Mortar and Murder (10 page)

“So she’s not a criminal.”

Wayne shook his head. “She’s not showing up in the criminal database, no. Neither for the police, nor for the FBI or any other organizations we have access to. And she’s not military, either.”

“I didn’t really think she was,” I said.

“You never know,” Wayne answered.

I changed the subject. “Irina said she tried to call her sister Svetlana, in Kiev, but she couldn’t get hold of her. She seemed a little worried.”

“Really? But this—who we have downstairs—isn’t Svetlana, right?”

“She said it isn’t. And if it was, why would she be worried about not being able to talk to her sister?”

“Damned if I know,” Wayne said as the elevator doors opened down the hall and Dr. Lawrence came toward us, carrying a wrapped package. “But maybe I’ll contact the police in Kiev and see if I can get hold of her. Someone wrote that information on that piece of paper and gave it to our victim, and it’s possible it might have been Svetlana . . . um . . .”

“Rozhdestvensky,” Dr. Lawrence said, stopping next to him. “Here you go. Everything our girl was wearing. Jeans, shirt, panties, and bra. Not a tag among them.”

“Appreciate it.” Wayne tucked the package under his arm. “Let me know when you hear from toxicology, OK?”

“And you let me know when you find out who she is. Meanwhile, I’ll put her in storage. As Jane Doe.” Dr. Lawrence made a face.

We took our leave of the doctor and the morgue and walked back out into the crisp spring air. It felt good, and I breathed deeply.

“Irina gone to work?” Wayne asked.

I nodded. “She’ll be coming back home tonight.”

“I’d like her to look at the clothes. You, too. Maybe one of you will recognize the make or brand.”

“I’d be happy to,” I said, “but I really don’t think you’ll be doing Irina any favors if you show up at the real estate company to talk to her in full uniform. It’s not urgent, so why don’t you just wait until she comes back to Waterfield for the night. By then, maybe you can reassure her about her sister, as well.”

Wayne agreed that this made sense, and then I called Irina and agreed to meet her at the police station at six P.M. so we could look at the clothes together. That done, Wayne got in his police cruiser and I got in my Beetle, and we both left the morgue parking lot and hit the road.

I didn’t want to leave the Beetle in Portland, so even though I could catch the ferry to Rowanberry there, I still drove back to Waterfield and parked in the harbor parking lot. The ferry left at twelve fifteen sharp, and I made it to the dock just as the gangplank was hauled up. When the crew saw me coming, they held off long enough to let me skid across, and then they made tracks—or rather waves—out to sea. I dropped down on one of the dozen benches available and tried to catch my breath.

The ferry runs in a big circle from Waterfield to Moosehead Island to Rowanberry Island to Little Rock Island to Big Rock Island to Frog Island to Boothbay Harbor and back to Waterfield. The whole trip takes a couple of hours, and the ferry runs continually. Since Rowanberry Island was one of the first stops, I didn’t have too long to wait, and I was able to sit back and relax and enjoy the weather, which was back to being partly sunny and not rainy at all today.

I did keep an eye out, though, just in case something interesting should happen to float by, but nothing did. As we left Moosehead Island and started heading across the sound to Rowanberry, I got up and wandered over to the young man who was guarding the gate and letting the gangplank up and down every time we docked.

“This is Rowanberry Island coming up, right?”

He nodded. I placed him in his early twenties, with white blond hair and eyes of the same chlorinated blue as my own. He was chewing gum.

“First time?” he inquired between chews.

I shook my head. “My boyfriend and I are renovating a house on the other side of the island. But we have our own boat. I just couldn’t go out with him this morning, so I’m taking the ferry.”

The young man nodded. “I heard someone bought the old van Duren place. Is that what you’re working on? You guys planning to move in?”

“We’re just flipping it. Renovating and then selling.”

The houses on Rowanberry Island were coming closer by the second. “Did you hear about the body in the water?” I asked, keeping my voice light.

The young man’s face closed up. “The Waterfield cops stopped by the ferry yesterday to show me a picture. They asked me if I knew her or if I’d noticed anyone looking like that on the ferry recently.”

“I guess you hadn’t?” Since Wayne probably would have let me know if he had any leads.

He shook his head. “Never seen her before in my life. Would have remembered if I had; she looked hot.” He paused a second, mulling the statement over, and then amended it. “Like she would have been, I mean. When she was alive. Not in the picture they showed me.”

“Right.” I’d figured that. “So do you ever see Gert Heyerdahl? The writer?”

“The guy in the other van Duren house? Nah. He has his own transportation. Doesn’t take the ferry.”

“Oh.”

He relented just a little. “He’s mostly here in the summers. Comes about June or so. The rest of the time he lives away. ’Scuse me.”

The ferry driver cut the motor and the boat drifted toward the dock on Rowanberry Island. My new acquaintance busied himself with another boat hook, before tying off on a convenient pylon. Then he slapped down the gangplank and offered me his hand. “Here you go. Looks like it’s just you getting off today.”

He touched a finger to his forehead and jumped back on the boat. “You have a good day, ma’am.” I grimaced.
Ma’am?
When did that happen?

The small ferry chugged away in the direction of Little Rock Island, and I looked around to get my bearings.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been in the small Rowanberry Island village. Derek had dragged me out here in November to look at the house; this was while he was hankering to buy it. We’d come back a couple of months ago, just before we actually bought it, to make sure we still wanted to, and maybe to make sure it was still standing and hadn’t deteriorated too much over the winter. The weather hadn’t been cooperating either time: In November, it had been foggy and clammy, and in January, it had been freezing, with a foot of snow blanketing everything. This was the first time I’d been here when the sun was shining and I could actually see everything.

