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

she wanted to get home. I couldn’t blame her. I was looking forward to seeing Derek, too.
    “That’s fine.” But the house was coming up, and I pulled up to the curb to peer at it as we got there.
    It looked just the way it should. Big and imposing and dark, like a black void against the night. Derek didn’t trust the electrical wiring, so we hadn’t left any lights on, not even on the porch. Didn’t want to come back and find a charred mess tomorrow morning.
    “It’s big,” Cora remarked.
    “Not as big as the house on Rowanberry Island.”
    The rambling center-chimney Colonial from 1783 had seemed to go on for days. But the Green sisters’ house was certainly a lot bigger than the other two projects we’d done since then: the small condo in Josh Rasmussen’s building and the even smaller 1930s cottage in the Village that used to belong to news anchor Tony “the Tiger” Micelli—until he was stabbed to death with a screwdriver in the kitchen.
    “Did you leave a light on upstairs?” Cora asked, and I returned to the present, pushing the mental image of Tony and the pool of blood aside to peer up at the house.
    “No. Why?”
    “I thought I saw one.”
    I looked again, staring at the three side-by-side windows in the dormer in the front of the house. They were dark, just as they should be. “I don’t see anything.”
    Cora shook her head. “Maybe it was the reflection of a pair of headlights up on the hill. Or a reflection from the house across the street.”
    Maybe. I looked to the left, at the farmhouse Victorian located there. One story tall. No second-story windows.
    “I must have made a mistake,” Cora said, still staring at the bungalow. “There’s nothing there.”
    No. Although now that she’d suggested it, I was loath to leave without making sure. Even if I was equally loath to leave the car to investigate.
    Cora glanced at me. “There’s nothing there, Avery. I made a mistake.”
    “Right. It’s just . . .” What if she hadn’t? What if someone was inside the house?
    “Why would anyone break into an empty house?”
    “People do sometimes,” I said. “To steal the tools. And the copper pipes.” Or so Derek had told me.
    “Are there any copper pipes in the house? Or any tools?”
    Well . . . no. We hadn’t needed tools yet. So far it had all been about hauling junk to the Dumpster. Taking stuff out of the house, not putting anything in. There were no pipes, either, for the same reason.
    I shook my head.
    “I really think I made a mistake, Avery,” Cora said. “It was just a trick of the light. Let’s go home. If you want to come back, you can take Derek with you.”
    That made sense. He had the key, anyway. And I’d rather have Derek next to me than Cora when exploring a creepy old house in the dark.
    I put the car back into gear and rolled away from the house, with a last look past Cora and out the passenger side window. There was nothing to see. All the windows were dark. The front door was closed. There were no sinister shadows skulking around the corner. Nothing was stirring. As she’d said, she must have made a mistake.
    In contrast, the small green Folk Victorian on Cabot where Cora and Dr. Ben lived was cheerfully blazing with lights. And with sound, we realized when we walked in. It wasn’t just Derek and his father in residence; I could also hear the television, as well as the voices of Beatrice, Cora’s second daughter—her first is Alice, who lives in Boston—and Bea’s husband, Steve.
    “Is so!” Steve said.
    “No, it isn’t!”
    “Yes, it is. And if you’ll give me a minute, I’ll prove it to you.”
    There was silence apart from the TV, then a groan from Beatrice and a crow of triumph from Steve.
    “Scrabble,” Cora said, hanging up her coat.
    I nodded, keeping mine on. “Wonder which word he spelled?”
    “‘Syzygy,’” Derek said when I asked.
    “Bless you.”
    “That’s the word. ‘Syzygy.’” He spelled it, and added, “It