Verwandte Artikel zu Knockdown (Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, 14, Band...

Knockdown (Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, 14, Band 14) - Hardcover

Buch 14 von 16: Home Repair is Homicide

Graves, Sarah

 
9780553807899: Knockdown (Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery, 14, Band 14)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553807897 ISBN 13: 9780553807899
Verlag: BANTAM DELL, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

They say you can’t go home again—and when it comes to someone with an old score to settle, sometimes you’d better not. That’s what Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree discovers when the past she thought she’d laid to rest comes calling at her lovingly restored 1823 Federal-style house in Eastport, Maine. Unfortunately, her old life and her new one are about to collide with deadly consequences. . . .
 
Jake is deep in her latest home improvement project—repainting a porch—when she notices the man repeatedly biking past her house. His face is unsettlingly familiar, but his chilling message seems inexplicable: Blood shows up again. Murder will out.
If it’s a prank, it’s an ugly one, and so is the anonymous email warning her to beware the Fourth of July—just two days away. Back in her days as a hotshot financial manager she did business with plenty of shady characters, but she’s still baffled as to the identity of her nemesis—until she receives a photo of a murdered man.

Now Jake knows what—and whom—she’s up against. But knowing her enemy is no guarantee that she can escape the grim payoff he has in store for her. From home invasion to kidnapping, this twisted killer is slowly but surely plotting a knockdown with not just Jake but the entire town of Eastport at its explosive center. And no one can predict when or where the shockingly deadly finale will occur.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sarah Graves lives with her husband in an 1823 Federal-style house in Eastport, Maine, where her mystery novels are set. When she is not scraping, painting, glazing, sanding, hammering, or otherwise repairing (or failing to repair!) the old house, she is working on her next Home Repair Is Homicide novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Remove dark stains from wooden floors by dabbing the stained area only with half-strength bleach. Rinse and repeat until the stain is gone, then recolor the lightened spot, if necessary, with wood stain and an artist's brush. --Tiptree's Tips

HER NAME WAS JACOBIA TIPTREE--JAKE, TO HER FRIENDS--and on that bright day in July twelve years after the Manhattan meeting, 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 frowned as 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 hundred antique 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 gone she returned to removing a ton of porch paint one stubborn chip at a time.

Soon a warm, salt breeze, sunshine like pale champagne, and the faint cries of seagulls over the bay had all but erased her memory of the bike guy . . . until, just when she'd really forgotten about him, he came back yet again, half an hour or so later.

Using a belt sander, she was at last making progress on the job. Under the power tool's howling attack, the paint came off in clouds of sawdust.

And that was more like it. She'd finished the first step, begun on the second, and shut the sander off to replace a clogged belt when someone behind her cleared his throat meaningfully. On its own, her hand moved to grab the sharp-edged paint scraper.

"You won't need that." His voice was New York-accented.

She stood, turned, and took a step toward him, forcing him to move back fast.

"You're on private property. And I want you to leave now."

The fellow smiled at her. Not a pleasant smile.

More like a baring of teeth. "Yeah, I guess you would."

Close up, he appeared clean and neat, with a careful shave and a recent haircut. "But hey, not everyone gets what they want in this world." The smile slid into a smirk.

Her heart thumped. "You've mistaken me for someone else." She took another step. "You'll have to go, or I'm going to call the police and let them take care of you."

At this he let out a laugh of genuine amusement. She was gripping the paint scraper very tightly, she realized.

" 'Call the police,' " he repeated. "That's a good one."

"Okay, that's it. I mean it, you need to go."

She searched her mind for an exit strategy, not wanting to turn her back on him. Besides, the screen door at the top of the steps was locked so the dogs wouldn't barge out through it.

Oh, the hell with it. Back in Manhattan, half the pedestrians on the sidewalk were pushier than this guy. Scraper in hand, she advanced on him.

His hands went up in a conciliatory gesture. "Okay, I get the idea. You don't want to hash over old times."

She followed him to the end of the sidewalk. He got on the bike, rode it in a tight circle, then braked hard, skidding.

"I guess if I were you, I wouldn't want the past coming back to bite me, either. Not if I'd done what you did."

Speechless, she could only stare.

"But it has," he continued. "What'd it say in that famous guy's play? Murder will out?"

She found her own voice. "You've got the wrong person. Now please take your nonsense and--"

His hands gripped the handlebars: smooth skin, pristine fingernails. "I know you, though. And what you did. Anyway, you've got until the fourth," he added. "When it's over, you will be, too. Over, that is."

As he spoke, a little cloud sailed across the sun and the sky darkened suddenly. The breeze stiffened, and all at once the gulls' cries sounded hostile.

"That play-writing guy had it right," said her unpleasant visitor. " 'Blood shows up again. Murder will out'."

He began pedaling slowly away. "And now," he called back as she stared after him, "right now, it's here and it's outing you."

Brrring!



She was still shaking when she got inside. Locking the back door, she hurried to the front to be sure the screen really was on the hook.

It was, and the bicycle guy was nowhere in sight. Her heart hammering, she checked the dogs and found them both asleep in the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
BANTAM DELL
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553807897
ISBN 13 
9780553807899
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
278
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar