The bus shuddered to a halt at a rusted sign that read Honeybell Hollow, Pop. 842, and Cordelia Pruitt wrestled her suitcase down the narrow aisle. One wheel had given up the ghost somewhere outside of Atlanta, leaving the lime-green vinyl bag to list hard to one side like a tipsy wedding guest.
The driver, a thick-necked man with a cassette deck humming Conway Twitty, glanced at her through the rearview mirror. You sure about this stop, hon? Town square is another four miles east.
I'm sure. Cordelia kept her voice even. My grandmother's place is just over the hill.
The driver shrugged, a rolling motion of massive shoulders, and popped the door open with a pneumatic hiss. The air that rolled in carried the scent of cut hay, woodsmoke, and something floral she couldn't quite place. Magnolias, maybe. Or the memory of them.
She stepped down onto cracked asphalt. The bus pulled away with a belch of diesel, and then there was nothing but the sound of crickets starting up in the tall grass and the distant complaint of a screen door swinging somewhere up the road. A single wooden bench sat beside the road, its paint peeling in long curls like sunburned skin. She dropped onto it, dragging the broken suitcase beside her, and took stock.
The town of Honeybell Hollow spread out below the gentle slope of the road like a quilt someone had stitched and then forgotten. White clapboard houses with wide porches. A general store with a gas pump out front, the sign so faded she could only just make out Pruitt's Sundries in faded gilt. A church steeple, copper gone green, pointing one crooked finger toward a sky bruising toward evening.
Her phone, dead for the last hour of the ride, sat useless in her coat pocket. She hadn't bothered to buy a charger before leaving the city. Hadn't bothered to do much of anything except pack two changes of clothes, her grandmother's worn copy of Rebecca, and the deed to the orchard that had arrived in the mail three days prior.
The letter had been typed on lavender paper, the words formal and final. Pruitt Family Trust, it had read. The orchard, fifty-two acres of failing apple trees and a farmhouse with a sagging porch, passed to the next living heir upon the death of Margaret Pruitt. That was all it said about her grandmother, who had raised her one summer and died alone in a county hospital while Cordelia was arranging peonies for a Goldman Sachs retirement party.
She'd taken the next bus south.
The bench creaked beneath her as she shifted her weight. The suitcase listed against her knee, and she rested one hand on its curved handle. The leather was warm from the journey. A mockingbird lit on the rusted sign above her and poured out three bars of somebody else's song before wheeling away toward a stand of pecan trees.
"Well," she said to no one. "Here we are."
She stood, slung her tote bag over one shoulder, and took the suitcase by its good handle. The broken wheel dragged a furrow in the dust behind her as she started down the road toward town, the suitcase waddling stubbornly at her side.
The general store resolved itself as she approached: a long, low building with a false front and a screen door that slapped shut behind a fat orange cat. A pair of gas pumps stood sentinel at the curb, one of them missing its nozzle, the hose dangling like a question mark. Above the door, an American flag hung limp in the still air.
She paused outside, leaning the suitcase against the porch rail. Through the screen, she could see shelves of canned goods, a wire rack of seed packets, a glass counter holding pocket knives and fishing lures and a row of mason jars filled with something amber and viscous. A bell hung above the door, and when she pushed it open, the bell gave a single, bright note, and the cat shot out between her ankles with an indignant yowl.
"Well now," said a voice from the back. "Ain't you a sight for sore eyes."
The speaker was a tall, rawboned woman with steel-gray hair pulled back in a bun so tight it looked structural. She emerged from a doorway hung with a curtain of plastic strips, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and regarded Cordelia over the top of a pair of reading glasses perched low on her nose.
"You the Pruitt girl," the woman said. It wasn't a question.
Cordelia nodded. "Cordelia. I take it you're Mrs. Pickett."
"Beverly. And call me Bev. Everybody does except the tax man and the Lord, and He and I have an understanding." She set the towel aside and came around the counter with the careful, measured gait of someone whose knees had seen better days. "Heard you were comin'. Got the word from Beatrice Bellweather, and when Beatrice Bellweather says something's so, you can take it to the bank and cash it."
