She thought she heard Brett sigh before he answered. “Would you mind if I stopped over for a few minutes? I’d like to show you something.”
Susan remembered that the plans she and Jed had made for a romantic evening had already been turned over to plumbers and repairmen. She wanted this month alone to be free of interruptions, but what the hell. “Of course. We’ll be here.”
“Great.”
Susan barely heard the final consonant of Brett’s reply. She didn’t have any idea what the loud noise was; it sounded like someone was holding a demolition derby in her driveway. She muttered a few words, hung up, grabbed the Polaroid camera, and dashed to the front of the house.
Her guess had been a good one. Years spent on the demolition derby circuit was the only possible explanation for the state of the two vans in her driveway. On closer inspection she realized that only one and a half vans were actually on the macadam. The rear wheels of one of the vehicles were firmly planted on a much-prized rhododendron. Apparently the driver was aware of this. He got out of his van, pulled his meet the real king of beers hat off his head, and grinned. “Looks like the thing coulda used a little pruning, huh? Helps ’em grow. It’s a puny thing, ain’t it?”
“It’s a rare miniature variety,” Susan stated as calmly as possible.
He frowned. “Ain’t got no thorns, does it? Them’s new tires.”
Susan chose to ignore this particular concern. She was trying to make out the painted letters under the layers of dirt on the sides of the identical vehicles. “ ‘Plumbers R Us’?” she read aloud slowly.
“That’s what we are—plumbers!”
“ ‘We fix pains in your drains’?”
“Yup!”
“ ‘Let us flush away all your problems—except your in-laws’?”
“The wife made me add that. You know how women are.” He frowned again and thoroughly scratched the few inches of exposed flesh between his greasy jeans and stained red cotton muscle shirt.
Susan had no trouble deciding that this man was not going to enter her house under any circumstances—even before meeting the driver of the second van.
The other guy was tall and thin and wore a crew cut that would have made any marine proud. The military look, however, stopped at his eyebrows. From the nose down he was furry. His beard spread out between a handlebar mustache and an unpolished brass belt buckle. The hair on his arms extended from knuckle to shoulder and then peeked out of the drooping neck of a tie-dyed T-shirt that declared eternal allegiance to the Grateful Dead. Matching hair sprang up from his toes and around the rubber thongs on his feet. “You the lady with the problem?” he asked directly.
“Oh, yes, I have a problem,” Susan agreed, not admitting that he and his partner were not the solution. “That is, I had a problem. It’s been fixed,” she lied. “You’re not needed anymore.”
“Lady, Harry and me ain’t here for nothing,” the hirsute deadhead insisted.
“And it costs a lot more than nothing to get us here,” the other man reminded her.
“Naturally, you have a fee for house calls,” Susan said quickly. “I’ll just go get my checkbook.”
“We prefer cash …”
“Course you can write a check to cash …”
“Now, look,” Susan said, irritated at the assumption that she would help this dreadful duo avoid paying taxes. “I don’t see why I should write a check to cash—and I’m not actually sure why I should pay you to drive in my driveway and run over a very rare shrub.”
“You called us, lady.” The heavyset man turned to his thinner partner for confirmation. “She called us.”
“We didn’t get no call from heaven to come here, that’s for sure.”
Susan had no idea why they were enjoying the situation so much—until she looked down at the piece of paper that the “beer king” handed her. “One hundred and forty dollars! For what?”
“For coming right over to help you with your emergency. What else?”
“You think we’re here because we ain’t got nothing better to do?”
“Can I mail you a check?” Susan asked.
“See what it says at the top of the paper? ‘Please Pay Promptly.’ We means what it says.”
“I’ll go get my checkbook,” Susan said flatly.
“Me and him—we’ll be right here.”
“We ain’t leaving ’til we get paid.”
Susan wanted them off her rhododendron and out of her driveway and her life as fast as possible. She was back outside in record time. “Shall I write this out to Plumbers R Us?” she asked, ignoring their previous request. “My husband insists,” she lied, hoping to add conviction to her statement.
“Yeah, well …”
Susan got the impression that as long as she paid the outrageous bill immediately, these two men would be happy to leave. She wrote quickly, then ripped the check from the book and handed it over without a smile. “Thank you for coming,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Yeah. Well, we’ll be seeing you, lady.”
“Yeah. We’ll see ya.”
There wasn’t a lot of time for those threats to do any ringing in Susan’s ears. The vans sounded worse than they looked as the engines roared to life and, squashing only a couple more plants, Plumbers R Us headed off into the sunset.
“Why are they leaving?” Jed appeared beside his wife.
“You wouldn’t believe what they charged us—”
“Charged us for what? They didn’t even come into the house! Susan, what’s going on?”
“I sent them away.”
“You sent …” Jed’s face turned an interesting shade of red. “You did what?”
“You don’t usually act like this,” Susan protested.
“I don’t usually have a cracked main drain … smashed walls … a kitchen ceiling in the middle of the room …” He took a deep breath. “Susan, why did you send them away?”
