Fatal Fixer-Upper (12 page)

I flushed.

He drove and I pouted until we pulled to the curb outside another immaculately restored Victorian, pale green in color and surrounded by masses and masses of blooming flowers. I looked around for a sign telling me this was a doctor's office or medical clinic but didn't see one.

'Where are we?' I asked when Derek came around the truck to open the door for me.

'Birch Street. This is where the doctor is, when he's not up at the medical center.'

'His house? Won't he mind us dropping in like this?'

Maybe it would be better just to go to the emergency room after all.

Derek smiled. 'He won't mind at all. Loves me like a son. C'mon.'

He scooped me out of the car and closed the door with his hip before heading up the immaculate walkway to the front door, holding me to his chest. I looped my arms around his neck and enjoyed the ride.

9

––Waterfield's doctor was a good-looking older man with graying hair cut short and a friendly, open face with round glasses. He was casually dressed in wrinkled khakis and a faded blue golf shirt with a crocodile on the pocket. A napkin tucked under his collar was stained with yellow, and he had a fork in one hand. When he saw us, he took a step back, eyes wide behind the lenses. 'Derek. Good morning, son. What's going on?'

'Morning, sir,' Derek said, walking right in. 'This is Avery Baker. I'm helping her renovate her aunt Inga's house over on Bayberry. I found her looking like this when I came to work this morning.'

'Mercy.' The doctor looked around for somewhere to deposit his fork and ended up putting it and the soiled napkin on what was either an outstanding reproduction or a genuine mahogany-veneered Hepplewhite sideboard standing in the hallway. Philippe would have been green with envy. 'You'd better put her in the parlor.'

He stepped out of the way. Derek headed into a room on the right with the doctor following. 'On the couch, please.'

The couch was a pristine example of a 1770s Federalstyle straight-back sofa upholstered in yellow damask. It might even have been a Sheraton. Again, Philippe's mouth would have watered, and he would surely not have approved of the way Derek unceremoniously dropped me onto the old seat. The doctor, whose sofa it was, didn't turn a hair. 'What seems to be the problem, young lady?'

'I fell down the stairs,' I explained. 'Last night. The lights were out, and when I went down to the basement to flip the breaker, I fell and banged myself up a little.'

'More than a little,' Derek muttered.

'I scraped my hands and my face, and my knee hurts,' I added.

'Would you mind?' The doctor gestured to my leg with a pair of scissors that he had pulled out of a knitting or embroidery basket next to the sofa.

'What? Oh . . . Sure, if you have to.' I watched as he sliced into my favorite jeans, forever ruining them. A hole at the knee is one thing; a slit from the bottom all the way up to thigh level is something else. The doctor crouched in front of me and began poking and prodding. Derek folded his arms across his chest, his eyes narrowed as he watched.

'Why don't you go on into the kitchen, Derek?' the doctor suggested over his shoulder. 'Say hello to Cora and give me a chance to talk to your friend here. If I know you, all you had this morning was a pot of coffee.'

Derek hesitated for a moment, but then he gave a short nod and wandered off.

'Gotta remind the boy to eat,' the doctor said with a friendly wink, 'just like when he was little. He'd get so caught up in things, he'd forget.' He smiled, probably to distract me while he twisted my knee. 'So you're Inga Morton's niece?'

I nodded. 'Great-niece. Yes. My great-grandfather and her father were brothers. Ow.'

'Sorry.' He sat back on his heels, peering up at me over the glasses. His eyes were the same shade of blue as Derek's, but with a darker ring around the iris. 'The good news is, your knee is going to be fine. You bruised it when you fell. It'll be discolored and swollen for a few days, but there's no significant damage done. I can put a couple of Band-Aids on the scratch, if you want.'

'That's not necessary.' I touched it gingerly. 'It's already starting to scab over. What's the bad news?'

'The bad news is it'll take a few days to get well. You should go to the drugstore and buy yourself a knee brace. Stay off it as much as possible, and when you do have to move around, try not to put any undue pressure on it.'

I nodded. 'Thank you, Doctor.'

The doctor grinned. 'Call me Ben. Any friend of Derek's is a friend of mine. Plus, I treated your aunt, you know.'

'No,' I said, 'I didn't. Did you know Aunt Inga well?'

