“You met her when you were in second or third grade?” Sam’s question headed her back to the point.
“Yes. Our mothers had known each other forever, but my family moved that year. Up.”
“You moved up?”
“Exactly. My father got a promotion-I guess-and we moved to a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood. I changed schools and started in the Brownies. And met Courtney.”
“And you were friends?”
“Never. I don’t remember all that well, but I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days and I don’t think we ever had a chance to become friends. You see, my mother wanted me to be like Courtney and she was very open about her feelings. Even a kid isn’t going to like someone her mother holds up as a good example. Courtney was thin. Courtney was a straight-A student. Courtney was popular. Courtney could play the piano. Courtney was on the swim team and, despite my extra fat, I sank like a stone to the bottom of the country club pool.” She noticed Sam’s eyebrows rise at the mention of her family’s club membership, but she didn’t feel she had to explain her entire past right then. “You get the idea. I couldn’t like someone I was always being compared to.”
“I won’t argue with that.”
“And I was jealous as hell of her. Over little things. Like my mother’s idea of an appropriate bedroom for a young girl included lots of ruffles and fake French-country furniture. I slept in a canopied bed until I went off to college. In fact, I may have gone off to college just to get away from that horrible room. I wasn’t even allowed to put up posters on my own walls. And that wallpaper desperately needed to be covered! My mother,” she explained, “loved cabbage roses.”
“I don’t think I know what they are.”
“You’re lucky. So was Courtney. She slept in a room furnished with teak Scandinavian furniture. I used to think she could stay in that room and imagine she was living in an apartment in Greenwich Village even though she lived a few blocks away from me in a conventional upper-middle-class suburb. And when she was in high school the rock posters were so thick on her walls that she probably didn’t even have to turn on the heat in the winter.” She paused. “I was jealous of her.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“I don’t mean to sound stupid. I guess a therapist would say that we have a lot of unresolved stuff between us.”
Sam seemed to be thinking for a moment. “You didn’t change your name, did you? I mean, you grew up as Josie Pigeon.”
“My family called me Josephine, but everyone else always knew me as Josie. Why?”
“Just wondering. What did she say to you?”
“About what?”
“About the past. What did she say about you two meeting again after all these years?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
ELEVEN
"NOW WAIT A second. How was Island Contracting chosen to be on Courtney Castle’s Castles?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who contacted you?”
“Bobby Valentine.”
“How?”
“He called on the phone. Why?”
Sam ignored her question and asked another of his own. “When?”
“About a month ago.”
“Did you take the call?”
She had to think to answer that question. “The answering machine actually picked up the call. I called him back.”
“And what did he say?”
“He asked if Island Contracting would be on the show. What else?”
“Josie, try to remember exactly what he said and when he said it. On the tape and during your first conversation.”
“I’m not sure I can,” she admitted.
“Try. It might turn out to be important.”
“Okay. I think he just introduced himself. You know, I’m Bobby Valentine and I’m a television producer and I need to speak with Josie Pigeon immediately. In fact, I’m sure that’s what he said because I remember Dottie was listening and she said he would be a difficult client since he was so snotty that he thought I should know right away what he did for a living. Of course, that was before we knew what he wanted. We thought he was calling about a normal remodeling job at first.”
“Of course. But you called him back, right?”
“Yes, immediately. And he explained that he didn’t want to hire us. He wanted Island Contracting for a television show. I… I’m not sure if he said the name of the show then. But he did say that he wanted to feature the remodeling project we were going to start this month, the one we’re doing now.”
“How did he refer to it? I mean, you usually say things like the Richardson project or the Jones project, right?”
“Sure. We refer to it by the owner’s name. This one we’ve been calling the PBS house though. Um… I think he may have called it the house on the bay.”
“How did he know about it?”
“Oh, that’s easy. He said that someone who worked on the show had told him about it and that they were always looking for interesting projects, which made a lot of sense at the time. Do you think he was lying?”
“I have no idea. But I sure would like to know which staff member knows the owners of that house. Who are the owners, by the way? Do they live on the island?”
“I doubt it. I’ve never met them.”
“What? Doesn’t that worry you?”
Josie laughed. “Are you kidding? You’ve been around long enough to know that homeowners frequently are big pains in the ass, always in a panic that the job won’t get done on time while making extensive and time-consuming changes. This job would be the easiest ever if that television show wasn’t involved.”
“So how did you get the remodeling job?”
“It just dropped in our laps. Like the TV show, come to think of it. The house is owned by a company called Island Homes. My contact has been through some lawyer. He called a few days before Bobby Valentine did and asked if I would look at an architect’s plan and submit a bid for the job. I did, and it was accepted.”
“That simple?” Sam, who had been around for more than one of Josie’s projects, was surprised.
“It was. I couldn’t believe it. The bid was accepted in a day. Amazing.”
“Have you ever had that happen before?”
“Yeah, once or twice. But usually with repeat clients. What happens is we do a job and the clients are happy with our work, so when they need something else done, they think of us. But everyone wants a bargain and there are a lot of contracting companies, so they ask for a few bids. But once the bids come in, they discover that our bid, if not the lowest, is in the ballpark and since they know our work, they really don’t have to think about it. They hire us right away.”
“But this is the first time it has happened with a new client?”
“I guess. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But so what? What could it have to do with Courtney’s disappearance?”
“Probably nothing. It’s just interesting.” He frowned.
“Didn’t you tell me that you had two big jobs this summer and the first was on one of those Cape Cods at the foot of the dunes? Did that job disappear?”
“Oh, no. It’s still on. We’re going to start that the third week of July. But you’re right. We were going to do them in reverse order. But things changed suddenly…”
“And Bobby Valentine just happened to want to tape the bay job for the show at the beginning of the summer?”
“How did you know?”
“Just a good guess. Seems to me there are a few too many coincidences here, Josie. Who made the change? The lawyer for Island Homes?”
“No. It was the other job. The family who owns that house had a change in plans. They were going to spend the second half of the summer in the house and I’d remodel the kitchen and add on a breakfast slash family room before then, but they decided to do it the other way and asked if Island Contracting could accommodate them.”