Mortar and Murder

by Jennie Bentley

  “Did you write it?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “But it’s Russian?”

  “Cyrillic. Yes.”

  “And it’s your name and address.” This time it wasn’t a question.

  Irina nodded, uneven teeth worrying her lower lip. Her hands were so tightly clasped that the knuckles showed white.

  “Do a lot of people in the Ukraine know your address here?” I wanted to know.

  Irina shook her head. “Just family and a few friends.”

  “What about the handwriting? Do you recognize it?”

  But Irina said she didn’t. Wayne put the Ziploc back in his pocket. “The woman in the picture,” he said, “was found in the sea. Derek and Avery found her on their way to Rowanberry Island this morning.”

  Irina glanced up at me. I nodded.

  “The piece of paper was in her pocket. It has your information on it. Are you sure you don’t know who she is?”

  Irina shook her head.

  “Any idea who could have written the note?”

  Irina said she didn’t. I was watching, though, from the other side of the table, and as she said it, I thought I noticed a quick wash of color stain her cheekbones.

  I suspect Wayne noticed, too. “I would like you to come to Portland with me,” he said, “and have a look at the body. The picture is small. Maybe, if you see her, you’ll recognize her.”

  Irina looked like she wanted to refuse but didn’t dare. “Now?” she said instead, dismay clearly written on her face.

  Wayne shook his head. “Tomorrow will be sufficient. Tonight is . . . inconvenient.”

  Inconvenient for the corpse, I gathered, more than for Wayne. The autopsy was probably under way, and the ME had to make the body presentable again before it could be viewed. Especially by someone who might know it. Her.

  “Avery?” Irina had turned to me. I focused on her face. “Will you be there?”

  I glanced at Wayne. He grimaced. More in resignation than refusal, I thought.

  “I’ll be happy to go with you,” I said. “Derek can do without me for a few hours.”

  Irina smiled. She looked relieved.

  “Wonder if I need to send Brandon to keep an eye on her house?” Wayne muttered, more to himself than to me, I thought, when we were back in the police cruiser. I had arranged to fetch Irina at nine the next morning to go to Portland. Wayne would be there, too, of course, but I didn’t want to be dependent on him for my ride back to Waterfield after our visit to the morgue, so I thought I’d better drive myself. Plus, I never get tired of zipping around in the little spring green VW Beetle my mother and stepfather had given me for Christmas.

  For the longest time I had resisted getting a car. I grew up in New York City, and although I made sure I had a license and knew how to drive, most people in the city rely on the subway and on cabs for transportation. I was no exception. After moving to Waterfield and realizing I really needed my own wheels, I still made excuses for why I couldn’t buy a car. Too costly, couldn’t find the right one, didn’t know what I wanted. After nose-diving Derek’s truck into a ditch when someone messed with the brakes, I’d gotten even more scared and resistant. I was amazed at how much I enjoyed driving my sassy little green Bug.

  Now I watched Wayne maneuver the police cruiser out of Irina’s driveway and head down the street to the corner. “Why would you put surveillance on her? Are you afraid she’s going to run away overnight?”

  “She did look nervy,” Wayne said, looking both ways before taking a left on Primrose.

  I couldn’t argue with that. “I think that’s just general nerves, though. Not a guilty conscience. If a dead body showed up with your name and address in its pocket, you’d be nervy, too. And if she was lying about recognizing the girl in the picture, she’s the best liar in the world.”

  Wayne nodded, if reluctantly. “I’d tend to agree. That doesn’t mean it isn’t someone she knows, or knew once.”

  “But if she didn’t recognize her, she wouldn’t have any reason to run away. I guess you’re hoping that she’ll recognize the body tomorrow?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Wayne said, with a shrug.

  5

  I had had to tell Derek about the latest development over the phone because Melissa’s plumbing problem had turned out to take all evening and half the night. I tried not to read too much into that.

