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children to the yellow fever. Whole families died sometimes.”
    “He wanted a houseful of children. Adam was the only child who survived. Delaney’s poor wife had half-a-dozen miscarriages trying to get him more. Wore her out and killed her in the end.”
    “Mother,” Nancy said, moving the pork chops away from Ann, “unless you’re a whopping lot older than you’ve been saying all these years, there’s no way you could know all that.”
    “My mother, your grandmother, told me, Miss Nancy.She wanted to marry Adam’s son Barrett for a while. She was glad in the long run she’d missed out on him. A meaner man never lived. During the depression he foreclosed on half the farmers in Fayette County so he could acquire their farms cheap when they were sold on the courthouse steps. One of them tried to shoot him. Missed, unfortunately.”
    “But the next generation was happy. Aunt Maribelle and Uncle Conrad doted on each other.” Ann said. She started to reach for the chops, but one look from her mother stopped her. “I mean, they seemed to have had a wonderful marriage. Everybody got along, even Aunt Addy.”
    “You were much too young to see what was really happening. Two cats in a burlap bag. My sisters barely tolerated each other, and living in the same house didn’t help. When Daddy refused to let Addy go to the Conservatory of Music in Philadelphia, I really thought she’d die. She had real talent. She wanted to be a concert pianist. Instead, she wound up an old maid living in her sister’s house and teaching piano lessons to children like you. Daddy should have let her go.”
    “Why didn’t he?”
    “He always said that it wasn’t seemly for an unmarried woman to live alone in an apartment or a boardinghouse, but the real reason was that Maribelle was engaged to Conrad Delaney and demanded a society wedding. Daddy couldn’t afford both.”
    “So Aunt Maribelle won?”
    “Maribelle always won. Mostly because it never occurred to her she wouldn’t win. You have no idea how it galled Addy to have to live under her sister’s roof all those years. And Maribelle’s marriage to Conrad wasn’t quite the blissful union she tried to make everybody believe.Anyway, that has never been a happy house, and it will find some way to make the new owner suffer, too, you mark my words.”
    On the drive back to town from her grandmother’s farm, Ann absently scratched behind Dante’s ears and thought over her grandmother’s remarks. Bernice had said more or less the same thing at the café that morning, but Ann hadn’t paid much attention. However, she couldn’t dismiss her grandmother’s concerns as easily. Sarah Pulliam was supposed to be fey. People said she had “the gift.”
    As far as Ann could tell, that meant her grandmother could penetrate the facades behind which people tried to hide. Ann had suffered many times as a child because her Gram always knew full well who was responsible for knocking down the rose trellis or forgetting to feed the dogs. It wasn’t second sight. It was solid knowledge of the mischief Ann was capable of.
    And Gram was the only person who’d warned her she’d be miserable if she married “that Travis Corrigan.” She’d definitely been right on that score.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE FOLLOWING MORNING , Paul slept later than he’d planned, stood under a hot shower to loosen his shoulder, stowed his bags in his car, grabbed a couple of sweet rolls and a paper cup of hot, bad coffee from the lobby of his motel and drove east toward Rossiter.
    He’d planned to arrive before the workmen, assuming they showed up. He’d had enough experience with contractors and their crews when Giselle was remodeling her kitchen. Half the time they simply didn’t show—no excuses, not even a telephone call.
    Not this morning. Overnight a large blue Dumpster had appeared outside his back door, and half-a-dozen pickup trucks festooned with equipment stood haphazardly on his front lawn. He could hear