"Is that so."
"That is so. She said you'd be draggin' a suitcase with a busted wheel. Said you'd have that look about you. You know the one."
"I'm not sure I do."
"Sure you do." Bev gave her a long, appraising look. "The look of a woman who left somewhere she belonged and came back to somewhere she don't. Now, is that wheel fixable, or do I need to fetch my grandson with his toolbox?"
Cordelia looked down at the suitcase, its broken wheel canted at an angle that suggested both regret and defiance. "I think it might need a wheelchair, not a wheel."
Bev laughed, a short bark of genuine amusement. "That's the spirit. Set it right there. I'll get Eli to look at it when he gets in from the fields. You headed up to the orchard?"
"Eventually. I was hoping to catch a ride, if there's any to be had."
"Ride, she says. Honey, in Honeybell Hollow, if you need a ride, you wait until somebody passes by who knows you, and then you wave like you mean it." Bev crossed the counter to the glass case and pulled out a mason jar of the amber liquid. "In the meantime, you set a spell. Have a sip of my scuppernong. It's just starting to go from sweet to useful."
Cordelia hesitated, then nodded. "A small one. I've got a long walk ahead of me, I imagine."
"The orchard road is two miles north, and the last quarter mile is more suggestion than thoroughfare. You'll want a flashlight, if you got one. Path goes through a stand of pines, and the deer like to come out and have discussions right in the middle of it around dusk."
Beverly poured two glasses of the wine, thick and golden, and pushed one across the counter. Cordelia lifted it. The scuppernong was sweet on the tongue and slightly fizzy, like biting into a ripe plum.
"It's good," Cordelia said.
"It's better than good. It's the only reason I stay in this town, if you want to know the truth. The people are middling, the weather is murder, but the scuppernong makes it all worthwhile." She raised her own glass. "To comin' home, such as it is."
Cordelia clinked her glass gently against the counter, not trusting herself to echo the sentiment.
A bell on the screen door jangled before she could take a second sip, and a tall woman swept in, trailing the scent of gardenias and the particular static charge of someone who had been born into a room and expected it to rearrange itself accordingly. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and a dress the color of buttermilk, and she carried a wicker basket on one arm from which protruded the leafy tops of fresh carrots.
"Beatrice," Bev said, with the particular flatness of someone who had known a person too long to be impressed by them. "Twice in one week. To what do we owe this particular visitation."
"Don't be cross, Beverly. I've come bearing gifts." The woman deposited the basket on the counter with the practiced flourish of a magician producing a dove. "Carrots from my garden, and a bit of news I thought you'd like to hear before it makes the rounds."
Bev's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. "What news."
"Cordelia Pruitt, I presume." Beatrice turned her gaze on Cordelia, who found herself pinned under inspection like a butterfly on a board. "I'm Beatrice Bellweather. I was a dear friend of your grandmother's, though I expect you've been told that already by half the town."
"Only by the bus driver, so far."
Beatrice laughed, a sound like a cash register closing. "Charming. You have her mouth, you know. Margaret's mouth. Always one comment ahead of the rest of the conversation." She removed her gloves, finger by finger, and laid them beside the carrot basket. "I'm here to offer you a ride up to the orchard, if you'll have it. My Buick is just outside, and I've got errands that way regardless."
"I don't want to put you out."
"Out is what I'm putting in, my dear. Besides, I have questions about the estate that I'd rather ask in the privacy of an automobile than over the counter of a general store." She glanced at Bev, and the glance held the faintest edge of something older than friendship. "No offense, Beverly."
"None taken," Bev said, in a tone that suggested otherwise. "But I'll thank you not to gossip about the Pruitt affairs in front of my canned goods. People can hear through walls in this town."
"People can hear through walls anywhere, dear. It's called paying attention."
Cordelia set down her glass. "I'd appreciate the ride, Mrs. Bellweather. It's been a long day, and I suspect the suitcase and I have used up most of our cooperation."
