by Leslie Caine
Although I’d already given Sullivan my version of the incident, he asked Michael, “You just happened to arrive right as the dozer was heading toward the house? And you didn’t see anybody near it?”
“Correct on both counts. And that sounds kind of suspicious, I know. The police questioned me on that very point.” He turned to me. “After you left, Erin, we decided you were right about calling the police. I was afraid for a minute there that they were going to arrest me right on the spot. Except that’d mean I was damaging my own property. And obviously I have no reason to do such a thing.”
Unless his motive had been to kill me or, more likely, Shannon. He’d recently been cheating on his wife. And yet for all I knew they had an open marriage and Shannon knew all about his infidelity. In any case, Audrey was friends with the man, so I hated to think that he was cooking up not only dishes on her show, but murder attempts, too.
“So you didn’t see anybody at all in the immediate area at the time?” Sullivan asked him again.
“There were plenty of folks who could have started up the bulldozer—one of the workmen, David, Pate…”
“Or Rebecca Berringer,” I interjected impulsively, testing Michael’s reaction.
“Rebecca?” Michael echoed as though I must be daft. “Would you know how to set a bulldozer into cruise control, Erin?”
“No, but I doubt that’s innate knowledge that comes only with the Y chromosome.”
Michael rocked on his heels, but made no comment. “By the way, Ang Chung showed up just after you left for the funeral. He seemed to think that we should scrap the idea of the glass bricks, now that the front wall had been all but flattened anyway.”
“He wants to shorten the room again?” I asked through gritted teeth. “And Shannon agrees?”
He shook his head. “She really liked the glass bricks, and so did I. She merely agreed to postpone our decision till this afternoon. Ang can take more readings, which he said he could only do at high noon, or some such hooey. Maybe that geo…something-or-other compass he uses is solar-powered.”
Shannon shuffled toward us, wearing jeans and a CU sweatshirt. She was also wearing a pair of purple-tinted, octagonal, wire-rimmed glasses that looked like a throw-back from the sixties. I’d never seen her wear glasses before. As Michael had forewarned, I’d also never seen her look this listless. “Ang’s still not here?” she asked with a sigh. “I hope he hurries. I’m half ready to chuck this whole remodel.”
“We can do that, you know, honey,” Michael replied.
“Oh, sure,” she snapped. “We’ll just leave a smooshed shell of a room out front, maybe hang a garland or two on the Porta Potti, and then we’ll be all set for a big bash to celebrate our wonderful remodel!”
Shannon may have looked listless, but she was as sharp-tongued as ever, I silently noted.
Michael didn’t seem to mind, however. He replied gently, “We can figure out the best way to put the house back together again…maybe just scale back on the size of the addition. I’m sure Gilbert and Sullivan can help us.”
Sullivan frowned at my name having come ahead of his. I grinned and winked at him.
“Whatever we do,” Shannon responded wearily, “we can’t afford to keep paying David and crew to sit around, twiddling their thumbs.”
“There’s no excuse for that,” I interjected. “There’s scads of work yet to be done. Even if everything else is done, they could be working on the back of the house.” Shannon’s devotion to feng shui had inspired her to commission a partially covered courtyard that would effectively square off the ell wing of the studio, making the house more rectangular and more in line with feng shui principles. “I’ll go speak to David.”
I headed out the door. Ang’s Toyota was now parked alongside my van. He was nowhere in sight. Must have been wandering around someplace with his compass, looking for more dragon tails.
I decided to cross the street to take a good look at the front of the house. I could see right away that it might indeed be possible to “scale back” on the size of the addition as Michael had wanted. We could fill in and hide the excessive foundation beneath the wraparound deck.
Either way, I’d grown enamored with the idea of glass bricks in the southwest corner of the room. Sullivan and I had truly turned lemons into delicious lemonade with our plans. The room was going to be spectacular. It would irk me to no end if this bulldozer “accident” forced Shannon to settle for a smaller, ordinary room with no glass column.
