Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (5 page)

Just like before … “Kids playing a joke, most likely,” she told Ellie, more annoyed than concerned.

When she first came to Maine ten years earlier, a telephoned death threat would’ve unnerved her. But nowadays she reserved her anxiety for true emergencies.

Such as, for instance, the fact that it was nearly winter and despite earnest promises from a succession of remodeling contractors, her old house still had no insulation in it. So she was doing it herself, a decision she dearly hoped would not end up making her wish the death threat were carried out.

She was only putting about a gazillion cubic feet of fire-retardant-treated cellulose into the old walls, though, so what could go wrong?

Nothing, she reassured herself. The whole thing would be a snap. But Ellie still didn’t seem quite convinced.

“Are you sure we should try this?” she asked Jake again when they had climbed the two full flights of stairs up to the third story of the old dwelling.

Most of this floor had been turned into a large, modern studio apartment a few months earlier. But a big, south-facing section was still Jake’s carpentry workroom: a place to glaze antique windows, strip off layers of paint, and sand sections of old hand-carved woodwork laid out on milk crates.

“I don’t see why not,” said Jake. Much earlier that day, as dawn was breaking, the delivery truck had arrived and the big, bright room with its tall, bare windows and whitewashed walls had been filled by the delivery men with as many blue-plastic-covered bales of insulation material as could be stuffed into it.

Hoping yet again that she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew, or at least not without breaking a tooth, she added, “People do it, we’re people, therefore …”

Also in the room were a forty-foot orange heavy-duty extension cord, a circular saw that in a pinch could’ve been used to anchor a barge, an iron pry bar, dust masks, and two plastic shower caps. A leak in one of the insulation bales had spewed a small volcano of impossibly fluffy-looking gray cellulose onto the floor.

“How’s Bella doing?” Ellie asked, poking one of the bales experimentally and watching it spring back.

“Okay, I guess.” Since the housekeeper’s recent marriage to Jake’s father, her relationship with Jake had gotten awkward, or so Jake felt. “We don’t quarrel, if that’s what you mean.”

They never had. The trouble was, now Jake didn’t think it was enough. At her insistence the third-floor studio apartment had been put in for the newlyweds; Jake thought that alone must signal to Bella her happiness at her father’s choice.

But Bella had gone on behaving after the wedding just as before: kindly, even affectionately, yet with the faintest touch of distant formality. And surely, sooner or later, a person’s stepmother should begin treating a person more as a daughter and less as an employer?

“She’ll warm up,” Ellie predicted, but Jake barely heard her as she looked around again at the room full of stuff. It was a lot of equipment, as befitted the installation of a lot of insulation, yet something was missing. A big something, an important—

“Oh, what an idiot I am.” Standing at the window, she peered to the yard below, put a hand to her head in dismay.

Three stories down on the lawn stood an air compressor. Positioned on a wooden pallet, the compressor was for blowing the insulation material into the space between interior and exterior walls. About the size of the cab on a standard pickup truck, it had been delivered early that morning while she was still getting dressed.

And by the time she’d raced downstairs to ask them to move the machine upstairs, the delivery men had gone. Then the dogs,
Monday the black Labrador and Prill the red Doberman, had begun dancing urgently around, indicating that they needed to go out.

So she’d taken them, even though it wasn’t her job, being careful not to let them cross over into the precious rosebushes. She’d brought the animals in and fed them—not her job, either—and then the death threat had come in.

And in her annoyance over all these things, she had forgotten about the compressor. “Dumb, dumb …”

“What?” asked Ellie, but Jake was too vexed to answer. Even from this high above it, she could see that the machine the men had delivered featured a large metal intake hopper on one side and seventy-five feet of wide-bore, black corrugated plastic hose on the other.

A hose with a plastic nozzle on it, just as required. The trouble was, the compressor was way down
there
, but the insulation bales that needed to go into the hopper were all up
here
.

“Hmm,” she commented thoughtfully, which made Ellie look cautious.

“Jake,” said the pretty redhead in a warning tone born of experience.

