Decorating Schemes

by Ginny Aiken

“I guess I’ll have to take what I can get.”

  “Good idea. Now, there’s this really great book that’s calling my name.”

  “Go back to your Austrian count in the IRS office.”

  “Not even close, but I’ll let it pass. You can have the book when I’m done.”

  “Don’t bother. I have a conviction to avoid.”

  The misery in his words again got to me. “I’ll keep you in my prayers, Dutch. And I’m serious this time.”

  After another long silence, he said, “Okay. It can’t hurt. See ya.”

  After I hung up, I leaned back against my pillows. An icy rush chilled me with the memory of everything that happened to me last year. Not only did I find Marge dead and bloodied, but I was also arrested. Those hours behind bars left an indelible stain on my mind. It rivaled the hideous moment when I was attacked five years ago.

  A rapid-fire series of images flew through my head. I began to shake. Tears oozed from my eyes, and eventually sobs took over. Midas, sweetheart that he is, crawled up and nestled his head into the crook of my arm. I welcomed his warmth, but it didn’t thaw me out from the grip of the memories.

  We stayed like that for what seemed like hours. Soon enough, though, Midas’s bladder sounded its alarm. I headed for the kitchen, my mind on a fresh cup of java. On my way there, I detoured past the Roseville jardiniere where I keep my stash of Milky Ways. Midas is about as crazy for chocolate as I am, but the theobromine might kill him. So I keep my second vice hidden where he can’t reach.

  In the kitchen I let him out, then paused. What an ugly mess. A feud between business partners, a dead teenager, a missing newborn child. If only it were the movie plot it resembled so much. But I’d seen the girl. And Lila didn’t know where the infant had gone.

  Misery caught my heart in its vise grip.

  Babies, babies, babies... A baby had played a part in Marge’s death. Now this girl, KC Richardson, had given birth, but there was no sign of her child. Dread lodged in my gut. Where was that tiny, helpless infant? What had become of it? Was it a boy or a girl? Did it have red hair like its mother, or did it have no hair at all?

  A tear rolled down my cheek, and I scooped a generous measure of Starbucks House Blend beans into the coffee grinder, whirred it to a fine grind, poured it into the filter, filled the water reservoir, then pushed the coffeemaker’s on button. I picked up the coffee canister, and a sob broke free from my throat.

  I watched my hands shake as if from a distance. Still, I turned to the fridge—coffee beans keep better in the cold. As I opened the door, the image of KC’s lifeless body materialized before my eyes.

  I moaned.

  The canister fell.

  Stoneware shattered, and coffee beans bounced.

  I dropped to the floor to clean up the mess, but many more images, vivid and painful, filled my mind. My sobs deepened, grew more painful. My tears fell among the brown bits. The piece of broken china I reached for slipped from my unsteady fingers. I followed it on my knees. It skipped just beyond my grasp.

  I gave up.

  The coffeemaker chimed.

  I stood, then reached for the comfort of my favorite beverage. At the table I peeled the wrapper from the Milky Way, but the thought of even one bite made my stomach heave.

  The first sip of coffee scalded my tongue. The second and third went down better. “Dear God, how can you bear to see your children hurt each other like this? It’s more than I can stand.”

  I prayed. I prayed for Dutch and KC’s family, for KC and her baby, for Lila, her Smurfs, and for me.

  On the heels of my heartfelt sigh, the back door burst open.

  “Okay, Haley girl,” Bella bellowed. “I gave ya plenty of time after the cop left, and now I’m here. I’m your secret weapon. We don’t want her to know I’ll be investigating.” She stopped cold. Then, “What are you sniffing out this time?”

  If anything could get me out of my funk, it’d have to be the sight of—oh, great; new hair color—greenish/bluish-headed Bella, gi a splendid white, all aquiver at the thought of a mystery to solve.

  My watery smile wasn’t enough for her to pause. “I know!” she added. “I’ll bet you’re investigating the disappearance of all the packages of that plant food down at Percy’s Plant Planet. You know they make bombs out of fertilizer, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you sit and write a book, Bella? You have to have a wilder imagination than the average New York Times best-selling author.”

