Corpse in a Crate Read online

  “Too long,” he agreed. “The will was all tied up. My Uncle George passed away seven years ago, while I was in graduate school. He left the house to me, which was generous—to say the least.” Then, he sighed. “However, for some reason I’ll never understand, he left the land itself to my cousin Kevin.”

  “Ouch,” I winced.

  “Yeah. Kevin kicked and screamed, to put it mildly. For years. It was pretty ugly, but my lawyers worked it out with his lawyers.” He shrugged, a smile taking over for his troubled expression. “Anyway, here we are. I’ve had a vision for this property ever since I heard it had been left to me, and it’s grown over the years of waiting.” He clapped his hands once, briskly. “You wanna see the plans? I have them inside.” Just like that, he was a kid on Christmas morning.

  “Sure!” Raina trailed behind him, looking just as eager as Nate did. I had to wonder what the situation was between them. When she’d told me about this place and her friend, that was how she’d described him. A friend. Somebody she’d grown up near, their fathers having been friends and business associates for years. Just like so many other people whose social circle had existed adjacent to hers, occasionally leaking through.

  The evidence before me, meanwhile, spoke of something a little deeper.

  “This is where the reception desk will be, of course.” Nate waved his arms around what would eventually be a beautiful greeting area. Windows lined two walls and flooded the room with light. There was a grand staircase at the far end of the room which extended up to a landing, where it split off to the right and left.

  Over the landing was a massive stained-glass window depicting a scene that brought the actual farm to mind. Flowering trees, a brook winding through fields of deep green. The sun rose, turning the sky pink and gold.

  I stared up at the window, transfixed, imagining what it would look like with the sun shining through.

  Nate noticed, chuckling. “That’s an actual Tiffany window,” he confided.

  “Wow,” I breathed, shaking my head. “To think, nobody’s lived here for years. There was nobody to enjoy it.”

  He grinned. “You get it. I like you. That’s honestly why I didn’t want this place to go to my cousin, as long as I’m being honest.” He took me by the arm, scooting me to the side as a pair of men wearing hard hats carried ancient furniture down from the upper floors.

  “Why? You don’t think he’d appreciate it?” I asked.

  “Exactly.” His dark eyes crinkled at the corners when they narrowed. “He has all the soul of a rock. He either would’ve torn the house down and sold the land or built a multiplex. Whatever would’ve made him the most money.”

  Raina snickered at my side. “Like you’re planning on running a charity here.”

  “That’s not the same,” he argued, good-natured. “People will come here to enjoy the beauty and feed their souls. I’d much rather that were the case than some soulless salute to capitalism. I think my uncle felt the same way, which is why he left me the house.”

  I wanted to ask how he managed to secure the rights to the land but bit my tongue. It was all so interesting, and so completely outside the realm of anything I was familiar with. My sister and I once fought over a doll, pulling it between us until the head separated from the neck.

  That was the extent of my history with fighting over property.

  He led us to the study off the front room, where a set of plans was spread over an old desk. Along with it were sets of artist renderings depicting the finished product.

  “This is gorgeous,” Raina murmured, her eyes shining as she looked over one drawing, then another. “You’re going to be the next new thing. The go-to getaway location.”

  “Fingers crossed,” Nate chuckled. “So long as we stay on schedule around here. It seems like there’s always something, you know? The chimney needs to be replaced, full-stop, along with the roof. There was a family of raccoons living in the carriage house, which we intend to turn into two larger rental spaces—one on the ground floor, one above. That was a fun day, evicting them.”

  “It’ll be worth it in the end,” I assured him, looking down at the renderings again.

  “Can we take a look at the upstairs?” Raina asked, already halfway out of the room.

  “Sure,” he agreed, leading us around a trio of workmen and up the stairs. It was like something out of Gone With The Wind. I could practically picture myself in a hoopskirt and petticoats, sweeping up the stairs like a romantic heroine.

