Mortar and Murder Page 2

  “Derek? Look out. You’re about to hit the dock.” Literally.

  “Oops.” His eyes came back into focus, and he made the necessary adjustments to bring the boat up alongside the decrepit-looking dock leaning into the water at a precarious angle. “Sorry about that.”

  “No problem. Is the dock safe, do you suppose?”

  “I’m sure it is,” Derek said, looping a rope around a pylon and bringing the boat to a rocking stop. He bounced out and onto the dock, which looked to me as if it could break into pieces under his booted feet at any moment. Miraculously, it held. “C’mon.”

  He reached down. I grabbed his hand and used the support to get to my feet, unsteadily. Growing up on the coast of Maine, Derek had been in and out of boats his entire life. I was born and raised in Manhattan, and the closest I’d ever gotten to a boat was the occasional trip on the Circle Line ferry when friends from away came to visit.

  “Upsy-daisy.” He lifted me onto the dock. Sometimes it’s nice to be petite. Especially when your boyfriend is a strapping six feet or so and used to hauling lumber and other heavy objects. I tottered—just slightly on purpose; the dock was slippery and about as wobbly as it looked—and he put an arm around me to steady me. I leaned in. The puffy orange life vest made cuddling less fun than usual, but his arm was nice and warm and solid through the wool sweater, and the brisk wind hadn’t managed to eradicate his particular aroma: Ivory soap and shampoo mixed with paint thinner and sawdust. Mmmm!

  All too soon he let me go, though, and turned to survey the house again. I sighed. “You’re more comfortable in the boat than I am. Why don’t you hand the stuff up to me, and then we’ll carry it to the house together.”

  “Sure.” He tore his gaze away and went back into the boat. We unloaded for a few minutes, and then we picked up what we could carry and started across the meadow toward the house.

  I’m not sure what the reason was; whether it was that this was the first time I’d seen the place clearly, in bright sunshine, since early November—and the light hadn’t been that good then, with the fog and the rain—or whether it was because this was the first time I’d seen the house uncovered by snow while we owned it . . . but I was aware of a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach. Had it really always looked this bad? Or had the winter months and the snow done a number on the place so that it now needed another ten or twenty thousand dollars’ worth of work above and beyond what we had expected to put into it? Had the hole in the roof always been so big? Had there always been so many broken windows? And how was it possible that I hadn’t noticed how the whole thing tilted to the right like something out of a Dr. Seuss book?

  “What?” Derek asked when I stopped dead in the middle of the grass, my eyes round. “You OK, Tink? You look like you’re gonna faint.”

  “I feel like I’m going to faint,” I said. “Did it always look this bad?”

  He stared at it. For a long time, before he turned back to me. “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Oh.” I bit my lip. “I didn’t realize . . . I mean, I knew it would need a lot of work, but I had no idea . . . This is, like, a hundred times worse than Aunt Inga’s house!”

  Derek examined the house again. “Not quite,” he said judiciously. “I mean, yeah—it’s rough. It’s gonna need a lot of work. A lot of work. But it isn’t a hundred times worse than your aunt’s house.”

  My voice reached an uncomfortable, hysterical pitch, even to my own ears. “The roof has a hole in it! Big enough for a helicopter to land in the attic! If there’s an unbroken window in the entire house, I can’t see it, and the whole thing is leaning! Like the freaking Tower of Pisa!”

  “Maybe we can turn it into a tourist attraction?” Derek suggested, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “I can’t believe you’re laughing at me! It isn’t funny, dammit. We’re gonna sink every dime we own into this place, and it won’t even make a dent, and then we’ll have to rob a bank or something to keep going, and when we’re finished, assuming we aren’t caught and sent to jail, it’ll be years from now, and we’ll have spent so much money we’ll have to sell the house for a couple of million to get our money back, and no one’s gonna wanna pay that much for a house on an island in the middle of the ocean where it isn’t even warm!”

