Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      1

      The afternoon that Erica Castle drove into Eugene, Oregon, she was elated, excited at the thought that she would sleep in her own house that night. Weeks earlier an attorney had called to inform her that she had inherited her grandmother’s property; she had become a home owner. She had never met her grandmother, had never before been farther west than Indiana, but her mother had talked about the fine old mansion many times in the distant past, and now it was hers, Erica’s.

      She drove with care, admiring the well-kept houses, the neat lawns and lovely landscaping with flowers everywhere. After grimy industrial Cleveland, everything here looked fresh and scrubbed, sparkling clean. It was an affluent neighborhood, not superrich, but comfortable. No more dingy apartments, inner-city filth, just her own house in a nice neighborhood where flowers bloomed.

      Driving slower and slower, she watched the house numbers, then came to a stop, backed up, pulled into a driveway and braked hard, aghast at the spectacle before her. The yard had gone to weeds, knee-high or higher, and a tangle of blackberry brambles was ten feet high. There was trash strewn in the driveway, beer bottles, an oil can, a broken chair…The two-story house had peeling paint and bare wood in places. There was a broken window held together with duct tape, a broken banister on the front porch.

      She felt as if for weeks she had been floating, as buoyant as a dandelion seed in a breeze, only to have a giant hand reach out now and crush her back to earth. Moving with leaden legs she got out of her old station wagon and approached the front of the house, forced herself up the three steps to the porch, across it to the door.

      It was worse on the inside. The smell was so bad that she gagged and took a step back, then hurried through a hallway to the rear of the house and opened a door. Trash was everywhere, more beer cans, wine bottles, liquor bottles, pizza boxes, junk furniture, piles of newspapers, a foam mat on the floor….

      She didn’t go upstairs and didn’t linger inside the house longer than it took for a hurried glance. Junk. Nothing but junk. Then she stood on the back porch and regarded the rear of the property: more blackberries, more weeds, more trash. The brambles had nearly covered a small garage.

      She fought tears and made her clenched fists relax. “All right,” she said in a low voice. “So there’s no free lunch.”

      The house could be cleaned up, painted, the yard cleaned and made neat. Then she would sell it. After cashing out her pension, she had eleven thousand dollars. If she had to use part of it to get the house ready for a sale, so be it.

      The giant hand that had crushed her was rubbing her nose in the dirt, she thought grimly the following day, when the attorney informed her that there was also a property tax lien of eight thousand dollars. He put her in touch with a Realtor, Mrs. Maryhill, who walked through the house with Erica and pointed out what needed doing before putting the house on the market.

      “See those water stains? Needs a roof. And probably the wiring needs an overhaul…Maybe there’s dry rot in that bathroom. Hard to tell with so much mold…Three windows need replacing…. That water heater’s twenty-five years old, has to be replaced…. All the oak flooring needs to be refinished. What a shame to let it go like that.”

      Then, on the rear porch, she said, “I’ll tell you straight, Ms. Castle. You sell it as is, and maybe you can get fifty thousand, maybe not even that. And it might take months or even years. See, no Realtor is going to want to show it. Put in ten, twelve thousand, bring it up to par with the neighborhood and you can get $150 thousand to $185 for it. It’s really a very nice old structure, solid, good wood, but gone to pot now. Depending on how it’s finished, how it appears, maybe you’d get up to two hundred. But it’s going to take a lot of work first.”

      Two weeks later Mrs. Maryhill dropped by again. “Just in the neighborhood,” she said, looking all around. “My, my, you’ve been busy, haven’t you? You’re doing it all yourself?”

      “So far. I thought I’d see how much I could manage before I yell for help.”

      The electricity was on; the kitchen and the downstairs bedroom were scrubbed and usable and just needed repainting; the odors in the house now were of Lysol and bleach, trisodium phosphate, ammonia and Pine Sol. Junk was high in the driveway, with more added daily. The heap looked like a rising volcano of obsidian; some of the trash bags even steamed in the sun.

      To Erica’s surprise the house she was unearthing was very nice, as Mrs. Maryhill had said earlier. The first floor had four spacious rooms and a small pantry; the upper apartment had four rooms; and the basement was dry with a good concrete floor.

      “Eventually,” the Realtor said, “you’ll have to hire help. If you decide to take out a mortgage, hold off as long as possible. Get the house in the best shape you can before anyone comes to inspect it. Do you plan to get a job?”

      “I hadn’t given it any thought yet,” Erica said. She suspected that Mrs. Maryhill had assessed her financial position quite accurately. No one did the kind of cleaning Erica had been doing if they had a tidy fortune stashed away.

      “Well, consider it,” Mrs. Maryhill said. “Banks like to think their clients can repay a loan. They’re