“Jed, you didn’t meet them. They were disgusting. You should have seen their clothing—they were dirty and … and they ran over your rhododendron. Look!” She pointed dramatically to the crushed bush.
“Susan. They’re plumbers. Their work is dirty and messy. What did you expect them to be wearing? And I don’t care about the landscaping right now,” he added quickly before she could explain further. “I would just like to have some running water.”
“There must be other plumbers, Jed. Believe me, you wouldn’t have wanted them to work on our house.”
“Susan, I called seven numbers in the phonebook and left messages on six answering machines. Plumbers R Us has a woman who answers the phone and who relayed a message to their vans. They came here immediately. No one else has even returned my call. Don’t you want to have running water?”
“I …”
“That’s the phone. I certainly hope it’s a plumber!”
Susan hoped so, too.
“Did you take those photos?” Jed called back over his shoulder as he jogged to the phone.
“Right away.” She waved the camera in the air to display her good intentions, but he was gone. “Well, onward and upward,” she muttered to herself. “May as well begin at the top.”
Susan spent the next fifteen minutes recording the damage. Two packs of instant film later, she was very depressed. She must have been out of her mind to send those men away. Anything was preferable to living with this mess for one second more than was actually necessary. For one wild moment she considered calling back Plumbers R Us. But reason prevailed. Besides, Jed was coming down the hall with a smile on his face. He must have good news.
“The company that Jerry recommended is on the way. I’ll wait for them outside. Maybe you should put Clue in the backyard.”
“She really hates being out there when things are going on in the house.”
“Susan, do you have any idea what that dog-run cost? Why did we have it put up if we weren’t going to use it?”
“I—”
“There goes
the phone again. Why don’t you get it, and if it’s the insurance company, tell them what’s going on. I’ve got to get outside.”
“I’ll answer the phone,” Susan assured him, hurrying off to the kitchen. All this tension was making her hungry and she might as well get a snack. A leisurely meal out sure didn’t appear to be looming in the immediate future.
The refrigerator bore signs of her children’s food preferences. Chrissy, the eternal dieter, had stocked up on peach-flavored mineral water and fat-free strawberry yogurt while Chad had filled the bottom shelf with high-calorie ingredients for the pepperoni pizza he concocted daily. Susan, ever an adaptable mother, grabbed a yogurt and a few slices of whole-milk mozzarella. At least she’d be getting enough calcium today, she thought, maneuvering around the water to answer the phone. As she picked up the receiver, a drip of rusty water fell on her shoulder.
“Damn!”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t talking to you,” Susan apologized to the unknown caller. “There’s water dripping on my new white linen shirt.”
“That’s why I’m calling.”
“What? Oh, you must be a plumber.”
“Got it in one, lady. Your husband left a message on my machine.”
“Oh, he’ll be so thrilled that you called back. Let me tell you about our problem,” she added, and then explained. After extracting a promise of immediate attention, she hung up, pleased with her own competence. She did, however, wonder if it was essential for all plumbers to address her as “lady.”
Clue was drooling on her foot and Susan tossed the dog a piece of cheese and then led her outside to the dog-run. One of her neighbors, one she didn’t particularly like, was always saying things like “When you’re stuck with lemons, make lemonade.” It was beginning to occur to Susan that maybe that was her best approach to this situation. She’d always wanted to remodel the bathrooms; she’d read articles guaranteeing that the money spent on remodeling was almost always recouped when a house was sold; somewhere around the house she had stashed a bunch of magazines with titles like Kitchen and Bath and Remodel. And she had just seen a wonderful article about ceramic tiles in Martha Stewart’s Living—or was it House & Garden? She pushed Clue through the metal gate and returned to the house.
When Jed found her, she was sitting in his den, magazines piled on the desk before her. “Hon, why did you tell another plumber to come over? We don’t need two plumbers—”
“What we need, Jed, is a contractor,” Susan interrupted. “I’ve been thinking. This is the perfect opportunity to remodel both bathrooms … and maybe the little one on the third floor, too. We should—”
“We should get our pipes fixed and then worry about everything else later. Susan, we have to get our priorities straight here—”
“And I hate to tell you folks, but no matter what else is going on here, this murder investigation is going to go right to the top of the list.”
Chief Fortesque had joined them.
THREE
“Why?”
Her marriage was right on track, Susan decided. She and Jed had asked the question simultaneously. “Hi, Brett,” she began again.
“What exactly do we have to do with this murder investigation?” Jed asked, leaping directly to the point.
“I’m not sure.”
A tall young man with a mohawk appeared behind Brett. “I need someone up on the top floor. Gonna have to take up the rest of those floorboards, and I sure don’t want to run into any surprises.”
“I’ll come,” Jed said quickly.
“And I’ll explain why I’m here,” Brett added, sitting down on the edge of the desk.
