False Premises (37 page)

He flung his hands aloft. “Then we’re stuck with keeping our reservations at the sushi bar. And if you get food poisoning, I hereby vow to act as your indentured servant for a period of one full month, or until one of us kills the other, whichever comes first.”

“Deal,” I said with a sigh. As he began to limp toward Jimmy Sum’s and I struggled to match my stride with his, it was yet another lesson learned today: Gilbert and Sullivan would never, ever, be mistaken for Rogers and Astaire.

about the author

Leslie Caine was once taken hostage at gunpoint and finds that writing about crimes is infinitely more enjoyable than taking part in them. Leslie is a certified interior decorator and lives in Colorado with her husband, two teenage children, and a cocker spaniel, where she is at work on her next Domestic Bliss mystery,
Manor of
Death.

If you enjoyed the latest Domestic Bliss mystery,
FALSE PREMISES
, you won’t want to miss any in Leslie Caine’s charming series.

Look for the first Domestic Bliss mystery,
DEATH BY INFERIOR DESIGN
, at your favorite bookseller.

And read on for a tantalizing early look at Leslie Caine’s next mystery,
MANOR OF DEATH,
in which Eric Gilbert redecorates a home rich with history . . . and reveals old unsolved crimes, unexamined truths of the past . . . and new complications in Gilbert and Sullivan’s budding relationship!

MANOR OF
DEATH

a domestic
bliss mystery
by

Leslie Caine

Coming in Spring 2006 from Dell

MANOR OF DEATH
Coming in Spring 2006

A ghost was on Francine Findley’s roof! That was my first thought at spotting the figure in white—almost luminescent in the moonlight outside my bedroom window.

My second thought was that the stress I’d been under lately was getting to me. Not a ghost. Just a girl wearing a white nightgown, her long red tresses blowing in the breeze. Could that be
Lisa,
up on her mother’s roof at this hour? Who else had long red hair? No, this girl was taller and older than the twelve-year-old Lisa. It was too dark and too distant for me to be certain, but she looked a lot like Willow McAndrews, the college coed who was renting a room in the house next door to Francine’s. Willow had short blond hair, though.

Still staring out the window, I brushed aside the sheets, swung my legs off the bed, and struggled to rouse myself from my brain fog. Why would Willow McAndrews don a red wig and climb out onto her neighbor’s roof? And how could she or anyone else get onto the roof of the third-floor “tower room” in the first place?

As an interior designer, I was intimately familiar with Francine Findley’s octagonal-shaped room. She had hired me recently to renovate her Victorian mansion in preparation for Crestview, Colorado’s, annual tour of historic homes. Contrary to my advice, Francine had insisted on keeping the wall intact that sealed off the only staircase to the roof. Decades ago, previous owners had built that wall after their daughter had fallen to her death, a tragedy that later inspired the rumor that the ghost of “Abby” haunted the widow’s walk—the flat banister roof modeled after homes along New England shores where wives of fishermen could watch for their husbands’ boats.

That afternoon Francine had mentioned that she, too, was exhausted and planned to “have an early dinner and collapse in bed tonight.” She could have been forced to leave home suddenly and had asked Willow to stay overnight to watch Lisa. That would at least explain Willow’s presence
in
the house, just not
on
it. The windows were all dark. Should I call Francine’s cell phone? I looked at my radio alarm clock on my nightstand. The red digital numbers read 1:06 A.M.—a horrid hour to call a single mother probably in the midst of a real emergency merely to report that her sitter was walking around on the roof.

I looked outside again, but just like that, the girl was gone. She couldn’t possibly have climbed down a ladder or even eased herself over the railing that fast. She must have dashed down the stairs and was now in the three-by-ten-foot walled-off space. That meant she was getting in and out through the window near the staircase. The glass had been boarded up, though, last time I’d looked. Yawning, I rubbed at my eyes as I lay back down, cursing this insomnia that had left me so addled for the past month. In desperation, I’d poured a small fortune into my bed: Egyptian sheets that felt like the finest silk, a goose-down comforter, which—

Wait!
I bolted upright. There was a second—and horrible—means for someone to vanish from a rooftop in an instant!

