchin, even when I had made an effort to look good, and most of the time she seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense when I looked my worst and zero in on me in those moments. Like now, when I was dressed in worn jeans and sneakers, with my hair twisted up in a tie, and a minimum of makeup on my face.

  “Hi, Melissa,” Kate answered, with her own big, fake smile. Kate is Melissa’s height, and between the two of them, I feel positively dainty. I also felt like lightning bolts-or more accurately, lighted barbs-were crossing above my head. Kate dislikes Melissa on a whole lot of levels, and the fact that Kate adores Derek, and that Melissa dumped him, is only one of them. She-Melissa-is also doing her best to turn Waterfield into the kind of town Kate left Massachusetts to get away from, and then there’s the fact that every time Melissa refers someone to Kate’s B and B, she seems to feel that Kate owes her a referral fee. Somehow, the reverse isn’t true: Whenever Kate refers someone to Melissa, it doesn’t seem to cross Melissa’s mind to give Kate a referral fee or so much as a handful of flowers for her trouble. Melissa usually manages a thank you, but even that seems to be a bit of an effort.

  I guess I don’t have to say that I don’t like Melissa, either. In addition to her delight in making me feel small and insignificant, she dumped Derek and hurt his pride and his feelings, even if she didn’t break his heart. More than that, she was married to Derek for a few years before she dumped him, and that means there are things about him she knows that I haven’t discovered yet. And then there’s the fact that she’s dating my cousin Ray, who’s a jerk. Mostly, though, I just chafe at her perfection. I dredged up a smile from somewhere and plastered it on my face. “Nice to see you.” Not.

  Melissa looked from me to Kate and back, all her lovely teeth on display and her amazing eyes-deep violet, her own-gleaming with interest. “What are you talking about?”

  Kate glanced at me. I shrugged. Word would get all over Waterfield sooner or later, so we might as well tell her now. “There are bones buried under the house that Derek and I are renovating.”

  “Oooooh!” Melissa patted my arm with a sympathetic hand ending in long, bloodred talons, a perfect match to the shoes. “That’s no fun, is it? I remember last year, when Ray and Randy were starting development on that little subdivision north of town-not Devon Highlands; the other one, Clovercroft-anyway, when they started digging, they turned up bones. So we called the police, and they came out and had a look, and then they called in someone from the college, the anthropology department, and it turned out to be an old Indian burial ground, and now the whole thing is a nightmare, with the various tribes and nations refusing to let the bones be moved, and until they are, Ray and Randy can’t go forward with the development, and everything is just a big mess!”

  “Gee,” Kate said with a grin, “that’s too bad.”

  Melissa narrowed those fabulous eyes, but instead of commenting on Kate’s lack of sympathy, she addressed me instead. “Derek must be livid, the poor baby. He gets so upset when he’s sidetracked. What are you going to do, Avery?”

  “Oh, I’m not going to do anything,” I answered, with a sweet smile. “Derek is helping Wayne and Brandon with the excavation. And if he’s livid, I didn’t notice. He’ll be home this evening. I guess I’ll find out then.”

  Melissa smiled back, a little less sweetly. “Where are you renovating now, Avery?”

  “Gosh,” I said, “I thought you knew. We bought the old Murphy house on Becklea. You were out there just a couple of weeks ago, weren’t you?”

  “You bought that?” For a second, Melissa’s lovely face didn’t look quite so lovely. Then it smoothed out again. “Actually, I was. But how did you know?”

  I explained that one of the neighbors had seen her.

  “That old biddy in the house next door, I guess,” Melissa said with a look at me from under her lashes, looking for confirmation. “Horrible old busybody. She kept peering at me through the curtains, like she thought I was doing something wrong.”

  “Miss Rudolph likes keeping an eye on what goes on in her neighborhood,” I agreed, glancing over at Kate. She hid a smile.

  Melissa cleared her throat to bring our attention back to her. “How are the renovations going, Avery?”

  “Fine, until the skeleton became an issue. You know Derek. Good with his hands.”

  I smiled. Kate snorted and changed it into a cough. Covering her mouth with her hand, she turned away, shoulders shaking. Melissa’s eyes narrowed, but she kept her voice smooth and solicitous.

  “I’m glad you two are doing well. Poor baby, he took it so hard when we broke up. I didn’t think he’d ever find anyone else.”

