Wall-To-Wall Dead

by Jennie Bentley

  I blinked.

  “I called your mother,” Derek added. “She approves.”

  Of course she did. My mother likes Derek. And besides, I was thirty-two. It wasn’t like I needed my mother’s approval to marry.

  “I love you, Avery.” He looked at me across the tablecloth, those blue eyes beautifully sincere.

  “Derek,” I sniffed. Somehow it was the only thing I could manage to say.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Of course it was a yes. I just couldn’t get the word out. So I nodded, and threw myself across the tablecloth so champagne and small blue flowers went flying. He caught me and pulled me in for a kiss.

  “I love you, Avery.”

  “I love you, too,” I sniffled, and let him rescue the ring from my grasp and slide it, whoopie pie crumbs and all, onto my finger. Where it fit perfectly and looked—as the saying goes—like it was where it belonged to be.

  —1—

  “This is a waste of time,” my fiancé grumbled. I glanced over at him as I slotted my spring green VW Beetle into a parking space outside the condominium building where Josh Rasmussen lived, and cut the engine. It was a few days later, and truth be told, I didn’t need the Beetle; I could have floated here on the invisible pretty pink clouds that still surrounded me from Derek’s proposal.

  “We don’t know that. And even if it is, you owe it to Josh to be nice about it. He’s trying to help.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Derek said and opened his car door. “I’ll be nice. But I want it on record that I’m against this.”

  I swung my legs out, too, and addressed him across the roof of the car. “Listen, you got your way when we bought the house on Rowanberry Island. We spent all spring and most of the summer renovating it, not to mention all the money in our account, and we’re still waiting for it to sell. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but if we have to lower our standards for a while, and renovate a two-bedroom condo in a 1970s building—a condo that has none of the architectural elements that make your heart go pitter-patter—you’ll just have to suck it up and deal with the situation. If you want to get married in October, we need the money. Weddings aren’t cheap.”

  The date we had picked was only six weeks away, but Derek didn’t want to wait, and neither did I. My mom had raised her eyebrows at the timeline, but it was an afternoon wedding, so I didn’t need a proper gown. We had booked the church and the minister, and had settled on the adjoining reception hall for the celebration, and everything was proceeding apace.

  “I don’t want to get married in October,” Derek said. He waited until I was close enough so he could snag my wrist, and then he pulled me even closer so he could look deeply into my eyes. “I want to get married right now. Or at least pretend we are.”

  I squirmed, as those cornflower blue eyes had their usual effect on my insides. “There’s a little old lady watching us.”

  Derek straightened up. “Where?”

  “First-floor apartment on the right. White lace curtains.”

  “Oh yeah,” Derek said as the lace curtains fluttered. He smiled down at me, dimples and all. “Wanna give her a thrill?”

  “You’re awful.” But I let him kiss me, and as usual, my stomach swooped.

  “Break it up, you two!” a voice yelled, and when I turned my head, I saw Josh Rasmussen, along with his best friend and brand-new girlfriend, Shannon McGillicutty, hanging out of the window of Josh’s third-floor apartment. They were grinning. I grinned back and lifted a hand.

  “We’ll be right up.”

  Josh nodded. “I’ll buzz you in. Mr. Antonini’s apartment is on the second floor. Meet you there.”

  They withdrew from the open window and closed it behind them. I looked up at Derek. “Remember, be nice.”

  “I’ll be nice. And then afterwards, you can be nice to me.” He gyrated his eyebrows exaggeratedly. I burst into laughter, and he grinned back. “C’mon, Tink. Let’s get this over with. Then we can take the honeymoon early.”

  I smiled. “By all means.”

  He flung an arm around my shoulders, and I snuggled into his side as we walked toward the front door.

  My name is Avery Marie Baker. I met Derek Ellis some sixteen months ago, when I inherited my aunt Inga’s old Victorian house in the tiny hamlet of Waterfield, Maine. He was the renovator I hired to help me fix the place up, since my ninety-eight-year-old cousin a few times removed—the “aunt” was a courtesy title—hadn’t been in a position to maintain or update the house. My plan was to sell it, pocket the money, and go back to my perfectly blissful existence in Manhattan, with my textile design career, my rent-controlled apartment, and my boss-cum-boyfriend, Philippe. But over the course of the summer I fell in love not only with Maine but with Derek, and I ended up staying. We’ve been together, personally and professionally, ever since.

