Death at a Premium

by Valerie Wolzien

  “You don’t like Leslie?”

  “Look, my life was damn near ruined by a man. Let’s just say I’m always suspicious of men who are supported by women.”

  “She’s supporting him?”

  “Well, he buys pizza sometimes and picks up the tab at the bakery in the morning, but I think that might be it. I know when I run into Vic at the grocery store, she’s there alone, and she’s paying with the money she’s earned, I’ll bet.”

  “How did you meet Leslie?”

  “Vicki told me about him the night before I left D.C., but I didn’t actually meet him until the next day. I was dumping my bag into the back of my truck, and she came up to me in the parking lot and introduced us. I was surprised Leslie was a man, but being a licensed electrician, I thought you’d be interested. We’d had such problems getting electricians all winter.”

  “Yeah, there was no way I was going to turn down a competent electrician,” Josie agreed. “But did you know they were going to be living together when you told Leslie about Island Contracting?”

  “Nope. I knew Vicki had a humongous crush on him, though—anyone looking at the two of them could tell that. My granny used to talk about people in love having stars in their eyes, and Vicki had the whole Milky Way in hers.”

  “And Leslie?”

  “Look, I don’t want to trash Leslie. As far as I know he’s a good guy: works well with women, treats us all like equals, doesn’t make a lot of sexist jokes. But at the same time he does think he’s god’s gift to women, and he takes Vicki’s adoration the same way he takes her money—for granted. And that’s what was going on when I met him. She had those stars in her eyes and he was preening. Anyone could have seen that they’d spent the night together, but no one said it went beyond that. I did think for a second or two that a lone man on an all-female crew might be a potential problem, but, hell, we’re all adults . . .”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” They had arrived at the office and Josie opened the passenger’s seat door and prepared to hop down. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “No problem. Give me a yell if you think of any more questions. I’ll be hanging out in my apartment all evening.”

  Josie smiled. “See you tomorrow. Bright and early.”

  “You got it!”

  Josie might have said more if she hadn’t realized that her son was waiting for her, lounging on the small porch that connected her office with the street. “Tyler!”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you. And I fed the kittens . . . I may even have found a home for one.”

  “That’s great. Then I won’t go inside. Sam is meeting me here.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe we could talk.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Why do you always think there’s something wrong?”

  “I don’t always think any such thing,” Josie replied honestly. Tyler was a good kid and had never given her any real problems. “It’s just that we haven’t spent much time together since you came home for vacation. Sam and I are going to one of Basil’s places for dinner—why don’t you come along? You can have some of those mussels you like so much.”

  “I already ate. I had mussels, too. Risa was trying a new recipe—she’s always trying new recipes these days. Have you noticed? It’s not like her, is it?”

  “Maybe she’s decided it’s time to try something new,” Josie commented. She wasn’t much interested. All of her landlady’s meals were wonderful, whether she was using family recipes from her childhood in Italy or something she had seen the night before on the Food Network.

  “Yeah, maybe. These were wonderful. I think I’m beginning to gain weight.” He pulled his jeans away from his slender waist and frowned.

  “You look just fine. Listen, Tyler, I can’t stand up Sam, but if you’re still awake when I get home . . .”

  “I’ve got a late date, Mom. Movie on the pier—a bunch of us are going to the show and then out for pizza or something. It may be late before I’m in.”

  “How about breakfast at Sullivan’s tomorrow morning?”

  “Yeah, okay. Nine o’clock?”

  “More like seven. I have to be at the Bride’s Secret by seven-thirty. Can’t expect my crew to work without me.”

  “Well . . . maybe. If I’m up that early.” They both knew he wouldn’t be, and Josie was about to suggest an alternative meal when Tyler changed the subject. “You know, at work we’re making up brochures for the supermarket, and I was talking to one of the old guys there. He said his father used to tell stories about the bride disappearing on the night before her wedding and . . . hey, there’s Sam’s MGB. Guess I’d better split if you two are going to dinner.”

  “Tyler . . .” But her son had hopped on his bike and was off, speeding down the street, pausing only to wave at his mother and her fiancé.

