On Deadly Tides (A Wendover House Mystery Book 3) (6 page)

The woman behind the counter in the empty coffee shop was hunched over and
scowling,
and she moved like she was walking into a strong and bitter headwind that had chapped her skin and given a constant squint to her eyes. She also smelled of
eau de bathroom cleaner
and was cuddling a dirty ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette that smoldered sullenly. Her less than effervescent personality was a good match for the faded décor which would have made a mortuary look lively.

“Hello.” My voice wasn’t peppy either. I had lost my enthusiasm about forty miles and two towns back.

She stared long enough that I wondered if she was giving me the evil eye. When she finally spoke, her voice was predictably dry and raspy.

“You looking for Tom?” she asked me.

I blinked but missed only half a beat before answering.

“How’d you guess?” I asked.

She stared at my nose but didn’t comment on it. It was kind of nice that though she saw the family resemblance, she didn’t seem to know any family history.

“He said someone might come. Didn’t know he had any family left after his cousin died. High time someone showed up.” She sniffed disapprovingly.

This time I didn’t blink, though I said a silent prayer of thanks for the distinctive Wendover features that seemed to be giving me permission to walk right into a stranger’s life and not be questioned.

“We aren’t as close as we should be,” I said. “But I’m trying to change that.”

“You better be close enough to pay his back rent. Laura Kingman is pissed that he just up and left. Another week and she’s throwing his stuff in the gutter. She won’t keep that moral imbecile’s things without pay.”

Moral imbecile.
That was an old term for a sociopath. I could feel the hairs
raising
at the base of my neck. Was she serious, or was this normal vitriol?

“We’re close enough for that,” I assured her. “Where would I find Mrs. Kingman?”

“Across the street.
Single story gray house with black shutters.
Knock loud. She’s kind of hard of hearing.”

“Thanks.”

My heart was pounding as I crossed the street. No matter what was waiting, it would answer some of the puzzle. I hoped—actually I didn’t know what I hoped. That Tom was really Kelvin? But surely that would mean he was dead and I couldn’t want that.

Of course I had thought him dead before and not minded so much—it was just that the idea that he had been nearby all this time and we could have met.…

So, did I want the missing Tom to be some kind of illegitimate relative no one else knew about? One I hadn’t gotten to meet before he died? That would be better, wouldn’t it, if he were really a sociopath?

Because someone—some Wendover—was dead. The only question was which body had washed up on the beach.

The streets were slushy and the chill traveled up my body. The rain that had cleared the islands of snow hadn’t made it this far south. The light was also hazy, discouraging of plants and animals alike, and made everything appear rather monochromatic and sterile.

There was something in the air too, invisible but real that made my eyes sting. My exhalations condensed into a vapor that was slow to assimilate into the still air around me and my lungs protested the tainted oxygen that replaced each breath.

I knocked on the hollow core door at number eleven and wasn’t too surprised when it was opened by a woman who was as straight as the waitress had been slumped, but in all other ways could have been her unhappy twin. The lifelong habit of frowning pretty well expressed her attitude toward the world, and I was betting the world frowned back whenever it noticed her.

“About time someone showed up,” she said at last, proving yet again that whoever had rented her room was a Wendover.

“I hear Tom owes some back rent,” I said, figuring money was the fastest way inside.

“Yep—one hundred and twenty dollars.”

I doubted it was that much but didn’t argue.

“Well, let me take care of that. Do you mind if I leave him a note?
In his room.”

The hard eyes looked at me, but as I had figured, money was a great lubricant and she let me into the living room without any protests
that oh no she couldn’t do a thing like that
.

The house was too hot and the floor vent began pumping out more air as soon as I stepped inside. The carpets smelled like some kind of animal though I didn’t see a dog or cat.

“Tom’s benders don’t usually last this long,” the woman offered. “He’s kind of old for going off like this.”

“I wouldn’t know about his personal habits. We aren’t that close.”

“
Hmph
. Figures.
No one is very close to him, the godless heathen. Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she said, after showing me down the hall papered in fading red flocked wallpaper to the last door on the right. There was no suggestion that I might like a cup of coffee.

