“No rats anymore, and it wasn’t Harvey’s fault they were in the neighborhood in the first place. Seems Brimley was just throwing every kind of trash imaginable in his backyard and calling it a compost pile. Whole colony of rats had moved in. Eastman and his daddy took care of that this last spring, and they’ve been keeping their eyes on the place ever since.”
“Is Ham Brimley the neighbor on the left or the right?”
“Right, I think. Garage side, whichever that is.”
“That would be the right side.” I glanced over at where the portly man—presumably Mr. Brimley—was back on his porch, glaring at me.
“Other side’s Mrs. Gudgeon, who could single-handedly keep the nine-one-one line afloat if the rest of the county gave up using it,” Randall said. “Keep an eye on Brimley.”
“Is he dangerous? Because I was going to leave Cordelia out here to keep Mr. Dunlop on task. If there’s any danger—”
“Just a blowhard, as far as I can see. But he could be part of the bunch who broke into Dunlop’s garage while he was in the hospital with his gallbladder and cleaned out a bunch of his stuff.”
“Mr. Dunlop mentioned that,” I said. “He thinks his relatives were also involved.”
“Wouldn’t put it past them, either. I’d keep my eye on all of them.”
“I plan to,” I said. “And I also plan to keep them out of Mr. Dunlop’s house.”
“Good,” he said.
With that we signed off. I was feeling chilled and turned to go back to my car. As I was reaching for the door handle, I heard a voice behind me—too close.
“You’re not condemning the house, are you?”
Chapter 5
I started, and turned to find that Morris Haverhill had returned.
“No, we haven’t condemned the house, Mr. Haverhill.” I refrained from explaining that Randall had done his best to assure the building inspector that if he just gave us a little more time we’d have the house up to code. “I already told you—”
I suddenly realized that this wasn’t Morris Haverhill—Morris was still sitting in his car, scowling at us. But the man in front of me was clearly a Haverhill. He wore a faded blue suit rather than a gray one, and his bow tie was navy rather than red, but apart from that I’d have had a hard time figuring out which was which if they were standing side by side.
“You told my brother.” His voice suggested that he didn’t like being mistaken for Morris. “I’m Ernest Haverhill.” He held out his hand, which proved to be as dry and bony as his brother’s.
“Sorry,” I said. “As I told your brother, we’re here to declutter the house, and then a crew will come in to fix it up. It hasn’t been condemned yet, and if we can get our work done, it won’t have to be.”
“Well, that’s not very satisfactory,” he said. “When will you know?”
Not very satisfactory? I considered and rejected several snarky replies.
“That depends on what the building inspector finds when he gets here,” I said finally. “I’m sure your cousin can keep you posted.”
“I’m sure he could, but he won’t,” Ernest said. “Just hides in his house. Won’t even answer the phone.”
He glared at me as if this was my fault. I thought of pointing out that if his cousin refused to talk to him, maybe trying to pry information out of me was a little inappropriate. But I sensed that was a subtlety that would be lost on him.
“Let’s see how it goes, shall we?” I accompanied this nonanswer with a bland smile. Realizing he wasn’t going to get any information out of me, he made a “hmph” noise, turned away, and crossed the street to get in one of the cars parked there. Not the one his brother Morris was sitting in—the one at the other end of the little line. There appeared to be a tall figure in the middle car—did they travel in threes, like the ghosts in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol? And would I soon be meeting the Haverhill yet to come?
I got into my car and dialed Mother. When her phone went to voicemail, I called Robyn Smith—who as rector of Trinity Episcopal was one of the main instigators of Helping Hands for the Holidays.
“Meg! Your mother and I were just talking about you!” she said, once we’d exchanged Christmas wishes.
“Mother’s there with you—good. I have a lot of work for both of you.”
I filled them in on our latest project and then laid out my requests: willing bodies to pack Mr. Dunlop’s stuff. Food and beverages to fuel the bodies.
“We can manage that,” Robyn said. “Your mother wants to know if she should come over to help out.”
“Good heavens, no,” I said. “If she even caught a glimpse of this place she’d probably have to take to her bed with a cold compress over her forehead. Remind her that we’re keeping our eyes out for rats and cockroaches, and encourage her to stay put and recruit volunteers.”
“Roger.”
“And see if you can get at least one volunteer who’s also a deputy,” I said. “Cousin Horace might be willing. Or Randall’s cousin Vern. Or Aida Butler.”
“That could be tough,” Robyn said. “Last I heard, the chief had two officers out—Sammy Wendell with his broken leg, and poor Bethany in California, not knowing if her mother will pull through or not.”
“Three actually,” I said. “Four if you count civilian staff.” Which meant I had to fill her in, since she hadn’t heard about George, the desk clerk, having his appendix out late Sunday night, or the fact that Dad had sent another officer to the hospital with concussion—a casualty of the same obstreperous drunk-and-disorderly prisoner who was responsible for Sammy’s broken leg.
“I see I should add a few hospital visits to my agenda,” she said. “Getting back to your project—why do you want a deputy—are you expecting some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. Randall says there’s bad blood here.” I glanced around. The binoculars were still trained on me from the house on the left. The Haverhills’ cars were still parked across the street from me. Mr. Brimley had left his porch and come down to the street. In fact, he was now crossing the road and approaching one of the cars. Ernest’s. “I have this creepy feeling of being watched by unsympathetic eyes,” I said. Ernest Haverhill had rolled down his window, and he and Brimley were talking. They were both frowning—but were they frowning at each other, or at Mr. Dunlop’s house? “And some of those eyes belong to Mr. Dunlop’s relatives and neighbors,” I continued to Robyn. “According to him, they’ve already done a vigilante decluttering on his garage and made off with a lot of valuable antiques.”
“Does he actually have any valuable antiques?” Robyn asked. “I tried to make a pastoral call a couple of times—not that he’s ever come to services since I’ve been here, but we have a bunch of Dunlops buried out in the Trinity churchyard that I’m pretty sure are his kin, so I thought I should try. The one time he let me in I couldn’t see anything but rubbish.”
“Who knows what’s buried beneath the rubbish?” I asked. “Besides, what matters is that he thinks he has a house full of treasures. What if the neighbors or the relatives try to take advantage of our being here to barge in again and start throwing his stuff away? That could torpedo the whole thing.”