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

by Bentley, Jennie

  She made an effort to push herself farther up in the chair, without much success. Derek went to help.

  “Do you need a hand, Miss Ruth?”

  She blinked up at him. “You’re Dr. Ellis’s son, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Derek.”

  “Aren’t you a doctor, too?”

  He shifted her a little higher in the chair and made sure she was comfortable before he stepped back. “I used to be. Now I renovate houses. This is my wife, Avery.”

  “Hi,” I said. If I hadn’t been carrying the boxes of stuff, I would have twiddled my fingers at her.

  She had very cool, blue eyes. “Renovate houses?”

  “We bought yours,” I said apologetically. “From Mr. Silva.”

  Her face closed. “I see.”

  “I’m sorry you had to leave. You lived there a long time, didn’t you?”

  “All my life,” Ruth said. “My father bought the house for Mother when they married.”

  That was quite the wedding gift. “How long were your parents married?”

  “Fifty-seven years,” Ruth said proudly.

  “That’s a long time.” And it meant that whoever had done what was done to Baby Arthur—if anyone had done anything at all, and if it even was the remains of Baby Arthur we’d found—Mr. and Mrs. Green had stayed together afterward. For a long, long time.

  If Mrs. Green had had an affair, Mr. Green had obviously forgiven her. And she had loved him enough to stick around after the death—or disappearance—of the baby.

  “They must have been happy together.”

  Ruth shrugged skinny shoulders underneath a fuzzy cardigan jacket. “They had their difficulties, like everyone else.”

  “Marriage is hard.” I glanced at Derek, who arched his brows at me. Sorry, I telegraphed. Nothing personal. Just trying to get information.

  It must have transferred, because he said, “Avery has something for you, Miss Ruth.”

  “Right.” I put the boxes down on the foot of the bed and retrieved the one with Ruth’s Elvis clippings. “I thought you might enjoy having this. I found it in the wall cubby in your room. There were a couple of boxes in your sister’s room, and this one in yours. Pictures of Elvis.”

  I took the lid off and put the open box on her lap, carefully, and watched as her thin fingers sifted through the clippings.

  “How old were you?” Derek asked after a moment, his voice soft.

  She shot him a distracted glance before going back to the clippings. “Sixteen. Seventeen.”

  She’d been around ten, then, when her brother went missing. Died.

  “We found some of Mamie’s things, too. In the other bedroom.”

  I took the lid off the box with the tea set, and showed it to Ruth. She stared at it for a second, silent, before she said, “She loved that. She used to make me take tea with her dolls long after I was too old to play with them.”

  “You must have been good friends. Sisters, close in age . . .” I let the sentence trail off, hoping for a tidbit of information.

  She smiled. “We were. Mamie, me, and Henrietta.”

  “Henrietta?” Of course I knew who Henrietta was, but I wanted to keep the conversation going.

  “Our cousin,” Ruth said. “She’s a year younger than I am, and a year older than Mamie. We were inseparable, the three of us.” A shadow passed over her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She shook her head, her lips pressed tightly together. “We were good friends when we were small. Then things changed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was nobody’s fault,” Ruth said, going back to sifting through her clippings. “Things happen.”

  She said it without looking up. I glanced at Derek. He nodded and got to his feet. “We’ll leave you to rest, Miss Ruth. It was nice to see you.”

  “Didn’t she want to sell the house?” I asked Derek when we were back in the hallway, hunting for Mamie’s room.

  “I don’t think she did,” Derek answered. “She must have known she didn’t have a choice, but I can’t imagine she was happy about it. She and Mamie lived together in that house as long as they’ve been alive. It’s the only home she’s ever had. And now she’s here, with no privacy, unable to take care of herself, unable to take care of Mamie . . .”

  He shook his head. “It happens to a lot of people as they get older, you know? They get to a point where they can’t live on their own anymore. Just look at Henrietta. With the hip, Ruth would be out of commission for a good long time, and of course Mamie couldn’t stay in the house on her own. This was the best thing for them. The only thing for them. But I imagine she’d have preferred for it not to be this way.”

  Probably so.

  Mamie’s room was empty, except for the two dolls and one teddy bear on the neatly made bed. The bear was a dirty yellow and was missing one black button eye and half an ear. One of the dolls was the baby I’d found in the basement of the house a few days ago. The other was tucked carefully under the blanket so only the top of the head was visible. I guess maybe it was Mamie’s favorite.

  I took an impulsive step forward, but Derek held me back. “She isn’t here.”

  “I just wanted a look at the doll,” I said.

  He shook his head. “She might be able to tell if someone has disturbed the ‘baby.’ Better leave it alone.”

  I figured I’d probably be able to put the blanket back over the “baby” to make it look like no one had touched it, but it wasn’t important, after all. Just idle curiosity on my part. So I backed out of the room and we wandered on down the hall looking for Mamie.

  We tracked her down to a chair in the common room, by the fireplace. Maybe she was still feeling chilled after the ordeal the other night, or maybe someone else had put her there and she just hadn’t gotten around to wandering off yet.

