The Father Factor

Shallis was all too familiar with The Voice. It was high and cooing and polite, dripping with honey yet still somehow sharp as a razor and cold as Arctic ice. She’d heard it many times during her pageant years, when Mom spoke to another pageant mother whose daughter was, say, bitching about the other girls behind their backs, or wearing a gown that Mom considered inappropriate for her age. “Your daughter could pass for twenty instead of twelve in that outfit, couldn’t she, bless her heart!”

Shallis only focused on her mother’s tone, at first, but then the tone changed—got warmer by about five degrees, kept the honey but lost some of the razorlike edge—and she started to listen more carefully.

“Oh, you have?” Mom was saying. “And you want us to come in? Right away? Yes, because we’re very anxious to hear. We’ll be right down.”

She flipped the phone shut a few seconds later and looked at her daughter with raised brows.

“He’s found out something,” Shallis said.

“And he doesn’t want to discuss it over the phone. Doctors are like that, too.” Mom sounded edgy. “They want to see that you’re sitting down. What in the blue blazes could Gram have had going on in her life that we would need to hear about sitting down?”

Mom was already on her way to the bathroom with her lipstick in her hand. She tended to wear makeup the way medieval knights wore suits of armor. Shallis felt an instinctive urge to follow her and do some facial repair work of her own, but she resisted and simply retrieved her lip balm from her purse instead.

“You’re not going to change and do your face?” her mother asked. She looked shocked.

Shallis looked down at her jeans and top, and brushed away a few token specks of dust. “Nope,” she answered.

Put on full cosmetic battle dress for Jared Starke?

She wouldn’t stoop to such desperate measures.

Mysteries weren’t supposed to be this easy to solve. As soon as he’d gotten home from his exploratory visit to Fifty-six Chestnut Street last night, Jared had called his grandfather and found his cell phone switched on at last.

“Darn it, I meant to tell you about that place before I left. Too much else on my mind.”

“Like trout fishing flies, I’m guessing,” Jared drawled. He understood his grandfather pretty well. “So you know about it?”

“Of course I know about it. Find something in this town that I don’t know about and you can sell me the Empire State Building while you’re at it.” He clicked his tongue. “I wanted Caroline McLenaghan to do something about the place, but she didn’t feel ready, and then she had her stroke. I was her lawyer for fifty years. More to the point, I was Flip Templeton’s lawyer, too.”

Jared sighed. “Tell me the whole story, Grandpa Abe. I have a feeling none of this is going to make any sense until you do. Beginning, middle and end, please, in that order, and don’t make any assumptions about what I already know.”

So now Jared knew, and Sunny and Shallis Duncan were on their way to his office at this very moment to find out. He’d spent half the morning wondering when and how to give them the story. Mrs. Duncan’s phone call a few minutes ago had made the decision for him.

He didn’t know how they would take it. It wasn’t so much the fact that Caroline McLenaghan had secretly owned a very substantial Victorian dwelling for the past thirty years and more, it was the reason why she’d owned it that might knock the whole Duncan family for a loop.

This was what small town legal work was all about, he’d begun to discover, after just a day and a half on the job. Friends and enemies, rumors and facts, individuals and families, secrets that echoed down the generations.

Jared hadn’t known it would be so interesting…or such a responsibility. By his own admission, Grandpa Abe would have more stories locked away in file drawers and safes and his own memory than anybody but old Dr. Taylor, who’d finally retired at eight-five, just last year. As manager of the Douglas County Bank, Bob Duncan must know a good few town secrets, also, but his mother-in-law Caroline McLenaghan had always banked with Tennessee State and Main, so Bob hadn’t known this one.