Fatal Fixer-Upper (21 page)

'We're heading down to Barnham College,' Derek said.

'To see a man about a dog,' I added. 'It's not important. Do you need anything else?'

I could tell that Wayne was curious, but he shook his head. 'I'll keep looking for the Range Rover and the chaise longue. After I write you,' he turned to Derek, with a grin, 'a ticket for a traffic infraction. Making a U-turn on Main Street is illegal, as you very well know.'

Derek rolled his eyes.

. . .

Thirty minutes later we were sitting across from Paige Thompson in the cafeteria at Barnham College, nursing cups of bad coffee. She was a slight, pale girl with mousy blonde hair, dressed in an oversized denim shirt. Her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she'd been crying, and her hands were convulsively tight around the white cup. Shannon sat on one side of her, bristling like a mother hedgehog, and on the other sat Josh, tall and lanky in a Barnham College sweatshirt and round glasses. I recognized Wayne's steady brown eyes behind the lenses.

'You know, Shannon,' I said with a smile, in an effort to lighten the mood and put the three of them at ease, 'when I spoke to you last night, I suspected you'd been seeing Professor Wentworth on the sly.'

For a second or two, Shannon looked totally shocked, while Josh hid a grin. Then her eyes started sparkling, and she grinned, too. 'Me? You thought
I'd
been seeing Martin Wentworth? I can't imagine where you'd get that idea.'

'Well,' I said, 'you called him by his first name, and your mother thought you had a boyfriend this winter, because you were whispering on the phone all the time. And then there was that ‘special project' that you worked on together . . .'

'Right,' Shannon said, her grin fading. 'The special project.' She and Josh were both careful not to look at Paige.

'Of course,' I continued, smiling sweetly, 'that was before I talked to Derek and realized that you weren't the one having the affair.'

I moved my attention to Paige, who managed to look miserable and defiant all at the same time. Shannon rolled her eyes. 'That just figures, doesn't it? After all the trouble we went to, to make sure that no one guessed, it turns out that Derek's known all along.'

'What can I say?' Derek said with a shrug and absolutely no attempt at modesty. 'I'm brilliant.'

'Or just lucky,' Josh suggested. 'You probably happened to see them together sometime, right?'

Derek grinned. 'You got it.'

Shannon turned to me. 'She has enough trouble as it is, don't you think, Avery? Without you giving her any flak. I mean, her boyfriend's missing!'

'Please,' I said, lifting both hands in the universal gesture of surrender, 'I have no plans of giving anyone a hard time. As far as I'm concerned, she can date anyone she wants. That's her business. All I care about is finding out what happened to my aunt.'

'Your aunt was Inga Morton, right?' Paige asked. Other than the initial, whispered greeting, this was the first time I'd heard her voice. It was soft and wispy, the voice of a little girl. 'Martin visited her several times. He was researching the Marie Antoinette legend—how Marie Antoinette's things came over from France after the revolution, but she didn't—and there was some kind of connection.'

'Between my aunt and Marie Antoinette? Or the Marie Antoinette items?'

Paige shrugged, her pale hair falling forward. 'Either. Both. I don't exactly know what it was, because he wouldn't tell me. Said it was confidential. But I know that he was working with your aunt on something. It had to do with some things she owned. Or maybe didn't own.' She looked confused.

'I'm trying to determine when they met,' I explained, 'and if possible, what they discussed.'

Paige didn't answer. I turned to Shannon, who said, 'Josh and I don't actually know much about what Martin was working on outside class. He told us to call him that, by the way. Josh isn't even a history major, and that special project I told my mom about was just an excuse. The real reason he drove me home that night was because I'd just found out about him and Paige, and I'd been chewing him out. But of course I couldn't tell my mom that.'

I nodded.

She continued, 'He wrote down everything he did in that day planner you asked me about last night.'

'The one that went missing when he did?'

The three of them exchanged a look.

'Oh, don't tell me,' I said, 'it's not really missing after all, is it?'

They looked guilty.

'The three of you stole Professor Wentworth's day planner?' Derek said.

Shannon grimaced. 'Yeah.'

'And you the son of the chief of police,' Derek said to Josh. Josh shrugged, sipping his own coffee.

