A Whisker of Trouble Read online

  I parked close to the back door because we’d need to load some empty boxes and garbage bags in the back of the SUV. I’d already arranged to have a Dumpster for the garbage and a bin for everything that could be recycled delivered to Edison Hall’s house.

  It looked as though spring was going to be a busy time for us between the influx of tourists eager to get away from the city after a cold winter that had stretched all the way from the Atlantic Canadian provinces down to Virginia, and the work I was planning on the old garage. I wouldn’t have said yes to clearing out Edison Hall’s house if it hadn’t been for my grandmother. She’d known Edison’s sister, Stella, since they were, as she put it, captains of opposing Red Rover teams on the playground.

  “Please, do this for me,” Gram had asked when she called from South Carolina. She and her new husband, John, were working their way back to Maine after almost nine months of an extended honeymoon traveling around the country and working on several housing projects for the charity Home for Good. “I know what I’m asking, believe me. I was in that house a couple of years ago and it could only have gotten worse.”

  I’d pictured her shaking her head, lips pressed together.

  “I’ll call Stella,” I’d told Gram. I couldn’t say no to her, which was why both Rose and Charlotte were working for me. And how bad could Edison Hall’s old house really be? I’d reasoned. Very bad, I’d discovered. The man was a pack rat.

  I followed Rose and Elvis into the workroom at the back of the store. I could smell coffee. The morning was getting better and better. I set the bag of felted sweaters on the workbench that ran along one wall of the work space and headed into the shop. Mac had just come downstairs. He was carrying a heavy pottery mug and he held it out to me. His title, on paper at least, was store manager, but he was a lot more than that. He was my colleague, a second set of eyes and sometimes the voice of reason I needed to hear. And more and more he was the person I turned to when I needed someone to talk to. It had started the past winter when I was almost killed in my own house. It was Mac I’d called, Mac who I’d shared with how scared I’d really been. Our friendship had only deepened in the following months.

  “You read my mind,” I said, dropping my briefcase at my feet and taking the cup from him. “Thank you.”

  As good as Rose’s breakfast had been, this was one of those mornings when I needed a nudge of caffeine.

  Mac smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  This past winter the building where he had rented an apartment had been sold. So we’d renovated part of the second-floor space above the shop and now Mac had a small self-contained apartment up there and I worried a lot less about security for the store. Not to mention that most mornings the coffee was on when I arrived. It seemed to be working out well for both of us.

  Rose and her furry sidekick, Elvis, were disappearing up the steps to the second-floor staff room. I knew she’d be back in a couple of minutes with a slice of coffee cake for both Mac and me.

  Mac walked over to the cash desk where he’d set his own coffee mug. He was tall and lean and the long-sleeved gray T-shirt he wore showed off his muscles very nicely. He had light brown skin and kept his black hair cropped close to his scalp.

  I took a sip of my coffee and pushed a stray piece of hair back off my face. Usually I wore my brown shoulder-length hair down, but I’d pulled it back into a ponytail, since we were going to be working for most of the day on the old house. “I saw the boxes you left by the back door,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “There’s more under the stairs if you think we need them,” he said, walking back over to me. He studied my face. “Are you having second thoughts about taking the Hall estate on?”

  I shook my head. “No. The numbers are good. We both checked them. We’ll make a nice little profit and I think the price is reasonable as far as what Stella Hall will have to pay. The house just makes me a little sad, piled full of . . . well, boxes of junk that no one else wants.” I ducked my head over my cup and gave him a sidelong glance. “If I tell you something, do you promise not to laugh?”

  His brown eyes met mine. He put a hand over his heart. “I promise.”

  “The first time we went out to look the place over—when we were trying to decide what to charge Stella—when I got home that night I cleaned out two closets.” Mac smiled. “Just between you and me, I came back here and put two boxes of old parts in the scrap-metal recycling bin.”

  “And how much did you pick back out the next day?” I teased.

  “No comment,” he said, taking another sip from his cup.

  I laughed.

  Mac could fix just about anything. About eighteen months ago he’d left his high-powered job as a financial planner to come to Maine and sail. I had no idea what had prompted him to make such a dramatic change in his life. I’d asked him once and he’d very skillfully evaded the question.

  I hadn’t asked again.

  During the sailing season he spent every spare minute crewing for pretty much anyone who needed an extra set of hands on deck. Wooden boats were Mac’s passion. There were generally eight windjammers tied up at the North Harbor dock during the season, along with plenty of other boats, so there were lots of opportunities to get out on the water.

  I knew eventually Mac wanted to build his own boat. He worked for me because, he said, he liked the satisfaction of having something tangible to show for his efforts at the end of the day. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix, as far as I’d seen. Second Chance was successful as much from his efforts as from mine.

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt to take a few extra boxes,” I said, walking over to the front window to straighten two quilts that were hanging on a wooden rack. “According to Gram, Edison was a collector of—well, a lot of things. Maybe some of his collections will turn out to be something we can sell here or in the online store.”

  “We have some of those plastic bins out in the garage,” Mac said. “Do you want to take maybe half a dozen?”

