Wreck The Halls: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery - Sarah Graves - Hardcover

Chapter 1 Blood was everywhere, so much of it that at first Ellie and I didn't realize what it was or understand what we'd walked into. Before us lay Faye Anne Carmody's familiar Eastport kitchen, the woodstove at one end faced by a bentwood rocker and a small cushioned footstool, the table at the center with four painted wooden chairs pulled squarely up to it, and at the other end the sink with a few clean glasses upended on the drainboard. Tucked into one corner was a white, ornately framed metal daybed with a heap of quilts on it, a common item of furniture in an old Maine island home. A door led to the butcher shop that Faye Anne's husband, Merle Carmody, owned and operated in the ell of the house. The door was secured with a slide bolt near the doorknob and with two big hook and eyes screwed into the door frame. "Jake," Ellie said, nearly whispering it. "I know." So much blood ... "Go next door, Ellie, will you? And call Bob Arnold and tell him " Bob was the police chief in Eastport, Maine, and the man to call when you happened unexpectedly on a thing like this. Whatever this was. "Faye Anne? Merle?" No reply. The blood had begun to dry, darkening in sludgy droplets like paint. The smell of it hung in the air along with something else I did not yet want to identify. It was just past nine on a Monday morning in early December. Ellie and I had knocked and walked in; in Eastport three hours from Bangor and light-years from anywhere else you locked your house up only if you went to Florida for the winter. But now ... "Tell Bob something bad has happened and we need him right away," I said, but by then she had gone; when something bad does happen, Ellie is generally on her way to take care of it long before I've even absorbed it. So I was alone. "Faye Anne?" I said again, not expecting anyone to answer. A sad, drowning sensation of comprehension was beginning to replace the shock I'd felt when we first entered; Faye Anne was dead and her husband, Merle, must have killed her. Everyone always said he would and now it had happened. Said it, I mean, the way people do say such things: shaking their heads. Sympathizing with Faye Anne. Wishing she would leave Merle, even making offers designed to save her pride while ending the chronic parade of black eyes, split lips, bruised arms, and other injuries that Faye Anne blamed, utterly unconvincingly, on her own clumsiness. I myself had pressed the card of the local women's shelter, printed with the 800 number and their slogan, "Domestic Violence Is Everyone's Business," into her unwilling hand. But none of us had ever really expected to walk into a kitchen painted in her blood. No one ever does, I guess. Faye Anne, I thought damn it, I should have just gotten her out of there when I had the chance Faye Anne was probably the only one who had really expected it. Ellie's voice came from the hall. "He's coming. I called Bob from Kenty Dalrymple's." Kenty lived next door to Merle and Faye Anne, and I had not much doubt that Kenty was on the phone right now, telling all and sundry of the excitement going on over at the Carmody house. If a pin dropped in Eastport, Kenty heard it. And reported on it. But pretty soon the whole state of Maine would know what had gone on here; Kenty, whose own life offered little in the way of excitement, might as well have the ghoulish thrill. Ellie came up behind me. "He says stay right here, don't do anything or touch anything," she said, and I heard the irony in her voice, minGraves, Sarah is the author of 'Wreck The Halls: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery - Sarah Graves - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780553802283 and ISBN 0553802283.