Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery Read Free Page B

she was scraping loose paint off the porch steps of her big old house in Eastport, Maine, when the guy on the bike went by again.
    Or she’d thought the paint would be loose, anyway. But as her son Sam always said, hope springs infernal, and the reality was something else again. Meanwhile:
    Pedaling slowly, looking right at her, the guy on the bike frownedas if he’d just sniffed a spoiled carton of milk. He was decent enough looking otherwise, clean-shaven and neatly dressed.
    But this was his third trip past her home in the last half-hour. And each time he went by, he’d been staring at her in that same unpleasant, almost accusing way.
    Still holding the scraper, she got up, trying to recall where she’d seen his sour expression before. That she
had
seen it she felt certain, but on somebody else’s face.
    A
similar
face. The guy turned the corner, not looking back. She stood there another moment, wondering. But then with a mental shrug she knelt by the steps once more and returned to work.
    After all, it was nearly the Fourth of July, and the remote island town of Eastport—three hours from Bangor, light-years from anywhere else—was full of tourists. No doubt the bicyclist was one of them, and she really had seen him around, somewhere.
    As for his riding by so often, maybe he liked the house. She had when, upon finding Eastport over a decade ago, she’d fallen instantly in love with the old place. Now from the porch steps she pictured it as she’d first seen it:
    An 1823 white clapboard Federal with three stories plus an attic, it had three red-brick chimneys and forty-eight windows, each with a pair of green shutters. Among its other selling points were a huge yard, a fireplace in every room, and original hardwood floors.
    Unfortunately, it had also been a wreck. Under nearly two hundred years’ worth of charm lay nearly as many of neglect; she’d had to get the wiring redone and the chimneys rebuilt, and it had needed painting.
    All of which she’d had done, for an amount slightly less than it would’ve cost to bulldoze the place and start over. Back then, she’d known no better; nowadays, mostly from necessity, she was a halfway decent home-repair enthusiast.
    But it wasn’t only about money. Scrape off enough old paint, patch enough plaster, sand the wood floors and rehabilitate half a hundredantique windows plus shutters, and you too could begin feeling that maybe—just maybe—you’d rehabilitated yourself.
    Too bad the half she was any good at was so rarely the half that needed doing. This time, she’d decided to paint all the parts of the house that she could reach and farm out the high work. The plan had seemed reasonable as she was formulating it.
    But for one thing, the porch was massive. So there was a lot of old paint to scrape off before the new could go on. Also, the peeling bits clung like barnacles. Wielding the tool, she went at them with fresh energy; they hung on for dear life.
    “Grr,” she muttered, but they couldn’t hear her, and even if they could it would probably only make them more obstinate.
    As she thought this, the guy on the bike appeared again, pedaling along. Dark hair, striped red-and-white polo shirt, blue jeans … in his middle twenties, maybe, she thought.
    The bike was a balloon-tired Schwinn from the fleet of them that were available for rent downtown, with a wire basket up front, fake-leather saddlebags, and a bell.
    Brring!
She wouldn’t have thought a bike bell could be rung threateningly, but he managed it.
    “Hey,” she began, taking a step toward the street.
    Climbing sharply from the waterfront, Key Street featured big antique houses fronted by huge maples lining each side. It was the very picture of a traditional Maine coast town’s prosperous old residential area. Scowling, the guy stood on the pedals and pumped, speeding away through it.
    Once more she felt she knew him from somewhere. But there wasn’t much she could do about it, so when he’d