Mortar and Murder

by Jennie Bentley

  No kidding. “How did you get away? Did you have to escape, or did the guy let you go?”

  “I escaped. The same night he brought me there. He had a heart attack, and I called nine-one-one and then I ran away. I didn’t want to be sent back to Ukraine.”

  “Oh, my God.” I sat up straight, the plastic crinkling under my butt. “What did you do?”

  I couldn’t imagine finding myself in that situation: practically broke, in a strange place, knowing no one and unable to go to the police for fear of being arrested and deported.

  Irina avoided my eyes. “Walked to Augusta. Slept outside for a few nights until I found a shelter. They sent me to Portland. Eventually I found a job and a place to stay.”

  There must be a lot more to the story than those few terse sentences, but it was beyond obvious that she didn’t want to go into detail. “What happened to the guy?”

  “Mr. Eagan?” Her lips thinned. “He died. The ambulance got there too late.”

  “Did you tell Agent Trent all this?”

  Irina nodded. “And then I told her about that night at Shaw’s Supermarket, and that I recognized the voice of a man from”—she hesitated—“the organization. The people who brought me here. One of the men in charge.”

  I nodded.

  “You told me the man behind you was Gert Heyerdahl’s caretaker, so I told Agent Trent that. She said she was going to take the ferry from Portland to Rowanberry Island and have a look around. Pretend to be a visitor, you know? I told her about you and Derek, and that she could say she had come to see you if anyone asked.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I thought so,” Irina said, her eyes shiny now. “I asked to go along, in case she found Svetlana, but she said no. If I had recognized the man, he might have recognized me, too, and she didn’t want us to be seen together. So I let her leave and found my backpack and sleeping bag and took the next ferry from Waterfield. I thought I could follow her, you know? I thought she might get into trouble, and maybe I could help. I’ve known about the smuggling for three years, and I haven’t done anything to stop it. I’ve been too afraid. But this time I wasn’t. I wanted to help. So I followed on the next ferry. But I didn’t see her on the way, and when I got here, she wasn’t here, either. She never came.”

  I wrinkled my brows. “How do you know that?”

  “He told me,” Irina said.

  “He? Who?”

  “Me,” a gravelly voice said from the doorway. It added, precisely, “Or rather, I.”

  19

  I froze. I hadn’t even heard him come inside, let alone up the stairs and over to the door. And he looked threatening standing there, still in those padded coveralls and with that ski mask on his head, ready to pull down over his face. It was grim. The face, I mean. The really scary part, though, was the gun. It wasn’t pointed at me—not precisely—but it wasn’t exactly pointed anywhere else, either. It was in his hand, sort of hanging there, ready to come into play at any moment.

  “This is Avery,” Irina said into the silence.

  He nodded, those muddy brown eyes flickering over at her for a tenth of a second before coming back to me. “We’ve met.”

  “Of course.”

  Silence reigned for another moment, only punctuated by the beating of my heart, surely loud enough for them both to hear. I tried not to look at the gun, but it was difficult.

  “You won’t need that,” Irina added.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded. “Just put it away, please. It’s making Avery nervous.”

  No kidding. As soon as the gun was out of sight in a pocket of the coveralls, I felt myself starting to breathe easier.

  Even so, it took me a few seconds to get my voice to cooperate.

  “What’s going on?” I looked from one to the other of them.

  They looked at one another.

  “I think I’m missing something,” I explained. “See, I thought you”—I looked at the man in the doorway—“were helping Irina smuggle Svetlana and her friends onto Rowanberry Island and hiding them in the secret room in Derek’s and my house, and then, when we started fixing the place up, you moved them here, since Gert Heyerdahl was away until summer and the place was just sitting here, empty, and that’s why you were so standoffish when I came and asked to see the house. And then, when one of the girls got away and drowned, and ICE was called in, and Lori Trent caught on to what was happening, I thought the two of you killed her. But now I’m not so sure anymore.”

