Right of Redemption Page 3

  By the time Rafe came back into the kitchen, in socks and boots and a sweater and jacket, Carrie and I were dressed and ready to go. Pearl was thumping her stubby tail hopefully against the pillow, and looked crestfallen when I told her, “Sorry, baby. We’re going to look at houses. You wouldn’t enjoy it.”

  “Bring her,” Rafe said. “If I’m right and South J still ain’t the nicest place, she could come in handy.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter. Nobody will be there to see us. And it’ll make her happy. C’mon, Pearl. Car ride.”

  Pearl jumped to her feet, all quivering excitement. When Rafe grabbed her leash from the hook next to the door, the little bit of her tail that’s left wagged so hard the entire back half of her body moved from side to side.

  “Good girl.” He opened the back door. “Let’s go.”

  Pearl bounded past him into the dark, barking joyously, and then came back to circle him, making sure he was making progress toward the garage and the car. I stopped long enough to lock the door and then followed, with Carrie’s car seat over my arm.

  When the mansion was built, around 1840, give or take a year, people had carriages, not cars. By the 1900s, that had changed, and the old carriage house was converted into a garage at some point before I was born. Rafe opened the bay where the Volvo was parked—the chrome on his Harley-Davidson caught the light from the next bay over—and then the front passenger door of the car for Pearl. When we have her with us, she rides shotgun while I stay in the back with the baby. I mostly trust Pearl around Carrie, but it makes me feel better not to take any chances. Pearl had a rough life before we rescued her, and until I’m sure she won’t suddenly lose her mind and attack Carrie, I don’t leave the two of them alone together, even in the backseat of the car.

  So we made ourselves comfortable, and Rafe backed the car out of the garage and headed down the driveway around the corner of the mansion and toward the street.

  “Nice night for a drive,” he told me as he took the turn from the driveway onto the Columbia Highway heading north.

  I suppose it was. A little cold, but not freezing. Clear, so we could see the stars, and a pale sliver of moon to the east. “It was nice of you to offer to come with me.”

  “Can’t let you have all the fun,” Rafe said, and focused on keeping the car on the road while Pearl sat up on her haunches, panting excitedly, next to him.

  * * *

  We were on J Street in Columbia about fifteen minutes later, cruising between small Victorian cottages and bungalows sitting close together on narrow, city-sized lots. Here and there, a porch lights gleamed, but more often, there was just the blue flicker of a TV from behind half-drawn curtains.

  “Don’t look much different from what I remember,” Rafe said, peering left and right.

  It didn’t. Or at least it didn’t look much different from what he’d told me to expect. The street had a rundown and sort of desolate air. There was trash piled up at the gutter here and there. The cars were all older, past the first bloom of youth, nothing new or shiny. The houses were on the small side and not well kept. They must have had some individuality originally—all Victorian cottages and Craftsman bungalows—but at this point, they’d all taken on the same air of quiet desperation. If someone ever decided to take a chance on the area, it had the potential to turn into something nice. But no one had so far, and I didn’t think I wanted to be the first.

  “I’ll have to search recent sales in this area,” I said, as Rafe pulled to a stop in front of a small white cottage with peeling paint and dark windows. “Just in case this goes for a song tomorrow. If we can get it cheap enough, there might still be some money to be made.”

  Rafe nodded. “Let’s take a look.” He opened his car door as Pearl watched him, wagging eagerly.

  I unfolded myself from the car and grabbed the car seat while Rafe clipped the leash to Pearl’s collar. And off we went, across the sidewalk, through the gate, and up the walkway to the house. I stumbled over an out-of-alignment brick, and almost took a nosedive.

  “Here.” Rafe reached back and took the car seat out of my hands. “You take the dog.”

  We made the exchange, and kept going. Rafe didn’t stumble over anything, of course. His night vision is far superior to mine.

  “The porch is rotten,” he informed me as he climbed the steps. “Be careful.”

