Do-It-Yourself - Spackled And Spooked Part 10

It was a lovely voice, a soft and feminine purr with a hint of sheathed claws underneath, and it fit its owner perfectly. Melissa James was gorgeous, from the top of her razor-edged cap of glossy hair to the pointy toes of her s.h.i.+ny, red, patent-leather Mary Janes. Manolo Blah nik, of course, with four-inch heels. Her killer body, all five feet eight inches of it, was dressed in an Yves Saint Laurent pencil skirt and matching blouse, and she smiled down at me with her blindingly white, preternaturally even teeth. Melissa invariably made me feel like a dirty-faced urchin, even when I had made an effort to look good, and most of the time she seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense when I looked my worst and zero in on me in those moments. Like now, when I was dressed in worn jeans and sneakers, with my hair twisted up in a tie, and a minimum of makeup on my face.

"Hi, Melissa," Kate answered, with her own big, fake smile. Kate is Melissa's height, and between the two of them, I feel positively dainty. I also felt like lightning bolts-or more accurately, lighted barbs-were crossing above my head. Kate dislikes Melissa on a whole lot of levels, and the fact that Kate adores Derek, and that Melissa dumped him, is only one of them. She-Melissa-is also doing her best to turn Waterfield into the kind of town Kate left Ma.s.sachusetts to get away from, and then there's the fact that every time Melissa refers someone to Kate's B and B, she seems to feel that Kate owes her a referral fee. Somehow, the reverse isn't true: Whenever Kate refers someone to Melissa, it doesn't seem to cross Melissa's mind to give Kate a referral fee or so much as a handful of flowers for her trouble. Melissa usually manages a thank you, but even that seems to be a bit of an effort.

I guess I don't have to say that I don't like Melissa, either. In addition to her delight in making me feel small and insignificant, she dumped Derek and hurt his pride and his feelings, even if she didn't break his heart. More than that, she was married to Derek for a few years before she dumped him, and that means there are things about him she knows that I haven't discovered yet. And then there's the fact that she's dating my cousin Ray, who's a jerk. Mostly, though, I just chafe at her perfection. I dredged up a smile from somewhere and plastered it on my face. "Nice to see you." Not.

Melissa looked from me to Kate and back, all her lovely teeth on display and her amazing eyes-deep violet, her own-gleaming with interest. "What are you talking about?"

Kate glanced at me. I shrugged. Word would get all over Waterfield sooner or later, so we might as well tell her now. "There are bones buried under the house that Derek and I are renovating."

"Oooooh!" Melissa patted my arm with a sympathetic hand ending in long, bloodred talons, a perfect match to the shoes. "That's no fun, is it? I remember last year, when Ray and Randy were starting development on that little subdivision north of town-not Devon Highlands; the other one, Clovercroft-anyway, when they started digging, they turned up bones. So we called the police, and they came out and had a look, and then they called in someone from the college, the anthropology department, and it turned out to be an old Indian burial ground, and now the whole thing is a nightmare, with the various tribes and nations refusing to let the bones be moved, and until they are, Ray and Randy can't go forward with the development, and everything is just a big mess!"

"Gee," Kate said with a grin, "that's too bad."

Melissa narrowed those fabulous eyes, but instead of commenting on Kate's lack of sympathy, she addressed me instead. "Derek must be livid, the poor baby. He gets so upset when he's sidetracked. What are you going to do, Avery?"

"Oh, I'm not going to do anything," I answered, with a sweet smile. "Derek is helping Wayne and Brandon with the excavation. And if he's livid, I didn't notice. He'll be home this evening. I guess I'll find out then."

Melissa smiled back, a little less sweetly. "Where are you renovating now, Avery?"

"Gosh," I said, "I thought you knew. We bought the old Murphy house on Becklea. You were out there just a couple of weeks ago, weren't you?"

"You bought that?" For a second, Melissa's lovely face didn't look quite so lovely. Then it smoothed out again. "Actually, I was. But how did you know?"

I explained that one of the neighbors had seen her.

