Mortar and Murder (15 page)

I nodded. “That’s what they all seemed to be. All the sites I looked at yesterday; and I looked at a bunch. Full of single Russian women seeking wealthy American—or Australian or European—husbands. But there’s no law against marrying for money.”

“Right.” Wayne glanced at the paper in his hand with Svetlana’s vital statistics. She was five foot seven, 137 pounds, with brown hair and gray eyes, and she liked long walks on the beach, candlelit suppers, and snuggling in front of a fireplace. All the usual stuff that men expect women to like.

“I should get going,” Wayne said. “If I hurry, maybe I can catch Irina at home before she heads out to Portland for the day. I can give her the news about her sister, ask her about the picture, and let her know to expect a call from the ICE agent, all at the same time. And after that, I’ll swing by Barnham College and see if Calvin might remember any additional details about the conversation he overheard or the people having it when it’s the police asking.”

“It’s worth a shot.” I stepped off the welcome mat. “I’ll be on Rowanberry Island with Derek all day. If you need me for anything, you know where to find me.”

Wayne nodded. “I don’t think I will, but if I do, I’ll call.”

“You can’t call. There’s no cell phone service. But if you’re desperate, there’s a ferry.”

“If I get desperate,” Wayne said, “there’s the coast guard. But I doubt it’ll come to that.”

“Glad to hear it. I’ll give you a call tonight, OK? Just to see what Irina says.”

Wayne nodded. I guess he’d realized the futility of trying to stop me from meddling. Or rather, from “taking an interest.”

He closed the door, and I hoofed it back out of the yard and down the hill toward the harbor to where Derek was waiting with the boat.

Forty-five minutes later we were on Rowanberry Island, in our house, working on replacing worm-eaten paneling. There hadn’t been anything even remotely interesting in the water today—thank God, because I really didn’t want to come across another body; I just couldn’t keep myself from looking—although Derek thought the discovery of Russian-bride Svetlana was interesting. I had printed out a second copy of the personal ad to show Derek. He agreed with me that this Svetlana did look a lot like Irina, and that it was quite likely, if not certain, that she was Irina’s sister.

And then he went to work recreating two-hundred-plus-year-old paneling.

If you’re thinking of 1970s paneling, which comes in flimsy sheets, you couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re picturing 1940s knotty pine, you’re a little closer to the mark, but only a little.

Colonial-era paneling is thick and made from sections of eastern pine put together into a pattern, with grooves and raised panels of various shapes and sizes. Squares, rectangles, skinny strips.

“These are the stiles,” Derek explained as he laid things out for me, his finger on one of the vertical pieces. “The horizontal pieces are called rails. The big pieces in the middle are panels. All of them have grooves on the sides so they fit together neatly.”

“And then they get glued?”

“They can be.” He was working as he talked, and we had to raise our voices over the whine of the saw. “In Colonial times, they weren’t. That was part of the point of having lots of panels.”

“How so?” I wanted to know. I mean, wasn’t the point of having lots of panels to make it look intricate and pretty?

He squinted at me. “You know that wood breathes, right? It can expand and contract with the weather and humidity.”

I nodded. “You’re talking about how doors sometimes stick in the summer, right?”

Derek nodded. “A door that sticks has picked up moisture and expanded, so it doesn’t fit into the frame anymore. But if you cut it down, when it contracts again in the cold weather, you’ll have a gap.”

“OK.” This made sense, as far as it went.

“The settlers wanted their houses to be able to breathe. The panels would expand and contract with the weather, and the grooves would let them do it. Any kind of ornamentation would hopefully mask the fact that here and there, now and then, there might be a gap.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Have you given any thought to color? Usually the paneling was painted.”

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said, perking right up, “but I guess I should. Do you think the hardware store has a good selection of Colonial colors?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“If they’re open when we get back to town, I’ll stop by and pick up a brochure,” I promised. “Meanwhile, can I do anything for you?”

Derek thought for a moment. “You can stand by and hand me my tools and wipe my sweaty brow once in a while.”

“Or?”

He grinned. “You could find something useful to do.”

“Like?”

“I’m finished with the palm sander. Why don’t you take it out to the hallway and start sanding the stairs?”

“I could do that,” I said.

“And then we’ll have to decide whether to poly the steps and paint the risers, or whether you want a poor man’s runner.”

“A what?”

“Poor man’s runner. It’s when you paint the steps in two different colors; one on the edges and one in the middle, so it looks like there’s a carpet runner going up the stairs.”

“Why do they call that a poor man’s runner?”

“Back in those days, most people couldn’t afford floor coverings, so they lived with bare plank floors. That’s if they were lucky; in many places, people had dirt floors. Some of the big houses painted their stairs to look like there was carpeting going up.”

“That’s interesting. I thought they had sailcloth rugs, though.”

Derek looked up and quirked his brows at me. “How come you know about sailcloth rugs but not about poor man’s runners? Oh, wait. Textile designer. I forgot.”

“And I’ve seen some sailcloth rugs in museums. There’s one at the Fraser House, I think.”

For those of you who aren’t textile designers, let me explain: As Derek had mentioned, up until the seventeen hundreds, flooring generally consisted of unfinished wood or earth, tamped hard by walking. Most Americans were too poor to afford woven floor coverings, i.e., carpets. At some point, someone came up with the idea of using worn canvas sailcloth off the ships as a substitute. They’d take a piece of sailcloth roughly the size of a room and cover both sides of it with several layers of oil-based paint to prevent shrinking and make the fabric waterproof. The exposed upper surface would be painted a base color, and then in a pattern; often a black-and-white check or a diamond pattern with embellishments. Little flowers or such in the squares. Sailcloth rugs, interestingly, often look and feel a lot like 1950s linoleum. They were durable, easy to clean, insect resistant, and pretty to look at, and they were cool underfoot in the summer and blocked cold drafts from below in the winter.

