Mortar and Murder (29 page)

So I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath and walked through the door, while the
chugga-chugga
of the boat motor echoed through the fog.

The inside of Gert’s house was fabulous, even in the semidarkness with the shutters closed. Gleaming wood floors, intricate paneling, high-end furniture. Once upon a time, I worked for—and dated—a reproduction furniture maker, very good at what he did, and this stuff looked like it could have come from Philippe’s studio.

“This place is gorgeous.”

Irina nodded, looking around. “Mr. Heyerdahl has a lot of money.”

No kidding.

Aside from the fact that it was finished, and beautifully, the layout of the house was exactly the same as in our house on the other side of the island. Parlor to the right, dining room to the left, tight run-around staircase in the middle with—just maybe—a secret room behind it, accessible from the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Irina asked when I strolled, oh so casually, into the dining room.

“Just having a look around.” I did just that, admiring Gert’s dining room set in dark wood with demure blue, yellow, and white stripes on the cushions. It was tasteful and elegant, although personally, I would have rather seen a pattern of white daisies with bright yellow centers on a spring green background.

The kitchen was updated. Totally, top to bottom. Tile floor, granite counters, stainless steel appliances, brass pots hanging above the island where the stove was. The fireplace was still there, though, and the built-in cabinets next to it. I opened the nearest cabinet door and stuck my head in.

“What,” Irina repeated, her voice more strident now, “are you doing?”

I pulled my head back out again and explained over my shoulder. “In our house, there’s a secret room behind the chimney. I just wanted to see if there was one here, too.”

“I have no idea,” Irina said, folding her arms across her chest. There was a knife block on the counter a few feet away from her, bristling with wooden handles. I glanced at it and then glanced away. Better not to give her any ideas.

The hidden room could wait. I straightened up. “Why don’t we go sit down somewhere. This is going to take a while.”

We ended up upstairs, in one of the bedrooms; the same one where I’d seen Irina’s reflection through the window earlier. She must be staying there, because the double bed looked like it had been slept in, and there was a backpack, empty, tossed in the corner. A sleeping bag, still rolled up, lay next to it. One of the drawers in the bureau was open a crack, where a piece of clothing—what looked like another pair of jeans—had gotten caught and kept the drawer from closing all the way. A hairbrush was lying on top of the bureau, the couple of long, dark hairs caught in the bristles identifying it as belonging to Irina.

She sat on the rumpled bed while I curled up in a small, white chair over in the corner, with a plastic bag tucked under my butt so the mud on my behind wouldn’t stain the pristine whiteness of the fabric. It made a crinkling noise every time I moved. Irina kept her hands tightly folded in her lap and kept shooting glances out the window, where the fog was now pressing against the wavy glass.

I watched her, trying to decide where to start, how to broach the various subjects and questions I had. What to say so I didn’t freak her out or—scary thought—make her feel like she had to do something to shut me up. And there were so many questions to ask, so many things I needed to know. Where was Svetlana? Who was the dead girl in the water? Had Irina killed Agent Trent? Did she know Angie, Ian’s girlfriend?

Probably better to start with something less confrontational, though.

“How long have you been here?”

She glanced around the room. “Here? Since Friday night.”

“I spoke to Arthur Mattson,” I said. “He told me he’d seen you leave and that it looked like you were going camping. That’s why we thought, when we got the tip about the Appalachian Trail, that it might be you. Is Svetlana there? On the trail?”

Irina shook her head, lips tight.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Irina said, and from the expression on her face, I don’t think she was happy about admitting it.

“Have you seen her?”

Another head shake.

“But she’s here? In Maine?”

Irina pried her lips apart. “I think she must be. She’s not in Kiev.”

“But you don’t know where?”

She shook her head.

“The writing on that piece of paper the dead girl had in her pocket? Was it Svetlana’s handwriting?”

Irina shook her head, but not in negation. More like resignation or disgust or despair, closing her eyes for a moment. “I think so. But it was hard to tell. The paper was wet. Everyone else in my family is where they are supposed to be, though. All except Svetlana.”

I nodded. “Did you talk to Agent Trent the other day? Or did you run away—come here—to avoid talking to her?”

Irina’s lips thinned again. “I spoke to her.”

I tried to soften my voice, to sound friendly and nonconfrontational. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Irina said. “She called me at work. Mr. Mattson had told her where I work, and she called the front desk and got transferred. She asked me to meet her.”

“At the Waterfield harbor?” Where Irina had conked her over the head and tipped her into the water?

“In Portland,” Irina said.

“Oh.” I bit my lip, my cheeks pink. Well, duh. That made a lot more sense, didn’t it? Agent Trent had come to Waterfield to talk to Irina, but Irina wasn’t there so Lori Trent tracked her down in Portland instead.

Irina shook her head at me. “You don’t really think that I killed her, do you, Avery?”

“I think the police think so. That that’s why you ran away. So you wouldn’t be arrested.”

“I didn’t,” Irina said.

“I believe you. So what did you talk about? You and Agent Trent?”

Irina sighed, rubbing her hands over her face as if she were tired. She looked tired, with dark rings under her eyes and tight lips. “I told her everything. That it was Svetlana’s handwriting on the piece of paper, that I suspected she and a friend had come into the country illegally and were being held somewhere, and that the friend must have been trying to get away. . . .”

“So you didn’t have anything to do with smuggling them into the U.S.?”

She shook her head.

“Oh. I thought maybe . . . you know, that you . . .”

“I came here illegally,” Irina said. “Someone contacted me online, through a website I’d signed up for.”

