Colter drew in a long breath. There were no easy answers in life. And now he had to go and have supper with Grace and listen to her rattle off her prejudices against his sister and Clancey. That wasn’t going to end well.

“Well, at least it smells better, doesn’t it?” Clancey asked Tad, forcing a smile. She’d cleaned the rooms, sacked up the trash and taken it to the trash can outside, sprayed with Lysol, and aired out the bedrooms and the living room, despite the cold temperatures.

“It smells lots better. Is it our house now?” Tad asked.

She smiled sadly. “It’s our house.” She hugged her brother. “We have to have some sort of funerals for Granddaddy and Morris,” she added quietly. It was hard to realize that her grandfather really was dead, after years of hoping that he might be alive somewhere, with amnesia or something. Irrational hope, but hope nevertheless. “I’m not sure if I can handle planning a funeral.”

“We could ask Mr. Banks to help us,” Tad suggested.

“Mr. Banks has done so much already. I hate to ask him to do anything else,” she said, thinking about Colter’s date with Grace tonight and his coolness to herself. She picked up her phone and called Cal Hollister.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me sooner?” he asked, exasperated.

“I was busy...”

“Lame excuse,” he muttered.

She grimaced. “I know. Listen, I have to do something about funerals for Granddaddy and Morris.” She paused. “Granddaddy’s body was in really bad shape, too.”

“What do you want to do about him?”

She was thinking about expenses. She had hardly any money coming in and funerals cost thousands of dollars. “Cal, I can’t afford big funerals,” she confessed, strangling on pride.

“I know that,” he said gently. “Why not a simple memorial service for both of them? You can have the remains cremated and urned. It’s not that expensive, and if you go to Lunsfords, they’ll let you clear the debt over as much time as you need.”

She let out a breath. “That’s such a relief,” she said. “I didn’t know how to manage.”

“Call Lunsfords,” he suggested. “They’ll handle it.”

“You’re such a nice man,” she said.

There was a hesitation. “Clancey, why didn’t you call Colter?”

She bit her lower lip. “He’s been, well, cool since the shooting,” she began.

“He’s traumatized,” he said simply. “He watched a man being killed in front of his eyes. Even for a lawman, that’s hard.” He sighed. “I watched two of my men blown away by an incendiary bomb in Africa some years ago, men I’d worked with for a long time. I got drunk and couldn’t lift my head for three days. Even if you don’t pull the trigger, it’s still traumatic.”