Mortar and Murder (22 page)

Glenda nodded when I said as much.

“What about Mr. van Duren?” Derek wanted to know. “Which side was he on? Didn’t he have a problem with one of his daughters marrying someone from the other side?”

Glenda grinned. “John van Duren didn’t care. He was playing both sides against the middle.”

“Meaning?”

“He was an opportunist. A smuggler. Before the Revolution, he imported tea and sugar and molasses and all the other things the British government had levied a tax on. During the war, he smuggled goods to the army at Long Island, and after the Revolution, he brought British goods into the new United States under the nose of the new government.”

“Equal opportunity,” Derek said with a grin. “Although if he intended Sunrise to be a reflection on the new day, and a new beginning for a new country, that says a little about his sympathies right there. Maybe?”

“Maybe so,” Glenda admitted.

“Where did Mr. van Duren live?” I asked. “Somewhere in the village?”

Glenda shook her head. “He owned the southern part of the island, where Sunrise and Sunset are. His house was down there, as well. The village wasn’t built until much later.”

“I guess it isn’t there anymore, is it? Mr. van Duren’s house?” More than two hundred and thirty years old and exposed to the elements . . . it wasn’t likely.

“Actually, the last I heard, it still was. It’s rather primitive and rough, as I recall, but Lonnie doesn’t seem to mind for the couple weeks a year that he’s here. My second cousin a few times removed. We’re all related in one way or another.” She thought for a second and then added, judiciously, “Or maybe he does mind; I don’t think he was here last summer.”

“I think I may have seen it,” I said. “I took a wrong turn on my way back from Gert Heyerdahl’s house a week ago and ended up at the end of this little path where there was a very small saltbox. It looked quite old.”

“That sounds like old John’s house,” Glenda nodded.

“All the windows were shuttered. Gert Heyerdahl’s windows were shuttered, too, when I tried to stop by his house.”

Glenda gestured with a package-laden arm. “There are shutters on every house in the village. We need them during the winter. We don’t keep them closed all the time, since we have to live inside, but the snowbirds close their shutters when they leave in the autumn and open them when they come back in the spring. It cuts down on broken windows.”

“I can imagine.” If someone would have just made sure to shutter our windows, maybe we wouldn’t have had to replace fifty-six window panes.

Derek was shifting impatiently beside me—I guess he was worried that I’d talk so long that we wouldn’t have time to walk to the house, feed the kitten, walk back, and still catch the next ferry—so I added, “We should probably go. It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Harris.”

Mrs. Harris reciprocated before she trudged up the cobblestoned street and into her peeling little house. Derek and I ducked into the small grocery store cum post office to look for cat food.

The interior of the store looked like something out of a 1930s movie: dingy and dark, low-ceilinged, and overflowing with weird and wonderful things I never would have expected to see in a place that sold food. Snow shoes were rubbing elbows with fishing lures and bird shot, while old-fashioned galoshes sat next to bags of chicken feed and souvenir snow globes. A thin layer of dust covered everything, with circles here and there where something had been removed since the last time the place was dusted. A snow globe must have been sold recently, sometime in the past week or so, and someone obviously had a fondness for canned vegetables, since there were circles all over the shelf with the green peas and corn. In comparison, the floor was sparkling clean, so clean it glimmered where the light hit it.

A man about Glenda Harris’s age was perched on a stool behind the counter, an unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He looked up when the bell above the door clanged, deep-set eyes tracking us as we piled inside and spread out to look around.

“Afternoon,” I said perkily as I headed for the snow globes.

The man grunted. He didn’t take the cigarette from his mouth. “Do for you?”

“Oh. Um . . .” I aligned the snow globe I’d picked up with the circle I’d plucked it from and watched as the sparkling snow settled on the ground around the little scene inside. “Greetings from Rowanberry Island,” it said in curly script on the base, and I guess the green blob inside was supposed to be the island. There wasn’t much resemblance that I could see, but the trinket was well made and surprisingly heavy. “We’re looking for cat food. Or if you don’t have cat food, a can of tuna fish.”

