Remodeled to Death

by Valerie Wolzien

  “And it didn’t get finished?” Susan asked, thinking of the bathroom over her head.

  “It didn’t get started. Simon Fairweather wouldn’t approve the initial plans. And it was all Ken Cory’s fault. You’d almost think he didn’t want the work.”

  “I don’t understand. What did he do?”

  “What do you know about the Universal Building Code?” Jack asked, popping a cracker piled with cheese into his mouth.

  “Nothing. Except that Jed was telling me that Hancock uses it, whatever that means.”

  “Well, in the case of Lacy Knight it meant that she didn’t even get to begin to refinish her attic the way that she wanted to,” he answered.

  “But it was all Ken Cory’s fault,” his wife repeated. “If Ken had just filed the plans and said that the space was going to be used for storage, everything would have been all right.”

  “But he didn’t do that?” Susan asked, hoping the story would become clearer as it became longer.

  “No, he drew the plans, and when they were submitted, he explained that the attic was going to be used in the future as a bedroom for two children. So, of course, the plans were turned down.” Ellie leaned back against the couch as though she had just made everything crystal clear.

  Jack recognized Susan’s confusion and explained. “You see, there are certain qualifications that rooms must meet for different uses. Like grounded outlets have to be installed in all bathrooms. And the windows in rooms where people sleep have to be of certain dimensions so that they can serve as exits in case of fire.”

  “But bedrooms have a lot of different window sizes—” Susan began.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he interrupted. “The bedrooms in this house have small casement windows with tiny panes. I doubt seriously if they’re up to code—and they don’t have to be. Each building must meet the code in effect at the time it is built. The code changes—is upgraded and probably becomes better in terms of safety—but only new or remodeled spaces are required to meet the current code.”

  “Oh.” Susan nodded, thinking that she understood at last. “So the attic would have had to have lots of changes to be considered as a bedroom in this day and age.”

  “Expensive changes,” Ellie added. “Like doubling the size of all the dormer windows, and there are ten of them, five across the front of the house and five across the back. And the roof is hand-cut slate. Lacy said it would have cost a fortune.”

  “And if Ken Cory had submitted the plans stating that the work was being done to create extra storage space?” Susan asked.

  “They would have passed,” Jack answered.

  “Unless Simon Fairweather found some other excuse to turn them down,” his wife disagreed.

  “And the same thing happened to Debbie Sanderson?” Susan continued her questions.

  “Not quite, as I understand it,” Jack replied.

  “Well, the result was the same,” Ellie argued. “Her backyard is even worse than our bathroom.”

  “Debbie was having an extension added to the back of her house,” Susan said, thinking she had heard something about this.

  “They were having a huge extension added. I saw the plans and it was going to be wonderful. The architect had designed a large octagon with built-in couches and bookcases and glass on five sides. Then there was a wooden deck attached that repeated the shape of the building and steps that led down to a similarly designed flagstone patio with a fish pond placed in the middle of it.”

  “Sounds fabulous.”

  “We’ll never know. The entire thing turned out to be such a mess that Debbie says it was actually responsible for her divorce.”

  “What happened?” Susan asked.

  “Cory Construction started to dig the foundation before the plans were approved by the building inspector’s department. And when Simon Fairweather found out about it, he insisted that the entire project be stopped.”

  “For how long?”

  “I believe Debbie said that his exact words were ‘until Hancock has a new building inspector,’ and she didn’t think he was talking about retiring.”

  “What does that have to do with the Sandersons’ divorce?” Susan asked.

  “Debbie signed the contract for the project without her husband’s knowledge. He said he wasn’t going to pay for work that he didn’t order done and that, apparently, wasn’t going to be completed anytime in the near future. And he just walked out the door and never looked back. At least, that’s how Debbie sees it.”

  “And what is she going to do?” Susan asked.

  “I have no idea. They’re in the middle of negotiations over the terms of their divorce. He refuses to give her anything, except the house, which is large, expensive to run, and has water flooding into the basement from the ugly dirt hole that is now in their backyard. Debbie says she can’t afford to fill it in and there is no way she’s going to be able to sell it like it is.”

  “Unless she can convince a prospective buyer that it’s a swimming pool,” Jack Bordon added with a smirk.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Ellie asked, an identical expression on her face.

  “I’m going to go home, change my clothes, and go to church,” Susan answered, standing up.

  “Good idea. Prayer never hurts,” Ellie said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Simon Fairweather’s funeral was beautiful. The Hancock Episcopal Church was filled from the doors to the altar with bouquets of white flowers tied with miles of wide white satin ribbons. In the pews mourners sat elbow to elbow, sharing hymnals since there weren’t enough to go around. Susan had slipped in after the service began, intentionally arriving late to avoid standing around before the service and talking about a man she couldn’t even remember meeting. Now she got the feeling that everyone else in town had been his close friend. She frowned and listened as Buck Logan, Hancock’s mayor, explained what she had missed.

