Plaster and Poison Read online

  “And she’s been here in sleepy Waterfield, when she’s been usedto the hustle and bustle of Boston,” Kate reminded me. “She’s been working for a pittance and having to deal with Melissa and the Stenhams on top of it, when she’s been used to being a lady of leisure. I wouldn’t blame her for getting a little desperate.”

  “And she wouldn’t have told anyone what she was planning,” Mom added, “because the whole idea is to get her husband so worked up that he’ll finally realize he might have lost her. And to do that, no one else can be in on the deception. Everyone has to think she’s really missing.”

  “So where would she be? ” Kate asked.

  I shrugged. “If that’s really what happened, she could be anywhere. She grew up in Waterfield. I’m sure she has friends here she could stay with. And she has money. Lots of money. She could have taken a cab to Portland and be staying at the Harbor Hotel, watching HGTV and eating Cordon Bleu cuisine from room service.”

  “That’s easy to check, anyway,” Noel said. “Not for us, but for the police. Or her husband. All they have to do is monitor for activity on her credit and debit cards. I assume she took her purse with her? ”

  “I assume she did, too,” I said, “since I didn’t see it anywhere. Not in the office and not in her car. That doesn’t mean anything, though. If someone took her, they could equally well have taken her purse. And left the cell phone, not realizing it was on the desk underneath the papers.”

  “That’s true,” Kate said. “But at least this is another possible avenue to explore. It’ll give Cora something to do today, instead of just sitting at home wringing her hands. She can contact all of Beatrice’s old friends and see if they know where she is, or whether she mentioned anything to any of them.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to call Derek and suggest it. And also see what Wayne had to say. He was on his way out to Clovercroft when I left. Derek decided to wait for him and get a ride back with Cora. They may still be there.” I pulled out my phone.

  “How did you get into the office?” Kate wanted to know. “Was it unlocked? ”

  I shook my head, listening to the ringing on the other end of the line. “Locked up nice and tight. Derek called Melissa. She came out and opened it up.”

  “That was nice of her,” Kate said blandly.

  I shrugged. “Hey, it’s me,” I said into the phone.

  “Hi, Tink.” Derek sounded tired.

  “Nothing new? ” I asked, sympathetically.

  “Unfortunately not. We’re back at the house. Wayne’s here, too, but there’s nothing he can do until tonight. He’s going to put out an unofficial APB, but until Bea has been gone for twenty-four hours, we can’t file a missing-person report. And he warned us that a twenty-eight-year-old woman who doesn’t come home from work, after she has left her husband and is bunking with her parents two hours away from where she lives, isn’t going to be a high priority. As we’ve talked about ourselves, there are a lot of things that could be going on, and none of them criminal.”

  “I’ve got another one for you,” I said, running through the scenario I’d just discussed with Mom, Kate, and Noel. “You know her better than me. Does this sound like something she’d do? ”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Derek said, “but we’re not that close. I get along well with both her and Alice, but we’ve never spent much time together. We were all adults when Dad and Cora got married, and Beatrice was already away at college by then. It’s more a question for Cora or Alice, I think.”

  “Can you ask? ”

  “Sure I can. But I don’t want to right now. Cora is too upset. I’ll broach the subject a little later.”

  “It’ll be something for her to do,” I said, “something to make her feel like she’s not just sitting there waiting. She can contact everyone Beatrice knows, friends from school, anyone she’s met since, and especially anyone she’s had contact with since she got back to Waterfield, and see if they know anything.”

  “I’ll suggest it. It’s not a bad idea in any case, whether Beatrice left of her own free will or not. But I may wait to make that other suggestion. Maybe I’ll talk to Alice first. See what she thinks.”

  “Do what you think is best. Is there anything we can do to help? ”

  He sighed. “I don’t think so. Just have fun with your mom and Noel. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “OK,” I said. “Um . . . Cora invited us to dinner tonight. Remember? Me and you, Mom and Noel. I guess that’s not going to be happening, right? I mean, I don’t expect it to—she has other things to worry about—but I just wanted to make sure. Just in case she’d like the distraction.” If our company would make her feel better, I was only too happy to go, plus I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to ask Dr. Ben about William Ellis. Although we had more important things to think about now, I was still curious about the cold case.

