The Party Line

Chapter One

A unt Gracie wasn’t afraid of spiders, mice, or snakes, and there was no doubt in my mind that she would face off with the devil himself without blinking. Just that look she could give when she was angry would have him whimpering and running away with his forked little tail tucked between his legs. She taught me fearlessness, so why were my hands shaking and every hair on my head feeling like I’d just gotten hit by a lightning bolt?

As a child I had hunted ghosts in Aunt Gracie’s old two-story house lots of times—under the beds, where all I found was dust bunnies the size of baby elephants, and in closets where musty old clothing that had been stored for at least a hundred years made me sneeze. So why was this so different?

You are dreaming, an eerie voice whispered in my head. Holy smokin’ hell! I had finally located a ghost, even if it was in a nightmare. I opened my mouth to ask who was talking to me, but no words would come out. The thought went through my head that someone had drugged and kidnapped me, and this was one of those crazy reactions to whatever potion they had given me.

A loud noise brought me somewhere between sleep and fully awake. Was that chains I heard rattling in the attic? I blinked a couple of times, and a strange scent wafted across the room. Had whoever drugged me done so by putting something in the air vent? I shook my head and glanced over at the open window. Fresh morning air carried the aroma of a skunk somewhere in the neighborhood, or maybe someone was smoking weed in my yard.

I scanned the room, moving only my eyes. The door was open, so I hadn’t been kidnapped, but I was not in my apartment in Austin. I was in my bedroom in Aunt Gracie’s house, the one with the yellow floral wallpaper and the antique furniture. I sat up slowly and reached for my cell phone to see what time it was, only to find the bedside table bare of everything. Evidently, I had swiped it clean when I was dreaming about the ghosts that might know whatever secret Aunt Gracie had taken with her to the grave a couple of weeks before.

All the folks in Atascosa County had wondered about that secret for more than eighty years, and still today I didn’t know what it was. Aunt Gracie had most likely hung on to it so tightly that the angels in heaven—or ghosts down here—couldn’t pry it out of her hands.

The sheets were tangled up around me, holding me down tighter than if I’d been chained to the bed. Sweat popped out all over me as I fought my way free. When I was finally on my feet beside my bed, I tried to remove my ragged old sleep shirt, which was drenched with sticky moisture, but that was another fight. It was glued firmly to my body like it had taken up squatter’s rights. By the time I freed myself from the thing, I felt as if I’d fought and barely won a battle. I waved my hand above my head until I found the wooden thread spool attached to the string that turned on the overhead light bulb. The brightness almost blinded me when it lit up the room.

A coyote howled, and for a minute I thought the critter was coming right into the house. I rushed over to close the window and realized I was wearing nothing but a pair of white cotton granny panties. If anyone had been standing outside staring up, they would have caught sight of me, but at least a coyote wouldn’t crawl inside my bedroom. So it was a win.

When I moved to Austin to go to college, I had gotten so used to sirens going off every few minutes that I didn’t even hear them after a few weeks. Ditto, Texas, population less than twenty-five, didn’t have sirens, except when there was an ambulance arriving from Poteet to take someone to the hospital. The howling coyotes, barking dogs, and donkeys braying to celebrate the sunrise were something I would have to get used to.

“Coyotes cannot climb trees or sticky bushes to get into a second-story window,” I assured myself.

I took a step toward the nightstand and tripped over the base of the old party line phone. I fell face forward over the bed and into a big feather pillow that did its best to smother me to death. Damn, did my toes hurt.

The sun wasn’t even up and my day was already crappy. I rolled over on my back and stared at the ceiling until that bare light bulb put red dots in front of my eyes. Finally, I got up, picked up the base of the phone, and slammed it down on the nightstand with enough force to rattle the pictures on the walls. The receiver swung back and forth like a pendulum, barely touching the floor. My sweat-dampened hair hung in limp strands and kept getting in my eyes when I dropped down on my knees to search for my cell phone. It had skittered halfway under the bed and was lying in a pile of dust bunnies.