"That old biddy in the house next door, I guess," Melissa said with a look at me from under her lashes, looking for confirmation. "Horrible old busybody. She kept peering at me through the curtains, like she thought I was doing something wrong."

"Miss Rudolph likes keeping an eye on what goes on in her neighborhood," I agreed, glancing over at Kate. She hid a smile.

Melissa cleared her throat to bring our attention back to her. "How are the renovations going, Avery?"

"Fine, until the skeleton became an issue. You know Derek. Good with his hands."

I smiled. Kate snorted and changed it into a cough. Covering her mouth with her hand, she turned away, shoulders shaking. Melissa's eyes narrowed, but she kept her voice smooth and solicitous.

"I'm glad you two are doing well. Poor baby, he took it so hard when we broke up. I didn't think he'd ever find anyone else."

This was a none-too-subtle dig at both Kate and me. Two birds with one stone. Derek and Kate had dated a few times when Kate first moved to town, shortly after Melissa's defection, and for obvious reasons, it hadn't worked out between them. They got along well and enjoyed each other's company, but the romantic spark just wasn't there. In her own inimitable way, Melissa was telling Kate that she hadn't measured up in Derek's eyes. And of course the suggestion that it had taken Derek five years to find someone to replace her was designed to make me think about the possibility that he might just have picked me as second best, after he finally came to terms with the fact that Melissa was lost to him. I didn't think that was really the reason he'd settled on me-on me, not for me; or so I hoped-although the worry would probably gnaw at me at intervals until I could put it to rest. d.a.m.n Melissa and her insidious suggestions.

Her job done to her satisfaction, Melissa wriggled her fingers in a friendly wave. "I'd better get back to work. Nice seeing you both." She sashayed away, back into the Waterfield Realty office. Her cell phone was glued to her ear before she had shut the door behind her. Probably calling Ray to tell him that Derek and I had scooped them once again and were renovating the house that the Stenhams had wanted to get their hands on. At the moment, with the skeleton in the crawls.p.a.ce added to the haunted house issue and the old murders, I was kind of wis.h.i.+ng that the Stenhams had scooped us this time and that the whole mess had landed in their laps instead of in ours. Still, the feeling of having beaten them to the punch was compelling enough that I smiled anyway.

"Boy, she sure put us in our place, didn't she?" Kate said with a grin. "Aren't you feeling properly scorned, Avery? I mean, does she really think I care that Derek didn't choose to pursue our relations.h.i.+p? Puh-leeze!" She rolled her expressive, hazel eyes.

I smiled half-heartedly, and she added, "And that lame attempt to make you think Derek only picked you after he realized that he could never have Melissa back? What a crock!"

"You think?"

"Of course! The only reason he fell in love with Melissa in the first place was that he was young and stupid, and she was gorgeous and determined to marry a doctor. Believe me, he's learned his lesson. He won't be making that mistake again."

She sounded so confident that I thought maybe I'd better listen to her. She had known Derek for five years longer than I had, so she probably understood the situation fairly well. If she said he wasn't hung up on Melissa, I should probably take her word for it.

"So what are you doing here?" Kate dismissed the question of Melissa, and looked around at the not-so-bustling downtown Waterfield. "Why aren't you working on the house?

"Wayne has vetoed any further renovating until they get the body out."

I explained that I had driven Derek's truck into town and parked it behind the hardware store, and now I was on my way home to Aunt Inga's house.

"You know, Avery," Kate said, "your aunt-rest her soul-has been dead for months. It's your house now."

"I know that. It's just easier to think of it as Aunt In ga's house. Everyone knows where Inga Morton lived. She was a Waterfield inst.i.tution."

My aunt had been almost ninety-nine when she died, the longest-living resident of Waterfield.

