Murder at Wrightsville Beach by Ellen Elizabeth Hunter

Author:Ellen Elizabeth Hunter [Hunter, Ellen Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780975540435
Publisher: Worldwide
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

Wednesday morning was hot and muggy and I hated leaving the beach where there was a breeze off the ocean. In town, steam seemed to rise from the pavement. I pulled up in front of the Lauder house at about eight to find that Willie Hudson, our elderly general contractor, had already assigned a crew of brick masons to the project. How pleased the neighbors must have been to awake to a construction crew on their street.

The brick masons had erected scaffolding across the front of the house. All the windows in the house had been pried open, and someone looked down at me from one of the upstairs bedroom windows. Good old Jon had beat me to the site again, I thought, although I didn't see his Escalade parked at the curb. I waved but by then he had moved away.

The brick bonds on the Lauder house had been laid in the English pattern design which had been popular in the twenties. Brick was beautiful and durable and provided excellent insulation.

"Hey, Miz Wilkes," Willie called and came to meet me on the sidewalk. "Or should I be callin' you Mrs. Yost? And what do you hear from that hero husband of yours?"

"Hey, Willie," I called back. "When are you going to start calling me Ashley?"

"When you start calling me Mr. Hudson." He grinned. This was our morning ritual.

"Okay, then Mr. Hudson, I've decided against the hyphenated last name. Ashley Wilkes-Yost sounds too much like Ashley Milque-toast to suit me. So I'm sticking with Wilkes."

Willie threw back his head and roared with laughter. "Milque-toast! That's a good one, Miz Wilkes. Anybody know you would have a hard time thinking of you as Milque-toast. Not the way you keep finding those dead bodies."

"Let's not get started on that. You've begun the pointing, I see."

"Sure have. Took off all them old gutters and leaders yesterday, and will have new ones up before the end of the week. This nice hot weather's just fine for pointin'."

"You like this weather?" I asked, incredulous.

"Love it. I was born in the summer, partial to summer ever since."

"Are you finding much damage to the mortar?" I asked.

"In a house this age, and with settling and all, the mortar's cracked pretty good. Some pieces are just plain missing. So my boys take a chisel and a hammer and chip away the loose mortar. They'll slosh water into the joints so them old dry bricks don't suck up the moisture out of the mortar. Then we'll trowel the mortar into the joints and be as good as done.

"And while we're up there, we'll be looking around for missing or cracked bricks. Got a stack of new ones up there just so's we can replace the old. Selected them myself, match just fine."

"Sometimes I wonder why folks bother to hire me and Jon, Willie. You know more about this than I'll ever know."

"That's what I keep askin' myself, Miz Wilkes," Willie laughed. "But then, you gotta do all that paperwork. Myself, I hate the paperwork.

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