“How do you know I didn’t go very far?” Sid said, after Teddy went back to finish her program.
“You spent the day in the toolshed. Vel saw you go inside. We knew where you were the whole time.”
“There’s no drama when you have older sisters.”
But of course, older sisters or not, now there was too much drama in Sid’s life to suit either of us.
By the time I’d showered—this time to wake up—changed into my work clothes, and hunted unsuccessfully for our cat, Lucy had arrived. I found her at Ed’s computer in his home office.
“Has it levitated yet?” I asked, rolling the sleeves of my buffalo plaid shirt over my elbows. “I can brandish a crucifix. Or maybe a Star of David.”
“
You
are the problem. There’s nothing wrong with the computer. And you won’t believe what I’ve found.”
Gone was my party girlfriend. Lucy was wearing realtor clothes, so I assumed she was going off to earn big bucks when she was done here. She looked professional in conservative camel herringbone slacks and a turtleneck sweater of a slightly darker hue with a multicolored fuzzy scarf draped over her shoulders.
I rubbed the scarf between thumb and forefinger. “That looks like a Junie scarf. Everybody got one for Christmas. Mine’s green.”
“She gave it to me as a thank you for taking her around town the other day.”
“Apparently you took her to the Victorian?”
“She thinks we’re amazing.”
“I have a nice mother.”
“Your mother is a keeper. Okay, are you ready for excitement?”
Clearly I wasn’t, but that wasn’t going to matter.
“Cliff Grable may look staid and boring, but his life is anything but. Everything Rand told us about the lawsuit stemming from his first wife’s suicide is true. But here’s the thing. It’s not the only suit he’s taking part in.”
I screamed for my enthusiasm to show itself. It slogged toward the light. “Oh”—Even in my sleepless state I knew more was called for—“interesting.”
“Remind me not to let you stay out past midnight again. I’ll print this out for you before I leave, but here’s the story in a nutshell. There’s a whole interview from a magazine for inventors, so it’s legit—”
“How do you find this stuff? You come in here, turn on the computer, and it purrs like a kitten. Then it spits out useful information.”
Lucy ignored me. “The interview is kind of a cautionary tale. Apparently Cliff is something of a whiz kid but a lousy businessman.”
“He’s one of those guys who can’t read people.”
“Right out of college he went to work for some firm, had a great idea—something that makes no sense to me—and basically just gave it away to his employer. They realized what they had and managed to cut him out of any subsequent profits by claiming he came up with this idea while he was on salary. And the contract he’d signed said as much.”
“Wow, strike one.”
“The only good thing that came out of it was that everyone wanted to hire him. So several years later and somewhat smarter, Cliff got a great job and came up with an idea for a new hot water heater valve that significantly cut energy consumption. This time he made money, but once again, the idea was so successful he only made a fraction of what it was worth. When he tried to negotiate better terms, he lost his job, rumors circulated about his instability, and no one else would hire him.”
“For a smart guy, he’s a slow learner.”
“No, it’s more like this time he did protect himself, but the company’s a lot richer and has a fleet of lawyers. They hoped he’d cave and accept a payoff, particularly if his financial situation got desperate. They underestimated him, though. He sued and the lawsuit is pending. If he wins, he’ll be worth a fortune.”
“And the lawsuit against the drug company?”
“Could go on for years. It’s a class action suit, but if they win he’ll be better off for it.”
“So he’s a rich man in waiting. Maybe. How long has this lawsuit against his old company been in process?”
“The papers were filed a little less than a year ago.”
“After he was already married to Ginger. I bet she loved that.” I sank to the love seat beside the computer desk. “Every penny he has must be tied up.”
“His attorney might work on contingency fees, but I think there would still be a lot of other expenses, court costs, consultants, etc. And if he’s not getting a salary, then where’s the money coming from?”
That was the big question. “What else does the interview say?”
“The rest is advice to other inventors on how to keep the same thing from happening to them.” She swivelled in the chair and her eyes were sad. “At the end he said the best advice he could offer was to find somebody to stand beside you when you’re going through this kind of turmoil. Cliff said he was so grateful to have his wife’s support.”