  She thought for a moment. “Nah. That’s way too boring. I wanna go where the action is. Since your last case, I’ve done my homework. I’ve studied up on investigative procedures. Got me a roomful of books off the Internet, and I’m an expert now, if I do say so myself.”

  Last year Bella showed us just how expert she was with a canister of pepper spray. My eyes still sting and my nose still runs at the memory. “That’s why you should try your hand at writing.”

  “Don’t try to put me off. I’m not your typical old lady, you know. I know karate.”

  My lips twitched. Bella began to train at Tyler’s dojo almost a year ago, but in spite of her attempts to pass the test for yellow belt, the white belt still scored her belly in two.

  I had to distract her. “So have you figured out yet that the plant food’s manufacturer had a fire at their production facility? That’s why that lurid lime-green stuff you and Dad sprinkle on every growing thing is no longer in stores.”

  “No...” Bella looked like a kid who’d had her ice cream cone stolen. “Really?”

  “Check Sunday’s paper. Someone wrote a letter to the editor, and the response was published right next to the question.”

  Bella’s blue eyes danced. “You mean they really and truly put my letter in the paper?”

  “Are you Greeny Growy in Seattle?”

  She preened. “What do you think?”

  “That you’ve got a color fixation. First the pink hair, then the purple and the orange, now the bluish/greenish—”

  “Turquoise, Haley girl. Southwestern Turquoise by Beauty Be Done.”

  I shuddered. “Okay, turquoise it is. Anyway, the greeny bit gives you away.”

  She bustled to the kitchen pantry door, familiar as she is with our setup. “Let me see,” she muttered while she rooted through the old newspapers. Then she reared up. “Eeeuuwww! What’s this moldy, wet wad of newsprint doing here?”

  “That’s just a running joke between Dad and Ina Appleton’s granddaughter. It’s yesterday’s paper, so it can’t be moldy. Not yet.”

  “It’s still disgusting.” She continued her search. “Oh yeah! Here it is. Hmm... did you cut out the section? To preserve for posterior, you know. Or did you keep it intact? At least this paper didn’t get caught up in that dumb joke of the reverend’s.”

  I chose to ignore her blooper. “It’s not all that dumb. Remember how much trouble Sandy Appleton used to be in? You know, right after her parents died.”

  “Oh, Haley girl. She about drove poor Ina bananas.”

  “Well, Dad and Ina got Sandy to apply for a paper route. She really wanted the money, so she did, and that’s when she and Dad got into a fuss about where she should leave his paper.”

  “That doesn’t explain the wetness.”

  “Simple. Sandy likes to throw the paper on the lawn. That way she doesn’t have to get off her bike at each house and can finish sooner. Dad wants it on the porch, where it stays nice and dry.”

  “Ah... so when it rains, like it did Saturday night, you guys get soggy wood mush with black ink.”

  “Something like that.” I wasn’t about to try to explain the perfectly dry copy that always appears on the back step. Bella might suggest alien intervention or spontaneous materialization as its source. You can’t predict the twists and turns of Bella’s mind.

  But she wasn’t senile or dumb. “So what does that have to do with Sandy’s getting into trouble all the time? I thought she’d stopped all that.”

  “She d
id stop. She and Dad are buddies now, and he takes her apple muffins every time he bakes. She’s also a regular member of his youth group at church.”

  Bella looked befuddled. “All because of wet papers, huh?”

  Sometimes repetition is best. “Something like that.”

  “Weird.”

  Before I could remind her of pots and kettles calling each other black, Bella plopped into a chair. “Anyway, if the plant food plant burned, and nobody’s stealing the stuff to make bombs with, then what did the cop come to question you for?”

  I was getting desperate. Delay tactics were the best I could come up with. “Who says she came to question me?”

  “Well, she’s not your best friend, Haley. What, do I look stupid or something?”

  Dumb? Not exactly.

  Something? Definitely.

  Eccentric and then some. The aging beauty made an art of her individuality.

  “Never said you were dumb.”

