1Do Drop-in
As she inched along on her back beneath the rotting foundation of the Tattnall Street house, Hattie Kavanaugh was already having second thoughts. About her insistence on inspecting the corroded cast-iron pipes herself, instead of taking her plumber’s word. About all the money Kavanaugh and Son had already sunk into this 157-year-old magnificent wreck. About not owning one of those wheeled things auto mechanics used—what were they called? Creepers? But mostly, she was having second thoughts about that second cup of coffee she’d gulped just before being summoned to the house they were restoring in Savannah’s historic district.
The call had come from one of their subs, reporting the unhappy news that scrap bandits had struck overnight, stealing the copper tubing from three brand-new air conditioning compressors. An eleven-thousand-dollar hit to their already wildly out-of-control construction budget. And now this.
“Uh, Hattie?” Ronnie Sewell, Hattie’s plumber, was lounging against the bumper of his pickup truck when she and Cassidy Pelletier, her best friend and construction foreman, arrived at the Tattnall Street house that steamy Saturday morning. “We got issues.”
She and Cass followed the plumber around to the rear of the house, where she found a freshly dug trench leading beneath the home’s brick foundation.
“I had a feeling something wasn’t right,” Ronnie said, pointing to the trench. “I decided to get under the house and take a look.”
Hattie swallowed hard. “Just tell me, Ronnie. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is, you got a hunnerd percent crappy old cast-iron pipes under there. And you know how it floods on this flat street, right? And it all drains to the back of this lot. Water’s been collecting under there for no telling how long. Well, it’s all ruint. Rusted, busted, ruint.”
“Oh God,” Hattie moaned. She eyed her plumbing contractor. He was in his late fifties and built like a fire hydrant, with a huge belly that lapped over his belt. “Are you sure? I mean, you went all the way under the house?”
Ronnie shrugged. “I got as far as I could go. It don’t take a rocket scientist.”
Without a word, Hattie walked away. When she returned, she was zipping herself into her own baggy white coveralls. She pulled a bandana from her pocket and tied it around her hair, then fastened plastic goggles over her face.
“What?” Ronnie said, his face reddening with indignation. “You calling me a liar? Hattie Kavanaugh, I been doing business with your father-in-law since before you were born.…”
“Calm down, Ronnie,” Hattie snapped. “I had this house inspected before we made an offer on it. Nobody said anything about bad pipes. I’m not calling you a liar, but I need to see it with my own eyes. Tug would tell you the same thing if he were here.”
“See for yourself then.” He turned and stalked off in the direction of his truck, muttering as he went. “Goddamn know-it-all girls.”
Cass bent down and peered at the trench beneath the foundation, at the pool of mud and brick rubble, then looked back at her friend. “For real? You’re crawling down into that swamp?”
“You wanna go instead?”
“Who, me? Oh hell, no.” Cass shuddered. “I don’t do mud.”
Hattie went over to a tarp-covered stack of lumber, selected a pair of two-by-fours, and slung them over her shoulders. She shoved the boards under the house, considered, then went back for another pair, laying them beside the first two boards.
Cass handed Hattie her flashlight.
“Pray for me,” Hattie said, flattening herself on the boards. “I’m going in.”
* * *
Mo Lopez pedaled slowly along in the bike lane. The neighborhood he was passing through was clearly in transition. On one side of the street, brick or wood-frame Victorian-era homes boasted signs of recent restoration, with sparkling new paint jobs and manicured landscapes. There were smaller homes, too, modest Craftsman cottages with bikes chained to wrought-iron fences, porches bristling with fern baskets and potted plants and weedy yards. As he pedaled, an idea began to form in his head.
Savannah, he reflected, was a pleasant surprise. He’d accepted the invitation to speak to television and film students at the Savannah College of Art and Design strictly as a favor to Rebecca Sanzone, the assistant head of programming at the network. One of her former classmates now worked in the SCAD admissions office. Becca, of course, had been much too busy to make the trip herself, and had forwarded the invite to Mo.
“You should go,” she’d urged. “Why sit around town and wait for these network idiots to make up their minds?”
The idiots were Rebecca’s immediate bosses at the Home Place Television Network. The former president of programming had been abruptly fired two months earlier, and the new guy, Tony Antinori, was said to be taking a long, hard look at the HPTV lineup.
Mo was understandably anxious. Killer Garage’s first season was considered a success for a new show, but this second season, viewers weren’t quite as fascinated with watching motorheads spend obscene amounts of money building garages equipped with everything from video-gaming consoles to elevators to full kitchens. The numbers, Rebecca had pointed out, weren’t awful, but they weren’t awfully good either.
He needed a new idea, and he needed it fast. His thoughts drifted back to what Tasha, the SCAD administrator, had told him; that Savannah had the distinction of being the largest intact contiguous trove of original nineteenth-century architecture in the country. This town was a beehive of restoration and renovation activity.
His mind worked as furiously as his legs. On a street called Tattnall, he spied a trio of vehicles parked in front of an imposing three-story Queen Anne Victorian. As he got closer, he saw two pickup trucks that had KAVANAUGH & SON, GENERAL CONTRACTING stenciled on the door.
Mo paused at the curb and looked up at the house. A full-scale restoration was obviously under way. Scaffolding had been erected on the east side of the house, where some of the old wooden siding had been replaced, and other sections had been scraped down in preparation for paint. Piles of lumber were stacked around the yard, and pallets of roofing shingles had been unloaded on the porch.
The roof and the porch overhang were both covered with blue tarps. The eaves and porch of the house dripped with elaborate wooden gingerbread trim.
He leaned the bike against a sawhorse and climbed a set of temporary wooden steps leading to the porch. The front door, a period-perfect confection of hand-carved detailing inset with a leaded-glass window, was ajar.
