Death by Inferior Design (3 page)

“Randy? Is that you?” a woman’s voice called.

“Last time I checked.”

“I caught Taylor Duncan poking around in our refrigerator a couple of minutes ago! You need to go out back and—” A trim, fifty-something woman in a Waverly floral print cotton dress rounded the corner. Spotting me, she froze and stared slack-jawed at me.

Assuming she was simply caught off guard at suddenly finding herself face-to-face with an unexpected guest, I smiled and said, “Your husband suggested I come over and meet you. I’m Erin Gilbert. I’m going to be redecorating the Hendersons’ bedroom.”

“Pleased to meet you, Erin,” she said, and stepped forward to shake my hand. She let her grip linger an instant longer than necessary, studying my features all the while. “My name’s Myra. Myra Axelrod.”

“Have we met before? If so, I’m sorry, but I—”

“No, no. You just remind me of somebody. My, uh, sister. When she was your age. I—”

“Erin’s got to get cracking,” Randy told his wife before she could say more.

“I’m all set, too,” Myra said, grabbing a tan cardigan from the arm of the sofa. Her piercing gray eyes stayed on my face. “I’ll come with you, Erin, and be your personal assistant for the weekend.”

Before I could respond, Randy decreed, “No way, Myra. We need to start at the McBrides’ house.”

“But I—”

“No, Myra.” He shook his head.

They held each other’s gaze. Or rather, they held each other’s glare. All things considered, I decided, this was my worst-ever send-off for a new job. “It was nice meeting you, Myra, but I
do
need to get cracking. . . .” My voice faded as I pondered the expression. When it comes to interior design, cracking is rarely a good thing.

“We’ll catch up to you later, Erin,” Myra replied with a warm smile.

The moment the door shut behind me, I could hear the bass and contralto rumblings of their argument. From my vantage point across the street, I got a good look at the McBrides’ house and could see that it was half again as large as the Hendersons’ place. Subtle clues in the roofline—now adorned with icicle-light strings— and weathering of the cedar shingles indicated that the McBrides, or maybe the house’s previous owners, had made two significant additions to the original structure. Odd that homeowners who could afford to put that kind of money into their property would hire a designer for a surprise one-weekend makeover. Then again,
everything
in this neighborhood felt slightly odd.

Making a mental note to never again let mercenary concerns override my instincts, I returned to the Hendersons’ bedroom. Taylor was there, helping Carl clear out the room. I stole a moment to scan the bedroom, both as it existed and as I envisioned it, which was an ability that I considered one of my most precious gifts. My spirits soared at the notion of how, in just one weekend, I’d be able to take this space from blah to wow.

Carl had told me that his wife was a voracious reader, and there were books stacked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa along the wall beside her side of the bed. I planned to convert the small closet by the entrance into a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that would be hidden behind the closet door. Despite the richness that neatly arranged books bring to any room, “neatly arranged” was the operative phrase, which obviously wasn’t Debbie’s strong point.

The Hendersons already owned an exquisite eight-drawer alder chest with a lightly distressed stained exterior. That one piece was worth several thousand dollars—roughly ten times the value of all their other furniture in the room combined. When I was done, Debbie Henderson would have a fabulous custom-designed alder bed with maple accents in a light finish that complemented the showpiece chest. Curtains would hang between the bedposts and hide the new headboard’s shelves so that she could keep them in whatever state she wished and not spoil the visuals of the room.

As for color schemes, the walls were now bone white. When my work was complete, they would be fauxfinished with a gold base and a burgundy top coat, which would create a warm, romantic hue reminiscent of a Tuscan sunset. Floor-length honey-gold raw silk draperies would really pop against the wall’s dark color. Crown molding, which echoed the lines of the chest, would enhance the height of the room.

Now that my cruddy send-off was behind me, I suddenly relished the chance to sink my teeth into this job. And if I got to force Sullivan to eat some humble pie in the process, all the better.

