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

by Bentley, Jennie

  But I did get to the top, and squirmed through the hole into the ceiling. “You want to come, too?”

  “No,” Derek said. “I want to get back to my coupling.”

  “We’re a couple.”

  He chuckled. “I stuck my head up there the first time Darren brought us here, and from what I remember, it doesn’t look like a place where any coupling should take place.”

  It didn’t, actually. I was kneeling on a rough plank floor, guaranteed to give splinters. Not a romantic setting whatsoever.

  “Have fun exploring, Tink. Let me know when you’re coming down.”

  He walked away. I heard the sound of his steps echoing up to me, and then I pulled my head back into the attic and looked around.

  In addition to the rough plank floors, there was a rough plank ceiling: the stuff underneath the shingles and decking. The points of long nails stuck through here and there, from the roofers. Like in the cubbies in the bedrooms, the plank floors only went partway to the eaves: Beyond that was old insulation, like cotton batting. There was a lot of dust—decades of it—over everything, and I could see the exposed brick of the chimney where it cut through from the living room fireplace up through the roof. It was visible on the outside of the house, too, but the interior side was visible here.

  The plank floor was only about five feet wide, running the width of the house from side to side. There were a few boxes up here, within easy reach of the hole in the floor. I could stay where I was to investigate them, so I did. One contained old china, human-sized this time and carefully packed with newspapers for cushioning. It wasn’t particularly nice china, so they had probably replaced it with something newer and prettier, sometime in—I checked the date on one of the newspapers—1947, and had stuffed it up here out of the way.

  Several of the boxes were empty—kept for packing purposes maybe, in case whatever had arrived in them needed to be repackaged at some point? I had a few of those myself, up in Aunt Inga’s attic. I hadn’t brought a lot of stuff with me when I came, though, so although Aunt Inga’s attic was filled with stuff, it was mostly her stuff, not mine.

  There was nothing else to see really. But it was only a few minutes since Derek had tossed me up here, and he’d probably be annoyed if I called for him to come help me down so soon. So I got up on my hands and knees—there was no way to walk, even bent over—and crawled over to the chimney for a closer look at the mortar. The outside bricks could do with some tuck-pointing, and I knew Derek planned to take care of it. Since I was up here, I might as well take a look and see whether he’d need to crawl up here, too, while he was at it.

  The mortar didn’t look too bad, although it was a little crumbly in places. Nowhere near as bad as the outside, though. I guess it stayed together better inside, away from wind and rain and snow. Although I was able to pick out loose pieces here and there, when I rubbed my finger across the joints. It might not be a bad idea to get him up here to take a look. He was better at this kind of thing than I was.

  I was just about to turn away and crawl back when I noticed, tucked into the shadowy corner of the chimney and the wall, another box.

  Not a cardboard one this time. More of a crate. It was made of battered wood, with a board and batten lid—three planks side by side, two across to keep them together—and both crate and lid were printed with a faded logo in red and black. I squinted, but couldn’t make it out in the dusk. There were no light fixtures up here, and no illumination other than the faint streaks of sunlight that pushed through the gaps in the ceiling at intervals.

  I pulled out my cell phone and turned the flashlight app on the crate. The stamped logo became almost possible to read. “Dr . . . k MOXIE,” it said in big letters, and below, in tiny ones, “TR . . E M . RK REG U . PAT OFF.”

  Moxie Soda. One of the first soft drinks mass-produced in the United States, a hundred and fifty years ago or so, and the official soft drink of Maine. Not as sweet as other sodas, flavored with wintergreen. Definitely an acquired taste. A taste I hadn’t seen the need to acquire.

  With it being tucked away here out of the way, I thought there was a chance the lid might be nailed down. I was wrong: It came off easily in my hands. At first glance and in the dark, the crate appeared to be empty. It was interesting, though, and probably worth some money to an antique dealer. I’d seen similar crates for sales in the stores on Main Street, for a lot more money than they looked like they should be worth.