Mo paused in front of the door, edging it open with the toe of his shoe. “Hello?”
His voice echoed in the high-ceilinged foyer. No answer. He shrugged and stepped inside. The interior of the house was a marvel of Victorian excess. Several different decades’ worth of wallpaper layers were in the process of being stripped away to the bare plaster walls. Overhead, an enormous chandelier dripping with dusty crystals and frosted glass globes swung from a ceiling decorated with crumbling but intricate plaster ornamentation.
“Place is a money pit,” Mo muttered, but the contrast between the before and after could be amazing. He walked toward the back of the house. Looking up, the view was of ceilings with gaping holes; underfoot were floors of oak parquet laid in a herringbone pattern, nearly obscured with decades of blackened varnish.
“Nice.” He kept walking, passing what had obviously once been a bathroom. The old penny tile floor was filthy, and the only remaining fixture was a claw-foot bathtub filled with fallen plaster fragments. Exposed pipes poked up through the floor.
At the end of the hallway he spied the wide opening to what would obviously be the kitchen. He stood in the doorway, studying the scene. It had high, water-stained ceilings and walls that had also been stripped to the studs. The floor featured layers upon layers of linoleum, some of which had been peeled all the way down to the subfloor.
Mo took a couple of steps into the kitchen and suddenly, the world seemed to crumble beneath his feet. He heard wood splintering and reached out, in vain, to try to break his fall. Then, darkness.
The last thing he remembered hearing was an outraged voice screeching, right in his ear, “What the hell?”
* * *
Hattie scooted on her butt as far under the house as she could, looking for the source of the broken pipe. She thought she was now directly beneath the kitchen, but it was damp and dank, and her flashlight beam picked out a maze of corroded cast-iron piping that had been dug out to expose the line.
She heard footfalls overhead.
“Cass?” But these footsteps were too heavy to be coming from skinny-as-a-rail Cass. Maybe Ronnie had a change of heart? Surely he’d know better than to walk into the kitchen where termites had laid waste to those floor joists.
Thunk. Chunks of rotted wood and linoleum and more than a century’s worth of unspeakable debris rained down onto her face. Followed by a body. A large, living body, which landed directly on top of her.
“What the hell?” she shrieked.
In the dim light she could see that the body was a man.
“Uuuhhhh,” he moaned. His face was beside hers, and he looked dazed.
“Get offa me,” Hattie said through clenched teeth. With effort, she managed to roll him sideways, until he was lying flat on his back in the muck beneath the house.
She heard footsteps again. “Hattie?” Cass’s head poked through the hole in the kitchen floor. She pointed the beam of the flashlight at her friend, and then at the prone body of the intruder, who was groaning and also trying to sit up. “Who’s the guy? And what the hell is going on down there?”
“Damned if I know,” Hattie said. She held out a hand to her best friend. “Come on. Get me outta here. Ronnie was right. The pipes are toast.” She pointed at the stranger. “And so is this guy. Call the cops. Looks like we trapped us a scrap bandit.”
2The Proposal
Hattie looked down at the guy sprawled on the kitchen floor. Some women might have found him attractive. He wore black designer jeans and a black open-collared shirt, which told her he wasn’t local, because nobody with any sense wore all black in the sweltering heat and humidity of a Savannah summer. Currently he was splattered with muck and scowling up at her like she was the intruder instead of vice versa.
Cass prodded Mo’s leg with the toe of her boot and glanced over at Hattie, who was brushing chunks of gunk out of her hair. “Doesn’t look like my idea of a scrap metal thief.”
“You’re right,” Hattie said. “For one thing, it looks like he’s got all his own teeth. For another, he’s dressed too nice.” She played the flashlight over Mo’s ruined tennis shoes. “Day-um, girl. Check it out. These Nikes cost like, six hundred dollars.”
“Maybe he stole them,” Cass mused.
“Cute,” Mo said, suppressing a groan as he got back on his feet. “Hilarious. You two must be a smash hit at the comedy clubs around here.”
He glanced down at himself and sighed. Both arms sported jagged, bleeding scratches. His clothes were filthy and the Nikes were caked in mud. Or something like it. He groped the back of his head with his fingertips and felt a knot raising. Maybe he was concussed? It was that kind of day.
“The front door was standing wide open,” he lied. “How was I supposed to know this place is a death trap? I could sue you for maintaining a criminal nuisance.”
“And we could call the cops and have you locked up for trespassing,” Cass shot back. “Right, Hattie?”
But Cass’s best friend was studying the guy’s face. She’d definitely seen him before, the dark hair brushing his shirt collar, the olive complexion that went with the hair and eyes, aggressively thick eyebrows, and one of those trendy not-beard beards. He’d been staring down at his phone, but she was sure he had been listening to her conversation with Tug.
Hattie snapped her fingers. “Hey. You were sitting at the table next to ours at Foxy Loxy this morning. And obviously eavesdropping on my conversation.”
“Not eavesdropping,” Mo insisted. “Minding my own business, having breakfast. Not my fault that you talk so loud everyone in the place could hear you.”
“Hmm. And then you show up here less than an hour later. At this house we were just discussing. Obviously a coincidence.”
Mo made another snap decision.
“Okay, not a coincidence,” he said. “I did overhear you and—your dad?—talking at that café. And I was intrigued.” He reached into his hip pocket and brought out a slim leather case. He plucked a business card from the case and handed it to her.
Hattie’s eyebrows drew together as she read the card. “Mauricio Lopez. President, executive producer, Toolbox Productions.” She handed the card to Cass. “This doesn’t tell me why you followed me over here, and then trespassed on my work site.”
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