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

  “Shot? You mean he was murdered?”

  “Could have been an accident,” Mills once again asserted.

  “Not if someone didn’t report it. You remember that case in Jacksonville a few years back? The kid was tried for second-degree murder because he left the man wounded and crying for help.”

  Mills raised an admiring smile at both Alma’s memory and her understanding of the legal system. Smiled, that is, until he recalled that her knowledge stemmed from personal loss. “He sure was.”

  “And, despite all the guns out there, fatal hunting accidents don’t happen as often as you’d think. So either way, this is gonna wind up as a murder investigation,” Alma announced and then folded her arms across her chest triumphantly. “So you still gonna claim you’re looking into an accident?”

  “Nope. I’m gonna ask you all to leave.”

  “Leave? But this is our home,” Stella argued.

  “You can come back once we do what we need to do. Until then, you’ll have to stay elsewhere.”

  “But Weston was shot outside, by the well,” Nick spoke up. “Why do we have to leave the house?”

  “Weston’s body might have been found out in your yard, but we don’t know for certain he was shot there. That open back door gave Weston, or his shooter, full run of the place. Heck, if it was premeditated, the shooter could have been waiting in your kitchen. Now look,” Mills’s face softened. “I know you folks are eager to move into your new home, but I can’t let you trample over potential evidence. I promise we’ll try to wrap things up quick. Until then, Alma can help you find a motel—”

  “Motel?” Alma interrupted. “Why, Charlie Mills, it’s nearly Columbus Day—you know the whole state’s overrun with leaf-peeping flatlanders!”

  “Flatlanders?” Stella asked.

  “Oh, all the people who come here from New York and New Jersey and Connecticut and think they own the place.”

  Stella flashed Nick a worried glance.

  Alma drew a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I am sorry! I didn’t mean the two of you! I mean the folks who come up here and block up the roads with their SUVs, expect traffic to wait for them when they walk into the middle of the road, and pollute the place with noise and trash. By the end of the season, you’ll be sick of ’em too. My point was that inn and motel rooms are as scarce as hen’s teeth right now. But don’t you two worry; I can put you up, at least until deer season starts.”

  “I thought it already had.”

  “No, that’s bow and arrow deer season,” Mills explained. “Alma’s talking about deer rifle season, which is the second week of November.”

  Stella couldn’t envision shooting deer with anything other than a camera, but she kept her opinions to herself. “It’s very sweet of you to put us up at your place, Alma. Thank you so much. I promise we won’t inconvenience you for long. As soon as we can get a room elsewhere, we’ll be out of your hair. Right, Nick?”

  “Absolutely. Once the flatlanders are finished decimating the town, we’ll check into whatever decent motel is still standing. Unless, of course, we’re able to move in here by then.”

  “Oh, you’re not gonna be in my hair at all,” Alma said pleasantly. “Our place is barely big enough for me and my brother, Raymond. No way I could fit another person in it, let alone two. But Raymond has a hunting camp just a few miles from here. It’s just one room, and it’s not winterized, but it’s not so cold at night that you two can’t manage. What do you say?”

  Stella and Nick once again exchanged worried glances before replying in unison, “Hunting camp?”

  Chapter

  4

  DECIDING THAT IT was easier to leave the moving truck at the farmhouse than to attempt to steer it through the woods surrounding the hunting camp, Nick and Stella retrieved their suitcases from the truck’s cab, flung them into the back of Alma’s black Ford F-150 pickup, and followed her back through town in the Smart car.

  Lined with a mix of two-story brick storefronts and white clapboard buildings, Teignmouth’s Main Street was the quintessential New England thoroughfare. Marble sidewalks and granite curbs provided pedestrians with a safe path between the many shops and eateries. A center median separating the two lanes of traffic had been planted with rows of yellow and rust chrysanthemums.

  Indeed, Teignmouth could easily stand in for the setting of one of Norman Rockwell’s famous paintings. Stand in, that is, if the sparkling white sidewalks and the newly paved road weren’t awash with rain, swarms of tourists, and close to one hundred idling automobiles.