It wasn’t a big place. Maybe a dozen houses along one main road, most of them private residences, but a few with commercial signs out front. There was a general store, which seemed to sell everything from bait to rubber boots to root beer and Moxie. It also served as the island’s post office.

A little farther up was a little house with a sign in the window that said “Rooms for Rent.” The sign was faded, and so were the curtains; I couldn’t imagine that there’d be much demand for guest rooms in a place like this.

There were no bars or restaurants, nothing in the way of nightlife; I guess if the residents of Rowanberry Island wanted to kick up their heels, they’d take the ferry to the mainland and party there. And then they’d hop the ferry back again, with no danger of drinking and driving.

That thought brought me back to the young woman in the water. Dr. Lawrence had said it’d be a day or two before toxicology lab reports were ready. At that point, we’d know if the girl had been drunk when she went in the water. It didn’t look like she’d been the victim of a crime—there were no injuries on the body save the scratches on the soles of her feet and the bruises the doctor had mentioned. No, she had died a natural death, if dying of exposure can be considered natural. But if she’d been drunk, that meant that someone had most likely been drinking with her that night, someone who hadn’t reported her missing. And didn’t being intoxicated make it more likely that she’d fallen off a boat? Was anyone out partying on a boat this time of year, though? Surely that’d happen in the summer, but in still-chilly April?

Could she have fallen off the ferry? Was it possible that my new acquaintance, the ferry conductor, had lied to me—and to the police—when he said he’d never seen her? If she’d been drunk, and he’d seen her come on board, and she had fallen out somewhere along the route without anyone noticing, might he lie to avoid trouble? To avoid a charge of being negligent?

He very well might, I decided. Although if she’d been on the ferry, unless she was the only person there, someone else would have seen her, too. The ferry had been practically empty just now, but even so, there had been three or four passengers on board, in addition to the captain and the conductor. As for the last ferry of the night, surely that’d be more populated, with stragglers trying to get home for the night?

Alas, speculation wasn’t really getting me anywhere as I left civilization behind and followed the rutted track across the island toward our house on the other end.

So I turned my mind to other matters. Maybe I was being paranoid, because it was kind of hard to believe that Melissa would have sabotaged her own plumbing. Hard to imagine how she could have gotten into the wall to do it, too. But ever since she moved into the loft directly across from Derek, she had asked him for help with one damn thing after another, and it was getting on my nerves. First there were the locks; she didn’t feel safe with the locks that were there, since someone else might have a key. Why she couldn’t just hire a locksmith, I don’t know, but no, she asked Derek to change them out for her. Then, a week later, there was the kitchen; she needed a vent fan installed for all the gourmet cooking she was planning to do for herself now that she was single again. She even fed him: little stuffed mushroom caps and oysters and things.

After the cooking vent and the aphrodisiac foods came the bedroom ceiling fan. He spent an hour standing on her king-sized bed, the one she’d be sleeping in alone from now on, to hang a new ceiling fan above it, because Melissa got so uncomfortably hot at night. If he caught the unsubtle implications of that statement, he didn’t let on, but I sure did. I made a snide comment about hot flashes, and he laughed, and that was it. I wasn’t worried. The whole situation didn’t make me happy, either, though.

As a result of this train of thought, I arrived at the house flushed and riled, and no happier to find Miss Melly herself cuddling up to Derek in front of the fireplace in the living room.

I say cuddling, but I’m being a smidgeon unfair. He was kneeling on the floor in front of the fireplace, obliviously tucking new mortar between the old bricks. Melissa was standing over him, watching, close enough that she was practically rubbing up against him. I wondered if she’d been doing the same thing all last night as well.

When I closed the door behind me, she turned with her trademark smile. Melissa has more teeth than a crocodile, brilliantly white. “Hi, Avery,” she cooed.

Derek pulled his head out of the fireplace to glance at me over his shoulder. “Morning, Tink. Everything OK?”

“Fine. What are you doing?”

“Tuck-pointing the fireplace. The old mortar has crumbled.” He went back to work. Melissa stepped aside as I approached, politely giving the impression that she, in her magnanimity, was allowing me, the interloper, to come closer. I gritted my teeth.

What I wanted to say was, “What the hell are you doing here?!” She knew it, too, so I took a breath and moderated the statement, leaving off the expletive and the attitude. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Melissa.”

“Derek told me so much about this place,” Melissa said, with a fond look at his bent head, “that I wanted to come see it for myself.”

“And you walked all the way across the island? In those?” I glanced at her pristine suede boots with the three-inch heels.

Melissa tinkled a merry laugh. “Of course not. Tony ran me out here in his boat.”

“Tony?”

“Micelli,” Derek said from inside the fireplace.

“Oh. Right.” Tony “the Tiger,” reporter for Portland’s Channel Eight News. The guy who had expressed hope for multiple dead bodies on our property on Becklea Drive. “Where is he?”

“He had to go back,” Melissa said. “He just stopped in long enough to ask Derek a couple of questions.”

“So we’re stuck with you for the rest of the day?” fought with, “Questions? What about?” in my mind. The latter won. But just barely.

“About the girl,” Derek said.

“The one in the water?” I looked from Derek to Melissa and back. “I thought you said people drown up here regularly.”

“They do. I guess it’s a slow news month.” He shifted his shoulders in a shrug. Melissa mimicked the gesture, a pretty pout on her face.

“Hunh,” I said.

“How did it go with Irina?” Derek asked, his voice hollow from inside the fireplace.

“Fine.” And since I didn’t think we should say anything more about the body in front of Melissa, who would probably report anything she heard back to Tony the Tiger, I added, “She went to work.”