Mortar and Murder (7 page)

Irina was on her way back to Waterfield on the bus when I called, and Wayne arranged to meet her at the bus stop and drive her to her house on Becklea Drive, where they would “talk.”

“Wait a second,” I said when he got up from the bench without talking to me.

He turned to look at me. “What?”

“You’re not leaving me here, are you? You need me!”

“Why?”

“Because if that girl we found in the water this morning is someone Irina knows, she’s going to want someone there with her.
You
’re going to want someone there with her. I’m available. And between you and me, I don’t think she’s too fond of the police.”

Wayne lowered his brows. “What do you mean?”

I hastened to assure him. “Oh, not that she’s a criminal or anything. As far as I know, she’s a perfectly nice, hardworking woman who gets by on very little. It’s just an impression I got, back when we were dealing with that skeleton in the crawlspace.”

Wayne’s eyebrows were still tilted, so I continued, “She grew up in Russia. Or somewhere in what used to be the Soviet Union. And she’s in her midthirties, so she probably remembers what it was like in the bad old days. The police weren’t the good guys over there back then.”

Wayne nodded. “I get it. In that case, maybe it would be best if you came along. Just don’t interfere.”

“When do I ever interfere?” I said, insulted.

Wayne didn’t answer, just opened the passenger door of the police car for me and waited for me to get in.

Irina Rozhdestvensky is a few years older than me—thirty-five or thirty-six, maybe—and she’s tall and severe, with dark hair pulled straight back from a broad face with a strong jaw and those high Slavic cheekbones. When she stepped off the bus, I saw she was wearing one of her tailored business suits, this one in navy blue with a yellow blouse underneath. When she came closer, I noticed that the blouse had small dots all over it. And when she stopped beside me, I realized that they weren’t dots at all; they were tiny butterflies.

“Avery.” She smiled when she saw me, her teeth crooked, but her smile genuine.

“Hi, Irina.” I returned her smile. “This is Wayne. Police Chief Wayne Rasmussen. When he told me he was coming to talk to you, I invited myself along.”

Irina’s gray eyes turned wary. “Chief Rasmussen.”

Wayne nodded. “Miss Rozhdestvensky.”

Irina listened to him stumble over the name. “You may call me Irina, Chief Rasmussen. It will be easier for both of us.”

I hid a smile. Wayne looked relieved. “Thank you, Miss . . . um . . . Irina. Why don’t you get in the car”—he opened the passenger-side door for her; I was relegated to the backseat, behind the bulletproof glass—“and I’ll drive you home. We can talk there.”

Irina nodded, tucking her skirt around her knees as she got into the car. I crawled into the back and met her eyes in the mirror. She looked worried.

The drive from the bus stop to Irina’s house on Becklea Drive was short, just a few minutes, and nothing much was said. Wayne pulled into the driveway outside Irina’s midcentury brick ranch and cut the motor.

“How are Beatrice and Steve?” he asked me.

I glanced up the street to the house that Derek and I had renovated six months ago. Another low-slung brick ranch, it looked well maintained but empty. Derek’s stepsister, Bea, and her husband, Steve, had ended up buying it and were moving here from Boston. Steve, a lawyer, was planning to open a general practice in Waterfield, just as soon as he got all his ducks in a row and took the Maine bar exam.

“As far as I know they’re fine. They were here a couple of weeks ago, and they’re coming back for Easter. I don’t think they’ll actually move in until the summer, though.”

Wayne nodded. “And Miss Rudolph’s house?”

The house next door to ours was also empty, since the owner had passed on in the fall.

“No idea,” I said. “It belongs to her brother, I think. Derek and I thought about offering to buy it, but I don’t know that I want to renovate two houses right next to each other. And there are some bad memories here.”

Wayne nodded. Irina, meanwhile, had opened the door to her own house and was waiting for us to join her. We abandoned our discussion about the neighborhood and went inside.

