Plaster and Poison

Plaster and Poison Page 19

by Jennie Bentley

  The question was directed equally at Jill and at Reece Tolliver. Jill was the one who answered.

  “Go ahead. I think I’m going to close the shop and go home. Spend the day with the kids.” Her voice was distant.

  “Chief Tolliver?” Derek turned to Reece Tolliver.

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Go ahead, son. I know where to find you if I want you. And you, too, Miss Baker.”

  I nodded. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do, Jill.”

  The door from the shop opened, and Peter came in, followed by Brandon. He had changed out of the greasy overalls and was wearing jeans and a blue sweater under a black coat. Jill’s eyes followed him as he went around the counter and over to Reece Tolliver, Brandon dogging his heels like a faithful—and really big—puppy.

  “Right this way.” Tolliver gestured toward the door.

  “I’ll see you in a little bit, cara,” Peter told his wife.

  Jill nodded and blinked, swallowing.

  The three of them passed through the door and out into the cold morning. None of us spoke as they got into their cars, Peter in the back seat of Brandon’s Waterfield PD black-and-white. Like a common criminal.

  “This didn’t work out right,” I said to Derek.

  He shook his head. “Tell me about it.”

  “You don’t think they’ll keep him, do you?”

  He glanced at Jill, still standing like a statue, watching the cars drive away. “Let’s just hope for the best.”

  Jill sat down abruptly, giving the impression that her knees had given out. Derek walked over to the door and flipped the sign in the window from Open to Closed. “C’mon, Jill. We’ll take you home.”

  “I’ve got my own car,” Jill said, weakly, staring straight ahead into space.

  “You probably shouldn’t be driving it, though. Why don’t I drive you home in your car, while Avery takes the truck? ”

  “I don’t want to impose . . .” Jill said.

  “Don’t be an idiot.” Derek’s voice was gruff. “It’s the least I can do. C’mon.” He grabbed her under the arm and hoisted her out of the desk chair. She followed him around the desk, docilely. “Coat?”

  “Here.” I snagged a down-filled, blue coat from the coat tree by the door and helped her into it. “Take care, Jill.”

  Jill nodded and walked out with Derek. He passed me the keys to the truck and dropped a quick kiss on my cheek. “I’ll see you later, Avery.”

  “Right.” I got into the truck and got myself out of there. Hopefully spending some time with Derek would help Jill to feel better. He has a very comforting presence, my boyfriend. It’s probably something they teach you in medical school. The last thing I saw before I disappeared down the street was Derek gently easing Jill into her ten-year-old minivan and making sure she was strapped in properly before loping around to the driver’s side door.

  Mom was dressed and fully coiffed, sitting in the kitchen when I got back to the B&B and talking to Kate. But she was alone. I looked around. “Where’s Noel?”

  “Morning, Avery,” Mom said brightly. “He’s not feeling well, I’m afraid. His nose is red and runny, and he’s sniffing and sneezing.”

  “Oh, no,” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry. I guess the cold weather has been too much for him. Walking all through town yesterday . . .”

  “He’s going to stay in bed today,” Mom explained, “and Kate is going to bring him some hot tea with honey in a little bit.”

  Kate nodded.

  “Well, do you want to stay home with him, then? Read him stories and soothe his fevered brow? I can find things to do on my own. Like work on the carriage house. I have to put some thought into the bedroom . . .” I stopped, biting my tongue, when I remembered that that’s where the dead body had been found. Maybe Kate didn’t want to be reminded of that.

  “Can I see it?” Mom asked.

  “The carriage house? Sure. Now?”

  “No time like the present,” Mom said and got up. “Just let me look in on Noel first.” She headed out into the hallway.

  “Where did you guys go?” Kate wanted to know. “I thought you said you didn’t have to run off anywhere today.”

  “Oh. Um . . . right.” Derek had said that, hadn’t he? Of course, that was before I’d told him about Gerard and Peter and Ludlow.

  “Did something happen?” Her eyes were candid.

  “Nothing new. We went to see Jill and Peter Cortino.”

  Kate blinked. “Why?”

