Stipulations and Complications

by Becki Willis

  Tan was too boring, taupe too trendy.

  Green was out.

  Browns wouldn’t do.

  The reds weren’t to her liking, and none of the blues had struck her fancy.

  One by one, she flipped the color samples over, until the only ones left were shades of white.

  “You wanted something warmer,” Nick Vilardi reminded her, struggling to keep the impatience from his voice. He had envisioned a color scheme from the beginning, but bringing her around to the same decision was harder than he thought.

  “I know, but nothing else seems right…”

  “You liked this cream color, didn’t you?”

  “I’m afraid it might look yellow in certain light.”

  “This pale gray was nice. Remember, you liked this one. It has the feel of tradition, while still being fresh and modern. Elegant, with warm undertones. It would make an excellent field color.”

  “Maybe,” Madison conceded, chewing on her bottom lip. “I liked it with the off-white trim.”

  It was the most progress they had made. Encouraging her to keep up the momentum of making a decision, Nick nodded enthusiastically and pressed for an accent color. “What about this for the accent? Or this cranberry color?”

  Madison studied the samples he presented. “Could I see it again on the computer model?”

  All but grinding his teeth, Nick managed a smile. “Sure.”

  He punched a few buttons on his iPad, brought up a digital rendition of the Big House, and electronically re-painted the image on the screen. He turned it toward Madison for her approval.

  “I don’t know…” She chewed on her lip, then turned to her friend. “What do you think, Genny?”

  “I like it,” her friend said, earning a bright smile from the television host. “Nick is right. It keeps the traditional feel of elegance, especially with the cream trim, but the colors are so much warmer and more inviting than conventional white.”

  Before Madison could voice a protest, a loud commotion erupted from behind the house. Someone screamed. A door banged shut and something crashed to the ground. The cameraman jerked his focus from the indecisive woman to the ruckus unfolding; it was certainly more interesting.

  A worker raced from around the house, running as if a flame crawled up his shirttail. There was plenty of fire in his voice as he yelled, “Help! Call the police! Dear Jesus above, I just found a dead body!”

  Chapter Two

  Blanching whiter than any of the paint samples, Madison felt the air swish from her lungs. “It’s a curse,” she lamented beneath her breath. “I’m cursed with dead bodies.”

  The show was forgotten. Even the cameras knew where the real story was.

  An on-duty security officer stopped them before they reached the entrance to the basement.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go down there.”

  Madison’s voice brooked no argument. “This is my house. Move out of my way.”

  “But we need to preserve the scene until the police get here.”

  Although he blocked the entrance, he occupied the step below her, and his five-foot-something frame was shorter than Madison’s to begin with. She all but loomed over him, looking formidable with her hands propped upon her hips and determination flashing in her hazel eyes.

  “I watch CSI just like you do,” she informed him coldly, eying the security badge on his chest with something close to disdain. They both knew he had no real authority in the matter. “You were hired to keep the crowd from disrupting filming, not to keep me, the owner, from my own property. Now move, or I’ll have you fired.”

  “You have no authority to do so,” the man said, but his voice wavered with uncertainty.

  Madison arched a fine eyebrow. “Maybe not, but I can have you banned from the property, which is essentially the same thing.” The challenge was clear in her eyes as she stared him down.

  He was the first to blink. His eyes darted to Genesis. “Fine, but she stays here.”

  Ignoring him, Madison grabbed her friend’s wrist and tugged. “Come on, Genny. You’re with me.” The man moved hastily away, lest the women trample him.

  Before they cleared the doorway, Nick Vilardi and the cameraman were close on their heels.

  Madison had only been in the cellar twice before. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim lighting of the underground recesses. Electricity had been added at some point over the years, but the receptacles were crude and sparse. She paused to get her bearings. The necessitated support beams and load-bearing pilasters chopped the cavernous space into odd and random rooms, creating a maze effect.

  As before, the cellar’s size and the number of rooms comprising it astounded Madison. She always thought of a cellar as a cold, cramped space filled with vegetables and spiders, a place to retreat when tornadoes swirled through the stormy Texas skies. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, it seemed that cellars played a much more valuable role.

  True, the space was cool and slightly damp, kept naturally insulated with floors and walls made of brick, stone, and mortar. But there was evidence that the many rooms within the underground structure were used for different purposes.

  Food storage, certainly. Old bins and baskets still lined the walls.

  One smaller room was dedicated to wine and spirits. It boasted a huge wooden labyrinth tucked against one wall, its rack still half-filled with dusty bottles. A half dozen unopened oak barrels sat around the room. Madison made a mental note to visit the wine cellar again at a more opportune moment.

  Another room housed a cistern. Discarded buckets and crude early-century copper plumbing apparatuses scattered around the old casement. Connected to that room was another, obviously used as an early laundry room.

  Madison and crew moved into a larger space, a graveyard of sorts where old furniture was brought to die. Genny nudged her friend and pointed out some of the antiques littering the area, but there was no time to dawdle over the would-be treasures. The worker who had discovered the body led the way, clearly still distraught. He wrung his hands as he mumbled a mixture of prayers and panic, words of praise interspersed with vile curses. Half came out in English, half in Spanish.

