Right of Redemption Read online

  “What if you don’t make any money?” Darcy asked.

  I blinked. The idea that we might not make a profit hadn’t occurred to me.

  It took me a second to figure out what I wanted to say. “I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. I’ll find us a house that’s priced well enough that it won’t.”

  “I’m not sure you can guarantee that,” Darcy said, and of course she was right.

  “I’ll pay you back, Darcy. If I take your money and you don’t get it back, plus a profit, when we sell the house, I’ll pay you back somehow. It might take me longer—” would undoubtedly take me longer, “—but I’ll pay you back.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Darcy said. “The risk of losing your principal is part of the risk of investing. How much do you need?”

  Just like that? Must be nice. “I have no idea,” I said. “It would depend on the house. I’ll have to take a look and see what’s out there. But I’d be very careful about how much we paid, and how much work it would need.”

  “I’d want to see the house before you bought it,” Darcy said.

  “Of course.” I nodded. Several times. “I’ll go home and see what’s available. I’ll contact both you and Charlotte with what I discover. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Maybe we can go looking.”

  “I’m having dinner with my mother,” Darcy said. “I’m free until then.”

  “I’ll let you know.” I picked up my coat again.

  Darcy eyed me. “You don’t want to see your sister or brother? Or brother-in-law?”

  I shook my head. Now that she had agreed to provide the money I needed—we needed—I had no reason to involve my brother or other sister. Especially since they’d probably try to talk her out of it, if they heard what I’d talked her into. “I’ve already seen the sister I came to see.”

  Darcy’s lips curved. “I know what you’re doing,” she told me, “but I still like to hear you say that.”

  I shoved one arm into the coat, and then the other. “You are my sister. You’re just as much my sister as Catherine.”

  “I’m half as much your sister as Catherine,” Darcy corrected.

  Maybe so. Technically. But— “Still my sister. And more likely to give me money than Catherine.”

  “I don’t have three kids and a mortgage,” Darcy said.

  “Not yet. But soon.” I grinned at her and picked up the baby carriage. “I’ll talk to you tonight. Keep your fingers crossed that I find something good.”

  “I believe in you,” Darcy said. And then she went back to the computer, and I went back outside to the car and headed home.

  Two

  When Rafe came through the door, it was after seven, and I was sitting at the island in the kitchen with my laptop open in front of me. Pearl the pitbull was snoozing on her pillow by the back wall, twitching occasionally in sleep. Carrie was sitting in her bouncy seat kicking her feet and batting at brightly colored animals hanging from the handle, and on the stove, Bolognese sauce was simmering and water was on the boil, waiting for me to toss in a couple handfuls of linguine. A tray of garlic toast was sitting on the counter, waiting to go in the oven.

  Then Pearl raised her head from the pillow and started rumbling in her throat. I glanced at her. “Did you hear something?”

  The stub of her tail slapped against the pillow once, and she turned her head to fasten her eyes on the door. When the key slid into the lock, she gave a single bark.

  “It’s just Rafe,” I told her. “No need to go crazy.”

  By then, she’d figured that out for herself, and was settling back down, her stubby tail wagging and her jaws split in a doggie grin, but she wasn’t barking anymore.

  Rafe stepped through the door and shut it behind him, and bent to give her a scratch behind each ear before turning to me. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s no problem,” I said, as I looked him up and down. “At least you let me know.”

  As usual he looked better than anybody had a right to. Faded jeans clinging to long legs and a black leather jacket stretching across broad shoulders and tapering to a narrow waist. I couldn’t see what was under the jacket, but I knew. I had to clear my throat before I added, “I ate a couple hours ago. I kept the sauce warm for you. It’ll take ten minutes to boil more pasta and heat more bread.”

  “Just enough time for me to get a shower.” He glanced at the heat in my cheeks, and grinned. “Wanna come upstairs and wash my back?”

