Mortar and Murder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Home-Renovation and Design Tips

  Plaster and Poison

  “A delightful small-town Maine sleuth . . . Solid and entertaining . . . A pull-no-punches mystery.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  Spackled and Spooked

  “Smooth, clever, and witty. This series is a winner!”

  —Once Upon a Romance

  “Bound to be another winner for this talented author. Home-renovation buffs will appreciate the wealth of detail.”

  —Examiner.com

  “I hope the series continues.”

  —Gumshoe Review

  Fatal Fixer-Upper

  “A great whodunit . . . Fans will enjoy this fine cozy.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Smartly blends investigative drama, sexual tension, and romantic comedy elements, and marks the start of what looks like an outstanding series of Avery Baker cases.”

  —The Nashville City Paper

  “Polished writing and well-paced story. I was hooked . . . from page one.”

  —Cozy Library

  “There’s a new contender in the do-it-yourself home-renovation mystery field . . . An enjoyable beginning to a series.”

  —Bangor Daily News

  “A strong debut mystery . . . Do-it-yourselfers will find much to enjoy.”

  —The Mystery Reader

  “A cozy whodunit with many elements familiar to fans of Agatha Christie or Murder, She Wrote.”

  —Nashville Scene

  “A great whodunit. Fans will enjoy this fine cozy.”

  —The Mystery Gazette

  “A fun and sassy journey that teaches readers about home renovation as they follow the twists and turns of a great mystery.”

  —Examiner.com

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Jennie Bentley

  FATAL FIXER-UPPER

  SPACKLED AND SPOOKED

  PLASTER AND POISON

  MORTAR AND MURDER

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, projects, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with a professional. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

  MORTAR AND MURDER

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / January 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47678-9

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  No writer is an island, and this book couldn’t have happened without the help of a whole lot of people.

  As always, thanks to my wonderful agent, Stephany Evans, and everyone at Fine Print Literary Management, and my equally wonderful editor, Jessica Wade, and everyone at Berkley Prime Crime.

  Thanks to my publicists, Tom Robinson with Author and Book Media and Megan Swartz with Berkley, without whom this book would be nowhere.

  Thanks to the Penguin design team for another beautiful book: Rita Frangie for art direction and cover design, Jennifer Taylor for cover art, and Laura K. Corless for interior design.

  Big hugs to my critique partner, the wonderful Jamie Livingston-Dierks, who saves my posterior over and over again, and to all my other writer friends, too numerous to mention, who have loved and supported me through it all.

  Thanks to Angela Burns, my favorite breed of human—a librarian!—for donating her name to a good cause and for tirelessly pushing my books on her patrons. Thanks also to all the other librarians and booksellers out there, along with all the reviewers, and most especially the readers, who have made this journey possible.

  Finally, thanks, hugs, kisses, and undying love to my family, especially my husband and two boys, who know the real me and love me anyway. You guys are the best!

  1

  On April Fools’ Day, Derek started work on his dream house. If I had thought about it, I would have realized that that was a bad sign, but no, I was just too excited that he finally had something to do to worry about anything else.

  The house was a decrepit 1783 center-chimney Colonial on Rowanberry Island, about thirty minutes up the coast from Waterfield by boat, and he had fallen in love with it six months earlier: leaking roof, leaning walls, broken windows, and all. He’d wanted to buy it right then and there, but we were in the middle of renovating another house, a project where all our money was tied up, and with winter coming on, the timing just wasn’t right. But as soon as the snow melted and the ground thawed, and we sold the house on Becklea D
rive and put some cash back into the coffers, Derek was back to harping on about the Colonial on Rowanberry Island. He’s nothing if not persistent.

  Derek Ellis is my significant other, as well as my business partner. We’d met the previous June, when I’d inherited two cats and a house in tiny Waterfield, Maine, from my great-aunt Inga. Once I decided to spend the summer fixing it up, Derek was the handyman I hired to help me do the work. And in spite of a rocky beginning, I fell for him like a ton of bricks. When I chose to stay in Waterfield instead of going back to New York and my textile design career, going into business together seemed like a no-brainer.

