Murder on the Cape Fear Read Online Free Page A

look pretty in that dress, but you’ll look absolutely ravishing without it!”
    “ And no one is better at ravishing me than you,” I said with a giggle and took his hand to lead him up the stairs.
     
    Captain Thomas Pettigrew’s house faced east on Front Street. The back of the house overlooked the river and there were porches and a lower level garden tucked into the hillside above Chandler’s Wharf. We surveyed the garden that was filled with construction equipment. Scaffolding covered the rear wall of the house. Exterior siding from the millworks had been delivered on Friday, and on Monday, Willie Hudson, our general contractor, and his crew would begin the work of replacing rotted siding.
    “ While you were at the Old Carolina Brick Works on Friday,” I said, “I had a paint expert take scrapings from wood sections all over the house. He bagged and labeled them - just like a crime scene teckie - and took them to the lab. Next week we’ll know exactly what colors were original to the house.”
    “ Want to bet they’ll be wild and exuberant. Victorian houses were painted in polychrome, and popularly referred to as Painted Ladies. People tend to believe that the Victorians went in for dark and dreary, but not so - they loved bold colors,” Jon said.
    I looked up at the crumbling chimneys. “How did things go at the brickworks? Are they going to be able to match our bricks?”
    Jon grinned. I love his smile. For a moment I was lost in it, as pure joy passed from him to me. He is perfect for me, I thought. Why did it take me so long to recognize what everyone else had seen? Because it takes time for a girl to mature into a woman, Ashley sweetheart, I heard my father’s voice say to me.
    “ Ashley, are you listening?” Jon asked. “You seem to be a million miles away.”
    “ Oh, just thinking about how cute you are,” I said with a smile. “Go on, you were telling me about the brickworks. See, I was listening.”
    “ You should have seen that place, Ashley,” he said enthusiastically. “They do everything by hand. Mix up the clay and water as if they were making bread dough, then the mixture gets formed into what they call slugs. Workers pick up the slugs and pitch them into the molds. That’s why they are called hand thrown. The bricks then get stacked and are run through the kiln at 2000 degrees. The bottom layer gets dark because of direct flame. The bricks on top come out lighter and are more uniform in color. They can match any brick color we give them.”
    “ That’s good news because the bricks along the foundation are a softer shade than the chimney.”
    “ I took samples. We’ll get the right color. I have absolute faith in those guys,” Jon said.
    I started up the outside stairs that ran along the side of the house. “Let’s check on the inside.”
    In the mid-nineteenth century, Captain Thomas Pettigrew had been a river pilot as a youth, crewed on merchant ships, then later Captained his own ship, the Gibraltar. In those days, river pilots and ship Captains liked to build their houses overlooking the waters they plied, and Pettigrew had built his home in Wilmington while others had built houses in Smithville, now Southport, or on Federal Point, now known as Carolina Beach. A seafaring man’s house often sported a widow’s walk on the roof so that his wife could pace atop the house as she anxiously scanned the waters for sight of her husband’s ship. But Thomas Pettigrew did not have a wife. He had been young, twenty-two, when he built this house for his mother Jessica Pettigrew and his younger sister Lacey. He lived here with them between voyages out to sea.
    Jon slipped a key ring out of his pocket and undid the lock on the front door plus the padlock. The door was not original to the house and would eventually be replaced with a period door if we could locate one, or a reproduction if we could not. The windows that fronted the street were boarded shut while the period window