I’d seen no strange torture devices and smelled no scent of decomposing flesh. The only shrine I’d noticed had been to Scarlett and Rhett, and Venetia couldn’t have struck me any less like a person who murders other people and buries them in her neighbor’s crawlspace. She did, however, strike me as too intelligent to stash a body on her own property. If the cadaver dog had scented another corpse, I didn’t think Venetia would turn out to be its killer.
Arthur Mattson looked disappointed, but before he had a chance to speak, Tony the TV guy came over. “Whose house?” he asked, gesturing with a manicured thumb.
I hesitated, but the camera was still pointed the other way, and besides, all he’d have to do was read the name on the mailbox. “It belongs to a lady named Venetia Rudolph. Single, lives alone.”
“Thanks.” He turned away and pulled out his cell phone. He was probably calling someone at the television station to ask them to do some digging into Venetia ’s background, just in case he got the chance to ask questions later.
No one else seemed to have anything to say, so we just stood there in a small, huddled group and waited. Nothing too exciting seemed to be happening inside the house. There were no screams, no loud explosions, no aging woman bursting through the door screaming, “You’ll never take me alive!” Brandon had long-since disappeared inside. Daphne the trooper led her canine companion past us toward their state police vehicle. The dog was just walking now, scenting neither ground nor air. “Great job, Hans,” I heard Daphne say as they walked by. “Good boy.”
Stella the shih tzu looked longingly at the regal Hans, but he didn’t dignify her presence with as much as a flick of his tail. In the baby carriage, Trevor whimpered, made a quarter turn, and slept on.
After a few minutes, the back door opened again, and Derek came out. He stood for a second on the deck, looking out at us all, before he crossed the deck and started down the stairs. His steps were heavy, and my heart sank. What had they found inside? More bones? Body parts?
Excusing myself to the neighbors, I hurried forward and caught up with him at the foot of Venetia ’s stairs. “What is it? What did you find?”
He shook his head, lips tightly pressed together. “She’s dead.”
“ Venetia? But…” It took a second for the news to sink in, and then I felt the color leach out of my face. I must have wobbled, because Derek’s arm shot out and caught my elbow. “How?” I managed. “What happened?”
“Wayne and Brandon will figure that out,” Derek said, keeping his voice low. “They just wanted me to make absolutely sure that she was beyond any lifesaving measures, and they did the rest. I couldn’t even pronounce, since I’m not actually an MD anymore. They’ll have to get dad to do that, or the ME from Portland.” He looked upset.
“But you could tell what happened?”
He nodded, lowering his voice. “She was hit over the head with something. Last night.”
“Hit? With what? Why?”
He shrugged. “Flower arrangement in a vase. It was on the floor next to her. In a couple of pieces.”
I did my best to think straight. “The one from the dining room table? With the magnolias and leaves? I saw it yesterday, when she invited me in.”
“You were inside her house yesterday? You should talk to Wayne, see if he’ll let you look around. Just in case you notice something.” He turned me around and escorted me up the stairs to the back door again, an arm around my shoulders hustling me along. I turned my face away from the TV camera.
Yesterday, I’d come through the front door, and all I’d seen of the house was the L-shaped living room-dining room combination. As in our house, Venetia ’s back door led into the den. Hers was paneled in a greenish color, with the same brick fireplace on the back wall. It had a swag of magnolias draped over the mantel and a picture of Tara hanging above. (That would be Scarlett’s Tara, not my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Tara Hamilton.) The carpet was green and the furniture upholstered in floral chintz.
“In here,” Derek said, gesturing to the doorway to the living room. I took a breath and plunged through.
Venetia was lying on her stomach in the middle of the floor, and there wasn’t as much blood as I’d feared. Her gray hair was matted, and a smallish puddle had soaked into the rose-colored carpet by her head, but that was all. And she looked pretty peaceful, all in all. Her eyes were closed, and her teeth weren’t bared or anything weird. She looked like she was sleeping, except for the fact that she was clearly not present anymore. Her soul, for lack of a word less fraught with controversy, had left her body.
Until we bought the house next door to Venetia ’s, I’d always thought ghosts were a bunch of hooey. People died and were buried, and that was that. But now, with unexplained footsteps walking down the hallway next door, I wasn’t quite so sure. Maybe the soul really does survive the death of the body and goes somewhere else. Or stays where it is, hanging out, as the case may be. In certain circumstances, anyway; maybe when death comes unexpectedly. Maybe Venetia ’s soul was still hanging around, too. I looked around nervously, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“Avery was here yesterday,” Derek explained to Wayne and Brandon, who were busy looking around. “I thought maybe she’d notice if anything was missing or looked wrong. Avery?”
He turned to me. I shook my head. “It looks just like it did yesterday. Except that she’s changed her clothes since I saw her. Yesterday afternoon she was wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. This looks like pajamas.”
Venetia ’s compact body was encased in a plain, white T-shirt and a pair of flannel lounge pants in shades of blue, green, and red plaid.
“ Maine tartan,” Derek said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s the official Maine tartan. Designed in the 1960s by a guy named Sol Gillis. The light blue is for the sky, the dark blue for the water, the green for the pine forests, and the red for the bloodline, or the people, of Maine.”
“Huh,” I said.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Derek answered with a shrug.
“Well, whatever it is, she wasn’t wearing it when I saw her. She must have put it on later. So she must have been killed late at night, after she got ready for bed.”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Wayne nodded. “Her bed’s been turned down, but not slept in, and there’s a book on the sofa and a mug of cold tea on the table.”
“I notice you didn’t disagree with the idea that she was killed.”
He shook his head. “Not much doubt about that. She’s in the middle of the floor, there’s nothing she could have hit her head on accidentally, and she couldn’t have reached back and knocked herself out, either. Especially not with this big thing.” He toed one of the pieces of the large fake magnolia arrangement.
“I guess not,” I agreed. So someone must have gotten in somehow after all the hoopla died down last night, and had conked Venetia on the head. But why?
I looked around. “It doesn’t look like anything’s missing. All the collectibles are still here,” and Venetia had had enough Gone with the Wind paraphernalia to make a fortune on eBay, “and so are the TV and the silverware on the table and the antiques, what few she owned. Most of this is reproduction furniture.”
“You’d know,” Derek said, making a sly reference to the fact that my ex-boyfriend and former boss, Philippe, had been a furniture maker.
“Unless we find a hidden safe somewhere,” Wayne said, “and it’s been cleaned out, it doesn’t appear as if robbery was the motive.”
I had to agree. “Do you think it has something to do with what happened in our house? Finding the bones?”