Death by Inferior Design

by Leslie Caine

  Finally he stopped, and I trotted up to him. Taylor could flatten me with one punch. There was some old saw about discretion being the better part of valor, but Mom had never stocked that particular piece of advice in her arsenal. I asked him point-blank, “Did you put that photograph in the paneling?”

  He snorted. “No way.”

  “You’re the one who built that hiding spot in the wall, though. No one else even knew it was there.”

  “Randy knew. Like I told you the other day, he was spying on me and turned me into the police. I was keeping drugs stashed in it. I sure as hell didn’t put someone’s baby picture in it, though.”

  “Then Randy put the picture there?”

  “Who knows? Randy’s dead. But I’d bet my last dollar it was intended for someone else to see.”

  “How did you know about it if you weren’t the one who put it there in the first place?”

  Taylor stared at me as though I were an idiot and retorted, “You just told me!”

  “All I said was that it was a photograph. I didn’t say anything about a baby picture.”

  He clenched his jaw and glared at me for several seconds, but then said, “I saw you take it out and put it into your pocket.”

  “So, what did you mean by ‘it was intended for someone else’?”

  Fury suddenly marred his naturally fierce features. He stabbed a finger in my face. “You think you’re so much smarter than me, bitch, you figure it out.”

  Once again, not the best possible exit line for a job interview, I thought sourly as I returned to my office, mind racing.

  I arrived fifteen minutes early for our scheduled fact-gathering appointment at Myra’s and decided to stay in the car and review my notes and sketches. Debbie Henderson pulled up and parked next to my van in the driveway. I gave her a smile as she emerged from her car. Opening my door, I explained, “I’m early and thought I’d go over some things.”

  “Come on inside with me. You’ll be more comfortable there, and Myra won’t mind in the least.”

  “Thanks. That would be great.”

  “I’m so glad to hear you’re going to do Myra’s guest room,” she said.

  “I actually haven’t agreed to that yet. Steve’s coming over, too, and eventually we’ll discuss who’s doing what.” I studied her, noted the weary sadness to her features as she unlocked the door, and found myself wondering how wise it was for her to move in across the street from her newly estranged husband. I wondered, too, what had become of the argument I’d overheard between her and Myra the morning after Randy had died. How had they put aside their differences so quickly?

  “Can I get you some coffee or anything?”

  “A glass of water would be great.” As long as I watched her pour it from the tap, water would be safe to accept.

  The living room was identical to how I’d last seen it— no collapsed floor and no pizzazz. Debbie led me past the living room, and I stepped gingerly around the one wall to the dining room, just above the newly repaired support beam. Debbie suddenly froze, and I almost bumped into her. An instant later I saw what had stopped her in her tracks.

  With Myra at his side, Kevin McBride had obviously been trying to slide the back door open quietly, intent on making a hasty exit. His neck was smudged with lipstick.

  He gave us a sheepish smile. “Oh, hi, Erin. Debbie. I was just checking the runners on the screen door for Myra.” He made a show of sliding the screen back and forth. “You just need a couple drops of oil in the wheels, Myra. That’s all. I’ll bring some over next time I think of it.”

  “Thank you, Kevin.” Myra was, avoiding everyone’s gaze. “That’s extremely considerate of you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I’ll be right with you, Erin,” Myra said, clearly flustered. “I just need to duck into the bathroom for a moment. . . .”

  Red-faced, Kevin turned to Debbie and me. “The, uh, carpenters did a great job on the beam,” he told us. “It’s good as new now.”

  Debbie crossed her arms and muttered, “It’s nice to see that you’re worrying about a squeaking screen door, Kevin. That’s downright neighborly of you.” Her face was frozen with malice.

  “Yes. Well. I was just making a handyman’s visit, wanting to make sure everything’s safe and sound. The house has sure made me nervous, after Erin, here, was nearly conked on the head by that huge beam.”

  “Yes, Kevin,” Debbie agreed scathingly. “You’re nothing if not helpful to Myra.”

