Flipped Out

by Jennie Bentley

  “I don’t like it, either,” Derek said. When I turned to him, he added, “If it could happen at someone else’s worksite, it could happen here. Maybe someone will try to get rid of Adam.”

  We all turned to Adam, who looked like a male model—for pizza—standing in the front yard, sleeves rolled up to the shoulders so the sun could gild all his visible muscles. I was surprised he hadn’t taken his shirt off entirely. But maybe he was just trying to maintain his tan, and not, in fact, trying to show off his assets.

  Or maybe he was trying to listen in on Nina and Ted’s conversation. They were over by the fence, where Nina had stood earlier, when Wayne and I talked to her.

  “Josh said murders come in twos,” I remarked, “although he seemed to think Nina was the next logical victim.”

  Derek looked at me, brows raised. I ran through it for him while Kate nodded.

  “If that’s the case,” Derek said, “we ought to be safe. If Stuart was the first intended victim, then Tony was the second, and we shouldn’t have any more.”

  I hadn’t thought about it like that. “That’s actually promising.”

  He shrugged. “That’s if you’re right and there’s a connection. What happened to Stuart might have been an accident.”

  “Nina doesn’t think so,” I said, watching her holding forth to Ted, her hands waving and her face intent. He was listening and nodding.

  “Well, I’m not sure there’s anything we can do except wait and see. And take precautions. From here on out, I’m checking everything myself. Twice.” He got up to get another slice of pizza out of the box. “Avery? Kate?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve had enough, thank you.” Kate nodded, her mouth full.

  “You know,” she said once she’d swallowed, “what this place needs is a porch swing. There’s not enough seating out here.”

  “I know. I was planning to get one. But the lumber depot was out when I was there last week. I was planning to paint it turquoise and put lots of pillows on it. But now I don’t know if I’ll have time to track one down. I doubt Derek will let me go off on a porch swing hunt anytime soon.”

  “You got that right,” Derek said, sitting down next to me again with two more slices of pizza on his paper plate. “This is good pizza.” He filled his mouth.

  “The porch needs something, though,” Kate said. “A couple of chairs, if nothing else. Or you could make your own swing.”

  “That’d take more time than driving to Portland to buy one.”

  She shook her head. “Not necessarily. I saw an article in a magazine once where someone had made a porch swing out of an old door.”

  “A door?”

  “It was more of a hanging chaise lounge, really. A wooden door with chains at each corner, and a head rest, sort of, added on. Plus a bunch of pillows. It looked kind of cute. And I don’t think it’d be difficult to make.”

  Derek swallowed. “Drill holes at the corners. Hook chains to the ceiling. Put some scrap wood on for the head rest. Paint the whole thing. An hour or two at the most. We can do it tonight.”

  “You’re taking me to the Waymouth Tavern tonight.”

  He arched a brow. “I am?”

  “Wayne told me that Brandon didn’t get up there yesterday, what with talking to the teenagers and picking up Melissa. I told him we’d ask about Nina and Tony. Just in case someone noticed something.” Like Melissa skulking in the parking lot, watching the couple through highpowered binoculars. Or a particularly homicidal gleam in Nina’s eyes.

  “I see,” Derek said. “OK, then. You can make the porch swing tomorrow. After you put all the kitchen cabinet doors back on.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to be able to work inside tomorrow.”

  He shook his head. “We’ll have to, Tink. We can come and go through the back door. I’ll poly the floors tonight before we leave, and again in the morning, and then we can work on the kitchen and utility room. I’ll hang the laundry room cabinets while you make your porch swing. There are a couple of old doors out in the shed behind your aunt’s house that you can use.”

  “Sure,” I said happily.

  15

  And so it went for the rest of the day. We painted. By now, Derek had finished tiling and grouting the bathroom floor, and it had to sit and dry for at least twenty-four hours before anyone could step on it. Painting the bathroom would be a task for Friday. One of those last-minute cleanup tasks, ridiculous as that sounded. Luckily it was a small room, with lots of tile in it, so it wouldn’t take much more than an hour to paint.

