The House of Seven Mabels jj-13

by Jill Churchill

  Jane read the dimensions, then consulted Shelley's notebook. "It's even farther off what we measured. Nearly three feet just across the back. And no name on this one, either."

  "So we figure Bitsy didn't do this herself, right? So who did?"

  "Sandy," Jane said firmly.

  "Sandra, or some amateur friend of Sandra's, maybe," Shelley qualified. "One of her feminist gang, I'm willing to bet. Maybe she has a daughter studying architecture."

  "Shelley, we really should tell Bitsy this. She's not one of my favorite people, but I hate to see her being made a fool of."

  "You bet we will."

  Jane thought for a moment, then said, "Shouldn't we just bow out and let them fumble through it themselves?"

  "Jane, I've never heard you say a single cowardly thing," Shelley exclaimed.

  "Oh, of course you have," Jane said with a laugh.

  "Maybe once or twice," Shelley admitted. "But this is serious. Someone's ripping off a stupid woman. One, I admit, who never should have taken on something she knew so little about, but still, neither of us would ever feel good about ourselves again if we didn't at least try to warn Bitsy."

  Jane sighed. "You're right. Damn."

  Seven

  Jane and Shelley showed up early the next morning, ready to pull poor Bitsy aside and point out the errors in the drawing. This time the street in front was even more crowded. As they got out of Shelley's van, a siren screamed and an ambulance pulled into the front yard.

  "What's happened?" Jane asked, realizing it was a stupid question to ask Shelley, who was as surprised and alarmed as she was.

  Bitsy and Sandra were standing on the sidewalk, wringing their hands. Sandra looked confused and was clutching her ever-present purse to her chest. Bitsy was clearly angry.

  "What's going on?" Shelley asked as Jane caught a glimpse of two well-dressed middle-aged women she'd never seen bending over and vomiting in what the plans had shown as a bank of azaleas that would be in front of the porch.

  "Since it's a chilly morning, our furnace guy tried out the system and within moments there was the most awful smell," Bitsy said.

  "I have to go tend to your friends Dorothea and Wendy," Sandra said, indicating the women who were where the azaleas would someday make their appearance. They were now being tended by the ambulance attendants. A breeze sprang up and suddenly Jane and Shelley could smell it as well. Something terribly rotten and utterly disgusting made them hold their hands over their noses and mouths.

  When the wind changed direction, Jane said to Bitsy, "Your furnace guy? I thought all the workers were women."

  "Not quite all. But Wesley Woodley's an exception. He works for a company run by a woman. Ms. Betty Stanley. You may have heard of her. She's in a lot of civic organizations."

  "Did I hear my name being used in vain?" a very tall young man asked.

  "Wesley!" Bitsy yelped. "What is that smell?"

  Wesley shrugged. "I couldn't go in the house to tell. Mrs. Stanley's bringing some breathing apparatus so I can find out. Did anyone have the wits to turn off the furnace?"

  "I didn't," Bitsy admitted.

  "That's the first thing I need to do. Second, you need to rent some powerful fans to clear the odor out."

  "Where do you rent fans?" Bitsy asked.

  "Ask your contractor," he replied. Jane thought there was a hint of a sneer in his remark, but couldn't be sure. Unless he had had a run-in with

  Bitsy before, it was a logical question for an ordinary person to ask. Jane herself would have had to ask.

  The ambulance people had moved the women who were ill away from the house and put them on blankets on the ground with damp cloths over their faces, and were taking their blood pressures.

  Jane approached Sandra and asked, "How are they? And who are they?"

  "Friends of Bitsy's she wanted to show the house to," Sandra said with irritation, fidgeting with the strap of her purse. "I wish she'd picked any other day. The nurse in the van says since they didn't ingest anything and it only smelled like something rotten, not chemical, they'll probably be okay. But someone has to drive them to the hospital to confirm whether it was dangerous fumes."

  Jane knew what Sandra really meant. That she and Shelley had nothing better to do. "Weren't other people in the house? And they might have felt like gagging, but no one else is sick, are they?"

  "I don't imagine you're free to…?"

