The Antique House Murders

by Leslie Nagel

  “I’ve got to get moving, but I’ll be back at ten-thirty for the staff meeting.” She pointed a finger at a blissfully unconcerned Hercules. “I’m leaving you in charge. You boys behave.”

  Charley slipped on her jacket, grabbed a slice of cake, and, with a final wave, headed out to tackle the day. When she stepped onto her front porch, she stopped dead. For a full minute she simply stood and breathed.

  “Now this,” she murmured, “is how to cure a headache.”

  After a brutally cold, gray winter that left everyone exhausted and grumpy, springtime had finally come to Oakwood, Ohio. Daffodils, crocuses, and forsythia bloomed. Everywhere delicate flowers and tender greenery emerged to brighten the gardens and boulevards. There’d been plenty of April showers, but today was picture-postcard perfect, sun sailing across a deep blue sky dotted with puffy clouds. A soft breeze caressed her face, stirring a few stray wisps of curling red hair that had escaped a hurriedly assembled topknot.

  As she slowly descended steps flanked by terra-cotta pots overflowing with gold and white pansies, she felt her spirits rise. Yellow daffodils and tiger-striped tulips bloomed in a double row across the front of the Carpenter home, a cheerful splash of color against dark red brick. She and Lawrence had had such fun planting them last September. Bobby had sat on the porch enthroned in his wheelchair like a benign ruler overseeing his subjects, happily directing operations and soaking up the sunshine.

  She glanced next door. There were no signs of life in the wake of Eugene’s angry exit scene. Thank goodness the yelling had stopped. The tension that emanated from the Sharpe household was palpable. This thought suddenly brought to mind a nearly forgotten encounter with another member of that demonstrably unhappy family.

  Several days ago, well after dark, she’d been standing in her front yard, just as she was now. The balmy evening had drawn her outside, where she’d hoped—in vain, as it turned out—to quiet her body and spirit enough for sleep. Eyes closed, surrounded by the layered darkness of streetlamps and moonlight filtering through branches still thinly clad in this first week of April, she began the measured breathing exercises she’d learned in John Bright’s martial arts classes. There was no sound except for the occasional passing car, a voice calling in the family dog from a distant back porch, and the murmur of the wind.

  “I know who you are.”

  Charley almost jumped out of her skin. She whirled around, heart pounding, her eyes probing the shadows. A figure stood motionless near the steps of the house next door.

  “Hello? Who’s there?”

  When the speaker stepped forward, light from the nearest streetlamp revealed a thin woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a pale, square face. Despite the mild evening, she wore a heavy, long-sleeved brown wool dress, thick cotton tights, and a brown cable-knit cardigan. She had her arms wrapped around her body as if she were freezing. Charley put her age at about thirty. Her looks were not exactly pretty, but it was a face you’d remember, she thought, especially once you noticed her remarkable bicolored eyes. Heterochromia, if she remembered her high school biology. The woman drew closer, staring openly in her turn.

  “You’re the girl who helps catch murderers.”

  Charley was taken aback. While her various exploits had received some local media coverage, she’d never considered the fact that people she didn’t know might actually know her. Upon consideration, that was a foolish, and possibly dangerous, misconception. In this day and age, there was no such thing as privacy.

  She crossed her yard and extended a hand. “Charley Carpenter. I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. Are you a friend of Eugene and Judith’s?”

  “Sarah Weller.” A thin, icy hand clasped Charley’s briefly and was quickly withdrawn. “I’m visiting my mother. And my…half-siblings.” Her mouth twisted. “Eugene is no friend of mine.”

  Charley was unsure how to reply to this rather extraordinary statement. “Well,” she ventured lamely, “you certainly have lovely weather for your visit.”

  Sarah ignored this. “I have an online subscription to the Oakwood Register. Do you help other people, or just the police?”

  “Help people?” Charley was even more disconcerted. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Sarah didn’t answer right away, instead staring at Charley with an intensity that bordered on manic, an impression magnified by her unusual eyes. Brown and hazel, they bored into Charley’s gray ones. Sarah’s expression became distressed, almost angry, as if she were fighting some internal battle. Seconds ticked by in silence that grew as taut as a bowstring.

