Flipped Out (11 page)

When my distant cousin Ray Stenham went to jail, Melissa sold their shared McMansion for a lot of money. She put half toward Ray’s legal fees and used the other half to buy herself a loft on Main Street in downtown Waterfield. It was half a block from her office at Waterfield Realty, and right in the middle of the commercial and tourist district. Unfortunately, that meant that it was also directly across the street from Derek’s loft above the hardware store. For the first couple of months after she bought it, she kept him on almost permanent retainer for things like leaking faucets and peeling paint and burned-out lightbulbs. For a few weeks at a time, it seemed like he spent almost as much time in her apartment as he did in my house. Derek swore I didn’t have anything to worry about, that she wouldn’t want him back even if he were willing to take another chance on her and he wasn’t, and I believed him . . . but I didn’t like it.

At any rate, he was familiar with Melissa’s place. There was no hesitation at all when he walked her through the living room—painted in Melissa’s trademark cream, with a cocoa-colored sofa and cool blue chair on a geometric brown rug—and into the only bedroom.

I trailed behind, looking right and left. She had invited me up before—heck,
Derek
had invited me up before to stand by and hand him his tools and at the same time see for myself that nothing was going on—but I’d declined, telling myself that I trusted him. Ergo, this was my first time inside.

The decor was what I’d have expected, knowing Melissa. Tasteful, elegant, expensive. Not much personality. The color choices were the same ones Melissa favored in her clothing. The kitchen was updated with mocha cabinets, stainless steel appliances, and granite. The artwork seemed to have been chosen to coordinate, whether or not Melissa had any particular affinity for it. There were no photographs anywhere, and no clutter. Everything looked perfect, like a photo spread in a home-and-garden magazine, right down to the two wineglasses and expensive bottle of Bordeaux grouped on the kitchen island. Idly, I wondered if she’d kept her and Derek’s apartment looking like this when they were married, too, and how my casually untidy boyfriend had felt about that.

It wasn’t until I wandered closer that I noticed that the atmospheric grouping of wine and glasses wasn’t intended for show. The glasses were used—with Melissa’s telltale lipstick marks on one—and the wine bottle was open and empty. Incidentally, it was Melissa’s favorite Bordeaux, and coincidentally, the only wine she’d ever succeeded in getting Derek to drink. The one he’d told me about. Not that I was reading anything into that, of course.

It did cross my mind to wonder who she’d been drinking with, however. Given the pristine state of the loft, Melissa clearly wasn’t in the habit of leaving dirty dishes sitting around, so the glasses had to be from last night or they’d already be washed and in the dish drainer. And if Tony had been having dinner with Nina, who had been here with Melissa? There were no lipstick marks on the second glass, so probably not another woman.

I had a quick look around, but there were no other clues. No Turkish cigarette butts in the ashtray—no ashtray, for that matter—no convenient package of matches bearing the logo of a hotel in Portland, and also no monogrammed handkerchief accidentally dropped under the coffee table. A man’s jacket did hang in the coat closet just inside the front door, but it looked like something Tony would wear. Smelled like him, too.

When I got to the bedroom, Derek had finished tucking Melissa into bed. Her clothes were still on, but he had unstrapped her sandals and slid them off. They were lying on their sides on the floor next to the bed. I picked them up and set them upright in a corner, out of harm’s way. They were Jimmy Choos, and, as such, deserved respect. Then I watched as Derek walked to the bathroom and came back with a glass of water.

“Here you go. I’ll leave it here, along with the pills.” He put the glass and two small white capsules on the night table.

Melissa nodded. She looked pitiful, like Greta Garbo on her deathbed in
Camille
. I felt guilty thinking it, but something seemed off. As if it were show rather than real emotion.

“Is she all right?” I whispered.

Derek glanced at me. “Fine. She just needs rest.”

“Let’s go, then. I want to talk to Wayne.”

“Sure,” Derek said. “See you, Melissa. Try to get some sleep.”

Melissa nodded, looking wilted. But I could feel her eyes drilling into my back as I towed Derek toward the door.

7

“What was that about?” Derek asked when we were in the truck and on our way back to Cabot Street.

I glanced at him. “What?”

“Dragging me out of there. You’re not upset, are you?”

“With you? Of course not.” Derek’s compassion is a wonderful quality, and one I really appreciate—when he’s taking care of me.

I must not have sounded convincing enough, because Derek took his eyes off the road for a few seconds to look at me. “Doctors can’t always choose who they treat, Tink. They can’t pick only the fun cases, or the ones that don’t make their girlfriends feel uncomfortable. I know I’m not a doctor anymore, but it’s the way I was brought up. When someone needs my help, no matter who they are, I have to do what I can. Just like Dad.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “Listen, you know I’ll never have warm feelings toward her, but I hope you know I didn’t want this. No matter who she is. Losing a fiancé or a husband or a boyfriend isn’t something I’d wish on my own worst enemy.” Especially under circumstances like these. Accident or natural death is bad enough; brutal, bloody murder a whole lot worse.

“I know that, Avery,” Derek said, reaching out with his free hand to take mine, twining our fingers together. “You’re all talk. If Melissa really was in trouble, you’d be the first in line to help.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. But in any case—

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” I said, thinking that the trouble Melissa was likely facing was being charged with her fiancé’s murder.

