Spackled and Spooked (22 page)

Until we bought the house next door to Venetia’s, I’d always thought ghosts were a bunch of hooey. People died and were buried, and that was that. But now, with unexplained footsteps walking down the hallway next door, I wasn’t quite so sure. Maybe the soul really does survive the death of the body and goes somewhere else. Or stays where it is, hanging out, as the case may be. In certain circumstances, anyway; maybe when death comes unexpectedly. Maybe Venetia’s soul was still hanging around, too. I looked around nervously, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“Avery was here yesterday,” Derek explained to Wayne and Brandon, who were busy looking around. “I thought maybe she’d notice if anything was missing or looked wrong. Avery?”

He turned to me. I shook my head. “It looks just like it did yesterday. Except that she’s changed her clothes since I saw her. Yesterday afternoon she was wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. This looks like pajamas.”

Venetia’s compact body was encased in a plain, white T-shirt and a pair of flannel lounge pants in shades of blue, green, and red plaid.

“Maine tartan,” Derek said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s the official Maine tartan. Designed in the 1960s by a guy named Sol Gillis. The light blue is for the sky, the dark blue for the water, the green for the pine forests, and the red for the bloodline, or the people, of Maine.”

“Huh,” I said.

“I thought you’d want to know,” Derek answered with a shrug.

“Well, whatever it is, she wasn’t wearing it when I saw her. She must have put it on later. So she must have been killed late at night, after she got ready for bed.”

“That’s what we’re thinking,” Wayne nodded. “Her bed’s been turned down, but not slept in, and there’s a book on the sofa and a mug of cold tea on the table.”

“I notice you didn’t disagree with the idea that she was killed.”

He shook his head. “Not much doubt about that. She’s in the middle of the floor, there’s nothing she could have hit her head on accidentally, and she couldn’t have reached back and knocked herself out, either. Especially not with this big thing.” He toed one of the pieces of the large fake magnolia arrangement.

“I guess not,” I agreed. So someone must have gotten in somehow after all the hoopla died down last night, and had conked Venetia on the head. But why?

I looked around. “It doesn’t look like anything’s missing. All the collectibles are still here,” and Venetia had had enough
Gone with the Wind
paraphernalia to make a fortune on eBay, “and so are the TV and the silverware on the table and the antiques, what few she owned. Most of this is reproduction furniture.”

“You’d know,” Derek said, making a sly reference to the fact that my ex-boyfriend and former boss, Philippe, had been a furniture maker.

“Unless we find a hidden safe somewhere,” Wayne said, “and it’s been cleaned out, it doesn’t appear as if robbery was the motive.”

I had to agree. “Do you think it has something to do with what happened in our house? Finding the bones?”

Wayne looked like he might have hesitated for just a second. “Likely there’s a connection, yeah. Somewhere. When two unusual things happen back-to-back like this, usually they’re connected somehow. When you saw her yesterday afternoon, how did she seem?”

I shrugged. “Just like always. Tart. Full of questions about what was going on next door. We talked a little about the people she’d seen around the house, because I was trying to figure out whether Venetia might know who the skeleton was, or who might have put her there. Without realizing she knew it, of course.” I went through the list of individuals Venetia had mentioned, who had been seen in or around the house over the past few years. “That reminds me,” I added, digging in my pocket for the earring, “I found this in the kitchen next door a couple of days ago. We thought it might have belonged to one of the Murphy women, but Mr. Nickerson, at Nickerson’s Antiques downtown, says it’s not old enough. And Shannon McGillicutty has a similar pair, which she says Josh gave her for Christmas a few years ago.”

Wayne nodded to Brandon, who pulled a little Ziploc bag out of his pocket. I dropped the sparkly drop into it, and he sealed it and, after a moment’s hesitation and a glance at his boss, put it down on the gleaming surface of the coffee table. I opened my mouth to ask if he recognized it, but before I had the chance, Wayne continued.

“It was in the kitchen?”

I nodded. “In the dust where the fridge used to be. See, Derek ditched the old fridge and stove the day we started work because . . .” I stopped, feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

“Because of what?” Wayne prodded. I swallowed.

“Because there was a spill of something down the side of the stove. From the corner. We thought it was tomato sauce or ketchup . . .” I trailed off, fully aware of how lame the excuse sounded. We’d talked about tomato sauce and ketchup, yes, but what had caused us to hustle the appliances out of the house in a hurry, was the thought that the spill was blood. I’d assumed the blood to be from one of the Murphys, but now . . .

“Where are the appliances now?” Wayne asked. Derek gestured with his thumb.

“The dump. They were more than twenty years old, so I doubted even the reuse center would want them. I loaded them in the truck and drove them out to the landfill. Didn’t want them sitting around, even in the Dumpster.” He grimaced.

Wayne nodded to Brandon, who left, without a word being exchanged.

“They were red,” Derek called after him. He added, for our benefit, “No sense in him wasting time looking at every white and almond and stainless steel stove he sees.”

“Maybe we should go with him,” I suggested. “We’re cluttering up Wayne’s crime scene as it is. Is Brandon finished next door, so we can go back to work, or does he still have things to do?”

“There are no more bodies in the crawlspace,” Wayne answered, walking with us toward the back door of Venetia’s house, “and none on the rest of the property, either. Just the one we’ve already got out. With this new victim, and figuring out who the old one was, and processing the stove and fridge when we find them, not to mention the work you two have already done tearing everything useful outta there, I’m gonna say that Brandon’s probably finished. But it might be a good idea to wait until tomorrow anyway, just to get rid of the crowds and the reporters before you go back in.”

