He’d known her better than anybody, better than she knew herself. Hank had always been the quiet one, the planner, the plotter. And Hattie? She was always ready to kick in the door of a new project and plunge in headfirst. As much as she loved starting a new job like this one, she was reminded that she was starting another project without him. It had been almost seven years, and the missing him was still there.
Now, it wasn’t the knife-sharp anguish she’d felt that first year, the despair of waking up without him in bed beside her, or fixing a sandwich for one instead of two, or pushing his clothes aside in the tiny bedroom closet to get to her own.
The pain wasn’t like that now. It was more like a dull ache, like the pain of a scar that never quite healed. She would never stop missing Thomas Henry Kavanaugh, but in the meantime, this old house needed her.
“It looks like the Creedmores just walked away one day, locked the doors, and never came back,” Cass said, pointing at the kitchen cabinets. “They even left dirty dishes in the sink.”
It was true. The sink was full of grease-clotted dishes covered with a thin film of cobwebs.
“Do you know the family that owned this house?” Mo asked.
“Savannah’s a small town, son,” Tug said. “Almost everybody knows everybody else.”
“The matriarch of the family, Mavis Creedmore, goes to church with my mom,” Cass explained. “That’s how we found out the house might be up for sale.”
Hattie picked up the narrative. “Holland Creedmore was a couple years ahead of us at Cardinal Mooney, that’s the boys’ Catholic prep school here. He was a big deal back in the day.”
“More like a big dickhead,” Cass muttered.
“You’re talking about Creedmore Junior. His dad, Big Holl, was in my class,” Tug said.
“Holland Junior was at Tybee City Hall today,” Hattie said. “He was totally pissed when he found out I’d outbid him. Yelled at the city clerk and threatened to sue. Then he actually followed me out to the truck. He offered to buy the house from me for fifty thousand.”
“You should have taken the money and run with it all the way to the bank,” Tug said.
“This kitchen’s a decent size,” Hattie said, ignoring her father-in-law. She pointed at the low ceiling, with its waterlogged plaster. “Job one in here is ripping out the dropped ceiling. Let’s hope there are some cool old beams behind that crap.”
“Let’s hope the whole damn thing doesn’t fall in on our heads,” Tug said.
* * *
“Is this a bathroom? In the kitchen?” Cass poked her head into a doorway to the right of the kitchen door, then backed quickly away, both hands pressed to her nose. “Gaaaah! Mildew city!”
Hattie took a look for herself. The room in question was long, spanning the back of the house, and narrow. Somehow, a washing machine and clothes dryer had been shoved in there, along with a toilet, a sink, and a prefab fiberglass shower stall. The floor was covered with what looked like dark green artificial grass.
“Good news is this bathroom isn’t original to the house. Probably added in the seventies, and of course, without being permitted.” She turned and gestured to Mo. “Take a photo of all of this. It comes out day one.”
They moved toward the front of the house, with Mo snapping photos to document the “before” condition of the house, and Hattie dictating notes into her phone.
“Big living room–dining room combination up here. Great fireplace, but the tile surrounding is all wrong. And we’re gonna need a new mantel.”
Tug, grunting, knelt on the hearth and shone his flashlight up the chimney. “I don’t like the looks of this flue. It’s stuffed with old newspapers. And what looks like an old squirrel’s nest.”
“What’s wrong with the flue?” Mo asked.
The old man heaved himself upright. “Too narrow to build a proper fire without burning the joint down, which is why they stuffed the papers up there, to keep out the drafts. We either rip it out, or we leave it alone and just call it decoration. Or spend five thousand dropping a new fire-rated liner in there.”
“We can’t rip it out,” Hattie said. “Part of the terms of the sale was that everything we do here has to meet historic preservation standards.”
“Seriously?” Cass shook her head. “That’s gonna be a major pain in the ass.”
“Save that thought,” Mo interjected. “When we do the walk-through with Trae, you can discuss that on-camera. It’ll make for great conflict.”