Rotten to the Core Read Online Free

around Seth had been the lucky one to find the corpse, shoved into her septic tank.
    “You’re not kidding, are you? Oh, Meg, I’m sorry.”
    Meg shrugged. “At least I didn’t know him this time.”
    Seth showed a comforting lack of curiosity about the dead man. “Are you all right? Listen, you look cold. Why don’t we go inside? How about some tea?”
    Meg smiled. “I’m not a fragile flower, you know.” But when he looked disappointed, she relented. “Tea sounds lovely, Seth, and thank you for suggesting it. Come on in.”
    She led the way through the back door into the kitchen. Filling the teakettle from the tap, she looked out the window and studied the van. “I see you got the van painted. It looks good. I like your new logo.”
    Seth came up behind her and followed her gaze. “If I can’t afford a new van, I can at least handle a new paint job. It does look good, doesn’t it?”
    He looked inordinately proud of himself. Meg knew that he had been thinking about branching into old-house renovation for a while, but it had taken the events of the previous months to push him to make the change. Maybe, Meg thought, it was a classic example of a silver lining. Or of Seth’s ability to make lemonade out of the sourest of circumstances.
    “Excuse me.” She slipped past him to put the kettle on the stove. “We might get that tea faster if I actually boil the water. Why don’t you sit down?”
    Seth didn’t move. “Meg, you really are something, you know? You stumble over a body and you just keep right on going.”
    “Maybe it hasn’t really sunk in yet. Although I do dearly wish that people would find someplace else to die. Or to leave the remains.” Meg clamped down on her sudden anger. Maybe she was more upset than she’d realized. She should be, shouldn’t she? A man was dead. A young man, cut down in his prime. She felt tears sting her eyes.
    Seth was quick to notice. “Sit. I’ll make the tea.”
    He knew the kitchen well and had things assembled by the time the water boiled. Meg sat obediently, thinking of nothing. Seth set the teapot, cups, spoons, sugar, and milk on the table, then sat across from her. “You want to talk about it?”
    Meg shrugged. “Not really.”
    He gave her one more searching look before he changed the subject. “You want me to bring you up to speed on what I’m planning for the barn?”
    “Sure. Have you changed things around again?” Seth had been acting like a kid in a toy shop, making and discarding plans almost daily. Meg had to admit his enthusiasm was infectious.
    “Sort of. Here, let me sketch it out for you.” He pulled a paper napkin from the holder on the table and fished a pencil out of his pocket. “Okay, here’s the basic ground plan, right?”
    Meg looked on as he produced a rough sketch. It had never occurred to her to take a bird’s-eye view of the place. Her mother had inherited the property decades earlier from their distant aunts Lula and Nettie Warren, and had ignored it ever since, content to collect rent. Meg had been living here for only a few months—after she’d lost her banking job in Boston, her mother had decided that Meg could use her “spare time” to renovate the house. But the brutal New England winter hadn’t inspired Meg to do much exploring—and she had had more than enough to do to make the house livable, and so much to learn about the orchard, that she hadn’t had time to consider the broader layout of the buildings. Of which there were a surprising number, or at least their remnants. As Seth sketched, her house appeared, with the driveway running alongside. Then the roughly framed addition where she parked occasionally, which was connected to the kitchen. Beyond that, at an odd angle, lay what Seth had informed her was the nineteenth-century carpenter’s shop, then finally, perpendicular to that, the old barn facing the house. To her eye, the barn was no more than two stories of splintered wood and patches, but