I nodded. Made sense.

“If you’d wanna ride with him out to the dump to see if maybe you can expedite things, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“I’ll do that,” Derek said. “Maybe he can drop me off at Cortino’s on the way back into town.” He jogged after Brandon, who was in the process of getting into his cruiser.

Daphne the state trooper was packing things up, too, letting Hans into his special compartment in the K-9 vehicle. I guessed their job here was done. Wayne excused himself to go talk to her, and I stood on the lawn for a second, at loose ends, before I trudged back to the neighbors. Word would be out in a few minutes anyway, and they’d already started speculating—wildly—so maybe it would be better just to tell them the truth instead of allowing them to perpetuate the myth that Venetia had murdered untold numbers of people and hidden them in her house.

“Well?” Arthur Mattson said when I was close enough to hear him. The rest of the group turned, eagerly.

I waited until I didn’t have to raise my voice. “I’m afraid Miss Rudolph has died.”

“Died?” Arthur repeated, as if the word didn’t quite compute. I nodded.

“Murdered?” Denise asked shrilly. Tony the TV guy’s head turned toward the sound. She lowered her voice. “By the same person who killed whoever was in your basement?” It was by no means certain that the same person had killed both our unknown skeleton and Venetia, although as Wayne had said, when two unusual things happen in close succession and right next door to one another, it would be a monstrous coincidence if they weren’t related.

“I don’t know about that,” I said as Tony started toward us.

“But she was murdered?”

“Well . . .”

“Oh, my God!” Denise glanced down at the sleeping Trevor and around as if she were afraid someone was getting ready to pounce on him.

“How?” Arthur demanded.

“Um . . . I think maybe it would be better to leave the telling of that to the police.”

Arthur looked like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. “An accident?” he suggested.

I shook my head. “Likely not.”

“Mercy.” He shook his head. Irina muttered a Russian word or two, and Denise squeaked. Linda crossed herself.

“She was an awful old battle-ax,” she said, with the air of one giving credit where credit was due. “Always carrying on about the kids today. No morals, no sense, no respect for their elders; and the girls, how they were dressed . . . ! Remember, Denise?”

Denise nodded, a faint smile on her lips as she watched Trevor sleep. Linda continued, “But she surely didn’t deserve
that
. There wasn’t any harm in her. Just because she couldn’t seem to mind her own business . . .”

She pulled a miniature liquor bottle out of the pocket of her housecoat and tipped it in the direction of Venetia’s silent house before taking a swig.

“Amen,” Arthur Mattson said. “She’d always stand behind those curtains whenever we’d walk by, making sure I kept Stella off her grass and didn’t let her do any of her business on Venetia’s lawn. Still, you wouldn’t wish something like this on your own worst enemy.”

The others shook their heads solemnly.

“I remember once,” Denise said with a giggle, “when Holly and I . . .” She stopped abruptly, blushing, and made herself busy adjusting the light blanket that covered the sleeping Trevor. Nobody spoke, and the silence lengthened, heavy.

“Who’s Holly?” I said eventually, looking from one to the other of them. Irina shrugged. Denise still had a betraying blush in her cheeks. I guessed that she and Holly, who must have been her friend, had done something mean or embarrassing to Venetia back in the day, which she wasn’t about to own up to now, when Venetia was due the respect usually accorded the newly deceased. “Holly White?”

Linda shot me a look, and Denise nodded. “We were friends growing up. How do you know about Holly?”

“I don’t,” I explained. “Just the name. Brandon Thomas mentioned her yesterday, when he was talking to Lionel Kenefick, and I happened to see her picture in the newspaper archives yesterday, too. Prom photo. Pretty girl.”

“Gorgeous,” Denise nodded.

“He said she went to Hollywood to become an actress?”

“That’s what she always said she wanted to do. Hollywood or Las Vegas. Or maybe Paris or Rome.”

Linda snorted and took another swig from her bottle. At this rate, it would be empty in another minute.

“She didn’t even stay for graduation,” Denise added. “Just up and left one day. Without even a good-bye. They had to mail her diploma, didn’t they, Mrs. White?”

She looked at Linda. I blinked, surprised. Whoa, not much family resemblance there between the lovely and svelte creature from the photograph, in her shimmery gown and tiara, and her mother, overweight and boozy, in a wrinkled house dress and with rollers in her hair.

“You’re Holly’s mother?” slipped out of my mouth.

“For my sins.”

“Surely she can’t have been that bad?”

Linda didn’t answer. “She wasn’t bad,” Denise said. “Just . . . different, I guess. Waterfield was too small for her. She was always talking about how she needed to get out, to see places and do things. Exciting things. Because nothing exciting ever happens here.” She shrugged.

I looked around at the hustle and bustle of police cruisers and K-9 vehicles, cops and TV cameras. There was nothing slow and sleepy about what was going on in their quiet subdivision these days.

“Looks like something exciting has happened now,” I said.

13

I was pretty much stuck where I was for the time being, a fact that hadn’t occurred to me until now. But with Derek’s truck in the shop, and Derek off with Brandon, and Melissa long gone, and with Wayne stuck here processing and keeping watch over the new crime scene, I had no way to get back to Waterfield unless I wanted to walk. Which I didn’t.

Luckily, a ride arrived shortly in the form of Josh Rasmussen and Shannon McGillicutty.