Well-Offed in Vermont: A Pret’ Near Perfect Mystery Read online

  “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about Vermont’s reputation for illegal substances. But you know, honey, it’s been nearly twenty years since you graduated college. Aren’t you past that experimental age?”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “Oh?” She sipped her champagne artlessly. “What did you have in mind?”

  The half-empty beer bottle made a dull clunk as Nick set it down on the hardwood floor. Reaching his arms around Stella’s narrow waist, he pulled her close to him and kissed her, nearly sending the contents of her glass spilling onto her sweatshirt.

  “Ah, I give you a buzz, do I?” She set her champagne glass beside Nick’s beer bottle.

  “As if you need to ask. Now give me a kiss or I’ll put you back in that fireman’s carry and spank you.”

  “Promises, promises,” she teased before complying with her husband’s command.

  Nick returned the kiss and then some. Removing her sweatshirt hungrily, he eased Stella back onto the air mattress and let his lips travel slowly from her mouth and to her chin, then down the length of her neck.

  “I love you,” she stated breathlessly.

  He sat up, pulled his shirt over his head, and flung it on the floor. “I love you too,” he whispered as he leaned in for another kiss.

  Just then, there was the sound of a distant knock.

  Stella hoisted herself up on her elbows. “What was that?”

  “Probably just the house settling,” Nick dismissed, his focus concentrated upon the task of seducing his wife.

  She sat motionless and waited for the noise to repeat itself, all the while trying to ignore her husband’s fingertips as they travelled beneath her fitted black T-shirt, circled her navel, and then headed north.

  After a few silent and increasingly unbearable moments had elapsed, Stella felt safe in succumbing to her husband’s charms. Without a word, she sat up and removed her black cotton shirt, revealing a black lace brassiere.

  “Pretty fancy moving gear.”

  “A girl has to be prepared for every possible situation.”

  “Oh, you’re definitely prepared.” Nick gazed admiringly at his wife’s ample bosom. “Makes me think I should thank you for that too.”

  Stella leaned back on the mattress. “For the lace bra or for being prepared?”

  “For what’s in the lace bra—and for being full of surprises.” He lay down beside her and brushed her hair away from her neck. However, before he could place his lips there, the knocking sound returned, this time with greater force.

  Nick bolted upright. “Okay, so I was wrong—that wasn’t the house settling earlier.”

  “So much for no one dropping by. Bet you’re glad I put that blanket up now.” Stella sat up and searched for her T-shirt.

  “No, no,” Nick waved his hand. “Don’t get dressed. Stay exactly as you are. I’ll get rid of them and then be right back.”

  He pulled his shirt over his head and strode down the hallway and into the farmhouse kitchen. Through the back door window, he could see a woman huddled beneath the shelter of the back porch roof. Tall, thickset, and in her mid-fifties, she wore a pair of faded jeans and a Vermont T-shirt topped by an oversized corduroy shirt, and her crown of gray-flecked, dark curly hair was in dire need of a trim.

  Nick opened the unlocked door, his face a question.

  “Maggie Lawson. Live in the farmhouse out on the main road.” Without so much as a smile, she thrust a plastic-wrapped plate of toothpick-studded chocolate cupcakes at him. “Thought I’d bring these to ya and say hello. You Graham Buckley?”

  Nonplussed, he took the plate in his left hand and shook her hand with his right. “Uh, yeah. You can—you can call me Nick, though. Um … how did you know my name?”

  “Clyde down at the store told me.” The identity of this Clyde or the location of said store was unknown to Nick, but Maggie apparently did not find it necessary to elaborate. Instead, she peered nosily over his shoulder. “Where’s your wife? Sarah, is it?”

  “Stella,” he corrected. “She’s, um, she’s lying down. It’s been a rough few days, as you can imagine.”

  “Can’t say I can. Lived here my whole life; never moved. Wouldn’t know where to begin if I did.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much how we felt too. A little … a little overwhelmed …” In response to Maggie’s blank stare, Nick’s voice trailed off, and he smoothed the back of his short-cropped hair. “I’d—um—I’d show you around, but I don’t want to wake my wife. She’s a light sleeper. But maybe another day you can come over for coffee?”