  The brake lights on the F-150 glowed red in the gathering twilight as Alma slowed behind the long queue of cars that clogged Main Street, all of which bore license plates from places other than Vermont. She thrust her head out of the driver’s-side window and motioned to the Buckleys to do the same.

  Nick rolled down his window.

  “See what I mean? Two weeks every October. Two weeks! And Sheriff Mills thought you’d get a hotel room. Ha!” she shouted before pulling her head back inside the cab of the truck.

  Nick closed his window and wiped the raindrops from his face. “She’s right. This is like midtown during rush hour.”

  “Or any day the president is in town.”

  “Gridlock for the president, I understand,” Nick complained. “But these people are here to look at leaves.”

  “I don’t understand it either. The traffic wasn’t this bad when we drove through this afternoon.”

  “Probably because it wasn’t raining then. And it wasn’t supper time.”

  “Ah, yes. Feeding time at the zoo,” Stella noted sarcastically.

  The two vehicles traveled at a snail’s pace through the bumper-to-bumper traffic before finally turning onto a side road that led to a dark, empty section of Route 4. After driving fifteen miles, they turned left onto a narrow dirt road that cut across the nearly thirty acres of pristine woodlands that surrounded Raymond Johnson’s hunting camp.

  During daylight hours, the scene was undoubtedly breathtaking, but without the sun’s glow or even a street lamp to illuminate their brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges, the local sugar maples, yellow birches, ashes, and elms blurred together, forming an inky black canopy against the starless evening sky.

  “Where the heck is this place?” an eager Stella asked from the passenger seat. “It feels like we’ve been driving forever.”

  “It’s a hunting camp, honey. You’re not going to find it alongside a strip mall,” Nick explained as his knees banged and scraped against the dashboard with every twist and bump in the road.

  Nick seldom drove their car. Whereas Stella’s job sometimes required her to travel to museums in the outlying boroughs, Nick’s position at the US Forest Service’s New York City Urban Field Station had been a short subway ride from his and Stella’s Murray Hill apartment building. And, while most of Stella’s friends had married and settled in the suburbs, Nick’s buddies either lived locally or just over the bridge in New Jersey.

  The decision to purchase an automobile was therefore entirely Stella’s, and the moment she spotted the bright yellow coupe, she fell in love. Fuel-efficient, easy to park on crowded city streets, yet youthful and trendy in appearance, she thought it the ideal vehicle for an urban couple in their mid to late thirties. Nick, on the other hand, was left wanting more—of everything. Likening the experience to piloting an airplane from a coach seat, Nick was never comfortable driving the Fortwo. Indeed, even its bright yellow color had spurred him to dub the car “the pee-mobile.” Yet, for the sake of marital harmony, he agreed to the purchase and silently suffered through taking Stella on the odd shopping trip or visit to his mother-in-law’s.

  However, when Nick’s friends, upon seeing their buddy wedged behind the tiny two-spoke steering wheel, dubbed him Magilla Gorilla, Nick declared to his wife that although he was still available to drive the Fortwo when needed, he fully intended on purchasing a manlier automobile just as soon as their finances would allow.

>   “Looks like we’re here,” he announced as he threw the transmission into park and immediately stretched out his arms.

  The high beams of both the truck and car shone brightly upon a single-story house with a front porch. Clad with unfinished wooden planking, the weathered gray exterior of the structure was punctuated in the front by a solid door and two mismatched windows. In the rear of the building stood a small shed, and in the front yard area sat three Adirondack chairs and a wooden table with two metal spikes that stuck up from either end.

  “This is camp?” Stella questioned. “I expected to see tents.”

  “Seriously?” Nick looked at her and shook his head.

  “Why not? When my friends used to go camping, they brought tents and sleeping bags.”

  “This is a hunting camp, not a Boy Scout jamboree. The guys who use this place aren’t making s’mores.”