  She had no idea who we were, of course, and didn’t seem to understand when we explained it. But she was beyond excited to receive her tea set. Her face cracked in a wide grin, and she hummed as she pulled each little cup and saucer out and caressed them before putting them on the table beside her.

  “Who gave it to you?” I asked, pulling up an armchair and leaning forward to watch as she put it all together perfectly on the table.

  “I got it for Christmas. From Mama and Papa.” Her voice was high, girlish.

  “That’s a great gift.” I found myself talking to her as if she were seven instead of seventy-some. “How old were you?”

  She wrinkled her brows at me. “It was last Christmas.”

  Of course. “Seven maybe? Or eight?”

  “Seven,” Mamie said. “I was seven last Christmas. I’m eight now.”

  I made sure not to look at Derek. “Eight is a great age. Do you and Ruth play tea party a lot?”

  “Ruth and I and Henrietta,” Mamie said. “Henrietta is my cousin.”

  “I think I’ve met Henrietta once.”

  “She’s nine. But she still likes tea parties. Ruth doesn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She has to take care of the babies,” Mamie said, fiddling with her teacups. “The babies are too small for tea parties.”

  “Do you like babies?”

  “I like my baby,” Mamie said. “I don’t like Henrietta’s. He cries all the time.”

  “But your baby doesn’t cry?”

  She shook her head. “He’s good.” She looked up at me. “Do I know you?”

  “My name is Avery,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know you. And I’m not supposed to talk to strangers. You’ll have to leave.”

  “Of course.” I got to my feet. “Enjoy your tea set.”

  She looked down at it, and her face softened. I don’t think she even noticed when we walked away.

  • • •

  “Something wrong?” Derek inquired when we were outside again, crossing the parking lot and breathing deeply of the crisp, cold winter air
with a hint of snow.

  It wasn’t that it had smelled bad inside the nursing home. It hadn’t particularly. I hadn’t even noticed being bothered by it inside. There had been a medical, sort of antiseptic smell, overlaid by some mixture of baby powder or vanilla and lavender. But it hadn’t smelled bad.

  But now that I was outside, I noticed I was gulping deep mouthfuls of cold air, as if I couldn’t replace the air in my lungs fast enough.

  I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

  “Dizzy?”

  “No. Just . . . the air feels good.”

  “Close in there.” Derek nodded.

  It had been, yes. And hot, not just in front of the fireplace, but everywhere. I guess it’s true what I’ve heard, that old people feel the cold more.

  “We didn’t really learn anything.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” He unlocked the car door for me and boosted me inside. “We found out that Mamie liked her own brother, but didn’t like little Henry.”

  “So?” I said, but he had already closed the door behind me and was on his way around the truck. That gave me a little time to think about what he’d said before I had to respond.

  “Do you think that’s significant?” I picked up the conversation when he was sitting beside me.

  He glanced at me in the process of inserting the key in the ignition. “Hard to say what’s significant and what isn’t. I don’t imagine it is. But it’s something.”

  “If it doesn’t mean anything, I don’t really care.”

  “It’s too soon to know what means anything,” Derek said and put the truck in reverse. “You also found out that Ruth, Mamie, and Henrietta were close friends when they were small, but that something happened to change that.”

  I nodded. “Do you suppose it was Henrietta who killed the baby?”

  Derek stared at me. “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “What are you saying, then?”

  “I’m not saying anything. Just telling you that you found out some things.”

  “Useless things.”

  “That happens,” Derek said and headed out of the parking lot.

  I waited a few minutes, while he navigated back toward Waterfield proper, and then I broke the silence again. “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” Derek said.

  “To Aunt Inga’s house?”

  He nodded. “You can drop off the lanterns and paint, and I’ll find a spade. Then you can spend the afternoon taking up the floor in the kitchen.”

  “Fine.” I folded my arms across my chest.

  He gave it a minute and then looked at me. “Don’t you want to take up the kitchen floor?”

  “I want to make my Christmas ornaments,” I said.

  “The lanterns?”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you do that tonight? I’ll help you. We can spend all night getting ready for the tour. I’ll even cook.”

  “Cook what?”

  “Dunno,” Derek said. “What do you want?”

  “Tikka Masala.”

  He stared at me. “Indian?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know how to cook Indian food.”

  “Then you shouldn’t offer,” I said.

  “Can you cook Indian food?”

  “I can barely make sandwiches. You know that.”

  “Then you have a lot of nerve criticizing my abilities.” He was silent for a moment. “Do you really want Tikka Masala?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Spaghetti would be fine. Or cheese sandwiches. Or chili. Something simple.”

  “Stir-fry?”

  “Stir-fry would be great.” He made a good one.

  “We’ll have to stop for a few supplies on our way home. So you’ll come back to the house with me and work on the kitchen floor if I promise to make you stir-fry tonight?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I appreciate the rousing enthusiasm,” Derek answered and stepped on the gas.