  Maggie’s round face registered neither enthusiasm nor disapproval. “Yup,” she replied blandly before turning on the heel of a pink perforated rubber garden shoe and heading toward the back steps.

  “Thanks for the cupcakes,” Nick added as she left.

  “Yup.”

  The rain had intensified and was now accompanied by a stiff wind. Fearful that Maggie’s terse responses were brought about by perceived rudeness, Nick called after her. “Hey, do you want a ride home? It’s coming down pretty heavy.”

  “Nope. Gonna get wet putting the cows in the barn anyhow.” She raised a hand in what was most likely a farewell but might have passed as a demand for silence.

  “Yeah, I guess you will … won’t you?” he replied, but it was too late. She had already disappeared around the front of the house.

  Plate still in hand, Nick shut the back door and returned to the living room where Stella, having stripped to her underwear, sat by the fire sipping champagne.

  “Who was that?” she asked as he entered the room.

  “Our new neighbor, Maggie. She brought us these,” he said and handed her the plate.

  “That was nice of her. Mmm, chocolate,” Stella lifted the plastic and sniffed. “But I thought our nearest neighbor lives over a half mile away.”

  Nick plopped onto the air mattress and picked up his beer bottle. “She does,” he confirmed before taking a swig.

  “Oh. That’s odd. I didn’t hear her car pull away.”

  “She didn’t have one. She walked.”

  “She walked a half mile in the pouring rain?” Stella asked incredulously.

  Nick answered in Maggie-fashion: “Yup.”

  “You’re joking.” Stella deposited the plate of cupcakes on the floor and rushed to the window. Taking care to remain covered, she peered from behind the blanket and watched as the figure of Maggie Lawson wended its way down the puddle-laden driveway. “She’s soaked through. Didn’t you offer her a ride home?”

  “I did, but she wouldn’t take it.”

  “Well, now I feel bad about not meeting her. Did she seem disappointed?”

  Nick shrugged. “Hard to tell.”

  “Hmm. What did you tell her I was doing, anyway?”

  He grinned. “That you were lying here half-naked, waiting for me to make wild, passionate love to you.”

  Stella gasped and ran from the window. “You did not!”

  “I did. Now get over here and make sure I didn’t tell that poor soaking-wet woman a lie.”

  She approached the air mattress, but as she did so, she noted a gummy substance on her hands. “That plate must have had some icing on the bottom of it. My hands are all sticky. I’ll be right back.”

  “Hurry,” Nick instructed as she ran out of the living room, down the hallway, and into the small lavatory off the kitchen.

  She switched on the hot-water tap and waited as the long-dormant pipes sputtered, rattled, and hissed back to life before issuing forth a steady stream of cloudy red water. Stella allowed the tap to run for several seconds in an attempt to flush any impurities from the plumbing system; however, every fresh drop of water seemed just as murky as the first.

  “Nick,” she called. “Nick, there’s something in our water.”

  “Did you let it run?”

  “Yes, but it’s getting worse.”

  “That can’t be,” he called from the living room. “The
home inspector had it tested—everything checked out okay. The well guy was just here to put in a new pump. He probably didn’t let it run long enough afterward.”

  “I don’t care how long he let the water run, there’s still something in it that shouldn’t be there,” Stella insisted. “Come see for yourself.”

  Nick sighed noisily and rose from his spot on the air mattress. “Stella, it’s an old house. There’s probably rust in the pipes that got shaken loose by the increase in water pressure. If you’d just let it run—”

  “It’s not rust, Nick,” she interrupted, her voice rising in alarm.

  “What do you mean, it’s not rust?”

  “I mean it’s not rust. Look!”

  Nick stuck his head in the bathroom door and immediately saw the cause of his wife’s concern. The water, albeit clear in spots, was darkened by swirls of a viscous crimson substance. “You’re right. That’s not rust. It looks like—”

  “Blood,” Stella boldly completed the sentence. “It looks like blood.”

