Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) (14 page)

“Having a tea party,” I said. “With the doll from the basement and the tea set we found upstairs.”

An expression of shocked pity crossed Peter’s features. “Did the cold get her?”

“Must have. She wasn’t wearing a coat again. Just the dress and pinafore.”

They both shook their heads. Down the road I saw bobbing lights.

“The others are coming, too,” Derek said. “I called them after you called me. Well, Brandon called Wayne, I’m sure. But I called Kerri and Dab.”

“You know Kerri and Dab?”

“Of course I know Kerri and Dab,” Derek said. “Remember when I told you I knew someone who makes stained glass?”

“Sure.”

“That’s Dab.”

“She makes stained glass?”

He nodded. “Her father did the restoration of the stained glass windows in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland. Remember when we were there for Ryan’s wedding, I told you I’d asked him advice on restoring the windows in Barry’s church? I met Dab then, three or four years ago. She came out to look at the church and decided she’d like to live here.”

“Huh.”

He nodded. “She has a cabin and a little studio outside town.”

“Do you think she might teach me how to make stained glass?”

“I suppose she might,” Derek said. “We can ask her. Only not right now.”

No, right now wasn’t a great time.

Kerri and Dab reached us at the same time as another police cruiser with Wayne behind the wheel. He must have stopped at home to pick it up. And to drop off Josh at the same time, because Josh wasn’t with him. “I sent him inside to give Kate and Shannon the news,” Wayne explained when I asked. “He can’t do anything here.”

None of us could really. Yet we were all standing around in a huddle under the streetlight. It wouldn’t be long before the neighbors started peering out their windows, too.

Footsteps crunched on the snow in the yard, and we all turned to watch the paramedics navigate around the Dumpster with their stretcher. Miss Mamie looked very small and cold. Henry Silva followed behind, his face pale, while Brandon and Dr. Ben trailed him. Darren made up the rear. Wayne gave us all a nod and went to talk to his deputy while the rest of us stood aside and watched as the paramedics loaded Mamie into the ambulance. Henry crawled in behind. Kerri took a step forward, maybe to offer her condolences, but when one of the paramedics closed the doors, she stopped. The paramedic went to join his partner in the cab, and the ambulance drove off. Silently, with no lights or sirens, while we all stood there staring after it.

Kerri turned to Darren, who was staring after the ambulance, his face blank. “Is your father all right?”

He turned to stare at her. A second ticked by, then another. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Fine.”

That couldn’t possibly be true—this wasn’t how any of us had wanted the night to end obviously. We’d all—I know I had—expected to find Mamie alive and well, if a bit cold, pushing her baby carriage around the Village with her “baby” inside.

A baby I noticed Dr. Ben had carried up from the playhouse, and which he was showing to Wayne.

I watched, forehead wrinkled, as Wayne nodded and looked around. He studied the group of us for a moment, but none of us must have passed muster—or maybe he didn’t see who he expected to see. Maybe he was looking for Henry.

He passed the doll to Brandon, who went to put it in his patrol car. After a moment’s hesitation beside the trunk, Brandon ended up putting it on the backseat.

Meanwhile, Wayne approached those of us standing in a silent cluster by the edge of the road. “Sorry.”

We all nodded.

“There’s nothing more any of us can do.”

Right. Time to go home.

He turned to me. “Dr. Ben told me what happened, but you’ll have to do a report, too, Avery.”

I nodded.

“It’s standard procedure,” Wayne added, “in an unattended death.”

“Of course.”

An autopsy was also standard procedure, I knew, but I refrained from asking whether one would be performed. Not while Darren was standing right there.

“You can do it now or tomorrow.”

“Is it OK if I leave it till the morning? I had to stop in the middle of a project when we left the house earlier.”

“Sure,” Wayne said. “Just come to the police station in the morning, give a statement, sign it, and you’ll be done. Thirty minutes, tops.”

I told him I’d be there, and he turned to Darren. “Can I give you a lift? To the hospital, or maybe home to pick up your car?”

“The car’s parked at the church,” Darren said.

“Get in. I’ll take you there.”

They drove off together. Brandon was already gone. The handful of us who were left stared at one another blankly.

“This is horrible,” Kerri said.

We nodded.

“Poor Henry.”

Poor Mamie. And Ruth. And I suppose Darren.

We stood in silence a bit longer.

“So how are the renovations coming?” Peter asked in an attempt to change the subject to something a little less disturbing.

“They’re coming,” Derek answered. “Slowly. We haven’t started the cosmetics yet.”

“So far it’s just been hauling junk and working on things like the plumbing,” I added. “The functional stuff that doesn’t have to be pretty, but has to work. Derek’s domain.”

My husband turned to Dab. “Avery was just saying the other day how she’d like a stained glass lamp for the dining room. Any chance you can show her what you’ve got?”