  No, I wasn’t afraid that Derek was cheating on me. He’s not the type. If he’d decided he wanted to go back to Melissa, and he wanted to end things with me, he’d end them, fair and square, before doing anything else. But I did feel a little miffed about the fact that he’d spent the evening with his ex-wife, even if it hadn’t been by choice.

  Not that I could complain about the company I’d kept myself; on my way up Main Street, I had run into Kate McGillicutty-Rasmussen, Wayne’s wife, and had been invited to dinner.

  Kate was my first friend when I moved to Waterfield. I’d spent the night at the Waterfield Inn, her bed-and-breakfast, after Aunt Inga sent me a letter saying she wanted to see me, and we had struck up a friendship. It was Kate who had insisted that I hire Derek to help me renovate the place; I still didn’t know whether she’d been trying to matchmake, or whether she just wanted to do us both a good turn and throw some money his way while ensuring I had skilled help.

  “Both,” she said now, when I asked. “I knew you were going to need help with the house, and I knew Derek was the best person to help you. I figured you’d get along well once you got used to each other. And I thought he’d probably like you.”

  “What about me? Did you think I’d like him, too? Or didn’t that really matter?”

  “You’re a woman,” Kate said with a grin over her shoulder at me. “Have you ever met a woman who didn’t like Derek?”

  Now that she mentioned it, I hadn’t.

  “Here.” She put a bowl of ziti on the table in front of me and sat down on the other side herself, with a bowl of her own. We were in the kitchenette of the carriage house, the one Derek and I had renovated over Christmas. “Dig in. So how are things going on the island?”

  “Not too good today,” I admitted between mouthfuls of food. “Did Wayne tell you about the dead girl in the water?”

  She nodded. “He said he’d have to work late. They’re still trying to identify her.”

  “Irina and I are going to the morgue tomorrow morning to see if Irina knows who she is. Apparently she had a piece of paper in her pocket with Irina’s name and address on it.”

  “That’s interesting,” Kate said.

  “I know. Wayne showed her a picture, though, and Irina said she didn’t know the girl. Wayne’s hoping that seeing her in person might make a difference.”

  “It might,” Kate said. “Dead people don’t always look like themselves.”

  “True.” I glanced down. “Maybe we should talk about something else. I’m losing my appetite. And this is really good ziti.”

  “Glad you like it,” Kate said, and smoothly turned the conversation to her special ziti recipe. Nothing more was said about Irina or the girl in the water, at least not until I’d left Kate’s house and walked to my own and was on the phone with Derek.

  He was sick and tired of tinkering with Melissa’s pipes, and although he listened to my story about the scrap of paper with Irina’s contact information on it, and Svetlana who was supposedly at university in Kiev, and the trip to the morgue I had promised to take the next morning, I could tell his mind wasn’t on what I was saying. So I simplified things.

  “I can’t go to the island with you tomorrow. I have to drive to Portland in the morning. If it doesn’t take too long, I’ll take the ferry out later.”

  “That’ll work,” Derek said.

  “Are you all right? You sound . . .” What he sounded was pissy, but he might not appreciate that word. “. . . annoyed.”

  “Melissa is annoying,” Derek said.

  “Wasn’t there anything wrong with h
er plumbing? I mean, with her bathroom?”

  “Oh, it was leaking. In the most inconvenient spot imaginable.”

  I thought for a second. I should know the answer to this. “Inside the wall?”

  “You got it. So I had to cut through the drywall, replace the plumbing, replace the drywall, mud the drywall, and now I have to go back tomorrow night to sand the drywall, re-mud the drywall, and then re-sand the drywall and paint the damn wall the day after. I rue the day I ever met that woman.”

  “You could tell her no,” I said.

  “No, I can’t. She asked me for help. I can’t refuse to help her.”

  “What if she asked for something else? Would you do that, too?”

  “Within reason,” Derek said, his voice a little lighter. “But only up to a point. And I missed you. She doesn’t stand by and hand me my tools the way you do.”

  Hopefully that meant she also didn’t stand by and admire his rear view in the tight jeans, the way I was wont to do.

