Plaster and Poison (10 page)

Cortino’s Auto Shop is located on the other side of downtown from the Village, but since Waterfield is a very small town, we were there in just a couple of minutes. While Derek drove, I called to let Jill know we’d be coming, and she and Peter were waiting for us when we pulled up.
The first time I met Peter Cortino, I thought he was the handsomest man I had ever laid eyes on. Off a television screen, anyway. In a purely aesthetic way, naturally, since he was married and I was in a steady relationship. But I’m not blind, and Peter is definitely the kind of guy who gets noticed. As dark as Derek is fair, he looks like an old-fashioned matinee idol: Tyrone Power or Rudolph Valentino or one of those guys. Swarthy and smoldering. These days, maybe Antonio Banderas. That general type, anyway, although Peter doesn’t really look much like any of them. More like a Michelangelo sculpture right off the plinth. He’s a little shorter than Derek, and stockier, with black, curly hair, melting brown eyes, olive skin, and bone structure to die for.
Call me shallow, but when I first saw him, I wondered how Jill had managed to snare such a god. Not that she’s ugly or anything, but she’s nothing out of the ordinary, either. Plain and a little on the dumpy side, with dishwater blonde hair and too much junk in the trunk. Not the type you’d expect a gorgeous specimen like Peter to get involved with. Nor the type you’d expect a teenaged Derek to get involved with, either, for that matter.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that in addition to being gorgeous, Peter, like Derek, is a genuinely nice guy, and smart enough to know that women who don’t look like supermodels often have other, better qualities to recommend them. The Cortinos seem very happy together, and Peter is clearly crazy about Jill. He touches her every chance he gets, and when he looks at her, it’s with his heart in his eyes.
Like now. He came into the office and immediately went to stand behind his wife’s chair, one hand on her shoulder. She tilted her head back to smile at him, and he smiled back, all gleaming white teeth and smoldering sex appeal. And warm affection.
“Can’t keep their hands off each other,” Derek muttered, putting an arm around my shoulders. Jill rolled her eyes.
“What exactly can we do for you two?” Peter asked, without removing the hand.
Peter is from Boston, and whenever I hear him talk, it reminds me of my dad. I smiled. “It isn’t us, it’s my mom and stepdad. They rented the Beetle in Boston this morning, and on the way here . . .” I went through the whole explanation.
Peter shrugged. “I’ll go have a look. Shouldn’t take long. If you want to take your parents somewhere for lunch, Avery, the car should be done when you come back.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” Noel said from the doorway, where he was ushering my mother inside, “I think I’d just as soon wait.”
I must have looked disappointed, because Derek said, “Why don’t I stay here with Noel, while you take your mom into downtown and show her around. Get some lunch and catch up on things. We’ll see you back at the B&B later.”
I hesitated. It was tempting, I had to admit. And it would give me a chance to break the news of Gerard’s murder to my mom while it was just the two of us, which I guessed was what Derek meant when he said to catch up on things.
“Noel and I will be fine,” Derek added. “We won’t starve. There’s a pizza place right across the street. We’ll order a pie and get to know each other. Talk about things.”
Like Gerard’s murder.
“Great idea,” I said, beaming. “Mom?”
“Of course,” Mom said, nodding. “It’ll be nice. Just like the old days.” She smiled.
“Excellent.” If I hadn’t known better, I’d say that Noel was happy to be rid of us, too. He rubbed his hands together.
“Derek and I can get to know one another while you girls go have a good time.”
Uh-oh. I tried to catch his eye to signal that I really, really didn’t want him to have that conversation about Derek’s intentions that we’d talked about, but he wasn’t looking at me.
Outside on the road, a van from the medical examiner’s office in Portland drove slowly by. All of us followed it with our eyes until it had passed.
“Wonder what’s happened?” Jill said, a wrinkle between her eyes as she stood up to snuggle closer to her husband. He fitted his arm around her waist. “I hope it isn’t another situation like Carolyn’s.”
Derek and I exchanged a glance. We shouldn’t have, because she noticed and straightened. “What do you two know that we don’t?”
“Don’t tell me,” Peter added jokingly, “Avery has stumbled over another dead body.”
I grimaced. His face sobered. “Really?”
Mom turned to stare at me, her eyes huge.
“I’m afraid so,” Derek said. “It was in the carriage house when we got there this morning. Upstairs, in what’ll be the master bedroom.”
“We thought he was sleeping,” I added. “At first, I mean. Before we got a good look at him.”
“Who?” Jill demanded, at the same time as Peter said, “A bum?”
“I wish. No, it was Kate’s ex. He’s been hanging around Waterfield for a couple of weeks, getting to know Shannon.”
