Donna looked a little alarmed, and I added, quickly, “Just in case he might have noticed someone. Or something. Or at least whether Tony’s car was here. You never know what might be helpful.”
“Right,” Donna said, but she still looked a little apprehensive when she excused herself to hustle back across the street.
By tacit understanding, we all waited to speak until she was back inside her own garden gate. Then Derek opened his mouth. “So there really was a group of teenagers wandering around last night.”
“Fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds. I don’t think that’s what Wayne had in mind, do you? Would they even know what a pawnshop is? Or realize that tools can be worth money?”
“They’re not stupid,” Derek said. “And these are small-town kids. Not like the ones you grew up with down there in Noo Yawk.” He pronounced the two syllables in the most obnoxious drawl he could manage. “They’ll know that tools are worth money. Kids from around here are used to tools.”
“Fine. Although Donna seems like a nice lady. I doubt she’d have brought up hoodlums. And if they’re the kind of kids who hang out in their parents’ backyard on a summer night, they can’t be that bad. They or their friends.”
Derek shrugged. “We’ll find out. I’m gonna call Wayne, let him know.” He wiped his hand against his jeans before digging in his pocket for his phone. Cora straightened and arched her back.
“I think I’m about done in for the day. What about you, Bea?”
“I could leave,” Beatrice said, rotating her head to work out the kinks. She’s as tall and rail-thin as her mother is short and plump, but they have the same soft, brown hair—Cora’s is short, Beatrice’s long and straight—and the same blue eyes. “I’ll drive you home.”
“I’d appreciate that.” Cora turned to me. “You and Derek are welcome to come over for supper later, Avery. I’m sure you’ll want to clean up first. And it’ll be basic; I won’t have much time to put anything fancy together.”
“That’s all right,” I answered. “We’d be happy . . . No?”
Derek shook his head, still on the phone with Wayne. I turned back to Cora, apologetically. “Guess not. Something must be going on.”
“Some other time,” Cora said easily. “You know you’re always welcome. C’mon, Beatrice.”
The two of them headed toward the gate and the car parked beyond. I waited for Derek to get off the phone. “What’s up?”
“Wayne’s gonna look into Donna’s kids. He wants us to have dinner at Guido’s Pizzeria.”
I blinked. “Is he meeting us there?”
Derek shook his head. “Josh is taking Fae Cameron there. And now Adam has asked Shannon to go, too. Wayne wants someone there to keep an eye on things.”
He must not trust Adam. Or maybe he was afraid Adam and Josh would come to blows over one of the girls. I shook my head, smiling. “I should have known Shannon would figure out a way to get there.”
“She might not care,” Derek said.
“You didn’t see her this morning. She looked upset. I guess she finally realized that Josh isn’t gonna wait for her forever. Might be just what she needs to get her act together.”
“But if he’s interested in Fae . . .”
“Fae lives in California. She’ll be leaving in a few days. Even if he’s interested now, it’ll end soon enough.” And then he’d go back to pining for Shannon. Maybe.
“I guess we’ll see tonight,” Derek said.
I nodded. Guess we would.
10
Guido’s is located in a little cinderblock building on the outskirts of town, down near Barnham College. During the school year, it’s always filled to the rafters with college students. In the summer, things are a little less crazy. Waterfield, like all of down east Maine, gets its fair share of tourists, not to mention summer people: the snowbirds who winter in Florida and come back north for the mild season. But Guido’s is off the beaten track, and unless you know it’s there, you might be excused for thinking it’s a strip joint because of a neon sign in the window that blinks “HOT-HOT-HOT.”
It isn’t. It’s a pizza parlor, and it’s become something of a favorite haunt of Derek’s and mine. The food is good, but more than that, we always seem to learn something interesting when we stop by. I hoped tonight would be no exception.