"Then let's be off." Beatrice picked up her gloves and basket with a single fluid motion, the way someone does when they've been practicing the choreography of graciousness for sixty-odd years. "Beverly, I trust you'll have my carrots washed and bunched by Thursday for the church supper?"
"You trust, and then you do, because we both know I'm the only one in this town who knows how to tie a proper knot."
The screen door slapped shut behind Beatrice, and Cordelia was left standing in the sudden quiet of the store, the orange cat having reappeared to wind itself around her ankles with a proprietary air.
"Go on," Bev said, watching her. "She means well, mostly. And Margaret would have wanted you to have a friendly face on the road, even if the face comes attached to a woman who can't keep a thought in her head that she doesn't immediately speak out loud."
"You didn't care for my grandmother, did you."
Bev paused in the act of wiping down the counter. Her eyes, pale and shrewd, met Cordelia's. "I loved Margaret Pruitt for fifty-two years. We had a falling out over a quilt pattern and a borrowed pie plate, and we never made it right before she passed. That don't mean I didn't care for her. It means I cared for her so much I couldn't stand to be in the same room when she was wrong, and she was wrong about Beatrice Bellweather for thirty years running."
Cordelia absorbed this. "And the news?"
"Oh, the news." Bev shook her head, a small motion. "Beatrice will tell you herself, if she hasn't already started. But I'll tell you this much, free of charge. There's a stranger been seen up at the orchard. A man. Staying in the old smokehouse for the better part of a week. Your grandmother let him in, or he let himself in, and nobody in this town can quite get the story straight."
"A stranger."
"A squatter, some say. A cousin, others. A ghost, if you ask Lila Crane, and Lila's been drinking her own vinegar for longer than I care to count."
Cordelia stood very still, her hand on the counter. The scuppernong had gone faintly metallic at the back of her throat. Through the screen door, she could see Beatrice Bellweather waiting beside a pale blue Buick the size of a small boat, tapping one gloved finger against the roof.
"Thank you, Bev."
"Don't thank me yet. And when you get up to the house, you check the latches. All of them. Twice. And if that man is still there, you send word down to me or to Sheriff Hawthorne before you do anything foolish."
"What counts as foolish?"
Bev smiled, a quick and crooked thing. "Anything that sounds like the opening line of a story you'd rather not tell."
Cordelia picked up her suitcase and pushed through the screen door into the thickening evening. The heat of the day had begun to drain out of the air, replaced by a cooler current off the pines that smelled of resin and the first hint of coming rain. Beatrice Bellweather stood beside the Buick, one hand resting on the open door, watching her approach with an expression that might have been patience or might have been anticipation.
"In you go, my dear," Beatrice said, and lifted the suitcase from Cordelia's hands as though it weighed nothing. "We have a great deal to discuss, and the light won't last."
The Buick's bench seat exhaled the trapped heat of the day as Cordelia settled against it, and for a moment the smell was everything: vinyl and old perfume and the ghost of a thousand county suppers. Beatrice Bellweather slid behind the wheel with the practiced grace of a woman who had been driven places her whole life and intended, from this moment forward, to do the driving herself.
"You look like your grandmother," Beatrice said, and did not elaborate. The engine turned over with a sound like a great cat purring. Gravel popped beneath the tires as they swung out of Bev's cracked concrete drive and onto the lane that led up toward the old Featherstone place.
Cordelia watched the fields slide past, the scuppernong rows going dark with the falling light, their leaves a tired green that spoke of the long dry summer just past. In the orchard to the east, she could see the ghost shapes of the old apple trees, her grandmother's pride and her grandmother's ruin, standing in ragged rows like a congregation waiting for a sermon that would never come.
"I'm sorry I couldn't come sooner," Cordelia said.
"Nonsense." Beatrice's gloved hands rested at ten and two on the wheel. "You came when you could. That's what family does, when family is what we're talking about." A pause, just long enough to have weight. "Are we talking about family, Cordelia?"
"I think we have to."
