Eight-thirty the next morning found me back in Columbia, waiting for Darcy and Charlotte to show up.
I was alone: Rafe had a date with Tamara Grimaldi and the joint sheriffs of Maury, Giles, Lawrence, and Lewis, to trek through Laurel Hill in the company of a park ranger. Because Bob was busy, Mother was at loose ends, and had offered to stay with Carrie and Pearl while I went to the auction. So she was currently hanging out at the mansion, petting an adoring Pearl and watching Carrie kick her feet and gurgle, and I was here, on Fulton, getting my first look at the place in daylight.
It didn’t look too bad, all things considered. Fulton Street was just waking up, this early on a Saturday. A few curtains were open, more were still closed. An older woman walked a small dog with short legs down the other side of the street. A couple of houses up on my side—or the side I hoped would be ours—two kids were playing behind the fence in a front yard.
The house we were trying to buy looked pretty decent in the morning sun. Still a little run-down, with uninspired paint and vegetation in the gutter, and a little sad, with no curtains to brighten the windows, but in halfway decent shape. The roof looked good. The windows were intact. There was no visible sagging. It was what I’d told Charlotte we should look for: a house that mostly needed cosmetic updates.
A car turned the corner down at the end of the street and I watched as my sister’s blue Honda made its way toward me and parked behind the Volvo. A second later, Darcy swung her long legs in snug jeans out of the driver’s seat and strode over to me. “Good morning.”
“Morning,” I said.
She smiled and looked around, into the back seat of the Volvo. “No baby?”
“Mother offered to stay with her. Bob’s off on a field trip with Rafe and Grimaldi and the sheriffs of Lawrence, Lewis, and Giles.”
Darcy arched her brows, and I explained what was going on.
“That’s not good,” she said.
“Tell me about it.” And upon consideration, which I had done on the way over here, Rafe was probably the last person who should be involved in trying to eradicate a group of white supremacists. Or the first person, from a different perspective. But he was involved, whether I liked it or not, so it didn’t matter one way or the other whether it was a smart move. And I could just imagine his reaction if I suggested that he recuse himself because the job was too dangerous.
Darcy turned to the house. “This it?”
I nodded, just as another car turned the corner at the end of the street. We watched as Charlotte’s minivan came toward us and turned into the driveway. The door opened and she hopped down. “Morning.”
“Good morning,” Darcy and I echoed.
Charlotte came over and stood next to us, peering at the house. “Is this it?”
“This is it.” I put on my metaphorical realtor hat and took a breath. “As you can see, it isn’t in terrible shape. The roof looks good. The gutters need to be cleaned out, but hopefully we can get away with not replacing them. We’ll need to do some landscaping, but there aren’t any big trees that need to be taken down, or anything like that.”
They both nodded.
“The street looks good. Old people feel safe enough to walk their dogs and mothers leave their children unattended in the yard. There’s a cop a few doors down.”
“Which cop?” Darcy asked.
I told her. “Does Nolan know him?”
Patrick Nolan is Darcy’s boyfriend, and also an officer with the Columbia PD.
“If he does, he’s never mentioned him,” Darcy said. “But it’s a good sign, that there’s a cop on the street. The neighborhood must be safe.”
“Exactly.” I beamed at her, because she got it. “Ready to go in?”
She nodded. Charlotte did, too, and I led the way up to the door while I fished my keychain out of my purse. “This would be the living room/dining room combination,” I told them after I’d unlocked the door and waved them both inside. “The kitchen is through that door on the left.”
“It isn’t very big,” Charlotte said, looking around. “It would be hard to get a sofa and chairs as well as a dining table in here.”
She had a point. The living/dining combo was considerably smaller than just the dining room at the mansion, and the same was probably true for the Victorian Charlotte’s parents lived in, in downtown Sweetwater.
Then again, the dining table at the mansion can seat sixteen. There would be no need for that kind of thing here.
“At most, you’d probably have six people living here. Two parents in the master, two kids in each of the other bedrooms. More likely there would be less. Two parents, or maybe just one, with two or three kids.”
Charlotte nodded. So did Darcy.
“It would be a little tight, but we could fit a dining room table down at that end.” I pointed. “Or here’s another option. We knock out most of the wall between the dining room and kitchen, which won’t give us any more space, but it’ll make it seem more open, and maybe we can add an island with seating, and avoid the table altogether. They do that on HGTV sometimes.”
“How much is that going to cost?” Darcy asked, squinting at the wall.
