Spackled and Spooked (12 page)

“You two know each other?” I looked from one to the other of them.

“Went to high school together,” Brandon explained, slapping Lionel on the back. Lionel staggered. Turning to Wayne, Brandon asked, “Should I start roping off the crime scene, boss?”

“Crime scene?” Lionel bleated before Wayne had a chance to answer.

I looked from one to the other of them. “Yes, isn’t it a little premature to call it that? We don’t know that the skeleton didn’t die a natural death, and even if it didn’t, we don’t know that it died here. Someone could have killed it somewhere else and just buried it here. Just because it’s in the crawlspace, doesn’t mean it died in the house. Or on the grounds.”

Brandon had to admit, reluctantly, that I was right. “Still,” he insisted, with a glance at Wayne, “we have to rope off the yard. Can’t have civilians wandering around, possibly contaminating the evidence.”

Wayne was grinning. He looked from Brandon to me like a spectator at a tennis match, clearly enjoying the banter, but without showing any inclination to get involved in the conversation.

“What evidence?” I said, hands on my hips. “It’s a skeleton. It must have been in the ground for months, if not years, to turn into nothing but bones. Right?” I looked at Derek, who nodded. “Any evidence would be long gone by now.”

“Not necessarily,” Brandon argued. “The house has been empty. Chances are no one’s been down in the crawlspace for years.”

“There were squatters there a couple of years ago,” Venetia said. “And a few years before that, the neighborhood teens would come over and hang out to prove to their girlfriends how brave they were.” She was making rather a point of not looking at Lionel. He sent her a dirty look anyway.

“I remember that,” Brandon said with a grin. “I even came here once myself, back when I was young and stupid. Or younger and more stupid. With Holly White. Remember her, Lionel? The brunette, with the big . . .” He remembered that Venetia Rudolph and I were there, and finished, rather lamely, “Feet.”

I rolled my eyes. So did Wayne.

Lionel nodded, his face void of expression.

Brandon added, “She went to Hollywood to be an actress. Or was it Las Vegas to be a showgirl?”

“Big feet are a real asset for a showgirl,” Derek agreed, his face solemn but his eyes dancing.

Brandon grinned but abandoned the subject. “There were squatters here?” he addressed Venetia. She nodded. “When?”

She thought back. “Must be two or three years ago now. The house has been sitting empty since the early ’90s, you know. After the Murphy murders. They stayed for a few days, and then they were gone again.”

“Do you think the body belongs to one of the transients?” I asked.

Brandon opened his mouth to answer, then deferred to Wayne, who said, “Could be. We’ll know more when we’ve gotten it out. You’d better get busy, Brandon.”

Brandon nodded and excused himself. After rooting around in the trunk of his car, he pulled out a roll of yellow crime scene tape and started stringing it around the perimeter of the yard, from tree trunk to tree trunk and bush to bush. It was just a matter of time before our small group was either corralled or asked to leave, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

“I’m going to take off for a while. If that’s OK with you, Wayne.”

Wayne nodded. “I know where to find you. And I’m not worried that you had anything to do with this body. This poor fella’s been down there longer than you’ve been in town.”

“That’s a relief,” I said, only half kidding. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Bring some pizzas,” Derek said.

“Gack!” I answered, as Lionel turned a paler shade of green. “How can you be hungry at a time like this?”

“Digging is hard work. And Brandon’s still a growing boy.” He bent to kiss me on the cheek. “Drive carefully. And I wasn’t kidding about the pizzas. Three ought to do it. Unless we get company.”

“Better get four,” Wayne said, pulling out his wallet to give me a couple of twenties. I stuck them in my pocket. “We’ll start seeing Josh and his friends in about a half hour, most likely. I really have to get that police band radio away from him. And once Josh knows, then Shannon knows, and then Kate knows, and soon everybody knows.” He shook his head, wandering toward Brandon’s car, talking to himself.

7

My adopted hometown has two newspapers. There’s the
Waterfield Clarion
, established in 1915, and the
Waterfield Weekly
, established in 1912. Because it’s a weekly, the latter isn’t quite as timely when it comes to reporting hard news as the
Clarion
, but it does a much better job with human interest stories, like reports of the Garden Tour and the school bake sale. The offices of both papers are located on Main Street, each in its own turn-of-the-last-century Victorian commercial building. I started at the
Clarion
, and if I couldn’t find what I was looking for there, I figured I’d cross the street and try the
Weekly
instead.

OK, so I know it seems a little odd that I’d shoot off so quickly, leaving Derek to handle the mess back at Becklea, but it’s not like there was anything I could do there, you know. I don’t know anything about working a crime scene, and Wayne wouldn’t let me help even if I did. And I had absolutely no desire to get any more intimately involved with the skeleton than I had been already.

But there was just a chance that I might be able to discover something in one of the papers. If I could put a name to the skeleton, or at least come up with a missing person or two during the time when Brian Murphy had been in residence, maybe that would help. . . .

Derek had showed me how to operate the microfiche machine last time we were here, and it didn’t take me long to get what I needed from the archivist, who remembered me from last time. Derek has a way with middle-aged women, from spinsters to happily married matrons. They all adore him, and I always feel like they’re looking at me askance, trying to determine whether I’m good enough for him. I had that feeling now, as the plump sixty-something behind the counter handed me the boxes for the late ’80s and early ’90s and gave me a thorough once-over.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling my most winning smile.

She nodded but didn’t smile back. “How is Derek?”

“He’s fine. Busy. We’re renovating another house.”

She nodded. “I heard he bought the old Murphy place. That what you’re looking for?”

