by Leslie Caine
Her story was farfetched, but not impossible. I tried to recall if I’d read anything in the Crestview papers three months ago about a death from an allergic reaction. It did sound vaguely familiar. “Aren’t there emergency injections you can keep on hand for people who have severe allergic reactions?”
“Epinephrine syringes,” Helen said with a sad nod. “We kept them right in the top drawer over there.” She pointed to the left of the refrigerator, but all her cabinets were blocked from view. “This happened before I cleared out the garage, mind you...when the kitchen counters and drawers were accessible.” She sighed again. “Back when I still enjoyed cooking. Because I had someone I loved to cook for.”
My heart ached for her. The knowledge that a meal she’d prepared had killed her sister must have been torturous. It also explained why she’d buried her kitchen. Even so, her current lifestyle was risky for her health. Judging by her baggy clothing, it was causing her to lose too much weight. Not to mention that she would be flattened if one of her heavier stacks tipped over on top of her.
“The killer must have temporarily removed all the syringes from Lois’s purse and kitchen drawer, though they were back by the time the police investigated,” she continued. “Otherwise Lois would have given herself a life-saving injection.” Her eyes misted, but she kept her voice steady. “She was at the base of the stairs when Peter found her...the next morning. She was obviously trying to get to the syringe she kept upstairs in her nightstand.”
“How terrible! I’m so sorry, Helen.”
“If only I hadn’t left town, my poor sister might still be alive. Now nobody believes me, and I’m forced to match wits with her killer all on my own.”
“What do the police say about her cause of death?”
“Oh, they treat me like a doddering old fool. All three times I spoke to them about Lois, they patted my hand and sent me on my way. Police officers seem to assume when your hair loses its color, your mind’s gone too.”
I wondered if my friend Linda, who was a police officer, had heard about Helen’s chilling theory. Linda, I was certain, wouldn’t have been condescending. I decided to ask her about Helen the next time we got together. “But why do you think someone wants to kill you?”
“I don’t know why, but I have booby-traps on—”
Someone pounded on the door to the garage, and Stephanie called, “Are you about finished in there, Aunt Helen?”
“Not yet.” Helen brushed past me, and I assumed she was going to let her niece and nephew inside, but instead she threw the lock. She squeezed past me a second time, then crooked her finger at me. “Come on. Let me show you my proof.”
Proof? She threaded her way to the back door, pointed to the top corner, and flattened herself against the door so I could maneuver close enough to see. “I tape a strand of my hair across the opening.” Sure enough, Scotch tape was fastened on the trim and on the upper corner of the door. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that a hair is snapped in two. Ever since Lois’s murder, every time I leave home, I make certain that the hair is intact. I’ve got another one taped to the front door, and I always put a third one on the door from the garage. Whenever a door opens, the hair breaks. Six times in a row, I came home, and the hair was snapped in two. Had to keep plucking out more hairs. I’m going to go bald at this rate!”
“That’s a clever alarm system.” Albeit whacky. It could explain why her hairdo was so unruly.
“Oh, it’s not original. Read about the trick in 1984. The book, that is, not the year. As I was saying, the last several times I’ve gone out, I’ve come home to find the strands broken on the front or back doors, but never once on the door between the house and the garage. That’s how I know I’m safe in my garage. Plus, if anyone tries to attack me there, I’ll run right over the punk.”
Someone rapped on the garage door again, much softer this time. “Aunt Helen?”
“Just two minutes, Peter.”
Stephanie hollered, “If you’re taking Erin on a tour, why is your voice still coming from the kitchen?”
“Ventriloquism,” she shouted. Quietly she said to me, as she squeezed past me to head toward the main alley, “My garage guests are getting restless. We’d better shake a leg. Like I said, the only other room besides the kitchen that’s really bad is in the back.”
“The den?” I asked as I followed her.
“Yes. And let’s not even look at the basement.” She tapped an unadorned door near the kitchen entranceway.