“I really don’t think I can tell you very much about Simon Fairweather.” Susan repeated what she had said on the phone less than an hour before.
“I came over hoping you could explain this,” Brett said, handing her a sheet of slick paper. “You don’t have to be careful with it, it’s a copy of the original document.”
Susan sat back and read through the paper without asking any questions. “I don’t understand.”
“It was found crumpled up in Simon Fairweather’s fist.”
“Well, that explains all the tiny lines, but I still don’t understand,” Susan repeated. She studied the document carefully before asking another question. “Do you know if it’s his handwriting?”
“We believe so. The secretary in the building department says that it is, but we’ll have to call in a handwriting expert to be sure.”
“So you think he was writing it right before he was killed.”
“It seems likely. It’s also possible that the murderer found it someplace and put it into his hand after killing him.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“I have no idea, but it’s still a possibility.”
“Do you know what this other name means?”
“Only because I looked in the phonebook. They’re listed as a contracting company. The address is down by the water.”
“In Hancock?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand it,” Susan said, then paused. “Why would Simon Fairweather write my name over and over and then Cory Construction? There are even arrows connecting the two.”
“It looks to me like he was just scribbling,” Brett said. “And it may mean nothing.”
“But why would he scribble my name at all? I don’t think I ever actually met Simon Fairweather. When he came out to the house to approve—or, as it turned out, disapprove—of our garage extension, I wasn’t even here. Jed handled it all.”
“And I gather Cory Construction doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“No. Although the name is familiar. I may have seen their trucks on the street or heard them mentioned by someone. You know how many people have their houses worked on around here.”
Brett nodded. He had noticed. Couples living in five-bedroom houses with two children felt urgent needs to add on family rooms, dens, guest suites, etc. He didn’t understand, but he had noticed.
Susan grinned at the expression on his face. “I know. A lot of people are more than a little house-proud. And there are plenty of old houses in town, too. And, believe me, old houses need constant maintenance.” She grimaced, thinking about the mess her not-so-old house had just become. “Is it getting warm in here?”
“Hmm,” Brett agreed without interest. “Maybe you should open the windows.”
“I’ll turn down the thermostat,” Susan said, doing just that. “That’s funny,” she commented. “In this room you can usually hear the air-conditioning come on immediately.”
Brett reached out and flicked the switch on the desk light. Nothing happened. “No power.”
“Oh, fine! We don’t have water. And now we don’t have power. What else is going to happen today?” Susan asked rhetorically.
“I wonder if it’s just your house or the entire grid,” Brett said, reaching for the two-way radio that hung from his belt.
“Jed’s yelling something,” Susan said, moving toward the doorway to hear him better. “Something about electricity, in fact.”
“They must have turned off the main circuit breaker,” Brett exclaimed, putting his radio back in place. “I should have known. Professionals have too much sense to break through walls without making sure they don’t cut a live wire.”
“Which leads us back to death and Simon Fairweather.” The mystery of the power crisis solved, Susan was busy opening windows as she spoke. “I suppose I’d be a bigger help to you if Cory Construction had worked for me—”
“This paper may not mean anything,” Brett interrupted. “You know how people scribble … Are you listening to me?”
“Yes,” she lied. Actually, she was trying to remember the details of an article she had scanned in the dentist’s office a few months ago. Something about how unconscious thoughts or needs or desires are revealed in small everyday activities. There had been more than one mention of doodlin
g. She cringed as the sounds coming from above increased in volume. “Maybe I should ask Jed about Cory Construction. The name may mean something to him.”
“Good idea.” Brett nodded approval as he motioned for her to precede him from the room. “This sure is a mess,” he added, glancing in at the kitchen.
“Wait till you see the upstairs,” Susan promised, heading to the bathroom at the top of the stairs from which she thought the loudest sounds were emanating.
“Good lord!”
Susan nodded. “We’re going to need more than a couple of plumbers to fix this, aren’t we?”
“An entire army of plumbers is going to be kept busy for weeks cleaning up this.”
“Months,” Jed suggested, joining them. He held a piece of paper in his hand. “These are the names of contracting companies that these guys have worked with. Maybe we’d better start making calls as soon as possible.”
“I’ll do it,” Susan volunteered, taking the paper and glancing at it. “Looks like Cory Construction isn’t here,” she added to Brett.
“Cory Construction?” Jed repeated. “No, they didn’t mention that company, but if you’ve heard something good about them, go ahead and call. We’ve got to get going here.”
“Shouldn’t the insurance company come over first?”
“There’ll be lots of time for that. It’s not likely that we’ll get a major job like this one started immediately.”
“I’ll start calling then.”
“Yes. But maybe you should check around first and see who your friends suggest. A big job like this is going to take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. We want to get the right crew for the job.”
Susan nodded.
“I’d better get going,” Brett said, now that he was sure Cory Construction meant nothing to Jed. “If you think of anything that might add to the investigation, you’ll let me know?”
“Of course,” Susan said.
Remodeled to Death Page 2