  And then I tripped over a loose plank and the fantasy came to a crashing halt. At least I managed to recover quickly, with nobody noticing. Raina was too busy chatting with Nate and making eyes at him. How could she have forgotten to tell me she had a huge, goofy crush on this guy?

  “We’ll have fifteen rooms total, including the carriage house,” Nate explained, nodding toward one of the rooms in question. The door was open, revealing a man in the process of pulling ancient carpet from the floor. “The rest will be for the staff staying on-premises. That seemed like a manageable number. Some of these rooms will be expanded, the walls between them knocked down to create larger spaces.”

  “Mr. Patterson?” somebody called out, waving at Nate from the other end of the hall. “We’re gonna start emptying the attic, if that’s all right.”

  “Please, do,” Nate replied with a thumbs up before adding out of the corner of his mouth, “If we value our lives, we’d better get downstairs. I’m not sure I want to see half of what comes out of there. I’m still suffering flashbacks from the raccoon family.”

  The three of us were turning away, ready to go downstairs, when a shout cut through the rest of the banging and general commotion. The sort of shout that meant either somebody had gotten hurt or a family of something bigger than raccoons had set up house in the attic.

  Nate jogged down the hall to the ladder leading up to the third floor. “What’s happening?” he called up.

  One of the men climbed halfway down and muttered something to him. Something that made his tanned face go grey.

  “I wonder what happened?” I whispered to Raina, who shook her head.

  “I don’t know, but he looks like he just found out somebody died,” she whispered back. “It can’t be good, no matter what it is.”

  Nate was rubbing the back of his neck when he joined us. “Uh, we’d better get out of here,” he announced, looking around. “The police will probably need room to move around.”

  “The police?” I gaped, feeling sick.

  He only nodded, distracted, while the workers got their things together and hauled it out of there. “Yes. Uh. It seems somebody died and ended up in my attic.”

  Chapter Three

  “I’m telling you. I have no idea how the body ended up in the attic. I didn’t know it was there until the workers found it in that trunk.” Nate looked from one detective to the other, helpless. “That’s the truth. I swear it.”

  The detectives exchanged a look I’d seen before on the face of other cops. It had been just over a month since I got involved with the Riviera Resort murder case, in which James Flynn was killed by the wife of an old friend of mine. Joe Sullivan, the detective on that case, had looked at me more than once with that skeptical expression all over his annoyingly handsome face.

  The female detective, an attractive young woman in a fitted pantsuit, cleared her throat. “The house has belonged to you for the last seven years, Mr. Patterson. You mean to tell us you owned the property for all this time, but had no idea there was a body rotting beneath the roof?”

  “I didn’t live here,” he sighed, looking up from his seat on the front steps. “The house was mine, but the land was willed to my cousin. I’m sure you could find all of this out if you go down to the hall of records.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” the older, male detective said with a snicker. He reminded me of my dad, if my dad was shorter and rounder and openly sarcastic toward the people he questioned. Granted, I had never witnessed Dad while h
e was in the middle of questioning a person of interest, but I had the feeling he showed a little more professionalism than that.

  “Just because there was a body up there doesn’t mean Nate had anything to do with it.” Raina stood with her arms folded, just next to where Nate sat. She was his watchdog, no question. Just like she’d been with me after the murder at the resort, where I’d made the stupid mistake of touching the murder weapon when it just happened to be sticking out of a dead man’s chest.

  “And you are?” the lady detective asked, looking her up and down. She might’ve wanted to discount anything coming from Raina’s mouth once she took in the designer jeans, the Birkin bag over one arm, the diamond earrings. I could tell from the smirk she wore that she didn’t want to take my friend seriously.

  Which would be a mistake on her part, because Raina was about as smart as they came.

  “An old friend, visiting to see how the renovations are coming along,” Raina replied, her smirk mirroring the detective’s. “Raina Delancey. And this is Emma Harmon, from Cape Hope, New Jersey.” I wiggled my fingers in a wave, content to be in the background of a situation for once.

