Wall-To-Wall Dead

by Jennie Bentley

  They tore across the grass, laughing and yelling, until the little boy tripped and fell and rolled. His mother fell right along with him, and she grabbed him and tickled him until he was breathless with laughter and was hiccupping for her to stop.

  “Must be Robin and Benjamin,” I said.

  Derek nodded, his eyes still on the pair down on the grass.

  “Have you ever wanted children?”

  He glanced over at me. “It never really seemed a possibility before.”

  “You and Melissa never got to that point?”

  He shook his head. “I told you. We were pretty young when we got married, and circumstances were never conducive to kids. At first I was in school, then there was residency, and by the time we got to Waterfield, I wished I’d never married her.”

  I nodded.

  “What about you?” he asked after a moment. “Do you want children?”

  “I’m not getting any younger.”

  Derek smiled. “That’s not really an answer, is it?”

  I smiled back. “I guess not. Sure, I think I’d like a child. Before it’s too late.” A little copy of Derek running around in striped overalls, squealing with laughter.

  “One thing at a time, OK? Let’s get married first.”

  “Let’s,” I said.

  By the end of the day, we’d accomplished what we’d set out to do, and had cleared the sinks out of both the kitchen and the bath, along with the vinyl flooring and the kitchen counter. Tomorrow we’d start ripping down the kitchen cabinets. After that, a trip to the lumber depot was in order, to see what was available to replace the cabinets we’d torn out, so I could start designing the kitchen.

  It’s one of my favorite aspects of the job. I didn’t go into interior design after Parsons—I’ve always liked fabrics and sewing too much for that—but I’d taken my share of design classes while I was there, and the fact that I got to put some of that knowledge to use now was wonderful. Derek’s heart is more in restoration anyway; whenever there’s something old and salvageable, he wants to keep it,and he finds great pleasure in tinkering with it until it’s good as new.

  “Space is at a premium in this one,” I said as we locked the door behind us and headed down the stairs to the parking lot. “Wherever we can make something seem bigger, we should. And wherever we can tuck things away out of sight, that’s good, too. Open and airy feels bigger than cluttered.”

  “Like?” He glanced at me over his shoulder as we descended the stairs. Miss Shaw was not lying in wait for us this time, and we made it past the first-floor landing without incident.

  “A friend of mine in New York had an old fireplace in her apartment that didn’t work anymore. So she put her TV in there and had a frame built for it, so it was actually built into the fireplace. And someone else had an apartment with a really great closet—one of those with double doors, you know?—but not enough room for an office. So she bought an extra armoire for her clothes and turned the closet into an office. She bought a long counter and installed it inside the closet, along with a lot of shelves above, and then she could push the chair inside and close the doors whenever people came to visit.”

  “Genius,” Derek said.

  “It was, actually. You’ve never lived anywhere like that, but—”

  “Actually, I have.” He pushed open the door to the parking lot and held it for me. “In medical school. The apartment I shared with a buddy was no bigger than this one.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. My mom and I had this table in the kitchen in the apartment in New York—after my dad died and it was just her and me, you know—and it hung on the wall under the window. It was this little half-circle with hinges, fastened to a sort of base, and the half-circle part could flip down when we didn’t use it.” I illustrated using my hands.

  “Genius,” Derek said again.

  I elbowed him. “You’re being facetious. I don’t like it.”

  “Sure you do.” He grabbed me around the waist and swung me around so my back was against the truck and he was in front of me. “You like me. Admit it.”

  I wound my arms around his neck. “Fine. I like you.”

  Just as he bent to give me a kiss, I turned my head. “Not here. Miss Shaw is watching.”

  “Damn Miss Shaw,” Derek said and kissed me anyway.

  —4—

  By the time we reached the condo building the next morning, Josh’s Honda was gone from the parking lot, along with Candy’s hybrid, Jamie’s compact, William Maurits’s sedan, and Mariano’s Jeep. Indeed, the only car still there was an older model Ford Taurus station wagon, gold colored, parked over in the corner. I spied a child seat in the back, so I guessed it must belong to Robin and Benjamin. Everyone else, it seemed, had gone to work or school. Even Miss Shaw’s curtains hung quietly for once.