I had no idea, and told her so. “It depends on whether it’s load-bearing, first of all. If it is, the opening either has to be smaller, or we have to pay to put a beam up in the ceiling. That count run into some money. But if it’s just a matter of ripping and tearing, we can probably do it ourselves.” Although we’d need to get someone in to reframe the opening and deal with the electrical wires and outlets.
She nodded.
“The kitchen needs updating.” I led them through the doorway that might be going away and into the compact U-shaped kitchen. “It has a lot of cabinets and counter-space, though, for being a fairly small room. Rafe suggested that we could save money by refacing the cabinets—putting new doors on them—instead of replacing everything. They look solid, so it’s worth looking into.”
“New appliances,” Charlotte murmured, and I nodded.
“New countertops. New flooring. New sink and faucet. New drawer pulls and cabinet handles.” That, on its own, could run into some money.
Darcy calculated in her head and mentioned a figure that sounded mostly on target. We moved on to the bathroom and the two bedrooms, and finally to the addition. By the time we were done, Darcy had come up with an idea of what the renovations would cost, that meshed reasonably well with the figure Rafe had mentioned last night. And while it wasn’t exactly pocket change, it didn’t sound too bad, either.
Granted, my only expertise came from watching Flip or Flop on television, but it was something.
“So what do you think?” I asked when we were back outside on the stoop and I had locked the door behind us. “It’s your money, Darcy. And—” I turned to Charlotte, “your time and effort. I like it. I think if we could get it for fifty or so, we’d stand a good chance of making money.”
“Fifty dollars?” Charlotte said.
“Fifty thousand. Tax auction bidding starts at the amount of taxes owed. In this case, it’s probably around ten grand.”
Darcy’s eyes lit up, and I shook my head. “We won’t get it for that. The houses often go for close to market price. On the market, this might go for sixty or even seventy thousand. But there’ll probably just be investors at the auction, and they like to get things cheap. So we could get lucky. Not that lucky, though. But lucky enough to pay ten or twenty thousand under market value.”
“I think I’d be OK up to sixty thousand,” Darcy said. “After we put the money into it—if you’re right about the amount—and if you’re right about the… what did you call it? Out-price?—we stand to make somewhere around seventy thousand.”
“A bit less, after realtor fees and other closing costs. I’d do that part for free, of course, since I’ll be getting a third of the profits, but we still have to pay the other agent. So maybe sixty.” If I was right and all the numbers lined up.
“Twenty thousand each,” Darcy said. “Not sure it would be worth the risk for any less than that.”
No. It was easy for me to feel confident, since all I had to put up was some time and effort. If this blew up, Darcy would be the one with egg on her face. So if she wanted to stop the bidding at sixty thousand, that’s what we’d do.
“Ready to get this show on the road, then?”
They both nodded.
“Want to drive together? That way we don’t have to worry about finding parking for three cars.”
“Is it safe to leave the cars here?” Charlotte wanted to know, with a glance at her late-model Town and Country. I didn’t think the minivan was in any danger of being stolen—most car thieves don’t go for mom-vans when they commit grand theft auto, and they don’t tend to commit grand theft auto at nine on a Saturday morning in a nice, residential neighborhood, either—but of course I didn’t tell her so.
“If it makes you feel better,” I said instead, “you can drive. But you have to come back here after the auction to drop us off.”
“I’d have to come back here after the auction either way,” Charlotte said. “I have car seats in the back.”
Come to think of it, so did I. “I think it’s up to you,” I told Darcy, the only one of us who hadn’t produced offspring she was ferrying around in her car.
She sighed. “First my bank account and now my car. Where’s it going to end?”
“Hopefully on the courthouse steps.” I headed toward the Honda. “C’mon. We don’t want to be late. You can ride shotgun, Charlotte.”
“That’s OK,” Charlotte said. “I’ll take the back. You sit up front with your sister.”
We arranged ourselves and Darcy put the car in gear and headed down the street toward the courthouse.
“How’d it go?” Rafe asked several hours later, when he came home, sweaty and out of sorts, from spending the best part of the day walking and climbing all over Laurel Hill.
I was back in the kitchen, this time with the computer open to tile choices, and I beamed at him. “It went well.”
He took his leather jacket off and hung it over the back of a chair. “Got the house?”
I nodded. “It took some doing, but we did. Eventually.”
One guy had kept the bidding going much longer than I’d wanted—I suspected at that point he was doing it just to drive the price up, although that could have been my imagination—but eventually he gave up, and we were the proud owners of a fixer-upper on Fulton Street.
Or we would be, once Darcy got to the county clerk’s office on Monday with the check.
“Good for you,” Rafe said.
“I guess it is.” We’d come in under Darcy’s top price, if a few thousand above where I’d wanted to be. But if my calculations were right, and the renovation costs didn’t go over by too much, we should still be able to make a decent profit.