  I smiled back. “You have no idea how much I’d like that. But with the baby…”

  He nodded, and came a couple steps closer. “Hi there, pretty girl.” He reached out and ran the tip of his finger down Carrie’s cheek. She gurgled. At three months old, she was already a confirmed daddy’s girl.

  Rafe turned to me. “And you’re pretty, too.” He bent his head and fitted his lips to mine. By the time he straightened, my head was swimming and I had to unclench my hand, one finger at a time, from the leather.

  “You sure you don’t wanna join me upstairs?” He winked.

  “I would love to join you upstairs,” I said, and it was God’s honest truth. “But I can’t just leave Carrie to fend for herself. If you can hold off an hour, maybe…”

  He grimaced. “I’d rather get the stink off now.”

  Somehow, I was sure there was no stink. His body is perfect in every way, including that one. However— “I’ll have food ready for you when you come back down. And you can tell me about all the excitement.” And then we could have sex—not in the shower—later. After Carrie was asleep.

  He nodded. “I’ll be back in a few.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said, and watched him walk across the room and into the hallway before I slid off the chair and padded over to the stove to crank the heat up to high.

  * * *

  By the time he came back downstairs, the linguine was draining in the colander, and the Bolognese was bubbling. I told him to take a seat at the counter, and then I went to doctor his plate the way I knew he liked, with a sprinkling of parmesan and a bottle of beer. Red wine would go better with the Italian food, but as he’d told me once, he’d spent a couple of years eating meals provided by the Riverside Penitentiary, and he wasn’t picky.

  When I turned around, plate and beer in hand, he had pulled my laptop over so he could look at what I was doing. He arched a brow. “Looking to leave me?”

  “Of course not.” I nudged the computer back out of the way and put the plate and bottle in front of him. “Charlotte and I are talking about renovating a house. She needs money. Her husband has frozen their accounts and canceled her credit card.”

  “I bet he hasn’t frozen his own account,” Rafe said, picking up his fork.

  I leaned my elbows on the counter and shook my head. “I’m sure he hasn’t. But Charlotte probably doesn’t have an account of her own. Or if she does, it was an account he funded, so she could have some spending money. She hasn’t worked since she married him.”

  “She’s worked,” Rafe said, twisting linguine around his fork. “She just didn’t get paid.”

  Point to the man with the bare feet. Charlotte had taken care of Doctor Dick’s children, and probably Doctor Dick’s house and yard and laundry and meals, not to mention Doctor Dick’s sexual needs. Or at least some of them. And now the bastard had cut her off without a penny.

  “We had lunch earlier today,” I explained. “Charlotte suggested that maybe she could get a real estate license and we could work together. I guess she thinks maybe I’m doing better than I am.”

  Rafe chuckled, but didn’t say anything.

  “When I pointed out how long it would be before she’d start earning money, we came up with the idea of flipping a house instead. I’ve been looking at the options.”

  “Come up with anything?” He wound another forkful of pasta and conveyed it to his mouth.

  I made my way around the island. “If you don’t mind eating and looking, I’ll show you.”

  He swallowed. “Su
re. I don’t guess Scotty Junior’s house is on the market?”

  The house I mentioned earlier, the lovely little Victorian cottage with the remains in the basement.

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t want to buy that, anyway. It’s going to be a long time before anyone in Columbia forgets what was hidden there. It would be almost impossible to sell.”

  Rafe nodded, and picked up a piece of garlic bread and bit into it. It crunched, and the smell of garlic butter wafted my way. My teeth watered, even though I’d eaten my share—or more—of garlic bread earlier.

  “These three are what I came up with.” I ran my finger over the mouse pad. “Here’s a cute little mid-century ranch in Sunnyside, with all the original features.”

  I showed him a picture of a low-slung brick one-story before I started scrolling through the interior shots. “The price is a little high for a fixer-upper, but it’s a nice neighborhood. Big yards. And if we kept a lot of the original features, like this pink tile—”

  Rafe winced.

  “—and the knotty pine kitchen cabinets, we could bill it as mid-century chic.”