For a second, no one spoke. Then—
“Oh, dear!” Mom said faintly, clutching Noel’s arm.
“Poor Kate,” Jill muttered, shaking her head. “Poor Shannon.”
Peter looked down at her, then dropped his hand from her waist. He had gone pale under his usual olive complexion. “Sit down, honey. Here.” He pulled out the desk chair and put her into it. “I’ll go take care of the car.”
Truth be told, he looked worse than she did, but Jill sank down on the chair again and smiled at him. He smiled back—it looked more like a grimace—before heading out the back door into the auto shop. I watched him, perplexed, until I couldn’t see him anymore. It seemed rather an abrupt departure, if you asked me.
“Why don’t you go on, too, Tink,” Derek said and patted my shoulder. “You and your mom go have a good time. I’ll see you back at the B&B in a couple hours.”
I glanced up at him. “You sure?”
“Positive. Noel and I will still be fine.”
“If you’re sure,” I said tentatively. “Mom?”
Mom nodded. She kissed Noel on the cheek and took my arm. We walked out of the garage and left the three of them together.

9

“He’s lovely, Avery,” Mom said warmly a minute later, as we walked toward downtown. Her voice was the only warm thing about the situation: The temperature was below freezing and there was icy slush all over the road and sidewalk.
“Who? Derek?” I smiled. “He
is
great, isn’t he? So you two got along?”
“Oh, of course. That man could charm a stone.” Mom added, “Much like Noel.”
“Noel is lovely, too,” I agreed. “I really like him. Although I’m a little concerned that he’s back there right now, trying to guilt Derek into proposing to me.”
“Why would he do that?” Mom wanted to know. “Do you want Derek to propose?”
I blinked. It’s hard to credit, but I hadn’t actually thought about it in those terms. I mean, I had thought about him proposing. I had pictured it, wondering if he would, and wondering how I’d respond if he did . . . but I hadn’t ever considered whether I wanted him to. Our relationship was pretty perfect just the way it was. We saw each other every day, worked together most of the time, spent more time together than most married couples . . . but at the end of the day, if we wanted to, we could get away from one another. We had our own individual spaces. And down the line, if things didn’t work out, we could separate a whole lot more easily if we weren’t shackled together in bonds of holy matrimony.
“I don’t think so,” I said eventually. “At least for the time being, things are fine the way they are. I don’t need a ring on my finger to know I’m in a relationship.”
Mom nodded. “It’s early days yet. Taking the time to make sure how you feel before you make any decisions seems wise.”
I glanced over at her. “Is that what you did? When you met Noel?”
Mom smiled, her blue eyes sparkling. “I knew the moment I set eyes on him. There was no need to take any more time than that. I just had to wait for him to realize it, too.”
“How could you know? I mean, isn’t that kind of like falling in lust?”
Hard to imagine anyone lusting after my portly and past middle-age stepfather, but surely it isn’t possible to love someone from the moment you set eyes on them? Anyone else I’d met, who claimed to have fallen in love at first sight, had gotten burned. Derek with Melissa, Kate with Gerard—me with Philippe. Then again, Jill had probably fallen in love, or at least in lust, with Peter at first sight, and they seemed to be doing OK.
“It isn’t like that,” Mom said. “When it’s right, you just know.”
“So if I don’t just know, then it isn’t right? Because I thought I knew with Philippe, and with Will, and with Ian, and with Gareth . . .”
Mom shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, Avery. I knew as soon as I met Noel that I wanted to be with him, but of course I’d known him for a while by then. Online, you know. I knew he seemed to be a nice man and that we had a lot in common; I just hadn’t actually met him yet. And with your father . . . I was twenty-one or twenty-two, he was handsome and charming, and I fell flat for him. And we had a good life. We had you. We’d still be married if he hadn’t died.”
“But if you and Dad were still married, what about Noel?”
“I don’t know, Avery,” Mom said. “These are some very big questions. But if life had taken a different turn, and Kenneth hadn’t decided to go for a ride late at night, and that other driver hadn’t hit him, and we were still married . . . then maybe Claudette—that’s Noel’s ex-wife—wouldn’t have decided she needed to stretch her wings and find herself, either, and they’d still be together, too. Or he would have met someone else he liked, who made him happy.”
“Different futures?”
“Something like that.”
“So why didn’t the two of you just live in sin?”
“At my age?” Mom chuckled. “We’re old enough to like the convention of marriage, I guess. I was brought up to believe that you’d meet someone, get married, and settle down. And I’ve already had one good experience; I wasn’t afraid to try again. There is safety in marriage. And I like the commitment. It’s too easy to leave if you’re not married.”