  "No. Shelley and I were on our way to an appointment." After a moment's thought, she added, "To see an attorney about Bitsy's contract. I suppose since they're Bitsy's friends, hauling them to the hospital is her job," Jane said.

  "I guess so. But she really needs to be here."

  "Who needs to be here, Sandy?" Bitsy asked, approaching the two.

  Jane got as far from them as fast as she could. "Shelley, let's hide out for a bit," she said, grabbing Shelley's arm. "Sandra and Bitsy are trying to figure out how they can shove the responsibility for taking those two women to the hospital on us."

  "I'm not letting strangers I didn't invite over here, and probably stink for a number of reasons, ride in my van," Shelley said. Jane's first thought was how callous this sounded, but she realized that quite honestly, she'd feel the same way.

  "Let's" go and have breakfast somewhere if you're up to it. I need a cup of coffee to get the smell out of my head."

  There was a pricey coffeehouse a block or two away, and as they sat down with their cups and the pastries they couldn't resist, Shelley said, "I guess we'd better wait awhile to hit Bitsy with more bad news."

  "I don't know," Jane said with a wicked grin. "It might be interesting to see how much she can take before she crumbles."

  Shelley laughed so hard, she almost snorted coffee up her nose.

  When she'd recovered, Jane asked, "What do you think caused that odor?"

  "One thing it isn't is a body," Shelley said. "It wouldn't fit in a furnace or a duct. It could be just a dead animal that already was awfully ripe, and turning on the blower created a crisis."

  They dawdled just long enough to be present at the renovation site when Wesley, in protective gear and what looked like a World War I-era gas mask unearthed from Mrs. Stanley's attic, reappeared with a heavyweight plastic bag at the front door. He removed the gas mask.

  "Someone shoved a wad of frozen shrimp way back into one of the ducts," he shouted across the yard at Bitsy. "You're going to have to find a way of disposing of it."

  "Put it in the Dumpster," Bitsy yelled back. She had already either delivered her friends home or forced someone else to do so. Come to think of it, Jane decided, the ambulance people should have taken them along to the hospital. Apparently the women didn't want to make any more fuss.

  "No, the bag will probably explode." Wesley set it down on the lawn and came over to them. Jane and Shelley got close enough to overhear the conversation, but not so close that they could smell him. Sandra and Bitsy moved around a bit to get Wesley downwind of them.

  "I had to tear a lot of the duct work out to find it," Wesley complained. "And the smell is just as bad as ever. You'll have to call in someone to deodorize the whole house."

  "There are people who do that?" Bitsy said with awe. "What will that cost?"

  "I have no idea," Wesley said. This time the contempt in his voice was clear. "And those fans

  that are coming off that truck next door aren't strong enough. You must air the house out thoroughly first. The stench is in the wood and the Sheetrock. It'll all have to be treated. While it's being done, you need to secure the property."

  "Secure the property?" Bitsy was at sea. Apparently she thought this was a financial term. "What will that cost me?"

  "It means put new locks on the doors and replace the crumbling plywood in the open windows." Wesley was openly sneering now. "Anyone could, and has, gotten in here to commit this act of vandalism."

  Standing where they were on the sidewalk, Jane and Shelley heard the purr of a car and turned to see an enor
mous black stretch limo stop in front with no regard to the fact that it was blocking traffic. The chauffeur came around and opened the back door, and an extremely well-dressed middle-aged man with a full and beautifully cut head of pure white hair stepped out.

  He approached, saying, "Bitsy, dear, I was doing some business in the neighborhood and saw everyone standing outside. What's going on?" He would have been quite handsome if he hadn't been smirking.

  Bitsy's face hardened. "Neville. How coincidental that you are here. Something tells me you know exactly what's going on."

  The man looked genuinely surprised. Or maybe it was a good act, Jane thought.

  "How would I know what you're up to? Is this a picnic of some sort?"

  "Neville, go away. You're not welcome here," Bitsy said and turned her back on him.

