“Just dead?” But I opened my eyes.
No, she didn’t look bad, although she looked very dead. Pale and somehow empty.
She must have been a pretty woman, alive. Her features were regular, with wide cheekbones and a dimpled chin. Eyebrows and lashes were a few shades darker than the blond hair slicked back from her face by the salt water. Dry, it would probably be ash or wheat blond. At a guess, she was somewhere in her midtwenties, about my height, but with longer legs and a slim figure.
“Are you going to try mouth-to-mouth?” My voice was hushed.
Derek shook his head, his eyes on the still figure in the bottom of the boat. “It’s too late. She’s been in the water for hours. Probably since sometime last night.”
“Poor thing. Drowning must be a horrible way to go.”
“I don’t think she drowned,” Derek said. “She probably died from exposure. Hypothermia. The water is freezing this time of year, with all the snowmelt. Wearing just that”—he indicated the jeans and skimpy shirt—“she would have frozen to death long before she had time to drown.”
“I’m not going to ask you how you can tell.”
He turned back to the wheel. “We’re gonna have to go back to Waterfield. Get your phone out, would you? There’s not gonna be any reception out here, but once we get closer to land, you should be able to raise Wayne.”
I nodded, digging in my pocket. Before I tried to call the Waterfield chief of police, though, I found a tarp under one of the seats and covered the dead girl with it. Both because I didn’t want to look at her, and because I thought she could use that little bit of dignity.
By the time we were within sight of land, I had coverage, and I dialed Wayne’s number. When he answered, I explained the situation. His first words were, “Not my jurisdiction,” but then he said that he’d call the coast guard, although “it isn’t their jurisdiction, either. They respond to incidents on the water, like shipwrecks, fires, and oil spills, but they don’t investigate drowning deaths.”
“So whose jurisdiction is it? The state police? Your friend Reece Tolliver?”
“Maybe,” Wayne said. “I’ll give him a call and find out. And I’ll meet you at the harbor in ten minutes. Tell Derek to put in somewhere out of the way. When the ambulance shows up, I don’t want a crowd gathering to see what’s going on.”
I relayed the instructions to Derek, and then I found myself caught up in thoughts about the girl—the corpse—and wondering what had happened to her.
She wasn’t dressed for being out on the water in early April in Maine. Or outside at all, for that matter. She should have been wearing an overcoat of some sort over the flimsy top, not to mention shoes and socks.
The soles of her feet were abraded, I’d noticed, as if she’d been walking barefoot over gravel or rough tree roots. But what kind of idiot goes outside barefoot in April, when the ground’s only been thawed for a week or two?
“A drunk one,” Wayne said when we had put in to shore and I had pointed out my observations. He’d been waiting for us at the far end of the harbor, as far away from any houses or businesses as he could get. “She’s probably some girl from Barnham College, who had herself a good time last night, and now she’s paid the ultimate price for it.”
He looked at her, shaking his head sadly. I knew he was thinking of his son, Josh, and his stepdaughter, Shannon—Kate’s daughter—both Barnham College students.
Our corpse would have to be one of the older students if she came from the college; she looked closer to twenty-five than twenty. Barnham was a four-year college, so barring the odd exception, the oldest students there were around twenty-three or so.
“If there were others involved, she probably scared them witless when she went in the water and disappeared,” Wayne added, “and they were too worried to report it. May be drugs or something involved, that would get them into big trouble if they called us. The ME will figure that out. Toxicology will take a few days, but meanwhile I’ll take a picture of her down to Barnham and see if anyone can identify her.”
“You will?” Derek was watching as the ambulance crew approached. The ambulance itself was parked at the end of the road; the two paramedics were maneuvering their gurney across the rough planks of the pier.
Wayne grimaced, hands in the pockets of his tan uniform pants and shoulders hunched against the weather, his curly salt-and-pepper hair beaded with raindrops. “I talked to the coast guard. If there’s a chance she’s from Barnham, they want me to handle it. Even if she’s not, I’m better equipped to deal with her than Reece, given the glut of dead bodies we’ve had since Avery moved to town.”