  “Where’s he off to?” Sam asked, waving back.

  “The movies and pizza.”

  “I hope the island police don’t see him—I think he rides that bike over the speed limit.”

  “But the speed limit doesn’t apply to bicycles, does it?”

  “I don’t think so. And I was just kidding. So, shall we head over to Basil’s?”

  “My truck is at the Bride’s Secret, but we can pick it up after dinner. I’m starving.”

  “Why did you leave your truck there?”

  “I wanted to talk to Nic, and it was easiest to do that on the way here, so I rode along with her.”

  Sam didn’t have any more questions, and they rode over to Basil’s in his MGB, top down, the warm evening wind in their hair. “I think I’d better visit the lady’s room before anyone sees me,” Josie said, getting out of the car and patting down her red mop, making absolutely no improvement in her appearance.

  “Basil is meeting us in the bar.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she answered.

  Basil’s place had the best food on the island, but the ambience was casual. Although Josie’s overalls weren’t in the same price range as the average tourist’s Brooks Brothers polo shirts, chinos, and boat shoes, she didn’t look too terribly out of place—once she had spent some time washing her face and hands and tying a bandanna over her hair. As promised, Sam and Basil were in the bar, sitting before a table covered with an array of pastel cocktails.

  “Wow! What is all this?”

  Basil, whom no one had ever seen wearing anything by Brooks Brothers, jumped up from his seat, his sharkskin slacks, red silk shirt, and a Hermes tie wound through his belt loops, causing him to stand out in the crowd. “Champagne, of course. Vintage if Sam’s store carries such, but I thought imaginative cocktails as well. Apple of My Eye Martini. Wedded Bliss Rum Punch. Connubial Cosmopolitan. Marriage Mimosa. Vows Vodka Shots.”

  Basil pointed from glass to glass as he listed the drinks. “We can, of course, serve all of them, but I thought you might just pick two or three.”

  There were at least a dozen drinks on the table. “You want us to taste them all?” Josie asked, reaching for a large goblet of pale orange liquid.

  “Just a sip,” Sam said as she gulped down more than half the contents of the glass.

  “Wow! That’s fantastic! What’s in it?”

  “Champagne, Grand Marnier, orange juice, and cherry brandy. It’s a variation on the classic mimosa.”

  “It’s delicious,” Josie said, finishing off her drink.

  “Maybe we should eat as we drink.”

  “I’m starving,” Josie pointed out, as she felt the warmth of the alcohol begin to ward off the room’s chilly air conditioning.

  “We’ll need to discuss main courses at a later date. I’ve only laid out my favorite appetizers and first courses, but I think we can make a meal of them.” Basil pointed to a table laden with dozens of tiny plates and trays of dainty food. “Soups and pastas are coming.”

  Josie looked at Sam, smiled, and picked up a fork. “I know this is goi
ng to be a lot easier—and more fun— than picking out a wedding dress.”

  Basil pulled a pen and notebook from his shirt pocket. “You two eat and enjoy. I’ll keep track of what you do and don’t want.”

  Josie and Sam managed to consume a huge meal during two hours of sipping and tasting Basil’s best offerings. They left the restaurant and walked out into the moist night air, uncomfortably full and exhausted.

  “Can you drive?” Josie asked, slipping into Sam’s English leather seat and closing her eyes.

  “I stopped drinking over an hour ago. What about you? I could drop you off at your apartment. Can you get a ride to work in the morning?”

  “I think I’ll be okay. After that first drink, I mostly just tasted the drinks. Really.”

  “If you’re sure . . .”

  It was only about twenty-five blocks, but Josie fell into a deep sleep, waking up with a start when Sam’s wheel scraped against the curb in front of the Bride’s Secret Bed and Breakfast. “Oh . . .”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a ride home?”

  “I’m sure. I . . . what’s the ringing?”

  “My cell phone.” Sam fumbled in his shirt pocket and answered. “It’s my mother. She wants me to stop at the grocery store and pick up some butter—she’s baking a cake.”