“There’s that,” I admitted. The flip side of easily being able to dissolve the relationship is that it’s too easy to dissolve the relationship. (Yes, I know it’s the same thing. The difference is in how you look at it.) Would I want it to be easy to dissolve my relationship with Derek, I wondered. My instincts said no—I’d want to hold on to him for as long as I could—but if he wanted to leave, would I perhaps feel differently?
“Don’t worry about it, Avery.” Mom patted my arm. “When it happens, you’ll know what to say.”
“You think?”
“Of course, honey.” She smiled and looked around. “Well, this hasn’t changed much.”
We had reached Main Street, and I looked around, too. No, I imagined it hadn’t, not since the last time Mom was here, and not in the eighty years before that, either.
“That’s Derek’s apartment,” I said, pointing to the windows above the True Value hardware store. “He has a loft on the second floor. It used to belong to Peter Cortino, but when Peter and Jill got married—and Melissa divorced Derek—he moved in there instead.”
“Seems like a fair trade,” Mom opined. “You know, Avery, when I was here before, I don’t remember there being quite so many handsome men in Waterfield. Derek, Peter Cortino, and that chief of police isn’t bad, either . . .”
“Well, Peter’s new. He’s only been here for five or six years. He moved from Boston, I think. Not too long after Kate and Shannon.”
“An Eastie.” Mom nodded. “I recognize the accent.”
“Right. And no offense, but they’re all younger than you are. By a few years. When we were here for Aunt Catherine’s funeral, Derek was”—I counted on my fingers—“nine, and Wayne Rasmussen was probably twenty or so. It’s not likely you would have noticed him.”
“That’s true,” Mom admitted. “Still, I can see why you like it here, Avery.” She grinned.
“So you’re not disappointed? You don’t wish I was in New York, working on Madison Avenue? After all the time and effort—and expense—of putting me through Parsons?”
“As long as you’re happy,” Mom said, “it’s all that matters. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
I smiled. We linked arms and continued up the sidewalk.
Since it was going on lunchtime, I took her by Derek’s favorite deli and bought her a lobster roll. She agreed that it was excellent, and she even ordered a Moxie to go with it, while I stuck to Diet Coke. Afterward, we headed back out into the ice and snow toward Aunt Inga’s house.
We had gone maybe a block or so, to just outside John Nickerson’s store, when we came face-to-face with Cora Ellis and Beatrice.
Cora looked worried, her round face pinched and her eyes shadowed. When she saw me, she grabbed my arm.
“What’s going on over at Kate’s B&B, Avery? Why are the police there?”
“There was a problem overnight,” I explained. “When we got to work this morning, we found a body in the carriage house.”
Her fingers tightened on my arm. “A body? Whose body? ”
Cora has lived in Waterfield most of her adult life. She must be wondering which of her friends or acquaintances had met with an untimely demise.
I hastened to reassure her. “Nobody local. It was Kate’s ex. Shannon’s father. From Boston.”
Beatrice gasped.
“Oh, no,” Cora exclaimed. “How awful! Was he in town for the wedding?”
“We don’t know why he was in town. Except that he’s been hanging around with Shannon for the past couple of weeks.”
“Oh, dear. She must be devastated, poor girl.” Cora glanced at her own daughter, who seemed pretty devastated, too, considering that she didn’t know—couldn’t have known—Gerard.
“She’s pretty upset,” I said. “She hadn’t known him long—apparently there was very little contact while she was growing up—but they’d seen each other pretty regularly the past few weeks, from what I understand.”
“Oh, dear. What happened to him?”
I shrugged apologetically. “I don’t really know. Wayne mentioned something about poison, but I’m not sure whether that means he was poisoned deliberately or if it could have been an accident. And then he couldn’t breathe. Not sure whether that was accidental or on purpose, either. Maybe a side effect of whatever he took. As for what he was doing in the carriage house in the middle of the night, I have no idea. I guess Wayne and Brandon will have to figure that out.”
“Oh, dear.” Cora shook her head sadly.
I took the opportunity to make introductions. “Cora, this is my mom, Rosemary Carrick. Mom, this is Cora Ellis, Derek’s stepmother, and Beatrice . . . um . . .”
“Gremilion,” Bea murmured.
“Beatrice Gremilion, Cora’s daughter.”
“Nice to meet you.” Mom shook hands with both of them. While she and Cora discovered that they had both grown up in Portland and set out to decide whether they had any old friends or experiences in common, I turned to Beatrice.
“How are things with you?”
“Fine.” She smiled. It didn’t reach all the way to her eyes, but I didn’t think it was anything personal.
“Are the Stenhams treating you OK? You’re still up there at the Clovercroft site, right?”
She nodded. “I hardly ever see them. Melissa stops in once in a while, but I rarely see anyone else. There’s no construction going on, either.”