  I nodded, focused on where I was placing my feet. I wasn’t really worried, though. If the steps had held him and Carrie, they would probably hold me no problem.

  I dug my keychain out of my purse and sifted through for the HUD key in the dark.

  The house was late Victorian, and would probably have had a nice, ornate wooden door when it was first built, with a window in the top half.

  If it had, that door was long gone. Someone had replaced it with a standard builder grade metal door. Not only did that mean there was no original door here to restore, it also meant that I and Charlotte, or whoever ended up renovating this place eventually, would have to spend money on a better door than was here now.

  So my mental tally added the cost of a new and fancy front door in addition to what it would cost to rebuild the porch and deal with the landscaping. We hadn’t even gone inside yet, and the renovation costs were mounting.

  “I’ll go first,” Rafe told me. He held his hand out for the key. I handed it to him and watched as he inserted it in the lock and twisted.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again. “You sure this is the right key, darlin’?”

  “It’s supposed to be the right key,” I said, and took it back so I could hold it up to my eyes to peer at it. “Yes, it’s the right key.”

  “It ain’t working.”

  “Try it one more time.” I handed it back to him, and he tried it one more time, and shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Well, damn. I mean… darn.”

  It was so dark on the porch that I almost couldn’t see his lips curve. “Good thing I don’t need a key, ain’t it?”

  It was. A very good thing. “Need anything from my purse?”

  He shook his head. “No, darlin’. I got my own.”

  Of course he did. I watched as he dug in his pocket, and pulled out a skinny black case, and then I watched as he turned his back to me to fiddle with the lock. After a few seconds he straightened and pushed the door open. And walked in, feeling for a light switch on the wall inside the door.

  I opened my mouth to tell him that the power would be off, that part of the procedure of prepping a foreclosure is turning off the power and water, but before I could say anything, the lights flashed on and practically blinded me. I squeezed my eyes shut, but not before a room full of furniture had imprinted itself on my retinas. Sofa and chairs in front of the fireplace, small TV in the corner, old shag rug, books on the shelves, an ashtray full of cigarette butts…

  Three

  “Shit!”

  Rafe flicked the light switch again and plunged the room back into darkness before he turned toward me and pushed me ahead of him through sheer force of personality. He didn’t tell me to “Go, go!” but I heard it clearly in the back of my head, and in his voice.

  I dragged Pearl across the porch toward the stairs just before Rafe stumbled over her, and he shut the door behind us. “Here.” He handed me the car seat with the baby. “Go. I’ll lock the door.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t just…?” Get out of here, and stand not on the order of our going?

  “It’ll only take a second. Go get in the car.”

  Yessir. I scrambled back down the rickety steps and across the uneven brick pavers, while Pearl panted in the lead. She probably thought this was some sort of fun game, instead of us trying desperately not to be caught breaking and entering an occupied dwelling. By the time I reached the car, Rafe was already beside me, and took the car seat out of my hand. “I got this. You deal with Pearl.”

  His voice was calm, but he didn’t waste any time getting the back door open
and the car seat fastened on the base.

  I dealt with Pearl—“Go on, baby, back in the car!”—and left the leash dangling when I shut the door behind her and scurried around to the other side. Rafe ran around the other way, and we tangled for a second in front of the doors before we made it to our respective doors. His arm squeezed my waist on its way past, but I suppose it could have been accidental. Then again, maybe not.

  I crawled into the back seat and shut the door behind me while he threw the car into gear and peeled away from the curb. By the time we got to the corner he was laughing. “Been a while since I had to book it out of a house in advance of a shotgun blast.”

  “First time for me,” I said, sitting up and straightening my coat.

  He grinned at me in the mirror. “Coulda been worse. At least my pants weren’t down around my ankles this time. Makes it easier to run.”

  I could imagine that it would. “When you say down around your ankles… are you referring to the saggy fashions you wore in high school, or the fact that you would have been nailing some poor teenage girl to the wall when her daddy came home?”

