Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

took a step back. “Dirt?” And to answer the question, no. I hadn’t noticed the door. Or rather, I’d seen it, but hadn’t thought to open it. I thought it was a pantry, to be honest. Tucked under the stairs to the floor above. Because he hadn’t said a word about a basement and I’d figured, if there was one, he’d have mentioned it.
    He glanced at me. “Sorry, Tink. They didn’t finish basements in the 1920s. That came later.” He started down. The staircase groaned in protest, and shimmied like a flapper girl.
    “Is it safe?” I asked.
    “Wait until I get all the way down,” Derek answered. “That way, if you fall, I can catch you.”
    Great.
    Derek watched me with a frown as I picked my way down. “You OK, Tink?”
    “Just remembering Aunt Inga’s house,” I said through gritted teeth. I’d fallen down the basement stairs there shortly after moving in, owing to one of the steps being purposely sabotaged.
    “Ah.” His face cleared. “I don’t think anyone’s messed with this staircase. If anyone had, it would have broken when I came down. I’m a lot heavier than you.”
    He was. However, his weight might just have broken it almost all the way, and mine might finish the job. Or so I reasoned.
    But it turned out to be misplaced worry and residual memory, because I made it all the way down into the basement without mishap, and stopped next to Derek to look around.
    The area was smaller than the first floor, but it followed the footprint of the house roughly. And if that didn’t make much sense, it was because there were low walls all around the front and sides of the basement, creating a sort of shelf. Imagine this: a roughly ten-by-fifteen-foot hollow in the ground, with five-and-a-half-foot-tall dirt walls, the tops of which extended another four or five feet toward the foundation of the house. There were grimy windows back there, which let in a little bit of light, although since there was a sprinkling of snow on the ground—just an inch or two—visibility was limited. And because of the dirt shelves, the windows were too far away to be cleaned; not that I saw any need.
    At the back of the house, the basement ended in a flat dirt wall, and didn’t extend all the way under the utility room. I could see the pipes to the kitchen sink cross the insulated ceiling and disappear through the planks into the kitchen floor.
    “Looks like you’ll be spending some time down here,” I told Derek.
    He shot me a distracted look, and I added, pointing to the pipes, “Galvanized iron. You’ll have to swap them out where they’re visible, at least.”
    “And everywhere else. The water pressure is nonexistent.”
    I’d take his word for it, since that was something else he’d checked that I hadn’t paid attention to.
    I turned my focus back to my current surroundings again.
    The basement wasn’t as scarily full of junk as I had been afraid of, from Derek’s estimation that it would take us another two hours to clear it. Maybe I should have guessed, since he’d seriously overestimated the time it would take to clear the rest of the house.
    I mean, there was junk in the basement, and lots of it. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. There were plenty of boxes and crates, full of things like old Christmas decorations and chipped china. An old bicycle with flat tires leaned up against one wall, while a rusty baby carriage stood parked nose-in over in the corner. A fake pine tree still sporting a few sad-looking icicles lay sideways on top of the dirt. A pair of snowshoes and two pairs of child skis were tucked up under the rafters, out of the way. They looked ancient. There were a couple of spades and rakes and other garden implements in a corner, along with a coiled hose, probably stored for the winter. A few buckets and other things lay around: the stainless steel variety instead of colorful plastic.
    Something white and skeletal gleaming faintly over in a corner caught my eye, and caused my