The three of us had soon moved the furniture into the guest room, and while the two men carried out armloads of paperbacks, I removed the corner bead from the aspen paneling on the accent wall. The sensation of ripping out boards has always greatly appealed to me. For one thing, it marks the no-turning-back-now portion of the journey, just like breaking a bottle of champagne on a ship’s bow. For another thing, the nails as they’re wrenched free make a really cool noise.

This paneling, which the Hendersons faced from their bed, was on a short wall that they had to round in order to reach their dressing area and bathroom. The floor plan necessitated that the large chest remain against this south wall, but placing wood furniture against a wood wall in nearly identical tones is a mistake. My remedy was yummy wallpaper with an elegant pattern that had a light burgundy—claret—background and champagne gold as the accent color.

I began my demolition on one side of wall, Carl and Taylor on the other. They were making short work of the task and had about half of the boards removed when Taylor asked, “Hey, Carl? Mind if I keep these boards and use ’em in my trailer? I’ll burn the cracked ones in the fireplace ’n’ install one of those kinds of decorating thingamajigs where the paneling comes halfway up the wall.”

“Wainscoting,” I couldn’t help but interject, alarmed that a supposed first-rate carpenter wouldn’t immediately know that term.

“You may as well, Taylor,” Carl answered. “Might make Debbie feel better to know someone was getting some use out of it. This paneling was her favorite thing in the room.”

“Wait a minute, Carl!” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell me that when I was asking you what your wife might want?”

He shrugged. “You’re the designer. I didn’t want to cramp your style. ’Specially not when there’s a Super Bowl ticket riding on it.”

“But this is your and your wife’s room! I’d have been happy to forgo the wallpaper and work the paneling into my design.” Horrified, I looked at the pile of thin tongue-and-groove boards we’d made. Most were cracked and dented. “Now it’s too late. . . .”

“Then there’s no sense sweating about it now, Gilbert,” Taylor said with a sneer.

I glared at him and almost sniped,
Thanks for the advice, Einstein,
but for once kept my mouth shut, realizing it wasn’t in my best interest to antagonize my time-share carpenter. “Please call me Erin, not Gilbert.”

I went back to ripping out boards with a vengeance. One short board suddenly fell off the wall before I’d even touched it.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “This had better not be a dry-rot problem.” I knelt to take a close look.

“What’s that?” Taylor asked, leaning down to look over my shoulder.

“Looks like a secret compartment,” Carl replied.

“Weird,” Taylor muttered.

I reached inside the small cubbyhole, which looked as though someone had punched through the drywall and then chipped at its edges. The opening was roughly eighteen inches above the floor and was large enough for me to reach my arm through past the elbow and touch the floorboards. The first thing my fingertips brushed against felt like a delicate chain, and I managed to pinch it between my fingers and lift it out. It was a necklace— a lovely onyx cameo on an old-fashioned chain of gold links. The intricate carving of a woman’s face in profile against a pink coral background was stunning. With the delicacy of Belgian lace, the gold setting framed the petite carving beautifully. This cameo appeared to be a family heirloom, as opposed to a priceless possession. Why would someone hide such a beautiful personal item inside a wall?

“Is this Debbie’s?” I asked Carl.

He shook his head, but his cheeks had gone crimson and his jaw looked tight enough to crack his teeth. I reached inside again and pulled out a sheaf of folded papers. They were tied with a red satin ribbon. Love letters, no doubt. I set the stack on the floor near my feet and reached one more time into the cubbyhole to determine if there was anything else behind the drywall, but the letters and necklace were everything.

“ ‘My dearest,’ ” Taylor read, crouching down by the pile of letters, “ ‘You were constantly on my mind today—’ ”

“Stop!” I cried. “You have no right to read those letters, Taylor! They belong to somebody else.”

He ignored me but did at least read silently. After he flipped over the first page, he said, “It’s boring anyway. Signed, ‘Love always,’ and the letter
M.”

“I don’t know any
M
people,” Carl muttered.

“Unless it’s really
H
for Henderson.” Taylor’s voice was mocking.

Carl grabbed the letters from Taylor’s hands. “That’s an
M.
And even if it
is
an
H,
it’s not
my
love note. I’d remember if I’d been stashing love notes inside my bedroom wall, for God’s sake!” The muscles in his jaw were working.