  “I’d better get home, then. Excuse me, ladies.”

  “You might want to button up your shirt collar before you see Jill,” Debbie said, rubbing her own neck where Myra’s lipstick had marked Kevin’s. He took the hint: he was scrubbing away the plum stains with a tissue from his pocket as he left.

  Debbie had apparently forgotten about my glass of water and started to brew some coffee. I asked if it would be all right if I headed upstairs to take a quick look at the guest room. “Go ahead,” she said. “First door on the left.”

  I leapt at any chance to see a soon-to-be-redone room by myself and without distraction. This is a phase of my job that I love—when a room feels like a blank canvas that needs a burst of color here or splash of fabric there to be completely transformed.

  At a glance, there was no way I was going to do the guest room in a burgundy faux finish. This room faced the mountains, and I just knew the view cried out for buttery yellow walls.

  The furniture was in a sorry state of repair. A book was propping up the nightstand; one of its three-inch-tall back legs was missing entirely. I glanced at the word Chemistry in the book’s title and instantly thought about Randy’s poisoning. I extracted the book and let the top of the table gently lean against the wall. It was some old chemistry textbook, the cover now badly dented from years of service as a table leg. Myra had said she’d taught chemistry at CU and in high school.

  Out of idle curiosity, I opened the book to see if the pages, too, were dented. They weren’t, and as I started to set the book aside, something fell out of it.

  I knelt and stared, my heart racing. This couldn’t be happening again, surely. Another trap, another photograph for me to happen to stumble across. And yet, this time my happening to pick up and almost drop that one book was too unlikely for this to have been staged; no one could have known that I would find this picture.

  Incredulous, I picked up the photograph that had fluttered to the floor and slowly got to my feet, staring aghast at the three people seated on a sofa in the celluloid image. I recognized my mother. Seated on the other side of the sofa from my mother was a young Myra Axelrod, who must have been just about the same age I was now. Between them sat a bright-eyed, smiling baby, maybe a year old. Although I’d never seen photographs of myself at that age, I knew at once that the baby was me.

  “Erin!” Myra cried.

  Startled, I gasped, and she stormed through the doorway toward me. “You’re poking around in my personal possessions!”

  “This photograph just fell from a book.”

  Crimson splotches stained her cheeks as she snatched the photograph from my hand. “Huh. Must have been some friend of mine and her daughter. From when Randy and I were first married.” She let out a little laugh. “I can’t even remember her name.”

  She handed me back the picture and whirled on her heel to abruptly leave the room.

  “I do,” I called after her. “She’s my mother.”

  Myra stood frozen in place, her back toward me. When she finally turned and looked at me, her expression was one of tremendous pain.

  Only one conclusion could be drawn: Myra was my birth mother. An all-but-forgotten childhood fantasy flitted past my mind’s eye—my beautiful, gracious birth mother would pull up to the schoolyard in her limousine, and my classmates would watch slack-jawed in envy as she whisked me and my ecstatic parents off to live with her in her palace.

  In this face-slap reality, I’d outgrown the need for happily-ever-after fa
iry tales, but to my shame and surprise, the need to hear that I hadn’t been fundamentally unlovable at eighteen months of age nagged at me even all these years later.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “My mother made me promise that I would never try to find my birth parents. Apparently you found me, however.”

  Tears ran down Myra’s cheeks. “It’s too late now,” she said softly. “It’s been too late for the last twenty years. Jeannie let me know that in no uncertain terms.”

  I was unable to keep the bitterness out my voice as I asked quietly, “So you remember her name, after all.”

  She nodded. “Of course I do. Jeannie was our live-in nanny for more than a year.” She swiped at her cheek with the back of her hand and took a ragged breath. “It’s not easy to forget someone who takes your only child away from you to raise as her own.”

  chapter 16

  It felt as though all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. Myra’s words terrified me. Had my beloved mother kidnapped me after all? If so, I didn’t want to know that. Not now. Not ever.