Jake wasn’t listening. The hose was plenty long enough to reach up here; she could still stick its nozzled business end into the third-floor walls to fill them with heat-saving material just as she’d planned, no problem at all.

But she was pretty sure she couldn’t throw a bale out the window and hit the hopper with it, even if she could figure a way to get the plastic to come off the bale as it descended.

She could throw one out the window and
not
hit the hopper, though, and a bale of what was basically shredded paper couldn’t do too much more than bounce at the bottom, could it?

Surely not. And then while she ran the hose, Ellie could just go down there and put the dropped insulation bale where it belonged, into the compressor’s maw.

“Jake,” Ellie said even more warningly, but Jake just waved her off, experimentally hefting a bale.

It was a foot square, three feet long, and surprisingly heavy. Solid as a brick, too, in its blue plastic wrapper, almost pressurized-feeling, as if the contents were trying hard to burst out at her.

Downstairs, the phone began ringing. Jake ignored it as, with the bale in her arms, she staggered over to the window and raised the sash with her elbow, and gave the bale a shove.

“Wow,” said Ellie as the bale toppled out.

They watched it fall. As Jake had expected, it missed the hopper, dropping straight down to hit the ground just a foot or so away from the compressor.

But it didn’t bounce. Instead, with a short, sharp
pop
that sounded like big trouble—and was—the insulation bale exploded.

Gray stuff spewed up from the burst blue plastic wrapper as if shot out of a cannon. An aerosol of pale gray insulation flew up past the third-floor window and just kept on going.

Jake felt her mouth drop open in awe as the stuff spread out over the neighbors’ lawns, wherever it wasn’t blocked by treetops. Where it was blocked, it snagged in the high branches and began fluttering in the breeze.

Fortunately, none of it landed on the rosebushes next door, because they were already burlap-wrapped. And that, as far as Jake could tell, was the only fortunate thing about the entire event.

“You know,” Ellie said thoughtfully, “maybe that wasn’t a good idea.”

“Right,” Jake said, as below, a familiar shape came around the corner of the house.

Thickly covered with a truly enormous amount of fluffy gray stuff, the shape strongly resembled the Abominable Snowman. Then, slowly, it looked up and saw them.

Jake recognized the figure. Under all the abominableness, it was
her father, and despite his usual unflappable good nature, he did not look happy.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“No kidding,” said Ellie.

But then that phone started ringing again.

JAKE HAD A HUSBAND, A FATHER, A GROWN SON, AND A
stepmother who was also her housekeeper living with her in the big old house on Key Street.

But, as often happened, when she wanted one of them, nobody was around.

Racing down the two flights of stairs from the third floor, she noticed in passing that her son Sam’s bedroom door was wide open and that his bed was neatly made. Like the dogs’ anxiety to go out earlier and their not having been fed, this was unusual.

Sam, who was doing this year’s autumn college semester here at home, was ordinarily very responsible about his animal chores and casual about his bed-making ones. But in her hurry she didn’t pause to wonder about it.

That phone …

She took the last few steps at a leap, sprinted into the telephone alcove between the dining room and the kitchen, and glanced at the caller ID.
Undisclosed
.

Answering, she spoke fiercely. “Stop calling me. Do you hear me? You stop calling here, I mean it, or I’m going to … What? Say that again, please?”

Bella Diamond peered in, her grape-green eyes inquisitive. Tall and rawboned with henna-dyed hair skinned back tightly into a rubber band, she smoothed her hands over the front of her white bib apron, then returned to her morning’s task of cleaning the kitchen even though it was already so spotless that in a pinch, organ transplant
surgery could have been done in it. Bella was the teensiest bit devoted to household hygiene, if by that one meant obsessed.

“Sorry,” Jake said distractedly into the phone, “but I was expecting …”

A death-threat caller
.

“You are … Who did you say?” she asked, still perplexed. “And who did you say you wanted to—”

The caller pronounced his name again; the light dawned. “Oh, Chip Hahn! Of course I—”

Outside the dining room window, the Abominable Snowman had lost most of his fluffiness. He looked like Jake’s father again, a lean, clean old man in faded overalls and a red flannel shirt, his stringy gray ponytail fastened back with a leather thong. But he still didn’t look happy.

