Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 145729 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145729 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“They both have addiction problems. They’d do just about anything for money. They grew up with it, were given everything and never held accountable, and the two of them were toxic for each other. It started in high school. They were in and out of trouble then, and their parents bailed them out and paid people off every single time. My grandmother really regretted how she raised my mother.”
“How were you raised? You said you had a lot of money at one time.” Sonia followed her into the kitchen.
The house was cozy. One story. The great room was larger than the other rooms, but far smaller than Sonia’s living room. It was painted in pastels, and somewhere, Molly had found a rug of the softest wool, patterned with soft blues, golds and creams. It took up most of the floor, giving a room that might have been cool a rich warmth.
Molly shrugged. “My mother started taking drugs after she had me in order to get thin again. She really blamed me for her weight problems. By the time I was four, they both were into drugs so heavily, I don’t remember any other way of life. They liked going out and were gone more than they were home.”
“That’s awful,” Sonia said, thinking about how wonderful her mother had been to her.
The formal dining room, right off the kitchen, was very small, holding a four-person gleaming oak table and chairs. A single chandelier hung over the center of the table. Dark wood made up the sideboards and cabinets.
“Maybe, but I didn’t realize it because I didn’t know anything else,” Molly said, her voice matter-of-fact. “I think there are a lot of kids growing up the way I did.”
Sonia had to agree with her, but it didn’t make it right. Her father had been murdered and her mother forced to do unthinkable things by the very man who had ordered her husband’s murder. Through it all, her mother had made her life wonderful.
Molly’s kitchen was small, but very efficiently built. There was a breakfast nook in the corner by the windows, so one could look out as they drank their morning coffee. Molly opened the fridge and pulled out a large pitcher of strawberry lemonade. “I made this before I left the house. It should be ice-cold.”
Strawberry lemonade was a weakness. Sonia nodded. “Love some. We’ll have to sit for a while before I tackle the woodworm thing.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. There are holes, like some horrible creatures bored through my walls. I’ve been on an extensive wall search and I marked every hole I found,” Molly said, filling two tall glasses with ice and then pouring the lemonade. “I counted seven of them.” She handed one glass to Sonia. “Two in my bedroom. Two in the great room. One in my dining room and two in the kitchen.”
“The worms have managed to bore a hole through the kitchen wall too?” Sonia tried not to laugh. “All the way through?”
Molly nodded solemnly. “I noticed the holes because there were tiny bits of sawdust on the floor. That’s how I found all of them.”
“Sawdust?” Sonia couldn’t help the frown. Joshua had told her she didn’t have a poker face. She put down the glass. “Show me. I want to see the wood shavings.”
“I threw them away. It just looked like sawdust to me. Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I thought you were a little paranoid, but if you saw sawdust at every site, that means whatever is boring a hole through the wood is on the outside to begin with. It’s weird that there would only be one or two holes in each of the rooms. No holes in the bathroom wall? Show me the two in here.”
Sonia had a bad feeling. The house was made of cedar. It wasn’t very likely that there would be an infestation of bugs. More, they would be grouped in one or two rooms, not spread through the house like that. She went through the list of bugs in her head. There were a couple of types of beetles, termites, carpenter ants, certainly old home borers… She frowned. She hadn’t seen any evidence outside on the porch of any destruction by insects. She’d been there to give an estimate on redoing the garage and had looked at the wood. It was something she couldn’t help.
One or two holes in different rooms? Sawdust on the floor, on the inside? She didn’t like that. She followed Molly to the side of the kitchen away from the street, facing the backyard. Molly pointed to a place about two feet from the floor. Sonia crouched down to inspect it. Sure enough, there was a very small hole, perfectly round. She stared at it for a few minutes, trying to puzzle it out in her head. It looked like a hole a 5/8ths of an inch drill bit might make. Maybe a little larger, but definitely a hole that was drilled by a tool, not a bug.