  “Let me ask.” He moved the phone away from his ear, and I heard his voice put the question to Cora. I could also hear her answer.

  “They’re like family. They’re welcome to come over. But it won’t be anything fancy.”

  “She says you’re welcome to come,” Derek told me.

  “I know. I heard. My mom likes to cook, so maybe we can throw something together between all of us. Potluck.”

  “Sounds good,” Derek agreed. “I’ll be in touch, OK? ”

  “Me, too.” I ended the call and turned to Mom and Noel. “We’re on our own. He’s sticking with Cora for now. And there’s nothing we can do for them, for the time being. Anything we can do for you, Kate? ”

  “Nothing,” Kate said. “Shannon’s asleep; the pills Dr. Ellis prescribed worked. Josh went back to school. He would have been happy to sit here and watch her sleep, but I kicked him out. No sense in both of them missing class. If you’re leaving, I think I might just go back to bed, too. I didn’t get much sleep last night, either.”

  “Sounds good.” I smiled encouragingly. “Don’t worry. I’m sure the police will figure out who killed Gerard and get off your back. And they’ll release the carriage house, and then we can get back to work. We’ll still be able to finish by the time you come back from Paris.”

  “If we go to Paris,” Kate said.

  “Why wouldn’t you go to Paris? ”

  Her voice was brittle. “I’m afraid one of us will get arrested before we get that far. When my ex-boyfriend shows up three weeks before my wedding and is murdered on my property, with my fiancé on the premises, not to mention myself, I’m not sure anyone will let us leave the country. Not until the murder is solved and the case closed, and God knows when that’ll be. Especially if they won’t let Wayne work on it.”

  “I’m sure Reece Tolliver from the state police will figure it out,” I said. “After all, he wouldn’t be where he is if he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “We’ll see.” But she didn’t sound hopeful. “I’m going to go lie down. Excuse me.”

  She wandered out, taking her apron off as she went.

  “Great,” I said after I’d heard her door close, “that’s all we need. Kate falling apart.”

  “You can’t blame her, Avery,” Mom answered. “There’s a lot going on. Her ex-boyfriend getting killed, her fiancé being a suspect, she and probably her daughter being suspects . . . and you two renovating the house where he died, so she and her new husband can move into it once they’re married. It’s a lot to process.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. “She might not want to live in the carriage house now that Gerard’s body has been there.” And what the hell would we do then? Would we get paid for the work we’d done and reimbursed for the materials we’d bought, or would we be out of luck? And what was wrong with me to even be worrying about something like money at a time like this?

  Mom lifted a shoulder. “There’s no telling. You’ll just have to ask her. Some people wouldn’t care, but some people would. I’m sure there have been other deaths in this house already. But this was someone she knew, so it might be different.”

  I nodded. Might. Might not. For now, renovations seemed to be on hold, anyway, until the state police decided to release the carriage house to us.

/>   “So what do you want to do now? ” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind showing Noel Aunt Inga’s house,” Mom said. “If you don’t mind, that is.”

  “Of course not. Why would I mind? ”

  It had been sort of a rhetorical question, but Mom answered it. “Well, it’s really your house now, and we don’t want to intrude on your privacy.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’re welcome to look at anything there. If you had wanted, you would have been welcome to stay with me while you’re here, too.”

  “I know.” Mom smiled and squeezed my arm as we walked out together. “But we didn’t want to cramp your style. Didn’t want you to feel that you couldn’t have Derek sleep over if you wanted, or do what you normally do because we were in your house.”

  “And maybe you didn’t want me to cramp your style, either? ”

  Mom had been celibate for seventeen years—at least to my knowledge—from when Daddy died until she met Noel, so I had no doubt she and Noel had had fun the year they’d been married, making up for lost time.

  Mom blushed. “Maybe so.”

  I grinned. “That’s fine. But I don’t mind you coming over and seeing the place. I made the bed this morning, and unless the cats have made a mess in the past couple of hours, the house looks just like it did when you were there yesterday. I left Derek’s truck in the lot behind his loft and walked over here, so I’m without wheels. Do you want to walk or drive your rental car? ”

  “Let’s walk,” Mom said. “Such a nice, crisp day.”

