Plaster and Poison Read online

  Aunt Inga’s house—my house now—is an 1870s Second Empire Victorian with a square tower, a mansard roof laid in a flower pattern, and tall, thin windows. Derek had painted it a lovely robin’s egg blue, with cornflower and ochre trim, back in August, and just last weekend, he had hung strings of blue Christmas lights along the porch and around the front door for the season. It looked like a fairy-tale cottage.

  Mom and I had stopped by for a brief tour before heading back to the B&B this afternoon. She had admired the mosaic backsplash I had painstakingly put together out of the broken china someone had left all over Aunt Inga’s floor, and the original kitchen cabinets that Derek had made me keep and that I had jazzed up with some antique lace panels cut from Aunt Inga’s never-used wedding veil. And of course she had met the cats, Jemmy and Inky, two monstrously large Maine coons that I had inherited along with Aunt Inga’s house back in June. Six months later, we were still tiptoeing around each other, trying to figure out our relationship. Or I was tiptoeing, anyway, while Jemmy and Inky were making it clear that I was there for their convenience, not the other way around.

  I didn’t have any pets growing up. The apartment in New York was small for Mom, Dad, and me, as are most apartments in New York; plus, it had a no-pets policy. And I lived in the same apartment until I moved to Waterfield, with just Mom after my dad died; alone after she moved to California. I had friends who had pets, though. Amy had three rabbits, which chewed the electrical cords and tried to bite me if I attempted to pick them up. And Laura Lee, Philippe’s lawyer, had a dog: a small Yorkshire terrier named Muffin who ate better food and had more expensive accessories than I do. Laura carries Muffin around in a monogrammed bag so the dog’s polished toenails never need touch the pavement, and she feeds it gourmet dog food from the Kanine Kafé. Reba was the only one with a cat, and it was a Siamese so ancient it practically creaked when it moved. Mostly, I’d see it in Reba’s lap, being stroked, or curled into a ball on the sofa. So nothing had really prepared me for the responsibility of two fully grown, extremely healthy Maine coon cats who were used to coming and going as they pleased, and who had absolutely no use for a human.

  Aunt Inga had bequeathed them to me, though, so I did my best, and we’d forged an uneasy sort of bond where we inhabited the same house—when the cats deigned to come home—and where I made sure their bowls were filled with food and water and that they got their checkups regularly to keep them healthy. Beyond that, we coexisted by pretending the other wasn’t there. Imagine my surprise when they both walked right up to my mother and butted their heads against her legs and—when she bent down—her hands.

  “They liked her,” I told Derek at dinner. “They don’t like anyone, but they liked my mom.”

  “Of course,” Derek answered smoothly, with a wink across the table. “They have good taste. I like your mom, too.”

  I sniffed. “So if they have good taste, and they don’t like me, what does that mean, exactly?”

  “Nonsense, Avery,” Mom said, “of course they like you. I’m just new and exciting, that’s all. Or maybe I remind them of Aunt Inga.”

  “Hah,” I answered and turned to Noel. “So how did it go at Cortino’s earlier? Was Peter able to help you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Noel caught Mom’s eye as he nodded. “Peter was very helpful. It’s all taken care of.”

  “Excellent,” Mom said, smiling at her crab cakes.

  I looked from Noel to Derek. “Did he say anything about Gerard after we left? Or did Jill?”

  Derek shook his head. “Why would he?”

  I shrugged. “No reason, I guess. I just thought he looked shocked when he heard the news.”

  “We all looked shocked when we heard the news, Avery,” Mom said.

  I huffed, exasperated. “I know that. I just thought he looked more shocked than he ought to look, if he didn’t know Gerard.”

  “I guess maybe he thought Waterfield would be safer than this,” Derek said. “I think he moved here to get away from Boston and all the crime. And now we’ve had nothing but dead bodies ever since you moved here in June.”

  “Thanks ever so,” I began, and then stopped when he caught sight of something—or someone—beyond me. Derek’s eyes turned flat, and he straightened up, as if bracing himself. I turned to look over my shoulder and rolled my eyes. “Oh, great.”

