81. Daisy
Chapter 81
Daisy
T ears streamed down my face as I left the compound behind. I didn’t get the answers I’d expected, but maybe I’d gotten the ones I needed.
And Mac was there, willing to talk, willing to answer my other questions if I decided to ask them.
It wasn’t nothing.
I was halfway back to the house when my phone rang from an unknown caller with a city area code. I hesitated before answering — the media had been wild in the days after the deaths of Piers and Gray Cantwell, plus two “associates” of Cantwell Holdings — but I finally decided to accept the call.
I wasn’t going to hide. My mom had been right after all.
I was stronger than I’d known.
“Hello?”
“Is this Daisy Hammond?” a woman said on the other end of the line.
I relaxed a little. Her voice was brisk, someone sitting at a desk somewhere making one of a hundred calls on their list for the day. “This is Daisy.”
“Hi, Daisy, I’m Margaret Chatham at Decor magazine. I’m calling about your property in Blackwell Falls.”
“My… property?”
She recited my address and continued. “I understand you’ve recently renovated the place?”
“Um… yeah. It belonged to my mom’s family. They were founders of the town back in the 1800s. I’m sorry… why are you calling?”
She laughed. “We love the pictures we’ve seen of the place. I’m wondering if I could send a scout out to take some more photographs for a possible feature.”
“A possible feature… in the magazine?” Decor was one of my favorite magazines. I had five years’ worth of tear sheets, pages I’d ripped from the magazine to use as inspiration for my mom’s house.
“It’s preliminary of course,” Margaret said. “We want to see the place in more detail, see where we might slate it in our upcoming issues. Blackwell Falls is a burgeoning tourist destination. Maybe fall…?”
“I’m confused. You have pictures?” I was glad I knew the roads leading to my mom’s house like the back of my hand because I was on autopilot as I tried to figure out what in the world was going on.
“Oh! You don’t know.” I heard the shuffle of papers on the other end of the line. “Sorry about that. They were sent in by a… Wolf LaForte. He provided some backstory on the house and some images, which, like I said, we loved.”
Wolf. Wolf had done this.
“If you’re interested in being featured, I can have someone contact you to come out and take some more images.”
“We’re just finishing the kitchen…”
“That’s okay, Mr. LaForte mentioned that. It’ll take us some time to get you on the schedule anyway. So what do you say?” Margaret asked. “Shall I have someone call you to set it up? Decor can be a terrific launching pad to a design career if that’s something you’re interested in.”
“Yes,” I said. “Please. I mean, sure.”
Margaret laughed. “Wonderful. We’ll be in touch.”
The call disconnected and I turned up the road to the house. It was a big deal that Decor wanted to feature the house.
Huge.
But even more than that was the fact that Wolf had done this for me — and not just Wolf, but Otis and Jace too, because I knew firsthand that everything they did, they did together.
It seemed impossible that things could go so right when they’d been wrong for so long, but maybe that was how it worked. Maybe you just kept doing the things that made sense, that felt right — not to everyone else, but to you — until the universe met you halfway.
It sounded good to me.