  “Then it’s got to be that poor dead girl at that face-lift and tummy-tuck doctor’s place.”

  Trust Bella to get right to the heart of the matter. I couldn’t think of any other way to distract her, and I really object to lying. “The Marshalls want me to redesign their new home.”

  Her blue eyes grew big as Delft platters. “Oh, Haley girl. You were there. You saw it all.”

  Before I could get a word in, her glee did runneth over.

  “Ooh! It’s gotta be better than that. I bet you found the body. Oh, that’s it. That’s it! I just knew it. You’re a born gumshoe.”

  “More like a clodhopper.”

  Bella gave an airy wave. “Pshaw! Of course not, dear. It takes one to know one. See? I figured it all out. Just like you found a way to find the body.”

  I grimaced. “Actually, all I did was keep an appointment with a home owner. When she went to show me her back patio, the girl was there.”

  Bella’s expression alternated between warm empathy and fascinated horror. “Was it really awful?”

  I met her gaze. “Worse.”

  “Oh, Haley girl. And here I’ve been acting like a ghoul. I’m so sorry.”

  “At least I’m not under suspicion... much.”

  “What do you mean ‘much’? Is the cop stupid or something?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, but Lila Tsu is a diamond-tipped blade in the PD’s workshop.”

  “So the girl was murdered.”

  “Not definitely. She bled to death.”

  “How’d the bleeding start?”

  “Lila said the preliminary examination showed she’d just had a baby. Who knows? Maybe she didn’t get proper treatment and lost too much blood.”

  Bella shook her head. “That’s not normal. True, if she’s really, really young, then childbirth could cause major tearing, but if that happened, then why would she show up on someone’s patio?”

  “It’s Lila’s job to find that out, don’t you think?”

  Frown lines appeared on Bella’s surprisingly smooth forehead. “Something doesn’t add up. A dead girl. Childbirth. A patio. And a plastic surgeon with a silicone-filled trophy wife. Where do you fit in?”

  “I just told you. I went to look at the house so that I could come up with a design plan. They want to remodel the whole back of the place to take advantage of the view of Lake Union. Then the new Mrs. Marshall wants me to turn her exquisite traditional décor into some übermod museum showplace.”

  My neighbor didn’t speak, but I could almost hear the gears crank around in her overactive head. Then she snapped her fingers. “I got it. The teen girl is the doc’s daughter who’s come home to daddy when she got herself in trouble. But those horrible baby sellers stole the baby right from her body and then left her to die.”

  “Bella! Shame on you. That’s gruesome.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m not the one who comes up with the stuff. I saw something just like that on the late-late-late-night movie the other night. It probably happened just like that here. You don’t know who’s watching them shows and picking up sick ideas.”

  “In the first place, the girl’s not the doctor’s daughter. And in the second, we don’t know for sure that anyone did anything to her.”

  I was sure, but why encourage Bella?

  She took even my nonanswer and ran with it. “So who’s the girl? What’s her name? Where does she live? Is she a runaway? And where’s the baby?”

  The painful constriction struck my heart again. It all seemed to come back to my recent question for Lila. Where was KC’s baby?

  “The girl’s KC Richardson; she must live somewhere in the Seattle area, since Dutch and her dad were partners once upon a time; and I don’t know if she ran away.”

  “Dutch? That’s the hunky construction guy I got to come and bail you out when you nearly died last year, isn’t it?”

  I winced—I do that a lot around Bella. When am I going to get a grip on my mouth, Lord? What’s it going to take?

  “Yes, Bella, that’s Dutch.”

  “Poor guy. There he went to help you, and you just—”

  “Let’s not go there, okay?”

  “Then tell me, Haley girl. Where’s that KC’s baby?”

  I struggled with my emotions, fought for a deep breath. “I don’t know, Bella. And I just can’t get that thought out of my head.”

  Bella reached over, her face serious, full of love and concern and complete knowledge of how my psyche works. “Come on, now. Don’t let it stew inside you like that. That kind of thing can make you go mad. Maybe the thought’s stuck in your head because the Lord wants you to find out what happened to that child.”

