Flipped Out (31 page)

“Like hell it isn’t!” Wayne said.

“Wilson and Ted told me they were together the night Tony died. In Portland. Did you confirm that?”

“You thinking they might be working together?”

“Shades of Agatha Christie,” Derek contributed, mouth quirking.

I shrugged. The thought had crossed my mind, briefly.
Murder on the Orient Express
and all that. “These people all seem to be connected. Fae and Wilson are family. Ted and Nina are friends, sometimes with benefits. They both worked with Tony, as well as with Aurora. If Fae is Aurora’s daughter, then Wilson is Aurora’s brother, or brother-in-law.”

“Not necessarily,” Derek said. “He could belong to the other side of the family. Fae’s father’s family.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. That picture of Aurora looked familiar when I saw it. I think she may have looked like Wilson’s wife. He showed me a picture of her a few days ago. Her name is Veronica. Beautiful woman. Dark hair, brown eyes.”

“Like Fae,” Derek said.

I nodded. “Maybe she’s the one sending the letters. They’ve got Missouri postmarks.”

“Think I’m gonna have to talk to Fae,” Wayne said. “And Wilson, too.”

“We were thinking it might be a good idea for you to keep her overnight.”

Derek went over our reasoning with regards to Fae either being in danger or being a danger to someone else, specifically Nina. Wayne nodded.

“But don’t keep Wilson,” I added. “We need him to finish filming the renovation.”

“If he killed Tony,” Wayne said, “I’m keeping him.”

“What about Melissa?” Derek wanted to know. “You still holding on to her?”

“The murder weapon has her fingerprints all over it. Hell yeah, I’m still holding on to her. At least until I have someone else I can lock up instead.”

Wayne scowled, but after a moment, he relented. “If this idea with Fae and Wilson works out, she might be out by tonight. I can’t keep her for more than forty-eight hours, without charging her anyway, and if there’s a chance that someone else did it, then I don’t wanna do that. All it takes is reasonable doubt to get her off, so if I charge anyone, I want it to be watertight.”

“You going to talk to Fae and Wilson now?” Derek asked.

Wayne nodded. “Guess I’d better.”

“Let us know how it goes.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the police station, leaving Wayne to get on with it.

We ended up back at Aunt Inga’s house, where we shared tuna sandwiches and chips. Derek had to dodge Mischa, who spent the entire time—after I peeled him off Derek—on my lap, purring hysterically. Once we’d eaten, we filled the bed of the truck with the window boxes and planters Derek had made the other night, along with the pillows I’d stitched, and headed back to Cabot Street.

It turned out to be a quiet afternoon. Derek went back to work on finishing my porch swing, while I pulled out a gallon of exterior paint and started painting the front door. Tony had put vinyl siding all over the house at some point in the last few years, so we couldn’t change the color of the house itself, but we could liven things up by adding some splashes of color. Namely, the cobalt blue door and—Derek decided—some new shutters.

“Batten board,” he said. “Or board-and-batten.”

“In English?”

I’d taken mandatory architecture classes at Parsons back in the old days, so I knew the basic home styles of the past few hundred years, but he knew a lot more about the specific details than I did, especially when it came to the construction of things.

“It’s a type of siding or paneling that has wide boards and narrow wooden strips, called battens. A lot of Tudor houses and beach cottages have board-and-batten shutters. So do brownstones; you probably saw them in New York. They’re real easy to make; you just put three boards together, and then nail two battens near the top and bottom.”

“Oh!” I said. “I know what you’re talking about!” I had indeed seen them, both in New York and up here in Maine. “That style would look great on this house!”

Derek grinned at my enthusiasm. “Why don’t I run to the lumber depot and pick up some boards? It won’t take but thirty minutes to put them together. Then you can paint while I start hanging them.”

“Pick me up one of those bristly doormats, too,” I said. “I saw them last time we were there. Everyone’s been tracking dirt all over the house, and I want a mat here by the time we open the front door tomorrow. I’ll paint a pattern on it to make it match the front door.”

Derek said he would, and headed for the truck. It wasn’t until he drove away that I realized I was all alone.

I’d like to be able to say that something awesome, significant, or even scary happened, and that I singlehandedly solved the case while I stood there, paintbrush in hand, but alas, no such luck. The only thing that happened was that the (much reduced) crew came back to the house, and there was nothing awesome, significant, or scary about it. They just parked the van at the curb, wandered through the yard, and stopped when they got to the porch.

And only Nina, Ted, and Adam returned to explain that Fae and Wilson were talking to Wayne.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Nina wanted to know. Her eyes were puffy, but she looked calmer than earlier. I noticed she was sticking close to Ted. Maybe they’d decided to go “on again.” When I glanced at him, he gave me a tiny smile.

“I think he just had some additional questions for them,” I said. “They hadn’t mentioned being related, and I guess maybe he thought that if they’d kept quiet about that, they may have kept quiet about other things, as well.”

Nina and Ted exchanged a look. “Like what?”

I circumvented the question, since I really had no idea. Or rather, I had a lot of ideas, but no solid facts. “Would you happen to remember whether Aurora Jamison’s baby was a boy or a girl? And was it really a baby? Could it have been a toddler? Two or three years old, say?” Or six, if we were talking about Adam.

He had taken up position with his back to one of the porch posts. I avoided looking at him.

“God.” Nina shook her head. “It was more than twenty years ago, Avery. How do you expect . . . ?”

“It was a girl,” Ted said. “And she was less than a year old.”

We all stared at him. And I guess we must have been thinking the same thing, because Nina’s expression changed to one of dawning realization while Adam slapped Ted on the back with a grin. “My man!”

