Mortar and Murder (26 page)

“Where is it located?” Wayne glanced up at us both, still stirring.

“The entrance is through one of the built-in kitchen cabinets. Right next to the fireplace. The room itself is behind the fireplaces and the staircase in the hallway. Turns out the staircase doesn’t butt up to the back of the chimney; there’s six feet of space between them. Just enough for a twin mattress and a few feet to walk around in.”

“Interesting,” Wayne said.

I rolled my eyes. “That’s not why we’re telling you. I mean . . . yeah, it’s interesting. I’m excited about it. But it’s what we found there . . .” I dug in my pocket.

“What did you find there?” Wayne squinted at it. “Comics?”

“Not just any comics,” Derek said. “The comics page from the
Boothbay Register
three Sundays ago.”

Wayne thought for a moment. “Didn’t you own the place three Sundays ago?”

“We sure did.”

“So someone was in your house. If you’re reporting a B and E, Brandon can file the report for you. I’m off duty tonight.”

“We’re not reporting a B and E,” Derek said with heavy patience. “I don’t care that someone was in our house three weeks ago.” He paused. “Well, actually . . . yes, I do. But that’s not what this is about. Show him, Avery.”

“Look at this.” I held the paper up to his nose, indicating the scribbles along the side.

“Looks like the writing on that other piece of paper,” Wayne said. “The one the dead girl had in her pocket. That’s Irina’s name right there, isn’t it?” He used the spoon to point.

“Yes and no. It’s actually Svetlana’s name.”

Wayne lowered his eyebrows. “How do you know?”

“That’s something else we have to tell you. We drove up to Boothbay Harbor for lunch and stopped by Burns Salvage to see if Derek’s friend Ian had any Colonial hardware we could use at the house.”

“And?”

“He has a new wife,” Derek said. “She’s Ukrainian.”

“No kidding?”

“No. He also had Agent Trent’s business card in the office.”

“And a baseball bat behind the counter. And a rifle just inside his front door at home.”

Wayne glanced at me but addressed Derek. “Did you ask him about it?”

Derek nodded. “He said he and Angie—that’s the wife—spoke to Agent Trent a month ago. During a home visit. Trying to make sure she’s legal. He said they haven’t seen her since.”

“I’ll make a trip up there tomorrow. See what I can find out. Tell me more about the words on the . . . What is that, a paper towel? I take it you asked Angie to translate for you?”

I nodded. “Ian took the piece of paper inside the house to her and brought the paper towel back. According to Angie, they’re names. Three names. First and last. All Russian. All female.”

Wayne was just as quick on the uptake as Derek. Quicker. “Trafficking,” he said.

Derek nodded. “That’s what we’re figuring, too.”

He went through the scenario he had come up with during the car ride home, casting Irina as the main bad guy. I waited for Wayne to start picking holes in the theory, to point out why Irina couldn’t be guilty, but he didn’t, just nodded as he played with his stir-fry.

“What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” I muttered.

Both men turned to me. “I’m not about to put out an arrest warrant on her, Avery,” Wayne chided me. “I just want to talk to her. This explanation doesn’t have to be the true one; there are others that might fit, as well. But as a theory, it covers all the bases.”

It did, unfortunately.

“And as such, I have to take it seriously. Just like I have to look at all the other options. Including getting Brandon to take this piece of newsprint down to Barnham College and double-check that your friend Angie gave us the right translation.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Wayne said, “that’s what I want to find out. I’m also going to have Brandon take another look at Irina’s house to see if he can find evidence of anyone else having stayed there recently. We’ll put out an APB on three foreign women traveling together anywhere in the New England states, in case someone happens to take notice of them. I’ll call the police in Kiev myself and see if they have any information about these other two women. And I’ll have Brandon contact the bus station and the train station and every hotel, motel, bed-and-breakfast, and inn in a three-state area to see if anyone fitting the description of these three women is staying there. Anything else you two have learned today that you want to share?”

The food in the wok was starting to smell like it was ready, and outside, we heard a door close at the same time as the clock on the wall sounded the hour. Kate must be on her way across the grass for dinner, and Wayne was very obviously trying to get rid of us. The marble-topped table in the dining alcove was set with china and wine goblets and tall candles in silver holders . . . there was even a bunch of flowers in the middle. Carnations.

Derek took my arm. I thought about the other thing I had wanted to mention—Gert Heyerdahl’s Russian blue cat—and decided Derek was right; I was making something out of nothing. There couldn’t possibly be a connection between a Russian blue cat and missing Russian, or Ukrainian, women. That was just too far-fetched. It certainly wasn’t important enough to bother Wayne with when he so obviously wanted to be alone with his wife.

We withdrew, giving Kate a hug on our way across the grass to the truck.

“Dinner?” Derek said when we were back in the cab.

I did my best to shake off my feelings of gloom. Maybe Irina hadn’t had anything to do with Agent Trent’s death. Maybe she’d just gone camping. And in any case, it wasn’t Derek’s fault either way, and I shouldn’t take it out on him. “Chinese sounds good.”

He grinned. “As it turns out, I, too, make a mean stir-fry.”

“You’re gonna cook?”

“If Wayne can do it, I can do it. Let’s stop at Shaw’s for some stuff and go back to the house.”

“My house?”

He glanced at me. “Of course your house. I don’t have a wok.”

“And you think I do?”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m sure there’s one somewhere.” I sat back against the seat. “If not, I have a big frying pan.”

“That’ll work,” Derek said, and put the truck into gear.