  I finished painting the kitchen cabinets, and Kate and Shannon finished the doors. Then all three of us started on the kitchen and laundry room walls. The utility room would be yellow, bright and sunny, to pick up the color in the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen itself would be a warm shade of creamy white, to pick up the speckles in the new countertop we’d be putting in tomorrow.

  While the rest of us painted, Derek loaded Wilson and Adam into the truck and drove to Portland to pick up the kitchen counter. Wilson thought it was a good idea to get some footage of Derek at the granite depot, and of Derek and Adam flexing their muscles getting the slab of granite we’d ordered into the back of the truck. Adam was less thrilled about the whole thing. He seemed to want to hang around the house, although I wasn’t sure whether it was Shannon, Fae, or Nina who was the draw. But it didn’t matter anyway, since Wilson snapped his fingers at him, and Adam had to jump.

  By the time they got back, it was going on dinnertime. Cora, Beatrice, and Josh had finished painting the living room and dining room while Shannon, Kate, and I had just a little bit left to do on our area of the house. We had to stand aside while Wilson filmed Derek and Adam, aided by Josh, wrestle the slab of granite into the utility room. Muscles strained under short sleeves, and all us women stood still for a minute and enjoyed the show. Including Fae, who had stuck around although Nina and Ted had gone back to the B&B.

  “She wasn’t feeling well,” Fae said, with a flip of her hair.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Fae shrugged, which seemed a little uncaring, I thought.

  The last thing we did before we left was put a coat of polyurethane on the hardwood floors. I passed through the two bedrooms with the big shop vacuum, and then Wilson filmed Derek spreading poly while I moved into the living room and dining room. Specks of dust in the polyurethane makes for an uneven finish, and Derek is rabid about vacuuming and mopping before starting to spread poly on the floors.

  Once he was done, we cleared out, stopping in the front yard to turn around and look at the house. After the pressure washing, and with the new shrubs and bushes in place, it already looked a lot better. With a porch swing with some pillows, and Derek’s window boxes, and the planters on the porch, it would look even better.

  “Not bad for three days’ work,” Derek remarked, putting an arm around my shoulders.

  I nodded. “We’ve managed to do a lot, even with losing a lot of yesterday. Doing the outside work instead helped.”

  “I’m glad we did this—the TV show—but I don’t think I ever wanna do it again. The next time I renovate something, I want to take my time. Do it right. Enjoy the process.”

  I nodded. Me, too. This was a lot more stressful that I’d wanted it to be. Of course, that was partly because we didn’t just have the stress of the renovations to deal with; we had the stress of a murder, and poison-pen letters, and Derek’s ex-wife ending up in jail....

  “Can we stop by your place before we go to the Waymouth Tavern?” I asked Derek.

  He looked surprised. “Why?”

  “Don’t you want to change into something more presentable? And less dirty?”

  He glanced down at himself. “I guess that might not be a bad idea. You want me to drop you at your place on the way? Give you a little extra time to get ready?”

  I shook my head. “I want to come with you.”

  He chuckled. “To watch me change?”

 
Not exactly. Not that I don’t usually enjoy that particular experience. But in this case, I had something else in mind.

  “You go on up,” I said when Derek had pulled the truck into the parking lot behind the hardware store. “I’ll wait down here.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Suit yourself.” He jogged toward the door to the stairs. I waited until he was inside, and then I turned around and surveyed the terrain.

  If I had just come back from killing my fiancé, and I needed somewhere to hide the murder weapon in a hurry, where would I put it?

  The lot was fairly small, tucked behind the hardware store and the yard of the building on the next street. It only had a dozen spaces, and two of them were taken up by a big Dumpster that belonged to the True Value store. Derek’s truck was parked in his customary slot, and there were a couple of other cars sitting around, too; they probably belonged to people who were inside the store, either shopping or working. There was a big bin over by the wall, with a lid on it; it looked like an oversized, old-fashioned saltbox, and it probably contained either gravel or salt or sand for the winter months. It looked like a great place to hide a screwdriver—just shove the tool in and bury it—but the bin had a padlock on it.