  “On the upside,” Derek added, “what I’m charging her is enough to pay for all the new window panes for the house on the island.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And what’s left will take a lot less time. We can have dinner together tomorrow night, if you want. My treat.”

  “That sounds nice,” I said. “Anything but ziti. I had that tonight.”

  “I have to work for a few hours and you’re already going out with someone else?” His voice was back to normal now, light with laughter. “Who’d you take up with while my back was turned?”

  “Just Kate. Wayne was working late. She didn’t want to eat alone.”

  “Can’t blame her there. Much nicer to have company. So you’re taking Irina to Portland in the morning?”

  “She asked me to. She said her brothers and sister are still in the Ukraine, and if she has a boyfriend, I haven’t seen him.”

  “Me, neither,” Derek said. “I’m sure she’s too busy trying to make a living. Real estate is a cutthroat business—just look at Melissa—and Irina has a few strikes against her. People are more suspicious of foreigners, and she’s not from Waterfield, so she doesn’t have a network of acquaintances already built up that can refer her business.”

  “Melissa isn’t from Waterfield, either,” I pointed out. Delaware or West Virginia or some such place, if I remembered correctly. Not the same as the Ukraine, but still, not a native Mainer.

  “There have been Ellises in Waterfield for generations,” Derek said, unconsciously arrogant. “The moment she was introduced as my wife, and as Dad’s daughter-in-law, she belonged.”

  Figures. “Did she use your name? Or did she always keep her own?”

  “She used mine,” Derek said. “And went back to her own after the divorce.” He paused, perhaps to wonder how we had gotten onto this subject.

  “Anyway,” I switched back to where we’d been before, “Irina asked me to go with her tomorrow. I couldn’t really say no.”

  “So much for not getting involved this time,” Derek said.

  “I know. I was telling myself this morning that here’s finally a dead body I have no connection to, and now look what’s happened.”

  “Murphy’s Law,” Derek said. “Or something like it. OK. I’ll go to the island without you in the morning, and if what you’re doing doesn’t take all day and you want to come out later, you can take the ferry.”

  “I’ll wear comfy shoes for the walk across the island,” I said. “And I can’t imagine a trip to the morgue can take all day. I’ll probably see you in the afternoon.”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” Derek said gallantly and hung up.

  Irina and I got to the morgue just before ten the next morning. I was wearing my usual uniform of jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt; clothes I didn’t mind ruining with paint, polyurethane, or power tools later on. Irina was wearing her usual uniform of staid business suit with starched blouse and high heels. Today’s suit was black, and the blouse was gray; I wondered if she had dressed for the occasion or if it was just the outfit that was in the front of the closet this morning.

  The choice of black clothing may or may not have been deliberate, but I couldn’t see any signs of mourning on her face. She looked as she always did: composed and distant. Her eyes weren’t red rimmed from crying, and she looked like she’d spent a perfectly pleasant night. If she had recognized the young woman in the picture, she wasn’t someone Irina knew well. I thought I detected a sign of nerves when I turned the Beetle off outside the Portland City Morgue, though. When I opened the door and swung my legs out—for the occasion, I had replaced the pink lipstick boots with a pair of comfy, fur-lined clogs—Irina didn’t follow suit. When I turned to look at her, she was staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed on nothing and her face pale. I nudged her.

  “It’s OK. She doesn’t look bad.” At least the corpse hadn’t looked bad yesterday, when we fished her from the water. Now that the medical examiner had had a go that might have changed. But I thought he would be sensitive to what was a potential relative or acquaintance and make sure the body was presentable. I wasn’t too sanguine about going into the morgue myself. I’d seen corpses before—more than my fair share—but I’d never been to the morgue, and I would have been happy to keep it that way.

  I coaxed Irina out of the car and into the building. Wayne was waiting for us in the lobby and took us downstairs to the cold storage. He did give me the option of staying behind, but Irina looked like she was ready to bolt, and when I hesitated, wondering if maybe I could get away with waiting upstairs, she sent me such a desperate look that I couldn’t in good conscience abandon her. So we all headed down to the basement in the elevator.