  My legs felt wobbly. I knelt and turned my face away from Myra as I put the photograph back into the book and slipped the book back under the base of the nightstand.

  “I’d thought that was the perfect hiding place for that picture,” Myra said wistfully.

  “Why did you have to hide it?”

  She didn’t answer, but rather, gave me a sad smile. “Your mother was a very decent and kindhearted woman, Erin,” she said.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and sighed with relief.

  “I heard that she died recently.”

  “She did.” I rose. “It was two years ago, but sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So was I.” I finally managed to meet her gaze. She was searching my face with a pitiful longing in her expression. I’d seen that look on more than one mother’s face as they’d showed me the former bedrooms of their now grown children.

  “And . . . your father?” she asked gently. “I never met him. I don’t even know his name.”

  “He lives in California. He remarried. The divorce was several years ago.”

  So. Myra Axelrod was indeed my biological mother. She had a flatter, broader profile than mine; perhaps she had some Native American genes. Maybe I’d inherited my thin frame from Myra and some yet unrecognized facial characteristics from Randy. He might not even have been the father, though. My father, I reminded myself.

  “If there was any way I could have kept you, Erin, I would have. But Randy said . . .” She paused and swiped the tears off her cheeks. “You have to understand. I did the only thing I could do. There was no way I could protect you from that monster. I had no choice.” She struggled to keep her voice steady.

  “What monster? Do you mean Randy?”

  She closed her eyes and said nothing.

  My God, this was weird—speaking to my biological mother, the woman who’d given birth to me. “Myra, I don’t understand—”

  “All these years, I tried to find you. But I never could.” She gritted her teeth and snarled, “It would have to have been Randy who managed the feat. It’s almost funny, under the circumstances.”

  “What circumstances?”

  Again, her gray eyes took on that wistful longing as she met my gaze. “Randy knew he didn’t have much longer to live. He’d told his doctors that he’d decided to forgo the bypass surgery that they all insisted he needed. He told me he wanted his last weeks and months in this world to be on his own terms. And, I guess, that included finally getting to know his daughter.”

  But now he was dead. Murdered. This was all to much to handle. Simultaneously I longed to learn the answers to questions that had gone unanswered for most of my life and to leave this house and strike everything about the Axelrods from my memory banks.

  “I . . . just can’t do this now, Myra. I’m sorry. I have to go . . . be alone for a while.”

  She nodded, her arms folded tight against her chest. “Of course. When Steve arrives, I’ll tell him that we need to reschedule. But can you come back, Erin? At four this afternoon? Please?”

  I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to reenter this house. Ever. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “It would mean a lot to me if we could just . . . move forward with everything, go on with our lives. I don’t want to feel like now you can’t even bear to treat me like a client.”

  I hesitated. Her request was phrased precisely as my real mother—the woman who’d mothered and loved me for more than a quarter of a century—might have expressed it. That connection tugged at me. Yet I’d just found out that Myra had given birth to me. How the hell was I supposed to treat her like any other client? “I don’t know how I feel yet,” I told her honestly, and saw her flinch. “I’ll wait for Steve outside, and we’ll decide about rescheduling later.” Without waiting for her reply, I brushed past her.

  This had been as far removed from my childhood-fantasy reunion as possible. I felt all turned inside out. I wandered down the sidewalk awhile, then slumped down on the curb shivering, trying to get my heart out of my throat.

  Steve Sullivan drove up just then and parked. He slowly made his way down the sidewalk toward me.

  “Gilbert? You okay?”

  Not looking up, I murmured, “Oh, absolutely. Confident and optimistic. Just like always.”

  He crouched to lower himself to my eye level. His pea coat was unbuttoned. He looked dashing and handsome. Must be nice to just arrive at work without having your heart ripped out and handed to you. “What’s wrong?” he asked gently.

