by Leslie Caine
“You’re innocent. You don’t have to worry.” He put his arm around my shoulders and guided me out of the bathroom. He, too, was shaking as we made our way to the phone on the nightstand. He grabbed the phone and started to sit down on the edge of Myra’s queen-sized bed, then thought better of it and leaned a shoulder against the wall. He dialed 911.
There was a noise from below us as someone opened and then closed a heavy door. Debbie called up the stairs, “Myra? I’m back from Safeway. I got everything on your list.”
My head felt ready to explode. I pushed against my temples with the heels of my hands. I knew I had to tell Debbie the terrible news.
Steve was speaking to the dispatcher on the phone and looked at me. I held up a hand to signal that I’d handle this, and left the room.
Debbie turned and smiled at me as I entered the kitchen. “Erin, hi. I thought you were here. I saw your van. Did you leave a cup of . . .” Her voice faded. “What’s wrong? Where’s Myra?”
“Something awful has happened. Steve Sullivan is upstairs, talking to the police.”
“The police? Oh my God! Is she . . . hurt?”
I grabbed both her arms before she could pass. “She’s dead, Debbie.”
She yanked free from my grasp, staring at me in disbelief, then wobbled and dropped into a chair at the silver-speckled Formica table. “But . . . that’s not possible! She was perfectly fine when I left to run some errands. She was healthy. She can’t be dead! How could she be dead?”
“I don’t know, Debbie. We had an appointment scheduled. I got scared when no one answered the bell, so we let ourselves in. I found Myra on the bathroom floor.”
“But . . . but nothing looks any different. Shouldn’t something have changed if . . . I can’t believe this is happening.” She stared into my eyes. “I . . . should go up there, shouldn’t I? She shouldn’t be alone till . . . someone comes for her.”
“Steve’s upstairs. The police will be here very soon.” I took a seat at the small table across from her. I couldn’t stop shivering.
“I don’t understand,” Debbie moaned. “How could she die just a week after . . .” Her eyes widened. She shook her head. “Nobody had any reason to hurt her, Erin. She lived such a quiet life here with Randy. She didn’t have any enemies.”
Could this have been an accidental poisoning? I wondered. “Did she have breakfast this morning?”
With a vacant look on her face, she answered, “Scrambled eggs and toast. But she made them herself, and I was right there in the kitchen with her.” Her speech was slow and her voice quiet. “And we shared the eggs. The police tested everything in her kitchen for poison and didn’t find anything.”
“Did she have coffee?”
She shook her head. “Tea. Myra drank tea. Always. But it was a new box. She told me the police took her tea, even though Randy never touched the stuff. He was a coffee drinker, like me.” She sank her head into her hands. “God. I’ve been going out for coffee every morning till today. The first couple days, it made me too nervous to drink Myra’s, in spite of the police tests. Today I drank her coffee, though, and used her sugar. Myra said that they’d all been replaced.”
There were sirens now in the distance. Debbie blinked back the tears. “Carl’s at work. I’ve been packing up my things. I found a rental place with immediate occupancy. Only . . . I didn’t want to just leave Myra like this, so I went and bought us the makings for dinner tonight . . . for my last night here. I was going to . . . to make the two of us dinner.”
Steve came into the kitchen. His face was still ashen. “The police are pulling up outside.” He looked at Debbie. “I’m sorry that this has happened.”
Debbie began to cry softly. “She was a good friend. I can’t believe this is happening.” She looked up at me, still in shock. “Erin, come over to my old house later today, if you can. We need to talk.”
My eyes misted a little with relief when Linda Delgardio entered the house in full uniform, along with three uniformed male officers. Linda promptly took me into Randy’s office to interview me in private. Myra had cleared everything—including the umbrella stand—out of the room, but we dragged in two of the rosewood chairs from the dining room.
“For once I wished I smoked cigarettes,” I muttered as I took a seat in the stripped room.
