Read Online Crooked Little Lies by Barbara Taylor Sissel - Free Book Online

Gloria had hidden her bourbon? Suppose there were more in the house and Jeff or one of the kids found them?
    Going into the office at the back of the warehouse, she sat down at Jeff’s desk, intending to check their e-mail, but instead, when she woke the computer, her attention caught on the screen saver Jeff had created using a montage of photos from past deconstruction projects. There were a few of the old dairy barn they’d taken down five years ago and a couple of the two circa-1900 Craftsman bungalows that had been in the same tiny town, even on the same block. The town’s name slipped her memory now. There was one taken in Houston of a 1970s-era, ranch-style house, where of all things, they’d recovered a thirty-six-inch Wolf gas range in near pristine condition. There were several shots of Jeff and a crew that included Lauren and Tara in hard hats, holding pry bars, filthy and grinning at day’s end, standing in front of the goods they’d salvaged: piles of lumber, vintage windows and doors, light fixtures, cast-iron sinks, a claw-foot tub, hand-turned porch posts, ornately carved cornice trim, ceiling medallions, all kinds of hardware—a veritable treasure trove of times gone by, that once it was cleaned up could be repurposed to become a beloved part of someone else’s history.
    That was the heart of it for Lauren, what she loved most about the work and where she derived the most satisfaction. A couple of the nurses, even Dr. Bettinger, had asked her how she could do it, why she would do such hard, dirty work, as if the salvage business was no place for women. But there was a lot a woman could do, from taking down chandeliers to unscrewing cabinet door fronts to gently prying vintage beadboard from lath walls. But where she often made a difference was in her size. She was five seven, slim and lithe, where Jeff was big, broad shouldered, and tall at six and a half feet.
    The day they met, Jeff’s size was the first thing Lauren noticed about him. It was three years after her parents died, and Lauren had taken over running their antiques shop. Named for her father, Freddie Tate’s was in the Rice Village then and catered to clientele who preferred higher-end, handpicked European furnishings with a decidedly French flair. Lauren had kept up that inventory, and the shop was crammed with a collection of Louis XV armoires and buffets, assorted chairs and tables. The day Jeff walked in, Lauren glanced up to see this enormous man, standing in the doorway, staring at the crowded collection of period furniture and locked, glass-fronted display cases loaded with priceless china, and the what-am-I-doing-here look on his face was so comical, it made her laugh.
    “Are you lost?” she said.
    “Well, if I am, I don’t mind,” he said, wending his way through the crowded store toward her. He was down from Dallas, he told her, killing time, waiting to talk to a guy at a nearby restaurant about a local demolition job. It turned out knocking down buildings and hauling the remains to the city dump was his line of work. He’d gotten into it without much thought after leaving his dream of a pro football career and a good chunk of his heart in a Dallas hospital ER. Lauren was the one who asked him if he’d ever thought of trying to salvage the stuff, the brick and lumber, tile flooring, granite and marble vanity tops, rather than trash it. No one then, in the early to midnineties, was talking much about the economics of reusing building material versus tossing it into a landfill. But Jeff was interested, and while he continued to take on the big commercial salvage jobs, their early dates were spent driving the countryside between Dallas and Houston, appraising smaller buildings—not only old houses but dilapidated sheds and barns with the roofs half-gone. Once they deconstructed an old grain silo. Turned out a lot of folks were agreeable to having an abandoned building on their property removed in exchange for the material