She glanced at the boxes I was holding. I hesitated, and she added, “Because the tragedy took place here.” She tapped her finger on a box halfway down the stack. “You won’t need the others.” She leaned back on the chair and folded her plump arms across her plump chest.

“I’m going to read about the . . . um . . . tragedy,” I admitted, since I was, “but I’m also looking for anything else I can find. Just out of curiosity, you know.”

She didn’t look convinced, and I couldn’t blame her. But since I couldn’t very well tell her about the ulna and the fact that the Waterfield PD was currently digging up the Murphy house crawlspace, I excused myself with another bright smile and scurried off to the microfiche machine, where I muddled my way through the process of getting everything set up.

I knew exactly when the Murphy murders had taken place, so those stories weren’t difficult to find. They matched Derek’s account in pretty much every particular, with very little additional information. The police had been notified in the early hours of the morning, when one of the neighbors called to report a domestic disturbance and shots fired at the Murphy house on Becklea Drive. According to the newspaper article, five-year-old Patrick Murphy had been woken from sound sleep by a “bang,” and when he stuck his head out into the hallway, he had seen his father, gun in hand, move from the master bedroom to the room where Patrick’s grandparents, Margaret and John Duncan, slept. Patrick, being more astute than the usual little boy, had made for the outside door and had run down the street to his friend Lionel’s house, where Lionel’s father had called the police. Upon arrival, the Waterfield PD had found all the inhabitants of the Murphy household (with the exception of Patrick) dead: Peggy and her parents in their beds, and Brian on the floor in Patrick’s room. Police Chief Roger Tucker had gone on record to say that the police were treating the case as a homicide and suicide, and that there was no doubt whatsoever that Brian Murphy had killed his wife and his in-laws, and that he had then gone to his son’s room to finish the job. The police found several bullets in the boy’s bed but were unable to say for sure whether Brian thought he had actually succeeded in killing Patrick, or had realized, too late, that the child was gone. In either case, he had ended his short reign of terror by shooting himself.

A follow-up story, a day or two later, quoted a couple of neighbors and friends of the family as saying that Brian had been increasingly sullen and difficult to deal with over the last few months. There had been problems at work—he had been a forklift operator at a nearby warehouse—and management had had to give him several warnings about his temper and about his increasing tardiness. He had taken to hanging out at a local bar late into the nights, and it must have made it difficult for him to punch in by six in the morning. Once he had turned up at his wife’s place of employment and caused trouble. Mr. Nickerson, her boss, didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he had gotten the impression that Mr. Murphy was, not to put too fine a point on it, stinking drunk. And at four o’clock in the afternoon, too. Brian had removed his wife, bodily, from the premises, but the next morning, when Peggy Murphy came back to work, she had claimed that everything was fine, and having no choice but to believe her, Mr. Nickerson had taken her word for it.

So much for that part of it. I started scanning the microfiche for missing persons.

In any town of any size, people disappear once in a while. It was just a few months ago, as a matter of fact, that Professor Martin Wentworth from Barnham College had gone missing. He had been acquainted with my late Aunt Inga, and at the time, while we were trying to figure out what had happened to him, Wayne had explained to me that it’s extremely difficult for someone to just disappear without a trace. Someone usually knows something, whether it’s the missing person himself, if he left under his own steam, or it’s whoever did away with him, if he didn’t. In most cases and both scenarios, the missing person shows up sooner or later, either alive or dead.

I had requested the microfiche for a couple of years before the Murphy murders, just in case Brian Murphy had buried someone under his house, and also for the time around two years ago, when Venetia Rudolph said there had been squatters in the crawlspace. The idea that the body might belong to one of the squatters made a certain amount of sense. It would explain why they cleared out suddenly, too.
Does a body buried in the ground smell?
I wondered. Nah, probably not. If buried bodies smelled, then nobody would ever visit churchyards.

The thought inspired a pang of guilt, and I promised myself I’d go visit my Aunt Inga’s grave again shortly. It had been a few weeks since I’d been there, and the flowers I’d put out had probably died long since. Pushing the thought aside for more pressing, or at least more immediate matters, I went back to microfiche scanning.

Nobody seemed to have gone missing during the time the Murphys had lived on Becklea, and there was no mention of any missing persons two years ago, either. I scanned the pages for any information about the squatters, but couldn’t find any. I’d have to ask Venetia again, to see if she knew anything more about them. I didn’t even know if they were old or young, runaway kids or professional hobos. Waterfield didn’t seem to have a large homeless population, so maybe it had just been someone passing through on their way to or from Canada, maybe. Illegal aliens or something.

Since it was still early, and the
Waterfield Weekly
was located just across the street, I dropped in there, as well, and went through the same process of requesting microfiche and access to the machine. The
Waterfield Weekly
, being a weekly, could squeeze more issues of their newspaper into a microfiche box than the
Clarion
could, and the woman behind the counter gave me several boxes that covered several years each. I popped one in the machine and started scanning idly.

I wish I could say that I found a marvelous clue that explained everything, but no such luck, I’m afraid. I came across a few photographs of members of the Murphy family taken at various times, though. There was one of Peggy, taken around Christmas, outside her place of employment on Main Street. Apparently the town did a Dickens Christmas celebration every year, during which the shopkeepers and business owners dressed in period costume and handed out grog, hot chocolate, and toddy, along with Christmas cookies. Peggy was kitted out in a long dress and velvet bonnet, and her cheeks glowed with cold. She looked familiar somehow, although it was difficult to see her face clearly under the bonnet. As part of the same article, I also saw a picture of Dr. Ben in frock coat with tails, and bushy sideburns he must have grown especially for the occasion. I printed it out, just so I could show it to Derek, although he’d probably seen it before, come to think of it.