Night of the Living Deed (26 page)

Which I actually found sort of reassuring.

I picked Melissa up from school just in time and drove back to the house. Melissa couldn’t understand why I was being so quiet, but she respected my feelings, mostly because she knew that not doing so was going to get her into an area where she didn’t want to go.

But she wouldn’t leave the room when Paul insisted on hearing about my interview with McElone, not even when Maxie offered to watch the second season of
Friends
with her on the laptop. Melissa wasn’t budging.

“What do you think you’re going to say that will be so bad for me?” she asked. “I already know Ms. Wright is dead. Somebody killed her, didn’t they? Like they killed you two.” She pointed at Paul and Maxie.

Paul nodded. “Probably, Melissa,” he said.

“So I already know that.” Not a glimmer of fear in my daughter’s eyes. Mine, on the other hand, were filling with tears. “So go ahead and have your talk. You’re not going to get rid of me.” If she hadn’t had that squeaky little voice, she would have been truly intimidating. She sat down on the kitchen floor and adopted her “just try to move me” face. The one she’d put on the night The Swine left for California.

Paul looked at me, shaking his head just a little. “The women in your family are really something,” he said, and I’m not sure it was meant to be complimentary.

“My great-grandmother pulled a plow,” I said.

“We need to take some action,” Paul went on, hand to his chin as it usually was when he was thinking. “We can’t just wait for things to happen anymore.”

“Sure,” I told him sarcastically. “Let’s pi—Let’s get them angry. What have
you
got to lose?”

Paul, as had become his custom, went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If we rattle the cage a little bit, something’s bound to happen that we can work with.”

“Something already
has
happened,” I reminded him. “Terry’s dead.”

“And since McElone held on to the evidence, you never got a good look at that file you were . . . borrowing,” Paul reminded me. “That might have told us why Maxie’s estate sold the house to you and not to Adam Morris.”

I stole a glance at Maxie, who was pretending not to listen but was looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Who would have represented your estate, Maxie?”

She scowled. “Probably my mother,” she said.

“Well, that makes things simple.” Paul brightened up.

“Oh no,” Maxie said. “Absolutely not.”

“I’ll let you pick out the colors for the upstairs bathrooms,” I offered.

She considered, then shook her head. “No. It’s not worth it.”

“And you can choose the border paper in the kitchen.”

“Border paper!” Maxie was appalled. “What is this, nineteen seventy-seven? You have to go for decorative tile backsplashes in the kitchen. Have a little fun.”

I played it coy. “I don’t know . . .”

But Maxie caught on right away. “This is blackmail,” she said.

Melissa’s head had been toggling back and forth between Maxie and me. She was watching the tennis match with supreme interest.

“You can say what you want, but I have the working body,” I told Maxie. “It’ll be border paper.”

“Fine! Go ahead! Call my mother. But you have to do
exactly
what I say in the bathrooms and the kitchen!”

Maxie didn’t stick around for a response. She knew I’d agree.

Melissa looked up at me. “Nice work, Mom,” she said.

Maxie’s mother, who told me to call her “Kitty,” couldn’t have been older than fifty. She must have had Maxie when she was very young.

But today, placing a hot cup of coffee in front of me in her kitchen, Kitty Malone looked at least ten years older. The strain of losing her only daughter had clearly taken a very heavy toll.

That surprised me, since Maxie had insisted that her mother had considered her a disappointment, a failure as a child and a woman. But that certainly wasn’t the tale Kitty was telling me today, and I was starting to believe her.

“Maxie was the funniest little girl,” she said, her eyes staring dreamily off into the past. “She asked me one time why there was the color white. She thought it was a waste of space where there could be other colors.” Kitty chuckled a little to herself. I’m not sure if she was aware of my presence in the room right then.

“That’s lovely,” I said, in spite of myself. I had told Kitty I knew Maxie from a time when we both worked at an establishment called the Club Sandwich, a business about which Maxie would tell me nothing other than it “wasn’t a place you’d go to look for a hero.” She probably was laughing hysterically to herself back at the house. “That’s not the Maxie I knew, but at the same time, it is.”

Kitty smiled. “I’m glad you two were friends,” she said, and I saw no need to contradict her. “And now you’re living in that house.” The way she said “that house,” I could tell she wasn’t crazy about the place.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s not really a coincidence. Maxie had told me about the place, and when I saw it, I thought it really fit the plans I had for a guesthouse in the area.” I’d been very carefully coached—after Paul had somehow convinced a reluctant Maxie to help—to cover any and all possible topics of conversation. “I don’t want to be insensitive, and I hope you don’t mind my asking, but would you like to come and see what I’ve done with it?”

“No,” Kitty said immediately. “I don’t want to see it. Maxie and I had a . . . falling-out over that house. I thought she was getting in over her head, and she wanted to borrow money for a down payment that, frankly, I didn’t have. We only spoke a few times in the months after she bought it, and things were never the same again. So no, I don’t want to see it, thank you.”

“Of course,” I answered. “You inherited the house from Maxie. I saw your name on the documents I had to sign when I closed on the house.”

“Yes, and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as I possibly could. Do you have any children, Ms. Kerby?”

“I have a daughter named Melissa. She’s nine.”

“Then I don’t think I have to say any more,” Kitty answered. “I didn’t want to own that house for one second longer than I had to, and so I guess you got a pretty good deal.”

I had, in fact.

“I told that Realtor to sell the place for what was left on the mortgage and the real estate costs,” Kitty went on. “I paid off the debt and made sure I didn’t clear a dime of the blood money from my daughter.”