“I know what you mean.” Linda sat down in the chair in front of mine, gave me a reassuring smile, then flipped open her notepad. “Tell me what happened, Erin.”
“Steve Sullivan and I had an appointment here at nine to discuss our design ideas for Myra’s house, so . . .” I paused, then asked tentatively, “Is it all right if I start further back . . . rehash the stuff I already told Detective O’Reilly?”
“Of course, Erin.”
So I went into everything from the beginning, including the entire story of Myra’s telling me that I was her daughter and how Emily Blaire had refuted that. Just as I was about to describe Emily’s giving me the old letters and cameo, though, I fell silent. I didn’t want to surrender them to the police. A friend had once had her stolen silverware recovered, only to have it be declared police evidence and locked away for two years. Emily had intended for the letters and necklace to be given to me almost ten years ago. There had to be some point at which I was allowed to keep those small mementos from a mother I’d never known and a childhood in Colorado that I’d never experienced.
“You believed Emily Blaire’s story?” Linda prompted, breaking into my thoughts.
“Completely.”
“Why? Did she show you any proof?”
“She was just much more convincing than Myra. And Myra’s story about discovering I wasn’t Randy’s through my blood type was nonsense.” I felt my face growing warm at my failure to mention the letters. Worse, Linda was looking at me so intently that she seemed to detect something was wrong. “I feel really guilty, because part of me knew I should have called the police last night. Myra was so upset—despondent—that I thought she might even be suicidal. But I found out that Debbie Henderson was going to be with her, so I convinced myself she would be fine.”
“You suspect that Myra committed suicide?”
“I’m worried that she might have . . . and that maybe, if I’d taken action last night, it could have been prevented.”
“Did you notice anything when you found her body that made you sus—that made you worry this might have been self-inflicted? Empty glasses on her nightstand, pill bottles, powder spills?”
I shook my head.
She glanced back through her notes, then gave me a long look. “Is there anything else?”
“Not that I can think of. But I still have your card.” I rose, and she did as well.
“Don’t hesitate to call me, Erin. If something else occurs to you.”
I forced myself to hold her gaze. My heart was pounding. I was hiding evidence from the police and lying to a new friend. “I won’t. Hesitate, I mean.”
Linda excused herself to speak with one of her fellow officers. I retrieved my coat, anxious to get away.
“Miss Gilbert?” a male officer called, causing me to all but jump out of my skin. I clenched my teeth. He handed me a slip of paper. Steve had written: Get in touch ASAP and had included his home address and phone number. “You’re the other decorator’s partner, right?”
“Right.”
“He said to call or come over later if you wanted.” The officer smiled a little. “Are those your real last names— Gilbert and Sullivan?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky. That makes your business name real easy to remember.”
I made no comment and put the piece of paper in my pocket. “Is Mrs. Henderson still here?” I asked.
“No. Said she was going back to her own house.”
“I’m going to go check on how she’s doing. Thank you, officer.”
I headed across the street, glad to leave Myra’s house, but with a growing sense of foreboding over what might be in store for me next.
The way things were going, Debbie was probably going to drop some bombshell on me—perhaps insist that she was my birth mother and that Henry Kissinger had been my father.
I rang the Hendersons’ doorbell. Debbie’s eyes were red and puffy when she came to the door. “Erin! Come on in.”
She closed the door behind us, then rounded the railing by the door and, without a word, plopped into the La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room. She blew her nose while I took a seat on the off-white wool bouclé love seat against the front window. It was chilly, so I kept my coat on; Carl must have set the thermostat at sixty degrees while he was gone.
