his head were telling him to do.
“Okay,” he said. “After work today, we’ll go and look at it.”
Dennis was right about one thing. This project would take them all winter should they choose to accept it. But he’d been wrong about the project including only interior work. CJ had cast a critical eye over the place before they walked in, and knew they might have to tackle both the siding and the roof, which had a few bare spots where old shingling had slid to earth. Inside, things looked worse—or better, depending on one’s perspective. The interior had indeed been stripped, but it had also been left looking as if a tornado had been responsible for the denuding. They would have to spend days dragging the old sheetrock out, along with the pulled-up carpet and sheets of linoleum from the kitchen, before they could start the restoration work.
Right off, CJ could see that a substantial portion of wiring would need to be replaced, as would some studs, and one load-bearing column in the great room. And that was just what he could see; who knew what they’d find once they got deeper into it.
On the way over, Dennis had mentioned the owner considering wood floors throughout, as well as custom carpentry for the staircase. If these were added to the rest of the work, they’d be looking at March before they were finished.
The house was one of the largest in Adelia, set back against the hills on the north side of town, skirting the county line. As a teenager, CJ had driven the Mustang through this area a few times, wondering what kind of money the people had who owned these homes. This one in particular had caught his eye all those years ago, principally for the wrought-iron gate backed by a tall hedgerow that kept prying eyes off of all but the topmost floor. At the time, CJ had wondered how the family home, the house on Lyndale, could have been so small compared to these that had sprung up almost overnight. He understood, now, that his family had enough money to build a home five times the size of this one, but there had been no need. That was actually something he appreciated about his upbringing; he’d been taught to eschew ostentation.
Now that he was inside, CJ guessed this house to be close to five thousand square feet. Not quite the mansion it had appeared to be back then, but a large home nonetheless.
Thor was busy investigating one of several piles of drywall and other refuse in the hallway, and CJ suspected there was a mouse or two in residence amid the rubble. By the looks of things, the crew that had stripped the place finished their work over a year ago, which had allowed a thick layer of dust, along with a general feeling of dereliction, to fall over the home.
“How long has it been like this?” CJ asked.
Dennis shook his head. “No idea. I g-got the job last week and told them it would t-take a while. They d-didn’t seem concerned.”
CJ walked over to the window, pushing the dingy curtain aside. The backyard was enormous, with a garden that looked to have been well-maintained at some point. CJ’s guess was that the current owners were relatively new to the area, and they probably got the place for a song.
“How much?”
“We agreed on f-fifteen thousand,” Dennis said.
CJ gave his friend a nod. Seventy-five hundred would pay a bill or two. “When do we start?”
“How about th-this weekend?”
“Okay, then. This weekend it is.”
CJ wondered if he was up to it. In the short time he’d been at Kaddy’s, he’d rediscovered muscles he’d forgotten existed. There was no telling how he’d feel after this type of labor. He chuckled to himself. There were many things he was rediscovering the longer he stayed in Adelia, and he suspected sore muscles wouldn’t be the last of it.
Small towns did to Daniel Wolfowitz what a single errant fringe in a throw rug did to an obsessive-compulsive. It was that almost subconscious feeling of disquiet that lodged like a sliver in the brain, coloring everything else with discordant notes. While it could be ignored for a while, eventually the thing would rise to prominence until he was down on his knees, smoothing the threads into uniform alignment.
In Daniel’s case it was the idiosyncratic sameness of small-town America that did him in. In a large city, there was no way to measure the number