Wall-To-Wall Dead (6 page)

“I always told you it was stupid—” she said, with a soft Southern drawl to her voice, and stopped abruptly when she saw us. “Sorry.”

“Good morning.” Derek flashed his patented Derek-grin, the one that never fails to give me a little swoop to my stomach. Candy blinked. After a second, she seemed to recognize him.

“Oh. It’s you. Hi.”

“Hi,” Derek said, just as a clatter from inside the building announced the arrival of someone else. After a moment,
a pair of long legs in jeans appeared on the stairs, and a second later, the rest of Josh Rasmussen became visible.

“Oh,” he said when he saw us. “It’s you.”

Derek arched a brow. “Didn’t you expect us?”

“Yeah. Sure. It’s just…” He shook his head. “I gotta go, or I’ll be late for school. I’ll see you later.”

He pushed past us and headed for his car, a small, brand-new, dark blue Honda parked in the lot. It had replaced the dark blue Honda he used to drive, after that one had ended up in the Atlantic Ocean a month or so ago, and had been declared a total loss by the insurance company.

“Probably can’t wait to see Shannon,” I said to Derek. He nodded.

“We’d better go, too,” Jamie told Candy. “Don’t want to be late. Excuse us, please.”

They disappeared into the parking lot and went in different directions. Candy headed for a small white hybrid, while Jamie got into a nondescript compact, pale blue. A few seconds later, all three cars were lined up at the exit, waiting to merge with traffic on the Augusta Road.

“Want to take bets on which of the neighbors we’ll see next?” I asked Derek.

He shook his head. “I’d rather just get inside before we see any of them. We’ll never get any work done this way.”

Since he had a point, I scurried through the door and up the stairs after him, with only a sideways glance at Miss Shaw’s door on my way past.

We spent the next several hours causing major destruction. It’s quite cathartic, actually. I enjoyed ripping out all the worn and torn ugliness, and imagining all the pretty and shiny we would be installing it its place. Derek went to work with pliers and wrenches, taking the plumbing to the kitchen and bathroom sinks apart preparatory to tearing out the sinks themselves, while I armed myself with—of all things—a shovel, and went to work ripping up the vinyl floor in the kitchen. That took us through to lunch, when we broke out the sandwiches and drinks I’d packed and made ourselves comfortable on the small balcony.

The front door was actually on what I’d consider to be the back of the building, where the parking lot also was. On the front—or other—side, there were balconies overlooking a wide expanse of grass and a line of trees. We were into September, and among the fir trees were a few oaks and birches that had just started to turn yellow, bright against the blue autumn sky. Some of the leaves had given up the ghost and were drifting lazily toward the green grass.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the crisp, clean air. “Pretty.”

“It’s a good place to live,” Derek agreed.

I glanced at him. “Did you ever want to live anywhere else? You were a doctor; you could have gotten a job anywhere.”

He shook his head. “I always planned to come back here, to take over Dad’s practice.”

“What about Melissa? You were married when you graduated. Did she want to live somewhere else?”

“If she did, she never said anything about it,” Derek said. “She’s still here, yeah?”

She was. And I’d wondered about that. She’d come to Maine with Derek, and after their divorce, she’d stayed on with my cousin Ray Stenham. But he was out of the picture now, too—and would continue to be for a while longer, I hoped—and since then, Melissa’s most recent beau had met with an untimely death. It wouldn’t have been surprising if she’d decided to leave Waterfield to start fresh somewhere else. After all, there wasn’t really anything left for her here.

Except her career, I suppose. She’s Waterfield’s most premier real estate agent, which means she’s doing quite well financially, and from what Derek had said, she’d always been concerned with position and social standing and with being “somebody.” That’s why she’d made sure to marry a doctor, he’d said—for the money and the prestige. If living in Waterfield gave her both, then that might be reason enough for her to stay. I could understand, even if I
sort of wished she’d pack up and get out of what was now
my
town.

“What about you?” He glanced at me. “Is this your way of telling me you’re sick of being here and you want to go somewhere else?”

“Oh, no.” I shook my head. “I’m perfectly happy.”

“Good to know. Why did you ask?” He stretched out his legs and leaned back on the plastic chair. It groaned in protest.

“Just curious. I never used to consider living anywhere but Manhattan. I was born there. I went to college there. I lived there my whole life. When I first came here, I didn’t think I’d survive the summer.”

Derek grinned. “What changed your mind?”

I smiled back. “You did. I figured you’d never agree to move to Manhattan with me.”

And at that point I’d noticed all that Waterfield had to offer. There was clean air and a slow pace and friendly people—not that New Yorkers aren’t friendly; they’re just busier as a rule, and don’t have as much time to sit and talk—and there was Aunt Inga’s house, and the cats—who wouldn’t be happy in a New York apartment, especially one where I wasn’t allowed to have pets—and Derek, and everyone else I’d gotten to know, and did I mention the clean air and the slow pace and—oh, yes—the ocean? We New Yorkers like being close to the ocean.

Downstairs, we heard the sound of a door opening, and a second later, a tiny figure burst out onto the green grass. A little boy, maybe two years old, in striped overalls and a red shirt. He had a shock of jet-black hair, and was squealing with laughter as his short legs pumped. A few steps behind came a woman with long, blond hair, whose voice floated up to us. “I’m gonna get you! I’m gonna get you!”

