Plaster and Poison Read online

  “Why would he do that?” Mom wanted to know. “Do you want Derek to propose?”

  I blinked. It’s hard to credit, but I hadn’t actually thought about it in those terms. I mean, I had thought about him proposing. I had pictured it, wondering if he would, and wondering how I’d respond if he did . . . but I hadn’t ever considered whether I wanted him to. Our relationship was pretty perfect just the way it was. We saw each other every day, worked together most of the time, spent more time together than most married couples . . . but at the end of the day, if we wanted to, we could get away from one another. We had our own individual spaces. And down the line, if things didn’t work out, we could separate a whole lot more easily if we weren’t shackled together in bonds of holy matrimony.

  “I don’t think so,” I said eventually. “At least for the time being, things are fine the way they are. I don’t need a ring on my finger to know I’m in a relationship.”

  Mom nodded. “It’s early days yet. Taking the time to make sure how you feel before you make any decisions seems wise.”

  I glanced over at her. “Is that what you did? When you met Noel?”

  Mom smiled, her blue eyes sparkling. “I knew the moment I set eyes on him. There was no need to take any more time than that. I just had to wait for him to realize it, too.”

  “How could you know? I mean, isn’t that kind of like falling in lust?”

  Hard to imagine anyone lusting after my portly and past middle-age stepfather, but surely it isn’t possible to love someone from the moment you set eyes on them? Anyone else I’d met, who claimed to have fallen in love at first sight, had gotten burned. Derek with Melissa, Kate with Gerard—me with Philippe. Then again, Jill had probably fallen in love, or at least in lust, with Peter at first sight, and they seemed to be doing OK.

  “It isn’t like that,” Mom said. “When it’s right, you just know.”

  “So if I don’t just know, then it isn’t right? Because I thought I knew with Philippe, and with Will, and with Ian, and with Gareth . . .”

  Mom shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, Avery. I knew as soon as I met Noel that I wanted to be with him, but of course I’d known him for a while by then. Online, you know. I knew he seemed to be a nice man and that we had a lot in common; I just hadn’t actually met him yet. And with your father . . . I was twenty-one or twenty-two, he was handsome and charming, and I fell flat for him. And we had a good life. We had you. We’d still be married if he hadn’t died.”

  “But if you and Dad were still married, what about Noel?”

  “I don’t know, Avery,” Mom said. “These are some very big questions. But if life had taken a different turn, and Kenneth hadn’t decided to go for a ride late at night, and that other driver hadn’t hit him, and we were still married . . . then maybe Claudette—that’s Noel’s ex-wife—wouldn’t have decided she needed to stretch her wings and find herself, either, and they’d still be together, too. Or he would have met someone else he liked, who made him happy.”

  “Different futures?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So why didn’t the two of you just live in sin?”

  “At my age?” Mom chuckled. “We’re old enough to like the convention of marriage, I guess. I was brought up to believe that you’d meet someone, get married, and settle down. And I’ve already had one good experience; I wasn’t afraid to try again. There is safety in marriage. And I like the commitment. It’s too easy to leave if you’re not married.”

  “There’s that,” I admitted. The flip side of easily being able to dissolve the relationship is that it’s too easy to dissolve the relationship. (Yes, I know it’s the same thing. The difference is in how you look at it.) Would I want it to be easy to dissolve my relationship with Derek, I wondered. My instincts said no—I’d want to hold on to him for as long as I could—but if he wanted to leave, would I perhaps feel differently?

  “Don’t worry about it, Avery.” Mom patted my arm. “When it happens, you’ll know what to say.”

  “You think?”

  “Of course, honey.” She smiled and looked around. “Well, this hasn’t changed much.”

  We had reached Main Street, and I looked around, too. No, I imagined it hadn’t, not since the last time Mom was here, and not in the eighty years before that, either.

  “That’s Derek’s apartment,” I said, pointing to the windows above the True Value hardware store. “He has a loft on the second floor. It used to belong to Peter Cortino, but when Peter and Jill got married—and Melissa divorced Derek—he moved in there instead.”

  “Seems like a fair trade,” Mom opined. “You know, Avery, when I was here before, I don’t remember there being quite so many handsome men in Waterfield. Derek, Peter Cortino, and that chief of police isn’t bad, either . . .”