A cynical thought gripped me: Could Michael have been desperate enough to save money—and get a payoff from his insurance—to have aimed the bulldozer at his own house? Surely not. That would be pointless. Michael wanted his home to be worth as much money as possible.
I rounded the house in search of David Lewis. I hesitated when I heard a male voice speaking in hushed, secretive tones. I peeked around the corner. David, his back to me, was using his cell phone. I ducked out of sight.
“Yeah. I got it all handled,” he was saying. “So you owe me every penny you promised.”
My stomach clenched. His words could be innocent. But they could also mean that he’d been promised money for sabotaging this job. Such as by plowing an unmanned bulldozer into the house.
“Look, my friend. Somebody already wound up dead. That was not what I signed up for.” He paused. “I’m not saying you did. But you need to understand. If I pull one more stunt, my ass is going to be in a sling. I’m not letting our little agreement wind up putting me in jail.”
David was all but confessing to a crime!
“And what about the bulldozer?…No, I didn’t have anything to do with that! I figured you did!…In that case, I’m doubling my fee!…Why? Because someone else is messing with this job! It’s out of control! No way am I taking the fall. Look, I gotta go. We’ll talk again later.”
Furious at the implications of what I’d just overheard, I tore around the corner and shouted, “Wait, David! Who were you talking to just now?”
“I was talking to another home owner, a guy who’s trying to stiff me. Why?”
“You’re lying! You were talking to someone who hired you to wreck this house!”
“No way! Check my phone log if you don’t believe me!” He thrust the phone at me.
“No, let me see the one you’re trying to hide in your hand.”
He froze. For a second I had a vision of him striking me and fleeing.
Ang Chung strode across the Youngs’ backyard toward us. “Pardon me,” Ang said with a deferential bow, apparently reverting to his pseudo-Asian roots. “Can I have my phone back?”
“It’s not what you think, Erin,” David said. “I was pretending to be Ang Chung just now. That’s why I borrowed his cell phone to call Rebecca Berringer. I wanted to see if she would admit to knowing anything about his ruining my work.”
“Your voices are hardly similar,” I said.
“But there’s lousy reception here,” he countered with a shrug.
Ang’s jaw had dropped. “You asked to borrow my phone so that you could impersonate me? I’ll have your head on a platter for this!”
David said to him, “Hey, buddy. Don’t go making threats to me! I just found out that you’re getting paid off by Rebecca.”
“That’s a lie!” Ang turned to me. “He was using my phone, yes. But he was speaking for himself. Not for me.”
“Let’s get Rebecca over here to answer for herself,” I said, “shall we?”
“She’ll lie,” David exclaimed. “She’s the one paying off Ang, so that she can mess with Shannon’s mind.”
“You miserable, lying piece of crap!” Ang growled.
“You’re calling me names,” David said with a sneer. “Not very enlightened-Asian of you.”
“You’re right. And neither is this!” To my complete surprise, Ang braced himself and punched David’s stomach. With a groan, David doubled over. Ang grinned triumphantly. Seconds later, however, David dived at Ang’s knees. Ang went
flying to the ground. Each man flailed at the other, struggling to land solid blows.
Three of David’s crew members appeared, but none of them wanted to break up the fight and instead proceeded to cheer their boss on. “Steve! Help!” I yelled.
The back door flew open. “Break it up, guys!” Steve grabbed the closest man, which happened to be Ang, and tried to pry him off of David. Michael had followed Steve outside and helped break up the altercation by grabbing David around the waist. Soon the two men were crimson-faced and gasping for air, but were no longer fighting.
Shannon rushed outside. “What on earth is going on here?”
“Get back to work! Now!” David snarled at his employees, ignoring her. The crew slowly shuffled off.
I explained to Shannon, “David borrowed Ang’s cell phone and claims to have called Rebecca Berringer. Supposedly this was in order to impersonate Ang and find out if he was accepting bribes from her. If David’s lying, he has been sabotaging the work here himself. Sullivan and I will probably have to fire him right now, and—”
“What? You can’t do that!” David objected furiously. “I haven’t ‘sabotaged’ a thing!”
