Sing It to Her Bones by Marcia Talley

the day trying to make sense out of her accounts, which consisted of a spiral-bound notebook full of nearly indecipherable scribbles and a shoe box stuffed full of invoices, check stubs, and receipts. I wasso caught up alternately worrying about Connie’s slovenly bookkeeping habits and the poor Dunbar family that I forgot to worry about why Paul still hadn’t returned my call.

chapter
    5
    It rained all the next night. Great explosions of thunder rattled the windows, followed before I could finish chanting “one one thousand” by zigzags of lightning that sliced through the dark and scented the air with ozone. When I awoke at eight, the rain had stopped, but clouds still plastered the slate gray sky and patches of fog hovered over the low-lying fields. I breathed in the sweet, damp air and felt immensely content. Until I remembered. Rain. The cistern would be full again.
    I had planned to spend the day lounging around the house reading one of the paperbacks I had brought with me. A dozen mysteries lay under my bed, jumbled up in a plastic grocery bag. I never dreamed when I packed them up in Annapolis that I’d be walking right into a real-life mystery a few days later. I was sittingcross-legged on the floor, browsing through the pile, trying to decide whether to revisit a favorite Dick Francis, Reflex , or to launch into the latest Sue Grafton when Connie tapped lightly on the door.
    “Hannah? You up?” The door eased open, and Connie’s tousled head appeared.
    “Just picking out the day’s reading material.” I waved the Sue Grafton at her, N Is for Noose . “What do you suppose she’ll do for titles after she gets to the end of the alphabet?”
    Connie plucked the book from my outstretched hand and scanned the blurbs on the back flap. “Oh, I don’t know. How about starting over? AA is for Alcoholics Anonymous, BB is for Gun.” She set the book down on top of the dresser. “I gave up on Grafton somewhere around the letter J, I think.” Connie turned apologetic. “Hannah, I was wondering. Could you help me pack up my gourds this morning?”
    I saw my nice, quiet day sliding down the tubes. I shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” I tried to sound enthusiastic about helping prepare the shipment, but I really just wanted to get it over with.
    A few minutes later, in the kitchen, I grabbed a bagel and a cup of coffee and tried to call Paul at home. I got the message you get when the line is busy, which meant he was either talking on the phone or logged on to the Internet. I suppose the phone could have been off the hook, too, or out of order, but my bet was he was slogging through his E-mail. So what the hell was going on? Paul might have missed seeing the article in the Sun , but there was no way he could have missed my messages. I was becoming seriously annoyed. Too bad Connie didn’t have a computer and a modem. I could have E-mailed my husband a nasty-gram.
    In the studio I lounged against the workbench for a few minutes, munched on the bagel, and watched Connie work. My gawd, the woman was disorganized! She’d unfold a box, tape it up, then get distracted by something on one of the pieces she was packing, take it over to the window, turn it from side to side, squint … it drove me nuts.
    “You won’t finish until sometime in the next century if you keep checking everything like that. You need to set up an assembly line.” I unfolded six boxes, taped down the flaps, lined them up, and filled each with a layer of plastic peanuts. Then I rolled each precious object in protective bubble wrap and snuggled it down into the bed of peanuts. After an hour of this I was decorated in peanuts. They clung by static electricity to my sweatshirt and jeans and dangled from my chin, but we had ten packed boxes and left a wall of empty shelves.
    Colonel, who had been observing all this activity with one eye open, head resting on his paws, a plastic peanut stuck to his right ear, followed us outside and trotted behind