Hotspur by Rita Mae Brown

didn’t start to worry until Sunday supper.”
    Leaning back in her chair, Sister glanced outside at the sky, darkening from turquoise to cobalt, then back at Tedi. “Here’s what I think, knowing what we now know. Nola was killed sometime between seven in the evening and early the next morning. You and Edward were building the covered bridge. The earth was still soft around it, remember? She had to have been killed in that time frame, because people don’t go burying their victims in broad daylight. Whoever killed her had to have known about the bridge work. That was a drought summer. The earth was hard as rock. Thanks to the bulldozers, the embankment and the base for the bridge weren’t packed tight yet. You were just putting the roof on the bridge. So whoever killed Nola knew that.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Tedi whispered.
    â€œAnd we’d hunted through there Saturday morning. I’ve checked my hunt records.” Sister, like many masters, kept a detailed hunt diary. “We had forty-one people the first day of cubbing.”
    â€œEveryone in the county knew about the bridge work,” Tedi said, a wave of hopelessness washing over her. She fought it off. “A lot of people knew, anyway.” Tedi reached for the ring. “I should have never given this ring to Nola. For her it was the Hapless sapphire, just as it was for its first owner.”
    â€œOld sorrows,” Sister said.
    â€œIt was made for the Empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Elizabeth. She had dark hair, was a wonderful, wonderful horsewoman like Nola. Loved foxhunting. Rented hunting boxes in England and flew her fences. But hers was not a happy life. Her son committed suicide, and she was assassinated. I often wonder, if she’d lived, would Franz Josef have signed the Declaration of War of 1918?”
    As a foxhunter, Sister had always found the empress’s story irresistible. “As I recall, the Bancrofts bought this right after the First World War,” she said. “Nolan couldn’t have worried too much about the history of the stone if he gave it to his wife. She lived a long, happy life.” Nolan was Edward’s grandfather, who had lived through the terrifying action at Belleau Wood during the Great War.
    Tedi held the ring up to the light; bits of rainbow struck off the diamonds, little dots splashing the walls. She slipped the ring on the middle finger of her left hand. “This was on my baby’s finger when she died. Now I’m wearing it. Every time I look at it I’ll remember her laughter. I’ll remember how much I loved her. I’ve not spent one day that I haven’t missed her, felt that ache. It’s kind of like my tongue going back to the site of a missing tooth. I swore I would find out what happened to her but never did. Now—this. Sister, I will find Nola’s killer even if it kills me.”
    â€œThat makes two of us.”

CHAPTER 7
    â€œJesus Christ, Doug, watch what you’re doing.” Shaker rubbed the back of his elbow where a heavy oak board had smacked him from behind.
    â€œSorry,” the handsome young man apologized. “It’s this heat. I can’t think today.”
    Sticky, clammy humidity added to the discomfort this Monday, July twenty-second.
    Shaker put down his hammer, tilting his head to direct Doug’s attention across the road.
    Doug followed Shaker’s eyes. Wearing a torn tank top and equally torn jeans, an old red bandanna tied around her forehead, Sister toiled on the other side of the dirt farm road building a new coop, a jump resembling a chicken coop, with Walter Lungrun’s help.
    The old hunt club truck, Peter Wheeler’s 1974 Chevy with the 454 engine, was parked off to the side of the road.
    â€œCan’t slow down,” Doug pretended to whisper, “she’ll cuss us.”
    â€œI heard that.”
    â€œI thought you were working, not