  “What?” Mom said.

  “Melissa.”

  Mom raised an eyebrow.

  “Hi, Derek,” a voice purred as a vision in creamy white cashmere and taupe suede stopped beside the table. An elegant hand with long, French-manicure-tipped talons landed on his shoulder. Another reason to dislike her: I’ve never been able to keep my nails long or to keep polish on them. “Hello, Avery,” she added, a good deal less sweetly.

  I smiled back, insincerely. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I showed teeth.

  Melissa James brings out the worst in me. Not only the worst of my inferiority complexes, but the worst of my behavior, too. I don’t like her. In addition to having been married to Derek for five years, while I’ve known him for only a few months, she’s tall and elegant, with pale hair razor-cut in a sleek wedge, and huge violet blue eyes. Real, of course; not contacts. She’s always dressed to the nines, in designer originals and tasteful—and, above all, genuine—jewelry, while I’m short and bouncy with kinky hair the color of Mello Yello. I gritted my teeth, wishing I wasn’t wearing jeans and a fuzzy turtleneck, and that I was taller and my hair wasn’t so frizzy and that I had bigger boobs and longer legs.

  Melissa had already moved on. “And these must be your parents.” She bathed Mom and Noel in the brilliance of her smile. I swear she has more teeth than a crocodile, and they’re impossibly white. “I’m Melissa James.” She took the hand off Derek’s shoulder and offered it to my mother.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mom said, with—I was pleased to note—just about as much sincerity as I’d been able to muster. Mom must already be feeling proprietary toward Derek, and Melissa clearly didn’t intimidate her. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Oh?” Melissa glanced at Derek, whose bland expression gave nothing away. Then she turned to Noel and turned the charm up another notch at the same time, until it was almost visibly oozing out of her (invisible) pores. “And you must be Avery’s dad. So nice to meet you!”

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Noel said politely.

  Melissa beamed at us all. “So you’ve come up to visit Avery. How do you like Waterfield?”

  As the most successful Realtor in town, the one whose slogan is “Selling Waterfield one yard at a time,” Melissa obviously feels a proprietary interest in the place. She has bought and sold enough of it, certainly.

  “Fine, fine,” Noel said with a glance at Mom.

  Mom smiled brightly. “It’s quite different from what it used to be, isn’t it? A few years ago, Waterfield was such a lovely, quaint little place. Before all the building and development, and before all the flatlanders started moving in.” She sighed and shook her head, sadly.

  Melissa flushed, I’m happy to say. Not only is she a flatlander and a Southerner—she’s from Maryland or West Virginia or some such place—but she’s also responsible for selling Waterfield properties to many of the other flatlanders, and, through her boyfriend, she’s responsible for quite a lot of the building and development, too.

  “So how is my dear cousin Mary Elizabeth?” Mom added. “Avery tells me you’re seeing Randall now.”

  “Raymond,” I said.

  Mom glanced at me. “Raymond. Of course. My mistake. How are the Stenhams, Ms. James?”

  Melissa recovered her poise and told Mom that Aunt Mary Elizabeth was fine, except for her health. Apparently Mary Elizabeth is what used to be called delicate. I’d be delicate, too, if I had brought Ray and Randy into the world. They’d been thoroughly nasty little boys who had tied me to a tree and left me there for hours the summer I was five. And they had not improved with age. I hadn’t even been in Waterfield a week when Randy threatened me with bodily harm if I didn’t sign Aunt Inga’s house over to him and Ray and leave town.
/>   For this and other reasons I had endeavored to avoid Aunt Mary Elizabeth during the time I’d been here. I didn’t think I’d know her if I saw her on the street. Mom, on the other hand, had met her many times growing up, while my grandfather was still alive and the family came up to visit. Naturally, Mom might like to see her cousin while she was here. Or if she didn’t precisely want to, she might feel an obligation. She told Melissa that she and Noel were staying at Kate’s B&B, and she would call tomorrow to see if Mary Elizabeth might be interested in getting together.