“I hope y’all don’t bite,” I whispered as I reached as far as I could and still couldn’t put my hands on the phone. Then the dang thing lit up and started ringing—startled me so badly that I jumped and hit my back on the bottom of the bed.

After several words that almost wilted the yellow roses right off the wallpaper, I finally freed myself and stormed out into the hallway, still wearing nothing but my sweaty granny panties. I forgot all about my phone and headed to the bathroom. The old pipes squealed like baby piglets when I turned the knobs and sent the water up to the showerhead. After what seemed like half an hour later, the water was finally warm enough for me to step around the end of the curtain into the claw-foot tub that probably was put into the house when it was built a hundred years before. I thought the disastrous morning was over when I’d finished washing my hair and started to step over the edge of the tub.

I was wrong.

I did not inherit Aunt Gracie’s fearlessness when it came to spiders, and one was sitting on the braided rug where I was about to plant my foot. I didn’t squeal or scream. What came out of my mouth sounded more like a screech—maybe from a two-hundred-pound owl from prehistoric times. The spider stared up at me with pure unadulterated evil in his beady little eyes. In that moment I was ready to move back to Austin even if the rent on my apartment doubled. The eight-legged critter pranced across the rug like he was the king of the house, and just to show me what he could do, he jumped on top of my towel, which was lying on an old ladder-back chair.

I didn’t care if he was one of those wolf spiders that could win a pole-vaulting contest. In my mind the only good spider was a dead one, so I grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the little shelf above the tub and, with one blast, sent him to that great spiderweb in the sky. I got another towel, because I wasn’t about to use the towel he had touched to dry my body.

I did not tempt fate by thinking nothing else could possibly go wrong that morning, just marched out of the bathroom with a towel around my body and another one wrapped turban-style around my head. I went to my room and dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt that had George Strait’s picture on the front of it—Mama brought it to me when she and her boss, Madge, had attended a concert.

The door to Aunt Gracie’s bedroom was open when I walked past, so I peeked inside. There was another of those black party line phones on her bedside table. When I asked her why the phones didn’t have a dial or push buttons on them, and why she kept something that didn’t even work, she explained the process to me. Seems like way before my time, back before Aunt Gracie was even a teenager, whoever wanted to make a call picked up the receiver, and the operator said, “Number, please.” The caller gave her three or four digits—Aunt Gracie’s line was 298—and the operator plugged in a cord on the other end that rang that person’s phone.

“And sometimes folks like us here in Ditto had to share lines. Our phone rang three short times when the call was for us, but we shared with two other folks. One of them got a long ring, the other got a short followed by a long one,” she had told me.

“But now you have a working phone in the kitchen, so why don’t you throw these away?” I asked.

She said that she kept them as a reminder of a very bad time in her life. Her expression when she thought about that experience was one I figured she used to freeze mice, spiders, and the devil’s horns. She had kept me from the time I was an infant so my mother could work at one of the cafés in Poteet, and I liked staying with her, so I didn’t pry any further.

A memory surfaced, and I tried to give that black phone the same look she did when she told me about it. I was a little girl back then, and overheard Mama telling Madge, who was her boss at the café where she had cooked and waitressed since before I was even born, that she didn’t understand how anyone could live in a house full of ghosts and secrets.

I thought it would be great to find a real ghost, so for a whole year, I prowled through all the nooks and crannies in the whole two-story house, looking for one. I’m not sure what I would have done if an eerie figure had popped out from behind a dresser or even from behind a door—probably turned tail and run, screeching like I did when the spider showed up in the bathroom.

I also never did find what the big secret was; it was only whispered about behind those fans at church with Jesus on one side and a big bowl of strawberries on the other. That morning, almost two decades later, I wondered if somewhere, hidden away safely, there might be a diary or a journal, or maybe even a piece of paper with S ECRET written in big letters on the front and an explanation on the back.

“I think the secret is that there is no secret,” I said out loud as I walked down the stairs and into the foyer and the kitchen. The plastic strawberry slapped me right in the forehead as I crossed the floor. The thing was about the size of a golf ball and was attached to the chain that turned on the lights. I grabbed it on the second swing and pulled so hard that it came off in my hand.

