by Donna Ball
“The situation is,” he explained as they descended into the bare-bulbed dimness, “this house wasn’t built to carry air-conditioning. Probably wasn’t even built for electricity. Looks like the wiring was added later. How old is this place, anyway?”
“A hundred and six years,” replied Cici.
He gave a low whistle. “They sure don’t build them like this anymore. Solid. Anyway, here’s your problem.”
He made a sharp right at the bottom of the stairs and crossed to the fuse box on the wall. He opened the door, switched on the high-powered beam of his flashlight to illuminate the inner workings, and stepped back to allow her to appreciate the problem for herself.
Cici looked at the fuse box, looked at him, and said, “Okay.”
He said, “You’re gonna have to run a new wire. We can’t hook up anything to this. There’s no room.”
She stared at him. “You couldn’t have discovered that before you cut holes in the ceiling?”
He shrugged. “Generally, when we come to do a job, we’re counting on electricity.”
Cici frowned impatiently. “Look, I don’t mean to be unreasonable, but it has been three weeks and it’s getting hotter by the day. How long will it take you to run the wire and install the air-conditioning unit?”
He was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “You’re gonna need an electrician for that.”
Again, she stared. “But—you’re a contractor, right? Isn’t that what it says on your card? Heating-and-air contractor? Isn’t that what contractors do? They contract with whoever they need to get the job done?”
He snapped off the flashlight beam. “Call me when you get the wiring done.”
And he left.
The electrician said, “Miz Burke, can I just show you one thing?”
Cici, who was on the third from the top rung of the stepladder with a roller dipped in glossy white exterior paint poised against the ceiling of the front porch, glanced down at him. He was greasy-haired, ruddy-nosed, and the script across the pocket of his half-tucked blue work shirt suggested that his name was Cal. He had, however, introduced himself as Lenny, of Lenny’s All-Electric in Silverton County.
Lenny had brought a crew of three with him, and so far they had walked around the perimeter of the house together, muttering and nodding, squinted upward at the roof a good deal, and done a lot of leaning against walls while Lenny/Cal had taken readings with his voltage meter. Previously Cici had been asked to interrupt her painting to look at the fuse box, which was in desperate need of being upgraded to a circuit breaker system, and the outside meter, which apparently was improperly grounded. Every time she looked at the estimate, which originally had been requested only to cover running the wiring for a heat pump, went up another thousand dollars.
Cici carefully climbed down from the ladder, wrapped the roller in plastic film, covered the paint tray, removed her gloves, and followed Lenny/Cal inside.
At eleven a.m., the temperature was already eighty degrees—seventy-eight inside with all the windows and doors open. By noon it would be uncomfortably hot on the ladder, and by one the paint would be dry before it left the roller. Cici suppressed a groan as she heard Lindsay’s brand-new, state-of-the-art riding lawn mower sputter to a stop somewhere in the backyard, and grind its engine repeatedly in an effort to start again. It would definitely be too hot to mow the lawn in another hour, even on a riding mower.
Lenny/Cal led the way across the living room into the small enclosed sunporch that adjoined it on the back side of the house. The low ceiling and marble tile floors suggested this room might once have been an open patio. Now the banks of windows on three sides—all of which were encased in wooden frames that were suffering from dry rot and covered in flaking white paint—filled the room with morning light and made it hot enough to bake bread. Even the ladybugs that swarmed across the window panes were dropping, shells-down, onto the sills from apparent heat exhaustion. For this reason, the ladies hadn’t yet found a use for the room, and it was empty now except for the three men in sweat-stained blue uniforms with names stenciled on the pockets who variously squatted on the floor and lounged against the wall near an electrical outlet whose faceplate had been removed.
“See this here?” Lenny/Cal hunkered down and pointed at something in the outlet with the tip of his screwdriver.
Cici saw nothing, but she made a sound of interest as she blotted her forehead with the back of her arm.