  “Myra’s just confessed that she’s my birth mother. So. It seems that my biological mother is a bit of a loon, and my father was an abusive bully with a bad heart—both literally and figuratively—who was murdered almost in front of me, and I suspect by my mother’s hand. That’s setting aside the fact that a booby-trapped beam fell in their house and narrowly missed killing me.” I gritted my teeth, determined to shrug off this gloom. If there was one thing my mother had taught me over the years, it was that self-pity does much more harm than good. “But then, I guess everyone’s family is a bit dysfunctional, right?” I got to my feet and brushed myself off, and Steve rose as well. “On the bright side, at least if I ever decide to host a family reunion, my guest list will be really, really short.”

  “I . . . wish I knew what to say. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to say anything. But I do need a couple of hours to sort this through. Myra suggested we return at four this afternoon. Can you make it back here then?”

  “I can, but what about you? Are you really sure you want to go ahead with this job?”

  “I’m not sure about a single thing right now. Except that I need to be alone for a while. Unless I call and cancel, let’s just meet here at four.”

  “Erin,” he said softly, and touched my shoulder.

  I shrank away, not looking at him, and headed for my van, saying over my shoulder, “Thanks, Sullivan. I’ll see you at four, then.” No way was I going to let myself break down in front of him; if I decided later that I needed company, this was strictly girlfriend-commiseration territory, after all.

  I drove to Audrey’s house, parked, and sat in the van, lost in thought. Given any choice, I never would have looked for Myra and Randy, but they’d found me. Had I unconsciously hoped for some sort of reunion? Otherwise, as my father had said to me over the phone, I wouldn’t have chosen to move to Crestview, Colorado, in the first place.

  Now I had to face up to the simple fact that I was inexorably myself—that I wanted and needed to know the answers even to painful, soul-baring questions and to make peace with whatever happened next. I had to know who had murdered my birth father, or at least the man who’d apparently taken me into his home and served as my father for the first eighteen months of my life. I had to know, too, why the Axelrods had allowed their young, unmarried live-in nanny to adopt me.


  Furthermore, I had to prove to my birth mother—the woman who had hired me—that I was one hell of a designer. I was going to squeeze every iota of experience and creativity out of myself and Steve and give Myra Axelrod’s house a stunningly brilliant design.

  A little less than three hours later, just as I’d pulled into Myra’s driveway, my cell phone rang. I answered, and Steve said, “Hey, Gilbert. It’s Sullivan. I’m almost at Myra’s. It’s not too late to cancel the job at Myra’s, you know. Are we in or out?”

  “In. So let’s be brilliant.”

  He chuckled and said, “If you insist. And I’m right behind you.” I glanced in the rearview mirror: he was. We hung up.

  I took a deep breath and imagined myself dispelling all the bad thoughts from my body as I exhaled—a self-help technique I’d picked up someplace. I had to admit, to myself at least, that on this particular job, I was glad to have a partner.

  Despite some obvious awkwardness between Myra and me, the first half hour of our information-gathering meeting went very well. Debbie, Myra, Steve, and I checked out the repaired beam, and the carpenters had done a good job. Although retracing my steps put me on edge—I refused to stand underneath the beam—the experience was somewhat cathartic. Debbie then excused herself to do some writing on her notebook computer in her bedroom.

  Myra told us what her budget for redoing the entire house was, and it was a workable figure—enough that we would be able to make significant improvements, but not so much that we would be tempted to gut the place and rebuild from scratch. We signed the contracts and received our retainer, and listened to Myra’s requirements and preferences for her new design. The three of us then attempted to get some ideas flowing in earnest.

  There are trade-offs in all interior design decisions; otherwise, there wouldn’t be a need for more than one designer in the entire world, who could answer everyone’s questions from an 800 number. Question: what’s the best floor plan for a thousand-square-foot main floor that includes a kitchen, living room, family room, and dining area? Answer: a great room with a kitchen island, Berber carpeting in the combination living/family room, hardwood floors in the dining room and kitchen. One large great room can prevent multiple, claustrophobic rooms and utilize space efficiently.