  “Well, Peter’s new. He’s only been here for five or six years. He moved from Boston, I think. Not too long after Kate and Shannon.”

  “An Eastie.” Mom nodded. “I recognize the accent.”

  “Right. And no offense, but they’re all younger than you are. By a few years. When we were here for Aunt Catherine’s funeral, Derek was”—I counted on my fingers—“nine, and Wayne Rasmussen was probably twenty or so. It’s not likely you would have noticed him.”

  “That’s true,” Mom admitted. “Still, I can see why you like it here, Avery.” She grinned.

  “So you’re not disappointed? You don’t wish I was in New York, working on Madison Avenue? After all the time and effort—and expense—of putting me through Parsons?”

  “As long as you’re happy,” Mom said, “it’s all that matters. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

  I smiled. We linked arms and continued up the sidewalk.

  Since it was going on lunchtime, I took her by Derek’s favorite deli and bought her a lobster roll. She agreed that it was excellent, and she even ordered a Moxie to go with it, while I stuck to Diet Coke. Afterward, we headed back out into the ice and snow toward Aunt Inga’s house.

  We had gone maybe a block or so, to just outside John Nickerson’s store, when we came face-to-face with Cora Ellis and Beatrice.

  Cora looked worried, her round face pinched and her eyes shadowed. When she saw me, she grabbed my arm.

  “What’s going on over at Kate’s B&B, Avery? Why are the police there?”

  “There was a problem overnight,” I explained. “When we got to work this morning, we found a body in the carriage house.”

  Her fingers tightened on my arm. “A body? Whose body? ”

  Cora has lived in Waterfield most of her adult life. She must be wondering which of her friends or acquaintances had met with an untimely demise.

  I hastened to reassure her. “Nobody local. It was Kate’s ex. Shannon’s father. From Boston.”

  Beatrice gasped.

  “Oh, no,” Cora exclaimed. “How awful! Was he in town for the wedding?”

  “We don’t know why he was in town. Except that he’s been hanging around with Shannon for the past couple of weeks.”

  “Oh, dear. She must be devastated, poor girl.” Cora glanced at her own daughter, who seemed pretty devastated, too, considering that she didn’t know—couldn’t have known—Gerard.

  “She’s pretty upset,” I said. “She hadn’t known him long—apparently there was very little contact while she was growing up—but they’d seen each other pretty regularly the past few weeks, from what I understand.”

  “Oh, dear. What happened to him?”

  I shrugged apologetically. “I don’t really know. Wayne mentioned something about poison, but I’m not sure whether that means he was poisoned deliberately or if it could have been an accident. And then he couldn’t breathe. Not sure whether that was accidental or on purpose, either. Maybe a side effect of whatever he took. As for what he was doing in the carriage house in the middle of the night, I have no idea. I guess Wayne and Brandon will have to figure that out.”

  “Oh, dear.” Cora shook her head sadly.

  I took the opportunity to make introductions. “Cora, this is my mom, Rosemary Carrick. Mom, this is Cora Ellis, Derek’s stepmother, and Beatrice . . . um . . .”
/>   “Gremilion,” Bea murmured.

  “Beatrice Gremilion, Cora’s daughter.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Mom shook hands with both of them. While she and Cora discovered that they had both grown up in Portland and set out to decide whether they had any old friends or experiences in common, I turned to Beatrice.

  “How are things with you?”

  “Fine.” She smiled. It didn’t reach all the way to her eyes, but I didn’t think it was anything personal.

  “Are the Stenhams treating you OK? You’re still up there at the Clovercroft site, right?”

  She nodded. “I hardly ever see them. Melissa stops in once in a while, but I rarely see anyone else. There’s no construction going on, either.”

  I shook my head. “Sometime over the summer, a back-hoe turned up human bones on the construction site. The archaeology department at Barnham excavated and decided that it was an old Indian burial ground. Penobscots or Micmacs or something. And now the various nations are arguing over who has jurisdiction and whether or not to re-inter the remains. Ray and Randy just want to dig ’em up and get rid of them, of course, but the tribes would prefer that their ancestors stay where they are. Understandably so. If they were my ancestors, I wouldn’t want to dig ’em up, either.”