  I put the lid aside and grabbed my cell phone. Got up on my knees to shine the light into the crate.

  And screamed.

  —6—

  “Avery? What’s wrong?”

  It took a few seconds, and then Derek was at the closet, his voice worried.

  “Need you,” I managed through chattering teeth.

  He didn’t waste time answering, just swarmed up the “ladder” into the attic and crawled toward me. “What is it? What happened? Are you hurt?”

  “Crate,” I said, pointing to it. I had scrabbled backward about eight feet, and was sitting on my butt, my eyes wide and staring at the crate as if I were afraid the contents were about to rise up and come after me. My pointer finger was shaking.

  He looked at me for a second before heading that way on all fours.

  “Wait,” I managed.

  When he turned back, I handed him the phone. “It’s hard to see.”

  He raised his brows but didn’t comment. I watched as he made his way over to the crate and shone the light inside. For a second there was nothing, then—“Damn.”

  Indeed. “It’s real, isn’t it?”

  It would be nice to imagine that it wasn’t, but we probably wouldn’t be that lucky.

  “Looks real.” He stuck a hand into the crate, and I held my breath at the faint sound of twigs rustling. Or not twigs exactly, but the sound was the same.

  He pulled his hand out and wiped it on his jeans. “Feels real.”

  “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  He shot me glance. “I should. Not that I’ve had occasion to see a lot of these. When we did skeletons in medical school, they were adult ones. Not babies. The ones with the usual number of bones.”

  I glanced at the crate, and at the jumble of tiny bones inside it that I couldn’t see from where I was sitting. “Doesn’t this one have the usual number of bones?”

  “I’m sure it does,” Derek said, sitting back on his heels. “At least I don’t see any sign that any parts are missing. I’d have to count to be sure. But newborns have more than two hundred and seventy bones. Adult humans only have two hundred and six. They fuse.”

  I swallowed. “What do we do now?”

  “We have to call Wayne,” Derek said. “Human remains, no matter how old, always require a visit from the police.”

  “I’ll go call.” I turned to the hatch to the downstairs. I couldn’t get out of the attic quickly enough, and not only because the crate and contents were beyond creepy, but also because they were so sad that I felt like I could start crying.

  “We’ll both go,” Derek said, crawling behind me. “I’m not sitting up here waiting for them. That”—he glanced back over his shoulder—“isn’t going anywhere.”

  I didn’t imagine it would. Not if it had been up here for . . . God knew how long.

  The sadness receded a little in the curiosity I felt.

  How long would that have been exactly, that the crate and baby bones had been up here? The house was built in the 1920s. The Green sisters had lived here their whole lives, or so Brandon had said. Seventy-plus years.

  Then again, Moxie has been produced since 1876, so the baby skeleton could have been put in the attic before the Green sisters were born. The crawl space wasn’t the kind of place I imagined they’d spent a lot of time. Hard to get to, and not very useful. The Green family seemed to have preferred their basement for storage, and not surprisingly, since it was much easier to access, with the permanent staircase.

  I glanced over my shoulder. “How
long . . .”

  “Hard to say,” Derek said, swinging his legs through the hole in the floor. “I’ll go first and help you down.”

  He wiggled through the hole and hung for a moment before dropping, without bothering to use the makeshift ladder on the wall. “OK,” I heard his voice, “come on.”

  I stuck my feet through the opening and followed. Since I’m not quite as athletic—or strong—as Derek, I turned on my stomach and scooted off the edge that way instead. I felt his hands grab my knees and then slide up over my thighs and my butt, before grasping my waist.

  “I’ve got you. Let go.”

  I let go, and dropped into his arms. He held me for a second, breathing into my hair, before letting me go so I could call Wayne and set the machine in motion.

  • • •

  Wayne pulled up to the curb outside ten minutes later, in a squad car but without lights or sirens. There was no hurry, after all. The body had been dead a long time and wasn’t going anywhere. There was no emergency.

