Wall-To-Wall Dead (11 page)

I arched my brows at Derek and ducked under the tape.

Miss Shaw’s apartment was laid out exactly like the one above, with the same rooms in the same places, and the same hollow-core doors and plain but serviceable vinyl and parquet floors. Any similarity ended there. The Antoninis’ place had been empty when we took it over: broom-clean condition, in real estate terms. Hilda Shaw’s home was a mess. Lots of mismatched, overstuffed furniture, with doilies hiding the threadbare arms of the sofa and chairs.

There was stuff everywhere: Hollywood gossip rags in piles on every flat surface, a line of pill bottles along the top of the toilet tank, boxes of cereal decorating the kitchen counter. And books. Stacks upon stacks of books. Mysteries and thrillers, many of them true crime. For some reason they were stacked all over the floor in front of the bookcase rather than on the shelves.

Brandon was in the back bedroom, and he wasn’t alone. Josh was holding up the doorjamb, and his lanky height made Brandon look shorter than I knew him to be. As we walked in, Josh said, “I swear to God,” in the tone of voice
of someone who’d said the same words a few times already, “I locked the door last night. Nobody could have gotten in.”

“Someone did,” Brandon answered, “or do you think I left it looking like this?”

He indicated the drawers in the oak dresser, open with fabric tumbling out—the plain but serviceable white cotton underpants of an older woman with no significant other in her life—and the open doors to the closet, where sacklike housedresses were hanging on hangers where they hadn’t tumbled to the floor.

A strapping young man who played football in high school, Brandon is twenty-three or -four, a few years older than Josh, and as fair as Josh is dark. He has blond hair that he keeps in a regulation buzz cut, with bright blue eyes, and an equally bright smile. He and I had gotten to know each other quite well the first few weeks after I moved to Waterfield last summer, since someone was trying to force me out of Aunt Inga’s house, and that same someone kept breaking in and leaving me little souvenirs, like all of Aunt Inga’s china smashed on the kitchen floor, and a step in the basement stairs sawed through, so I fell and twisted my ankle. I kept Brandon quite busy for weeks, dusting Aunt Inga’s house for fingerprints and looking for hairs and fibers.

“What’s going on?” I asked, peering past Josh’s side, while Derek leaned to look over my head. His front was warm against my back, and he slipped an arm around my waist to pull me a little closer.

“Someone was here after Josh locked up last night,” Brandon said. “I don’t work like this. I don’t tear things out of drawers without putting them back. If something falls on the floor, I pick it up. I would have put the books back on the bookshelf, not left them lying all over the floor.”

“What’s here that anyone could possibly want?”

“I don’t know,” Brandon said, “but I’m going to find out.” He went back to riffling the contents of the bedside drawer.

“If it was here,” Derek muttered in my ear, “don’t you think whoever was here last night would have taken it?”

I shrugged. Maybe, maybe not. There was a lot of junk here. It would depend on what it was the unknown somebody had been looking for, and whether he or she would have had time to find it in the mess that was Miss Shaw’s apartment. “Have you found anything interesting?”

“Nothing that anyone else would be interested in,” Brandon grunted.

“Any word on cause of death?” This was Derek’s contribution.

Brandon shook his head without looking up from the drawer. I could see his fingers sifting through packets of folded tissues, cough drops, and other odds and ends. “Too early. The ME hasn’t started the autopsy yet.”

“There’s going to be an autopsy?” Josh asked. He sounded almost concerned. I glanced up at him, but he didn’t meet my eyes.

“Gotta be.” Brandon nodded, straightening. “Unattended, unnatural death. The ME will probably call it an accident—anaphylactic shock, the victim ingested something she shouldn’t have—but we have to know.”

“There’s no reason to suspect foul play, is there?”

“Not as far as the death goes,” Brandon said. “She clearly had health problems. All the stuff in the kitchen is gluten-free. There’s nothing with strawberries, nuts, or shellfish anywhere. And she took a ton of medicines.”

“EpiPen?” Derek said.

Brandon glanced at him. “Is that a medicine?”

“Emergency injection for anaphylaxis.”

“Syringe?” Brandon shook his head. “Haven’t found anything like that.”

“Keep looking. If she had severe allergies, she should have had an EpiPen.” Derek pulled me backward out of the doorway. “We’re going upstairs. Let us know if you need anything.”

“Will do,” Brandon said. Josh followed us out and headed downstairs to the parking lot with a murmured good-bye. He still looked worried.

“What’s up with Josh?” I asked Derek when we were inside our own apartment with the door closed so neither he nor Brandon had any hope of hearing us.

“What makes you think something’s up?”

“He looked worried. Frazzled. Tired.”

“Can you blame him?” Derek asked, digging wrenches and pliers out of the toolbox in the hallway. “If he forgot to lock the door last night and someone was inside Miss Shaw’s apartment…”

“He said he didn’t.”

Derek straightened, tools in hand. “Well, what was he gonna say?”

“If he forgot, I hope he’d admit it.”

Derek didn’t answer, and I added, “He doesn’t seem like the type who’d forget something like that. He’s the son of the chief of police; if anyone knows how important it is to keep a crime scene secure, it would be Josh.”

“It isn’t a crime scene,” Derek said.

Point taken. “Strange that he’d be the one locking up in
the first place. Wonder why Brandon didn’t. It isn’t like him to leave it to someone else.”

“Maybe he got called away abruptly,” Derek said. “Girlfriend emergency.”

“Maybe.”

