Fatal Fixer-Upper (9 page)
Authors: Jennie Bentley
'But he's been doing this a lot longer than you. He knows his business. Just don't let him talk you into using real milk paint when it comes time to paint the walls. It stinks to high heaven and is really hard to apply. Unless you buy the powdered kind; that's not so bad. But he talked me into painting my kitchen with the real thing, put together from old, curdled milk and lime and powdered brick. It's beautiful, and it'll last forever, but what a horrible experience!'
'Surely it can't be any worse than the air in New York,' I said bravely but nonetheless slightly nauseous at the thought of applying curdled milk to my walls.
'I wouldn't count on that,' Kate answered. 'You know, there are things you can do to the existing cabinets to jazz them up. You're a designer, right? I'm sure you can think of something fun. They're your basic picture-frame construction, see?' She pointed to a cabinet door, which did indeed look something like a framed picture, with a thicker border around a flat middle panel. 'You could pop out the panel and put in something else, like glass or beadboard paneling. Paint the whole thing a funky color or two, and voilà, new cabinets!'
'That's true,' I said, my eyes going glassy as I pictured the possibilities. Glass, beadboard paneling . . . fabric? Meanwhile, Kate wandered back down the hallway to the door to the parlor, and peered in. 'What happened here?'
'Oh, right.' I hurried after her. 'Derek won't let me help him in the kitchen, so I decided to go through Aunt Inga's desk instead. You startled me when you knocked on the door, and I dropped one of the files.' I sank to my knees on the floor next to the desk and began piling the contents of the cat file into an untidy stack.
'What sort of file?' Kate plopped down next to me to help.
'Medical histories and CFA registrations and stuff like that for the cats. Looks like they go to the veterinarian on Broad Street for checkups.' I held up a bill for feline distemper vaccinations administered sometime in the past year.
'It's the best vet in Waterfield.' Kate nodded, grabbing a few stray pieces of paper and adding them to the stack. Halfway under the desk, I saw a small, white rectangle and reached for it. I assumed it would be the veterinarian's business card, filed away with the other cat-related paper work, but I was mistaken. Oh, it was a business card, all right; it just didn't belong to Dr. Piedmont, the vet on Broad Street.
'Huh,' I said.
'What's the matter?' Kate peered over at me, her hands full of paper.
'Found this under the desk.' I handed it to her. 'Martin Wentworth. That's the missing professor, right?'
Kate added her papers to the stack and took it. 'Sure is. What's Martin Wentworth's card doing in your aunt's cat file?'
'I was hoping you'd be able to tell me that.'
Kate shrugged. 'Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe he liked Maine coon cats. Maybe he was writing an article about them and interviewed your aunt. Or maybe Jemmy and Inky got lost one day, and he found them and brought them home.'
'How did your boyfriend's trip to Boston go last week? Anything new on the professor's disappearance?'
Kate grimaced. 'Unfortunately not. Wayne went to talk to some of the staff at Boston University. That's where Professor Wentworth did his graduate work. But they haven't seen him. And neither has anyone else. He's still missing. Wayne's upset. Once they've been gone over seventy-two hours, the chances of finding them alive decrease every hour.'
'Huh,' I said.
Kate watched me for a moment. 'What's the matter, Avery?'
I shrugged. 'Probably nothing. It just seems a little strange that my aunt should write to me and ask me to come visit her, because she had some important family secret to share with me. But by the time I get here, she's dead, and Professor Wentworth is missing.'
'That doesn't mean there's a connection.'
'His card was in her desk,' I said, holding it up. If that wasn't a connection, I didn't know what it was.
'Professor Wentworth probably just stopped by to talk to her about the history of Waterfield. She was very old. She probably knew a lot.'
'Maybe. So you don't think we ought to call Chief Rasmussen to tell him that we found the card here?'
Kate shrugged. 'I'll mention it to Wayne when I see him tonight. I don't suppose there's a date on the card, or anything like that? It might help if we had some idea when they met.'