  Chapter

  2

  WINDSOR COUNTY SHERIFF Charlie Mills was a quiet man with quiet habits. Living in a small house on a dead-end road just outside of town, he shunned the modern-day “necessities” of satellite radio and cable television and, although dogs were de rigueur amongst his hunting buddies, Mills opted instead to share his quarters with Roscoe and Rufus, a pair of orange tomcats who, aside from being self-cleaning and self-exercising, also boasted the inability to bark.

  Calm and steady, but with enough personal quirks to enable him to communicate with the area’s more fringe inhabitants, Mills was precisely the sort of man one would call upon to resolve a dispute or to take charge during an emergency. Off the job, his slow, deliberate mannerisms made him the ideal fishing and hunting companion, and his taciturn nature made him a favorite audience for the loudmouths and braggarts who gathered at the local bar.

  Mills’s understated personality had gone far in helping him win the friendship and respect of every person in town, with the exclusion of one. And she was the only human being in all of Vermont that Mills actually wanted to impress.

  Alma Johnson, Miss Maple Syrup of 1973 and Queen of the Prom for the graduating class of 1974, had been the object of Charlie’s affection since he had first laid eyes on her in the cloakroom of Miss Betsy’s morning preschool class. Blue-eyed, raven-haired, and with a wit sharper than the best deer-cleaning knife, Alma would eventually grow to possess an hourglass figure that would have made Raquel Welch go green with envy.

  To state that Alma Johnson could have had her pick of any man in Windsor County and several towns beyond was no exaggeration. It therefore came as a great surprise to her Vermont neighbors when Alma, at the tender age of eighteen, eloped to Keene, New Hampshire, with Russell “Rusty” Deville.

  Ten years Alma’s senior, Rusty Deville was a junk dealer who talked big, drank big, and did very little except to chase down car wrecks and attractive women. It was during one of his frequent cross-border auto-part scavenges that Rusty first encountered a bikini-clad Alma bathing at the local swimming hole with her high-school friends.

  Like countless men before him, Rusty was instantly taken with the dark-haired beauty. But the why and wherefore behind Alma’s decision to even speak to Rusty, let alone fall in love with and marry him, to this day had yet to be explained. Some townsfolk theorized that Alma, in her youth and innocence, had simply fallen victim to Rusty’s smooth-talking salesman ways. Others speculated that Alma, fresh out of school and with no prospects for college, saw Rusty as a way to get out of town and escape her abusive father.

  Whatever her motive, Alma married Rusty just six weeks after their swimming-hole meeting, and she bore him a son one year later. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, Russell James Deville Jr. possessed both his mother’s wit and good looks. However, he also inherited his father’s tendencies toward laziness, drunkenness, lechery, and dishonesty.

  Upon completing high school on the five-year plan, a drunken Rusty Jr. celebrated at a friend’s graduation party, where he proceeded to try to force his attentions on his host’s girlfriend. The girl in question managed to extricate herself from the situation before it escalated into rape and fled, shaking and bruised, to her boyfriend, who by this time was also very drunk. Before she could finish her story, the boyfriend pulled his father’s hunting rifle from the living room gun case and shot Rusty right in the heart. Rusty died five days later, and his friend, despite feeling great remorse and regret, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

  With the death of her son, Alma lost any reason to continue with pretense. Her marriage, as well as any of the original feelings behind it, had faded long before Rusty Jr.’s untimely demise. So, precisely a week after burying her only child, Alma packed up her belongings, moved into a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Keene, and filed for divorce.

  In the years that followed, Alma lived a solitary existence. Swearing off the dating scene, she bought an African gray parrot for company and spent her weekends watching movies and baking cookies and cupcakes for the children in her apartment building. During the week, she worked any job she could find that didn’t require a college degree. But as she approached her fiftieth birthday and saw her youth and her employability waning, she knew that she had better come up with a better plan, and fast.

  With the attainment of a university-level education financially out of reach, Alma decided to pursue a career doing the thing she loved most: baking. Expanding her repertoire of cookies and cakes to include breads, pies, and pastries, she quickly discovered that not only did she enjoy working with flour, sugar, eggs, and yeast, but she seemed to possess a natural talent for it.