  Nonetheless, he didn’t look happy. His first words to us were an echo of Derek’s. “Why does this always happen to you?”

  “It’s not our fault,” Derek said. “We’re just doing our jobs.”

  Wayne scowled. He looked like an older version of his son, minus the glasses: a lanky six foot five or so, with curly black hair—turning to salt and pepper now in his late forties—and brown eyes, wearing a uniform shirt and jeans under a regulation blue parka.

  “That skeleton’s been there for years,” Derek added. “Decades probably. Long enough to decompose completely. There’s nothing left but bones. It’s not like anyone dropped it off for us to find.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “There was a thick layer of dust on the lid,” I said. “I doubt anyone’s opened it since it was put up there.”

  “Show me,” Wayne demanded.

  “It’s upstairs. All the way upstairs.” Derek led the way to the staircase. “In the attic.”

  “What were you doing in the attic?” They both began climbing. I headed up after them.

  “Avery was nosing around,” Derek said.

  That’s right, I thought. Throw me under the bus.

  “Good thing, too,” he continued, “or we wouldn’t have known it was here. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind to crawl into the attic.”

  Wayne mumbled something I didn’t catch, but which I was pretty sure wasn’t complimentary.

  “Someone put it there,” I told him. “It didn’t crawl up there on its own. That makes it a crime scene. And your jurisdiction.”

  Wayne sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I’m just not looking forward to this. Anything to do with children is twice as hard as anything else. And the press is going to have a field day.”

  “At least you don’t have to worry about Tony Micelli.”

  “True,” Wayne said and sounded a little happier.

  We’d reached the second floor now, and Derek opened the door to the closet and showed Wayne the hatch in the ceiling. The chief of police contemplated it with his head tilted. “Not sure I can get through that.”

  “There isn’t a lot of room,” Derek admitted. “I left the crate in situ, so you could see where it was, but if you like, I can go back up and fetch it down. Take a couple pictures maybe. You can see the situation from the top of the ladder.”

  “Ladder?” Wayne said.

  Derek indicated the blocks of wood nailed to the wall and Wayne arched a brow. “Not my idea of a ladder.”

  “Mine, either. But I’ve seen these before. They’re footholds. What do you think?”

  “Fine with me,” Wayne said with a shrug. “You’ve already been up there, so the scene’s already been compromised, and after all this time, I doubt we’d find any forensic evidence.”

  “The crate is rough wood,” Derek informed him. “Too rough to take fingerprints, I think.”

  “Not sure fingerprints would do any good anyway. Anyone involved in this is likely dead by now. Go ahead. I’ll wait here.”

  He nodded to Derek, who grabbed the blocks of wood on the wall and started climbing. After a half a minute, he had disappeared into the attic again, and we could hear his scuffling progress through the hatch, then the scrape of the wooden crate along the floorboards. “He has to crawl,” I explained to Wayne. “He can’t just pick it up and carry it, because the ceiling is low enough that he can’t walk.”

  Wayne nodded. “Hopefully it’ll hold together.”

  “I’m sure it will. It looked sturdy. One of those old wooden Moxie crates with a lid.”

  “I’m familiar with them,” Wayne said as the scraping stopped and Derek’s face appeared in the hole.

  “I’ll lower it as far as I can. Hopefully that’ll be enough for you to get ahold of it.”

  Wayne nodded.

  “I used my phone to snap a couple pictures. Once I get down, I’ll send them to your phone.”

  His head disappeared and we heard scraping. Then the crate appeared in the hatch, supported by Derek’s hands, and was lowered into Wayne’s without mishap. He carried it out of the closet and put it on the floor on the landing. Meanwhile, Derek swung himself through the hatch and landed beside me.

  “All right, Tink?”

  “Fine,” I said faintly.

  “You look pale.”

  “It’s a creepy sort of business.”

  Since there was no arguing with that, he didn’t try, just put his hand on my back and guided me out of the closet and onto the landing.

