The Other Side - J. D. Robb [133]
“Please stop saying that.”
“I rammed my backhoe into its southeast corner this morning. There was a rumbling noise and dust flew everywhere. When it cleared, the house was the same. I didn’t even crack the foundation. It ain’t coming down.”
“Mr. Brown, will you hold for just a moment, please?”
Tears of frustration pressed against the back of her eyes before the line was muted. She blinked slowly at the ceiling until the stinging subsided, and she curled her fingers into fists. This was her mother’s fault. If just once her mother had listened to her when she advised her to sell Hedbo House and buy into an easy-turnover residence in a retirement community, it wouldn’t be happening. Her mother never listened.
And now she never would.
She didn’t have the time or energy for this. She needed every second, every ounce, to make partner at Wilson and Bows, and the audit and analysis of Longwire Industries was the deal breaker. She could feel it in her bones. All eyes would be on her for the next few weeks, and she couldn’t miss a step.
She took a deep breath and splayed her hands out flat on the desktop, trying to relax. The only house she ever heard of that refused to fall down was in a nursery rhyme about pigs, and even then, she thought the wolf gave up too soon. There were laws of physics that applied to this situation, so there had to be an answer somewhere.
She adjusted her headset and reconnected with Mr. Brown. “Maybe I’d better drive out there Friday after work and see for myself. Can you meet me at the house about six?”
The drive from Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., to Loudon County and the barely there, drive-through town of Johnnie’s Bend was easy enough. Despite the fact that she’d spent time there as a child and her mother had lived the last ten years of her life there, her trips out had become fewer and fewer in recent years as her life became increasingly consumed with her job and the responsibilities thereof. But she could see immediately that Johnnie’s Bend was changing . . . growing.
At last.
And no one, including her, was going to miss Hedbo House—a ramshackle, three-story, brick colossus built in the late eighteen hundreds by Horatio Hedbo, who invented and manufactured a modern press that put holes in buttons and left his fortune and home to his only son, Hobart Hedbo, when he died in 1930. Hobart, something of a womanizer, married late in life and had three daughters—Imogene, Odelia, and Adeline.
Imogene married and had a son, Rufus, who died of pneumonia at a young age. Odelia never married. Adeline married four times, producing only one descendant: M.J., who was as convinced as any completely unsuperstitious person could be that it was living in the very old and truly dreary Hedbo House that had killed them all.
But it wasn’t going to get her. She’d planned to raze the house even before the lucrative offer from Smoothie Hut, Inc., arrived at the family lawyer’s office almost a year after her mother’s funeral.
However—and wasn’t there always a however somewhere—certain family heirlooms needed to be removed and looked after: given to distant relatives and donated to specific museums or charities to be auctioned off according to her mother’s will. With so little time in her schedule, she’d given the list to her contractor, Mr. Brown, who owned a deconstruction company out of Leesburg. He planned to salvage the doors, hardware, wood paneling . . . everything he could, actually, and recycle the rest. Profits to her would come in the forms of sale of the salvage, a tax-deductible donation of the refuse, and selling the land rights to Smoothie Hut, Inc.
“Okay. Give me the key, and I’ll try it this time.” The standard key in the dead bolt worked fine. It was the long, nondescript skeleton key that fit into the ancient lock under the doorknob that he was struggling with. She pulled her gaze from the second of two large picture windows on the front of the house that were cracked, shattered in fact, yet inexplicably intact. “Old locks