  I nodded. Rose came down the stairs then, still trailed by Elvis. She handed me a slice of coffee cake on a blue-flowered napkin.

  I smiled. “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome.” She smiled back at me.

  Elvis looked up at me and blinked his green eyes.

  “No,” I said, breaking off a chunk of coffee cake. “Don’t think I don’t know Rose already fed you a piece.”

  The cat made a huffy sound and headed for the workroom.

  Rose handed a piece of coffee cake to Mac. “I left half of the cake for you upstairs in the blue tin,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I fixed your iron. It was just a loose connection. It’s on the workbench.”

  Rose clapped her hands together. “Aren’t you wonderful?” she exclaimed.

  Rose’s steam iron was probably as old as I was. It gave off copious amounts of steam, surrounding her in a cloud as if she were standing in a fogbank. And it was as heavy as an anvil. But she liked using it and when it had stopped blasting steam a few days ago, Mac offered to see what he could do. I wasn’t surprised he’d been able to fix it.

  “I may as well go do those last two lace tablecloths,” Rose said. “I can probably get them done before Charlotte gets here.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I think we’ll put the bigger one on that table.” I pointed to a long farmhouse kitchen table that sat about three feet from the back wall of the shop. Mac had sanded it for me and I’d whitewashed the top and painted the legs black. It had turned out even better than I’d hoped. With the lace tablecloth and several place settings of vintage china, I knew it would make customers think of happy meals shared with family and friends.

  Charlotte arrived about five minutes to nine. Her cheeks were rosy and her white hair was a little mussed.

  “Did you walk?” I asked. “I could have picked you up.”

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sp; “Yes, I did,” she said. “It was a lovely morning for a walk.” She pushed her glasses up her nose and looked down at me. Even in flats Charlotte was at least an inch taller than I was. She had perfect posture—it seemed she was incapable of slouching. And she still had the steely glare of the high school principal she’d been before she retired.

  “I’ll just go put my things upstairs and you can head out to Edison’s.” She hesitated for a moment and then reached out and gave my arm a squeeze. “Thank you for taking this on, Sarah,” she said. “I’ve been in that house.” She shook her head. “I know Stella tried to get Edison to keep the place up, but he acted like running a vacuum cleaner around would kill him. The dust bunnies have probably taken over.”

  “I have Mac and Rose and Elvis in case there’s anything with more than two legs,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Nicolas is using this against me, you know,” she said, pulling the soft cotton scarf from her neck and tucking it into the pocket of her jacket. “He says my garage is in danger of looking like Edison’s.”

  Nicolas Elliot—Nick—was Charlotte’s son, a former EMT who now worked as an investigator for the medical examiner’s office.

  “Did you suggest that maybe he should come and clean it out?” I asked. I’d known Nick since we were kids. In fact, when we were teenagers I’d had a huge crush on him. I’d seen him butt heads with his mother over the years. I’d never seen him win.

  Charlotte shrugged. “No. Although I did point out that about ninety percent of the boxes in there belong to him.” A smiled played at the corners of her mouth. “That was the last I heard about the garage.” The almost smile turned into a grin as she started for the stairs. “I’ll be right back,” she said over her shoulder.

  By quarter after nine we were on the road, with Mac riding shotgun and Rose and Elvis in the backseat. I’d been serious when I told Charlotte that I was taking the cat along to deal with anything that had more than two feet. While I believed that all living creatures had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of the animal equivalent of happiness, I didn’t really want most of the four-legged ones sharing my space while they were doing it—Elvis excluded, of course.

  Before I’d acquired Elvis, or maybe more accurately, before he’d acquired me, the cat had spent some time living on the streets around the harbor front. I wasn’t sure if that was where he’d honed his skill as a rodent wrangler, or if that particular ability came from his previous life, whatever that had been.

  Edison Hall’s house was a small white bungalow on the outskirts of town. It was usually a short trip over to Beech Hill Road, but a water main had broken on the street a few days earlier. Now it was being repaved, down to one lane for traffic. When it was our turn to go, I tried not to wince as the tires threw bits of pavement up against the undercarriage of the SUV. Elvis sneezed at the sharp smell of tar and when I looked in the rearview mirror he was making a sour face, despite Rose stroking his black fur.

  There was a single-car garage at the end of the short driveway at the Hall house. I was happy to see the Dumpster I’d ordered sitting on a patch of gravel to the left of the garage. As I backed in, I caught a glimpse of the smaller recycling bins against the long right wall of the garage, on the old stone patio by the path to the back door, exactly where I’d asked Aaron Ellison to put them.

  “Do you want to leave everything here and take another look around, maybe make a plan of attack?” Mac asked as he undid his seat belt.

  I nodded. “Remember all those wine bottles that were in the basement?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Apparently Ethan moved them up to the kitchen. Stella left me a message saying they were supposed to all be moved out yesterday, but I want to make sure.”

  I had told Stella that we didn’t have the expertise to handle her brother’s wine collection. She’d said that Edison’s son, Ethan, was planning on hiring someone to put a dollar value on the bottles so they could be sold.

