Free Unhinged by Sarah Graves Page A

Top Cat Productions truck rumbled toward us.
    “On the other hand,” Bob cautioned, “if Harry Markle
did
have an old enemy following him—”
    “Not someone whose radar you want to be on,” I agreed. But with Bob not seeming to give the notion much credence, it seemed more remote to me, too; comfortingly so.
    Too bad I couldn’t dismiss the rest of what Harry had said. “What else did you find out about him, anything?”
    “Just that he’s got a girlfriend already. One of the dancers in that video they’re making, name of Samantha Greer. Not local,” he added.
    People from away could behave like a hutch full of bunnies for all Bob cared; he didn’t have to attend town meetings with
their
parents. “Jake. About the binoculars.”
    So he knew that Harriet hadn’t taken them with her. Around here, if a sparrow fell Bob knew it before the feathers quit fluttering.
    Knew, and did something about it, too, if necessary.
    All in good time.
    I hoped.
     
     
    My old house stands on a granite foundation each block of which was quarried miles away on the mainland, dragged to the water, barged over the channel, and hauled by oxcart to the site where it was mortared in by someone who knew how. The house’s first owner, Captain Jeremiah Loundsworth, survived a long career of dangerous, extremely lucrative commercial voyages only to perish by shipwreck in a storm while carrying soldiers to the Civil War.
    Sometimes in the house late at night I could almost hear the weeping when the word came: that the captain was lost. Or possibly it was cheering at the news that the old tyrant had finally drowned.
    I’ll never know; the walls cannot speak. But they can fall down, and they were doing it very convincingly when I returned home.
    “Sorry,” Wade said, throwing an arm around my shoulder as I gazed at the clapboards lying where they had fallen onto the back lawn. A row of them had smashed the pretty trellis Ellie and I had built the previous summer to support the Concord grapevines.
    “Guess we bumped them too hard with that ladder,” Wade added ruefully. “Gutters and downspouts are all on straight, though.”
    I managed a chuckle. The rotted clapboards were bad enough. But the real disaster was why they’d fallen; the framing beneath them was rotten, too. And that meant . . .
    “Leak,” I diagnosed grimly. “Bad flashing, snow and ice on top, water ran inside.” I should have let the Shingle Belles do the whole roof, not just the actively leaking portion on the ell, as they had advised.
    But it was too late now. The hole where the clapboards fell resembled a spreading patch of leprosy. And it would act like one if it didn’t get repaired, as Sam would’ve put it,
soot tweet
.
    “I’ll order the materials today, by Friday I can have new clapboards painted,” I said, adding and subtracting in my head.
    Mostly subtracting. The job would take hundreds of dollars’ worth of clapboards, as hideously expensive as skin grafts. And it would need oil-based paint, which is the very devil to work with. But here on the island in the damp salt air, latex exterior paint is about as durable as a dusting of powdered sugar.
    “Turpentine,” I recited. “Sprayer nozzle—”
    The way to paint clapboards is
before
you nail them up: two coats of primer, two of paint. I was certainly not going to paint them with a brush, and the paint-sprayer nozzle had a clog in it.
    This being yet another do-it-yourself home-fix-up rule:
The paint-sprayer nozzle always has a clog in it.
    “The storm will be past by then. And,” I went on recklessly, gazing at the bare spot which was a good ten feet higher than I’d ever climbed before, “maybe I can put the clapboards up myself. I could rent scaffolding, or borrow a longer extension ladder.”
    Wade’s head moved against my hair in a way that I had learned meant he was trying hard to keep from laughing outright. “What’s so funny?” I demanded.
    “You.” He wrapped me in a bear hug.