Free Death by Inferior Design by Leslie Caine Page A

head back to the lumberyard, or I make your table thirty-six inches high ’stead of forty inches.”
    “There’s no way I’m short a board.”
    “Search the yard if you don’t believe me. Frisk me if you want, Gilbert, but I promise you, you ain’t finding no missing board. Face it. You underordered your materials. Tough luck.”
    I was too sleep-deprived to be nice, and I was itching to strangle the guy, even if he was eight inches taller than I and outweighed me by some one hundred pounds of solid muscle. “I bought five of these boards, Taylor, and all five were here last night when I covered them with plastic. How many boards did you start with this morning?”
    “I dunno, Gilbert. Nobody told me I was supposed to count boards. I’m a carpenter, not a mathematician.”
    And counting to five is hardly calculus! I closed my eyes and let out a quick growl to vent before replying.
    This stand for Carl’s thirteen-inch TV had been the only aspect of my design that Carl had commented on when he’d nixed my armoire design—tiger maple to match the night table with knobs that were identical to the alder chest’s. With it, the entire room would have created a fabulous, unified feast for the eyes. Carl, however, had objected. “My TV can’t be closed in, or I’ll lose emergency access to the rabbit ears when the cable’s out!” He wanted me to simply stack their two oak reproduction icebox nightstands and set the TV on top of them. This forty-inch-tall oak stand was my compromise between perfection and an eyesore.
    Slightly calmer, I decided to reason with my carpenter. “Okay, Taylor. Explain something to me. If you didn’t add up the total length of the boards you had available, how did you know you were going to come up short?”
    “That was just experience talking, plus a bit of luck.” Pride lurked in his voice. “I remembered you told me yesterday to make ’em thirty-six inches high.”
    Breathe, Erin, I reminded myself. Take nice deep calming breaths. Then grab a two-by-four and smack the guy upside the head.
    I looked at the lumber he was using. There did indeed appear to be only four boards. It was extremely unlikely that some random thief had stolen a single board. Randy or Myra could have taken a board into their house, but why ? Then again, I seemed to have been asking myself that question nonstop ever since Carl Henderson first walked into my downtown office last month.
    Taylor tapped his wrist, indicating an imaginary watch. “Time’s wasting. What’s it gonna be? Do I fall behind schedule and start over once the lumberyard’s open—in, like, three hours—or do I make this hunk of junk thirty-six inches high?”
    I decided to let the “hunk of junk” remark slide, largely because, in my exhaustion, my wittiest comeback would have been —Oh, yeah? If that’s a hunk of junk, you’re a hunk of punk— and I had too much pride. That darn board had to be someplace. Maybe Taylor had simply misplaced it. More likely, Steve Sullivan or Kevin McBride was trying to get a leg up on the Super Bowl bet by messing with his competitor’s plans.
    “Well?” Taylor prompted.
    “You can wait the two minutes it’ll take me to try to locate the missing board, then I’ll let you know.”
    “Suit yourself, Gilbert, but it’s too late now. I already cut up two of those boards.”
    Nothing under the table. No boards wedged alongside the concrete pad by the back door. This backyard was roughly half an acre, but there was no place for an eight-foot board to get misplaced. “At this point, I just have to know what happened to the thing, even if it’s too late to get what I want.”
    The only reasonable possibilities were that (a) I was losing my mind; (b) Taylor had recognized his mistake earlier and had chopped one board into shims and tossed them to avoid having to admit to his error; or (c) someone had maliciously removed one board from my stack of supplies to mess with my design and my head. The