"Then we will." Beatrice glanced toward the passenger seat, and there was something in her pale eyes that Cordelia could not quite read, something between warning and warmth. "But not until we've looked at things with our own eyes. I've found that the truth of a place is usually written in the first ten seconds, if you've the stomach to read it."
The lane wound upward through a corridor of oaks whose lower branches had been allowed to grow into a kind of tunnel, so that for a stretch the Buick moved through a green gloom punctured only by the occasional late-blooming wildflower pressed against the window. Then the trees fell away, and the Featherstone house stood before them at the crest of a shallow rise, its white paint gone the soft gray of old bone, its porches sagging in the middle like the shoulders of a woman who had been standing too long in one place.
Cordelia's breath caught in her throat.
She had not been here in seven years. She had told herself a great many sensible things about why: the distance, the business, the particular ache of stepping into a house where the voices you expected had gone quiet. But the truth, she suspected, was simpler and less forgivable. She had been afraid of what she would find.
Now she found it.
The camellias were blooming.
That was the first thing, the thing that stopped her hand on the door handle before she'd even realized she'd reached for it. Along the south foundation, in a bed her grandmother had tended for forty years, the camellias were in riot. White and pink and a red so dark it looked like wine held up to a candle, the heavy waxen blossoms crowded against the weathered siding as though they meant to push their way inside. The scent of them drifted through the cracked window, sweet and faintly rotten at the edges, the smell of something too alive for the season.
"Well," Beatrice said softly. "Well, well."
"What does that mean?"
"It means your grandmother kept a tidy house and a tidy garden and never in her life let a camellia go unpruned." Beatrice's mouth was a thin line. "Those bushes haven't seen a pair of shears since she passed. And yet."
"And yet."
They sat for a moment in the idling Buick, listening to the engine tick and the first tentative crickets tune up in the grass. The house offered no light. Somewhere in the holler, a dog began to bark, then stopped, as though it had been told.
"I'll take the front," Beatrice said, and was out of the car and halfway up the walk before Cordelia could argue. The Buick door swung shut with the heavy finality of something meant to be remembered.
Cordelia followed.
The porch steps complained under her feet, each board a separate complaint, and the screen door, when she reached it, stood ajar an inch, its spring broken or simply tired. Through the gap she could see the dim shape of the front parlor, the shapes of the furniture she remembered covered now in a fine dust that glowed faintly in the last of the daylight.
"Beatrice," she said, low.
"I see it."
Beatrice Bellweather did not step inside. She stood on the worn plank of the threshold with one gloved hand pressed flat against the doorframe, and she listened the way Cordelia had seen her listen at countless town meetings, her whole body tuned to some frequency most people could not hear. After a long moment she shook her head, once, and stepped across.
The parlor was exactly as Cordelia remembered and entirely different. The same horsehair sofa, the same marble-topped table, the same portrait of her great-grandmother above the mantel, her expression imperious even in oil. But the smell was wrong. Beneath the expected dust and the camellias drifting in through the broken window, there was something else, something Cordelia had only ever smelled once before, in the back room of the city florist shop on a morning in February when a delivery had come in from a morgue across the street and the ventilation had failed.
"Don't touch anything," Beatrice murmured. "I'm going to fetch Rusty."
"Beatrice."
"You stay here."
"I'm not staying here alone in this house. I came up here to look at things with my own eyes, didn't I?" Cordelia set her suitcase down on the porch step, where anyone coming up the lane could see it. "That's what you said. The truth of a place in the first ten seconds."
Something shifted in Beatrice's face, a softening at the corners of her mouth that might have been respect. "Then stay behind me. And if you see anything that moves that isn't me, you scream loud enough to be heard in the next county."
They moved through the parlor into the narrow center hall, where the staircase rose into a darkness that smelled of pine sap and something older. The kitchen door stood open, and beyond it, the back of the house had been given over almost entirely to glass, a sunroom her grandfather had built in some flush of optimism in the early seventies. Cordelia had played in that sunroom. She had eaten apples from a bowl on the floor and watched the light move across the tile in long slow stripes.
