For a moment, I contemplated picking up the sledgehammer and decking Clay with it. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths until the urge passed. Then I pulled out my phone and called Randall Shiffley.
“Meg? I’m already on my way over there. What’s up?”
“We need some help out here,” I said. “Clay Spottiswood was removing a wall—”
“The load-bearing wall between the master bath and the big closet? The one I told him not to touch under any circumstances?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “Apparently, in addition to being load-bearing, it also contains some of the pipes for the bathroom. He’s flooded the study downstairs. We’re going to need some workmen to repair the damage. Tomás and Mateo can’t do it all themselves.”
“I have work I need Tomás and Mateo to be doing,” Clay protested.
“Too bad,” I said. “For the time being, Tomás and Mateo will be fixing all the damage you’ve done—here and downstairs in Sarah’s room.”
“But—”
My temper boiled over.
“Get out of here right now!” I stamped my foot as I said it, for good measure.
“I need to finish—”
“You’re finished for the day!” I said. “And maybe for good. I’ll call later to tell you if you’ll be allowed to continue or if we’re kicking you out of the house completely.”
Clay opened his mouth to argue, but looking at my face must have made him think better of it. He disappeared for a moment into the walk-in closet, then reappeared, putting on his coat as he stormed out.
I was still taking my deep, calming breaths when I heard the front door slam downstairs.
“Meg?” I’d almost forgotten that I had Randall on the phone. “You really kicking him out?”
“I think I should let the committee make that decision,” I said. “Things would certainly be a lot more peaceful around here if he was gone. And Martha would kill for a chance to do this room. She already has a set of plans, you know—she really expected to get it.”
“Then she should have applied before the deadline like everyone else, instead of assuming the rules didn’t apply to her and we’d come begging.”
“No argument from me,” I said. “But right now I’d rather have her doing the master bedroom than Clay. Do you want to bring this up with the committee, or shall I?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I’ll tell the rest of the committee we need to hold an emergency meeting this afternoon or this evening. You hold down the fort there at the house. I’ll send over some guys.”
I was reassured. Not just that help was on the way, but also that Randall, who was on the committee, would support me if I decided we had to kick out Clay. I suspected without Randall’s influence the committee might have caved when Martha pitched her hissy fit. Of course, they probably wouldn’t have taken the master suite away from Clay—they’d have demoted one of the lesser designers. Princess Violet of the Many Ruffles. Or the designer Mother and I called Goth Girl, who was turning the third bedroom into a black-and-red pseudo-medieval lair. Or Our Lady of Chintz, who was running amok with too many different prints in the dining room, causing Mother, at regular intervals, to mutter thanks for the pocket doors separating it from her living room.
Or maybe the Quilt Ladies, the cheerful pair of designers who were turning the bonus room over the garage into a quilt and craft room. We all forgot the Quilt Ladies were there half the time, since their room was a little apart from the main body of the house. You could reach it from the garage via the back stairway. Or you could go through the now-paint-smeared back bathroom. Not my favorite feature of the house, that bathroom. From the main part of the house, you couldn’t reach it from the hall, only from one or the other of the two smaller bedrooms. And yet it had a back door leading to the bonus room. If Michael and I had bought this house, the first thing I’d have changed would be to remove that back door. I wasn’t sure what would worry me the most about that door—that it would let burglars sneak in through my sons’ rooms, or that it would give the boys such an easy way to sneak out when they got old enough to think of doing so.
But however dysfunctional the house’s floor plan might seem to me, the two stairways were going to make traffic flow easier once we opened up the house to visitors. We could send people up one set of stairs and down and out through the other.
I made a mental note to drop by to see the Quilt Ladies later in the day. Just because they weren’t squeaky wheels didn’t mean I should ignore them.
I was still standing in the master bedroom, surveying the damage. Tomás and Mateo returned, followed by Eustace. The two workmen disappeared into the ruined bathroom.
“The muchachos can fix everything Clay ruined,” Eustace said. “But it’s going to take time. And that’s not something we have a whole lot of.”
Did he have to remind me? Today was Saturday, December 20. The show house’s main run would be from December 26 through January 5, but we’d given in to the historical society’s request to have a special preview day—with wine and cheese to justify higher prices—on December 24. And just to make sure all the rooms were ready for the sneak preview, we’d arranged for the judges for the best room contest to make their tour of inspection at 9:00 P.M. on December 23. So we had today, tomorrow, Monday, and most of Tuesday to get everything done. I hoped Clay hadn’t just ruined our chances of making our deadline.
Of course, our secret weapon was Randall Shiffley. As the town mayor, he had the strongest possible motive for making the show house successful. And as a leading member of the family that had a virtual monopoly on the building trades in Caerphilly County, he could draft an almost unlimited supply of skilled labor to get projects like this done.
“Randall’s sending over some workers,” I said aloud. “It would help if you and the guys can figure out what materials we’ll need and call him.”
“Will do.”
I was turning to go. I had the feeling I should make sure Sarah was okay.
“One more thing,” Eustace said. “Tomás and Mateo understood enough of what happened just now to figure out that Clay might not be coming back.”
“I’m leaving that up to the committee,” I said.
“Fair enough,” Eustace said. “But they’re a little worried, because he hasn’t paid them.”
“You mean for today?”
“At all.”
“But they’ve been working here for weeks.”
Eustace raised one eyebrow as if to say “what do you expect?”
“What a jerk,” I said. “I’ll mention it to Randall. Maybe the committee can work something out. Put pressure on him.”
“Or the committee could pay them and force Clay to reimburse them as a condition of being in the house.”
“And if he refuses?”
Eustace leaned back, put his hands on his hips, and made a slow, deliberate survey of the décor in Clay’s room. The enormous four-poster mahogany bed, with its black sheets and red curtains. The oversized matching bureau and dresser. The black leather recliner. He wrinkled his nose slightly, as if detecting a faint but foul odor.
“We’ve got his stuff,” he said. “Not to my taste, but it should be worth something.”
He had a point.
“I’ll mention it to Randall,” I said. “Right now I need to go down and check on Sarah.”
I found her standing in her room, looking shell-shocked. The red-and-gold oriental rug was gone, and Tomás was using handfuls of rags to dry off the floor. The brass ceiling fixture was sitting in one of the red-velvet chairs, and Mateo was atop a ladder doing something to the damaged section of ceiling.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Sarah.
“I’m lucky, I guess.” She didn’t sound as if she felt lucky. “They stopped the water before it ruined everything.”
The streak in her hair was bright blue today, and from the way she was anxiously twisting the strands around her finger, I was afraid she’d pull out all the blue before too long.