  “At this time of night? You don’t think she’s planning on baking our wedding cake, do you?”

  “Anything is possible. I’d better get going. Summer hours are long, but I’m pretty sure the grocery closes at nine-thirty.”

  They kissed and Josie fumbled in her pockets for her truck keys as Sam roared off down the street. She was cursing her own inability to find a spot for her keys and stick to it when she appreciated her situation: if she hadn’t spent those few minutes searching for the key, she might not have seen the flashlight beam as someone moved from room to room on the top floor of the Bride’s Secret Bed and Breakfast.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A KEY TO the inn’s front door was hanging on Josie’s key ring, and she wasted no time getting into the house, taking care to leave the door open behind her. Leslie had switched off the circuit breakers on the first floor, but light from the street lamps streamed in through windows and the door, and she managed to reach the stairs without tripping over piled-up debris.

  “Hello? Who’s there?” she called out, beginning to mount the stairs. “This is a work site. It’s dangerous to be here, and you’re trespassing. Hello? Hello?”

  Had she heard the click of a flashlight being turned off, or was her imagination working overtime? For the first time, Josie considered the possibility that she wasn’t going to confront a teenager or two fooling around, possibly drinking or getting high, but someone whose intentions weren’t so benign.

  “Come on. It’s time to get out. I won’t call the police if you’ll just leave so I can lock up, and we can all go home.”

  There was no answer, and Josie was wishing that she had thought to check the ground-floor doors and windows to figure out just how the intruder had gained entrance when she arrived on the second floor landing. She looked down the hallway to the right, and to the left, and was amazed to hear herself making a noise that belonged in a cheap horror movie.

  The apparition at the end of the dark hall looked remarkably similar to photographs of the bride who had made the inn famous: dark blouse, flowing white skirt, long blond hair. But in a variation on the scary theme, the bride was carrying a gun pointed straight at Josie. She screamed again.

  “For Pete’s sake, shut up. Do you want the neighbors to call the station?”

  It took a moment for Josie to recognize the voice and realize exactly whom she was seeing. “Officer Petric? Trish?”

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Josie. Josie Pigeon.”

  “Why did you scream?”

  “I thought—I know this sounds stupid, but I thought you were the ghost—you know, the bride. The rumor on the island is that she walks the halls of this place at night,” Josie explained, feeling like an idiot.

  “Believe me, I’m no ghost. Why are you here?”

  “I saw a light on the top floor and I was just checking it out. What about you?”

  “I saw a light too—maybe the one you saw—but I’ve been through the entire building. If anyone was here, they’re gone now.” Trish was putting her gun back in her holster as she spoke. Josie’s heart was still beating at double time, but she tried to sound in control.

  “Yeah, maybe, but I suppose I’d better look around and see if the intruder took anything . . . Why are you carrying that dropcloth?” Trish, Josie realized, was wearing her police uniform—that was the black shirt she had seen—and carrying one of Island Contracting’s heavy cotton dropcloths, which Josie had seen as the floorlength skirt the bride was supposed to have worn.

  “I thought I heard something,” Trish explained.

  “Something hiding under the dropcloth?”

  “It was draped over a sawhorse. I thought someone might be hiding, crouched down behind it.”

  “Listen, my flashlight is out in my truck,” Josie said, not bothering to explain that its batteries were probably dead. “Could you walk through the place with me while I check everything out?” She didn’t want to start messing with circuit breakers—the last thing any of her workers needed was an electrical surprise first thing tomorrow morning.

  “No problem. I wouldn’t mind another look around myself. We can start upstairs and work our way down.”

  “Great.”

  The women went through the house carefully, disturbing some mice nibbling on old pizza crusts torn from garbage bags on the top floor, closing a shutter that had been blown open by the sea breezes, but discovering nothing out of order.

  Josie was tired, and Trish didn’t seem inclined to chat, so they arrived back on the first floor having exchanged few words. Josie was ready to lock up and go home when the police woman spoke up.

  “You grew up here, didn’t you?”

  “On the island? No. I moved here when I was in my twenties, but I came here for family vacations when I was a kid.”