  “Most people don’t feel like mid-century chic means a knotty pine kitchen,” Rafe said. “Not these days.”

  No. “But at this price, we won’t have the money to redo two bathrooms and the kitchen. And mid-century is popular.”

  Rafe didn’t say anything, just focused on winding linguine around his fork, and I sighed and moved on. “Here’s another little Victorian not too far from the Mason house, but without the stigma of bones in the basement. Nice front door. Nice fireplace mantel in the parlor. Unpainted, which is always a bonus. The tile on the hearth is ugly, but it wouldn’t be hard to replace it. Someone already ripped out the original tile and replaced it with this ugliness, so I wouldn’t feel bad about taking it out again. It isn’t original. The kitchen would need redoing, and the bathroom…”

  I scrolled through the pictures.

  “Lotta work,” Rafe said. “And only one bathroom? That could be a problem.”

  It could. People these days like to have more than one potty.

  “Anywhere in the house you could add one?”

  “If I sacrifice one of the bedrooms,” I said. “Turn it into a two-bedroom, two-bath house, instead of a three-one. That would give me somewhere to put the laundry room, too. Right now it’s in this shed addition off the original back door…”

  I scrolled through the pictures until I got to the shed addition, and watched another flicker of pain cross Rafe’s face. “You don’t like the idea?”

  He glanced at me. “That’s gonna turn into a lot of money, darlin’. Redoing the kitchen and existing bath, adding another bath and a laundry room. That means moving plumbing and electrical. And if you’re tearing off the laundry room, you’re not only not adding square footage, you’re taking it away.”

  True. And the smaller the house was, the smaller the out-price—the price we’d be able to get for it after it was finished—would be. I gnawed on my bottom lip. “I think the roof needs replacing, too. And the area isn’t as nice as Sunnyside. It would probably be harder to sell.”

  “What else did you find?” Rafe asked, and picked up his fork again. “Where are you getting the money for this, by the way? We don’t have much.”

  “Darcy’s going in with us,” I said, while I brought the next listing up on the screen. “She has a job, so she won’t be doing a lot of the work, but she’s footing the bill.”

  “Nice of her.”

  “She loves me,” I said, and Rafe grinned.

  “Yeah. She does.”

  “And I won’t ask you to help, either. You’ve already got a job, and I know you’ve got your hands full. We’re hoping to find a house that mostly needs cosmetic renovation, so we can do a lot of the work ourselves.”

  Rafe nodded. “I’ll go take a look with you, give you an idea what you’re looking at as far as work. But I don’t think I’m gonna be a whole lotta help after that.”

  “Just looking at it and helping me pick the right house would be great,” I said. “Here’s the last one.”

  It was a much more recent construction, built in the last twenty years, and situated in a subdivision of similar cookie-cutter houses on the north side of Columbia. It hadn’t weathered the time as well as the other two. Rafe took one look at the exterior shot and shook his head.

  “No?” I pulled up the interior pictures. “Are you sure? It isn’t bad inside.”

  “Laminate flooring,” Rafe said, pointing to it. “Plastic molded tub, pressed wood cabinets, quarter-inch drywall…”

  “You mean, it’s badly constructed?”

  “Cheap,” Rafe said. “At least those knotty pine cabinets were solid wood. The clawfoot tub in the Victorian was cast iron. The walls were real plaster. This is all cheap materials.”

  “But if we tore it all out and put in real hardwood floors, and ceramic tile, and solid wood cabinets…”

  “Like putting lipstick on a pig, darlin’.”

  “Oh.” I sank my teeth into my lip. “Then I don’t know what to do. These were the only three possibilities I could find on the MLS…”

  The MLS is the Multiple Listing Service, where all the realtors share their listings with each other. Outside the MLS, the options are severely limited.

  “Craigslist?” Rafe suggested.

