The Nightingale Before Christmas(9)

For a moment, I contemplated picking up the sledgehammer and decking Clay with it. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths until the urge passed. Then I pulled out my phone and called Randall Shiffley.

“Meg? I’m already on my way over there. What’s up?”

“We need some help out here,” I said. “Clay Spottiswood was removing a wall—”

“The load-bearing wall between the master bath and the big closet? The one I told him not to touch under any circumstances?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Apparently, in addition to being load-bearing, it also contains some of the pipes for the bathroom. He’s flooded the study downstairs. We’re going to need some workmen to repair the damage. Tomás and Mateo can’t do it all themselves.”

“I have work I need Tomás and Mateo to be doing,” Clay protested.

“Too bad,” I said. “For the time being, Tomás and Mateo will be fixing all the damage you’ve done—here and downstairs in Sarah’s room.”

“But—”

My temper boiled over.

“Get out of here right now!” I stamped my foot as I said it, for good measure.

“I need to finish—”

“You’re finished for the day!” I said. “And maybe for good. I’ll call later to tell you if you’ll be allowed to continue or if we’re kicking you out of the house completely.”

Clay opened his mouth to argue, but looking at my face must have made him think better of it. He disappeared for a moment into the walk-in closet, then reappeared, putting on his coat as he stormed out.

I was still taking my deep, calming breaths when I heard the front door slam downstairs.

“Meg?” I’d almost forgotten that I had Randall on the phone. “You really kicking him out?”

“I think I should let the committee make that decision,” I said. “Things would certainly be a lot more peaceful around here if he was gone. And Martha would kill for a chance to do this room. She already has a set of plans, you know—she really expected to get it.”

“Then she should have applied before the deadline like everyone else, instead of assuming the rules didn’t apply to her and we’d come begging.”

“No argument from me,” I said. “But right now I’d rather have her doing the master bedroom than Clay. Do you want to bring this up with the committee, or shall I?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I’ll tell the rest of the committee we need to hold an emergency meeting this afternoon or this evening. You hold down the fort there at the house. I’ll send over some guys.”

I was reassured. Not just that help was on the way, but also that Randall, who was on the committee, would support me if I decided we had to kick out Clay. I suspected without Randall’s influence the committee might have caved when Martha pitched her hissy fit. Of course, they probably wouldn’t have taken the master suite away from Clay—they’d have demoted one of the lesser designers. Princess Violet of the Many Ruffles. Or the designer Mother and I called Goth Girl, who was turning the third bedroom into a black-and-red pseudo-medieval lair. Or Our Lady of Chintz, who was running amok with too many different prints in the dining room, causing Mother, at regular intervals, to mutter thanks for the pocket doors separating it from her living room.

Or maybe the Quilt Ladies, the cheerful pair of designers who were turning the bonus room over the garage into a quilt and craft room. We all forgot the Quilt Ladies were there half the time, since their room was a little apart from the main body of the house. You could reach it from the garage via the back stairway. Or you could go through the now-paint-smeared back bathroom. Not my favorite feature of the house, that bathroom. From the main part of the house, you couldn’t reach it from the hall, only from one or the other of the two smaller bedrooms. And yet it had a back door leading to the bonus room. If Michael and I had bought this house, the first thing I’d have changed would be to remove that back door. I wasn’t sure what would worry me the most about that door—that it would let burglars sneak in through my sons’ rooms, or that it would give the boys such an easy way to sneak out when they got old enough to think of doing so.

But however dysfunctional the house’s floor plan might seem to me, the two stairways were going to make traffic flow easier once we opened up the house to visitors. We could send people up one set of stairs and down and out through the other.

I made a mental note to drop by to see the Quilt Ladies later in the day. Just because they weren’t squeaky wheels didn’t mean I should ignore them.