  “… one of the finest members of our community. Not only was he diligent in his work as Hancock’s building inspector—a position he held for almost thirty years—but his volunteer work for the community is well known by everyone. How many years did he single-handedly run the Community Chest fund drive? How many times did he say yes when the volunteer firemen were looking for someone to help erect the Christmas tree on the town commons? How many Halloween parades for our smallest children did he help judge? How many Easter eggs were hidden and then found under the auspices of this particularly devoted citizen of our lovely village? And who was ever more ready, willing, and able to assume high office in one of the many clubs to which he belonged?” Buck looked over the large congregation as though expecting an answer from man, if not from God. “Who else but Simon Fairweather?” he ended when no one spoke.

  “So who would kill such a saint?” someone in a pew at the back of the church whispered loudly.

  “Almost anyone who knew the bastard!” came the anonymous reply.

  The man next to Susan snorted his amusement and his wife smacked him in the ribs with her elbow. Susan tried to concentrate on Buck’s continuing tribute.

  “Although he had no children of his own, all Hancock’s children have and will continue to benefit from the conscientious way Simon Fairweather carried out his professional duties and his personal obligations. And now we’ll have a word from another dear friend of mine and a dear friend of Simon Fairweather’s, the president of the Hancock Community Chest.”

  Susan watched and waited as Simon Fairweather was eulogized by at least half of Hancock’s most boring men. She was in the middle of singing the final hymn when she realized that no one had mentioned Simon’s personal life, and that, in fact, this was the first funeral she had attended where not one member of the family spoke.

  Not that Simon had much of a family. His aunt was sitting in the first pew, too old and possibly too senile to pay much attention to either the service or her surroundings. His wife, Patricia, was the only other family that Susan knew of and certainly no
one expected the dead man’s wife to speak at her husband’s funeral. The wife’s job was to greet the mourners after the service and possibly to entertain them later in her home. At least Susan hoped that was what Patricia Fairweather was going to do. She hadn’t even seen the widow yet. She closed the hymnbook and joined the general exodus toward the rear of the church.

  And that’s when she spied Patricia Fairweather. She was standing in the doorway of the narthex surrounded by a group of tall, blond people. They looked so much like her that it was impossible to imagine they were anything but closely related.

  “They must be the Storm sisters,” a neighbor of Susan’s whispered in her ear. “I’ve always heard how much they looked alike when they were young. I guess that didn’t change much as they aged.”

  “The men,” Susan asked. “Were there any brothers?”

  “No, those are the husbands, I think.”

  “All three sisters were attracted to men who look like Norse gods?” Susan asked, incredulous.

  “Don’t all women like men who look like Norse gods?” came the reply.

  No one disputed that.

  Susan continued on her way to say a few words to the widow. She passed some friends and many neighbors and found herself wondering if she would rate a funeral half this size if she died in her sleep tonight. As at many funerals she’d attended, the talk was about everything but the deceased. One couple was arguing over an apparent snag in their divorce settlement. There were more than a few people exchanging stories (horrors or brags) of their summer vacations. Three women were even exchanging favorite recipes for barbecue sauce. Susan passed through the crowd, smiling at those she knew and eavesdropping on those she didn’t, until she was at Patricia Fairweather’s side.

  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured.

  “Thank you.” Patricia looked straight into Susan’s eyes and then glanced down. “You will be coming over to the house afterwards, won’t you?” she asked quietly.

  “Of course,” Susan assured her, thrilled that she was to be included in the group. Not that she was morbid or wanted to intrude on anyone’s grief; she just expected that she would find out more about Simon Fairweather there than anyplace else at the present time.

  “So I’ll see you at the Fairweathers’ house?” asked the neighbor who had spoken to her earlier as Susan headed down the steps of the church and out into the humid August heat to the parking area behind the rose garden.

  “You were invited, too?” Susan asked undiplomatically.

  “Everyone who came to the funeral was asked as far as I could tell. Don’t tell me you expected this to be an intimate little gathering, Susan Henshaw. You know Hancock better than that. I just hope I can manage to stay away from Buck Logan—that man is so obnoxious in an election year. You’d think there was actually someone else in town who wanted his job from the way he campaigns.”

  Susan smiled politely and hurried toward her car. If everyone there was heading over to the Fairweather house, it was going to be difficult to get a parking place. She started the car, relieved when the air-conditioning began blasting cool air. She had become only too aware that her best black summer suit was more appropriate for spring than an August day that was promising to be in the high nineties.

  There was going to be food, Susan realized, pulling up in the driveway behind the caterer’s vans. In her rearview mirror she spied other guests arriving, getting out of cars and, apparently in unison, deciding a more casual approach to dress was appropriate and tossing their jackets back into their vehicles. Susan followed suit.

  And then she followed the line of guests heading into the backyard, where a buffet brunch had been set up on the edge of the mossy green lawn. Susan accepted a cup of coffee from a uniformed waiter and wandered around, trying to keep her heels from puncturing holes in the immaculate lawn and find a friend to speak with at the same time.