  “You’d be surprised,” Derek said. He dropped a rolled-up tarp he’d been carrying across his shoulder on the grass. “C’mere, Avery.” He put his arm around my shoulders and began steering me in the direction of the house again, murmuring encouragement the whole way. The medical profession lost a great doctor when Derek retired his license; his bedside manner is excellent, both in and out of the bedroom. “It’ll be all right, you’ll see. It won’t cost as much as you think. And it won’t take as long, either. And you’d be surprised how much someone might pay for a place like this, all fixed up. That other Colonial we saw? It belongs to Gert Heyerdahl.”

  “The author?” My feet were moving, independent of my brain.

  Derek nodded, prodding me gently along. “The same. He’s only there for a few months in the summer. The rest of the time he divides between his penthouse in Miami and his villa in Tuscany.”

  “What a life. Maybe I should become a thriller writer.”

  “Or maybe you should just stay here with me,” Derek said. “There are a couple of other houses like that, too, here and on the other islands. All of them summer homes; the only people who live here full time are the ones in the villages. And I guess maybe some of the big houses have staff. Or maybe not; they may close them down for the winter and only open up again for the season.”

  “M-hm.” We had reached the front steps now, and they appeared in no better shape than the leaning dock down by the water. “Think this’ll hold our weight?”

  “It’s held mine every time I’ve been here. Along with Irina’s. And she’s a lot bigger than you.” He dropped his arm from around my shoulders and started up the wooden stairs. They creaked under his feet but didn’t break. Something that had been underneath must have shared my misgivings, though, because it streaked out from under the porch and disappeared in the brush. All I saw was a blur of fur going by at warp speed. I squealed.

  “What?” Derek said, turning around.

  “Animal. Furry.”

  “Mouse?” Derek said.

  I shook my head, knees knocking together. “Bigger. And blue. What kind of animal is about this big”—I held my shaking hands a little less than a foot apart—“and blue?”

  Derek thought for a moment. “Cookie Monster?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. Cookie Monster is much bigger. And it wasn’t that kind of blue. No animal in nature is Cookie Monster blue.”

  “More of a blue gray? A squirrel, maybe? Or a rat?”

  “Not a rat. We don’t have rats.” At least we’d better not. “I think the legs were longer. And I didn’t notice much of a tail.”

  “Hare? They’re gray. With white stubby tails.”

  “Maybe. Although it didn’t hop.”

  “We’ll find out,” Derek said. “If it lives under there, it’ll be back.”

  “True.” And wouldn’t that be lovely?

  The distraction of the blue gray furry thing—and the fact that Derek had been jumping up and down on the porch—had alleviated one of my fears, anyway. If it could hold him, surely it could hold me. I crept up the steps while Derek fumbled in his pocket for the key. He turned to the heavy front door. While he wrestled with it, he gave me a crash course in architecture, most of which I knew already—from mandatory architecture classes at Parsons School of Design—but some of which was new to me.

  “The center-chimney Colonial is the first distinctive housing style in New England. It started out as a very simple one-story design: two rooms around a central chimney. Then it got expanded to one-over-one: two stories, four rooms. Three bays wide.”

  “Bays?”

  “Doors and windows.” He grunted, trying to turn the key in the lock
. “This house is five bays wide. Center door, two windows on each side. That style came later. After 1750, say. And we’ve got two stories. Plus an attic. And a tight run-around staircase. That, there.”

  He pushed the protesting door open and pointed. I nodded, stifling a moan.

  It wasn’t the staircase so much. The staircase was fine, really. Narrow and cramped, yes, sort of doubling back on itself, but compared to some of the other features, not a big deal. Quite attractive, really.

  The floors were wide planks, and if they’d ever been sanded and polyurethaned, it wasn’t in my lifetime. The windows were small and deep set—and dirty and broken—and the light filtering in was pale and weak. It didn’t help that the ceilings were low and made the rooms seem even darker. At least in Aunt Inga’s 1870s Victorian cottage, the ceilings had been ten feet tall. Here, they looked like they’d brush the top of Derek’s head once he started walking around. I made a mental note: no hanging light fixtures. They’d all have to be flush-mounted or even recessed. Except maybe in the dining room: a chandelier-type light fixture is really de rigueur above a dining room table.