Now the light was almost gone, and the camellias pressed against the panes, and the apples in the bowl on the floor had gone dark and wrinkled, and at the center of the tile, in a drift of fallen petals, her aunt Beatrice Bellweather lay on her back with her arms folded over her chest and her face turned slightly toward the door, as though she had been waiting to be found.
The apple tart was in her left hand.
It was half-eaten, the crust still pale and flaking, the slice taken cleanly down the middle as though someone had paused mid-bite to consider the sweetness and then had been given no further opportunities to consider anything at all.
Cordelia made a sound that was not a word and felt Beatrice's gloved hand close, firm and surprising, around her wrist.
"Don't," Beatrice said.
"She's dead."
"I know she's dead. I can see she's dead." Beatrice's voice was steady, but there was a fine tremor in the hand at Cordelia's wrist. "I have known that woman for forty years. We quarreled about the placement of the pecan tree at the Founders' Day picnic in 1987 and we did not speak for six months and I have regretted every word of it every day since. Do not touch her. Do not touch anything. I need to fetch Rusty Hawthorne, and I need to fetch him now, and I need you to go back down to the lane and wait in the Buick with the doors locked and your headlights on."
"Beatrice."
"Cordelia." Beatrice turned her face toward her, and for the first time since Cordelia had known her, the mayor of Pippin Hollow looked her age and more. "I have buried two husbands and a son and a dog I loved more than either of them. I will not bury my oldest friend by myself, and I will not have you implicated in anything you cannot undo. Go to the car."
Cordelia went.
The gravel of the lane was cool under her shoes, and the air had gone the particular blue of an October dusk, and somewhere down the slope a whippoorwill had begun its long and patient counting. She sat in the Buick with the doors locked and the headlights on, and she watched the dark shape of her grandmother's house fill up with night, and she waited for Beatrice Bellweather to come back down the lane, and after a long time Beatrice came.
She came alone.
"He's not coming tonight," Beatrice said, sliding behind the wheel. Her face was a mask. "He says there's been another one. Up at the Crane place. He says he's sorry. He says he'll be here first thing in the morning."
"Another one what?"
"He didn't say." Beatrice put the car in gear. "He didn't have to."
They drove down the lane in silence, the headlights cutting a pale path through the gathering dark, and the camellias at the foundation of the old Featherstone house bloomed on, indifferent and prolific, in the light of a moon that had only just remembered how to rise.
The telephone rang at a quarter past six on a Saturday morning, which was wrong because Cordelia Pruitt never answered the telephone before her second cup of coffee and that second cup was still brewing on the stove, a matter of some personal principle. She let it ring three times while she counted the chimes of the grandfather clock in the hall and judged the distance between the kitchen and the parlor.
She picked up the receiver on the fourth ring. The voice on the other end belonged to a young woman who was trying very hard to sound professional and was not quite managing it.
"Ma'am, this is Deputy Penny Pickett with the Pippin Hollow Sheriff's Department, and I am supposed to inform you that Sheriff Hawthorne is on his way to your location and he says not to touch anything and especially not to touch the camellias."
Cordelia closed her eyes. The steam from the coffeepot curled upward in a thin, aromatic ribbon.
"Good morning, Penny," she said. "Would you like to start from whatever part of this makes sense?"
"Miss Cordelia." The deputy's voice dropped half an octave, which was meant to be a whisper and was not. "We got a call. About the, um, the situation up at the old Featherstone place. And the sheriff says he knows you and Miss Beatrice was there last night and he just wants everybody to stay calm and, and, and stay put."
"Penny."
"Yes ma'am?"
"What part of the property is the sheriff referring to when he says not to touch anything? The house, the grounds, or the camellias in particular?"
There was a long pause. Cordelia could hear, faintly, the sound of someone in the background chewing something crunchy and a low voice saying what sounded like for the love of Pete . Then the deputy came back, and her voice had climbed up again toward a register that suggested she was holding the receiver away from her mouth.
"He says the whole property, Miss Cordelia. Especially the camellias. He says, and I am quoting, that if he gets up there and finds one single petal out of place he is going to be very unhappy with a great many people and he does not mean maybe."