  A second cameraman rushed to get in the lead, eager to capture the looks on the group’s faces as they advanced into the cool recesses of the cellar.

  Have they no shame? Madison wondered. No sense of reverence? She wanted to shout at them to turn off their cameras, but the truth was that she appreciated the additional light proffered. She stumbled on an uneven stone in the floor, barely missing a low overhead beam, but Nick caught her arm and helped her to remain steady.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” she asked their leader. They approached a brick wall that looked like a dead end.

  “Si, yes. There is a hidden room.” The man kept moving forward, slipping into a shadowed recess. The passageway narrowed, forcing them to move through the space in single file. The floor beneath them dipped. “Cuidadoso.Watch your step,” he warned.

  Maddy and Genny alternately clung to the narrow walls and each other as they took the slippery path to access the lowest level of the cellar. The floor through the tunneling passage sloped downward as the brick gave way to dirt. The air became close, the cloying smell of dank earth crowding in around them.

  Madison fought a wave of claustrophobia and memories best left in the past. She belatedly realized the folly of her rash decision to see the body for herself. Wasn’t the sight of two dead bodies — in three months, no less — enough for anyone?

  This is just a room beneath my house, she reminded herself, not Ronny Gleason’s incinerator. There’s plenty of room to move around down here, plenty of air to breathe. No danger. She swallowed down a gulp of fear.

  “Th-There!” the man said, throwing his arm toward the back of the darkened space.

  They were in a small room, not more than eight feet wide by ten feet deep, its ceiling low. While the rest of the cellar had finished walls and floo
rs, this deepest underground room was much more crude.

  Casting too much light for such a small space, the glare from the cameras bounced off the earthen walls, causing momentary blindness. Madison shielded her eyes, peeking through her fingers as she surveyed the room. A crude wooden bed occupied the far corner. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the skeleton stretched out upon it.

  Beside her, Genny gasped softly and moved closer in. Nick Vilardi moved behind both women and put an arm around their shoulders.

  “It appears to have been here quite some time,” he murmured.

  Madison managed a nod. “Thank goodness,” she said weakly. “Still, I wish Brash would hurry.”

  What was taking him so long? She would feel better when the chief of police arrived, even if their questionable relationship was strained at the moment.

  “I called Cutter,” Genny offered. “He’s on his way.”

  Confusion creased Nick’s brow. “Cutter? Isn’t that the guy from the fire department?”

  Genny’s blond head bobbed. “The Volunteer Fire Department helps with a lot more than fires, you know.”

  “I think it’s too late to help our friend here.” He nodded to the pile of bones on the platform before shifting his attention to the distraught worker. “Enrique, how did you find this room?”

  Still visibly shaken, the man pointed to a narrow step that all but blended into the wall. “I was finding pasadizos secreto like you said, Boss. Circle down to here.” He made a circular motion with his finger.

  “A secret spiral staircase?”

  “Si. Can I go now, Boss?”

  “You may go up, but don’t leave. Chief deCordova will want to talk with you.”

  “Gracias, Boss.” Already halfway out of the room, the worker tossed the hasty parting over his shoulder.

  “What is this room?” Madison breathed, venturing forward a few steps. In addition to the bed, it had a narrow table, a set of rickety shelves, and the hidden staircase. None had been touched in recent decades.

  “I think someone lived down here,” Genny guessed. Her eyes zeroed in on the collection of bones. For the most part, the skeleton was still intact. Perhaps the person had died in their sleep, or been sick. Or wounded.

  “It looks like they died down here, too,” Madison murmured. The air grew thinner and the walls seemed to inch inward. She was relieved to know the body was decades old, already fully decayed and rotted. Still, being in the room with any dead body was disturbing, particularly when that room was underground, small, and dark. For all she knew, the person had suffocated for lack of air.

  “I think I’d like to go up, too,” she announced abruptly.

  She suddenly could not escape soon enough.

  ***

  As they stepped back into the blessed fresh air, Madison noted the crowd out front had grown. When two fire department trucks arrived, a half dozen vehicles followed; people in their small community were just naturally curious. If there had been an actual emergency, they would have gladly pitched in to help. And if there was anything to see, anything to pass along in the form of gossip… well, they would be happy to help in that regard, as well.

  “You look rather pale,” Genesis told her friend. “You find a spot to rest. I’ll show Cutter and his men down.”

  “Thanks.” Without arguing, Madison made her way out to the side yard. She could watch the chaos unfolding from there, no need to be up close and personal. She knew it was ridiculous, but the thought of being in the house right now, even on one of its porches, gave her the willies. This was the house she would eventually live in, and that body had been there for ages. It posed no danger, but she needed to put some distance between herself and it right now.

  She found a massive old pecan tree just this side of the fence. The exposed roots offered the perfect perch for her weary body.

  She watched as a half dozen men from the fire department took control of the scene. With the help of the security officer on duty, three of the firefighters set up a perimeter, shooing away personnel and any clutter accumulated near the cellar entrance. Nick dismissed the crew for the rest of the day, even though most seemed reluctant to leave. It appeared everyone wanted to know what kind of body had been found, and where. One firefighter talked with Enrique, while Genny led Cutter and another fireman inside the would-be crypt.

