Mortar and Murder (20 page)

The woman in the doorway couldn’t be much over twenty. She was only a fraction of an inch taller than me, and slender. Everywhere except for the stomach, which looked like she had swallowed a basketball. She was wearing a pair of black leggings and a long-sleeved, pink T-shirt with black lettering, like those signs you see in station wagon windows: Baby on Board
.
The “sign” was positioned directly on the belly. Her hair was soft and brown, curling around her ears. Her eyes were huge and melting brown, like chocolate, and surrounded by gorgeous, long, curving lashes.

“This,” Ian said, walking to her and wrapping a meaty arm around her slight body; her head didn’t even reach the top of his shoulder, “is Angela. My wife.”

A beat of silence followed, while we stood there speechless. Then I pulled myself together. “Congratulations.”

I elbowed Derek, who was still gaping. He closed his mouth and opened it again. “Guess it’s been longer than I realized since I was up here.”

“We met just before Christmas,” Ian explained, gazing fondly down—way down—on his wife.

Derek finally got it together. He turned on the charm and took a couple of steps forward, holding his hand out. “Nice to meet you, Angie. Congratulations.”

When Derek comes toward them, smiling, most women smile back. Angie shrank into Ian’s side while her eyes got even bigger.

“It’s OK,” Ian rasped. “This is Derek Ellis. He’s been coming here for years, buying stuff.”

Angie nodded, a jerky little movement of her head. She still didn’t look comfortable, but she extended a small hand and shook, forcing a smile.

“This is my girlfriend, Avery.” Derek put his arm around me and pulled me forward.

I smiled and waved across the counter. “Hi, Angie. It’s nice to meet you.” If she didn’t want to shake hands, I certainly wasn’t going to force her. Maybe she was worried about catching cold or something. Pregnant women can be weird sometimes. Or so I hear.

“Nice to meet you, too,” Angie murmured. She had an accent much like Irina’s.

“Are you from the Ukraine?” I asked impulsively.

She jerked, like I had slapped her. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes widened, and I don’t think I imagined the panic with which she looked up—way up—at her husband.

“Why do you ask?” Ian said.

I looked from one to the other of them. Huh. “No reason. We have a friend in Waterfield who’s Ukrainian. You sound like her.”

Angie bit her lip. At this rate, she’d gnaw a hole in herself.

“Her name is Irina Rozhdestvensky,” Derek added, doing a credible job with the sneezy syllables that made up Irina’s surname. “Maybe you know her?”

Angie shook her head.

“Angie doesn’t get out much,” Ian said. “Difficult pregnancy.”

Right. That’s why she was bouncing around here, her cheeks rosy, the very picture of health.

We stood in awkward silence for another few seconds, and then Derek broke it. “Have you had a chance to look for anything Colonial for me? Doorknobs? Latches?”

“Sure.” Ian dropped his arm from around his wife’s shoulders with a murmured assurance. “Through here.” He disappeared into the back of the building, where Angie had come from, waving Derek to follow.

“Be right back,” Derek said, letting me go.

I nodded. “I’ll be right here.”

The two of them disappeared. Angie and I were left alone. She looked uncomfortable and seemed to wish she were somewhere else. Anywhere else. I smiled. “When are you due?”

“Pardon?”

“The baby? When is the baby coming?”

“Oh.” She put a hand on her stomach. “End of May.”

“Congratulations. Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”

Usually women who are expecting are happy and excited to talk about their pregnancies and soon-to-be offspring and their delivery dates and all the rest of it. Not Angie. She shook her head without a word.

“Want to be surprised?” I offered. That’s the usual reason why people don’t find out the sex of the baby ahead of time, isn’t it? Personally, I’ve always thought it would be useful to know—for decorating purposes, you know—but then I’ve never been pregnant, so maybe I just don’t understand the whole suspense thing.

Something about the question must have bothered Angie, anyway, because she turned a shade paler before she nodded.

It was obvious that talking about the baby wasn’t the way to her heart. “So how long have you lived in Maine?” I tried instead.

Angie had been in Maine just over a year.

“Why did you decide to come to Boothbay Harbor? Are there a lot of Ukrainians around here?”

Angie shook her head, her enormous eyes darting from side to side.

“Where did you and Ian meet?” Of course, I was jumping to the immediate conclusion that perhaps it was through one of the Russian-bride websites.

At this question, Angie turned pale all the way to the tips of her lips and put a hand on her belly. I watched, worried, as she sank down on the chair behind the counter that Ian had vacated earlier.

Of course, he chose this exact moment to come back into the office, and when he saw his wife’s expression, he fell to his knees next to her chair with a worried bellow. She smiled shakily and patted his shoulder.

“What happened?” He turned to me, scowling. If he’d been intimidating when he was happy to see us, he was doubly intimidating now, even kneeling. I took a step back, straight into Derek, who had swung around the counter to come up behind me. He tucked his arm around my waist.

“Nothing happened,” I said. “We were just talking. About the baby and how long Angie has been in Boothbay Harbor and where the two of you met.”

Ian didn’t answer. “I think Angie needs to lie down,” he said, gently helping her up from the chair. “I’ll be right back to ring up the doorknobs.”

Derek nodded. We watched Ian half support, half carry his tiny wife out the door in the back wall.

“Is it me,” I said softly, tilting my head back to look up into Derek’s face, “or is something weird going on?”

“No idea. Look at this, though.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me after him, toward the door he’d passed through earlier. Just before he got there, he stopped in front of a bulletin board hanging on the wall. “Look at that.”

I looked at where his finger had landed. “That” was a business card, identical to the one I’d seen three hours earlier in Arthur Mattson’s hand.