They tore across the grass, laughing and yelling, until the little boy tripped and fell and rolled. His mother fell right along with him, and she grabbed him and tickled him until he was breathless with laughter and was hiccupping for her to stop.

“Must be Robin and Benjamin,” I said.

Derek nodded, his eyes still on the pair down on the grass.

“Have you ever wanted children?”

He glanced over at me. “It never really seemed a possibility before.”

“You and Melissa never got to that point?”

He shook his head. “I told you. We were pretty young when we got married, and circumstances were never conducive to kids. At first I was in school, then there was residency, and by the time we got to Waterfield, I wished I’d never married her.”

I nodded.

“What about you?” he asked after a moment. “Do you want children?”

“I’m not getting any younger.”

Derek smiled. “That’s not really an answer, is it?”

I smiled back. “I guess not. Sure, I think I’d like a child. Before it’s too late.” A little copy of Derek running around in striped overalls, squealing with laughter.

“One thing at a time, OK? Let’s get married first.”

“Let’s,” I said.

By the end of the day, we’d accomplished what we’d set out to do, and had cleared the sinks out of both the kitchen and the bath, along with the vinyl flooring and the kitchen counter. Tomorrow we’d start ripping down the kitchen cabinets. After that, a trip to the lumber depot was in order, to see what was available to replace the cabinets we’d torn out, so I could start designing the kitchen.

It’s one of my favorite aspects of the job. I didn’t go into interior design after Parsons—I’ve always liked fabrics and sewing too much for that—but I’d taken my share of design classes while I was there, and the fact that I got to put some of that knowledge to use now was wonderful. Derek’s heart is more in restoration anyway; whenever there’s something old and salvageable, he wants to keep it,
and he finds great pleasure in tinkering with it until it’s good as new.

“Space is at a premium in this one,” I said as we locked the door behind us and headed down the stairs to the parking lot. “Wherever we can make something seem bigger, we should. And wherever we can tuck things away out of sight, that’s good, too. Open and airy feels bigger than cluttered.”

“Like?” He glanced at me over his shoulder as we descended the stairs. Miss Shaw was not lying in wait for us this time, and we made it past the first-floor landing without incident.

“A friend of mine in New York had an old fireplace in her apartment that didn’t work anymore. So she put her TV in there and had a frame built for it, so it was actually built into the fireplace. And someone else had an apartment with a really great closet—one of those with double doors, you know?—but not enough room for an office. So she bought an extra armoire for her clothes and turned the closet into an office. She bought a long counter and installed it inside the closet, along with a lot of shelves above, and then she could push the chair inside and close the doors whenever people came to visit.”

“Genius,” Derek said.

“It was, actually. You’ve never lived anywhere like that, but—”

“Actually, I have.” He pushed open the door to the parking lot and held it for me. “In medical school. The apartment I shared with a buddy was no bigger than this one.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about. My mom and I had this table in the kitchen in the apartment in New York—after my dad died and it was just her and me, you know—and it hung on the wall under the window. It was this little half-circle with hinges, fastened to a sort of base, and the half-circle part could flip down when we didn’t use it.” I illustrated using my hands.

“Genius,” Derek said again.

I elbowed him. “You’re being facetious. I don’t like it.”

“Sure you do.” He grabbed me around the waist and swung me around so my back was against the truck and he was in front of me. “You like me. Admit it.”

I wound my arms around his neck. “Fine. I like you.”

Just as he bent to give me a kiss, I turned my head. “Not here. Miss Shaw is watching.”

“Damn Miss Shaw,” Derek said and kissed me anyway.

By the time we reached the condo building the next morning, Josh’s Honda was gone from the parking lot, along with Candy’s hybrid, Jamie’s compact, William Maurits’s sedan, and Mariano’s Jeep. Indeed, the only car still there was an older model Ford Taurus station wagon, gold colored, parked over in the corner. I spied a child seat in the back, so I guessed it must belong to Robin and Benjamin. Everyone else, it seemed, had gone to work or school. Even Miss Shaw’s curtains hung quietly for once.

We spent the first part of the day taking down the kitchen cabinets. It’s a two-person job, since someone has to hold the cabinet while the other person unscrews the screws holding it to the wall. If not, the cabinet will fall and hit someone on the head. Derek held while I unscrewed, and I won’t deny that I enjoyed watching the play of muscles in his arms under the short sleeves of the T-shirt as he wrestled with the cabinets. I may even have taken a little longer than I should to unscrew a few of the upper ones, just because I was distracted by the view.

Once the cabinets were down and stacked in the bed of
the truck, along with yesterday’s bathroom cabinet and sink, we left for a while, to drop the spoils off at the local reuse center, where someone else might have use of them, and to grab a couple of Derek’s favorite lobster rolls.

We were sitting there, on orange plastic benches facing one another across an orange plastic table, when the door to the street opened and Jill Cortino maneuvered herself inside.

Peter Cortino’s wife and Derek’s high school sweetheart is a plump, slightly frumpy, somewhat plain woman in her mid-thirties, with blond hair and blue eyes. Between Derek, who’s gorgeous, and Peter, who looks like a Roman statue, she’s managed to snag two of the best-looking men Waterfield has to offer. The reason for that is personality. She’s one of the nicest, most genuine people I’ve ever met, and it’s frankly a little surprising to me that Derek, after dating Jill, would even look twice at Melissa, who’s downright stunning but nowhere near as nice.