Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 79850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 319(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
I glanced at Ada, who nodded.
“And you had an alligator down there?”
“Not when there were still people coming to the house,” she explained. “But once there were no more parties, then yes.”
“But he got too big.”
“Yes.”
Was she kidding?
“There were two originally,” Gale apprised me, “so…best to keep Misha off the floor.”
“He is snack size,” Ada agreed.
I was terrified of what I was walking into. Just inside the house, there was a stack of actual mining helmets and they all had lights in them.
“I changed the batteries a month ago,” he said, putting one on. There was light immediately. “Cool, right?”
Ada put hers on and they were both waiting for me.
“I thought you were kidding?”
“Darling, why would I kid about something like that?”
Gale waggled his eyebrows at me.
“This is nuts,” I told them.
“What’s nuts is that before we only had tennis rackets,” Ada informed me. “But then I remembered that Oscar used to play cricket and I had the bats in his room. These are far better.”
“Sturdier,” Gale assured me. “In case ya gotta kill something.”
Jesus.
Two hours later, I had packed a bag for Ada and walked her back over to my house, where I put her in the second bedroom since she refused to take the larger one as that was mine.
I had no idea which parts of the main house were fine and which were not. At first glance, it looked pretty good overall, but I had no background in construction, and so I wasn’t about to risk her life—more than she already had herself. How had she been living there like that all this time? How did no one notice?
Oscar’s suite, as Ada called it, appeared in only mild disrepair and seemed by far the best maintained room in the house—all being relative. The paint was chipping, the wallpaper faded, fixtures needed replacing, but the marble bathtub, Baccarat crystal doorknobs, and floors were still lovely. The wood needed refinishing, the area rugs had holes in places, and the decor had to be updated, but as far as I could tell, it all looked structurally sound.
The attic, on the other hand, was definitely a health hazard, given the pervasive black mold and the amount of bat guano, and I had no idea if it could be saved. And once the bat guano was cleared out by people in hazmat suits, there were trunks and trunks of stuff. Someone would need to determine if anything was salvageable, but I was betting no.
“I haven’t been up there in decades,” Ada confessed.
“The house might need to stop at the third floor and we get rid of the attic altogether,” I suggested. “We won’t know until we have people out here to look, but my bet is you don’t clean that much shit and piss out of wood.”
She nodded. “Tactfully put.”
“Sorry,” I said softly. “But maybe instead of the attic, we could put a widow’s walk up there. That could be cool, couldn’t it?”
Her eyes lit up.
I said, “When I was little, my mother took me on a trip to the coast of Maine, and a lot of houses on the coastline had those. My mother really loved them. It occurs to me that you might have a nice view from up there.”
She gasped. “I would love that, Maks. That’s what I always wanted.”
I thought she might, with how in love with a bygone era she was. “Well, we’ll see what can be done once we have someone out here who can vouch for the foundation.”
“And the basement bathhouse?” Gale asked.
Even in their current state, I was certain that at some point the tile and interconnected pools had been lovely. Now they were filled with brackish water and God knew what else. I would not have been surprised to see an alligator lying on the steps. It had been freshwater, pumped in from a well that had gone dry years ago, but there was still water seeping in from underground. And since it rained continually, I was betting a French drain would need to be put in to prevent leaks.
We’d had a similar situation at our second house in La Grange when Pasha and I were kids. Cracks in the cement in the basement, under hastily laid down carpet, had allowed water to come up and into the house whenever it rained. My parents had bought the house, not knowing, and it had been a horrible surprise when Pasha and I went downstairs to play and immediately got our socks wet. Of course, the homeowner who sold us the house had paid for the repairs, including repainting and floor tiles—my father didn’t want carpet again. You didn’t say no to Grigory Lenkov, but I was thinking that for Ada, perhaps the bathhouse could just go. Either way, it needed to be drained, and like everything else, the foundation needed to be checked. My vote was to simply fill it all in with concrete, but I wasn’t a building inspector, so we’d have to wait and see. If I were a betting man, my money would be on the basement being a goner.