'Fairly well. I was her physician, just like my father before me. We've been doctors for generations.'

Derek, sauntering in just in time to hear this, pressed his lips together as he put a hand under the older man's arm and helped him to his feet.

Dr. Ben continued, with a nod and smile at him, 'Your aunt was the oldest resident of Waterfield; she went through several generations of doctors and lawyers in her lifetime. You've met Mr. Rodgers, I'm sure?'

I nodded.

'Before him, old Horace Cooper was her attorney. Graham Rodgers was his protégé, a fatherless boy from Thomaston whom Horace took under his wing because he didn't have any children of his own. He put Graham through law school and then took him on as a junior partner, and when Horace died, Graham inherited the Cooper family home along with the law practice.'

'Nice work if you can get it,' Derek remarked. Dr. Ben smiled. 'Have you seen Cliff House yet, Avery? As someone who likes to renovate, you'll appreciate it.'

I shook my head, reserving judgment on whether I actually
liked
to renovate. 'Kate McGillicutty told me he has a big spread outside town.'

Dr. Ben nodded. 'It's another of our historic homes, like the B and B. The Cliff House was built in the early 1800s. Beautiful place. You worked there recently, didn't you, Derek?'

'Painted the damn thing last fall,' Derek said. 'From top to bottom. All sixteen rooms.'

'Wow,' I said. 'That sounds like quite a job.'

Derek shrugged.

'He painted this house, too,' Dr. Ben said, with a proud look around that encompassed Derek himself. 'Every wall, every baseboard, every inch of trim.'

I looked at the ten-foot ceilings, the carved molding, the plaster walls. It was all pristine and beautiful. 'Good job.'

Derek didn't answer. A grouping of small oil paintings on the far wall caught my attention, and I peered at them for a second. There was Dr. Ben's house, Kate's B and B, and a big, white house with a red door, which looked Federal or Georgian in style. Someone in the Ellis family liked to paint pictures as well as walls, it seemed. I wondered if this was Derek's work, as well, but before I could ask, a cluster of redbrick buildings in another canvas resolved themselves into a faithful reproduction of Barnham College, complete with minuscule gargoyles, and took my thoughts in a different direction. I turned my attention back to Dr. Ben. 'This may be an odd question, but would you happen to know what was going on between my Aunt Inga and Martin Wentworth?'

'The young professor who disappeared a couple of weeks ago? I'm sorry, I have no idea.'

'What makes you think something was going on?'

Derek asked.

I glanced at him. 'I found Professor Wentworth's card in the desk in the parlor, and Wayne found his fingerprints in the kitchen. I was wondering what they were discussing.'

'Your aunt was the oldest resident of Waterfield,' Dr. Ben reminded me. 'She could remember things that everyone else had forgotten. The smuggling during Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, even World War I, when she was just a girl. Stories and local scandals that nobody else remembered anymore. And although her body was becoming feebler, her mind was still sharp. And I must admit I was quite shocked when Wayne Rasmussen called and told me she had passed on. I know she was almost one hundred, but I thought she'd be around for a while yet.'

'There wasn't anything suspicious about her death, was there?'

The doctor's voice was cautious when he answered.

'Nothing I saw was inconsistent with an accident, and the M.E. in Portland confirmed it. Do you have reason to suspect otherwise?'

'Not really. It's just that some weird things have been happening.' Like Aunt Inga's cryptic letter to me, and her death so quickly afterward, not to mention the threatening note I'd received and the broken china . . . The doctor nodded. 'The only thing that struck me is to wonder what she was doing upstairs in the first place. The stairs were almost impossible for her to manage anymore. Occasionally, she'd ask me to bring something down for her, but to my knowledge, she hadn't ventured upstairs herself for several years.'

I nodded. 'Wayne Rasmussen told me that my cousins tried to have her declared incompetent a couple of years ago. Kate said it was so they could get their hands on her property.'

'They didn't succeed, though. I testified before the judge in the case, and the Stenhams didn't stand a chance. They've never been remarkable for their wits, have they, Derek?'

Derek shook his head with a quickly suppressed grimace.

