1 A High-End Finish (8 page)

“Everyone has her opinions, of course,” Emily said. “Natty Terrell believes it was either Mr. or Mrs. Boyer, or maybe they were in on it together. According to her son, Colin, who works part-time at the flower shop, Joyce Boyer was in there yesterday to order flowers for her mother. She was boasting about the fact that Jerry was killed in their basement. Poetic justice, she called it, and said ‘good riddance.’”

“‘Good riddance’? Joyce said that? Wow.” I shivered.

“It’s a bit gruesome, isn’t it?” Emily said, nodding. “Colin also reported that Joyce was quite tearful as she spoke. So was she happy he was dead, or sad?”

“She was crying?” I thought about it. “It’s an awfully cold statement to make in public, especially by a woman rumored to be sleeping with the man. Maybe she realized what she’d said out loud and it upset her.”

“But what does she mean by
poetic justice
?” Emily shook her head. “She sounds angry and guilty to me.”

“I would love it if that were true, if only to stop the police from suspecting me. But I don’t believe she would talk like that if she really did kill him.”

“No, probably not. Despite her big mouth, she doesn’t seem like a stupid woman.”

“On the other hand,” I mused, “she
was
having an affair with Jerry.”

“True. So how smart can she be?” Emily took a small bite of tender stew meat and chewed it before continuing. “Phillippa Baxter told me that Jerry had the hots for her, as well.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yes. But she assured me she wasn’t about to fall for any of his fancy words. She’s apparently well versed in the wicked ways of evil men.”

I shook my head. “Flipper has always imagined that every guy in the universe is after her body. She’s kind of insane.”

“But highly entertaining.”

“I suppose,” I said cautiously. I’d gone to high school with Phillippa Baxter, or Flipper as we called her. The poor girl had been delusional about men forever.

Emily set down her fork. She took a sip of wine and leaned closer. “Honestly, Shannon. These people confide their deepest secrets to me. It’s a bit shocking, really. I feel like the vicar in the confessional.”

My laughter was strained. “I just hope the police don’t get wind of our little investigation.”

“The police?” She brushed off my concerns. “They won’t take notice of some small-town gossip. And my teetotalers love chitchatting with me. Who knows? One of them might just drop a vital clue that leads to some fabulous revelation.”

“As long as you’re careful. Don’t forget, there’s a murderer out there somewhere.”

“Yes, I tend to forget from day to day that we’re harboring a killer.” She pondered that dark thought for a moment, then smiled brightly, reached over, and patted my hand. “Ah, well, as long as we can keep you out of the pokey, that’s what matters most.”

•   •   •

I woke up the next morning to a cold gray sky with more fog rolling in. I added a thermal T-shirt under my usual henley and flannel shirt, then drank an extra cup of coffee to keep myself revved up. Foggy days often made me want to stay inside with a cozy blanket and a good book.

I spent the first half of the day driving from one end of town to the other and back again, checking on my six main job sites. I also met with the architect on the Main Street Brownstones project. My company had been hired to do the rehab, and I was eager to find out what obstacles, if any, he might’ve discovered in his research.

Thank goodness I had plenty of work to do besides sit around and try to avoid a certain hunky police chief.

That afternoon, I stopped at the Boyers’ house in South Cove. I spotted Wade Chambers, my head foreman in charge of this job site, standing on the front porch, talking to one of the cops who was still there collecting forensic evidence.

The place was still a crime scene, so I had cut the crew down to two guys, plus Wade, who traveled between sites. The basic assignment here was to make sure that none of the police fell through the feeble floorboards or tripped down the basement ramp.

Wade checked in with the police every day to see if they were finished with their evidence collecting. We were all eager to get back to work inside the house.

Wade saw me and waved, said one last thing to the cop, and carefully jumped off the porch. “Hey, boss, I was just going to call you. The police still have the interior cordoned off, but they gave us permission to work out here. I thought we should go ahead and tackle the front stairs. What do you think?”