  He chuckled. “Mostly the latter. But the pants I wore back then didn’t make it any easier to get away.”

  No. “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “how many times did you have to hike your pants up and get out in advance of some outraged father’s shotgun blast?”

  “I don’t think it happened more’n once or twice, darlin’.”

  He’d slowed the car down now, that we were a couple of blocks away from the… let’s call it a crime scene, and were cruising at an unobjectionable speed along dark streets. “There was this girl named Rhonda…”

  “Of course there was.” I made a face, while I flipped through the Rolodex in my head to try to place Rhonda. “I don’t think I remember her.”

  “No reason why you would, darlin’.” His voice was easy. “Sorry about that.”

  “Rhonda?”

  He chuckled. “No. I shoulda thought to knock on the door first, to see if the place was empty.”

  “It was supposed to be empty,” I said. “Why would you question it, if the house is going to auction tomorrow?”

  It was a rhetorical question, and he didn’t answer it. “Anyway,” I added, ““I don’t think anyone was home, so chances are, even if you had knocked, you wouldn’t have gotten an answer.”

  “I oughta know better, though. Guess I’m outta practice.”

  “Since nobody was home,” I said, “hopefully they’ll never realize we were there.” And would have no reason to test the doorknob for fingerprints. His are on record, so would show up in a search. “Or did you take the time to wipe the doorknob before you left?”

  “’Course, darlin.’”

  Of course. “Well, then we probably don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Let’s hope not.” He didn’t sound all that worried. “You wouldna wanted that house anyway. Too much work.”

  I nodded. “Did you see that ugly tile around the fireplace? It was worse than the tile in that picture we looked at earlier.”

  “And while you prob’ly coulda gotten it cheap, nobody woulda wanted to pay much to live on that street once the house was finished. No matter how nice it looked.”

  True. “I guess the problem wasn’t my HUD key after all.”

  “Don’t seem that way,” Rafe said. “I guess whoever lived there prob’ly found the money to pay off the lien. Or maybe they’re just hanging on as long as they can, hoping that whoever buys the house tomorrow won’t evict’em. Somebody could be picking it up for a rental or something.”

  Maybe. I didn’t think I’d have it in me to evict anyone, and I wasn’t looking to pick up a rental anyway, so at this point it didn’t matter. It was on to the next one, and better luck next time.

  * * *

  “Gimme the key,” Rafe told me a few minutes later.

  We were parked outside another little house, this one a few decades younger. Post-WWII, at an (educated) guess, with a more recent addition tacked onto one side. Like the other house, it was painted an uninspired dirty white, but other than that, it didn’t look like it was in terrible shape. There was no porch, just a concrete stoop, so we didn’t have to worry about sagging boards, and the front door, painted a boring brown, at least had some promising flourishes.

  “Roof looks pretty good,” Rafe remarked, staring up at it while I dug the keychain back out of my purse. “No holes that I can see. Gutters need cleaning out. I can see things growing up there.”

  I nodded. I could, too. Visibility was better here—no one had broken half the bulbs in the streetlights—so we were able to get a halfway decent view of the place.

  “The lot’s bigger than the other one,” Rafe added. “And the neighborhood’s nicer.”

  It was. Not only were the streetlights intact, but there were cheerful porch lights up and down the street, and everything looked mostly well maintained and cared for. The house we were sitting in front of was the worst-looking of the bunch, and that’s always a good sign when you’re looking to renovate something.

  “Here you go.” I handed the keys across the back of the seat. “Go make sure it’s empty.”

  He opened his door. Pearl perked up, and then drooped sadly when he told her, “No, girl. You have to wait.”

  He closed the door behind him.

  “He’ll be back,” I told her, as I watched him cross the patch of dead grass in front of the house and step up on the low stoop. He applied his knuckles to the door, and I could hear the sound of the knock even with the car windows shut. Definitely wood, that door. Another point in the house’s favor.