“Don’t be a jackass,” Ted said, moving away. “Nina . . .”

Nina stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. “You and Rory? You never told me that. Even after she died, when we spent all that time talking, you never told me you’d been involved with her. And—God!—that her baby was yours . . . !”

“It didn’t matter,” Ted said.

Nina looked like she wasn’t quite sure how to take that, and frankly, I wasn’t, either. Ted must have realized it, because he tried to explain. “It didn’t last long. Our affair. Just a few weeks. I wasn’t devoted enough to her. She was really insecure, always looking for someone who’d give her whatever she felt was missing in her life. She had this older sister that she was always talking about, who had everything Rory wanted. . . .”

“Name?” I shot in.

Ted shrugged. “It was twenty years ago. Who the hell remembers?”

“Could it have been Veronica?”

“Might have been. Why?”

“That’s Wilson’s wife’s name.”

They’d both finally caught up, and I watched Ted’s sallow skin turn pale. “Fae? Fae is Rory’s daughter? My daughter?”

“There’s a good chance. It all hangs together, right?” And now that I examined Ted up close, something I hadn’t really done so far, there were hints of Fae in his eyes and the shape of his face.

“You never wanted her?” Nina asked, and Ted turned to her.

“I was twenty, Neen. So was Rory. It was before I met you, and before Tony came to work at the station. I wanted her to have an abortion. She said no. I guess maybe she thought a baby would fill that hole she had inside that nothing else ever could.” He was silent for a moment before he continued, “I must have made it clear I wasn’t interested in being a daddy, because she didn’t put my name on the birth certificate. I don’t think I saw the baby more than a half dozen times, and always by accident. I wasn’t a part of her life, and I didn’t want to be.”

“But when Rory died . . . ?”

“I thought about it,” Ted said. “But I didn’t think I’d be able to take care of a kid. We were all so young, and we wanted so badly to make it big. . . .”

Nina nodded.

“I went to see Rory’s parents afterward. Told them I thought I was the baby’s father but that I didn’t feel I could take care of her. They were just fine with me giving up any rights to her. She was all they had left of Rory; they didn’t want to share her with anyone.”

“And you haven’t seen her since?”

Ted shook his head. “She doesn’t look like Rory. Fae doesn’t.”

“She looks a little like you, though,” I said. He turned to me, surprised. “The eyes.”

“Huh.” He thought for a second, then shrugged. “Too late now, I guess. So you think she’s the one who’s been sending Nina the letters?” Nina must have clued him in during the time they’d been gone, because when I’d asked her earlier in the day, she’d told me she hadn’t confided in Ted about what was going on.

“I think there’s a good chance,” I said. “She and her auntie Veronica. Or maybe her grandmother. Someone who’s still in Missouri.”

“Veronica’s not in Missouri,” Nina said. “Wilson and Veronica live in California.” She shook her head. “How would they know about me? I mean . . . targeting Tony I could understand; he was the one who was with her that night—but why me?”

“You took over her job?” I suggested. “They blamed you?”

“I told them about you,” Ted added. “That time after the funeral that I went to them to talk about the baby. I told them that you and Tony were both really sorry about what happened. I guess they put two and two together.”

Nina nodded, pale. “I deserve it, you know. The letters. Being scared. I can forgive her for that, if she’s the one who’s been sending them. But Tony shouldn’t have had to die. He didn’t deserve that. We didn’t force her to get in her car that night. Rory made that choice.”

There were tears in her eyes. Ted moved to comfort her, and for a second, it looked like she might reject him. But then she smiled, and I guess decided to let bygones be bygones. It wasn’t like she was without blame, after all. There was enough of it to go around.

“I’ll take you back to the B and B,” Ted said. “You don’t have to deal with this today. Without Wilson, we can’t film anything anyway. Let’s just see how it goes.”

He steered her down the porch steps and through the yard, toward the van. I glanced at Adam, who was still leaning against the porch post, muscular arms folded across his chest, the better to emphasize his biceps.

He caught my eye and winked, flashing that smile that someone at some point had probably told him was irresistible. “That was real,” he said.

I shrugged.

“So Fae is Ted’s daughter? And Nina and Tommy—”

“Tony.”

“—did something to her mother when she was a baby?”

“Not really. She died in a car accident. After going out drinking with Tony.”

“And Fae’s been sending Nina letters?”

I nodded.

“Wow,” Adam said as a calculating look entered his pretty blue eyes.

I’m not particularly devious or underhanded myself—I tend to be more naive and believe the best of people until I have proof otherwise—but I’d decided I really didn’t like Adam, and in this case, I had no problem following the direction of his thoughts. In a word, blackmail. Adam was trying to figure out how best to take advantage of this new knowledge, and probably to put the screws on Nina not to fire him for incompetence once they got back to Los Angeles.

“Well, we’ve all done things in our lives that we aren’t too proud of,” I said.

Adam looked at me. “I guess.”

“I’m sure you’ve got something you’d just as soon no one ever brought up again. Right?”

Adam nodded.

“In that case, it would probably be best if you just left this one alone, don’t you think? In the interest of fairness, and all that.”

Adam hesitated. But then Ted laid on the horn and Nina leaned out of the car window and raised her voice. “Are you coming, Adam?”

Adam turned back to me. I smiled sweetly. Out at the street, Derek’s truck pulled up and my boyfriend jumped out. And Adam gave up the fight. “I guess,” he said.

Attaboy!

I thought about saying it, but I didn’t. Instead I just smiled again. “I’ll see you later.”

“Right,” Adam said, and headed for the van.

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