Plaster and Poison Read online

  Apparently, she had been one of the Stenhams’ accountants, keeping one of their projects on track financially, and she had been on her way home from babysitting for her daughter late one night when she had gotten into a car accident on a lonely stretch of road on the outskirts of Waterfield, near Barnham College. It was late and the roads were slick, and she had been spun off the road and into a rock wall. The driver of the other car had fled the scene, leaving Carolyn there, and she had died. Speculation was that maybe the hit-and-run driver had been a college student, possibly someone driving under the influence, but no charges had ever been filed against anyone, and the last I heard, Wayne had no idea who was responsible. It was like the driver had just vanished into thin air. Wayne and Brandon Thomas, his young deputy, had turned the college campus inside out looking for damaged vehicles, and they had talked to all the auto body shops as far away as Portland in hopes that they could track down the culprit that way, but so far they’d had no luck. Meanwhile, we were all looking sideways at one another, wondering if our next-door neighbor or the teenager down the street might be culpable.

  Anyway, the accident had taken place two or three weeks before this, and from what I understood, it had been nasty. I focused as Kate continued her story.

  “When Wayne arrived at the B&B, he caught a couple of the guests in the kitchen. They’d snuck down for a post-midnight snack. Of course, they were frightened out of their minds when a cop in full uniform—gun, handcuffs, bloodstains, and all—came through the door at one A.M.”

  Derek chuckled, and I giggled at the image she painted.

  Kate continued, “He explained the situation, and they scuttled back to bed, but when they came down to breakfast the next morning and saw that Wayne was still there, it made him feel uncomfortable that they knew he’d spent the night.”

  “We know he spends the night,” I pointed out.

  “But you’re not there to see it,” Kate answered. “Or hear it.”

  “Hah!” Derek crowed. “I told you that’s what it was!”

  Kate shrugged. “Yeah, well, can you blame him? The chief of police, providing entertainment for all my guests? They’re not all from away, you know. Some are local, and Wayne feels it undermines his authority when they see him in his boxer shorts in the middle of the night coming from the bathroom.”

  “I can see why it might,” I admitted, hiding a smile.

  Derek didn’t even try. “No kidding, Kate.”

  Kate shrugged, pouting.

  “So what does he want you to do about it?” I wanted to know.

  The wedding was scheduled for New Year’s Eve, and I didn’t think either of them wanted to cancel. They seemed totally committed to one another and to getting married. Wayne had his apartment, of course, where he could continue to live after they were married, but Kate needed to be on-site to run the B&B. If she had any plans of getting rid of the business, I sure hadn’t heard about it.

  “That’s just it,” Kate said, starting to brush shreds of napkin into a pile on the table in front of her. “There’s only one thing I can do, really.”

  I blinked, disconcerted. “You’re not going to sell the B&B, are you? Wayne wouldn’t ask that, would he?”

  Derek, who knows her better than I do, shook his head at me. “Don’t worry, Avery. She’s playing us. Enough with the guilt, Kate. What do you need?”

  Kate glanced at him from under her lashes. When she saw the look on his face, she must have realized that further prevarication was futile. She grimaced. “I need you to renovate the carriage house for me.”

  Derek nodded; obviously this didn’t surprise him. “Uh-huh.”

  “What carriage house?” I said.

  Kate turned to me. “The one at the back of my property. Tall, pointed roof, double doors, little cupola on top?”

  “Right. I remember you telling me you were planning to turn it into an apartment and move out there when Shannon leaves the nest. You want to do it now instead? And be finished by New Year’s? Can that even be done?”

  I glanced at Derek, who shrugged.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Kate said. “And I won’t even be able to help much, with Thanksgiving coming up, and planning the wedding, and guests coming in. . . .”

  “Did my mom and Noel call you?” I veered off topic. “They said they would.”

  “They’re booked the second week of December. Two solid weeks of rent for the suite, and they wouldn’t even let me give them a discount. Your mom’s husband must be loaded.”

