“Happy enough,” he said, smiling.
“Great!” She moved closer. She was only a little shorter than he was, and he was over six feet tall. “I’m hosting a party at my aunt’s a week from Friday night,” she said. “I’d love to have you join us. It would be a nice way to meet Jacobsville’s upper social strata.”
“Where and what time?” he asked.
She grinned. “I’ll write down the address. Just a sec.” She went back to her car and bent over to give him a good view of her body as she retrieved a pen and pad. It didn’t take second sight to know that she was available and interested. So was he. It had been a long, dry spell.
She wrote down the address and handed it to him. “About six,” she said. “That’s early, but we can have highballs while we wait for the others to show up.”
“I don’t drink,” he said.
She looked startled. He was obviously not joking.
“Well, then, we can have coffee while we wait,” she amended, smiling so that he could see her perfectly capped teeth.
“Suits me. I’ll see you then.”
She hesitated, as if she wanted to stay.
“I’m just in from D.C. very early this morning,” he said. “And it’s been a full day at the office. I’m tired.”
“Then I’ll go, and let you get comfortable,” she said immediately, smiling again. “Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
He’d gone around her car to put the Bucar in front of the house, on the semicircular driveway, so she simply pulled around him to shoot out the driveway, waving a hand out the window as she passed him.
He went inside, almost colliding with Miss Jane. “That fancy woman parked herself in the driveway and said she’d wait for you. I didn’t invite her in,” she added with a faint belligerence. “She’s only been in town two months and she’s already got a reputation. Put her hand down Ben Smith’s pants right in his own office!”
Apparently this was akin to blasphemy, he reasoned, waiting for the rest.
“He jerked her hand right back out, opened his office door, and put her right out on the sidewalk. His wife works in the office with him, you know, and when he told her what happened, she walked into Andy Webb’s office and told him what he could do with the property they’d planned to buy from him, and how far!”
He pursed his lips. “Fast worker, is she?”
“Tramp, more like,” Miss Jane said coldly. “No decent woman behaves like that!”
“It’s the twenty-first century,” he began.
“Would your mother ever have done that?” she asked shortly.
He actually caught his breath. His little mother had been a saint. No, he couldn’t have pictured her being available to any man except his father—until his father had cheated on her and hastened her death.
Miss Jane read his reply on his face and her head jerked up and down. “Neither would my mother,” she continued. “A woman who’s that easy with men she doesn’t even know will be that way all her life, and even if she’s married she won’t be able to settle. It’s the same with men who treat women like disposable toys.”
“So everybody in town is celibate?” he queried.
She glared up at him. It was a long way. “People in small towns mostly get married and have children and raise them. We don’t look at life the way people in cities do. Down here, honor and self-respect are a lot more important than closing a business deal and having a martini lunch. We’re just simple people, Mr. Grier. But we look deeper than outsiders do. And we judge by what we see.”
“Isn’t there a passage about judging?” he retorted.
“There are several about right and wrong as well,” she informed him. “Civilizations fall when the arts and religion become superfluous.”
His eyebrows went up.
“Oh, did you think I was stupid because I keep house for you?” she asked blithely. “I have a Master’s Degree in History,” she added with a sweet smile. “I taught school in the big city until one of my students beat me almost to death in front of the class. When I got out of the hospital, I was too shaken to go back to teaching. So now I keep house for people. It’s safer. Especially when the people I keep house for work in law enforcement,” she added. “Your supper’s on the table.”
“Thanks.”
She was gone before he could say anything else. He was still reeling from her confession. Come to think of it, the Jacobs County Sheriff, Hayes Carson, had recommended Miss Jane. She’d worked for him temporarily until he could get the part-time housekeeper he wanted. No wonder she was afraid of her old job. He shook his head. In his day, teachers ran the classrooms. Apparently a lot of things had changed in the two or so decades since he graduated from high school and went off to college.
He was lying awake, looking at the ceiling, when there was a frantic pounding at the front door.
He got up and threw on a robe, tramping downstairs in his bare feet. Miss Jane was there ahead of him, turning on the porch light before she started to open the door.
“Don’t open it until you know who it is!” he shouted at her. His hand was on the .40 caliber Glock that he’d stuffed into his pocket as he joined her.
“I know who it is,” she replied, and opened the door quickly.
Their next-door neighbor, Grace Carver, was standing there in a ratty old bathrobe and tattered shoes, her long blond hair in a frizzed ponytail, her gray eyes wide and frantic.
“Please, may I use your phone?” she panted.
“Granny’s gasping for breath and her chest hurts. I’m afraid it’s a heart attack. My phone won’t work and I can’t start the car!” Tears of impotent fury were rolling down her cheeks. “She’ll die!”
Before she got the words completely out, Garon had dialed 911 and given the dispatcher the address and condition of the old woman.
“Wait for me,” he told Grace firmly. “I’ll be right back.”
He ran up the stairs, threw on jeans and a shirt and dragged on his boots without socks. He grabbed a denim jacket, because it was cold, and was downstairs in less than five minutes.
“You’re quick,” Grace managed.
“I get called out at all hours,” he said, taking her elbow. “Jane, I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’ve got my keys. Lock up and go to bed.”
“Yes, sir. Grace, I’ll keep her in my prayers. You, too.”
“Thank you, Miss Jane,” she said in her soft voice. She had a faint south Texas drawl, but it was smooth and sweet to the ear.
Garon bypassed the Bucar, unlocked the black Jaguar and put her inside. She felt uncomfortable, not only because she was in her nightclothes, but because she wasn’t accustomed to being alone with men.
He didn’t say anything. He drove to her grandmother’s house, pulled up in the driveway and cut the engine. Grace was up the steps like a flash, with Garon on her heels.
The old lady, Mrs. Jessie Collier, was sitting up on her bed in a thick blue gown that looked as if it had been handed down from the 1920s. She was a big woman, with white hair coiled on her head and watery green eyes. She was gasping for breath.
“Grace, for God’s sake,” she panted, “go find my bathrobe!”
“Yes, ma’am.” Grace went to the closet and started rummaging.
“Stupid girl, never can do anything