Repair to Her Grave Read Online Free PDF

remembered the cellar location of the main shutoff. So I swore and sputtered while he ran down there and twisted the main knob, which fortunately did not break off in his hand or the house would have floated away.
    “Huh,” George said, coming back upstairs to survey the pool of water spreading out into the hall. He straightened his gimme cap, which was black, with GUPTILL 's EXCAVATING lettered on it in orange script. “Guess that old filler pipe handle must just’ve been ready to go.”
    “Right,” I said through gritted teeth, thinking that what plumbers really get paid for is aggravation. “Go eat your lunch, George, okay? I’m not fit to be around right this minute.”
    “Yep,” he said prudently, and skedaddled.
    Whereupon I cleaned up and went back to Wadsworth's for a new filler pipe handle and a kit of new insides for the toilet tank, the installation of which turned out to be as complicated as rewiring the space shuttle. And by then George was gone, but I managed it by adding an extra part I devised out of a paper clip.
    That, bottom line, is the thing about house repairs in a very old house:
    Any part of it that you touch is apt to be as fragile, and as likely to topple over onto something else that is even more fragile, as a row of dominoes. So on-the-spot improvisation is often needed.
    That floor bolt, for instance, that broke while I was removing it. If I’d tried getting the rest of it out of the floor before proceeding, I would probably still be there trying.
    Instead I’d tapped the stuck shaft of the bolt down into the floor with a nail and screwed a new, slightly larger bolt into the same hole right on top of it. The new bolt had pushed the old one farther along into the hole ahead of it and held just fine.
    Voy-lah, as George would have remarked.
    Meanwhile I kept thinking about improvisation, and about how I felt that somehow Jonathan Raines was doing it, too.
    When he’d arrived, for instance, I’d assumed I must have invited him. He, anyway, seemed quite certain of it. But now upon reflection I thought something else was also possible: that he’d made the invitation up out of whole cloth. Heard of me from his cousins, phoned me merely to find out for himself what sort of person I was, and decided to wing it, not wanting to risk a refusal.
    Trusting in his Flim-flam talents to convince me that I had asked him here.
    Which, if true, implied two more fairly interesting things:
    First, he was an excellent con man; the Flim-flam had worked beautifully.
    And second, Eastport in general wasn’t his target area.
    A motel or one of the town bed-and-breakfasts wouldn’t have suited him. No, he’d wanted to stay with me; had lied, perhaps, in order to engineer precisely this result.
    He was after a priceless, probably mythical, old violin.
    And I was his target area.

2
    Hecky Wilmot was a short, wizened old fellow with dyed black hair, sharp, suspicious eyes that spied everything, and a lined, age-mottled face that looked as if it had been carved out of a walnut. A native Eastporter who’d lived here all his life, he was fond of saying he knew all about the town that a decent man could report, and plenty that a decent man couldn’t.
    “So,” I said to Ellie, “we tell Hecky that Jonathan Raines is your cousin, right?”
    I’d decided to get out of the house for a while, and had run into Ellie downtown. Between us, Monday mooched happily along the sidewalk.
    “That's right,” Ellie said. She’d been thinking. “My good old cousin Jon.”
    Like Hecky, Ellie was an Eastporter born and bred, and around here, being related to an Eastporter was almost as good as being one yourself.
    “And then we ask Hecky please not to let it get public that Raines is my relative,” she added. “Hecky will like the idea of a man who doesn’t want to trade on his family connections, but you know he’ll gab it all over the island that there are some.”
    “You bet,” I agreed. If Raines was related to