“But Rebecca did know she was talking to you,” I said. “Otherwise you’d have kept your answers really short. That way she wouldn’t be able to detect the difference between your voice and his.”
He scowled and brushed off his dusty blue jeans. “The truth is, all I’m doing is telling her what’s going on here. With the feng shui. She promised to do the same for me at Pate’s house. In exchange. That’s all. Once Taylor had the accident, I wanted to call a stop to it. And that’s when I found out that Ang is being paid to slow us down.”
“Lies!” Ang hollered. “All lies!”
“This is ridiculous,” Michael intervened. “Shannon, this is our home. We need to fire both of them…Ang and David.”
She shook her head adamantly. “I’m not going to do that. Ang predicted all of this would happen. That the people working on this house would fight amongst themselves. So nobody is to blame. It’s the malevolent energy lines. Our house is in a terrible cycle right now. We’re all falling victim to those dangerous forces. It’s just lucky that you and I aren’t living here right now. We’re less under the pull of the bad energy.” She crossed her arms and said to Ang, “This is the last straw. We need to hire you to do an exorcism.”
“A what!?” Michael bellowed. “Now you think our house is haunted?”
“No, no. Not by ghosts, but by the bad natural forces at play.”
“It’s not natural forces! Both of these creeps are taking us for fools!” Michael gestured at Ang and David, “One of them probably put a nail in the foreman’s head!”
“I did no such thing!” David protested just as Ang chimed in: “That’s untrue!”
Michael tried to shout over their voices. “And plowed a bulldozer into our house! And set fire to our attic!”
“What we need to do is to regroup,” Shannon continued, suddenly sounding calm and collected, now that her husband was the one in hysterics. “That’s what I’ve had to do many times as an artist. Some piece I’ve devoted months or even years to just isn’t coming together. So I meditate, and I’m patient. I listen to what the world is trying to tell me. Then, and only then, do I take action.”
The word “patient” wouldn’t leap to my mind when describing Shannon. She must hold her saintly attributes in reserve for her artwork.
“You really want to just let this go?” Steve asked her.
“You’re letting both of these jerks get away with cheating us?” Michael asked more pointedly.
“We don’t know that either one is cheating us,” she retorted. “In any case, Ang and David are grown men, not little boys who need to be reassigned to new classrooms.”
“The least we should do is contact Rebecca and ask her who she was talking to just now,” I suggested.
“Yes. Let’s,” David piped in.
“Fine by me,” Ang said. Then he furrowed his brow. “On the other hand, we both have been exposing ourselves to terrible I Ching here. That would cause anyone’s tempers to erupt.” He held out his hand to David and gave a slight bow. “Mr. Lewis, I understand your desire to find peace with a warring force. I blame the impact of those malevolent forces for making you unjustly accuse me of wrongdoings.”
David groaned.
“Shake hands, gentlemen,” Shannon instructed, “or I’ll have to let both of you go.”
Reluctantly, David shook Ang’s hand.
“All right, then,” Michael said, but his voice was simmering with frustration. “We’ll try and carry on.”
Sullivan glanced at me, probably expecting me to speak up, but I’d decided to stay silent this time and for once let this play out however our clients wished. “Shannon,” he said, “this is a mistake.”
“No, it is not, Mr. Sullivan,” Ang said sharply. “Or are you saying you can’t remain on this job?”
“Sullivan and Gilbert are the only ones who deserve to stay on, if you ask me,” Michael said. “Unfortunately,” he added, glaring at his wife, “nobody did.”
After a few minutes of grudging silence, the men seemed to accept Shannon’s questionable decision. We all sat down at Michael and Shannon’s large, country-style dining table to discuss rebuilding the front room. We quickly reached a consensus. We would stick with our original plans, including the glass column in the corner. David got his crew back to work, and Sullivan and I drove off.
The moment we were safely away from the house, I said, “Things are way too strained between David and us. I can’t imagine how we can keep working with him.”
