A High-End Finish(68)
“Well, hello there.”
I looked up to find Stan Boyer grinning at me. “Hi, Stan. Good to see you.”
“House is coming along.”
“The guys are doing a great job,” I said, and brought him up-to-date on the work they’d done that he might not have noticed.
“I’m real pleased with everything, Shannon.”
“I’m glad. You’ve got the bones of a beautiful home here.”
He leaned his hip against the table. “I saw Joyce corner you earlier. What were you two talking about?”
“Oh.” I thought fast. “I was just telling her that we’re right on schedule. How are you doing? I saw you at the pub the other night but didn’t get a chance to say hello.”
“I’ve been around.” His eyes twinkled. “You’re the one who’s been missing.”
I smiled ruefully. “True. I’ve been nursing a shoulder injury, but I’m better now and happy to be back at work.”
He scuffed his shoes on the ground a few times. “Listen, I want to apologize for the last time we talked. I sent you on a wild-goose chase that turned ugly.”
“I’ll say it did,” I said lightly, trying to match his casual tone. But ugly was putting it mildly. Because of Stan’s phone call last week, I had come over here to do him a favor and found Jerry Saxton’s dead body instead. Both Mac and Eric had suggested that maybe I’d been lured to the basement to find Jerry’s body. If that were true, then Stan would’ve played a part in luring me.
“I heard you got called down to the police station,” he said.
“Sure did,” I said mildly. “They hauled me down there and asked me a lot of questions.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, they asked me a bunch, too.”
Since he seemed to be in a talkative mood, I went ahead and brought up the one thing I’d been dying to know the answer to. “What happened that afternoon, Stan? You told me on the phone that your neighbor telephoned you, but the police said later that none of them would admit that they called you.”
Frustrated, he raked his fingers through his sparse patch of gray hair. “I didn’t lie to you. I did talk to my neighbor’s daughter. Daphne said she was out walking the dog and passed my house on the way to the beach. The dog took off running and ended up sniffing around the side.” He pointed toward the back of the house. “Over there. He started barking and wouldn’t stop. When Daphne caught up with him, she could hear water running, so she called me on my cell.”
“Didn’t the police interview her?”
“Well, here’s the thing.” He looked embarrassed again. “She took off that night for San Francisco to catch a red-eye for her semester abroad in Spain. It was hell getting in touch with her right away because she was going to go hiking around the country for a week or so before starting classes. But they finally got hold of her and she told her story just like I said. So that let me off the hook.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“You and me both, girlie.” He gave a cursory glance at the medallions I was working on. “I’ll let you get back to whatever you’re doing.”
“Okay.”
Stan walked away and I went to work stripping the medallions. I placed them neatly at the bottom of a big plastic bucket and carefully poured the solvent over them. I estimated that they would need a few hours of soaking to get rid of the paint and varnish they’d been coated with. I tucked the bucket under a window on the porch and taped a piece of paper to the side that said, CAUSTIC SOLVENT AT WORK. DO NOT DISTURB.
I thought about my conversation with Stan. I hadn’t learned anything except that he hadn’t been lying about the reason he’d called me that day. I still didn’t know why he’d told me he was in San Francisco, but decided I didn’t want to know. I’d already heard way too much about his and Joyce’s personal relationship. I didn’t need to know more.
As I was stowing my tools back in my truck, my cell phone rang. I checked the number and groaned out loud. I didn’t dare let it go to voice mail, though, because that would exact a worse punishment than if I just faced the music and took the call. “Hello?”
“My family room ceiling is leaking. I’m having a very important dinner party tomorrow night and this has to be fixed.”
Gracious as always, I thought. “Hello, Whitney,” I said.
“I’ll expect you to be here in fifteen minutes.” She hung up the phone.
What a charmer. Here was the thing about Whitney Reid Gallagher. She and Tommy and their three children lived in a gorgeous, modern Victorian-style home near the Alisal Cliffs. Their beautiful, trendy housing development was called Cliffside. My father had built many of the Cliffside homes over the past twenty years, including Whitney’s. So in her little mind, this made it okay for her to call me whenever anything went wrong in her house.
The reason I always responded was not because I was the nicest contractor in town—which I was—but because I knew that if I didn’t repair the damage immediately, she would bad-mouth my father’s beautiful work to all her snooty friends.
She was just that kind of a bitch.
I looked around for Wade and found him clinging to the side of the house like a determined spider as he worked to replace several rows of cedar shingles underneath the second-floor gable. I checked to make sure he was securely belted to the scaffolding before yelling his name.