The First Billion

Three weeks into the project, the cost had skyrocketed from eighteen to thirty thousand dollars, and there was no end in sight. Each day brought a new complication: faulty wiring, rusted pipes, asbestos. Yes, asbestos! Yesterday, she'd learned the hundred-year-old Victorian fixer-upper suffered from a healthy case of softwood termite infestation. Once the slab was completed, the house would have to be tented and fumigated. Cost: seven thousand dollars. Where she'd get the money to pay for it seemed to be no one's concern but hers, and the cause of one hangnail, a persistent headache, and very soon, if she wasn't careful, an ulcer.

Cate had no choice in the matter. The work was obligatory. The building code demanded it, and The Code's will be done. It had all started because of a faulty outlet. First her toaster blew, then her rice steamer. She called in the electrician, who traced the problem to a frayed circuit box beneath the kitchen floorboards. But the circuit box wasn't the real problem, he'd informed her while writing out his bill. The house, it turned out, had been built half on a wooden foundation, half on bare earth. It was a code violation of mythic proportions. By law, he was required to inform the building inspector. She asked him how the house had managed to remain standing through a century of earthquakes, including, if she wasn't mistaken, a couple of doozies in 1906 and in 1989. The electrician didn't know. He only knew that a bare-earth foundation was against code.

Code!

She'd learned to hate the word and had reserved a place for it in her personal lexicon alongside "fascist," "fibber," and "philanderer," three hall-of-fame baddies.

Even with her name in bold print beneath a weekly column, she barely earned sixty thousand dollars a year. Take away taxes, utilities, car payments, and her mortgage, and she was left with a disposable income of eight hundred dollars a month. Enough for one martini and a cowboy rib eye at Harris's, a couple of movies, a pair of tickets to a Giants game, and maybe a pair of shoes- all depending on how she filled the fridge. Every time she heard a politician say she was "affluent," she wanted to brain him.

Ka-lunk!

The sound was louder this time, as if someone had dropped a bowling ball onto her precious stained-pine floor. Cate cocked her head, no longer so confident it was the workers. The problem was the thump itself: The quality of the noise, its pitch and timbre, was unfamiliar. She did not recognize it.

Over the last month she'd become fluent in the buzzes, bangs, and squawks of a construction site. She could rattle off any of a dozen different tasks simply by listening to the frequency of the saw blade or the whine of the drill bit. The thump was not a sledgehammer. It certainly wasn't a pick. No, the sound coming from the study was that of a large object being dropped upon the floor.

The thump was a stranger, and it scared her.

Only then did Cate pick up her watch from the nightstand and look at the time. It was 4:06. The streetlights reflecting off the dense fog had lent the sky an eerie luminescence, feigning sunrise and providing a false dawn.

4:06.

Cate stared at the dial, anger and fear welling up in her in equal parts. No workman showed up at a job site at 4:06. Even Bob Vila didn't go to This Old House until six-thirty at the earliest! Suddenly, she was wide awake, her senses honed, her radar on full alert. She could smell the oil from the cement mixer parked out front. She could hear the ticking of her watch, the hum of the PC on her desk. The screensaver ran on a loop reading, "John Galt is dead. John Galt is dead." Her capitalist manifesto.

Someone she did not know was inside the house. There was an intruder in her study. Call the police. She reached for the phone, but froze halfway there, paralyzed by an older and more wrenching fear. There were worse things than physical peril.

Retrieving her hand, she slid her back against the headboard and waited for a footfall on the landing, for the door to her bedroom to be flung open. For a few moments, the house was silent, and Cate decided it was better for you to go get them than for them to come get you. Gathering her courage, she placed her feet on the ground and stood. For once, she'd make impatience her strong suit. She took one step and stopped, but only for a moment- just long enough to double-check if her sanity was in its proper place, tucked between her aversion to cigarettes and her love of Vermeer- then padded across the room to the bedroom door. The wood planks were cold to the touch and groaned at her meekest step.

Slowly, she ordered herself, concentrating on rolling her feet from heel to toe. You're a Shaolin priest walking on rice paper, she said, quoting from the bible of late-afternoon TV. Calmly, Grasshopper. But to her revved-up ears, she sounded like a newly shoed colt crossing the smithy's floor.