Mortar and Murder

by Jennie Bentley

  “You’re not,” I said, scooting over. “We’re just sitting here talking about Gert Heyerdahl.”

  Wayne folded his long legs under the table next to me. “Why?”

  “No particular reason. We saw a boat that looked like it was headed for his house and got on the subject.”

  Wayne nodded. “I don’t know him well, but I think Reece does. Mr. Heyerdahl contacted him for some information once, I think. Background for a book he was writing.”

  “Derek doesn’t know him, either, but he says they’ve met once or twice. And that Mr. Heyerdahl is weird.”

  “He’s a writer,” Wayne said. “They’re all weird.”

  “Right.” I hid a smile. “Any news since this morning? On the dead girl?”

  He grimaced. “Nothing good. The toxicology report came back and showed that she had tranquilizers in her system. That wouldn’t have helped at all when she got in the water. And I spoke to Irina, and the Russian bride you found is her sister Svetlana. Who is still missing, or at least gone. She’s not where she’s supposed to be, and no one can get hold of her. Irina has been trying all day.”

  “She must be frantic,” I said at the same time as Kate seemed to realize she was missing something.

  “What?” She looked from Wayne to me, her hazel eyes round.

  I turned to Wayne. “You haven’t told her?”

  His tone was curt. “It’s an open investigation. One that doesn’t involve her.”

  “Oh. Right.” I bit my lip. I’m so used to talking to Wayne about his cases, the ones I inveigle my way into, that it’s just automatic to think that everyone else knows as much about them as I do. Especially Wayne’s wife. “Can I tell her?”

  “Can I stop you?” Wayne retorted.

  “If it’s about the girl in the water,” Kate said, “I know all about her already. Avery told me about finding her, and Shannon told me about Brandon coming around with a picture of her, and Josh told me about a friend of theirs who had heard someone talking about Russian women.”

  Wayne rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

  “Who’s Svetlana, though?” She turned to me.

  I told her about Irina’s sister and the entry for Svetlana I had found on the Russian-bride website. “Apparently no one has seen her or heard from her for weeks.”

  “And no one’s reported her missing?”

  “I guess no one realized she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.”

  “And by now she could be anywhere.” Kate looked around, as if she expected to see Svetlana materialize next to the table. Instead, it was the waiter who appeared, with two glasses of water and the menus. Wayne ordered a beer and Kate a glass of Chablis, and the waiter departed again.

  “I don’t think she’s at the Waymouth Tavern,” Wayne responded to Kate’s look around the restaurant. “I’m more concerned that she might be dead.”

  “But that wasn’t her in the water, right?”

  We all shook our heads.

  “We still haven’t identified the girl from the water,” Wayne said. “I spoke to the agent from ICE—she stopped by to introduce herself earlier today—and they have no record of her.”

  “What was the ICE agent like? This was the hotshot rookie you were telling me about this morning, right?”

  Wayne nodded. “She’s less than thirty and gung ho, although she seemed competent enough. Her name is Lori Trent. I gave her Irina’s contact information and sent her on her way.” He smiled.

  “Passed the buck, eh?” Derek leaned back and lifted both arms above his head to stretch. Muscles moved smoothly in his shoulders and arms under the blue shirt. Kate caught my eye and winked. I blushed, sheepishly.

  “I don’t really know much,” Wayne answered calmly.

  “And I have a feeling Irina knows more than she’s told us.”

  I looked away from Derek—he was lowering his arms again anyway, so the show was over—and twisted sideways to stare at Wayne. “You don’t think she lied about the girl from the water, do you? She really didn’t seem to know her.”

  Wayne shook his head. “I didn’t get the impression that she did, no. But I think she knows, or suspects, something about that note the girl had in her pocket. Most likely who wrote it. There’s something she’s not telling me. And she wasn’t happy when I mentioned that ICE had been called in.”

  Silence reigned for a few seconds while we all chewed on this.

  “Is she illegal?” Kate suggested.