  Josh, whom we were here to meet, is the son of the Waterfield chief of police, Wayne Rasmussen. Wayne married my best friend, Kate McGillicutty, last New Year’s Eve. Kate is Shannon’s mother. That makes Josh and Shannon sort of stepsiblings, which is a little weird when you consider that Josh has been in love with Shannon since she and Kate moved to Waterfield when Shannon was thirteen. The infatuation came long before the sibling relationship, though—in fact, I think it was Josh who introduced Kate and Wayne. And the romance is brand-new. It took Shannon quite a while to warm to the idea—she was afraid she’d lose her best friend if things didn’t work out—and it took them both plunging off the cliffs and into the Atlantic Ocean recently to make her realize how quickly it could all go away. (Sort of the same thing that made Derek finally pop the question, I guess.) It had been horribly scary and we’d all been very worried, but they’d both been mostly OK, and the person responsible got caught, eventually. They’ve been working things out for the past week or so, and when they came to unlock the front door for us, we could see that things seemed to be going well. Josh had a trace of lipstick at the corner of his mouth, while Shannon’s long mane of black cherry hair was tangled, as if someone had had his hands in it quite recently.

  Derek grinned. “Having fun, kids?”

  Josh blushed and adjusted his glasses. Shannon grinned back. “Yes, in fact.”

  I elbowed Derek’s ribs. “Leave them alone. They’re over twenty, they can do what they want.”

  “Of course they can,” Derek said. “And I’m thirty-five, so I can give them a hard time.”

  I shook my head, exasperated.

  “Knock it off,” Josh said, “or I won’t show you the apartment. If you’re going to keep doing this to me, maybe I won’t want you working downstairs from me.”

  I shot Derek a look that said, Don’t you dare tell him to go ahead because you don’t want to see the apartment anyway! And he put his hands up in the classic pose of surrender. “I’ll be good.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” Shannon said, and smiled at me.

  I smiled back. “So tell us about Mr. Antonini and the apartment. What’s going on?”

  “Mr. Antonini,” Josh said as he fit the key into the door of the condo on the second floor, right above the little old lady with the lace curtains, “bought this condo when the building was new. He lived here for years with his wife and a couple of kids. The kids grew up and moved out, and eventually Mr. Antonini retired. He and his wife became snowbirds.”

  A snowbird, for the uninitiated, is a Mainer—or someone from another of the cold Northern states—who migrates south in the winter. Many snowbirds are retirees, who keep two residences: one in the northern U.S. for the summer, one in Florida, Alabama, or the islands, for the winter.

  “They’re in their seventies now, and they’re tired of the traveling. So they’ve decided to sell the condo and just spend all their time in Florida.”

  “And that’s where we come in,” Derek said.

  Josh nodded, struggling with the door. It seemed to be going around. “They’ve owned the place for more than thirty ye
ars. It’s paid for. It didn’t cost much when it was new—not compared to what real estate costs these days. And it needs a bit of updating, since they haven’t done much to it in the time they’ve owned it.”

  “So we can get it cheap.” Derek glanced at me.

  “Not to say cheap,” Josh said, finally pushing the door open and pocketing the key. “Condos in this building, all fixed up, go for over two hundred thousand these days. You’ll probably have to pay a hundred for it. But you’ll be able to make a bit off the deal.”

  “It depends on how much updating it needs,” I warned him as Derek led the way into the dark hall, peering left and right. “If it’ll be prohibitively expensive to renovate, he won’t want to do it.”

  I already had my hands full convincing him that redoing a small, bland flat could be interesting. We’d been spoiled so far, between Aunt Inga’s Victorian, Kate McGillicutty’s carriage house from World War One, and the 1783 center chimney Colonial on Rowanberry Island.