“What you got here,” explained Lenny/Cal with authority, “is your reversed polarity. Same all through here. Way I figure it, this room was built onto and whoever did the wiring did a half-assed job. If I was you I’d check the rest of the house, too. Who knows what we’re like to find.”
The other three men nodded sage agreement.
Cici said, “And how much will that cost to fix?”
He looked thoughtful as he straightened up. “Well now, that all depends. We go through, have to pull wires, replace all the outlets . . . parts, labor, three men upwards of two weeks . . . that’s not counting construction work, mind you, if we have to cut into walls . . . could run oh, two, three thousand more.”
Cici gazed at him without expression. “Okay,” she said in a moment. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. The original job you were hired for was going to cost six hundred dollars. Next thing I know we’re replacing the fuse box for a thousand dollars, and burying a ground wire for another thousand. Now you’re talking about another three thousand dollars. Let me ask you something. How much does an electrical outlet cost?”
“Well now, I’m not saying it’s for absolute we’d have to replace them all—”
“They’re $2.98 each,” Cici supplied for him, “and it takes approximately three minutes to change one out. Even if you replaced a hundred outlets in this house at your outrageous rate, we’re talking less than five hundred dollars, now aren’t we?”
He started to sputter. “Well, I don’t know how you’re figuring that. Besides, that’s not even counting the wire—”
“Which is fifty cents a foot for 120,” she returned, “and which I did not ask you to do.” Sweat trickled down her sides and began to chafe behind the knees of her paint-splattered jeans. “Mr.—um”—she glanced at his shirt pocket and decided—“Lenny, I think we need to come to an understanding, here. All I want is a separate 220 circuit installed for a heat pump and air conditioner.”
“You’re gonna have to upgrade your box,” he insisted defensively.
“I understand that,” she replied, as patiently as she could. Another trickle of sweat crawled down her spine and she twitched her shoulders against it. “What I don’t understand is why it’s going to cost a thousand dollars.”
He grinned at his three compadres. They grinned back. Then he grinned at her, hitched up his pants, rocked back on his heels, and began to explain. “Now there, young lady, there’s a lot about electric you don’t know. Lots that can’t be found in your Sears, Roebuck catalogue. You start dealing with live wires, you’re gonna be talking about some money. You take an old house like this, she could go up like kindling, you don’t know what you’re doing. Why, I remember one time—”
Cici took a breath. “Lenny,” she said, very calmly, “this is not your fault. I think what we have here is a simple misunderstanding, so let me see if I can clear it up. First of all, I am not a young lady. I am a big-city woman who’s low on hormones and low on patience and you don’t have any idea how much I want air-conditioning right now.” His grin began to fade. She took a step forward. “So here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go out to your truck and you’re going to get some wire and some tools and you’re going to hook up a 220-volt circuit for my new air conditioner, and you’re not going to worry about new outlets or pulling wires until I tell you to, okay?”
He shifted his sullen gaze from Cici to his crew, and then back again. He muttered, “Got to go into town to get the parts.”
Cici said, staring him down, �
��Then you’d better get started.”
As one, they shuffled past her out of the room. When they were gone, Cici pulled up her T-shirt and wiped her face, then followed them. She reached the front of the house just as four truck doors were slamming, and Lindsay came in from the kitchen. She looked as hot and sweaty as Cici felt, and her face was spattered with grass clippings. She tugged off her baseball cap, lifting one shoulder toward the front door. “Where’s the electrician going?”
Cici sighed. “Who knows? But I’ll bet you ten dollars that’s the last we’ll ever see of him.”
“Unless his crew comes back to murder us in our sleep. Did you get a good look at those guys? I swear I’ve seen some of them on the bulletin board at the post office.”
“Oh.” Cici scrubbed another film of sweat off her face with the hem of her shirt. “Maybe I’d better be more careful who I piss off from now on.”
“Cici! Lindsay!” Bridget’s voice, shrill and imperious, came through the window. “Will you come out here please?”
