The Book of Old Houses by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online Page B

said, scanning my face anxiously.
    â€œOh, hush up,” I told him, annoyed. “Can’t a person blow off a little steam without a witness around, making shocked faces?”
    Which I suppose was not a particularly kind thing to say to a recuperating person, and especially not one who was working as hard at it as Sam was. But oh, I was so cheesed off, and mostly at myself.
    Angrily I strode down the hall and upstairs to see if just possibly the whole bathroom fiasco had merely been what my son would’ve called a Fig Newton of my imagination.
    But no such luck. The room was all just the way I’d left it, which is to say I had about as much chance of repairing it by tomorrow as an ice cube had, stuck on one of the tines of Satan’s pitchfork. On the other hand, I reminded myself grimly, even the worst home-repair massacre in Eastport was a day at the beach compared to the kind of foolishness I used to endure on a regular basis.
    Because back in the old days, before I bought a big antique house on an island in Maine and began pouring pretty much every single drop of my blood into it, not to mention any dollars that weren’t firmly nailed down, I lived with my then-husband and son in Manhattan, where I was a freelance money-manager to . . .
    Well, let’s not get too specific about it. But among my clients were the absolute cream of New York mobster society, guys whose funds were so dirty that when they brought me cash I sent the manila envelopes stuffed full of greenbacks through a nearby commercial laundry’s steam-cleaning apparatus before opening them.
    After that I found ways of investing the cash that would not set off alarm bells down at the Federal Building, where photos of many of my clients—labeled with nicknames like Bloody Eddie, Fast Al, and Tommy “Eyeballs” McGown—were prominently posted.
    And at home things were even more interesting. We lived on the Upper East Side in a building so exclusive that it should’ve had an alligator-filled moat. My neighbors wore diamonds as big as gumdrops to the meetings of their charity organizations, while their husbands got whisked off each morning in limos to jobs that apparently involved guarding the safety of the Free World, or at any rate of all the advertising accounts in it.
    Their nannies dressed better than I did. Meanwhile in my own apartment we were apparently holding a contest to see who could break me first:
    1. My husband, Victor, the eminent brain surgeon, whose eye for the ladies around the hospital where he worked was so legendary that they’d started calling him the Sperminator, or
    2. My not-yet-teenaged son, who while still in eighth grade was already addicted to so many substances that once when we were picking a friend up at LaGuardia, his physical presence ruined a major drug bust by distracting every contraband-sniffing dog in the terminal. Luckily Sam didn’t actually have anything illegal on him; it was just that his whole system was so saturated.
    One night not long after that memorable incident, I came home from a hard day of transforming half a million dollars in mob money into certificates of deposit so clean that even a forensic accountant wouldn’t be able to find anything wrong with them.
    Which was the whole point. Dirty money leaves a slime trail. But I’d eliminated it, and earned a hefty commission for myself.
    So I poured a glass of wine to celebrate, which was when I noticed that two of the good wineglasses were already missing from the sideboard. One was in the sink, and the other, I learned when I turned from discovering the first, was in the hand of an extremely pretty young woman who did not have much clothing on.
    None, actually. She stood in the kitchen doorway between the eight-burner professional gas range and the Sub-Zero refrigerator with built-in icemaker and water dispenser.
    On the shelves to one side of her stood the world’s priciest Cuisinart, a