“ Why didn’t you have the electricity updated?” I groaned as I searched for the chain. I’d just found it and given it a tug when Mama came in, carrying a take-out container of soup.

She set it on the counter and headed across the floor. “The breakfast crew will be waiting at the café door to come in for their morning gossip session, but I saved you back some soup from yesterday.”

“Do you know what this big secret is about this house?” I asked. “I was having a nightmare and ...” I went on to tell her about my morning. “I figure it’s that there is no secret at all. That someone made up a rumor and it’s hung on all these years, like Bigfoot, Santa Claus, or that monster in the ocean.”

“Oh, there’s a secret, all right. Aunt Gracie knew what it was, but she didn’t tell anyone.”

“Then how did anyone even know there was one?” I asked.

“Something happened when she was a teenager that upset her so badly that she wouldn’t come out of her room for a week,” Mama answered. “When anyone asked about it, like I did years later, she would get this look on her face that was frightening. I only asked one time because her expression scared the bejesus right out of me.”

“The look that would terrify the horns off Lucifer?” I asked.

“That’s the one,” Mama said with a nod and a shiver. “Rumor has it that when she came out of her room, she had words with her parents, but whatever was said stayed between the walls of this house. That’s when the gossip started about the secret. Poteet was already known for being the birthplace of George Strait and the best strawberries in the state, but they added the secret to the list.”

“She never told anyone?” I asked. “Not even Jasper?”

Mama shook her head. “Not sure, but if she told him, he’s never said a word, either. That would have been more than eighty years ago, and no one knows to this day what it is. How can you spend any nights in this haunted house? It’s not easy for me to be here in the daylight.” Mama crossed the room and put her hand on the doorknob.

“The sun is coming up and ghosts don’t like daylight, so you are safe,” I told her.

She shook her finger at me. “Don’t tease me about something this serious.”

I outgrew my mother in height when I was in the fifth grade. That old adage about dynamite coming in small packages was what came to mind that morning. She had been a young mother at eighteen and raised me by herself, with help from Aunt Gracie. Mama’s dark hair didn’t have a gray streak anywhere, and she had that peaches-and-cream complexion that movie stars would die for. That was the good DNA from Aunt Gracie’s side of the family. The Evanses were known for never having gray hair and always having lovely skin. But she was Mama’s first cousin—three times removed—and by the time the Matthews’ DNA tainted what came from Aunt Gracie’s family, I didn’t get any of their good looks.

People often said I didn’t look a thing like her, and they were right. I am a tall redhead with pale skin that burns and freckles but never tans, and I have a curvy body that could weather an F5 tornado without needing even so much as a breath mint in my pocket much less a rock or two.

“Evidently, the superstition gene wore plumb out when it got to me, because I don’t believe in spirits and ghosts.” I opened the container and ate several bites of the cold vegetable soup as I carried it to the table.

“That’s cold, and it’s not a breakfast food,” Mama scolded me.

“Tastes good to me, but if you insist.” I put it in the microwave and hit the two-minute button. “There. It’ll be hot pretty soon, and you need to get to work. Those old coffee-drinking guys will be banging on the door for you and Madge to let them inside. Thank you for the breakfast. I could eat your soup three times a day and not get tired of it.”

Mama opened the door and took a step out onto the back porch. I could feel her relief when she was officially out of the house. She waved from the other side of the old screen door. “You are welcome. Now that you are living close by, you can reap the benefits of your mother working in a café. You want to come watch a movie with me tonight?”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” I took the soup from the microwave and set it on the table. “I’ll be chained to the computer all day, so I’m going to take some time to sit on the porch, breathe in the fresh night air, and watch the sun go down. Want to come down here and have a beer with me?”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” she repeated. “You know how I feel about this place. I’ll be here at ten thirty in the morning to pick you up for church.”

“Call me when you get here, and I’ll come right out,” I told her.

She waved again, and then I heard the crunching sound of tires on gravel as she drove away.

