“Hang on a second,” I said as I dug out my telephone book. I found the dry cleaner’s number at the shop, dialed it, and listened to the machine as it gave me the shop hours and the day’s special. “They’re still open.”
“Unless they forgot to change the outgoing message on their machine before all of this happened,” Maddy said.
“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? We need to head back to Cow Spots in the morning and see if we can get anything out of Vivian.”
“We’ve been there so much lately, I’m thinking about looking for an apartment.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I asked. I loved having my sister so close, and the thought of her living somewhere else, even if it was just the next town over, was too much for me to take. Apparently, I leaned on her more than I’d realized.
“Don’t worry. I was just kidding. Can you imagine ordering the return address labels? Timber Ridge is bad enough, but Cow Spots is just an open invitation for ridicule.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s kind of cute.”
“Well, you can’t move, either.”
I touched a nearby wooden column, carefully restored during our rehab. “Sis, we both know that I could never leave this place. There’s too much of Joe in it.”
“Even if you and David got married somewhere down the road?” she asked. “Would you still live here?”
“It’s my home,” I said.
“I’m not saying that it’s even on the horizon, but let’s play what-if for a second. Do you think David could live here, what with Joe’s ghost around every corner?”
“Joe isn’t haunting me,” I said.
“Not now he’s not, but then again, David’s not here now, either.”
“Maddy, if there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that Joe would approve of me moving on with my life. He loved his life too much to deny anyone else happiness if they had a shot at it.”
“He was a pretty special fella, wasn’t he?” she asked.
“Golden,” I said as I yawned. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.”
“You never really answered my question, though, did you?” she asked as I walked toward the master bedroom.
“Didn’t I?” I replied with a grin.
As I got ready for bed, I realized that the reason I’d avoided Maddy’s question was that I didn’t know what the answer was. Could I invite someone else into the home that Joe and I had created together? Or, even worse, could I leave this place in order to live with someone else? I honestly didn’t know, and since David wasn’t about to propose and I knew that I wasn’t going to do it, I was pretty safe just ignoring it for the moment. I planned to enjoy my relationship with David for as long as I could, and if it eventually grew into something deeper, I’d make that decision then.
“Can I help you?” Vivian asked as we walked into the Clean Break the next morning. She didn’t even look up from her newspaper to see who was in her shop.
“I’m glad to see that you’re out of jail so fast,” I said brightly.
No one else was around, but as she looked up at me, she said urgently, “Would you keep your voice down? How did you know about that?”
“It’s not supposed to be some kind of big secret, is it?” Maddy asked. “If it is, you’ve got a problem. We found out an hour after you were arrested. How long do you think it’s going to take the citizens of Cow Spots to find out? If they’re anything like the people who live in Timber Ridge, it’s already common knowledge around here.”
“It was all just a misunderstanding,” Vivian said.
“Really? Is that how you’re going to try to spin it? Vivian, you were booked for soliciting gambling and released on a higher bail than I could have scraped together in a year. That doesn’t sound like a misunderstanding to me,” Maddy said.
“My employer has hired an attorney for me,” she said.
“Once he’s got this all straightened out, it’s not going to matter.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Maddy said. “Even if they did try to forget about it, a new murder charge will remind them pretty quickly.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” she said flatly.
“Hey, I can understand it,” I said. “It couldn’t have felt good when Grant dumped you like that and decided to chase back after his old girlfriend.”
“Do you honestly think that he’d dump me for a run-down old hag like you?” she asked Maddy.
My sister didn’t blow up, which might not have been a good sign, but I was going to pretend for the moment that it was. Instead, she said, “We weren’t talking about me. Besides, I was married to him too, remember? Why on earth would I want to have leftovers after I didn’t really enjoy the meal in the first place?”