Chapter 1

Amanda Watson rocked back on her heels, trying to get a better look at the tangle of pipes and puddles of water in the cabinet under the chipped white porcelain kitchen sink. She rested her left elbow on her knee, and twirled an earring reflectively as she surveyed the situation. Why was it still dripping? Was something wrong with the trap? Was the water coming from a joint? A cracked pipe? The drain? How long has it been leaking? Did Aunt Tess ever try to fix it herself—or consider having it fixed? From the watermarks on the plywood, it looked as if this particular leak had been a problem for quite a while. Amanda sighed, mentally adding yet one more item to the old house’s ever-growing fix-it list. How was she ever going to sell the house in this condition?

Always willing to take on a challenge, Amanda figured there had to be a way to get to the bottom of the problem. Okay, so she wasn’t a plumber. She wasn’t handy the way a tradesman would be, but she was resourceful and wasn’t afraid to take on something new. And she had learned a thing or two from her dad, helping him as he puttered around the house, fixing sticky doors and building bookshelves. She felt confident that she could tackle the sink. In her mind, the leak was simply a problem to be solved: she’d find a way. She had so far, she often reasoned. Hadn’t she found the courage to make it on her own, first after her father died, later in college, and now as a mother. And a newly-divorced single mother at that.

Amanda reached under the sink, located the shut-off valve, and gave it a twist. It groaned grudgingly, but finally turned, and the annoying dripping slowed and finally stopped. There was no denying the obvious: this house—beautiful and Victorian though it was—needed to have a lot of time and money invested in it. And Amanda knew she didn’t have much of either one. She considered the scope of work she had noticed since just yesterday afternoon when she and Lexie, her daughter, had pulled into the driveway. Had the house really been this bad last fall when she had come to Cape May to care for Aunt Tess? Amanda had been too busy chasing her toddler and tending to her ailing and much-beloved aunt to take notice.

But now the much-needed repairs were painfully obvious. Carpentry problems ranged from creaky stairs and broken shutters to rotting boards on the porch. The roof looked like slate, and its poor condition was the likely cause of the watermarks on many of the plaster ceilings. The house would need rewiring, too—what else w