His lips curved. “Cold feet?”
“Yours or mine?” He was in the process of peeling off his socks, from which I deduced that he’d probably gotten wet at some point.
He nodded when I said so. “There was a creek. I had to make it to the other side.”
“Just you?”
“Most of the others are old,” Rafe said. “And Tammy’s a girl. I volunteered.”
“I’m not sure Grimaldi would appreciate you calling her a girl.” Or Tammy, for that matter.
He smirked. “I wouldn’t do it to her face.”
“That’s probably safer. So did you find anything interesting on the other side of the creek?”
He made a face, but I wasn’t sure whether it was because of the wet feet or the subject matter. “A sort of half mask someone had left on the ground. Printed with the bottom half of a skull.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Although there’s no law against running around in the woods wearing a skull mask. There could be lots of reasons for that.”
He arched a brow and I corrected myself. “Maybe not lots. But it could be kids playing or something like that.”
“Not with what else I found,” Rafe said.
“What was that?”
“Bullets. Lots of’em.”
I wrinkled my brows. “Who’d dump a bunch of bullets in the woods?”
“They didn’t dump’em,” Rafe said. “They used’em. For target practice, prob’ly. And when it was time to leave, they didn’t pick’em all up. Either ‘cause they couldn’t find’em, or because they just didn’t care about being stealthy.”
If they’d been meeting for target practice, and they’d been wearing skulls over the bottom halves of their faces, I think stealthy was out the window. I mean, yes… they’d clearly taken some pains not to be recognized if they were seen. Hence the masks. But getting together in a popular wildlife area less than an hour and half’s drive from Nashville, wearing skull masks and shooting guns, wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. If they wanted to stay out of the public eye, there were better places they could hide to do their business.
“No clues as to who they are or where to find them, I guess.”
He shook his head. “They didn’t leave calling cards. But now that we know they meet there sometimes, we can keep an eye on the place. And maybe catch’em next time.”
“You can’t arrest them, though,” I said. “Can you? I mean, it’s a wildlife area. Shooting is allowed. And there’s no law against shooting while wearing masks.” At least as long as they didn’t try to shoot people.
“But we can figure out who they are and follow’em home. And then keep an eye on’em.”
Right. In case they decided to do more than shoot at targets.
“But they weren’t there this weekend?”
He shook his head. “The rangers are keeping an eye out. But if they were there last week, we’re thinking it might could be a week or two before they’re back.”
“If they come back at all.”
“No reason they wouldn’t,” Rafe said. “Nobody bothered’em this time. They’d prob’ly feel safe coming back.”
Maybe so. Although for the next week, that left him, and Grimaldi and the sheriffs, with nothing to do but wait and see.
“So you got cold feet?” He came back to the part of the conversation that had been derailed by the discussion of the creek and what had been on the other side of it.
“Not so much cold feet,” I said. “I’m glad we got the house. But the whole thing is scarier now that reality’s set in. It was fun while we were talking about it, but now that we actually have to do something, I’m not sure I know how. I’ve never renovated anything before. Bradley’s townhouse was new when we moved into it. My apartment was a rental, so I couldn’t do anything there, and you’d already done all the work on your grandmother’s house by the time I moved in.”
He nodded.
“The mansion’s been the same for a hundred and eighty years. But this house is on me. Darcy’s putting up the money and Charlotte’s willing to help with the work, but I’m going to have to be the one to tell them both what to do. And what if I don’t know what I’m doing? What if I forget to turn off the power, and someone gets hurts?”
“You won’t,” Rafe said.
Maybe I wouldn’t. But— “What if I choose the wrong wall color or bathroom tile, so nobody wants to buy the place, and we don’t make any money and Darcy doesn’t get her investment back?”
“She’ll still love you,” Rafe said.
Yes, of course she would. At least I hoped she would. But— “I want this to be a success. Charlotte needs the money. I could do with another property to sell. And I don’t want to fail my sister.”
Rafe shook his head. “You won’t fail, darlin’. You know what people are looking for. You know the paint color and tile to pick. Worst case scenario, you’ll make a little less than you hoped you’d make. But nobody’s gonna die because you were negligent, and you’re not gonna fail.”
“Famous last words,” I said.
He grinned. “How about I get changed, and we drive over to Home Depot and look at paint and tile? And then I’ll take you to dinner. How does Cracker Barrel sound?”
Cracker Barrel sounded great. “I love you,” I said.
The grin widened. “I love you, too. Gimme five minutes.” He disappeared down the hallway while I closed the laptop and prepared to go.