  They looked at one another again. After a second, Irina smiled. Her friend blushed.

  “Avery”—Irina turned to me, her lips twitching—“this is Gerhardt Heyerdahl. He’s been staying here all winter.”

  “You’re kidding.” I stared at him, up and down a few times. “You don’t look anything like the picture in your books.”

  “You’ve read my books?”

  “My boyfriend’s read your books. I like cozy mysteries.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “That picture is fifteen years old. I don’t look like that anymore.”

  No kidding. He must have lost fifty pounds, easily, and he’d shaved off the beard, which had obscured most of his face, and cut his hair. It was amazing the difference it made.

  “Here.” He stuck his hand in his pocket—I stiffened—and came out with a wallet (not the gun). “My driver’s license.”

  It was from Florida, and the face was the one he sported now, sans beard and with a healthy tan. The name identified him as Gerhardt Heyerdahl, with an address in Miami.

  “Thank you.” I handed it back. So he really was Gert Heyerdahl. But did that mean that he wasn’t involved in the smuggling?

  Not necessarily, I thought.

  “Gert realized something was going on last year,” Irina explained while Gert put the driver’s license back in his wallet and the wallet back in his pocket. “But he didn’t know what. So this fall, he decided to make it look like he’d gone back to Florida, but instead he’d stay on the island and try to figure things out.”

  I looked around. “You’ve been living here all winter? With the shutters closed?”

  Gert Heyerdahl nodded.

  “I guess that explains Pepper. I thought it was strange that you’d leave her here when everyone said you always take her with you when you leave.”

  “You’ve seen Pepper?”

  “Yesterday. In the village. I think I have one of her kittens living at my house.”

  “You can bring it here,” Gert said.

  “That’s OK. I think I’ll keep it, if that’s OK. I have two cats at home that I inherited from my aunt, but they’re not very friendly. I’m hoping maybe the kitten will be nicer.”

  Gert nodded.

  “So if you didn’t kill Agent Trent”—I looked from one to the other of them—“who did? And what’s with the gun?”

  They looked at each other.

  “Protection,” Gert said. “Bad stuff going on.”

  For a bestselling author, he wasn’t very eloquent.

  Irina nodded. “When we find Svetlana, they may not want to let her just walk out. The gun will help.”

  “You have a permit for it, I hope? If not, you’re not supposed to have it.”

  Gert informed me that he did. The gun was owned fair and square, leftover from a period a few years ago when he’d acquired a rabid fan who wouldn’t leave him alone.

  “I realized that something strange was going on last year,” he explained. “I was doing some research into smuggling, because my next book has to do with human trafficking, and I was looking into the history of Rowanberry Island. Did you know that John van Duren, who built both our houses, was a smuggler?”

  I nodded. “I saw your signature on the list of people who had taken out the file from the Historical Society before me. Have you explored your secret room yet?”

  “I didn’t know I had a secret room,” Gert said.

  “Well, I don’t know that you do. But the houses are supposed to b
e identical. And we have a secret room. Just a little one. Behind the chimneys. The entrance to ours is from a built-in cabinet in the kitchen.”

  “Show me.” He turned and walked down the hall, without waiting for me to answer. I glanced at Irina, who was still sitting on the bed. She shrugged.

  “Sure.” I uncoiled myself from the chair and crinkly plastic and trotted after Gert. Irina got up from the bed and followed.

  The houses were identical, at least originally. But when Gert’s house went through remodeling before he moved in, he’d had someone redo the built-in cabinets along with the rest of the kitchen to where the shelves were now securely fastened to the walls and didn’t come out. I guess they hadn’t realized the shelves were loose for a reason. There was no way into the cabinet anymore. At least not for Gert, who—even pared down—was much too big to squeeze between the shelves. Even Irina had a problem fitting herself in. I was small enough to slither through, though, on my belly on the floor, like a snake. Clutching a high-powered flashlight.

