by Leslie Caine
“She fainted,” Rebecca interjected. “You need to take care of her. I’m fine. The man who was killed…it’s her brother.”
“What’s happening?” a male voice called. Pate Hamlin was striding across the street toward us. “Rebecca? You okay?”
“I’m fine, Pate. There’s been a terrible accident. Involving a carpenter.”
“Go back in your house, sir,” the officer said. “We’ll be—”
Pate ignored him. “He gonna be all right?” he asked Rebecca.
“No, he’s dead. I think his name was Duncan.”
“Taylor Duncan?”
“Please, sir! We need to clear the scene so we can do our jobs.”
“He’s Erin Gilbert’s brother,” Rebecca told Pate. “And Erin works with Shannon’s designer, Steve Sullivan.”
Another officer sauntered toward us. With a bearing that signaled he was top dog, he barked, “You people need to move away from the house and stand by the patrol cars. Sir,” he thundered at Pate, “go back into your house.”
“Actually, I’ve got to head into town.” Pate pulled a business card out of his pocket. “If you have any questions, you can reach me at this number. But I won’t be much help. I didn’t know anything was wrong till I saw the police cars. Didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything.”
He trotted away. Ten minutes later, as Sullivan, Rebecca, and I were being ushered away from the door, Pate drove off in a red sports car—a Corvette, I was guessing. A pair of officers entered Shannon’s house.
While I was answering some questions for the officer who’d called me “ma’am,” a tan sedan drove up and parked in the road. I groaned. Detective O’Reilly’s vision locked on mine. His jaw muscles were working. He was no doubt envisioning himself chewing my head off in an icy cold interrogation room. A uniformed policeman emerged from Shannon’s house and spoke quietly with the detective, probably filling him in on the grotesque scene inside. After their conversation, O’Reilly sauntered toward me. “Miss Gilbert. Again. I might have known.”
“Detective O’Reilly.” Again! I did know!
He shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
“You found the body? Again?”
“Yes. It was Taylor Duncan. My half brother.”
“Huh. Figures. We’ve had more than our fair share of run-ins with Mr. Duncan.”
“He’d been trying to clean up his act, Detective,” I growled.
“Uh-huh.”
Shannon’s silver Lexus neared the driveway; Michael’s black BMW followed. At the sight of all the emergency vehicles, they both barely pulled over before deserting their cars in the road. “Oh, my God! Erin? What’s going on?” Shannon called.
“Why are the police here? What’s wrong?” Michael rushed up beside his wife and put an arm around her protectively.
“Do you live here, ma’am?” O’Reilly asked.
“Yes. I’m Shannon Dupree Young. And this is my husband, Michael Young. Why are you here? What’s happened?”
“Apparently one of the men working on your, uh, project had an accident. Do you know why there was only one carpenter here?”
“None of them were supposed to be here today,” Michael answered. “It’s Saturday. The crew don’t work on weekends.”
“Oh, honey,” Shannon said. “Didn’t I tell you? The foreman asked me yesterday if he could put in some overtime this morning. He wanted to get us back on schedule. I told him yes, because we wouldn’t be here anyway.”
Michael took in this information without comment, then returned his attention back to O’Reilly. “My wife was the keynote speaker at a luncheon at the Royala. It just ended. Shannon, are you saying you just gave this man our key?”
“No,” she said petulantly. “I told him the combination to the garage-door opener. Like I did for Gilbert and Sullivan. And David Lewis. Are you sure it was a carpenter, Detective? Not a burglar, or something?”
“It was Taylor Duncan. The foreman,” I said. “He was murdered.”
“Oh, dear Lord!” Shannon cried.
“That real big guy, you mean?” Michael asked.
“I need to get your statement, Miss Gilbert.” O’Reilly grabbed my elbow. “Excuse us, Mr. and Mrs. Young.”
“What…do we do now?” Michael asked in bewilderment. “Can we get into our house?”