Cordelia thanked her, hung up the receiver, and stood for a moment in the parlor with her hand on the cradle of the telephone. The morning light came through the east windows in long, slant bars, and the dust motes turned in them like something almost patient. She could hear the chickens in the side yard beginning their slow negotiations about the day. She could hear, more distantly, the sound of a vehicle coming up the lane at the speed of someone who believed in gravity.
She poured her second cup of coffee into a thermos. She put on her grandmother's barn coat, the one with the torn pocket and the brass buttons that had gone green at the edges. She walked out onto the porch and sat down on the top step with the thermos between her knees and waited, because there was no percentage in standing up before the sheriff of Pippin Hollow wanted her to stand up, and Sheriff Rusty Hawthorne had been wanting things his own way since long before Cordelia Pruitt had come home to bury her parents.
The cruiser came up the lane in a slow and considered way, the gravel popping under the tires in a pattern that sounded almost like speech. It stopped at the foot of the porch steps. The driver's door opened and closed with the particular reluctance of a man who had not yet finished his own second cup of coffee. Sheriff Hawthorne came up the steps two at a time, his hat already on, his notebook already out, his face wearing the expression of a man who had been awake for some time and wished to make it clear that this was not his preference.
He was a tall, soft man, gone gray at the temples, with the kind of mustache that suggested he had been meaning to trim it for several years and had never quite found the morning. His boots were good boots. His badge was pinned a little crooked, the way it always was, and he had a pencil behind his ear that he would lose before noon.
"Morning, Cordelia," he said.
"Morning, Rusty."
He looked at the thermos in her hands. He looked at the porch. He looked out across the side yard toward the rise where the camellias had begun, even from this distance, to show their first pale blooms of the season.
"I'll take some of that coffee if you're offering," he said, "and then I'll thank you to tell me exactly what happened up at that house last night, because Miss Beatrice called my dispatcher at eleven forty-two and said the word unexpected in a tone of voice that I have heard her use exactly once before and that was when her husband Leland drove the Cadillac into the duck pond in seventy-nine."
Cordelia poured him a cup. He took it. He did not sit down. He stood on the top step and he looked at the orchard and the lane and the rise, and he took a long sip, and then he said:
"Tell me about the smell."
Cordelia told him about the smell. She told him about the gloves on the porch rail and the camellia petal caught in the lining of one of them and the glass of something that might have been apple brandy sitting on the porch table with a lipstick on the rim that was not Delphine's color and had not been Delphine's color for thirty years. She told him about the high color in the dead woman's face and the way the white hair had been combed and pinned as if for an occasion. She told him about the box of bitter almonds in the pantry, behind the flour, half empty, with the lid not quite seated. She did not, at that point, say the word poison . She did not need to.
Sheriff Hawthorne listened. He did not write anything down. He sipped his coffee. The steam from it rose into the cool morning air and vanished.
"All right," he said, when she had finished. "All right. I'm going to go up there now, and I'm going to have a look, and I'm going to talk to the people who were in that house before I do, and at the end of it I am going to write in my book that Miss Delphine Featherstone came home after dark, climbed the porch steps in the dark, caught her heel on the top step in the dark, fell forward onto the railing in the dark, suffered a cardiac event brought on by the fright of the fall, and was discovered by Miss Beatrice Bellweather, who had the good sense to call my office and not to move the body."
He looked at her over the rim of the cup. His eyes were the color of creek water and just about as clear.
"That is what happened, Cordelia."
"Is it, Rusty."
"That is what is going to be in the book," he said, "and that is what is going to be in the report, and that is what is going to be on the record when the county man comes up from the city on Monday to sign off. That is what happened, because I am the sheriff of Pippin Hollow and I have known every Featherstone that ever lived in this town, including the ones who were not technically Featherstones, and I will not have this place turned into a story for the evening news. Not today. Not on my watch."
He finished the coffee. He handed the empty cup back to her with a care that suggested he might, at some point, want it filled again.