Things were considerably calmer today than the last time I’d been here. Then, we’d had to use our elbows to get across the floor, and Barnham students had all but swung from the rafters like chimpanzees. Tonight was still busy, but the audio level was manageable, and we had no problem finding an empty booth. Like always, the tabletop was covered by a checkered plastic cloth and sported a candle in an empty Chianti bottle. The waitress was also an old acquaintance: Candy, a gum-chewing blonde with a ponytail and a pink cropped shirt, which completely failed to meet the top of her low-riding jeans. As usual, she all but ignored me, preferring instead to address herself exclusively to Derek. Starting with a melting smile. “Hi, again!”
Derek smiled back. “Hi, Candy. A beer and a Diet Coke, OK?”
“Sure thing, handsome.” Candy swung on her heel and sashayed away, posterior swinging. Derek turned to me and grinned when he saw my sour expression.
“Don’t say it, Tink”
“What’s to say? You’re irresistible.”
“Glad to hear it.” He reached across the table and took my hand, linking our fingers together. For a second, I allowed myself to fall into those blue, blue eyes, and then he opened his mouth again. “So what kind of pizza do you want?”
“Such a romantic,” I said, but I didn’t take my hand back. His was warm and hard and felt good. “Whatever you want. I’m not picky.”
“Something else I like about you.” He let go of my hand to lean back on the chair. “So Josh asked Fae out?”
“While Shannon was sitting on the other side of the table. He even asked her if she minded. What could she say but no? I don’t think she was happy, though.”
“I imagine not,” Derek said. “Was he doing it to try to get her riled up, do you think?”
“I wish. But no, I think he did it because he actually likes Fae. Did Shannon agree to go out with Adam to get back at Josh?”
“I’m sure she did,” Derek said. “Or because she wanted to keep an eye on them. What other reason would a girl have for going out with someone like Adam?”
“I can’t imagine.” I grinned.
After a minute, Candy came back and put our drinks on the table. Derek ordered shellfish pizza with shrimp, mussels, crabmeat, and mushrooms, and Candy took herself off a second time while Derek downed half his beer in one gulp.
“Crazy day, huh?” I said sympathetically.
He looked at me across the table. “It’s just two days since we toasted to a successful week with no dead bodies. I can’t believe Tony’s dead.”
I had a hard time believing it myself, and not in the way he meant. Why would anyone bother to kill Tony Micelli? He wasn’t the most personable guy in the world—a little too slick and self-absorbed for my taste, and way too concerned with ratings—but that’s hardly reason enough to kill someone. Is it?
“What are the usual reasons why someone commits murder?” I asked across the table.
Derek contemplated me in silence for a second before he said, “You’re not gonna interfere in Wayne’s investigation again, are you, Avery?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I never interfere. Especially this week, since we have way too much to do. Although we can talk about it, can’t we? And if we happen to come up with something interesting—entirely by accident, of course—then we’ll have to let Wayne know about it.”
“Of course.” Derek didn’t bother to suppress his amusement. “To answer your question, I think the most common reasons for murder fall into four or five categories. At least they do in books and movies. There’s insanity. I don’t think we have to worry about that one. If there were any homicidal maniacs wandering around Waterfield
, I think we’d have seen signs of it. Beyond Tony, I mean.”
“Let’s hope so. Greed is another reason, right? Someone benefitting financially.”
Derek nodded. “Tony was probably fairly well off. He had a good job, and he owned property. And besides, I doubt Melissa would give him the time of day if he didn’t have money.”
“But they weren’t married, so she won’t inherit.”
“Not unless Tony wrote a will. I have no idea who’d inherit. He’s never been married that I know of. His parents are dead, and I think he was an only child. He’s . . . he was six or seven years older than me, so we didn’t know each other well growing up, and back then—thirty years ago, when I was little and Tony was a teenager—Cabot Street was on the ‘bad’ side of the Village.”
“There was a bad side of Waterfield Village?” Hard to imagine, the way things were today.