  We spent the first part of the day taking down the kitchen cabinets. It’s a two-person job, since someone has to hold the cabinet while the other person unscrews the screws holding it to the wall. If not, the cabinet will fall and hit someone on the head. Derek held while I unscrewed, and I won’t deny that I enjoyed watching the play of muscles in his arms under the short sleeves of the T-shirt as he wrestled with the cabinets. I may even have taken a little longer than I should to unscrew a few of the upper ones, just because I was distracted by the view.

  Once the cabinets were down and stacked in the bed of the truck, along with yesterday’s bathroom cabinet and sink, we left for a while, to drop the spoils off at the local reuse center, where someone else might have use of them, and to grab a couple of Derek’s favorite lobster rolls.

  We were sitting there, on orange plastic benches facing one another across an orange plastic table, when the door to the street opened and Jill Cortino maneuvered herself inside.

  Peter Cortino’s wife and Derek’s high school sweetheart is a plump, slightly frumpy, somewhat plain woman in her mid-thirties, with blond hair and blue eyes. Between Derek, who’s gorgeous, and Peter, who looks like a Roman statue, she’s managed to snag two of the best-looking men Waterfield has to offer. The reason for that is personality. She’s one of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve ever met, and it’s frankly a little surprising to me that Derek, after dating Jill, would even look twice at Melissa, who’s downright stunning but nowhere near as nice.

  Anyway, Peter and Jill have been married for seven years, and have three kids plus one on the way. Peter Junior is six, Paul is five, and Pamela is two and a half. And Jill is about to burst. When she stopped beside our table and we invited her to sit, she put a hand against her back and puffed like a beached whale. “I won’t fit.”

  She was right, she wouldn’t. There wasn’t enough room between the orange bench and the edge of the orange table for a nine-months-pregnant stomach.

  “You’re enormous,” Derek said, getting to his feet to pull a plastic chair over from another table and carefully lowering her into it. “Are you sure there’s only one baby in there?”

  Jill swatted him. “Yes, there’s only one. And no woman likes to hear that she’s enormous.”

  “You’re beautiful.” He kissed her cheek, and Jill gave him a crooked smile.

  “You’re too charming for your own good, Ellis. Always have been.” She winked at me. “How are you doing, Avery? Getting everything ready for the wedding?”

  I told her I was fine, and yes, things were coming together.

  “The invitation was beautiful,” Jill said, making herself comfortable on the hard chair. “Where did you find it? I’d love to have some of that paper for birth announcements or shower gift thank-yous or something.”

  I told her I’d made the invitations myself. “When we’re both recovered”—Jill from labor and sleepless nights, and I from getting married—“we can get together sometime and I’ll show you how.”

  “I’d like that,” Jill said. “Maybe I can make the invitations to Poppy’s christening.”

  “Is that the name you’ve chosen? Poppy?”


  Last time I’d asked, they hadn’t been able to decide between Penelope, Piper, and Portia. My joking suggestion of Petunia hadn’t even made the first cut, and Poppy hadn’t been in the running, as far as I could recall. But it was another P-name, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

  “I wanted to call her Lucia,” Jill confessed. “Or Anne Marie. Or Cindy. Something that didn’t start with a P. I think we have enough P’s by now, don’t you?”

  She waited for my noncommittal murmur before she continued, “But Peter said that since we’d started, and all the others have P-names, this one should, too.”

  “Poppy is a pretty name.”

  “It’s better than Pippa,” Jill said darkly, by which I guessed that Pippa might have been the front-runner in Peter’s mind.

  “Are you ready?”

  Jill turned to Derek, who had asked the question. “We’ve been through it three times already. By now it’s just another trip to the hospital.”

  Just another trip to the hospital, like just another trip to the grocery store—except instead of cereal and milk, you came home with a baby. “You’ll let us know if there’s anything we can do, right?”

