Hide & Find (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

interesting outside the windows again. “There is one other building on the property that has working water, sewer and electricity. It’s the one on the other edge of the clearing from the bunkhouse. You’ve seen it?”
    “It looks like a giant carriage house.”
    “That’s because it was, and then it was converted into a garage. The poor farm employed three mechanics to keep the farm equipment and vehicles running. They slept in a loft above the stalls. There’d be room for a lot of boys over there. We could even put in a kitchen and several showers. I could rotate which boys live in which building and give some of the older boys additional responsibility.”
    I was practically jumping up and down. “So we could take in even more than the Clayborne brothers?”
    Walt winced. “Money, Nora. It’s going to take a lot to make the garage habitable. You know the camp barely scrapes by each month as it is. Without your Christmas gifts of jeans and coats and boots for the boys, they’d be threadbare.”
    I stopped bouncing on my tiptoes and took a turn staring out the windows. “I have money, a sort of slush fund. Not sure exactly how much. I haven’t counted it. I mean, I know generally—” My voice tapered off as I reminded myself not to reveal all the sordid details.
    It was money laundering money — or rather money that hadn’t yet been laundered when I’d withdrawn it from Skip’s accounts. I’d given away most of it, but I’d filtered a small batch through several charities before it was driven across the Canadian border in an unmarked truck. Definitely ill-gotten gains. And while Walt could probably guess its shady origin, my source of funds wasn’t a subject I had divulged in depth, hoping to spare him guilt by association. And hoping to provide him immunity should the FBI decide to extend their suspicion and questioning. It was a point of silent contention between us.
    “Which you need to live on,” Walt said firmly.
    “I don’t have extravagant tastes.” I tried to convince him with a smile. “In fact, I have an itch for real estate development. I also have an old codger on the dole who needs to get off his duff, and a mother-in-law who has proclaimed she wants to help. We need a hefty dose of hard work — all of us. Please? We’re not skilled, but we could definitely do whatever demolition needs to be done before the remodeling can begin.”
    “So you’re telling me I just got the green light to start the project and a volunteer workforce?” Walt’s eyes lit up — looking for all the world like a little boy who’d just been handed a bucket full of water balloons on an August afternoon, dreaming of grandiose possibilities.
    I grinned back at him. “We can squeeze the Clayborne boys in, can’t we? As long as Jilly knows their proper accommodations are forthcoming?”
     
    oOo
     
    There is something terribly cathartic about ripping things apart with your bare — well, gloved, in my case — hands. Dwayne had perked up when I mentioned there would be sledgehammers, and he led our procession to the garage with our tools over our shoulders like the seven dwarfs going off to the mine, bellowing “Heigh-Ho” with only a hint of a limp.
    Since it was Saturday, we had an eager bunch of boys for company. We set about splintering flimsy partitions into rubble and hauling out the junk by the wheelbarrow load. Rusty parts from both the horse and motor eras, squirrel nests, owl pellets, leather and wood bellows, and one bat skeleton were found and examined thoroughly.
    There were cubbyholes all over the place. Maybe they’d been horse stalls, or maybe they’d been for storage, but nothing was well-built or in the correct dimensions for a dormitory. With the exception of the loft floor over our heads, the place had to be gutted. Walt set the boys to sorting debris into piles well away from the structure — burnable and non-burnable.
    I tired fast — surprisingly and embarrassingly fast. My