Free Repair to Her Grave by Sarah Graves Page B

panty hose can give me a cramp. But when winter returned and it started getting dark at two-thirty in the afternoon, and I had been wearing ice cleats on my boots for what seemed forever, the ladylike refinement portion of the program would start looking pretty good to me.
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re not going to have to attend. In fact—”
    Men sometimes hovered around the edges of Reading Circle meetings, or were present as invited guests. As a rule, though, it was a girl thing.
    “I’ll make myself scarce,” he assured me. “Don’t worry about that.”
    Wade had his own little house on Liberty Street, to which he repaired when he wanted to throw an all-male bash, bourbon and cigars. Or if he just wanted a stretch of solitude. Early on, I’d felt rejected when he did it, but then I noticed two facts: (a) his mail and his packages kept coming to my place, and (b) sooner or later, so did he. If—when—we got married, I would want him to keep the place on Liberty Street.
    And so would he. “Meanwhile,” I went on, “the power in the house is …”
    But then I stopped. We were cresting the hill on Key Street, under the big old maples looming massively along the sidewalk.
    “… out,” I finished. “Or it was.”
    Beaming through the branches, turning the new, transparent maple leaves a luminous gold-green, every window in the house blazed. All but the ones in Sam's room; he must have woken up and switched his off, not realizing that the rest were on, too.
    Monday woofed suspiciously once and fell silent as she caught our scent; when we got inside she did a doggy buck-and-wing in the hall to greet us, then settled back into her bed.
    Raines hadn’t returned. “Lucky for him,” I said grimly as Wade got a beer from the refrigerator and took it to the dining room to survey the damage. “When I get hold of him …”
    “Um, Jacobia?” Wade's voice sounded curious. “How big a hole did you say he made in here?”
    I’d been turning out lights, but at his tone I stopped and went into the room. And wished I hadn’t: half an hour earlier, the gap in the plaster had been about two feet square. But in my absence, the old-house domino effect had gone to work with a vengeance: with such a sizable section of old plaster missing—and therefore not available to hold the rest up against the forces of gravity—a whole section of wall between the door to the butler's pantry and the window pantry had collapsed.
    In other words, a two-foot square hole—not minor, but it had been manageable—had expanded to six-by-twelve: disastrous.
    “Oh,” I said inadequately.
    “Now, don’t panic,” Wade said, seeing my face.
    “I’m not panicking,” I said.
    Also, I wasn’t screaming. But I felt like it. Ragged ends of plaster chunks hung from the ceiling trim and dangled along the window, clinging only there by virtue of the strands of horsehair still embedded in them.
    “Inside the fortunately very solid containment vessel that is my body, I am exploding,” I said carefully.
    “Let's just go make ourselves a few scrambled eggs and an English muffin,” Wade said, putting his big hand on my shoulder. “And a couple of double whiskies. I can open the Lyman press in the morning.”
    And that, in a nutshell, is Wade. To him, disaster is green water over the helm and a fire in the engine room; little else signifies.
    “Right,” I said. There was nothing to be done about it now, anyway. So I went around turning off the rest of the lamps, glancing into Raines's room to make sure he hadn’t sneaked back in.
    He hadn’t, but his duffel still lay by his neatly made bed; that and his eyeglasses, still out on the dining room table, told me he would return to the scene of the crime sooner or later.
    And when he did, boy, was he ever going to be sorry.
    Wade and I had whiskey and eggs at the kitchen table, Monday delicately accepting the little bits of muffin and egg I fed her.
    “People giving you a hard time,