MONDAY, MAY 13
Chapter 1
“They’re at it again.” Gloria Willingham stood on our doorstep, shoulders hunched as if to resist a blow. Her elegant contralto voice throbbed with righteous indignation and a suggestion of barely controlled hysteria. I tried to decide who she was channeling. Lady Macbeth? Hedda Gabler? The Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland? Like my husband, Michael—and for that matter, most of their colleagues in Caerphilly College’s Drama Department—Gloria tended to reprise her favorite acting roles whenever real life gave her the chance.
“I told you this TV thing was a bad idea,” she added, flipping back her mane of shoulder-length braids.
“And I agreed with you.” I stepped away from the front door and gestured her inside. “And so did the town council, but unfortunately they couldn’t think of a way to stop it.”
“At least we tried.” Gloria lifted her chin, and her fierce grin suggested that she enjoyed the memory of her dramatic appearance before the council, demanding that they stop her neighbors from having their house redone by one of the many home makeover shows that had spawned to fill whole channels of cable airtime.
“Not even one of the better-known makeover shows,” one of the council members had said with a condescending sniff. But the problem wasn’t so much that Marvelous Mansions was a relatively unknown—and probably low-budget—home makeover show. Any makeover show would have been a disruption to one of the quiet, tree-lined streets of downtown Caerphilly.
And on top of that, it was the Smetkamps’ house getting the makeover. The Smetkamps, who seemed to have made a hobby out of annoying their neighbors. A hobby? More like a crusade.
But unfortunately, as long as they and Marvelous Mansions filed for the proper building permits and obeyed all the relevant town ordinances, there was nothing the council could do about it.
“Sorry to darken your doorstep at such an ungodly hour,” Gloria went on. “But yesterday when I told Michael how horrible it was, he said I could come and use your library the next time things got too noisy next door. And yes, I could work at my office in the Drama Building, but this time of year you can’t go five minutes day or night without students showing up to ask for extensions on papers and breaks on exams and—”
“It’s absolutely fine.” I was suppressing the urge to chuckle at her calling 8:00 A.M. “an ungodly hour.” No wonder I got along so well with Michael’s theater colleagues. Eight A.M. absolutely was ungodly to a night owl like me. The daily discipline of getting my twin sons off to school on time did not come naturally, but this far along in the school year, I woke early by force of habit, even on days like today when school wasn’t in session due to teacher workdays.
Gloria stooped, picked up a battered copier paper box, and handed it to me. It was heavy—full of books and papers, I suspected. Gloria then slung a laptop over one shoulder, heaved a bulky leather satchel over the other, and followed me across the foyer and then down the long hall to our library.
“I’m not normally a fussbudget,” she said. “You know me. But I’ve got that damned dissertation to finish. If I don’t turn it in by the end of the summer, the college might not let me stay.”
“I understand,” I said. “Sorry I haven’t been able to keep them in line. The makeover crew, that is.”
“And why is keeping them in line your job, anyway?” Gloria asked.
“Because I’m the mayor’s special assistant in charge of nuts and nuisances,” I said.
She chuckled at that.
Actually, the official wording was Executive Assistant for Special Projects, but my version was more accurate. I was thinking of asking for a title change to make it official.
And since it was all part of the job, once I got Gloria settled, I’d be heading into town to see what I could do to keep the makeover people from making life unbearable for the rest of the neighborhood.
Perhaps I should offer a refuge to any of them who couldn’t tolerate the chaos. Not just the use of the library—we could provide spare bedrooms as well. We were expecting a big crowd of family and friends for Memorial Day, but it would be at least a week before any of them arrived. If the makeover was still going on by then—and still making life unbearable for the Smetkamps and their neighbors—we’d figure something out.
“This is perfect,” she said, as we set her stuff down on one of the sturdy Mission-style oak tables in our library. She began unpacking the interesting contents of her box—which I suspected were only a small portion of the books and articles she was using to research her sweeping study of Black women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance. Maybe I’d peruse some of the plays later. For now—
“So you said they’re at it again,” I said. “At what? If they started construction before seven—”
“No,” she said. “Oh, they were slamming their truck doors and talking at the top of their lungs and doing everything they could to be annoying. They were even making weird animal noises. Gobbling like turkeys, for heaven’s sake. But no actual hammering and sawing. In fact, they hadn’t even started doing that when I took off. They seemed to be arguing about something.”
“Arguing with whom? Each other, or some of the neighbors, or—”
“No idea. I deliberately didn’t even look. Just got in my car, backed out of the garage, and fled the scene of the crime. Didn’t want to get sucked into any of it.”
