Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery)

by Bentley, Jennie

I took the phone, but didn’t dial. “She’s alive, isn’t she?”

  Derek glanced at me. “I hope so.”

  He approached carefully. Maybe he was feeling a bit spooked by the whole thing, too, even if he didn’t show it.

  I waited, phone in my hand, while he squatted next to Mamie and put out a hand. He was careful not to startle her, just held it in front of her face without touching. “Still breathing.”

  “Good.” I started dialing.

  “Not warm enough, though.” He wrenched out of his coat. “We can’t wait for him here. She’ll freeze to death.” He tucked it around her while I listened to the phone ring on the other end of the line.

  When Brandon came on, I told him we’d found Mamie Green, asleep or unconscious, in her old house, and that we would take her back to the nursing home where she lived. “Derek says we shouldn’t wait for you. She’s too cold and needs to get warm quickly.”

  “I’ll meet you at the nursing home,” Brandon said. “Do you know where it is?”

  I didn’t, and he gave me directions. Meanwhile, Derek gathered Mamie into his arms. She didn’t weigh much, she was pretty much just skin and bones from what I could see, nor did she wake up, which couldn’t be a good sign. I hung up with Brandon and lighted Derek’s way down the stairs and out through the front door over to the car.

  “How are we going to do this?”

  “I’ll drive,” Derek said, stopping beside the car so I could open the passenger door for him. “You’ll go in the back, if you don’t mind. That’s easier than trying to fit Mamie in there.”

  “Shouldn’t she be lying down?”

  “We’ll lower the seat once I get her strapped in.” He suited action to words, and loaded Mamie carefully—and awkwardly—into the front seat of the Beetle. It was a bit like maneuvering a life-sized mannequin, one that was still clutching the doll to her chest. Now that I got a good look at it in the car’s interior lights, I recognized it from this afternoon: It was the same doll that had given me such a scare in the basement. She must have found it in the carriage and taken it inside with her.

  “I guess we’ll have to replace the locks,” I said with a glance toward the house, “if people still have keys.”

  “Maybe not,” Derek said, leaning across the body—Mamie’s body—to fasten the seat belt. “I’d rather have her inside than out. She came close enough to freezing to death as it is. If she hadn’t been able to get in—if she’d decided to sleep on the porch—she’d be dead by now.”

  In that case, maybe we’d better not do anything about it, at least not yet. We’d have to change the locks before we sold the place, though. We couldn’t expect the new owners to be as sanguine as we were about uninvited visitors. But that wouldn’t be for a few months yet, so maybe by then Mamie would have gotten used to the fact that it wasn’t her house anymore.

  “I’ll go lock up.” For all the good that it would do, when there were keys floating around.

  Derek nodded, fumbling for the mechanism to lower the seat. “Hurry. I want to get the car started and the heat going.”

  I hurried, and then scrambled into the backseat so he could drive. The Beetle took off from the curb like a rocket.

  The nursing home didn’t turn out to be far away at all. And Derek knew where he was going, so he didn’t need my directions. Ten minutes later, we pulled in under the portico in front, behind Brandon’s police cruiser. By then, the interior of the Beetle was like a sauna, minus the wet branches. Derek had kept the heat cranked to ninety degrees the whole time, as high as the car would allow.

  Mamie was still out cold, or asleep, but her skin wasn’t as cold and flaccid to the touch. Her death grip on the doll had loosened. When one of the nurses tried to remove it after they’d loaded her onto a gurney, she held on, though.

  “Let her keep it,” the other nurse advised. “We can always get it away from her later.”

  They wheeled the gurney into the nursing home. Derek watched as he absently shrugged into his jacket.

  “How did you find her?” Brandon asked. “This time of night?”

  I told him about driving past the house on my way home from Kate’s meeting, and how Cora had thought she’d seen a light. “I brought Derek back to investigate. Good thing, too, because she might have been dead by morning.”

  Derek nodded. “If we hadn’t found her tonight, she probably would be. Maybe we need to start heating the house overnight.”