They started toward the back door. “Why didn’t you just call Farley?” Lindsay asked.
“I guess I’ll have to. I just hate to ask the man to rewire the house for ten dollars.”
“Well, when you do, tell him to bring his tractor.”
Cici pushed open the back door. “What for?”
“To pull our lawn mower out of the swamp.”
“What swamp?”
“The one in our backyard. There’s an inch of standing water and a bog over my ankles.” She pointed to her bare feet. “I lost a tennis shoe.”
Cici stared at her, but Bridget’s insistent voice came again. “Cici! Lindsay! I’m not kidding!”
Far more concerned about the sudden appearance of a bog in the backyard than with either the electrician or whatever was on Bridget’s mind, Cici opened her mouth to question, but Lindsay just shrugged and hurried off after Bridget.
They found her, as expected, in the garden. The ten-by-ten spot she had originally cleared for vegetables had quickly grown to twenty-by-thirty as repeated trips to Family Hardware yielded flat after flat of seedlings. It had all begun when she went out one morning to check on the progress of her three tomato plants, and discovered they were gone. Rabbits, she was certain. She went into town for replacement plants and tomato cages, and returned with not only the tomatoes, but a six-pack of yellow squash—and each pack contained three plants. Squash takes an enormous amount of room, but the ground was soft and easily tillable, so Bridget simply enlarged the garden spot, planted eight new tomato plants and all the squash. The next day half the squash plants had been plucked out of the ground. Bridget went into town for deer repellent and returned with a packet of seed corn, a flat of bell pepper plants and another of cucumbers. Once again she enlarged the vegetable plot to accommodate three rows of corn, two hills of cucumbers, and a row of bell peppers.
She accused moles of making off with the cucumbers, but replanted them and enhanced the garden with eight climbing bean plants, three pumpkin vines, and a selection of zucchini and winter squash. Barring any more mysterious disappearances, they would soon be harvesting enough produce to supply a town twice the size of Blue Valley.
And that was what brought them up short as they made their way past the abandoned reflecting pool, through the walled garden that protected nothing, and emerged from beneath the rotting twig arbor into the sunny vegetable garden. There they just stood, and stared.
“Well, now that’s weird,” Lindsay said at last.
“That is definitely one rabbit I don’t want to meet in a dark alley,” agreed Cici.
Where once there had been stalks of foot-high corn, there were now only empty holes. Where once had stood a neat row of bell pepper plants, there was now dirt. Every other trailing cucumber plant was missing. The huge yellow squash blossoms that had been so cheerfully promising yesterday were no longer. And standing in the midst of it all, wearing a floppy hat and a thunderous look, was Bridget.
“Are you going to try to tell me a deer did this?” she demanded. “What kind of deer pulls corn stalks out of the ground?”
“A hungry one?” suggested Lindsay, then shrugged apologetically as Bridget turned the look on her.
“I don’t know, Bridget,” Cici said, stepping carefully around the rows to reach her. “What do we know about deer except that they used to eat hostas out of Mrs. Livingston’s yard? These are country deer. Maybe they like corn.”
“Sure. So they just pull it out of the ground and take it home to transplant.”
“Maybe it’s not deer.”
“Maybe it’s the ghost.”
“Maybe,” suggested Bridget darkly, “it’s a person.”
Cici lifted her eyebrows. “Why would anyone want to steal produce from us?”
“Especially when it’s not even ripe,” Lindsay pointed out.
Bridget’s scowl grew uncertain. “Well, all I know is it needs to stop.”
“We could put up a fence,” Cici offered, albeit with obvious reluctance.
“We could call the sheriff,” Lindsay said, “but if it turns out to be a deer . . .”
“It’s not a deer!” Bridget insisted sharply.
Cici patted her shoulder. “At least you saved most of the corn. And we had too many peppers anyway.”
“What kind of deer eats peppers?” Lindsay mused.
“Wait!” Bridget exclaimed, her face clearing suddenly. “Cici, do you still have that nanny cam you bought when you thought that maid was dipping into the bourbon?”
