Conundrum

Published by Susan Cory

Copyright © Susan Cory, 2012

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgements

The characters in Conundrum bear no resemblance to my classmates and professors at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Would you really want to read a story about a bunch of nice architects?

I am grateful to many people for their help in wrestling this story down onto the page /screen. For virtual hand-holding as I crossed over from the visual world into the verbal one I’d like to thank my fellow writers at Sisters-in-Crime, especially the Guppies.

Heartfelt thanks and admiration go to Anne Wagner, Pam Simpson, and Kat Lancaster for their editing expertise. For helping me to plug plot holes I’m indebted to Eve Spangler and Martha
Craumer
.

A special
thanks goes to
Narween
Otto, my critique partner, for her sensitive ear to dialogue, and to S.J.
Rozan
for her talent as a teacher equal to hers as a crime fiction writer.

For technical help, I’m grateful to Katie
Hallett
for her psychological insights, Alex
Harpp
for her legal take on Norman’s tape, and Detective Danny Marshall of Cambridge Major Crimes for his explanation of the jurisdictional chain of command as well as a tour of the new Cambridge Police HQ.

My husband, Dan
Tenney
, deserves a medal for patiently reading through every latest installment dished out at dinnertime and for giving me his feedback diplomatically.

Finally, this book would never have been started without the encouragement of my friends and fellow architects Gail Lindsey and Olga
Vysatova
McCord. I so wish you both
were
here to see it in print. I dedicate
Conundrum
to you.

“Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.”

—Marcus
Tullius
Cicero

Chapter 1

I
ris Reid loved Monday mornings when she had a house in construction. She couldn’t wait to get back to the building site to check on its progress. Her old jeep bumped up the rutted dirt driveway in the upscale Boston suburb of Lincoln. Dirty patches of snow pock-marked the ground and Iris could see her breath condensing on the windshield. After maneuvering around
a sharp turn her eyes lit up—
the three-level skeleton of the house faced her. It stepped gracefully up and into the hillside, with bright blue tarps over its flat roofs snapping in the wind. Several balconies, cantilevered in a cubist configuration, now sprouted from the volumes of the main house. She cut the engine and studied her Modernist creation, savoring the changes since last week’s visit.

Then she spotted Frank’s Dodge pickup. Damn. That was th
e only drawback to construction—
having to deal with contractors. This one rated about a 7 on the 1-to-10 misogyny scale. It seemed to bug Frank more that she had gone to Harvard than that she was female or an architect. He’d learned this fact from her website and now made a point of calling her “Hey, Harvard.” Still, the house was coming together.

For this design, Iris had used an arsenal of ‘green’ features. From the insulating sod roof to the wood floors reclaimed from a Vermont barn, this house had impeccable environmental ‘cred’ and she was hoping to get it certified as LEED platin
um. But its piece de resistance—
the M
eeker geo-thermal energy system—
had been contributed by her client.

Years earlier, her former classmate, Norman Meeker (or more likely one of his underlings) had designed a system of running water pipes 15
0
feet underground, harnessing the earth’s core temperature of 52 degrees to modulate heating and cooling. It was simple, brilliant and had made Norman’s fortune. His first fortune, that is. By now he had three or four major patents on clever energy-saving building products. He’d used his architecture school training in a far more lucrative way than the rest of them. Even in school, Norman had affected the avuncular manner of one whose success would out-pace his peers’. This manner had always irritated Iris, so when he’d called her a year earlier to discuss her designing a house for him, she’d been ambivalent. But she’d always said a plum project and steep fee could give her the patience of a saint. Now she was getting a chance to test this.

Iris climbed the building frame to the top level, the main living section of the open floor plan. The roof tarp cast an eerie blue glow over the space. Frank, talking on his cell phone, scowled at her, then flipped the phone shut.
He sauntered over, jaw at the lead, his tool-belt swinging low on his hips like an outlaw’s holster.
“Hey, Harvard, the windows for the living room aren’t
gonna
fit.”

She groaned inwardly. Iris had created a composition with the windows and doors that allowed little margin for error. Casements, stati
onaries, transoms, French doors—
all fit together
like a Chinese puzzle. Contractors hated not having room to fudge, so Frank had been predicting disaster from the moment he had first read the drawings and specs. Now he looked smug.

“
Okaaaay
, let’s go over this,” she said. “Where’s the problem?”

“Marvin dropped off the windows late Friday. We uncrated them and laid them out like you drew, and the whole thing is 1/2” too wide. It won’t fit.” Frank made a dismissive sweep toward the windows. Iris registered the abrupt silencing of power tools as several carpenters stopped to watch the show. “When they ganged the two doors and stationary window, they made it wider than you put on the drawings. I told you it was too tight to work. Now my schedule’s
gonna
be shot to hell.”