  A police cruiser arrived on scene, then another. Madison breathed a sigh of relief when she saw a familiar athletic form crawl from the second car. She determined, however, that Brash could start his investigation without her. She was fine right here, thank you.

  After a while, Madison became aware of voices behind her. As the crowd grew front and center, the swelling number of people pushed along to the side view of the house. Although the gawkers could not see her sitting on the other side of the large tree, she could easily hear their discussion.

  “Been years since we’ve found a dead body; now she shows up, and they’re popping up like weeds!” one person harrumphed.

  “I wonder who it is this time. First, she finds Ronny Gleason dead in his chicken house, then she watched as Caress Ellingsworth was killed in her own living room. Wonder who she’s found this time?”

  They could at least get their facts straight, Madison thought sullenly. True, she had witnessed the fight that resulted in the former soap queen’s death, but she didn’t actually watch the murder take place. Secondly, it had been in the actress’ dining room, not the living room. And third, she had not been the one to discover this body. Details, people.

  “This might just be a fancy trick to get more people to watch her TV show,” a third person suggested.

  “I heard she didn’t have a penny to her name, till those TV folks came around and offered her ten thousand dollars to do their show.”

  There was a discernible sniff. “Why would they pay her ten thousand dollars? She’s nobody special.”

  “I heard she and her husband were some sort of fancy socialites in Dallas. Lived in a house almost as big as this one, with a maid for every floor and a cook, too.”

  Nope, a few thousand feet smaller than this one. No maids, unless you counted the once-a-week cleaning service Gray insisted upon. Definitely no cook. Gray would be pleased with the socialite comment, though, even though it was never my style.

  “If she had it so good in Dallas, what’s she doing here in Juliet?” one of them asked.

  “I heard she’s planning on fixing up the Big House, and then selling it to a Japanese couple she knows from Dallas,” someone replied.

  Huh?

  “Humph. That’s not what I heard,” the sniffing woman said. “I heard her husband had an investment company, but when the housing market went down, so did they. Hard.”

  A fourth voice spoke with an air of authority. “I heard he was involved in one of those Fonzie schemes. Swindled a bunch of people out of their money. Big, important people, people that were supposed to be their friends. Then the whole pack of them turned on her and she came running back home.”

  Okay, getting warmer.

  “I think you mean Ponzi, not Fonzie. Anyways, Lou Ann Snell said she was fixing up the house on her father’s behalf, so he can turn it into a home for troubled youth. Her folks are moving back so they can run it.”

  “Who would have ever thought Charlie Cessna would become a missionary?” This from the first voice, sounding a bit awed. “He wasn’t exactly a bad kid, but he was the only one of Miss Bert’s boys to stir up trouble. He tried a little bit of everything, before he found his calling with the Lord.”

  Another sniff. “If you ask me, it’s just a good excuse to run around, traveling the world. Sounds better than to say he gets itchy feet the minute the grass starts to grow beneath them.”

  You might have a point.

  “I hope they don’t bring in trouble-makers,” one woman fretted. “They had one of those homes over in Navasota, but it closed down after only about a year. They tried to be self-sufficient, but folks got tired of
those kids walking around town, trying to pawn off their baked goods and crafts. Always trying to sell you something, or get you to pay them for doing odd jobs around the house. When folks finally gave in and did let them fix the fence or paint the porch or cut the grass, they would later notice how things came up missing.”

  “I certainly hope we don’t have to deal with those sorts of shenanigans here.”

  Still another voice spoke. “I don’t think any of you are right. I watched the pilot for the show. It looks like they’re fixing up the house for her to live in.”

  “It’s just her and two teenage kids. Why do they need a house this size?”

  “To keep it in the family, so to speak. You know Miss Juliet thought of Bertha Hamilton Cessna as her own child. Why else would she have practically given her town to the woman?”

  “You’re new here. You don’t know the whole story.”

  “I’ve been here over twenty years,” the woman protested.

  “Yes, and thirty years ago Juliet Blakely up and left her estate to her cook’s daughter, instead of her most trusted employee like she’d always promised. You can’t tell me Bertha Cessna didn’t have something on the old woman. Mark my words, she tricked Miss Juliet into leaving her fortune to her.”

  Ignoring the squabble between the two women, the first person spoke. “I went inside it once, you know. That staircase is absolutely gorgeous, even more so in person than it looks on TV. A half dozen living rooms, sitting rooms, and whatnot. You know Miss Juliet was all about putting on airs. If it was considered proper and dignified, it was in that house.”

  “Does it really have a famous mural painted on the wall?”

  “The artist, at least, was famous. Someone Miss Juliet brought in from Paris, France.”

  Someone gasped. “Just to paint a wall?”

  Miss Sniffster spoke again, her tone disapproving. “I watched the show, too. I think there’s something going on between her and that carpenter. I’ve seen the looks that simmer between them. Shameful, if you ask me. She’s a widow, after all, and still in mourning.”