  “I don’t see how she could be. She’s working. I assume she’s paying taxes.”

  We all sank back into silence. In the middle of it, the waiter came back to take Kate and Wayne’s food orders and menus, and Derek’s and my plates and dessert order.

  “Whoopie pie?” my beloved inquired, blue eyes on me across the table.

  “You know me. I’m always up for whoopie . . . pie.”

  He grinned. “One chocolate whoopie pie with two forks, please. And the check.”

  “Yessah.” The waiter grinned, too. I blushed. Derek laughed, and Kate smiled indulgently, but only until Derek turned to her, maliciously.

  “So how’s married life treating you? You’re looking a little haggard. Not getting enough sleep?”

  “And by the way,” I muttered, “do you still beat your wife?”

  Kate ignored him to address me. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s one of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ questions. If you’re getting enough sleep, you’re not having enough sex, but if you admit you’re not getting enough sleep, you also admit you’re having too much sex.”

  “There’s no such thing as too much sex,” Kate said. And blushed. Derek chuckled.

  Our whoopie pie arrived shortly—it’s a Maine delicacy, consisting of two soft chocolate cakes with whipped vanilla topping between them; sort of like a dessert hamburger in a bun—and we gobbled it up while Kate and Wayne were still waiting for their dinner to arrive. And then we scooted out of the booth and headed home, both so the newlywed Rasmussens could enjoy what had probably been intended to be a romantic evening for two, and to enjoy a romantic evening of our own.

  I won’t go into details on that score, but the result was another late morning. And since it was late anyway, I prevailed upon Derek to let me stop into the Fraser House to see Miss Barnes and whatever information she had dug up about the house on the island. That allowed us an extra half hour in bed, too, since we had to wait for the museum to open before we could head out.

  The Fraser House is one of Waterfield’s historic properties, a Greek Revival house built between 1839 and 1842 by Jeremiah Fraser, a Waterfield captain engaged in the China trade. It’s a lovely place, full of antique furniture and paintings, including a bergère, a small armchair which supposedly belonged to Marie Antoinette.

  Edith Barnes holds court behind the counter in the entry, a forest of brochures in Plexiglas stands in front of her and a wall of filing cabinets behind. She was thrilled to see Derek and was so busy simpering under his practiced and old-fashioned flirtation that she completely forgot why we were there. I had to remind her.

  “You said you’d get some information together about the house on Rowanberry Island for us, remember? The other night, when I met you at the store.”

  “Of course.” She put hands on a skimpy folder waiting somewhere on the surface behind the counter. “Sign here, please.” She brought out a big book, the same book I’d signed over the summer, when I wanted to take some of the information about Aunt Inga’s family, the Mortons, home with me. Then, I had seen the name of Aunt Inga’s murderer in the records. This time, the name on the previous line was a horrible scrawl, absolutely impossible to decipher.

  “Who had this before me?” I wanted to know.

  Derek leaned in to peer over my shoulder. “Ouch,” he said, “that’s even worse than my handwriting.”

  “Well, you know what they say about doctors.”

  “Doctors do it on call?” He turned his hea
d to grin at me, so close I could almost kiss him. “I’m not a doctor anymore. And Dad has beautiful handwriting.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. Dr. Ben spends his free time painting lovely little watercolors of Waterfield landmarks, and he has a gentle hand, both with a paintbrush and a pen as well as with a patient.

  Meanwhile, Miss Barnes was examining the entry. “That’s Mr. Heyerdahl’s signature,” she said after a few seconds. “I remember now. He came in last summer to do research for his next book.”

  “He’s writing about our house?”

  “Probably just writing about his house,” Derek said, leafing through the slim folder. “There’s information on both in here.”

  “Actually,” Miss Barnes said primly, her arms folded across her scrawny chest, “I believe Mr. Heyerdahl is writing about smuggling.”

  Smuggling?

