Fatal Fixer-Upper (22 page)

A month later there was another robbery, in neighboring Thomaston, and this time, the robbers got more than they bargained for. The homeowners, probably alerted by the previous robberies, had hired a security guard while they were out of town for Thanksgiving. The guard wasn't anyone official, just a local man out of work at the beginning of the Great Depression, whose wife was expecting and who had said himself was willing to make some extra money.

He wasn't armed, and when he came across the robbers in the middle of the night, one of them hit him over the head with a piece of statuary. Then they proceeded to take what they wanted, including an embroidered chaise longue rumored to have come to Maine from France in . When the owners came home the next day, the security guard was dead on the floor, and all their valuables were gone.

'Oh, my God!' I said, paling. 'How horrible!' Not only had he failed to stop the robbery, but the thieves had killed him and left his wife a widow and his unborn child fatherless.

Derek nodded. 'They were probably just trying to knock him out so they could finish the job they came to do, but they panicked and hit him too hard, and then they left him there. It's easy to do in the heat of the moment. If they'd gotten him to a hospital, he might have lived.'

'It sounds like you know a lot about it,' I said.

'Not because I go around hitting people over the head. I did an emergency medicine rotation during my residency, and I saw all sorts of things.' He started the microfiche machine moving again.

'I doubt we'll find any robberies after this,' I said, focusing on the screen. 'They probably weren't professionals, and when the guy died, I bet they stopped.'

Derek nodded. 'We've pretty much found what we came for anyway, haven't we?'

'I guess we have,' I admitted.

'You want to go across the street to the 
Weekly
 and see if they've got anything different?'

'I don't think that's necessary. I've got enough on my mind without adding to it.'

'I don't blame you,' Derek said, removing the microfiche from the machine. 'Let's go home.'

'Let's.' I walked out of the room with my head held high, stopping only long enough to hand the microfiche back to the lady at the desk and confirm that Professor Martin Wentworth had indeed been there, sometime in October or November, and had, among other things, wanted to see the to issues of the 
Chronicle
.

17

––'I'll finish sealing the backsplash,' I said when we walked into Aunt Inga's house again. 'I'm sick and tired of looking into the past. You always find out things you wish you didn't know.' Like the fact that your aunt's big secret was that she was sitting—literally, in the case of the chaise longue—on a pile of loot.

'I'll go pick up some lunch,' Derek said. He hesitated for a second before he reached out and chucked me gently under the chin.

I smiled. Nice of him to try to cheer me up, even if it didn't work.

He was gone for at least an hour, but I didn't notice the passage of time. Too many things on my mind, too many unanswered questions. The stolen chaise longue and missing tapestry, the dead security guard, the missing professor, my dead aunt . . . and her criminal past.

To avoid thinking too deeply about any of it, I threw myself into a frenzy of physical activity. When I had finished sealing the backsplash, I pulled out the sewing machine and started constructing lace panels for the kitchen cabinet doors. The large piece of lace I'd found upstairs—Aunt Inga's never-used wedding veil?—was discolored and moth-eaten in patches, and I was grateful, because its condition allowed me to cut it up with a clear conscience. After lunch, I'd ask Derek to start taking the doors off the cabinets and popping the middle panels out.

Mother had told me that Aunt Inga never married. But if she'd had a wedding veil stashed in the attic, surely she must have thought about it at some point. Mother had mentioned a boyfriend, hadn't she? As I cut the old lace into squares and basted and then hemmed the edges, it occurred to me to wonder who Aunt Inga had been planning to marry. If she had ended up with some of the loot from the robberies, which it seemed she had, unless there were two eighteenth-century French fainting couches sitting around Waterfield, then maybe her boyfriend had been one of the robbers.

This led me to drop the lace and open the file I'd gotten at the historical society, containing information about the Morton family.

When Derek eventually knocked on the door again, I hurried out to open it for him and dragged him inside the house by his arm, almost causing him to drop the packages of food and drinks. 'Look at this!' I bounced on the balls of my feet, waving what I had found in the file in front of him. Derek squinted as it zoomed past his nose. 'It's a picture of Aunt Inga when she was young. She's with a guy, and I'm thinking it might be her boyfriend.'

