Do-It-Yourself - Spackled And Spooked Part 26

"You two all right?"

Derek nodded, dabbing at his bottom lip with a paper napkin he had unearthed from inside the van.

"I'm fine," I said. "He didn't touch me. Didn't even know I was here until I hit him with the shovel."

"A pity you didn't hit a little harder," Derek said, contemplating the bloodstained napkin.

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather not have his death on my conscience. I'm not sorry I hit him. I'd do it again, but I'm glad I didn't kill him."

"He'll pay," Wayne promised. "He'll spend a long time in prison. And this way, maybe we can get some answers from him before we lock him up."

"I wouldn't mind asking him a few questions," Derek muttered, his free hand curled into a fist, the knuckles abraded. I took his arm, and after a moment, his muscles relaxed and he smiled sheepishly down at me.

"Sorry. Thanks for rescuing me, Avery."

"Anytime." I linked my fingers through his.

We all turned to where Lionel was sitting, still on the damp ground with his back against the wheel of his van.

He was conscious now and scowling at us as we approached, his boyish face set in a snarl. "I should have killed you when I had the chance," he told me.

I put my hands on my hips. "And when exactly did you have the chance to kill me?"

Lionel grinned. "I spent some time outside your house a couple of days ago, looking in. Nice pajamas."

"Yuck," I said. So that's who had been outside that night I'd been on the phone with my mom. Not the neighbors' Weimaraner at all. I should have thought of Lionel as soon as Derek explained that the doohickey I'd found was something electricians use, but of course that was a clue that had gone right over my head.

Derek lowered his head and looked ready to charge, but Wayne moved an un.o.btrusive step left to stand between them.

"I should warn you," he said, clearing his throat, "that you do have the right to remain silent and that anything you say can be used against you in a court of law . . ."

Lionel listened to the Miranda warning, then shrugged. "I don't figure it matters much now," he said. "What do you want to know?"

The three of us looked at each other. I don't know about the others, but personally, I was too full of questions to have an easy time isolating just one.

"That a grave you've been digging?" Wayne said eventually, nodding to the dark rectangle in the ground a ways away. "What were you planning to do with it?"

Lionel didn't respond. Since the answer was self-evident, Wayne continued, "Were you planning to bury Brandon alive? Or were you gonna kill him first?"

Lionel shrugged again. For indicating that he was willing to answer questions, he wasn't being very forthcoming.

"Was Holly alive when you buried her, too?" I shot in. Lionel turned his attention on me, his eyes suddenly burning in his freckled face.

"I would never do that to Holly! I loved her!"

"Strange way of showing it," Derek muttered.

I nodded. "Why did you kill her, then? If you loved her?"

"I didn't mean to!" His voice rose to a register it probably hadn't reached since before p.u.b.erty. "She was leaving. Waterfield. Me. Everyone. She'd asked Brandon to go with her, but he'd said no. Didn't want to leave his mommy." He said it with a sneer, as if Brandon's decision to stay in Waterfield with his sick mother instead of going to law school somewhere else, somehow made him a mama's boy rather than a devoted son. And this from a guy who was also still living with his own mother.

"So you offered to go instead?" Wayne asked, trying to inject some calm into the conversation. "To California? And Holly said no?"

"She laughed at me." Lionel's cheeks darkened with spots of color. "She said she was going to Hollywood to be a star, to be discovered, and she couldn't have someone like me along, always watching what she did."

"So you killed her."

His voice rose. "I told you, it was an accident! I tried to make her change her mind. She turned to leave, and I grabbed her. All I wanted to do was make her stop and listen. But she wouldn't. I had to make her."

"So you hit her?" Wayne asked.

"I had to stop her," Lionel repeated stubbornly. "I had to make her listen. We could have gone together. I wouldn't have stood in her way. I could have helped her. I could have gotten a job and supported her. But she wouldn't listen. She laughed at me, and then she tried to push me away. So I grabbed her throat, and when she kicked me, I hit her head against the corner of the stove."

"What were you doing inside the Murphy house in the first place?" I asked. Lionel turned to me.

"It was private. And I had a key. From when the Murphys lived there. They had a key to our house, and we had one to theirs."