"The bitter almonds," he said, after a moment.
"Yes," Cordelia said.
"The ones in the pantry."
"Yes."
"Behind the flour."
"Yes."
"In the tin with the blue lid that says Delphine's Kitchen, Not for the Mice ."
Cordelia looked at him. Sheriff Hawthorne had the particular expression of a man who had been the law in a small town for fifteen years and had learned, in that time, every cupboard in every house that had ever come under his attention, including the ones that had not, strictly speaking, required his attention, but had ended up there all the same.
"Miss Delphine Featherstone was eighty-seven years old," he said, "and she had a heart that had been giving her trouble since before I was weaned, and she lived alone in that house since nineteen fifty-six with nobody but a cat that hated her and a sister who hated her more, and that woman had a right to die in her own house of her own heart stopping in the manner of her own choosing, and I will be damned, Cordelia, if I am going to be the one who tells the world different."
He put his hat on a little straighter. He put the pencil behind his ear in a slightly different position, as if to mark the change of subject.
"Now," he said, "I want you to take me up to the house and introduce me to whoever is in charge of the arrangements, and I want you to be very calm and very quiet and very helpful, because there is a young deputy in my cruiser who is taking notes on a clipboard and she has already spelled your name two different ways and we cannot afford any more excitement in that vehicle than is strictly necessary."
Cordelia stood up. She picked up the thermos. She looked at the orchard, and the lane, and the rise, and the place where, somewhere behind the rise, the camellias were blooming in the first pale fires of their season.
"Rusty," she said.
"Cordelia."
"You know I cannot just leave it."
"I know you cannot."
"You know what is going to happen if I do not leave it."
"I have a fair idea," he said. "I have been getting fair ideas about you since you were twelve years old and you figured out that the Henderson boy had been putting rock salt in the church collection plate for the better part of a year. That is not why I am here."
"Why are you here, Rusty."
"Because somebody has got to be the sheriff," he said, "and because this town has had enough of being a story, and because Miss Delphine Featherstone, for all her considerable faults, deserved a quiet Saturday morning and a clean death on her own porch and not a circus. And because," he said, and he said it more quietly, "because I am asking you. As a favor to me. Let me do my job this morning. Let me write it in the book. Let me send the county man home on Monday without a thing on his desk but a sad and ordinary piece of paperwork. And on Tuesday, if you have got to go poking around, you go poking around. But give me today."
Cordelia looked at him for a long time. The chickens had stopped their negotiations. The whippoorwill from last night had been replaced by a cardinal somewhere down the slope, and the cardinal was singing in the bright, repetitive way cardinals sing, as if it had just learned the song and was very pleased with itself.
"Beatrice will not like it," Cordelia said.
"Beatrice," said the sheriff, "will like it when I explain it to her in the front parlor with the door closed and a cup of her own coffee in her hand. Beatrice has buried two husbands and a son and a dog, and she knows what an honest sheet on a Saturday morning is worth in a town like this one. She will like it just fine."
Cordelia nodded, once. She handed him the thermos. He took it without comment. They walked down the steps together, and the gravel popped under their feet, and the morning opened around them like the first page of a long and careful book.
At the foot of the steps, Sheriff Hawthorne stopped and looked back up at the porch of her grandmother's house, and then out across the orchard toward the rise, and then at her.
"On Tuesday," he said.
"On Tuesday," she said.
He turned and walked to the cruiser. He opened the driver's door. The deputy on the passenger side looked up from her clipboard with an expression of profound and slightly desperate concentration, and the sheriff said something to her that Cordelia could not quite hear but that made the deputy put down her pencil and put her face in both hands for what appeared to be a measured count of five.
The cruiser pulled out of the lane. The dust rose and settled. The lane lay quiet.
Cordelia Pruitt stood for a long moment in the cool of the morning, the barn coat around her shoulders, the empty thermos in her hand, and the taste of bitter almonds still faint and improbable at the back of her throat.
On Tuesday, she thought. On Tuesday she would start.
For now, she went inside to pour the rest of the coffee.