'I'm afraid not,' I said, turning the card over. 'Aunt Inga doesn't seem to have kept an appointment calendar, either. Didn't have many appointments to keep track of, I guess.'
'I guess not,' Kate agreed. 'I'm not sure whether the professor kept a calendar, but if your aunt's name had been in it, I'm sure I would have heard.'
I nodded. Most likely.
Kate opened her mouth to say something else but closed it again when the front door opened. I'd been so engrossed in our conversation that I hadn't heard Derek's truck drive up or the truck door slam outside. I watched as he sauntered into the hallway and spared a glance in our direction. When he saw that I wasn't alone, he did a comical double take that made me smother a laugh.
'Kate.' Damned if he didn't blush, too.
'Hi, Derek,' Kate said sweetly. 'Long time no see.'
Derek shrugged, scuffing the floor with the toe of one well-worn boot. 'Been busy.'
'Good for you. I'm glad you could find the time to help Avery.' She smiled.
'My pleasure.' He shot me a look.
'I'll bet,' I said.
Kate looked at me with amusement lighting her hazel eyes.
'I'd better get to work,' Derek added. 'See you around, Kate. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.'
He disappeared from the doorway, and we could hear his steps recede down the hall toward the kitchen. I waited for the sound of tools starting up back there before I broke the silence.
'Is he always this charming?'
Kate giggled. 'Pretty much, yes. You can't say I didn't warn you.'
I shook my head. No, I couldn't.
7
––The days settled into a groove. Derek showed up bright and early every morning with a disgustingly cheerful greeting and went to work in the kitchen or basement while I continued to sort through Aunt Inga's accumulated stuff, of which there was a lot. The Dumpster that Derek had ordered was filling up rapidly with discarded galvanized pipes, ratty vinyl, old newspapers, and ugly, broken furniture and knickknacks. Kate got into the habit of stopping by for a few hours in the afternoons to help me get the house habitable and—I think—to tease Derek. On Wednesday morning Wayne Rasmussen dropped in, too, to tell me what Officer Thomas had determined regarding my break-in, and also what he had found out from examining the envelope and threatening letter I had received.
'First off, Brandon found no evidence of forced entry when he was here on Saturday morning. Not that anyone would have needed to break in with the key under the mat.'
I shook my head. And here I'd thought small towns were supposed to be safe.
'There were no fingerprints that didn't belong here. Yours, your aunt's, Mr. Rodgers's, a few of ours from when we found her. And, interestingly, Martin Wentworth's.'
'Really?' I said.
Wayne nodded. 'We snagged them from his condo when we first realized he was missing. Just in case of . . . well, you know.'
I nodded. I did know, or if I didn't, I could make a good guess. Just in case they had to identify him by his fingerprints whenever they found him.
'Of course,' Wayne added, 'his prints here don't mean anything. We already suspected that they'd been in touch from the business card you found. Good job on that, by the way. But the card, along with those prints, could have been left anytime between September and now.'
'That's true,' I admitted. Assuming my aunt hadn't cleaned house in the eight or nine months before she died, anyway.
'As for your letter, we had no more luck there, I'm afraid. Lots of fingerprints, but none we could identify. The envelope and paper are basic, available in any office supply store, grocery store, or drugstore. The CVS and the Walgreens carry them, and so does Shaw's Supermarket. The letter could have been written on pretty much any computer in town, including those down at the police station, and printed on pretty much any printer, with standard black ink. The staff at the Waterfield Post Office couldn't identify who sent it. They don't remember seeing it before. And seeing as there are mailboxes all over Waterfield where it could have been deposited, there's no reason why they would.'
'So there's no way to know who sent it to me?'
He shook his head. 'You gave Mr. Rodgers your contact information before you left, and you signed the guest register at Kate's B and B with your New York address. And anyone who knew your name could have looked you up through the White Pages. I did, and you're listed.'
'What did the Stenhams say when you spoke to them?'