"So you talked Holly into going to the Murphy house to talk," Wayne said, "and then you offered to drive her to California, and when she tried to leave, you grabbed her, and she hit her head and died?"

Lionel nodded.

"And then you waited until it was late and came back and buried her under the house?"

Lionel nodded. "But she was dead, I swear. She wasn't breathing at all. And there was a lot of blood." He shuddered.

"Did you realize she'd lost an earring?" I wanted to know. Lionel shook his head.

"Not then. After I'd gotten her downstairs, I saw that one was missing. I went back, but I couldn't find it."

"It fell under the fridge," I explained. "I found it a few days ago, when we took the fridge and stove out."

"What happened to the other earring?" Derek wanted to know, his voice still m.u.f.fled by the napkin. "It wasn't buried with her."

"I gave her those earrings," Lionel said, face darkening. "For Christmas."

"You took it?" Wayne guessed. Lionel shrugged as well as he could with his hands secured behind him.

"So you buried her in the crawls.p.a.ce," Wayne continued, "figuring that no one would find her, since Patrick Murphy owned the house, and he wasn't around anymore?"

Lionel nodded. "But then you two showed up," he scowled at Derek and me, "and said you were buying the house. I thought I'd get rid of you before you could find a reason to go into the crawls.p.a.ce, so I tried to scare you away. When that didn't work, I punctured the brake cables on the truck. You had told me where you lived; it wasn't hard to find. But instead of an accident the next day, the brake cables held, and you had time to find the body."

"By the time I drove off the road," I said, "Venetia Rudolph was dead, too. How did that come about?"

"You said that Venetia had told you that she had seen everyone who came and went in the house for the past twenty years. I figured she'd seen me and Holly, so she had to go."

"And that wasn't an accident at all?" Wayne's question was just for form's sake, since Lionel had clearly indicated that it wasn't. "What about Brandon Thomas?"

Lionel bit off a couple of descriptive words about Brandon and what he thought of him. Chief among the complaints seemed to be that Brandon was everything Lionel wasn't, and Lionel was jealous. Brandon had been good-looking, popular, and most likely to succeed, and he had also been Holly's boyfriend. Lionel had been short and unpopular, and Holly had laughed at his no doubt heartfelt advances. When the opportunity had presented itself to s.h.i.+ft the blame onto Brandon's broad shoulders, Lionel had grabbed it.

"You suspended him because he'd been dating Holly," he said, "so it made sense to put the bag at his house. I couldn't get inside with Brandon's mom there, but I knew about the shed. Brandon used to take Holly there sometimes." His face darkened again.

"And then you called in an anonymous tip to make sure we found it."

Lionel nodded. "I wasn't planning to do anything to him, though. I figured he couldn't prove that he didn't kill anybody-he was home with his mom those nights, and everyone would expect her to lie-so I thought I'd just let him go down. Even if he didn't get arrested, his life would be ruined."

"What happened to change your mind?" Wayne put his hands behind his back and came to parade rest; I suspected it was because he wanted to allay the temptation to throttle Lionel.

Lionel looked disgusted. "There'd been people crawling all over the house for days. When I saw you two driving away," he nodded to myself and Derek, "I figured I had an hour or so to get rid of those wires and microphones I'd used for the spooky sound effects. I didn't expect anyone else to be there."

"Where were the microphones and wires?" Derek wanted to know. "I looked."

"In the walls," Lionel said, with the barest hint of a smug smile. Derek looked chagrined; naturally he hadn't thought to actually check the wiring itself. "Behind the outlets and switches. The footsteps are in the outlet in the hallway, opposite from the bathroom, and the screams were behind the switch plate next to the front door. I had to disable the porch light, because I needed the wire to trip when you opened the door that first time."

"And that's why the front porch light didn't work," I said, "even when we put in new lightbulbs."

Derek grimaced.

"So Brandon caught you," Wayne brought the conversation back on track, "and then what?"