  I hesitated. How much should I tell her? Did I, for instance, confess to having listened at the door during her conversation with Reece Tolliver yesterday? Was it any of her business that Peter Cortino had a criminal record? And what about the Carolyn Tate hit-and-run; did I tell her that Peter suspected Gerard of being involved in that?

  “Reece showed up just a few minutes after you left,” Kate said into my silence, “and he and Brandon headed out together. Also to Cortino’s Auto Shop.”

  I sighed. If I didn’t tell her now, Brandon would tell her later, and then she’d be mad at me for having known but not told. “They got there just after us. Turns out Peter knew Gerard from before. They were in prison together in Massachusetts.”

  Kate paled under the freckles. “How did you find out that Gerard had been in prison?”

  “Looked him up on the Internet,” I said, skipping lightly over the conversation I’d eavesdropped on. “I came across a picture from a Massachusetts paper, about inmates in the Hampden County Correctional Facility helping to build a playground for a housing development.”

  “And Gerard was one of them?”

  I nodded. “So was Peter Cortino. I told Derek about it when we got into the carriage house this morning. He had no idea, and he didn’t know if Jill did. He wanted to make sure he told her before the police stopped by. We figured it was just a matter of time.” Although I hadn’t realized they were just a few minutes behind us.

  “What did he say?” Kate wanted to know, her voice uneven. “Peter? Did he . . . was he the one who killed Gerard? ”

  I hesitated. “He says no. Of course, that’s what he’d say anyway. But I don’t think he did.”

  “Why?” Kate challenged.

  “Well, Gerard threatened to tell all of Waterfield that Peter had a criminal record, so Peter definitely had reason to want to get rid of Gerard. But he also had a more convenient way to do it.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Um . . .” Mental head thunk.

  “What? You know if you don’t tell me, I’ll get it out of Brandon!”

  I sighed. “He thought Gerard had something to do with that hit-and-run that killed Carolyn Tate. Gerard brought his car to Peter just afterward and wanted him to repair some body damage. Without telling anyone. Peter doesn’t know for sure—he said he didn’t ask and Gerard didn’t tell—but if Peter really had wanted to get rid of Gerard, calling in an anonymous tip about the hit-and-run would have been a lot easier than murder.”

  “That’s true,” Kate admitted, just as Mom came back down the hall and into the kitchen, holding her puffy blue coat. She looked from one to the other of us.

  “Ready, Avery?”

  “Ready,” I said, getting up from the table with an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, Kate.”

  “No problem.” She waved a hand. “It was bound to come out sooner or later. You guys have fun.”

  I made a face. Fat chance of that while all this was going on all around us.

  “What was that all about?” Mom wanted to know as soon as we were outside in the cold. I explained what I’d discovered last night and what had taken place this morning. Mom opened her eyes wide. “You don’t think that beautiful man is a murderer, do you? Oh, what a waste!”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t like to think so, but someone killed Gerard. Who else could it be? It had to be someone who knew Gerard, someone who felt threatened by him . . .”

  “Peter Cortino does seem to fit the bill. Or his wife, if she knew what was going on.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. Now I did, and I didn’t like it.

  “I have a hard time seeing either of them
as cold-blooded murderers,” I admitted. “I just don’t know who else to suspect. Besides Kate and Shannon, and Peter, I don’t think Gerard knew anyone else in Waterfield. Except for Beatrice, but I don’t want it to be her, either.”

  “Beatrice?” Mom echoed.

  I nodded. “Peter said he asked him—Gerard asked Peter—questions about Bea.”

  “That’s interesting. Any connection between his death and her disappearance, do you think?”

  “Like, she killed him and then made a bunk? I thought about it. I’d be more inclined to believe it if I hadn’t seen her face when she heard the news that he was dead. She was shocked, wouldn’t you say? If she’d killed him, she wouldn’t be surprised that he was dead, and anyway, why would she wait until after the body was discovered to leave? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go before anyone knew he was dead?”

  Mom admitted that it would. “Maybe she didn’t realize she’d killed him. Maybe it was an accident.”