Shaw’s Supermarket was fairly quiet on a Saturday evening at dinnertime, and it didn’t take long to walk through the produce section and fill a basket with sugar snap peas and carrots, broccoli and garlic. In the refrigerated section, Derek snagged a package of already sliced steak, and from the dry goods, we grabbed a bag of rice. I glanced at the floor, remembering how last time we’d been here, I’d been with Irina. Where on earth could she be? And was it actually possible that she had smuggled her sister into the United States and had bashed Agent Trent over the head and dumped her in the harbor?

“What do you want for dessert?” Derek said.

I pulled my eyes away from the place on the floor where Irina had been squatting, picking up the pieces of glass from the broken tomato sauce jar, her face averted. As if she didn’t want anyone to get a good look at her face.

“I don’t care, as long as it’s chocolate. Whoopie pie?”

“Why did I even bother to ask?” Derek said, heading for the bakery.

I followed, after a last look at the floor.

As it turned out, I
did
have a wok in a box in one of the kitchen cabinets, and Derek
did
make a mean stir-fry, dripping with garlicky goodness and crisply perfect veggies. I ate until I couldn’t eat another bite, and then I sat back and groaned. Derek grinned.

“Good?”

“Do you even have to ask?” I’d all but licked my plate. “Why didn’t you tell me you could cook?”

“Because I can’t,” Derek said. “This is it. And stir-fry isn’t exactly cooking. It’s just tossing a bunch of stuff into a pan and making sure it doesn’t stick.”

It seemed like cooking to me. More, it
tasted
like cooking. He’d definitely be doing this again.

“How about I build a fire in the fireplace in the living room,” Derek said, getting up, “while you clean up, and then we can watch a movie?”

“Sure.” I started to clear the enamel-topped table while he sauntered out of the kitchen, down the hall, and out the front door to the porch, where I—or rather, Derek—keep a small stack of firewood. I could hear him come back inside while I ferried the used plates to the bright blue resin counter. Jemmy and Inky looked up at me from the floor, their eyes fixed and demanding. Jemmy, the more vocal of the two, opened his mouth in a yowling demand. I rolled my eyes and dropped a couple of pieces of meat into their bowls. Silly of me to try to buy their affection with treats, but it was a shame to let the food go to waste, and they obviously wanted it. The cats went to work, tails twitching. I moved the other leftover meat into a ziplock baggie, intending to take it to the island in the morning. Maybe the Russian blue kitten would appreciate some of it, too.

By the time I was done, the fire was crackling, and Derek had found an old James Bond movie on cable. I curled up in a chair and he stretched out on the sofa as we both lost ourselves in Sean Connery and
From Russia with Love
.

That’s irony.

Derek’s phone rang at an ungodly hour the next morning, but like most practicing and former doctors, he goes from dead sleep to full wakefulness in less than a heartbeat. “Yeah?”

I rolled over into the warm spot left by his body and snuggled in.

“You’re kidding,” Derek said.

The voice on the other end quacked. I opened my eyes and squinted. It was still dark outside.

Derek sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

He put the phone back on the nightstand and got to his feet.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, watching sleek muscles ripple as he moved.

He shook his head in the process of pulling on his jeans, his voice disgusted. “That was Brandon Thomas. Someone reported seeing three women, two of them fitting the descriptions of the Rozhdestvensky sisters, going onto the Appalachian Trail yesterday afternoon.”

“Isn’t that in the South?” North Carolina? West Virginia? When you heard people talk about it, it was always down there somewhere.

“The Appalachian Trail runs from Maine to Georgia,” Derek said. “The mountain range reaches all the way into Canada. Two hundred and eighty-one miles of trail is in Maine. We have some of the most difficult hiking of any state.”

“And Irina and her sister went there?”

“Looks that way. Wayne has called in help from the state police in Augusta. Daphne and Hans are going, along with Brandon. He wants me to come with them as well. Both because I’ve hiked the trail a bunch of times before—in the summer, though, not in April; my God, it can still snow in April!—and because if someone gets hurt, I can help set a broken bone or diagnose a concussion.”

I nodded. “Give me a minute to take a shower, and I’ll come, too.”

He shook his head, scouting for the rest of his clothes. “No offense, Tink, but we’ll have our hands full without having to worry about you.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

He stuck his arms through the sleeves of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. I watched, just a little sadly, as all those lovely muscles disappeared behind blue cotton. When his head popped out on the other side, he said, “How much hiking have you done in your life? Do you have hiking boots? Real ones? Sneakers won’t be enough for something like this, and those cute, little boots you wore this winter . . ”

“Fine. I get it.” I grimaced. “This is for the big boys, and I’m just a weak little woman.”

He sat back down on the edge of the bed. “Don’t be that way, Avery. You wanna go hiking on the Appalachian Trail, I’ll take you. Just not today. Sometime this summer, when I know there isn’t gonna be snow at the higher altitudes, and sometime when we’re not trying to track down three fugitives or criminals or whatever they are. I can’t worry about you, too.”

“Fine.”

But I didn’t feel fine, and Derek knew it. He pulled me into his arms. “I love you, Tink. I don’t want anything to happen to you. It snowed on the mountains overnight. If we find them at all, they could be dead. If they’re not, if they survived the night and they’re determined to get away, they could be desperate. They could have guns. People could die. And I don’t want you to be one of them.”

“OK,” I murmured. It’s hard to say no to Derek when he’s holding me close, and his voice is rough, and I can hear the beat of his heart under my ear and feel the warmth of his body and smell his soap and shampoo and detergent and concern.

“Thank you.” He let me go with a kiss on top of my head. “I have to run. You’ll be OK without me today, right?”

“Of course. I’ll probably just hang out here. Do some cleaning or something.” The kind of things that women do. “Maybe I’ll go visit Kate. Or go out to Rowanberry and see if I can catch the cat.”