  “On the other hand,” Beatrice murmured, “one can understand why the Stenhams just want to move forward with their project.”

  I nodded. “Oh, sure. They’ve paid for the land, paid for the survey, paid for materials, and paid to get things rolling . . . and now it’s all just sitting there, and they can’t do anything but wait it out. It could take years before some sort of decision is made, and it’s an unholy mess.”

  I smiled, since the idea that the entire construction zone was lying barren, and that the Stenhams and Melissa were unable to cash out and get their investment back, brought me great pleasure. Small of me, no doubt, but that didn’t stop me from reveling in the feeling. Maybe they’d even fall on hard times and have to stop buying up land and putting up cracker-box houses. It wasn’t like they were hurting. Their other development, Devon Highlands, was going great guns, with parcels selling for more than a hundred grand each, and the houses topping out at five hundred thousand or so. So there’d be presents under the Stenhams’ Christmas trees this year, too, I was sure.

  “I’m sorry you have to sit there by yourself all day,” I added. “It must be boring.”

  Beatrice shrugged. “I’m used to being alone,” she said. “And I’m finding things to do. Straightening out the Stenhams’ bookkeeping is a big job. There’s been some very interesting balancing going on.”

  “Really? I guess maybe Carolyn Tate wasn’t quite the treasure Melissa claimed. I should have known she was exaggerating.”

  Melissa had gone on TV after the accident and extolled Carolyn’s virtues as a bookkeeper and member of the team; heck, practically a member of the family.

  Beatrice didn’t answer. Looking around for a distraction, she found it in John Nickerson’s display window. “Wow. What a great dress.”

  “Isn’t it?” I moved to stand next to her. “I was actually thinking about buying it. Letting John keep it until after Christmas, since I don’t want to destroy his decorations before the Victorian weekend, but putting a deposit down so I can wear it on New Year’s Eve. Wouldn’t it look great with black stockings and black shoes, and with a big, black flower at the waist?”

  Beatrice glanced down at me. Like most everyone, she has me beat by a few inches. “You could pull that off. I don’t think I could.”

  “Of course you could. Although that style probably isn’t the best choice for you. Too”—I hesitated—“girly.”

  I knew her to be under thirty, younger than me by a few years. But she was looking older than her real age at the moment. Her mouth was pinched and her features strained, and there were shadows under her eyes, like maybe she was missing Steve more than she’d thought she would.

  I added, “What I meant was, this isn’t your kind of dress. You need something more sophisticated. More elegant. With your figure, you can pull off high fashion. I can’t. I’m too short, for one thing.”

  And not bony enough, for another. My face is round, my nose is pert, my hair is kinky; there is nothing elegant or sophisticated about me. While Beatrice had that clothes-hanger figure down pat and cheekbones for days.

  “I had a part-time job in the accounting department at Filene’s Basement on Boylston Street in Boston for a while,” Beatrice said, her lips curving reminiscently.

  “No kidding?” Filene’s is an institution. Designer clothes at fifty to seventy-five percent off, and then there’s the Brides’ Run . . . “Why did you leave it?”

  She glanced over at me. “Steve got this incredible job with an incredible salary, and I didn’t have to work anymore. I could just go home all day and putter. He told me I should take advantage.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Two years.” She stared into John’s plate glass window. “At first it was wonderful. We’d been struggling to make ends meet for long enough that I appreciated not having to worry about money. I’d been holding down two and sometimes three part-time jobs so Steve could finish school, and suddenly we had enough that not only did I not have to work anymore, we could hire someone to cook and clean. I didn’t have to do anything but sleep in, go to lunch with my friends once in a while, work in the garden, go shopping, and not in the clearance racks. . . .”

  “But? ”

  “But eventually I got bored. I had everything, but no one to share it with. Steve was always working. Weekdays and weekends, holidays and vacations. Thanksgiving, Christmas, our anniversary, and my birthday. He was just never home.”

  “That must have been hard,” I said, sympathetically.

  She shrugged. “Not compared to what some people have to deal with. My dad used to beat my mom black and blue. Steve never raised a hand to me. We never argued, never fought, never even disagreed; he just wasn’t ever there.”