With the holidays almost over, Lucy and I had to get busy and find a handy person to help us with the harder repairs. But the wallpaper in the upstairs bedroom where Cliff and I had worked on Christmas Eve was history now. We had been pleasantly surprised to discover that whoever had installed it had stripped previous layers and primed the walls. So one layer down, and we were ready to patch and choose a color buyers could live with until they put their own stamp on the house.
Normally I would suggest one of a million shades of off-white, but since anyone buying the Victorian would expect a certain level of frou-frou, we had decided on lavender, a shade pale enough that painting over it would be a cinch if our new owners weren’t purple people. Since a house sells better furnished, we would move the single bed that had graced the room back inside, put a fuzzy white rug from the church rummage sale on the floor and a flowered comforter and various throw pillows from the same sale on the bed. The dresser had gone with most of the other furniture, but I would move a bookshelf against the opposite wall and a vanity catty corner to that. This gave the feeling that the house was occupied but uncluttered.
I explained all this to Sid as I showed her what we’d done. At the last minute the girls had been invited to spend the day shopping with Junie. She had promised new dresses for their American Girl dolls, and they were going to pick out the fabric. We had the Victorian to ourselves.
“This wallpaper came off pretty easily,” I said. “I thought we’d start across the hall today.”
“Uh huh.” She was less than enthused.
“Pep up there. If you don’t, I might fall asleep on my feet. I’m counting on you to keep me dizzy with excitement.”
“I don’t really love my little condo. I’d like an extra bedroom, and a view. Plus the drive to work can be really awful sometimes. And Ludwig, the guy who manages our dining room, is such a creep, I read the newspaper classified section every Sunday looking for a new job for him. I circle promising ads and leave them in his box.”
I wasn’t sure I understood. “And?”
She faced me. “And I want to be there! I actually found myself wondering how Ludwig’s Christmas went. I listen to audio books in my car, and I was halfway through this great novel by Elizabeth George, and I want to be stuck in traffic again so I can find out how it ends.”
“I’m sorry.”
She let out a long breath. Not a sigh exactly, more like a leaky tire. “I know. And I love you and the family and being with you.”
“It’s not having any say in where you are.”
“And wondering if I’m going to jail.”
We walked into the hall and I opened the door of the room we would be working in. It was the master bedroom with a small attached bath. This wallpaper was a black and white grid splattered with dinner plate-sized dahlias in colors nature purposely avoids. Like the paper in the room we had finished, this wasn’t in good condition. And luckily it, too, appeared to be only one layer deep. If the walls had been properly primed, we were in business.
I walked through the doorway and the lights came on. “Well, will you look at that. Cliff ’s been here.”
“They come on during the day?”
“Just when it’s gloomy like today, I think.” After that first night, the lights had behaved. Of course I made a point of not touching the switches.
“This is his next great invention,” I said. “Maybe this one will finally make him a millionaire. Apparently the most advanced version of these switches does everything except walk the family dog.”
“Isn’t it a shame that somebody so brilliant has been slapped in the face so many times?” In the van on the way over I’d told Sid what Lucy discovered online.
The stepladder was already in the room. I dragged it to the wall nearest two double-hung windows. “The thing about Cliff is that he doesn’t seem to notice. I wonder if he’ll ever realize Ginger was using him?”
“Maybe in her own weird way she loved him.” Sid caught my eye, and we both shook our heads at the same moment. “Nah.”
Now I filled Sid in on what I’d learned last night. By the time I finished, I was at the top of the ladder with the clothes steamer heating on the shelf and my spray bottle of fabric softener and water beside it. While I talked I had picked at the edge of a roll and found, to my delight, that it was loose enough to peel a good distance. She stripped off a rose-colored cardigan that Junie had knit for her and put it in the closet out of harm’s way, donning an old flannel shirt of mine to cover her turtleneck.
“So you think Ginger married Cliff to get money to pay off this Kas person?” Sid buttoned my shirt to the top.