  “He seems to do OK,” I said, although I knew that Noel was, in fact, a lot better off than merely OK. “I’m glad you’ve got it all worked out. And they won’t be bothering you much, I don’t think. They’ll spend most of their time with us.”

  “They’ll spend most of their time with you, you mean,” Derek corrected.

  I turned to him. “What do you mean? Where will you be? Don’t you want to meet my mother?”

  “I’ll be renovating Kate’s carriage house,” Derek said. “If it has to be finished by the wedding, it’s going to be a more than full-time job between now and then. Two months isn’t a long time to build a house from scratch, and that’s what it’s going to be like.”

  “So you won’t be able to spend any time with my mom? But that’s the whole reason she’s coming.”

  “Of course he’ll be able to spend time with your mother, Avery,” Kate said, shooting Derek a look. “This way, you and your mom will have lots of quality time together, just the two of you—shopping in Portland, going through your aunt’s attic, sightseeing maybe—while Derek’s slaving away, and then at night, you can all get together for dinner and your mom can get to know him.”

  “But won’t you need my help?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what disappointed me more, the fact that my mom wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with Derek as I’d hoped, or the fact that he was going to be renovating a house without me.

  “I’d love to have your help, Tinkerbell,” Derek said. “But I don’t want to take you away from your mom. You haven’t seen her for more than a year. And there’ll be plenty of time for you to help me before she gets here. By the time she and Noel show up, you may be so sick of home renovation—and of me—that you’ll be glad for a chance to duck out for a while.”

  “So you’ll do it?” Kate asked.

  I looked at Derek. He nodded.

  “I believe we will,” I said.

  2

  I’d never actually been inside Kate’s carriage house before. I’d seen it, of course, squatting at the back of her property, painted a pretty butter yellow like the main house, but I’d never wandered close. Kate kept her lawn mower and tiller and aerator and other gardening stuff in it—and I was quite pleased with myself for knowing the names of those tools, since before I came to Waterfield, my biggest exposure to flora had been a potted ficus in my Manhattan apartment. But since I don’t know enough to operate any of them, there had never been a reason for me to go inside the carriage house. Now I looked around the dark and chilly interior with horror.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Why?” Derek said. It was later that same afternoon, and he was standing next to me as we had our first look at our new project. I looked up at him, my eyes wild.

  “We can’t do this!”

  He glanced down. “Why not?”

  I waved my hands, indicating the roughly four hundred square feet, story-and-a-half-tall room with cobwebs dangling from the rafters and a dirt floor. My breath made a cloud in front of me when I spoke; it was several degrees colder in here than outside, and outside wasn’t precisely warm. “There’s nothing here. No floor, no windows, nothing. I can see daylight through the exterior walls!”

  “It’s a carriage house,” Derek said. “There was no need to insulate it. Cold doesn’t bother machinery.”

  “But Kate and Wayne can’t live here!”

  “Of course not,” Derek agreed. “We’ll replace the rotted wood on the exterior and give it a new roof, frame and insulate the walls, run some electrical lines and plumbing before we drywall, put up some interior walls, or ma
ybe it would be better to leave it open, give it more of a loft look. . . .”

  He trailed off, looking around, his eyes a soft, dreamy blue.

  “It’s gonna be awful,” I said, stamping my feet and wrapping my arms around myself, imagining driving nails and soldering pipes in this cold. Derek turned to me, his eyes warming.

  “It’ll be fun. The other houses we’ve renovated needed mostly cosmetic updating. This”—he glanced around—“this is a blank slate; it needs everything, even walls and floors. The good thing is, we can do anything we want.”

  He turned back to his vision.

  “So long as it’s what Kate wants,” I reminded him.

  “Well, yeah. Sure. But within reason.” He put an arm around my shoulders. “You probably took some basic architecture classes in design school, right? How would you set this up? Where do you see the kitchen? Or the bathroom? What sort of style do you see?”

  He pulled me into the warmth of his body. I snuggled closer and looked around, doing my best to look past the cobwebs, the cracks in the walls, the dirt floor, and the dirty beams overhead. Picturing gleaming hardwood and sleek furniture, granite counters, and stainless steel appliances.