Helen allowed me quick peeks into the small dining room and the bathroom, and we wove our way through the living room. These rooms were furnished in mass-produced items, unexceptional but functional. I automatically redesigned these spaces in spectacular fashion, adding color to the bone-white walls and pizzazz to the furnishings, then tried to shut off my mental before-and-after camera; my role here, I reminded myself, was exclusively to get rid of Helen’s hoardings.
Compared to the kitchen, the rooms were livable, but would rank as a clutter disaster by most standards; nary a flat surface could be seen because of the mishmash of stuff. Nearby, the spindly legs of an end table strained to support a ceramic cow, a wooden ladle, a deck of cards, a lamp with heavy terra cotta base, a dozen books, a small loom, and a rusty motor of some kind. Balanced atop that messy pile was a candy dish filled with coins, peanuts, and little black wrinkled things that I dearly hoped were raisins.
Despite this avalanche of possessions, the bones of this house were marvelous, and the construction was rock-solid. With its ornate trim and arched doorways, the house appeared to have been built in the fifties or earlier. “This wasn’t the home you and your sister grew up in, was it?”
“Oh, no. I’m older than the house, actually.”
“When did you buy this place, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, well, I once owned quite a bit of stock in a startup company that hit it big. Cashed that in some forty years ago, when real-estate prices were a fraction of what they are now. The original owners were selling it themselves and took a shine to me.” She primped at her lopsided, haphazard bun and added proudly, “Even though they had better offers than mine, I was the only one who thought to promise them that I would never allow this property lot to be parceled out into condos. Also that I’d never let the house be bulldozed in favor of some sprawling, soulless monstrosity. Like those ones Stephanie’s company keeps erecting. They specialize in enormous homes that can entertain a hundred partiers at a time. Heaven forbid you prefer to curl up in a corner with a good book, or sit and chat with a couple of good friends. For that it’s like trying to get snuggly in a cavernous museum.”
It was true that this home was nothing like a “cavernous museum.” A museum warehouse after an earthquake, perhaps. “I can see why preserving this place was so important to the original owners. It would have been a crime to tear it down. The home has such natural integrity and grace.”
She grinned, pleased. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“Which is not to say that a small addition wouldn’t work wonders,” I said with unbridled enthusiasm. “A workroom extending out back from the kitchen would solve most of your problems. We’d give it oodles of built-in cabinets and skylights for natural lighting. Judging by your luscious flowerbeds, it’s clear that you’re a master gardener, so it could be a combination greenhouse—” I stopped myself, remembering belatedly the limited scope of this assignment. “Just something to think about for the future.”
“Wow,” she murmured. “A workroom. That really is tempting. Hmm. Maybe for once my niece knew what she was talking about when she said it was worth throwing money away on a designer.”
“I’d like to think so.” Not counting the part about throwing money away. “If nothing else, we can restore enough order to your household so that you’ll feel cozy and safe here once more. It’s nerve-wracking when you’ve got all these massive stacks everywhere you look, so you can’t ever see who or what else is in the room with you.”
To my surprise, she replied, “You might have a point there. I didn’t always used to live like this, you know, Erin. Things only got really out of control when Lois moved in with me.”
Helen had amassed decades’ worth of accumulations, but this wasn’t the time to argue with her. She led me to the staircase, but stopped abruptly and said, “Go on up. I’m staying down here. I don’t ever go upstairs anymore. Just...be careful on the steps. You never know if they were booby-trapped during the latest break-in.”
As with shutters, I had a thing for staircases, and this one was utterly adorable with its wonderful white-painted ball-finial banisters and understated trim. Suitably cautioned, I climbed the steps, which, except for their having been treated like ascending storage surfaces on both sides, were perfectly safe and solid.
