Mercifully, her cell phone rang. A 911 call. She listened to the dispatcher and then barked, “Bob, I’ve got to take this.” Elbowing past him, she hurried out to her cruiser.
An intruder call had come in from the Captain Chadwick House, the eighteenth-century whaling captain’s showplace that was one of the anchors of Dorset Street’s tree-lined Historic District. It was a mammoth, brick mansion with wraparound enclosed porches and four acres of rose gardens and manicured lawns. Back in the 1920s, the Captain Chadwick House had been converted into a summer hotel. Then it was the Dorset Inn for a while. These days it housed the village’s most exclusive luxury condominiums. Six very desirable units-plus an apartment over the garages for the live-in caretaker. The Farrells lived in one of the downstairs units. A New York widow named Breslauer lived across the hall from them. The other two downstairs units belonged to wealthy couples that had multiple residences around the world and spent only a few weeks out of the year in Dorset. The owner of one of the upstairs units had recently passed away. Her children were fighting over it. The other upstairs unit belonged to Bertha Peck, the indomitable eighty-eight-year-old widow who was the Heidi Klum of Dorset polite society. Bertha Peck decided who was in and who was out. No village blue blood dared to marry, divorce or sneeze without clearing it with Bertha. Bertha was rich. Bertha was powerful. Bertha was Dorset.
It was she who’d placed the intruder call. Bertha wasn’t exactly a stranger to the 911 dispatchers. Just last Tuesday she’d dialed 911 to report that her toilet was stopped up. “Ma’am, you do realize that this number’s for emergencies, don’t you?” the dispatcher had pointed out. To which Bertha had loftily replied, “Young lady, my toilet isn’t working. Allow me to assure you, that is an emergency.”
The old girl was high maintenance. Downright dotty. But as first responder, Des had to play it by the book. As she parked her cruiser out front, her eyes scanned Dorset Street for any sign of a getaway driver idling nearby. She saw no one. Got out and rushed up the path to the front door.
The entry hall of the Captain Chadwick House was elegantly wallpapered and carpeted. A chair lift had been built into the grand staircase up to the second floor. Bertha’s, from when she’d had hip-replacement surgery last year. She didn’t need to use it anymore. Got around just fine now. Played a round of golf every afternoon at the country club with three other rich widows, who together comprised an octogenerian Heathers set.
When Des arrived at the top of the stairs she found the door to Bertha’s apartment wide open. The lock did not appear to be tampered with but Des unsnapped her holster anyway. “Mrs. Peck?” she called out, rapping on the open door with her knuckles.
“Come in, Desiree!” Bertha sang out from somewhere inside of the apartment. “We’re in here, dear!”
We?
Bertha Peck’s grand-sized living room had a twenty-foot ceiling, a chandelier, wood-burning fireplace and a balcony that looked out over the rear lawn to the Lieutenant River. Her taste in decor leaned toward Victorian plush. Sofas and armchairs that looked like great big ornate pincushions. But the artworks that crowded her walls were quite modern and exotic. Bertha was a major supporter of the Dorset Art Academy and liked to display the originals she purchased at the annual student show-including one of Des’s own horrifyingly brutal pen-and-ink drawings of a murder victim. This one a battered ten-year-old girl named Honoria Freeman. Giving artistic life to the murdered souls whom she encountered on the job was Des’s passion and her salvation.
She found Bertha seated on the sofa in her den, calmly watching a rerun of Seinfeld. The episode where Jerry decides to buy his dad a new Cadillac. Bertha Peck was a dainty little thing who’d topped out at maybe five feet two back in her prime a half century ago. Now she was more like four feet eleven, and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. Her linen summer dress was trimly cut, expensive and stylish. So was her cropped, layered hair, which she dyed an unlikely jet black. The round glasses she wore were also black, the saucer-shaped eyes behind them a piercing blue. Her lips were bright red, as were the nails on her tiny hands.
“Mrs. Peck, did you place a call about an intruder?”
“I most certainly did,” Bertha responded airily. “He’s there in the corner. I’ve taken care of him myself. But I still require your assistance, I’m afraid.”
Des saw no one in the corner. Saw nothing. Frowning, she moved slowly in that direction until she reached the overstuffed chair that was parked there and saw… well, it was a small field mouse imprisoned inside of an overturned highball glass. The mouse was dead. Covered in blood.
First, Des reached for her cell phone to stop the other cruisers from rushing to the scene. Then she tipped her big Smokey hat back on her head and said, “Want to tell me what happened, Mrs. Peck?”
“I spotted him out of the corner of my eye,” Bertha informed her proudly. “He was fast, but my own reflexes have always been well above average.”
Des nudged the glass with her foot-and discovered, to her shock, that the poor creature was still moving. “He’s alive.”
“Of course he is. I’m no murderer.”
“But… he’s got blood all over him.”
“That’s not blood, dear. It’s Clamato juice. I was having a Bloody Mary at the time.”
“I see. And now you…?”
“I want him removed from my residence, if you please.”
“Of course, ma’am. Do you have a piece of cardboard I could use?”
Bertha went down the hall and returned with a shirt cardboard. Des slid it beneath the glass to secure the mouse in place, then carried it downstairs to the backyard and released it on the lawn. It ran away in a flash of red.
Maddee Farrell was out there fussing with the Captain Chadwick House’s prized, fragrant Blush Noisette rosebushes, her pewter-colored hair drawn back in a tight helmet. Summertime could be very cruel to older women, Des reflected. Even those who were tall, slender and patrician. Maddee had no doubt been willowy and lovely when she was young. Now that she was approaching seventy, Maddee’s sleeveless white blouse and pastel-yellow shorts revealed sticklike arms and legs that were mottled with liver spots. Her elbows were pointy, her throat shriveled. The poor woman looked like a famine victim. It didn’t help that she had a street beggar’s needy look on her deeply creased face. And wore too much lipstick that was such a ghastly shade of magenta.
“Why, good afternoon, Master Sergeant Mitry. Is everything okay with Bertha?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Please tell me you’ve apprehended that awful pervert.”
“I wish I could, ma’am.”
“I’m afraid to go near a window after dark. We have a ground-floor unit. I-I could be his next victim, you know.”
Des started back upstairs with the highball glass. Maddee stayed right on her tail, matching her step for step. When they reached Bertha’s apartment, Maddee went barging into the lady’s kitchen and started rummaging around.
Bertha stood in the entry hall, shaking her head. “I call her the trash Nazi, Desiree. Just watch, I guarantee you she won’t return empty handed.”
She didn’t. Maddee emerged from Bertha’s kitchen clutching an empty tonic water bottle as well as several used, gunky Ziploc freezer bags. “Bertha, you can get a nickel back on this bottle,” she clucked. “And these Ziplocs can be washed and re-used.”
“They’re all yours, dear,” Bertha said grandly. “Desiree, it might interest you to know that our Maddee has the largest privately held collection of used Ziploc bags in southern New England. What do you suppose she does with all of them?”
“And if you’re discarding any other items of clothing, please let me have them for the Nearly New shop. I found several very nice sweaters of yours out in the garbage cans yesterday.”