  I’d had more than enough of questioning from detectives. I could happily go the rest of my life without being questioned again.

  “I’m Detective Wallace,” the older cop replied, “and this is Detective Clark. And needless to say, this is gonna be a big story. George Patterson was one of the wealthiest men in the state, and there’s been a buzz over this farm being turned into a tourist trap by his nephew.”

  “Not a tourist trap,” Nate snapped. “A bed and breakfast.”

  “Just the same,” Wallace replied with a grim smile. “There’s been a lot of attention lately, ever since the renovations started.”

  “Are you trying to imply something?” Nate asked. “Because I can’t for the life of me understand what anything you’ve said so far has to do with the body my workers found in the attic.”

  “I understand you had a rather public fight with a member of your family in town earlier this week,” Detective Clark said as she reviewed scribblings on a notepad. “One of our officers happened to be in the area and said it got pretty heated. What was that all about?”

  Raina and I exchanged a worried glance. That didn’t sound good.

  Nate looked at the ground between his feet. “A family matter. Private, in other words.”

  “You’re a man whose attic held a dead body until just about twenty minutes ago,” Detective Clark muttered as she scratched out another note, probably something about how reluctant Nate was to answer questions. I wanted to tell him he wasn’t helping anything by answering that way.

  If anybody knew about that, it was me.

  “Are you implying that I killed the person whose body was in the attic just because I had a public argument with a member of my family?” Nate snorted. “If that were the way life went, you’d have to inspect a lot of attics. I would imagine there isn’t an attic anywhere that doesn’t hold a body or two.”

  He made a good point, but that didn’t seem to impress either of the two detectives. In fact, they seemed fairly disgusted with him. Why was that? Did they think it would be easier to get information from somebody if they looked at him with open contempt?

  Or did it go deeper than that? Was Nate not the sweet, happy-go-lucky guy he’d seemed when I met him? Raina had called him an old friend, sure, but she’d never mentioned him in the years since we were roommates in college. People could change over time. Maybe these cops knew something about him that we didn’t know.

  There I went, making up stories and getting myself emotionally tangled up in matters that had nothing to do with me. Was this how my mother felt all the time?

  “I hope you weren’t in any sort of hurry to get this place open,” Detective Wallace sighed, looking up at the house.

  “Why do you say that?” Nate asked.

  “Because this is a crime scene now. Any work that was going on here is going to have to wait for a while, until we have an idea of just why that body was in the attic and how it got there.”

  “To say nothing of whose body it turns out to be,” Detective Clark added. “To say nothing of anything else we might find inside.”

  Raina had clearly had enough. “Just wait one second. Here you are, speaking to my friend like you believe he’s guilty of a crime. He’s already told you everything he knows, yet that doesn’t seem to be enough.”

  Nate’s concerns, on the other hand, were more concrete. “I can’t afford to postpone,” he announced, standing. “I’ve already sunk more money than I’d planned to on the first phase of renovations. We’re on a tight schedule. I wanted to have this place open by Fourth of July, at the latest. In fact, I already have interest from several parties regarding reservations for that weekend.”

  Detective Wallace could clearly not have cared less. He shrugged, removing his glasses so he could wipe them on his pinstriped tie. “That falls under the category of not our problem, Mr. Patterson,” he shrugged. “But it might inspire you to be a little more forthcoming with anything you know about the identity of who was in that attic.”

  “I’m telling you, I have no idea! I haven’t lived here. The house and the land it sits on have been the subject of a bitter lawsuit—and while we’re on the topic, it was the result of that lawsuit which led to the argument between my cousin and myself in town on Monday afternoon.”

  Detective Clark’s mouth widened in a smile. “That’s more like it. So it was Kevin Patterson you fought with on Monday outside the sandwich shop.”