  She breathed deeply of the nice, crisp air, cold enough to freeze the insides of my nostrils. Noel huddled inside his sheepskin-lined coat and pulled his hat farther down over his ears. He sneezed twice on the way.

  “Brrr!” he said when we were standing inside the central hallway in what had been my aunt’s house, stamping his feet to regain circulation and flapping his arms like a penguin. “Nice place.” He sniffed.

  “You should have seen it in June,” I said. “The grass was a couple of feet high, the paint was flaking off in sheets, the porch floor was a death trap, and the wallpaper in here was the most god-awful pattern of orange and green plaid I’ve ever seen in my life. But it looks great now.”

  I looked around, proudly, at Derek’s and my handiwork. The hardwood floors gleamed with three coats of high-gloss polyurethane, the walls were painted in dramatic jewel colors—appropriate for an 1870s Victorian—and at the end of the hallway, my pride and joy, Aunt Inga’s kitchen, was visible through the open door.

  When I’d first moved into the house, the kitchen had been a total disaster area. I was able to look past the ugly wallpaper everywhere—wallpaper comes off—and the scuffed and dull heart pine floors throughout the house—hardwood floors can be sanded—as well as the clutter littering every flat surface—clutter can be removed—but the kitchen, with its rusty, half-circular wall-mounted sink, its crooked cabinets that looked like they were made from driftwood, and its peeling vinyl floor exposing dry and blackened floorboards, had me in tears. I didn’t feel any better when Derek refused to tear out the cabinets with the explanation that they were custom made and would cost a fortune if I were to order them today. I didn’t want them, so what did I care?

  He turned out to be right, though. He usually is, at least when it comes to repair and renovation. The cabinets were fine once we leveled them, and painted them, and punched out the center panels in the doors and replaced the wood with pieces of Aunt Inga’s wedding veil, which I’d found in a box in the attic. The broken pieces of china that someone smashed all over the floor in an effort to scare me into leaving Waterfield had turned into a marvelous backsplash, perfectly complementing the bright blue resin countertop, and the floors, though weathered and full of character (Derek’s word), had come out looking great. At this point, the kitchen was probably my favorite room in the house. Not because I like to cook so much—whenever I eat at home, it’s usually canned tuna or microwavable macaroni and cheese—but because it just makes me happy to look at the results of all our hard work.

  Plus, that kitchen was where I first set eyes on Derek. And where I first realized I was in love with Derek. And where Derek first . . . never mind.

  Anyway, I like my kitchen a lot. I like my whole house a lot, but I like the kitchen the best.

  “The attic is full of Aunt Inga’s stuff,” I told my mom. “I had Derek take anything too ugly to salvage to the dump and put all the 1970s stuff on consignment in John Nicker-son’s antique shop downtown—he specializes in midcentury modern—but of course I couldn’t get rid of anything personal. I sent you all the photo albums and papers I came across, but the attic is still full of old tablecloths and vintage clothes and little porcelain tchotchkes and things like that. There are a couple of pairs of old ice skates up there, and several pairs of snowshoes, and a pair of old, wooden, cross-country skis that look like they might belong in a museum. They’re at least fifty years old, if not a hundred. If there’s anything you’d like to have, feel free to take it with you. Or I can ship it to California, if you don’t want to take it on the plane.”

  “I’ll have a look,” Mom said happily and headed up the stairs to the treasure trove while I showed Noel around the rest of the house.

  After the tour, we all settled down in the little parlor in the front of the house with a couple of boxes Mom had brought down from upstairs. It was too cold to sit in the attic, she said; she could see her breath in front of her face, and her fingers were turning numb. So I stoked up a fire in the fireplace—something else I’d learned how to do since moving to Waterfield—and we sat there and sorted through some of Aunt Inga’s knickknacks while the cats were competing for Mom’s attention and very pointedly ignoring Noel and me. Maybe she was right; maybe she did remind them of Aunt Inga. Or maybe it was just that she was sitting on the 1940s loveseat that had been their particular spot for as long as I’d owned the house. The worn gray velvet had been caked with cat hair when I first moved in. Now the loveseat was reupholstered in a midnight blue satin blend with stars—my own design—and the cat hair brushed right off. It was a trick I’d learned from Melissa James, of all people. I had put her on the gray loveseat once, hoping that copious amounts of cat hair would adhere to her elegant posterior, but unfortunately she was wearing a slippery sort of dress, and the hair just slid right off and onto the floor, leaving Melissa, as always, spotless, but me with a mess to clean up.