  “Sarah?” Charley asked at last, keeping her voice low. “Do you need help? Are you in some sort of trouble?”

  As Sarah opened her mouth to reply, a sharp command cut across the evening, issued by a harsh and demanding female voice that sounded none too happy.

  “Sarah! Where are you?”

  The spell was broken.

  Sarah’s lips tightened, and she took a deliberate step back. “That’s my mother. Good night.” She turned and ran into the house. The door slammed behind her, leaving Charley staring in astonishment. After a few minutes of standing alone in the dark, she’d shrugged off the odd encounter and returned to her bed, where she’d tossed and turned until dawn. She hadn’t given Sarah Weller another thought.

  Until now. What was Sarah’s story? ‘Do you help other people?’ She’d clearly been on the verge of asking Charley for help. Help with what? She’d promised herself she would get Sarah alone and find out what was on her mind. Now, four days later, she was a bit ashamed to admit that she’d completely forgotten about Sarah Weller and her hypothetical problems. Blame it on the insomnia, she thought.

  And also on the fact that she hadn’t seen Sarah again. Strange, although her comment about Eugene hadn’t boded well for a pleasant family visit. Perhaps Sarah had already left.

  According to the ever-resourceful Lawrence, there was also a young man in temporary residence, a son of Eugene’s from a previous marriage. Brandon Sharpe attended some sort of military academy. Oakwood’s spring break had come and gone, but private schools ran on their own schedules.

  Charley hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of Brandon since his arrival. She wondered what he did all day. Sleep? Perhaps he helped Judith with the twins. Perhaps he had already gone back to school. Perhaps having all those visitors under his roof was the reason for Eugene’s recent displays of temper.

  “Perhaps the Sharpes and their houseful of half- and stepsiblings are none of your business,” Charley admonished herself, shaking off her reverie and checking her watch. She needed to get it in gear.

  As she turned toward the street, she stilled. A prickle of unease crawled across her scalp. Something born from deep within a primitive part of her brain, the part that had schooled her cave-dwelling ancestors in the ways of survival, was broadcasting a very clear message. Danger! Run! Get away! Since she was not a Neanderthal, but was instead a modern, stubborn woman, Charley stood her ground. Was something wrong? Or was her overactive imagination playing tricks?

  Experience had taught her to pay attention to her instincts, so she began examining her surroundings in detail, seeking out potential threats. Her eyes scanned up and down the street, taking in the houses, the boulevard, the spreading oak tree in her front yard, all the familiar elements of a well-known, beloved scene she’d been looking at her entire life. Nothing was amiss, at least that she could see.

  Across the street, the Douglas girl was out walking the family schnauzer before leaving for school. Four doors down, Mrs. Grant’s old hatchback pulled carefully out of her driveway. She had an hour’s drive to her manufacturing job in Mason and liked to beat the traffic. Birds sang, squirrels scolded and chased one another. All perfectly normal.

  And yet, something wasn’t normal. Charley turned in a circle, her eyes searching. Was something missing? The Mystery Machine, her custom-painted panel van, was safely parked in the garage with the Carpenter family sedan. A fe
w of her neighbors parked on the street, but no one’s vehicle appeared to be damaged.

  Her gaze lingered on the garage as she contemplated her adored Mystery Machine. When her vintage VW Beetle had been destroyed in the Mulbridge House fire that had nearly claimed Charley’s own life, Holland Mulbridge’s insurance had covered the cost of this much more practical replacement. At least, she frowned, it was supposed to. Marc had arranged the purchase and outfitting of the van, surprising her with its Scooby-Doo paint job, a touching show of support for her amateur sleuthing. But the plan was to reimburse him the moment Charley received the insurance payout. It had been over sixty days. Shouldn’t she have seen that check by now? She filed it away, promising herself she’d look into it this afternoon.