Derek nodded. “The ‘good’ part of the Village was the area north and east of town, where the Victorian houses are. Kate’s B and B, your aunt’s house, my dad’s. But once you got past the church and the cemetery, everything on that side was a little less desirable. Those houses were smaller and built later, and that was where the ‘common’ people lived. The doctors and lawyers, and the folks from the old families, like your Aunt Inga and Helen Ritter, they all lived on the ‘good’ side of the Village.”
“Weird.”
Derek shrugged. “A lot of the change is Melissa’s doing, to be honest. She’s done more than anyone to make every part of Waterfield a desirable place to live. People from Portland move up here and commute to work because they want to raise their kids in a small town by the ocean. So prices have gone up, and the ‘bad’ side of the Village has become just as good as the ‘good’ side.”
“Remind me to thank her later,” I said, not entirely truthfully, since we were all annoyed with the new developments and the urbanization of our small town, even those of us who were profiting by the out-of-towners. “So someone might have killed Tony for his money, but we don’t know who. I’m sure Wayne will be looking into that. What other reasons are there to commit murder?”
“Revenge?” Derek suggested.
“Like, if Tony did something to someone? Accidentally killed them, or bankrupted them, or caused someone’s divorce, or got someone thrown in jail?”
“Something like that. He was a reporter; he might have stumbled over some tidbit of information that someone wanted to keep hidden. And then that someone killed him to shut him up. That’d be considered fear, right? Fear of exposure?”
“Sounds like it. But surely there’s not that many people in Waterfield with things to hide.”
Derek stared at me. “You’re not serious, are you? Doesn’t everyone have something to hide?”
“Well, sure. But in a small place like this, it’s not usually things that are worth murder, is it?”
“I would think that depends,” Derek said. “I mean, something that you’d be desperate to hide may not be that big a deal to someone else. Or vice versa.”
“True.” I cocked my head and looked at him. “What would make you commit murder?”
He looked surprised. “Me personally? I’m not sure anything would. That whole ‘do no harm’ thing, you know. Although . . . if someone hurt Dad, or Cora, or you . . .”
“Revenge, then. No other reason? You wouldn’t kill for money or to stop someone from telling the world that you still eat Frosted Flakes for breakfast, or because they threatened to leave you for someone else?”
He looked vaguely insulted. “Of course not. If money was important to me, I wouldn’t have left the medical practice, and why would I care what people think about my breakfast habits? As for someone leaving me for someone else . . . I didn’t mind when Melissa left. Although if this is your way of telling me that you’ve decided to go back to New York and Phil . . .”
I shuddered. Philippe Aubert, aka Phil Albertson, was the boyfriend I’d had before I met Derek. And he was exactly what he sounds like: a fake Frenchman with a little ponytail, tight leather pants, and flowing poet shirts he kept unbuttoned to show off his nicely browned—in a tanning booth—chest. There was no comparison to Derek. None. And also no way in hell I’d ever have anything to do with Philippe again. “Not on your life.”
“Good to know. Here’s the pizza.” He moved his empty beer bottle out of the way so Candy could put the pie on the table. “I’ll take another of these, please, when you have a minute.”
Candy nodded and dimpled and wiggled off with the bottle, without asking me if I needed a refill.
For a few minutes, everything was quiet while we both ate. It had been a long day, and I’ve noticed that yard work tends to boost the appetite. After devouring two slices of pizza practically whole, Derek sat back to take a break and look at me.
“So what about you? Any reason you would commit murder?”
I lowered the slice of pizza I’d been nibbling the edge of, and thought about it. “None I can imagine right now. I’ve never considered killing for money. Wouldn’t know who to kill, for one thing, and besides, I can always go out and get a job. No one’s ever done anything to me that I felt like I needed to get revenge for. I don’t have any deep, dark secrets I’d kill to keep. And although I love you, I wouldn’t kill for you, or in order to keep you. The only person I’ve ever felt like killing, at least recently, is Melissa, and I don’t think I was serious.”
“You don’t, huh?” He grinned. “So is that all of them? The reasons? What’s left?”