“Maybe . . . I guess so . . . I don’t remember selling it. It’s probably in a box somewhere in the cellar. The maid quit before I ever set it up.”
“It runs on batteries, right?”
“Oh no,” said Lindsay. “You’re not going to put a nanny cam in the garden? This sounds like something Ethel and Lucy would do!” And when Bridget turned the full force of her glare on her, she added quickly, “I’ll help you set it up.”
While Bridget and Lindsay trolled the cellar for unopened boxes from the move, Cici went to examine the bog in the backyard. She had a dreadful suspicion even before Farley puttered up the drive on his tractor to pull the lawn mower out of the mud and confirmed her fear.
“Septic,” he said, unhooking the chains from the lawn mower. “Roots.”
Cici had grown used to reading between the lines of his taciturn conversation, but this one gave her pause. “I’m sorry?”
He just grunted.
“Is there a—um, septic person I can call?”
“Yep.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yep.”
“Who is it?”
“Will Peterson. Bear Gap Road.”
As she so often did after successfully finishing a conversation with Farley, Cici sighed. “Thank you.” She pulled a ten dollar bill out of her pocket and he took it silently.
“Won’t do you no good.” Farley tucked the bill into his wallet.
Again, a sense of dread crept upon her. “Why not?”
“Gone to Baltimore.”
“Oh. When will he be back?”
He looked at her for a moment as though the stupidity of the question surpassed understanding. “Ain’t no telling. Sometimes a week, sometimes two.”
“Isn’t there anyone else?”
He said, “Nope.” He climbed aboard the tractor. “Ya’ll coming to the pig-pickin’?”
Now it was her turn to stare blankly. “The what?”
“Fourth of Ju-ly.” He pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable of July. “Parade and pig-pickin’, downtown. Starts at one o’clock. Maggie said I was to ask you special. Ain’t got no fireworks,” he added, somewhat morosely, Cici thought.
“Oh. Well, yes, of course we’ll come. Thank you.” She felt compelled to add, “I’m sure it will be wonderful, even without fireworks.”
She wanted to ask him about wiring the house for a heat pump, but he started the engine of the tr
actor and puttered down the driveway without another word.
All things considered, it was probably just as well.
10
In Which the Ladies Find Religion
“What do you suppose a pig-picking is?” Bridget asked
Lindsay tossed her a look of mock disdain. “Where are you from, anyway? The big city? Everyone knows a pig-picking is where they turn a little pig loose in a maze and a bunch of boys try to catch it.”
“I think that’s a greased pig chase,” Cici said.
“Well, it’s something like that.”
Cici pulled into one of the few remaining parking places on Main Street, half a block away from the Dollar Store. “Remember,” she cautioned, “we can’t stay long. I want to try to get the front porch floor painted this afternoon.”
“You sure know how to celebrate a holiday,” Bridget said.
“It’s way too hot to paint,” agreed Lindsay. “What I want to do is find someone, anyone, who will sell me a window air conditioner.”
“You try to plug in an air conditioner and you’ll blow every fuse in that house.”
“Come on, girls,” Bridget said, opening the car door, “let’s try to forget about the heat for a while and enjoy the parade.”
“No fireworks,” Cici reminded them with a fair imitation of Farley’s glum expression, and they all grinned as they got out of the car.
The smell of charcoal and hickory smoke greeted them, causing them each to suppress a groan of anticipatory pleasure. The sidewalks were lined with booths decked in red, white, and blue bunting, selling everything from crocheted teapot cozies to memberships in the Women’s Club. The Lions Club had the most popular booth, featuring homemade ice cream scooped from churns packed in dry ice. The ladies joined the line of men, women, and children dressed in cotton shorts and colorful shirts and found themselves sharing some of the restless anxiety as, in the distance, they heard the drumming of the marching band beginning its warm-up. No one wanted to miss the opening of a parade.
