According to newspaper accounts, the local station was always being hit with enormous libel suits, most of which they lost. Or more correctly, their insurance carrier lost. There had been an article only a month ago about the insurance carrier trying to drop the station's coverage, but the station had filed suit against the carrier, claiming it was the carrier's incompetent lawyers who were to blame. When it got to court, a judge had ruled in the station's favor. The newspaper reporter, mincing among the libel laws himself like a trained soldier in a minefield, managed to suggest, without saying so, that the judge was afraid of what Lance King might to do him if he didn't rule in the station's favor. The general manager of the television sta? tion had been quoted as saying that Lance King was the brightest star in their galaxy of fine reporters and they considered his reports an honorable and necessary public service. . blab, blah, blab. In other words, he was a point grabber and, Jane suspected, would have been out on his ear if the insurance had been canceled.
And now darling, cute, bubbly, idiotic Julie Newton had blabbed to him about their block caroling party, no doubt told him interesting tidbits about the neighbors and, worst of all, invited the jerk to Jane's house.
“Julie,' Jane said, sitting down across from her and fixing her with a bleak stare, 'you have to uninvite him. I won't have the man in my house.”
Julie quit bouncing in place for a minute. Then said, 'Oh, Jane, another joke!' She wiggled like a happy puppy.
“I'm not joking, Julie,' Jane said firmly. 'You're going to have to call him back, explain that you failed to check with the hostess of the party in advance and she has now told you her house can't accommodate any more people — like him and his crew.'
“Jane, I can't do that.'
“You must do it. Otherwise I'm going to tell everyone the party after the caroling is canceled. Or you can have it at your house.'
“No, I can't. I don't have a kitchen. I made some changes and Bruce couldn't finish it all.' Julie sat very still for a moment. 'He knows your name and address. Lance King does. I'm sorry, Jane, but he asked where the party was so he could come by early in the day and setup cameras. If I tell him you won't let him in, it'll make him mad at both of us.'
“I don't care if he's mad at me,' Jane said. 'Are you sure?' Julie asked.
“What can I do?' Jane asked Shelley half an hour later. Shelley had responded instantly to Jane's frantic call for advice and sprinted across their driveways to chew the situation over. 'Even if it hadn't been somebody obnoxious, Julie had no business inviting an outsider to my house.'
“No, she didn't, but the problem now is to get rid of him,' Shelley said.
“If I refuse to let him come, he'll be insulted and angry and he's the last person in the world I want to make enemies with,' Jane said. 'On the other hand, it makes my stomach hurt to think about having him in my house. People will think I'm expressing some sort of approval of his appalling behavior.'
“You could come down with a sudden, violent, and highly contagious disease,' Shelley suggested.
Jane shook her head. 'No, nobody'd believe it. And I'd just end up sticking someone else in the neighborhood with the same problem. And I wouldn't even be able to help them out because of my smallpox or cholera or whatever.”
Shelley took a sip of her coffee. 'Much as I like to be the neighborhood wise woman, always ready with a solution, I'm coming up empty on this one,' she admitted. 'How did you leave it with Julie?'
“You mean after I beat the stuffing out of her?
I've never been so tempted to smack somebody upside the head. I told her I wanted an hour to think about it.”
The doorbell rang and Jane found Bruce Pargeter standing on the front steps, looking very upset.
He introduced himself and Jane said, 'I know you, Bruce. Remember, you put in new pantry shelves. Come in out of the cold.'
“I remember. I wasn't sure you did.”
Bruce was a chunky, florid-faced young man, probably about thirty years old, Jane would have guessed, who lived with his widowed mother at the other end of the block. He was a wizard at fixing, repairing, or renovating almost anything. Almost everyone in the neighborhood had benefitted from his skills at one time or another. One of the advantages to having him around was that he was unfailingly cheerful and polite and had excellent taste. He could suggest to homeowners that their own ideas were dreadful without being the tiniest bit rude about it.
But today he didn't look the least bit cheerful. In fact, he looked extremely upset.
“Hi, Bruce,' Shelley said when they entered the living room. 'I've been meaning to tell you how happy I am with that flooring in the family room. I'm so glad you convinced me to get the planking rather than the squares.'
“Too bad you don't have a tape recorder running, Bruce,' Jane said with a laugh. 'Not very many people have ever heard Shelley admit that someone else was right and she was wrong.”
But Bruce Pargeter only gave her a thin smile. 'Jane, I want to warn you about something andask a favor. I'm doing Julie Newton's kitchen and I couldn't help but hear her on the phone this morning. Do you know she's invited Lance King to the neighborhood caroling party?'
“I'm afraid I do know. Shelley and I were just trying to figure out what to do about it.”
Bruce gave her a grim look. 'Jane, if you value the quality of your life, you won't let that — that person in your house. Believe me, you'll regret it the rest of your life. He's the most evil person in the world.”
Four
It turned out that Bruce's
“Ever heard of karst topography?' he asked.
“Something to do with caves, isn't it?' Jane said.
Shelley looked surprised. 'I never cease to marvel at the weird snippets of things you know about, Jane.'
“College geology,' Jane said. 'I liked geology.”
Bruce took up the explanation. 'In the simplest terms, karst topography is where you have limestone bedrock below the soil. When there's a lot of groundwater, it erodes the limestone over time and that forms caves. If it erodes far enough, sometimes the top of the cave falls in and you get a sinkhole. Most of the middle part of the country is limestone bedrock, but only some areas get sinkholes. Kentucky is one of them.'
“This has something to do with Lance King?' Shelley asked.
“Quite a lot,' Bruce said. 'My dad was a contractor outside Louisville. He built a little subdivision, eight or ten houses, and just as the last one was being completed, the first one fell into a sinkhole. The added weight of the house itself collapsed the ceiling of the cave and the entire house just collapsed into the hole.'
“Oh, my gosh!' Jane exclaimed. 'Shouldn't somebody have known there was a big hole under the house?”
Bruce nodded. 'Oh, yes. Nobody in their right mind would build in that part of the country without having a thorough geologic survey done. My dad hired the people, who assured him that it was solid bedrock.'
“I sense Lance King coming into the story real soon,' Shelley said.
“Yep,' Bruce said. 'But it was much worse than just losing the building.' His expression grew even more bleak. 'It happened early in the morning while a woman and her two-month-old baby were in the house asleep. They were both killed. Crushed as the house collapsed.”
Jane and Shelley tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle their gasps of horror.
Bruce sighed. 'I think my dad would rather it had been him. He nearly had a breakdown when he heard. It was only the old Puritan ethic of facing things down that kept him going. And, of course, that's where Lance King comes in. He was on his first job out of college, heard about the tragedy, and took out after my dad like a rabid wolverine. He did pieces on him almost every night for a week. Went around to other people Dad had built houses for, scaring them to death, working them all up to say Dad was a murderer — God, it was awful.'
“Your poor family,' Jane said softly.
“Lance knew from the beginning that the responsible party was the geological surveyors. But they were