  “O-ho!” Derek said, eyes still on the folder. “Listen to this, Tink: John van Duren made his fortune as a smuggler before the Revolutionary War.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  He shook his head. “Remember we talked about smuggling once, soon after you moved here? About William King, Maine’s first governor, and how he traded with both the British and the Americans during the War of 1812?”

  I nodded. “We were talking about Alexander Cooper and the house on the cliffs outside Waterfield. Where I got stuck in the tunnels with Philippe and the dead body.”

  Derek nodded, his lips tight. I’ve been in tough spots since, with and without him, but that first one was scary, and he doesn’t like to be reminded of it. I don’t, either, for that matter.

  “So are there tunnels under our house, too?” I couldn’t help the quiver in my voice. Those hours I spent underground, with my terrified ex-boyfriend and a reeking corpse, were forever etched in my memory. Every once in a while, a nightmare will bring me bolt upright in bed, shaking, with the smell of death in my nose, and I’m still not too happy about being alone in the dark.

  Derek shook his head. “No room for tunnels under our house. Too close to sea level. No need for tunnels, either. A ship could anchor out on the ocean and a small boat could sneak in under cover of darkness, straight up to the beach.”

  “Right.” I breathed a secret sigh of relief.

  He turned his attention back to the folder. “It says here that the house was used for rum-running during the prohibition, as well.”

  “Rum-running being liquor smuggling?”

  “Exactly. Big business around here. And everywhere with a coastline. Do you know what the rum line was? Or Rum Row?”

  I shook my head.

  “U.S. jurisdiction ends three miles off the coast. That was the rum line. Rum Row was the line of ships that would anchor there, just outside the rum line, and wait for small local boats to come out and buy their wares. It was unsafe for the smugglers to go into U.S. waters and easier for the smaller boats to outrun the coast guard. They could disappear up small rivers and inlets where the coast guard couldn’t follow. You ever hear the expression ‘the real McCoy’?”

  “Of course,” I said. It means the real thing or the genuine article. “Why?”

  “In the early 1920s, there was a rumrunner called William Frederick McCoy. Some say he inspired the expression, because he refused to water down his liquor to make it go further. Bill McCoy is credited with coming up with the idea of Rum Row.”

  “Did Bill McCoy have anything to do with our house?”

  “I doubt it,” Derek said. “It’s just a fun story.” He closed the folder. “Can we take this with us?”

  Miss Barnes nodded. “Miss Baker signed for it. Don’t lose any of the contents, if you please.”

  “Would I do that?” Derek asked, favoring the old bat with his most charming smile. She blushed but held her ground.

  “I do remember a time or two when your homework went missing, young man.”

  “That was because Ray and Randy Stenham waylaid me before class and took it,” Derek answered. “That won’t happen this time.”

  Miss Barnes let us walk out with the folder, and we headed for the harbor.

  “Do you think there’s a secret storage room somewhere in our house?” I asked Derek as we walked down Main Street. “If they didn’t need tunnels, they might at least have needed somewhere to store their goods. It wasn’t just tunnels under Alexander Cooper’s house, you know; there were rooms, too. Where the smugglers kept their stuff, and probably where they could hide themselves if they had to.”

  “We’ll have to look,” Derek answered, “although I can’t imagine where a secret room might be, if there is one. Cliff House was . . . well, it was on the cliffs, wasn’t it? There was plenty of room below for tunnels and rooms and all sorts of things. The island is a lot flatter, at least down on that end. Up on the north side, where the village is, they may have basements, but we don’t. There’d be constant water intrusion.”

  “Unless John van Duren built a secret room into the house itself.”

  He glanced down at me, eyebrows tilted. “Why would he do that?”

  “You said he made his fortune smuggling in the years before the Revolution, didn’t you? Tea, I guess?”

  “And molasses and sugar and wool, among other things.”

  “But he didn’t build the houses until after the Revolutionary War. Don’t you think he might have wanted to make sure there was somewhere safe to store stuff, just in case he’d have to go back to smuggling? Or one of his descendants might?”

