Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“This is Bailey Toms. You talked to my daughter a few days ago. I worked on the concrete job at Heartstone. The garage, both times.”
A jolt of adrenaline flashed through me, and I sat up straight. “You poured the concrete in eighty-six?”
“That was me. I worked on the big garage renovation a few years before that, and then fixed it when they tore it back up in eighty-six.”
“So, you remember the job?” I asked. “The woman I talked to was sure no one would.”
“That was my daughter—she runs the company now with my sons. It’s been a lifetime, but I remember that job,” he said, his shaky voice slow. “Doesn’t matter how long it’s been. Everybody remembers doing work at Heartstone.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” I said. “I know I was young at the time, but from what I can see, the major garage renovation was a number of years before I was born. But then my father had some work done on the floor again in eighty-six. We’re going through old house records, trying to organize them, and I was curious.”
It wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t entirely a lie either.
“It was odd,” Bailey said. “Your father didn’t explain much—just said there was some water damage, the floor had to be jackhammered up. They fixed the plumbing, tried to re-pour the concrete. He said the guy they hired fucked it up and they needed my crew to finish it.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, what was odd about it?”
“Well, I looked, and I saw signs of some plumbing work, but then they’d tossed dirt and gravel over it and dumped what looked like hand-mixed concrete over that. Didn’t make sense. And then he insisted we just fill it in, on top of what was there.”
“And that’s not how you’d usually handle it?” I asked, not sure what was so odd about what he’d seen.
“No. Not at all. The plumber should have filled it in with gravel or called us to take care of it. This was sloppy, like they dumped whatever was around in the hole and bought a few bags of concrete from the hardware store. Prentice always wanted the work to be top-notch. This wasn’t. And it smelled off in there.”
“Like a busted septic line?” I asked.
“No. Seen plenty of those, and this was different. Like garbage that had been left out, but the garage was clean. Maybe it was whatever they used to mix that concrete,” he mused.
“That is weird,” I agreed, remembering my father’s insistence that Heartstone be maintained to perfection. It was part of why his withdrawal in the last few years of his life had been so bizarre. The father I knew never would have let Heartstone fall into ruin the way he had. I knew now—we all did—that he’d been grieving the loss of his child and the woman he’d wanted to marry. If that woman hadn’t been Cole Haywood’s wife, I might have felt sorry for him.
But this was back when he was at full power, full asshole. Why would he accept a sloppy repair job?
“So, you went ahead and filled in the hole?” I asked.
“Well, a job’s a job, and you knew your father. Nobody argued with him. We filled it in, smoothed it out, and got paid. Always stuck with me, though. Didn’t make sense.”
No, it didn’t make sense. What was in the garage? I didn’t want to put pieces together in the wrong order, but… “And you said this was on the right side of the garage?”
“Yep. The bay all the way on the right if your back is to the door into the Manor. The one closest to the backyard. The hole was right in the center of that parking space.”
I stopped myself from asking any other questions, not sure I wanted to lead Bailey Toms in the direction my mind was sprinting. “Thank you, Mr. Toms. Thank you for returning my call. This is very helpful.”
“Not sure how it could be,” he said. “It was so long ago. But I was curious you asked, so I wanted to call you back.”
“I appreciate it.” Without another word, he hung up.
My mind raced. It was possible that everything Prentice had said was true—maybe he’d hired a shitty contractor to fix the hole and then replaced him with Bailey Toms’s company. Maybe.
I stood up and walked down the stairs to the guest wing. Standing in the hall in between my room and Paige’s, I realized that just below was the garage, and underneath our bedrooms, the spot Bailey Toms had spoken of.
I thought of my door swinging open for no reason, the plumbing and electrical fritzing out all the time, the frozen room, and the stuck door. And I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that there was more than pipes underneath the garage.