Mortar and Murder Read Online Free

Um . . . from what, exactly?”
    “The worry. I’ve been worrying for two days straight.”
    “Except when we were doing other things,” Derek said, a reminiscent twinkle in his eyes.
    I blushed. “All right. Yes, except when we were doing other things. But I’ve been standing here for the past two days, worrying that you’ll fall off the roof, and I need to do something else for a while.”
    “You can start working on the inside,” Derek suggested, since I had refused to do that while he was outside.
    “Other than that.”
    He sighed. “Fine. What do you want to do?”
    “I want to take a walk,” I said firmly.
    “A walk?”
    “Across the island, to the other Colonial. I want to see it. Up close.”
    “Oh.” His face cleared. “Sure. Go ahead.”
    “You don’t want to come?”
    He smiled. “I’d love to come. But the sooner I get the holes patched and the windowpanes replaced, the sooner we can hook up the generator and get some heat and power going. It’s been a while since I had to work only with manual tools, and I can’t wait to get my electric drill plugged in somewhere.”
    “Oh.” I nodded. Totally understandable. I’m not good at roughing it, either. A hotel without room service is about as far as I’ll go. “OK, then. I’ll just take a quick walk across the island—it shouldn’t take much more than ten minutes to get there, do you think?—and have a look around, and then I’ll come back. Thirty minutes, tops. Just to see what they’ve done to the place, you know?”
    “Be careful,” Derek said. “Knock on the door before you start peering through the windows. Just in case someone’s there. You don’t want to catch Gert hanging around in his boxer shorts drinking beer and watching NASCAR.”
    I shuddered. “Definitely not.” Derek watching TV in his boxer shorts was one thing, gorgeous specimen that he is. Gert Heyerdahl, with his beard and long hippie hair, was another, and not one I wanted to experience firsthand. “I’ll be careful.”
    “If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll come looking for you.” He turned and headed up the stairs to the front door. I went the opposite way, around the corner of the house and along a narrow, partially overgrown path that led away from the ocean and into the woods.
    The state tree of Maine is the eastern white spruce, tall and straight, with rough bark and blue green needles. There are also a lot of other trees indigenous to the area: various birches and elms, poplars and oaks, maples and hickory. They like the cold climate, and grow tall and dense. Only the spruces and pines were green, of course; the rest looked like they might be thinking about throwing out buds but hadn’t quite made the commitment yet, just in case we got another cold snap. The lack of growth made it easier to see where I was going as I shuffled along the narrow ribbon of beaten earth that led into the woods, surrounded by more trees than I’d ever seen in one place before in my life.
    After a few minutes’ walk, the path split: one branch going left, the other continuing more or less straight. Both new paths were even less defined than the one I’d used to get this far. I stopped at the fork, squinting through the pine needles and bare branches at the sun and trying to picture the layout of the island in my head. It started out wide and flat on the southern end, where Derek’s and my house was. The other Colonial house was positioned on the western side. The little village, meanwhile, was situated at the back of a little cove on the northwestern shore, up where the terrain was higher. On the other side of the woods, and past more meadows. It would seem, then, that the path going straight led north to the village, and the one on the left went due west to Heyerdahl’s house.
    I struck out to the left, jumping over the muddy ruts left by the recently melted snow and skipping over gnarly tree roots and patches of dormant vegetation that bisected the skinny