Since I had searched diligently for the ghosts when I was a little girl and never found even a single one, I didn’t believe the house was haunted. The secret folks still talked about and had become as important as strawberries and George Strait—now that was a whole different matter. If it concerned Aunt Gracie, I wanted to know all about it.

I opened the drawer where Aunt Gracie had always kept the cutlery, grabbed a spoon, and had a nice hot breakfast. When the bowl was empty, I got a piece of bread and sopped up what juice was left. I tossed the container in the trash, washed the spoon, made a cup of coffee in the new one-cup-at-a-time machine I had given Aunt Gracie for Christmas, and headed to the back porch.

Jasper, Aunt Gracie’s lifetime friend, was sitting in an old wooden rocker on his porch, only twenty yards from mine. He waved and motioned me over. I held up my coffee, and he held up his to show me he had a full mug. I crossed the yard and set my mug on the tree stump that had been between the two rocking chairs for as long as I could remember and took a seat.

“Beginning of a brand-new day. It’s time to sit a spell to let the peace settle around you and reflect on life before you dive into your work,” he said.

“Amen to that,” I told him. “I’ve got a full load waiting for me today.”

He took a long drink and then said, “You shouldn’t work on Saturday. You need some time for the body to rest. Even God needed some downtime.”

“I’m still playing catchup from the days I used to live in Austin,” I said. “But this is the last Saturday I’ll have to put in hours.”

“That’s good,” Jasper said with a curt nod. He had aged well and could have easily passed for eighty instead of ninety-six. I used to try to count the freckles on his face, but after I got to a hundred, I gave up. One thing for sure, he had more than I did. His hair was once a dark chestnut brown, but now it was as white as Aunt Gracie’s bedsheets. When I was a little girl he had a beard and mustache that he kept expertly trimmed, but these days he was clean shaven.

“Gracie has been on my mind a lot lately. I sure do miss her. I figured I’d go before she did,” he said.

“Y’all were friends for a long time, so it would be normal for you to miss her.” I took a drink of coffee and set the chair to rocking.

“I can’t remember a time when we wasn’t friends,” he said with a long sigh. “Davis and me and Gracie were inseparable as little kids.” He stopped talking and rocked awhile before he continued. “Every day after school, we’d meet up right here in this yard and play all kinds of games. Davis and his mama lived in this house back then, and me and my grandma lived on the back of the property. Granny and Davis’s mama, Rita, both helped the missus with cooking, cleaning, and taking care of Gracie. When we was in high school, Davis and his mama moved to Poteet, and my grandma and I moved into this house. Gracie and I saw Davis at school every day, but things wasn’t the same after that.”

“How were they different?” I asked.

He just shrugged and changed the subject. “A tornado demolished our old house in 1950 while I was still in the army. Nobody had lived in it for years, but it was my childhood home, and I missed it when I got back from the army. I moved in here with Granny and never did get around to finding my own place. Mr. Evans hired me to help him with his oil well business. He sold off all that just before he died. My granny still cleaned the house until Gracie made her retire. She died a year after that. Gracie kept me on the payroll, and I helped her out with yard work and whatever else she needed done until we were both sixty-five.”

That didn’t sound like it could be connected to the secret, but I filed it all away to think about later.

“Why did they move? Did Davis’s mama get a better job?” I wondered if leaving Ditto had something to do with the secret.

“Granny didn’t know, but it wasn’t long after that when the missus left Mr. Evans and went to live with her friend up in Oklahoma. When I asked Granny about it, she just told me to mind my own business,” Jasper said.

“Did you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I still don’t poke around in other people’s business,” Jasper said with a smile and pointed up to the sky. “Look at that beautiful sunrise with all the pretty colors. It comes up in the east just like it does every morning. That’s one thing we can depend on that never changes. It’ll never disappoint us, and it’ll come up in the mornin’ and go down in the evenin’ sure as shootin’. You goin’ to church with your mama tomorrow?”

“I guess I am,” I said with a sigh.

