The Foundation Crack

The March windstorm takes half of Agate Reach with it. Gutters, shingles, fence line, and Ed Barlow’s deck. By the time the power comes back, every contractor between here and Newport is booked through June.

Then a white truck rolls into town with a low estimate and a very good handshake.

Margot Slade nearly hires him herself. She is still learning how to be the kind of person who accepts help. But she works at the county clerk’s office, and she has a habit she isn’t trying especially hard to break. She pulls the filings.

Coastal Pacific Contracting was formed four weeks ago. Its license was issued twelve days before the storm; twelve days before there was anything to repair.

Ed Barlow doesn’t need the paperwork. He spent thirty-two years building houses, and he reads a stack of lumber the way Margot reads a document. He starts asking the contractor questions. He is not a man who raises his voice, and he is not a man who lets things go.

Then Ed Barlow is dead behind his own house, and the county writes it up as exactly what it looks like: a retired man, a half-finished deck, a bad step.

Connie Barlow was married to a builder for thirty-four years. She looks at that deck and knows better.

And Margot Slade spent twenty-four years married to a man who was running a con, and never saw it once.

She is not going to miss it twice.