“It’s not my fault,” I said. Several of those bodies had been dead before I even got to Waterfield. And I certainly hadn’t had anything to do with killing the others.
“Of course not,” Wayne agreed. “But you’ve gotten up to some trouble in the past year, Avery.”
I shrugged, pouting. So what if I had? It still wasn’t my fault. And I’d helped him solve several of those murders, let’s not forget. Putting myself in grave personal danger along the way, too.
Well, this time there was no danger of that, anyway. I had no idea who the dead girl was, and apart from the fact that we’d found her, she had no connection to us. I had no reason in the world to concern myself in her death. In fact, once the paramedics had taken charge of the body, I intended to wash my hands of the whole thing—I’d make sure Derek gave his hands a good scrubbing, too—and then I intended to get back in the boat and go back to Rowanberry Island and back to work on the house, and I wasn’t going to give the girl or her death a second thought. This time, it had nothing to do with me, and I was happy to keep it that way. It made for a nice change.
The two paramedics wheeled their gurney up to where we stood, with the corpse at our feet, still covered by the blue tarp. Wayne had blocked off the entire pier, so the paramedics had had to duck under several lengths of yellow crime scene tape strung from post to post down by the road. A very few people were hanging out down there, looking our way, but there were no crowds, per se. Maybe it was simply the unpleasant weather that was keeping most of the crowds at bay. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to complain. I’d had my share of notoriety back in September, when news vans had been parked outside our house on Becklea Drive and Tony “the Tiger” Micelli from Portland’s Channel Eight News had been hoping for another case like Chicago’s John Wayne Gacy, with dozens of bodies buried in the yard and crawlspace. He hadn’t gotten his wish, thank God, and the media onslaught had only lasted a couple of days, but I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.
It took only a few minutes for the paramedics to lift the drowning victim onto the gurney and confer with Wayne about where they were taking her and what they’d be doing once they got there. They were from the nearest fire department, doing chauffeur duty since it would have taken too long for a van to arrive from the medical examiner’s office in Portland, the nearest big city to Waterfield. “Big” being relative; metropolitan Portland has about 230,000 inhabitants, versus my hometown of New York City’s more than eight and a half million. Compared to Waterfield, though, it was a big place. Once again, I was aware of a feeling of displacement, my perceptions so radically different from what they used to be.
At any rate, the paramedics would be taking the victim to Portland, where they would deliver her to the morgue, where the ME would do whatever it is medical examiners do. I shut down that train of thought in time to hear what Derek was saying instead.
“. . . don’t need us, we’ll just head back to work.”
“Sure.” Wayne nodded. “It’s not like there’s much you can tell me other than that you found her floating in the water somewhere between Rowanberry Island and the mainland at 8:42 A.M. or thereabouts. If you’ve never seen her before and there was nothing else out there with her . . .”
Derek shook his head. “Nothing we noticed. We didn’t take the time to look around much, since we wanted to get her back here as quic
kly as possible.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Wayne said. “The coast guard is having a trawl for anything unusual. Keep an eye out, just in case you notice something on your way back to Rowanberry Island, but other than that, I don’t think there’s anything more you can do. And no reason for you to concern yourselves further.” His glance brushed mine.
OK, so perhaps a few times in the past I’d stumbled into one of Wayne’s cases, where I didn’t belong. Mostly because I’d found some kind of information that concerned someone I knew, and I felt compelled to figure out what was going on. And maybe he and Derek had had to come to my rescue a few times, when I’d gotten in over my head. Mostly because I didn’t watch where I was going. But there was no need to worry about that this time.
“You don’t have to warn me off,” I said. “I’m sorry she drowned, or died of exposure or whatever, but I don’t know her, and what happened to her is none of my business. I just want to go back to my house on the island and get back to work.”