Aunt Gracie had taken me to church every Sunday morning until I graduated from high school and went to Austin. Mama worked the morning shift in those days, but she always went to the evening church service. That meant I had to sit on a hard oak pew twice on most Sundays. After I left, Mama had Sundays and Mondays off, so she and Aunt Gracie went to the morning services and seldom attended in the evening. And me? Well, Sunday became the day for doing my laundry and catching up on sleep.

“You do know that God don’t live in a church house building?” Jasper’s statement came out more like a question. “If we look at nature, we can see him.”

“But you go to church,” I reminded him.

“Yes, ma’am, I do,” Jasper said in a serious tone. “I like the singin’ and the fellowship. I’d be glad for you to go with me if you want. You might even drive me into Poteet for a hamburger afterwards.”

“What time?” I asked.

“It starts at eleven, so we need to leave about a quarter till. I go to the little church only a couple of miles down the road.” He motioned to his left with a wave of his hand.

“Then I’ll pick you up at that time,” I told him.

“That’ll be good. I don’t drive anymore. I had one fender bender too many, and Gracie wouldn’t let me get my license when it came up for renewal. She drove both of us until the day she went on to heaven to meet up with Davis.”

“When did Davis die?” I asked.

“We both enlisted right out of high school. Four years later I came home, but he didn’t.” His voice quivered, so I didn’t ask any more questions.

He stood up, picked up his cane, and headed across the porch. “Have a good day, Lila.”

I pushed up out of the chair and took a step toward the house. “You, too, Jasper.”

“I’m glad you decided to live in Gracie’s house. Seems fittin’,” he said before he disappeared inside.

I kicked off my flip-flops so I could feel the soft green grass beneath my feet—something I hadn’t done since I was a child—sucked in the cool morning breeze, and enjoyed the smell of spring that filled the air as I crossed the yard from the little house to the big one. I exhaled and then took another deep breath, and that time I got a whiff of ripe strawberries. “Bless the Broken Road,” an old song by Rascal Flatts, popped into my mind. I sang the lyrics off-key and out of tune as I made my way to the back door, leaving the cool grass behind for the wooden porch. The lead singer said that he blessed the broken road that led him home. Of course, it was a love song, and he was glad that all the roads he had traveled had brought him home to his soulmate. I wasn’t sure the universe had a person like that in store for me, but I was glad for the peace that washed over me that Saturday morning.

I left my flip-flops on the back porch and went upstairs to my new office, and when I reached the foyer, I could have sworn that I heard Aunt Gracie say, “Turn off the kitchen light. Electricity ain’t free, my child.”

With a smile, I turned around and went back to obey her. At least it was daylight and I didn’t have to grope around for the wooden spool on the end of the cord. I was crossing the foyer when I noticed the arrangement above the credenza. I stopped and studied the collage Aunt Gracie had made of my school pictures, from kindergarten all the way through my senior year. It had hung there in the foyer for more than a decade, but that morning I really looked at the photographs.

“Hmmm ...” I studied each of the twelve pictures lined up around the one in the center, which had been taken my senior year. “I wonder if there’s a picture of my father hidden away somewhere. I must look like him because I certainly do not look like Mama or Aunt Gracie.” I giggled out loud at the crazy thought that went through my mind. “And I dang sure don’t look like George Strait.”

I have to admit that in the past I did wonder if my birth father—maybe George Strait—was the third thing, but then I remembered that party lines were done away with years and years before my mama was even born. I still had hopes that a file with C LASSIFIED written in red letters was hiding somewhere in the house, and maybe when I found the thing, there would also be something about my father in it. Mama said that he left town before I was even born. She had looked so sad that I was afraid she would cry if I asked about a picture, so I didn’t.

Maybe the file is hidden behind something, I thought as I continued to stare at the picture. Something that was out in plain sight all the time—like the photograph right there before me. I removed the frame from the wall and turned it over. Nothing there, and the only thing behind where it had been hanging was a perfect rectangle of Wedgwood blue wallpaper sprigged with tiny white flowers, which had not faded like the rest of the foyer walls. There wasn’t a piece of paper, a file, or even a safe hiding behind the picture with a secret combination, like maybe the numbers in Aunt Gracie’s birthday. Not even a tiny cabinet that I could open and find a journal inside.