  I sighed. The only other option was the Dumpster, and I’d really hoped to be able to avoid that. But as it seemed I had no choice, I wandered over and peeked in. It was full of cardboard boxes and bags of trash from the hardware store. Derek threw his kitchen trash into it, too, I knew. There were flies buzzing around, and things didn’t smell too good. I really had to do some fast talking to convince myself to crawl in.

  A couple of minutes later, I heard Derek’s voice. “Avery?”

  I raised my own. “Here.”

  “Where?”

  “Dumpster.”

  His face appeared in the opening above me. “What happened? Did you fall in?”

  “Hardly. I’m looking for your screwdriver. And the rest of the tools.”

  He gave me one of those eyebrows that told me to go on, so I did. “If Melissa killed Tony—and I know you don’t think she did, but go with me here—if she was there, and she killed him, she took the murder weapon with her. We’re thinking the screwdriver was the murder weapon, right?”

  “The wounds were consistent with a round instrument,” Derek said.

  “A screwdriver. Or something else, but we’re missing a screwdriver, so let’s just go with that. And let’s go with Melissa, just for the time being. She kills Tony with the screwdriver, and then she takes it with her, because she knows her fingerprints are all over it. She takes the other tools, too, to make it look like a break-in gone bad. But she didn’t leave the stuff in her car, because Brandon checked, and she didn’t take it upstairs to her apartment, because he checked that, too—”

  “I think I would have noticed if she pulled a bloody screwdriver out of her purse while I was there,” Derek said. “Especially if it had my initials on it.”

  “Exactly. So she got rid of the screwdriver and everything else sometime between when she left the house on Cabot and when you saw her. Right here.”

  “Shit,” Derek said, following my train of thought.

  “What better place to put it? It’s yours, so no one would think twice about it being here. And the Dumpster belongs to the hardware store; they deal with tools all the time.”

  He shook his head, his mouth set. “Have you found anything?”

  “Not yet. There’s a lot of stuff in here.” I ducked back out of sight to keep rooting through the garbage.

  “You want me to come in there and help you?”

  “You just changed. I’ve got it.” I moved a crumpled bakery bag out of my way. “And I doubt she crawled in and actually hid it. She probably just tossed it through the opening.”

  “Makes sense,” Derek said, just as the bakery bag hit the side of the Dumpster with a click. “What was that?”

  “Something that shouldn’t have made a sound. Unless this half a scone is really, really stale.” I reached for it. Yeah, there was definitely something in there that wasn’t baked goods.

  “Gimme,” Derek said, reaching a hand into the Dumpster. I handed him the bag. He opened it and looked in. “Yep, that’s it. My screwdriver and a handful of bloody napkins. Plus a coffee cup with lipstick on it.”

  “Don’t touch anything. There’s probably fingerprints. Or DNA.”

  “Do I look stupid?” Derek said and put the bag gently on the ground. “Can you see any of the other tools?”

  I shook my head.

  “Let me give you a hand out.”

  “I’m not sure you want to touch me right now. I smell kind of ripe.”

  “I’ll take you home for a shower before we go to dinner,” Derek promised, ignoring the filth to help me out of the Dumpster. “But first I want to take this to the police.”

  “I’m right behind you.” I headed for the truck, brushing myself off as I went.

  The Waterfield jail turned out to be a one-room cell in the new police station on the Portland Highway. Back in the old days, the Waterfield PD was housed in one of the historic buildings off Main Street, but some fifteen years ago or so, the town—and nearby Portland—had grown enough to necessitate more space for officers, computers, and other equipment, so the town built a brand-new police compound on the western highway, a few miles outside of town. It was a just a few months since I’d been there to look at some clothes Wayne had taken off a drowning victim in an effort to try to identify the girl.

  Everything looked the same way it had then. Ramona Estrada, the police secretary, was long gone, home to her husband and grandkids, but a young man, someone even younger than Brandon, was manning the front desk. “Ma’am,” he said politely when I walked in, “Sir.”