  At this point, Derek was owner and I was resident designer of Waterfield Renovation and Restoration. There were no other employees, so Derek was also plumber, electrician, painter, and general contractor, while I did a little of this and a little of that, including some painting, some tiling, some wall treatments, and some other stuff. I do what I can, in other words, and what I don’t know how to do, Derek either does himself, or he gives me a crash course on the subject and lets me loose. It’s worked for us so far.

  The house on Rowanberry Island would be our fourth—and most ambitious—renovation project. After Aunt Inga’s Second Empire Victorian in the historic district, we’d spent most of the autumn redoing a midcentury ranch in a suburb west of Waterfield (the aforementioned Becklea Drive place), before coming back to the Village to spend the early part of the winter turning my friend Kate’s carriage house into a romantic retreat for her and her new husband. They’d gotten married on New Year’s Eve and had flown to Paris for their honeymoon, and we had just managed to get everything into place for their return.

  Since Waterfield was still blanketed under a foot of snow, Derek was forced to spend the first couple months of the new year doing small handyman jobs for other people, while I had agreed to teach a couple of textile design and history classes at local Barnham College. Both of us waited eagerly for enough snow to thaw to allow us to start work on the Rowanberry Island house.

  The big day turned out to be April first: The weather was beautiful, most of the snow was gone, and the top couple of inches of ground had thawed. We brought all of Derek’s tools down to the harbor and loaded up a little motorboat we had borrowed from Derek’s friends Jill and Peter Cortino. That done, we locked Derek’s black pickup truck and set out for Rowanberry Island.

  The island was only accessible by boat. It was inhabited year-round, but just barely. A handful of houses clung stubbornly to the rocky ground on the northwestern—lee—side, but every year it seemed another person or two gave up the fight and moved to the mainland. Kids went away to college, never to return, and the elderly died or were moved to assisted-living facilities off island.

  For those who held on, there was a little ferry that docked in the tiny harbor a few times a day. Our house was clear across the island from the village, and Derek and I didn’t want to be dependent upon the whims of the ferry, so we’d arranged with Peter and Jill to use their boat. It was too early in the year for them to use it themselves; the Maine coast in April isn’t conducive to pleasure-boating.

  April first was a perfect example. The air was crisp, the sky was a lovely, clear blue, and the wind was strong enough to make me wish I’d put on my down-filled winter jacket instead of a padded vest and the knit sweater with reindeer and snowflakes I had spent a couple of months slaving over. The life jacket Derek had insisted I wear helped a little, but not enough. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my ears, my Mello Yello-colored hair was stinging my face where it blew in the brisk wind, and my lips were turning blue under my lip gloss.

  “How much farther?” I squeaked over the sound of the motor. And had to repeat it, louder, when Derek couldn’t hear me. “Derek! How much farther?”

  “Not far,” Derek answered bracingly. He was upright, steering the boat, while I was huddled in a miserable, shivering bundle on one of the seats in the back. And, of course, he didn’t look at all cold, even though he was wearing less than me. A pair of faded jeans hugged his posterior, and a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater was covered by an orange life vest. The wind whipped his hair, which looked more brown than blond now, after being covered by a hat most of the winter. In the summer, the sun lightened it in streaks through the front and crown. His cheeks were flushed, and he looked happy. “See that?” He pointed to a low, green shape rising from the water in front of us. “That’s it. It’ll take another ten minutes, tops, to get to it.”

  “Great.” I huddled deeper into the life vest, shivering.

  “You’ll be OK once we get there,” Derek promised. “It’ll take me a while to hook up the generator, but then we’ll have heat.”

  “The little bit of it that won’t escape through the holes in the walls.”

  “There are no holes in the walls,” Derek said.

  “Fine. The cracks, then. The cracks between the planks that are wide enough for me to put my fingers through.”

  He didn’t answer that. Couldn’t, when he knew I was right.

  “A week from now we’ll have it insulated and all the rotten wood replaced,” he said instead. “After that, heat loss won’t be a problem.”