  The first thing that struck me was the odor. That sickly sweet smell of death, not quite masked by the air fresheners and air-filtration system. For a few days last summer I hadn’t been able to get it out of my nose.

  “Avery?” Wayne shook my shoulder, gently. “The visiting room is this way.”

  I opened my eyes. The visiting room. Like we were stopping by to see an old friend in a nursing home or hospital. Or prison.

  The visiting room was small, with just enough space for a gurney and a handful of people. A woman was already there: a tall and sturdy lady in her late fifties, with graying blond hair cut short. She was dressed in a white lab coat over green scrubs and was holding a clipboard. When Wayne ushered us in, she nodded a greeting. “Morning, Chief Rasmussen.”

  “Morning, Dr. Lawrence,” Wayne returned. “This is Avery Baker and Irina . . . um. . .”

  “Rozhdestvensky,” Irina said faintly.

  Dr. Lawrence bobbed her head at us both. “You’re the one who found her,” she said to me, tapping her clipboard. “I remember your name.”

  I nodded. “My boyfriend and I came across her in the ocean yesterday morning and brought her back to shore. Wayne took over from there.”

  Dr. Lawrence, who must be the medical examiner, turned to Irina. “And you’re here to see if she’s someone you know.”

  Irina hesitated. Her sideways glance at the covered gurney was agonized.

  I had avoided looking at it myself so far. Not that there was much to see, really. A steel table with wheels, and a white sheet covering what could have been anything, but which was probably our girl from yesterday.

  “Don’t worry,” Dr. Lawrence said reassuringly. “We’ve taken good care of her.”

  By way of proof, she folded the sheet gently back from the corpse’s head. I averted my eyes automatically and had to force myself to look back.

  Dr. Lawrence was right; from what I could see of the body—and that was just the head down to the very top of the shoulders—the medical examiner had been careful to be as respectful as possible. The blond hair was dry and combed, fanning out around the young woman’s head. It still looked natural to me, not colored. I was certain Dr. Lawrence had sliced the body open and taken samples of all the innards, those incisions now decently hidden by the
sheet, but if her examination had included opening the cranium and looking at the brain, I couldn’t see any sign of it. Although I’ll readily admit I didn’t look closely. As far as the face went, it looked just like it had yesterday when Derek had lifted the young woman out of the ocean. Pale and wan, with sunken eyes and colorless lips.

  “Her eyes are blue,” Dr. Lawrence said softly, “and the hair color is her own. She was small, just five feet one inch tall and roughly one hundred and five pounds, and as far as I could determine, she was healthy. She had a broken leg sometime in childhood, but it healed completely, and in a way that wouldn’t have given her any trouble. There are old fillings in some of her teeth”—she handed Wayne a dental chart—“but no untreated cavities, which leads me to believe she took care of her health.”

  He nodded.

  “Other than a few bruises here and there, on her upper arms and one on her hip, there are no fresh injuries on her body other than some abrasions on the soles of her feet. From walking around barefoot recently, I gather. I removed a few small pebbles and pieces of vegetation.” She took a small ziplock baggie off the clipboard and gave it to Wayne, who held it up to the light to peer at it.

  “Looks like just regular sand and rock and maybe a pine needle?”

  “Something very like that.” Dr. Lawrence nodded. “Just what you’d expect if she’d been walking barefoot anywhere along the coast. I place time of death at some point between midnight and six A.M. yesterday morning. By the time you found her”—she nodded in my direction—“it was hours too late to do anything for her. She died from exposure, by the way. From being in the cold water. There was no water in her lungs.”

  I nodded. “I’ll tell my boyfriend. He said all those things, too, and I’m sure he’ll be happy to know he was right.”

  “Your boyfriend must know a lot about medicine,” Dr. Lawrence remarked.

  “Four years of medical school, four years of residency, and a year or so of practice before he decided he’d rather be a handyman.” I shrugged.