  The mention of Kate’s B&B got Melissa off on another tangent. “I hear you’ve found another body, Avery.” She smiled at me with no warmth whatsoever. “Who was it this time? ”

  “If you know about the body, how come you don’t know who it was?” I countered.

  Melissa shrugged elegant shoulders under the cashmere. “Tony didn’t know. Just that the police were investigating. Apparently Wayne’s being stingy with the details.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I’m not sure I should tell you, either.”

  Tony, by the way, is Tony “the Tiger” Micelli, investigative reporter for Portland’s channel eight news. I’d encountered him before, a couple of months ago, after Derek and I found that skeleton in the crawlspace of the house we were renovating on Becklea Drive. The fact that Tony is slick and slimy and calls Melissa “Missy” was enough to turn me against him, although the final nail in his coffin was when he said that he was keeping his fingers crossed for another John Wayne Gacy story, as in the serial killer. The fact that anyone—even an on-air reporter with the IQ of a turnip—would wish such a discovery on anyone was seriously disturbing.

  “Be nice, Avery,” Derek said. “Wayne will go out with a statement as soon as he can, I’m sure, Melissa. But in the meantime, I’ll tell you. The deceased was Kate’s ex. Shannon’s father.”

  Melissa turned pale under the meticulously laid makeup. “Gerard? How terrible!”

  “Did you know him?” I asked.

  She turned to me. “Of course not. How would I know him? He wasn’t from Waterfield.”

  I shrugged. “You knew his name. And you do seem to hook up with every good-looking man who comes through town sooner or later, so I thought maybe your paths had crossed.”

  “Why, thank you, Avery!” She smiled.

  “You’re welcome.” I hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but then she knew that.

  “Be nice, Tinkerbell,” Derek murmured and put a hand on my back. It was warm and hard through my sweater, and I leaned a little closer to him.

  Melissa watched us. “Tinkerbell?” she repeated, an elegant eyebrow arched. “How sweet.” She smiled condescendingly before focusing on Derek. “What was it you used to call me, again?”

  “You didn’t really lend yourself to nicknames, Melissa,” Derek said, although there was a little extra color in his cheeks, I thought.

  Melissa smiled, as at a private joke. Or a nice memory. “I should get going. I have a client waiting. Nice to meet you both.” She smiled at Mom and Noel, who grimaced back, politely. “Here’s my card. Give me a call sometime. I have some lovely condos just getting ready to go on the market in the new year. Granite counters, stainless steel appliances, ocean view, and a very good price, considering. I’ll be happy to give you a preview, if you’d like.”

  “We live in California,” Mom said.

  “Oh, of course.” Melissa nodded. “But with your daughter settled here, at least for the time being, I thought you might consider purchasing a place to stay when you come to visit. Kate’s bed and breakfast is lovely—I sold it to her; I should know—but it isn’t like having your own space, is it? And since you’re family, I’m sure Ray and Randy would give you a good deal. Just something to think about.”

  She bathed us all in another blindingly white smile before turning on her heel and slithering off, cashmere swinging around her calves.

  “I hate that witch,” I muttered as I watched her go.

  “That’s not very nice,” Derek answered mildly.

  I glanced up at him, still tucked in the crook of his arm. “Can you blame me?”

  His eyes were level. “Actually, I can. Melissa and I have been divorced for almost six years. It’s over between us. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “It’s not that I’m worried, exactly,” I said. Although worried was exactly what I was, of course. “What did you used to call her?”

  “Like I said,” Derek said, “she didn’t lend herself to nicknames.”

  “I can think of a few.” I straightened up, putting some distance between us.

  “I’m sure you can,” Derek said and dropped his arm from around my waist. “But there’s no need.”

  “Because you don’t want to hear anything against her?”

  “Because you won’t call her anything I haven’t already called her myself. Let it go.” He turned away to the view.

  Mom looked from one to the other of us. “If she’d never met the murdered man,” she said, “how did she know his name? She never explained that.”

  “Kate told her?” Derek suggested, over his shoulder. “They talk sometimes.”

  “When Kate can’t avoid it,” I said. “I doubt she’d confide any secrets in Melissa.”