“No. Talk to one of the officers. They can give you a number for Crestview Victims’ Advocates. They can help get you set up in a hotel for the night.”
Shannon sent a string of protests trailing the detective, but O’Reilly led me away as though he hadn’t heard her. He asked me quietly, “So, let’s hear it: Why were you here on a Saturday?”
“Designers work on weekends when that’s what our clients need us to do.”
He cocked an eyebrow as he led me to his sedan. “Okay, but in this case, your clients weren’t even home. Did you come with your brother?”
“No. I was looking for my brother and hoped he might be here.” The police must have pried Sullivan free of Rebecca’s grasp. She was talking to one of the officers in his squad car, while Sullivan and a second policeman stood at the foot of the drive. Sullivan gave me a reassuring smile, but I couldn’t return it.
After what could only be considered a ridiculously lengthy interrogation, O’Reilly let me go. By then, Steve and Rebecca were sitting next to each other in the back of the van, their legs dangling from the side doorway facing the house. The sight of their too-cozy seating arrangement instantly irked me. Granted, for the sake of our fledgling business, Sullivan and I had vowed to keep our relationship strictly professional. And the man was something of a natural flirt; he was very charming, which often worked wonders in winning over new clients. But in this case, he was literally flirting with the enemy, and I despised him for it.
They both hopped to their feet as I approached. “Hi, Erin,” Rebecca murmured in a sicky-sweet-I’m-oh-so-concerned voice. “I didn’t want to take off before I knew that you were all right.”
“I’m fine.”
“I just…feel so terrible that I called your half brother a ‘big galoot.’ I never would have been so heartless if I’d had any idea—”
“That’s okay,” I interrupted, though I’d noticed two things. One, that she now knew Taylor was my half brother. Two, that she was watching Sullivan out of the corner of her eye.
“As I’ve been saying to Steve”—she glanced over at him with lust-filled eyes—“I hate it that circumstances beyond any of our control have forced us into such adversarial roles. Let’s hope that this tragedy will bring an end to the hostilities between our clients.”
“That’d be great. Will Taylor’s death make Pate Hamlin decide not to buy the Youngs’ house out from under them, do you suppose? Or maybe Pate will stop trying to make Shannon’s life so miserable that he simply drives her from the neighborhood.”
The sharpness of my tone wasn’t lost on Rebecca. She averted her eyes and said gently, “Pate’s not a bad man, Erin.”
“Merely ruthless.”
She gave me a wry smile, squeezed my arm, and announced—I was certain—for the benefit of Steve’s ears more so than mine, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.” She added solemnly, “Call me if you’d like some company, Steve.”
I glared at her as she strolled down the driveway. Quietly, Sullivan said to me, “Want to go someplace and talk? I’ll buy you lunch.”
I shook my head, unable to meet his gaze. I was dangerously close to tears. “I think I need to take off.”
“Of course. You going home?”
Again, I shook my head. “I’m going to tell our mother about Taylor.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. But thanks for offering.”
“No problem,” he said sadly. “I just wish…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
I struggled to get my thoughts together as I drove out to my mother’s house, which was in a neighboring
town, twenty minutes from Crestview. I didn’t know what to say to her, but I did know that I had to do this in person.
Emily Blaire was a truly nice woman, if at times a tad self-absorbed. She ran a fitness studio in town, and I tried to get together with her at least once a month. It had been a strange shock last year to meet my birth mother out of the blue for essentially the first time. These days I was working hard at getting Sullivan’s and my new business venture going; Emily was now dating a man who she thought was “the real thing.” Both of our lives were hectic. Taylor, with his drug-abuse problems and constant brushes with the law, had been a source of contention in our relationship. There was no telling whether his death would push us further apart or bring us closer together.