“That’s interesting.”

Derek nodded. “Wonder when Agent Trent was here?”

I wondered, too. And not only about that. If Ian and Angie hadn’t met until this winter, who was the father of her baby?

“It was last month sometime,” Ian said when he came back into the office and Derek asked him about the business card. “March. Just after Angie and I tied the knot.”

“Did she come to talk to Angie?”

He shot me a look. “Yeah. Why?”

I shrugged. “No reason. Just curious. Have you seen her since? Lori Trent?”

“No,” Ian said. “That’ll be two hundred and three dollars.” He held out an oversized paw. Derek put his credit card in it.

“Spoken to her?” I suggested.

Ian shook his head, eyes on the credit card and on the old-fashioned machine he used to take an imprint of it.

“You sure?” Derek pushed.

Ian tossed the too-long hair out of his face. “Sure I’m sure. What’s with the third degree?”

“Agent Trent is dead,” Derek said.

For a second, Ian looked like he was reeling; a mighty redwood in a storm. I inched back, just in case he fell. Then he bit down on the shock. “That’s too bad.”

“It happened last night. We found her in Waterfield harbor this morning.”

“Drowned?” Ian handed the credit card and sales slip back to Derek.

Derek shook his head. “Bashed over the head with something.”

“What?” It wasn’t an exclamation, but a question.

“Could have been anything. A boom. A baseball bat.” One was leaned up against the wall in the corner behind the counter. Ian didn’t glance toward it, but I did. “A Ukrainian Easter egg paperweight.”

Derek finished signing the credit card slip and pushed it back across the counter at Ian. The latter picked it up and shoved it in the cash drawer.

“What?” he said, bushy brows wrinkling.

“I saw one yesterday,” I explained. “Polished stone, painted to look like a Ukrainian Easter egg. A
pysanka
. It had ears of corn and deer and birds on it, and it weighed a ton.”

Ian looked blank. Maybe Angie hadn’t told him about that particular Ukrainian custom.

“I guess you guys don’t have any,” I added. “
Pysanky
, I mean.”

He shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

“What did Lori Trent want? Back in March, when she was here?”

“It was just after we got married,” Ian said. “She was doing an at-home visit. They do that when Americans marry foreign nationals. Especially when one of ’em looks like Angie and the other one looks like me.”

“Agent Trent thought yours was a marriage of convenience? Pro forma?”

This was something else I’d read up on the other night, the sometimes horrendously difficult process a foreign spouse has to go through to get legal residency in the United States. Not that I’m saying it should be easy, just that I’d come across some real horror stories about wives and husbands being torn out of their spouses’ arms and sent back to their native countries because they couldn’t prove that they’d married for the right reasons. On the other hand, it’s no good when bad people get onto American soil and do bad things. Although if Angie Burns was a spy, I’d eat that fricking paperweight.

Ian nodded. He looked from me to Derek and back. “If you’ll excuse me, I should go check on my wife. Make sure she’s feeling all right.”

Derek nodded. “I’ll give you a call next time I need something.”

He bent and hoisted the cardboard box. It contained a jumble of old doorknobs, plates, latches, and the like, in black, hammered iron.

“And let us know when the baby comes,” I added.

Ian said he would, and we walked out of there. Derek put the box into the back of the truck and me into the front seat before he loped around the hood and opened the driver’s side door. I waited until he was inside with the door closed and the engine running before I opened my mouth.

“Did that sound a little cagey to you?”

“About Lori Trent?” He put the car into gear and backed out of the parking space and onto the road. “Maybe a little.”

I glanced back at the office, just in time to see Ian turn the sign in the window from Open to Closed.

“He just closed up shop.”

“It
is
Saturday,” Derek said.

“I know, but it’s also only twenty minutes after two in the afternoon.”

“So maybe he’s worried about his wife.”

We rolled down the road, picking up speed, leaving the salvage yard behind. I gnawed on my lower lip, pensively.

“She did look like she was about to faint, didn’t she? And all I did was ask her where they’d met.”

Derek glanced at me. “Where did they?”

“No idea. She just looked like she was about to pass out. I was wondering if maybe it was one of those Russian-bride websites.”

Derek nodded. “Would have explained a lot if so. It’s just the sort of thing Ian would do. Try to find a wife online. He’s not good with people.”

He’d seemed to deal with Angie just fine. If Agent Trent really had stopped by for an impromptu at-home visit, surely five minutes with the two of them would have convinced her that their marriage was legit. The girl was practically bursting at the seams with fertility, while Ian was hovering just as anxiously as any dad-to-be.

Unless Agent Trent had also figured out the time issue inherent in the pregnancy, of course, and then she might have had questions.

“How long have you known him?” I wanted to know.

Derek shrugged. “Five or six years now. Since just after I started doing renovations. I was looking for something—some prisms to complete a crystal chandelier, I think it was—and he had ’em. We’ve never been close friends, though. Never hung out or anything. Ian’s a bit of a loner.”

I nodded. “Makes you wonder how he managed to snag a girl like Angie, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all, but she’s gorgeous. And much younger than him.”

“He
is
a nice guy,” Derek said, “and maybe that’s what she was looking for.”

“Maybe.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes as the outskirts of Boothbay Harbor flashed by outside the window.

“Do you think he told the truth?” I ventured. “About Agent Trent? That they hadn’t spoken to her since March?”

“No idea. Why would he lie?”

“Because he killed her? You did see the baseball bat, didn’t you?”

“A lot of shop owners keep weapons behind the counter, Avery,” Derek said.