Like a wealthy old widow dressed up for a ball, the house had been shown to its best advantage in the shadows of evening. In daylight, it was dismaying. Knowing she didn’t have much time, Dolly passed straight through the dusty kitchen and into the dining room, going to work on the wet floor with the haste of an emergency room nurse. After she sopped up the standing water, though, she found disheartening evidence that this was not the first rainstorm the broken window had endured. As Mrs. Fryt had suspected, it seemed obvious that, at least since Mr. Wojtas had died, no one had checked on the inside of the house. The floor’s finish was all but ruined, and, when Dolly flipped up the corner of the saturated rug, she found that its underside and the floor underneath were dark with mold. The chair at the head of the table was destroyed, too, its golden shot silk upholstery splotched with brown patches, the wood spotted with white like a cancer.

“Sometimes you have to cut a part out to save the rest,” she remembered her father telling her, but this cancer was too far gone. Even the end of the grand mahogany table was mottled with white spots. Dolly thought it was despicable that the Mickelson family had let the house go like this.

At the very least, though, she could try to prevent further damage; it would make her life much easier once Byron bought the house. She wiped dry the aged windowsill and frame, then dug in her bag, glad she’d thought to bring her hammer, tacks, scissors, and the Koroseal Strawtex fabric she had purchased with the intent of reupholstering Byron’s favorite chair. Of course, when she’d showed him the Strawtex, he had laughed and said, “Baby-blue plastic? On my chair? I don’t think so, Doll.” (This although he was supposedly in favor of having a modern home!) Well, she was grateful now; it would be just the thing to keep the Mickelson house dry.