“Or show me how to make one,” I added.

He glanced at me. “You want to make your own?”

“Why not?”

“No reason.” He turned back to Dab. “Any chance you have time to give Avery a crash course in stained glass making?”

Dab nodded. “I’d be happy to.”

Her eyes were pale green behind the lenses, quite pretty, and her face wasn’t unattractive, either.

“Maybe I can stop by this Saturday?”

“That would be fine,” Dab said. Derek told her we’d see her then, and we stood in awkward silence for a moment. Dr. Ben stamped his feet in the snow.

“Cold,” he told me when I glanced at him. “It’s all right for you, you’re young, but people feel the cold more when they get older.”

“We should go. There’s nothing more we can do here.”

We walked up the street together. Kerri and Dab went inside Kerri’s split-level when we passed it, and the rest of us parted ways outside the church. Peter got into his van and drove away, home to Jill and the kids, and Dr. Ben said good night and headed back to Cora. I glanced at the church, and the light glowing through the stained glass windows. “Someone’s inside.”

“Barry,” Derek said. “Lighting candles or praying for Mamie.”

I nodded. “We probably shouldn’t disturb him.”

Derek shook his head. “No.”

“Is Brandon lighting candles and praying, too, do you think?”

“What?” Derek said.

“That’s his car, isn’t it?”

I pointed to it, parked at the curb a few yards away.

Derek contemplated it with his head tilted for a few seconds. “Yes.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“No idea,” Derek said.

“Maybe he’s just filling Barry and Judy in on the details. I’m surprised Barry didn’t come over to the house with Brandon after I called him.”

“There was nothing anyone could do,” Derek said. “And Barry has things to do here. Light candles, activate the prayer chain, make sure Ruth is taken care of and has someone with her when she gets the news . . .”

“When will Wayne tell her, do you think?”

“Not until tomorrow,” Derek said. “He’s not going to wake her up for this.”

Of course not. “Should I go out there?”

“You don’t know her,” Derek pointed out. “It’s not like you’ll be able to give her a lot of comfort.”

Maybe not, but I had found her sister. And she might have questions.

“Why don’t you ask Wayne tomorrow morning?” Derek suggested. “When you go to give your statement. If he thinks there’s anything you can do, he’ll tell you.”

I nodded. And glanced at the church again.

“You said you had work to do at home,” Derek reminded me. “You left your Chinese lantern Christmas ornaments unfinished, remember?”

“I remember.”

“The home tour is only two days away.”

Yikes.

“We’d better get home,” I said with a last lingering look at the lighted stained glass windows. I was really curious to find out what Brandon was doing here, but Derek was right: The home tour was drawing near, and I had to finish getting ready.

So we got into the Beetle and drove home. I went back to work on my Chinese lanterns, and Derek watched for a bit before he asked if he could help. We finished the ornaments together, and hung them to dry on two big portable clothes racks I had brought from New York when I moved, and stored in the attic. It kept the ornaments apart enough that they wouldn’t touch each other and possibly smear the paint, and it kept them inside in the warmth, where they’d dry faster than if we hung them on the porch.

They’d turned out pretty nice, I thought. I planned to wait until they dried, though, to determine whether I needed to start over. They weren’t shiny, the way Christmas balls are, and I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be happy with that. I might just have to spray paint them all with high-gloss paint and decorate them again, but that was for another day. Today had enough troubles of its own, and I was beat. I took Derek’s hand and we headed up to bed.

The new police station—built long before I relocated to Waterfield, but new compared to the old police station they had before it—was a brick building located on the northwest side of downtown, on the Augusta Highway. Not too terribly far from the condo Derek and I had renovated in Josh Rasmussen’s building, which made a lot of sense, considering that Wayne had lived there with Josh before he married Kate, and he had bought the condo after his wife died because it was close to work.

When I walked through the police station’s door, Ramona Estrada, the police secretary, recognized me. “Morning, Avery.”

“Good morning,” I said.

Back when I first moved to town, Derek had given me the impression that Ramona was some kind of gorgeous, nubile Jennifer Lopez lookalike in a police uniform, and I don’t mind telling you I’d been jealous. In actuality, she was a plump and grandmotherly woman in her sixties, who might have been quite a looker in her youth, but who was old enough to be Derek’s mother by now. It had amused him rather a lot, too, when he realized I’d fallen for his lie, hook, line, and sinker.

“Wayne said you’d be in. He’s in his office.” She waved down the hallway. Security at the Waterfield police station is, to say the least, lax. I thanked her and headed down the hall toward Wayne’s office. I’d been there before, too.

He was sitting behind his desk with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose when I arrived in the doorway. The door was open, so I cleared my throat to let him know I was there, and he peered at me above the glasses and told me to come in and take a seat. “This’ll only take a minute.”