“I’m trying to shrug everything off and keep packing,” she muttered, and dabbed at her nose with a tissue. “Suddenly I’m having a rough time with dust. Pretty ironic, wouldn’t you say? That was such a catalyst for me, clueing me in that my marriage really was over, once I found out that Carl couldn’t even remember which wife had allergies.” She sighed. “You know, Erin, I was the only girl of the two hundred or so at my twenty-fifth high school reunion who’d never been married. I felt so sorry for myself. For my thirtieth, I was married and tried like mad to convince Carl to go with me, but he refused. Said he’d be bored stiff. It’s just as well. This way, five years from now, when I’m unmarried once again and, once again, attend my thirty-fifth reunion alone, I won’t have to put up with everyone asking me what happened to that tall, grumpy fellow I was with last time.”
I had no response. She was having such a rough time in her life—her marriage ending, first Randy and now Myra dying. Maybe griping about something as trivial as a high school reunion was what she needed to do to get herself through this impossibly difficult day. “Did you tell Carl yet about Myra?”
She grimaced. “No. I guess I should call him at work. I so wanted to be able to just slip away without having to see him . . . to be all moved out by the time he got home. The moving men are coming at four.” She sighed again. “It’s a really small, one-bedroom place, so I’m just taking the bedroom stuff, the kitchen table, and the living room furniture. Carl can keep everything else. At least for now.”
“I thought you were keeping the house and Carl was going to be the one to move out.”
“Carl’s such a stick-in-the-mud, I figured it’d be faster and less painful if I let him stay here till the judge decides who gets what.” She stared at her hands in her lap. At length, she said, “I had a bit of business to wrap up with you before I moved out, though. I wanted to tell you that the wall that the police destroyed looks good as new now. Carl hired Taylor. He already managed to repair the bedroom wall and rehang the wallpaper.”
“Really? I still have that extra roll in my van. Taylor never asked me for it.”
She gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Carl must have bought more. It’s his money to throw away as he chooses. The point is, I’m going to have the moving men take the bed, night table, and dresser this afternoon. I thought you’d like the chance to take your photos for your portfolio now, while the room’s still intact.”
“Yes, I sure would. That’s really thoughtful of you. I’ll do that right now, if you don’t mind.”
“Go ahead.”
I fetched my digital camera from my satchel in the van, then went upstairs and shot my photographs from every angle. At first, I thought the room looked precisely the way it had before the police ruined the wall, and then I noticed the outlet cover plates. Taylor had merely reused the ones that I’d created to match the original wallpapering job; now that the paper behind it had been rehung, the pattern on the plates no longer matched.
Cursing under my breath, I trudged down the stairs. It would take me thirty minutes, tops, to remove the old paper from the covers and recover them, as opposed to letting the thought fester in my brain indefinitely that the outlet plate covers were loused up in a room that I’d so carefully designed.
I found Debbie in the kitchen, packing up the blue willow dishes. “The room looks great, doesn’t it, Erin?”
“Taylor did a pretty good job. But the wallpaper on the outlet plates needs to be redone. I’ll have to get my tools.”
“Please don’t bother. I noticed that, too, I’ll admit, but Carl sure won’t.”
“It won’t take me long, and I just can’t knowingly leave a mistake like that.”
“Suit yourself, but there’s no need to do it right this minute.” She shut the packing box, grabbed her coffee mug, and headed, once again, for the living room, as if she could only handle the task of packing in short spurts. “I’m sure the outlets won’t show up in the photographs that the Denver Lifestyles photographer’s taking.”
“Pardon?” I followed her.
“He’s coming at two o’clock this afternoon.” She reclaimed her seat. “I’m now officially editor in chief at Denver Lifestyles, so I can dictate the photo shoots. Now that Myra, the in-name-only owner, has passed away, I no longer feel obligated to keep my role secret.”
“Myra was the owner of the magazine?” I asked, dropping back into my seat on the sofa, stunned.
Debbie nodded. “Though it was Randy’s money. He and Myra had temporarily split up, and I guess Randy’s buying a business for her was part of his means for winning her back. Although he gave me quite the shaft in the process.”
“Randy bought the magazine from you?”