  “Do people sell houses there?” If so, I wasn’t proud. I’d buy a house on Craigslist. I mean, I was a professional. I had all the required forms and knew how to fill them out. Where most people could get in trouble buying a house on Craigslist, I actually knew what I was doing.

  He shrugged. “Ain’t there a tax sale tomorrow?”

  “Is there?”

  “I heard something about it,” Rafe said.

  “At the meeting?”

  The reason he was late for dinner was a last-minute meeting called at the police department that he’d been required to go to. He hadn’t told me anything about it, other than that he’d be late, so it seemed like a reasonable question.

  He grinned. “No, darlin’. Earlier this week. Extra cops directing traffic around the courthouse on Saturday morning.”

  “Is that where the sale is taking place? On the courthouse steps?”

  “As far as I know,” Rafe said. “Tax sale. Courthouse.”

  “Do you know what time? Or what’s going to be auctioned off?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure there’s a website.”

  I was sure there was, too, and was already Googling. “Here we go. Ten o’clock tomorrow. Two properties.” I rattled off the addresses. “Do either of those sound familiar to you?”

  “South J Street is near downtown,” Rafe said. “I think it’s by the railroad tracks. Didn’t used to be the nicest area back when I was running the streets, but that coulda changed in the past ten years. Not sure about Fulton.”

  I had already found South J Street on Google Earth and was waiting for the streetscape to populate. When it did, I tilted my head from one side to the other. “Hard to see, with the vegetation.” The picture obviously hadn’t been taken recently, since the yard was almost covered in foliage. You don’t get that in February in Tennessee. “Looks like it could have potential, though, if I’m looking at it right. Another little Victorian cottage. Might be some original features inside.”

  He glanced up from the plate and over at it. “Might not.”

  No, it might not. And if they were, they might be in as bad a condition as the previous little Victorian we’d looked at.

  Nonetheless, I gave the picture a longing look. “It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go over there now.”

  Rafe glanced at the clock on the stove. “It ain’t that late.”

  “It’s dark,” I said. And while it was still before eight, he had already had a long day. It was something he didn’t point out, but something I should keep in mind, as a good wife. “Maybe we could make it over there tomorrow morning instead.” When the sun was up
and we could see what we were looking at. “Before the auction.”

  “Better to do our snooping in the dark,” Rafe said, “if it involves breaking and entering.”

  Yes. But— “It won’t. I have a key.”

  He arched that brow at me. “How’d you get a key to a house you didn’t even know was coming up for auction until fifteen minutes ago?”

  “It’s called a HUD key,” I said. “Or at least that’s what Tim calls it.” Tim is—or was—my broker at the real estate agency I worked for in Nashville. Since I hadn’t moved my license anywhere else, I guess he still was, technically, my broker.

  Not that any of that mattered to what we were talking about. “When a house goes to foreclosure, the Department of Housing and Urban Development changes the locks, so the previous owners can’t get back in. But then there’s a parade of other people through the house. It has to be winterized, and inspected regularly, and once it goes on the market, realtors come and go. It’s much easier with a universal key.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “LB&A had one, and one day I made a copy of it, so I wouldn’t have to borrow the office key every time I wanted to take somebody into a foreclosed property. It was inconvenient. Much easier to have my own.”

  His lips twitched. “Sure.”

  “I still have it. So we won’t be breaking and entering. It’s legal to enter as long as I have a license and the key.”

  “Ain’t that a shame,” Rafe said. “But we can pretend. Be almost like old times, wouldn’t it?”

  I guess it would. “If you’re willing to cut your evening short, I’m certainly not going to try to stop you.” It would give me the time tomorrow to show Darcy the place before the auction. “But you really don’t have to. You’ve had a long day already, and…”

  “It ain’t likely to take long.” He pushed his empty plate away. “I’ll go get dressed.”

  He padded barefoot toward the hallway. I rinsed the plate and put it in the dishwasher, considered the pots and pans on the stove and decided they could wait until we got back, and went to the foyer to get my coat and boots, and Carrie’s pink winter suit and the car seat.