Free Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) by Jennie Bentley Page A

accents.”
    He glanced at the tub and shower the way it was now: molded plastic. “Sure.”
    “Brown tiles on the floor maybe, to match the wood in the rest of the house. Easier to keep clean than white. Although white would look OK, too.”
    “It sounds great, Avery,” Derek said, “but unless I can get this coupling off, you won’t have a bathroom to pretty up.”
    Right. “I’ll just find something else to look at while I wait for it to be lunchtime.”
    “You do that.” He turned back to the plumbing.
    Very well. I backed out of the bathroom and left him to it.
    So far I had investigated both the cubbies in the girls’ rooms. There was nothing interesting there. We’d cleaned out the basement, and there was nothing interesting left there anymore, either. The first floor was bare. The second floor was bare. The third . . .
    There was no third floor. The second floor was the top, the attic.
    Only . . . I looked up, at the flat ceiling above my head. Wandered into Mamie’s room and did the same. The ceiling sloped sharply down to the knee wall, which was only three feet tall or so. But above my head, there were a few feet of flat ceiling. The roof came to a point, though, the way roofs do, especially here in the Northeast. A steep pitch makes it easier for the snow to slide off. What you don’t want is a flat roof where the snow can accumulate and maybe crash through. It happens, and it isn’t pretty.
    So there had to be a little space between the flat ceiling and the roof itself.
    “Could we vault the ceilings up here?” I asked Derek.
    “Vault the . . .” It took him a second to catch up, then he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
    “There’s space up above, isn’t there? If we took it out . . .”
    “Chances are the ceiling up here is supporting the roof,” Derek said, “and if we took it out, we’d have a problem. This house wasn’t built to have vaulted ceilings.”
    Fine. “Can I go look at it anyway?”
    “The space upstairs?” He shrugged. “Sure. Knock yourself out.”
    “How do I get up there?”
    “Look for the hatch in the ceiling,” Derek said. “And the ladder.”
    There was a ladder? I hadn’t seen anything resembling a ladder up here. “It isn’t in the bathroom, right?”
    “No,” Derek said, “it isn’t in the bathroom.”
    It wasn’t in Mamie’s room, either. Nor was it in Ruth’s. I’d spent enough time in both to have noticed it if it were there. And it wasn’t in the hallway.
    As a last resort, I pulled open the door to the empty closet at the top of the stairs, cater-corner to the door to Ruth’s room, and peered in. And there it was: a white square outlined against the white of the ceiling.
    “How do I get up there?”
    There was a pause, then Derek materialized beside me. I guess he figured he wouldn’t get any peace until I had something to do. This is the boring part of renovating for me: the times when Derek is busy doing plumbing and wiring and framing, the sort of stuff I don’t know enough to help him with.
    “See those?” He pointed to three wooden blocks nailed to the wall on my right. “That’s the ladder.”
    I tilted my head. “It doesn’t look like a ladder.”
    “It is. Trust me. Here.” He grabbed the top block and hung on by his fingertips while he scrabbled for purchase for his toes on the bottom “rung.” Once that was done, he used one hand to push the hatch up into the ceiling before jumping down. “There you go. Let me give you a hand.”
    He grabbed my waist and boosted me up. I did my best to hang on to the blocks of wood on the wall—no way would I dignify them with the title “ladder”—and to move up. It wasn’t easy: There was nothing to hang on to really, since the blocks were flush to the wall and only an inch or two thick. I don’t think I would have made it all the way up if it hadn’t been for Derek’s hands on my waist—and occasionally my butt—keeping me steady.
    But I did get