The subdivision that Becklea Drive is part of—Primrose Acres—was built in the 1950s. Most of the houses looked and felt very similar. All were built of brick; some red brick, some yellow, some gray or rose. Some speckled. All of them had a big picture window in the front, where the living room was. Venetia Rudolph’s house, right next to the one we had renovated, had the exact same footprint as what was now Bea and Steve’s house, and the same interior layout. Irina’s house was similar, with a living room- dining room combination up front, a kitchen beyond the dining room, and three bedrooms and two baths down the hall. The only difference was that everything was mirrored here; in our house and Venetia’s, the dining room and kitchen were to the left, the bedrooms and baths to the right. In Irina’s house, kitchen was right, bedrooms and baths left.

I say the
only
difference, but of course it wasn’t. The house we had renovated was beautifully redone, with fresh paint, refinished wood floors, new light fixtures, maple kitchen cabinets . . . Venetia’s house, when I’d been inside it, had been heavily carpeted and curtained, with draperies and wallpaper and
Gone with the Wind
tchotchkes everywhere. Not my taste, but it had been cared for and spotless; clearly a beloved home.

Irina had done her best with what she had, and it wasn’t her fault her place didn’t show to advantage. I pegged it for a rental, with bland off-white walls, stained, beige carpets, and thrift-store furniture. The kitchen, which I could see through the dining room, was basic: unpainted oak cabinets, off-white laminate countertop, chapped vinyl flooring, and appliances that had clearly seen better days. Basic scratch-and-dent floor models, they were unmatched and at least ten years out of date. The only attractive thing about the place was a collection of eggs on the fake-oak circa 1970 entertainment center along one wall, where Irina’s small TV and old-fashioned VHS/DVD player were located.

There were roughly a dozen of them—the eggs—and they were in several sizes, from small chicken eggs to a huge specimen that must have come from an ostrich or dinosaur. All were painted in bright colors, some with geometric designs, others with stylized pictures of fauna—fish and fowl—or flora—flowers or wheat or what looked like oak leaves.

“
Pysanky
,” Irina said.

“Bless you.”

“That’s what they are called.
Pysanky
. Ukrainian Easter eggs. Very famous.”

“Can I touch them?”

“They are fragile,” Irina warned. “There.” She pointed to the coffee table, where another egg was lying amid pieces of paper, the Sunday comics, and a few store circulars. “That
pysanka
is made of stone.”

I reached for it and felt my eyes widen when I tried to pick it up. She wasn’t kidding; it was heavy and cool in my hands, a chunk of rock polished to eggshell smoothness and then painted with images of wheat and what looked like stylized deer and birds.

“Health,” Irina said, pointing to the heads of grain. “Strength and prosperity.” She indicated the deer. “Happiness.” The birds.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s a paperweight,” Irina said. “Those”—she indicated the collection on the entertainment center—“are real eggs. I make some for Easter every year.”

“Can you teach me? Sometime?”

“Sure.” She shrugged. “It’s easy. Like batik. You know about batik, right?”

I nodded. Batik is a traditional Asian method of dyeing fabric in which wax is applied to areas where you don’t want the dye to take. In recent times, the word has come to mean any type of fabric with traditional batik prints, whether or not the actual batik technique was used to produce it.

While I turned the
pysanka
over in my hands, admiring the intricate design, Irina turned her attention to the furniture. “Please excuse the mess,” she muttered, moving books and magazines off the chair and sofa and onto the floor, indicating that Wayne should sit. There were books everywhere: on shelves along the wall, stacked on the coffee table, on the floor . . .

Wayne looked around, at the bodice-ripper romance novels rubbing elbows with teenage vampire sagas and recent thrillers. I recognized Gert Heyerdahl’s latest in a stack on the floor. “You must like to read.”

“The nights are long,” Irina said with a shrug. I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the short winter days this far north or the fact that she lived alone and, as far as I knew, didn’t have a husband or boyfriend anywhere. “And I am trying to improve my English.”

“Your English is already fine.” I grabbed a stack of magazines and dumped them on the floor so I could curl up in a faded chintz armchair on the other side of the table, the
pysanka
still cradled in my hands.

Irina, meanwhile, sat next to Wayne on the sofa. She looked uncomfortable, perched on the edge of the pillows, knees together and hands folded—make that clenched—in her lap. Her jaw was tight, too.

“How long have you been living here?” Wayne wanted to know. “Where did you move from?”

