Death by Inferior Design Read online

  “Cyanide, actually.”

  “Whatever. And this could all be connected to your baby picture being hidden inside a wall.”

  “Nice summation, Sullivan. What’s your point?”

  “You have to go to the police.”

  “I know. I called the hospital and reported the cyanide before I left the Hendersons’. I told the receptionist that I’d tell the police, and I will, eventually. But Randy seems to have had a heart attack. With any luck, he’ll be treated and released, and finally learn to lose those extra pounds and take better care of himself.”

  Steve was staring at me, unsmiling. “At the very least, you should call your father and tell him about this . . . see if he can shed some light on anything.”

  “I suppose. My thoughts are so jumbled right now, I’ll have to go home and look up his number in my address book. I only keep business numbers on my Palm Pilot.”

  “I have one of those, too. Aren’t they great? They’re expensive, breakable, and less convenient than a spiral notebook.”

  Again, I battled back my smile; Steve Sullivan was unknowingly tugging at my weakness for men who could make me laugh. “Yes, but they smack of success . . . of our ability to throw money away on electronic gadgets.” I drained my drink.

  Steve polished off his beer, too, then asked, “Should I get us another round?”

  “No, thanks. I got so little sleep last night that two drinks would flatten me. Thanks for listening. I’d better get home and get this phone call to my father over with.”

  “Want company?”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

  He lifted his palms. “You said you wanted to bury the hatchet, and you’ve had more than your fair share of trauma the last couple days. It seems to me some company might help. We can go pick up your van, and I’ll follow you to your place.”

  If this had been anyone else, I’d have leapt at the offer. Audrey would be in Vail, so only Hildi would be there to greet me, and Myra’s sorrowful wails were still echoing in my brain, taunting me that my birth father might at this very moment be at death’s door. But Steve Sullivan was the man who’d called me three or four times my first year in Crestview and harassed me about how he was losing clients who’d gotten “Gilbert” confused with “Sullivan.” The man who’d ridiculed me in a drunken tirade at a social function last fall. Who’d lied to the Coopers to steal their business out from under me.

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

  He nodded. He looked expectantly at me after he’d set some money on the table to cover our drinks, probably waiting for me to either rise or say that I’d decided to order something else after all. I felt paralyzed. I neither wanted to stay or to leave, but Sullivan was right about one thing: I was definitely not ready to be alone. Babbling, I said, “I live in an amazing house. It belongs to Audrey Munroe.”

  “Of Domestic Bliss with Audrey Munroe?” Steve’s eyes widened.

  “The one and only. Audrey lets me have a room, and in exchange, she uses me for design consultations and services on her mansion. Which is great, because she changes her mind so frequently on what she wants done that it’s a never-ending job. One day she’ll be decorating the parlor to resemble a drawing room from the Château de Versailles, and the next day she’ll be doing it up like the jungle room from Graceland.”

  He grinned. “Sounds fun.”

  “It is. Except I never know what furniture I’ll have in my home one day to the next. She’s always buying things or giving them away on whims. Two weeks ago, I walked into the den, and the camelback sofa was gone. As it turns out, a friend of hers had visited that morning and praised it to the sky, and poof. Audrey got someone with a pickup to haul the thing to the friend’s house.”

  “Wow. I’ve got to make nice with this woman. I could use some free furniture.”

  I had to resist a sneer. Sullivan would want to take advantage of Audrey’s generosity. “I’m sure you already have lots of exquisite furniture.”

  “To tell you the truth, Gilbert, I’m into minimalism these days. I lost a lot of my stuff.” He clenched his jaw and his fists and said with unmasked bitterness, “Thanks to Evan.”

  He’d said his former partner’s name with pain rife in his voice. Clearly I’d misinterpreted his role regarding that woman I’d seen clinging to him in the bar. So his ex-partner had taken most of the furniture when he’d moved out. “Evan Cambridge?”