Frowning, I gazed up at the house. It wouldn’t do much good to start reinforcing the sagging porch roof if we couldn’t even get up to the porch without risking life and limb on those stairs. “I agree. Let’s get started on the stairs.”

Two police squad cars were parked out front, so there had to be at least four cops somewhere on the property, probably downstairs collecting more evidence. Lucky for them, we’d already done the preliminary work of jacking up the basement ceiling and adding four new support posts down the center of the room. We’d rebuilt the main header beams and repaired several damaged joists, all before Jerry Saxton was killed down there.

With an old house, we always followed the golden rule of triage: first, stop the bleeding, so to speak. Whenever I took on a new job, I prioritized the work according to structural urgency. In other words, a coat of paint might make the place look nice on the surface, but if a wall or a load-bearing beam was weakened by age or termites or water damage, the house wouldn’t survive much longer without fortification. And that had to start at the bottom, with the basement. With so many police officers traipsing through the kitchen, going up and down that precarious ramp, and then moving themselves and their equipment around the big, dank basement space, all three floors of the house would’ve collapsed on top of them if we hadn’t done the reinforcement work first.

“Have the owners been around much?” I asked, as Wade escorted me back to my truck.

He shook his head. “Todd said Mrs. Boyer was here for a little while on Monday. She wasn’t in the best mood, apparently.”

I tried not to show any reaction. “It must be weird to know that someone was killed in your own house.”

“According to Todd,” Wade said quietly, “she wasn’t any too sad about it. Apparently she made quite a point of telling the men how much she hated the guy. The statement was sort of ruined when she burst into tears, though.”

“She was crying?”

“That’s what Todd said.”

“So she hated Jerry Saxton, but she was crying about it.” I shook my head. “I understood the two of them were having an affair.”

Wade was too much of a gentleman to say anything overly inflammatory about anyone, but the news about Joyce and Jerry’s relationship was all over town. As far as I was concerned, Joyce had every right to hate Jerry after finding out about his many affairs—if only she hadn’t been carrying on her own extramarital affair at the same time. But it sure seemed odd that she’d been canoodling with him a few days before his death and now, all of a sudden, she insisted she hated him. It didn’t make her a murderer. It just made me wonder. Especially when I kept hearing that she was bursting into tears all over the place.

I left the Boyer house in Wade’s good hands and drove out to the Paradise Lane work site a mile east of the center of town. On the drive, I pondered the information Wade had shared. Emily had heard the same basic story from Natty Terrell, whose son had heard Joyce call Jerry’s death a “good riddance.” Was Joyce simply jealous that he had been fooling around with other women? Again, since she was married, she couldn’t complain too much, could she?

Apparently, she could.

And I still didn’t know why Stan Boyer had lied to me about his whereabouts when he called me last Sunday. Not that I would expect him to tell me he was having an affair, but he didn’t have to say he was in San Francisco, did he? I supposed some people felt the need to embellish their lies in order to make themselves sound more plausible. I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t lie worth beans. Oh, I tried to every so often, but I usually ended up sounding ridiculous.

I pulled to a stop on Paradise Lane, climbed out of my truck, and stared at the property in front of me. This house was among the oldest Victorians in town and one of the “grande dames” of Lighthouse Cove. If you took one of the historical tours that were offered around town, this house was always featured. It was built in 1867 by a prosperous Danish dairy farmer, Herman Clausen, otherwise known as the Butterfat King and one of the earliest settlers in the region.

The house was a gorgeous example of the Stick-Eastlake style, whose most notable features were elaborate fretted woodwork, fanciful carved moldings, and stunning spindle-wood gables. The style epitomized the gingerbread look for which so many Victorian homes were noted.

The new owners had insisted that they wanted only the simplest updating done to the house. I had hesitated to take the job until they assured me that they loved every aspect of the design. Some new owners of vintage homes wanted to strip away those froufrou details that made some Victorian homes so unique and valuable. I usually didn’t take those jobs.

This home still had the original stained-glass panels on the front door and side insets. The intricate stick work that framed the porch eaves was in remarkably good condition. The pitched tin roofs over the dormer windows needed only modest repair and repainting. The new owners thought those features were delightful and just wanted them lovingly restored to their original charm.