“Of course I remember you, Chip,” said Jake. “But you’re where? The police station? Here?”

She listened some more. Not much that came out of the phone sounded sensible, though. Mostly she understood that someone had gone missing; the rest was panicked babbling.

“Chip? Listen, you just stay there and I’ll come and … No. No, I’m not hanging up on you, I’m just … Stop. No. Chip, listen to me, now, I—”

She took a deep breath. “Chipper—Will. You. Shut. Up?”

So he did. And then she did hang up.

BELLA DIAMOND WATCHED JAKE AND ELLIE HURRY OUT OF
the house, then lifted a large wooden box down from a pantry shelf. Her own feelings of pleasure at the younger women’s liveliness mingled with regret that she could no longer share in it.

Or so it seemed. She had celebrated her sixtieth birthday a few months earlier, not that sixty was old, especially nowadays. But with
age and experience had come caution, and now she worried that caution might be hardening into timidity.

Lately she feared heights, spiders, snakes, even the pilot light on the gas stove. And darkness—especially that. Going down into the cellar after nightfall had become a trial, because the string used to pull the light on was located several paces from the foot of the cellar stairs.

Paces that had to be taken blind, with no idea what horror might be reaching stealthily out of the darkness at her …

Bella shuddered just thinking about it, at the same time as she made scornful fun of the thought. She was turning into a scaredy-cat, an idea she would have pooh-poohed vigorously only a few years ago.

Still, right now there was work to be done. Turning to it with relief, she peered into the box, where a whole pollock, split and cleaned, lay in a bed of rock salt. Its preparation, at which Bella was an expert, was a legacy from early Eastport, at a time when refrigeration was unknown and ice a luxury.

Once the large white-fleshed fish had absorbed all the salt it could—Bella knew just by looking at it when it was right—it would be hung out on the clothesline with two clothespins, to dry until it had a texture somewhere between leather and cardboard, at which point it could be stored for the winter.

Later it would be used to make dried-fish dinner, with boiled potatoes and fried pork scraps. Bella smiled, anticipating this; her new husband, Jacob Tiptree, liked hearty fare, plain cooking, and plenty of it.

She hadn’t yet tried serving him what the old guard in Eastport still called huff-and-puff—potatoes and turnips mashed together with bacon fat—but sooner or later she was going to get her nerve up, she resolved, and do it. But that notion brought her thoughts around to her own cowardice, and to Jacobia again.

She closed the lid on the fish box and returned it to the pantry,
wondering why she had always felt so comfortable with Jacobia before, but not anymore. Something about being a stepmother had thrown her off, Bella decided.

Of the two jobs, being a housekeeper was easier. And being a mother-in-law
and
a stepmother … well.

She just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. Returning to the big old-fashioned kitchen with its high, bare windows, pine wainscoting, and scuffed hardwood floor, she reflexively touched one of the small gold hoop earrings she wore.

Anne Dodd had given them to her as a birthday present, long ago. And Anne, who had been Bella’s oldest friend in the world, would know what to do.

How to reach out to Jacobia, to signal a willingness to try—what? Anne would know.

But Anne Dodd was dead now and would not be offering any more opinions on anything. Fingering the earring sadly, Bella reminded herself to get safety catches for these, her most treasured possessions.

Well, aside from her wedding ring, of course. She’d been wearing the earrings for six weeks, ever since Anne’s body was found, and they hadn’t fallen out or gotten lost yet.

That didn’t mean they couldn’t, though. In fact, Bella had her hand on the phone to call the jewelry store in Bangor and ask about safety guards for the earrings, whether she could just go in and pick a pair or if there were other considerations.

But just then Jacob came inside with a few lingering fluffs of insulation material still clinging to him, and in her haste to remedy that situation she put the telephone down and forgot about it.

Although not about her own decision, that in the personal courage area—especially as it had to do with her new stepdaughter, Jacobia—she was going to have to try to do better.