  Steve nodded. “He cleaned out our accounts and ripped off some of our clients, big time. I had to max out all my credit cards and go way into debt to cover for him. It was either that or lose the business entirely, and I just . . .” His voice had been rising, and now he stopped himself and regained control. “Anyway. That’s your ‘full explanation’ regarding the Cooper account. I’d bid on the Cooper job already, before they called you to get a second designer’s input. Then Mrs. Cooper called me, after she’d agreed to hire you, to say that she’d loved both of our designs but had gone with yours because yours was slightly less expensive. I had to have the money, so I pleaded with them to give me the work at the same price that they’d agreed to pay you. I learned my lesson from that experience. I felt so crappy about the whole thing that it just wasn’t worth it.”

  “Jeez, Sullivan. If you’d just called me and explained your predicament, I would—”

  He held up his hand. “There are things I know I should have done differently. I was pretty crazed at the time.”

  “I’d have been crazed, too. Who wouldn’t be? Did you report this to the police and to the BBB?”

  “Yeah. Evan appears to have fled the country. Let’s just say that the odds of my finding him and getting my money back aren’t great.”

  “But what about your insurance? Surely your errors-and-omissions policy would cover at least . . .”

  He was shaking his head. “Guess who was in charge of supposedly paying the insurance company?” He blew out a puff of air. “I was head over heels at the time, and I trusted Evan implicitly. Meanwhile, he emptied all my accounts and ran everything I’d worked my whole life for into the ground.”

  The poor guy! Come to think of it, I had heard some murmurings of Sullivan’s having some trouble, but that was right after his drunken vitriol toward me at the party and immediately followed by his stealing the Cooper account, and I hadn’t wanted to listen to a sob story on his behalf, which would have spoiled my perfectly justified indignation. I stared at him, stunned. “I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Nobody ever does. I’ve been a real joy to have around at parties and social gatherings, let me tell you.”

  “Well, maybe you’re not exactly Santa Claus or one of his merry elves, but—”

  He snorted and grumbled, “I’m not even one of his reindeer.”

  “But on the other hand, you probably make everyone else feel better about their own lives in comparison. I know I feel better.”

  “Good.” He grinned, rose from the table, and gave me a slight bow. “Then my work here is done, milady.”

  To my near mortification, I actually blushed and giggled like a schoolgirl as I got to my feet, too. Well, then, as my mom would say, live and learn. That’s what came of my imbibing alcohol in the aftermath of someone collapsing in a client’s home.

  Maybe Steve Sullivan wasn’t quite as bad a skunk as I’d come to believe. Then again, everyone who’d ever met the man, myself included, knew how charming Sullivan could be whenever he wanted to be. And a skunk’s fur is beautiful. So what?

  chapter 7

  Audrey’s parlor remained in the same state as it had been in last night, the contents shoved with abject indifference against the walls. In times of stress, I’m drawn to certain pieces of furniture— regardless of their setting—the way some people are drawn to certain types of food. The parlor’s sage sofa—its plush velvet impossibly soft to the touch—was a haven for me. I curled up against its arm, the cordless phone in my hand, and gathered my courage.

  Just as I felt resolved a
nd ready to act, Hildi sprang onto the far end of the sofa and began to navigate a nonchalant course over the plush cushions toward me. Too nervous about my impending phone conversation to have my cat on my lap, I rose. Hildi promptly hopped back onto the antique-pine floor. Her indignation at having been treated so ignobly was evident in her every movement. She flicked the white tip of her tail at me as she strode past me toward the kitchen, in a feline gesture that I chose not to interpret at the moment.

  I dialed my father’s number, half hoping there would be no answer. I waited through the first three rings, my stomach in an unpleasant flutter. My father picked up. At least it wasn’t Angie, his wife, or their twelve-year-old daugher, Jessie. Forcing a measure of gaiety into my voice, I said, “Hi. It’s Erin.”

  “Well, hi there. I was just thinking of you.”