Dr. Ben added, 'All they succeeded in doing was ensuring that they didn't get the house after she died, either. She left it to you instead.' He smiled, seemingly pleased that the Stenhams had thus shot themselves in the foot.

'Ray Stenham accosted me the other day,' I said. Derek muttered something, and I turned to him. 'Excuse me?'

'I said, that was Randy. Not Ray.'

I squinted. 'Are you sure?'

Dr. Ben shot him a glance. His expression was partly laced with wry amusement and partly something else that I couldn't quite pinpoint. Derek remained impassive. 'Positive. I grew up with 'em both; I can tell 'em apart.'

'Oh.' I bit my lip. 'I thought it was Ray.' Good thing I hadn't actually called him by name.

'What did he want?' Dr. Ben asked.

I turned my attention back to him. 'He
said
he wanted to warn me about all the things that could go wrong when renovating a house. What he actually wanted, I think, was to scare me into leaving town, and giving or selling Aunt Inga's house to him and his brother.'

'Interesting.' Dr. Ben turned to Derek, and they exchanged a look.

'What?' I said, glancing from one to the other of them. Derek looked away. 'Nothing. You ready to go?'

'I guess.' I looked at Dr. Ben, who nodded.

'Just take it easy for a few days. Try not to use that knee any more than you have to. Sit and watch while Derek does the work.'

Derek rolled his eyes.

I grinned. 'Don't mind if I do. Thanks, Doctor. How much do I owe you?'

'I don't charge for doing a favor for a friend,' Dr. Ben said with another smile. He clasped my hand for a moment when he said good-bye, before Derek hoisted me again, and headed back out to the truck.

'Nice man,' I said when we were rolling down the street in the direction of Aunt Inga's house again. 'He called you son. He's your dad, right?'

'He's my dad.' Derek glanced left and turned right at the corner.

'Your dad's a doctor, and you're a handyman?' As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could take them back.

He shot me a look. 'You have a problem with that?'

'Of course not. I guess I'm just surprised that you didn't follow in his footsteps.' Especially since Dr. Ben had said that the family had been physicians for generations.

'You're not one of those girls who won't get involved with anyone but a doctor or a lawyer, are you, Tinkerbell?'

'That's a fine thing to ask,' I answered. 'My former boyfriend was a furniture maker, for your information.'

'No kidding,' Derek said. 'What happened?' He twisted the wheel to make another turn.

'What do you mean, what happened? We broke up. Just before I moved here.'

'Mutual?'

I hesitated. 'In the end, I guess it was.' Philippe had cheated, and I'd chosen not to forgive and forget.

'Do you still have feelings for this guy?'

'You know,' I said, 'I could turn all snarky and say that's none of your business.'

'But?' He smiled.

'But I'm a nice person, so I won't. Sure, I have feelings for him.' Feelings of wanting to kill him, mostly.

'He's six hours away, with someone else, so I also have some perspective.'

'Makes sense,' Derek admitted.

A few minutes later we pulled up outside Aunt Inga's house. He opened his door. I did the same, scooting out before he could pick me up and carry me again. Frankly, I was enjoying the experience a little too much, and I thought it better to nip that in the bud. But the moment I put any weight on my bum knee, it buckled, and Derek had to move quickly.

'Of all the stupid, pigheaded, stubborn . . .' he muttered. The rest of the litany of my failings was drowned out by my outraged squeal as he tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of grain and strode up the walk, kicking open the gate on the way.

After dropping me back onto Aunt Inga's bed, he sat down next to me. 'Tell me again what happened last night. In detail.'

I sighed. 'I already did. There's nothing more to tell.'

'Humor me,' Derek said in a voice that left no room for argument. I rolled my eyes but did as he said.

'After you left, I stripped the rest of the wallpaper from the hall. Then I took the bike from the shed and rode out to this place called Mario's for dinner.'

'I know it. Down the ocean road apiece.'

I nodded. 'When I came home, I discovered that all the lights were out. I thought maybe you'd turned them off and forgotten to turn them back on before you left.' In his eagerness to cash his check or something.

He shook his head. 'I didn't turn them off yesterday. And I wouldn't have forgotten to turn them back on if I had.'

'You flipped the breaker this morning, though, and the lights came back on. Right?' He nodded. 'So they really were off last night. If you didn't turn them off, who did?'