hormones settled down and Norman settled in here. Right now, she was such a distraction that Bobby was complaining that Norman couldn’t seem to keep his mind on the business. “She’s always butting in, running her mouth so hard we can’t hear ourselves think.”
She turned back to the architect’s plans for remodeling two of their properties a few doors down Main Street to make one large modern office interior that could house both aspects of their newly combined businesses. Their sales office would still front onto Main Street. The architect proposed a facelift that blended a recognition of old- fashioned virtues with modern efficiency yet kept within the guidelines drafted by the planning board. New windows would allow them to display pictures of their most enticing properties as if they were jewels. The management aspects would be handled from the adjoining rear building, which they wanted to raise so as to provide a well- designed and suitably camouflaged parking deck underneath.
Once the leaves had fallen and the seasonal people were gone back to Florida or wherever, finding men in the building trades was never a problem. With a little luck and the promise of a completion bonus, the work might actually be finished by the first of the year so that Norman could move his records and his staff up from his Howards Ford office. And damned if Sunny hadn’t come along for every meeting with the architect as well, claiming she was too nervous to stay home alone, even though the Osbornes had a live-in housekeeper in their garage apartment.
She should take a page out of Tina Ledwig’s book and get herself a dog. Tina had always joked that if Carlyle died before her, she’d buy a little yippy dog the next day and sell that big house on Old Needham Road the next week.
True to her word, Tina had been in last week with her new King Charles spaniel and had asked them to list the house.
Her speed had startled Joyce. Weird to realize that it was only two weeks ago Sunday that she and Bobby had stopped by for a quick drink. She remembered how they had rolled their eyes at each other as Carlyle stomped around snorting so much fire over little Carla getting herself knocked up by some colored boy—as if that was the worst thing a kid could do to her parents—that Bobby’d told him about the merger just to take his mind off the baby. Next day, she and Bobby had driven down to Asheville to see about Bob Junior, and when they got back and heard that Carlyle was dead, it was hard to take in.
Yet, a week later, there was Tina sitting in her office, telling Joyce to sell the house.
“You sure you want to do something this serious this fast?” Joyce had asked her. “Most grief counselors advise waiting a year.”
“A year? Hell, no! I’ve hated that damn house from the beginning. Like living in a stone barn. Carla’s in a dorm at Tanser-Mac, Trish’ll be there or someplace else next year. What am I going to do with five bedrooms? I want y’all to find me a cozy little three-bedroom condo right next to the fairway at Rabbit Hollow, not an inch over twenty-five hundred square feet, you hear?”
“I don’t know if they come that small in Rabbit Hollow,” Joyce had said dryly, “but we’ll certainly find out.”
Like Bobby, she had grown up on White Fox Creek in a cold-water cabin with an outhouse out back. Five kids in a house whose entire four rooms would fit in the one room she’d used for the party last night, with space to spare. Even with all they’d spent on their children, the two of them sometimes looked around at how far they’d come, how much they’d acquired, and could hardly believe it.
And now—
If Carlyle had died a week earlier, she’d have had to send Tina to Norman, who held the exclusive on it. With the partnership a six-day-old done deal, though, she could show Tina any house there, and she’d immediately made an appointment to stop by the Ledwig house to take pictures and write up the specs, although Bobby and Norman both thought it was hardly worth going to that much trouble when she told them.
“Hell, it won’t stay on the market long enough to get the pictures developed unless you put them in the one- hour box,” they’d said.
“New neighbors?” said Sunny, who of course was there that day. “Let’s try to find a buyer that’ll be here year- round.”
With both Norman and Sunny facing her, only Joyce had seen Bobby make his gag-me face, but maybe Sunny was right to suggest it. Seasonal people weren’t as involved in the community and they didn’t care whether or not the roads ever got plowed. Some developments in the county were like ghost towns from the end of October to the first of May and the streets never saw a snowplow all winter long because no one was there.
Of the eight houses on the half-mile stretch of Old Needham Road between the Ashes’ house at the bottom and the Osbornes’ at the top, three had already been closed for the winter and the other two would be by the middle of October. Nice to have the caretaker accounts, but sometimes those empty houses made Joyce feel awfully isolated.
The bell on the outer door jingled, abruptly interrupting her musings on all that had happened these last two weeks. Joyce looked through the glass front of her office to see one of their staff get up to greet the arrival. Almost immediately, it registered who he was and she went out to him.
“Hey, Sheriff! You finally ready to put a bid on that house Shirley likes?”
“Wish I could, Miss Joyce. You get the county commissioners to vote me a raise and we’ll sure talk about it.”
“Then I reckon you’re here about Norman Osborne?”
He nodded. “Me and some of my men are fixing to start an official search along Old Needham Road between your place and his, but I was wondering if we could search your house, too?”
“Well, sure,” she said, “but there must’ve been thirty of us that already did that last night.”
“I know. Mr. Burke told me about y’all’s party, but for it to be official, I’d feel better doing it myself if that’s all right with you?”
“Give me five minutes and I’ll be right behind you.”
She signaled to their office manager and looked around for her camera and measuring meter. As long as she was up there, she might as well keep her afternoon appointment with Tina.