  The lever—in the same spot as ours—was stuck from years of no use, and the secret door opened with a grating squeal of dry hinges. But it opened, enough that I could squeeze through and into the secret room.

  It wasn’t until I was inside that I realized that they could lock me in here and no one would ever know where I was. If the Russian girls had been kept in the secret room in our house and hadn’t been able to get out, then chances were there was no egress. No matching lever on the inside. If John van Duren and his sons-in-law had used the rooms for storage of illicit goods, it wasn’t like they’d need a way to open the door from inside, was there? Although, just in case something went wrong and they accidentally locked themselves in—if the secret door slammed closed from a gust of wind or something—or if John thought he might have to hide his family in the room to keep them safe while something was going on outside, and he was worried that something might happen to him before he could get back and let them out . . . surely he would have incorporated a second lever inside? Wouldn’t he?

  I never had occasion to find out, because Irina and Gert made no move to lock the secret door behind me. They just stood at the entrance to the cabinet, peering into the darkness after me. “Anything?” Gert said.

  I got to my feet and flashed the light around.

  The inside of Gert’s secret room looked just like ours. Small and square, with red-brick walls, a brick ceiling, and wide plank floors. There was no mattress here, though. No one had been living here, at least not recently. There was a layer of dust, like velvet, thick on the floor and on a couple of boxes over in the corner. Wooden boxes, not cardboard. Crates. I walked over to them, noting the marks my footsteps made in the dust. No one else had been here in the time—years—it had taken for almost an inch of dust to settle on everything.

  I raised my voice. “A couple of crates in the corner. Too heavy to carry. I’ll push them out to you.”

  I started maneuvering the closest box across the floor toward the door. From the faint tinkling noises it made as I shoved it, it sounded like there was glassware inside. Maybe some long-ago householder had used the secret room as a butler’s pantry or storage room, for the “good” china.

  Gert stood ready to grab the crate and pull it the rest of the way into the kitchen, and I went back for the other while he and Irina opened the first. I could hear the nails scream as they pried off the wooden lid.

  “Bottles,” Irina announced.

  “Rum,” Gert added.

  “No kidding?” I was pushing the second crate across the plank floor now. It was making the same tinkling noises as the first. “Must be Mr. van Duren’s stuff.”

  “It’s not old enough,” Gert said. “This is from the prohibition. 1920s. Rum-running.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Haven’t you read the file from the Historical Society?” He took the second crate from me and hauled it into the kitchen. I went back to make sure there were no more.

  “Not very well,” I admitted as I flashed the beam around. No, nothing else in here. “I looked at it a little over lunch yesterday, but after that we got busy, and I left it in Derek’s truck overnight. The truck that he took to the Appalachian Trail this morning.”

  I got down on my stomach and elbows and slithered back through the cabinet, under the lowest shelf, into the kitchen, leaving the secret room open behind me.

  “More liquor,” Irina explained when I came out, brushing dust and maybe even some cobwebs off my hair. Brrr.

  “Jeb Perkins was a rumrunner,” Gert said, peering at a bottle he’d lifted from the crate and held up to the light. “He owned this house in the early part of the century. In fact, all of Rowanberry Island was involved. Everyone benefited from the smuggling Jeb did, so everyone kept their mouths shut and helped out. Were there bottles in your secret room, too?” He glanced over at me.

  I shook my head. “Just an old mattress and some blankets. And a piece of paper with Cyrillic writing on it.”

  “What did it say?” Irina wanted to know.

  I glanced at her. “Your sister’s name. And two others. Katya and Olga. I can’t remember their last names.”

  “They were there.”

  I nodded. “Must have been. A couple of weeks ago, anyway. The names were written on a page from the Boothbay Harbor newspaper, and it had a date on it. Late March. But we started work on the house on April first, and the girls must have been moved somewhere else. I thought they were here”—I looked around—“but obviously they’re not.”

