The Homewreckers(112)
“In other news,” Mo announced, addressing the assembled camera crew and construction workers, “on Friday, we film the reveal.”
“What?” Hattie squawked. “You said we had six weeks. It’s barely been four. We can’t get everything finished by Friday. Not after the fire and everything else…”
“Gotta happen,” Mo said. “The network’s breathing down my neck to get everything in the can so we can go to postproduction. We’ll need it furnished, too. You can do that, right?”
“No,” Trae said. “Furnish this whole house, from scratch, while we’ve got painters and carpenters still working? It can’t be done. I’m a designer, not a magician.”
“They’ve got furniture stores in Savannah, right?” Mo said. “The good news is, we’ll just shoot the living and dining room, the kitchen, and the master suite. Concentrate on the downstairs rooms. It’s a beach house, so it doesn’t have to be fancy.”
“Unbelievable!” Trae said loudly. “Fucking insanity.”
Mo ignored the designer’s tantrum. He pointed to Trae and Hattie. “Let’s do it. I want you to re-create that whole little tableau you two just acted out, right down to the cute little lovers’ spat over the furniture. Gary, you ready?”
“Lovers’ spat?” Hattie glared at Mo.
“Squabble?” He walked away, smiling to himself.
* * *
Hattie sat on the back porch, dabbing at her melted makeup. The trailer with the Bobcat had arrived shortly after filming halted for the day, followed by a dump truck full of sand, and now the bulldozer operator was running his equipment back and forth, scraping and smoothing the earth above the filled septic tank pit. Cass had given her the news that a truck full of sod would be delivered early the next morning. Soon, all signs of the spot where Lanier Ragan had been entombed for seventeen years would be erased.
She couldn’t bear to watch, so she averted her eyes, and finally got up and walked rapidly toward the seawall and the river.
She’d been thinking about Elise Hoffman off and on all afternoon, and in her mind, reliving what might have happened here on that stormy Sunday night all those years ago.
Pushing past an overgrown clump of palmettos and oleanders, she walked along the seawall, pausing to inspect the house to the north of her property, which was also undergoing a dramatic transformation. Formerly an unfortunate rendition of a seventies cedar A-frame, the house had been lifted up on jacks and rebuilt on top of a concrete foundation. Hattie knew the builder-designer, Liz Demos, who’d made a specialty of buying small flip houses in gentrifying in-town Savannah neighborhoods, and was interested to see what she’d do with a project on this scale. Rumor was that Liz would ask north of a million dollars, once the remodel was complete.
Whatever she did, Hattie hoped the project would help with the comps on her own property. She stood on the seawall for a moment, looking out toward Little Tybee. A boat roared past towing a bright orange inner tube bearing two waving bikini-clad teenaged girls.
A dock jutted out from the seawall on the next lot. The tide was out, revealing a thin strip of sandy beach dotted with clumps of seaweed and oyster rakes.
Hattie turned and looked up at the house she knew belonged to Davis’s family.
The Hoffmans’ beach house had been designed in the 1960s by a famous Atlanta architect who was better known for his high-rise hotels and resorts. Made of poured concrete and painted gray, it resembled the prow of a ship, pointed directly toward the river, bristling with iron-railed decks and expanses of plate-glass windows and sliding glass doors. On the bottom level, a tiled deck featured a narrow lap pool surrounded by huge potted palms. Locals referred to the house as “the Titanic.”
She heard the clatter of a lawnmower and watched as a man pushed the mower around from the side of the house toward the back. His face was shaded by a baseball cap and he was dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. For a few minutes he seemed oblivious to her, but then he stopped to empty the mower’s bag of grass clippings and looked up, obviously surprised to see that he had company.
“Hattie?”
She’d assumed the worker was part of a landscape crew, but to her shock it was actually Davis Hoffman.
Her stomach lurched as he walked toward her, grinning. “Howdy, neighbor,” he said. “Good to see you.”
“Oh, hey,” she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as jumpy as she felt. “Didn’t expect to find you out here today.”
“I didn’t expect to find me here either, but my mother called in a panic because we’ve got family coming in from out of town to stay here this weekend, and her yard man has a bum knee.” He wiped his perspiring face with the back of his arm and she noticed that his right hand was wrapped in a wide gauze bandage.
“What happened there?” She pointed at his hand.
“Oh.” He stared down at his hand as though just discovering it. “So stupid. I was getting ready to grill some steaks last weekend and I guess I got a little carried away with the lighter fluid. I jumped back, but obviously not fast enough.”
Hattie felt herself freeze. Davis’s eyebrows were singed too. And she spotted an angry blistered spot just above the neckline of his sweat-soaked T-shirt. Whoever had torched the dumpster at her house could have gotten a similar burn. Temporarily tongue-tied, she struggled to keep her voice light.