I gasped as my door creaked farther open. I could make out my black cat’s silhouette in the doorway and see her yellow eyes. My heart pounding, I looked out the window again. No one was on the roof. “Oh, Hildi, I have to go check my neighbor’s yard!”

I flicked on the small vintage table lamp atop my nightstand, sprang from my bed, jammed my arms into the sleeves of my dusty-rose bathrobe, and grabbed the first shoes I could find—black sandals. I hoped I wouldn’t trip on the two-inch heels if I had to run to assist some badly injured girl. I started for the door, then remembered I had a small flashlight by my bed and doubled back. I snatched that up and raced down the stairs, my confused cat darting out of my path. I threw open the back door, crammed my feet into my shoes, and tore across the lawn. My leather soles slipped with my every step on the wet grass, but, thankfully, I was able to maintain my balance and didn’t slow my pace until I reached the landscape rocks among the row of rosebushes that rimmed our property line. It hit me then that I absolutely did not want to go traipsing around my neighbor’s property at that hour.

With the stones crunching beneath my feet, I stopped at the short decorative wrought-iron fence and swept my dim beam across Francine’s back lawn. “Hello? Is anybody out here?” I asked the silent darkness, my voice barely above a whisper.

No groans. No crumpled bodies clad in white nightgowns. No maniacal cackles, either. My presence did, however, set off Francine’s next-doorneighbor’s dog to barking—Hillary Durst’s beagle. Hillary’s attic window was aglow with a yellow light. Was that lamp on earlier, or had I wakened her? Or could that be the room that Willow McAndrews was renting from Hillary? If so, Willow had the closest view available of Francine’s widow’s walk. Hillary had once told me that her new renter was a rock climber; maybe pretending to be the red-haired ghost of some unfortunate, long-dead soul was Willow’s idea of humor.

Hildi joined me, her soft fur now brushing against my bare shins. One reassuring thought occurred to me as I turned around: if anyone had fallen off Francine’s roof, Bugle would
already
be barking.

Come to think of it, his shrill barks were what had originally awakened me.

Crestview, Colorado, was doing its best impression of Seattle on the mid-June afternoon as I walked to Francine’s home. I held my London Fog overcoat closed with my free hand, careful not to crush the rolled-up four-foot lengths of wallpaper that I’d angled into my inner pockets. The steady patter of raindrops on my umbrella was a soothing sound, which was helpful to me. When I’d called Francine that morning and reported what I’d seen last night, Francine assured me she’d been home all night and that “it is absolutely impossible that there was a prowler on my roof.” She sounded as though she thought I was as flaky as old paint on a picnic table.

Could I have dreamed the whole thing? I’d never had such a vivid dream, if so. Maybe my current struggles with the neighborhood association and with my beloved landlady, Audrey Munroe, were wreaking havoc with me, even during my sleep.

While stepping over a puddle, I silently repeated my personal mantra: confidence and optimism. In so many ways, this was my all-time dream assignment—an interior-design job within my own astonishingly lovely neighborhood of Maplewood Hill, at the Victorian mansion that I’d lusted over for two years now, ever since I’d first moved to Crestview. Granted, I’d hit nothing but snags and roadblocks so far, but that goes with the territory—the better the job, the bigger the challenges.

And, after all, Audrey had already told me she understood and supported my decision to accept this assignment at Francine’s—that I couldn’t very well damage my career without as much as knowing
why
Audrey didn’t “wish to associate with Francine. Ever.” (Nor was Audery willing to elaborate on the matter, even so.)

Furthermore, soon enough the neighborhood association would approve of our plans to install three picture windows within the tower room. If not, I would plead with Francine on bended knee till she allowed me to go with my plan A: remove the blasted inner wall that made the room all lopsided. Her sole argument was that she had “a severe fear of heights” and didn’t want Lisa to be able to get onto the roof. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why she refused to let us simply remove both the wall
and
the staircase to the roof. Be that as it may, when it comes to interior design, the customer is always right; after all, the customer, not the designer, is the one who will live with the final results. However, some customers need more nudges than others to discover their own good taste and sound decision-making skills. Francine Findley required a nice, firm shove in the back, and fortunately for her, she’d hired just the right designer to give her one.