  The memories came at me fast and hard. “I can’t. I just can’t go there, Bella. I’ll never make it if I do.”

  Later that night I waged the sheet-and-pillow battle of my life. Since I’m not prone to insomnia, much less used to little or no sleep, I got up grouchy and irritable in the morning. Even Dad’s sermon on God’s faithfulness did nothing to change my mood.

  The teen’s death weighed on my psyche, both the conscious and unconscious side, and in defiance of Bella’s advice. There wasn’t much I could do about it. At least, not at home, in or out of bed, and with not much else to think about.

  Monday broke no better.

  Which meant I had to go back to the Marshalls’ mansion.

  Breakfast held no appeal for me, not even Dad’s fresh-baked apple muffins, which I normally devour on sight. My lack of appetite was so unusual that it led to raised eyebrows on his part.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Reluctant to worry him any more than I already had in the last few years, I shrugged, grinned, and said, “I’m off to slay the brontosaurus for dinner. There’s a beast of a place to redecorate—according to the plastic surgeon’s new wife.”

  “You’re not happy about what she wants.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Nope. The place is gorgeous as it is. Whoever did the décor has perfect taste and played with proportions like a master. Who knows what Deedee will really want—besides the wall of windows out the back, which isn’t all that bad, since it will bring light into the dark kitchen.”

  “See? You already agree with her on one thing. She’ll probably surprise you with her good taste.”

  That wasn’t the impression I got from Deedee at our first meeting. But for Dad’s sake, I smiled again, the edgy feeling I’d had since I dragged myself out of bed as strong as ever.

  “I can always hope.”

  “Take a muffin with you if you’re not hungry now. You can’t go without food and expect to think clearly.”

  I wanted a muffin for breakfast about as much as I wanted a couch for lunch. “Okay. Maybe I’ll get the munchies soon.”

  Not a chance, but why worry Dad any more?

  I went to the desk in my room, called the Marshall home, and agreed to meet Deedee in an hour. Then I rummaged through my samples, chose plain, neutral swatches for the upholstery, checked to make
sure I’d brought home the pieces of teak and mahogany I prefer for case goods in the design I think she wants, and pulled a catalog of ultracontemporary and midcentury modern reproduction furniture from my bookshelf.

  Once I had it all packed in my portfolio, with a smattering of design projects I’d done at school to spark some ideas, I turned to my Bible and curled up on the chaise by the window. God’s inspired Word seeped into me and soothed my restless heart.

  This time when I got to the Marshalls’ front door, I had to make use of the shiny brass door knocker. Heavy footsteps sounded their approach over the polished marble I’d admired the other day, and then the solid wooden slab opened.

  “You painter lady?” asked the short, gray-haired man garbed in tails, bow tie, and big-time sulk.

  Oh boy. “I’m the interior designer, if that’s what you mean.”

  He gestured for me to enter, which I did.

  “What? You no gonna paint the place?”

  His accent identified him as Latin American, and his assumption told me he had no idea what it is I do. “I won’t do the painting itself, sir. I’ll work with Mrs. Marshall to choose the paint colors, furniture styles, rugs, drapes, and to make sure it all works well together.”

  He made a face when I mentioned my client. “She no Mrs. Marshall. Mrs. Marshall lady in Europe. This one... what you say?” He scratched his pointed chin. “I know. She a flozzy.”

  “A what?”

  “You know. A flozzy. She no care for nothing but money, big house, and do no work. Oh, she like diamond too. Many diamond. You know. Big, flashy—like TV bimbo.”

  Good grief. I backed away. “I have an appointment with the floz—er... the lady of the house.” His frown made me pause. “Please let Deedee know I’m here.”

  “You name?”

  “Haley Farrell.”

  “Oh, the woman who got the rich lady’s used furniture place when she got dead.”

  My fame travels far and wide. “Something like that. I do have an appointment with Mrs. Marshall, and I prefer for her to know I arrived on time.”

  “I go get—”

  The rich notes of the Westminster chimes cut off his words. He turned and drew back the front door again. “Who you?”