Wayne nodded.
“She’s all yours. I won’t even ask you later if you’ve figured out who she is and what happened to her.”
“You don’t have to go that far,” Wayne said, while Derek’s lips twitched. “I’ll let you—both of you—know what I find out. Just as long as I don’t have to worry about either of you interfering.”
“I never interfere,” Derek said.
“I never mean to interfere,” I added.
Wayne shook his head, resigned. “Just go away,” he said. “Let me know if you come across anything interesting. Like another body.”
“Gah.” I shuddered. “Please don’t say that. One dead body is enough.”
“More than enough,” Wayne agreed, “but still, let me know if anything turns up.”
Derek handed me back down into the boat and jumped in after me while Wayne followed the two paramedics and their sad burden toward the shore and the ambulance and police cruiser waiting there.
The return trip to the island was mostly quiet. The weather had gotten a little better in the past hour, the rain wasn’t stinging my face so much as just settling like a damp, gray blanket over everything, but I guess neither of us really felt like talking. Derek steered the boat and I sat in the stern, huddled with my own depressing thoughts. I know I’d told Wayne—and myself—I couldn’t care less, but it was hard not to be affected by what had happened. The girl in the water had been young and pretty, seemingly healthy; she had probably enjoyed life, and had expected it to go on for eternity, or at least for a long time to come. And now she was dead. She might have had a boyfriend, or even a husband. Young children, maybe. Certainly a mother and a father. Maybe siblings. Friends . . .
“Leave it alone, Avery,” Derek said when he had pulled the boat up next to the leaning dock again and had hauled me out to stand next to him. We had seen no more bodies on the way here, and nothing else, either, with the exception of a coast guard boat off in the distance, slowly making its way between the islands scattered off the coast. Searching for clues, I guess.
I pulled my focus back in to look at him. “What?”
He shook me, gently. “Leave it alone. I know it sounds cold, but we didn’t know her, and there’s nothing we can do for her. Sometimes there just isn’t. Even when they come to you still alive, sometimes there’s nothing you can do.”
“I know that. I’m just thinking about her family, you know? She’s on her way to the morgue, and they have no idea. And she was so young. . . .”
“Accidents happen,” Derek said, not unkindly. He let me go and started unfastening the straps on his life vest. “Especially here on the coast. There are a few drownings here every year. And a few people who die from exposure because they underestimate the temperature, either of the water or the air. I’m sorry about it, but it’s life.”
I nodded reluctantly, unbuckling my own life vest.
“Wayne will take care of her. They’ll figure out who she is and notify her family, and that’ll be it. In the meantime, let’s just get back to work. It’ll give you something else to think about.”
I nodded. Sounded like a good idea.
We spent the rest of the day working on the house, which meant that Derek concentrated on getting the generator up and working while I walked around with pen and paper, counting the cracked window panes that needed to be replaced (fifty-six), and measuring the piece of worm-eaten paneling that needed to be matched (four feet by two and a half), and trying to come up with an accurate tally of missing bricks from the foundation and missing doorknobs from the interior doors. At some point, someone had done their level best to strip the house of anything not integral to the structure, so there were no light fixtures, just naked bulbs hanging from the ceilings, and no doorknobs or other hardware, either. Anything someone could walk off with was gone.
“There’s a place up near Boothbay Harbor,” Derek said when I mentioned it to him, “where they’ll have what we need. A salvage yard.”
“Old House Parts?” Everyone in Maine has heard of the Old House Parts Company. Except I had been under the impression that the famous architectural salvage company was located in the other direction.
“That’s in Kennebunkport,” Derek confirmed. “This place is smaller, and it’s up the road apiece. The selection isn’t as wide, but the prices tend to be a little better, and sometimes you can find some real treasures there. The competition isn’t as stiff.”
I nodded. “You want to go there now?”
