Murder Takes to the Hills Read online

  Murder Takes to the Hills

  An Alex Peres Novel

  by Jessica Thomas

  Copyright © 2010 by Jessica Thomas

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  First Edition

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designer: Stephanie Solomon-Lopez

  ISBN 10: 1-59493-178-X

  ISBN 13:978-1-59493-178-9

  Acknowledgments

  For John and Carol with the hope your neighbors forgive my peopling your scenic town with a bunch of kooks and crooks.

  And to my editor Katherine V. Forrest for catching the bad spots and complimenting the good ones. See, Katherine, no unnecessary commas!

  CHAPTER ONE

  It may not have been the worst of times, but it sure as hell wasn’t the best of times, either!

  For a couple of years I had known that the roof on my house was working itself into replacement mode. Strong winds would bring down a shingle or two, and heavy rains or sleet left little streaks of grit at the bottom of the downspouts. At that time, I had checked with the bank about getting a loan. The VP and CEO, Choate Ellis, was ever so gracious: they’d be happy to lend me the money…and if I wanted any other improvements or repairs they’d be happy to lend me that money, too. They should be happy. Fisherman’s Bank has held mortgages on every piece of property my family has owned for the last one hundred and fifty years.

  I was living alone at the time and decided to take Choate up on his offer and add a second bedroom and splurge on a bathroom especially for me. And I would spring for one of those walk-in showers that fired water at you from every direction at any heat and any strength that pleased you…from drizzle to fire hose. It included everything but the compliant blonde to scrub your back. Oh, yeah. Dream on.

  About that time, Cindy Hart came to town to head up the bank’s new Personal Investments Department. She rented a small cottage from my Aunt Mae, and of course, we met. We fell in love and discovered—voila!—that we also liked each other. Finally, Cindy moved in with me.

  But she also kept the cottage. It was our safety net, she said, for times when one of us wanted to be alone for a day or so; it was also our get-away when we both wanted to be unavailable to the world. It was a bit strange to have a get-away only about a mile from our main residence, but we found great peace on the little deck overlooking a small pond and the pine woods stretching beyond it. Wells, our lovely, petite black-and-white cat, enjoyed hunting in the reeds, and Fargo, our black Labrador retriever, took delight in leaping off the old dock to scatter invading ducks and geese. And we loved watching them.

  Somewhere along the way, I sort of lost track of the roof.

  Last month a whopping nor’easter brought a steady drip into the pantry, and I called Orrick Construction. My brother Sonny had recommended them, reminding me they, too, had been around for a century or so. And I’d gone to school with Bobby Orrick, who was now the main honcho of the company, so I felt at ease with him. He proved extremely helpful.

  The Master Suite, as he referred to my idea for another bedroom and bath, would present no problems. He suggested we also run an enclosed walkway from the back door of the house to the side door of the garage, thus providing not only shelter between the two, but also storage space so we could fit both cars into the garage.

  While I was trying to guess what this would cost, Cindy pointed out that this walkway would make a small U-shaped alcove when attached to the garage and the house. It would give that part of the yard protection from the wind on three sides, so why didn’t we put a deck outside the Master Suite (apparently she liked that phrase, too)—which would be completely private, so that we could enjoy it in our pajamas or whatever.

  Bobby agreed it was a genius idea. He added that since that area would get the afternoon sun, we might want to consider a small rock garden with a little fountain. This could be our own miniature Eden—I never knew him to be such a poetic type in school—and when we had guests we could use the larger, more open backyard.

  By now I had visions of a feature appearing in Better Homes and Gardens…about three days after we became bankrupt and homeless.

  “Look,” I finally managed to squeak. “We can’t afford all this! My God, you two are planning the Taj Mahal!”

  Cindy patted my hand and laughed. “Darling, you forget—the house is also in my name now and, as I am an employee of the bank, we will have a much better deal than they offered you last year, not to mention that lovely rebate the government is handing out on income taxes. Relax. Enjoy.”

  I did neither. But I gave in, as we all knew I would.

  Orrick’s began work two days later. From eight in the morning to five in the evening, except for the lunch hour, we were treated to hammers, drills, saws, a small backhoe, trucks and men with loud voices…doubtless compensating for hearing damage from the hammers and drills. At night the house was covered with a large blue plastic tarp, which protected us from moisture and small critters and flapped all night in the slightest of breezes. And Orrick’s worked a six-day week in order, we learned, to get Bobby’s crew to the next victim on schedule.

  The animals suffered most. Wells took up residence under the bed, where she hissed and slapped at any attempt to get her out before five fifteen p.m. Fargo barked himself hoarse every day by nine a.m. He had to be taken out on lead, even when the men had left for the day, because he had stolen several small tools and probably buried them somewhere, dug an artistic addition to a trench that was ready to have a foundation poured and chewed through an extension cord, which was thankfully unplugged.