That worked for me.

I tracked down Carla Harrison, my second foreman, at the back of the house and almost forty feet up in the air, where she was inspecting one of the third-floor gables with the owner. They stood inside the basketlike platform of our articulated boom lift, one of my favorite pieces of equipment and a real thrill ride. The steel-encased platform held two people comfortably as the powerful motor and pump allowed the mast and riser arms to stretch as far as fifty-one feet into the air.

I greeted Douglas, the crew member assigned to watch the lift and operate the lower controls in case of a glitch. Even though the upper platform had its own controls, it was important to have another person on the ground checking that everything ran smoothly.

The articulated lift was a necessity for any company that worked on Victorian houses as much as mine did, since many of the homes stretched three stories high and had roofs so steep that it was impossible to scale them. They were often irregularly formed as well, with balconies and turrets in the oddest places, so scaffolding wasn’t always possible. The boom lift solved all those problems.

Carla was pointing out some aspect of the intricate woodwork to the owner and explaining something I couldn’t hear. But I knew that all that whimsical woodwork—I think we counted 312 unique pieces—would have to be pried off individually and stripped of paint, the cracks would have to be filled and sanded, and then all would be sealed and repainted and put back where they belonged.

When the boom brought them back down to the ground, Dan, the owner, looked slightly shell-shocked. I assured him that it was all part of the service and included in the price they were paying for the rehab.

Dan gave me a weak smile. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

“It’ll be beautiful when we’re finished,” I assured him, but I knew how he felt. It was a daunting job to fully restore a historic home to its original luster. I was so glad that Dan was determined to have it done the right way.

After he walked off, Carla and I strolled over to her truck to talk privately. She was the daughter of my dad’s old foreman so we’d grown up together, part of each other’s families.

We talked about a small hitch she’d run into on the job site and the fact that she was still on schedule, a minor miracle. I got Wade on the phone and the three of us arranged a meeting for Sunday morning. We usually tried to meet every two weeks to go over the schedule and work out any crew or subcontractor issues the two of them had. We would determine which job got what heavy equipment for the week and which homes needed extra crew. And I wanted to talk about the slowdown at the Boyers’ house.

As I was leaving, I looked up and saw my guy Johnny kneeling on the flat porch roof. He’d been assigned to the Boyers’ rehab but we’d moved him over to this job site while the crime scene was in effect. I waved to him and he acknowledged me by holding up a brush and can of rubberized sealant. He was applying it to the seams of the roof to prevent water from leaking into the eaves, in advance of the change of seasons.

“Good job, Johnny,” I shouted.

“I do it all for you, boss.”

I smiled as two of the other guys laughed. They were repairing the porch balusters and doing a really good job, I noticed before jogging back to my truck.

From Paradise Drive I drove seven miles south to the Point Arlen City Hall. There was a snafu on a construction permit for a family who wanted to build a Craftsman home there, and while I didn’t expect it to be an insurmountable hassle, I wanted to show up at City Hall early enough to work out the problem and have the permit issued right then and there.

I wouldn’t have time to stop by the owners’ property today, but as soon as I got my hands on the permit, I would give them a call and figure out a start date.

It always gave me a thrill to work on a Craftsman home, although I didn’t get the chance very often because they weren’t my professional specialty. I’d been born and raised in Lighthouse Cove, so the Victorian design was my main area of expertise. And since the entire town had been designated a National Historic Landmark District for its plethora of well-preserved Victorian homes and businesses, I was right where I needed to be. Still, I was excited at the opportunity to design and construct a Craftsman home. It was a chance to show off my carpentry muscles. Luckily, the city clerk was able to clear up the snafu in record time.

On the way back home, I got a call from Marigold, who invited me to dinner with her and her aunt Daisy. She indicated that she had some news to share, but refused to spill it over the phone. I couldn’t blame her, even though I was frustrated the whole way home. I couldn’t wait to find out what my friend had discovered.