'Makes sense,' Derek said, grabbing my wrist and holding it steady, the better to see the picture. 'She's got a very proprietary grasp on his arm, at any rate.'

I wondered whether his grasp of my arm might be considered proprietary, too. He had his hand wrapped around my wrist, with his thumb against the soft skin on the inside of my arm, where my pulse was beating overtime. I decided not to worry about it.

'Of course,' Derek added pensively, 'so does this young lady.' He indicated the third person in the picture. The old black-and-white photograph showed three people: two young women, one young man. The two girls were dressed in the height of s fashion: calf-length, narrow skirts; wide-shouldered, belted jackets; small hats. One was a tall blonde, the other a short brunette, and both had the same possessive grasp of the young man's arms. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair slicked back, his smile dimpled and devastating.

'That's Aunt Inga,' I said, pointing to the tall blonde.

'I'm not sure who the other two are.'

'The guy looks familiar—so does the girl, now that I look more closely at her—but I can't place either of them.'

He dropped my arm and walked around me and down the hall toward the kitchen. When I got to the table, he was digging sandwiches, drinks, and desserts out of his bags. 'Italians, Moxie, whoopie pies,' he said.

'Excuse me?'

'Italian sandwiches. Cans of Moxie soda. And whoopie pies for dessert.'

'Oh. Great.' I suppressed a face. Italian hoagies are OK, even though in Maine the rolls are split open on top instead of along the middle, like in any civilized part of the world. And whoopie pies are delicious. Moxie soda, however, is an acquired taste, one I haven't seen the sense in acquiring, since Moxie isn't readily available outside New England. Still, I sipped bravely, not wanting Derek to see that I considered his choice of beverage just slightly superior to battery acid and about on par with soapy water. Seemingly lost in his own thoughts, I doubt he noticed, and as usual, we ate without speaking much.

'What's the matter?' I asked eventually, when I'd had enough of staring at the way his eyelashes made shadows across his cheekbones.

He glanced up, a quick flash of blue. 'What? . . . Oh. Nothing.'

'You sure?'

'Sure I'm sure.' He looked back down to his paper plate.

'Because you seem kind of . . . I don't know . . . preoccupied.'

He shrugged. 'Got a lot on my mind.'

I nodded. I could understand that. There was a lot on my mind, too. But I preferred to talk about it. Hash it out. Speculate. Try to figure out what it all meant. By the time he had gotten to the whoopie pie, the food seemed to have mellowed him out a little, and he spoke around a bite of chocolate cake and vanilla cream. 'Wayne called my cell while I was out.'

Uh-oh,
I thought. 'Now what?'

'Melissa. He talked to her.'

'She's back?'

'She was never gone. She dropped her car off at the dealership for some repairs yesterday, and they gave her a loaner. That's why Wayne's APB didn't turn it up.'

'So where's Philippe? Phil, I mean?'

'Melissa doesn't know. They parted ways in the early evening. She assumed he went back here to wait for you, but if he did, he was gone by the time we got here at eight.'

'And so was the fainting couch,' I said.

Derek nodded. 'Wayne said Melissa swore she doesn't have it. And I don't think she does. No appreciation for anything older than herself.'

'I still can't imagine how the two of you got together.'

The words fell out of my mouth without conscious thought, and as soon as they were uttered, I wished I could take them back. However, not only did Derek answer, he answered civilly, without biting my head off.

'I was in med school, and she wanted to marry a doctor. She was pretty, and I was young and not too smart.'

I smiled. 'Kate said she swept you off your feet.'

'I thought she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. I couldn't get over the fact that she liked me, when she could have had any man she wanted. Before I knew what happened, we were husband and wife. Kate probably told you it didn't last long?'

'Four or five years, I think she said. Long enough, she said.'

'Long enough,' Derek echoed. 'It was pretty bad toward the end. After I quit medicine to do this.' He glanced around, taking in my kitchen and beyond, his work.

'Next time, maybe you should marry someone who likes the things you do, now that you know what they are.'

'I'll keep that in mind,' Derek said with a grin, his eyes crinkling at the corners. 'So tell me more about this photograph and why you think it's important.' He pulled it toward him for another look.

