Repair to Her Grave Read Online Free PDF Page A

replaced it. And just about that time George Valentine happened to come in the back door, so he helped me lift the fixture again and get it settled back onto its original footprint.
    Which was when it hit me, the first thing I’d noticed about Jonathan Raines: why was he wearing a shark's tooth pendant? Like his fit-looking physical condition, the daredevilish ornament didn’t fit any mental picture of him that I could come up with.
    But to this, as to so many other questions that had arisen that morning—such as where I would ever get enough chairs to accommodate the Ladies’ Reading Circle—I had no ready answer.
    “Hey, way to tackle it,” George said approvingly, standing back to eye my plumbing handiwork.
    George has dark hair, milky-pale skin, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Thin, permanent black lines were etched into his knuckles from the dirty work he was always having to do around town somewhere; in Eastport, George was the man you call for a dead car battery, a fallen tree limb, or an underground fuel line that has broken and needs to be dug up, pronto.
    “Thanks,” I said. “Big noise across the water a while ago.”
    “Ayuh. Don’t know what, yet. Sent some of the fire crew over on the Coast Guard cutter, see if they can help. You’re okay with the rest of the job?” He gestured at the little bathroom.
    “I hope so.” All that remained was to put in the floor bolts and turn on the water; the moment of truth was fast approaching. “I guess we’ll see in a minute.”
    “Ayuh,” he allowed evenly again. “Guess we will.”
    George was Ellie's husband and one of my main cheerleaders in the household fix-it department, partly because before I began attempting them I used to call him at all hours to come over and do things like unstick a balky window sash or flip the switch in the fuse box. Not that he ever complained about this or even mentioned it; what he did instead was, he began replacing his tools.
    One at a time, he went out and bought himself new hammers, pliers, and screwdrivers. The old ones, somehow, always wound up living at my house, and eventually I got my own toolbox for them, too. Which was either the beginning of it all or the beginning of the end, depending on how you look at it.
    At any rate, I put back the floor bolts. “Voy-lah,” George said as I hooked the water up again and the tank began filling.
    “Yeah, maybe, huh?” I said hopefully.
    Noticing that no water was spreading out onto the floor, I allowed myself a small moment of triumph before hurrying to the basement to check that I had not inadvertently transformed the steps down there into a waterfall.
    I had not. Well, this was looking auspicious. Cheered by the thought of the infinite number of dollars I had saved, I went up the basement steps, which was when I noticed that the water was still running in the little bathroom; it shouldn’t have been. And whipping off the top of that porcelain tank, I saw why.
    The filler mechanism was bent so the float had snagged on the tank's side, jamming the shutoff mechanism. As a result the water level had already risen nearly over the edge of the tank; flooding was imminent. Pressing the flush handle to empty some of it, I crouched to turn the small round knob on the filler pipe to stop the inflow.
    Whereupon the knob popped off into my hand and water began jetting merrily. Reeling back in drenched surprise and forgetting what a tiny room I was in (this was, after all, originally only the entrance to the back stairway, and servants were not expected to take up much room any more than they were expected to make much noise) I cracked my head on the doorframe, my knee on the porcelain, and my elbow on the wall.
    Well, I made a lot of noise, and luckily for me George was still around—after all those fix-it trips to my house, he’d gotten to feel at home there, and he was making a peanut butter and banana sandwich and pouring himself a cup of coffee when I yelled—and he