  This was a none-too-subtle dig at both Kate and me. Two birds with one stone. Derek and Kate had dated a few times when Kate first moved to town, shortly after Melissa’s defection, and for obvious reasons, it hadn’t worked out between them. They got along well and enjoyed each other’s company, but the romantic spark just wasn’t there. In her own inimitable way, Melissa was telling Kate that she hadn’t measured up in Derek’s eyes. And of course the suggestion that it had taken Derek five years to find someone to replace her was designed to make me think about the possibility that he might just have picked me as second best, after he finally came to terms with the fact that Melissa was lost to him. I didn’t think that was really the reason he’d settled on me-on me, not for me; or so I hoped-although the worry would probably gnaw at me at intervals until I could put it to rest. Damn Melissa and her insidious suggestions.

  Her job done to her satisfaction, Melissa wriggled her fingers in a friendly wave. “I’d better get back to work. Nice seeing you both.” She sashayed away, back into the Waterfield Realty office. Her cell phone was glued to her ear before she had shut the door behind her. Probably calling Ray to tell him that Derek and I had scooped them once again and were renovating the house that the Stenhams had wanted to get their hands on. At the moment, with the skeleton in the crawlspace added to the haunted house issue and the old murders, I was kind of wishing that the Stenhams had scooped us this time and that the whole mess had landed in their laps instead of in ours. Still, the feeling of having beaten them to the punch was compelling enough that I smiled anyway.

  “Boy, she sure put us in our place, didn’t she?” Kate said with a grin. “Aren’t you feeling properly scorned, Avery? I mean, does she really think I care that Derek didn’t choose to pursue our relationship? Puh-leeze!” She rolled her expressive, hazel eyes.

  I smiled half-heartedly, and she added, “And that lame attempt to make you think Derek only picked you after he realized that he could never have Melissa back? What a crock!”

  “You think?”

  “Of course! The only reason he fell in love with Melissa in the first place was that he was young and stupid, and she was gorgeous and determined to marry a doctor. Believe me, he’s learned his lesson. He won’t be making that mistake again.”

  She sounded so confident that I thought maybe I’d better listen to her. She had known Derek for five years longer than I had, so she probably understood the situation fairly well. If she said he wasn’t hung up on Melissa, I should probably take her word for it.

  “So what are you doing here?” Kate dismissed the question of Melissa, and looked around at the not-so-bustling downtown Waterfield. “Why aren’t you working on the house?

  “ Wayne has vetoed any further renovating until they get the body out.”

  I explained that I had driven Derek’s truck into town and parked it behind the hardware store, and now I was on my way home to Aunt Inga’s house.
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  “You know, Avery,” Kate said, “your aunt-rest her soul-has been dead for months. It’s your house now.”

  “I know that. It’s just easier to think of it as Aunt In ga’s house. Everyone knows where Inga Morton lived. She was a Waterfield institution.”

  My aunt had been almost ninety-nine when she died, the longest-living resident of Waterfield.

  There was another reason why I still referred to the house as my aunt’s and not mine, though, although I didn’t want Kate to know it. She’s a people-person, in the best sense of the word-interested in everyone and everything they’re up to-but she’s also a bit of a talker, and I didn’t want word to get around that I was having… maybe not second thoughts about settling down in Waterfield, exactly, but at least thoughts about it. I’d been in town for a few months by now, I’d started to make friends, and of course I’d become involved with Derek, but there was a part of me that was still keeping one foot on the fence in case I decided I didn’t want to stick around beyond the winter. Referring to the house as Aunt Inga’s and not mine allowed me a certain amount of emotional distance. Once it was my house, in my mind as well as on paper, I figured I was stuck with it.

  I grew up in New York City, and until I came to Waterfield, I’d never lived outside Manhattan. I was enjoying the change of pace-the fresh air, the ocean, the slow rhythm of life in Maine -but I also missed the hustle and bustle of the city. The restaurants and shops, the theater, the sure and certain knowledge that something exciting was just about to happen somewhere close by. I missed my old friends. My alma mater, prestigious Parsons School of Design. My compact apartment, currently someone else’s home. My job, with its steady income…

  “You want to walk up the hill together?” Kate asked. “If you’re ready to go.”