Spackled and Spooked by Jennie Bentley Page B

with over the last few months. There had been problems at work—he had been a forklift operator at a nearby warehouse—and management had had to give him several warnings about his temper and about his increasing tardiness. He had taken to hanging out at a local bar late into the nights, and it must have made it difficult for him to punch in by six in the morning. Once he had turned up at his wife’s place of employment and caused trouble. Mr. Nickerson, her boss, didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he had gotten the impression that Mr. Murphy was, not to put too fine a point on it, stinking drunk. And at four o’clock in the afternoon, too. Brian had removed his wife, bodily, from the premises, but the next morning, when Peggy Murphy came back to work, she had claimed that everything was fine, and having no choice but to believe her, Mr. Nickerson had taken her word for it.
    So much for that part of it. I started scanning the microfiche for missing persons.
    In any town of any size, people disappear once in a while. It was just a few months ago, as a matter of fact, that Professor Martin Wentworth from Barnham College had gone missing. He had been acquainted with my late Aunt Inga, and at the time, while we were trying to figure out what had happened to him, Wayne had explained to me that it’s extremely difficult for someone to just disappear without a trace. Someone usually knows something, whether it’s the missing person himself, if he left under his own steam, or it’s whoever did away with him, if he didn’t. In most cases and both scenarios, the missing person shows up sooner or later, either alive or dead.
    I had requested the microfiche for a couple of years before the Murphy murders, just in case Brian Murphy had buried someone under his house, and also for the time around two years ago, when Venetia Rudolph said there had been squatters in the crawlspace. The idea that the body might belong to one of the squatters made a certain amount of sense. It would explain why they cleared out suddenly, too. Does a body buried in the ground smell? I wondered. Nah, probably not. If buried bodies smelled, then nobody would ever visit churchyards.
    The thought inspired a pang of guilt, and I promised myself I’d go visit my Aunt Inga’s grave again shortly. It had been a few weeks since I’d been there, and the flowers I’d put out had probably died long since. Pushing the thought aside for more pressing, or at least more immediate matters, I went back to microfiche scanning.
    Nobody seemed to have gone missing during the time the Murphys had lived on Becklea, and there was no mention of any missing persons two years ago, either. I scanned the pages for any information about the squatters, but couldn’t find any. I’d have to ask Venetia again, to see if she knew anything more about them. I didn’t even know if they were old or young, runaway kids or professional hobos. Waterfield didn’t seem to have a large homeless population, so maybe it had just been someone passing through on their way to or from Canada, maybe. Illegal aliens or something.
    Since it was still early, and the Waterfield Weekly was located just across the street, I dropped in there, as well, and went through the same process of requesting microfiche and access to the machine. The Waterfield Weekly , being a weekly, could squeeze more issues of their newspaper into a microfiche box than the Clarion could, and the woman behind the counter gave me several boxes that covered several years each. I popped one in the machine and started scanning idly.
    I wish I could say that I found a marvelous clue that explained everything, but no such luck, I’m afraid. I came across a few photographs of members of the Murphy family taken at various times, though. There was one of Peggy, taken around Christmas, outside her place of employment on Main Street. Apparently the town did a Dickens Christmas celebration every year, during which the shopkeepers