“That’s what it sounds like. If she was really into drugs, she might have owed him for a lot more than her portion of the down payment on the condo.”
“Remember that last night she was . . . alive? At dinner? She kept staring off into space. I assumed she was plotting evil deeds. But she did seem unfocused, you know?”
I had thought of that, too. “Her mother had serious addiction problems. Ginger grew up watching her. Maybe Ginger got addicted after the accident, and she just couldn’t shake loose.”
“Or maybe she realized she was working a gold mine. Beautiful woman with decent acting skills. Verifiable car accident and injury. Back pain, which is impossible to quantify. A market for pain pills and a boyfriend who sells them.”
Put that way it did seem likely. I started steaming the paper, moving down the ladder steps as I went. I showed Sid how to use one of the scoring tools, and she climbed the ladder and began at the top where I had steamed.
“I’m not sure I understand the draw. Who wants to be zonked out all the time?” I asked.
“I heard something on a talk show about some of these drugs. They come in time release tablets, designed that way so the user can’t get high, but if you crunch the tablets, then you can shoot or snort them.”
“Ick!”
“It produces a big rush. I guess for some people that’s worth it.”
I heard the downstairs door open, then footsteps in the downstairs hall. At first I thought it might be Lucy, but the steps were too heavy.
“That might be Cliff,” I said softly, to cut off further speculation. I knew he had been at the house several times doing some simple electrical repairs. He’d asked my permission, and I suspected this was therapy, a way to stay busy.
Sid lowered her voice, too, and descended the ladder so we were both on the ground. “I’m surprised he’s hanging around town.”
“I think he’s waiting for the cops to make an arrest.”
I saw Sid wince. “Or maybe he doesn’t want to go back to their house or on to his family’s, where everybody will fuss. Maybe that’ll make it all seem too real.”
The footsteps started up the stairs. I went out to make sure it was Cliff. It was, and he waved from the landing, toolbox under one arm.
“Sid and I are stripping paper,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“I thought I’d replace the plugs in the bathrooms. But I don’t have to do it today.”
The inspector had noted that the plugs next to the sinks needed to be replaced with ground fault circuit interrupters to protect against shock. Apparently Cliff had noticed this, as well. He was all set to work, wearing his too-short jeans and what looked like a brand-new work shirt.
I wanted him to feel included. “Why don’t you start in this bathroom and leave the door open. Then we can talk.”
He looked so grateful I really wished there was more I could do for the guy. “I’ll have to turn off the power,” he warned.
“We’ll have enough light for what we’re doing.”
He left and I steamed while I could. In a few minutes the power went off. Luckily this room had enough windows that we were okay, although I was glad we had started nearby. Sid and I used the scoring tools, then the bottle of fabric softener and water and scrapers. When Cliff returned he left the door open between rooms and set to work.
I’ll have to confess, although I wanted to make Cliff feel better, I also wanted to send Sid back to Atlanta where she could circle ads for Ludwig and sit in traffic jams to her heart’s content. I tried to figure out how to ease into a long list of questions. Like whether Ginger had been an addict. And how they lived so well when she had no visible income and his was probably providing Tahitian getaways for a gaggle of lawyers.
“You know, Cliff,” Sid said, beating me to choosing a subject, “I never heard details of the way you and Ginger met.”
“At a party in Cincinnati. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I didn’t see any point in introducing myself, but about halfway through the night, she introduced herself to me. We were inseparable after that. I couldn’t imagine she’d want to marry me, but she was the one who insisted.”
I thought of Officer Jim and the stranger danger puppet show. Cliff needed a front-row seat. Ginger had enticed Cliff to marry her just the way a kidnapper entices a child into his car. Flattery, promises of rewards, lies. And he was as naive as a first grader, at least when it came to Ginger.
“I met Bix at a party,” Sid said, surprising me since the Bix word had rarely issued from her throat since the night he left town. “Same thing. He sought me out at the country club where I work, and I felt like a million dollars. Here was this really cool guy and I was the one he wanted. After that he was my date for every event.”