Free April of Enchantment (Sweetly Contemporary Collection) by Jennifer Blake

were missing, and this too was cleaned and painted. The sandblasting crew then turned their attention to the brick walls, carefully blowing away the crazed, cracked, and peeling finish without disturbing the soft, handmade brick that had been burned on the place when the house was built, or the crumbling, hand-mixed mortar. The painters moved in quickly behind them to cover everything with white once more, preventing deterioration from the damp spring weather.
    Stripping the paint from whatever they came across seemed to become a compulsion, however. One day after the paint crew had moved inside, Laura came upon them just beginning to chip away the muddy-looking grime on the baseboards of the library.
    “No!” she exclaimed. “Stop!”         
    The men turned to her in amazement. It was only after she brought soap, water, and a polishing cloth, and got down on her knees to scrub at the boards, that they were able to recognize what she had seen all along. Once cleaned, the paint revealed itself to be a fine example of faux bois, literally translated as “false wood.” Original to the house, the baseboards had been carefully painted by a talented artist to represent marble, with the same shadings of color and swirling pattern. Similar detailed work had been done on the cornices, with a lighter blend on the convex molding and a darker shading on the concave moldings for a remarkable three-dimensional effect. Though at the time it was done the artist’s efforts had been intended to pass for the more expensive marble material, at the present time the uniqueness of the artistic expression made it more valuable than the real thing would have been.
    After that incident, Laura began to spend more and more time at the house, staying from before the moment the carpenters and painters arrived until after they left again, busying herself scraping paint, cleaning, running errands, or poring over some of the hundreds of catalogs that she had collected containing period wall coverings and draperies, paint chips, and hand-loomed rugs.
    She was often joined for brief stretches of time by Justin Roman. He was interested in everything she had to show him, quickly becoming submerged in the smallest detail. And yet, his attitude was businesslike, distant. He took great pains not to be alone with her, and never stayed long. Sometimes Laura found evidence, tracks on the drive, fingerprints in the fine dusting of sand that settled everywhere, footsteps in the mud, which showed he had been there after everyone else had gone. They did not talk a great deal, especially when he brought his fiancée with him to check on the progress, but slowly Laura gained confidence that he meant to return Crapemyrtle to its former splendor with no more jarring modern adjuncts than were absolutely necessary.
    She was rudely shaken out of her complacency early one morning the first week in March. When she pulled into the live-oak-lined drive, she saw Myra’s crimson sports car parked before the house, drawn onto the grass that was just beginning to show touches of tender green. Beside it was parked a carpenter’s truck with a name stenciled on the door that she did not recognize. Frowning a little, she stepped out of her compact. Her footsteps were swift as she crunched over the white gravel of the drive, mounted the steps, and entered the house.
    Myra’s high-pitched tones directed her to the sitting room at the front of the house. The woman, dressed in a pair of tight-fitting black pants worn with a green silk shirt and three-inch-heeled sandals of green leather, stood before the fireplace. She was talking volubly to a man in overalls.
    “We’ll tear out this marble mantel. It’s just too, too quaint and insipid. Instead, we’ll put in a brick wall with a raised hearth and glass doors over the fireplace opening. After that, we’ll take down all these silly roses and naked cherubs, and lower the ceiling to something reasonable for better