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  Derek continued, “Cora said she’ll be on hand whenever we need her, and Beatrice is back in town, too.”

  Cora is Derek’s stepmother, and Beatrice is her youngest daughter. Bea and her husband, Steve, divided their time between Boston, where Steve was transitioning out of a job with a big law firm, and Waterfield, where he was starting a small practice of his own. Cora is fantastic in the garden, and although Beatrice is mostly a math whiz, I knew we’d be able to find something she could do to help. After all, another pair of hands is another pair of hands.

  “Between all of us,” Derek said, “we’ll get it done.” He took another big bite of burger, seemingly not the least bit worried. I picked at my crab cakes.

  “It’s just a very short time and a whole lot of work.”

  “Not that much,” Derek said. “It’s mostly all cosmetic. Slapping lipstick on the pig. Dressing it up for the cameras. New paint, a couple of coats of poly on the floors, new kitchen counter, new tile in the bathroom. You’ll be surprised at how fast the work will go.”

  “If you say so.” Although I probably wouldn’t feel calm again until next week, when this whole ordeal was over. The house on Cabot was a great little cottage, it would be tons of fun to redo; I just wished we could really do it right and give it the time we should, instead of being in and out in five days flat.

  Derek pulled his plate back across the table, put the burger on it, and started chomping on fries. I played with my crab cakes while sneaking glances past him to a romantic table for two where the other reason I wasn’t looking forward to the coming week sat.

  Top-producing Realtor Melissa James was currently sharing a toast with Tony “the Tiger” Micelli, ace on-air reporter for Portland’s Channel Eight News.

  Melissa is Derek’s ex-wife. They married young, while he was still in medical school. When he decided—after four years of education and four of residency, plus a year of working with his dad, Waterfield GP Benjamin Ellis—that he didn’t want to be a doctor after all, Melissa dumped him. Then she took up with my distant cousin Ray Stenham. That relationship had ended six months ago, and since then, Melissa had been on the prowl. I’d been a little worried that she might want Derek back, but lately she’d spent much of her time in the company of Tony the Tiger, so I was keeping my fingers crossed that that relationship would work out. Given the champagne toast and the steamy looks, not to mention the little velvet box I thought I saw sitting on the table, it looked like the chances were pretty good.

  They hadn’t noticed us come in, and I had breathed a sigh of relief, but I should have known it was too good to last. They finished their meal before us, and as they made their way toward the door, Melissa looked over and saw us. And tugged Tony’s sleeve before heading in our direction.

  “Oh, hell,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She’s coming this way. I was hoping they wouldn’t notice us.”

  Derek glanced over his shoulder and saw the two of them bearing down on us. “Be nice, Avery.”

  “When am I not nice?” I wanted to know.

  He opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, a manicured hand with long pink talons landed on his shoulder. It may have been my imagination that turned the gesture into more of a caress, but I don’t think so. Melissa enjoys rubbing my nose in the fact that she spent five years married to my boyfriend.

  “Hello, Avery.” She showed me all her blindingly white teeth in a smile of false warmth before she turned her attention to Derek. “Hello, Derek.”

  I don’t think I imagined the way her smile changed. Not to mention her voice. She was practically purring.

  “Hey, Melissa.” Derek’s didn’t. He doesn’t want Melissa back, and he’s made that clear. I just don’t like the way she’s all over him. He doesn’t belong to her anymore, and she gave up the right to pet him when she dumped him for Ray Stenham.

  Derek greeted Tony the Tiger. “Micelli.”

  Tony nodded back. “Ellis.”

  He’s a good-looking guy. Tony, I mean. Derek is gorgeous: six feet tall, with hair that’s a shade closer to blond than brown, at least in the summer, and those melting blue eyes with crinkles at the corners. But Tony’s quite all right, if you like the type. A half dozen years older than Derek’s thirty-five, and sort of slick. Black hair and hooded brown eyes, olive complexion, always very nicely dressed. My boyfriend is happiest in faded Levi’s and worn T-shirts, while even Tony’s golf shirts are ironed and his jeans have creases down the front. He and Melissa make a lovely couple: She’s always decked out to the nines, too. Tonight’s outfit was a flirty Zac Posen skirt and blouse, with gold sandals and matching jewelry. Including the obscenely large stone weighing down the ring finger of her left hand.

