Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

open and stepped inside the bedroom, where a small brown bundle of fur began leaping at her knees in a frenzy of barking and yipping.

“Heyyyy,” Grace said softly, bending down to get a closer look. The dog leapt into her arms and began lavishing her chin with a soft pink tongue.

“Oh my God,” Grace said, holding the reeking animal at arm’s length. “You poor thing.”

Her best guess was that she was some kind of poodle mix. But it was hard to tell because the dog’s fur was filthy and matted. Its liquid brown eyes were cloudy and tinged with some milky substance, and there were speckles of dried blood on its muzzle.

She set the dog down gingerly and wiped her hands on the seat of her shorts. The dog sat back on its haunches and looked at her expectantly.

“Pathetic, ain’t it?” Arthur asked, standing behind her in the hallway. “She’d been locked up in this room, I don’t know how long, when I got over here this morning.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bedroom. “You can see the mess she’s made. Not that you could blame her.”

The room was, as Arthur said, a disaster. Even mouth-breathing could not contain the stench.

Grace picked the dog up again and stepped into the hallway, closing the door to the horrors within.

“What will you do with her?” Grace asked, still holding her at arm’s length.

Arthur reached into the bathroom and found a threadbare bath towel. “Here. Wrap her in this. She’s got fleas pretty bad.”

As Grace wrapped the towel around the dog, she felt it shivering violently.

“I think she’s sick, too,” she said, looking up at Arthur.

“Gotta be,” he agreed. “I give her a bowl of water when I found her this morning, and what was left of the sausage biscuit I had out in my truck, but there’s no telling how long it had been since she’d been fed.”

“Those people should be tracked down and put in jail for something like this,” Grace said fiercely. She swallowed hard, feeling nauseous.

“I’ve filed a report with the sheriff’s department, but there’s no telling how long they’ve been gone. I know the wife, well, I guess she was his wife, I don’t really know, but she did mention at one point that they had family in Alabama.”

He looked down at the shivering bundle of fur in Grace’s arms. “I was gonna take her to the animal shelter. Later on. But if you’d take her, that’d be a whole lot better.” He reached out and scratched under the dog’s chin, and she wriggled in delight. “She’s kinda cute, in a homely sort of way.”

Grace looked down at the dog and sighed. “She seems like a sweetheart. But I’m living with my mom, above the bar. And if you know Rochelle, you know she doesn’t believe in having inside pets.”

“And my wife has got three big ol’ tomcats, and they don’t like dogs any more than I do,” Arthur said. He took the dog from Grace’s arms, opened the bedroom door, and set her back inside before firmly closing the door.

The dog’s plaintive whines tore at Grace’s heart.

Arthur knew how to deal with such a thing. He stalked out to the living room and began loading his wheelbarrow with more trash.

Grace wanted not to hear the dog’s cries. “How long do you think it’ll take to get this place cleaned up?” she asked.

“Who knows? However much time it takes, it’s more than I can spare,” Arthur said. “We usually spend the summer up in North Carolina. Fixing to leave next week, until this happened.”

“I have an idea,” Grace said slowly. “It’s kind of crazy.”

“Crazier than me letting these folks do me out of three months’ back rent?” Arthur asked.

She took a deep breath. “What would you think of letting me fix the place up for you?”

“Why would you want to do something like that?” Arthur asked, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

“I’m an interior designer, and I write a blog about home design and home improvement,” Grace said. She gestured at the dank room they were standing in. “This little house actually has good bones. It’s small, but it could be terrific. I could make it terrific. And I could photograph it and write about the process. If you’d let me.”

She was already writing the blog posts in her mind, picturing the rooms, stripped of their filth, the cottage returned to its old Florida vernacular architecture. Let J’Aimee try to copy that!

Arthur shook another cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. “I don’t know…”

“Okay,” Grace said easily. “As I said, it was just an idea.”

He lit the cigarette and inhaled. The smoke smell was actually an improvement. “What would you charge for something like that?”

“Uh, nothing,” Grace said. And then she hurriedly backed up. “That is, you’d need to pay for the materials.” She did a 360-degree turn around the room. “Paint, new light fixtures.”

“Carpet, for sure,” he added.

Grace stubbed her toe into the shag carpet. “What’s under here, do you know?”

“Wood floors, best I remember,” he said. “God knows what kinda shape they’re in. We’ve had carpet down, ever since I can remember.”

“Best-case scenario, rip up this carpet and refinish the wood floors,” Grace said. “It’s way cheaper than buying new carpet, and if you put down a good finish, your next tenants shouldn’t be able to ruin it.”

She walked out to the kitchen. “I’m thinking you’ll need new appliances in here.” She knelt down and peeled at an edge of the vinyl-roll flooring. “This stuff would have to come up, too. So either refinish if there’s wood or put down new vinyl.”

He nodded. “I was gonna have the stove and fridge hauled off, probably tomorrow.”

“How much were you thinking it would cost to get it ready to rent again?” Grace asked.

Arthur pursed his lips and flicked his cigarette ash onto the carpet. “With appliances—there’s a washer and dryer on the back porch, and they’re ruined, too, I’m thinking a couple thousand.”

“With