  “It’s kind of small,” I said after a moment, “and Kate’s used to having a lot of space. It’s going to be difficult to fit everything in.”

  Derek nodded. “I see it as being very open,” he offered, “with one room flowing into the next.”

  “But the building’s kind of tall—one and a half stories, at least, wouldn’t you say?—so maybe we could expand upward? Make the kitchen and living room down here, with maybe a half bath? For guests, you know? And then we could add an upstairs, with a master suite.”

  “Kate might need some sort of office, too. For the B&B business. Unless she wants to keep that in the main house. Maybe that would make more sense.”

  “We should ask her,” I said.

  He let his arm drop from around my shoulders. “You go ahead inside. I’m going to take some measurements while I’m here.” He pulled a one-hundred-foot measuring tape off his belt.

  “I’ll help,” I said, reaching for the loose end. Instead of putting it in my hand, Derek grabbed me around the wrist and pulled me to him.

  “C’mere, Tink.”

  “I’m already here,” I pointed out, my hands against his chest as I shook my hair out of my face. Often, I keep it piled on top of my head; today, it just happened to be down, warming my ears.

  “So you are.” He smiled down, both arms wrapping around my waist now. “You’re on board with this, right? You think we can do it?”

  “Of course we can,” I said robustly. When he held me and looked at me with those beautiful blue eyes, and said “we” . . . I believed we could do anything.

  “And it’ll be fun, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  I wasn’t quite as definite this time. This project was a whole lot bigger than any other we’d tackled. I knew my way around a paintbrush and a stud finder—no pun intended—but framing and insulating were as yet foreign concepts to me. The two houses we’d renovated so far, Aunt Inga’s Victorian cottage and the midcentury ranch on Becklea Drive, had been in pretty good shape, everything considered. We had torn out carpets (and carpet pads and tacking strips and staples) and Derek had refinished the floors (because he said the sander would run away with me), and we’d painted and tiled and installed new kitchen cabinets and counters and toilets and sinks . . . but most of what we’d had to do had been cosmetic. Surface gloss. We’d never had to do any bona fide construction.

  Or I should say that I hadn’t; obviously the idea didn’t bother Derek. He seemed perfectly at ease about the whole thing. I wasn’t. That is to say, I was confident in his ability to do it, but I was less confident in my ability to help him.

  “Am I going to be able to do anything at all, Derek?” I asked rather pitifully, my cheek against his chest. “You’re the one who knows how to frame, and drywall, and install plumbing pipes and electrical wires. . . . I don’t know how to do any of those things. I’m just the decorator.”

  His arms tightened. “You’re not just the decorator, Avery. You help with the other things, too. And that’s just grunt work, anyway. Anyone can learn how to drive nails and weld pipes. All it takes is practice.”

  “But I feel useless,” I murmured. He shook me and then held me out at arm’s length, hands on my shoulders and eyes serious on mine.

  “You’re not useless. What you do is important. I may be able to install a hell of a p-trap, but if you don’t come in after me and make the bathroom look pretty, it’s not enough. Don’t sell yourself short, Avery.”

  He let me go with a last squeeze. “I’m going to take measurements now, while you go talk to Kate and discuss what she wants from her new house. Go over what we talked about and make sure it works for her. Wayne’s getting older; he may not want to climb stairs to get to his bedroom. Especially if he has to carry Kate. She’s no lightweight.” He smiled.

  “Wayne’s forty-six,” I said, stepping back. “That’s hardly at death’s door. But I’ll make sure a second-story master suite is OK with her. She’ll know what Wayne would say.”

  Derek nodded. “Then, once we have the measurements and the particulars, you’ll design the layout of the new house. Where to put the kitchen, where to put the bathroom, where to put the tub and the sink and the stove and the fridge. I’ll figure out where the electrical wiring and the plumbing lines have to go. While I frame and insulate and do all the rest of the boring stuff, you and Kate get to pick out all those pretty things, like tile and countertops and cabinets and light fixtures. The construction won’t take more than a few weeks, and then we’ll start putting those things in. You’ll be helping with that.”

