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

Grace laughed. “She doesn’t know I’m the one who tricked you, does she?”

He gestured toward the house. “I got over here right at sunup this morning and set off a couple of flea bombs in there. I just opened up all the windows, so you should be all right to go in now.” He reached in the pocket of his own faded blue jeans. “Here’s the keys. Front and back doors, and the garage.” He nodded at his workers, who were bringing the washing machine out on a furniture dolly. “I had the fellas put all that furniture in the garage, and put a tarp over it. There’s some other odds and ends out there you can maybe use.”

“All right,” Grace said. She took her camera from around her neck and stepped into the street, clicking off a few frames.

“Stand right there by the mailbox, will you Arthur,” she called. “I like to document everything, right from the beginning.”

Arthur stood awkwardly by the curb, his hands thrust in his pockets. “You don’t want pictures of this ugly old mug,” he growled. “It’ll break your camera.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” Grace said, stepping backward to shoot. “Arthur, do you have any idea when this house was built?”

“Let me see. Well, I’m seventy-three, and we’ve got old family pictures of my grandma, standing out front of this house with me in her arms. I know my grandpa bought the house, probably sometime in the thirties. It looked a lot different back then. There was no front porch, no real trees, just some scrub palmettos and sand, and where the kitchen is now, was a porch they used to cook on. There was an old wood cookstove out there. My grandpa used to fry mullet on it Friday nights. Hard to believe they raised seven kids in this little bitty place, isn’t it?”

It was just a little after nine, but the sun was already high in the sky, the summer heat relentless. Grace walked all the way around the house, photographing it from every conceivable angle, swatting at mosquitoes and stopping to pick off the sandspurs clinging to her ankles. She prayed no snakes were lurking in the thick underbrush. Despite that, the more she saw of the house, the more she liked. Virtually nothing had been done to change the house in the years since the porch had been added. In a way, she decided, it was a very good thing that Arthur Cater was a cheapskate.

When she got back to the front of the house, Arthur was standing by the truck, waiting on her. He handed her a slip of paper. “Here’s my phone number. You call me if there’s a problem, hear? I set up a draw for you at the hardware store. And my wife said I should tell you she’d like it if you’d e-mail us some pictures as you go. She’s all jazzed up about this project of yours. Good thing we’re leaving town, or she’d be over here all the time, sidewalk superintending.”

Grace stood on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on Arthur’s grizzled cheek. He looked surprised, but not displeased. “All right then, get to work,” he ordered. He drove off with the two laborers in the back of the truck, wedged in among the rusted appliances. A moment later, he was backing down the street toward where she stood at the curb.

He hung his head out the open window. “Meant to ask you about that little dog,” he said, failing miserably at pretending he didn’t care. “How’s she doing? Did you find somebody to take her in?”

“Sweetie is going to be just fine,” Grace said. “They kept her overnight at the vet’s office, giving her some IV fluids and some antibiotics. I’m going to pick her up this afternoon. And I’m going to keep her myself, until I figure out something else.”

“Sweetie, huh? Dumb name for a dog.”

*   *   *

Grace paced every inch of the cottage interior, snapping photos and making notes. She found an old broom in a tiny utility closet off the kitchen and swept up an entire village of dead insects. Then she cranked up the music she’d downloaded onto her iPod, adjusted the tiny little speakers, pulled on her work gloves, and got down to business.

A veteran of the remodeling wars, Grace donned a paper face mask before tackling the carpet. It was a hot, filthy job. The carpet was so old and brittle, hunks of it tore apart in her hands as she pried it from the nail strips along the baseboards. But when she pulled up the thin foam padding and got the first glimpse of the intact oak floors, she got a new burst of energy. By noon, when she took her lunch break with a sandwich and a bottle of water she’d brought from home, she’d pulled up all the carpet in the bedrooms, rolled it up, and dragged it out to the curb.

She was buzzed with adrenaline, dancing around the smaller of the two bedrooms doing a creditable accompaniment to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” using the broom as a makeshift microphone. The music echoed in the high-ceilinged empty rooms, and she whipped her sweat-dampened hair from side to side as she cataloged the all-too-familiar misery of a lover done wrong.

Grace didn’t hear the front door open. Didn’t hear anything except the music, until she happened to turn around and see Ben, standing in the doorway, arms folded over his chest, watching her performance with no trace of amusement.

Her face flamed. She grabbed for the iPod and shut it off.

For a moment, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her throat went dry, and all she could think of was how idiotic she must have looked to him, dancing around a filthy house, in her filthy clothes, playing air guitar with a broom.

Then she got mad and found her voice again. “What are you doing here?” she asked, clutching the broom,