  Grinning again, he approached Jane and Shelley. "What do you ladies do? Stencil cute little designs around the tops of the rooms? I'm Bitsy's ex-husband. The man whose hard-earned money is financing this idiocy. Much against my will, I might say."

  Before Shelley could draw breath to tell him off, Bitsy screamed, "Neville, leave my friends alone. If you don't get out of here this instant, I'm calling the police."

  He bowed to her with mock respect and turned and slowly, arrogantly, let his driver open the door for him. "Have fun, dear," he said before it closed.

  Bitsy actually stomped her feet like a child getting ready to have a tantrum.

  Jane and Shelley strolled away. "She's tougher than I suspected," Jane said, chuckling. "I don't think this is the day we want to put her over the edge."

  Eight

  When jane and Shelley returned home, Shelley said, "I think we ought to just stay away until the stink's gone."

  "Okay by me. There's no rush," Jane replied.

  "It'll give me time to write up a new contract," Shelley said.

  "You're starting over?"

  "From scratch. It's going to be a big job to rekey the whole thing into the computer. Making it fair is only one part. Trying to figure out how to make the sentence fragments make sense is another, and the third is correcting the grammar and spelling."

  "Better you than me," Jane said with relief.

  After Shelley went home to start her project, Jane checked the answering machine and found a message to call Todd's math teacher, Miss Milton. That was ominous. She returned the call and was told the teacher was in class, but would call back on her break. When Miss Milton called, she wouldn't commit to what she had to say without

  a face-to-face meeting. They set it up for immediately after school that afternoon.

  Jane did a couple of loads of laundry. Up and down the basement stairs. When all the kids were gone, she was going to convert their bathroom upstairs to a laundry room. Clothes tended to lie neglected in the basement. And they often came up smelling ever so slightly of kitty litter in the winter, when Max and Meow didn't go outside much.

  What on earth was the teacher after her for? she wondered as she sorted darks from lights and came up with too many darks for one load and too few lights for a full load. Todd's best grades had always been in math. That wasn't saying much. They were usually B's and the rest were C's. And the way he was staying in his room in the evenings and actually studying… it couldn't be terrible news, could it?

  Jane hadn't met this teacher yet. School had started only a short time ago, and the dreaded parents' night when they had to sit in little chairs and be bored senseless hadn't occurred yet. But when Jane found the room, the chairs and tables were normal size for the older kids. The teacher met her with a smile as they introduced themselves.

  "Mrs. Jeffry, I'm sorry to inconvenience you this way, but did you hear about our testing this year?" Meeting a blank look, she went on, "We don't normally test first thing, but this year we wanted to get a handle on what we were up

  against. There's a movement to give vouchers for private schools when the public ones don't perform as well as they should."

  "I do know that," Jane said pleasantly. She'd expected a Miss Milton to be straight out of college, but the woman was nearly Jane's age.

  "This school district isn't in any danger, mind. But the school board decided to test first thing this year and again at the end of the year, and see what sort of improvement was made."

  "I see," Jane said, wondering when Miss Milton would get to the point.

  "This is a national test. I forgot to say that up front. And your Todd tested into the high ninety-ninth percentile."

  Jane was too astonished to speak for a moment. "Are you sure of that?" she finally managed to ask.

  Miss Milton nodded. "It's a remarkable skill that he's never shown. His previous scores in past years on the same sort of test put him in the upper sixtieth percentile. That's good, of course. But we have no idea why this great leap of skill happened."

  "He went a few weeks to that half-day summer school the district set up," Jane said, "but didn't seem to enjoy anything but the math class. And he's become unusually studious this year. He's never really cared what kind of grades he gets, but seems to have turned a corner. Hormones, maybe," Jane finished with a smile.

  "You're sure that's it?"

  The smile faded. "Excuse me, Miss Milton. You're not suggesting that Todd cheated, are you?"

  "I'm not suggesting it at all, but I'm forced to ask when there's such a remarkable difference."

  "When was this test taken?" Jane asked.

  Miss Milton told her date.

  "I've got my datebook in the car. Let me get it."