  • • •

  I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon shoveling vinyl in the Green sisters’ house, while Derek clanged and banged the plumbing all around me. After finishing upstairs, he came down to the first-floor bath and went to work there. Meanwhile, I pried up big flakes of mustard yellow vinyl and dragged them out to the Dumpster. Every so often, I took a break and went to watch Derek work. Shoveling is hard on the arms and shoulders, whether you’re shoveling snow, dirt, or old flooring, and the view was quite nice. Derek in faded jeans that pulled nicely across his posterior as he knelt on the floor, and in a plain blue T-shirt that showed admirable musculature as he wrestled with the pipes . . . definitely worth taking a break for.

  Until he sent me a pointed look over his shoulder and inquired whether I didn’t have something more useful to do, whereupon I toddled back to the kitchen and my spade.

  By five we called it a day and locked up. The vinyl was gone, and Derek had determined that most of the hardened glue cemented to the old floors could be sanded off and the hardwoods rescued.

  We stopped at Shaw’s Supermarket—a Maine institution since 1919—to pick up supplies for the stir-fry. And no sooner had we walked in than Derek nodded a greeting. “Darren.”

  Darren Silva nodded back. “Derek.” He glanced at me, but either he couldn’t remember my name, or I just wasn’t worthy of his attention.

  I didn’t like Darren Silva. It could have been shyness on his part, I suppose—maybe he just wasn’t used to women, or something like it. Derek had another friend like that: Ian Burns, up in Boothbay Harbor. The first time I met him, Derek warned me not to look directly at him and under no circumstances talk directly to him. Just pretend he wasn’t there unless he spoke to me.

  Maybe Darren Silva was the same way.

  It was hard to reconcile that kind of person with the picture in front of me, though. While Ian was a big, burly lumberjack-looking fellow who kept a full beard because it made him feel safe, and who ran his family’s salvage yard and shot moose in his spare time, Darren Silva was nicely groomed and dressed in an expensive designer suit with a starched shirt and tie under an elegant cashmere coat . . . looking for all the world like he had just stopped at Shaw’s on his way home from the office.

  He looked normal. Gainfully employed. Well off. Secure of himself and his position in the world.

  In other words, I suspected he was just being rude.

  “How’s everything?” Derek inquired politely.

  Darren snorted. “Going to hell.”

  All righty, then.

  “How so?”

  Darren rolled his eyes. “You know. The police showed up at the office this afternoon to tell me there’d been bones found in the house. You found them.”

  “Yes,” Derek said.

  “Couldn’t you just have left them where they were? Or put them in the Dumpster, or something?”

  There was a pause. I was too flabbergasted to speak, and Derek must have felt the same way, because it took him a minute to find his voice. When he did, it was mild. (I’m pretty sure I would have been shrieking like a banshee by then, had it been me.) “Not really, no. Human remains are a police matter.”

  “If they’d been there for over sixty years,” Darren said with an annoyed flick of his neck, “a few more years wouldn’t have mattered. You know, I have half a mind to tell you to stop renovating.”

  There was another pause. I waited, interestedly, to see whether Derek would lose his temper this time.

  He didn’t. “You can’t tell me to stop renovating,” he informed Darren, his voice as smooth and polite as before. “It isn’t your house anymore. I paid for it.”

  “I’ll buy it back!” Darren said.

  “I’m sorry, but it isn’t for sale.” Derek took my arm and nudged me sideways. I sidled to my right.

  We’d taken only a few steps when Darren called us back. The high color was gone from his face, and he looked sheepish. “Listen,” he told Derek, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. It was jus
t a shock. You know?”

  “To us, too,” Derek said, obviously not entirely ready to forgive and forget yet.

  Darren glanced my way. “I thought we’d cleaned out the whole house before you took over.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said, since he’d acknowledged me. Sort of. “The crate was up in the crawl space under the roof, wedged beside the chimney. Unless you were up there, you wouldn’t have noticed it.”

  Darren shook his head. “I asked Aunt Ruth, and she said there was nothing in the attic. That it was too hard to get to.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t know, either.”

  There was a pause.

  “Did the police say anything else?” I asked.

  Darren looked at me. He had very pale blue eyes, several shades lighter than Derek’s. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe they’d asked you questions.”

  “Questions about what?”

  “About the skeleton,” I said patiently.

  He sounded mighty defensive for someone who hadn’t even been born yet when Arthur Green died, and moreover, wouldn’t be born for another thirty years, give or take. It wasn’t like I was accusing him of anything.

  Unless he was feeling defensive on someone else’s behalf. Not his father, since his father had been just a baby. But maybe Darren’s aunt Henrietta . . .

  “What about the skeleton?” Darren said.

  “I thought maybe they’d asked you about it. What you thought happened to it. Whether there were any family stories.”

  “Family stories?”

  I gave up. “I’m sure things will calm down shortly. And at least the news channels haven’t gotten hold of it.”

  Darren paled at the thought.

  “Excuse us,” Derek said and gave me another push. I stumbled off and he followed. Darren didn’t say anything to stop us this time.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I told my husband when we were out of earshot.

  “He wasn’t very nice.”

  No, he hadn’t been. “I guess it must have been a shock. He might feel guilty for leaving it there for us to find, even if he had no idea it was there. And it was a relative. It’s personal. Not like it is for us.”