There was another reason why I still referred to the house as my aunt's and not mine, though, although I didn't want Kate to know it. She's a people-person, in the best sense of the word-interested in everyone and everything they're up to-but she's also a bit of a talker, and I didn't want word to get around that I was having . . . maybe not second thoughts about settling down in Waterfield, exactly, but at least thoughts about it. I'd been in town for a few months by now, I'd started to make friends, and of course I'd become involved with Derek, but there was a part of me that was still keeping one foot on the fence in case I decided I didn't want to stick around beyond the winter. Referring to the house as Aunt Inga's and not mine allowed me a certain amount of emotional distance. Once it was my house, in my mind as well as on paper, I figured I was stuck with it.

I grew up in New York City, and until I came to Waterfield, I'd never lived outside Manhattan. I was enjoying the change of pace-the fresh air, the ocean, the slow rhythm of life in Maine-but I also missed the hustle and bustle of the city. The restaurants and shops, the theater, the sure and certain knowledge that something exciting was just about to happen somewhere close by. I missed my old friends. My alma mater, prestigious Parsons School of Design. My compact apartment, currently someone else's home. My job, with its steady income . . .

"You want to walk up the hill together?" Kate asked. "If you're ready to go."

I tore myself away from my increasingly unsettling thoughts. "I wanted to have a look at a few of the antique and junk-stores, in case there's something I can use when I renovate the house. I'm thinking mod-you know, 1960s retro-and I just wanted to look for some inspiration. There's the bathroom with that brown and blue tile, which I just know Derek isn't going to let me change. . . ."

"There is such a thing as porcelain and ceramic tile paint," Kate pointed out as we started moving along the sidewalk. "You just clean the tile well and paint over it."

"That's not a bad idea, actually." I pictured the drab bathroom done up in more cheerful colors. "Although I don't know how well that would work in an area that will get wet all the time. Won't the paint flake off after a while?"

"By then it won't be your house or your problem anymore," Kate answered, but with a smile that let me know she wasn't serious. "You're probably right. Paint would be better for things like fireplace surrounds, if you have missing tiles and can't match them, or something. Low-traffic areas. Or a kitchen backsplash or even a bathroom wall that won't get wet very often. Maybe you can work with the brown and navy. Do a faux paint finish on the walls to make them look like leather or something like that."

"That might look nice. Or I can do some other funky wall-covering. One of my friends in New York did her living room in brown grocery bags once. It looked great."

"Brown grocery bags?" Kate repeated. I nodded.

"You tear the bags into pieces and crumple them, then straighten them back out and glue them to the wall with wallpaper paste. Gives a lot of texture, and looks something like suede or leather. Then you can paint or faux finish over top. Very cool."

"Huh," Kate said, obviously not convinced. I shrugged.

"For the other bathroom, I'll have to do a complete makeover. There was nothing there worth saving, so it's all gone, or will be." I explained my concept for the main bath, ending with, "What do you think?"

"Sounds good to me," Kate said. "What do you want to put the salad-bowl sink on?"

"That's part of what I'm looking for."

"An old chest of drawers would work. As long as it wasn't too tall. An old desk. A makeup table. Even a potting bench."

I shook my head. "Not a potting bench. Not in that house. If we were redoing a Victorian cottage or something, that might look cute, but here I need something more streamlined. Like . . ." I stopped, distracted by the nearest shop window. "Oh, wow, look at that!"

Kate followed the direction of my finger. "That?" she said doubtfully. I nodded. "The dresser thing? But that wouldn't look good in a white bathroom full of Mary Quant daisies."

I c.o.c.ked my head. "I guess maybe it wouldn't. But look at it; it's so '60s."

"It's brown," Kate pointed out.

"Teak. They used a lot of teak in the 1960s. What do you think-maybe it'd look good in the other bathroom? The brown and blue one? With a funky vessel sink on top? Gla.s.s, maybe, with colored speckles? Come on, I have to see how much it is."

I pushed open the door to the shop, with Kate trailing behind, lugging her shopping bags. It wasn't until I was inside the gloomy s.p.a.ce, breathing in the dusty atmosphere of old furniture and antiquated knickknacks, that the name of the shop computed in my sluggish brain. The faded gold letters on the front window said Nickerson's. Peggy Murphy had worked for a man named Nickerson, who had a business on Main Street. This could be where Peggy Murphy had worked. Mr. Nickerson could have been her boss . . . and possibly even her lover.