“It’s got to be here somewhere,” I muttered as I hung the picture back where it belonged and went on up to my office.

Aunt Gracie’s gravelly voice popped into my head. Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

“Does that mean that one person still knows?” I asked out loud.

She didn’t answer, so I had no clue. I glanced over at a stack of mail on the credenza and promised that I would go through it the next day after church. Since we had a Poteet address, went to church in Poteet, and I’d ridden the bus for thirteen years to Poteet schools, I figured that gave me bragging rights to say I was from Poteet when anyone asked. That sounded better than telling folks I was from Ditto.

I went on up to my office, which was really the fourth bedroom. I stood at the double doors that opened out onto the balcony and stared out across the land. Only a few houses remained in the community of Ditto—now barely even a community, much less a town. Aunt Gracie’s two-story place—with four bedrooms upstairs and a living room, kitchen, and dining room on the first floor—was the biggest house in the area. Mama’s small place was down the road a quarter of a mile, and Jasper’s was in the backyard. A couple or three more were scattered between our little part of the community and Poteet, but not many. The last time a census was taken in Ditto, the population was somewhere around twenty.

That evening, when I had finished my work, I went out to the back porch expecting to see Jasper. His front door was open, and I could see the blue light from his television. A loud voice was announcing an upcoming ball game. I didn’t want to disturb him, so I went back inside, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and carried it to the front porch. By the time I finished it, I had had my fill of crickets and tree frogs announcing that it was now spring and strawberry season was about to be in full swing. I went inside and had a long bath, read several chapters of a book, and went to sleep earlier than usual.

That night I dreamed that I was riding the bus home from school, and we passed the sign at the edge of town that read W ELCOME TO P OTEET , B IRTHPLACE OF G EORGE S TRAIT . Mama loved his music and played it so much that I used to tell myself that the man was really my father, that Mama had just made up the story about my dad not sticking around. In my dream, the King—that’s what Mama called him—was waiting for me when I got off the bus at Aunt Gracie’s house, and he held my hand all the way from the end of the lane back to her house. He called me Princess and then disappeared.

I woke myself up giggling. If there was ever a princess in Ditto, Texas, it dang sure wasn’t Lila Matthews. I got out of bed thirty minutes before my alarm went off and headed down to the kitchen for my first cup of coffee.

I popped a couple of breakfast pastries in the toaster and wished for a bowl of Mama’s soup or maybe even some cold lasagna. When the cinnamon-flavored carbs popped up, I carried them and my cup of coffee to the back porch and sat down on the top step. Jasper looked up from his Bible and waved, but he didn’t motion me over. I waved but didn’t intrude on his meditation.

The fields to the west of the house were red with strawberries. My first good, solid memory was a beautiful spring day when Aunt Gracie and Jasper took me out to the edge of the twenty acres to pick the first big, ripe ones. They let me eat half a dozen or more right off the plants before we carried a full basket back to the house to make a strawberry shortcake.

Way back before I was born, Aunt Gracie had leased the final twenty acres of what she had inherited to Otis Thurman. He had always let her gather what she wanted for her own use, so she made strawberry jam with some of them and froze several bags to put on the top of ice cream or to eat for dessert.

Like most small towns or communities, everyone knew everyone, and the family history that went with each person. Take the strawberry field, for instance: When Otis died, the lease was passed down to his son, Everett. He and his wife had one son, who hated the ranching business and instead chose the military life. Everett’s wife died a while back, and his only grandchild, Connor, had come home last fall, according to Aunt Gracie. Everett had always reminded me of a scarecrow—tall, lanky, with a crop of unruly hair, and he always wore bibbed overalls. A person would never guess that he owned most of the town of Ditto and had more money than a mile of the golden streets of heaven.

I swatted flies, ate my breakfast, and drank my coffee in peace and quiet—something I had missed in the city. I noticed a streak in the sky and almost made a wish on it, but then I realized that stars falling out of the sky didn’t show up in the daylight. What I had seen was the trail of an airplane, most likely flying south out of San Antonio.

