Sarah Graves - The Book of Old Houses (Home Repair Is Homicide Mysteries)

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PDB Name: Sarah Graves - 11 - The Book Of

Creator ID: REAd

PDB Type: TEXt

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Unique ID Seed:

Creation Date: 5/17/2008

Modification Date: 5/17/2008

Last Backup Date: 1/1/1970

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Synopsis:

Once upon a time, Jacobia Jake Tiptree was a hotshot money manager to Manhattans rich and dreadful until she left city life behind for a centuries-old fixer-upper in the quaint seaside town of Eastport, Maine. But even this tiny haven has its hazards and they can be astonishingly deadly....

When a mysterious book is unearthed from the foundation of Jakes 1823 fixer-upper, she immediately sends it off to local book historian Horace Robotham. After all, there must be a logical explanation for why the long-buried volume has her name in it written in what looks suspiciously like blood. But all logic goes out the window when the book disappears and Horace turns up dead.

The suspects include Horaces spoiled daughter, who has enough credit card debt to give killing her rich daddy a certain appeal. And just about everyones pointing fingers at a local crackpot with a penchant for black magic and an unholy lust for its artifacts including antique texts inked in blood. To complicate matters further, theres a mysterious stranger in town with vengeance in his heart and a gun in his pocket.

Never mind that Jakes just taken a sledgehammer to her ancient bathroom. Or that she forgot shes set to host a party for Eastports most treasured teacher. Shes also about to lose her beloved housekeeper on account of her fathers hasty marriage proposal ... and her son, Sam, has just taken his first tentative steps toward sobriety.

But all that will have to wait, because when two more victims turn up in a town better known for its scenic views and historic homes than its body count, she and her comrade-in-sleuthing, Ellie White, need to go on the prowl to find someone who may believe that the pages of an ancient book are the blueprint for a perfect murder.

The Book Of Old Houses

By

Sarah Graves

Book 11 in the Home Repair is Homicide Mysteries series

Copyright a 2007 by Sarah Graves

Chapter 1

Driving up I-95 through New Hampshire and on into Maine, Dave DiMaio noticed as if from a distance how anger made the familiar route look alien to him. The Way Life Should Be, the sign welcoming visitors to the Pine Tree State proclaimed. But to Dave it was as if he were seeing it all by moonlight, everything bleached by rage.

Once he was nearly overcome by the urge to lean forward onto the steering wheel and howl over the murder of his friend Horace Robotham, whose death Dave had learned of only the night before. But he was speeding along the turnpike, so he couldnt.

He pulled off at a service area to use the restroom and wash his hands. Blinking tourists, kids with dogs straining on leashes, vans and campers with bikes, canoes, and kayaks lashed to their roofs crammed the asphalt parking area. Coming back out into the sunshine with the air faintly tinctured by exhaust fumes and the smell of breakfast sandwiches from a nearby fast-food place, he was tempted to linger, stretch his legs and work the kinks out of his neck.

But Horaces deathmurder, Dave reminded himself fiercely, his friends brutal murderwasnt all that troubled him. The thing hed tucked into his glove compartment before leaving home seemed to broadcast its evil presence on a special wavelength that only police officers and car thieves could hear. Then he noticed the scrap of paper on his windshield, tucked under the wiper, and the fragments of red plastic littering the pavement at the rear of his car.

During the few minutes hed been inside, someone had bumped the cars tail light, shattering it. The note on the windshield held an apology and a promise to pay for the repair, along with a name and phone number.

Dave tossed the paper into a trash receptacle and got back on the road. If a smashed light was the worst that came out of this trip, he would count himself lucky.

At Bangor he threaded his way through numerous highway signs and across the Penobscot River bridge toward coastal Route 1A. On the bridges far side he pulled into a convenience-store parking lot to buy a soft drink.

All around him the midmorning bustle of ordinary people on ordinary midmorning errands continued, just as if Daves oldest friend had not had his skull savagely crushed in with a rock one recent night while he was out for a walk.

Thinking this, he changed his mind about the soft drink. A lady coming out of the convenience store peered at him before getting into the car next to his, and it took him a moment to understand that there were tears running down his cheeks, the dark well of mingled fury and grief brimming over again without warning.

Wiping a hand hastily across the moisture on his face, he mustered a smile and a weak Its okay wave for the lady, whose own hands now touched her lips in an uncertain praying gesture as if she was trying to decide whether or not to get out of her car and come over to him. But at his wave she just nodded minutely instead, her kind, plain face seeming to say that shed had a few unscripted teary moments of her own over the years.

That it could happen to anyone. She backed out and drove away, and after another moment Dave did too, following the maps directions to a twisty rural road leading to Route 9.

The sudden change from four-lane highway to something that was little more than a paved trail triggered a flashback to a trip Dave had taken years ago with Horace, to New Mexico, where theyd pulled in very late one night to a motel on Route 66.

Once they were in the room Dave had gone to the rear window and pulled the curtain aside, expecting to look out onto another brightly lit commercial strip of gas stations and restaurants. But he had seen only moonlit desert, dark shapes of what he supposed were saguaro trees marching toward distant mountains.

It had startled him then the way civilization could end so abruptly, and he felt just as vulnerable here in Maine. Once you left a city and the thin buffer of suburbia surrounding it, wilderness closed in on you again in earnest.

He and Horace had risen before dawn the next morning, and as they departed the motels parking lot Dave had happened to glance in the rearview mirror just in time to see the light over their rooms door wink out.

Only theirs, none of the others. To Dave it felt ominous, like a message from the darkness that had enclosed them all night. Horace had seen it too, and as they pulled onto Route 66 in the predawn gloom hed glanced silently at Dave, wearing that funny little smile of his that Dave now remembered so painfully.

Dave hit the gas just as he had all those years ago, roaring out onto Route 9 between a log truck and a highballing eighteen-wheeler, causing his underpowered old Saab 99 to labor briefly. Soon a lane for slower vehicles opened on the right and he pulled into it to give the faster ones a chance to pass.

After that it was smooth sailing, the landscape rising and the road curving up into it with breathtaking swiftness. Dave sped through tiny settlements surrounded by dairy farms, their pastures stone-studded and terraced by plodding hooves.

Next came land so thinly settled that the towns didnt even have names, only numbers, gated access roads, and desolate highway-maintenance yards sited in the clefts of the high hills. The enormous sand-heaps in the yards testified to the shortness of summer here in Maine, and the treacherousness of winter.

Not that this particular highway wasnt an attention-grabber even in August. Dave drove Route 9 for a long time, his anxiety increasing each time an oncoming truck hurtled around a curve straight at him, then roared past without overturning or losing its load as it seemed the massive vehicle surely must do.