  Wayne had already taken the lid off the crate and was peering at the grisly contents. Derek and I joined him, looking down at the tiny—and very sad—little skeleton.

  Up there in the attic, between the shock and the lack of light, I hadn’t gotten a good look at it. That was fine with me. Looking at it now, in the light, the pitiful remnants of life were almost too much to bear.

  A tiny pile of bones and a tiny skull, just the right size to fit in my hand. Or if not mine, then Derek’s. Someone’s hand.

  If it hadn’t been for that skull, I might have imagined we were looking at an animal, a cat or small dog, hidden away instead of buried after death.

  But there was the skull, tiny but perfectly formed, unmistakably human even without the toothy grin.

  And a blanket. I hadn’t really noticed the blanket before, but it was there. Tattered and stained—I preferred not to think about with what—but there. Wrapping the baby when it was put in the crate and shoved next to the chimney. A white blanket—crocheted, from what I could see—made by hand with a scalloped blue border.

  Did that mean we were looking at the remains of a baby boy?

  Or was it just the luck of the draw, and nobody had had any idea what kind of baby it was until it came out, and the blue was just a coincidence?

  I cleared my throat. It was remarkably hard to get the words out. “Any sign of foul play?”

  Stupid question, I guess, considering that the baby was in the attic instead of in the graveyard, where it belonged. But Wayne understood what I was asking—or what I was careful not to ask. He shook his head. “Not that I can see. Nothing here indicates anything but a natural death.”

  After a second, he added reluctantly, “Of course, it’s hard to tell just from bones. But if the skull was cracked or there was a bullet in the box with the bones, or evidence of a knife on the ribs . . .”

  “Surely not on a baby!”

  “No,” Wayne said, and I could tell from his face that he wasn’t enjoying thinking about this any more than I was. “Not a baby. I was thinking more generally. About adults. When there are dead babies . . .”

  He stopped to swallow. Audibly. “We’ve never had a dead baby before. Not to my knowledge. Not in Waterfield. But when a dead baby is found somewhere, most of the time it was from natural causes, and the parents were afraid to report it for fear that they’d be blamed.”

  “You think that’s what happened here?”

  “I have no idea wh
at happened here,” Wayne said, and took a breath. “The further back in time you go, the more likely you’d get a stillbirth, too. There weren’t the medical advances back then to know when something was wrong, and births were a lot more traumatic as well, without the medical care we have these days. Births often took place at home . . .”

  He trailed off.

  “What?” I said.

  He shot me a distracted glance. “There’s something about a baby.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll have to look up the details. But it’s something about a missing baby. A long time before my time, so I don’t remember, but there’s something in the back brain.”

  I glanced at Derek, who shrugged. Whatever had happened had been before his time, too—he was at least ten years younger than Wayne—and obviously it didn’t ring any bells.

  “What will happen now?” he asked Wayne, who shrugged.

  “I guess I’ll have to send Brandon over to take a look at your attic. Just in case there’s something to be found there. But my guess is this crate has been up there for fifty years or more, and any physical evidence as to who put it there is long gone. Still, it has to be done.”

  Of course.

  “Can we keep working?” I asked, and Derek gave me a surprised look.

  “Are you sure you want to, Avery? That you wouldn’t rather get out of here? Go home for a while?”

  “I want to stay busy,” I said, since at home, all I’d be able to do was sit and relive the moments in the attic and the sad discovery.

  “Sure,” Wayne said. “There’s no point in us looking at the rest of the house. Not after all this time.”

  “What about the . . . that?” I looked at the crate, unable to call what was left inside it a baby, but not quite able to bring myself to call it a skeleton, either. “What will happen to it?”

  “It’ll have to go to the medical examiner’s office in Portland,” Wayne said. “I doubt they’ll find much, but maybe they’ll be able to extract some DNA or something. If we’re lucky, we can come close to finding out who this is. Was.”