  “Sure,” Jill said, “but my parents are taking the kids, and my mom will be around after the baby comes. And Peter’s mom will come up from Boston to spend a couple of weeks, too. We’re all set.”

  “You’ll let us know when it happens, though, won’t you? Derek’s right, you do look like you’re about to pop.”

  “Any day now,” Jill confirmed. “My due date is in just over a week, but sometimes they come early.”

  “Did the others?”

  She shook her head. “Paul was a day late. Petey was two days late. Pamela was right on time. With that in mind, it sounds like Poppy might be early.”

  She put her hands against the table and levered herself up to her feet, wincing, as the cashier waved to let her know her take-out order was ready to go. It took her a second to find her center of gravity once she was upright. “I’ll make sure Peter calls you when it’s time. It won’t be too much longer, I think. Or so I hope anyway.”

  She waddled over to the cashier and then out the door with her lobster rolls. On her way back to the auto shop with lunch for her husband, I assumed.

  “She looks great,” Derek said.

  “For being the size of a small house, you mean?”

  He grinned. “For being pregnant. Pregnancy agrees with her. Makes her glow.”

  Good thing, too, as many times as she’d been through it. Counting back in my head, I calculated that Jill had been expecting babies for thirty-six out of the past seventy-two months. Wow.

  “You ready to get outta here and back to work?”

  I nodded. “We’re going to the lumber depot, right? To look at kitchen cabinets?”

  “Fine with me,” Derek said. “On our way back to the truck, let’s go by way of the hardware store and pick up some paint samples.”

  I nodded.

  And regretted it as soon as we turned from the little side street where Derek’s favorite deli is located, onto Main Street.

  Waterfield’s main drag is a turn-of-the-last-century construction: three blocks full of two- and three-story red brick Victorian commercial buildings starting at the harbor and going inland. There are businesses, shops, and restaurants on the first floors of the buildings, and offices, storage, and sometimes living space up above. The hardware store was about halfway down the street, in a two-story building. The second floor is a loft: Derek’s loft, to be precise. And directly across the street from it is another loft, one that belongs to Derek’s ex-wife. She’d bought it after she sold the McMansion she and Ray Stenham had shared, some seven or eight months ago now. Ostensibly, the reason was to be closer to work—the offices of Waterfield Realty are also on Main Street—but I’d always suspected she did it at least partly because she knew it would annoy me. Or maybe that’s just my paranoia rearing its ugly head.

  Anyway, when we turned the corner onto Main Street, there she was, on her way up the sidewalk in our direction, looking like the proverbial million bucks.

  The first time I met Melissa James, she knocked on the door of Aunt Inga’s house to introduce herself and to tell me she could sell the house for me. Aunt Inga had been dead for only a few days, and Melissa didn’t know me from Adam—or Eve. At that point, I had no idea she used to be married to Derek—I hadn’t even met Derek yet—and I also didn’t know she was involved with my distant cousin Ray Stenham, whom I’d always known to be a nasty bit of work. Even without any of that knowledge, she managed to rub me wrong in amazingly short order. It was the way she looked, the way she spoke, the way she looked at me: down the length of her perfect nose, as if I were a grubby teenager with pigtails while she was the lady of the manor.

  She’s taller than me by about five inches. We’re both blond, but while my hair is the aforementioned kinky Mello Yello, Melissa’s is like a sleek cap of spun moonlight. We both have blue eyes, but mine are the chlorinated blue of faded denim while hers are a fabulous Elizabeth Taylor indigo.

  I could go on, but I won’t. And the reason I won’t is that although Melissa used to make me feel insecure, she doesn’t anymore. Now that I’ve heard Derek tell me, repeatedly, that she made him miserable and I’ve made him happy again, and that before he met me, he never considered getting remarried, I can look at her and feel pity for someone stupid enough to throw away the best thing that ever happened to her. In fact, I can even be grateful to her, since her loss—so to speak—is my gain. Derek is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, too.

  I smiled at her. “Hi, Melissa.”