  Gert and Irina both shook their heads. I looked closely at Gert—I still didn’t quite trust him the way Irina seemed to; unless Irina just seemed to and they were both playing me—but if he was lying, I couldn’t tell.

  “Why would you suspect me?” he asked, plaintively.

  “Other than the fact that you were extremely standoffish when I first met you? And that the house was tightly shuttered? And you had a boat with a cabin below deck, perfect for transporting illegal cargo? And that it was the night after I was here that that poor girl drowned?”

  “Ah,” Gert said, following my reasoning with no problem, “you thought she’d heard you outside and realized someone was nearby, and she tried to find you?”

  I nodded. Trust the thriller writer to figure out that sequence of events without being told. Unless the dead girl really had been here, and that’s how he knew exactly what had happened....

  My head was starting to spin from the various permutations of possibilities. Could I trust this guy? Was he telling the truth? Was Irina? Had he duped her, too, or was she in on it with him? Or was he truly just trying to figure things out, too?

  I’ve always been a pretty trusting type of person. Naive, if you prefer. I tend to see everyone the way they present themselves to me, and I’m not particularly good at looking past the obvious and suspecting nice people of doing bad things. That’s the biggest reason why, until I met Derek, my love life was one long line of disappointments as the nice guys I thought I knew turned out not to be nice at all. The cheating bastards.

  Anyway, I’m not good at being suspicious. I take things at face value and proceed accordingly. Much as I wanted to, I had a hard time putting aside the fact that I’d always liked Irina—and the fact that Irina seemed to like Gert—and go on the assumption that they were both trying to fool me.

  “Did you go anywhere else that day?” Gert asked, obviously following his train of thought to its logical conclusion. If the girl had seen or heard me that day—and that was by no means a sure thing; it might have been a coincidence, pure and simple—but if she had, and it hadn’t been here at Gert’s house, then she must have seen me somewhere else.

  I shook my head. “Just here and back. Derek and I came out in the boat that morning, I didn’t take the ferry, so all I did was walk from our house to yours and then back again.” I paused, remembering. “Except . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I took a wrong turn on the way bac
k and ended up in front of a little saltbox house. I think it used to belong to John van Duren. You know, the original van Duren house. Where Daisy and Clara grew up.”

  “I know what you’re talking about.” Gert nodded. “A little overgrown saltbox about halfway between our two houses. Lon Wilson owns it, but he’s usually away in the winter.”

  “So . . . if someone used our house while it was empty, you think it’s possible that they might have used Mr. Wilson’s house while he’s been away, too?”

  “You suspected them of using my house while I was away,” Gert pointed out, “so yes.”

  “I suspected you of using your house while you were away. It’s not exactly the same thing.”

  Irina was looking from one to the other of us, impatiently. “Who cares who thought what about whom? Where is this place? I want to see it.”

  “They’re probably not there anymore,” Gert warned even as he walked toward the door to the dining room. Irina followed and I brought up the rear, brushing ineffectually at my pants. Between the mud earlier and the dust now, I looked like I was growing mold.

  “I’m sure as soon as that poor girl died,” Gert added, “they would have moved the other women out. Maybe even off island.”

  “I still want to see it,” Irina said stubbornly.

  “Of course.” Gert held the front door open for her. I scuttled through, too, and we headed around the house, aiming for the path I knew was there, even if I couldn’t see it in the fog.

  By now, the pea soup was thick enough that unless we stayed together, we’d lose one another in a matter of seconds. Irina and I held hands as we stumbled through the woods, and the flashlight I still carried from earlier did nothing except illuminate Gert’s back five feet ahead of us as he led the way down the path. Trees and branches came and went nearby; once in a while one of them would materialize out of the fog fast enough to make me jump, my heart accelerating nervously.

  Irina was jumpy, too. Her palm was sweaty, and whenever something unexpected would loom out of the fog—like a big branch close to the path—she’d catch her breath fast and tighten her grip on my hand.