I leaned back on my uncomfortable kitchen chair. 'I don't know how important it is, but it seems worth looking into. My mother told me Aunt Inga had a boyfriend when she was young. If she had a wedding veil stashed in the attic, maybe he was more than just a boyfriend. But apparently it didn't work out. Something to do with my aunt Catherine. After that, Aunt Inga pretty much became a hermit. Didn't go out much, didn't allow anyone into her house.'

'Makes sense, if she didn't want anyone to know she had the fainting couch and the tapestry,' Derek said. I nodded. 'I wonder what happened to the tapestry. Lately, I mean. The professor had a photograph of it, so it must have been here until recently. He was only in Waterfield since September. Unless the wall in the background was someone else's wall, but how many people would buy orange, green, and blue tartan wallpaper, do you suppose?'

Derek shrugged.

I added hesitantly, 'You don't think he took it, do you? Professor Wentworth? Pushed Aunt Inga down the stairs and then grabbed it and ran?'

'How much did you say it would be worth? Two hundred grand? Doesn't seem worth committing murder for.'

'Tell that to that poor guard in Thomaston back in ,' I said.

'Whoever the robbers were, they didn't make a dime, since they couldn't very well sell any of the stuff they stole. Someone would have recognized the items, with all the press they got. Except for the jewelry, maybe. They could have taken all the stones out of the rings and necklaces, like the Comte de Lamotte did with Marie Antoinette's necklace, and sold just the gems.'

'The Comte de who?' Derek said. I told him the story of Marie Antoinette and the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace. 'That makes sense, I guess,' he said when I was finished. 'Take the jewels out of the jewelry and sell them separately, but keep the antiques hidden where no one can see them.'

'Until Professor Wentworth came along, wanting to talk to Aunt Inga about the history of Waterfield, and recognized the tapestry, because he'd studied the legend.'

Derek nodded. Apparently this progression of events made sense to him, too. 'I still say he wasn't the type to push your aunt down the stairs and make off with it, though. He had a good job and a nice little girlfriend, and he was a historian. He wouldn't steal an artifact.'

'Unless he justified it by telling himself that they stole it first.'

Derek shrugged. 'Why didn't he make off with the chaise longue, too, then? He disappeared on Wednesday, and she wasn't found dead until Thursday. That would have given him plenty of time to drag it down from the attic.'

'And do what with it?' I asked. 'The bike was in the shed, and his car is still at the condo. You've carried the chaise longue; could he have put it on his back and staggered down the street with it?'

'Not without someone noticing,' Derek said.

'But he could have kept an eye on the place, and when he saw that we found it and brought it downstairs, he showed up with a rental car and made off with it then.'

'I suppose he could have,' Derek admitted reluctantly, 'but I still think that was Phil.'

'Or Melissa.' Derek opened his mouth to argue, and I continued, 'She may not be interested in it herself, but maybe the Stenhams are. They're part of the family, too, and they've lived here their whole lives. Maybe they knew Aunt Inga had these things. Maybe the Stenhams have been trying to get rid of me so they could get their hands on the antiques. They've certainly tried hard enough to get the house. Razing it and developing the land for condos may be just an excuse. Or an added bonus.'

'There isn't much I would put past Ray and Randy Stenham,' Derek agreed. He dug a flat carpenter's pencil stub out of a compartment in his tool belt and turned Aunt Inga's picture over, preparatory to writing something on the back of it. Then he stopped, squinting. 'Is there something written on the back of this?'

'Is there?' I grabbed for it.

Derek held on. 'Come over here if you want to look.'

'Fine.' I got up, hurried around the table, and leaned over his shoulder, trying not to be affected by the heat from his body and the smell of soap and shampoo. 'What does it say?'

'It says, ‘Independence Day ,' ' Derek said, looking up at me. 'And then it says ‘Bath, ME. Inky, Jemmy, Cat.' '

I blinked. 'Inky and Jemmy? Those are the names of the cats.'

'Obviously more than the names of the cats,' Derek said.

'Aunt Inga named the cats after herself and her boyfriend?'

'If he was her boyfriend.'