“Probably not. Interior doorknobs aren’t a priority. I’ll give Ian a call, see what he can scrounge up and if he can hold some stuff for us until we can make it up there. He’s usually good about that kind of thing, since he knows I’ll get there eventually.”
“What are we doing in the meantime, then?”
He grimaced. “Unfortunately, supplies probably take precedence right now. We should head back to town soon to make sure we can make it to the hardware store and the lumber depot before they close. I need lumber for the new paneling and the hardware store can cut the window glass we need.”
“Do you know how to put them in?”
He smiled. “By tomorrow night, you’ll know how to put them in, too. There’s nothing to it.”
“Until I slice my wrist open on a piece of glass and bleed out, you mean.”
“Good thing I’m a doctor,” Derek said lightly, and lifting my hand, he turned it over and kissed the inside of my wrist. My toes curled inside the pink rubber boots, and suddenly I couldn’t wait to get back to shore.
Of course, once Derek had his pieces of wood for the new paneling, and we had ordered the fifty-six panes of glass we needed, and we were leaving the hardware store and we only had to walk around the building to the rear stairs and go up to Derek’s loft and shut out the rest of the world for a while, the rest of the world interrupted.
“Yoo-hoo! Derek!”
“Oh, great!” I muttered.
Derek chuckled. “I don’t think she did it on purpose, Avery.”
I wouldn’t bet on it. Personally, I think Melissa James, Derek’s too perfect ex-wife, would be just delighted to screw up my prospects for a romantic tête-a-tête with her ex-husband. And not only because I think she wants him back, but because it’s the sort of thing she’d do just because she could.
Melissa and Derek got married in their twenties, while he was in medical school and she was prowling for a husband. She stuck with him all through school and residency, and then moved back to Waterfield with him so he could join his dad, Dr. Ben Ellis, in the latter’s medical practice. The Ellises have been physicians for generations. From what I gather, Melissa did it all with a pretty good attitude, too, probably envisioning herself becoming the gracious First Lady of Waterfield as time went by. That all changed about a year later, when Derek decided he wasn’t happy being an MD, and he wanted to quit and start Waterfield Renovation and Restoration instead. Dr. Ben was disappointed but supportive, while Derek’s other friends just wanted
him to do whatever would make him happy. And, of course, Melissa had a fit. In the midst of all of this, she went out and got her real estate license, and then she hooked up with my cousin Ray Stenham, a local builder. As soon as she had him firmly wrapped around her finger, personally and professionally, she drop-kicked Derek to the curb.
Now that Ray was out of the picture, it seemed that she might want Derek’s attention again.
“Derek! Over here!”
She was hanging halfway out of the window of a loft across the street, waving. Yes, once Ray and Melissa broke up, Melissa had moved out of the shared McMansion on the outskirts of Waterfield and sold it. Half the money went toward Ray’s legal fees while the other half went toward a loft on Main Street, right across from Derek’s and just up the block from Melissa’s office at Waterfield Realty. She could probably look out her window straight into Derek’s bedroom. I made a mental note to put up some curtains. Immediately.
“Derek!” Her voice was starting to become annoyed.
“I should go see what she wants,” Derek muttered. Happily, he didn’t seem thrilled at the prospect.
“Be my guest.”
“You don’t want to come?” He glanced down at me.
“You know me. I like Melissa better at a distance.”
“Don’t we all,” Derek said. “You wanna go upstairs and wait for me?”
I shook my head. The rain had stopped, and although it wasn’t precisely warm, I was all right, for the time being. “I’ll just wait right here.”
“It might take a while. She probably wants to talk about some new project she wants me to do.”
“I don’t doubt it at all,” I said. “It’s pitiful, how she can’t come up with a better excuse than that. After spending six years ordering the Stenham Construction crews around, you’d think she’d know enough other plumbers and electricians and carpenters that she didn’t have to cozy up to you.”
“But I’m the best,” Derek said with a grin.
I grinned back. “No argument here.”
Mortar and Murder Page 4