A High-End Finish(27)
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I woke up the next morning to a cold gray sky with more fog rolling in. I added a thermal T-shirt under my usual henley and flannel shirt, then drank an extra cup of coffee to keep myself revved up. Foggy days often made me want to stay inside with a cozy blanket and a good book.
I spent the first half of the day driving from one end of town to the other and back again, checking on my six main job sites. I also met with the architect on the Main Street Brownstones project. My company had been hired to do the rehab, and I was eager to find out what obstacles, if any, he might’ve discovered in his research.
Thank goodness I had plenty of work to do besides sit around and try to avoid a certain hunky police chief.
That afternoon, I stopped at the Boyers’ house in South Cove. I spotted Wade Chambers, my head foreman in charge of this job site, standing on the front porch, talking to one of the cops who was still there collecting forensic evidence.
The place was still a crime scene, so I had cut the crew down to two guys, plus Wade, who traveled between sites. The basic assignment here was to make sure that none of the police fell through the feeble floorboards or tripped down the basement ramp.
Wade checked in with the police every day to see if they were finished with their evidence collecting. We were all eager to get back to work inside the house.
Wade saw me and waved, said one last thing to the cop, and carefully jumped off the porch. “Hey, boss, I was just going to call you. The police still have the interior cordoned off, but they gave us permission to work out here. I thought we should go ahead and tackle the front stairs. What do you think?”
Frowning, I gazed up at the house. It wouldn’t do much good to start reinforcing the sagging porch roof if we couldn’t even get up to the porch without risking life and limb on those stairs. “I agree. Let’s get started on the stairs.”
Two police squad cars were parked out front, so there had to be at least four cops somewhere on the property, probably downstairs collecting more evidence. Lucky for them, we’d already done the preliminary work of jacking up the basement ceiling and adding four new support posts down the center of the room. We’d rebuilt the main header beams and repaired several damaged joists, all before Jerry Saxton was killed down there.
With an old house, we always followed the golden rule of triage: first, stop the bleeding, so to speak. Whenever I took on a new job, I prioritized the work according to structural urgency. In other words, a coat of paint might make the place look nice on the surface, but if a wall or a load-bearing beam was weakened by age or termites or water damage, the house wouldn’t survive much longer without fortification. And that had to start at the bottom, with the basement. With so many police officers traipsing through the kitchen, going up and down that precarious ramp, and then moving themselves and their equipment around the big, dank basement space, all three floors of the house would’ve collapsed on top of them if we hadn’t done the reinforcement work first.
“Have the owners been around much?” I asked, as Wade escorted me back to my truck.
He shook his head. “Todd said Mrs. Boyer was here for a little while on Monday. She wasn’t in the best mood, apparently.”
I tried not to show any reaction. “It must be weird to know that someone was killed in your own house.”
“According to Todd,” Wade said quietly, “she wasn’t any too sad about it. Apparently she made quite a point of telling the men how much she hated the guy. The statement was sort of ruined when she burst into tears, though.”
“She was crying?”
“That’s what Todd said.”
“So she hated Jerry Saxton, but she was crying about it.” I shook my head. “I understood the two of them were having an affair.”
Wade was too much of a gentleman to say anything overly inflammatory about anyone, but the news about Joyce and Jerry’s relationship was all over town. As far as I was concerned, Joyce had every right to hate Jerry after finding out about his many affairs—if only she hadn’t been carrying on her own extramarital affair at the same time. But it sure seemed odd that she’d been canoodling with him a few days before his death and now, all of a sudden, she insisted she hated him. It didn’t make her a murderer. It just made me wonder. Especially when I kept hearing that she was bursting into tears all over the place.
I left the Boyer house in Wade’s good hands and drove out to the Paradise Lane work site a mile east of the center of town. On the drive, I pondered the information Wade had shared. Emily had heard the same basic story from Natty Terrell, whose son had heard Joyce call Jerry’s death a “good riddance.” Was Joyce simply jealous that he had been fooling around with other women? Again, since she was married, she couldn’t complain too much, could she?
Apparently, she could.
And I still didn’t know why Stan Boyer had lied to me about his whereabouts when he called me last Sunday. Not that I would expect him to tell me he was having an affair, but he didn’t have to say he was in San Francisco, did he? I supposed some people felt the need to embellish their lies in order to make themselves sound more plausible. I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t lie worth beans. Oh, I tried to every so often, but I usually ended up sounding ridiculous.
I pulled to a stop on Paradise Lane, climbed out of my truck, and stared at the property in front of me. This house was among the oldest Victorians in town and one of the “grande dames” of Lighthouse Cove. If you took one of the historical tours that were offered around town, this house was always featured. It was built in 1867 by a prosperous Danish dairy farmer, Herman Clausen, otherwise known as the Butterfat King and one of the earliest settlers in the region.