  “You two all ready?” she wanted to know, absently massaging Derek’s shoulder and making the lima-bean-sized diamond sparkle in the light from the Tiffany lamps.

  “We’re ready for an offer on the house on Rowanberry Island. Any activity?” I smiled insincerely.

  After our usual Realtor, Irina Rozhdestvensky, had married a few months ago and become too busy with her new husband to tend to her career, we’d had to fall back on Melissa to market and sell our latest renovation project. It was over my strenuous objections, since I had spent the past year actively trying to avoid doing business with her. But she was the premier real estate agent in Waterfield, and probably in all of down east Maine, and when she cornered Derek and told him we needed someone with real experience to handle the sale of what had turned out to be a halfmillion-dollar historic waterfront property, he had been unable to say no. The house had been on the market for a couple of weeks now, but she hadn’t pulled a buyer out of a hat. I couldn’t resist bringing it up, even though I knew it was unreasonable to expect to get an offer so soon.

  Melissa widened her fabulous violet blue eyes innocently. “I told you it would take time, Avery.”

  She had. I guess buyers with that kind of money don’t grow on trees.

  “What I meant,” she added, “was whether you were ready for tomorrow.”

  The house we were flipping for the cameras belonged to Tony Micelli. When Melissa found out about Noel and the TV show, and that we needed a project to work on for a week, preferably without having to actually buy it first, since most of our money was tied up in the house on Rowanberry Island, she’d suggested Tony’s place. He’d owned it for years, had in fact grown up in it, and had been using it as rental property for a while now. The tenants—a couple of students from Barnham College—had graduated and left town at the end of the semester, and now Tony recognized the opportunity to give his property a cheap facelift before cashing out. Having the house featured on television would likely bring any selling price up, and he had a girlfriend who could market it for him. Besides that, he’d probably enjoy having Derek—his girlfriend’s ex-husband—doing the manual labor.

  The sticky “ex” situation had been the biggest consideration in whether or not we wanted to take on the project. I’d wanted to say no when Melissa came to us—to Derek—with the idea of using Tony’s house for our project. I didn’t want to deal with her any more than I had to, and the idea that Tony would be hanging over our shoulders, making condescending comments and ordering Derek around, seemed reason enough to stay clear. But Derek said he couldn’t care less what Tony did; he liked the house, he thought it would fit our needs, and besides, he was used to dealing with demanding personalities—after all, he’d been married to Melissa for five years. And it was just for a few weeks: one before the shoot, one during, and one after, to tie up any loose ends. So I’d relented. I still wasn’t thrilled about having to deal with them both, but I could cope. At least I thought so.

  “As ready as we’ll ever be,” Derek answered, sending me a smile across the table.

  I smiled back. Melissa smiled, too, tightly, and dropped her hand from Derek’s shoulder, albeit not without a last little stroke. “Has the crew arrived?”

  “I assume so. If
something had happened, I’m sure Kate would have called.”

  “They’ll be at the house in the morning?”

  “Bright and early,” Derek said.

  “Wonderful.” Melissa glanced at Tony. “We might stop by, if you don’t mind. To meet everyone.”

  Her tone indicated that we’d better not. Mind.

  “Sure,” Derek said. “It’s your house. Not like we want to keep you out.”

  Speak for yourself, I thought.

  “Tony’s been in broadcasting for twenty years, you know. It’s quite possible he already knows some of the crew.” She used the hand with the ring to smooth her sleek, moonlight-pale hair behind one ear. By now, I was sure she was trying to draw attention to it, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of hearing me ask. And Derek, bless him, was oblivious. Of course, he’d had his back to them and hadn’t seen the champagne toast or the little velvet box.

  “Television is a small world,” Tony said in his wellmodulated reporter’s voice. “I know a lot of people. Twenty-plus years in the business, a body gets around.” He passed a hand over his jet-black hair while smiling complacently at Melissa. “Are you ready to go, Missy?”