  “So you left.”

  She nodded. “Better to be alone by yourself, than alone with somebody, don’t you think?”

  “I guess,” I admitted.

  “Nice lady,” Mom said after we’d said good-bye to Cora and Beatrice and were on our way up the hill toward the Village.

  “Cora? Yeah, she’s great, isn’t she? I’ve been looking forward to introducing the two of you. I figured you’d get along.”

  “They invited us for dinner tomorrow night. Of course you and Derek are included.”

  I nodded. I had heard Cora extend the invitation and had assumed as much. “I’ll tell him. Although you do realize it’ll be much easier to discuss us if we’re not there, right?”

  “Now, why would we be talking about you behind your backs, Avery?” Mom wanted to know and slipped her hand through my arm again. “You’re not sixteen. It isn’t like Noel and I have to approve of your boyfriend before you can go out with him.”

  “It helps if you like him, though. Not so I can go out with him”—since we were a ways beyond that by now— “but because it’s just nice when you like my boyfriends. I don’t think you ever have.”

  “You’ve dated some real duds,” Mom said calmly. “Starting with that garage band musician in high school and ending with Philippe. Phil. Whatever. Not a decent human being among them.”

  “Derek’s a decent human being.”

  “He seems to be. And I remember Ben Ellis from when I was growing up; he’s always struck me as a nice guy. And I really like Cora. Although her daughter seemed . . .” Mom thought for a second before she said, judiciously, “Troubled.”

  I nodded. I had noticed the same thing. Gerard’s death seemed to have upset her, for some reason. Maybe she was thinking of Steve and realizing that anything could happen to him in her absence. “She just left her husband. He’s always working and never home, so she figured if she was going to be alone anyway, she might as well be alone by herself. Or with her family around her.”

  Mom nodded. “It’s a good thing, living in a time and place where a woman can leave her husband without legal or moral repercussions.”<
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  I had honestly never thought about it. Being able to leave a dysfunctional relationship seems like it ought to be a right. It’s a sad thing when marriages break up, but sometimes, it’s the only choice. But Mom had a point: In other parts of the world, it was a right many women didn’t have. Even in our part of the world, women hadn’t always had it. As recently as a hundred years ago, women didn’t have the right to vote in elections. And as Miss Barnes and Derek had told me, up until World War I, the navy hadn’t been willing to accept women in its ranks. As soon as the war was over, it kicked back out the ones whom it had relied on.

  And even now, there were women who wanted to leave their husbands and couldn’t for fear of repercussions. I had a feeling Cora knew all about that. So did Bea, having grown up with an abusive father.

  “Looking on the bright side,” I said, “at least it doesn’t sound as if Steve is the possessive sort. I don’t think he’ll be showing up in Waterfield with a shotgun.”

  “Be grateful for small favors,” Mom said. “There have been too many murders in this quiet little town already.”

  10

  The Waymouth Tavern is located a few miles outside town, overlooking the ocean and the small islands that dot the Maine coastline. Rowanberry Island, where Derek’s Colonial house is located—the Colonial house that Derek wants to renovate—is one of them, and we pointed it out to Mom and Noel over dinner. Noel had the lobster, of course; you can’t visit Maine for the first time and not have lobster. Mom had crab cakes, and so did I, to show solidarity and because I like them. And Derek, being Derek, had a burger and fries.

  He’s one of those supermetabolic people who’ll never get fat because his body burns calories so fast, and usually, when there’s food in front of him, he focuses on eating it. To the exclusion of anything else, including conversation. At first it bothered me, since I took it to mean that he wasn’t interested in me or what I was talking about. Now I know that it doesn’t mean anything at all, except that he’s hungry. Once he gets some food into him, he’ll pay me attention again. This evening, in an effort to impress Mom and Noel, he was on his best behavior. I even managed to get a couple of words out of him between bites. The rest of the time, Noel, Mom, and I held down the conversation. Mom told Noel how downtown had changed—or not—since she was last in Waterfield, and how we’d met Cora and Beatrice and been invited to supper tomorrow, and how nice Aunt Inga’s house looked and what a marvelous job Derek and I had done on the renovations.