Nice for her that she could just leave. I didn’t want to get sucked into any arguments, either, but it was all part of my job.
“Are you going over there?” she asked, as if reading my mind.
“Unfortunately,” I said.
“See if you can talk some sense into Jennifer. That’s the student who rents my spare bedroom. She’s spent the last few days hanging out in the front yard in a bikini. She seems to think the TV people are going to discover her and put her in the movies.”
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Seriously. I live for the day when I can afford my mortgage without renting out the spare room to her and the attic to that weirdo and his forty-seven computers.”
“Forty-seven?” I echoed. “He’s even got my nephew Kevin beat. And there are worse things than having a tame techie in your basement. Or attic. It’s like having a sentient firewall and spam blocker.”
“Forty-seven’s an exaggeration, but he has at least ten,” she said. “And he’s not tame. More like feral. Not the least bit helpful like your nephew. The only time he talks to me is when he has a complaint. Remember the twelve-hour power outage we had last week after that huge thunderstorm? He practically had a nervous breakdown by the end of it, and he’s threatening to withhold his rent unless I install a generator. Which is rich, considering what he did to my power bill the first month he was here.”
“Your power bill?” I echoed.
“First month he was here, the total was up by nearly eight hundred dollars,” she said. “And the only thing that was different was him and all his equipment. Did your nephew Kevin’s setup do that to you when he moved in?”
“Not that I noticed,” I said. “And Kevin’s the one who arranged installing a whole bunch of solar panels on the roof of our barn, so these days our electrical bills are next to nothing unless we have a prolonged heat wave or cold spell.”
“Wish Chris would do something useful like that,” she grumbled. “I told him he either had to pay the difference or find another place to live, and he griped about it for a while, then told me he’d found the problem and my usage should be back to normal. And it was. But I keep my eyes on the power bill, just in case. And if he thinks he can stop paying rent to force me to install a generator, he has another think coming.”
“Sounds like a pretty difficult tenant,” I said.
“At least I’m not stuck with him much longer,” she said. “The student I rented the attic to in the fall had to drop out, and Chris was the only person who answered my ad. I was so desperate to get a new tenant that I probably didn’t do as much checking as I should have. But his lease is up at the end of July, and I’m not renewing it.”
“Tenant/landlord disputes can be nasty,” I said. “If you have any problem getting him to either pay up or move out—”
“Michael already gave me the contact info for your cousin, the lawyer,” she said. “And I’m absolutely calling him if I get any more static from the attic. What would I do without you and Michael?”
I got Gloria settled in the library and then dropped by the kitchen to let my cousin Rose Noire know that we had a guest in the library and I’d be heading into town.
The kitchen smelled heavenly. I smiled as I took a deep breath. One of these days, Rose Noire might suddenly decide that she wanted a place of her own and move out of the third-floor bedroom she’d occupied for so many years. But not just yet, thank goodness. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was smelling—a mix of coriander, turmeric, cumin, cloves, and several other spices. But I knew what it added up to.
“Curry for dinner?” I asked, in a hopeful tone.
“Oh, no,” she said. “This is for Seth’s sheep.”
She returned to what she’d been doing—vigorously stirring the liquid simmering in our biggest stockpot.
“Do sheep like curry?” I peeked into the pot. Disappointing. It wasn’t actually curry—just great handfuls of spices simmering in water. “Curry flavor,” I corrected.
“We don’t know yet,” she said. “We hope so.”
“Then why are you cooking it for them?” The only possible reason I could think of was that they were trying to flavor the meat while it was still on the hoof—but Seth’s sheep were wool sheep rather than meat sheep. And he didn’t even send them to the slaughterhouse when they grew too old to be good wool producers— he moved them to the retirement pasture, where they led a relatively quiet life most of the time. Once a month or so, Seth would give workshops on raising, shearing, or herding sheep—the latter with the assistance of Lad, his champion Border collie—and from what I’d seen the senior sheep rather seemed to enjoy being drafted into service for these events. And they definitely enjoyed spending the summer in their pen in the town square as part of the farm animal petting zoo that had become such a tourist attraction. So no, Seth would have no interest in curry-flavoring his sheep.
“If you have no idea whether the sheep will like it, why are you fixing it?” I asked.
“It’s one of your grandfather’s projects,” Rose Noire said, as if that explained everything. Well, it did and it didn’t. Dr. J. Montgomery Blake, the eminent zoologist and environmentalist, almost always had dozens of projects and experiments going. But he was a passionate animal welfare activist, vehemently crusading against any kind of research that caused pain or stress to animal subjects. With both him and Rose Noire involved, the sheep would be fine.
But it would be nice to know what he was up to. And clearly Rose Noire was in no mood to explain.