  Josh nodded. “I told Mr. Antonini that. He understands. He’d prefer to get this taken care of quickly, with minimal fuss—and from Florida—so he’d like to avoid listing the house with a Realtor and going through all the time and effort it would take to market it, but if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. Have a look around.”

  I did, following Derek inside.

  Like Josh’s place—like all the apartments in the building—it was a two-bedroom, one-bath flat. The front door took us into a dark and narrow hallway with parquet floors and papered walls. To the left was a kitchen; I could see vinyl and avocado green appliances through the doorway. To the right was a bedroom. Next to the front door was the door to the only bath, and roughly opposite was the doorway to the combination living room/dining room. It had a little balcony off the back, just big enough for a minuscule table and two plastic chairs, overlooking grass and pine trees. Off the other end of the room, where the dining table stood, was another door—this one to the second bedroom.

  “Split bedrooms,” I said.

  Derek nodded. “Hard to find in apartments from the seventies. They liked to group things together back then.”

  “It’s a good thing, right?”

  “Oh yeah. People like split bedrooms. Put the kids down on the other side of the house and turn in with no worries that they’ll wake up from the mattress squeaking and the bed banging against the wall.”

  So the split bedrooms were a plus.

  “This is a good-sized room.” I turned in a slow circle, taking in the living room/dining room combination. “Airy. Lots of light.”

  “That wall of windows out to the balcony is great,” Derek agreed. “Though I’m not sure I’d call it a good size, Avery.”

  “That’s because you haven’t seen the apartment I grew up in in New York City,” I said. “It was only about half the size of this. Three of us lived there. And we still managed to fit in two bedrooms, a bath, a living room, and a kitchen. Some people have much less.”

  “Up here people are used to enough room to stretch their legs,” Derek answered. “But it isn’t too bad. Let’s look at the rest.” He headed out into the hallway to look at the kitchen and the bath, where most of our efforts—and funds—would be spent.

  Everything was neat and clean, but dated. The wallpaper in the kitchen was mustard yellow and green tartan plaid. The vinyl floor was made to look like brick—in perfect condition, but sinfully ugly. The appliances were green, the counter yellow. The bathroom floor was also vinyl, and the tub had a molded plastic shower wall. An oak vanity cabinet with a single basin completed the 1970s look.

  “What kind of people live in this building?” Derek asked over his shoulder.

  “All kinds,” Josh answered from the hallway. “There are eight apartments, two on each floor. The Antoninis lived here: two parents with two kids, until the kids moved out and only the parents were left. The other second-floor apartment belongs to two guys named Gregg and Mariano. Gregg works at the hospital. I think he’s a resident. Your dad probably knows him.”

  Derek’s father is Benjamin Ellis, Waterfield’s GP. The plan was for Derek to take over the practice, until my boyfriend decided he liked working on houses more than he liked working on people. He quit doctoring to start Waterfield R&R some six years ago.

  “Mariano commutes to Portland to work,” Josh added. “I think he’s in the hotel business. Below them is William Maurits. Single guy in his fifties, likes Eastern religion and abstract art. Insurance adjuster. He commutes to Portland, too.”

  “Below us on this side is Hilda Shaw,” Shannon contributed, peering at us around Josh’s shoulder. He’s as tall as his father, close to six and a half feet, and although Shannon is half a foot taller than me, she looks almost dainty next to Josh. I was happy to see that the bandage she’d had on her forehead since the accident had been replaced with a much smaller Band-Aid.

  “The lady with the lace curtains?” Derek asked.

  Josh nodded. “She’s lived here as long as the Antoninis. She’s an older lady, lives on Social Security or disability or something. No job. Spends most of her time sitting at the window watching people come and go.”

  “If you decide to buy the place,” Shannon added, “be prepared that she’ll tie you down and not let you up again until she’s turned your brain inside out. She knows everything there is to know about everyone who lives here, right down to what’s in their refrigerator and what they wanted to be when they were eight. Everyone has to pass by her door to go in or out, so she knows everyone’s business. There are no secrets in this place. Miss Shaw knows them all.”