  “I don’t know that Gerard’s name would be a secret,” Derek answered. “It’s not like Kate’s ever tried to pretend that Shannon was found under a cabbage leaf.”

  “That’s true.” I took a breath, a deep one, to pull myself together. I wasn’t doing myself any favors by acting like a jealous teenager. “She might have mentioned it when she first came to town, while she and Melissa were looking at houses together. Before Kate bought the B&B and realized what a waste of oxygen Melissa is.”

  Derek rolled his eyes. “Don’t hold back, Avery.”

  “I never do,” I said.

  When we knocked on Kate’s kitchen door around eight A.M. the next morning, both McGillicutty women were up and about, if not exactly chipper. Shannon looked like death warmed over, huddled at the breakfast table wrapped in a blue robe, her hair a straggly mess and her face naked. She was ghostly pale, with dark circles under her swollen eyes and a sort of little-girl-lost look to her that was painful to see.

  Kate wasn’t in much better shape. I had called her the night before to make sure she was OK, and she had assured me that she was, but it looked like she had spent a rough night. She was pale like her daughter, her freckles standing out across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, and with the same dark circles under her eyes. If she had cried for Gerard, after the first time yesterday morning, she showed no signs of it, though. Her hazel eyes were neither red nor swollen, and although she was pale, she was composed. She was standing at the stove when we walked in, cooking what smelled like French toast.

  “Any news?” Derek asked.

  Kate turned to him. “Not much. Brandon has gone through the carriage house from top to bottom looking for evidence, and he says they’ll probably release it sometime today or tomorrow. It’s sparkling clean. Not so much as a speck of sawdust anywhere.”

  “What did they come up with? Anything helpful?”

  Derek pulled out a chair for me and took one himself, keeping his eyes on Kate.

  “They’re not telling me,” Kate said, her voice brittle. “Apparently we’re suspects.”

  Shannon closed her eyes, as if in pain. Or disgust.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, “of course you’re not suspects. Wayne can’t possibly think you had anything to do with this.”

  “Wayne’s not in charge anymore. He’s a suspect, too.” She flipped a piece of toast.

  “You’re kidding!”

  Kate shook her head. “He was here the night Gerard was put in the carriage house.”

  “Put? ”

  She nodded. “Apparently he died somewhere else and was dumped here.”

  “Ugh.” Who’d do something like that to us? Or to Kate and Shannon?

  “What does that have to do with Wayne?” Derek asked.

  “Nothing really,” Kate answered, “except that he got here late, when I was already asleep. He could have put the body i
n the carriage house before coming inside.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “No idea. But when my ex-boyfriend shows up three weeks before my wedding and ends up dead, the police have to look at my fiancé. That’s just the way it is.”

  “Even when your fiancé is the chief of police?”

  Kate shrugged and put her spatula down on the stove to rub her eyes.

  “So who’s in charge, if not Wayne?” I asked. “Is Brandon handling the investigation on his own?”

  At twenty-two, was he ready for such a big responsibility? I mean, if there was ever a case we didn’t want mishandled due to inexperience, it was this one.

  Kate shook her head. “Reece Tolliver from the state police in Augusta was called in to help.”

  “So what’s Wayne doing now?” Derek asked.

  Kate grimaced. “Directing traffic.”

  “What a mess,” I said.

  Kate nodded, picking up the spatula once more and turning back to the French toast.

  “How are you holding up?” Derek asked Shannon. “You hanging in there?”

  “More or less. I couldn’t sleep at all last night.” Her voice was low, rusty. “I just can’t imagine who would have done this, you know? He wasn’t doing anything to anyone!”

  “I think he must have been,” Derek said gently, “for this to happen. Are you sure he didn’t say anything to you? Mention anything he was doing or someone he had contact with? Other than you?”

  She shook her head, fisting her hands in her hair as if to tear it out by the roots. “I’ve thought and thought about it. All night long. All day yesterday. I’ve gone over every word he ever said to me, twice, three times, and I don’t know anything. He came up here to see me. And that’s all I know!” Her voice rose.