Death by Inferior Design Read Online Free Page A

more time into the cubbyhole to determine if there was anything else behind the drywall, but the letters and necklace were everything.
    “ ‘My dearest,’ ” Taylor read, crouching down by the pile of letters, “ ‘You were constantly on my mind today—’ ”
    “Stop!” I cried. “You have no right to read those letters, Taylor! They belong to somebody else.”
    He ignored me but did at least read silently. After he flipped over the first page, he said, “It’s boring anyway. Signed, ‘Love always,’ and the letter M.”
    “I don’t know any M people,” Carl muttered.
    “Unless it’s really H for Henderson.” Taylor’s voice was mocking.
    Carl grabbed the letters from Taylor’s hands. “That’s an M. And even if it is an H, it’s not my love note. I’d remember if I’d been stashing love notes inside my bedroom wall, for God’s sake!” The muscles in his jaw were working.
    He paged through the letters, and this time I couldn’t object—they’d been found in his house, after all— though I grew increasingly uneasy. If they were Debbie’s, I found myself hoping Carl wasn’t the violently jealous type.
    “The paper looks really old,” Carl remarked. His features and voice revealed some relief. “I’ll bet Randy or Myra put them here. Hey! M for Myra!”
    But wouldn’t Myra have remembered this stash in the years since they’d last lived here? Discussing the Hendersons’ design project, if nothing else, surely would have sparked a memory. How hard could it have been to sneak upstairs and remove the contents before I arrived? “I have to plaster up that hole and have it dry in time to hang the wallpaper,” I said, thinking out loud.
    Taylor went back to work tearing down paneling while Carl carried the letters and the pendant to some other room. I idly turned over the board that had been covering the hole to see if the back half of the groove had been filed away.
    In a rectangular, carved-out indentation that would have lined up with the cubbyhole was tucked a small photograph of a smiling toddler with red hair. She stood next to a blue-and-green checkered umbrella stand. I stifled a gasp.
    I glanced up at Taylor. He was paying me no mind, absorbed in his work. I peeled the picture loose and pocketed it. My pulse was racing so fast that I felt faint.
    I’d seen an enlarged image of that photograph sitting on my mother’s piano every day for sixteen years of my life. The baby in the photograph was me.

chapter 2
    I felt as though I’d been sucker-punched. I continued to rip out the paneling, grateful that this activity allowed me not only to stare at a wall, but to treat that wall with no small degree of violence.
    What was my baby picture doing here? And how the heck had someone gotten hold of it? My adoptive mother was dead; my adoptive father had moved to California more than a decade ago. Only my birth parents could have had copies of that photograph.
    Memories of my mother’s death two years earlier made my eyes sting with tears. My chest ached, as it had throughout those two months of hospice care when my mother lay dying, the worst time of my life. My hopes and prayers had focused on the desperate, futile longing that I could somehow give my breath to my mother— could prevent her congenitally diseased lungs from filling with fluid—taking her from this world and from me when she was just forty-six years old.
    To make the end more comfortable and less impersonal, I’d brought her home, only to discover that the apartment she and I once shared and loved swiftly mutated into a mini-hospital, rife with the odors of disease and despair, pungent antiseptic, and medicine. My mother had been my first and ongoing client long before I’d enrolled at Parsons, and yet every design decision I’d made suddenly mocked me—every speck of color and vitality in our home made her look all the more ashen and frail and her hospital bed more stark. Even fresh flowers became merely funereal;