'Why would she do that? No, never mind. She did it so that when she died, she could write in her will to her heir— me—that she had every confidence I would know the right thing to do about Inky and Jemmy.'

'That's a clue if I ever heard one,' Derek said.

'Maybe so. But what is it she wants me to do?'

He shrugged. 'Beats me. Maybe we should try to figure out who Jemmy was, and see what he has to say.'

'He has to be dead, don't you think? If Aunt Inga was almost ninety-nine, he couldn't be much younger. Not if he was breaking and entering in .'

'Would your mother know?' Derek asked.

I shook my head. 'I doubt it. My aunt Mary Elizabeth might know, although I don't relish the idea of asking her.'

'Mary Elizabeth Stenham? No, you don't want to do that. I'm sure we can figure it out some other way.'

I started gathering the remains of the lunch. I was standing anyway, so I figured I may as well. 'Your dad wouldn't know, would he? He said he spent time with Aunt Inga once in a while.'

'She would have had to have told him,' Derek said. 'He's only fifty-nine, so it all happened long before his time.'

'Would he be able to tell us, if she did? What about patient-doctor confidentiality?'

'That only applies to medical information,' Derek said.

'Unless you're a priest, then everything told under the confessional is privileged . . . wait a minute.'

'For what?' I pitched the crumpled papers and empty Moxie cans in the trash.

'I'm thinking. If your aunt Inga and her boyfriend were getting married, there'd be records of that, right?'

'I think so,' I said.

'In the old days, the church would announce the banns for three weeks prior to the wedding. Not like these days, when you can get a marriage license, wait three days, and then get married.'

'Or go to Las Vegas and get married the same day.'

'So if the banns were read, the church might have a record of it. You up for another break?'

I glanced out the kitchen window. 'It looks like a nice day.'

'A perfect day for a stroll through the churchyard, I'd say. And a chance to work off that whoopie pie, too.' He stretched, both arms over his head.

'I don't see that being a problem for you,' I said, watching, 'but I'm game.'

'Glad to hear it. Let's go, Tink.' He held out a hand.

'Just out of curiosity,' I said, taking it, 'why do you call me that?'

'Tinkerbell?' He looked down at me as we walked toward the front door. 'It seems to fit, don't you think?'

'I don't know. Does it?'

'She's little and cunning and pouts a lot, with a whole lot of yellow hair piled on top of her head.' He tweaked the messy pile on top of mine. I had scooped my hair into a sort of bun earlier, because it was getting in my face while I was sewing, and I had forgotten about it.

'Cunning?' I repeated, letting my hair down and leaving the scrunchy around my wrist for later. I'll admit to being small, and I had probably pouted more than usual lately, but it was the first time anyone had called me cunning. He grinned. 'Cute.'

'Cunning means cute?'

'Sure. Colloquialism.'

'In that case,' I said, 'thanks.'

'My pleasure.' He opened the garden gate and bowed me through. I passed him, glowing a little more brightly than usual, just like Tinkerbell whenever Peter Pan was around. He thought I was cute . . .

. . .

The church, one of those tall-steepled, white New England churches I'd seen in so many photographs, was a few blocks away, and we took the truck. Derek parked outside the white picket fence that circled the graveyard and came around to open the door for me. 'Been here before?'

I shook my head, embarrassed. 'I should have been, I guess. Mr. Rodgers told me that Aunt Inga didn't want a fuss, so there was no funeral and no graveside ceremony. But she gave me her house, so I ought to have found the time to put some flowers on her grave.'

'Now you know where it is, you can come back.' He opened the little white gate and ushered me through. 'The older graves are down here, near the street, while the newer ones are up there on the hill. I'm not sure where your aunt would be.'

'I'm not sure, either,' I admitted. 'Maybe, if we go inside, someone can tell us.'

'Worth a try,' Derek opined. 'We'll have to go in anyway, to find out about the parish book.'

The interior of the little white church was whitewashed like the outside, hushed and cool, with dark wooden pews and tall stained glass windows, shining like gems where the sunlight slanted through them. 'I worked on those,' Derek said. 'Cleaned off more than a hundred years of grime. Took me some time, but I got them looking pretty good, I think.'