Brandon had caught Lionel hard at work on the switch plate just inside the front door. The two of them had had a question and answer session, rapidly degenerating into an argument about what Lionel was doing there, and then Lionel had lost it-whether from anger or fear or a mixture of both-and he had whacked Brandon on the back of the head with a wrench when Brandon brushed past him to leave the house. That must have been when Brandon's cell phone got lost in the weeds beside the stairs; at least Brandon had had it in his hand when Lionel hit him. But at that point, Lionel had too many other things to worry about to look for it. He had to get Brandon and himself out of the way before Derek and I came back, and he didn't know where we'd gone or how long we'd be. So he tied Brandon's wrists and ankles with electrical tape and wrapped him in some tarps and drop cloths we had sitting around before bringing the van around and somehow managing to get Brandon into it. Then he drove the van down to his own driveway and parked it there while he went inside. He had to eat the dinner his mom cooked, because she'd get upset if he didn't, but as soon as he could get away, he planned to take Brandon to Devon Highlands to bury him.

"They're pouring the concrete for the foundation tomorrow," he explained. "I figured n.o.body'd ever find him."

Wayne looked disgusted. "I guess you also figured we'd think he'd killed Holly and Venetia Rudolph?" he said. "And that he ran away when he realized we suspected him?"

Lionel shrugged modestly. "It seemed to make sense."

"I think I've heard enough," I said. Derek nodded.

"Me, too." Wayne reached down and hauled Lionel to his feet. "C'mon, Mr. Kenefick. In you go." He loaded Lionel into the back of the police car and turned to Derek and myself. "I'll let you know how it goes."

"Please do." I snuggled closer in to Derek and watched the police car drive away.

He looked down at me. "Home?"

"Sounds good."

"Your place or mine?"

"Are you sure you feel up for . . . you know . . . strenuous activity?"

"I feel," Derek said, pulling me closer, "like it'd be a good time for reaffirming a few things. Like the fact that we're alive."

I nodded. I could get behind that.

Epilogue.

"h.e.l.l of a night," Derek said a month later. He fell onto the sofa and stretched his long legs, in form-fitting green tights, out in front of him.

I nodded as I curled up in the chair opposite, a gla.s.s of wine in my hand. "Quite."

"Think we did OK?"

"I think so."

"Good." He leaned his head on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes.

It was Halloween night, late, and we had just closed the door behind the last of the visitors who had graced us with their presence tonight, for our Halloween party-open house to celebrate the renovated Murphy house.

There had been a lot of visitors. Some had been trick-or-treaters, carrying goody bags and looking for candy, but more had been adults: curious neighbors, wanting to see what we'd done with the place, and local ghouls, eagerly eyeing the house where so many deaths had taken place. One was even a self-professed medium, who sat down on the floor in the master bedroom, Indian style, crossing her eyes and attempting to contact any lingering spirits. She couldn't raise anyone, and I wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. If she had succeeded, I thought there was a chance she'd have wanted to buy the house-genuinely haunted houses aren't that easy to come by-but on the other hand, such a confirmation of supernatural evildoings would have made it much more difficult to sell the house to someone else.

Word had gotten out about Lionel and the ghostly effects he'd rigged to keep people away, and the general consensus was that the house had never really been haunted. At the moment, Lionel was languis.h.i.+ng in jail in Portland while he waited for his case to come to trial. The judge considered him a high flight risk and had set bail accordingly, and although Lionel's mother had tried to remortgage her house, it still hadn't been enough to keep her no-good son out of jail. Thank G.o.d. Wayne had searched Lionel's room and that second earring, the mate to the one that had gotten lost under our fridge, had been there, along with the rest of Lionel's shrine to Holly. Pictures, notes, playbills from the high school drama society . . . as well as the couple of pieces of clothing that had turned out to be missing from the pink bag. I guess maybe he didn't think anyone would realize that they were still missing. Either that, or he just couldn't bear the idea of parting with them. Also there were a few notes she had written to him over the years. The one Linda White had found in her house had originally been written to Lionel, it turned out; his attentions had begun to bother her, and she had written a note to tell him to back off. Don't call me, I'll call you. A sort of inside joke between two wan nabe actors. And Lionel had made use of it to make Linda-and everyone else-believe that Holly had left Waterfield of her own free will.