He pointed. “Shelf.” He was jowly and unshaven, with pouches under his eyes and unhealthy skin color. Probably from the smoking. Or maybe he’d quit, or was trying to quit, and all he was allowed to do was chew on the filters.

I looked around. “Where . . . ? Oh, I see it. Thank you.”

Derek had already reached the shelf, only a few feet away, and was plucking down a couple of cans of cat food in different flavors. The tops of the cans were dusty.

“Check the expiration dates,” I said under my breath. “Some of this stuff looks like it’s been sitting here for years.”

He nodded. “It’s still good.” He raised his voice. “So how’s business?”

“Slow,” the shop owner grunted. He rang up the three cans of cat food and bag of crunchy bits and told me what I owed him. I went to look in my purse for my wallet and money and realized it wasn’t there. The purse, I mean. For a panicked second I thought I must have left it on the ferry, by now halfway to Big and Little Rock Island, and then I realized I’d left it sitting on the seat of the truck in the parking lot in Boothbay Harbor. I’d been telling myself that we’d only spend a minute or two talking to Ned before getting back in the truck and going home, and the bag would be OK. And then I’d forgotten to go get it in my hurry to get on the boat. But at least Derek had set the alarm before we boarded the ferry; I distinctly remembered him turning toward the car and pushing the button.

I turned to him. “I left my purse and my wallet in the car in Boothbay Harbor. Can you pay for the cat food?”

He pulled out his wallet. Men have it so easy.

“I’ll pay you back,” I added.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s cat food, Avery. I think I can support the expense.”

“I’m sure you can, but . . . it’s
my
cat food.”

“And your kitten. I know.” He tucked the five-pound bag of cat food under his arm and left me to grab the brown paper bag with the three cans. “Thank you, sir.”

The man behind the counter nodded. He had already looked down at the newspaper he kept folded behind the counter when Derek added, “I guess there aren’t many visitors this time of year.”

“Ain’t seen a stranger in here since August.” The unlit cigarette bopped up and down when he spoke.

“The police have probably asked you about the three missing women, right?”

The cigarette stopped moving. After a moment, he took it out of his mouth and put it in an ashtray behind the counter. “Missing women? Three of ’em?”

“I guess I shouldn’t say missing,” Derek admitted. “Only one of them is missing. The other two are dead.”

The man blinked. “Dead?” he said cautiously. “I heard about that young lady last week that they found in the ocean. Is someone else dead now, too?”

“The police found another body this morning.” Derek skipped lightly over the fact that we, not the police, had found her first. “In the water in the harbor. And a third woman might be missing. Another Russian. Irina Rozhdestvensky.”

The shopkeeper didn’t answer. His face was a careful blank. “What’s she look like?” he asked after a moment.

“Irina? She’s tall and dark haired, in her late thirties.”

The shopkeeper nodded.

“Have you seen her?”

“Should I have?”

“Not that I know of.” If I’d had any sense, I would have questioned Ned while we were on the boat. Not that I had any reason to think Irina had taken the ferry to one of the islands. If for some reason she was trying to get away from the police, she’d be better off going the other way, into the interior of the state, away from the ocean. Easier to get lost there. On an island, she’d be stuck until the next ferry came, and there was no way on or off the island without someone seeing her.

“Must be hard to get by out here during the winter,” Derek remarked. “With fewer and fewer people living on the island full time, and no tourists.”

“We’re making do,” the man said.

“Glad to hear it.” Derek turned to me. “C’mon, Avery. The sooner we get there and can feed your kitten, the sooner we can go back home.”

I nodded. “Thanks for your help.”

The shopkeeper grunted a good-bye. Derek held the door for me and we passed out into the afternoon sun again. Down the street, Pepper the kitty slunk around another corner. Whatever arrangements Gert Heyerdahl had made for her while he was in Florida—whether she’d gotten away from him or he’d left her in someone else’s care—she didn’t seem to be suffering. Her fur was sleek and shiny, and she looked neither too thin nor like her belly was bloated from eating out of garbage cans. Someone was taking care of Pepper the Russian blue.

“Do you think that’s a coincidence?” I said.

Derek glanced down at me. “What?”