  Nate shrugged, no longer seeing the use of being discreet. Meanwhile, I felt embarrassed just being there. Here I was, a perfect stranger, listening to private details of Nate’s family life. But Raina drove, and Raina might as well have grown roots. No way was she leaving until somebody forced her to.

  “Yes. It was my cousin, Kevin. He started it, by the way. I realize that sounds immature, but it’s the truth. I had stopped in town for something to eat for lunch, since the kitchen here isn’t working yet, and he found me as I was on my way out the door with a bag of sandwiches in hand. He called me a thief in the middle of the sidewalk, in the middle of the afternoon. Dozens of people heard him. He set out to cause a scene, and he most definitely got the attention he desired.”

  “Most definitely,” Wallace agreed, folding his arms over a slightly paunchy belly. “Seeing as how we heard word of it days ago. I understand he threatened to hit you.”

  Nate nodded, rolling his eyes. “Kevin is twice my age and around fifty pounds past his prime. Believe me, I hardly felt it was a threat. I got the sense that he was trying to lure me into hitting him, actually. I wasn’t about to take the bait. I’m not a hothead like he is.”

  “It’s pretty easy to be magnanimous when you’re the one who won the lawsuit,” Detective Clark observed with raised brows. “Are you sure that didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  “So what if it did?” Nate asked, his brow furrowing deeply when he frowned. “Either way, I’m not the one who started the argument, and I’m not the one who threatened to throw a punch. That was my cousin. If you want to hear anything else about it, you’ll have to go to him.”

  “You might not have thrown a punch, but you did have a few things to say, didn’t you?” Detective Wallace grinned. “Come on, Mr. Patterson. You can play the role of the innocent peacemaker all you want, but the fact is you told your cousin to go to hell and threatened him with legal action if he didn’t leave you and this project alone. Isn’t that so?”

  Nate threw his hands into the air, and I was roughly halfway toward doing that myself. It seemed like this dynamic duo was determined to get him to crack. “What am I supposed to do? Stand there and take it? Do you realize that he threatened to get in the way of this project? And here we are. You just told me renovations will have to hold off, and our timeline will have to be pushed back. Doesn’t that seem like interference to you?”

  “Ar
e you suggesting your cousin planted a dead body in the attic to make you look guilty?” Detective Clark deadpanned. “Tell me that isn’t what you’re trying to allege.”

  “What if it is? Kevin’s always been a little bit off his nut, anybody can tell you that. He’s lived just outside town his entire life. Why not speak to some of the people he does business with on a regular basis? Better yet, why don’t you question him yourself? The house didn’t belong to him, but the land did up until six weeks ago. I’m sure he could’ve found his way into the house at some point.”

  “Now you’re calling your cousin the murderer?” Detective Wallace asked. “Thank you for the information, Mr. Patterson, but we’ll do the detective work ourselves. For now, this is an active crime scene, and we don’t want anybody coming in or out.”

  Detective Clark, meanwhile, turned her attention to Raina and me. I found myself standing a little straighter, a little taller, and made sure to meet her gaze without fidgeting or flinching back. I knew the whole good cop/bad cop routine. Though for life of me, I couldn’t figure out which of the two of them was the good cop and which was the other one.

  Either way, it wouldn’t do any good to look guilty or shifty in front of them.

  “You were here when the body was discovered?” she asked, looking me up and down.

  “That’s right,” I replied. All things considered, I was proud of myself. I hadn’t asked any inappropriate questions, I had kept my curiosity to myself, I hadn’t jumped in and tried to defend Nate. Maybe my time with the Paradise City Police Department had taught me a few lessons, after all.

  Detective Joe would be so proud.

  “And is this your first visit to the property?” she asked.

  “It is. We were just stopping by to take a look around before going to our hotel,” I explained, while Raina was busy worrying over Nate.

  “Maybe the two of you shouldn’t go far for the next few days, in case we have additional questions relating to anything you witnessed today.” Detective Wallace nodded to his partner, and the two of them looked ready to head into the house. Forensics teams were having a field day in there, it seemed.