“Thanks.” I could hear my grandmother saying that good manners cost nothing and I closed the flimsy door behind me with extra care.

Tom rented a small bedroom with a half bath whose sink and
toilet were
crusty with mineral deposits. There was no medicine chest or mirror, just a ledge around the scratched sink where he had left a toothbrush and a mostly used-up travel size mouthwash and a large tube of denture adhesive. There was also a razor but no comb. Everything had a fine film of dust on it.

The same yellowed linoleum covered the floor of the bedroom and had been run into the half-open closet. He had one dirty window that looked out on a littered backyard with a rusting garden shed and a hedge that hadn’t been trimmed in the last decade.

I shuddered. It was the kind of place where you expected to find bodies in the basement.
Probably the late Mr. Kingman among them.

My first thought—and my second—was that this wasn’t anyone’s home. There were no pictures, no books, no CDs, nothing personal. My sock drawer is more interesting. This was a place to sleep, nothing more.

Deciding that this was no time for scruples about a stranger’s privacy, I opened the tiny closet door the rest of the way and then checked the battered dresser’s drawers.

No drawer liners, just blond wood and mothballs. Tom had left behind some wool pants, two flannel shirts, and a fur hat that the moths had been at. No shoes, five pairs of socks, two boxer shorts—worn but not worn out. Everything except the hat looked relatively new, cheap, and generic.
Like someone had gone shopping for basics at a store that sold things in packs.

There was nothing under the bed or in the toilet tank. The folded up paper under the back dresser leg was a flyer for the grocery store with coupons that had expired three years ago. There was a small bottle of cheap gin in the nightstand drawer.

Gin?
That didn’t seem much like Kelvin. As far as I knew, my great-grandfather had only liked Canadian whisky. But then, what did I really know about Kelvin?

Other than that, there was nothing but dust bunnies breeding under the furniture and some dead flies on the window sill which had to have been there since last summer. I stared out at the shed, bothered by the fact that there was a shiny new padlock on the door.

No shoes, no coat. He had obviously been wearing them when he went out.

He.
Was
this my
great-grandfather’s home, or some other man’s lair? My gut said no to this place being Kelvin’s refuge. This room could not have housed my great-grandfather who had been comfort-loving and a thinker.
An inventor and reader.
This space with no books, no art,
no
personality could not have been even a temporary home for Kelvin Wendover.

There was also another point that bothered me. To stay in Maine—if you really believed in the Bane, or knew your neighbors really believed in the Bane—was an act of self-extinction. I couldn’t imagine why anyone, but especially Kelvin who had brains and resources, would do it.

But then maybe I had it wrong. Was I trying to redeem my great-grandfather, to make him into something he was not? Was it preposterous to assume that he was some kind of brave adventurer starting off on a new life when he was probably just a scared old man?

Frustration made me search the room again, but there was nothing. I returned to the window and stared some more at the shed with its new lock.

What was in it? The damn thing was almost falling down, so why lock the door like it was the entrance to the Bastille?

“Damn.” I wished that Kelvin—my cat—was there, though this wasn’t the kind of house where you found secret passages or hidden compartments in the furniture.

Without thinking, my hands reached for the window bolt. It took some doing, but I got the old frame open and flicked the flies outside. It is the way of curiosity to turn an ill-advised passing thought into irresistible forbidden fruit and I didn’t fight it. What macabre relics might I find behind that locked door? Nothing would have surprised me.

Outside the bedroom’s flimsy door a vacuum started up. It was a symphony of slipping belts and clattering brushes that struck the floor unevenly and made the motor whine. Mrs. Kingman was busy for the moment. I took that as a sign that I should proceed.

It wasn’t a large opening since the house was not generous with its windows, but I would fit even with my coat and purse and it wasn’t far to the ground. Of course, I would have a hard time explaining what I was doing, if Mrs. Kingman caught me snooping in her yard, but the thought didn’t deter me as it should have done. Desperation and frustration were growing.