  Maybe I’d overreacted a little when I thought that Derek wouldn’t need me.

  “Go on, Avery.” He dropped a kiss on my forehead before turning me toward the double doors to the outside. “I don’t need help measuring. Go talk to Kate and get us the rest of the information we need to get started. It’ll take both of us working almost around the clock to get finished on time.”

  He swatted me on the butt to send me on my way. I shot him a glare over my shoulder, but when I saw the grin on his face, I refrained from comment.

  Kate was in her kitchen, sitting at the computer tucked into a corner of the big room, talking on the phone. To the florist. About the flowers for the wedding. I leaned against the counter and waited for her to finish, listening with half an ear as she discussed baby’s breath and sterling silver roses and fronds.

  When Derek came on board to help me renovate Aunt Inga’s house, he had insisted that I keep the old kitchen cabinets. Over my strenuous objections, I might add. I’d seen Kate’s kitchen by then, which Derek had also renovated, and it galled me that she had been able to convince him to let her install brand-new cabinets and a slate floor, while I had to settle for Aunt Inga’s existing cabinets and her stained and pitted hardwood flooring.

  I understood better now, aside from having come to love my kitchen and to realize that Derek was right. When Kate bought the B&B—long before it was a B&B—the lovely three-story Queen Anne had been used as rental property for years. It had been chopped up into apartments: There had been, as Kate had told me once, three electric meters and three separate kitchens, all of them rinky-dink and ugly, installed sometime in the 1970s with the cheapest materials available at the time. None of the kitchens were salvageable or, indeed, contained anything worth saving. Kate, with Derek’s help—or vice versa—had torn all three of them out and built this one from the ground up. The only reason everything here was brand spanking new was because there had been nothing worth saving in the others. Had there been something to save, I had no doubt Derek would have tried to save it.

  The end result was lovely. The kitchen was sleek and modern, with dark wood cabinets, granite counters, stainless steel appliances—double ovens, of course, and a warmer, and some other frills suitable for a gourmet cook, or a professional one—and over in the corner by the windows overlooking the backyard,
a built-in computer desk and filing cabinets.

  “I love your kitchen,” I said when she’d hung up the phone.

  Kate smiled, swiveling her office chair around to face me. “I do, too.”

  “Do you want the same kind of kitchen in the carriage house? ”

  She pondered for a second. “Something lighter, I think. White cabinets. Since it’ll be smaller.”

  I nodded, snagging a piece of copy paper and a pen off the desk to take notes.

  “Derek and I were discussing how to set things up.” I ran through our various thoughts on the subject and secured Kate’s wholehearted approval to the idea of expanding upward.

  “Wayne’s not so old that he has a problem with stairs,” she said, “and I’m still on the right side of forty. By a comfortable margin. Stairs are not an issue.”

  “So a master suite upstairs is OK.” I made a note on my borrowed piece of paper. “Tub, shower, or both? Separately or together? Derek wants me to design the place—decide where everything goes—and then he’ll figure out how to make it work. Do you have any other requirements or requests? Do you want to keep your office here, or do you want me to leave space for another office out back?”

  Kate pursed her lips as she thought. “I think,” she said eventually, “that we should leave the office here, in the main house. I’ll be here most of the time anyway, during the day. And that way, the carriage house can be more of a retreat. Somewhere we go after the day is over.”

  I nodded, scribbling madly. This seemed a good thought, one I should make note of, and it also gave me some frame of reference for how to arrange and, more important, decorate the carriage house once we got to the point of adding the pretty touches. Kate lived in a B&B, a gorgeous, gracious place where her job was to make sure that other people had a lovely, relaxing time. But Kate herself was probably not in a position to enjoy it much; she was too busy catering to everyone else’s needs. Within the carriage house, maybe she could have the same thing. A retreat for herself, just across the yard, yet private and secluded and romantic. Somewhere she and Wayne could close the door and leave the rest of their lives—Kate’s occasionally squabbling guests, the frequently unpleasant aspects of Wayne’s job—outside for a few hours.