  “Hey, Connor,” Derek said. “Avery, this is Connor Estrada. Ramona’s grandson.” He turned to the young man. “What are you doing here, Con? I thought you were at school.”

  Connor’s face had relaxed. “Home for the summer. I needed a part-time job, so Grandma talked Chief Rasmussen into taking me on. It frees up one of his deputies. Usually, one of them has to ride the desk when Grandma isn’t here.” He smiled.

  He was a good-looking young man, with his grandmother’s dark hair and eyes, and a ready smile.

  “You looking for the chief?” he asked now.

  Derek shook his head. “We’re looking for Brandon. This”—he put the bakery bag on the counter—“seems to be the screwdriver that killed Tony Micelli.”

  Connor’s brows arched. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Dumpster behind my apartment,” Derek said. “I want Brandon to check it for fingerprints.”

  “Sure.” Connor appropriated the bag, very carefully.

  “He’s gone home for the day, but I’ll make sure he gets it in the morning.”

  “You’ve also got my ex-wife locked up in your dungeon. I’d like to see her.”

  Connor glanced at me. “Both of you?”

  “Melissa and I are old . . .” I hesitated for a second, looking for the right word. When none was immediately apparent, I settled for the old standby, “friends.”

  Connor shrugged. “Visiting hours ended long ago, but I don’t think anyone would mind. C’mon. I’ll take you back.”

  He moved out from behind the counter, and that was when I realized he was sitting in a wheelchair. It was a surprise, not at all what I’d expected from such a young, healthy-looking man, and I guess I must have shown it, because he glanced up at me in passing. “Traffic accident.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.” He shrugged. “It’s down here.”

  He wheeled and we walked into the bowels of the building, past the offices—including Wayne’s, where I’d been this spring; it was dark and quiet now—and down a set of stairs to the lower level. The stairs were equipped with a lift, which took Connor and the wheelchair down while Derek and I walked.

  Yes, the “du
ngeon,” as Derek had called it, was in the basement. But it didn’t look anything like a dungeon. And Connor Estrada was certainly no old-fashioned jailer. He knocked politely on the door before he inserted the key card in the lock and hit the button for the intercom. “Miss James? You decent?”

  “Yes, Connor,” Melissa’s voice floated back. “You got something for me?”

  “Visitors. They’re coming in.” He removed the key card—it was the kind of lock you find on hotel room doors, with a light that flashes green, along with a no doubt supersecret code he had to enter on a keypad—and pushed the door open.

  I looked in, into a small room, only about eight by eight feet, with a bed—bolted to the wall—a desk or table—ditto—and a chair. It had carpet on the floor and the walls were painted an inoffensive off-white, something like the grayish yellow ecru of Nina’s poison-pen letters. The bathroom wasn’t in the cell itself, the way you see on TV; it was in a separate room off to the side. There was no door between them, but it wasn’t like this little space would be shared by more than one person at a time, anyway. It didn’t look like somewhere I’d want to spend more than a few hours, but it didn’t look too uncomfortable, either.

  Melissa was sitting on the bed, legs tucked sideways, flipping through a home-and-garden magazine. And for being in jail, she still managed to look pretty damn good. Her hair was brushed and gleaming in the fluorescent ceiling light. Her makeup was perfect, and she made jeans and a cotton top look like the height of fashion. There were even diamonds sparkling in her ears, as well as on her finger. When she saw Derek, she jumped up. “Thank God! Have you come to get me out?”

  Derek shook his head. “Afraid not. Wayne isn’t ready to release you yet.”

  Melissa pouted, and the pout got even more pronounced when she saw me coming through the door after him. “Oh. Hi, Avery.”

  “Melissa.” I managed not to smile too broadly, but I must admit that seeing Melissa in jail—even a fairly comfortable jail—had gone a long way toward making my day. Even if she managed to look stunning through it all, and even though I—after a long, hard day of manual labor and my crawl through the garbage—surely looked (and smelled) anything but.