Matt laughed. “Think bigger. Something with rocking chairs.”
“Oh,” Bailey said, then louder, “Oh. A porch?”
“Yes.”
“You mean—”
“That’s right. This whole area is a porch. It goes around about a quarter of the house in an L shape. Somebody—some do-it-yourselfer, obviously—closed in the porch and made it into an entryway, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.”
“A very ugly bathroom,” Bailey said.
“If you take out these walls, lose the bedrooms and the bath, you have your porch back.”
Matt was pleased to see that she looked too stunned to make any comment. Turning away to hide his smile, he walked back into the living room, and this time it was her turn to follow him like a trained dog.
Part of the longest wall in the living room jutted out about three feet. “Stand back and cover your eyes—this may be messy,” he said. He hooked his crowbar under the sheet of paneling, but then he halted. “I better not do this. Dust’ll get all over your furniture.”
“I have a vacuum,” she said quickly as she stepped back and closed her eyes, but opened them when she heard crashing. Matt had caught the sheet of paneling before it fell on her
furniture, but with it came a cloud of dust. When the dust settled, she saw stones.
“It’s a fireplace?” she asked quietly as he leaned the paneling against the wall.
“That’s right. It’s a fireplace. Made from native stone.” He stuck his head inside and looked up the chimney. “I don’t think it would take much to get it in working order.”
“And you could do that? You could pull all this off and make the fireplace work? And the porch? You could bring the porch back to life?”
She made him sound like a doctor who’d found a way to resurrect the dead. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound as though it were the easiest thing in the world. He wasn’t about to talk to her about structural damage or rotten overhead beams. Nor was he going to mention termites or dry rot. And right now he thought it was best not to tell her about the buzzing he was hearing inside the chimney.
Trying not to seem as though he were frantic, he picked up the piece of paneling and held it against the studs that had been put in front of the fireplace, then, as fast as he could, nailed the sheet of paneling back into place. Under his hands, he could feel angry bees, or wasps, protesting the disturbance of their nest.
“The kitchen,” he said loudly, pointing and moving both of them away from the fireplace. “I always thought that this wall should be torn out to make the kitchen and the living room into one big room. You could put an island here. You like marble or granite countertops?”
“Marble?” she whispered. “Granite?”
Again, Matt had to turn away to hide his smile, then he led her through to the bedrooms and told her how he could get plumbing fixtures wholesale.
“You do plumbing too?” she asked in wonder.
“No, but a high school buddy of mine is a plumber, so I’ll have him do it all.” He liked the furniture she’d put in her bedroom. It had a homey feel that appealed to him. Patsy liked furniture that was shiny enough to use as a mirror, and his ex-wife had liked antiques, the kind that cost so much you were afraid to use them.
He managed to keep talking when he went through the other two bedrooms and the bath. She didn’t seem to notice that he took a bit longer in those rooms, or that he kept looking at how the bathroom wall was shared with one of the bedrooms. Yes, he could put a door through the wall and make a private entrance into the bathroom. At Patsy’s house, he shared a bathroom with her two sons—and they were slobs. Every morning Matt risked bodily injury as he stepped over wet towels and underwear that the boys left on the floor. Patsy said it wasn’t her bathroom, that she never went into it, so she refused to clean it. For the last six months, Matt had spent every Saturday morning scrubbing it down.
“What?” he asked Bailey, still looking at the bathroom with longing. It was ugly, but it didn’t contain two teenage boys.
“What about the attic?” she was saying.
“Ah, yes,” he said, then led the way up the stairs. On the third tread, he shifted his weight. He didn’t like that; the stair didn’t feel sturdy. “Needs work,” he said over his shoulder.
At the head of the stairs, he paused and had to take a deep breath before he could walk forward. He used to tell his little brother that the attic in the old house was haunted. The truth was that he wanted to keep the upstairs as his private place; the attic of the old Hanley house had been Matt’s sanctuary when he was a boy. It had been a place where he could escape when his real life became too much for him.
“Are you okay?” Bailey asked, looking at him hard.
“Sure,” he said briskly. “I was just trying to remember what I found out about this attic when I was here. I think that the floor on the other side of that railing has been put in recently. Beyond the railing, I think it used to be open to the room below, but somebody covered the opening, cut a hole in the railing and made a room. Probably—”
“No!” Bailey shouted, making Matt halt. “Don’t walk on that floor.”
When he looked at her, he could see that she was embarrassed.