Derek and I had gone back to work on the house while we waited for the trial to begin. I had brown paper bagged the walls in the master bathroom and painted them to resemble leather. They looked great. Derek had finished installing the teak dresser sink base, which also looked fabulous with its two matching white basins and bright chrome faucet sets. To avoid having the master bath look too masculine, I'd gussied it up with some girly accessories: white soap dispenser, bottles of lotion, dainty towels, pretty, painted lampshades on the sconces flanking the mirror.

In the second bath, we'd gone basic, with white tile on the floor and around the tub. The walls were painted turquoise, suitable for both boys and girls, but we had jazzed it up by using both flat and glossy paint in stripes. It gave an interesting 3-D effect when the light hit it. And we had installed a big Fiesta dinnerware mixing bowl in lieu of a vessel sink on top of another small console table I had found in John Nickerson's antique shop. The wood finish on this one was dry and faded, enough that even Derek had to agree that painting it white would be acceptable. To finish things off, I had made a peek-a-boo shower curtain that had put a smile on Derek's face as soon as he saw it. I had bagged the daisy idea and come up with my own pattern instead, one with stylized flowers in black and turquoise on a white background. All of their centers were see-through, which made Derek chuckle. He'd tried to talk me into taking a shower almost every night we'd been here, but so far I'd managed to resist. I planned to make him his own peek-a-boo shower curtain for Christmas, though. With tools on it. Or maybe houses. And have all their windows be transparent. He'd like that.

The rest of the Murphy house looked great, too. The floors had come up nicely, polished oak throughout, and we'd painted all the walls in fresh, light colors. I had talked John Nickerson into letting me borrow some furniture and accessories from his store, and the place was staged perfectly (if I do say so myself). John had said so, too, as a matter of fact, just a couple of hours earlier, when he stopped by.

"Nice place," he'd said, looking around at the gleaming hardwoods, the fresh paint, and a framed fas.h.i.+on poster of Twiggy above the Finn Juhl-inspired sofa.

"It's not all from the sixties," I answered apologetically. "Some of it is earlier. I figured most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

"Most people are uncultured plebeians," agreed Derek with laughter in his eyes. "Hi, John."

He put out a hand. John nodded and shook. He was dressed as a vampire, with his hair slicked straight back and dyed shoe-polish black for the occasion, wearing a black suit and black cape with a stiff collar. "Nice tights," he said, with a hint of a smile. Derek grinned.

"Avery insisted."

I hadn't, but I didn't quibble about it. Dressing as Tinkerbell had been pretty much inevitable for me. I had on a little green dress and little green ballerina flats, with my hair piled on top of my head and a set of gauzy wings strapped to my back. Because it was almost November and we were in Maine, I had cheated: The dress wasn't strapless like Tink's; it had long sleeves and a sweetheart neckline, and I was wearing tights under it.

I had not, however, insisted that Derek dress as Peter Pan. Donning the green tunic and tights, with the cute little feathered hat sitting jauntily on top of his head, had been his choice. Peter's hair was a few shades closer to red, and his eyes were hazel to Derek's dreamy blue, but it wasn't a bad likeness for all that. The tights fit very nicely, too. At least I thought so, although Kate had taken one look at him earlier in the evening and been overcome with laughter.

She had been here, as had Shannon and Josh, Paige and Ricky. The latter was dressed as a sailor, in white suit and collar, while Paige and Shannon were angel and devil respectively. Paige had the droopy white dress, s.h.i.+ny halo, and wings, while Shannon was wearing a skimpy red c.o.c.ktail dress and high red heels, with two horns peeking out from under her hair. Josh, dressed as a mad scientist in white lab coat, had a hard time keeping his eyes off her. And Kate was Lady G.o.diva in a floor-length wig and flesh-colored bodysuit.

I had occasion to talk to Ricky alone for a moment, and I asked him if he'd like to have the boxes of papers we'd found in the attic. All except for the ma.n.u.script his mother had been writing; I'd taken that home before Ricky had seen it, so he didn't know it existed, and I didn't see the need for telling him. Instead, I had offered it to John Nickerson. It did concern him, after all.

"Ma.n.u.script?" he'd said when I told him about it.

"Peggy was writing a romance novel. Tied Up in Tartan . The hero's name is Iain MacNiachail."