  The greeting would have been flattering, except that was what he always said, and yet he contacted me so seldom that it was impossible for me to believe.

  “The strangest thing happened yesterday, and I need your input. I was removing the paneling from a wall in a house in north Crestview and discovered a hiding spot in the wall. A copy of that baby picture of me that Mom kept on the piano was inside.”

  There was a long pause. “Did you ask the owners about it?” His voice was utterly unemotional.

  “No. Mom made me promise never to look for my birth parents. But do you know who they are? If so, you don’t have to tell me their names, but . . .” I faltered. Staring unseeingly at the floor, I asked, “Do you have any idea why my not finding them was so important to her?”

  “Erin, as you know, when I met your mother, she’d already adopted you.”

  I chewed on my lower lip. He could sometimes take a hundred words to give a simple yes or no.

  “I didn’t even know for the longest time that you weren’t really hers—that she hadn’t given birth to you herself. All I ever knew about the circumstances was that she adopted you from a friend when she was living in Colorado. It was a sore subject with her, and I chose to never upset her by prying into it.”

  I frowned, frustrated. That she’d adopted me from a friend and that, even though I’d been eighteen months old at the time of my adoption, she’d known and loved me from when I was just six weeks old was all she would ever tell me as well. She never explained why six weeks or why this friend had given me up, aside from the gentle, pat answer: “She knew I would take better care of you than she could.”

  “You never asked? Was the adoption even legal?”

  “I’m sure it was all legal and aboveboard.”

  I completed a full circle of the parlor. Even while this phone conversation was so critical as to make me hang on my father’s every word, I still managed to silently admire the painstaking stitch-work that was evident on the back of Audrey’s rolled-up hand-knotted oriental rug. “But . . . how could it have been? She was just twenty-one and single. I was already eighteen months old. That’s not your standard, legal adoption. Is it?”

  No reply.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “I’ve always told you the truth, Erin.”

  “You say that, Dad, yet it’s so hard to believe that, once you found out I wasn’t her biological child, you simply let the subject drop. Who would do that? How could you be so complacent about your own family?”

  “You know what they say about curiosity and cats.”

  Though impatience and anger had already crept into my father’s voice, I had to ask the question that had haunted me for the last two decades—ever since my mother first admitted I was adopted. I’d dragged that much out of her when she’d been unable to produce any pictures of me as a newborn, which my second-grade teacher wanted for a which-child-is-which-baby guessing game. From that day on, her meager answers had only brought me more questions and doubts. None of the circumstances surrounding my adoption had been typical. Neither of my parents was ever willing to explain them fully. My mother’s dying wish had been for me never to look into my past.

  “Erin? Are you still there?”

  I slid a wing chair toward me to reach over its back and reposition Audrey’s divine coral harlequin table lamp so that its ivory shade was no longer being crushed. I took a deep breath. “Dad, is it possible . . . that I was an abduction?”

  “Absolutely not,” he fired back, suddenly furious. “How could you even think such a thing of your mother? Or do you mean that you think I’ve been lying all these years, and that I snatched you from your real parents?”

  My emotions fluctuated between rage and despair. The retort that I couldn’t bring myself to say aloud blasted through my brain—Do you honestly think I’m trying to hurt you, Dad? Can’t you see this from my side for once—what it’s been like for me? Not to know such basic truths as who I am and where I came from? To always have my most soul-baring and painful questions met with an angry barrage?

  I leaned against the entrance to the kitchen, the only spot on the wall that wasn’t blocked by Audrey’s repositioned furniture. Over the lump in my throat, I persisted. “Look at this from my perspective, Dad. Certain things about my adoption never made a whole lot of sense to me, but that didn’t ever really matter till now. I had a good, happy childhood.” More or less.

  “Yes, you did. You did indeed. And you went to the school that you wanted, and you got the career that you wanted.”