The drive went much too quickly, and I soon found myself walking up to her small but cozy ranch-style brick house. My heart was pounding. I began to panic and now prayed that she wouldn’t answer the doorbell. No such luck. I heard her melodious, “Just a moment,” and she swept the door open moments later. “Erin!” she exclaimed. Then her smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
My eyes were tearing up. “Can I come in, Emily?”
“Oh, my God. It’s Taylor, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.
Emily cried. She dropped one damp white tissue after another, until they surrounded her like the petals from a dying flower. I sat beside her on the sofa. Gently, I explained how and why I’d found him, and that I knew very little else. I also told her about my friend in the police department—Officer Linda Delgardio—and that I hoped Linda would keep me up to speed with the investigation. My heart ached, and I found myself half regretting that Detective O’Reilly had allowed me to be the one to give Emily the horrible news; he’d agreed to wait an hour or two before he or anyone else from the department spoke to her.
Finally, she’d collected herself enough to speak. “This was the one thing I prayed would never happen…. I never wanted to outlive my child. It was bad enough that I never had the chance to watch you grow up, Erin. Now I’ve lost my only son.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“I wish I’d been a better parent to him. I never knew what to do when he started hanging out with the wrong crowd. I made him change schools. He found an even worse crowd. We moved. Same results. I pleaded. I nagged. I wept. I ignored. I fawned. Nothing worked! I finally went with tough love. I banished him from the house. Six months ago, I turned him into the authorities when I found out he was using again.”
“I know, Mom.”
She met my eyes, startled. That I’d inadvertently called her “Mom” was equally startling to me; it seemed disloyal to my adoptive mom’s memory; she’d died after a lingering illness three years ago. I continued, “You did everything you could do. You couldn’t live his life for him. Taylor seemed a lot more together when I spoke with him yesterday than he’s ever been.”
“Somebody did this to him! He’s been using power tools and nail guns since he was ten years old. He’s never hurt himself. Not once. He was murdered, Erin. You’ve been through this before. You found your father’s killer.”
“The police did,” I reminded her.
“And they wouldn’t have if it weren’t for you. The police are never going to put full effort into finding Taylor’s killer. They’ll just assume it was drug-related. If they run into any dead ends, they’ll just quit.”
“No, they won’t. They’ll treat Taylor like they would anyone else, and they’ll solve it.” I realized at once that I’d spoken with a confidence I didn’t feel.
Emily picked up on my hesitancy. “Erin. Please. You know as well as I do what will happen. They’ll look at this and say, ‘Here’s a dead twenty-year-old handyman with a drug record who tripped over his own nail gun. Tragic accident.’ And that’ll be the end of it.”
A pang of guilt melded with my sorrow. I’d missed Taylor’s twentieth birthday. Now he was dead. There was no way to make up for that now.
An idea struck me. “Remember how Taylor had that hiding place in your old house, between the studs?”
“Sure. He was always one for building hiding places. Especially when he was using drugs.”
“Did he have a hiding place in this house?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“Has he hidden anything there since he got out of prison?”
“No. It was emptied out when he went to jail, and he hasn’t been living here since he got out. He rented a room east of downtown Crestview. We agreed that’d be best…if he was living on his own. But he had an old paint can in the garage where he hid things before he…went away. And he did visit me once. Earlier this week…Monday or Tuesday. I can’t remember right now.”
“You should tell the police about his hiding place when they get here.”
“Which I’m sure will be soon…and that they’ll accuse him of dealing drugs again, or something.” She rose. “Let’s go look now and make sure his hiding spot is still empty.”
She led me to her garage. She looked, frankly, like walking death, and I asked if she wanted to be doing this now. She nodded grimly. “To the police, he was just a punk with a record, Erin, but he was my baby. You need to make sure the police get to the bottom of this. Promise me, Erin.”
“I will. I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you,” she said in a broken whisper. An array of cans lined the shelves along the back wall. She reached for a paint can.
“Wait! Fingerprints could be significant.”