'I know that Brandon Thomas is the only forensic crime tech in the Waterfield Police, and as soon as I heard that he was on his way to the professor's condo, we went to the office and took the day planner. The door wasn't locked—it never is—and the girls made sure I wasn't caught.'

'But didn't you realize that it might help the police find him?' I asked, at the same time as Derek demanded to know, 'Why, for God's sake?'

Shannon chose to answer him instead of me. 'We figured that Paige's name would be all over it. If Josh's dad got hold of it, everyone would know that she'd been seeing Martin.'

'Do you still have it?'

I held my breath, hoping that these juvenile criminals hadn't thought to get rid of the planner to hide the evidence. It's what I would have done; at least I hoped it was. Anything else would have been stupid. I hoped very much that they were too young and inexperienced to realize that. Josh and Shannon both turned to look at Paige. She nodded.

Josh rolled his eyes behind the glasses.

'Probably couldn't bear to burn it,' Shannon muttered. I nodded. By now, the appointment book was all Paige had left of her boyfriend, and she must have been clinging to it. 'Do you have it with you?' I asked. She shook her head. 'It's in my room.'

'Can you go get it?'

'Why do you want it?'

'Because it will help me figure out what happened to my aunt. And because we can give it to Wayne without getting you—any of you—in trouble.'

'I'll talk to Wayne and get him to agree not to tell her parents,' Derek added. 'But the police need to see it. If he really wrote everything down, the planner might help them figure out where he went. Or what happened to him. Or what he did.'

'What do you mean, what he did?' Paige's guileless blue eyes narrowed to thin slits.

Shannon looked apprehensively at her.

Derek glanced at me. He chose his words carefully, for all the good that it did. There's really no way to gently break the fact that you're suspecting someone's lover of being a cold-blooded killer and a coward to boot. 'There's a theory that he killed Avery's aunt and then ran away to avoid the consequences.'

'He'd never do that!' Paige said, spots of high color in her cheeks.

Shannon patted her on the back, reassuringly. Derek raised both hands, palms out. 'Hey, relax. I'm not saying he did it on purpose. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he got scared. It could happen to anyone.'

'He wouldn't!' Paige had closed her small hands into fists, and her soft voice was shaking. 'He wasn't a coward. He cared about Miss Morton. He'd never hurt her. And if he did it accidentally, he'd call the police. He'd never run away and leave her there!'

'Then the police need to know that,' I said, trying to inject some calm into the situation. 'All I want to know is what happened to my aunt. If her death was an accident, that's fine. If it wasn't, I want to know who's responsible. If it wasn't Professor Wentworth, I have no desire to crucify him. Why don't you let me read the planner, and then I can decide whether there's anything in it that might help?'

'You won't give it to them without telling me?' Paige's eyes were beseeching. All three of them were staring at me, unblinkingly.

'I promise,' I said.

16

––Paige agreed to go to her dorm room to get the planner, and although she was reluctant to hand it over to us, she did it eventually. I thanked her profusely and promised I'd take good care of it, and only give it to Wayne if I thought it would help him find the professor or find out what happened to my aunt. Thirty minutes later, Derek and I were back in Waterfield, inside Aunt Inga's house. Everything looked the same as it had when I left the day before, except for Brandon Thomas's fingerprint powder all over the front parlor. It didn't look like anyone had been in the house since last night. Even so, Derek insisted on doing a walk-through before rejoining me in the kitchen. The unfinished mosaic backsplash looked reproachful, and I turned my back on it.

'I'll seal the backsplash,' Derek offered, 'if you want to work on the planner.'

I squinted at him. 'Are you sure?'

'I wouldn't offer if I wasn't.'

'But don't you want to see what's in here?'

He grinned. 'Oh, I'm sure you'll let me know when you find something. You're not exactly reticent, you know.'

'Unlike you. Well, if you're sure you don't mind.'

'Go ahead. I'll just get busy, and you sit right there and start reading. That way I'll be nearby if you find something you want to discuss.'

