“I’m here to bring the house into this century and make it into a home again. But I’m also here to tell a story. This house’s story. I do that through a show on YouTube. I think viewers would be interested in your expertise.”

“A home or one of them condominiums that rents out to hippies and yuppies that come here for a week to stink up our air with their giant SUVs and take up too many restaurant tables?”

She pressed her lips together and held back a laugh. Wallace might be the grumpiest grumpy old man she’d ever encountered.

“What did you do at the museum?” she asked, trying to steer to a safer topic.

“Gave tours. Cataloged Mr. Campbell’s papers. Decorated for the holidays. Not that you care. You’d probably just as soon dump all of those ornaments in the trash.”

Maggie rubbed at the spot between her eyebrows. “If I promise not to throw out anything of reasonable significance, maybe you could help catalog some of the family possessions?”

“So you can do what? Sell it on that Antiques Roadshow? I won’t be a party to the gutting of the Campbell family’s estate.”

“I’d like to keep as much of the finds as possible with the house,” she said, exasperated.

He leaned in, mustache twitching with suspicion. “What’s your game, girlie?”

“Right now it’s not having an aneurysm. How am I doing? Are my pupils the same size?”

“My great-uncle died of an aneurysm. You shouldn’t joke about that kind of thing. He was walking from the barn to the house and then BAM!” Wallace slapped the table with his hand. “Dead as a doornail. Left a wife and seven hungry children. My great-aunt worked from dawn to dusk to keep the farm going and all those mouths fed.”

Maggie’s head was starting to throb dully, and she hoped it wasn’t the ghost of Wallace’s great-uncle. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said.

“My loss? I didn’t even know the man,” he barked.

She cleared her throat. “Uh. Okay. Well, you clearly have a great respect for history,” she began.

“Darn right I do. If we don’t honor our history, we’re nothing but a bunch of heathens running around not understanding consequences.”

Consequenceless heathens. That was a new one.

“If I promise to honor the history of the Campbell house, will you be willing to share some of the stories about the house and the Campbell family?” she asked wearily.

His glare was shrewd. “Maybe. Dunno. I’ll think about it.”

She tore off a corner of a piece of drafting paper, wrote down a number, and handed it to him. “This is my partner Dean’s number. If you decide you’re willing to help out, give him a call.”

Take that, Chicken Dean.