the regular office phones on automatic answering, but there’s a twenty-four-hour emergency number that tenants can call if a sink backs up or a fuse blows. And our cleaning crews work until nine or so, depending on how many show up on any given evening, which means we have someone here to lock up after they check their vans and equipment back in.”
“What about you?” said Terry. “What time do you leave?”
“Depends. Usually around five. Sometimes it’s later, sometimes it’s earlier. If I have to check on a job in Cotton Grove or Makely, I don’t bother to come back here before going home.”
“And Mrs. Bradshaw?”
“Again, it depended. We have good people, independent workers. Candace loved to quote Eisenhower: ‘Trust ’em or bust ’em,’ she’d say. I’ve never found it necessary to hold a stopwatch on anybody more than once. Candace pretty much kept the same hours as the rest of us. Once the commissioners made her chairman of the board, though, that did take up a lot of her time. On meeting nights, she usually left at noon to go home and change and read over the agenda items.”
“That what happened Tuesday?” asked Terry.
Gracie Farmer nodded. “And if you’re asking me again why she’d leave here perfectly normal and then go home and kill herself, I have to say again I honestly don’t know.”
She fingered the wooden flowers of her hand-carved necklace and her troubled blue eyes met Dwight’s. “Have you learned anything at all?”
“Nothing definite.” He shifted in his chair and said, “Who were her friends?”
The woman knitted her brows. “Close friends? I don’t know if she had any. Not women friends anyhow. There were some women in her party that she would have lunch with once in a while, but someone to sit around and dish the dirt with?” She shook her head. “I told you about her childhood and upbringing. I think she felt inferior because she didn’t come from money and she didn’t have much of an education.”
She removed a loose thread from the sleeve of her orange tunic. “Poor Candace. I don’t think she really fit in anywhere once she left home and moved to Dobbs. The caste system’s everywhere, isn’t it? The women here in the office tend to look down on the janitorial staff, but once she married Cameron and started working here in the office, she was their boss. She joined the Republican Women and went to all the meetings but if she ever got close to anyone in particular, I never heard her say. Most of them have college degrees and can talk about art and music and things that went over her head.
“Cameron—Mr. Bradshaw, he tried to educate her taste, but she wasn’t much interested. I think that’s one of the reasons they broke up. She got tired of trying to meet his expectations. I remember once she slammed down the phone on him because she wanted to go to a Willie Nelson concert and he wanted to go to Raleigh to hear some ‘effing harpsichords.’ Those were her very words. I don’t know what she had against harpsichords, but it was about a month later that she filed for divorce.”
“Which was never finalized,” said Terry Wilson.
“No. Actually, Cameron’s probably the closest thing to the kind of friend you’re asking about. He really is a nice man and once he was out of the house and not trying to improve her mind, she liked him again. It was like he was her favorite uncle.”
“What about her daughter?”
“Dee?” Gracie gave a sour laugh. “Dee might have been her ticket to becoming Mrs. Cameron Bradshaw, but Candace was no touchy-feely mommy. Not really her fault though, was it? I don’t know how she could’ve been anything else, coming from the home she did.”
“What about you, Mrs. Farmer?”
“Me?” She seemed a bit surprised by that question. “I suppose so. I mean we liked each other, and I guess she talked to me as freely as to anyone else, but . . .” She shrugged. “Again, it’s boss and employee, isn’t it?”
“You hired her,” Dwight said. “Did you resent it when she became your boss?”
“No. Not really.” She heard the doubt in her voice and gave a rueful laugh. “Okay, it was a little awkward in the beginning, but I knew way more about this job than she did and she knew it. Once I realized she was here to work and that she would be capable of running it profitably herself, I quit worrying about it. I’m not ambitious, Major Bryant. I live alone. I make a good salary. I’ve had good luck with some of my investments and I don’t care about power. She didn’t have to watch her back with me.”
“Who
“Nobody, so far as I know. Well, maybe Roger Flackman at first. He’s the accountant Cameron hired to go over the books twice a year. But we keep accurate books and he’s never found that she was holding back so much as a dime. Cameron told me about her letter, though. Is that what you mean? You think someone was going to blow the whistle on her?”
“Was there a whistle to blow?” asked Dwight.
She shook her head. “But isn’t that what politics is all about these days? On every level? Both sides playing one long game of gotcha?”
CHAPTER 10
FRIDAY NOON
When Dwight and I remodeled the house to add a new bedroom, bath, and two walk-in closets, he’d had the usual male reaction while helping me switch closets.
“I didn’t know I was marrying Imelda Marcos,” he said. “Who needs twenty-three boxes of shoes?”
I laughed. “This from a guy who has about three dozen old ties hanging in his own closet?” I took the boxes