As I plumped my butt down on the tight runaround staircase and ran the small, handheld sander over the steps, I thought about sailcloth rugs and poor man’s runners, and whether I should paint one, or both, for the house. The runner, for sure. It would look cool and authentic. The sailcloth rug . . . it might be fun, I decided. If whoever ended up buying the house didn’t like it, then they could get rid of it. Or maybe I’d just take it out of the house before closing and bring it back to Aunt Inga’s house. Or put it in Derek’s loft, or something. But painting a sailcloth rug was something I’d never tried, and really, there was no time like the present. I’d probably never renovate another Colonial home, so I’d never have a better excuse. And I could use up all the leftover paint after we had finished painting the walls. That’d make it easier to get the paint cans back to the mainland, too. And to dispose of them later.

I could see it now: a big, square sailcloth rug with a yellow ochre background and black squares along the edges, a few rows deep in a checkerboard pattern. After that, maybe a row of little silhouettes holding hands, like the ones children cut out of folded papers. And in the center, maybe a primitive house scene: the house we were renovating, perhaps, painted white, with a stylized dog or a couple of cats, and some apple trees and the ocean with a boat with white sails . . . sort of like an old-fashioned sampler that someone might have embroidered a few hundred years ago.

In such happy contemplation, with the accompaniment of Derek’s hammering and sawing and occasional swear-word from the living room, the day went by pretty quickly. We stopped for a picnic lunch in the middle—I made sure to bring a basket every day; Derek’s no good unless he has food in him—and today I had even thought to bring a little bowl with some kitty kibble I had skimmed off the top of Jemmy and Inky’s bag. I added a pinch of tuna from my sandwich on top and carried it outside, where I put it next to the porch. By the time we left for the day, the bowl was empty. Not only empty, but licked clean. Inside the house, the stairs were lovely and the paneling exquisite, except for the fact that it hadn’t been painted yet. But we got back to Waterfield in time to stop by the hardware store and pick up a brochure with historic paint colors.

“I need to go across the street and finish Melissa’s drywall,” Derek said when we stood outside on the sidewalk again. He didn’t sound happy.

“That’s a shame.”

“I know. The good thing is, it won’t take long. And after tonight, I’m done.” He grinned.

“Until she comes up with something else she wants you to do.”

“How much more can she want? I’ve done practically everything already.”

“She’ll figure something out,” I said darkly. In spite of Melissa’s presumably hot date with Tony the Tiger Micelli, I wasn’t entirely convinced that she wouldn’t gladly have Derek back if she could. Maybe she was hedging her bets. Or maybe she was trying to make Derek jealous by hanging out with Tony. Or vice versa.

My head was starting to hurt, so I stopped thinking about it. “I can wait for you,” I said. “Or come upstairs and hang out while you work.”

“Stake your claim?” He smiled. “That isn’t necessary, Avery. This’ll take less than an hour. How about I come get you after that, and we’ll go grab some dinner?”

“You want me to cook instead?”

“After working hard all day? Of course not. We’ll go to the Waymouth Tavern. If Miss Melly was there yesterday, she probably won’t be back tonight. We can have a romantic dinner, just the two of us.” He winked.

“Works for me.” I smiled back.

“Can you be ready by six thirty?”

An hour and a half? “Sure.”

“See ya, Tink.” He bent and kissed me. I kissed him back. And then I wound my arms around his neck and hung on.

The status quo lasted until a window opened across the street and Miss Melly’s mellifluous voice floated down to us. “Yoo-hoo! Derek!”

Derek muttered a bad word against my mouth. I giggled. He smiled sheepishly and dropped his arms from around my waist. “Let’s continue this later.”

I nodded. That’d be nice.

The Waymouth Tavern is perched on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, off the coast road in the direction of Boothbay Harbor. It’s built out of old timber, with fishing nets and old lobster pots on the walls, and imitation Tiffany lamps above the tables. Very dark and cozy. If you squint, you can see Rowanberry Island from the windows, but you can’t see our house, since it’s on the other side of the island. You can see the lights in the village, though, on the north-eastern tip, but that’s about it.

The night was clear, with a quarter moon and a sprinkling of stars, and some lights bobbing here and there on the water. One of them looked like it was chugging determinedly straight for Rowanberry Island. The southern tip, where our house was.

“Look,” I told Derek, “isn’t that boat heading for our house?”

Derek squinted out the window. “Looks more like it’s heading for Gert Heyerdahl’s house.”

“What would the caretaker be doing out there this time of night?”

“Maybe he sleeps there.”

“Maybe. Although it can’t be much fun, with all the windows shuttered.”

“They may not be shuttered all the time. Maybe he came to unshutter them the day you saw him.” He dipped a french fry in ketchup and popped it in his mouth.

“Maybe so,” I admitted, picking at my own crab cakes. “Do you know Gert Heyerdahl?”

“Personally? Not really. I’ve met him once or twice.”

“Is he a nice guy?”

“He’s a writer,” Derek said. “They’re weird, you know? In their heads a lot. And they see things differently than normal people. Especially the ones who write crime thrillers.”

“Like, I’ll notice the nice, new-car smell in the Beetle, and he’ll wonder how many bodies he could stack in the trunk?”

Derek nodded. “Exactly. But apart from that, he struck me as a nice-enough guy. Quiet. Maybe a little shy. Unless he just likes to sit back and watch people instead of interacting with them.”

“Could very well be that he likes to watch. That’s what writers do, isn’t it? Observe life, and then write about it. And suddenly you find yourself playing the killer or the dead body in a murder mystery.”