“Mine and his will already be on it.” Despite her words, she used a plastic trash bag as a mitt to handle the paint can. She pried off the lid with a screwdriver. “He keeps some sand in the bottom of the can so it doesn’t feel empty.” A look of enormous pain passed across her features; she must have suffered from the realization that she should have used the past tense just now. She muffled a sob.
She stared in surprise. “My God. It’s not empty.”
“You never let on to him that you’d found his hiding place?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It was the best way I could keep tabs on him.”
Using the bag to avoid ruining the evidence, she removed an envelope. It had been curled to fit inside the can. Her hands were trembling. She shook the contents of the envelope onto the concrete garage floor.
Four photographs landed faceup. Each showed a couple in the throes of passion in a silver sedan. I recognized the car immediately. A moment later, I realized that I recognized the couple, as well.
“What had he gotten himself into?” Emily murmured. “Pornography?”
“More likely he was collecting evidence.”
“Evidence? For blackmail?”
I hesitated, not wanting to answer, for there was no other easy explanation. “Maybe.”
“Do you recognize these people? It’s got to be related to Taylor’s murder, don’t you think? That he was maybe keeping these pictures hidden to protect him from somebody?”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. I’ll take this to the police. We’ll let them handle this.”
“Wait, Erin! I’ve seen that blonde before! She’s got that television show in the mornings. That she copycatted from Audrey’s Domestic Bliss show. Isn’t that her?”
“Rebecca Berringer, yes. And that’s Chef Michael from Audrey’s show.” My client.
Our homes are what restore us, reveal our inner selves, and celebrate not only who we are, but who we hope to become.
—Audrey Munroe
* * *
DOMESTIC BLISS
Although I had every intention of taking the photographs directly to the Crestview Police Department, I didn’t. I simply couldn’t face the prospect of going from the heartbroken grief of my biological mother’s house straight to the sterile coldness of the police station in general, and of Detective O’Reilly in particular. I first needed to go home and shore up my flagging spirits.
My whole body was trembling as I parked near the slate walkway. Just the sight of the regal stone exterior
of the mansion that I was lucky to call my home gave me some solace. As I opened the carved oak door, I desperately hoped Audrey would be here.
I immediately noticed a new bouquet of pristine white calla lilies in the Waterford vase. The vase sparkled with captured yellow light from the chandelier. Seeing such a pretty sight at such a bleak time made my eyes mist again. I took a moment to drink in the atmosphere. I loved every square inch of this entranceway, from the high-coved ceiling to the travertine tile floor—the succulent smoky green wall paint, the roomy coat closet with its paneled doors, the quiet elegance of the precise trim.
Now, however, what I loved most of all was my view through the French doors into the messy parlor. Audrey sat on the Oriental rug, ensconced in some art project for her show. My black cat, Hildi, sat beside her, scrutinizing her every move.
I shed my coat and stepped forward. Audrey’s smile faded as she studied my features. “Erin?”
“The worst thing has happened. Taylor Duncan was killed.” Feeling as though I was in some kind of a stupor, I watched as Hildi leapt onto a cushion of the sofa, apparently wanting to race me to my favorite seat.
“Oh, my God.” Audrey sprang to her feet, showing the grace that had been her hallmark as a former ballerina decades ago. “Sit down.”
I obeyed. She wrapped a feather-soft chenille comforter around my shoulders, swept up my startled kitty from her perch on the cushion, plopped her down in my lap, then took a seat beside me on the sage-colored sofa. “Tell me everything,” my landlady said.
When I glanced at my watch, I was surprised to see that an hour had passed since I’d begun pouring my heart out to Audrey. Hildi, who only ever stayed where she’d gone of her own volition, had long since left my lap. Having finally talked myself out, I slid the throw from my shoulders and started to rise. “Thanks for listening.”
“Where are you going?”
“The police station. To give them those photos.”
“That can wait. You look like you’ve been hit by a train. You shouldn’t be driving.”
