That was the part that made Hope uncomfortable. Shelly would naturally ask what Hope did for a living, and Hope didn’t talk about it with people she didn’t know. She didn’t want to talk about her personal life, either. Yet deep in a buried part of her soul, she wanted it so much she could feel it like a bubble working to get free. And that scared her. “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble,” she said.
“No trouble. Unless you say no and hurt my feelings.”
Hope looked into Shelly’s big brown eyes, and what could she say except, “Okay, I’ll be here.”
The Aberdeen twins, Andrew and Thomas, were tall and blond, and, except for the color of their eyes and the slight difference in the shape of their foreheads, looked exactly alike. A wad of tobacco bulged out their bottom lips in identical spots, and they both stood with their left shoulders higher than the right. They were quiet and well mannered and looked at each other first before they answered a question.
Hope had them search the house for bats while she sat on her front porch. She heard thumping and yelling from the second floor, and about forty minutes later, Thomas came out with the news that they’d found five bats altogether. Two in one bedroom and three in the attic. He spit a stream of tobacco into a Coke can he held in his hand and assured her the bats were no longer a problem. She didn’t ask how. She didn’t care to know.
Once the problem of the bats was solved, she put the boys to work cleaning and vacuuming the upstairs while she started in the kitchen. She cleaned the stove, tossed out the dead mouse, then washed out the oven and refrigerator. The pantry was empty except for a layer of dust, and she cleaned the dishes and pots and pans with soap she found beneath the sink. The windows could wait for another day.
By eleven-thirty, the first floor of the house was close to finished. There was a dark brown stain on the hardwood floor in front of the hearth, and no amount of scrubbing got it up. At noon, she gave the twins the task of taking down the wall of antlers and storing them in a shed out back. Then she headed across the street.
Shelly Aberdeen saw her coming and opened the front door before she had a chance to knock. “Let’s eat before the twins decide to come home for lunch. They eat like every meal is their last.”
Shelly had dressed for the day in a Garth Brooks T-shirt, tight Wranglers with a belt buckle the size of a saucer, and snakeskin boots. Hope had been in town only a day, but she’d already noticed that snakeskin was a fashion must-have in Gospel.
“How are the boys working out?” Shelly asked over her shoulder as Hope followed her into a small dining room off the kitchen.
“They’re doing a good job. They’re very polite and didn’t even complain when I asked them to clean up the bat droppings.”
“Shoot, why would they complain about that? Those two have been tossing cow patties at each other since they could walk. Last summer they worked slaughtering cows over at Wilson Packing.” She poured Hope a glass of iced tea. “I’m glad to hear they’re minding themselves. They’re going to be eighteen in about a week and think they know it all.” She handed the glass to Hope. “How’s the inside of the house look?”
Hope took a drink and let the cool tea wash the dust from her throat. “Better than the outside. Lots of cobwebs and there was a dead mouse in the oven. The good news is that the electricity and the plumbing work.”
“They should,” Shelly said as she set two plates loaded with pita sandwiches on the table covered in a white-and-blue checked cloth. “The realtor who bought the place this past fall had the whole place plumbed and wired. Couldn’t get the bloodstain up, though.”
“Bloodstain?”
“Hiram Donnelly killed himself with his hunting rifle right in front of the fireplace. Blood went everywhere. You might have noticed the stain on the floor.”
Yes, she’d noticed that stain, but she’d assumed someone had skinned some unfortunate animal in the front room. The fact that it was a human bloodstain was kind of freaky. “Why’d he kill himself?”
Shelly shrugged as she sat across from Hope. “He was caught embezzling money from the county to pay for kinky sex.”
“Was he a judge?”
“No, he was our sheriff.”
Hope placed her napkin on her lap, then reached for her pita. Her curiosity piqued more than she wanted her neighbor to know, she asked as if she were inquiring about the weather, “How kinky?”
“Bondage and domination, mostly, but he was into a lot of other weird stuff, too. A year after his wife died, he started getting hooked up with women through the Internet. I think it started out innocent enough. Just a lonely guy looking for some female company. But toward the end, he got real kinky and didn’t care if the women were single or married, their age, or how much it cost him. He was out of control and got careless.”
Hope bit into her pita and tried to recall if she’d read anything about a sheriff embezzling money to pay for his sexual addiction. She d
idn’t think so, because if she had, she would have remembered. “When did all this happen?”
“He killed himself about five years ago, but like I said, it started about a year before that. No one in town knew it, either, not until the FBI was about to arrest him and he shot himself.”
“How out of control did he get?”
Shelly glanced away, clearly uncomfortable talking about the details. “Use your imagination,” she said, then changed the subject. “What brings you to Gospel?”
Hope knew when to push and when to back off. She tucked away the information and let it go for now. “It seemed like a nice area,” she answered, then, just as neatly as Shelly, turned the subject away from herself. “How long have you lived here?”
“My family moved here when I was about six. My husband, Paul, was born in this house. I graduated from Gospel High School with most of the people around here.” Shelly counted them off as if Hope naturally knew whom she was talking about. “Paul and me, Lon Wilson and Angie Bright, Bart and Annie Turner, Paris Fernwood, Jenny Richards. Kim Howe and Dylan, but that was back when Dylan still lived at the Double T with his folks. His mom, sister, and brother-in-law still run the place. And, of course, Kim ran off with a trucker right after graduation and lives somewhere in the Midwest. I can’t remember what happened to Jenny.” Shelly took a bite of her sandwich, then asked, “You married?”
“No.” Hope’s neighbor looked at her as if she thought Hope might elaborate. She didn’t. If she mentioned the word “divorce,” other questions would follow, and there was no way Hope would share that ugly and clichéd part of her life with anyone. Especially not a stranger. She reached for her tea and as she took a long drink, she tried to remember the last time she’d had lunch with someone, other than for business. She wasn’t positive, but thought it probably had been right after her divorce. As was usual for a lot of married couples, her friends had been their friends, and whether they’d stopped calling or she stopped calling them didn’t matter. The end result was the same. Their lives had changed and they’d drifted apart. “Where did you live before you moved to Gospel?” she asked.