  Rose had already picked up Elvis and was getting out of the SUV.

  I pulled the keys Ethan had given me out of the pocket of my jeans and climbed out as well.

  I noticed the smell the moment we stepped in the front door. Mac looked at me and frowned. “Rat?” he asked.

  I made a face. “Maybe.” It wouldn’t be the first time we’d shown up at an empty house and found a dead animal. A couple of times it had been mice, once a raccoon and once a seagull that appeared to have fallen down the chimney.

  Elvis squirmed in Rose’s arms. She looked at me and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Let him go,” I said. “It’s the fastest way to find whatever it is that crawled in here and died.”

  The cat was already making his way to the kitchen. There seemed to be a path more or less through the stacks of boxes. One thing I could say about Edison Hall: The house wasn’t dirty. Charlotte was right about there being dust bunnies everywhere, but there were no bags of garbage, no muddy footprints or bits of spilled food. The place was piled, but I had the same thought I’d had the first time I was in the house with Edison’s sister, Stella: The old man had had some kind of system for the boxes that were piled everywhere. The problem was, I had no idea what that system was.

  Elvis meowed loudly. I couldn’t see him, but from the sound he was in the vicinity of the kitchen.

  “I’ll go,” Mac said.

  I shook my head and stuffed the keys back in my pocket. “It’s okay. I’ll go.”

  The cat gave another insistent meow. “I’m coming,” I called. I made my way in the direction of the kitchen. There was a path through the boxes, although it was a bit like being in a tunnel made of cardboard.

  “I’ll get the shovel and a couple of garbage bags,” Mac said.

  The path widened at the kitchen doorway. Elvis had somehow climbed up onto a stack of cartons about shoulder height. He was looking down at the floor, but he turned his head and his focus to me as I reached the doorway.

  “Mac, forget about the shovel,” I said, raising my voice so he’d be sure to hear me.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  I hesitated and after a moment he appeared behind me.

  “What do you need?” he asked again.

  I moved sideways so he could see that the body lying on the kitchen floor didn’t belong to a mouse or a raccoon.

  “I think we need nine-one-one,” I said.

  Chapter 2

  I reached for Elvis. I didn’t need to get any closer to tell that the man lying on his side on the brown-and-gold-cushion flooring was dead. There was a dark stain on the collar of his jacket and what looked to be dried blood matted on the back of his head. I was guessing he’d been dead for hours, certainly not as long as a day. He looked to be in his early forties, dressed in a dark wool jacket and good-quality black trousers. There was a wide smudge of white on one leg of the pants and bits of black asphalt stuck to the soles of his leather shoes. A wine bottle lay on its side about a foot from the body.

  Mac and I backtracked to the living room, being careful not to touch anything.

  A half wall to the left, just inside the front door, made a bit of an entryway. Rose was waiting there, her face pale. “It’s not Stella, is it?” she asked.

  I shook my head and a bit of the color came back to her face. “It’s a man,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Maybe someone who was homeless,” she said. “Maybe he came in looking for somewhere to sleep.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Mac and I exchanged glances. The dead man was wearing what looked to me to be nice clothes and expensive shoes. I doubted he was homeless.

  We went back outside. I handed Elvis to Rose. “Would you put him in the car, please?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Mac had taken a couple of steps away from us and pulled out his phone, calli
ng 911, I guessed. Now he came back to stand beside me. “Police are on their way.”

  I sighed and rubbed one shoulder with the other hand. “Have you ever seen that man before?” I asked.

  He shook his head and put the phone back in his pocket. “Never.”

  I glanced over at the SUV. Rose and Elvis were in the back and she was feeding the cat something, probably something it would be better I didn’t know about.

  “He wasn’t homeless,” Mac said. “Those shoes he was wearing? They set him back more than a thousand dollars.”

  I didn’t ask how he knew. Instead I asked the next most obvious question. “What’s a man in thousand-dollar shoes doing in Edison Hall’s kitchen?”

  He didn’t say anything at first. “It wasn’t an accident, Sarah,” he said finally, looking over his shoulder at the house.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, thinking about the dried blood in the dead man’s hair. Mac was right. However the man had died, it wasn’t accidental.

  A patrol car, the ambulance and a dark blue car all arrived a few minutes later. I walked across the grass toward the car.

  The driver got out and gave me a half smile across the roof of the car. “Hi, Sarah, what’s going on?” she asked.

  Detective Michelle Andrews was tall and slender in jeans, a shirt the color of chocolate pudding and a tan jacket. As usual, her red hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail.

  The patrol officer was already going up the front steps.

  “Edison Hall’s sister, Stella, hired us to clean the place out,” I said as Michelle came around the car to stand next to me. “This morning was our first day.” I stopped to clear my throat. “I could . . . uh, smell something as soon as I unlocked the door. I thought it was a mouse. It was a man, dead on the kitchen floor.”

  Michelle’s green eyes narrowed, but other than that, nothing changed in her expression. “Do you recognize him?”