  When Jane returned, she had the datebook open to the week in question. "Monday he did his social studies homework right after school and was allowed to go to a seven o'clock showing of a movie. I picked him up. Here's the note of the time I was to be there," she said, pointing to the entry. "It's not noted here, but he came home, watched a television program with me about some sort of little furry African animals I've forgotten the name of, and went to bed with the lights out."

  "So he wasn't memorizing something late into the night?"

  "Certainly not."

  "Mrs. Jeffry, I'm sorry I had to ask. Todd is a nice boy and you have a reputation for raising bright children. I've checked Mike's and Katie's records. I'm simply required to confirm that he's actually made this improvement."

  "Miss Milton, Todd's always been a lazy student. He's very bright about things he wants to be bright about. But it's too easy to slide by with a B

  average. I think I can promise you there was no cheating done."

  "Mrs. Jeffry, I believe you a hundred percent. As I said, I'm required to ask."

  Good news, bad vibes, Jane thought as she drove home. With a bit of the third child syndrome thrown in. Had she failed Todd? Was there the slightest chance he would cheat? No.

  She stopped at Shelley's house before going home. "Sorry to interrupt you, but I want to tell you something," Jane said. She recounted the conversation with the teacher.

  "How outrageous!" Shelley exploded. "Todd? Todd cheat? No way, Jane."

  "He's always been the quietest and most self-sufficient of my kids," Jane said. "I didn't have to badger and nag him as I did Mike and am still doing with Katie. Have I completely misjudged him? Have I accidentally neglected him?"

  "I'd like to slap you upside the head for even saying that," Shelley said. "Of course not. How many of his soccer games have you sat through, even though soccer bores you senseless? How much did you spend on Legos when he was only interested in them? You didn't leave the house for a full week when he had his tonsils out. He told my son that you treated him like a baby and nearly drove him crazy bringing him Jell-O and soft drinks. You've driven him all over the place for camps. You've done the room-mother thing for

  him. He's a thoroughly nice kid. Just quiet and self-contained compared to your older kids. Come to think of it, I'd rather slap that teacher upside the head instead for even putting the thought in your mind."

  "I would, too. But she was right. When a
kid improves that dramatically, it could be a good sign or a sign of cheating. She had to ask. I don't blame her. She hardly knows him and she'd never met me."

  "Then I'll put off beating her up," Shelley said with a grin. "You've just raised a mathematical genius and neither he nor you knew it until now. You've said he's taking school seriously this year. This score is the payoff, Jane. Just go home and praise him."

  "Thanks, Shelley. Maybe I did need that metaphorical slap."

  Jane went home and thought a little more about it. There's nothing worse for a single parent — maybe any parent — than to think a child has been ignored or neglected, but Shelley was right. She'd done right by Todd. He just wasn't as blabby as the others. He didn't even talk much until he was practically two years old. But he watched and listened to everything with interest.

  When he became older, he was obsessed for several years with Legos. Then he left that behind, put all the little pieces, hundreds of them, in a box still stored in the basement, and lived for soccer. But without explanation, he hadn't even

  joined a team last summer. He'd left soccer behind for math. He made the decision himself, as he usually did. That was a good thing. Showed a sense of purpose. A willingness to take on a new obsession.

  She went upstairs to hunt him down to compliment him for his score, but he had the first word. "Mom, can you help me work out something on your computer?"

  "What's that?"

  He showed her a big chart he was creating. "This isn't a good way to do it. I'd have to copy it over and over again."

  The sheet had a hand-drawn grid. Each square had a number. Some of the numbers were circled. "What is this?" Jane asked. "Oh, wait. I think I might know."

  "It's about prime numbers. Do you know what they are?" Todd asked.

  "Of course I do. They're the numbers like seven and eleven that can't be evenly divided by other numbers."

  Todd was surprised. "So I was reading something this summer about prime numbers. Nobody's ever found a pattern for them. The larger they get, the fewer there are."

  "That's right. They get so many new divisors."

  "Right. So there must still be a pattern of some kind. Maybe it's a spiral, maybe a long rectangle. Maybe the pattern goes from high to low. See why I need to do this on a computer?"