Mrs. Fryt raised her eyebrows. “Oh, he isn’t? And how would you know, having never met them?”

“Well, he isn’t like you say they are! Maybe they weren’t like you thought, either!”

Mrs. Fryt laughed, and went back to her stitching. “Now the child tells me I don’t know my own neighbors, my own neighbors I’ve lived across the street from for near sixty years!”

Thelma and Corinne cast Dolly pitying looks.

“I know JJ Mickelson,” said Judy. “He’s just like anybody else with too much money, thinks he’s entitled to whatever he wants. His sister Elissa was the same way. It served her right, what happened. It served them all right.”

Dolly glared at Judy. If the ladies only knew that yesterday JJ had spent two hours with her, telling her a detailed history of Henry VIII and his six wives, as she’d scrubbed the walls and floors of the bath suite and wiped down the oak doors with lemon oil. Or the way they’d smoked side by side on the front porch again when she’d finished her work, and how he’d walked her to the back door and bid her good-bye with a wink and a (was it hopeful?) “See you tomorrow?”

But she knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell the ladies about what JJ was really like. And she wasn’t about to quit the “job” now, not when the house was starting to look so good, and not when she and JJ were getting along so well—which might work in her favor when the time came for the Mickelson family to sell the house. Besides, what would JJ do if she quit? With his drinking, there was still the danger he might harm the house. And he would almost certainly talk to his father about her.

She knew she was walking a fine line; no doubt the less she told the quilting ladies, the better.

After the meeting, with her sewing basket hooked on her arm, Dolly dashed across the street under her umbrella and ran up the steps and into the back porch. She set down her basket, leaned her umbrella in the corner so it could dry, and fluffed her hair with her fingers.

He should have been expecting her—she had told him she would stop by after the quilting meeting—but he didn’t answer the door. She finally gave up pounding on it and let herself in. “JJ?” she called. It was quiet in the back hallway, and the air was damp and musty. She could hear the rain coursing through the gutters outside. “JJ?”

She took a few steps down the hallway toward the living room. Her heart seemed to be holding out judgment, paused in mid-beat.

The oak pocket door at the end of the hallway was half closed. She tiptoed up to it and peered into the living room.