He paged through the letters, and this time I couldn’t object—they’d been found in his house, after all— though I grew increasingly uneasy. If they were Debbie’s, I found myself hoping Carl wasn’t the violently jealous type.

“The paper looks really old,” Carl remarked. His features and voice revealed some relief. “I’ll bet Randy or Myra put them here. Hey!
M
for Myra!”

But wouldn’t Myra have remembered this stash in the years since they’d last lived here? Discussing the Hendersons’ design project, if nothing else, surely would have sparked a memory. How hard could it have been to sneak upstairs and remove the contents before I arrived? “I have to plaster up that hole and have it dry in time to hang the wallpaper,” I said, thinking out loud.

Taylor went back to work tearing down paneling while Carl carried the letters and the pendant to some other room. I idly turned over the board that had been covering the hole to see if the back half of the groove had been filed away.

In a rectangular, carved-out indentation that would have lined up with the cubbyhole was tucked a small photograph of a smiling toddler with red hair. She stood next to a blue-and-green checkered umbrella stand. I stifled a gasp.

I glanced up at Taylor. He was paying me no mind, absorbed in his work. I peeled the picture loose and pocketed it. My pulse was racing so fast that I felt faint.

I’d seen an enlarged image of that photograph sitting on my mother’s piano every day for sixteen years of my life. The baby in the photograph was me.

chapter 2

I felt as though I’d been sucker-punched. I continued to rip out the paneling, grateful that this activity allowed me not only to stare at a wall, but to treat that wall with no small degree of violence.

What was my baby picture doing here? And how the heck had someone gotten hold of it? My adoptive mother was dead; my adoptive father had moved to California more than a decade ago. Only my birth parents could have had copies of that photograph.

Memories of my mother’s death two years earlier made my eyes sting with tears. My chest ached, as it had throughout those two months of hospice care when my mother lay dying, the worst time of my life. My hopes and prayers had focused on the desperate, futile longing that I could somehow give my breath to my mother— could prevent her congenitally diseased lungs from filling with fluid—taking her from this world and from me when she was just forty-six years old.

To make the end more comfortable and less impersonal, I’d brought her home, only to discover that the apartment she and I once shared and loved swiftly mutated into a mini-hospital, rife with the odors of disease and despair, pungent antiseptic, and medicine. My mother had been my first and ongoing client long before I’d enrolled at Parsons, and yet every design decision I’d made suddenly mocked me—every speck of color and vitality in our home made her look all the more ashen and frail and her hospital bed more stark. Even fresh flowers became merely funereal; light seemed a taunting exposure, so we spent those somber weeks with curtains closed, shrouded in heavy shadows.

One evening after the meal that she couldn’t force herself to eat, she reached for me. “You have to promise me one thing, Erin.” Her voice was a halting, barely audible rasp, which tore at my heart.

“Of course, Mom. Anything.”

“You have to promise me you won’t
ever
look for your birth parents, under
any
circumstances. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, not for a moment, but I replied without hesitation. “We agreed to that years ago, Mom.” Her hand had become frighteningly cold in mine.

“I know. But you must promise not to change your mind once I’m gone.”

“I promise, Mom. But why is it so important to you?”

She returned the oxygen mask to her face for one more shallow breath, then, closing her lovely blue eyes—the only feature of my mother that still resembled the woman who’d always been my one true parent—whispered, “I can’t explain, Erin. I’ve got to rest now.”

Although she’d languished for another nine days, it seemed to me that she’d poured what little strength and resources she had into asking me for that final promise. Afterward, she said less and less, until she fell silent for good.

Now I resented the hell out of whoever had forced me to relive this heartbreak. Jeannie Gilbert—my mother— had been a vibrant, optimistic person in life, and that was the part of her I wanted to keep in my heart and in my memory. I could almost hear her spouting one of her cheerful aphorisms: “There’s a reason God gave us eyes in front of our head and not in the back, Erin, so that we can
always
look ahead.”

Maintaining an eyes-forward approach had been a second promise of mine to her. It was one that, although unspoken, I also fully intended to keep.