I hit the ground, breaking a small clay pot that was hiding in the snow, which fortunately swallowed most of the noise of the minor destruction. I paused there, gripping the sill, and listened as the cold slithered up my spine and thickened my breath, but the only disturbance was from the abused vacuum
whose
distant, painful flutters sounded like a wounded bird, thrashing on the ragged carpet.

“Move,” I whispered and forced my hands to let go of the sill.

My calm went from threadbare to tatters in the time it took me to cross the yard, hopping from clear patch of ground to clear patch of brick—there was something about the aged patio that bothered me, though I didn’t take time to have a nice long ponder of my subconscious worries. I was being careful to leave no footprints and to hurry. I did not have faith in Mrs. Kingman’s inclination to keep cleaning.

The shed’s door didn’t fit tight. I was able to open it a couple of inches and peer inside. I managed to stifle a small gasp when I saw what I thought was a shrouded body but turned out to be a sack of grass seed. There was also a new lawnmower.
A very new, very shiny red electric lawnmower.
And that was it. No shovels, no rakes, no tools of any kind.

I felt like an idiot and wasted no time getting back to my open window and hauling myself inside. It took me a couple moments to straighten my clothing and brush the dust off my coat, but I felt relatively safe from discovery after I got the window closed.

My heart was beating so hard that it hurt. My enthusiasm and energy for my self-appointed task reached a nadir. I was done playing sleuth. I did not have the proper apparatus for climbing through windows and sneaking around strangers’ yards.
Perhaps ten years ago—or maybe twenty—but not now.
My mind writhed at the embarrassment I would have faced if Mrs. Kingman had called the police to report an intruder. There wasn’t anything I could say that would make my visit sound good. What if I had been forced to call Harris or Bryson to bail me out of jail?

“Damn.”

I hesitated about writing a note since I didn’t really want to leave behind any hard evidence for the police to find when they eventually made it to Tom’s featureless den. And they would when people finally realized that Tom wasn’t coming back. Finally I decided that Tom, whoever he was, had to know enough about his history to figure out who I was and where I was, if he wanted to see me.

If he was still able to see me, which I really doubted.
Missing man, dead body on a beach—and both of us with features similar enough for people to know us as kin.

I left the bedroom feeling unsatisfied and annoyed. Fortunately I had enough cash on me to cover the inflated rent, though why it seemed important to keep the uninformative room intact I couldn’t say. It just seemed the right thing to do and I didn’t want to write a check. Mrs. Kingman seemed like the kind of woman who might look me up for reasons of blackmail.

“So, what last name is Tom using these days?” I asked. Perhaps I was maligning an innocent man, but I needed to know at least this much. “Not Jones, I hope.”

Again a hard look, but no expression of surprise that the man renting her room might be using an alias.

“Fischer,” she said.

I nodded and handed over the small stack of twenties. She didn’t say thanks or offer me a receipt.

Getting back out into the wet streets was a relief even though my nose began to run at the first deep breath and my eyes stung. The house, the whole town had disheartened me. Tom or Kelvin, moral imbecile or no, I felt sorry for whoever had been living here. Not that being dead was an improvement over a room at Mrs. Kingman’s boarding house, but this wasn’t a life I would wish on anyone.

I dug out my keys and headed for the car. The only other soul braving the cold was an old man tending a bonfire in his front yard. The leaves and twigs were damp and it smoked so much it made him cough. I wondered what
needed burning so badly that it
couldn’t wait until the snow was gone. I also wondered if he was the neighbor that Mrs. Kingman feared would sneak in and take her lawnmower.

I heard a noise overhead and looked up quickly. His pyre had attracted more than my attention. A row of unusually large starlings had taken up watch on a phone line upwind of the smoke. I like birds, but their fixed stares were kind of creepy and I hurried for the car at double time as a downdraft of stinging wind pressed heavily on my back. I did not need the added burden of cold and weight to hasten my parting. I was more than ready to leave that horrid little town that would probably wither like a slug if it were ever blessed enough to see a bright sun.