The few times I had seen a falling star, I wished that party lines were still around so I could listen in on other people’s conversations and learn their secrets—maybe I would even hear what Mama called “the big secret of Ditto.”

Aunt Gracie was old when I was a little girl, and she wasn’t really my aunt—but in the south, the word aunt is kind of an honorary title given to a kinswoman who is elderly. I could never figure all that cousin-so-many-times-removed stuff out, either, so in my mind, she was my aunt, my surrogate grandmother, and my friend.

A picture of the three people—my mother, Jasper, and me—gathered around Gracie’s wooden casket the afternoon of Valentine’s Day came to my mind. The preacher had read Psalm 23, said a quick prayer, and then each one of us put a rose on her casket. I had always given her a homemade valentine—complete with lots of hearts decorated with glitter—and a lollipop on the holiday, so I put the one I had ready to give her on the casket with the roses. We had followed her directions to the letter, except for the valentine. There was to be no big funeral at the church, where she had gone her whole life. No family dinner afterward. She wanted the three of us to be there, and the preacher to do exactly what she had written down. Then we were to go back to her house and hear her lawyer read her will.

We had done just that. I had been shocked to learn that she’d left everything—house, bank accounts, and her stock portfolio—to me and not my mother or Jasper. I signed papers for the better part of an hour. She had left Mama a nice big sum of money, and, according to the will, Jasper had the right to live in the little house for as long as he wanted or until he died. Mama was glad she didn’t have to deal with Gracie’s house or all its contents. Two weeks later, I had moved into the house and set up an office in one of the bedrooms.

The old golden housephone that hung on the kitchen wall startled me when it rang. I grabbed it and said, “Hello?”

“I’m not going to church this morning,” Mama said and then sneezed. “I think I’ve just got hay fever, but it could be a summer cold. I don’t want to spread it.”

“Why didn’t you call my cell phone?” I asked.

She coughed. “Sorry about that. I did try your cell, but it went straight to voicemail.”

“It’s under my bed, and I can’t reach it. I’ll have to take a broom up there and fight the dust bunnies to get it,” I explained. “I should have called you last night. I promised Jasper I would go with him this morning and then take him on into Poteet for a hamburger afterwards.”

“Aunt Gracie gave him rides to and from church all the time,” Mama said and sneezed again. “They were a strange pair, but they’d been best friends since ... well, way back when.”

“Did Jasper ever work anywhere else?” I asked.

“If he did, Gracie didn’t mention it,” Mama said. “Before Gracie’s daddy, Clarence, died, he sold off all his oil business and land to Otis Thurman ...”

I jumped in. I didn’t have all that much time—coffee was waiting. “Aunt Gracie filled me in on all that news, and I’ve always known that they were good friends.” I took a couple of steps and figured out that the phone cord did not reach to the coffeepot.

“Are you sure you don’t want to just drop him off and go on to our church?” Mama asked.

“No, I think I’ll stay with him.”

Mama sneezed a third time. “I’ve got to go find a box of tissues. The one beside the sofa is empty. Don’t come down here until I figure out if I’m contagious.”

“Want me to leave some chicken soup on your porch?” I asked.

“I’ve got a can or two in the pantry.” She sneezed again. “Bye, now. If I get to feeling better, I may have you pick up a pizza—but don’t get it until I call you.”

“Will do, and if you need anything, I’m right here,” I told her.

I was dressed and waiting in my SUV when Jasper made his way slowly around the house. His black suit hung on his frail body, and he leaned on his cane more than I remembered from the funeral, but he had a smile on his face and his Bible tucked under his arm.

“Let’s go get some Holy Spirit,” he grinned.

“I probably need a double dose this morning,” I told him as I opened the passenger door for him.

He raised an eyebrow. “Front seat?”

“Of course,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Me and Gracie thought it best not to rock the boat, so I rode in the back seat. She was one to keep things proper so rumors wouldn’t get started.”

“Well”—I patted him on his bony shoulder—“let’s rock the boat this morning.”