“He didn’t buy it, no. When we bought the Axelrods’ house and first got to know them, Myra told me that he was independently wealthy. I’d already come up with the idea for starting the magazine—back before I’d even met Carl, let alone Randy. I couldn’t get the financing I needed, though, so . . . one day I mustered up all my courage and presented everything to Randy to see if he’d be willing to invest in it. He said he’d look into it and let me know. He kept putting me off for months, then he finally let on that he’d already gotten everything off the ground and had made himself editor in chief and would hire me as his ghostwriter only.”
“Jeez! You couldn’t sue him?”
“He said that people couldn’t copyright their ideas alone, so there was no way I could. At first I told him where to shove it, of course, but my technical writing business wasn’t going well, and he assured me that he’d help me find work plus pay me very generously as long as I kept quiet, et cetera. And he told me that if I did try to sue, I’d only be hurting Myra, since he’d made her the owner.”
“That must have made you furious.” I wondered if I’d misjudged Debbie; maybe she was hiding a murderous rage.
She set her coffee mug down. “Yes, but that’s all ancient history. An amazing thing happened. Apparently Randy wrote a codicil to his will at some point. In it, he confessed that he’d gypped me out of my idea for the magazine and that I’d been his ghostwriter for years now, so he wanted ownership of the magazine and some back pay the company owed him to go to me instead.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“Well, it’s good, at least. We aren’t talking about a huge amount of money, but it will be enough for me to cover my rent and deposit on my one-bedroom apartment in Longmont.” That was a small town nearby.
She managed a small smile. “What this means as far as you’re concerned is a bit of good news during a dreadful day. We’re going to run a feature story about you and Steve Sullivan and the rooms you two completed. Originally my story was going to include your design in Myra’s house as well, but for obvious reasons I’m just going to nix that part and run the story of the contest, which I’ve officially declared a tie.”
“Thank you, Debbie. It will be a terrific boon to both Steve’s and my businesses. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear about this.”
“That reminds me. Jill wasn’t certain that she would allow photographs to be taken of Steve’s work, since she says the room is her least favorite in the whole house.”
Poor Steve! He needed all the publicity he could get, or his business might fold. “That’s going to be a major stumbling block to your magazine piece on our contest, won’t it?”
“I think Jill can be persuaded to change her mind easily enough. I can always agree to run a separate story next year that shows her entire house, and—”
The doorbell rang, and Kevin McBride burst inside. He was panting and flushed. He was wearing a jogging suit and was sweating profusely. For once, he didn’t give me a leering eye. Rather, he ignored me, gripped the short length of railing that ran adjacent to the door, and gasped, “Debbie! What’s happened at Myra’s house?”
Debbie clasped her hands and held them to her lips, studying Kevin’s face, her eyes tearing up once more. “Oh, Kevin,” she said. “You’d better come in and take a seat. I’m afraid it’s Myra.”
He stayed put but tightened his grip on the rail. “What does that mean, ‘it’s Myra’? What’s Myra? Is she missing? Did she have an accident?”
Debbie looked at me with pleading eyes.
“She died this morning,” I told him. “I found her when Steve Sullivan and I went to her house for an appointment.”
He shook his head. “No. No. She can’t be dead.” He doubled over and plopped down on the hard tile in front of the Hendersons’ door. Debbie rushed to his side and knelt in attempt to put her arms around him. Pushing her away, he cried, “What the hell is happening? I don’t understand any of this!”
“I know,” Debbie soothed. “It’s impossible to fathom.” She got to her feet and returned to her chair, hanging her head.
Kevin rose, supporting himself with the banister as he made the short trip into the living room to join us. He took a seat beside the La-Z-Boy on the carpeted step to the living room. He looked at me, his expression tight. “Was it natural causes? Or was she . . . killed?”
“I don’t know,” I replied quietly. “There wasn’t any blood, but she may have ingested poison.”
He rocked himself slightly, saying nothing. Debbie reached down to put her hand on his shoulder, and he held it there, his hand on top of hers. At length, he said to her, “I need to speak to Erin alone for a minute.”