  “So tell us more about the carriage house you and Derek are renovating,” Mom said, after we had finished talking about Aunt Inga’s house. “It’s the one at the back of the B&B, right? Small yellow building with a cupola on top and a set of French doors? ”

  I nodded. “There used to be a big barn-type door there that we took out. For the carriages and cars to fit through back in the old days. The French doors and sidelights went in instead.”

  “It looks lovely,” Mom said warmly. “Of course I haven’t seen the inside, and with what’s going on, I may not get to, but I peeked through the window yesterday, and from what I could see, it’s really nice.”

  “Derek does good work. And he’s been working hard.”

  “I’m sure you’ve worked hard, too, Avery,” Noel said with a smile and another sneeze.

  I smiled back. “Bless you. I have. But not as hard as Derek. The early part of the process—framing, roofing, stringing wire, and laying plumbing—that’s something he has more experience with than me, and I’d only slow him down if I tried to help. Kate—or rather, Wayne—didn’t give us much time to get the job done. I’ve been running around ordering cabinets and countertops, picking out paint colors, and making sure Derek has lunch. He’s not much good if he doesn’t eat. Oh, and tracking down this set of initials he found carved in one of the posts inside.”

  “Initials? ” Mom said, looking up from her inspection of one of Aunt Inga’s knickknacks. “What initials? ”

  “WE, ER, and a heart. Before everything got so crazy, I had just discovered that Lawrence Ritter Jr. was married to a woman named Emily.”

  “Really? ” Mom said.

  I nodd
ed. “I found a picture of the Ritter family at the topping-out ceremony for the carriage house in April of 1918. I have it here somewhere; you can take a look.”

  I dug through the bills and papers on the desk until I found the printout, which had been sitting there unheeded for the past week at least, and handed it to her. She put down the figurine she’d been looking at—a hideous ceramic kitten with enormous eyes—and she and Noel put their heads together over the article and photograph. Meanwhile, I carried on with my story.

  “I already knew that Lawrence Junior was married. Miss Barnes at the Historical Society told me. She didn’t tell me what his wife’s name was, though, and I didn’t ask, since I didn’t think it was important. I mean, why would someone’s wife carve her initials in the carriage house wall, inside a heart with someone else’s initials other than her husband’s? So I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence. But if you read the caption under the picture . . .”

  “I already am,” Mom said.

  “Then you’ll see that there was a guy named William Ellis working on the carriage house. Some relative of Derek’s. His grandfather’s uncle, I think he said.”

  Mom nodded. “And you said the other set of initials was ER, didn’t you? So even if Emily Ritter isn’t ER, William Ellis is likely WE, since he was working there and had every opportunity to carve his initials in the post. Are you sure he didn’t just do it to sign his work, so to speak? The way a painter signs a painting? Carve his initials in the post to show he’d been the one erecting it? There’s a man here named Edvard Rasmussen; maybe he’s ER.”

  “And the heart is just a blip in the wood? Or . . . wait! Maybe William Ellis was gay, and he and Ed Rasmussen—who’s probably a great-grandfather or uncle or cousin a few times removed of Wayne’s—maybe they were carrying on an illicit affair in the carriage house after hours. And because they couldn’t shout their love to the world, they carved their initials in the post instead.”

  “Don’t be facetious, Avery,” Mom said sternly.

  “I wasn’t.” Not entirely, anyway. I’d started out being facetious, but now that I thought about it, the explanation made as much sense as any other. As much sense as the idea of Lawrence Ritter’s wife carrying on an affair with one of the carpenters, anyway. People were gay in 1918, too, just not as openly as they are now. Homosexuality might even have been a crime. Coming out of the closet is never easy. More difficult in a small town like Waterfield, where everyone knows everyone else. And still more difficult a century ago, I’d guess, when people weren’t as open-minded about alternative lifestyles as they are these days.