Death by Inferior Design

Stylish Acclaim for Leslie Caine’s

DEATH BY INFERIOR DESIGN

“SPARKLES WITH CHARM, DESIGN LORE, AND
A SLEUTH WITH A GREAT MANTRA. COZY
FANS WILL EMBRACE THE DOMESTIC
BLISS SERIES.”

—Carolyn Hart, Edgar Award–winning author of
Letters from Home

“Witty and smart, with HOME DECORATING TIPS
TO DIE FOR!”

—Sarah Graves, bestselling author of the
Home Repair
Is Homicide
series

“Leslie Caine deftly merges hate-fueled homicide with
household hints in her ‘how to/whodunit’ mystery.”

—Mary Daheim, nationally bestselling author of
The Alpine Pursuit

“
Trading Spaces
meets
Murder, She Wrote!
TALK ABOUT EXTREME MAKEOVERS! Dueling
designers Gilbert and Sullivan might want to kill each
other, but no one expected anyone to try it. Who will
hang the trendiest curtains? Who will choose the
poshest paint? Who will come out alive?
I’m not tellin’.”

—Parnell Hall, author of
With This Puzzle, I Thee Kill

“Mystery lovers who love
Trading Spaces
will adore
[this] tale of dueling designers. In this stylish debut,
LESLIE CAINE PAINTS A WINSOME HEROINE
WITH FAMILY WOES, FURNISHES A
WELL-UPHOLSTERED MURDER, AND
ACCESSORIZES WITH WELL-PATTERNED
WIT AND A FINISHING TOUCH OF ROMANCE.
Open the door, step inside, and enjoy!”

—Deborah Donnelly, author of
May the Best Man Die

“What a delight! A MYSTERY WITHIN A MYSTERY,
A WINNING HEROINE, A YUMMY LOVE
INTEREST, SOME LAUGH-OUT-LOUD
LINES . . . AND AS IF THAT WEREN’T
ENOUGH, SOME TERRIFICALLY USEFUL
DECORATING TIPS.”

—Cynthia Baxter, author of
Dead Canaries Don’t Sing

“Interior designer—sleuth Erin Gilbert is wonderfully
appealing and reading all the lovely details of HER
LATEST DECORATING JOB WILL MAKE YOU
FEEL LIKE YOU’VE STUMBLED ACROSS
THE DEADLY SIDE OF HGTV.”

—Jerrilyn Farmer, bestselling author of the
Madeline Bean mysteries

For my fabulous agent, Nancy Yost,
to whom I along with every fictional character
I ever created give, in spirit, a resounding
and much-deserved standing ovation

acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank two immensely talented and generous designers who patiently answered hundreds of questions: Julie Thornton of Thornton Designs, Boulder, Colorado, and Emily Ferretti in Manhattan. Also thanks go to the Parsons School of Design and the Boulder Police Department. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to my wonderful, talented cowriter friends, especially Francine Mathews, Claudia Mills, Elizabeth Wrenn, Phyllis Perry, Christine Jorgensen, Lee Karr, and Kay Berstrom, whose encouragement and insightful comments were a beacon during my many months of writing and rewriting. I couldn’t write anything at all without the support of my family, especially Mike, Carol, and Andrew. I’m enormously indebted to Kate Miciak, my wonderful and brilliant editor, and to all the terrific people at Bantam and, of course, to my aforementioned agent, Nancy Yost. There are dozens more people whose names aren’t listed herein and deserve mention; please forgive me and know that your names and your many significant contributions are written in my heart.

chapter 1

Something was rotten in the state of Colorado, or more specifically, in this one Crestview neighborhood. Steve Sullivan’s utility van, emblazoned “Sullivan Designs,” was parked in my clients’ driveway.

I pounded the steering wheel with the heel of my hand. “Not again! If he steals another client from me, I’m going to kill him!” I parked my silver van with the name of my business—Interiors by Gilbert—an inch behind Sullivan’s bumper. “Gotcha!” Caught like a rat in a trap, Steve wouldn’t be able to get out of the driveway without confronting me face-to-face.

I silently repeated my personal mantra:
confidence
and optimism.
My credentials were sterling—an MFA in design from Parsons, a four-year apprenticeship at the D&D Building in Manhattan, and two years of supporting myself through my own up-and-coming business.

The trouble was, Steve Sullivan had been running
his
home-design business in Crestview for three times as long as I had, and he had three times the number of referrals. Not to mention that the guy had a great eye and a sleek, contemporary style—and no sense of business ethics whatsoever. Not in a million years would
I
resort to stealing
his
clients.

But, again:
confidence and optimism.
I would ring that doorbell, march inside, and convince Carl Henderson that I, Erin Gilbert, was the best designer in town.

My biggest challenge was that Carl Henderson had hired me without ever looking at my plans for his bedroom and professed not to care. His exact wording had been, “What the hell difference does it make what a room you’re sleeping in looks like?
All
rooms look alike once your eyes are closed.” Redecorating the bedroom was a “surprise Christmas gift” for his wife, whom he’d sent to a spa for the weekend. The room had to be completed by eight p.m. tomorrow, when Debbie was due to return, and—Carl insisted—the transformation had to be made sans my fabulous team of home-improvement contractors.

I glanced at the upstairs window above the Hendersons’ attached garage. The master bedroom that I’d
already been hired
to redecorate was located there, in the front of the house; the Hendersons had a splendid backdrop of the front range behind their home. This morning the sky was a cloudless sapphire blue. The distant peaks were snowcapped, though there wasn’t a speck of snow in the city itself.