  “Whatever,” Stella shrugged. “It’s a pleasant surprise, at least. An actual house instead of a big tent. And look, there’s even a picnic table. Now that it’s stopped raining, we might be able to drink our coffee out there in the morning. We’d have to be careful where we put our cups, but still …”

  “Those spikes are there because that’s not a picnic table, it’s a skinning table.”

  “A skinning table? What’s—” Stella was about to ask what a skinning table was when its purpose suddenly became clear. “Oh! That would explain why there are no benches with it, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it kinda would.” Nick exited the driver’s-side door and, flashlight in hand, helped Stella out of the passenger side before leading the way to the front door, where Alma stood waiting.

  “Here we are,” she declared as she opened the front door. “Hunter’s paradise!”

  “I can’t see anything,” Stella stated. “Where’s the light switch?”

  By the dim light of her flashlight, Alma managed to find her way inside. “This is our light switch,” she stated as she ignited a red cigarette lighter. Placing her flashlight on a nearby surface, she held the lighter beneath a dangling white object and reached into the darkness with the other.

  Within moments, the white object glowed with a light similar to that of a standard 60-watt bulb.

  Nick recognized the source immediately. “Gas lamps, huh?”

  “Of course. Can’t get electricity out here.”

  As Alma lit the rest of the gas lamps, the remainder of the room became visible. Approximately eleven feet wide and seventeen feet deep, the cabin was rustic in every sense of the word. Sheets of particle board bearing traces of dirt, blood, and other unidentifiable substances served as flooring, while the ceilings—if they could be called that—consisted only of bare rafters naked of both plasterboard and insulation.

  A corner of the back wall had been fitted with one white hanging cupboard, one knotty pine base cabinet with sink, a two-burner stove, and a large metal cooler to serve as a makeshift cooking area. Meanwhile, the front portion of the space was furnished as a living room, replete with a duct-tape-plastered avocado green recliner, a collapsible snack tray that subbed for an end table, and a threadbare sofa upholstered in a bicentennial-era “Spirit of ’76”-themed fabric.

  Stella felt as though she had stepped into the basement on That ’70s Show, but she remained positive and gracious. Given the current lodging situation, she was glad to have a roof—even if it were uninsulated—over her head. “Quite cozy. Where’s the bedroom?”

  “You’re standing in it,” Alma replied with a nod at the sofa. “That there’s a pull-out bed. Don’t know if there’s sheets on it, but I have some blankets in my truck.”

  “We brought our blankets too,” Nick quickly interjected, “so we should be fine. Right, honey?”

  “Absolutely. All I really want right now is to eat those sandwiches you fixed, have a hot shower—”

  “Oh, there’s no shower,” Alma corrected. “The only water out here is from a gravity-fed spring. Ice cold and hard enough to turn your blond hair bright green. If you want to get cleaned up, stop by my shop in the morning. I’ll give you the key to my doublewide.”

  “Your what?”

  “My doublewide trailer. Raymond and I are both out of the house by six, so there’ll be no fighting for the bathroom,” she explained with a smile.

  “A shower would be terrific. Thank you, Alma.”

  “Yeah, thanks for your help,” Nick added. “I don’t know where we would have gone if you hadn’t stepped in.”

  “Ain’t nothing,” Alma dismissed with a wave of her hand. “Now if you’d just grab your suitcases outta my truck, I’ll get going and let you folks rest up.”

  Stella and Nick followed Alma to her truck, retrieved their suitcases, and after a few words of parting, went back inside the camp.

  “Well, this isn’t quite where I expected to end our day,” Stella sighed.

  Nick set the flashlight on the snack table and instantly burst into laughter.

  “What? Why are you laughing?”

  “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think you’d wind up sleeping in a hunting camp.”

  “Believe me, I had no intention of proving you wrong. But you know what? I can make do for one night. Sometimes it’s good to step outside your comfort zone.”

  “Uh-huh. And after the one night?”

  “I’m a smart woman. I’ll figure out all this wilderness stuff.”

  “I’m sure you will.” He laughed even harder. “Even though you thought we’d be sleeping in a tent and singing campfire songs.”