I surveyed the two bedrooms and bathroom. For all of Helen’s “booby-trap” warnings, the construction of this house was sublime; not as much as a creak or loose nail among the wide-plank pine floorboards. The bedrooms, however, were dusty and held three times the appropriate bric-a-bracs. At second glance, Helen’s large, taupe-painted room was actually overstuffed five times over. Even so, underneath it all, the spaces were really charming with their attic-style slant to the ceilings and dormers on the windows.
Evidenced by the many photographs of Stephanie and Peter at various ages, the smaller bedroom had been Lois’s. The room was Pepto-Bismol pink, and the fabrics were rose-patterned and edged with frilly lace. An essential aspect of my job is to put my own tastes aside and uncover the beauty within my clients’ tastes. Given the chance, I would have muted the elements—steered her toward dusty rose, which can be wonderfully neutral, and suggested that less is more with regard to lace and frill. Yet Lois or her husband had had an excellent photographer’s eye; a black-and-white picture in a rough-hewn, gray-painted frame caught my eye. The photo showed a young Stephanie and Peter on a hammock. The expressions on their delicate faces made me smile; then-towheaded Stephanie was laughing as though she hadn’t a care in the world, her arm across her brother’s chest, pulling him back against her. Peter wore a gap-toothed grin, but his eyes were wide and his fists clenched the edge of the hammock.
Helen was pacing by the foot of the staircase when I returned. “The bedrooms upstairs are wonderful,” I told her. “Really cozy and inviting.”
“True. But with all the break-ins, it’s not worth it to me to risk going up there.”
“Who else has the key to your house?”
“Oh, lots of people. Lois was so trusting, bless her heart, she gave them out like they were candy from a Pez dispenser.”
Speaking of which, my gaze fell on a collection of at least thirty of the candy dispensers in a shoebox on the second step. “First thing we need to do, then, is change all your locks.”
“No, that’s out of the question. I’m trying to get rid of clutter, not to add to it.”
“But changing your locks won’t—”
“Of course it would! I’d have a whole other set of door locks for the house. You don’t actually expect me to discard a full set of perfectly good locks, do you?”
“I’ll take them with me, so you—”
“No, no, Erin! If we change the locks, I’ll be forever finding old keys that no longer work and getting them confused with the new keys...locking myself out, and so forth. Next thing you know, I’ll get frustrated and feel I’ll have to change the locks a second time. Then I’ll have a third set of locks lying around in my house and even more keys that don’t work. And I really will turn into a doddering old fool, who can’t even let herself into her own home.” She shuddered, squeezed her eyes shut, and waved her hands in front of her face. “It’s just better to keep that whole Pandora’s box shut tight...with its existing lock.”
Taken aback, I gazed at her for a moment. Before I could reply, however, the doorbell rang. Helen groaned. “That’s going to be Rachel Schwartz from across the street.” Helen flung the door open, but kept her hand on the knob and gripped the door trim with her other hand. “This isn’t a good time, Rachel,” she said firmly.
A tall, pretty woman in her late fifties with short, honey-blond hair peered at me over Helen’s shoulder and cried, “So it’s true! You have an interior designer in here! I can tell by how well she’s dressed. She has that professional aura that just says loud and clear: ‘Appearance is everything.’”
I automatically glanced down at my pale blue skirt suit, thinking that if that was truly what I was projecting to most people, I’d change outfits in a New York minute; appearance isn’t everything; quality is everything.
Treating Helen’s outstretched arm as though it were a turnstile, she stepped inside uninvited. “I’m Rachel Schwartz. I live in the Georgian colonial directly across the street.”
Too offended by her shabby treatment of Helen to be more than marginally cordial, I didn’t return her smile. “Erin Gilbert.”
“Yes, I know. I saw your name on the minivan parked at the curb. Well, your last name is printed there, at any rate. I assumed the Gilbert portion of ‘Interiors by Gilbert’ was your last name. So I looked you up on the Web.” The woman studied my features as though committing them to memory. “Are you aware that there’s a ‘Sullivan Designs’ in town? So that together you’d be—” she paused dramatically—“‘Gilbert and Sullivan’?”