  Maybe so. We hadn’t planned to start doing that until we were ready to begin the actual renovations, but if there was a chance that Mamie would be back, it would be safer.

  “She’ll be all right, won’t she?” I asked.

  He glanced at me. “She’ll be fine. As long as there’s nothing else wrong with her. If she just got confused and cold, and wandered in and went to sleep and then went into deeper hypothermia, she’ll be fine once they thaw her out. If there’s something wrong beyond that, then I’m not sure.”

  “Can you let us know how it goes?” I asked Brandon.

  He nodded. “Of course. I’ll stick around awhile, to make sure everything’s OK. If anything changes, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Do you want us to stay with you?”

  He smiled but shook his head. “That’s not necessary. I’ll let you know what happens.”

  “C’mon, Tink,” Derek said and put his arm around my shoulder. “See you around, Brandon.”

  Brandon nodded, and headed over to the seating area in the lobby while Derek and I walked toward the door to the outside.

  He didn’t call. Not until late the next morning, when we were back at the house, making inroads on filling up the Dumpster. Over the past two days, we’d dragged out all the debris: everything not nailed down. Now it was time to start on the stuff that was nailed down, like the unsalvageable kitchen cabinets and the chipped and rusty bathroom sink we were replacing, along with the yards and yards of rusted galvanized plumbing.

  When the phone rang, I was balanced on top of the kitchen counter, holding a kitchen cabinet door steady while Derek applied the battery-driven screwdriver to the hinges. That way he could have both hands free and not have to worry about the door hitting him in the head when he was finished.

  When my pocket started vibrating, he put the drill down and fished for my phone. “I got it.”

  “So I see,” I said, hanging on to the cabinet door.

  “It’s Brandon.” He put it on speaker so I could hear.

  “I’m just checking in,” Brandon’s voice told us, tinny through the connection. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night, but I just spoke to the nursing home. Ms. Green is alive and well. Still in bed for the rest of the day, but probably well enough to get up again tomorrow. And no worse for wear.”

  Good to know.

  “They’ll keep a better eye on her after this, won’t they?” If she could get up tomorrow, what were the chances that she’d be back here tomorrow night?

  “They’d better,” Brandon said grimly. He added, “Although it isn’t a prison, you know. The residents who are well enough to come and go, can. They’re not locked up.”

  “I guess we’d better keep the heat on from now on,” I told Derek, “just in case.”

  He nodded and addressed Brandon. “Thanks for letting us know. I’m glad nothing worse happened.”

  “Me, too,” Brandon said and rang off.

  • • •

  By the afternoon, the kitchen cabinets were down and out, along with the kitchen sink and counter. We had left the downstairs bathroom mostly intact apart from the sink—we needed a working toilet while we labored over the house—and moved on to the upstairs bath, the one shared by the two kid bedrooms. Derek busied himself unhooking the plumbing while I wandered around the upstairs trying to get a vision for the space.

  It would remain as two bedrooms, it seemed. Derek had been adamant about the master suite being downstairs, and in some ways it made sense. If it were my house and I had kids, I wouldn
’t want them sleeping downstairs while I was upstairs, either. What if someone tried to break in?

  So master suite downstairs, with two kid bedrooms and a bath upstairs.

  Or maybe not kid bedrooms exactly; could be guest bedrooms. Mother-in-law bedroom. Or even an office. There was no foyer or parlor in this house. If someone wanted an office, it would have to be up here, or possibly in the nook in the kitchen.

  So master suite downstairs, two other rooms upstairs. The bath would have to be kid-friendly, because chances were the house would appeal to people with children, but not so kid-friendly that it would turn anyone else off. Plain white subway tile for the combination tub-shower probably—it goes with everything—and with maybe some accents of pretty glass tiles, just to jazz things up a bit. Nothing too outré, though. Shades of brown and tan probably, to pick up the golden hues of the floors and of the dark woodwork around windows and doors. The Arts and Crafts movement was very much about the use of natural materials like wood and stone.

