Irene Brand_Yuletide_01 by Yuletide Peril Page B

sniffed the air like a dog on a scent.
    “There’s a funny smell in here,” he said. “I can’t place it.”
    “I’ve been noticing it, too,” Lance said. “I didn’t notice it when we were here before. It smells like turpentine or ether.”
    Janice had moved into a lot of smelly houses, so she wasn’t concerned with the odor. “What do you think of the house?”
    Cecil pulled on his whiskers, hummed a little tune andgazed at the ceiling. “It’ll take a lot of work to make this place the way it was a hundred years ago. But as far as I can determine, the structure is good, so termites must not be working on it. It’ll take a lot of money.”
    “Which I don’t have,” Janice said. “How much will it cost to get the downstairs rooms in good shape so my sister and I can live here? The upstairs renovation will have to wait.”
    Cecil studied the ceiling again and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Lance winked at Janice, obviously amused by Cecil’s idiosyncrasies. Wasps, buzzing around the ceiling, accompanied the contractor’s humming.
    “Lance,” Cecil said, after several minutes had passed, “you’ve had experience with a lot of construction at the school so speak up if you think I’m wrong. It’s my opinion that this house needs a good cleaning more’n anything else.” He appraised Janice with a keen glance. “You’ll have some expense to make the house fit to live in, but if you just do the downstairs, you can be comfortable without spending a lot of money.”
    “I agree,” Lance said, “but Janice knows I have reservations about her living here. It’s too isolated.”
    Cecil shrugged his skinny shoulders, peering at Lance under his shaggy brows. “That’s not for me to decide nor you neither, unless there’s something I don’t know.”
    Lance colored slightly, admitting, “It isn’t any of my business.”
    “I’ll give you an idea of what you’d have to do before you can move in,” Cecil continued. “First off, you’ve gotta replace all the broken windows to preserve the house. If you put new locks on the doors, that’ll give you protection from ordinary circumstances. You’d have to get rid of the curtains and the carpets. Later on, you might want to refinish the floors, but ifthey’re clean, you can manage if you add some rugs, here and there.”
    “You’ve encouraged me already, Mr. Smith. What else?”
    “Your biggest expense will be getting the plumbin’ checked and repaired. After ten years of neglect, you could have damage to the pipes. The gas furnace is old, so you might be better off to replace it. You can get somebody from the county seat if the local guys won’t work here. And I’d get all of this brush cleaned off the place, not only so you can see out, but so you can tell if anybody is looking in.”
    “Can you give a ballpark figure on how much this might cost her?” Lance asked.
    Cecil gazed around the ceiling for a while, closed his eyes and whistled a tune. He took a ragged notebook and a pencil out of his shirt pocket. He chewed on the end of the pencil and scribbled down some figures.
    “Not countin’ the curtains and rugs, and leavin’ the upstairs as is except the windows, and not painting the outside, I’d say she could get by with around ten thousand dollars. You got that much?” he asked.
    Janice nodded. That sounded like a lot of money to her, but she’d expected it to be more. The certificate of deposit she’d set aside to renovate Mountjoy would be enough, with some left for the driveway. The money in her personal savings would take care of their living expenses until she finished working on the house. She’d papered and painted her apartment once, so she could do a lot of the work herself. But should she spend so much money on an old house that someone was determined she shouldn’t occupy? She’d never had to make a decision of such magnitude before, and it wasn’t easy.
    Lance watched as Janice weighed her options.