Better Homes and Corpses Read Online Free Page B

decorated with the perfect mix of vintage and modern. He had a flair for everything he did and was also my go-to fashionista. He’d taken me under his wing on those rare occasions I was invited to an important Hamptons event. He was instrumental in coordinating my outfit for Caroline and Jillian Spenser’s cocktail party. I’d never tell him about the clinging-underwear faux pas.
    I tooted the horn at Maurice and pulled into the driveway. Elle waved to me from window of the carriage house. She held a phone to her ear and looked excited about something.
    I walked in and kissed a cheek smothered in freckles.
    “One sec,” Elle mouthed.
    I hung my jacket on one of Bullwinkle’s antlers and patted his head, seeing as that’s all that was left of him.
    Elle and I used the carriage house as a work space for our refurbishing projects. On one side of the massive room there was a kitchen with a cast-iron sink and a working O’Keefe & Merritt stove. A high-backed kitchen stool was stationed at each end of the workbench. The center of the room housed our works in progress—assorted chairs, tables, weathered oil paintings, frames, light fixtures, and sections of ornate iron gates. In one corner, Elle had installed a 1930s steel bank vault she used to store rare antiquities sent to her for evaluation. Before she worked at
American Home and Garden
, she was an antique appraiser at Sotheby’s and still did freelance work for insurance companies and wealthy collectors in the Hamptons area.
    Today I planned to complete three items that would eventually go into my current Cottages by the Sea project. Thefirst was a collection of English ironstone I’d feature in a built-in corner cupboard. The six plates, large serving platter, four milk pitchers, and soup tureen had come from a church thrift shop in Orient Point. I’d paid only twenty dollars. Naturally, at that price, there was a catch. All the pieces were stained like a rusty toilet bowl. I was following one of
American Home and Garden
’s do-it-yourself recipes. The ironstone had been soaking in thirty-percent liquid peroxide for two weeks. Wearing rubber gloves and feeling like a mad scientist, I removed the submerged pieces and placed them on aluminum foil in a warmed oven, which I’d turned off. Twenty minutes later, I opened the oven. Each piece was covered in a thick orange crust. After a few dunks in warm, sudsy water, I stood back to admire my handiwork. The pieces were now pearly white and the hairline cracks had all but disappeared. I knew the whole lot would sell for at least six hundred dollars at an antique show and twelve hundred or higher in a shop in Bridgehampton—a better return on my money than a winning stock portfolio.
    “Wow! Great job!” Elle clapped her hands. Her face was dewy and recently scrubbed. Her dark hair was cropped short into a pixie style, making her look ten years younger. Elle never left the house without an eye-dazzling cluster of rhinestone brooches affixed somewhere on her clothing. Along with the antique shop, she’d inherited a huge nineteenth-century dental cabinet filled with stunning pieces of vintage costume jewelry.
    “I was talking to First Fidelity Mutual when you walked in,” Elle said.
    “New assignment?”
    “They want me to do the Spenser estate,” she added, a little too nonchalantly. “What do you think?”
    “Say what? You’re going to inventory the estate of a woman who was stabbed to death?”
    “I know,” Elle said. “I have really bad vibes about working there. I told you something didn’t sit right after you told me about the cocktail party.”
    Ever the dyslexic psychic—Elle always felt things
after
they happened.
    “Hmm, I don’t remember you saying anything.”
    “Well, I felt it. I just didn’t want to alarm you, and that’s why I won’t inventory the estate alone. Too spooky—I need Scooby You. A lot of Caroline Spenser’s treasures came from Sotheby’s—the absolute mother lode of