  Rafe waited half a minute, and when nothing happened, he inserted the key in the lock. A few seconds later, he turned and waved to me. Everything must be working the way it was supposed to this time. It was a nice change. I unfolded myself from the car, took Carrie’s car seat in one hand and Pearl’s leash in the other, and made my way across the dead lawn to the house.

  There was no electricity on here, and Rafe’s Maglite lived in his company car—a beat-up Chevy the Columbia PD let him use in lieu of the Harley-Davidson—so we inspected the house by the light from Rafe’s phone. It didn’t take long. The place was small. A combination living room/dining room in the front, with a kitchen behind, followed by a bathroom and two small bedrooms. The addition looked like it might have been intended to be a den, with double French doors out to a small concrete patio in the back, and I looked around at it. “If we could get a bathroom in here, it would make for an OK master suite.”

  And that would turn the property from a two-bedroom/one-bath house to a three-bedroom/two-bath house, thus increasing the price exponentially.

  Rafe nodded. “You’d have to hammer up the concrete, though. Could be expensive.”

  It could. The addition was a step down from the rest of the house, and it had a concrete floor under the carpet. In looking at it now, I wondered whether maybe it wasn’t so much an addition as a garage conversion. “Maybe we could raise the floor and put the plumbing underneath.”

  Rafe gave it a dubious look. “Prob’ly end up with a step-up if you did.”

  Probably. But it might still be worth doing, if it was cheaper than taking a jackhammer to the floor.

  Inside the main part of the house again, I glanced around the smaller of the bedrooms while Pearl sniffed the carpet. “All in all, this isn’t too bad. New carpet—unless there are wood floors underneath…”

  “This age house, there could be,” Rafe said.

  I nodded. “I’ll never understand why anyone would cover perfectly good hardwoods with carpet, but I guess some people like something soft to walk on.”

  “Or lie on,” Rafe said, with an exaggerated leer that made him look positively devilish in the light from the phone.

  I laughed. “No way am I having sex with you on this. Not in someone else’s house we’ve broken into, with the baby and the dog in the same room.”

&n
bsp; “Rain check, then.” He shone his light around the walls. “But yeah. It don’t look too bad. Get rid of the rug, tear down that ugly border, paint the walls, update the fan, and you’re done in here. The front didn’t look bad, either. Most of your money…”

  “Darcy’s money.”

  He nodded. “Darcy’s money would need to go to the bathroom and kitchen. And this master suite conversion, if it works out to do it.”

  “Would you care to estimate how much money we’re talking about, to do this right?”

  He didn’t answer for a second. Counting in his head, I assumed. “Depends on how expensive you wanna get. If you’re sticking to mid-grade finishes, nothing designer, and maybe you work with the kitchen cabinets—replace the doors rather than the whole box, or you just paint’em if they don’t look too bad…” He named a figure that seemed ridiculously low. “That’s if you do a lot of the work yourselves. If you don’t, maybe double it.”

  “Double it, then.”

  He chuckled, and I added, “Not because I’m not willing to do the work. But we’ll probably have to hire people to do things you could handle yourself. And I’d rather over-estimate than under-estimate and then not have enough.”

  He nodded. “Guess you’ll have to do some figuring on what you can pay for the house, and what you have to put into it, and what you think you can get for it afterwards, before tomorrow morning.”

  I guessed so. “If you’ve seen enough, we should go.” So I could do the research I needed to, and still leave room for that rain check.

  I turned Pearl away from the enticing carpet smells and headed toward the door, peering into the bathroom as we went. “This doesn’t look too bad. New tile and new fixtures. But at least it isn’t a big bathroom. And I’ve seen worse kitchens. The layout is good. It—”

  I stopped with a squeak, as a big, black figure appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room.

  “Hands up!” it boomed, taking a very businesslike stance, legs wide, pointing something at me.