  Josh looked uncomfortable for a split second before he pushed through it. “One of the third-floor apartments is mine, or rather, Dad’s. The other third-floor apartment is a rental, and a couple of girls from Barnham College live there. Candy and Jamie. You’d recognize Candy; she works at Guido’s Pizzeria.”

  “The blond waitress with the ponytail?” I said. “She’s a little annoying. Whenever we go there to eat, she always fawns on Derek and ignores me. Makes it hard to order.”

  “She’s a bit of an airhead,” Shannon confirmed. “But Jamie is nice. Can’t imagine how the two of them ended up being roommates; they have nothing in common.”

  “Local girls?”

  Shannon shook her head. “Just Candy. Jamie is an out-of-stater.” She pronounced it “out-of-statah,” like any self-respecting Mainer.

  “Flatlander?” I suggested, since that’s what the native Mainers call people not from the mountainous New England states.

  “Mississippi. As far south as you can get. And I guess it’s pretty flat down there. Cotton country, isn’t it? Then Josh is across the hall from them, and on the top floor…”

  “A woman named Amelia Easton is on my side,” Josh said.

  My ears pricked up. “Her name sounds familiar.”

  “She started working at Barnham College last year. Took over Professor Wentworth’s job, remember?”

  “Of course.” Martin Wentworth had taught history at Barnham two years ago, during Josh and Shannon’s first year there, and had been replaced by Professor Easton the following autumn.

  “What about the last apartment?” Derek wanted to know. “Who lives there?”

  “That’d be the Mellons,” Shannon said.

  “Like the fruit?”

  She spelled it.

  “Mellon. Right. And what do they do?”

  “The husband works for your friend Peter Cortino,” Josh said.

  Peter is a Boston transplant who married Derek’s high school sweetheart, Jill. They run Cortino’s Auto Shop, so the guy on the top floor must be a car mechanic of some sort.

  “The wife stays home with a little boy,” Josh added. “He’s two. His name is Benjamin, and hers is Robin. Her husband’s Bruce.”

  “Bruce and Robin?” Derek’s lips twitched.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “No reason.” But he grinned.

  “What?” I asked
.

  “I’ll tell you later. So the building has four single people, a family, and two pairs of roommates?”

  “Gregg and Mariano aren’t so much roommates as a couple,” Shannon said. “They’d probably get married if they could, but they’d have to move to Massachusetts to do it.”

  I nodded, since I knew what Derek was thinking. If we were to take on the project, who was our targeted buyer? “The best thing to do would probably be to renovate for single or double occupancy. Two bedrooms, one that could be used as an office if the buyer is single. Most families probably wouldn’t choose to live in a place this small these days.”

  Josh shook his head. “Robin and Benjamin moved in with Bruce almost a year ago, and they’ve been talking about finding a place with a yard ever since. I don’t know why they don’t.”

  “Money?” Shannon suggested.

  Josh shrugged. “None of my business, I guess. And they’re quiet enough. I’m sure Benjamin would like a yard to play in, though. I had one growing up—we didn’t move here until after my mom died—and it just isn’t the same.”

  “Convenient for your dad,” I said, since the new police headquarters was on this same side of town, a few miles down the road. “And I’m sure it would have been hard to stay in the house after your mother was gone.”

  “Sure. Anyway, that’s it. Everyone who lives here. So what do you think?” He looked around.

  “I like it,” I said. The fairly compact space reminded me of being back in Manhattan—not that I wanted to be; I loved Maine and Aunt Inga’s old Victorian house, but the reminder was sort of nice—and I thought it might be fun to make such a little space functional and exciting. A totally different scope from the big Colonial we’d put so much time and effort into. Between then and now we’d spent a couple of weeks slapping lipstick and polish on a compact 1930s cottage in Waterfield Village, but it had been a rush job, work-for-hire, with the TV crew dogging our footsteps, and it hadn’t scratched the itch much at all. But I could sink my teeth into this, and put to good use some of the tricks I’d picked up in thirty years of living in Manhattan, for how to make something small seem more spacious and how to make something a little dull and dingy seem fresh and new. “It’d be fun. And it wouldn’t take long to do. A month maybe.”