10.

Or not. The man behind the counter wasn't the type to set anyone's heart aflutter, especially compared to the strapping Irish lad Brian Murphy had been seventeen years ago. Small and spare, his silver hair combed back in an early-Elvis ducktail, he was dressed in pale blue 1960s garb, complete with skinny lapels and a skinnier tie. "Help you ladies?" he asked, looking up.

"Mr. Nickerson?" I said. "My name is Avery Baker."

"Nice to meet you, Miss Baker. John Nickerson. New in town?"

I explained that I'd been here since early summer. "My aunt died, and I inherited her house."

John Nickerson nodded sagely. "The old Morton place, right? I drove by there the other day. Looks good."

"That's Derek's doing. Do you know Derek Ellis?"

"Course," Mr. Nickerson said. "Everyone knows everyone in Waterfield. Or used to, anyway. How are you, Kate?"

Kate said she was fine, and the two of them small-talked for a few minutes about how the summer's business season had been for them both. I took the opportunity to look around.

There are all sorts of antique stores in the world, from your basic junk store, where the owner has no idea what he or she has, to the sn.o.bby and upscale places that are more like museums, which specialize in a certain era or type of thing, and where gla.s.s cases preclude you from picking anything up even if you dare. Nickerson's was somewhere in between. John Nickerson had a little bit of everything, but if he had a specialty, it seemed to be midcentury modern: post-WWII up to about the 1980s. There was a ton of 1950s and '60s kitsch sitting around: a tall, hooked, s.h.a.g rug with a giraffe hung on one wall, while a pristine dinette set with a yellow Formica top and four yellow and white Naugahyde chairs had pride of place in the back corner. Under the giraffe sat a couple of orange scoop chairs and a gla.s.s table with a lava lamp on top, while a few framed examples of that big-eyed art that was so popular a generation ago hung above the dinette set. Everything was accessible and touchable, except for very few pieces of custom jewelry and other small items under the counter.

On a whim, I pulled the earring I had found out of my pocket. "I don't suppose you have another one like this, do you? I lost one, and now I can't wear them anymore."

He took the earring from me with fingers that trembled slightly. I wondered if it was significant or if he always trembled. After a moment of peering myopically at it, he shook his head. "After my time, I'm afraid." His voice was perfectly even and his face unexpressive; so much for trying to startle him by showing him Peggy Murphy's earring.

"After?" I had thought the earring looked 1940s or thereabouts. Of course, Shannon had already confirmed that hers were reproductions, so maybe I should have considered that this might be, as well. Then again, that meant that someone must have lost it over the past few years, while the house had been empty.

He nodded. "It looks vintage, but it's actually a modern reproduction. See the back? No soldering? It's been made in a mold in the past few years. Sorry I can't help." He handed it back.

"That's OK," I said, tucking it back into my pocket again. So it wasn't Peggy Murphy's after all, or her mother's, either. Maybe it had belonged to one of the teenagers that Venetia Rudolph had seen in the house a few years ago. "I was actually interested in that chest of drawers you have in the window."

"The Fredericia? Beautiful, isn't it?" He jumped down from the tall stool he'd been sitting on, and started toward the display window. His bearing was almost military, straight and tall, but he had a p.r.o.nounced limp, as if one leg was shorter than the other. "Vietnam," he said briefly when he caught my reaction. I blushed.

"Sorry."

"It's been forty years. Don't worry about it. This?" He pointed to the chest of drawers we'd seen through the window.

"That's the one."

"Nineteen sixty-five Danish Modern, teak, made in Fredericia Mbelfabrik. That's the Fredericia Furniture Factory to you. Still in operation today. Give it to you for five hundred fifty dollars."

"I don't know . . ." I said, biting my lip. Five hundred fifty dollars was more than I wanted to spend, especially considering that I'd have to do modifications to turn it from a dresser into a sink base. The top drawer or two would have to be glued and nailed shut and the bottom of at least one of them removed to make room for the plumbing, and I'd have to cut holes in the top for the drain and waterlines, as well as the faucet. Lots of room for error in doing all that, and if I messed up too badly, the piece would be useless. On the other hand, it would look fabulous in the brown and blue bathroom. "What's that?" I pointed. "A chip?"