  The temperature was freezing; it was even colder inside than outside, and although spring had officially come to down east Maine, it was really only warmer compared to the frigid dead of winter. If I couldn’t quite see my breath in front of me, I felt like I ought to.

  Derek rubbed his hands together. I’m not sure if it was the cold or the anticipation. Probably the latter. When he turned to me, he didn’t look daunted in the least. “Guess we’d better get started.”

  “I guess.”

  “Can you help me carry the extension ladder from the boat? That way, I can get the tarp off and start patching the hole in the roof.”

  “Sure.”

  He looked at me for a second before he reached out—with both arms this time—and pulled me close. With the stupid orange life vest gone, I could snuggle in and put my cheek against the scratchy wool of the sweater. His body was comfortably warm through the layers, and his heart beat steadily against my ear.

  “It’ll be OK, Avery.” He said it into my hair. “Come June, you won’t recognize this place, I promise. And you’ll feel better once we start working. You felt the same way about rebuilding Kate’s carriage house, remember? You didn’t think we could do it. But we did, and it was great. You did an awesome job. And you’ll do an even better job this time. This house is going to be a showplace by summer. I promise.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.” He tilted my face up and kissed me. “Now shake a leg. The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll be done.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said and followed him outside and down the stairs and across the meadow to the dock again. In the corner of my eye, a small blue gray shadow darted through the brush and under the porch.

  2

  Derek was right: I did feel better once I started working. Even if all I did for the first two days was hold the ladder while he climbed onto the roof, and then stand below to make encouraging remarks and watch him like a hawk so he didn’t fall off and plummet to his death.

  He spent the first day rebuilding and tuck-pointing the substantial chimney: making sure the mortar holding the bricks together was strong and not crumbling. Once the new mortar was set and the chimney was safe, he tied a rope around his waist and looped the other end around the chimney; that way, if he fell—through the roof or over the side of it—he wouldn’t fall too far. And then he proceeded to walk around up there holding on to the rope with one hand. Just wandering back and forth, peeling off old layers of roof shingle and decking and assessing the damage, whistling as he worked. All while I stood below with my heart in my throat, stomping my feet and twitching with worry. From time to time he’d even turn to give me a cheerful wave or thumbs-up, as if to make sure that I was all right.

  By the time he finally came down, two and a half days later, I was wrung dry emotionally. To the point where, as soon as he had put the second foot on the ground, I said, “I need a break.”

  Derek looked surprised. “OK. Um . . . from what, exactly?”

  “The worry. I’ve been worrying for two days straight.”

  “Except when we were doing other things,” Derek said, a reminiscent twinkle in his eyes.

  I blushed. “All right. Yes, except when we were doing other things. But I’ve been standing here for the past two days, worrying that you’ll fall off the roof, and I need to do something else for a while.”

  “You can start working on the inside,” Derek suggested, since I had refused to do that while he was outside.

  “Other than that.”

  He sighed. “Fine. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to take a walk,” I said firmly.

  “A walk?”

  “Across the island, to the other Colonial. I want to see it. Up close.”

  “Oh.” His face cleared. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “You don’t want to come?”

  He smiled. “I’d love to come. But the sooner I get the holes patched and the windowpanes replaced, the sooner we can hook up the generator and get some heat and power going. It’s been a while since I had to work only with manual tools, and I can’t wait to get my electric drill plugged in somewhere.”

  “Oh.” I nodded. Totally understandable. I’m not good at roughing it, either. A hotel without room service is about as far as I’ll go. “OK, then. I’ll just take a quick walk across the island—it shouldn’t take much more than ten minutes to get there, do you think?—and have a look around, and then I’ll come back. Thirty minutes, tops. Just to see what they’ve done to the place, you know?”

