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murder me and harvest my eyeballs or anything?”
    “You big-city women are paranoid. Melinda’s harmless, unless she thinks your chakras are out of alignment, and even then she’ll just talk you to death.” He took out his phone, consulted the screen, and said, “Back to more important subjects, regarding that drink—how’s tomorrow work for you?”
    I laughed. “I’ll have to check my calendar, but I don’t think I have any big plans.”
    “Good. If you want anything stronger than beer or wine, we’ll have to head outside of town—there are some good bars in Blowing Rock.”
    “You’re telling me this is a dry town?”
    “You can buy hard stuff at the liquor store, which keeps pretty much the same hours as a bank, but no, there’s no liquor by the drink in Boone. Just beer and wine in restaurants. I assume the city fathers are afraid the college students would turn into a drunken murder-mob if they could order shots at a pool hall.”
    “You should have mentioned this in the letter you sent me, Trey.” I gave him my best mock-stern look. “No liquor! I’m pretty sure you could be disbarred for an oversight like that.” I plucked the phone from his hands and put my number in his contacts list, then passed it back. “I have to go do some grown-up stuff now, as a responsible homeowner and impending pillar of the community. You still willing to show me around the property later?”
    “I live to serve. But inviting me to your house before we even get a drink together? This is starting to move way too fast for me, Ms. Lull.”
    “I just don’t think your grandpa’s going to want to tromp around the fields with me, is all.”
    “‘Tromp around the fields?’ Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?” He grinned when I rolled my eyes, making me want to roll them even harder. “But you have a point. The long grass is hell on his Italian loafers. How about I come over after lunch today, say around two?”
    “I’ll clear my schedule, Mr. Howard, Esquire. Oh, I forgot to ask your gramps—are there any more keys? There’s at least one lock I can’t open.”
    He shook his head. “Afraid not. You’ve got all the keys I know about. Could be more somewhere in the house, I guess. If you hired a crew of ten or twenty guys to sort the place, you might even find them in a year or two.”
    “You’re more helpful every minute. Now, if you’d kindly get your ass off my car door…”
    He popped up onto his toes, gave me another grin, and sauntered off, the picture of cool—only slightly spoiled by the smear of dirt from my car across the ass of his pants.
    It wasn’t bad, though, for a dirty ass.
#
    The rest of the morning went smoothly. The bank manager was happy to have me open an account and bring back some of the money Archibald Grace used to keep there, but he couldn’t tell me much about my dead relative, either—kept to himself, only met in person a few times, the usual. The manager set me up with a book of counter checks—paper checks, pretty quaint; next I’d get a buggy whip and a valet—and a temporary ATM card while I waited for the real stuff. I’d have to do something about my bank account in Chicago sometime, but the three-digit balance back home wasn’t so pressing now that I had a fat five-figure one here. The manager really wanted to talk about moving my money into high-yield blah-di-blah but I told him I’d get back to him about that, because I had another appointment.
    What I didn’t tell him was that appointment was with a cheeseburger at a brewpub. The beer was only so-so and the burger was just a little better, but the hand-cut fries gave me reason to be cheerful.
    I made one other stop, spending a good chunk of the money I’d taken from the bank in cash, and filled up my trunk in the process.
    After that final errand was done, I returned to the house—let’s make that “I returned home”—around one o’clock and briefly wrestled with my pernicious ingrained