as well as one about wild animals so she wouldn't make errors about where they lived in various seasons.
But the historical time lines were the best. She might drop by a bookstore while the noise was going on and see if there was some new book that would be useful. After all, she'd learned at a mystery writers and readers conference that books were deductible if you were a writer. She wondered if her cable bills would count. She'd taken notes from lots of programs on the History Channel. She'd check with her accountant. After all, deductions, as Martha Stewart was always saying, were a Good Thing.
Jane invited Todd to go along.
"I like books and bookstores, but you take so much time that I go crazy. I'll pass this time."
Jane was relieved. She knew she spent too much time when she went to a big bookstore. She was greedy for books. She'd take a list of the subjects, but didn't include mysteries. Those were the shelves she browsed through first before she could even consider the research books.
She found some of her favorites. Charlaine Harris had a new hardback and a paperback on the shelves. She hadn't read either of them yet. Rhys Bowen had a new paperback historical mystery so she picked that up as well. Jill Churchill had another of her books set in the thirties she couldn't resist.
She'd read these in the evenings when she'd finished her own work for the day. Then she consulted her list.
She'd looked up the latest USA Today booklist of the 150 bestsellers that week and taken notes. She'd also justbrowsed all of the nonfiction and history sections. She kept piling up books at a desk in the middle of the store, putting a sticky note on the top saying "Save for Jane Jeffry"
She had to have two bags because one would have spilled its guts out the bottom before she could haul it to the car. The real treasure she found was a government study of the most popular names for boys and girls through the whole last century. It listed the thirty most popular for each year. A plethora of names. Unfortunately, most of them for decades were Mary and John. But there were some really good ones that cropped up occasionally. Carmina, Drew, Mick, Serena, and for a spell after the last version of the movie about the Titanic came out, there were lots and lots of first place Jacks and Roses.
Early Tuesday morning Jane was awoken by the sound of her fence coming down. She'd forgotten to buy kitty litter and bins to see if they still remembered what they were for. She made a quick run to a pet store and discovered there was now a wonderful thing called "self-clumping kitty litter." Everything, including liquid, turned into a ball. You bought scoops with grooves through them, and lots of plastic bags. She was also told to get a box of baking soda and a fine sieve. Stir a tiny bit in every time you cleaned out the clumps and they wouldn't smell bad — to the cats or the person cleaning up. The pet store manager suggested that she should buy two low-sided bins. Most cats didn't want to use each other's bins.
When she returned home, she found a good-sized
plastic container in an upper cabinet that would do for a generous water bowl. There was lots of noise outside and the cats had taken refuge in the basement, just as they always did during lightning storms.
Todd and Shelley's boy John were already outside loving the noise and lots of strong men with power tools.
Jane made earplugs out of wadded-up tissues, and took her embarrassingly big bags of books outside to arrange them on the patio table in the shade of the umbrella. She laid them all out and started looking them over, one by one. There were very noisy digging machines carrying away a huge amount of soil and putting it into equally noisy trucks that took the dirt away. At the end of the day, there was an enormous hole in the backyard. At least four feet deep.
The next day, she was out early to see what was going on next and found that work had stopped and there was a calico cat with two kittens looking down into the hole. The mother was meowing loudly and there was a sound of mewing coming out of the hole. A workman got in the hole and after a bit of a chase, lifted the little orange kitten out.
The mother immediately started almost brutally washing the kitten, one paw holding it down. When the orange kitten was clean, she walked serenely out of the area of missing fence at the north end of the yard, three kittens running to catch up with her. Jane was smiling when the man who had rescued the kitten approached her.
"We need to go into your basement to drill through for hot water, cold water, and hook up to the sewer line."
"I'll have to get my own cats locked up or you'll be stepping on them. They're very curious."
"That's fine. My workers need to get their tools out of the truck."
Jane hauled the kitty litter bins, a bowl of water, and cat food up to her bathroom, then went back down to fetch Max and Meow.
By the time she returned there were horrible drilling noises coming from the basement again, and she went out to look down the hole.
There were four men in it now, one was helping thread the pipes through from the basement, and the others were building restraining walls to keep the concrete from flowing over the yard, she assumed. But the hole would take tons and tons of concrete. Wouldn't it be so heavy that the entire addition would gradually sink into the hole?
The general contractor had arrived and was watching the workmen. She approached him and asked him about her fears of the whole thing sinking. He laughed and said, "It won't be filled with concrete. It will be mostly gravel with a vapor barrier over it."
As he was explaining, a pipe appeared coming through the foundation closest to the far wall of the hole. "Which one is that?" Jane asked.
"Hot water," he said as somebody else in the hole was connecting a black pipe with a curve at the bottom and
coming up very high. "It has to be higher than usual and all of them will be capped off higher than necessary."
"Why are they coming out from the dining room foundation?"
"Because you don't want anything that holds water on an outside wall or it could freeze and burst."
Jane almost said "Duh" but John Beckman was used to people who hadn't added a room before asking silly questions.
By the time all the pipes were installed and capped off, she went to free the cats. When she got back downstairs, there were four men with heavily loaded bags of gravel in wheelbarrows. They were all sweating like pigs.
Others were building walls with big boards around the perimeter of the hole.
Jane was again sitting at the patio table under the umbrella. Todd and Shelley's son were also watching every step. Now and then, Jane would look up and see how the boards that would prevent the concrete from running all over the place were coming along. The workers were fast and efficient. They drove steel spikes into the ground every few feet to, presumably, keep the weight of the concrete from pushing the boards out of alignment.
By noon one and a half sections of wood were already in, and watching all the leveling, it looked as if it was going to be a good flat area to pour the concrete (or was the proper word cement?) nice and flat. She'd have to ask about the right word.
She went inside to make sandwiches for Todd andJohn and checked the kitty litter. One or the other of the cats had availed itself of one of the bins. Cats always seemed to her to have very short memories. But apparently they had some sort of early memory of kitty litter from kittenhood. She tried out the sieve. It worked like a charm. She scattered a half teaspoon of baking soda over the area of the bin that had been used and with the fine sieve mixed it in. Then she put the plastic bag with the solid lump into the trash bin behind the garage.