Death by Inferior Design Read Online Free Page B

light seemed a taunting exposure, so we spent those somber weeks with curtains closed, shrouded in heavy shadows.
    One evening after the meal that she couldn’t force herself to eat, she reached for me. “You have to promise me one thing, Erin.” Her voice was a halting, barely audible rasp, which tore at my heart.
    “Of course, Mom. Anything.”
    “You have to promise me you won’t ever look for your birth parents, under any circumstances. Do you understand?”
    I didn’t, not for a moment, but I replied without hesitation. “We agreed to that years ago, Mom.” Her hand had become frighteningly cold in mine.
    “I know. But you must promise not to change your mind once I’m gone.”
    “I promise, Mom. But why is it so important to you?”
    She returned the oxygen mask to her face for one more shallow breath, then, closing her lovely blue eyes—the only feature of my mother that still resembled the woman who’d always been my one true parent—whispered, “I can’t explain, Erin. I’ve got to rest now.”
    Although she’d languished for another nine days, it seemed to me that she’d poured what little strength and resources she had into asking me for that final promise. Afterward, she said less and less, until she fell silent for good.
    Now I resented the hell out of whoever had forced me to relive this heartbreak. Jeannie Gilbert—my mother— had been a vibrant, optimistic person in life, and that was the part of her I wanted to keep in my heart and in my memory. I could almost hear her spouting one of her cheerful aphorisms: “There’s a reason God gave us eyes in front of our head and not in the back, Erin, so that we can always look ahead.”
    Maintaining an eyes-forward approach had been a second promise of mine to her. It was one that, although unspoken, I also fully intended to keep.
    I wrenched my thoughts away from the past as I pried the last piece of aspen off the wall. Taylor announced that he happened to have some scrap pieces of Sheetrock in his truck, and I always carried mud and tape in my van for just such an emergency. Soon we had squared off the hidden hole and patched it.
    After an inordinately long absence for someone ostensibly putting away a few items, Carl returned to the room. He’d had enough time to read every word in those letters a dozen times. Suspicious that, despite his innocent act, he could have been the one to set this trap for me, I assigned him the miserable and messy job of sanding off the wall texture in preparation for the wallpaper. Even if it turned out that his wife was cheating on him and he’d had nothing to do with my photograph being inside his wall, he’d been a grump to work with; he deserved a nice coating of grit and white dust, I decided with petty satisfaction.
    I turned to Taylor. “Are you ready to get started on the new furniture and built-ins?”
    “I’ll get to ’em eventually.”
    “ ‘Eventually’ has rather tight limitations when the homeowner is supposed to return to a finished room in thirty-three hours. Even though the bedposts and legs have already been lathed, the headboard has a slanted backrest and an attached bookcase that’ll take a chunk of time to build. Let me show you my drawings.”
    He made a derisive noise. “So you’re in this big hurry, but suddenly you want me to look at your artwork?”
    “I’m talking about my sketches of the pieces I need you to build for me!” I took a calming breath and made a quick note to myself to adopt a new mantra for the weekend: be nice to the carpenter.
    I showed him my neat and precise diagrams, which he creased and stuffed in his pocket. He ignored me completely when I asked if he needed help unloading the boards from my van. Instead he called past my shoulder, “Hey, Carl! I’ll give you a hand with sanding that drywall.”
    Pointing out to Taylor that he was our carpenter and had yet to do any actual carpentry would not help matters. The upstairs guest room was now crammed