'I'd say. They're lovely.' I looked around. 'This is a pretty church. Restful.'

'That's what a church is supposed to be, yeah? The offices are in the back. C'mon.' He headed down the aisle with me right behind. A small door half hidden behind the wall-mounted pulpit took us into the utilitarian, unadorned part of the church, down a short set of shallow stone steps and along a murky corridor. Derek raised his voice. 'Anybody home?'

'Someone is always home in the Lord's house,' answered a resonant baritone from behind one of the open doors. Derek grinned. 'Afternoon, Barry.' He stuck his head into an office on the right.

I followed, a little diffidently, to peer past his shoulder.

'Nice to see you, Derek.' The speaker was a man of Derek's age, a little beefier in the shoulders and with a little less hair, seated behind a steel-and-fake-wood desk piled high with papers. He saw me, and continued, 'And who's this?'

'Avery Baker,' I said politely.

Derek added, 'Inga Morton's heir. I'm helping her fix her aunt's house over on Bayberry. Tink, this is the Reverend Bartholomew Norton, better known as my buddy Barry from high school.'

'Nice to meet you, Reverend Norton,' I said. Barry Norton inclined his head. 'And you, Miss Baker. I'm sorry for your loss.'

'Thank you. I didn't know her well, but I wish I had.'

'We're looking for her final resting place,' Derek said.

'Avery doesn't know whether there's a family plot somewhere or if her aunt's buried on the hill.'

'Inga Morton was buried in the family plot near the southwest corner.' Reverend Barry gestured through the thick stone wall of the church. 'The burial took place almost two weeks ago, with no fanfare. The last of the Mortons.' He shook his head sadly. Derek glanced at me. I recognize a smooth segue when I hear one, and this one was as smooth as could be.

'My mom told me that Aunt Inga had a beau when she was younger. I even found her wedding veil packed away in the attic.'

The Reverend Barry nodded.

'I have no idea what happened, or even who he was, but I was wondering if there is any way to find out. If banns were read, maybe. Just on the off chance that he's still alive.'

'Back in those days,' the Reverend Barry said, 'banns would have been read. Unless your aunt and her beau planned to elope, of course.' When he got up from the desk, he turned out to be just a few inches taller than me. From the powerful voice and the broad shoulders, I had expected someone much more imposing, but the Reverend Barry was at least half a head shorter than Derek.

'The marriage, birth, and death book is in the entry,' he continued over his shoulder, as he passed through the door into the dusky hallway on short but powerful legs. 'You passed it on your way in.'

Derek stepped aside and bowed me through the door ahead of him. We trooped back out the way we'd come in, up the stairs and into the church itself, back up the aisle between the glowing stained glass windows, and into the entry. Reverend Barry stopped by a huge book—two feet by one and a half by four inches thick—sitting on a small table off to one side of the heavy front door. 'It goes back to the beginning,' he explained, and added, before I could ask, 'the beginning of this church, I mean. Not the beginning of time, nor even the parish. Just back to , when the church was finished.'

'That's long enough,' I answered. Aunt Inga hadn't been born until ; any banns read for her would have taken place well after that.

'Help yourself.' He stepped aside and gestured me up to the table. I started turning pages while the Reverend Barry and Derek caught up on what had been happening in their respective lives lately. I wasn't listening with more than half an ear, and as a result, I didn't catch more than half of what was said. Melissa's name came up once—maybe Barry was asking how she was doing—and although I didn't hear Derek's answer, his tone of voice seemed to shut the subject down flat.

'Find anything?' he asked shortly thereafter. I shook my head.

'I started in , since . . . well, you know. I'm down to now, and there's still nothing . . . wait a second.'

He was next to me in a heartbeat. The Reverend Barry, with his shorter legs, took a little longer, but I had barely had time to point to the handwritten names before he was hanging over my other shoulder. 'Where? Oh, yes. Well, what do you know?'

'Huh,' Derek said.

I nodded. A part of me had suspected it, but it was still a shock to see the names there, next to each other. Banns for the marriage of Inga Marie Morton to Hamish Kendall, to take place on New Years Eve.