Mr. Nickerson bent down. "A small one. I'll knock off fifty dollars."

"I don't know. Five hundred dollars is still a little more than I'm comfortable with. See, I can go to the home improvement center and buy a sink base that'll look OK for a lot less than that. But because it's a 1960s ranch, I thought an authentic dresser would look good. With one of those vessel sinks on top, you know, like a bowl. There's this little brown and blue bathroom that my boyfriend won't let me tear out, because the tile is perfect. . . ."

I peered at him for any sign of recognition, some clue that he'd been in the Murphy house and had seen-maybe even showered in-the brown and blue master bath, but he didn't flicker so much as an eyelash. "Sounds like an interesting idea."

"I hope so," I said. "If you've lived in town for a while, you probably know the house. A family named Murphy used to live there, until seventeen years ago or so, when they all died." I did my best to sound innocent, but I don't know how well I did, especially considering that I was-surrept.i.tiously, I hoped-gauging his reaction.

"Peggy Murphy used to work for me," John Nickerson said neutrally. I opened my eyes wide.

"You're kidding? Small world."

It sounded fake even to me, and Kate rolled her eyes. She was over by the Naugahyde chairs examining the big-eyed people. "I remember these," she said, pointing to the pictures. "My grandmother had them. Little boys with puppies, little girls with kittens. On her living room wall."

"Highly collectible these days." John Nickerson left me to limp over to her. He seemed not to care whether I decided to buy the Danish Modern dresser or not. Or maybe it was a tactic: leaving me to stew and decide that if he didn't care, I'd better pony up. Or maybe my conversation was making him uncomfortable, in spite of his seeming lack of reaction to the earring and the mention of the Murphys.

"They're kind of cute," I admitted, following him, "in a weird way."

"I think I'll have to buy that one." Kate pointed to a lost-looking waif in a harlequin costume with a big tear rolling down her cheek. The child had the biggest, sad dest eyes I had seen in my life. "Looks just like Shannon did when she was young. I'm going to give it to her for her birthday."

"Will she appreciate that?" I asked, while Mr. Nickerson took the print off the wall and carried it to the counter.

"She'll think it's funny." Kate dug her wallet out of her purse and paid fifteen dollars for the picture. Mr. Nickerson wrapped it in brown paper for her.

"I'll let you know about the dresser," I said. "I should probably talk to Derek first. See just how difficult it would be to turn something like that into a sink base. Do you expect to sell it in the next couple of days?"

"Can't promise anything," John Nickerson said, "but with everything slowing down after the summer, it'll probably still be here a while. Let me know." He nodded politely but obviously didn't feel it necessary to offer me another incentive-like a lower price-to take the dresser off his hands now instead of later.

"What was that all about?" Kate asked when we were outside on Main Street again, continuing our way toward Aunt Inga's house and the B and B.

I shrugged. "Cora Ellis thought there might have been something going on between him and Peggy Murphy, and that's why Brian killed her."

"I wouldn't think so," Kate said. "John doesn't seem the type, but even if it were true almost twenty years ago, does it matter now?"

"I guess it doesn't, really," I admitted. "There's never been any doubt about it being Brian who killed the rest of the family. I'm not suggesting that it was really John Nickerson. I'm just curious what would make a man do something like that, you know. There had to have been something behind it, don't you think?"

"You'd think," Kate agreed, without sounding like it mattered to her one way or the other.

Derek called a little before nine that night to tell me that the skeleton was out of the ground and in storage at Barnham College. "It'll end up in Portland eventually, at the medical examiner's office, but Wayne wants to keep it here for a day or two to see if he can't figure out who it is without their help. She was buried here, after all, so she has to have had some kind of connection to Waterfield, even if it's just that her murder took place here."

"Murder?"

He sounded tired. "The back of her skull was crushed, as if someone hit her with something."