Irina pried her lips apart. “Three years in Maine. I come from Kiev. In Ukraine.”

Wayne nodded. This was just preliminary information, intended to put her at ease. It didn’t seem to be working, but he kept on. “Do you have any family? Or did you come over alone?”

Irina had come over alone, she said. “My family is still in Ukraine. My brothers Alexi and Ivan, my sister Svetlana.”

Wayne’s ears pricked up, as did mine. “Oh, you have a sister? How old is she?”

“Younger,” Irina said. “I am the oldest. Alexi is thirty-two; Ivan, thirty. Svetlana is the baby. Twenty-six.”

I glanced at Wayne. He didn’t meet my eyes. “And they’re all still in the Ukraine?” he asked. “Even Svetlana?”

Irina nodded. “Especially Svetlana. She is a student at the
Natsional’nyi universytet Kyyevo-Mohylians’ka akademiya.
”

The Russian words rolled off her tongue. I thought I recognized a few of the sounds, and the translation didn’t come as a total surprise. “The National University of Kiev, Mohyla Academy,” Irina clarified.

“When was the last time you spoke to her?”

Irina had to think about it. “Six weeks. Maybe more.”

So Svetlana could be the woman from the water. The age was right, and if Irina hadn’t spoken to her for weeks, she could have left Kiev and arrived here, no problem.

“Does your sister look like you?” I asked.

Irina looked surprised, and maybe a little worried. She had to be wondering why we were so interested in her sister. However, she answered willingly enough. “She is ten years younger. And the last time I saw her, her hair was longer, almost to her waist. But it’s brown, like mine.”

Not the girl from the water, then. Not unless the long, blond hair was bleached, but I hadn’t noticed any dark roots, and wet as it was, they ought to have been easy to spot. She was also considerably shorter and softer-looking than the severe Irina. That made things less complicated.

I glanced at Wayne. He nodded. Apparently he was thinking the same thing because some of the stress lines around his eyes disappeared.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked Irina.

Gone are the days of the instant Polaroids that you read about in crime novels. Wayne pulled his cell phone from his pocket and manipulated a few buttons before showing it to her. He must have snapped a picture of the body after we left him this morning. Or at the morgue, later.

Irina looked at the display. I watched her turn pale, but that could have been just because the girl so very obviously was dead. Her voice was steady, anyway. She shook her head. “I have never seen her before.”

“Are you sure? Look again.”

She looked again. And shook her head again. “I don’t know her.”

“It’s not your sister?”

Now she looked shocked. “Of course not. I would know my own sister!”

“You haven’t seen her for three years,” I reminded her, gently. “She could have bleached her hair, maybe . . .”

Irina shook her head. “This is not Svetlana.”

“Is she perhaps someone else you might know? Maybe from a long time ago?”

By now Irina was starting to look suspicious. “Why are you asking me all of these questions? Who is she? What happened to her? And why did you come to me?”

Wayne snapped his phone shut and fished in his pocket. Out came the ziplock baggie with the scrap of paper. “Do you know what this is?”

Irina shook her head. She didn’t reach for it. I think I might have been tempted to snatch, had it been me. Again, I watched the color leach from her face as she looked at what Wayne held in front of her.

“Did you write it?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“But it’s Russian?”

“Cyrillic. Yes.”

“And it’s your name and address.” This time it wasn’t a question.

Irina nodded, uneven teeth worrying her lower lip. Her hands were so tightly clasped that the knuckles showed white.

“Do a lot of people in the Ukraine know your address here?” I wanted to know.

Irina shook her head. “Just family and a few friends.”

“What about the handwriting? Do you recognize it?”

But Irina said she didn’t. Wayne put the Ziploc back in his pocket. “The woman in the picture,” he said, “was found in the sea. Derek and Avery found her on their way to Rowanberry Island this morning.”

Irina glanced up at me. I nodded.

“The piece of paper was in her pocket. It has your information on it. Are you sure you don’t know who she is?”

Irina shook her head.

“Any idea who could have written the note?”

Irina said she didn’t. I was watching, though, from the other side of the table, and as she said it, I thought I noticed a quick wash of color stain her cheekbones.