  I was pretty well undone most mornings by ten. And I was trying to get my work set up for summer, which could be hectic. My work? Well, I’m a private investigator and my name is Alexandra Peres…but please, please, call me Alex. My work varies greatly, from checking out potential employees to checking up on spouses who are thought by their mates to have forgotten that famous little clause, “forsaking all others.”

  I also investigate employees who are thought to be cheating on their employers in some way. I occasionally look for teenage runaways, although I duck those painful jobs if I can.

  And—the biggest part of my job: I investigate visitors to Provincetown who are filing personal injury claims against a B&B or motel, restaurant, store, etc. Several insurance companies retain me to handle their Provincetown customers, and it keeps me busy during tourist season…which seems to get longer every year.

  It also keeps me entertained. Some people are nothing if not clever in their efforts to have a profitable vacation, and some are incredibly dumb. Last summer, for example, after his wife was startled by a bird and stumbled backward into a large rose bush, the husband sued the B&B where the two of them were staying. Not for her injuries themselves, which were briefly painful but medically minor, but because he was denied his conjugal rights for over two weeks. Assuming the fellow would be thought mad, the insurance company let the case go to court. They lost.

  In another instance, a rather athletic woman staged a spectacular fall down a flight of stairs, due, she said, to a tear in the carpeting. Unfortunately, the scissors she had used to make the tear fell out of her handbag on the way down, and were immediately visible to an honest witness who happened to be standing at the foot of the stairs.

  Anyway, I was busy updating the list of clients that my clients represented. I was making
sure I had the seemingly hundreds of various new forms I needed and tossing out the old ones.

  And I was also busy at my second job—one which I hoped would someday replace my first one. A few years back I had gotten into nature photography as a hobby. I had become good enough to be doing it professionally, with several well-respected art galleries in Ptown and a couple of adjacent towns handling my photographs. It meant not only taking photos, which took Fargo and me on hikes that we loved, but also numbering and matting them and placing them in simple wood frames. I then took them to the galleries to see which new ones they wanted to show, and how many older ones they wanted to re-order. And, how many copies they wanted of each.

  Sudden loud noises did not help me in any of the above endeavors.

  Cindy had the best of it, missing all but an hour of the activity in the morning and another hour in the evening, plus Saturdays. Of course, the water might be abruptly cut off for unknown reasons at any hour, or strange men might go up a ladder outside our bedroom as she dressed, or a sudden hammering might begin just as she applied mascara. None of us was having it easy.

  We spent as much time as possible at the cottage. The quiet, the rejuvenated pets, the ability to say and do what we wished when we wished without benefit of a sudden audience restored us to some form of sanity. But even the cottage began to show its imperfections as we spent more time there. Closets were tiny, the bed was a double, not a queen, and Fargo and Wells seemed to take up more than their share of space in it. The kitchen was not built for two and there was no dishwasher. There was a clothes washer and dryer slightly younger than I am and slightly less noisy than the Orrick crew.

  But the main problem seemed to be around Cindy’s clothes for the office. She had ninety percent of both closets—my usual daily attire this time of year consisted of jeans, shirt, sweatshirt or light jacket, crew socks and loafers or sneakers…all of which could be stored most anywhere. Somehow, though, her clothes problem seemed in her mind to be my fault.

  This morning, for example, I was out on the deck enjoying my coffee in the unusually warm April sun and watching Wells and Fargo on their morning patrols.

  The screen door slammed, and, startled, I stood up and turned around. Cindy stood before me, mouth a straight line, hands clenched at her sides, her almost-Roman nose wrinkled in displeasure. This was unusual. Most mornings Cindy met the world with her gamin smile and her gray eyes on bright to see what the day held in store.

  “Would you just look at this mess!” She shook her head in disgust, undoing most of her efforts to control her wonderful dark curls.

  I looked more closely…and fought down a laugh. She had on a pale green skirt, a rather brilliant lavender blouse, a burnt orange blazer and blue pumps. I understood the shoes. She had worn a blue dress to work yesterday, and they were probably the only dress shoes she had here. The rest of it was a mystery to me. Usually, when Cindy was dressed, she was ready for a photo in the fashion pages of the New York Times Magazine.

  “It’s very interesting,” I said neutrally, and then the laugh got away from me.

  “It’s not funny!” she snapped. “Now I’ll have to go by the house with those thugs peering through the window while I change. I’ll be late to work. How could you do this to me?”

  “Me? How do you figure it’s my fault?”

  “You picked up the cleaning yesterday.”

  “I nearly always pick up the cleaning,” I answered reasonably. “I do not pick out what you wear to work.”

  “You could have called me and told me everything you picked up clashed.”

  “Darling, I never even look at what I redeem from that bunch of thieves. I just pay their ransom and bring the stuff home. If I phoned you in the middle of a workday to tell you what portions of your wardrobe I had in the car, you’d think I had lost my mind.”

  “Well,” she answered weakly, “now is different, with all this shit going on!”

  My eyebrows went up. Cindy rarely swore, and almost never scatologically. I still tried to be reasonable…I thought. “Look, I’ve got a clean white shirt in the bureau, and your light blue jeans are here—that should do it. It’s dress-down Friday.”

