The House of Seven Mabels (12 page)

"Pretty well. She explained to me at great length how someone gave Jacqueline a bit of a shock."

"And you understood?"

"Not in the least, but I pretended I did. I'm not sure she believed me. No, I
know
she didn't believe me, but it led to an interesting discussion. Thomasina said the liability insurance for electricians is right up there with malpractice policies for physicians. Hefty payments. And even more hefty penalties if a suit is brought against the electrician. She's so grateful that Jacqueline wasn't hurt seriously that she offered to pay the hospital bill. But she was really furious about Sandra allowing the house to be free to trespassers."

"She thought it was someone coming in off the street?"

"No. Thomasina suspects Joe Budley."

"Why?"

"She says word has gotten around in the trades that he has some troubles of his own with other projects and is involved in a couple of lawsuits over shoddy work, because he cuts corners to get projects done as fast as possible."

Jane saved her house plan and shut down the computer. As they went down the stairs to the kitchen, she asked, "You mean he could have been responsible for all the bad things so Sandra would be fired and Bitsy would have to take him on?"

"Remember, Bitsy had consulted him before she ran into Sandra. He lost a big job to a woman who wasn't even competent. Thomasina's pretty convinced he's behind the shrimp episode."

"Are you convinced?" Jane asked.

"Nope. I'd say it's Bitsy's ex-husband, if I had to guess. Or someone who had a personal grudge against Sandra."

Jane said, "That might be anyone who was forced to work with or for her."

Shelley nodded. "Exactly."

Jane was
wide-awake at six in the morning, eager to get back to Priscilla's house plans. Todd's bedroom light was on as well. "How's it going?" she said, stepping into his room.

"I have a lot to do before I can even start the real work," he said. "See, I figure I've got to have at least ten thousand numbers to see a pattern."

"That many?"

"At least. First I'm making a regular grid. Fifty wide. With five digits in each cell. Making the grid is easy. Cut and paste, but filling in the numbers is going to take a long time."

Jane looked at the grid. The number for one was really four zeros and the one at the end. It was red.

"Reds are prime numbers?"

"Right. I just keep putting numbers in and when I get bored with entering them, I go back, multiply by twos, and make them black."

"There's a nine thing I learned when I had a summer job at a bank," Jane said. "Any number

like…" She punched in multiplication in the little adding machine beside him. Nine times eighty-three. It came up seven hundred forty-seven.

"See? The two sevens equal fourteen and with the four they equal eighteen, which is divisible by nine. It's always that way."

"Cool! How'd you know that?"

"My dinky job at a bank one summer during high school was checking tapes of wads of checks. They were always added twice. When they didn't add up exactly, this wise old woman, who'd started at the bank doing the same boring job when she was my age, told me that if the difference in the two tapes equaled something divisible by nine, at least one number on a tape had been transposed."

"Transposed?"

"Yes, like sixty-three for thirty-six. It made it easier to find the error. So I played around with nines and discovered how neat they are. You want to shower first?"

"Okay. I'll leave you some hot water."

Todd saved his grid, shut down his computer, and headed for the kids' bathroom before Katie could pull herself together and occupy it for half an hour.

Jane went downstairs, made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and got out little plastic containers of orange juice for Todd's and Katie's traveling-to-school breakfasts. Then she hotfooted it back upstairs to work on her house

plans. Two hours later, she realized that the house was quiet except for Willard barking at the back door to be let out.

It had seemed mere minutes since she'd sat down at the computer.
This could be dangerous,
she thought.
Time just flies away when I'm doing this.

When she opened the back door, the cats shot out between Willard's legs and headed for the field. He snapped at them and growled but made no real effort to make contact. They had sharp claws and he didn't. Jane fixed a cup of coffee and went outside as well. She looked around the yard at her fledgling gardens and realized it was going to be an awfully nice day to do a bit of weeding and deadheading.