“Yes.” She had just named my biggest rival—a talented, hunky man with whom I shared a tempestuous relationship. I replied dryly, “Steve Sullivan and I laugh about that all the time.”
Helen cleared her throat. “As I said, Rachel, this isn’t a good time. Go home!”
“Oh, I will,” she tittered, beaming at Helen. “Just dropping by for a moment. I’ve come in response to the note that you put in my mailbox.”
“A personal visit was hardly necessary, Rachel. Especially considering that the note was addressed to Jack, not to you.”
The garage door, meanwhile, was rumbling open; the sound reverberated in the adjacent wall. Helen cast a nervous glance in that direction.
“Maybe so, but I also wanted to introduce myself to your designer...always such invaluable people to befriend.” She winked at me, seemingly unaware that my first impression of her wasn’t one of camaraderie. “And to let you know while I was here that Jack’s going to be in Denver most of the day, but he’ll be free tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you,” Helen said evenly, gesturing for her to avail herself of the wide-open front door.
“I’ll drop by tomorrow, with Jack.” Rachel gave me a big smile. “Nice meeting you, Erin Gilbert.” She stepped onto the front porch. Stephanie and Peter were now marching up the redbrick walkway. “Good morning, Stephanie.” Rachel waved at Peter who lagged behind his sister. “I noticed your Mercedes in the driveway.”
“Yes, I know,” Stephanie retorted. “I saw you watching us through your front window. Using your binoculars, just like always.”
Rachel harrumphed and swept down the steps. “I was watching my birdfeeder, not spying on you!”
Stephanie ignored the remark, brushed past her, and said to Helen, “Can we come in now, or are you going to leave a bowl of water and some kibble out here for us instead?”
“I’m sorry, Stephanie, Peter. I got distracted. Do come in, my dears. Let’s all take seats.”
Stephanie was still fuming. She gave me a furious glare, then headed straight for the kitchen.
Helen continued in vain, “Please don’t look in the—”
“Oh, my God!” her niece cried. “I knew you were hiding something. Peter, come see the kitchen!”
“I’ll take your word for it that it’s bad.” He took a seat on the Bentwood rocking chair while I moved a pair of boxes, plus an armful of clothing, then claimed the beige recliner. Helen edged her way around the jam-packed coffee table and cleared off the Naugahyde lounge chair, which, judging from the wear marks in the area rug, had recently taken the place of the pink loveseat now in the garage.
Stephanie eschewed taking a seat herself, but rather gripped the top of Peter’s rocker. I imagined she would chuck him out of the seat if he said anything she found disagreeable. Judging from the way Peter kept his weight forward, he seemed to fear the same thing. “Well, Aunt Helen?” Stephanie demanded. “Are you ready to let Erin begin her job?”
Helen folded her hands in her lap and closed her eyes for a moment. “Even though I still have severe reservations about permitting strangers to handle my personal belongings,”—she gestured at our surroundings—“I have to admit my lifestyle isn’t working. So, since I’ve been living in a sow’s ear lately, I might as well turn it into a silk purse.”
“Huh?” Peter asked. “Does that mean you’re letting Erin work here...or in the garage?”
Helen nodded, apparently resolute now that she’d made her decision. “Both. Erin’s going to help me get the place de-cluttered.”
“Excellent.” He settled back in his seat.
Stephanie shifted her piercing gaze to me. “How soon will we be seeing some results?”
“We’ll create an action plan right now, if Helen is okay with that.” Helen nodded at me in agreement.
“I hope to get started tomorrow morning.”
“Excellent,” Peter said again, giving me a thin smile.
“What kind of ‘action plan’?” Stephanie asked.
“First off, Helen and I will need to agree on what I can and cannot remove from the premises.”
“That’s easy enough,” Helen replied. “All I ask is that you don’t throw away anything I collect or use for scrapbooking.”