  Melissa nodded. He took her elbow, and they moved away between the tables.

  “I always feel like there’s a smell of sulfur in the air whenever she’s been around,” I told Derek, sotto voce, as soon as they were out of range.

  His lips quirked even as he checked to make sure Melissa and Tony were too far away to have heard me. “I think that’s her perfume.”

  It was my turn to smother a giggle. “They’ll be breathing down our necks for the next week, you know. Melissa might even offer to get her hands dirty, just to get more face time.”

  “I’m sure Tony has better things to do than hang around our project,” Derek answered. “He’ll have to cover the news for channel eight. I’m sure something will happen this week that’ll capture the public’s imagination and keep him busy. As for Melissa, don’t worry about her. She might drop by to get her face and name on TV, but she won’t try to do any of your work. Too afraid to break a nail.”

  He polished off the rest of his burger.

  I looked down at my own hands. I’ve never been able to grow my nails long, and with all the manual labor that I do, no polish would last beyond a day before peeling off anyway. So I keep my nails short and natural. On my hands, anyway. I do tend to go a little crazy on my toes, however. At the moment, they were lime green with pink tips to match my sundress, which had a border of green and brown palm trees against a pink sky marching around the hem.

  “Are you ready?” Derek asked.

  I looked back up at him. “To go home?”

  “I was thinking more of tomorrow. Are you ready to tackle the work and the TV crew? Get out in front of the cameras and get your groove on?” He grinned.

  I shrugged. I was feeling a little apprehensive about appearing on TV—nobody wants to look bad or sound stupid in front of a national audience—but on the other hand, I was looking forward to doing the work, and the exposure would be good. Between our own projects, while we wait for one house to sell so we can buy another, we sometimes have to take on jobs for other people to make ends meet. A TV appearance might mean more exciting opportunities, instead of just spending our time painting other people’s walls and sanding other people’s floors.

  “Always looking on the bright side,” Derek said when I pointed this out.

  “It beats always expecting the worst, doesn’t it?”

  “That it does. And on that note . . .” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to us, and to another great project.”

  I lifted mine, too. “A great project without any skeletons in the basement, or for that matter, any hidden rooms or dark family secrets.”

  “Or dead bodies,” Derek said, since we’d found one or two of those every time we’d taken on a new project.

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  We clinked our glasses together and did.

  2

  The camera crew arrived on Cabot Street bright and early the next morning. Derek and I were waiting on the porch steps, each gripping our paper cup of coffee, when the white van pulled up to the curb.

  The van was unmarked. I guess I’d expected something like the Channel Eight News van, with its colorful logo and slogan and Tony and his coanchors’ faces depicted many times life size on the side, but when I thought about it, I realized that that didn’t make sense. The crew was based in California and wouldn’t have driven all the way to Maine; they had probably rented a van at the airport to haul all their gear up here.

  The driver was a lean, sallow man with a narrow face, dark hair in need of a cut, and sad, droopy eyes like a bloodhound. A pair of ill-fitting khakis hung low on his hips, and on his feet were heavy boots with thick soles. Next to him in the passenger seat sat a blond woman in her early forties wearing a businesslike gray pantsuit. She looked expensive. Back in New York, I’m not sure I would have thought so, but here in Waterfield, she stood out. It was another reminder how much my life and my perceptions had changed over the past year.

  The back of the van held three other people, all dressed in jeans and T-shirts: one woman, two men. The woman was barely out of her teens and had a tangle of long, black hair pulled up into two bunches, one above each ear, as well as piercings in her nose, her eyebrow, her ears, her navel, and possibly a few other places that weren’t visible at the moment. She was chewing bubblegum, and as she stepped out on the sidewalk and pivoted slowly, looking around, she blew a big, pink bubble, popped it, and did it again.