'Deal.' I settled onto one of the kitchen chairs and opened Professor Wentworth's day planner, while behind me, Derek got to work with sealer and brush. What Paige had handed over was actually something more like a three-ring binder with a calendar, and what looked like most of a ream of blank pages in the back for jotting down notes. The calendar had two parts, one monthly, with all the days laid out in a grid, and the other daily, with a page per day, for hourly appointments and things like that. Almost every page was scribbled over with tiny, cramped handwriting. The only thing I can say for Martin Wentworth is that he was a tidy writer—especially compared to how messy he kept his office. His letters were small but extremely neat, arranged in ruler-straight lines, as precise as computer fonts. I had no problem reading what he had written. Understanding what he had meant was, unfortunately, a different matter. He used abbreviations a lot, probably to save space, and most of them were unfamiliar to me. Some I could guess at from the context, but once in a while I'd come across something that made no sense.

'What does VD mean?' I asked Derek. He left the counter to lean over me, one hand on my shoulder. I was wearing a skimpy tank top again, with my shoulders mostly bare, and his hand was warm and rough against my skin.

'Venereal disease?' he suggested. 'I hope Paige knows about that. ‘Checked into H for VD.' He checked into the hospital because he had venereal disease?'

'Or he checked into booking a hotel for Valentine's Day?'

'Or he might have looked into the vapor density of hydrogen.'

'Is that something a history professor would have to do?'

'I wouldn't think so,' Derek said, 'although he might have been doing all sorts of things in his spare time.'

'True.' And had been, it seemed. 'What about this one?' I pointed. 'WC?'

'God.' He rolled his eyes and blew out an exasperated sigh. 'WC could mean any number of things. Water closet, an old word for a bathroom. White Castle, the hamburger chain. There aren't any around here, but there are some in Portland. Someone with the initials WC, maybe another of his students, or a teacher down at the college? World Cup. Water cooler. Wing commander. Workers' comp. Any and all of them. I'm sure there are more, too.'

'It probably doesn't matter. I'm only at the end of January. If he disappeared in May, I'm not sure it matters what he did four months earlier.'

'Maybe you should start with the last entry and work your way back,' Derek suggested. I blinked. For some reason, this very logical approach hadn't occurred to me.

'You're not as dumb as you look, are you?'

He removed his hand from my shoulder. 'I didn't drop out of medicine because I was too stupid to hack it, if that's what you thought. And you don't exactly look like a nuclear scientist yourself.'

'I'm a girl,' I said complacently. 'I don't have to look smart. I just have to look pretty.'

'I'd prefer a smart girl to a pretty one. Of course, if your next boyfriend's gonna be another Phil, you've got nothing to worry about.'

He stalked to the counter and got back to work, his movements crisp. I looked at him over my shoulder for a moment, on the brink of a rejoinder, before I thought better of it and turned my attention back to the planner.

'Here it is,' I said after a moment of turning over pages, going backward through time. 'It says here that my aunt and the professor met several times during the spring, including the day before she died.'

Derek wandered over. 'What did they talk about?'

'No idea. He doesn't go into detail. There are just notations of : IM@h. Inga Morton at home, I guess. Every Wednesday for a while.'

'He went missing on a Wednesday,' Derek said.

'Did he really? There are cross-references to some of the note pages in the back of the book.' I flipped there and found page upon page of minuscule writing. Abbreviations and symbols proliferated there, too. I wondered, if we had a question about anything, whether Paige would be able to answer it. Perhaps she'd had practice deciphering the professor's impromptu shorthand. Or perhaps he'd told her what was what during their periods of pillow talk.

'I'll leave you to it,' Derek said, with a glance at the overfilled pages. 'Let me know if you come across anything interesting.'

I promised I would, and then he went back to the backsplash while I devoted myself to figuring out what Professor Wentworth had been researching in the months before his disappearance, and what connection there might be between that and my late great-aunt.

It became obvious rather quickly that Professor Wentworth had indeed been looking into the legend of Marie Antoinette. He had visited Montpelier and Dorchester and of course the Fraser House. He had also, it seemed, finagled invitations to a couple of the privately owned historic houses in the area, which had items that supposedly were brought over on the
Sally
. It looked like he was trying to compile a list of the various items that had arrived on that fateful voyage.

'Huh,' I muttered.

Immediately, Derek was next to me. 'What?'

'Look at this. It looks like he made a list of the cargo from the
Sally
. He probably looked up the ship's manifest, or something.'

'Or it could be a list of the contents of someone's house. Or shop.' He saw my expression and added, 'OK. Yeah, it does.'