Speaking of shoves, a chilly blast of wind encouraged me to step up my pace a little. Francine’s and Audrey’s backyards bordered each other, so when the lawns weren’t drenched and muddy, it was a thirty-second walk between our back doors. Even as I picked my way across a veritable river forming alongside Francine’s walkway, I was so taken by the looming presence of the tower room that I tilted my umbrella to look up. The curtains were quivering, as though someone had spotted me and ducked out of sight—Lisa Findley, no doubt, Francine’s daughter.

Protected by the roof over the Findley’s stoop, I shook off my umbrella and closed it. I rang the old-fashioned twist-key doorbell, and after a brief wait, Francine, a pretty woman in her late forties with auburn hair like mine, threw open the door and greeted me with a gusty “Good afternoon, Erin.”

“Hi, Francine. We’re having quite the shower today.”

“We sure are. Let me take your coat for you.”

I thanked her, wondering once again what could possibly have caused such a deep rift between my landlady and Francine in the three short years since Francine had moved to Crestview. She had always been nice to me. “I’ve got the wallpaper samples in my coat pockets,” I explained as I extracted the samples and some heavy-duty double-sided sticky tape.

“I
thought
you looked a little stiff—and wide— around the waistline,” she teased. As she grabbed a hanger out of the coat closet, I noticed a Halloween costume. It was a cheap department-store purchase— a skeleton painted on thin polyster black fabric and a plastic mask for the skull, its elastic cord looped over the hanger hook.

“Oh, look, Francine,” I said with a grin, “it seems as though you’ve got a skeleton in your closet.”

Francine followed my gaze, chuckled, and said, “Well, I suppose we
all
have skeletons in our closets. But this one in particular must be Lisa’s doing.” Francine clicked her tongue and said with a sigh, “She must be trying to give us a message about the lack of closet space in her bedroom.”

Along with my landlady and the homeowners’ association, Lisa was a third source of contention for me on this particular job. Francine’s twelve-year-old had been on very friendly terms with me—up until she’d learned that I had been hired to turn her would-be bedroom into a studio for her mom. It was my job to insure that
all
members of the family were satisfied—and preferably thrilled—with the transformation of their living spaces. “I can design a wonderful, spacious closet for her.”

Francine scoffed, “Oh, that won’t do the trick. Believe me.”

“She’s still hinting that she wants to have the thirdfloor room as her bedroom, then?”

“Yes. But I’ve told her all along that I was eventually going to convert that room into my music studio.” Francine was a musician who played some kind of modern-day electronic harp that she’d yet to demonstrate for me. “But now, after we’ve lived here for almost three years, she seems to think—”

Francine broke off as a door above us slammed, followed by the sound of tromping footsteps down the stairs. Lisa, Francine’s only child, sneered at me as she descended the final step. Today she wore a black camisole underneath a demin jacket. She was a freckle-faced redhead, and I couldn’t help but study her now to see if that could have been Lisa on the roof, after all. I was certain, though, that the girl I saw was a young woman and not Lisa. She lowered the headphones on her Walkman as she returned my steady gaze and grumbled, “Oh.
You’re
here.”

“Yes, Erin just arrived,” her mother replied breezily. “Which you would have realized if you weren’t always pumping rock music into your ears.”

Despite Francine’s pleasant tone of voice, Lisa rolled her eyes.

Francine smiled at me and, while Lisa grabbed a backpack out of the closet and slung a strap over one shoulder, explained, “Lisa here is off on a sleep-over before her best friend leaves town for three weeks.”

Lisa shrugged off her mother’s attempt to hug her, muttering, “You don’t need to tell the whole world my private business, Mom.”

“I’m only mentioning it because, at some point soon, the three of us need to sit down together and discuss what we want done with your bedroom.”

“Jeez! I already
told
you! I
want
the tower room as my bedroom! If I can’t have that, you might as well do whatever
you
want to
my
room!”

It was now Francine’s turn to roll her eyes in response to her daughter’s words. In a huff, Lisa proceeded to step into a pair of black flip-flops on the closet floor.