“His references checked out and I hired him.”

From the moment she’d watched him with Harry, she’d liked him. There was an inherent honesty about Bodie. Yes, he had a dark cloud hanging over his head that said back off, but just as visible was a sense of honor and morals. She’d barely met him, and yet she trusted him.

“Aren’t you curious what the sheriff found out?” Maybelle tempted, the twinkle in her eye saying she knew something Sarah didn’t.

“You already told me he wasn’t a serial killer,” Sarah reminded, feeling a little guilty that they’d essentially done a background check on Bodie. Still, she supposed since he was a stranger to Pine Hill, she understood why the women had. Despite her gut instinct that told her he was a decent person, she should have requested one herself.

She wouldn’t tell the spying queens, but knowing they’d checked Bodie out made her feel less silly for immediately taking him at his word. He’d come across as someone who was dependable, and who lived by high ethics. Time would tell.

“Sheriff Roscoe says he’s clean,” Maybelle continued in her deadpan voice, letting Sarah know a punch line was about to come.

She wasn’t disappointed.

“Not even a speeding ticket on his record.”

Sarah fought sticking her tongue out at Maybelle. She was way too old to do so, but sometimes, the Butterflies made her feel as if she were back in grade school, hanging with Aunt Jean and them as they worked on some project. They’d always included her, always treated her as if she belonged to them all rather than just Aunt Jean.

“If that was a jab at me,” Sarah said, ignoring the laughter in Maybelle’s eyes, “You should know that I was running late to meet with the school board about our back-to-school backpack program and wasn’t driving that fast.”

She’d only been going four miles over the speed limit and there hadn’t been another car on the road for miles, for goodness’ sake. She’d barely crossed into the lowered speed zone when the blue lights came on.

“Donnie should have given me a warning, not an actual ticket.”

“He gave you a warning the time before,” Claudia reminded in her most grandmotherly tone.

Sarah wrinkled her nose. Well, yeah, there was that time last month when she’d been going a whole two miles over the posted speed limit when Donnie had gotten blue-light happy, too.

“Well, it’s good to know Bodie hasn’t run into Donnie since he’s been in town,” she pointed out, then gestured to their ornaments. “That’s the last of these. Ready to cut out more snowflakes before it’s time to deliver meals to shut-ins?”

There were lots of little odds and ends needing addressed or touching up, but Bodie had decided to start with the first bedroom Sarah had shown him. It was the bigger of the two downstairs rooms she wanted done and had been her aunt’s. The other had belonged to her aunt’s in-laws.