I found Kate outside in her yard, getting ready for fall. Most of the leaves were still on the trees, changing from green to yellow to faint shades of orange now at the beginning of autumn. She wasn’t raking but was doing something to the lawn, something that involved a strange contraption that looked a little like a very old, manual lawn mower, except it had long spikes instead of blades on the revolving part. The spikes dug into the ground as she walked around. When I looked at her feet, I saw that she was wearing shoes with similar spikes on them.
“What are you doing?” I inquired, with the clueless-ness of a born New Yorker who had never in my life had to do anything to a lawn before.
She glanced at me. “Aerating. The soil is compacted, so I’m loosening it up. Then I’m going to seed and fertilize before the lawn goes dormant for the winter. Come spring, I’ll have nice, green grass.”
Grass hibernated? Who knew?
“Do I have to do this, too?” I said. “To Aunt Inga’s lawn?”
She shook her head. “David Todd will do it for you, if you ask him. For a fee, of course.”
“Of course.” I leaned my arms on the picket fence, watching her walk back and forth a couple of more times. It was mind-numbing and peaceful, like watching clothes revolve in a washing machine.
“What’s going on?” Kate asked on her next pass. I shook myself out of my dream world and back to reality.
“What isn’t? Wayne and Brandon have moved the skeleton to Barnham College. Josh is going to try a forensic approximation computer program. I drove Derek’s truck into a ditch when the brakes broke, and Peter Cortino says someone tampered with them. The cadaver dog has been all over the yard on Becklea and declared it corpse free, except now Venetia Rudolph is dead.”
“What?”
I repeated myself.
“How?” Kate demanded.
“Hit over the head with a flower arrangement. Sometime last night.”
“Why? By who?”
“No idea. Wayne thinks it has something to do with the skeleton, so I guess ‘who’ would be the same person who killed the woman who was buried under the house, and ‘why’ is because Venetia knew, or suspected, or might have known, who that person was. But that’s just a guess.”
Kate nodded. “Did you come by to tell me the news?”
“I was on my way home,” I said, explaining that I’d come from Cortino’s auto shop, “and I thought maybe you’d be up for taking a drive down to Barnham with me. You’d get to see Shannon, and maybe we’d discover whether they’ve made any headway in identifying the skeleton. She seems to be the center of it all, poor thing.”
“Sure,” Kate said readily. “Just let me put away the aerator.”
She wandered off across the lawn, taking the opportunity to get in a few more digs on the way. Two minutes later she was back, minus the spiky shoes, and behind the wheel of her tan Volvo station wagon. I clambered into the passenger seat, and off we went, back the same way I’d driven earlier. As the road started climbing toward Devon Highlands, I felt my stomach lurch.
“This is where my brakes gave out,” I said when we crested the hill. The development was spread out on our right, the sound of hammering muted through the car windows. Kate pressed her own brakes, which responded beautifully. “See”-I pointed to the impression the front of the truck had made in the soil-“that’s where I steered the truck into the ditch.”
“Good thing you managed to get off the road,” Kate answered. “You could easily have been up to sixty or seventy by the time you got to the bottom of the hill, and that would have made it tough to turn the car. You might have smashed right into the gates down at the bottom.”
“Or Melissa’s face on that ostentatious billboard.” That might have had a certain kind of poetic justice, actually. Almost satisfying, if I hadn’t been dead by then. “She was here, you know. Along with Ray Stenham and some of the workers. They were actually pretty nice. Ray had the truck towed to Cortino’s while Melissa drove me out to Becklea. Of course she took the opportunity to tell me how happy she is that Derek and I are together, since he was just devastated after she dumped him.”
“Right,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. I glanced at her.
“It did take him rather a long time to get involved with someone else-me-after Melissa.”
“Well, can you blame him? If I’d spent five years with her, I’d want some peace and quiet, too. Wouldn’t you?”
She steered the car around the curve at the bottom of the hill, easily skirting the gates and the billboard of Melissa.
“I guess,” I said. Kate shot me a look.
“You have nothing to worry about, Avery. Derek is over Melissa. He was over Melissa long before they divorced. If you don’t believe me, ask Jill.”
“Jill who? Cortino? Peter’s wife?”
She nodded.
“How would she know?”
The Volvo whizzed past Primrose Drive on the way to Barnham. “Derek and Jill were high school sweet-hearts,” Kate said. “Until he left for medical school and met Melissa.”
The invisible lightbulb above my head flickered on. “So that’s where I’ve seen her before.”
“Excuse me?”
“I thought she looked familiar. I saw her picture in the newspaper archives yesterday. With Derek. Prom picture.”
Kate nodded. “While Derek went away and hooked up with Melissa, Jill studied bookkeeping at Barnham. She never did marry anyone, and I guess everyone thought she was still carrying a torch for him. Until Peter Cortino came to town.”
“When was that?”
Kate thought back. “Must be about five years ago now. Or six. Right before Melissa and Derek split up.”
“About the same time you and Shannon moved here?”
She nodded. “I didn’t know any of them at the time, except for Melissa, but Derek told me what happened later. He and Jill used to hang out sometimes while Melissa was busy showing properties. She didn’t seem to see Jill as any kind of threat, so she didn’t mind the two of them spending time together.”
“Does Melissa see anyone as a threat?”
Kate grinned. “Now that you mention it, probably not. She didn’t mind Derek hanging out with Jill, anyway. Not that anything happened between them; Jill’s too nice to try to seduce someone else’s husband, even when the marriage is as rocky as Derek’s and Melissa’s was. Although people were whispering, of course. Derek and Melissa were on the skids, and Jill was getting into position, biding her time until he was free.”
“Of course.” People are always whispering, aren’t they? “Then what?”
“Then Peter Cortino moved to town and opened Cortino’s Auto Repair.”
“And Jill took one look at him and fell?”
Kate smiled. “You’ve seen him, right? Of course she did. Along with all the other single women in town. And a few of the married ones, as well.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Melissa?”
“She wasn’t above flirting a bit. But Peter’s too decent to poach on someone else’s turf, and Melissa was working her magic on Ray Stenham by then, anyway. Peter’s just an auto mechanic, after all. Nobody important. Melissa wanted money and status. That’s why she married Derek in the first place.”
“And why she divorced him when he decided he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor,” I nodded. “I know. So what happened?”
“Melissa kicked Derek out and started seeing Ray instead. Peter could have his pick of women and surprised everyone when he chose Jill. Not that she isn’t wonderful; she’s just not…”
“Pretty,” I said when she hesitated.