He continued signing off on paperwork for another short while and then he capped the pen and took the glasses off and looked at me across the desk. “You all right?”

“Fine,” I said.

“I know we all hoped for a different outcome.”

“I thought we’d find her rolling the baby carriage down a street somewhere, with her doll inside. Not that she . . .” My voice gave out. Guess maybe I was more upset than I’d realized.

Wayne didn’t say anything, just waited, and I got myself back under control. “She froze to death, right?”

“So we assume,” Wayne said. “There’s no reason to think otherwise. Unless you know something I don’t?”

I shook my head. “I can’t believe they let her wander off again like that. After what happened two nights ago, you’d think they’d be a bit more careful.”

“They didn’t,” Wayne said.

“They didn’t?”

He shook his head. “Mr. Silva picked her up to take her to dinner with his aunt.”

By elimination, this was Darren, since Henry Silva didn’t have an aunt, at least not one I knew about. “Henrietta?”

Wayne nodded. “They stopped outside the liquor store on Broad Street so Mr. Silva could pick up a bottle of wine for dinner.”

Wine? For Mamie? Wasn’t she tipsy enough without that?

“She stayed in the car,” Wayne continued. “Or so he thought, until he came out and found her gone.”

“So he’s the one who called you?”

“After he drove around for a bit looking for her. He didn’t think she could have gotten far. But when he couldn’t find her, he called us, and Brandon went out to have a look around. When he couldn’t find her, either, and it got late and it started snowing, we decided we needed to do a search.”

So it was Darren’s fault. If he hadn’t picked her up—if he hadn’t left her unattended in the car—she would have been safe and warm inside the nursing home.

No wonder he’d looked grim last night. Guilty conscience, no doubt.

“He must feel terrible,” I said, unwillingly sympathetic. I didn’t like Darren, but God . . . what a horrible responsibility.

Wayne nodded. “Tell me what happened last night.”

I went through the events of the evening—from the start of my search with Dr. Ben up until we found Mamie’s body—in detail. “She was curled up on one of the wooden benches. They’re built in, and there’s a little table in the middle. It was set with the doll-sized tea set I found upstairs in her room, that I’d brought to her earlier.”

“Earlier?” Wayne said.

I squirmed. I had hoped he’d miss that. “Derek and I went out to the nursing home in the afternoon, to bring Mamie and Ruth some things we’d found in the house that we thought they might enjoy. The tea set and some doll clothes for Mamie, and a box of newspaper clippings about Elvis Presley for Ruth.”

Wayne’s lips twitched. “Were they the same clothes the”—he hesitated—“the doll was wearing last night?”

I hadn’t noticed the doll wearing anything, to be honest. It had been naked the other two times I’d seen it. “Blue wool?”

Wayne nodded. “So you opened the door to the playhouse and saw Mamie.”

“That’s correct. Dr. Ben went to check on her. He told me to call nine-one-one and to wait for the ambulance. I did. And you know the rest.”

Wayne nodded.

“What happens now?”

“I’ll have Ramona type up a statement,” Wayne said. “It’ll take her a few minutes. Then you can sign it and leave. Thanks.”

“No problem. But I meant, what happens to the . . . to Miss Mamie.”

Wayne’s lips tightened. “She was taken to Portland, to the medical examiner’s office. Dr. Lawrence will look at her.”

Dr. Lawrence was the medical examiner. She was a few years younger than Dr. Ben, who knew her well. As she said once, doctors of the dead are doctors, too. We’d met a couple of times, and she was rather nice.

“Will there be an autopsy?”

“If Dr. Lawrence thinks it’s necessary,” Wayne said.

“It isn’t required?”

“It is if she thinks it’s necessary.”

Right.

“For now, she’ll just take a look at the . . . at Miss Mamie and determine whether there’s any reason to do an autopsy. I’m sure I’ll hear from her in the next few hours.”

I wanted to ask him to keep me in the loop, but there was no reason why he would, and if I asked, he’d tell me so. “I guess the Silvas will arrange for the funeral and all that?”

“I imagine they will,” Wayne said. “Darren arranged for Mamie and Ruth’s accommodations at Sunset Acres, and for the sale of the house. I’m sure he’ll arrange for the funeral, too.”

“Let me know what you find out, would you? I don’t think he’ll call us, and I don’t want to call him.”

Wayne nodded and got to his feet. “Let’s go see Ramona, and then you can be on your way. What are you and Derek working on today?”

I told him what Derek was doing while I was here—regrouting the lovely ribbon tile in the downstairs bathroom—and we wandered down the hall toward Ramona making small talk about renovating. Then his phone rang, and he loped off toward his office to answer it, telling me to go the rest of the way myself. I settled beside Ramona’s desk and told her my story, and watched her type it all into the computer. Five minutes later I was out of there.