  She continued trying to identify the source of her apprehension. She sniffed the air next, remembering a story about a late-night house fire that had been discovered in the nick of time by a sleepless neighbor with a sharp nose. No smoke, but…There was a hint of something on the breeze, a tinge of rot, of sweet decay that might’ve been a ripe garbage can, or perhaps an animal that hadn’t survived the winter and now lay decomposing under someone’s porch, its existence revealed by the first thaw of the season. Not pleasant, but hardly toxic. She sniffed again. The odor had already dissipated, gone without a trace. It might’ve been anything. Probably just someone getting a jump on mulching their flowerbeds, she decided.

  Shrugging off her disquiet as the product of a week’s worth of sleep deprivation, she crossed the yard and headed for the corner, hurrying now to make up lost time. Charley had elected to walk the dozen blocks to Old Hat this morning. Anticipation put a spring in her step as she strode along the familiar sidewalks in her jeans and light jacket, waving to neighbors and soaking up the pale sunshine like a slender flower emerging from a long winter. This first meeting was a highlight of her day, one she had no intention of missing.

  The fiery destruction of Mulbridge House and the murder of her friend Calvin this past February had taken their toll. In the wake of that terrible investigation and its shocking conclusion, Charley had decided life was too precious and too damned uncertain to allow a single “what-if” to slip through her fingers. Bolstered by numerous reassurances from friends and family that she wasn’t out of her mind, she’d temporarily shuttered her vintage clothing business and begun massive renovations to expand her retail offerings to include upscale wedding and baby gifts and apparel. She’d already settled on the perfect name for her newly imagined venture: “Old Hat New Beginnings.” The name felt like a promise. Day by day, tackling fresh challenges obliged Charley to move past the horrors of a friend’s violent death and focus with optimism on the future.

  She’d established a delightful daily routine of meeting with Dale Penwater, her general contractor. They toured the project together, assessing the previous day’s progress, dealing with the inevitable questions, problems, and surprises inherent in ripping into an old building, and discussing plans for the day ahead.

  This day, however, had plans of its own. The sight that greeted her as she stepped through her shop’s bright green door had all of her good feelings draining away like a tub full of dirty dishwater. As she surveyed the carnage, Charley Carpenter understood for the first time how someone could contemplate murder.

  Not that she minded a little chaos. Over the past weeks, she’d become accustomed to the destruction and general disarray that came with a major remodeling project. In fact, she embraced it. Each demolished wall, every Dumpster-load of old flooring and outdated lighting was another messy yet necessary step toward the realization of her dream.

  But there was demolition, and then there was destruction. No question which one confronted her now.

  A temporary worktable constructed of plywood and sawhorses had apparently collapsed overnight, dumping several buckets of paint onto the concrete subfloor. At least four of the buckets had burst open on impact, geysering gallons of viscous peach-colored liquid over bare, unprimed drywall. A collection of cardboard crates containing brand-new wood laminate flooring had been generously splashed with paint, as had the pile of long wooden trim pieces stacked in a corner, awaiting installation around baseboards and doorways.

  “What the hell happened?” Charley knew her tone sounded accusatory, but at the moment she didn’t really give a damn. The headache that had begun to recede during her walk came roaring back.

  Dale Penwater was several inches shorter than Charley, compact and wiry in the manner of men whose lives have been spent on hard work and few luxuries. His was one of those ageless faces, weathered and creased, with alert brown eyes that saw everything and gave little away. He had a habit of pausing before responding to any question. When he finally spoke, each word was well chosen and to the point. Busy men, he seemed to imply, had no time for idle chitchat.

  Charley had never seen him lose his temper, but she could tell Penwater was angry now. He stood with arms tightly folded, steel-toed boots planted wide, eyes narrowed, strong jaw flexing. As usual, he skipped the obvious and cut to the chase.

  “Lost over five hundred dollars of custom-tinted paint,” he said shortly. “Laminate in those boxes is mostly undamaged. We’ll need to scrape the subfloor, clean and seal that wall before we can prime. Same with the trim.”

  Time and money, she thought grimly. “How long will this set us back?”

