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By Root 897 0

it up and came home. She was never picked as the poster girl for Clinique or Estée Lauder but a lot of folks think she could have been. She looked at modeling a lot like climbers look at mountains. It was there so she climbed it, but once she got to the top, she looked around and discovered other peaks. When people asked why, she’d shrug and say, “Been there, did that.” What she was really saying was that she’d proven her point and broken the tether to her dad. That didn’t mean she didn’t love him, but it did mean that when she came home, he couldn’t control her with a noose through her nose. Modeling, traveling the world, opened her eyes to her real passion—design. So she returned to school in Charleston and finished a four-year interior design degree in two years and then went to work for a local firm. When it came to design, she had a knack for it. It didn’t take her long to have her own clients. Abbie’s sense of design was four-dimensional. She could see color and spatial design like everyone else, but her singular gift was that she saw opportunity and possibility when others saw bad lines, antiquated fixtures, a moth-eaten piece of furniture, wood rot or cracked and peeling layers of the previous owner’s bad decisions.

I learned this firsthand after we’d been married about six months. Between her career as a model and what her father had given her from her deceased mother and his growing estate, Abbie had her own money. And a good bit of it, too.

One day she parked the Mercedes top down in front of this boarded-up house that looked like it should have been in a Stephen King novel. Paint chipped, windows busted, shingles missing, porch falling off one side of the house, it either needed to be dozed or blown up. Nearly four years earlier, in September of 1989, Hurricane Hugo attempted to rip Charleston off the map. A category-five storm, it caused $13 billion in damage, and much of that occurred in the Carolinas. In its wake, many of the homes it decimated remained untouched and rotting. Like this one. After four years of sitting, the city had tired of arguing with the owners and was in the process of condemning it. Evidently, Abbie had caught wind of it and bought it off the courthouse steps.

She led me inside, around the dry-rotted debris and up a spiral staircase that led into the master bedroom on the second floor. From there, we mounted a steep, narrow wooden staircase that led into a third story. Finally, she opened a window, pointed me through and said, “Close your eyes.” I obeyed and she pulled me upward into the crow’s nest. The platform shifted under our weight. I opened my eyes and she pointed out across the water. “I bought you something,” she said. I scanned the waterline below for anything vaguely resembling an eighteen-foot fishing boat. I really wanted a Hewes, Key West or Pathfinder, but I’d have settled for a Carolina Skiff. I saw nothing.

“What?”

She stamped her feet and smiled. The iron platform rattled where a few of the bolts had wiggled loose.

I looked down, slowly. Pieces of the puzzle were sliding into place. While the house had weathered Hugo, it hadn’t been touched since. We weren’t just looking at a few missing shingle tiles, a little cracked and peeling paint or even a bit of wood rot. Not hardly. Entire sections of the roof were missing. Windows had disappeared leaving no trace that they’d ever been there. The front door was literally hanging on a twisted hinge. The basement sat stagnating in a foot of brackish water. Further, rumors told that the network of tunnels under this end of Charleston led from the old city, under this house, to the wharf. If that was true, and given the storm surge of Hugo, there was no telling how much water might have been in this house or how that might have eroded the foundations of this or any surrounding home. I leaned out over the railing and looked through the roof and down two stories into the kitchen. “You didn’t.”

Her eyes lit up, the smile stretching from ear to ear.

Months of nonstop weekends, long nights of work and ten thousand trips to Home