He disappeared into the bathroom, where he went to work on the plumbing. I busied myself taking down the wallpaper in the kitchen. It’s a surprisingly time-consuming chore, but a mindless one that leaves plenty of time for thinking.

The situation downstairs bothered me. I didn’t doubt Josh’s word that he’d locked the door last night. But I also didn’t doubt Brandon when he said that someone had been in the apartment overnight. He really wouldn’t have taken all the books off the shelves and left them on the floor. For one thing, he’d have had no reason to—all he was doing was making sure there was no evidence of foul play, that Miss Shaw’s death had indeed been what it appeared to be: an accident. And second, if for some reason he did move the books, he’d have put them back. He certainly wouldn’t have taken them down, left them on the floor, and then lied about it.

So who else had been there last night? And why? What had they been looking for? Jewelry or money? Something they could hock? Or something else?

“What kinds of allergies can kill someone?” I called through the wall to Derek.

“Any kind,” floated back to me.

“Cats and dogs? Ragweed and pollen? Mold spores?”

“If someone’s allergic enough.” He appeared in the door. “Usually, when someone dies from anaphylaxis, it’s food related. Either that, or a sting. Some people are deathly allergic to bees. If they get stung just once, they can die within thirty minutes.”

“Did you see any bee stings on Miss Shaw?”

“I didn’t examine her,” Derek said, folding his arms across his chest. I admired, distantly, the excellent musculature in his biceps and chest. “It wasn’t my place to do, and besides, she had a rash. I wouldn’t have been able to see anything like that.”

“Rash?”

“Hives,” Derek said. “Someone with that kind of severe allergy will break out in hives if they are exposed to the allergen.”

“What are the other symptoms of anaphylaxis?”

His eyes went vague, as if he were picturing the pages of a textbook. “There’s itching and rash followed by rapid pulse and possibly a sense of impending doom. Then comes swelling of the throat and tongue, which brings on difficulty in breathing and swallowing, and finally there’s loss of consciousness followed by sudden cardiovascular collapse.”

“Wow.” So the whole system shuts down essentially.

Derek smiled, his eyes back in focus again. “Out of all the people who present with an allergic reaction every year, only about one percent get to the point of dying from it. The rest get helped before it goes that far.”

“Why didn’t Hilda Shaw get helped?”

“I don’t know,” Derek said. “Maybe she ran out of epinephrine?”

“Does that make sense to you? That someone so allergic wouldn’t make sure she had what she needed in case of an allergic attack?”

“Maybe she’d run out and she just hadn’t had a chance to call the pharmacy for a refill. Or if she got her medicines by mail, the way a lot of older people do, she might have ordered one, but it didn’t arrive yet.”

“Maybe.” It was a big chance to take, though. So perhaps the EpiPen had somehow developed legs and walked off…“Was there anything at all that you saw yesterday that made you think maybe it wasn’t an accident?”

“Nothing,” Derek said firmly. “She died of anaphylactic shock. I’d stake my medical license on it.”

I smiled. “The one you don’t have anymore?”

He grinned back. “A minor detail.” And then the grin disappeared and his voice changed. “Don’t worry about Miss Shaw, Avery. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing we could have done when it happened. Let Wayne and Brandon worry about it.”

I nodded and went back to scraping wallpaper. Although I didn’t stop thinking.

A couple hours later, when I left to pick up lunch, Miss Shaw’s apartment was locked up tight and the crime scene tape gone, but there was a notice on the bulletin board downstairs in the hallway, outside the laundry room, that a meeting had been called for seven o’clock that night in the building’s community room. All residents were expected to attend. The note carried Wayne’s name on the bottom, but in Brandon’s handwriting; I guess Wayne must have called and told Brandon to put it up before he left.

As soon as I was outside and in the truck, I called Derek to let him know. “There’s a meeting tonight in the community room. I didn’t even know this place had one.”

“It’s in the basement, behind the storage rooms,” Derek said. “Are we expected to attend?”

I pulled the truck out of the parking lot and onto the Augusta Road. “I assume we are. Now that we own a condo in the building.”

To be honest, I don’t much enjoy driving Derek’s Ford F-150. It’s too big and bulky, and it feels heavy and hard to maneuver. I like my Beetle: small and zippy and good for taking corners and slipping through traffic. And a bonus: It has no bad memories attached. I once drove Derek’s truck off the road into a ditch after someone had messed with the brake cables, and every time I crest a hill and head down the other side in the truck, I remember that runaway feeling.

“You’ll have to go alone,” Derek said.

“I will? Why?”

“Don’t you remember? It’s Ryan’s bachelor party tonight. And the wedding tomorrow.”

Of course.

Ryan is an old friend of Derek’s from high school. He lives in Portland now, forty-five minutes away, and he was
getting married that weekend. I’d forgotten all about it in the excitement over the condo and Hilda Shaw’s death.

“You’re spending the night in Portland, right?”

As far as I knew, Derek and his high school buddies were going out drinking, the way men do at stag parties, and rather than missing out on the fun because he had to drive home afterward, Derek had booked a room in the reception hotel. He’d have to be back in Portland tomorrow afternoon anyway, unless he wanted to miss seeing his buddy fitted with the ball and chain, so he figured he may as well just sleep in, and I’d meet up with him before the ceremony. That way I’d have somewhere to change into my fancy dress, too, and I wouldn’t have to wear it on the ride from Portland, or make my toilette in one of the hotel restrooms. And we could spend the night after the reception in the hotel, instead of driving home—in separate cars—in the darkness of night.