  She stopped. “Hi, Avery. Derek.” There was a purr to her voice when she said his name that was missing when she said mine. My smile turned into a grin.

  “You look lovely, as always.”

  She did. Today’s outfit consisted of a pair of slacks in Melissa’s trademark cream—her Mercedes is that color, too—along with a sapphire blue silk blouse that set off those stunning eyes. She’d paired it with sapphire earrings and—I couldn’t help noticing—the lima-bean-sized diamond engagement ring Tony Micelli had given her. I’d have thought she’d stop wearing that now that Tony had died.

  “Thank you.” She preened. Those fabulous eyes looked me over, from head to toe and back—Tinkerbell hair, plain cotton T-shirt, faded jeans, sneakers; all of it dirty from the day’s labors—and it came as no surprise when she chose not to return the compliment. I guess I should be grateful she didn’t tell me how she really felt. “So what are you two up to?”

  “New project,” Derek said, putting his arm around my shoulders.

  Melissa pouted. It didn’t make her look like Tinkerbell. “You bought another house? Without my help?”

  “The owner wanted to avoid involving real estate agents,” I said. “He thinks you’re untrustworthy money-grubbing bottom-feeders.”

  Melissa sniffed. “I’ll have you know we have a strict code of ethics we have to go by—”

  “Avery’s just joking,” Derek said, squeezing my shoulders in warning. “A friend came to us and said his neighbor wanted to sell his condo, quickly and easily. He’d moved to Florida and just wanted it off his hands in a hurry.”

  “Where is it?”

  Derek explained the location of the condo building, and Melissa nodded. “That’s a good spot. And there’s very rarely any turnover there. When will it be ready?”

  Derek glanced at me. I shrugged. “Four weeks,” he said.

  “Wonderful.” Melissa showed all her teeth in a bright smile. She seems to have more than the usual number, brilliantly white. “Would you mind if I stopped by sometime, just to check how you’re getting along and perhaps to give you some input on what buyers are looking for these days?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her to stay away, but Derek got in before me. “Of course, Melissa. We’ll be there most days. Come by whenever you have time.”

  I closed my mouth
again.

  “Lovely.” Melissa turned to me. “Avery, dear…I got that sweet little invitation of yours in the mail yesterday.”

  Note the condescension. I certainly did, but I didn’t let it bother me. “Good. I’m glad.”

  She lowered her voice. “Are you sure you meant to send it to me? You do remember that Derek and I used to be married, right?”

  I giggled. “Yes, of course I remember.” That’s partly why I’d invited her. So she could sit there and watch him marry someone else. And know he’d never be hers again. “We’re all friends, aren’t we?”

  “Don’t feel you have to come, Melissa,” Derek said. “We realize it might be awkward. But Avery wanted to invite you just in case. She didn’t want you to feel left out.”

  He smiled at me, a smile that gave me more credit than I deserved. Of course, I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I just smiled back before I turned to Melissa. “Don’t feel obligated, Melissa. But we’d love it if you wanted to share the occasion with us.”

  “Thanks,” Melissa said, and I was pleased to hear that for a second or two she wasn’t quite able to hide her grumpiness. Then she pasted on another big smile. “I should get going. Busy, busy. I’ll give you a call and arrange a time to come by and see the place, Derek.”

  “Sure,” Derek said. Melissa continued up the sidewalk toward her office, her posterior swaying seductively. I turned to my fiancé.

  “Why did you tell her she could come by and give us advice?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Now she’ll think we’ll use her to sell the place.”

  “We have to have someone list and market the property,” Derek said, his voice reasonable as he guided me toward the hardware store. “It might as well be her. She’s already trying to sell the house on Rowanberry Island for us.”

  “Trying” being the operative word. She wasn’t succeeding. And part of me wanted to use that as an excuse to fire her. But as I mentioned, buyers for half-a-million-dollar Colonial houses on tiny islands out to sea don’t grow on trees, so chances were no other real estate agent would have been able to do any better. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t really hold it against Melissa that she hadn’t.