  “Be careful,” Derek said. “Knock on the door before you start peering through the windows. Just in case someone’s there. You don’t want to catch Gert hanging around in his boxer shorts drinking beer and watching NASCAR.”

  I shuddered. “Definitely not.” Derek watching TV in his boxer shorts was one thing, gorgeous specimen that he is. Gert Heyerdahl, with his beard and long hippie hair, was another, and not one I wanted to experience firsthand. “I’ll be careful.”

  “If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll come looking for you.” He turned and headed up the stairs to the front door. I went the opposite way, around the corner of the house and along a narrow, partially overgrown path that led away from the ocean and into the woods.

  The state tree of Maine is the eastern white spruce, tall and straight, with rough bark and blue green needles. There are also a lot of other trees indigenous to the area: various birches and elms, poplars and oaks, maples and hickory. They like the cold climate, and grow tall and dense. Only the spruces and pines were green, of course; the rest looked like they might be thinking about throwing out buds but hadn’t quite made the commitment yet, just in case we got another cold snap. The lack of growth made it easier to see where I was going as I shuffled along the narrow ribbon of beaten earth that led into the woods, surrounded by more trees than I’d ever seen in one place before in my life.

  After a few minutes’ walk, the path split: one branch going left, the other continuing more or less straight. Both new paths were even less defined than the one I’d used to get this far. I stopped at the fork, squinting through the pine needles and bare branches at the sun and trying to picture the layout of the island in my head. It started out wide and flat on the southern end, where Derek’s and my house was. The other Colonial house was positioned on the western side. The little village, meanwhile, was situated at the back of a little cove on the northwestern shore, up where the terrain was higher. On the other side of the woods, and past more meadows. It would seem, then, that the path going straight led north to the village, and the one on the left went due west to Heyerdahl’s house.

  I struck out to the left, jumping over the muddy ruts left by the recently melted snow and skipping over gnarly tree roots and patches of dormant vegetation that bisected the skinny path, ruminating on my situation as I went.
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br />   A year ago, the idea that I’d own not just one, but two houses in Maine, in addition to a car and two cats, would have been laughable. The picture of me, wandering through the woods in worn-out jeans tucked into a pair of Wellies, would have made my eyes pop. My Wellies were pink with red lipstick kisses on them, admittedly, nothing traditional, but still. Amazing, the difference a year can make.

  When I had first arrived in Waterfield, it had been early summer, and I’d planned to spend a weekend finding out what my aunt Inga wanted, and why she had summoned me, a relative she hadn’t seen for twenty-six years, to spill the beans about family secrets and truths and lies. Only to discover, when I got here, that Aunt Inga was dead and I was her heir. But I still had no thoughts of staying. Renovating the house before putting it on the market was just to maximize return on the sale. I’d thought I’d stay a few months and then go back to my regular life in Manhattan. I had a boyfriend, a job I loved, good friends I enjoyed spending time with, and the hustle and bustle of the city around me felt essential.

  Yet here I was, ten months later—house, car, cats, and all—pretty much as happy as a clam. Sure, I still missed certain things. Like Balthazar coffee in the morning. Decent Thai food. And going to the grocery store at three A.M. The coffee wasn’t too bad up here, even if it wasn’t Balthazar, and the seafood was great. I can live without Thai. And Derek was a hell of a lot better than any other boyfriend I’d ever had. In fact, Derek made it all worthwhile.

  Before Derek, I’d been—shall we say—unlucky in love. Or so determined to find Mr. Right that I saw him in every man I met. To my detriment. Over the years, I got involved with a string of guys I should have stayed away from, and that maybe I would have stayed away from, had I not been so eager to find my soul mate.

  But this time, I’d found something real. Derek, who’s sweet, and caring, and funny, and smart, not to mention good with his hands and good-looking, as well. At least if you’re a sucker for tall, lean guys with dreamy blue eyes, the way I am.