  “It’s not that dress-down, and anyway, I’m not going in there wearing a too-big shirt, probably with a frayed collar. Alex, you’re just impossible!”

  “No.” At this point I was a little snappy myself. “I am not impossible, I’m just trying to be helpful. Anyway, where are all your clothes that were here the other day? Isn’t there something you could wear?” I didn’t mention that this mindless discussion was making her ever later for work: that would dawn on her soon enough.

  “I took them home. The closets were getting so crowded.”

  “Couldn’t you have left just one or two outfits and some shoes? That way I wouldn’t need to be your personal dresser and try to figure out what you’d like to wear every time I get your cleaning.”

  “You don’t have to get snotty and…”

  “Girls, girls! For heaven’s sake, I heard you all the way in my house.” My Aunt Mae came up the stairs onto the deck, looking like a troubled pouter pigeon wearing glasses slightly awry. Her still-pretty round face belied her late fifties age…even if she had put on a pound or ten. Always soft-spoken, this morning her voice had a bit of a low-pitched edge to it. Had she really heard us all the way up the hill?

  “Now,” she said quietly, “I know workmen around a house are noisy and inconvenient, but you are both behaving like children. Here, Cindy, this light tan blouse of mine should fit you pretty well, and go with your blazer and skirt, and these tan shoes should get you through the day. Run inside and change before you’re good and late. You two would still be at it at lunchtime.” She shoved the clothing into Cindy’s arms and pushed her gently toward the door. Cindy went.

  “Goodness, I hate to hear you two quarrel.” Raised voices were not in Aunt Mae’s repertoire. “You’re both strung out with all this repair and remodeling, but you shouldn’t take it out on each other. I hope you don’t do this often.”

  “You’re right Aunt Mae.” I was embarrassed that she had heard us all the way up the hill. “We rarely quarrel, honestly. I guess we are just feeling put upon or put out or some damn thing. Even Wells and Fargo are grumpy.”

  “Well, they have some excuse…they don’t understand what’s going on. You two…”

  “…have no excuse whatsoever,” Cindy completed for her. She came out looking reasonably well put together if not quite her perfect self. “I should probably move under the bed with Wells and we could hiss and scratch together. I am sorry for my operatic performance.” She kissed us both on the cheek and started off the deck to her car.

  “You know what?” Aunt Mae called after her. “You both need a vacation. Leave the carpentry to the carpenters and go away somewhere. I’m serious.”

  “And probably right,” I agreed.

  “Ah, Paris in the spring!” Cindy sighed.

  “Chestnuts in blossom,” Aunt Mae added.

  “Do you think the Louvre would like some of my photos?” I asked.

  Neither of them answered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had returned to the house and was just wrapping up the spring cleaning activities in my office when the phone rang. Fortunately, the Orrick boys were working on the other side of the house, and I could actually hear my caller.

  “Alex? Ralph Ryder here.” Ralph and Becky Ryder ran a B&B down in the East end, and their insurance company was one that kept me on retainer to check out personal injury claims. They ran a tight ship, one might say, and I didn’t recall ever dealing with a claim against them. In fact I hardly knew them.

  “Ah, yes, Ralph, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, we’ve got a spot of trouble here, and I thought I should ring you up.”

  Then I remembered: Ralph had moved here from England when he was about three, but held doggedly to his accent, tweedy clothes, pipe and, probably outmoded, British slang.
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br />   “Could you take a run over for a recce?” he asked.

  “Could you tell me what the problem is? I hate to walk in blind.”

  “One of our guests came barefoot out of his bathroom and whacked his middle toe against a leg of the chest of drawers. You know those things hurt like the deuce. And he’s limping badly. Since hiking ’round the pine woods and the beech woods are his main reasons for coming, he’s not got much reason to stay, what?”

  “Probably not,” I answered, “but you didn’t push him into the furniture, either, did you?”

  “No. Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of doing that!” He sounded shocked, and I remembered that a sense of humor was not his main characteristic. “But that furniture leg was sticking out a bit,” he added. “Probably pulled away from the wall by one of the maids in cleaning, and not pushed back where it belonged.”

  “That changes the picture, Ralph. I guess I’d better stop by…how’s now?”

  “Perfect. Couldn’t be better! Ta-ta.”

  “You bet.”

  I went to my safe and took two brand-new hundred-dollar bills from a small stack of ten, which I kept for situations like this. Over time I had discovered that sometimes a crisp bill or two would eliminate lawyers and a plethora of forms—or vice versa—so I usually took some with me, just in case. Next I traded the sweatshirt for a blouse and blazer, considered myself properly dressed—with no histrionics, I might add—and left, with Fargo hard at my heels.

  As we drove down Bradford Street, I saw that Ptown was aware spring was coming. Many of the B&Bs showed new or cleaned awnings and glistening windows and neatly trimmed shrubs. Even Evans’ Market had a man out painting the yellow lines in the parking area.