Page 5 of August
“That’s what you meant about never being off work,” she said with a smile and took a few steps into Myra’s yard to inspect the white-painted front porch, complete with a swing. “I want a swing on my porch.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. I was just looking at your swing, and I think I want one of my own,” she said.
“Oh,” Myra replied. “I have a supplier; local guy who makes them. If you want, I can show you more of his stuff to choose from. I have a catalog he gave me. He does custom stuff but has some standard things he sells as well.”
“Maybe another time. I need to get the house repaired before I go buying new stuff for it.”
“No problem. I can be there around five-thirty, if that’s okay with you. If not, later is fine since I can walk over whenever,” Myra said.
“That should be fine. I’ll get my kids to behave.”
“Oh, okay,” Myra said.
“That was a joke. It was a bad joke, but it was a joke.” Elisa laughed a little at how ridiculous she sounded because this woman didn’t need to know that she had kids. “They’ll behave,” she added.
“I can bring candy if that helps.”
“They’re eighteen, so it will,” she said, laughing at her second lame joke.
Then, Myra laughed, and Elisa stopped laughing to listen to it.
“Well, this is probably the strangest call you’ve ever gotten from a prospective client, huh?” she asked.
“Pretty close, yeah,” Myra replied. “I did once get a call from someone who insisted I was the woman he’d gone on a date with one night, and when I told him that he’d called a contractor, he said I was lying and didn’t want to go out with him again, so I should just be an adult and tell him that.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I didn’t want to go out with him.”
Elisa laughed and asked, “What did he say then?”
“He asked me to reconsider because he really liked me.”
“Wow,” Elisa said, shaking her head now. “A real winner, that one.”
“I know. Right?” Myra laughed.
“I should let you get back to work,” Elisa said as she sat on her sofa.
“Oh, yeah,” Myra replied, and it sounded as if she had forgotten that they’d been arranging for her to come to the house. “Five-thirty?”
“I’ll be here,” Elisa said.
CHAPTER 3
Myra pulled into her own driveway and looked over at the house to her right. It was, just like her own, an old shotgun-style home, but this one, unlike hers, had a second floor. She hadn’t lived here when they’d added it on, but she could tell by looking at it that it hadn’t been built with the house initially. The wear and tear and weathering on the outside of the house were older on the bottom floor than on the top. She wondered, not for the first time, when they’d added on the entire second floor. She hadn’t needed that much room post her divorce, having no children of her own and not planning on having any, either, so it hadn’t made sense to build on to her own home, but she had always liked the look of the house next door, despite the upper and lower levels not exactly matching.
She had noticed months ago that it had been put up for sale and had seen the moving truck, but she’d been so busy with work that she hadn’t paid much attention to the new owner or, really, anything else. Technically, she had enough time now to go inside her own house and change out of her dirty and sweaty work clothes and into something more comfortable, but thiswasa work call, so she needed to appear in her work shirt and pants. Deciding to go inside and at least put on a fresh work shirt, she grabbed an apple and ate half of it before she slipped her boots back on. Finishing the apple on the way over to the other house, she dropped the core into the trash can she had in the back of her work truck to deal with later and carried her clipboard across the yard with her.
The call with Elisa Benedetti had been an interesting one. For a minute at the end there, Myra had forgotten that she was on a work call. It had been niceandstrange at the same time. Well, mostly nice and only a little strange, and shefound herself excited to go check out the house and even more excited to meet her neighbor. Myra hadn’t ever been the kind of person who just introduced herself to a neighbor when they moved in. She preferred to keep to herself, but she didn’t consider herself unneighborly. If someone needed to borrow that cup of sugar and she had it, she would give it to them. If she was in her backyard and her neighbor was in theirs, she’d give them a wave and ask how they were doing, but that was the extent of how far she reached out without someone doing the reaching out first.
She rang the doorbell and looked at the house up close for the first time while she waited. The door opened, and she was met with the confused face of a teenage boy who had a phone to his ear.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“I’m from Davies’ Con–”