  “I did not! Well, okay, maybe I did expect a tent, but not a Girl Scout sort of thing. I imagined something closer to what you’d see at an archeological dig or a nature photo shoot, not,” she began to chuckle, “my grandma’s rec room in cabin form. Seriously, everything in here dates to the Ford administration.”

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” Nick said and flopped onto the couch, his hands behind his head. “My parents had a sofa like this when I was growing up. Used to bring girls back to the house to watch TV and, you know …”

  “Yeah, I know.” Stella rolled her eyes.

  “I tell you, between my brother and me, that sofa saw a lot of action.”

  “I’m sure it did. Maybe not as much action as you told people”—Nick glared at her—“but I’m sure it had its fair share. Just don’t expect to re-create any of those make-out sessions tonight—at least not until you throw a few blankets over that thing.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe. Nothing puts a damper on the mood like discovering a corpse.”

  “Ugh. Don’t remind me.” She shivered and picked up the flashlight from the snack table.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The outhouse. I haven’t gone since the closing.”

  “Want me to go with you?”

  “No, I can manage on my own.”

  “Are you sure? It’s pretty dark out there.”

  “I have the flashlight, and, aside from the outhouse, I know where everything is.” She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt tightly over her head and set off through the front door.

  It didn’t take long, however, before the sounds of the wind, rustling leaves, snapping twigs, and unseen woodland creatures left Stella wishing she had taken Nick up on his offer. She paused and deliberated turning back, but the knowledge that her sudden reappearance would be met with Nick’s mocking laughter urged her forward.

  Sticking close to the perimeter of the house, Stella followed the length of the side exterior wall until she was a few yards away from the outhouse. Her flashlight trained upon the door of the structure, she stepped carefully through the tall grass until she reached her destination. With tentative fingers, she turned the rusty latch.

  What awaited Stella inside the outhouse was, to her urban sensibility, more horrifying than anything she might have encountered during the walk from the cabin. With no lights, no sink, and no modern fixtures, the single-room building consisted only of a small ventilation window
located near the roofline and, along the far wall, an enclosed wooden bench into which had been cut a large round hole. Beside the hole sat a roll of toilet paper.

  Stella scanned the bench area with her flashlight in hopes of discovering a handle, chain, or some other device by which to flush the wooden toilet. Upon finding none, she sighed heavily. Well, when in Rome, she thought to herself.

  Putting her flashlight down on the bench, she began to undo the top button of her jeans only to look up and see a large white eyeball with a dark brown center staring through the window.

  Stella reared backward and bumped into the bench, causing both flashlight and toilet paper to topple into the dark abyss of the latrine. Screaming at the top of her lungs, she lunged for the door, her fingers fumbling frantically for the latch. Before she could locate it, the door suddenly swung inward, hitting Stella in the face and sending her careening to the floor.

  Now silent, Stella looked up to find Nick standing in the doorway, holding a kerosene camping lantern. “Oh, Nick,” she exclaimed as she sprung to her feet. “It was a peeping Tom! He was looking in the window.”

  “A peeping Tom in the middle of thirty acres of forest?”

  “But it was!”

  “He must have been about seven feet tall to be able to look in that window.”

  “I-I-I don’t know, but I saw him! He looked right at me.”

  “Yeah, I saw him too. It was a buck.”

  “Who? What? His name is Buck?”

  Nick laughed. “No, a buck as in a male deer. I came out to make sure you were okay, and I spotted him looking into the outhouse.”

  “Whew,” she cried in relief. “Well, the good news is, I don’t need to go to the bathroom anymore. The bad news? I need to put on another pair of underwear.”

  Nick grinned and shook his head in disbelief. “Go grab your flashlight, and we’ll go back inside.”

  Stella nodded in agreement and turned around to grab the flashlight off the bench. “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to the hole in the bench, which was now glowing eerily from inside.

  “How did you—? Aw, never mind. Good thing I brought this along.” He held the lantern aloft.