“I appreciate the gesture. But I don’t understand,” I said to Kitty. “If you wanted to get rid of the house as soon as you could, wasn’t there someone else who wanted to buy it before I made an offer?”

Kitty came back to the present, and scowled. “You mean that developer guy?” she said, in a tone that indicated she was not Adam Morris’s biggest fan. “I knew about his plans for the house, and Maxie had told me how hard she was fighting to keep him from bulldozing the place. I couldn’t let that jerk touch a blade of grass on the lawn. Maxie wouldn’t have wanted it, and it was Maxie’s house. End of story.”

“You really loved her,” I said, about 80 percent unaware it was coming out of my mouth.

Kitty turned sharply toward me and gave me a stare that could peel the paint off a wall. “Of course I loved her,” she said. “She was my daughter. But the part that gets me, that really gets me now . . .”

“Did you not get to tell her you loved her?” That was what happened all the time in the movies.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kitty said. “I told her I loved her all the time. She knew it.” That wasn’t the impression Maxie had given me, but okay. Kitty’s voice caught for a moment. “The thing is, I not only loved her, I
liked
her, too. So I miss her that much more.”

 

 

I wanted to tell Maxie about my visit with her mother, but she didn’t make herself visible when I returned to the house. After debriefing me, Paul retreated to whatever Neverland he inhabited during what I’d come to think of as his off-hours, so I was in the middle of retiling the downstairs bathroom when Mayor Bridget Bostero brought David and Madeline Preston by “to see the lovely job you’ve been doing on their old house.”

“We had just come by to see Bridget on a social visit, and she suggested we take a look,” Madeline told me. “She said we’d be impressed.” I would have been flattered, except I knew that Mayor Bostero had never set foot in the house as long as I’d owned it.

“Well, thank you,” I said in what I’m sure was an unconvincing tone. “I didn’t realize you’d been monitoring my progress, Mayor Bostero.” I invited them inside, and they stood awkwardly in the foyer.

Bridget Bostero tossed her hair back to achieve a wind-swept effect (once a beautician, always a beautician). “I’m interested in
every
new business that comes to Harbor Haven, Alison,” she said. “I’m sure I mentioned that when we had our lunch together.” My goodness—was Bridget trying to impress the Prestons with how well she knew
me
?

I wiped my brow. Tiling isn’t incredibly hard, but you can still work up a sweat in a confined space with only a tiny window for ventilation. I think some grout might have been wiped onto my forehead from my index finger. “Well, I’m glad for the distraction and the compliment,” I said. I thought that was quite diplomatic, if I have to say so myself.

“You’re tiling,” David Preston said, no doubt noticing the smudge. “Are you doing the upstairs baths or the downstairs?”

“Downstairs, today,” I answered. “The upstairs ones are already done, if you’d like to see.” I didn’t mention the additional one I’d added, which I’d finally farmed out to Tony’s crew, because I wanted to see the Prestons’ reaction when they saw it.

“Yeah,” David said. The man’s wit knew no bounds.

I took them upstairs and showed off the work I’d done. Even though I didn’t think for one second that they were actually here to see the fruits of my labor—though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what they
were
here to see—I was proud of what I’d accomplished, and more than a little vain about showing it off.

The past few weeks had been devoted to the renovations I’d needed to make, but now, things were coming together. The new thermostat on the boiler had done the trick, and the heating system was now working. The new doors were on the kitchen cabinets, which were up on the walls. Painting, sanding and otherwise repairing of the walls had been achieved (with one notable exception). All I had left to do was refinish the floor in the dining room, and then the furniture could be delivered, various window treatments hung and area rugs put down, and I’d be able to take pictures of the house to put into a brochure and use for online advertising. People would be planning their next summer vacations soon, many before Thanksgiving. I was just about going to be ready.

In the new powder room, which I’d just finished painting that morning, the first reaction came from Bridget Bostero.

“This wasn’t here before, was it?” she asked.

“No,” David Preston jumped in before I could. “We had a larger bedroom here.”

“It’s all within the code,” I assured the mayor. “I’ve got the building permits.”

She assured me showing her the paperwork wasn’t necessary, but the look in her eye indicated she’d check the minute she got back to Town Hall, and I silently thanked the gods that I’d hired Tony’s crew, because I probably wouldn’t have bothered with permits but, being professionals, they had.

Madeline was consistently overpraising my work, which led me to believe (especially given how tightly her jaw clenched as she spoke) that she hated everything I’d done to the fond memories she had of her home, and was plotting my demise even as she smiled at me.

I did notice, however, that all three of them were peeking into corners and examining walls that had seen no repairs at all, aside from fresh coats of paint. But it wasn’t until we got back downstairs and into the main hallway that I started to suspect what might have been the catalyst for this uninvited visit.

“You’ll have to overlook the one thing I haven’t been able to fix yet,” I said. We reached the wall with the large, now perfectly rectangular hole in the wall, where inside studs were exposed and plaster was still flaking just a little more every day.

You’d have thought I was unveiling the
Mona Lisa
. The three visitors flocked around the hole in the wall and stared at it, seemingly mesmerized by its incredible allure.

It was, I have to admit, a little spooky. Especially when Paul emerged through the wall behind me and asked, “What’s all this, then?”

I started just a little, and David Preston looked at me. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Just not happy about everybody looking at my most glaring failure,” I answered.

“I don’t think it’s a failure,” Bridget offered. “It gives the room character.” I was quickly confirming my initial impression that Mayor Bostero was an idiot.