I shook my head. “Sometime over the summer, a back-hoe turned up human bones on the construction site. The archaeology department at Barnham excavated and decided that it was an old Indian burial ground. Penobscots or Micmacs or something. And now the various nations are arguing over who has jurisdiction and whether or not to re-inter the remains. Ray and Randy just want to dig ’em up and get rid of them, of course, but the tribes would prefer that their ancestors stay where they are. Understandably so. If they were my ancestors, I wouldn’t want to dig ’em up, either.”
“On the other hand,” Beatrice murmured, “one can understand why the Stenhams just want to move forward with their project.”
I nodded. “Oh, sure. They’ve paid for the land, paid for the survey, paid for materials, and paid to get things rolling . . . and now it’s all just sitting there, and they can’t do anything but wait it out. It could take years before some sort of decision is made, and it’s an unholy mess.”
I smiled, since the idea that the entire construction zone was lying barren, and that the Stenhams and Melissa were unable to cash out and get their investment back, brought me great pleasure. Small of me, no doubt, but that didn’t stop me from reveling in the feeling. Maybe they’d even fall on hard times and have to stop buying up land and putting up cracker-box houses. It wasn’t like they were hurting. Their other development, Devon Highlands, was going great guns, with parcels selling for more than a hundred grand each, and the houses topping out at five hundred thousand or so. So there’d be presents under the Stenhams’ Christmas trees this year, too, I was sure.
“I’m sorry you have to sit there by yourself all day,” I added. “It must be boring.”
Beatrice shrugged. “I’m used to being alone,” she said. “And I’m finding things to do. Straightening out the Stenhams’ bookkeeping is a big job. There’s been some very interesting balancing going on.”
“Really? I guess maybe Carolyn Tate wasn’t quite the treasure Melissa claimed. I should have known she was exaggerating.”
Melissa had gone on TV after the accident and extolled Carolyn’s virtues as a bookkeeper and member of the team; heck, practically a member of the family.
Beatrice didn’t answer. Looking around for a distraction, she found it in John Nickerson’s display window. “Wow. What a great dress.”
“Isn’t it?” I moved to stand next to her. “I was actually thinking about buying it. Letting John keep it until after Christmas, since I don’t want to destroy his decorations before the Victorian weekend, but putting a deposit down so I can wear it on New Year’s Eve. Wouldn’t it look great with black stockings and black shoes, and with a big, black flower at the waist?”
Beatrice glanced down at me. Like most everyone, she has me beat by a few inches. “You could pull that off. I don’t think I could.”
“Of course you could. Although that style probably isn’t the best choice for you. Too”—I hesitated—“girly.”
I knew her to be under thirty, younger than me by a few years. But she was looking older than her real age at the moment. Her mouth was pinched and her features strained, and there were shadows under her eyes, like maybe she was missing Steve more than she’d thought she would.
I added, “What I meant was, this isn’t your kind of dress. You need something more sophisticated. More elegant. With your figure, you can pull off high fashion. I can’t. I’m too short, for one thing.”
And not bony enough, for another. My face is round, my nose is pert, my hair is kinky; there is nothing elegant or sophisticated about me. While Beatrice had that clothes-hanger figure down pat and cheekbones for days.
“I had a part-time job in the accounting department at Filene’s Basement on Boylston Street in Boston for a while,” Beatrice said, her lips curving reminiscently.
“No kidding?” Filene’s is an institution. Designer clothes at fifty to seventy-five percent off, and then there’s the Brides’ Run . . . “Why did you leave it?”
She glanced over at me. “Steve got this incredible job with an incredible salary, and I didn’t have to work anymore. I could just go home all day and putter. He told me I should take advantage.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Two years.” She stared into John’s plate glass window. “At first it was wonderful. We’d been struggling to make ends meet for long enough that I appreciated not having to worry about money. I’d been holding down two and sometimes three part-time jobs so Steve could finish school, and suddenly we had enough that not only did I not have to work anymore, we could hire someone to cook and clean. I didn’t have to do anything but sleep in, go to lunch with my friends once in a while, work in the garden, go shopping, and not in the clearance racks. . . .”
“But? ”
“But eventually I got bored. I had everything, but no one to share it with. Steve was always working. Weekdays and weekends, holidays and vacations. Thanksgiving, Christmas, our anniversary, and my birthday. He was just never home.”
“That must have been hard,” I said, sympathetically.
She shrugged. “Not compared to what some people have to deal with. My dad used to beat my mom black and blue. Steve never raised a hand to me. We never argued, never fought, never even disagreed; he just wasn’t ever there.”
“So you left.”
She nodded. “Better to be alone by yourself, than alone with somebody, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” I admitted.