  The bedrooms themselves were plain to the point of being boring. Two square ten-by-ten boxes with heart of pine floors and sloped ceilings, and a set of two windows looking out at the neighbors. There was more ceiling than wall in each room, which meant I could have some fun with color. At the back of each room was a small door in the knee wall, barely big enough for a person to fit through. I’m not very big, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to fit, to be honest.

  Still, I was curious, so I got down on my hands and knees on the floor and pulled one of the doors open. Stuck my head through the opening and peered around. Daylight trickled through cracks in the ceiling, where the roof had deteriorated enough in places to let the sunshine in.

  The pine floors continued in here, not all the way out to the edges of the eaves, but a few feet, enough to provide room to stack a few cardboard boxes. I dragged them into the room, stuck my head in to make sure I hadn’t missed any, and set to investigating.

  I had high hopes for something interesting, of course—something secret tucked away in the eaves, out of sight—but it wasn’t anything special. One box contained a complete set of china decorated with small pink flowers: cups, saucers, sugar cup, cream pitcher, and teapot—all of it doll-sized, and all of it quite old and in mint condition.

  The other box contained doll clothes, hand-knit unless my eyes deceived me: a pale blue romper, small jacket, and little cap suitable for a baby doll like the one that had scared three years off my life yesterday. The doll Mamie had been clutching last night. This was the room we had found her in, so logic dictated that this must have been her room growing up, and these were her doll’s clothes. Not her own clothes, I thought; back when Mamie was a girl, they probably didn’t dress little girls in blue.

  If this was Mamie’s room, Ruth’s room must be the one across the hall.

  Wonder if Ruth had tucked away small treasures behind her knee wall, too?

  I wandered out onto the landing and peered into the bathroom. Derek was on his knees wrestling with the plumbing. I stood there for a moment admiring the fit of his jeans and the movement of his arms in the short-sleeved T-shirt . . . and then I tore myself away and headed into the room on the other side of the landing.

  It was a mirror image of Mamie’s room, only painted a different color. Mamie’s room was a pale, fleshy peach; Ruth’s was dull green. They were both boring as dirt. When it was my turn to paint, I might go with some nice warm goldenrod or something, to bring out the beauty of the dark wood.

  There was an access door in the wall here, too, leading into the same sort of narrow little space as on Mamie’s side of the staircase. I stuck my head in and peered around.

  Pine floors, old insulation in the gaps, and another cardboard box, this one flat and long. I dragged it into the room and dusted it off, sneezing. A fancy chocolates box. Hopefully there’d be something other than chocolates inside.

  There was, but it wasn’t all that exciting. Newspaper clippings about Elvis Presley. At the beginning of his career, from what I could make out from the dates and the way The King looked in the pictures.

  Elvis was much before my time, of course, but I’ve heard the stories. Here they were in black-and-white: swooning crowds, cops in riot gear, mayhem never seen before or since. Or maybe since, over the Beatles. That was also before my time, so I’m not sure.

  At any rate, Ruth Green must have been a fan. She might have been . . . I calculated. If she was in her midseventies now, maybe she’d been fifteen or sixteen when the King began his career in what I thought was the midfifties?

  Whatever. The stuff was interesting but probably not worth anything to anyone. If the newspapers or magazines had been intact, maybe they’d be worth a few dollars—but they weren’t. They were just clippings. Interesting as a cultural artifact of the time, I guess, but nothing more.

  I put the lid back on the box and stuck my head back into the storage space, turning it back and forth. Best as I could tell, the space was empty.

  “I found a few things,” I told Derek from the doorway of the bathroom.

  “What kinds of things?”

  I told him. “I guess Ruth and Mamie must have put their special stuff there when they were girls.”

  “Guess so.” He grunted as he wrestled with the plumbing.

  “Do you need help?”

  “No,” Derek said. After a moment he added, “Is it lunchtime yet?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Always.” He yanked on the wrench and swore when it slipped. And shot me a glance over his shoulder, a quick flicker of blue eyes. “I just thought I’d give you something to do.”

  “Are you trying to get rid of me?” That wasn’t very nice.