I shook my head and picked up the pizza again. “No idea. But someone killed Tony, and there had to be something behind it.”
Derek reached for another slice. “Maybe it really was teenagers. Just random. Wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I guess we’ll find out. Wayne will talk to Donna’s kids this evening or tomorrow, I’m sure. If he hasn’t already. They’ll be able to tell him whether Tony’s car was outside the house at eleven thirty.”
“True.” He glanced toward the door. “There they are.”
“Who? Oh, yeah.” There they were. Josh and Fae. Just arriving. He was holding the door for her, just as a gentleman should.
She had dressed up for the occasion, left the ubiquitous jeans at home and pulled on what looked like part of a Catholic school-girl uniform, slightly X-rated. The skirt barely covered the essentials, and she’d paired it with fishnet stockings and combat boots, along with a black cropped top that left her stomach bare. A red stone glittered in her navel and matched the bloodred, sparkly Gothic script across her chest: Bite Me. Her lips were equally red, and she’d left her hair down in a long, jet-black tangle, with a floppy, red flower stuck behind one ear. She should have looked a combination of scary and ridiculous, but somehow she made the ensemble work, and even managed to look somewhat cute in spite of it. Josh was clearly smitten; he kept looking down at her and smiling, as if he couldn’t quite believe his good luck.
They found a small booth on the opposite wall and settled in. Josh didn’t even glance our way, he was so busy looking at Fae. She was busy looking around, and getting stared at in return. The whole Goth-look isn’t big in Waterfield, and it was possible that a few of the locals had never seen anyone who looked like this before. Or maybe they were staring just because she was a stranger, and because most of them knew Josh and they were interested to see him with someone who wasn’t Shannon or Paige. Candy certainly goggled when she undulated over to take their order, but then Candy was as diametrically opposed to Fae as it’s possible to be, with her blond cheerleader ponytail and her faded jeans and petal pink T-shirt.
I grinned.
“What?” Derek asked.
“It’s just fun to watch how people react to her. She looks so different from everyone here.”
Derek glanced at her and then around the room before looking back at me. “People looked at you that way too last year, you know.”
“They did?” I glanced around, too. No one was staring at me now
. “Why? I don’t look like that.”
The Goth-thing has never been for me. I like color too much to go all black. Like the lime green and hot pink and orange tunic I’d slipped into, with a pair of cropped pants, for dinner. My own design, of course, with black piping and a border of black stick people along the hem.
“You look different, though,” Derek said. “From most of the locals. At first, they weren’t quite sure what to make of you.”
Huh. “And now?”
He smiled. “They’ve gotten used to you. And they’ve realized you’re not gonna break my heart by going back to New York and leaving me.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not gonna do that.” He was stuck with me for however long he was willing to keep me around. It had taken me the best part of a year to get to this place, mentally, but I was committed to Waterfield now. And to Derek. I’d survived the winter, and although I hadn’t enjoyed it much, I knew I could survive it again. The time of turning back on my decision had passed.
Over at the other table, Candy had left and Josh and Fae were staring deeply into one another’s eyes while they waited for their drinks to arrive. They looked like they were having a good time together, just like when I’d watched them in Kate’s kitchen this morning. Josh was talking animatedly, using his hands, and Fae was listening with a smile on her face, clearly hanging on every word. I was happy for Josh; he’d waited patiently for Shannon for long years, and it was nice that he’d finally found someone who appreciated him, even if she was only in Waterfield for a few days. Although the look on Shannon’s face earlier . . .
“Speaking of Shannon—”
“We weren’t,” Derek said.
“I know we weren’t. But there she is.”
Coming through the front door right now. The door that was held for her by Adam Ramsey, who gave her backside a look that was just as much lecherous as admiring as she moved past him with a smile and a swing in her hips. Ted, who walked in behind her, shot Adam a dirty look, and Wilson, bringing up the rear, went one step further and uttered a few words that I couldn’t hear, but which managed to wipe the grin and most of the drool off Adam’s chin.
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