Do-It-Yourself 4 - Mortar and Murder by Jennie Bentley

Author:Jennie Bentley [Jennie, Bentley,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

13

“It was last month sometime,” Ian said when he came back into the office and Derek asked him about the business card. “March. Just after Angie and I tied the knot.”

“Did she come to talk to Angie?”

He shot me a look. “Yeah. Why?”

I shrugged. “No reason. Just curious. Have you seen her since? Lori Trent?”

“No,” Ian said. “That’ll be two hundred and three dollars.” He held out an oversized paw. Derek put his credit card in it.

“Spoken to her?” I suggested.

Ian shook his head, eyes on the credit card and on the old-fashioned machine he used to take an imprint of it.

“You sure?” Derek pushed.

Ian tossed the too-long hair out of his face. “Sure I’m sure. What’s with the third degree?”

“Agent Trent is dead,” Derek said.

For a second, Ian looked like he was reeling; a mighty redwood in a storm. I inched back, just in case he fell. Then he bit down on the shock. “That’s too bad.”

“It happened last night. We found her in Waterfield harbor this morning.”

“Drowned?” Ian handed the credit card and sales slip back to Derek.

Derek shook his head. “Bashed over the head with something.”

“What?” It wasn’t an exclamation, but a question.

“Could have been anything. A boom. A baseball bat.” One was leaned up against the wall in the corner behind the counter. Ian didn’t glance toward it, but I did. “A Ukrainian Easter egg paperweight.”

Derek finished signing the credit card slip and pushed it back across the counter at Ian. The latter picked it up and shoved it in the cash drawer.

“What?” he said, bushy brows wrinkling.

“I saw one yesterday,” I explained. “Polished stone, painted to look like a Ukrainian Easter egg. A pysanka. It had ears of corn and deer and birds on it, and it weighed a ton.”

Ian looked blank. Maybe Angie hadn’t told him about that particular Ukrainian custom.

“I guess you guys don’t have any,” I added. “Pysanky, I mean.”

He shook his head. “Never heard of them.”

“What did Lori Trent want? Back in March, when she was here?”

“It was just after we got married,” Ian said. “She was doing an at-home visit. They do that when Americans marry foreign nationals. Especially when one of ’em looks like Angie and the other one looks like me.”

“Agent Trent thought yours was a marriage of convenience? Pro forma?”

This was something else I’d read up on the other night, the sometimes horrendously difficult process a foreign spouse has to go through to get legal residency in the United States. Not that I’m saying it should be easy, just that I’d come across some real horror stories about wives and husbands being torn out of their spouses’ arms and sent back to their native countries because they couldn’t prove that they’d married for the right reasons. On the other hand, it’s no good when bad people get onto American soil and do bad things. Although if Angie Burns was a spy, I’d eat that fricking paperweight.

Ian nodded. He looked from me to Derek and back. “If you’ll excuse me, I should go check on my wife.

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