“That there are Russian women dead and missing and that Gert Heyerdahl owns a Russian blue cat.”

Derek blinked. “I don’t see how it can be anything but a coincidence,” he said after a second. “I mean, they’re women and that’s a cat. Or are you suggesting that Mr. Heyerdahl has some kind of obsession with anything Russian? Not that the women are even Russian, really. Ukraine isn’t Russia.”

“That’s true, I guess. It just seems like it ought to mean something. I mean, he writes about a Russian, doesn’t he? Some kind of KGB agent or spy?”

“He does,” Derek said. “And you have a great imagination, Avery. But I really don’t see how a Russian blue cat, two Ukrainian women, and a reclusive American writer who spends the winter in Florida fit together.”

“I don’t, either,” I admitted. “Not when you put it like that. Unless . . . Gert Heyerdahl isn’t married, is he? Maybe he really does have an obsession with all things Russian. Or Slavic. Maybe he went looking for a Russian girlfriend. Maybe he found that cute little Angie on one of the Russian-bride websites and talked her into coming to Maine, and then he kept her locked up in his house all summer long. As his sex slave, or something. Then, when he left for Florida in the fall, she got away from him and hooked up with Ian. Maybe that’s why she’s so skittish. Maybe she’s having Gert Heyerdahl’s baby!”

“Interesting theory,” Derek said, his lips twitching. “What about the second Russian girl? The dead one? How do you account for her? Another of Gert’s sex slaves? And what about Agent Trent? And Irina? If Gert has been in Florida since the fall, he can’t have had anything to do with any of what’s been going on here this week.”

“Maybe he’s paying someone to take care of things for him. Like that guy I met. And not just around the house, you know? He’s a writer; he must be loaded. And his cat is here. Someone is feeding her. Maybe that same person is going around killing people at Gert’s command.”

“That’s true,” Derek admitted. “About the cat, I mean. I think you’re jumping to conclusions about the rest of it, though, Avery. You’ve found him guilty based on nothing but the fact that he owns a cat called a Russian blue. I’m sure a lot of people own Russian blues. You’re about to acquire one yourself, from what I understand.”

I made a face. “OK, so maybe I’m way off base. I probably am. It just seems very coincidental. Russian cats and Russian women. And a guy who writes about a Russian spy.”

We had left the village behind and were walking through last year’s dry grass now, on our way to the woods that covered much of the southern tip of the island.

“Can we at least mention it to Wayne?” I continued. “Just in case?”

Derek shifted the bag of cat food from one arm to the other. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

“And can we maybe go over to Gert’s house again—together—and you can see if the caretaker will let
you
in?”

“Not a chance,” Derek answered, ignoring my disappointed pout. “First, we don’t have time today. Not if we want to catch the next ferry back to Boothbay Harbor. And second, if you’re right and I’m crazy, instead of
me
being right and
you
being crazy, I don’t want you anywhere near that guy. When we get back to Waterfield, we’ll tell Wayne about the cat and let him deal with it.”

“Fine.” I stuck my bottom lip out. Derek grinned but declined to take the bait.

“Interesting story about Daisy and Clara,” he said instead.

I rolled my bottom lip back in. “How they married men who fought on opposite sides in the Revolution? Very interesting. Wonder how that came to be.”

In thinking about it, I realized I didn’t know much about what had been going on in Maine during the American Revolution. Everyone knows about the events in Massachusetts and Philadelphia—the Boston Tea Party and the battle of Concord; Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell—but had anything been happening in Maine?

“Oh, sure,” Derek said. “Lots of stuff happened in Maine. The various acts—the Sugar Act, the Molasses Act, the Stamp Act; you know, taxing imports and exports and everything else—affected Maine every bit as much as they affected Massachusetts and New York. The residents of Falmouth rioted, too.”

“Where’s Falmouth?”

He grinned. “These days we call it Portland.”

“Oh.” Silly me.

“York harbor had its own Tea Party in 1774. In 1775, British ships shelled Falmouth and caused a lot of damage. A lot of Mainers went north on the Canadian campaign.”

“What’s that?” I shifted the canned cat food to my other hand.