  Derek shrugged, putting an arm around my back to guide me across the street and onto the pier. “It’s worth looking into, I guess. Where would you start?”

  “No idea,” I said cheerfully. “Look for trap doors in the floors and secret panels in the . . . um . . . paneling, I guess.”

  “Shades of Scooby-Doo,” Derek said with a grin. He kept his arm around me as we navigated the uneven and slippery boards of the pier, where the paramedics had wheeled their gurney with its grisly burden just a few days ago. The air smelled salty and briny. Boats bobbed in the water on either side of us, thick ropes groaning as they stretched, and underlying it all was the sound of the water lapping against the piles holding the walkway up, and in the distance, seagulls squawking and boats chugging.

  The sun was breaking through the haze, the day looked like it would turn out to be crisp and clear, and everything was lovely. Until Derek stopped dead, dropped his arm from around me, and breathed a very bad word.

  I stopped, too, a step or two ahead, where my momentum had carried me, and turned to him. “What? Did you forget something?”

  He shook his head, his face grim. “In the water.”

  “What?” I looked around. It took a few seconds, and a nod from Derek, to see what he’d seen. And then I breathed the same bad word myself. “Not another one?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Derek said, looking around. “Call Wayne. I’ll get a boat hook and see if I can snag her. I’m afraid you’ll have to help me get her up on the pier.”

  “No problem.” I swallowed and reached for my phone.

  11

  It took Wayne a moment to respond to the announcement that we’d just discovered the body of another woman floating in the water. I imagined him pinching the bridge of his nose to ward off what was surely an oncoming headache. Then he said he would be with us in five minutes and so would the ambulance crew. I closed my cell phone and rejoined Derek, who had managed to find a boat hook, and who was in the process of dragging the body toward a ladder halfway down the pier, where he’d be able to climb down and get to her.

  “Wayne says to leave her in the water until he gets here,” I told him. “He or the paramedics will help you get her out.”

  He glanced at me. “I want to make sure she’s really dead first.”

  “Is there a chance she might not be?”

  He shook his head, grimly. “Not much of one, no. The ME will have to make the final determination, but it looks like her head is bashed in.”

&
nbsp; “Yow.” My stomach swooped. Derek gave me a narrow look but seemed to determine that I was OK on my own and that the corpse needed him more.

  “Here,” he said, “hold her still.”

  He grabbed my hand and wrapped it around the end of the boat hook. I followed with the other; not because I wanted to, but because I had to, to keep the body steady. I could feel it—or more likely the tide—pulling on the hook, and it took both hands to resist. I planted my feet and held on.

  Meanwhile, Derek swung himself over the side of the pier and fumbled for a foothold on the slippery ladder. I leaned over the railing, watching the top of his ruffled head descend.

  Below in the water floated the young woman. Derek had hooked one of the belt loops of her jeans—Lee, not Gloria—and she was just bobbing there, like one of the boats. Swallowing, I forced myself to take a closer look.

  Like the other woman, she was floating facedown, but unlike our previous victim, she was dressed for the weather this time of year. She wore stout shoes with thick soles, and above the snug jeans was what looked like a corduroy jacket. Her hair was short and dark, not long and fair, and I could see what Derek had been talking about: the back of her head wasn’t smooth and round, but kind of caved in. That thought gave me the heebie-jeebies, so I averted my eyes to watch what Derek was doing instead.

  “Move a couple steps to your left, Avery,” he said. “I can’t reach a pulse point.”

  I obeyed, stepping sideways and towing the body along. One of her hands hit against the ladder where Derek was perched, and he reached down and grabbed it, wrapping his fingers around the pale wrist. I counted along with him. Silently. Ten seconds. Twenty.

  “Nothing.” He dropped the hand back in the water and wiped the water off his own hand on his jeans. “Damn. I feel guilty leaving her there.”

  “It’s not for long,” I reminded him, gripping the pole. My knuckles were white, I noticed, not so much from the strain of holding the hook and the body as from the whole situation. “And if there’s nothing you can do for her . . .”