  Penwater grunted. “A day, maybe two.” He glanced at her sideways. “This time.”

  And there it was. The same suspicion Charley had been flirting with for weeks but hadn’t yet dared to put into words.

  This was no accident.

  Her project had been plagued by a series of “mishaps” almost from the very beginning. Lost equipment turning up days later, materials delivered to the wrong address, a mysterious electrical outage that shut down the job for two days, the discovery of a live corn snake inside one of the demolished walls—that last one had required a costly visit from a specialty exterminator. The idea that she’d been cohabiting with a snake for the last three years still gave Charley the heebie-jeebies.

  “You think it was deliberate.” She spoke softly, though none of Penwater’s work crew was in sight at the moment. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. All the delays, the accidents? I mean, no one’s luck is this bad.”

  “Mine surely isn’t,” Penwater said sourly. “In thirty-nine years, I’ve never…” He scowled. “I run a safe jobsite, Miss Carpenter. Always have. I send my men home, then I personally make sure the site is cleaned up and squared away. Equipment powered off, materials secured.”

  “No sign of a break-in?” she asked.

  “This is a construction site, not Fort Knox. You’ve got four points of entry now, and I haven’t installed any of the upgraded hardware yet.” He waved a hand, taking in the arched opening to their left. As a key part of her ambitious expansion, Charley had leased the vacant shop next door, doubling her retail space. The departure of the former tenant just after the New Year had been an added impetus to her plans. It meant more financial risk, but also more potential reward. It also meant she now had to secure two front doors as well as two rear exits. Penwater concluded, “Nothing was forced open, at least as far as I can tell. But if a bunch of damned kids want inside a place, they’ll figure out how to weasel their way in.”

  Charley was shaking her head even before he stopped speaking. “I don’t think kids are doing this, Dale. Paint? What teenager could have resisted the urge to write something in all that? We haven’t got so much as a smiley face.”

  “Maybe they were interrupted and took off before they could finish what they started.”

  “Maybe.”

  She’d been reluctant to voice the idea of sabotage, as if putting it into words would make it true. Now that the idea was out there, she felt an odd sense of relief, as though acknowledging the possibility finally gave her permission to tackle the situation head-on. She was also royally pissed. Someone was screwing with her, and she intended to
find out who. And why.

  For the first time, Charley assessed the space like a crime scene. It was a skill she’d had reason to cultivate in recent months. She glanced around, noting the expensive power equipment set up against one wall. “It’s pretty clear theft isn’t the motive,” she began. “Nothing’s ever been stolen, and there’s plenty in here worth taking. For that matter, none of the damage has actually been that serious. Mostly, it’s just cost us time. It’s almost as if…” She paused, startled at this new idea. “It’s as if someone wants this project to drag on without actually halting the work. Who would benefit from that?”

  “Benefit?” Penwater removed one of his vast collection of John Deere caps and smoothed neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair as he considered her question. After the requisite pause he said slowly, “The client—you—puts down a third in cash up front for materials. But I don’t get paid in full until the job’s complete.” He resettled his hat. “That means neither do my men, beyond a basic draw for living expenses. It’s not like I’m paying them by the hour.”

  “So, none of your people,” Charley agreed. Her mind sorted through possibilities. “How about enemies? Competitors? Anyone like that?”

  Before he could respond, they were joined by a young man entering through the archway. He wheeled a large trash bin filled with cleaning equipment. Parking it well clear of the now mostly dried lake of spilled paint, he began unloading supplies that included rags, scrapers, cleaning fluid, and a squeegee.

  “Duncan and I will handle the cleanup. If we hit it hard, we’ll be able to apply sealer today so it can dry overnight. The fumes are pretty strong, so once we—” Penwater’s cellphone rang. “Flooring crew. Got to tell them not to bother coming by.” As he stepped away to take the call, Charley turned toward the new arrival.

  “Good morning, Duncan. Looks like you’re stuck with another rescue mission.”

  He glanced up, large brown eyes wide. “Rescue mission? I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t—”