  “She just happened to be baking a batch of cookies when Cora’s heart medicine happened to fall into the dough, and rather than start over, Bea decided that a month’s supply of digitalis in the cookies probably wouldn’t hurt anyone, so when Gerard asked if he could have one, she didn’t see any reason to refuse? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.” We stopped outside the carriage house door, and I fumbled for the—new—key. The old key was still missing; whoever had dumped Gerard inside must have walked off with it. “And then I suppose he wandered over here on his own, lay down in the carriage house, and died? Or do you think that skinny Beatrice dragged his dead weight over here and up the stairs?”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “Maybe he asked her out for a drink. He might have, if he was trying to shake her down, or get closer to her husband to shake him down. Or if he was trying to seduce her. Gerard may have dropped something in her drink—from what you’ve told me about him, it’s not impossible—but she realized it, and switched glasses with him, and then he drank whatever it was and died.”

  “That’d make more sense if he died of an overdose of Rohypnol or GHB,” I said, pushing the door open. “I don’t think digitalin is used much for that purpose. Still, it’s worth considering. If he had a heart condition and was taking digitalin, getting an overdose like that might kill him. You should mention it to Chief Tolliver the next time he stops by the B&B.”

  “Maybe I will,” Mom said and stopped inside the door to look around the interior of the carriage house. “Oh, Avery . . . this is lovely.”

  I looked around, too. It was, rather. “It will be, once it’s all finished. Derek does good work, doesn’t he?”

  “You both do,” Mom said loyally. “So tell me what you envision down here, and then we’ll go upstairs.”

  “OK.” Not one to need a second invitation, I launched into my plans for the carriage house, including the Parisian-i nspired decor. Mom nodded and made encouraging noises, approving absolutely every word I said. “And up here,” I explained, once we’d navigated the stairs, “is the master bedroom. It’ll have cream-colored carpet on the floor, very opulent, and maybe some toile or something on the walls. With black-and-white photographs from the honeymoon. Maybe some silhouettes. Upholstered wall behind the bed. Mirrors everywhere; very French . . .”

  “No mirrors on the ceiling, I hope?” Mom interjected.

  “Of course not. I’m going for Parisian chic, not French bordello.”

  The ceilings were too steeply pitched for mirrors, anyway. Wayne and Kate would look like something out of a fun house. When we added the loft, we had kept the original pitch of the roof rather than squaring it off to a normal, flat ceiling. It dipped down low on both sides, so Derek had added a couple of skylights to make up for the lack of windows. Other than the skylights, the only natural light came from a set of French doors cut into the wall opposite the bed, leading onto a tiny balcony. It had a wrought iron railing, of course, and just enough room for another little table and two chairs. In the distance, above the now bare trees, the Atlantic Ocean winked. Or would wink, when the sun came out again after the winter. There was a window in the wall opposite as well, but since that was in the master bath, it didn’t do much to add light to the bedroom.

  But we had the skylights. They opened to let the gentle breezes in during the warm months, and they had remote-controlled shutters that slid across them in the winter. Very high-tech, and extremely useful. From the inside, though, they were just dark rectangles in the ceiling right now. Maybe I could do something fun with them to make them look prettier. And more French. Something like . . .

  “Shutters,” I said.

  Mom stuck her head out of the bathroom. “What’s that, dear? ”

  “Shutters. Fake ones. On the inside of the ceiling. To make the skylights look more festive. Maybe we can attach some window baskets underneath. With fake flowers, of course; I wouldn’t expect Kate to get up on a ladder every couple of days to water them. Plus, if they overflowed, it would ruin the white carpet. But they’d look cool, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, very,” Mom nodded. “Remember those pretty paper flowers you used to make, Avery? From scrapbooking paper? We had vases full of them all over the apartment when you were in high school.”

  “Of course,” I nodded. “They’d be perfect.” And I could even make one in fabric, to pin to the waist of that blue dress in John Nickerson’s shop window. “D’ you want to come with me to the lumber yard to look for shutters? Derek took Jill Cortino home in her van and left me the truck.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Mom said.

  17

  The lumber yard did have shutters, and I bought four sets, two for each of the four skylights, and loaded them into the back of the truck. We were just about to pull out of our parking space when another black truck zipped past the back of ours and pulled into the vacant space next to us. I glanced over, past Mom, and out the passenger-side window. The truck had the Stenham Construction logo on the side, and after a moment, the driver’s-side door opened, and my cousin got out.