  The universe must have agreed, for several months into her great baking experiment, Alma received word from her brother, Raymond, that Grandma’s Donut Hole, their hometown coffee shop, was closing after thirty years of business. Seizing a chance to start life anew, Alma moved back home and, with Raymond’s help, converted Grandma’s into Alma’s Sweet Shop.

  Using the freshest ingredients from local farms, Alma’s menu featured muffins, scones, cakes, breads, tarts, pies, quiches, and, of course, coffee and doughnuts from Grandma’s original recipe. The business was an immediate success. Six mornings a week—Alma’s was closed on Sundays—one could find its retro chrome-trimmed counter lined with everyone from truckers and construction workers to schoolchildren and senior citizens. However, one occupant of its red upholstered swivel stools remained constant.

  From the moment that Alma’s Sweet Shop had opened its doors for business and for every morning afterward, Sheriff Charlie Mills had been the first customer of the day. Waking in the wee hours of the morning and driving fifteen miles out of his way in all sorts of weather, Charlie ensured that, Monday through Saturday, he was outside Alma’s door the moment she unlocked the deadbolt and flipped the Closed sign to Open.

  Although the painted lettering on the Sweet Shop door designated seven am as the official start of business, there had been occasions when Alma, knowing that Mills would be waiting in knee-deep snow or the subzero winds of a Vermont winter, had unlocked the door prior to his arrival and greeted him with his usual: two strawberry-filled doughnuts and a cup of coffee with cream and sugar.

  It wasn’t befitting of a law enforcement officer to look forward to hazardous weather, but Mills relished those inclement mornings alone with Alma. There in the shop with the front door sign still turned to Closed, they would sip coffee, listen to the school-closing announcements, and reminisce about the snow days of old.

  In the three years since she had returned to town, those early snowy mornings were the most intimate moments Mills had ever shared with Alma, yet they had done little to establish a true relationship between the two. For when the snow had stopped and the sun returned and the crowds lined up at the Sweet Shop door, Mills’s presence once again elicited nothing more from Alma than a smile, a nod, and a quick thank you.

  Acutely aware tha
t his early morning doughnut routine had produced little aside from an expanding waistline, Mills purposely parked his patrol car at the end of the Buckley’s driveway, adjusted the plastic on his wide-brimmed hat, turned up the collar on his state-issued rain slicker, and, despite the driving rain, began a brisk walk toward the old farmhouse.

  Red-cheeked and winded, he arrived at the side yard of the house and brushed past the fresh-faced officer who, with a tangle of windblown yellow tape, was trying to cordon off the property. “What have we got, Lou?” Mills asked of the non-uniformed man who stood beside the Buckleys’ early 1900s well.

  Louis Byron, Windsor County coroner, pulled the hood of his green Carhartt rain jacket over his gray head and pushed the bridge of his glasses farther up on his nose. “Allen Weston.”

  “The owner of Weston Wells and Pumps?”

  “Yup, and Weston Waste Removal and Speedy Septic Service.” Byron led Mills to a gurney upon which lay a black body bag.

  “Yup, doing okay for himself.”

  “He was.” Byron unzipped the bag to reveal the contorted body of Allen Weston. Clad in a red flannel shirt stained with both blood and mud, the eyes and mouth of the dark-haired, bearded man remained open in a lifeless expression of surprise.

  “Snapped his neck?” Mills asked.

  Byron shook his head. “Shot in the chest—three times, as far as I can see, but I’ll tell you more when I get him back to the lab.”

  “Guess we can rule out suicide, then.”

  “Yup. Unless you reckon it likely that he drove out here, shot himself, and threw the gun away before he fell down the well.”

  “Drove,” Mills repeated under his breath. He scanned the area for a sign of Weston’s vehicle but found none. “I don’t see a truck anywhere. Was there one when you got here?”

  “Nope. If he had one on the property, it wouldn’t leave tracks. Been too dry.”