The rest of the day went by in a blur. We spent the time working on the house, and the evening working on Aunt Inga’s, getting it ready for the Christmas Home Tour. Derek decorated the big tree with all of Aunt Inga’s vintage glass ornaments, while I decorated the small ones with the miniatures. They were an unpleasant reminder of Miss Mamie’s tea set, but there was nothing I could do about that really, so I pushed the thought aside and focused on what I had to do instead.

The dining room mantel was next, and I laid it out like a little winter wonderland with drifts of white snow—pristine cotton batting sprinkled with a little glitter—arranged with Aunt Inga’s little group of pixies. I had found them with the ornaments: an old cardboard box that had the words
“Norwegian Nisser”
written on it in my aunt’s spidery but elegant hand. I had assumed they were simply more ornaments—until I opened the box and realized that they were little figurines instead. Vintage, about two inches tall, little red-cheeked, red-hatted pixies in the process of sledding and skating and skiing. I gave them cotton batting to ski and sled on, and a mirror for a skating pond, and arranged them all over the mantel.
Nisser
, it turned out, were creatures of Scandinavian folklore: protectors of the farm or homestead, particularly at night when the family was asleep. In Scandinavia, families would put out a bowl of porridge for their
nisse
at Christmas, just so he wouldn’t feel slighted and perhaps cause trouble.

These
nisser
looked adorable, if I did say so myself. Quaint and quirky and cute.

The Chinese lanterns hadn’t turned out quite as nicely as I had hoped, so I ended up spray painting them with quick-drying enamel in bright red, midnight blue, and green, and then doing the stenciling and application of glitter all over again. They just hadn’t looked shiny enough the first time. I had wanted them to look like enormous glass ornaments, and they just didn’t. Derek tried to tell me that I could just leave it until next year, but I wanted everything to be perfect for the home tour—if it wasn’t, Kate might not ask us to participate again—so I did it over while he rolled his eyes and turned on the TV.

It was almost ten o’clock by the time I called Kate. I had halfway expected to get her voice mail, but she answered herself.

“We’re ready for inspection,” I told her.

There was a pause. “I’m not doing that until tomorrow.”

“I didn’t mean for you to come over now. Just that we’re done.”

“Good,” Kate said. “I’ll be by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Can I come with you?”

“You’ll already be there,” Kate said.

“To the other houses. You’re checking them all, right?”

“Ye-e-e-es . . .” Kate said.

“I’m not going to have a chance to see them on Sunday. And they’re private homes, so it’s not like I can knock on people’s doors and ask to see their decorations when the tour is over. But I’d like to see my competition.”

“It’s not a competition,” Kate said.

“I know it isn’t. But I don’t want to look like a poor relation by comparison. Your house looks gorgeous. If they’re all like that, I don’t think I’d want anyone to see mine.”

Derek frowned at me over the back of the sofa. I gave him a friendly, don’t-worry-about-it sort of wave.

“I’m sure it looks wonderful,” Kate said. “You have a style all your own, Avery.”

Which didn’t necessarily sound good if you ask me. But since my whining was really only an excuse to get what I wanted, I didn’t quibble. And it’s true anyway. I do have a style all my own. None of the others had
nisser
, I was quite sure. Or Chinese lanterns, either.

“I’d just like to see them. I won’t have a chance to leave here on Sunday. I’ll be too busy with my own house. Can’t I come with you?”

“Of course you can,” Kate said. “I’ll do your house first, and then we’ll stop by all the others. It’ll take a couple of hours.”

“That’s fine. I’m not doing anything else tomorrow night. I’m going to Dab’s house earlier to learn how to make stained glass chandeliers, but other than that I’m free.”

“I’ll be there at four,” Kate said.

I told her I would, too, and we hung up. Derek was still frowning. “The house looks great, Avery. Don’t tell me you’re worried?”

I walked around the sofa and curled up next to him. “Not really. I just wanted her to agree to take me with her.”

He put an arm around me and pulled me in closer. “You’ve done a great job. Tomorrow I’ll hang the Chinese lanterns on the porch and we’ll be done. And people will love it.”

“I hope so.”

“I know so,” Derek said and turned his head to drop a kiss on the top of my head. “You have a great eye, Avery. And you’ve turned your aunt’s house into a work of art. It’s beautiful. The house itself, as well as the decorations. Everyone will love it.”

I nodded, but didn’t answer, since I didn’t want to say, “I hope so,” again. Instead I turned my attention to the TV. Someone was blowing something up. “What’s going on?”

“Unrest in the Middle East,” Derek said. “Or maybe it’s an action thriller.”

“If you can’t tell the difference, do you think maybe it’s time to go to bed?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Derek said and turned the TV off.

• • • 

Dab turned out to live up north of town, in a small cabin set on a big, wooded lot. The house was surrounded by tall fir trees, still green now in the middle of winter and sparkling with snow.