  One of them, anyway. Ray and Randy Stenham are identical twins, and I don’t know them well enough to tell them apart. They’re both tallish—over six feet—and broad, with overdeveloped muscles and matching egos. Like me, they’ve inherited the kinky Morton hair, but theirs is dark and a lot shorter.

  Mom rolled down her window. “Hello, Randall.”

  I glanced at her in surprise, while Randy—it must have been Randy, because he didn’t correct her—looked startled. After a second, he smiled. His teeth were less oversized for his face than when he was a kid, but there were still a lot of them. “Why, if it isn’t Aunt Rosemary! And Cousin Avery, too! How are you, coz?”

  “Fine,” I said repressively, knowing full well he was no more excited to see me than I was to see him.

  “You buying materials for that carriage house you’re renovating?” He glanced into the bed of the truck.

  I nodded. “A few little things for the bedroom.”

  “Shutters for the skylights?” Randy suggested.

  I nodded. “What are you working on these days? I hear Clovercroft is still at a standstill.”

  “Not for long,” Randy said, with a snap of teeth. “Devon Highlands is going strong, the parcels are selling like hotcakes, and we just picked up a property on the west side of town that we’re going to start developing over the summer.”

  “Good for you. Melissa must be very excited about all the sales.”

  Randy smiled. He knows just how little I like Melissa.

  “How is your mother?” Mom asked. “I’ve been thinking about stopping by to say hello, but I don’t want to intrude if she’s not feeling well. Mary Elizabeth always was delicate.”

  “Ma’s fine,” Randy began, and then seemed to think better of it. “But she’s always been delicate, like you said, Aunt Rosemary. So maybe it’d be better if you called first, if you want to see her, instead of just dropping in. Just in case she’s lying down or something.”

  “Of course,” Mom said.

  “I should get going.” Randy glanced toward the entrance to the lumber depot. “Nice to see you, Aunt Rosem
ary. You too, Avery.”

  “Always a pleasure,” I murmured insincerely.

  Randy grinned. “Tell your boyfriend to stop by the office if he wants a job. We can always use another carpenter.”

  “Thanks, but I think Derek”—would rather starve than work for you—“has enough of his own work to do. And if he gets tired of carpentry, he can always go back to medicine.”

  I smiled. Randy flushed, annoyed. Turning on his heel, he stalked off to see to his own lumber needs.

  “Tell me,” I said to Mom, watching him turn through the gate of the lumber yard, “just how did you know that that was Randy and not Ray? I can’t tell them apart.”

  “I can’t, either,” Mom answered calmly. “But I saw him watch that girl over there”—she nodded at a fresh young thing, perhaps one of the coeds from Barnham, bent over her trunk—“and I figured Ray wouldn’t be doing that.”

  “Good catch. I wouldn’t put it past Ray, actually, but it sounds like you nailed it. If he hadn’t been Randy, I’m sure he would have delighted in telling you so.”

  I put the truck into gear and pulled out of the parking space. And then I pulled in again. “Wait a second. Isn’t that Paige Thompson?”

  The coed Ray had ogled straightened up and shook blond hair back over her shoulder.

  “No idea,” Mom said. “I don’t know Paige.”

  “She’s a friend of Josh Rasmussen’s and Shannon McGillicutty’s. Native Waterfielder. I’ve been wanting to talk to her about Emily Thompson.”

  “Right,” Mom said, “the picture you found at the Ellises yesterday.”

  “Exactly. Excuse me a second, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” Mom said, folding her hands in her lap. “I’ll just sit here where it’s warm.”

  “No problem.” I left the truck in idle with the engine running and got back out into the cold. “Paige!”

  The girl at the car turned toward me.

  Paige Thompson is a tiny girl, no taller than me, and ethereal looking, with pale blonde hair, blue eyes, and translucent skin. Where I’m sturdy, Paige looks like a strong wind could knock her down. She fastened those big eyes on me. “Good morning, Avery.”

 

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