  He sat back on his heels. “No, Tink. But it must be boring for you, standing around watching me work.”

  I grinned. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  He grinned back. “You can appreciate properly later. Don’t you have something to do?”

  “I’m doing something. I’m looking at stuff and coming up with a plan for how to make it look pretty once you’re done doing the boring grunt work.”

  “Oh,” Derek said. “Don’t let me stop you, then.”

  “You’re not. I’m thinking white subway tile for the tub and shower surround. Nice and clean and classic, with some brown glass tiles for accents.”

  He glanced at the tub and shower the way it was now: molded plastic. “Sure.”

  “Brown tiles on the floor maybe, to match the wood in the rest of the house. Easier to keep clean than white. Although white would look OK, too.”

  “It sounds great, Avery,” Derek said, “but unless I can get this coupling off, you won’t have a bathroom to pretty up.”

  Right. “I’ll just find something else to look at while I wait for it to be lunchtime.”

  “You do that.” He turned back to the plumbing.

  Very well. I backed out of the bathroom and left him to it.

  So far I had investigated both the cubbies in the girls’ rooms. There was nothing interesting there. We’d cleaned out the basement, and there was nothing interesting left there anymore, either. The first floor was bare. The second floor was bare. The third . . .

  There was no third floor. The second floor was the top, the attic.

  Only . . . I looked up, at the flat ceiling above my head. Wandered into Mamie’s room and did the same. The ceiling sloped sharply down to the knee wall, which was only three feet tall or so. But above my head, there were a few feet of flat ceiling. The roof came to a point, though, the way roofs do, especially here in the Northeast. A steep pitch makes it easier for the snow to slide off. What you don’t want is a flat roof where the snow can accumulate and maybe crash through. It happens, and it isn’t pretty.

  So there had to be a little space between the flat ceiling and the roof itself.

  “Could we vault the ceilings up here?” I asked Derek.

  “Vault the . . .” It took him a second to catch up, then he shook his
head. “I don’t think so.”

  “There’s space up above, isn’t there? If we took it out . . .”

  “Chances are the ceiling up here is supporting the roof,” Derek said, “and if we took it out, we’d have a problem. This house wasn’t built to have vaulted ceilings.”

  Fine. “Can I go look at it anyway?”

  “The space upstairs?” He shrugged. “Sure. Knock yourself out.”

  “How do I get up there?”

  “Look for the hatch in the ceiling,” Derek said. “And the ladder.”

  There was a ladder? I hadn’t seen anything resembling a ladder up here. “It isn’t in the bathroom, right?”

  “No,” Derek said, “it isn’t in the bathroom.”

  It wasn’t in Mamie’s room, either. Nor was it in Ruth’s. I’d spent enough time in both to have noticed it if it were there. And it wasn’t in the hallway.

  As a last resort, I pulled open the door to the empty closet at the top of the stairs, cater-corner to the door to Ruth’s room, and peered in. And there it was: a white square outlined against the white of the ceiling.

  “How do I get up there?”

  There was a pause, then Derek materialized beside me. I guess he figured he wouldn’t get any peace until I had something to do. This is the boring part of renovating for me: the times when Derek is busy doing plumbing and wiring and framing, the sort of stuff I don’t know enough to help him with.

  “See those?” He pointed to three wooden blocks nailed to the wall on my right. “That’s the ladder.”

  I tilted my head. “It doesn’t look like a ladder.”

  “It is. Trust me. Here.” He grabbed the top block and hung on by his fingertips while he scrabbled for purchase for his toes on the bottom “rung.” Once that was done, he used one hand to push the hatch up into the ceiling before jumping down. “There you go. Let me give you a hand.”

  He grabbed my waist and boosted me up. I did my best to hang on to the blocks of wood on the wall—no way would I dignify them with the title “ladder”—and to move up. It wasn’t easy: There was nothing to hang on to really, since the blocks were flush to the wall and only an inch or two thick. I don’t think I would have made it all the way up if it hadn’t been for Derek’s hands on my waist—and occasionally my butt—keeping me steady.