“It won’t,” Derek answered.

By the time we made it to Cabot Street, Wayne and the television crew were long gone, and so was Tony’s car.

“Peter Cortino came and picked it up,” Brandon Thomas explained. Wayne’s youngest and most gung-ho deputy, he’s tall, blond, and strapping, with blue eyes and an easy smile, along with a rabid interest in anything forensic. If the Waterfield PD could afford to employ a full-time forensic tech, Brandon would be in heaven. As it is, he handles all the evidence and the crime scene investigations, but during the downtime, when nothing too exciting is going on, he’s out on patrol like everyone else. I’d gotten to know him quite well during the time I’d lived in Waterfield, since he’d had more than his fair share of crime scenes to investigate in the past year, many of them in or around houses Derek and I were renovating.

“Anything else happen?” Derek wanted to know, looking around. There were smudges of fingerprint powder everywhere, where Brandon had checked windowsills and door frames and knobs for anything useful. I’d probably be the one who had to clean that up tomorrow or the next day, when Brandon was done and we were back at work. I’d cleaned fingerprint powder out of several of our houses in the past, so I had it down to a science by now.

Brandon shook his head. “Nothing. Wayne took the TV crew back to the B and B to talk to them. I haven’t heard from him, so I guess the interviews are still going on. And there’s nothing exciting here.”

“No fingerprints?”

“Plenty of fingerprints. With as many people as have been through here, I’m not surprised. You two, the crew, Kate and Shannon, Tony and Melissa, and the people who used to live here . . . No way to tell whether any are unaccounted for yet.”

Of course not. That’d have to wait until he got back to the police station and started processing and matching what he’d found.

“Sounds like you’ve got a busy day ahead of you,” I said. Brandon nodded but then grinned, a little sheepishly.

“I have fun doing this. Probably shouldn’t say that when someone’s dead, but I like doing this stuff.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

Brandon shook his head. “I should be done here in another hour or two. Don’t think you’ll get the house back until tomorrow, though. Sorry.”

“We were prepared for that,” I said. “It isn’t the first time this has happened.”

“The crew can’t do any filming anyway,” Derek added, hands in his pockets, “so even if we could work here, it wouldn’t do any good. We can find something to do elsewhere until the morning.”

“By tomorrow, Wayne’ll probably be ready to release the crime scene. There’s not much here.” Brandon looked around with a shrug.

“No sign of forced entry?” I marveled, silently, at the life I’d led in the past year that had taught me to use expressions like that.

Brandon shook his head. “Whoever it was had a key.”

Derek muttered something, probably about his own stupidity in leaving the key on the porch where anyone could find it.

“It could have been Tony who unlocked the place,” I reminded him. “He probably had a key of his own.”

“Did you find it on him?” Derek wanted to know. Brandon shook his head.

“Well, even if the killer used the key you hid on the porch to open the door, you couldn’t have known that,” I said. “You were just trying to be nice.”

Brandon looked nonplussed. “What’s this?”

I explained about Ted and the key in the planter.

“And it was his idea to leave the key outside? Show me where.” He headed for the door.

“I don’t know that I’d call it his idea, exactly. . . .” I threw after Brandon’s departing back.

“He asked us to leave the place open,” Derek said, following, “so he could come in early and set up. But I didn’t want to. And it didn’t make sense to have another key made, since we all planned to spend pretty much every waking moment here for the next week. Besides, I don’t like a lot of keys floating around. Especially since it isn’t our house.”

“So this guy Ted suggested that you could leave the key outside?” Brandon stopped on the porch and looked around. “Where?”

“Right there.” Derek pointed. “Corner of the planter. And I’m not sure it was his suggestion. I think it was my call where to put the key.”

Brandon nodded, but he looked pensive. “I don’t guess you noticed anything going on between this guy Ted and Tony Micelli?”

Derek and I exchanged another look. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said. “The only person who admitted to knowing Tony from before was Nina Andrews. Ted didn’t look like he cared for him a whole lot, but that could have been because Nina didn’t seem happy to see him. At least not at first.”

“That changed?”

“I expect it must have. She went to dinner with him last night. Or she was supposed to.”

“Huh,” Brandon said.

“They were planning to go to the Waymouth Tavern. I guess someone will check?”

“I will,” Brandon said, coming back to reality, “when I’m done with everything else I have to do. And when they open this afternoon.”

Derek looked around. The sun was shining, small white clouds were chasing each other across the blue bowl of the sky like pieces of cotton wool, and I could hear the sound of a bumblebee nearby. “What about the neighbors? Have you spoken to them? Did anyone see anything last night?”

“Just the old lady next door,” Brandon said. “She didn’t hear or see a thing. What can you tell me about the rest?”

Derek shook his head. “Not a lot. We haven’t spent that much time here. Sounds like you’ve already met Miss Stevens. I know I’ve seen little children a couple houses down, playing in the yard. There’s a family with teenagers in the blue house across the street. The father drives a truck and the mother is home with the kids for the summer.

“She works at the high school library during the school year,” I contributed. “Her name is Donna. She introduced herself to me one day last week to ask what was going on. Tony hadn’t told her he was thinking of putting the house on the market, so she was a little surprised. Then again, she said he’s pretty much never around, so it wasn’t like he’d have occasion to tell her anything.”