Iris headed stiffly over to where the windows and doors had been laid out on the plywood sub-floor amidst the muddy imprints of lug soles. She pulled out a tape to take her own measurements as Frank glowered above her, hands on hips.

She brushed past him to consult her drawings set out on a makeshift table. There had to be some solution other than ordering a narrower window. She squinted at the critical string of dimensions, blurred by coffee rings. Then she leaned back. Thank god I’ve picked up some tricks over the years. She called out to Frank, “Keep your shirt on. I made the door frames triple-studded to allow for something like this. We can swap out one of those studs on the latch side with a one-by, and that’ll give you your extra half-inch plus.”

She noted his disappointed look. The other carpenters turned back to their work smirking. She shook her head. She hated the head-butting that often went with her job. They should teach child psychology in architecture school. It would be more useful than some of the esoteric theory courses she had dozed through.

“Measure all the rest of the windows to see if we need any more adjustments,” she shouted over the roar as the compressor came back on.

“I may have to put in a change order,” he yelled.

“Yeah, yeah… you do that. Oh, and Frank… don’t forget that the June 4th deadline is drop-dead. You’ve got three months. Norman’s planning to have an important dinner party here that night, so delays aren’t an option.”

“Tell that to the
Poggenpohl
kitchen people,” he called after her as she headed for the temp stairs before he could come up with any more complaints. Most contractors, by this point in the job, realized that the house was looking good and started respecting her judgment. Or at least they’d let up on baiting her. For whatever reasons, Frank didn’t get it.

She climbed dow
n two levels to her destination—
the wine cellar. A rough-walled cave with a barrel-vaulted ceiling had been carved out of a stone section of the hill. This would become a hidden room, accessed by pressing the right spot on the outer room’s paneling.

She took out a clipboard and jotted down dimensions for ordering the shelving, wine refrigerator, and table that Norman had requested. He knew very little about wine but wanted a state-of-the-art wine cellar. Ever since his wife had left him, he had been positioning himself as a “player” in the Boston middle-aged dating circuit. For a guy with a
Calligula
hairdo with one inch bangs, who walked toes-out like a duck, this was an uphill battle. Every possible electronic device had to be put on a remote control, 007
style
. With his status as a “green” activist in business, his Toyota Prius was a given, but he had also purchased a sleek, black 1995 Porsche 928—his one toy that had Iris salivating. She had offered to take the Porsche as her architectural fee.

“We belong in that car, Sheba, not Norman,” she’d lamented to her dog.

When it came to the wine cellar, Iris was on home turf. Her father had given her tutorials on vintages, varietals, and their proper care. By now she was a true connoisseur, able to create the perfect wine
cave
. The idea of a dork like Norman using it as a backdrop for a seduction attempt struck her as a crime.

Chapter 2

L
ater that morning Iris worked on a freehand sketch in the turreted home office of her Victorian house. She was hunched over the section of a table she’d designed that tipped up to form a drafting board. The loud “
thunk
” that announced something heavy coming through the mail slot nearby barely registered. But when Sheba, her six-year-old basset hound, waddled to the front vestibule, the clicking of her toenails on the wood floor roused Iris. She collected the mail, placing some bills in Sheba’s mouth for transport to the kitchen floor. The dog loved this “job”. Iris muttered about the latest misspellings of her four-letter, Anglo-Saxon surname, R-E-I-D— those fourth grade teachers with their ‘
i
before e except after c’ drill had a lot to answer for. Tossing aside the inevitable flyers and catalogs, she came to a book wrapped in plastic:
Twentieth Reunion of Harv
ard’s Graduate School of Design—
Class of 1988
and stood transfixed, staring at the cover.

It wasn’t a surprise. After all, Norman was the reunion’s chairman. He had been nattering on about it for weeks. It was due to the small, highly selective opening-night dinner in three
month’s time
that they were racing to finish the house. Norman was determined to show it off to one of their former classmates, C.C.
Okuyama
, who was now editing a big-time architectural magazine.

Iris was braced for it. Still, her insides felt knotted.

She headed mechanically to her kitchen window seat, and opened the directory with one finger as if it were radioactive, searching for five particular names.
Then she speed-dialed her best friend Ellie.

“Have you seen it yet?”

“What?”

“The reunion book.
It’s in today’s mail.”

“Call you back.” Ellie lived around the corner in Iris’ Cambridge neighborhood.

Fifteen minutes later Ellie tapped on the kitchen window. She hung her parka on a hook in the mudroom alcove,
then
followed Iris back to the kitchen window seat, where Sheba jumped up to nestle between them. “It looks like all 5 of them plan to come,” Ellie began. “You know what that means.”

“They didn’t come to the tenth or fifteenth. Why now?
Why all of them?”
Iris rested a fingernail between two teeth,
then
quickly removed it. “Are we really going to do this?”

“We could head out of town for the wee
kend to avoid running into them—
just let it blow over.”