"You're not moving very fast this morning, are you?" Shelley asked as she came through the gate. "Sleep hair, still in your robe."

"I've been up for hours, though," Jane said. "I've been playing with the computer. I've realized that since Priscilla's house is on a steep hill, there have to be lots of steps going up and down to rooms at different levels."

"Aren't you making this even harder for yourself?"

"Yes, but that's part of the fun. Do we have anything at the renovation we have to do today? I thought I might tidy up the yard if not."

"I don't think so. Bitsy called a few minutes ago. She's working with her attorney on our contract today."

"Good for her. I half hope it's not as good as we'll like."

"That's because, like your son, you have found another obsession," Shelley said, taking a seat at the picnic table with her own cup of steaming coffee. "But keep in mind, even if the contract is okay, this isn't a full-time job. And it involves a lot of shopping."

"There is that to consider. Not to mention making a bit of extra money."

"Quite a bit," Shelley said, "if we get our way. I think you're right about it being a good day to garden."

"I had a bit of a coup and impressed Todd this morning," Jane said, smiling. She told Shelley about the nines tricks.

"That can't be right all the time," Shelley said.

"Try it and see," Jane said smugly, standing up and yawning. "I need to shower. Want to lunch somewhere?"

"Of course."

Jane had never seriously gardened until the previous spring. She and Shelley had taken a course about it and imported fake gardens for the garden tour near the end of the class. But it had really inspired both of them.

What she liked best about it was pulling weeds. It was therapeutic to tidy up nature. It was a relaxing solitary thing that had nothing to do with words or other people. The best part was that it

didn't take much intelligence and allowed her mind to wander all over the place.

While she was pulling out the crabgrass that infested one part of her yard, she thought about her imaginary house plans and how she could refine them. As she worked on deadheading the cone-flowers, she considered Todd's project. While she loaded up the trash with unwanted greenery and dead stuff, she thought about the restoration of Bitsy's house.

It had seemed a curse to her from the beginning. She'd wished all along that Shelley had never mentioned it. But things might be looking up. Just getting a new contractor, no matter how obnoxious, who locked up the place was a good thing. And if Shelley could get a good enough contract out of Bitsy, it would be a nice extra income just from shopping — something that was fun to do with Shelley.

And since Sandra was gone, the feminist overtones that had irritated nearly everyone had died down.

She went inside, tidied herself up, and took a glass of iced tea outside to sit at the patio table and consider how much nicer the yard looked. Mind still wandering, she came back to Sandra. Mel hadn't told her anything more about the investigation. She wondered if, in the end, it would be considered an accident.

The missing purse, however, seemed to belie that. Even Jane, who didn't pay as much attention

to habits like that, had noticed that Sandra was never without it. Maybe she had simply uncharacteristically set it down for a moment somewhere and it went out to the Dumpster with other debris. She wondered if the police at the scene of the crime had emptied the Dumpster searching for it.

Still, it was odd that Sandra had even gone anywhere near the basement. It would be hard to negotiate the steps in high heels, which she had been wearing that day. The steps were steep and narrow, and the light wasn't good. Jane tried to remember if there had been handrails and didn't think there were, but when Shelley had turned on the light and they saw the body, she hadn't studied much else.

If it wasn't an accident, someone had pushed her.

Probably someone working in the house. Or maybe not. But it would be risky for an outsider to come in without being noticed, when people were up and down the stairs, in and out of all the rooms, all the time. And if there was such a person, it was unlikely that he or she would just happen to come across Sandra alone at the head of the basement steps with the door open. If it was deliberate, it seemed more likely to be one of the workers rather than Bitsy's nasty ex-husband, or the new contractor snooping around a job he had wanted and wasn't hired for.

Shelley, looking as if she'd never gotten her fin-

gernails dirty in her whole life,
came
through the gate to the backyard as Jane was pondering.