  I grimaced. And then I took a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m being grumpy.”

  He flashed me a grin over his shoulder, which after ten months together still gave me a thrill. “You really are a city girl, aren’t you, Tink? The ocean and the wind and the wide-open spaces freak you out.”

  I shrugged, pouting. That pout, coupled with the yellow hair I often pile in a knot on top of my head, and the fact that I’m a measly five foot two, is what had originally earned me the nickname. Tinkerbell. Now I was stuck with it. My mother thought it was adorable, Kate thought it was hilarious, and Melissa James, Derek’s ex-wife, thought it was cute. She didn’t mean it as a compliment. But then Derek’s nickname for Melissa had been Miss Melly, so I don’t know that she had a whole lot of room to talk.

  Melissa and Derek had gotten divorced almost six years ago, and Melissa had been shacked up with my distant cousin Ray Stenham ever since. Until just before Christmas, when something happened to change that, and now Melissa was back on the market and looking for someone to replace Ray. My big fear was that she had realized what she’d lost when she let Derek go, and now she wanted him back. I felt like she’d been coming around rather a lot lately, like I was stumbling over her every time I turned around, although I suppose it could have been my imagination. It’s just that she’s so damned perfect....

  “There it is,” Derek said. I looked up.

  The island was closer now: close enough that I could see the craggy coast, with its big boulders and rocky coves with grainy, grayish yellow sand. Most of the interior seemed taken up with pine trees, tall and dark, outlined against the china blue bowl of the sky.

  I squinted; we were heading northeast, it was fairly early, and the sun was shining. “That’s not our house, is it?”

  “Can’t be,” Derek said, “our house is on the other side of the island. Where?”

  “I can’t see it anymore. But there was a building of some sort in the trees. Big and white. Look, there it is again. Are you sure that isn’t our house? It looks exactly like it.”

  “Not exactly like it,” Derek said, squinting into the sun, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “That house looks like our house will look three months from now. When it isn’t falling down anymore.”

  “But it is a center-chimney Colonial, isn’t it? It looks like one.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Derek said, navigating the boat around the south end of the island, away from the other house. The one that looked just like ours, no matter what he said. “There are two of them. Twins. The man who built them had two daughters, and he built them each a house.”

  “Those were the days.”

  “Apparently the girls couldn’t get along, so he built one house on one side of the island, and one on the other, facing in opposite directions. That way, the girls never had
to look at one another again if they didn’t want to.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  “Irina told me. The first time she showed me the house. You didn’t want to come with us, remember; you and John Nickerson were busy picking out furniture to stage the house on Becklea Drive, and I went on my own.”

  “With Irina.” I nodded. “I remember.”

  Irina Rozhdestvensky is our Realtor, a Russian transplant who lives just down the street from the house on Becklea Drive that we renovated in the fall.

  I had met John Nickerson, the owner of an antique store on Main Street, around that same time, and he had let me pick some things out of his store to stage the house for showing. That’s what we’d been doing when Irina first drew Derek’s attention to the house on Rowanberry Island.

  “Did Irina know anything else about them?”

  “Nothing she mentioned.” Derek aimed the boat toward a small cove and rocky beach and cut the engine. “There’s our house. See it?”

  I nodded. It was big and square, positioned with its rear against a backdrop of dark pine trees and bare birches and oaks, getting closer every second as we drifted toward shore. The chimney had fallen in, there was a hole in the roof, more than half the windows were broken, and there wasn’t a speck of paint left on the entire front of the house, the old planks faded to a silvery gray from the constant onslaught of wind, sun, and salt. I shuddered.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” Derek said, and meant it. His entire attention was focused on the house, his eyes soft and dreamy, and his mouth curved in an adoring smile. Another woman might have felt a twinge of jealousy—I don’t think Melissa had ever understood why he’d look at a run-down wreck of a house with more emotion than he ever showed her—but I’ve gotten used to it. It’s no reflection of how he feels about me, it’s just how he feels about old houses. It seemed a pity to disturb his no doubt beautiful dreams; however, I didn’t have a choice.