  She was admiring a blowsy purple clematis growing over an ornate trellis when someone came up behind her.

  “What I don’t understand is, if no one liked him, why is his funeral turning into the social event of the season?”

  Susan turned and discovered Debbie Sanderson by her side. “Debbie! I was talking about you recently.…” Susan didn’t know how to finish that statement.

  “What about me? How my husband has actually had the lack of imagination to run off with his secretary? How my children are refusing to live with either their father or myself and trying to con their grandparents into paying tuition at one of the most expensive boarding schools in the country? How I had slightly too much to drink at the field club’s Fourth of July party and fell into the kiddy pool wearing a gauze dress that became completely transparent the second it hit the water? About how—”

  “About the remodeling job on your house,” Susan interrupted before she was forced to listen to every embarrassing thing that had ever happened to the woman. “How it was left incomplete due to a mistake made by Ken Cory. You see,” she added, “I hired Cory Construction to work on my house. In fact, they’re there right now.”

  “When did they start work?”

  “About seven o’clock.”

  “I mean, when did they start working on your house?”

  “A couple of days ago. Why?”

  “Right before or right after Simon Fairweather was killed?”

  “Right after.”

  “Then you’re okay.”

  “What do you mean?” Susan asked, puzzled by the direction this conversation was taking.

  “If he had been killed right afterwards, you’d be a suspect in his murder, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Susan, you’re supposed to be so up on everything in Hancock. Surely you know that Simon Fairweather has been screwing up jobs for Cory Construction for at least the last six months, maybe for the last year.”

  “Yes, I heard that’s what happened to your addition—”

  “Not exactly,” Debbie interrupted. “What happened with my addition is that Ken Cory somehow misunderstood someone in Simon Fairweather’s office. He thought the plans had been approved when they hadn’t. So he went ahead and hired someone to dig a huge hole in the backyard right next to the foundation of my house. And then when Simon Fairweather found out that the work had begun without his official sanction he stopped the entire project.”

  “He just said ‘I don’t approve’ and the work had to be stopped? Just like that?”

  “Not quite. He claimed that the addition needed to be granted a variance in the local zoning laws and that a variance had not been applied for.”

  “Weren’t those things Ken Cory should have taken care of automatically?” Susan asked. “I know that I’ve had those little yellow sheets of paper stuck up in my window from the first day of the project.”

  “What are you having done?”

  “Bathroom remodeling.”

  “Oh, nothing major,” Debbie said with apparent disdain. “That type of stuff can be done with a trip to the building inspector’s office. Throw a few dollars on the desk and get your permits. Extensions require more than that, a lot more.”

  “Like what? You mentioned variances?” Susan asked.

  “According to the zoning laws in Hancock, Connecticut, a house can only cover a certain percentage of the land that it is built on.”

  “You mean, like a house can only cover a third of an acre-size property? Something like that?”

  “Sort of.”

  Susan got the feeling that Debbie wasn’t all that sure of her facts. “So your addition was going to make your home larger than it should be? And that’s not allowed?”

  “Oh, it’s allowed. You just have to go through a long, time-consuming, and, of course, money-consuming process of getting every neighbor within a certain distance to agree to the whole thing. Then you and your builder and your architect have to go in front of the planning board and give them your plans and the opinions of the neighbors and then Simon Fairweather decides
whether or not you’re going to be allowed to do what you want to do with property that you already own.”

  “Not Simon Fairweather,” Susan argued. “The planning board makes that decision, surely.”

  “In Hancock, Connecticut, what Simon Fairweather says goes. He runs that planning board like he does his own office. Ken Cory assured me of that from the very beginning.”

  “How did Simon do that?”

  “He’s … he was … one of the original dictators.”

  Susan frowned. “I don’t get it. How did one man become so powerful?”

  “I don’t get it either,” Debbie said. “And I don’t want to get it. I’m so sick of worrying about Simon Fairweather that I could scream. And maybe,” she added, “it all comes down to what we were saying just a few minutes ago.”

  “What?” Susan asked, looking around. The backyard was filling up with guests. If she was going to taste one of those delicious-looking cheese Danish, she’d better get in line, she reminded herself as Debbie continued to talk.

  “If no one liked him,” Debbie repeated, “how come there are so many people at his funeral?”

  “You’re here and you certainly didn’t care for the man,” Susan reminded her.

  “I thought it was going to be a viewing. You know, with an open casket. I just wanted to make damn sure he really was dead.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was pure luck that the next person Susan ran into was Simon Fairweather’s secretary. She stood out in this large gathering of mourners by being the only person present who was wiping tears from her eyes.

  “Allergies,” the middle-aged woman explained. “From the moment the first stalk of goldenrod blooms by the side of the road until the first frost, I am a slave to my allergies.”

  “That must be dreadful,” Susan said noncommittally. They were side by side in front of a table piled high with tiny pastries and Susan was trying to choose between raspberry Danish and a miniature cheese croissant. She settled the problem by taking both. And then a third. After all, lemon was one of her favorite flavors.