  Of the two men, one was a few years younger than me, just on the underside of thirty, and the other in his midfifties at a guess. He had thinning, gray hair and a beard, plus a stomach that curved the blue T-shirt he wore under a many-pocketed safari-type vest. The younger man was unnaturally handsome, like a soap opera actor or model. His jeans were a touch too snug, and his black T-shirt clung tightly to his chest. The brown leather of his cowboy boots was a perfect match for the glossy brown curls framing a face that could have graced the cover of People magazine’s “most beautiful” issue.

  Derek snorted derisively.

  I grinned.

  The well-dressed woman looked at us, then came up the walk on pointy stilettos. “You must be the talent.”

  Derek got to his feet and extended a hand. “Derek Ellis.” He indicated me. “This is Avery Baker.”

  “I’m Nina Andrews.” She extended her hand. Her grip was no-nonsense, and so was the look in her eyes, although I noticed what appeared to be stress lines around her mouth and across her forehead. “I’m the director. This is the rest of the crew.” She turned to the van. “Fae, our PA. That’s F-A-E, like the fairy. No y, in case you ever have a need to spell it. Ted, the grip and gaffer. He does the lighting and other technical set up.”

  Ted was the driver, the skinny guy with the sallow complexion. He had opened the back of the van and was busy hauling plastic crates full of cords and equipment out of the vehicle and onto the sidewalk, and he must have been stronger than he looked, because the big crates didn’t seem to trouble him.

  “Wilson is the camera operator”—the older guy with the vest; he was helping Ted unload the van—“and this is Adam.”

  Her voice changed ever so slightly when she said Adam’s name, although that could have been because Adam himself came up to stand next to her right then.

  Up close, he was almost too pretty. Perfect nose, perfect skin, dark blue eyes with long lashes, pink lips that missed being too full by a hair, and white teeth so straight and even they couldn’t possibly be real.

  He took my hand in both of his, just holding it and not shaking, while he gave me a melting smile and a long, appreciative look from under his lashes. “I’m Adam Ramsey. Nice to meet you.”

  “Avery Baker. Likewise.” I twitched my hand out of his. I was Derek’s girlfriend and had no business holding hands with anyone else, and despite his obvio
us attributes, Adam didn’t appeal to me. He had this veneer of high gloss that made him look sort of waxed. And the charm was too practiced, too calculated. He reminded me of my ex-boyfriend Philippe, the reproduction furniture maker I had worked for in New York. Philippe had been all about appearances, and I was willing to bet Adam was, too. He wasn’t pleased to meet me; he was just oozing charm because I was female and that was what he did. Nina must be used to it, because she didn’t bat an eye.

  Next to me, Derek flashed a grin full of teeth and warning. “I’m Derek Ellis. Avery’s boyfriend. She and I will be doing the renovating.” He gave Adam’s hand a good squeeze.

  “Adam’s our runner,” Nina said as Adam stuffed his hands into his pockets. “He does a little of this and a little of that, wherever he’s needed. Right now, he should be over there with Ted and Wilson, unloading the van.” She glanced at him.

  Unabashed, Adam saluted. “Sure, Neen.” He winked at me before he turned on his cowboy-booted heel and sauntered toward the van. About halfway down the garden path, he passed Fae, and he must have said something to her, because she giggled and twisted her neck to look at him over her shoulder, her cheeks almost as pink as the bubblegum.

  Nina narrowed her eyes, but when Fae stopped beside her, she performed the next round of introductions without comment. “Fae, this is the talent, Derek and Avery. Fae is our PA, or production assistant. She takes care of any paperwork, legal permits, motel reservations, that sort of thing.”

  “Nice to meet you, Fae,” I said. Derek just smiled. Fae lowered her eyes, blushing again. Given the many body piercings and the amount of skin showing between the low-slung jeans and cropped top, I’d have thought she’d be harder and more sophisticated, but she actually seemed like sort of a nice girl.

  “Speaking of motel reservations,” Derek said, “you’re staying at the Waterfield Inn, correct?”

  Nina nodded. “Mr. Carrick said we had to. That he and Mrs. Carrick stayed there when they were in town for Christmas.” She looked at me. “Rosemary Carrick is your mother, isn’t she?”