I’d ask Grandfather later. I pulled out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, as I called my giant combined calendar and to-do list and scribbled in a reminder.
“We might be having a few overnight guests,” I said. “I’m going to offer the Smetkamps’ neighbors a refuge if they need it. And maybe even the Smetkamps themselves.”
“Oh, what a good idea.” She abandoned her sheep curry to dash across the room and rummage through the wicker basket she used to haul things to and from her herb drying shed in the pasture behind the house. “And if you’re going down to the makeover site, take this with you.”
She handed me a small cobalt-blue glass bottle with a black plastic screw top. It was labeled Breathe! in elegant calligraphy.
“If anyone gets worked up, try to get them to smell this,” she said. “Lavender, orange, rose, ylang-ylang, and myrrh. It’s a new blend I’ve come up with—it’s almost magical!”
“Am I supposed to use it on the poor, stressed-out neighbors or the quarrelsome makeover crew?”
“Either,” she said. “Both. Just tell whoever needs it to hold the bottle near their nose and inhale slowly and deeply.”
“Thanks.” I tried, for a moment, to imagine what would happen if I raced up to one of the quarrels that kept breaking out at the makeover site, waving the little blue bottle and ordering everyone to take a drag on it. Well, stranger things had happened there. I tucked the little bottle in my tote bag.
“Will you have time to pick the boys up after school?” she asked.
“No school today, remember?” I said. “Teacher workday. They had a sleepover with Adam Burke last night. Minerva will take them to baseball practice this morning and drop them off later.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “How silly of me to forget. Maybe I’ll make some brownies for the team. And a few extra as a thank you to Minerva and Chief Burke.”
I agreed that this was an excellent idea. Then I grabbed a cold soda for the road and headed for town.
I shoved Marvelous Mansions and the Smetkamps out of my mind as I drove into town. Although the weather threatened to be unseasonably warm later, for now it was a beautiful May morning. Ordinarily, I’d have been focused on planning Memorial Day activities, both for the town and for the horde of extended family who’d be coming to stay with us for the long weekend. But if there were problems at the makeover site, I needed to take care of that.
Still, I couldn’t do anything till I got there. So I rolled the window down and turned on the radio. Someone down at the college radio station couldn’t wait for the semester to end—they were playing nothing but summer-themed songs. I hummed along with “In the Summertime,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” and “Walking on Sunshine.”
I’d tucked my phone into the little holder hanging on the dashboard where I could see it without picking it up. About halfway through my drive, it dinged to signal the arrival of a text. I glanced over. The text was from Mayor Randall Shiffley. “Big trouble here on Bland Street” it said.
Bland Street was where the home makeover was taking place. How could big trouble possibly have developed this early in the day? Especially trouble big enough that Randall had been called in.
“Nothing I can do about it till I get there,” I muttered, and went back to singing along with “Summer in the City.”
My pace slowed when I reached town, mainly because the late spring tourist season was in full swing. Especially as I approached the town square, where I could see that the sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians. Traffic crawled, since most of the cars were either rubbernecking at the various sights or cruising along at a snail’s pace, looking for parking. I felt a twinge of impatience, but then I reminded myself that every single one of those slow-moving tourists was here spending money in the shops and restaurants owned by my friends and neighbors. Randall’s efforts to promote Caerphilly as a tourist destination were bringing prosperity to the town. So I fought down the urge to honk at the dawdlers, or mutter things under my breath, and focused on smiling at them. Especially the ones who were already laden with shopping bags so early in the day. They must have gone on a buying binge at the farmers market in the town square, since most of the shops weren’t even open yet.
Still, I was glad to leave most of the tourist traffic behind when I turned right onto Bland Street. If I’d turned left, the street would have dead-ended at the edge of the Caerphilly College campus after a few blocks. But to the right it led through block after block of peaceful, tree-lined residential neighborhoods. This near the college, the houses were reasonably large, and mostly either Colonial or mock Tudor. After a few blocks, the yards grew smaller, and the sizable Tudor and Colonial houses gave way to Craftsman-style cottages and stucco bungalows from the thirties. And as I knew from the days when Michael and I had been house hunting, the prices dropped from astronomical to merely inflated and unaffordable.
So I’d long ago learned to enjoy this neighborhood as a spectator. And this time of year there was a lot to enjoy. The dogwoods were fading, but the roses, peonies, and rhododendrons were going strong. I saw at least a dozen residents already at work in their yards—probably taking advantage of the cool morning hours before the predicted heat made gardening less enjoyable. I waved to the ones I knew, mostly Mother’s fellow Garden Club members.
Copyright © 2024 by Donna Andrews
