Much Ado About Muffin by Victoria Hamilton Page A

still didn’t know much about her past except that she was estranged from her family. I thought she came from the South; her accent had been fairly strong when I met her, though she eventually lost it.
    Sometimes I wondered if I should have tried harder once we got close, but she was as fragile as a dandelion; one puff and she’d shatter, I always worried. Fragile, and yet so incredibly strong in other ways. She must be strong, I often thought, because there was clearly something in her life that had wounded her, and yet she kept going. If Jack thought something was wrong, maybe now was the time for me to push. I remembered what Doc had told me, that he saw her talking to a strange man, but she hurried away when she saw Doc walking toward her. It made me uneasy.
    Minutes after hanging up, I was in the big Caddy, heading to the address Jack gave me. I drove into Autumn Vale, wound through the streets, and turned down the avenue that had a little parkette on the corner. I had discovered the tiny pocket park the previous fall; it was entered through a wrought iron gate over which the words
Come and Partake of Nature
were written in iron scrollwork. This was most definitely an old section of town. There was an elaborate Italianate house, a Colonial, and then there was the house Jack had described, with a Turner Construction truck parked outside.
    I pulled up to the curb. When I got out I noticed two men were using a jack to support the roof of the rickety veranda of the Queen Anne–style mansion; the men must be Rusty Turner’s new hires, I supposed. One was a stocky, balding African-American man whose fringe of hair had some gray in it, and the other was a biker-looking fellow probably in his late forties, with gray threaded through his long ponytail.
    The black guy had noticed me as I got out of the car, and smiled as he cranked the jack and locked it into place. “Nice-lookin’ old Caddy you got there,” he called out.
    â€œIt is a sweet ride,” I replied.
    The other guy turned, eyed me with indifference, and returned to his job, checking to be sure the hydraulic jack was firmly in place. Around the side of the house parked ona weedy, cracked paved drive I spied Jezebel, Shilo’s rickety old car, so I hoped I’d caught her at home.
    I ambled toward the house. It was a fixer-upper, that was for sure. If Jack hadn’t told me that the foundation was in perfect shape, I’d worry that it would tumble down around their ears. The house was a big clapboard Queen Anne, with a wraparound porch that extended on one corner to a round jutting section. The porch was in rough shape, with rotting boards and spindles, the railing split and falling off. But as I examined the home overall, I could see that the clapboard siding seemed in good repair, though it needed a paint job, and the windows were newer, double-hung, and installed sometime in the last twenty years or so.
    I strolled through the old wrought iron gate and toward the house. “My name is Merry Wynter,” I said. “You two must be Rusty Turner’s new guys. Are you new in town?”
    â€œI am,” the balding guy said. “Dewayne Lester at your service. Just got to town two weeks ago. I’d shake your hand, but I’m kinda busy.” He lifted a four-by-four into place on a second jack, under the beam, his maroon T-shirt stained with a V of sweat down the front and back, as his workmate silently pushed the jack into place and cranked.
    The other guy didn’t say a word.
    Dewayne eyed him with an expression of distaste. “This here is Pete, and he’s all business, no time to be polite.”
    â€œRusty don’t pay us to talk,” Pete grunted, working the jack until it pushed the four-by-four right up against the veranda roof beam. He was stringy, ropy muscles winding around sinewy arms, exposed by a plain white tank top shoved into tight paint-stained jeans, while Dewayne was stocky,