“I’d have to look in the files. But nothing popped up when we started a file on her,” he said, as he munched his way through the hot pizza. His gaze had shifted to the backyard, as if contemplating how this would impact the mystery. “I wonder if she ever declared him dead either? Maybe the Last Will and Testament will be completely tied up with this missing person angle on her husband. After all, barring a valid will, I would presume her estate would go to him, if he’s alive and if they are still married. Or did this grandson know anything about his granddad?”
“Hard to say,” she said, as she munched on her salad. “Is anybody even talking to him?”
“I had a talk with him this morning.”
“How fun was that?”
“Not,” he said. “He’s not saying anything, except that he has full rights to everything.”
“Did you tell him about the will?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “That’s up to the lawyer who handles her estate.”
“And so will that new will be honored?” she asked worriedly.
“Again, that’s up to us to help the lawyer settle that issue,” he said.
“Meaning, you won’t tell me if you found the witnesses and spoke to them yet?”
“No, I’m not telling you,” he said cheerfully.
She glared at him. “Mack, you have a mean streak.”
At that, he burst out laughing. “Maybe,” he said, “but some things just can’t be released.”
“Great,” she said. “That’s not fair, you know?”
“It is what it is,” he said.
And, with that, she had to be satisfied.
Chapter 20
Tuesday Morning …
Tuesday morning, Doreen woke up to an odd sound. She glanced at her watch and realized it was seven o’clock already. She bounced from her bed and peered out the window to see a couple men in her backyard. Gasping, she quickly dressed and, with Mugs in tow and Goliath completely ignoring her, stretching out in the bed instead, and Thaddeus squawking on her shoulder, she ran down the stairs.
She opened the wooden kitchen door and called out through the screen door, “Good morning.”
Tony looked up, smiled, and waved a hand.
“I don’t know if the deck’s safe to walk on. Is it?” she asked.
He walked over and asked, “When did you paint it?”
“Yesterday midmorning,” she said, “maybe a little later.”
Both the men looked and nodded. “It’s fine to walk on,” he said, “so you can come out. We’re here to check on the concrete itself.”
She clipped on Mug’s leash, then opened the screen door and stepped out onto the deck with him. She just loved the fact that she had this beautiful wooden deck now. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Don’t put any of the furniture up there yet,” Tony said. “It’ll need a little bit longer to set. You can walk on it, but don’t plan to put the table and chairs back yet. They’ll scrape through that coating pretty fast.”
“Until when?”
“Tomorrow morning will probably be fine,” he said. “Honestly, even later this afternoon will be fine. But it’s just that you’ll always want to give everything a final twenty-four hours to harden up.”
She nodded, excited to be walking here, especially with Mugs, who was sniffing the wood intently. “And what about the concrete?”
“All the framework can come off,” he said. “I don’t start work until ten this morning, so I thought I’d come early and do this now, so you had access to your backyard. My buddy here, Brody, has a pickup, and he wants the wood afterward.”
She looked at Brody, who wasn’t even watching her. He was measuring off the wood. “What’s he using it for?”
“Same thing,” Brody said. “Once it’s stained with concrete, you can’t use it for anything else.”
“I guess you could if you chipped it all off and sanded it down,” she said.
Both men laughed. “Wood like this is cheap,” he said. “To do that takes a ton of work.”
She nodded and didn’t know what else to say but figured that Mack would know. She said, “I’ll go inside and put on some coffee. I hate to admit it, but I slept in this morning.”
“Go,” Tony said. “Do your thing.”
So she went in and put on coffee, then quickly texted Mack. When the phone rang, she figured she hadn’t explained herself. “Sorry, Mack,” she said. “I was trying to figure out if that’s normal.”
“What part of what is normal?” he asked, his tone all business.
“That the wood will be handed off to somebody else,” she said in a whisper.
“Wood used to frame concrete is often done that way,” he said. “As long as it’s pretty smooth, it can be reused to frame up another pouring of concrete. For the rounded patio we used hard plastic edging that with rebar to keep the shape we wanted. The wood forms, the plastic edging, and the rebar can all be reused. Tony supplied a lot of that wood anyway. You didn’t, so it’s perfectly good to pass it along.”
She smiled with relief. “Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t want to seem like I was really cheap, when they’d done so much work. I just wasn’t sure if we needed the wood still.”
“Nope,” he said. “And, even better, you won’t have to pay for a dump run.”
She gasped in joy. “Oh my,” she said. “I didn’t even think of that.”
“Right,” he said, “so this is working out all that much better for you.”
“Okay,” she said. “In that case, I guess I should offer them coffee, huh?”
“I would,” he said. “You never know when you might need their help again.” And he hung up.
She pocketed her phone and opened the kitchen door. She could leave it open now, and Mugs wasn’t making too much of an attempt to go down to the concrete. It must have smelled funny to him. She looked for the two guys, but they had disappeared. She went through the garage, opened the big door out front, and saw a pickup parked there. The men were loading up the wood. “Hey, did you guys want coffee?” she asked.
Both of
