Page 45 of The Homewreckers
She put a five-dollar bill on the table and stood to leave. “Hey, uh, Mak? Thanks.”
“No problem. You’ll call me if you get any more of those anonymous tips, right?”
“As long as it’s a two-way street, yeah.”
20Breaking News
It was still dark when Hattie left her cottage in Thunderbolt, but the first streaks of pinkish purple lit up the sky as she drove east toward Tybee Island.
Her mind was on the day’s task—rebuilding the staircase at the Creedmore house. The original was impossibly narrow and steep and awkwardly placed just a few steps inside the front door.
It had been Trae’s idea to relocate the stairway to the hallway outside the downstairs bedroom and to add a small powder bath in the space beneath. The move would open up the living room, give better access to the second floor, and add a second bath downstairs. She’d been forced to (secretly) admit Trae was right.
As she crossed the Lazaretto Creek bridge she felt the familiar twinge, a sense memory, of Hank, on his Kawasaki, riding away from their cottage that night, with only a fleeting, backward glance in her direction. She blinked back the inevitable tears, forcing herself to consider the challenge at hand.
The network had given them only five more weeks to finish work on the house. It seemed impossible. She and Cass and her framing crew had worked on the house until 11P.M.the night before, punching a hole in the hallway ceiling so that work could begin this morning to erect the new stairs. Her painters were working from sunup to sundown, scraping, priming, and patching the old clapboard siding, and sometime this week, the plumbers would begin replacing all the old ductile iron piping.
Even Trae had been enlisted to pitch in with the manual labor. He’d spent the early part of the week peeling layer after layer of old wallpaper from the upstairs bedroom walls, all the while entertaining Mo’s crew with his running commentary on which wallpaper was the most heinous.
“This,” he’d said, holding up a strip of wrinkled seventies-era paper with a design of neon orange sunbursts superimposed over eye-popping purple stripes, “is a crime against humanity. Someday, I hope the designer of this atrocity will be jailed for this visual abuse.”
“Keep it up, Trae,” Leetha had encouraged. “Viewers love this outrageous shit.”
Hattie couldn’t decide if she’d just gotten immune to Trae Bartholomew’s abrasive personality or if he had, somehow, actually started to grow on her.
As she approached the house, Hattie was startled to see half a dozen vehicles parked on the shoulder of the road at the entrance to the driveway. There were two Tybee police cruisers and television vans from all three local network affiliates with roof-mounted satellite antennas.
Hattie steered the truck down the driveway, which had gotten even more rutted from all the trucks and machinery coming in and out of the construction site. It would have to be repaved, and soon. More money.
Her cell phone rang and she saw that the caller was Cass.
“Where are you?” Cass demanded.
“Just pulling up to the house. What’s going on?”
“Obviously you didn’t see the paper this morning,” Cass said. “There’s a big story splashed across the front page, about us finding Lanier Ragan’s wallet. That Tybee cop we talked to—Makarowicz, has reopened the investigation.”
Hattie was a couple hundred feet from the house when she spotted the small knot of people standing at the edge of the porch. “I’m here now. Where are you?” she asked.
“Walking toward you.” She spotted Cass, cell phone in hand, approaching the truck.
She put the truck in park and hopped out. Cass trotted over.
“Welcome to crazy town,” she greeted Hattie and gestured toward the gathering near the porch. “Mo is actually giving a press conference. We’ve been waiting for you to get here.”
“Me?”
“You’re the star ofHomewreckers.All these reporters want to hear from you.”
Hattie took a step backward. “Come on. I didn’t even find the wallet. I don’t want to be on TV. I just want to do my job and fix up this old house.”
“News flash, Hattie. Youareon TV. That’s why they want to talk to you. The sooner you talk to them, the sooner they’ll go away and let us get back to work.”
“What do you think happened to Lanier Ragan? Could she be here? In this house?”
Hattie recognized the reporter from WTOC, the local CBS network affiliate. He was tall and slender, with dark, slicked-back hair, and he had a television camera aimed directly at her. Aaron something.
“I don’t know…” Hattie started to say.