The glorious view of the Rocky Mountains was part of the reason I had moved to Crestview two years ago to start my business. I’d also fallen in love with the variety of architecture and sizes of homes. Here I could spend the morning working on a mouthwatering century-old mansion on Maplewood Hill or an adorable eighty-year-old bungalow a few blocks north, and spend the afternoon in a brand-new spacious dwelling in the Cottonwood Creek neighborhood. Crestview was a designer’s paradise!

I grabbed the sketches from my folder and strode up the brick walkway to the front porch. My bedroom design for the Hendersons would surpass whatever Sullivan had in mind. Sure, he was energetic, personable, charming—when he wasn’t stealing clients or accusing me of naming my business with the sole intention of confusing his referrals. What was I supposed to do? Give up my last name of Gilbert just because there happened to already be a Sullivan Designs in town? In any case, I’d been pretty darned charming myself when working with Carl Henderson, even though my newest client had been surly in return. Carl was only redecorating “to get the missus off my back”—the kind of heartwarming sentimentality that brings a tear to any girl’s eye. Carl did not
care
how good his bedroom design was.

So why was Steve Sullivan here?

During our initial meeting, the tall and angular Carl Henderson had insisted upon paying me a flat fee and stated that “Debbie wouldn’t want a whole troop of strangers tromping through our bedroom.” He vowed that he and a neighbor would be at my beck and call all weekend, and he’d even hired his stepson from his previous marriage, supposedly a professional carpenter, to make my custom-designed furniture on-site. Relatively on-site, that is. Carl had also said that “sawdust makes my wife’s allergies flare up,” so the workshop would actually be located across the street, at Randy Axelrod’s house— the home of Carl’s aforementioned helpful neighbor.

Even now, the name Randy Axelrod struck me as familiar in a worrisome way. In fact, the whole setup had given me a bad feeling that I knew better than to ignore. I’d wanted to postpone the project till after Christmas so that the customized furniture could be made in advance, but Carl had all but pounded on my desk in his refusal. “Debbie is already scheduled for her spa weekend. Taylor can handle whatever furniture you’ve got in mind.” Taylor Duncan was his stepson, the carpenter. Then Carl had frowned and said, “I know this isn’t how you’re used to working. So I’ll throw in another thousand bucks for being such a good sport.”

The
ka-ching
of a cash register in my head drowned out my skepticism when Carl went on to say, “That’ll make it more fair anyways, if you’re getting paid the same—” He broke off and winced, and his cheeks hit a hue halfway between dusty rose and crimson. When I’d pressed him to continue, he’d babbled about my getting paid “the same as what I told Debbie the room would probably cost us eventually.” Now, as I rang the doorbell and glanced back at Sullivan’s shiny big van, that cute little cash register jingle in my mind was replaced with a shrill warning siren. What had I gotten myself into this time?

Many of the Hendersons’ rooms were definitely in need of a face-lift, especially Debbie’s home office. Just by looking at the woman’s smiling likeness in the wedding photograph in their den, I’d gotten a sense that she was a nice, likable person, and I wanted to do an especially good job for her. The woman, however, was clearly not a neat freak. Carl could very well have decided to do a second room with a second designer in the same weekend while she was away. And, of all the designers in Crestview, he could have chosen my archrival.

A short, muscular man wearing jeans and a CU sweat-shirt swept open the door. I smiled, wondering if this was Randy Axelrod, the helpful neighbor. The guy was certainly too old to be Carl’s stepson; like Carl, he looked to be in his late forties. “Hi. My name is Erin Gilbert, and I’m here to—”

“Kevin McBride,” he interrupted. Despite my casual, paint-splatter-ready attire, he gave me a slow grin and a visual once-over. His gaze lingered on my chest so long that I wanted to clobber him. “Carl didn’t mention how attractive you were.”

That sounded like a stale pickup line—perhaps a residue from the man’s disco days—but I joked, “Didn’t he? Darn! I was so certain that was on the things-to-do list I gave him.”

Kevin chuckled and winked at me. “Come on in, Erin. Everyone’s in the kitchen.” He raked his fingers through his thick, graying hair as he said, “I’m afraid we’ve played a little trick on you. But I’ll let Carl explain.” Still eyeing me, he added, “Don’t worry.”

“Okay,” I replied placidly, although in truth, nothing makes me worry quite as much as being told “Don’t worry.” I knew the Sullivan Designs van in the driveway meant trouble ahead.

Kevin McBride ushered me along a wear-marked path in the tan carpeting—past the living room and dining room and around the corner. Carl Henderson and Steve Sullivan were leaning against a kitchen counter, listening to a third man pontificate about who would “really kick butt” in the Super Bowl. The football expert had an enormous paunch, salt-and-pepper hair, and a white scrub-brush mustache.

I tucked a lock of my wavy auburn hair back into its ponytail. In spite of myself, my vision was drawn to Steve Sullivan, who—because life isn’t so fair as to give human weasels beady black eyes and scrawny tails—was really
hot.
At roughly six feet, he was three or four inches taller than I and a couple of years older—thirty or so. He was wearing a black sweater—cashmere—and black jeans. He had gorgeous hazel eyes and light brown hair, slightly tousled in that arty, I’m-too-cool-to-comb-my-hair way that you just
know
takes twenty minutes in front of a mirror to arrange. His handsome face froze the moment he spotted me. Meanwhile, the large man beside him continued his football lecture and appeared to be in no hurry to acknowledge my presence.