Wayne made a face. 'That they had nothing to do with the break-in and that I couldn't prove that they did. And I can't.'
'So that's it?'
He nodded. 'Afraid so. I'll keep an eye out, but for now, that's all I can do. You'll have Derek here during the day,' he glanced toward the kitchen, where my handyman was once again hard at work, 'and I'll have the patrol cars drive by a few times each night. If anything happens, don't hesitate to call 911.'
I promised I wouldn't, and he took his leave. I went back to sorting through junk.
The coon cats had settled into the utility room, with their bowls and their kitty chow. To my amazement, there was no litter box to empty every few days. Jemmy and Inky weren't effete house cats, and they did their business out-of-doors. In fact, I saw them very rarely. As long as I kept their food and water dishes filled and didn't try to pick them up and cuddle them, they stayed out of my way. There was no snuggling up in bed at night; if they came home at all, through the cat flap in the back door, they preferred to sleep downstairs on the sofa in the parlor. Occasionally, I'd see one of them— the striped Jemmy or the coal black Inky—stalk away from the house, plumed tail waving, but mostly I forgot that they were there. Unless I forgot to feed them, and then they hunted me down, complaining loudly, and proceeded to twine themselves around my legs to trip me until I caught on to what they wanted and provided it.
Whenever I got bored with Aunt Inga's things or I wanted an excuse to move around and work out the kinks, I went to wherever Derek was and offered to help him. He invariably turned me down, with anything from a distracted frown to an amused grin depending on how his work was progressing that day. Occasionally, he'd allow Kate to make a suggestion, but for all intents and purposes, I was invisible. It irritated me. So much so that by Thursday afternoon, I was ready to scream.
'You know,' I said when he was coming down the hallway toward the front door, ready to leave for the day, 'this isn't how I planned it.'
He stopped in front of me. There wasn't a whole lot else he could do, unless he wanted to move me bodily out of his way, which, obviously, he didn't. 'No?'
I shook my head. 'I'm happy that you're here, because I wouldn't know what to do without you. I mean, I wouldn't know how to do what you're doing if you weren't here to do it. But I thought I'd get to do some of the renovating myself, too.' The fun parts. The parts that didn't involve replacing corroded pipes or scabbing rotted wood.
He grinned. 'You just said you wouldn't know how to do what I'm doing if I wasn't here to do it.'
'I'm not talking about redoing plumbing or shoring up walls,' I said, rolling my eyes.
Jeez!
'I just want to do something simple. Something creative. Something that doesn't require specialized knowledge or really big muscles. I'm not a moron, you know. I can manage to swing a hammer without hitting my thumb. I can even use a brush for something other than painting my nails.'
'Fine by me,' Derek said. 'Tomorrow, you can start taking down the wallpaper in the hall. It doesn't take strength or any special knowledge. It's just a boring, time consuming, messy job that has to be done before the walls can be painted.'
'Couldn't I just paint over it?' I suggested. 'I know some great texturing techniques. You wouldn't be able to tell there was anything but plaster underneath.' A couple of layers of thick oil paint ought to do the trick, with some appliquéd flowers or stars on top, maybe. My creative juices percolated.
From the expression on Derek's face—a kind of incredulous, half-pitying horror—you might have thought I'd suggested a spot of bank robbery.
'Guess not,' I said.
Derek shook his head firmly. 'No, Tinkerbell. You don't paint wallpaper. Ever. It makes it twice as hard to get off later. Plus, it just isn't
right
.'
'It's not like anyone would know,' I said.
'
I'd
know,' Derek answered.
I rolled my eyes. 'Other than you. You know, I know what your problem is.'
He cocked his head. That irritating lock of hair fell into his eyes. 'You do, huh?'
'I do, yes. You're a perfectionist. And a control freak. And set in your ways. And you have a problem with women. I don't know who turned you this way, and I don't care, but it wasn't me, so I'd appreciate it if you'd cut me some slack. I
am
paying your salary.'