"It looks better," she said, looking around Jane's backyard. "And you look a lot better, too. I want you to see my backyard after lunch. I'm starving."

They went to their favorite Italian restaurant and sat in a secluded booth. They were rather late to lunch and were almost the last customers to come in.

"I was brooding over Sandra's death while I weeded," Jane said. "Do you know if they went through the Dumpster in case she'd put her purse down somewhere for once?"

"I have no idea. I assume they did," Shelley said. "It would be a good place to dispose of anything you didn't want to ever be seen again."

"Not necessarily," Jane said. "Uncle Jim took a load of stuff in a rented trailer to the city dump once and invited me to go along."

"And you went? Of your own free will?" Shelley hooted.

"It was interesting. Of course, the smell was horrible, but there was this vast hole in the ground with a lot of enormous earthmoving equipment shoving the garbage over the ledge. A solid flock of seagulls looking for food. There were people there snatching up stuff others had dumped off. Tacky furniture, books, beat-up storage bins, and stuff like that. Unless the purse was concealed thoroughly in a sturdy bag and

strongly taped up, someone could have picked it up at the dump."

Shelley mused for a while. "But she was never without it. I imagine someone told Mel that."

"He knows and I told him about her being so snotty about the purse at that first luncheon. But it wouldn't hurt to remind him, I guess. I'll try to run him down when I get home."

"Why not now? I have my cell phone," Shelley said, fishing in her huge purse.

"That's your best toy, isn't it?"

"It's come in handy."

Mel was out of the office and didn't answer his own cell phone number, so Jane left the message.

"I was also wondering, if it wasn't an accident, how someone from outside the project could have come in without being noticed," Jane said.

"Good question," Shelley said. "The workers are always roaming around the whole place. If they're not looking for some tool that's been misplaced, they're gawking at what's going on elsewhere. But nothing much is going on in the kitchen right now, and it's sort of isolated. And the basement door is around a corner that isn't really obvious."

"How would anyone who didn't belong in the house get Sandra to the basement door?"

"He or she could have claimed they wanted to confide something to her privately and suggested the little hall to the basement. But only if they were familiar with the layout of the place," Shelley said.

"And almost anyone could have been. It was never locked up. I'll bet Bitsy's ex-husband had been there in the dead of night with a flashlight."

"Or Joe Dudley, looking over the job he'd missed getting. In fact, it could be anyone who'd even seen the house plan for the first floor," Shelley added.

"Or some private enemy of Sandra's we don't even know about," Jane added. "She probably had a lot of them. She was a tough-minded and not especially honest or tactful person."

The waitress brought Shelley's vegetarian lasagna and Jane's spaghetti and meatballs and said with a laugh, "You're not talking about me, are you?"

"We should watch what we say in public places about this," Shelley said, picking the olives out of her salad.

On Monday morning
Shelley called
Jane early.
Fortunately, Jane had been awake long enough to make some sense of what Shelley was rattling on about.

"Bitsy says she thinks she'll have the contract for us Wednesday or Thursday and she sent over the stuff we need to get into the Merchandise Mart. We can go look it over today. Are you free?"

"I guess I can be. How do we dress?"

"Like professional decorators. I'm afraid that might involve panty hose, but flat, comfortable shoes. We need to run by Bitsy's first to pick up the paperwork. Could you be ready in fifteen minutes?"

"You're not driving, right?"

"Of course not. We'll take the El and then a cab."

Jane was only five minutes over Shelley's limit. Her hair was a bit awry, but she had a brush, a mirror, and some spray in her purse and could fix

it as they traveled. The slight delay allowed them to miss the worst of the rush hour, and while Jane attempted to get her hair in shape, Shelley asked, "Have you ever been to this place?"

Jane looked up. "Never."

"Me neither. I've seen it many times, but not up close. Bitsy gave us a brochure in this envelope of stuff." She glanced at Jane's hair and said, "You should stop now while you're ahead, so to speak. It looks fine."