Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

I glanced at Derek, who said politely, “The meaning of what, Miss Rudolph?”

“That… that… squealing !” She looked from one to the other of us.

“One of the cats,” Derek said, at the same time as I asked innocently, “What squealing?”

Venetia Rudolph snorted. “Bad enough that you’re carrying on inside the house all day, but do you have to do it outside, too? At night?”

“We weren’t carrying on,” I said.

“We just came back to make sure that everything’s all right,” Derek added, obviously loath to admit that we’d forgotten the cats earlier.

“And when Derek opened the door,” I finished, “we heard a scream. It was probably one of the cats.” It hadn’t sounded like one of the cats, but they made a handy excuse. I only wished we hadn’t oiled the hinges on the door, or I could have blamed it on that instead. “It wasn’t me. I swear. I don’t squeal. Ever.”

“Sometimes you squeal,” Derek said, his voice soft. I flushed and hoped the night was dark enough to hide it.

“It didn’t sound like a cat,” Venetia Rudolph said. “If you didn’t squeal, who did?”

I shrugged. “No idea. I haven’t seen anyone else around. It wasn’t you, was it?”

She sniffed. “Certainly not. And if you are going to be insulting, young lady, I’m going back to bed.” She did, her back as straight as if she’d swallowed a broom handle.

“Huh.” I turned to Derek, after the door had slammed on the house next door. “Do you think it was her?”

“Could have been.” He walked up the steps to the front porch again. “I don’t suppose you could tell where the scream came from, could you? Inside or outside?”

He was inspecting the door jamb, running his fingers over it, his nose a scant two inches from the wood in the dark.

“I’m afraid not,” I said, hugging myself. I tried to make believe it was because the night was chilly and I wasn’t dressed warmly, but I was spooked. The darkness, the wind rustling the dry leaves on the trees, and the wispy clouds skittering across the moon like ghostly fingers-it all combined with the memory of that bone-chilling scream, which hadn’t sounded like it came from anywhere in particular; it was just all around me… “Do you see anything?”

“It’s too dark,” Derek said in disgust, straightening. “We’ll have to get a new bulb tomorrow. There’s nothing obviously rigged here, and if someone set something up, to make a scream go off the next time one of us opened the door, they did a pretty good job.”

“Maybe it was a coincidence,” I suggested.

“Huh!” Derek responded darkly. He slammed the door shut and locked it, his movements crisp and annoyed. “Let’s go home. I’ll have another look in the morning. We’ll be back here all too soon.”

“You can say that again,” I muttered. “What about the cats?”

“They’ve probably found their way back to Miss Rudolph’s catnip. This way.”

He headed around the corner of the house. I followed, balancing carefully on my high heels, while I thought unkind thoughts about Jemmy and Inky.

They were right where Derek had predicted, and as soon as they recognized us, they came trotting to wind themselves around our ankles, complaining loudly about being left behind. Derek snagged Inky, while Jemmy sat down in front of me to grumble. I bent to talk to him. “I’m sorry, Jem. In all the excitement of changing and getting to Ben and Cora’s house on time, I forgot that you were here. You were probably curled up in a spot of sunlight somewhere, sleeping, weren’t you? Sorry about that. It won’t happen again. Tomorrow you can stay home.”

Jemmy spoke again, a whiny note in his voice. Maine coon cats, for all their imposing size, have rather soft, kittenish voices. I reached out and carefully stroked his head. When he didn’t object, I ran my hand down his back and under his belly, to scoop him up. He stiffened for a moment and then allowed me to tuck him under my arm and carry him away from the enticing catnip.

The bright light of morning did nothing to shed more light on the problem of the scream. Derek went over the door, the jamb, and the surrounding area with meticulous attention-if he’d been in possession of a magnifying glass, I don’t doubt he’d have whipped it out-but without finding anything that didn’t belong there. No unexplained wires, no switches, no hidden speakers. He was grumbling angrily when he gathered up his heavy-duty gloves and his rented hole digger, which looked like a giant corkscrew with a handle, and headed for the crawlspace.

I got busy in the bathroom. While we worked on Aunt Inga’s house together, the structural improvements had been Derek’s domain, while the design was mine. Naturally I’d taken a hand in tearing out or painting or spackling or anything else he let me do, and he helped implement the cosmetic touches I wanted, but since I’m the one with the design background while he’s the one with the hands-on experience, the division of labor made sense. While he crawled under the house, digging holes and pouring concrete, I got busy planning what to do with the main bathroom.

As blank canvases go, it wasn’t bad at all. When we started out, there’d been a molded plastic tub on one wall, a toilet and sink base on the other. The tub had been torn out yesterday and was currently reposing in the Dumpster, but we had left the toilet and sink intact for now. The sink base was your basic fake oak with two doors that didn’t quite meet in the middle, under a top of molded white plastic. The toilet was a toilet: also basic white, with the wood-grained seat and lid that were so popular in the ’80s. The floor had been covered by sheet vinyl, black and white, but now only the subfloor was left, and the shredded vinyl was with the tub, in the Dumpster. The floor around the toilet was rotted, and Derek would have to replace it before I could start doing any serious decorating. Still, I could take measurements and plan what I wanted to do.

I was thinking of doing something retro and funky, and I hoped to figure out a way to incorporate those Mary Quant daisies I’d thought about the other day. Gluing them, three feet tall, to the wall in the hallway might be a little too mod for most people, but I could still use them, scaled down. A house with three bedrooms would likely appeal to families with children, and this bathroom would be the kids’ bath, seeing as the master bedroom had its own attached bath with a tiled shower. So this hall bathroom was the perfect place to add some funky touches. I had visions of bubblegum pink, but I supposed I could use banana yellow or pale green instead-something that would appeal to boys as well as girls, and to older children and adults, too. The rest of the bathroom would be bland to the point of being boring: plain white tile on the floor and around the tub to go with any color we decided to paint the walls. The fixtures would also be gleaming white, with bright chrome faucets and handles, and we’d install a slender pedestal sink instead of the clunky cabinet that was there now. Or maybe one of those vessel sinks that looks like a salad bowl. If they weren’t too expensive. If they were-and I thought they might be-maybe I’d just use a salad bowl instead…

I’d been at it for maybe forty-five minutes when I noticed, almost subconsciously, that the constant humming of the hole digger had ceased. No sooner had I realized this, than the back door opened.

“Avery?” Derek’s voice called. It sounded strained. My heart jumped in my chest, and I scrambled out into the hallway.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

He was standing inside the back door, jeans and boots dirty. And he shook his head in response to my worried question, but of course he’d do that anyway, even if he had cut off a limb. It’s the manly thing to do.