“Likewise.” He extended a hand, briefly. And although my mental visions were of dusty Italian vistas, Peter Cortino’s accent was Boston, all the way. And not upper-crust Boston, either. “Where’s Derek?”

I explained that Derek had gone to the dump with someone. Peter nodded, as if this was par for the course.

“Tell me what happened this morning.” He stuffed one hand back in the pocket of the oil-spotted overalls and put the other around his wife’s waist. She leaned into him. “The guy who towed the truck in said the driver had lost control and driven into a ditch.”

“There was a little more to it than that,” I answered. “I only drove the truck into the ditch because the brakes didn’t respond, and I didn’t want to cause a worse accident.”

Peter nodded, as if this confirmed his findings. “I had a look at it. The good news is, the problem’s easy to fix. I don’t know how much you know about automobiles…?”

He waited for me to speak. When I said I’d never owned a car and knew next to nothing about them, he grinned. “In layman’s terms, then: You had a hole in the brake lines, which turned into no response from the brakes. It’s a simple thing to repair. Installing new brake lines won’t take long at all.”

So far, so good. “What’s the bad news?”

“It didn’t happen accidentally. Someone nicked the lines, and while you drove, the tear became bigger and bigger, until the brake lines broke completely. Likely the same person jiggled with the mechanism for the airbag so that when you did have an accident-and you would have one, eventually-the airbag wouldn’t work.”

Something seemed to have gone wrong with my breathing. “So someone was trying to hurt me?” Or kill me?

“Not necessarily,” Peter said. “The brakes could have given out at any moment, while you were driving ten miles an hour through downtown, or while you were doing sixty on the highway. Depending on the situation, you could have eased the car to a stop at the nearest curb with no harm done to anyone, or caused a six-car pileup on I- 295.”

“Or driven off the road and into the water if I’d been heading up the ocean road?”

He nodded. “That, too. If Derek had been driving, you might have avoided the accident altogether. He’s more experienced than you.”

“That doesn’t take much,” I agreed. “So maybe it was more of a warning? Or is it possible that it was just an accident and nobody messed with the brakes? Maybe they just broke?”

Peter shrugged. “I wouldn’t think so,” he said, “although anything’s possible, I guess.”

We agreed that he would fix the problem, as well as replace the headlight that had shattered and the fender that had been dented when I hit the ditch, not to mention the airbags that hadn’t deployed, and then he’d call Derek to let him know when the truck was ready to be picked up. I thanked them both and set out for Aunt Inga’s house on foot. The last thing I saw before I closed the office door was Peter kissing his wife.

I started the walk by contemplating the two of them and their relationship, and from there I went on to trying to remember where I might have seen Jill before. Recently. We hadn’t been introduced-I’d have remembered that-but I’d seen her before. At the store? On the street? In some restaurant or other where Derek and I had shared a meal? She’d have been alone, if so, because if I’d ever seen her husband before, I would have recognized him for sure. He wasn’t the kind of guy you forgot meeting.

Pretty soon more important things claimed my attention, though, and I saw Venetia ’s body again, her gray hair matted with blood, the back of her head caved in. Just like the skeleton, a little voice in my head whispered.

I examined the thought. Clinically. Or as clinically as I could. Yes, there were similarities. Both victims had been hit over the head. Both were women. Both lived in Waterfield, one right next door to where the other’s body was found. That was pretty much the extent of it, though. The woman in the crawlspace had been young; Venetia was old. The murders had happened years apart; at least two, maybe as many as six. We didn’t know the reasons behind either, the motive the killer-or killers-might have had. There wasn’t enough left of the skeleton to determine whether she’d been assaulted, maybe sexually, before or after she died. Venetia hadn’t been. The only damage seemed to have been to her skull.

But surely a connection between the two was inevitable. Venetia had lived right next door to the Murphy house. She had seen people coming and going over the years. She had seen the squatters, seen the teenagers coming to make out, seen the handymen and repairmen and lawyers and looky-loos. She had probably seen the victim and the murderer, and just hadn’t realized it. Had Venetia known, I wondered, when the murderer came knocking on the door yesterday, the kind of trouble she was in? Or hadn’t she guessed, even when the floral arrangement hit the back of her head, why she had to die?

14

The first order of business, it seemed, was to figure out who the dead woman from the crawlspace was. Finding her bones had been the catalyst for everything else; up until that happened, the murderer must have felt pretty secure. The Murphy house was empty, and nobody ever did any work around the place except for cleaning the gutters, nailing down loose roof shingles, and repairing broken windows. The utilities had been turned off for years; we’d had them reconnected when we took over. Unless the crawlspace flooded or the pipes burst or something, there was no reason to think that anyone would ever find the bones. The squatters may have given him or her a turn-unless the squatters were the murderers-but they moved on after a couple of days, and who knew, the murderer may even have had something to do with that. But beyond that small issue, and that short period in time, all the murderer had to do was keep an eye on the place to make sure nobody took too much of an interest. Stop by once in a while, in the guise of a handyman, or concerned neighbor, or nosy citizen, and everything would be A-OK. Until we bought the house and started messing around, that is…

I realized I hadn’t asked Peter Cortino just how long we could have driven the truck with damaged brake lines. Would the nick in the brake lines turn into a hole and an accident pretty much right away, I wondered, or might the damage have been done earlier in the week, before we even found the bones? If so, maybe whoever had tampered with the truck had done it to prevent us from finding the bones. Just as he or she might have rigged the ghostly footsteps we’d heard inside the house, to freak us out. I had no proof that the footsteps were rigged, but unlike Kate, I wasn’t ready to welcome the idea of supernatural forces. I was more comfortable with the idea of a murderer trying to chase us out of the house to prevent us from finding his victim than I was with the idea that Brian Murphy was still walking around after all these years.

Speaking of Kate… Unless I could find another ride, I was stuck in town until Peter Cortino finished fixing Derek’s truck and until Derek finished helping Brandon Thomas dig through the dump. If I wanted to know who the bones belonged to, Barnham College seemed like a good place to start. It was where the bones had been taken, and also where Josh and his forensic approximation computer program resided. But if I wanted to get to Barnham, I needed a ride. Luckily, Kate was always up for an adventure, at least during midweek, when her lovely B and B wasn’t filled to the brim with guests.

I changed direction and headed for the B and B, but before I got that far, I had to pass Nickerson’s Antiques. The Fredericia dresser was still on display in the window, and I stopped for a second to gaze lovingly at it. It would look fabulous in the master bath, if we could just figure out the logistics of plumbing and a vessel sink and get it all attached without messing up the teak finish.