Free Trick or Treat Murder by Leslie Meier Page A

got out Monica's book and set it on the table.
    It was a wire-bound sketch book, which Monica had covered with blue Waverly plaid fabric. Lucy recognized the pattern, Monica had chosen it for the homing room curtains. She ran her fingers over it, and then opened the book.

    The first page had several photographs of the house as it was when the Mayes bought it. Overgrown bushes covered the windows, there was a hole in the roof, and the original pine clapboards were covered with crumbling asphalt shingles.

    "My heart stopped when I saw it," Monica had written in bold black ink. "Somehow I knew that this house would be mine. It was the house I'd always dreamed of having."

    The statement gave Lucy pause; never in her life had she decided something should be hers simply because she wanted it. For her, life was a constant juggle of too little time, too little money, and too much to do.

    Turning the pages, Lucy saw photos chronicling every stage of the restoration process. The plaster was stripped away from the walls, revealing the aged wood lath underneath. The chimney was torn down and rebuilt. The roof was replaced with bright new cedar shingles.

    Lucy smiled to see snapshots of Bill and herself. He looked impossibly young. She, pregnant with Toby, was absolutely huge. There were also photos of Monica's teen-aged children, tan in swimsuits, scraping the paint off a door. Their names were obligingly penned in beneath the pictures: Roily, Mira, and Tiny. Monica, Lucy remembered, had a penchant for nicknames.
    Once the house had been made sound and weather tight, Monica had focused her attention on decorating it. There were pictures of furniture found at auctions, paint chips, and fabric scraps. Sketches showed how each room was arranged. Once she had made a decision, recalled Lucy, Monica never changed her mind. She was not one to spend an afternoon rearranging the furniture.

    Closing the book, Lucy clutched it to her chest. She leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. She tried to guess how much the restoration had cost, but couldn't even remember how much Bill had charged.

    Curious, she climbed upstairs to the little attic room he used for an office. There, under the slanted ceiling, he had set up a drafting table and a couple of file cabinets.

    His files, as she discovered when she pulled out a drawer, were neater than she would have expected. She had no trouble at all finding the thick folder for the Hopkins Homestead. Lucy sat down at the desk and pushed aside the big stack of zoning bylaws Bill had left there. She opened the file; right on top was the estimate he had drawn up—labor and materials came to nearly one hundred thousand dollars.

    Lucy whistled softly under her breath. She had no idea. And this was more than ten years ago—it would be a lot more at today's prices. Bill's figures didn't include the cost of the property itself, or what Monica had spent to furnish or decorate the place. Lucy wouldn't have been surprised if Monica's little project—the house she was determined to have—had cost Roland close to a quarter of a million dollars. Lucy even remembered Monica joking about it, she had once said Roland would have to deliver a lot of babies to pay for it.

    Thinking back, Lucy couldn't recall even one picture of Roland Mayes in the scrapbook. It was a real old-fashioned marriage, thought Lucy. He made the money, and Monica spent it.

    Closing the file to replace it, Lucy's eyes fell on a penciled phone number. Monica had given it to them a few years ago, when she had taken a trip. They had agreed to keep an eye on the Homestead, and if anything happened, they were supposed to call Mira. She was married, now, and lived in a Boston suburb with her husband and baby. Impulsively, Lucy reached for the phone, then hesitated. She certainly didn't want to add to the woman's grief by asking a lot of questions. On the other hand, she rationalized, it wouldn't hurt to let Mira know that others