“Yeah. Plus I’m thinking Ang Chung is crossing our names off his Christmas card list, right about now.”
I tried to brake for the yellow light, but nothing happened. I gasped and veered around the car ahead of me to make a hair-raising right turn. I pumped the brakes wildly. Nothing!
“Jeez, Gilbert! Slow down!”
“I’m trying to!” I pulled on the emergency brake. Still nothing! There was no pressure there whatsoever! It felt like I’d just adjusted the windshield visor, for all the effect that it had on our speed.
“Oh, God! Steve! The brakes are out!”
chapter 12
Somehow I had to get away from traffic. The wheels squealed as I made a right turn. “We’ve got to find a ditch!”
“Shift into low gear!” Sullivan demanded. He grabbed the steering wheel.
“Let go! I can steer! I just can’t stop!”
We were speeding toward a clot of cars. We both started cursing.
“Turn! Field!” He pointed across the oncoming lane of traffic. A car was heading toward us. I didn’t have time to wait for it to pass. I jerked the wheel. That car’s brakes screamed, and the driver leaned on the horn. We barely missed colliding. An instant later we all but flew over a ditch and crashed through a barbed-wire fence. I flattened a flimsy metal post in the process.
We bounced across the bumps and ruts in the old corn field at a teeth-breaking pace. A copse of Russian olive trees was up ahead, then a farmhouse.
“Get down!” Sullivan shouted. I ignored him. He again grabbed the wheel and cranked it toward him. We made a sharp turn in the soggy field. He was sending us back toward the intersection!
“What the—”
“I’m trying to stop us on the bank of the damn ditch!”
I screamed as the van started to tip. Steve cursed repeatedly. The van righted itself. We crashed through the barbed-wire fence a second time. All that separated us from traffic was a line of saplings alongside an irrigation ditch.
“The bank’s not steep enough! Keep us off the road!” I cried.
He aimed us directly at the trees. Sullivan pulled me toward him to shield me. A moment later the windshield shattered. The airbags inflated. One hit my forehead with the force of a solid right cross.
Seconds later, the airbags sank away. Mercifully, we’d come to a c
omplete stop.
“Erin. Are you all right?” Sullivan asked.
“I think so. You?”
“Fine.”
I had a vision of the car catching fire, which always seemed to happen in Hollywood movies. I tried to get out. “My door’s stuck.”
Steve climbed out and dashed to my side of the van. He easily opened my door and took my hand to help me down. Our eyes met as I stepped onto the ground in front of him. He pulled me into a hug. I buried my face against his chest. I could hear and feel his heart pounding.
“Is everybody okay?” a man was calling from the road.
Sullivan abruptly ended our embrace and stepped back, as if embarrassed and anxious to get away from me. Affronted, I turned toward the voice. A celery-green SUV had pulled over. “We’re fine,” Sullivan said. “Our brakes failed.”
“I’ve got nine-one-one on the line,” the woman beside the driver said, waving her cell phone.
I glanced at my van. The windshield was cracked, and the bumper was bound to be badly damaged; I couldn’t see it from this angle.
“You sure you’re okay?” Sullivan asked me again.
“I’m doing a lot better than my van is.” At my mention of the van, I remembered something: When we’d left the Youngs’ house, I’d stepped over a puddle, which appeared to have spread from underneath my vehicle. Now that I thought back, I hadn’t needed to avoid any puddles while getting out of my van.
“This was no accident, Steve. Somebody drained my brake fluid.”
A pair of traffic patrol officers arrived and took notes as we recounted the incident to them. They helped us to contact an auto body shop, which sent a tow truck. The patrol officers waited with us as the paunchy, grizzled truck operator hooked my vehicle onto his. He was staring underneath the chassis of my van, and he called the officers over to see for themselves. The moment the officers had slipped into their car, I said to the tow-truck driver, “The brake line was cut, wasn’t it?”
“Yep. Cut through, clean as a whistle.”