“The Russian-bride one?”

She nodded. “He offered to get me into the United States for a price. I didn’t have the money, so he suggested an alternative.”

“What was the alternative?”

Irina just looked at me, and after a moment, the pieces aligned themselves in my head. Russian brides, attractive women from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia smuggled into the West . . . to work as prostitutes?

I managed to bite down on the exclamation before it slipped out, though I couldn’t quite keep the shock from showing on my face. Irina looked uncomfortable, ashamed, and then defiant.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “So you told Agent Trent about it?”

Irina nodded. “Everything. How I came here, what happened, all I knew or had learned about the people in charge. It wasn’t much. I spent a few weeks with them, and then I was . . . sold to a man in Skowhegan who was looking for someone to cook and clean and . . . do other things.”

Right. I suppressed a grimace. “Do you know a woman named Angie? Angela? From the Ukraine? Early twenties, very pretty, with brown hair and brown eyes? Pregnant?”

Irina shook her head. “Who is she?”

“Just a friend of a friend. I wonder if she isn’t one of you, too. She’s very skittish.”

Irina nodded. “Traveling halfway around the world for a chance at a new life only to end up in a brothel can do that to a person.”

No kidding. “How did you get away? Did you have to escape, or did the guy let you go?”

“I escaped. The same night he brought me there. He had a heart attack, and I called nine-one-one and then I ran away. I didn’t want to be sent back to Ukraine.”

“Oh, my God.” I sat up straight, the plastic crinkling under my butt. “What did you do?”

I couldn’t imagine finding myself in that situation: practically broke, in a strange place, knowing no one and unable to go to the police for fear of being arrested and deported.

Irina avoided my eyes. “Walked to Augusta. Slept outside for a few nights until I found a shelter. They sent me to Portland. Eventually I found a job and a place to stay.”

There must be a lot more to the story than those few terse sentences, but it was beyond obvious that she didn’t want to go into detail. “What happened to the guy?”

“Mr. Eagan?” Her lips thinned. “He died. The ambulance got there too late.”

“Did you tell Agent Trent all this?”

Irina nodded. “And then I told her about that night at Shaw’s Supermarket, and that I recognized the voice of a man from”—she hesitated—“the organization. The people who brought me here. One of the men in charge.”

I nodded.

“You told me the man behind you was Gert Heyerdahl’s caretaker, so I told Agent Trent that. She said she was going to take the ferry from Portland to Rowanberry Island and have a look around. Pretend to be a visitor, you know? I told her about you and Derek, and that she could say she had come to see you if anyone asked.”

“Makes sense.”

“I thought so,” Irina said, her eyes shiny now. “I asked to go along, in case she found Svetlana, but she said no. If I had recognized the man, he might have recognized me, too, and she didn’t want us to be seen together. So I let her leave and found my backpack and sleeping bag and took the next ferry from Waterfield. I thought I could follow her, you know? I thought she might get into trouble, and maybe I could help. I’ve known about the smuggling for three years, and I haven’t done anything to stop it. I’ve been too afraid. But this time I wasn’t. I wanted to help. So I followed on the next ferry. But I didn’t see her on the way, and when I got here, she wasn’t here, either. She never came.”

I wrinkled my brows. “How do you know that?”

“He told me,” Irina said.

“He? Who?”

“Me,” a gravelly voice said from the doorway. It added, precisely, “Or rather, I.”

I froze. I hadn’t even heard him come inside, let alone up the stairs and over to the door. And he looked threatening standing there, still in those padded coveralls and with that ski mask on his head, ready to pull down over his face. It was grim. The face, I mean. The really scary part, though, was the gun. It wasn’t pointed at me—not precisely—but it wasn’t exactly pointed anywhere else, either. It was in his hand, sort of hanging there, ready to come into play at any moment.

“This is Avery,” Irina said into the silence.

He nodded, those muddy brown eyes flickering over at her for a tenth of a second before coming back to me. “We’ve met.”

“Of course.”

Silence reigned for another moment, only punctuated by the beating of my heart, surely loud enough for them both to hear. I tried not to look at the gun, but it was difficult.

“You won’t need that,” Irina added.

“You sure?”

She nodded. “Just put it away, please. It’s making Avery nervous.”

No kidding. As soon as the gun was out of sight in a pocket of the coveralls, I felt myself starting to breathe easier.

Even so, it took me a few seconds to get my voice to cooperate.

“What’s going on?” I looked from one to the other of them.

They looked at one another.

“I think I’m missing something,” I explained. “See, I thought
you
”—I looked at the man in the doorway—“were helping Irina smuggle Svetlana and her friends onto Rowanberry Island and hiding them in the secret room in Derek’s and my house, and then, when we started fixing the place up, you moved them here, since Gert Heyerdahl was away until summer and the place was just sitting here, empty, and that’s why you were so standoffish when I came and asked to see the house. And then, when one of the girls got away and drowned, and ICE was called in, and Lori Trent caught on to what was happening, I thought the two of you killed her. But now I’m not so sure anymore.”

They looked at one another again. After a second, Irina smiled. Her friend blushed.

“Avery”—Irina turned to me, her lips twitching—“this is Gerhardt Heyerdahl. He’s been staying here all winter.”

“You’re kidding.” I stared at him, up and down a few times. “You don’t look anything like the picture in your books.”

“You’ve read my books?”

“My boyfriend’s read your books. I like cozy mysteries.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “That picture is fifteen years old. I don’t look like that anymore.”