  I clenched my teeth. He’d neglected to mention that my going to the school that I wanted had come to me thanks to a generous scholarship and my part-time job, so neither he nor my mother had been forced to pay for my education.

  He went on in a simmering tone. “And yet, even so, out of all the places to live in the entire country, you chose to move to Crestview, where your mother went to college. Why? Did you secretly want to find your biological parents, despite your mother’s explicit request?”

  “No!” This was so unfair of him. He was playing what I’d just now told him against my wounded emotions at the loss of my mother. Or was I in the wrong here? This was why I hated talking to my father about anything of a serious nature; I instantly felt trapped into being the same heartbroken twelve-year-old that I’d been when he’d moved out. It was impossible to see the forest for the trees when the branches kept jabbing me in the eye. I heard myself yammer, “Mom always talked about how pretty Crestview was. After she died, I just . . . wanted to see the place, and I wound up staying and starting up my business here. That’s all.”

  He sighed heavily in my ear. “Erin, if you’re asking my opinion, just do what your mother asked. Stay away from these people! Perhaps your mother had more than her fair share of secrets, but everything she did was in your best interest. Always.”

  “That’s the one thing I’m sure of,” I replied, feeling a little better from the reminder of that one cornerstone from my past.

  “Erin, I . . . This isn’t a good time for me to talk.” That was a frequent response from my father. I doubted that we’d had a single phone call in which he hadn’t uttered it at least once, including those rare occasions in which he had been the one to place the call. In a bad case of overkill, this time he added, “You caught me on my way out the door. I’ve got to go. Just . . . let someone else finish this . . . this room you’re working on, and stay away from those people.”

  “I can’t quit work three-quarters of the way through a project.”

  “Erin,” he said firmly, “the one and only thing I know about your birth parents is that one time your mother told me that they were dangerous.”

  “But you said she got me from a friend. How could she consider a friend of hers to be dangerous?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to go. Just . . . be careful. And good talking to you, Erin. Thanks for calling.”

  He hung up before I could reply. Good talking to me? That was what he says about a conversation like that? Hey, Erin. Your mysterious birth parent might want to hurt you. And it sure is shitty of you to worry that you may have been kidnapped a
t eighteen months. But it was good talking to you. I’ve got to get back to my real daughter now.

  I slammed the handset into its cradle on the mahogany console, currently wedged behind the chesterfield sofa. My cheeks felt red-hot. It was immeasurably painful not to believe my own father. His studious avoidance of this subject matter was, I was certain, the mortar of the brick wall he’d built between us. If only there were some other relatives—aunts or uncles—I could tap for information . . . But my mother had been an only child, and her parents passed away about twenty years ago.

  My father hadn’t asked for the name of the homeowners for my design project. Surely that meant he didn’t know my biological parents’ last name. That was an infinitely kinder possibility than its alternative—that he knew the name and just didn’t care.

  If only I could remake my own personal interiors as easily as I could a dwelling space, could keep only the useful or the lovely or the fondly sentimental. That simply wasn’t possible. Yes, Mom, we do indeed need to look forward and not behind us. But how can we understand where we are without ever understanding where we’ve been? I’d never thought to ask her that question when she was alive.

  With no one answering the phone at either the Axelrods’ or the Hendersons’ houses, around six o’clock that evening, I drove to the hospital. A sense of foreboding overwhelmed any cheer that I might normally have gleaned from the decorative lighting on the houses and trees I passed. I was now certain that Randy Axelrod was my biological father.

  Having run the phone conversation with my father through my head so many times that my brain was getting wear marks, one possibility could tie everything together: Randy was something of a bully. My biological mother and my adoptive mother had been friends, perhaps at CU. According to my father, I had been given away to protect me from a dangerous parent. Perhaps Randy had been abusive, and Myra and my mother had conspired to get me halfway across the country to keep me safe. Maybe my mother’s last wish was also geared toward keeping me safe. Perhaps she simply never wanted me to find out that my father was a despicable human being.