Spackled and Spooked by Jennie Bentley Page A

“We’ll have to get a new bulb tomorrow. There’s nothing obviously rigged here, and if someone set something up, to make a scream go off the next time one of us opened the door, they did a pretty good job.”
    “Maybe it was a coincidence,” I suggested.
    “Huh!” Derek responded darkly. He slammed the door shut and locked it, his movements crisp and annoyed. “Let’s go home. I’ll have another look in the morning. We’ll be back here all too soon.”
    “You can say that again,” I muttered. “What about the cats?”
    “They’ve probably found their way back to Miss Rudolph’s catnip. This way.”
    He headed around the corner of the house. I followed, balancing carefully on my high heels, while I thought unkind thoughts about Jemmy and Inky.
    They were right where Derek had predicted, and as soon as they recognized us, they came trotting to wind themselves around our ankles, complaining loudly about being left behind. Derek snagged Inky, while Jemmy sat down in front of me to grumble. I bent to talk to him. “I’m sorry, Jem. In all the excitement of changing and getting to Ben and Cora’s house on time, I forgot that you were here. You were probably curled up in a spot of sunlight somewhere, sleeping, weren’t you? Sorry about that. It won’t happen again. Tomorrow you can stay home.”
    Jemmy spoke again, a whiny note in his voice. Maine coon cats, for all their imposing size, have rather soft, kittenish voices. I reached out and carefully stroked his head. When he didn’t object, I ran my hand down his back and under his belly, to scoop him up. He stiffened for a moment and then allowed me to tuck him under my arm and carry him away from the enticing catnip.

    The bright light of morning did nothing to shed more light on the problem of the scream. Derek went over the door, the jamb, and the surrounding area with meticulous attention—if he’d been in possession of a magnifying glass, I don’t doubt he’d have whipped it out—but without finding anything that didn’t belong there. No unexplained wires, no switches, no hidden speakers. He was grumbling angrily when he gathered up his heavy-duty gloves and his rented hole digger, which looked like a giant corkscrew with a handle, and headed for the crawlspace.
    I got busy in the bathroom. While we worked on Aunt Inga’s house together, the structural improvements had been Derek’s domain, while the design was mine. Naturally I’d taken a hand in tearing out or painting or spackling or anything else he let me do, and he helped implement the cosmetic touches I wanted, but since I’m the one with the design background while he’s the one with the hands-on experience, the division of labor made sense. While he crawled under the house, digging holes and pouring concrete, I got busy planning what to do with the main bathroom.
    As blank canvases go, it wasn’t bad at all. When we started out, there’d been a molded plastic tub on one wall, a toilet and sink base on the other. The tub had been torn out yesterday and was currently reposing in the Dumpster, but we had left the toilet and sink intact for now. The sink base was your basic fake oak with two doors that didn’t quite meet in the middle, under a top of molded white plastic. The toilet was a toilet: also basic white, with the wood-grained seat and lid that were so popular in the ’80s. The floor had been covered by sheet vinyl, black and white, but now only the subfloor was left, and the shredded vinyl was with the tub, in the Dumpster. The floor around the toilet was rotted, and Derek would have to replace it before I could start doing any serious decorating. Still, I could take measurements and plan what I wanted to do.
    I was thinking of doing something retro and funky, and I hoped to figure out a way to incorporate those Mary Quant daisies I’d thought about the other day. Gluing them, three feet tall, to the wall in the hallway might be a little too mod for most people, but I