'I wonder why. I mean, look here.' I pointed. 'Fraser House. Where the historical society is, right? Fan, mirror and brush set, utensils . . .' My voice ran down.

'What?' Derek said. I shook my head.

'Nothing. Just a stray thought. My point is, the historical society and the Fraser House don't have these things anymore. They still have the chair, but all the smaller things were lost in that robbery Miss Barnes told us about, remember?'

Derek nodded. 'So maybe he was trying to come up with a list of what Marie Antoinette actually thought she'd need to start over.'

'What good would that do? If those things went into limbo in , who cares where they were before that?'

'Obviously he did,' Derek said. 'He was a history professor. Those things were probably interesting to him.' He went back to the backsplash. I shrugged—maybe so—and went back to the appointment book.

All right, so I'd try a different angle. On the list of items from the Fraser House, the small bergère was missing. But the chair was actually still there, in the house. The fan, mirror and brush set, and utensils were listed, but were not in the house any longer. So maybe Professor Wentworth was interested in the missing items more than the ones that were still there.

That same stray thought tugged on my memory again. Something about that list from the Fraser House. I turned back a page and read it over.

'My mother told me that Aunt Inga sent her a set of antique lobster utensils for her wedding last year,' I said, just as much to myself as to Derek. He glanced over.

'Your mom got remarried?'

I nodded. 'My dad died when I was thirteen.'

'My mom died when I was twenty-seven. My dad married Cora two years later.'

'Must be difficult to be alone again after you've been with someone that long. I know it threw my mother for a loop, and she was still fairly young. Suddenly all the responsibility was on her shoulders. She had to do everything herself. Make all the money, pay all the bills, and still be there for me. And if you think a thirteen-year-old girl is easy for a single parent to handle, think again.'

'That's how old Shannon was when she and Kate moved here,' Derek said. 'Believe me, I know.'

'So how do you and Cora get along? Do you like her?'

Derek nodded. 'She's great. But more importantly, my dad likes her, so even if I didn't, I'd find a way to make it work. How about you and . . . what's your stepfather's name?'

'Noel. And I never thought about him as my stepfather, although I guess he is, technically. They live in California, so I don't get to see them very often. I've only met him a few times. He seems very nice, though, and he worships the ground she walks on. Mom's very happy.'

'That's good. So she invited your aunt to the wedding?'

'The Wedding. Yes. Aunt Inga couldn't make it—too old and infirm, or maybe just too afraid to leave home—but she sent a set of antique lobster utensils that my mom said were fit for a queen.'

'Huh,' Derek said. His eyes flicked up and met mine. I didn't know how to answer the question he wasn't asking, but I was thinking the same thing, so I nodded. 'How could we find out?'

'The
Chronicle
's been around for a while.'

'Is that the local newspaper?'

'One of them. The other one's the
Waterfield Weekly.
That's been around a while, too. I think they both date back to the teens. There's probably something in the archives about the Fraser House robbery.'

'We could go see,' I suggested.

'We could.' He meticulously finished sealing another pottery piece before he replaced the lid on the sealer and wrapped the brush in plastic. 'Let's do it now. If it takes a long time, I'll buy you lunch.'

'Thanks,' I said, getting up, 'but if it's all the same to you, I'd rather come back here. There's a lot more research I need to do.' I'd only just started looking at Professor Wentworth's notes; who knew what else I might find in his day planner?

Derek shrugged. 'Suit yourself. We can pick something up and bring it back here if you prefer.'

'Either. I guess it doesn't matter.' I walked in front of him out of the house and stopped on the porch to lock the door behind us before shuffling down the walk in Derek's wake. The grass was still knee-high, and I really, really hoped Mr. Todd would be able to come soon to mow it. The
Chronicle
newspaper offices were located on Main Street, just across from the
Weekly
newspaper offices. It was like they were squaring off, ready to do battle, although I guessed there was probably room enough for both of them in a town this size. They'd certainly both managed to survive for long enough. The plaque outside the
Chronicle
main entrance said, Since , and when I wandered over to check the matching plate outside the
Weekly
's entrance, it said, Since .

'That's a long time,' I remarked to Derek as we pushed through the doors to the
Chronicle
offices. He nodded. The
Chronicle
archivist was another fan of Derek's, a round-faced woman in her fifties, with a thick gold band prominently displayed on her left hand. She looked delighted to see him, and when Derek turned on the charm, she couldn't move fast enough to do his bidding. In short order we were both sitting in front of a microfiche machine in a utilitarian back room.

This was my first experience with microfiche—textile design isn't a field where microfiche comes into play a whole lot—but Derek seemed to know his way around the machine. 'I have to do some research once in a while,' he explained when I asked. 'Sometimes I have to pull permits to do certain types of renovations. Waterfield Village has a protective zoning overlay, and there are certain things I'm not allowed to do to the facade of the houses in the historic district. But if I can prove that there was something similar there at one time, or that the house was originally painted in what's considered a nonhistoric color, I'll get special dispensation to do it anyway.'

'And there's microfiche involved in that?'

'Sometimes, yeah.' He operated the machine, rolling smoothly through the pages of the
Chronicle
. I yawned. I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow of the progression of events. Research is boring at the best of times, especially secondhand, like this. We hit pay dirt about an hour in, when we came across a small notice about a robbery in a neighboring town. Someone had broken into a private home while the owners were out of town for the weekend and absconded with several valuable items, among them a jewelry box full of gold and diamonds, as well as an Aubusson tapestry rumored to have come over from France on the
Sally
.

'Oh, my God!' I said, wide-eyed. 'An Aubusson!'

Derek looked at me like he couldn't quite see why I had turned pale and my hands were shaking. 'What's an Aubusson?'

'Aubusson is the name of a weaving and textile com

mune in France. Started in by weavers from Flanders who took refuge there. In the seventeenth century, the Aubusson workshop was given royal appointment status. They made tapestries for the kings and queens of France.'

'Know a lot about it, don't you?'

I shrugged. 'Maybe I'm not quite as stupid as I look, either. Textiles—fabrics—are my specialty. An antique Aubusson tapestry from the eighteenth century might be worth as much as two hundred thousand dollars these days. A royal commission Aubusson from the same time might be worth a whole lot more. If my aunt had one of those . . .'

'What makes you think your aunt had one of those?'

I hesitated, then came clean. 'I looked through Professor Wentworth's office the other day.' He arched his brows, and I added defensively, 'The door was open. And I didn't take anything. Nothing important. Just a stack of photographs from the desk drawer.'

'Photographs of what?' Derek asked, moving the microfiche along again, after printing out the article we'd found. Behind me, I could hear the printer on the other side of the room kicking into life.

'Antiques. A hairbrush and mirror set. Two hair combs. A
guéridon
—that's a small, three-legged table. A beaded footstool. The chaise longue we lost yesterday. And a tapestry hanging in Aunt Inga's hall. At least I think it was Aunt Inga's hall. The wallpaper was the same.'

'The wallpaper you took down?' Derek said. I nodded.

'The wall I painted yesterday? There was no tapestry there then.'

'Believe me,' I said, 'there's been no tapestry there at any time in the past couple of weeks. Not for as long as I've been around. An Aubusson tapestry isn't something I'd overlook.'

'But there was an Aubusson tapestry in Aunt Inga's house at some point. At least that's what it sounds like you're saying?'

I nodded.

'Someone must have removed it, then. Maybe she sold it.'

'I told you how much they go for,' I said. 'If she sold it, where's the money?'

He shrugged. 'No idea. I'm more interested in where she got it, anyway.'

'Isn't that rather obvious? If it's the same tapestry that was lost in the robbery, anyway?'

'I guess.' Derek stopped the microfiche again. 'Here's another.'

I leaned closer to the screen. 'Thieves Strike Again' was the headline. This time the daring robbers had snuck into a home in the middle of the night, while the elderly inhabitants were upstairs, asleep. They hadn't heard anything and hadn't realized that anything was wrong until the next morning when they came downstairs and saw that several valuable antiques were missing. Among the stolen items were a small, three-legged table, a beaded footstool, and all of their silverware, including a set of utensils rumored to have belonged to Marie Antoinette.

Derek didn't say anything, just hit Print and kept going. The next robbery we came across was the one from the Fraser House, in the fall of . As Miss Barnes had told us, a hairbrush and mirror had been stolen, along with a diamond-encrusted fan and a few other small things. The thieves had left the chair, either because it was too big and unwieldy to remove, or because they were interrupted. Derek printed the article and moved on.