  “Do you remember this place back then?”

  “Not really. I think I heard the story of the bride’s ghost, but I wasn’t particularly interested. When I was young, all I cared about was swimming and crabbing. As a teenager, the romantic story might have appealed to me, but most of the time all I cared about was getting the perfect suntan—not easy for a redhead.”

  “I know what you mean. I burn easily, too.”

  Josie yawned. It seemed a bit late for small talk. “How do you think the intruder got in?”

  “What intruder?”

  “Whoever you saw,” Josie explained. Apparently she wasn’t the only exhausted person there. “In fact, how did you get in? I unlocked the front door.”

  “Through the back door—it was open.”

  “Really?”

  “I should have said unlocked. I saw the light on the top floor, so I parked and checked all the doors. The door into the kitchen opened when I turned the knob, so I walked in to check things out . . . and probably scared away our intruder.”

  “Strange things seem to happen in this place,” Josie commented, yawning again.

  “You mean the murdered man.”

  “And those dummies that someone hid behind the walls—I’ve never seen anything like that. Although, of course, carpenters frequently find things people have stashed behind walls.”

  “Like what?”

  “Notes, toys; I even found an old real estate sign behind the walls of a bathroom installed in the early fifties once. It’s like signing wet cement—some people seem to feel the need to mark places where they have lived.”

  “Did you find anything like that here? Notes or anything?”

  “Just the dummies—and they were enough.”

  “Yes, of course. I guess we’d better be going.”

  “Yeah, I need to go home and get some sleep. I guess you’
re still at work.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll circle the island a time or two and then head on back to the station.”

  “Great. I’ll lock up the front if you’ll make sure the back door is secure,” Josie suggested.

  “Great. See you.”

  “Yeah, see you.” Josie left the Bride’s Secret Bed and Breakfast, locking the front door behind her, and hurried back to her truck. She got in and drove off quickly, circling the block before parking and taking off on foot through the alley back to the Bride’s Secret. She was in time to watch Officer Trish Petric check the latch on the back door, walk down the steps and stroll to her police car parked in the driveway of a nearby vacant home. The police officer looked around, got in her car and drove off—traveling, Josie noted, more than a few miles above the speed limit.

  The evening had given Josie a lot to think about besides appetizers and alcoholic beverages. Trish Petric may have seen something suspicious in the Bride’s Secret Bed and Breakfast, but her choice of parking place was equally suspect. Rental properties were frequently empty for weeks at a time; any police officer worth his or her salary would know which ones were unoccupied. By using the driveway of one of these homes, Trish had parked where no one would mind—and few would notice.

  But why? The only reason Josie could come up with was that Trish had lied to her: her search of the Bride’s Secret Bed and Breakfast had not been police business— at least not legitimate police business. Besides, if she had seen a light, why hadn’t she called for backup instead of investigating on her own? Josie puzzled over this on the short drive to her apartment, but she arrived home with more questions than answers.

  The sunroom where Risa spent much of the day smelled deliciously of an Italian feast as Josie passed through on her way to the stairs leading to her second-floor apartment. There was a note taped to her door, and she pulled it off to read in private. She headed straight for the small kitchen at one end of the large room where she and her son ate and lounged in front of the television. She realized she was actually hungry, and she unfolded the note as she opened her refrigerator door and peered inside. When she had left home that morning her refrigerator had contained a few out-of-date cartons of yogurt, an almost-empty quart of milk, some wilted carrots and squishy leaves of lettuce, and one very soft cantaloupe. It was now completely filled with Tupperware. Josie put down the sheet of paper unread and removed a few of the plastic rectangles. They were all labeled in Risa’s flowery script: scungili in marinara sauce, homemade sausages with sweet peppers, sauces for pasta and polenta. Josie cracked open the lid of the squid, stuck in an exploratory finger, and tasted the contents. Delicious. Incredibly delicious. She pulled open a cupboard and located a plate, which she filled and placed in the microwave. As her snack heated, she cleared a spot on the counter so she could eat and read in comfort.